by Joan Mellen
On occasion, Ferrie flew with another CIA contract pilot named E. Carl McNabb, who would later join Jim Garrison’s investigation in an attempt to redeem a murderous past. One day they arrived at the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, a joint project of Robert Kennedy and the CIA for training of the Latin American military. McNabb met with some resistance. Dave walked in as if he owned the place.
“I didn’t know your security clearance was so high,” McNabb laughed, a light glittering in his ice-blue eyes.
“I didn’t know yours was so low!” Ferrie rejoined.
“Kennedy is no good, Kennedy is a nigger lover,” Ferrie told the boys under his spell. CIA and Kennedy together screwed up the Bay of Pigs, he ranted. On his blackboard before an audience of rapt boys he had drawn plans for the invasion of Cuba, then accused Kennedy of making a deal to support the invasion only to back out. He spoke of his CIA connections openly.
Among the CIA’s schemes to kill Castro under OPERATION MONGOOSE was a plan concocted by Desmond Fitzgerald, chief of the Cuban Task Force, who was encouraged by Robert Kennedy to effect the assassination of Fidel Castro, already a CIA project. It involved the placement of a seashell rigged with explosives where Castro was known to enjoy diving. A midget submarine was needed to put the shell in place; on November 22, 1963, one such submarine sat in David Ferrie’s apartment, “the kind designed for skin divers,” Carlos Quiroga, an anti-Castro Cuban who worked for the Cuban Revolutionary Council, says. Quiroga watched Ferrie try to install its motor, as Ferrie talked of how he could build a mini-submarine armed with a bomb to propel into Havana harbor.
Jim Garrison’s next move was to invite Jack Martin to Tulane and Broad. Martin, who had awakened New Orleans to the Oswald-Ferrie connection, was a small man, five foot nine, in his forties, with a small mustache. He dressed perpetually in a gray suit and a black porkpie hat, his tie pulled down. Jack bore the pallor of an alcoholic and looked out at you through weak blue eyes (“a skinny, messy little guy,” Garrison’s secretary Sharon Herkes thought).
Jack Martin had a scar on his chin, chain-smoked and subsisted on bad coffee. He seemed a broken-down, harmless individual, a hanger-on. A would-be journalist, he had worked for the Westbank Herald, a right-wing paper owned by a Major Stewart, who bore intelligence ties to Latin America. In 1958 Guy Banister had been publisher. Jack also worked for Banister as a sometime private eye, describing himself as “a con man who has stayed just within the law.” He had mysterious access to police records, information he peddled. Like David Ferrie, he was a religious zealot, belonging to the same “church.” Martin was, Robert Buras says, “a type of Ferrie,” both men “highly intelligent.”
Jack Martin also bore a checkered criminal history. He had been caught in a crime against nature with a homosexual named “Mona Lisa,” and had a police record ranging from disturbing the peace, vagrancy and drunkenness to a 1952 murder charge in Houston, Texas, which had miraculously vanished. Despite all this, Martin was on a first-name basis with Senator Russell Long and enjoyed access to the office of Attorney General Jack P. F. Gremillion. Jack could get you a letter certifying you were an honorary attorney general of the state of Louisiana. Yet on the instructions of Plaquemines Parish czar Leander Perez, Martin had filed a petition to disqualify Gremillion as a candidate for reelection.
In November of 1963, Jack Martin’s business card read, “Martin, Newbrough & Dalzell, Private Investigations.” The telephone number rang through at Guy Banister’s detective agency, even as Banister’s own intelligence connections ranged from the expected FBI to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and CIA. William Dalzell was a CIA operative, as was Joseph Newbrough, a steady asset of the Domestic Contact Service, which in New Orleans also supervised the clandestine services. Newbrough was close to another CIA figure shortly to enter this story, Fred Lee Crisman. Dalzell’s criminal charges had disappeared in a manner similar to Martin’s. He had joined the Agency in the early fifties, a cryptologist with a “top secret” clearance, and was acquainted with David Ferrie. In New Orleans, CIA and FBI shared information about Dalzell.
