The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  KAISER: Which eventually delivered him into the grasp of David Ferrie. I started looking into Ferrie’s life as a favor, but the more I did, the more the case began to consume me. The only provable link between Ferrie and Oswald dated to 1955 and ’56, when Oswald was sixteen and a member of the Civil Air Patrol at Moisant International Airport. Ferrie had been the commander of that unit for some time. In Case Closed, Gerald Posner wrote that Ferrie and Oswald couldn’t have known each other, because they were never in the CAP unit at the same time—that Ferrie had been removed from his position prior to Oswald’s entry. But the very year Posner’s book was published, a photo surfaced that showed Ferrie and Oswald in a small, relaxed gathering around a CAP cookout fire.

  STONE: Ferrie lost his job as CAP chief, for molesting young cadets. We’ve verified that. He was a documented pedophile. Ferrie had initially hoped to be a priest, but he was kicked out of seminary for the same kind of nocturnal recreation—teenage boys. He almost certainly took that CAP job because hundreds of teenage boys came through the program.

  ME: You believe Ferrie molested Oswald as a teenager.

  STONE: Yes.

  KAISER: In 1963, David Ferrie told Jim Garrison that he’d never met Oswald. After being confronted with the Civil Air Patrol link, he backed off and said he simply didn’t remember him. Penn, I’m sure you had plenty of experience with pedophiles in the Houston DA’s office. Do you think a predator like David Ferrie didn’t remember every boy who came through his unit? Especially a vulnerable kid like Oswald? No father, insecure, confused sexuality, so desperate to be different that he’s spouting Marxist theory at sixteen?

  ME: Ferrie would have zeroed right in on him, no question. But you don’t have any objective evidence? No witness statements? Nothing?

  KAISER: Only deduction. I had to ask myself what kind of relationship could have—or would have, by necessity—remained secret for years. Like you, I’ve worked more murder cases than I can count, and that experience taught me that illicit sex is the one thing people will stay silent about, if they possibly can. Especially molestation of a minor. And remember, this was the 1950s. There were no cell phones, no text messages, no e-mail, none of the crap that traps people nowadays.

  STONE: Oswald sure wasn’t going to tell anybody about it. He took a lot of teasing from guys saying he was queer, all the way through the Marine Corps.

  KAISER: Neither was Ferrie. The stigma from a homosexual relationship could be lethal back then, even in New Orleans. More telling still, if you look at Oswald’s life after the summer that CAP photo with Ferrie was taken, the kid’s downward spiral really accelerated. He couldn’t do his schoolwork the following fall, and he dropped out of the tenth grade.

  ME: Hmm.

  KAISER: Trying to emulate his big brother, Lee tried to join the Marines at sixteen, but they turned him down. He then went to work at a dental lab. He remained in New Orleans until the following July, when his mother moved him back to Fort Worth, Texas. Obviously, Ferrie could have been having sexual liaisons with Lee throughout the period prior to this move, or only sporadically, or not at all. We just don’t know. But that next fall, at Arlington Heights High School in Texas, Lee only made it to the end of September before dropping out. Does that not sound like a kid who might have experienced something too big to process? Like an affair with an older man?

  ME: It does. But that’s still supposition.

  KAISER: I don’t deny it. But tell me it doesn’t feel right.

  ME: Look, you’re preaching to the choir here. After my years as a prosecutor, this is the easiest part for me to believe. But you still haven’t sold me that Carlos Marcello would employ this mixed-up kid when it came to a serious crime, much less an assassination.

  STONE: It wasn’t Marcello’s idea. It was Ferrie’s. Marcello’s JFK plans had nothing to do with Oswald. But Ferrie was working at the heart of Carlos’s effort to avoid deportation, and that’s what led to Oswald being brought in.

  ME: How?

