by Joan Mellen
THE BANISTER MENAGERIE
5
What number Camp?
—Jim Garrison
“W HERE IS CLAY BERTRAND? And why did he disappear after Smith’s death?” Garrison sat brainstorming with his reporter friend David Chandler. Bertrand spoke Spanish. Bertrand was rich. Bertrand sent gay men to Dean Andrews as clients. Bertrand’s first name was “Clay.” There was no “Clay Bertrand” in the New Orleans telephone book, although Justice Department records would later reveal that among the four people to whom one phone number was registered was a “C. Bertrand.”
“Only one person meets all these conditions!” Chandler said excitedly. “That’s Clay Shaw!” Chandler was “a bit of an agent provocateur,” the New Orleans entrepreneur and self-styled electronics expert soon to enter Garrison’s investigation, Gordon Novel, thought. But Chandler was right. When Moo Moo’s uncle called the bartender at Cosimo’s on Moo Moo’s behalf, this time the bartender told the truth: “Everyone down here knows who Clay Bertrand is. It’s Clay Shaw.”
Just before Christmas 1966, Jim Garrison had police investigator Lester Otillio pick up for questioning both Shaw and Layton Martens, a Ferrie lover who had been staying in his apartment on November 22, 1963. Martens, “a white-haired little punk,” Novel called him, was also a frequent Shaw guest, “for drinks and a chess game.”
Shaw appeared at Tulane and Broad, six feet four inches tall and distinguished, with kinky gray hair, sharply chiseled features and a dark complexion. His eyes were silver blue, his poise that of a self-invented, self-educated man. Moo Moo faced a former member of military intelligence and an experienced CIA operative.
I never met Oswald, Shaw lies, as he invents a story of how his assistant, J. B. Dauenhauer, had told him a young man asked for permission to distribute leaflets outside, only for Shaw to object. He had gone downstairs, but the man had vanished, Shaw says. It is unfortunate that I did not meet him, “since then I might possibly have had a tiny footnote in history.”
“Are you Clay Bertrand?” Moo Moo says suddenly. He has never met anyone named Clay Bertrand, Shaw says. He denies that he knows David Ferrie. He denies that he knows Dean Andrews. “What does Mr. Andrews do for a living?” Shaw says. Then he wishes Jim Garrison and Moo Moo Sciambra a Merry Christmas.
Later Shaw will write with dark laughter in a typewritten Diary: “Clay Bertrand? Who he?” At parties that Christmas season, he jokes about being a Garrison suspect. He is so confident that he doesn’t bother to brief his close friend and fellow homosexual, Dauenhauer, with whom he had served in the military, so that when Garrison assistants Sciambra and Alcock interview Dauenhauer on February 10th, he reveals that Shaw had lied. Dauenhauer had not been visited by Oswald before he distributed the leaflets; he had never asked Shaw for permission for Oswald to do so.
Jim Garrison considered what he termed “propinquities.” Didn’t Ferrie’s friend James Lewallen live next door to Shaw? Didn’t a young man named Dante Marochini, who in 1963 worked for Oswald’s employer, William Reily, also know Ferrie? Lewallen had admitted he introduced Marochini to Shaw, even as Marochini denied to Jim Garrison that he knew Shaw. “First Garrison got all the fruits, now he wants the cherry,” Marochini had joked.
In search of Cuban help to locate the dark Cuban photographed with Oswald, Jim Garrison enlisted New Orleans’ Director of International Relations Alberto Fowler, dubbing him “a legitimate Cuban.” Alberto had joined the 26th of July movement only for Fidel Castro to demand that he demonstrate his loyalty by murdering a Batista functionary, the mayor of a small town near the Fowler family sugar mill. Alberto complied, only to become disillusioned with the man who gave a speech entitled “Elecciónes, para qué?’
Perceiving there was no room for him in “the New Society,” Alberto moved to Miami, and then back to the city of his birth, New Orleans. “The revolution wasn’t a mistake,” he said. “The man was.” Now a veteran of the Bay of Pigs and of Castro’s prisons, Alberto was uniquely placed to help Jim Garrison, even as he remained of independent mind. He refused to join Butler’s fanatic INCA, which Alberto immediately perceived was “something other than it appears to be.” The CIA had wanted to appoint not Sergio Arcacha Smith, but Alberto Fowler to head the New Orleans branch of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Alberto turned them down.