Almost from the start Jim Garrison had come to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was not observed with anyone who was not connected with the Central Intelligence Agency. Garrison’s own witnesses were equally Agency-involved. His instincts were correct, although he never learned that Jack Martin, his first real witness, not only served with military intelligence, but was himself a former CIA employee. Jack’s real name was Suggs. His close intelligence ties he kept hidden. At one point Martin became hysterical at the thought that a television reporter had his photograph. “There are no photographs of me!” Jack insisted.*
John J. Martin was a low-ranking intelligence assistant. He joined the Agency in November of 1950 and left supposedly in June of 1958 on a “disability retirement.” He had been a GS-7 in the Transportation Branch, Services Division. Like David Ferrie, his rival and nemesis in matters ecclesiastical, Martin had been born in Cleveland, in 1913. Ferrie was born in 1918.
What emerges from the record is that Jack Martin never left the Agency. In New Orleans, Martin was assigned to a young man named Thomas Edward Beckham, in a manner similar to Ferrie’s relationship with Lee Oswald. Beckham was to notice that Martin had in his possession a variety of police credentials, and often posed as a police officer.
* See p. 405 of the Update for more information on Martin and his many identities.
In Louisville, Martin had worked for “Echo Blue,” a publication of the Fraternal Order of Police, where he also came to know Archbishop Carl Stanley. In New Orleans, Martin still carried “numerous police commissions,” making it his business to spy on other policemen. The “S” in the New Orleans name of Jack S. Martin stood for “Suggs,” Stanley told the FBI. But it was the same man he knew as John J. Martin.
Stanley created churches. He raised funds and mixed in politics, and John J. Martin had requested that Stanley consecrate him as a bishop to go to Cuba. He admitted to Stanley that he worked for the CIA and saw to it that Stanley did not promote David Ferrie in his quest to become a bishop.
CIA documents describe John Martin as suffering from “telephonitis,” as Jack Martin was known not to be able to stay off the telephone; often he called the Agency itself. “Judging from his rambling talk during his phone calls,” CIA wrote for the record, “and the ridiculous reason given for these calls, it would appear that the Subject is of unsound mind.” CIA’s John J. Martin, Louisville’s John J. Martin, another rambling talker, was also identical in appearance to the New Orleans Jack S. Martin: five foot nine, one hundred fifty pounds with a small mustache. Like John J., Jack called himself a “newspaperman.” “Bishop” John J. was a con man, like Jack. Jack’s wife told the FBI right after the assassination that he would take off “alone for several months every year,” his true identity obviously a mystery even to her.
Jim Garrison knew enough to listen to Jack Martin, then verify his facts. Almost always, unless he intended it otherwise, what Jack Martin told you checked out. One day Martin had invited Joe Newbrough to meet him at nine A.M. at a coffee shop. While Newbrough, “the fat man,” ate his hearty breakfast, and Jack sipped his bad coffee, a limousine pulled up. Suddenly Newbrough saw Carlos Marcello being hustled off. It was the day Marcello was deported, and Jack had foreknowledge of the kidnapping of the Mafia don engineered by Robert Kennedy.
In 1971, when Jim Garrison was arrested for allegedly accepting bribes from pinball gambling interests and was driven to the Wild Life and Fisheries building for booking, at the front of a crowd of spectators stood that man who always knew what was happening in New Orleans.
“They had to frame a case on the DA!” Jack Martin called out loudly. “How about that!” Then Martin led the crowd in applause. “Let’s hear it for the DA!” Martin shouted.
States-Item reporter Hoke May, himself a CIA asset, and for whom Jack Martin was an entirely reliable source, concluded that Jack Martin had been badly
discredited by the FBI on purpose, made to seem an alcoholic, a mental case and a person not to be taken seriously, when in fact he was entirely credible.
In December of 1966, Jack Martin told Pershing Gervais, who had reappeared at Tulane and Broad in a semi-official capacity, that David Ferrie had blackmailed G. Wray Gill and Carlos Marcello to pay for the service station he opened in 1964. Ferrie had told his friend and fellow CIA asset Herb Wagner, who ran a finance company, not to bother with charges because the “government” was paying for his gas. For Jack Martin and David Ferrie, there was no contradiction here.
The day after his interview with Pershing, Jack Martin told Jim Garrison that Oswald had “offices” in the Newman building, Guy Banister’s building. The janitor kept Oswald’s belongings after he was gone. He had spotted Ferrie “once or twice maybe” with Oswald at Banister’s. Once Ferrie walked in wearing “an army type fatigue suit and sunglasses,” accompanied by three or four young men, one of whom was named “Lee.” “He used to be with me in the CAP when he was a little kid,” Ferrie said of Oswald. “Oswald is a friend of mine.” There’s a photograph of Oswald with Ferrie at a cook-out, Jack said.
