Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Garrison even told conspiracy author Paris Flammonde that with respect to the assassinations of President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, “there is enough data available in all three cases to state, as a probability, that they were all accomplished by the same force and that they were all…[U.S.] intelligence assassinations.”97

  This is the irrational person who Oliver Stone deliberately misled millions of Americans into believing was the solid, sober-minded, level-headed, and heroic All-American figure portrayed by Kevin Costner. Stone’s Garrison was the personification of an honest and completely responsible public servant.

  I personally know of no American prosecutor who has ever abused his office’s power of subpoena and power to file unwarranted criminal charges against perceived adversaries to the degree that Garrison did in the Shaw case, causing fear and intimidation—undoubtedly precisely what Garrison was seeking to accomplish—in the minds of all those who might oppose what he wanted. As Shaw asserted in his May 1968 civil lawsuit against Garrison and two of his top assistants, “All who oppose the defendants or disagree with the theories expounded by them incur their wrath and displeasure, and the defendants misuse and abuse the powers of their office by filing criminal charges of one sort or another against them.”98* Garrison’s unprofessional antics were so notorious in New Orleans at the time that when David Chandler, a Life magazine reporter from New Orleans who wrote a series of articles in April and September of 1967 about organized crime in Louisiana containing unflattering references to Garrison (which Garrison called lies), was subpoenaed by Garrison before the Shaw grand jury to testify on what he had written, the federal district court in New Orleans, on March 11, 1968, enjoined Garrison from enforcing his subpoena. The court said that “Garrison has stated his lack of regard for the truthfulness of the very testimony being sought…Chandler’s fear of prospective prosecution for perjury…is well founded.” Chandler was thereby saved from an almost certain charge of perjury by Garrison.

  Little of this, unfortunately, was reaching the masses. Most people were all too willing to believe that a beloved president had been murdered and the authorities were concealing the truth from them. But was Garrison really an intrepid DA who was willing to take on the government to uncover the truth for them? On June 19, 1967, a major national network, NBC, had told Americans, in so many words in its television special on the case, The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison, that Garrison wasn’t legitimate and that his charges were fraudulent. Garrison knew he had to fight back nationally. Playboy gave Garrison the longest interview in the history of the magazine in its October 1967 issue, thirty-seven pages, and among other radio and TV appearances, Mort Sahl got him on the Johnny Carson show on January 31, 1968. “Johnny” may have been a comedian, but he had a good, solid head on his shoulders, and he could spot a phony, or at least an empty vessel, when he saw one. When Garrison kept hammering away that the truth in the Kennedy assassination was being suppressed from the American people, Carson asked Garrison, “Who’s suppressing all of this information? On whose order?”

  “I’ll tell you who’s suppressing it, the federal government is suppressing it.”

  “Who in the federal government?” Carson pressed.

  “The administration of your government is suppressing it because they know that the Central Intelligence Agency…”

  “On whose order?” Carson interrupted, not letting Garrison evade his question.

  “On the order of the president of the United States.”

  “For what possible reason?”

  “Why don’t you ask him, John?” (laughter and applause)

  “I know what he’d say. (applause) I think he would say…‘Mr. Garrison has come up with no credible evidence to support any of his theories.’”

  Garrison went on to tell Carson, “I am trying to tell you that there is no question, as a result of our investigation, that an element of the Central Intelligence Agency of our country killed Kennedy, and that the present administration is concealing the facts. There is no question about it at all.”

  “That is your opinion.”

