A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  A witness Jim Garrison never was able to question was Ruby’s factotum, the twenty-two-year-old drifter Curtis (Larry) Crafard. Ruby had introduced Crafard to his friends as “Oswald,” so that Crafard took a good hard look when one day Oswald walked into the Carousel Club. Garrison wondered whether Crafard had shot Tippit, whom Crafard now admits to knowing. Crafard says he saw Rose Cheramie dance at the Carousel. He admits to knowing Lawrence V. Meyers, who met with Ruby the night before the assassination. This was the same Meyers who contributed to the Dallas State Fair where Crafard worked with a check made out to Jack Ruby.

  “I think he’s a professional killer,” Jim Garrison concluded, even as, years later, Crafard would tell researcher Peter Whitmey that he had been a “hit man” in the 1960s. “We get good leads,” Garrison said, lamenting that he lacked the resources to trace Crafard’s associations, and to determine whether they led to the Mob or to the Agency. He pondered Crafard’s “special Army discharge.” Crafard’s not having surfaced in New Orleans led Garrison to postpone that lead. But he remained intrigued about the man who set up “light housekeeping at the Carousel Lounge —nobody has ever lived there before or since—and he’s gone the day after the assassination.” Crafard’s brother Edward says that Curtis was “heavily involved in the assassination.” Curtis “was involved in helping Ruby that weekend,” and knew that Ruby was acquainted with Oswald before the assassination. Curtis, his brother adds, did not leave Dallas until after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, in contrast to Crafard’s Warren Commission testimony that he had departed on November 23rd.

  Hugh Aynesworth reported to the Shaw defense that Dago Garner had seen Ruby, Tippit, Oswald and a white-haired man at the Carousel Club. They speculated that Jim Garrison must be giving Garner money. But, as in the case of the Reverend Clyde Johnson, it was not true. “Money don’t mean that much to me,” Garner says on tape, speaking to Lou Ivon. “I don’t care if I don’t get a penny. I can go to work.”

  “We don’t want you to lie to us,” Ivon says.

  Garner was more forthcoming on November 12, 1967. He had known Jack Ruby since the fifties, he now told Jim Garrison. At the Carousel Club, in Ruby’s presence, Clay Shaw had talked about “bounty hunting,” killing President Kennedy, the same term John Wilson had heard David Ferrie use. Garner had seen Oswald at the Carousel several times. Clay Shaw had paid Garner’s bus fare to New Orleans. They were to meet at Wanda’s Bar, owned by Eugene Davis, the man who advised young men in trouble to visit Dean Andrews and say “Bertrand” sent them.

  Garner had engaged in a skirmish at the Carousel Club with Lawrence Howard and identified his photograph easily. In a December interview with Mark Lane, Garner further demonstrated his bona fides not only in identifying Emilio Santana as a Ruby associate, but also in his knowledge that Jack Ruby had owned the Silver Slipper in Eunice. Like Rose Cheramie, Garner knew that Ruby’s nickname was “Pinky.” He knew Oswald did not know how to drive an automobile. He knew Shaw’s sexual practices, adding, he “liked to be whipped with ping pong paddles.”

  Other Garrison witnesses, Richard and June Rolfe, public relations people who had worked for Sergio Arcacha Smith, testified to Garner’s credibility. Rolfe had seen Jack Ruby put his arm around Garner and the two walk out of the office together. Garner was a “totally honest person,” Rolfe thought.

  In New York, Jimmy Alcock interviewed a New Orleans native and certified public accountant named Charles I. Spiesel, who had met David Ferrie at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop. Ferrie had invited him to a party where Clay Shaw appeared, and a man Spiesel identified from the composite of Oswald “with the beard drawn on it.” As at the gathering at Ferrie’s apartment described by Perry Russo, the group discussed “means and methods to be used in killing the president.” They had agreed that “a high powered rifle with a telescopic sight” would do the job. Shaw had asked Ferrie whether the man doing the shooting could be flown to safety, a subject that had also come up at the gathering Russo had attended. When Spiesel asked for help in getting accountancy work, Ferrie told him to call Clay Shaw.

