Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  An unsigned memo found in Ferrie’s file at the St. Charles Seminary told the faculty’s side of the story. It began, “We had serious misgivings about admitting him to our seminary after learning he had been refused re-admittance to Saint Mary’s in Cleveland.” Attempting to give a balanced portrayal, they described Ferrie as “a paradox,” saying “many of his ways were likable.” They even assumed some responsibility for their part in Ferrie’s tragedy by pointing out that they had renewed his relationship for over three years, but alas “there was surely an element of instability in his character somewhere.” Then they described what became a familiar pattern in Ferrie’s life, initial success both socially and scholastically, the achievement of a leadership position amongst his peers, growing conflict and jealousy, back-stabbing, self-pity, exaggeration, manipulation, misuse of leadership and trust, excessive criticism, threats, and contempt of authority.

  In a tone that approached apology, the anonymous author said there was no single event of magnitude, but rather a pattern of minor infractions, mostly of the rules of the house, but also “emotional instability,” especially “his inclination to suspicion and rash judgement and uncharitable conclusions” that indicated “he would not fit into a religious community.”

  The final stroke: “When corrected, his attitude seemed to be that the rule should be changed rather than that he should be forced to observe it.” On November 27, 1944, the Faculty of St. Charles Seminary refused to allow him to continue his quest for priesthood “due to the questionableness of his disposition.” He was unfit for the Society of the Precious Blood.

  In 1945, Ferrie was treated by a psychiatrist and began a period of relative stability. He lived at home, worked teaching English and Aeronautics at Benedictine High School, and began his long relationship with the Civil Air Patrol. This calm lasted through 1948, though the seven traffic violations from this stretch showed he was still having some trouble with “the rules of the house.”

  In 1948, he became involved in a series of serious misconduct incidents at the Civil Air Patrol which eventually drove him from Ohio. In the first case, he appropriated a squadron airplane which had been grounded by the U.S. Air Force and flew it, after dark and without landing lights, from Columbus to Cleveland. Identifying himself as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force during the incident got him into even hotter water. The CAP commander tried to have Ferrie dismissed from CAP, but the paperwork was “lost.” So Ferrie was still on their books in 1950, when two CAP cadets signed papers reporting that Ferrie, their instructor, had taken them to a house of prostitution in a nearby town. Ferrie was not charged with a crime, but his dismissal from CAP became imminent. Ferrie negotiated his disastrous situation into a transfer to Louisiana. When the Louisiana branch asked for his personnel file, the Cleveland office found it missing, but could not prove it was stolen.

  Ferrie did have his friends and allies along the way. One was a well-known female pilot who hired Ferrie to fly her ex-husband’s twin-engine plane on business trips down to Texas.6 She considered Ferrie a near-genius whose piloting skills were above reproach. She personally felt he did much for the Civil Air Patrol, building up their squadron to one of the largest in Ohio. She blamed his problems at CAP on jealousy from other instructors and blamed them for stealing his personnel files to remove his many letters of recommendation.

  In 1951, David Ferrie finally bailed out of Ohio and headed for his new home in New Orleans. There he moved into the French Quarter and before long was living on Bourbon Street. It must have been quite a change for someone who spent six years in a seminary!

  Ferrie’s life in New Orleans was successful for most of the 1950s. He landed a good job with Eastern Airlines and learned to fly big jets. He wore the Eastern uniform, and was eventually promoted to the rank of Captain.

  The life of a pilot is an unusual one. Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of fear and stress. When they are traveling, pilots are required to rest a certain number hours for each hour of flying time. This creates long layovers which are full of idle hours.

  Ferrie appears to have made good use of his time. His ability to teach himself intellectually complex subjects proved to be his major strength. He began his study of bio-chemistry and took a correspondence course in psychology and hypnotism, albeit from an un-accredited medical school in Italy. He listed himself in the phone book as Dr. David Ferrie.

