by Joan Mellen
Sciambra knows that Ferrie did not arrive at his alibi location, Thomas Compton’s Southeastern Louisiana College dorm room, until five in the morning on the Sunday night he returned from Houston and Galveston, although he had left New Orleans at nine or ten and Hammond was only an hour and a half away. Sciambra asks Ferrie to explain his whereabouts during those missing hours.
“Go to hell,” Ferrie says.
“Did you stay with Clay Shaw?” Sciambra persists.
“Who’s Clay Shaw?” Ferrie says.
“If that doesn’t ring a bell, how about Clay Bertrand?” Sciambra says.
“Who’s Clay Bertrand?” Ferrie says.
“Clay Bertrand and Clay Shaw are the same person,” Sciambra says.
“Who said that?” Ferrie blurts out, a question he would not have asked if he had not associated the two names with each other, if he did not know that Shaw was Bertrand. It was the Oswald library card follies all over again.
“Dean Andrews told us,” Sciambra fibs.
“Dean Andrews might tell you guys anything,” Ferrie says, ignoring that he has already denied that he knew Andrews. Ferrie now changes the subject and starts talking about Arlen Specter’s magic bullet theory.
“Save it for another day,” Louie says.
The following afternoon, just as Ivon was sitting down to Sunday dinner, his telephone rang. “My life is being threatened,” Ferrie said. “They’re going to kill me!” He pleaded for protection.
“David, hold still,” Ivon said. “I’ll be right over.” Ivon drove first to Jim Garrison’s house.
“Check him in at the Fontainebleau,” Garrison said. By four o’clock, Ferrie was checked in under a false name. Now he sat down and talked to Lou Ivon. He admitted that he had worked for the CIA. “How do you think I got the man out of Guatemala?” he said, referring to his rescue of Carlos Marcello. “Ain’t no ordinary person could do that.”
Both he and Clay Shaw, whom he had known for a long time, had been involved with the CIA. Of course Shaw was Bertrand. Shaw hated John F. Kennedy, Ferrie said.
Yes, Oswald had often been at Guy Banister’s office. Oswald had also visited the training camps across the lake. Ferrie talked freely about his own part in the burglary of the CIA-affiliated Schlumberger ammunition dump in Houma. His sponsor, Ferrie said, was Robert Kennedy, who had given him and Layton Martens “letters of marque.” He had received checks from the White House through a CIA account.
“You’re on the right track,” Ferrie told Ivon. “But you won’t get anywhere because of the government.” Then he added, “You guys don’t know what you’re dealing with. You all can’t handle this.” In his report, Ivon wrote that Ferrie had been the babysitter for Lee Harvey Oswald, a role assigned to him by the CIA. Clay Shaw had served as the conduit of information from Washington. At four A.M. Louie finally went home, leaving Lynn Loisel to keep an eye on Dave. When Loisel went out for cigarettes, Ferrie fled. So that there would be no leak, Ivon decided not to have his report typed by an office secretary but to give Jim Garrison his handwritten notes directly.
The next morning, Orestes Peña spotted Ferrie walking on Decatur Street. He must find Sergio Arcacha Smith and Wilfredo Mas, Ferrie told Peña. Mas was with both FBI and CIA; his brother in Miami belonged to the DRE. Peña suggested that Ferrie ask DRE member Bringuier. Then Peña telephoned Garrison’s office and told investigator Frank Meloche that he had just seen Ferrie.
“Garrison is trying to frame me because he wants the publicity to run for higher office,” Ferrie tells Bringuier. Assuming that Bringuier would know, Ferrie asks him for the date when the conspiracy started. He needs help in finding Arcacha. “All judges should be hanged,” Ferrie remarks. Bringuier’s back goes up. In Cuba, his father had been a judge.
“You should go to a psychiatrist,” Ferrie finally tells Bringuier, “because anyone who believes in a Communist conspiracy to kill Kennedy needs to go to a psychiatrist.” David Ferrie has renewed his acquaintance with the truth.
The next day, Tuesday, Ferrie sits at the New Orleans Public Library perusing the Warren Commission volumes. He sells his airplane. He is being harassed because he helped Carlos Marcello, he says. He has figured out that Jimmy Johnson has been spying on him but does nothing about it. He meets up with his old friend, now former policeman Sandy Krasnoff, who knows he is close to Shaw. “I’m going to kill myself,” Ferrie says. “I’m fed up with life.” He plans to use poison.