Then came another bombshell. David Ferrie made a trip to Dallas during the time Oswald was there and lied about it, Jack revealed. He was in Dallas or Fort Worth two days before the assassination. His assignment was to fly three people from Texas to Laredo, or to Matamoros, in Mexico. Jim Garrison was unable to verify Ferrie’s trip to Dallas. Yet it was so.
Having been turned over to the Secret Service on November 25, 1963, Ferrie told John Rice, the Special Agent in Charge, that he had not been in Dallas “for the last eight to ten years.” Soon the Secret Service yielded to the FBI’s insistence that it take over all investigating. “In the last fifteen years, I have been in Dallas, Texas, very infrequently,” Ferrie told the FBI, typing his own statement for Regis Kennedy. Ferrie lied, too, when he said he did not know Lee Oswald. Ferrie’s friends knew otherwise.
Benton Wilson knew David Ferrie from having served at Keesler Air Force Base where Ferrie took his CAP recruits on occasion. Wilson worked at National Car Rental with another Ferrie friend, Jim Lewallen, who was a tenant at one of the French Quarter properties renovated by Clay Shaw, the managing director of the International Trade Mart. Ferrie and the Wilsons met often at the Old Loyalty Bar on North Rampart Street, where Benton Wilson and his brother John lived.
Jim Lewallen confided to the Wilsons that he was the lover of both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie, and that of course Shaw knew Ferrie. Lewallen and Ben Wilson bore so remarkable a resemblance that, later, when Jim Garrison’s staff were interviewing Lewallen, Garrison walked in and said, “Congratulations, you finally got Wilson!”
The Wilsons admired David Ferrie for his passion, for his genius as an aviator, for his erudition, and for his superior vocabulary. More, they knew Ferrie as someone who would help people out, like an old merchant seaman named Joe Karl, who, in a case of mistaken identity, had been threatened by some mob characters. Once Ferrie became involved, the problem vanished.
One day during the third week of November 1963, Dave arrived at the Old Loyalty Bar wearing a hunting costume, full camouflage, complete with vest and cap.
“Why are you dressed like that?” Ben Wilson wanted to know.
“We’re going on a hunting trip to Dallas,” Ferrie said.
“What are you hunting for?” John asked. He was twenty-two years old.
“Big game! Big game!” Dave said cryptically. On the day President Kennedy was killed, Ben Wilson was certain. “They did it! They killed Kennedy!” he said, shaking his brother out of a deep sleep and referring to David Ferrie. A right-winger, like Dave, Ben shed no tears for a president he despised.
A few days after the assassination, John Wilson ran into Ferrie again. Dave was still in his hunting clothes, that same outfit Jack Martin had described Ferrie wearing during the summer when he appeared at Guy Banister’s office with Oswald.
“Did you get any big game?” John joked.
“Damn right. You know it,” Dave laughed.
At the law offices of G. Wray Gill, the week of the assassination, Gill instructed David Ferrie to rent an airplane since his own plane needed repair. Dave approached Herb Wagner, from whom he had borrowed money in the past—like the $5,000 Dave needed to bribe Jefferson Parish assistant district attorney A. J. Graffagnino in the Crouchet case (Graffagnino later went to jail on another matter). Dave had also invited Wagner, who, like Dave, held rank in the Civil Air Patrol, to join OPERATION MONGOOSE, the CIA’s project to assassinate Fidel Castro. Wagner was a short, stocky man, with thinning hair and glasses, resembling no one so much as the director, Mr. Hoover, himself. “It’s called Operation Mosquito,” Dave laughed; OPERATION MONGOOSE had not yet officially begun, but Dave knew about it. “The government knows what we’re doing. As a matter of fact, they’re backing us!”
Wagner declined, but he did help the CIA with its training camps of anti-Castro Cubans north of Lake Pontchartrain. It was apparently Wagner who was the pilot on an occasion sponsored by Ferrie when two soldiers-of-fortune, Gerald Patrick Hemming and Howard K. Davis, went to Louisiana in search of training camp sites. Herb also flew reconnaissance planes for the CIA into Cuba. His own flights, Dave told Wagner, were “the most patriotic thing I’ve ever done.”