  Alcock knew that Spiesel was far from an ideal witness. He had a habit of subpoenaing public officials to court (once he had subpoenaed Aaron Kohn). He believed every human being has a “double,” so that he took photographs of members of his family, including his mother. When he saw them later, he would check the person against the photograph. He even fingerprinted his daughter every six months to be sure he was not talking to her double.

  Skeptical, Alcock wondered if this was “a very obvious nut.” CBS reporter Bob Richter had telephoned Tulane and Broad to say he had heard Spiesel’s story and was dubious about the man. Yet Spiesel had revealed so much that was concrete and verifiable that his testimony could not be dismissed.

  Garrison had more confidence in a Dealey Plaza witness named Julia Ann Mercer, who appeared in New Orleans with her husband Kern Stinson, an Illinois state legislator. Handing Garrison a copy of her original affidavit to the Dallas sheriff on November 22nd, Mercer said, “They have me saying just the opposite of what I really told them.”

  Mercer had witnessed a green Ford pickup truck parked on Elm Street at 10:50 A.M., just beyond the triple underpass in front of the Stemmons Freeway. She identified the driver as Jack Ruby. A man had gotten out of the truck and carried a package wrapped in brown paper up the grassy knoll. Her statement to the sheriff’s office bore a notary stamp, although no notary had been present. That there was certainly such a truck is born out by Dallas police records: a dispatcher reported that a wrecker was needed to tow one away.

  Interviewed again the next day, November 23rd, Mercer had identified a picture of the man she was certain had driven the truck. Idly turning it over, she had read a name written on the back: “Jack Ruby.” By Monday, the sheriff’s office had inserted the words “Air Conditioning” onto the side of the truck, even as Mercer insisted that no identifying words were written on the vehicle she had seen. Soon the FBI would claim that no air conditioning companies in Dallas had a green pickup. After four interviews, the FBI wrote that Mercer “could not” identify any of the photographs of the man behind the wheel, which was patently untrue.

  After her fifth interview, the FBI insisted again that Mercer was not certain the driver was Ruby. She was. Ruby’s alibi, a Swiss cheese of obfuscations, would turn out to be consistent with the possibility that he could have been at Dealey Plaza at 10:50 A.M. He himself told the Warren Commission he “believ[ed]” he had arrived at the Dallas Morning News where he was placing an ad for his club at 10:30 or 11:00. He insisted that he talked to two employees who were together, although it emerged that they were not together at the time. One of them, Gladys Craddock, who had once worked at the Carousel as a “hostess,” destroyed her credibility by placing herself as working on Ruby’s ads at a time prior to when Ruby claimed to have been composing them. Later she changed this part of her story.

  Watching television on Sunday morning, November 24th, Mercer told Jim Garrison, she had again recognized Jack Ruby as “the man I saw in the truck. I looked right in his face and he looked at me twice.” The FBI report had reversed everything, stating she “could not identify” Ruby, but could identify the man who removed the gun case from the truck. The reverse was true.

  Garrison wondered whether the man with the gun case had been Curtis Crafard, but he did not have a photograph of Crafard for her to identify. Nor had the FBI shown Julia Mercer a photograph of Crafard, although, living at Ruby’s club, he seemed a logical suspect. They did show her Oswald’s photo. He was not the man who had gotten out of the truck, Mercer said.

  Dallas Secret Service agent Forest Sorrell, the first person to interview Ruby, told the Warren Commission that although “this lady said she saw somebody that looked like they had a gun case,” he did not pursue it. Julia Ann Mercer had placed Ruby at the assassination scene, connected to the crime before he shot Oswald. Yet the Warren Commission did not invite her to testify.

  For
Garrison now, Mercer wrote out a statement denying that the signature on the November 22nd affidavit was hers. Mercer was terrified, and, in exchange, Garrison promised not to subpoena her in the Shaw case, “assuming we can ever get the defendant on trial.” He wanted, rather, “a record as to where the truth is as against the organized effort to portray me as a liar and an insane person as well.”

  Neither Crafard, whom Garrison came to suspect as Officer Tippit’s murderer, not least because the man at the site had fled into an “Odd Church” in a light-colored windbreaker like one Crafard wears in an FBI photograph, nor Mercer was interviewed by the HSCA. Gaeton Fonzi searched for Crafard’s military discharge papers, which had been seized by the Warren Commission when he testified. They were nowhere to be found in the exhibits.