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, February 22nd, Ferrie was interviewed at his apartment by George Lardner of the Washington Post. To this particular reporter, according to Lardner’s published story, he lied, as if by rote. He said he did not remember having met Lee Harvey Oswald since they were “in different units” of the CAP. He was “hunting geese” the weekend of the assassination. The district attorney knows “he’s got a tiger by the tail,” Ferrie says. Lardner departed at 4 A.M.
At 11:45 A.M. on that Wednesday, Jimmy Johnson arrived to pack up Ferrie’s papers. The door was locked, so Johnson let himself in through a window. Ferrie lay dead, naked in his bed. His false eyebrows were still glued on, which was unlike him. On a coffee table sat two sealed envelopes. One was addressed to his brother Parmely, the other to Gerald Aurillo. Jimmy Johnson saw these two letters.
Twenty-five minutes later he noticed that they had disappeared. There were two typewritten suicide notes in the room. In “Suicide Note A,” which was sitting in the typewriter, Ferrie talked of life as “loathsome,” and leaving it a “sweet prospect.” A “somewhat Messianic district attorney” was “unfit for office,” Ferrie writes, as were two judges, J. Bernard Cocke and Federal Judge Herbert Christenberry, who denied “defendants due process of law.”
“Suicide Note B,” unsigned, was addressed to Alvin Beaubouef. “I offered you love,” Dave pleaded to his heir. He was dying, “alone and unloved,” for which he blamed Al’s girlfriend and future wife, Carol. Under Dave’s microscope was a smear, cells being checked for venereal disease. Krasnoff arrived at the scene, while his wife rushed to have someone remove the Eddie Sapir campaign sign from the front lawn. Beaubouef would keep some of Dave’s possessions but throw most of his library into the city dump. In one of Ferrie’s law books a particular section was highlighted: “the conditions under which the District Attorney of New Orleans could be removed from office.”
Coroner Nicholas Chetta knelt down and sniffed the corpse. “Poison! Poison!” he said. But Chetta ruled finally that Ferrie had died of natural causes, a ruptured blood vessel at the base of the brain, a “beury aneurysm.” Chetta’s verdict did not match Ferrie’s recent symptoms, his difficulty in walking, his lethargy. The autopsy was “slipshod,” Ferrie’s doctor Martin Palmer contends. It was only partial and they did not even open the brain case, casting the beury aneurysm verdict into doubt. Chetta at once reported to the highly interested FBI that “Suicide Note A” was “not a suicide note.”
Empty bottles of the thyroid medication Proloid were at the scene and could have been traceable through the high iodine content in the blood had the coroner run that test. Drugs, too, might cause an aneurysm, but samples of Ferrie’s blood were not kept. Leonard Gurvich, William’s brother, who had also attached himself to the Garrison investigation, noted that the inside of Ferrie’s mouth was “all burned up as a result of taking some type of acid drug.” Dr. Frank Minyard, later coroner of Orleans Parish, also has noted in the report reference to a contusion, perhaps caused by “something traumatically inserted into Ferrie’s mouth.”
Other ambiguities persist. “I can’t get hit in the head,” Ferrie had told Daniel Campbell, referring to his “eggshell cranium.” Morris Brownlee had told Garrison’s investigators that Ferrie “knew he was going to die from the weakened arterie [sic] in his head.”
In 1969, Dr. Dimitri L. Contoslavlos, a Pennsylvania medical examiner, tried to reach Jim Garrison. He wanted to point out that a blow to the side of the head just below the ear could cause an aneury
sm to burst, and there need be no external tissue damage. A karate blow, or even a punch to the side of the neck, could do someone in.
Dr. Chetta ruled that the time of death was before midnight, only for reporter Lardner to contend that he had been with Ferrie until just before four in the morning. Chetta then dutifully altered the time of death: “I can’t rule out the possibility he may have died as late as 4 A.M.,” Chetta said. It was a “major inconsistency,” Garrison noted, “one of the mysteries we don’t understand.”
That night, Robert Kennedy reportedly telephoned Dr. Chetta, inquiring as to the cause of David Ferrie’s death as he kept an ever watchful eye on Jim Garrison’s investigation. Garrison issued a press release cautiously referring to the “apparent suicide” of David Ferrie. He had planned to arrest Ferrie early the following week. “Apparently we waited too long,” it read. One of his assistants added a phrase, terming David Ferrie “one of history’s most important individuals.” These were not Jim Garrison’s words. Garrison did suggest an appropriate epitaph for Ferrie from the last words of Serb partisan Draja Mihailovic, shot by Tito for collaboration: “I was swept up in the gales of history.” Regarding the cause of death, Garrison would not “rule out anything.” Ferrie was “a man of lights and shadows, mountains and valleys,” Garrison summed up.