  STONE: Let’s fill in the years between Lee’s Civil Air Patrol summer and the summer of ’63. This is the trajectory everybody knows. Marine sharpshooter qualification at seventeen. Working at the U2 base in Japan, two courts-martial for self-destructive accidents. First marine to defect to Russia . . . marrying Marina while in the USSR. Disillusioned by the reality of Russia, Lee returned to America without being arrested or even debriefed—which we still can’t explain, I’m afraid—and settled in Dallas. Marina fell in with the Russian émigré community, but those people couldn’t stand Lee. During this time, he mail-ordered the pistol and rifle he would later use on November twenty-second. With those weapons he promptly stalked and nearly succeeded in killing General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist. It was in the wake of that failure that Lee came up with the idea of defecting to Cuba. His first step in this process was to move back to New Orleans, which he did on April twenty-fourth, 1963, seventeen days before his pregnant wife and his child came to join him.

  ME: That all sounds familiar. So what about the summer of ’63? You couldn’t find any proof of contact between Oswald and Ferrie? Or Oswald and Marcello?

  KAISER: I did find one reliable source. An old Marcello soldier told me that Oswald worked part of that summer as a runner for Sam Saia, out of Felix’s Oyster Bar, just like his uncle Dutz had. But he wouldn’t testify to it, and he died two months ago. Oswald worked as a maintenance man at Reily Coffee for a while, but they fired him, so the runner job makes sense. He had no other source of money. And there’s no doubt that the old crowd knew Lee was back in New Orleans. He was making a real ass of himself, handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets on the street, getting into fights with anti-Castro Cubans, and going on TV for a debate. If you accept the exploitative sexual relationship back in 1955 and ’56, you’ve got to figure it was only a matter of time before David Ferrie came around to renew contact with his long-ago victim.

  ME: I buy that, all right.

  KAISER: Even if Ferrie didn’t initiate contact, I think Oswald would have sought him out. Lee had no real friends in New Orleans, and based on all my experience as a profiler, he would have been dying to tell Ferrie about all the big things he’d done since he’d last seen him.

  ME: Oswald wouldn’t have felt any attraction for the guy who’d taken advantage of him when he was a kid, would he?

  KAISER: Probably not, though it’s possible. But let’s assume Lee hated Ferrie. The summer of ’63 was still his chance to tell his abuser that he’d grown up and married a hot Russian girl, which proved he’d gotten past his sexual confusion. He had the baby to prove it.

  STONE: What does your gut tell you, Penn? As a prosecutor, listening to a story?

  ME: If you accept the secret sexual relationship, then further Ferrie-Oswald contact that summer makes sense. But even so, we’re back to square one. If Carlos had Frank Knox ready to kill Kennedy as a last resort, why bring Oswald into it at all?

  STONE: Desperation.

  KAISER: Genius, on Ferrie’s part. Think about his position. Marcello’s deportation trial was set for November first. Ferrie and Banister were trying to figure a way to fix the verdict, but they weren’t having any luck. Carlos was expecting them to pull a rabbit out of their asses, and they didn’t have one. Neither did Jack Wasserman in D.C. With every passing week, it looked more like it was going to be arrivederla to Carlos Marcello come November. But if Ferrie met Lee that summer, and Lee caught him up on his recent past, then Ferrie would have seen instantly that Oswald was a gift from the gods.

  STONE: Only three pieces of information had to pass between Oswald and Ferrie for this theory to be valid. One, that Lee had taken a shot at General Walker in April. Two, that he owned the scoped Mannlicher-Carcano he’d taken that shot with. Three, that he was trying to defect to Cuba.

  ME: You’re saying Oswald wasn’t brought in as a patsy, but as the main shooter? And a signpost pointing to Castro?

  KAISER: I don’t think Lee was brought in at all at
that point. I think Ferrie just filed the information in the back of his mind and let it simmer. It represented a potential manipulation, that’s all. For one thing, Lee wasn’t exactly stable. And he was trying to get into Cuba. Even if Ferrie had the idea that early, he would have to wait and see how the Cuba thing worked out before he tried to sell Marcello on using the kid.

  ME: Go on.

  KAISER: On September twenty-sixth, after a truly shitty summer, Lee left New Orleans for Mexico City, hoping to get a visa to Cuba. Marina had left New Orleans three days earlier with an older friend, Ruth Paine. She was pregnant and tired of Lee’s bullshit. She moved back to Texas to have her baby.

