Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  Ferrie had a party at his apartment. His guests included Clay Shaw, Lee Oswald, Perry Russo, and several Cuban exiles. Ferrie got drunk and discussed how President Kennedy could be killed if he was caught in a crossfire of high-powered rifles.

  IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, Ferrie spent his time helping Carlos Marcello defend himself against racketeering charges brought by Robert Kennedy and the U.S. Justice Department. On November 22, 1963, at the moment of President Kennedy’s assassination, Ferrie was sitting in federal court in New Orleans with Marcello as the judge prepared to read the jury’s “not guilty” verdict.

  Later that afternoon, Ferrie made a sudden trip to Texas. Jack Martin (who had just been pistol whipped that afternoon by his employer Guy Banister) called the DA’s office to say that Ferrie may have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination. In response, the New Orleans District Attorney’s office raided Ferrie’s apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. There they found aerial bomb casings, maps of Cuba, a small portion of his medical equipment and a dozen or so mice in cages. Ferrie was picked up for questioning by the DA’s office when he returned to New Orleans. The New Orleans DAs found the circumstances of his trip suspicious, and Ferrie’s explanation of the trip unbelievable. They turned Ferrie over to the FBI for further questioning. The FBI promptly released Ferrie with what amounted to a public apology.

  At this point let me state that I cannot say if David Ferrie was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. And more importantly, it is not critical to the issue we are discussing.

  However, we are exploring the life and activities of a man who was running an underground medical laboratory which was said to have been using monkey viruses to develop a biological weapon. The fact that Ferrie was suspected of being involved in the Kennedy assassination is why we know as much about him as we do, and is how we know of his involvement in covert medical experiments with Dr. Mary Sherman and others. Later, in 1966, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison re-opened his investigation into the Kennedy assassination at the suggestion of U.S. Senator Russell Long. Garrison found Ferrie to be central to his investigation.

  Here are some comments about Ferrie from Garrison’s 1967 Playboy interview:

  After the assassination, as a matter of fact, something psychologically curious happened to Ferrie: He dropped out of anti-Castro exile activities, left the pay of the CIA, and drifted aimlessly while his emotional problems increased to the point where he was totally dependent on huge doses of tranquilizers and barbiturates. I don’t know if Ferrie ever experienced any guilt about the assassination itself, but in his last months, he was a tortured man.23

  I had nothing but pity for Dave Ferrie while he was alive, and I have nothing but pity for him now that he’s dead. Ferrie was a pathetic and tortured creature, a genuinely brilliant man whose twisted drives locked him into his own private hell. If I had been able to help Ferrie, I would have; but he was in too deep and he was terrified.24

  For a long time afterward, Ferrie kept the remaining mice in hutches in his dining room, nursing plans for attaching small incendiary flares to them and parachuting them into Cuba’s sugarcane fields.25

  David Ferrie perennially was being defrocked, first of his priesthood, then of his hair, then of his Civil Air Patrol captaincy and then of his position as an Eastern Air Lines pilot. It is unlikely that he was unaffected by this accumulation of bitter experience. This man with a brilliant mind and a face like a clown was a dangerous man.26

  In February of 1967, only a few days after Garrison’s investigation was made public, David Ferrie was found dead in his disheveled apartment. The Coroner ruled that Ferrie died of natural causes. To this day, speculation continues about the cause of his death: Some argue that he was murdered; some argue that he took his own life. The only three names mentioned in Ferrie’s handwritten will are his brother, his friend Alvin Beauboeuf, and Rev. George A. Hyde.

  Considering all the things he lost during his life, it is interesting to note that his religious garments hung in his closet until the end.

  IN JANUARY 1993, I FLEW TO NEW ORLEANS to assist Gus Russo in his investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald for the PBS television show Frontline. Before I left for New Orleans, I called Perry Russo.27 Perry had been Garrison’s key witness, who testified that he was in Ferrie’s apartment when Ferrie plotted to kill Kennedy In 1993 Perry was a cab driver in New Orleans, so I asked him to pick me up at the airport. Once in the cab I asked him to tell me everything he knew about Ferrie, starting with the first time he met him.