  “No, it is not. I know it,” Garrison assured Carson.99

  The lunacy of Garrison and his investigation of Shaw naturally carried over to Shaw’s trial, which commenced with opening statements by Garrison for the prosecution and by Shaw’s chief defense lawyer, Irvin Dymond, for the defense, on February 6, 1969, after fourteen court days of jury selection, which had started on January 21. Most of Garrison’s witnesses were prosecutorial nightmares. For instance, one witness, Vernon Bundy, was a twenty-nine-year-old black heroin addict who in 1967 was in Orleans Parish prison on a parole violation for a theft conviction the previous year. On March 16, 1967, two days after Clay Shaw’s preliminary hearing had commenced, Bundy contacted Garrison’s office with an almost laughably improbable and transparently fabricated story. Indeed, in the one-hour June 19, 1967, NBC news exposé on Garrison’s apparently trumped-up charges against Shaw, and which seven investigative reporters for NBC had spent several weeks working on,100 two fellow inmates of Bundy’s, Miguel Torres and John Cancler, said that Bundy had told them his story was a lie he came up with to get “cut loose” from prison. However, both thereafter pleaded their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when the Orleans Parish grand jury asked them to repeat their story under oath. It is not known whether they took the Fifth because they didn’t want to lie, or because they knew about Garrison’s habit of prosecuting people for perjury when their truthful testimony hurt him or his agenda.*

  In any event, according to Bundy, he was preparing a heroin injection for himself next to the concrete seawall at Lake Pontchartrain on a Monday morning in June or July of 1963 when he saw Clay Shaw get out of a black sedan, pass by him, and walk fifteen to twenty feet away, where he was approached by Lee Harvey Oswald, who he said was “dirty” and “looked like a real junkie himself.” Bundy said he saw Shaw and Oswald talk about “fifteen to twenty” minutes, during which time Shaw handed Oswald a roll of money and also told Oswald, with Bundy standing nearby, “I told you to shut up. You’re talking too loud.” Why Shaw would want to talk to and pay Oswald—presumably to be involved in the assassination of Kennedy—in public, with someone standing nearby, as opposed to inside his car or someone’s home, is not known. Nor is it known why Bundy, instead of taking his fix behind closed doors somewhere, would do so in public, knowing, as he must have, that if he were caught he could be prosecuted as well as be found in violation of his parole.

  Oh, yes. Bundy decided to gild the lily by telling the DA that as Oswald walked away, a pamphlet fell out of his pocket onto the ground. Bundy took time out from his heroin injection to retrieve the pamphlet, which he said had “Free Cuba” language on it.101

  No one, of course, believed a word Bundy said, and in the more than three years since the assassination, he had never told this story before. In fact, reporter Frank McGee said on the June 19 NBC News special that NBC investigators had learned that Bundy had failed a polygraph test, and because of this, Garrison’s first assistant district attorney, Charles Ward, urged Garrison not to call Bundy to the witness stand at Shaw’s preliminary hearing in 1967.102 In fact, the polygrapher, James Kruebbe, had personally told Garrison, in the presence of Ward and fellow prosecutor James Alcock, that Bundy “wasn’t telling the truth.”103 But Garrison, knowing he was possibly presenting perjurious testimony, did, and had Bundy repeat his tale at Shaw’s trial in 1969. At the trial, after Shaw, per Bundy’s request, walked twice from the back of the courtroom toward him, Bundy testified he was sure Shaw was the man he had seen that day. “I watched his foot the way it twisted that day. This is one way I identified this man the next time I saw him*…That is the foot [Shaw’s right foot] that twisted that day. The twisting of his foot had frightened me that day on the seawall when I was about to cook my drugs.”104 Shaw did have a slightly stiff walk from a bad back,105 but who else had ever said that his foot twist
ed when he walked? On cross-examination by Shaw’s lawyer, Bundy denied telling Torres and Cancler that he had made the Shaw story up.106

  And then there was the New York City accountant, Charles Spiesel, a short and dapper man with an authoritative voice and mien who told the Shaw jury that one evening in June of 1963 he was at La Fitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a bar in the French Quarter, when he recognized a man (David Ferrie) he had flown in the air force with during the Second World War. (There is no record of Ferrie having ever served in the air force.) Ferrie was with two women and another man, and they invited him, he said, to a party at a second-floor apartment in the French Quarter. At the party were ten or eleven men, including Shaw, who was the host, though it was not his apartment. The apartment’s occupants were out of town and had given Shaw the keys. Spiesel testified that “someone brought up the name of President Kennedy and just about everybody began to criticize him. Then someone said ‘somebody ought to kill the son-of-a-b!’” Ferrie expressed the opinion it could be done, and Shaw smiled and agreed. A young man with a beard and a splint said he’d like to be the one to do it “in a couple of weeks” when his splint was removed. Spiesel said the group finally agreed that the killing “would have to be done with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.” Shaw, per Spiesel, asked Ferrie if the assassin could be flown away from the assassination site to safety and Ferrie said it could be done.