  STONE: For three days in Mexico Lee tried without success to get a visa for Cuba, so that he could defect. He visited both the Cuban and Russian embassies. He had no luck at either place.

  KAISER: This would have been a major stressor, coming on top of several others. Lee left Mexico by bus, in despair. He didn’t go back to New Orleans, but to Texas, where Marina was living with Ruth Paine and her husband. Marina didn’t want Lee back, of course. But two weeks later, a friend of Ruth’s got Lee an interview for the job at the Texas School Book Depository.

  STONE: At that point, John Kennedy had thirty-seven days to live. But Lee Harvey Oswald had no idea he would be a part of his death.

  KAISER: Marcello was scared shitless by this time. His trial started on November first, and every night was consumed by strategizing for the proceedings. Banister had been working a deal to bribe one of the jurors, but Carlos couldn’t rely on that. He had to be thinking about pulling the trigger with Frank Knox.

  STONE: We know for a fact that Carlos spent the two weekends prior to Kennedy’s assassination at Churchill Farms. We also know that Ferrie was there with Carlos for one of those weekends. That was the bill I mentioned, for “legal services.” And Marcello actually paid it.

  ME: Isn’t this pretty late in the game to be planning something?

  KAISER: It had to be late in the game. Remember Stone’s Razor? This is the only timeline that eliminates coincidence from the plan.

  ME: So when and how did Oswald get recruited for Frank Knox’s job?

  STONE: The final weekend. November fifteenth through seventeenth. There’s no other possibility. The motorcade route was finalized on Friday the fifteenth. It wasn’t made public, but Dallas police officers were made privy to the route on that day.

  KAISER: The Joseph Civello mob in Dallas had hundreds of cops on their payroll. They could easily have passed that information to Marcello. He was their overboss, after all. By Commission law, Carlos owned Dallas.

  STONE: Imagine that final weekend. A heatwave had just broken in New Orleans that November. They’ve turned on the heat out at Marcello’s swamp house. Ferrie’s there with him, sweating like a pig. Marcello is crazed with rage. He can give orders to judges, governors, even senators, yet Bobby Kennedy is about to kick his butt out of the country. It was intolerable, and I think that sometime on that last weekend—probably Friday night—Carlos snapped. Maybe the scheme to bribe the juror fell through, or maybe Carlos just didn’t trust it. But he made the decision to have Frank Knox kill JFK. Of course, he needed a cutout to send the message to Frank, and also to pass on the motorcade information. And who was ready to hand?

  ME: David Ferrie.

  KAISER: Ferrie was a good courier because he was an ace pilot. And Carlos had easy access to planes. He was a big-time marijuana smuggler. So it would be easy for Ferrie to fly up to Natchez or Vidalia with Frank’s go order.

  STONE: Only Ferrie didn’t take that flight. Because after Carlos gave him the motorcade info—which had to be either a map or a list of streets and turns—Ferrie had the epiphany of his life.

  ME: Oh, my God.

  STONE: You see now? Ferrie saw that the presidential motorcade was going to run right past the warehouse where Lee Harvey Oswald was working. He was one of the few people in the world who knew that.

  ME: How did Ferrie know? Oswald told him at some point?

  STONE: He must have. We’re not sure how. My guess is by letter. Lee was a big letter writer, and I think Ferrie would have told him to send word about whether he’d made it to Cuba or not. If Lee wrote to Ferrie any time between October fifteenth and November twelfth, Ferrie could have received the letter and learned where he was working.

  KAISER: Ferrie could have visited Lee sometime during those four weeks. I wouldn’t rule that out, but there’s no need to go that far. All we need is for Lee to have let Ferrie know he’d gotten the job at the Book Depository.

  STONE: When Ferrie saw that motorcade route, he must have felt like he was witnessing divine intervention. Like God was reaching down to save him and Marcello at the last possible moment.

  KAISER: I think Ferrie turned it over in his mind for one night. Using Oswald would be a risk, but the advantages were too great to ignore. Lee had a rifle and the ability to use it. The attack on General Walker proved that he had the will to use it. And best of all, Lee had spent the summer publicly agitating for the Castro regime. Hell, he’d defected to Russia! And he’d tried to defect to Cuba. If Lee killed JFK, nobody was even going to think about Carlos Marcello.