“Jim, I didn’t kill him . . . but I wish I had,” Alberto joked when Garrison called to invite him to participate in his investigation. Learning that Fowler, who was “hardly pro-Castro,” was working with Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw blanched.
Alberto Fowler at once began to help “Big Jim.” He revealed that he had run into William Gaudet in Guatemala, and Gaudet “had been either an FBI or CIA agent.” He knew that Arcacha and his friend David Ferrie frequented a restaurant named Pedro’s, also a redoubt of Customs agents.
“I think Guy Banister’s office is near there,” Garrison said during a discussion recorded on tape. “We might take a look all the way up Lafayette Street, all the way up Camp, all around there.” Then he stopped. “What number Camp?” Garrison said. It was at that moment that Jim Garrison realized that Oswald had used as his headquarters the building that housed Guy Banister’s detective agency. “It’s one of my great discoveries,” Garrison said a decade later, “and I’m sure the CIA is eternally grateful.”
“A legitimate group wouldn’t fool with Oswald,” Garrison said, noting the close proximity to Banister’s office of the Old Post Office Building where CIA employees, Oswald, Kerry Thornley, Jack Martin and Thomas Edward Beckham among them, kept post office boxes. Garrison dubbed them “keys to the Club.” Haifa block away was the Crescent City garage run by Adrian Alba, also a CIA contact; here Oswald sat reading gun advertisements. A few doors down was Oswald’s employer, the Reily coffee company, whose owner, William Reily, was the subject of two CIA files in the Office of Security, a “B” file and a “C” file, indicating that he was both a covert and an overt CIA asset.
Oswald’s “not with anybody who’s not with the CIA,” Garrison concluded even without possessing Oswald’s Marine Unit diary. This traced his movements from Keesler Air Force Base, a training for which only five of his cohorts were selected, to Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia, through which the files of intelligence operatives passed. Oswald stayed at the Marine barracks at Hardwick Hall, arriving already qualified as an electronics operator with training in counterintelligence.
Other CIA assets Oswald encountered in New Orleans included Ed Butler, who debated him on the radio. “Mr. Butler is a very cooperative contact and has always welcomed an opportunity to assist the CIA,” Butler’s Domestic Contact Service Source Information Sheet reads. Yet the CIA asked Butler to leave its “Free Voice of Latin America” because he was too right wing. Other Butler CIA documents emanate from the Office of Security.
In an extraordinary slip, Butler revealed in a 1967 interview that he knew Oswald was a scapegoat, not guilty of killing President Kennedy. He compared Oswald with Marinus Van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year old Communist, as Oswald was twenty-four when President Kennedy was killed. Van der Lubbe, entirely innocent, was “caught walking out of the burning Reichstag and the Nazis used him for the showcase trial in 1933 to wipe out the Communist plot.” Both were pawns, Butler says, the two cases “almost identical.”
Even Joseph Rault, who was helping to fund Jim Garrison’s investigation, was a CIA asset, having been cleared to assist JMWAVE as president of a CIA proprietary with the cryptonym YCOUGH. Rault used his own petroleum business, Rault Petroleum Corporation, as a funding mechanism for YCOUGH. Other oil companies in which Rault had an interest were used as “back-stopping cover of JMWAVE operational vessels,” bound for sabotage in Cuba. Rault was also enlisted in a CIA project with the cryptonym ECHO, and recommended other New Orleans businessmen to participate in CIA activities. JMWAVE contacted him several times a month.
What was true for Oswald was equally so for the hatchet-faced Guy Banister, another impeccably dressed,
gray-haired man in this story. Banister added a fresh flower to his lapel every day. Virtually everyone connected with Banister worked for one intelligence agency or another, so that Garrison finally said, “It’s almost semantics to discuss whether Banister was ONI or CIA. What difference does it make?”
Under the cover of a moribund “detective agency,” Banister collected and stored weapons for anti-Castro operatives. On behalf of the CIA, he paid off its operatives, and functioned as a conduit for Company money at the training camps north of Lake Pontchartrain. Money flowed through his office in 1963. Sometimes he sent his runner, Thomas Edward Beckham, to make deliveries to the camps. Sometimes he sent Joe Newbrough, a fellow CIA asset, to demonstrate training techniques. “Why not get rid of Jack Martin?” Allen Campbell asked Banister one day. He needed Jack for surveillance jobs, Banister said vaguely.