  “No other witness so completely illuminated the extent of the cover-up,” Garrison wrote of Mercer. He had offered to provide the HSCA with her married name and address, if they would make “a serious effort to protect her.” He received no reply. The HSCA final report claims they “had been unable to locate her.”

  At the close of 1967, Garrison’s investigation took so unfortunate a turn that Garrison could not bring himself to mention it in On the Trail of the Assassins. Neither Ivon nor Alcock would have been capable of the incompetence volunteers William Turner and “Bill Boxley” now exhibited. One day Turner was leafing through Garrison’s “crank file” when he found a letter from a man named Thomas Thornhill.

  Believing there was something dubious about this lead, which incriminated a man named Edgar Eugene Bradley in the assassination, Assistant District Attorney Mike Karamazin had tucked it away deep in Garrison’s filing cabinet. There Turner unearthed it. Although it addressed neither Clay Shaw’s, David Ferrie’s, nor Oswald’s intelligence connections, Turner pronounced this lead viable. The California volunteers had begun to steer Jim Garrison to those false names “smoked” by Gerald Patrick Hemming, disobeying Garrison’s order: “I don’t care about who the shooters were. I care about who the planners were.” No greater disservice was done to Jim Garrison’s work than Turner’s and Boxley’s targetting of Edgar Eugene Bradley.

  Bradley was the California representative, at a salary of about $500 a month, of a right-wing preacher, the Reverend Carl McIntire. Admired by Jack Rogers, friend of Guy Banister and Richard Van Buskirk, McIntire had been approved for CIA contact use in 1954. Garrison had been right in connecting right-wing churches and the CIA. McIntire had even met with Guy Banister on another occasion, in 1963 at the Capitol House Hotel in Baton Rouge at a meeting of the National States Rights Party.

  But this was a far cry from McIntire’s assistant Edgar Eugene Bradley’s being involved in the assassination. Thornhill claimed Bradley had tried to hire people to assassinate President Kennedy during a California campaign trip. The fee was to be $50,000. Bradley supposedly produced a layout of the storm drain system near where Kennedy was to speak. Thornhill claimed Bradley had tried to persuade one Carol Aydelotte to get her husband to kill President Kennedy.

  In December 1967, as the Bradley scenario was being developed by Turner and Boxley, Jim Garrison headed west to California for speaking engagements. There, a brouhaha arose over a radio personality reportedly having discovered that there was a San Francisco Mafia contract on Garrison’s life. Hoover yawned. “Right,” he wrote. “It is another diversionary tactic by Garrison.” In the middle of all the distractions that followed was Boxley.

  In Albuquerque, where Garrison was traveling under the name “John Armstrong,” Boxley appeared without prior notification, armed with his .45. Garrison was livid. “I don’t appreciate your dumping this paranoid garbage on me,” he said. He had instructed his staff not to pass on death threats. But against Garrison’s instructions, Boxley called the Albuquerque sheriff’s office, and, impersonating an FBI agent, said the Mafia had “decided that Garrison should be killed.” The “syndicate contract” turned out to be a hoax.

  Sending Boxley home, Garrison went to Los Angeles, where he tells of an incident in the airport men’s room. Despite a long line of empty stalls, someone had taken a stall right next to his. He heard “low whispering voices.” Fearing he might be set up with a “sex misdemeanor charge,” Garrison suddenly thought of a telephone call from a client he had once represented on a federal case.

  Garrison writes of the incident in On the Trail of the Assassins. He remembered the man as “a grimy, furtive and disheveled homosexual who sold pornographic photographs for a living.” Only three weeks before the airport incident the man had called. “He was thinking of visiting New Orleans during the next Mardi Gras,” and hoped they might get together. Now Garrison wondered if this bizarre incident was somehow connected to the call from a person he had not heard of for years, yet who had managed to find his unlisted home telephone number.

  Believing his investigation was in jeopardy, that a public scandal would be catastrophic for the case, he fled. He had to brush past two airport policemen blocking the bathroom exit door. A ring of policemen stood outside.

  In Los Angeles, Boxley awaited him. Registered as “Clyde Ballou,” Garrison was surprised when a bellhop delivered a manila envelope addressed to “Jim Garrison.” Inside was a hard object.