  STONE: And with any luck, the whole country might start screaming for LBJ to invade Cuba, which would get Marcello and the mob their casinos back.

  ME: That’s how he sold Carlos.

  STONE: Bingo. The whole Oswald-as-patsy, blame-it-on-a-nut angle has always been too much of a stretch. There was a Sicilian tradition of using mental defectives to take the fall for gang murders, but Carlos wouldn’t have taken the risk had he not had a lot more to gain from Oswald than that.

  KAISER: Remember how desperate Carlos was. He was within days of being booted out of America. I think Ferrie pitched his plan as God’s deliverance, the miracle they’d been praying for. Carlos would have remembered Dutz Murret’s nephew, of course. You don’t get where Carlos was by forgetting people.

  STONE: Marcello might have been skeptical at first, but it was hard to find a downside in Ferrie’s plan. If Lee lost his nerve or missed, Frank Knox could still take out the president, and Lee could still be blamed.

  ME: But what if Oswald was captured? What if he talked?

  STONE: I don’t think Lee was meant to live more than fifteen minutes after the assassination. The safest plan would have been for Frank to kill him shortly afterward. But that’s where the operation went wrong. When Oswald saw Kennedy’s head explode through his crappy little scope, he knew he hadn’t fired that shot. At that point, he probably panicked. Lee skipped whatever post-hit rendezvous he was supposed to make—probably with Ferrie, in his mind—and there Marcello’s plan went off the rails.

  KAISER: It still worked. And Oswald died anyway.

  ME: Let me guess. The mob had to hire Jack Ruby at the last minute to shut Oswald up before he could give away anything?

  STONE: It’s possible. Ruby has been tied to the Civello mob, and through them to Marcello’s people. But it might be that Ruby was just what he seemed—a pissed-off loser who thought the world would call him a hero for killing the man who’d shot the president. Oswald actually died the way he did because he panicked, went home for his pistol, then killed Officer Tippit during his senseless flight.

  ME: Wait—back up. When did Ferrie sell Oswald on killing Kennedy?

  STONE: I think he flew to Dallas on Saturday, November sixteenth. Instead of flying north to give Frank Knox his go order, he flew west to Dallas.

  ME: Is there any record of Oswald’s movements that weekend?

  STONE: No. Those two days have always been a black hole in his timeline. No one has ever been able to pin down where Lee was either Saturday or Sunday. He disappeared Friday after work and reappeared Sunday night at the Paine house. Ferrie had plenty of time to sell him on the idea.

  KAISER: And to buy the second Carcano.

  ME: There’s no documented record of Ferrie being in Dallas between November fifteenth and the t
wenty-second?

  I remember Stone and Kaiser looking at each other when I asked this. Then Kaiser nodded, and Stone seemed to make some silent decision.

  STONE: No known record. In fact, there are two relevant reports that have never been seen by the public. One is among the sealed assassination records in Maryland. The other is in a special FBI archive in Washington. It was never turned over to the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee.

  ME: What do those records say?

  STONE: The sealed record contains a statement by FBI agent James Hosty, who was surveilling Oswald because of his earlier defection to Russia. Lee was just one of Hosty’s responsibilities. Anyway, that weekend, Hosty claimed to have sensed other surveillance on Oswald, or even on the both of them. Hosty—and Hoover—assumed this was probably CIA surveillance. But given what we know, my theory is that Hosty sensed either David Ferrie looking for a safe opening with Oswald, or Frank Knox.

  ME: And the second record?

  STONE: During Jim Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw in 1965, an FBI agent based in Dallas saw a close-up picture of David Ferrie. At that time he told his SAC that he believed he’d seen Ferrie in Dallas on the weekend prior to the assassination—at a diner, alone. With Ferrie’s fake eyebrows and hairpiece, it’s hard to believe that agent could have been mistaken.

  ME: What happened to that report?

  KAISER: Hoover ordered it buried.