Banister was close to the CIA field office chief William P. Burke, having been approved on November 10, 1960, “for contact use as a routine source of foreign positive intelligence,” all the CIA would admit on paper. CIA’s J. C. King considered Banister’s operation a vital component of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Banister also reported to the New Orleans head of naval intelligence, Guy Johnson. With Guy Johnson and another CIA asset, Maurice B. Gatlin, Banister had been involved in shipping jeeps to Cuba.
When Banister hired young men to infiltrate left organizations, later selling this information, he cleared them first with Guy Johnson. It was “intelligence for sale,” Daniel Campbell says. Johnson, who had brought Sergio Arcacha Smith to New Orleans, showed Jack Martin a document, more evidence that Robert Kennedy had put out a “personal contract” on Fidel Castro.
During the summer after the Bay of Pigs, when the Schlumberger ammunition dump at Houma seemed ripe for the picking, Banister, together with CIA’s David Atlee Phillips, organized a burglary. The thieves included David Ferrie and Layton Martens. By 1967 Phillips was keeping an eye on Jim Garrison, fearing that he would discover that the CIA were “the actual operators” of the Belle Chasse training camp, which was “entirely Agency controlled and the training was conducted by Agency personnel.” Phillips was worried that Alberto Fowler would help Garrison locate the camp.
Banister chatted on a regular basis with J. Edgar Hoover; Regis Kennedy was a frequent visitor to Banister’s office. Banister was also very close to G. Wray Gill, who had ordered Ferrie to go to Dallas the week of the assassination.
Other visitors to Banister’s office included Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell, in town to protest the screening of Leon Uris’ Exodus, and who was introduced to Banister by Jack Martin; General Edwin Walker; the ubiquitous Ed Butler; and Klan stalwarts Alvin Cobb and A. Roswell Thompson, who drove up in a big black Cadillac. Yet another Banister cohort was Jim Garrison’s enemy, Raymond Huff of Customs, who, with Banister and the CIA, was another of those who had participated in the overthrow of President Arbenz of Guatemala.
Banister did little detective work, and rarely paid his occasional employee Lawrence Guchereau. Instead, he ran a spying operation, keeping files on everyone of note in New Orleans. Banister had files on Hale Boggs; on young FBI clerk William F. Walter; on Tulane psychiatrist Harold Lief. The most important files were numbered “1013,” the “10” standing for Communism, the “13” for New Orleans. When David Ferrie showed Banister some photographs he had taken of Shaw in full female drag, Banister put them in his Shaw file, although Banister and Shaw were friendly, meeting frequently at the Old Absinthe House. Banister enjoyed an equally close friendship with Dr. Alton Ochsner. Banister kept his Lee Harvey Oswald file isolated from the others.
That Lee Harvey Oswald set up shop at intelligence operative Guy Banister’s establishment, there is no doubt. Both Allen and Daniel Campbell had known Oswald as a boy at the Bethlehem Orphans’ home. Allen remembers Oswald as a withdrawn child, trying to console the little girls who were abused by one of the people in charge. “Allen, don’t worry, someday we’ll find somebody who will love us,” Campbell says he recalls Oswald remarking.
“Can I use the phone?” Oswald asked Dan Campbell, who remembered him instantly. On another occasion, Campbell saw Oswald just sitting on the second floor, his eyes closed. Others who spotted Oswald with Banister include William Gaudet, who saw the two “deep in conversation right by the post office box. They were leaning over and talking and it was an earnest conversation.” By now Gaudet was certain the Agency knew Oswald. Orestes Peña also saw Oswald enter the building at 531 Lafayette Street.
Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, remembered Oswald walking in and asking for an application to be an operative. To her surprise, he was invited into Banister’s office. The door closed behind him. Soon Oswald was using a room upstairs, depositing his leaflets there. When Delphine observed him giving out his leaflets, she went to Banister: why hadn’t he checked this man out?