  He continued his involvement with the Civil Air Patrol and reached the rank of Captain. There he met a cadet named Lee Harvey Oswald.7

  Towards the end of the 1950s another personal tragedy entangled Ferrie. His hair started falling out in clumps. Before long all of the hair on his body, including his eyebrows and eyelashes, was gone. He compensated for this by wearing a crude homemade wig glued to his head and false eyebrows painted on his face. It is unclear whether his study of bio-chemistry was related to his hair loss, as some have suggested. But what is clear is that something happened in the 1950s that set his beast of unrest in motion again. With it came the awakening of a violent and intolerant political temperament. A glimpse of this can be seen in a letter that he wrote to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, “There is nothing I would enjoy better than blowing the hell out of every damn Russian, Communist, Red, or what-have-you. Between my friends and I, we can cook up a crew [sic] that can really blow them to hell ... I want to train killers ...”8

  Someone in the government must have seen the value in an airline pilot who wanted to train killers, because Ferrie started moonlighting as a pilot for the CIA.9 The precise extent of Ferrie’s relationship with the CIA is not fully known. Many of the documents are still classified. But it is widely reported that he few numerous missions in and out of Cuba, first supplying Castro with arms to fight Batista and later supplying the anti-Castro underground with weapons.

  Castro came to power on January 1, 1959. Within a year he had seized American assets (casinos, factories, and oil re-fineries), openly embraced Communism, and militarily allied himself with the Soviet Union. Ferrie felt personally betrayed, and set out with a vengeance to destroy Castro and his Communist dictatorship. This hatred led Ferrie into a long and complex relationship with the anti-Castro Cuban underground here in the United States. He firebombed targets inside Cuba,10 and traveled to Guatemala to train Cuban exiles to fly planes in support of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  Back in Washington, D.C., events were unfolding that would greatly impact Ferrie’s life.11 Kennedy’s White House and the CIA had very different ideas about how to stop Communism, especially the expansion of Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere. This policy dispute erupted into open conflict between the two camps. Many of the CIA’s activities were untraceable even by the CIA inspector general. These “unvouchered expenditures” essentially meant that the CIA was refusing to be controlled by the White House. The situation oscillated between insubordination and treason. In 1975 when the Senate Intelligence Committee finally looked into these activities, Chairman Frank Church likened the CIA’s activities to “a rogue elephant rampaging out of control.”12 Actually, the problem was even deeper. The question: Who is running the government?

  The stakes were enormous. The pressures unbelievable. The players believed nothing less than the destiny of the planet was at stake. The CIA’s plan for keeping the Soviets at bay was to put a gun to their head. Batteries of American missiles armed with nuclear warheads sat in Turkey on the U.S.S.R.’s southern border. All major Soviet cities, including Moscow, were now ready to burst into the flames of a nuclear nightmare within thirty minutes of an order from Washington. Kennedy ordered them removed, but the Pentagon did not comply. The Soviets were very unhappy about such intimidation and were anxious for an opportunity to show the Americans just what it felt like to have someone point a nuclear missile at them. Castro gave them the opportunity.

  Castro was determined to break America’s grip on his island. In his words, “It is time to tell the Yankees that we are not your plantation, your gambling casino, or your who
rehouse.”13 In order to discourage an American military overthrow of his government, Castro offered his island to the Soviets as launching pad for their nuclear missiles. The Soviets wasted little time in moving them into position.

  In early April of 1961 American intelligence started picking up unusual radio signals from the Camaguey Mountains in central Cuba.14 But the radio signals were too weak to analyze properly. They were simultaneously receiving reports from the anti-Castro guerillas inside Cuba that some large facility was under construction in a deep ravine in the jungle in the Camagueys. Were the Soviets moving nuclear missiles into Cuba? The CIA needed better intelligence. They needed hard evidence. The CIA decided to send a team into Cuba to collect radio signals from a mountain top in the Camagueys.

  Ferrie was ordered to come to Washington, where he met with General Charles Cabell, one of the top people at the CIA. The general explained the mission to Ferrie and a young aeronautic electronics expert named Robert Morrow. They would leave from the west coast of Florida at night on April 16, 1961. Ferrie would fly the plane, with Morrow as copilot, and land in a clearing in the jungles. Guerillas would meet the plane and take them to a location to record the radio signals. At last, Ferrie was doing something really important.