  Spiesel’s testimony, naturally, had a stunning effect on the media and the rest of the spectators in the courtroom. But on cross-examination, when Irvin Dymond, Shaw’s lead defense attorney, asked Spiesel if he had noticed anything unusual about Ferrie’s physical appearance, Spiesel said, “No,” which was the equivalent of saying he had never met Ferrie, and his whole story was poppycock. Without exception, everyone who met Ferrie was startled by his bizarre appearance, Ferrie being, as someone once said in a different context, a sight seldom seen in Christendom. What about Ferrie’s hair? Spiesel was asked.

  “Fairly well-groomed,” he said about the grotesque, dime-store wig Ferrie had glued on his head.

  “Did he have unusual eyebrows?”

  “A little thinner than most men’s, not unusual outside of that,” Spiesel responded about the inordinately thick, pasted-on eyebrows Ferrie wore.

  Spiesel was a nut of the first water, and on Dymond’s cross it came out he believed that from 1948 to 1964 a New York psychiatrist, the New York Police Department, the Pinkerton detective agency, the New York Horse Racing Association, and others had conspired to torture him mentally in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans, and that, acting as his own lawyer, he had filed a $16 million lawsuit against them. Dymond read into the record the entire text of the embarrassing complaint filed by Spiesel. The effect of the reading was apparent on Spiesel as he nervously made stroking motions above his head with his right hand, missing his scalp completely. His left hand rested firmly on the arm of the witness chair, his fingers tapping on the wood. Spiesel also said on cross-examination that he had been hypnotized “by possibly fifty or sixty” people “against my will” over the period between 1948 and 1964, including by the New York Police Department, causing him to suffer “hypnotic delusions” and lose the ability to have “normal sexual relations.” Others, he said, tried to enter his home disguised as members of his family. Why would all these people and groups want to do this? Shaw’s attorney asked. Spiesel said he did not know but suggested it was a Communist conspiracy to spy on him. How, Shaw’s attorney asked Speisel, would he know if he was being hypnotized? “When someone tries to get your attention, catch your eye,” Spiesel said, “that’s a clue right off.” Is it possible, Shaw’s attorney asked, that he was under hypnosis at the time he supposedly heard Shaw and Ferrie conspire with others to kill Kennedy?

  “I don’t really know if it did happen,” Spiesel acknowledged.

  Spiesel admitted that he currently had fifteen lawsuits against him in New York City for nonpayment of debts and that he had filed for bankruptcy. By this time, Garrison’s prosecutors would have mortgaged their homes to get Spiesel off the witness stand, but it was too late, as Spiesel inflicted further punishment on himself and the DA who called him to the stand. His self-administered coup de grace was when he testified that before his daughter had left home in New York City for Louisiana State University, he fingerprinted her, and again fingerprinted her when she returned home because he wanted to make sure she was the same person who had left home, not one of his “enemies” who had taken to impersonating members of his family to destroy him.107

  When Tom Bethell, Garrison’s chief researcher, left Garrison’s office out of disgust over Garrison’s investigation of Shaw, he sent a memo to the defense attorneys setting forth names and addresses of all the prosecution witnesses, including a summary of their expected testimony. This was extremely helpful to the defense since at the time in Louisiana, there was no right of “discovery” of the opposition’s witnesses and statements, meaning the prosecution could present surprise witnesses at the trial without the defense having had an opportunity to prepare for their testimony. Bethell told me that the prosecutor in Garrison’s office who interviewed Spiesel in New York City (and whose name, out of consideration for the prosecutor, he did not want to reveal to me) had reported back to Garrison that Spiesel would make an excellent witness “if it weren’t for the fact that he was crazy.” The prosecutor had learned, among other things, of Spiesel’s fingerprinting his daughter. Although Bethell didn’t furnish the defense attorneys with this information, once they learned of Spiesel’s identity through Bethell, their own investigation uncovered all of Spiesel’s quirkiness and eccentricities, including the fingerprinting, and the prosecution was stunned when all of this came out on cross-examination.108

  The prosecutor whose name Bethell did not want to give me was James Alcock. He had interviewed Spiesel on July 13, 1967, at a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Alcock’s three-page memorandum of the interview to Garrison on July 17 makes no reference to learning of Spiesel’s fingerprinting his daughter, and closes by saying, “Mr. Spiesel is willing to testify and only requests that we attempt to get him some per diem accounting work while he is in the city.”