  Perry began at the beginning and talked for nearly an hour. His descriptions were detailed and insightful. His story began back in high school, when he coached a neighborhood basketball team. One of the boys on his team was the object of David Ferrie’s affection. The boy had moved in with Ferrie. As a favor to the boy’s parents, Perry Russo infiltrated Ferrie’s group with the intention of bringing his friend home. To do this, he had to break Ferrie’s considerable psychological grip on the youngster.28 Throughout his tale, Perry Russo told me of both his successes and his failures in a balanced manner. I asked questions as we went along. He was quick to say “I don’t know” when he did not know, and he struggled to remember details about the things he could. It was clear to me that Perry never really liked Ferrie, but he came to respect him. His descriptions were particularly helpful.

  THE DAVE FERRIE THAT PERRY RUSSO talked about first was Captain Dave Ferrie, the successful commercial airline pilot. It was Perry who described Ferrie’s house near the airport room-by-room: the middle class apartment on the main floor, the fighter plane in the basement, and his medical suite above. It was here that Ferrie was most at home, among his diplomas, reclining couches, microscopes, test tubes, medical books, and mice. It was here he plotted to cure cancer and to rid the world of Communism.

  When Ferrie lost his airline job in 1961, he also lost his affluent lifestyle. Perry’s before-and-after descriptions contrasted a proud man who meticulously wore uniforms with a broken man who shopped exclusively at thrift stores. As Perry described Ferrie’s small apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway, it became clear that the bulk of Ferrie’s furniture, his medical equipment and his airplane-related paraphernalia did not make the transition to 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway. So I asked Perry about this. He said he remembered asking, “What happened to all Dave’s stuff?” to either Ferrie himself or to one of the boys who hung out at his apartment. Perry was told Ferrie had stashed his extra “stuff” in another apartment nearby.29

  TWO DAYS LATER Perry Russo picked up Gus Russo and me, and drove us over to Ferrie’s apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. While Gus asked Perry questions about Garrison and the Kennedy assassination, I got out of the car and walked around, checking the distance between that building and the one I knew, checking the angles, and taking pictures. When I got back in the car, Perry mentioned that Ferrie’s apartment had been vacant for four or five years after his death in 1967.

  Those were the same years that my girlfriend Barbara’s apartment had been vacant!30 Two rental apartments, both on the same street within a dozen houses yards of each other, both with the lingering smell of animals, and both voluntarily taken off the market (without rent) for years at a time! There had to be a connection! My conclusion could only be that Ferrie had been involved in both apartments, and used 3225 Louisiana Avenue Parkway as his underground medical laboratory.

  Having placed Barbara across the street from David Ferrie’s known rental, let’s revisit the subject of her upstairs neighbor Miguel. I do not want to make too much of him. It is possible he was a real “nobody,” but there are a few points worth noting.

  First, consider his claim that he worked occasionally “at a service station in Jefferson Parish.” From 1964 to his death in 1967, David Ferrie operated a service station in Jefferson Parish.

  Secondly, Miguel had said he worked as “a mechanic.” Within the covert operations circles in which David Ferrie ran, the word “mechanic” was a com
monly used euphemism for “assassin.”

  Thirdly, Perry Russo testified in court that, in September 1963, he heard David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, and several Cubans discuss shooting President Kennedy with high-powered rifles. The location of this incident was David Ferrie’s apartment at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway. When I interviewed Perry Russo about David Ferrie, he said the Cubans frequently showed up at Ferrie’s apartment. They just appeared. No phone calls. No cars. Always late at night. Always in groups. Always from the back staircase.

  Ferrie’s address sounds like it’s in the next block from Barbara’s 3225 Louisiana Avenue Parkway abode, but the numbers are misleading. There is no cross street, and both are on the same block.