Young John Wilson thought, “Dave just wouldn’t kill himself. He was looking forward to the coming bullshit. He would love all the publicity, and he believed that he was much more intelligent than Jim Garrison. It would be a fun time for Dave.” Most of the people who knew Ferrie believed he did not die of natural causes, as Dr. Chetta ruled. Wendall Roache, who had worked with Oswald in Customs, testified before the Church Committee to his belief that Ferrie was murdered.
Jack Martin noted that Nicholas Chetta was famous for selling “natural causes” verdicts, “just like a prostitute.” So Chetta had ruled in other suspicious deaths, from the wife of sheriff Johnny Grosch to the demise of Corrine Morrison, wife of mayor Chep Morrison. Only that past December, Martin, referring to the death of Ferrie’s mother, had remarked to Jim Garrison that there “are a lot of ways of killing a guy without showing in an autopsy.” Ferrie is “the key to everything,” Martin believed.
Benton Wilson was certain the CIA had murdered Dave.
Because Wilson knew so much about Ferrie’s connection to the assassination, he began to carry a knife.
When Jim Garrison sought him for questioning, Benton Wilson fled the state of Louisiana, not to return for decades. In the ensuing years, he would not talk to his sons about the assassination or about David Ferrie for fear that they might become vulnerable. When he saw the movie JFK, all Benton Wilson said was, “It wasn’t like that.”
Twenty-four hours after Ferrie died, his CIA Miami contact Eladio del Valle was found shot through the heart. Del Valle’s skull had been cut open from ear to ear with a machete, his body discovered not far from the apartment of Bernardo de Torres. Kennedy “must be killed to solve the Cuban problem,” del Valle had said. Del Valle had identified the Cuban Manuel García Gonzales from a photograph, and had promised to help Alberto Fowler.
CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston suspected that in late 1966 Del Valle had alerted President Duvalier about a plot led by Rolando Masferrer, with covert CIA encouragement, to invade Haiti. That may well have been the motive for his murder, the CIA wrote for the record, ignoring the extraordinary coincidence of Ferrie and Del Valle dying within twenty-four hours of each other.
In the 1990s, General Fabian Escalante, former head of Cuba’s intelligence services, confided in author Dick Russell. Tony Cuesta, a Cuban about to leave Havana after a hospital stay and grateful for the care, named in a written declaration two people as having been involved in the plotting of the Kennedy assassination. One was Eladio del Valle, the other Herminio Díaz García, a “darkskinned” Cuban who may have been the man Jim Garrison had identified as having been seen with Oswald, and often with Ferrie.
Jim Garrison held a staff meeting right after Ferrie’s death. Everyone, not least Charlie Ward, who had political ambitions of his own, recommended that he drop the investigation, turn what he had over to the federal government and resume his political career. By now Garrison thoroughly hated politics. “What am I supposed to do? Go out and cut ribbons?” he argued. He would continue. If anyone wished to leave the investigation, they were free to do so.
John Volz and Jimmy Alcock tried one last time to persuade Garrison to cease and desist. Together they entered his private office where no one went casually.
Your main witness is dead, they pleaded. You can’t go any further. Jim Garrison was so brilliant, Volz thought. You could explain a legal problem, or a public relations problem, to him in two sentences and he would come up with an instant answer, and a good one. On the subject of the Kennedy assassination, he was unmovable.
“Jim, we don’t have the wherewithal,” Volz said. “How many people do we have? It’s time to take this ball and roll it down the hill. It’s over.”
“You must be crazy,” Garrison said. “We’re just beginning to crack this case!”
Coda: There is a CIA document dated February 8, 1973, six years after David Ferrie’s death. It is a Memorandum For File, signed by Bruce L. Solie, Deputy Chief of the Special Research Section of the Office of Security. The subject is Ferrie, David W., #523949, and Ferrie is described as being “of continuing interest . . . relative to the case of Kenneth Ralph Tolliver, #538049.” Solie writes that “no action of any kind should be taken on Subject case without consulting the TOLLIVER file,” as if action on the dead Ferrie were still pending.