  The FBI had a file on Spiesel, dating back to 1949, that chronicled his bizarre accusations, including the charge that his enemies had placed people in his home disguised as his father and mother. Spiesel’s father, Boris, a New York City fur merchant, told the FBI his son was mentally disturbed.109

  The sad-sack prosecutors couldn’t even put a U.S. postman on the witness stand without evoking smirks and ripples of laughter from the courtroom audience. Garrison was alleging that the name Shaw used as an alias when he conspired with Ferrie and Oswald to murder Kennedy was Clay Bertrand (see later discussion). In the summer of 1966, Shaw executed a change of address form so his mail would be sent to the home of his friend, one Jeff Biddison at 1414 Chartres Street, while Shaw was on vacation. The postal worker, James Hardiman, told the jury that he delivered several letters addressed to Clem (not Clay) Bertrand to Biddison’s house that summer. On cross-examination, he was asked, “Did you ever deliver any mail to that address, that is, 1414 Chartres Street, addressed to a Mr. Cliff Boudreaux?”

  Yes, the postal worker answered.

  “Now, Mr. Hardiman, if I told you I just made that name up, would your testimony be the same?”

  “Maybe you made it up,” Hardiman answered, “but I have delivered Boudreaux mail there, too.”110

  One may wonder why Garrison was beset by so many goofy witnesses. But as author James Phelan pointed out, “There are certain sensational cases that have a fascination for unstable people and fetch them forth in droves…Celebrated cases also attract witnesses who are not psychotic, but who falsely identify key figures out of faulty memory or a desire to lift themselves out of dull anonymity into the spotlight.” The difference between Garrison and most responsible prosecutors in these high-visibility cases is that the latter don’t call the kooks t
o the witness stand. Garrison did. Phelan says, “The Garrison case had a disastrously low threshold, across which trooped a bizarre parade of people eager to bolser his conspiracy scenario.”111 And Garrison welcomed them with open arms.

  Garrison’s star witness at the Shaw trial, and the one around whom he virtually built his entire case, was Perry Russo (David Ferrie died before the trial—see later text), a twenty-five-year-old Baton Rouge insurance salesman who was a friend of David Ferrie’s. Russo claimed that he was in Ferrie’s apartment in New Orleans in mid-September of 1963 when he heard Ferrie, Shaw (using the alias Clay Bertrand), and Oswald conspire to kill Kennedy.112 The only problem is that cross-examination revealed that the first four times Russo told everything he knew about Ferrie—including to Baton Rouge State-Times reporter Bill Bankston on February 24, 1967 (two days after Ferrie’s death), and later in the day to Jim Kemp of TV station WAFB in Baton Rouge—he never mentioned any such thing, not even bringing up the names Oswald, Shaw, or Bertrand, much less any conspiracy by them. In fact, when Kemp asked him if Ferrie had ever mentioned “Lee Harvey Oswald’s name,” Russo answered, “No. I had never heard of Oswald until the television [coverage] of the assassination.”113 Russo only spoke about the Shaw-Ferrie-Oswald conspiracy meeting when he was put under sodium pentothal and hypnosis four years later in 1967, and even then, only after being asked leading questions.

  But one can see why Russo needed truth serum and hypnosis to recall hearing three people plot to murder President Kennedy four years earlier. Without truth serum and hypnosis, a plot to murder the president of the United States just wasn’t important enough for someone like him to remember. But what about around the time of the alleged incident? Surely he must have remembered the incident at least for a while back then, right? And if so, why, he was asked at Shaw’s preliminary hearing on March 15, 1967, hadn’t he gone to the authorities when, just two months after the meeting of conspirators he claimed he was privy to, the president was murdered? Again, apparently a plot to murder the president of the United States just wasn’t important enough to Russo. He responded casually, “I had an involvement with school, which was more pressing to me.”