  The mission went as planned, until their party was discovered by Cuban army troops, who strafed the plane as it was taking off. Ferrie was wounded in the incident. The intelligence they collected did get back to Washington, just in time for the biggest debacle in the history of the CIA.

  The Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster. At the last moment President Kennedy had refused to supply U.S. military air support for the invasion, which landed at dawn on April 17, 1961. Castro won the day and solidified his control of Cuba. Hundreds of invading Cuban exiles were killed on the beach. Over 1,200 were captured. Kennedy was furious at the CIA, believing they were trying to manipulate him into an act of war. He fired Dulles, Cabell, and Bissell, the top brass at the CIA, and ordered his brother Bobby, the U.S. Attorney General, to oversee the CIA, and to dismantle its system of unaccountable expenditures.

  These events led Ferrie into a very complex world of covert operations where the lines between official and unofficial, between legal and illegal, became increasingly unclear.

  By 1961, Ferrie lived in a three-level house near New Orleans International Airport, where he worked. Ferrie said his mother lived on the main floor, which looked like a normal middle-class house with sofas, paintings, books, and the like. Here Ferrie held air patrol meetings. The entire top floor was David’s personal territory, and was strictly for his medical interests. It contained a medical library with various diplomas hung on the walls, a psychiatric couch, medical equipment like microscopes and test tubes, and about twenty caged mice for his medical experiments. In the basement sat the sawed-off remains of a World War II fighter plane, which he used as a primitive flight simulator to teach flying.15

  This was, frankly, as good as life ever got for David Ferrie. From here we follow a descent that can only be described as tragic.

  As the story was told to me by ex-CAP cadets, one night Ferrie got drunk and, in an attempt to impress a young boy, borrowed a plane and went for a joyride, buzzing the sleeping city of New Orleans at tree-top level. Some say he had sex with the boy during the flight. FAA officials were waiting at the airport when he returned. They set in motion an effort to pull his commercial license. He was also booked on “decency charges” concerning his relationship with the teenage boy.16 About the same time, he lost his position with the Civil Air Patrol through insubordination and misconduct. Again, the basic ingredients were young boys. Ferrie insisted on sleeping in the cabin with the teenage cadets, and threw a beer party for them on the beach, both violations of CAP rules. Ferrie left the CAP and started his own flying club for teenage boys, called the Falcons, and held meetings in his home.

  Ferrie’s religious ambitions also re-surfaced in 1961. He became a member of the clergy of the Apostolic Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America, an independent of shoot of the Roman Catholic Church headquartered in a house in Louisville, Kentucky. It was from this fountain of legitimacy that Ferrie sought to attain his rank as Bishop.

  On November 30, 1961, wearing a wig Scotch-taped to his head and accompanied by sidekick Jack Martin, Ferrie arrived in Louisville expecting to be consecrated as a Bishop of the Church. It was not to be. The Archbishop who was supposed to perform the ceremony had heard of Ferrie’s dismissal from Eastern Airlines, refused to consecrate him, and chastised him for the reports of his unnatural sexual behavior. The Archbishop’s criticism went further still, telling Ferrie he intended to excommunicate him from the Church for behavior unbecoming to a Church official. Ferrie was furious and departed in anger. In January 1962, the Archbishop officially excommunicated Ferrie from the Church, advising him by letter that he had been “degraded and cast out of the clergy and Church in America.”

  Ferrie’s battle with Eastern Airlines had lasted for several years. A doctor who examined him for Eastern Airlines described him as having a “psychotic personality and no sense of responsibility.”17 He eventually lost his job. His life fell into a spiral. He moved from his tri-level house by the airport to a small apartment in town. His hair had now fallen out completely, and he began wearing a homemade orange wig which some said was made of monkey hair.18 He replaced his natural eyebrows with dark grease paint. When combined with his newly purchased wardrobe of second-hand clothes, his appearance created an unforgettable impression on those he met.