Lest anyone doubt Ferrie’s CIA connections, or Louis Ivon’s account of his last conversation with Ferrie, Kenneth R. Tolliver became a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, whose presidency was filled for a time by David Atlee Phillips. He is the author of A Defector in Place, a roman à clef about “Raya,” the Soviet Embassy code clerk in Mexico City who became a defector in place. An early Tolliver work was 5Gtc: An Authorization Code. Espionage is his subject. Agent Tolliver was connected to Ferrie in another aspect: he is a pilot of “fixed wing aircraft,” a subscriber to Sport Aviation.
Tolliver’s name surfaces in the Warren Commission questioning of Birchite Revilo Pendleton Oliver, a professor of classical philology at the University of Illinois. Oliver Exhibit No. 8 is a photostatic reprint of an article headlined, “A lot to remember, McComb Army officer big part in Kennedy funeral,” by Kenneth Tolliver. Tolliver writes about one Captain Richard C. Cloy who helped conduct the Kennedy funeral, including a quote from his wife on how the funeral was “one of the most moving experiences of her life.” The story appeared in the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger on February 21, 1964, and is of interest in its reflecting a certain interest on the part of Tolliver in the assassination of President Kennedy.
As to what the CIA contemplated on Ferrie’s case, action they were forbidden to undertake without consulting “the TOLLIVER file,” is unknown to the author at this time.
A WITNESS COMES Q FORWARD AND INTRIGUE AT THE VIP ROOM
8
He was hardly Joe Smith, American.
—Jim Garrison
THE DEATH OF DAVID FERRIE frightened potential witnesses. Garrison tried to combat this fear by telling reporters that his office had “solved” the case “two weeks ago.” On February 25th, he announced that he knew “the key individuals, the cities involved and how it was done.” Arrests were forthcoming. Senator Russell Long proposed that the federal government offer a “substantial reward” to “loosen the lips of some people.” Operating on a shoestring, Garrison borrowed $2,500 from Volkswagen dealer Willard Robertson, who would donate almost $30,000 dollars to the investigation.
Joseph Rault, along with a chemical engineer named Cecil Shilstone and Robertson, then formed a committee called “Truth and Consequences.” Fifty businessmen pledged one hundred dollars a month for a minimum of three months. That Rober
tson and Shilstone were simultaneously also on the board of INCA they did not view as a contradiction. Helping uncover the murderers of President Kennedy was their patriotic duty, a “civic effort,” Rault said. The public deserved “something better than the snow job the Warren Commission gave,” Robertson added. Contributors ranged from private citizens like David Ferrie’s insurance agent, Avery Spear, to Governor John McKeithen. A flippant reporter asked Garrison whether he expected a contribution to “Truth and Consequences” from the CIA. Garrison laughed.
“No, but I am expecting some from the FBI,” he said.
Reporters attempted to extract from Shilstone the names of contributors. “Even if I did know, I would not tell you gentlemen,” he said. There were reprisals against those who dared help Jim Garrison. In May of 1968, Shilstone reported to the FBI a rumor that he had been involved in the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. FBI’s Joseph Sylvester checked on Rault and discovered that he was a longtime Bureau informant.
One attack on the group focused on the presumed illegality of the district attorney’s accepting private funds. Louise Korns checked and found that such private contributions were entirely legal. Garrison was a “parochial officer, and does not operate a state agency,” she wrote. Korns established that the existing law did not apply to Truth and Consequences’ contributions. Pressure on the group to reveal its records persisted.
By June 1967, Garrison had spent a paltry $9,032. That summer he admitted that Truth and Consequences had “disappeared completely. . . all of a sudden one day came and they didn’t meet anymore.”
A Dallas cab driver named Raymond Cummings, having read that David Ferrie had denied being in Dallas in 1963, came forward. Between January and May 1963, Cummings said, he had picked up Lee Harvey Oswald at the Irving Continental Bus Station. A week later, he had picked up Oswald, David Ferrie and another man and driven them to Jack Ruby’s club. William Gurvich handled Cummings’ polygraph, with a cohort named Roy Jacob, who pronounced Cummings a liar. Cummings was sent back to Dallas. A decade later, Garrison knew Jacob could not be trusted and regretted that he had not accepted Cummings as a witness. Cummings had provided a “possibly good lead,” he wrote, “but temporarily torpedoed by ‘lie detector’ test arranged by Gurvich.” A Ruby employee named Clyde Limbough by then had revealed that he had seen Oswald in Ruby’s office on three occasions, as the evidence that Oswald and Ruby were well acquainted accumulated.