Now Dave wanted $400 to rent a plane to fly to Dallas, a trip Wagner later concluded was to take care of prearrangements for the assassination. He would be coming right back—the same day. That Dave flew to Dallas that week is also confirmed by Allen Campbell, a young Banister operative, who was Ferrie’s next-door neighbor at the airport. Campbell knew Ferrie with his “red brillo pad” glued to his head and his “circus,” the tough young kids with whom he surrounded himself. Yes, Campbell says, Dave flew to Dallas that week.
Wagner wanted collateral for the loan, and so Dave offered his dubious 1948 blue Stinson Voyager. “Does this plane have an Air Worthiness Certificate?” Herb asked, with the German exactitude that led Ferrie to nickname him “Von Wagner.” They went up in the Stinson; Wagner was not impressed. When he later told Jim Garrison that Ferrie’s plane was airworthy, Wagner lied. Even Ferrie had to admit to the FBI after the assassination that “the plane has not been airworthy since the license expired in the spring of 1962.” The only planes he would have access to would be “rental planes,” a fact the FBI verified.
When Wagner insisted that Dave find someone to cosign the four hundred dollar loan, Dave produced Clay Shaw himself, the man Jim Garrison was to place on trial for conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy. Vehemently, yet calmly, Shaw would always deny he had ever met David Ferrie. Yet he did cosign that loan. In 1967, Wagner wondered whether he should show the loan document to Jim Garrison. He consulted his friend Roger E. Johnston Jr., then a deputy marshal for the Kenner Police Department.
“I have a document that would really be beneficial to Jim Garrison’s probe,” Wagner confided. He opened a drawer at the bottom of one of his filing cabinets, and pulled out a tan manila folder. It was a loan contract.
“Here in front of my eyes,” Johnston says, “was the proof.” The borrower’s signature read: “David Ferrie.” The cosigner was “Clay Shaw.” The document proved not only that Ferrie and Shaw knew each other, but that they participated together in preparations for the assassination, reflecting their mutual foreknowledge of the crime.
In the 1980s, a retired Louisiana state trooper named Norbert A. Gurtner told the FBI that, shortly before the assassination, he was copilot with David Ferrie on a Beech D-18 flight from New Orleans Lakefront Airport to New Orleans Moisant and on to Love Field, Dallas. None of the passengers carried baggage. Nor did Ferrie introduce Gurtner to any of them. Gurtner identified Lee Harvey Oswald and Clay Shaw, and a young man named Perry Russo as passengers, and while this configuration demands pause, Gurtner’s revelation, apparently without an ulterior motive, should be noted. Gurtner said he was willing to take a polyg
raph if the FBI had any interest. It hadn’t.
Although Jim Garrison never learned about that loan granted to David Ferrie and cosigned by Clay Shaw, there was further evidence that persuaded him that Ferrie was connected to the assassination. Jack Martin, during the weekend of the assassination, had said that when Oswald was arrested, he had Ferrie’s library card with him, information he could not have gleaned from New Orleans television. When the FBI questioned Ferrie, he denied emphatically that he had loaned the card to Oswald. “The card has never been out of my possession,” Ferrie said. Then he wandered around town inquiring whether anyone knew about Oswald’s possessing his library card. He asked Oswald’s neighbor, Mrs. Doris Eames, if she knew “whose library card Oswald had.” He questioned Oswald’s landlady, Mrs. Lena Garner: “They found my library card on Oswald,” Ferrie said.
Jim Garrison concluded that if there were no evidence linking a library card found on Oswald to Ferrie, the FBI would never have put the issue in its report. If “Oswald had a library card on him bearing the name ‘George Washington,’ it would not be reasonable to state in an investigative report that David Ferrie denied lending his library card to Oswald.” Later Garrison learned from a source that Ferrie’s library card had indeed been found on Oswald, “but has since been destroyed.”
Despite Ferrie’s denials, his CAP cadets reported that Oswald had been among them. Ferrie, expecting protection from higher authority, was so bold as to name Jerry Paradis as willing to confirm that Oswald had not served under his command. But in 1978, an attorney now, Paradis clearly remembered for the House Select Committee that Oswald and Ferrie were “in the unit together” at ten or fifteen meetings. “I’m not saying that they may have been there together. I’m saying it was a certainty.”