  “It’s an explosive!” Boxley shouted. He threw the envelope in the bathtub and turned on cold water. The object was Lawrence Schiller’s new book.

  Boxley said he was in California to pursue the Bradley lead. Together, Turner and Boxley interviewed Thornhill and Aydelotte, who claimed that Bradley had CIA connections. They put Turner and Boxley in touch with Denis Mower, a “self-avowed Minuteman,” and with a Reverend Wesley Brice of the Hollywood Bible Presbyterian Church.

  Manifesting increasingly dubious judgment, Turner and Boxley then met Mower in a motel room where Mower insisted that in 1960 Bradley had attempted to recruit him to assassinate President Kennedy from the storm drain system of Sears, promising to pay him with “government money.” He had told all this to the FBI, Mower said. Brice’s story was that Bradley had admitted to him that he was in Dallas on the day of the assassination, staying a block from Dealey Plaza. This fact was confirmed by Bradley’s wife, who had purportedly said, “Guess where Gene is! He’s in Dallas!” Because he was a man of the cloth, Brice was to be the one person in this ugly charade whom Bradley would never forgive.

  Boxley announced that Bradley was “a former intelligence operative, a covert FBI employee and a current FBI undercover employee,” guilty of involvement in the assassination. It fit his persistent scenario of focusing involvement for the crime on the FBI and away from the CIA. Neither he nor Turner managed to uncover that Thornhill and Aydelotte had been in litigation with Bradley over a quarrel within the right-wing church movement. Aydelotte blamed Bradley for her expulsion from the John Birch Society.

  “That’s Gene Bradley!” Aydelotte told Boxley, pointing to a Fort Worth Star Telegram photograph of two men standing in front of the Dallas School Book Depository. Other less-than-helpful volunteers suggested that Bradley was one of the “tramps” arrested at Dealey Plaza.

  Garrison sent Moo Moo out to Lakefront Airport in search of anyone who might have seen Bradley with David Ferrie. The only person they had seen in 1963 was that CIA contract pilot Leslie Bradley, “dressed in a Castro fatigue outfit, complete with hat and beard,” and “sleeping on the second floor.” Bradley was soon to be rescued by Clay Shaw.

  On the reassurances of Turner and Boxley, Jim Garrison decided to charge Edgar Eugene Bradley. Dubious, troubled, retaining his integrity, Jimmy Alcock refused to sign the Bill of Information. Sciambra agreed with him. Richard Burnes wanted no part of it. Whatever Bradley did was not in New Orleans, Burnes pointed out. With no connection to Shaw, it would mean they would now have two conspiracies emanating from New Orleans. Charlie Ward examined the tramp photographs and was certain Bradley was not one of them.

  By telephone, Garrison threatened to fire them all were they not to obey his instructions. Onl
y with the deepest reluctance did Garrison’s assistants charge Edgar Eugene Bradley with participation in a conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy. When Bradley’s lawyer vowed to “fight extradition every inch of the way,” Ivon and Alcock breathed a sigh of relief.

  In retrospect, this unfortunate event seems part of a general sabotage from within of the Garrison investigation. Turner had attempted to draw the Minutemen into the case. Bradley stated that Colonel Gale, the leader of the California Rangers allied to the Minutemen, whose name Hemming had also brought into Garrison’s office, was nothing more than a “nut” and “an extremist.” For Boxley, Turner and Rose, Bradley’s perspective was inconvenient.

  If Bradley’s politics were to the right, that hardly implicated him in the assassination. A former CIA agent named Chris Gugas in Omaha, where the CIA had a strong presence at the Offutt Air Force Base, did Bradley’s polygraph, but Bradley pleads that it was Gugas who had contacted him. That Bradley had supported J. Edgar Hoover for president, that he was an informant to the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, did not implicate him either.

  Jim Garrison allowed himself to believe that he had found evidence against Bradley from Dallas deputy sheriff Roger Craig, who insisted he was “positive” that Bradley was a man, “standing among some Dallas policemen,” to whom he spoke on the steps of the school book depository. Craig said he had shared information with Bradley about a young man entering a waiting light-colored Nash station wagon with a Latin-seeming driver. Garrison had welcomed Roger Craig when he had revealed that the Dallas police had been told specifically “to take NO part whatsoever in the security of that motorcade.” Then he went on to trust Craig far too much.