  WE ENTER 1963. Ferrie made one final try at getting someone to recognize his religious talents, his fourth attempt at the clergy. This time it was from the Orthodox Catholic Church, another of shoot Catholic sect, which split from the Church over a doctrinal dispute in 1709. The worldwide head of this church was reported to be an Archbishop in Geneva, Switzerland, who was identified in the Southern Research report as a translator at a disarmament conference.

  The Chancellor of the North American Province was Bishop George A. Hyde, who lived in Washington, D.C. and ran a small seminary out of his house. Hyde had three young male novices and expected another three shortly. Each person in the house held an outside job and contributed his income to Hyde to run his house. Using the title Friar Hyde, he offered his services to the Washington D.C. Juvenile Court, which responded by placing a young boy in his home. Hyde said, “If I am successful, I would like to take in other boys like him.”

  Early that summer Ferrie told Hyde of his desire to become a priest and asked Hyde to ordain him. After considerable discussion, Hyde agreed to the request saying the next opportunity would be at the Bishop’s conference in Kankake, Illinois. Hyde recommended David Ferrie as a candidate for ordination, but requested the hosting Bishop to ordain him, since he could not attend. Ferrie was scheduled to be ordained a priest of this church on July 19, 1963.

  Just two days before Ferrie’s scheduled ordination, Jack Martin, Ferrie’s old sidekick in New Orleans, arrived at the Bishop’s Rectory in Kankake, Illinois, and told the Bishop that David Ferrie had been arrested several times on charges of homosexuality and that he was presently appealing one such allegation in the Louisiana Court of Appeals. Martin picked up the phone, called the Clerk of Court in New Orleans, and handed the phone to one of the priests to verify the information. The Bishop refused to ordain Ferrie.

  Back in New Orleans, Ferrie’s involvement with the increasingly desperate anti-Castro Cuban underground was escalating. His main employment was working as a “private investigator” for a right-wing extremist named Guy Banister, who was heavily involved in covert anti-communist activities throughout Latin America.19 Ferrie also served as a private investigator and personal pilot for accused Mafia boss Carlos Marcello (and others). By July of 1963, Ferrie’s assistance to the anti-Castro Cuban underground included the military training of a dozen Cuban exiles at a rural camp located about forty miles from New Orleans. Their target was Castro himself.20 By this time, Kennedy had explicit
ly prohibited paramilitary raids on Cuba by desperate exile groups. On July 31, 1963, the FBI raided this training camp, arrested and/or detained eleven people (mostly Cubans and a few mobsters), and confiscated a large quantity of military weapons. The military weaponry included over a ton of dynamite, aerial bomb casings, detonators, and the ingredients to make napalm. It is believed that the mission of this group was the assassination of Fidel Castro and that it was one of many projects organized by the Cuban exile, Dr. Orlando Bosch, a fanatical terrorist and saboteur who began his career as a medical doctor.21

  While there is no evidence that Ferrie was present when the FBI raided the camp, he is believed to have been closely involved and to have procured the explosives and military hardware for the operation from an explosives bunker at the Schlumberger Tool Company.

  Had ordinary people been caught with that same equipment and in those same circumstances, they would have been sent to jail for years. For some reason, the FBI released these eleven saboteurs and attempted to cover up their detainment.22 It should be noted that Ferrie-employer Guy Banister had run the FBI’s Chicago office and was a close professional associate of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Into this caldron walked one of Ferrie’s old Civil Air Patrol cadets, who had just returned to New Orleans with his pregnant wife and baby daughter. Lee Harvey Oswald had been off in the Marines for several years, and had lived for several more years in the Soviet Union, where he had met his young bride. In New Orleans, Oswald got a job at the Reily Coffee Company, located around the corner from Guy Banister’s office where Ferrie worked. Oswald was seen with Ferrie several times that summer:

  Oswald and Ferrie were seen together at Banister’s office at 544 Camp St.

  Ferrie and Clay Shaw took Oswald up to Jackson, Louisiana to try to get him a job in the Southeastern Louisiana State Hospital, a mental hospital staffed with doctors from both Tulane and LSU medical schools. As part of that effort, Shaw and Ferrie brought Oswald to nearby Clinton, Louisiana, to register to vote.