Banister was angry, famously, only when Oswald stamped “544 Camp Street” on one of his pamphlets. “He’s with us,” Banister finally told Delphine. Soon she suspected Oswald had a relationship with the FBI. Soon she learned that Oswald and Ferrie had traveled together across Lake Pontchartrain to a training camp. A local farmer named George Wilcox, out fishing near Bedico Creek, saw them as well: Ferrie, Oswald and some Cubans in military camouflage, carrying rifles and conducting a “military training maneuver.” Ferrie and Oswald were the only two “white men” among fifteen to twenty Hispanics. It was that camp to which Wendall Roache had referred and of which Robert Tanenbaum had viewed a fragment of film.
After a while, Banister no longer bothered to keep a secret of his acquaintance with Oswald. Together, according to then–history student Michael Kurtz, they appeared at LSU where Banister discussed the evils of integration and attacked John F. Kennedy’s politics. Banister called for a full-scale military invasion of Cuba, while Oswald kept silent. On the next occasion, Oswald himself denounced Kennedy for his civil rights policies. Later, Kurtz says, he spied the two eating together at Mancuso’s restaurant.
During Garrison’s investigation, neither of the Campbells; nor Gaudet; nor Delphine Roberts; nor Kurtz; nor Banister’s wife Mary, who saw the “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets in Banister’s possession; nor Banister’s brother Ross, who met Oswald and called him “rather stupid”—none of these potential witnesses came forward. Even Garrison’s chess partner, lawyer Thomas Baumler, only later admitted that “Oswald worked for Banister.” Banister cohort Vernon Gerdes informed only Clay Shaw’s defense team that he had seen Banister, Ferrie and Oswald together. Late in 1968 a Garrison volunteer found one of Banister’s student infiltrators, George Higginbotham, who penetrated left-wing groups under the code name “Dale.” Higginbotham revealed how he had kidded Banister one day about sharing a building with people distributing pro-Castro leafets.
“Cool it!” Banister had said. “One of them is mine.” Higginbotham promised more information, but would speak only to Jim Garrison personally. When Garrison met with Higginbotham, he was “close-mouthed.” Garrison was forced to write: “Contributed nothing.” No more cooperative was Banister’s landlord, Sam Newman.
“You must have seen Oswald up there,” Garrison said.
“I didn’t see nothing,” Newman said. Only for the HSCA would Banister secretary Mary Helen Brengel admit that both Banister and Delphine Roberts had “some prior knowledge of the assassination.”
Jim Garrison did know that Banister had pistol-whipped Jack Martin on the evening of the assassination. Jack had called police intelligence officer Major Presley J. Trosclair Jr. on that occasion, which was in itself unusual. Trosclair would be someone you would call if the issue were Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, not for a simple assault. No ordinary citizen could have gotten to Trosclair, Robert Buras says. But, with his intelligence connections, Jack could. The police report written up by Francis Martello, who interviewed Martin, says only that Martin and Banister had been discussing “personal and political subjects.” Martin did not press c
harges against Banister, his fellow operative.
It was a “god damned lie” that he had stolen any of Banister’s files, Martin lied to Jim Garrison.
On November 22nd, in the company of Joe Newbrough, Banister had stopped at a print shop and so learned about the assassination. “Now all we have to do is kill Earl Warren and the country will clear up!” Banister said. Later, refreshing himself at the Katz ‘n’ Jammer bar at 540 Camp Street, he speculated, “I wonder why Bobby wasn’t included. (“I’m glad,” Delphine had said when she heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s death.)
That Banister had a role in the assassination even Regis Kennedy believed. “Guy Banister is a key to everything that happened in New Orleans,” Big Regis told Moo Moo Sciambra, “and was in on everything from the very beginning to the very end.” Big Regis believed Jack had stolen some of Banister’s CIA files, and this had led to the pistol-whipping.
Jim Garrison never interviewed Banister, who died on June 6, 1964, of “natural causes.”
“If I’m dead in a week, no matter what the circumstances look like,” Banister had told Guy Johnson a week earlier, “it won’t be from natural causes.” Allen Campbell says a single round shot came in through the window, and that Delphine Roberts was present; she called Allen, who, in possession of Banister’s keys, headed for 531 Lafayette to remove files involved in the “ongoing internal security of the United States.”
Mary Banister called her friend Ruth Lichtblau in terror. “Guy’s been shot!” she said. There was blood on the walls. Soon Mary left New Orleans for good. “Don’t try to get in touch with me,” she told Lichtblau. Delphine later told Robert Buras she believed both Banister and Ferrie were murdered; she had kept silent in fear. Kent Courtney also believed Banister was murdered.