  How did the Cubans know when to show up? Were they staying in Miguel’s apartment down the block? Was Miguel one of them? It is clearly stated by both Garrison in On the Trail of the Assassins, and by Turner and Hinckle in Deadly Secrets (and many other books), that Ferrie was part of the secret war against Cuba, and that these activities included an underground railroad which transported militant Cuban exiles to guerrilla-warfare training at places like Banister’s camp outside New Orleans.

  Now, where would you lodge a group of guerillas who had just come from a week of combat training in the swamps? At your mother’s house? No, you would need to have a safe house. A secure place that was basically empty so it could be used as needed for a stopover. A place just like the apartment across the street from Ferrie, close to the operation, but far from high-traffic areas where it might attract unwanted attention. All of which made me wonder if our neighbor Miguel might not have been “part of the scenery,” an artifact of the underground Cuban railroad left in position to keep an eye on things, and to make sure no one got too curious about the apartment building where those terrible men did horrible things to those animals.

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  1 Southern Research Company, “Background on David William Ferrie,” March 6, 1963, p. 12.

  2 Comment by Jack Martin, an employee of Guy Banister and an associate of David Ferrie.

  3 Southern Research Company, Inc., “Background on David William Ferrie,” January 31, 1963 and March 6, 1963.

  4 The fact that Ferrie, both physically able and very intelligent, did not participate in World War II supports the nervous breakdown story.

  5 Mrs. Frances M. McKee, Rocky River High School, quoted by Southern Research, January 31, 1963.

  6 According to Southern Research, the female pilot was Jean Naatz.

  7 “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?” Frontline, a television documentary, PBS, November 1993.

  8 Davis, John H., Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F Kennedy (New York, 1989), p. 145; also Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 232.

  9 Garrison, “ Playboy Interview,” Playboy, October 1967, p. 160.

  10 Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 233.

  11 The story of Ferrie’s flight to Cuba is from Robert Morrow, First Hand Knowledge (New York, 1992). Morrow was the electronics expert who flew with Ferrie on the mission.

  12 Baltimore Sun, July 16, 1975.

  13 I saw a film clip of this speech on network television in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, I cannot cite the exact program. Check newsreel services for Castro speeches.

  14 Morrow, First Hand Knowledge, p. 35-45.

  15 Perry Russo, interview by author, January 1993.

  16 A newspaper article on file in the New Orleans Public Library confirms the fact that “decency charges” were filed against Ferrie regarding a teenage boy prior to 1963.

  17 Southern Research, March 6, 1963.

  18 Davis, Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F Kennedy (New York, 1989), p. 145.

  19 Garrison, “ Playboy Interview”, p. 161-162.

  20 Ibid., p. 156.

  21 Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets, p. 229.

  22 For a more detailed description of this training camp incident, and other covert activities against Castro and Cuba, see Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Secrets (1992), previously published as The Fish Is Red; also see Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 44.

  23 Garrison, “ Playboy Interview,” p. 176.

  24 Ibid., p. 176.

  25 Garrison, A Heritage of Stone (New York, 1970), p. 122.

  26 Ibid., p. 122.

  27 Perry Russo is not related to Gus Russo.

  28 Perry Russo, interview by author, January 1993.

  29 Ibid.

  30 This point about both apartments being vacant has been made by several people, including Barbara, who told me within days of renting her apartment in 1972 that her landlord had two properties which had been vacant, and had just rented the other unit across the street. She pointed the building out to me. It was memorable because of the arched window in the façade, which lit the stairwell by day but made it look like an aquarium at night. I am positive that this was Ferrie’s apartment at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway.

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  CHAPTER 6

  Mary, Mary

  THE WOMAN ENTERS OUR STORY as an enigma. Considered “absolutely brilliant” by her medical colleagues, Mary Sherman rose rapidly to the very top ranks of the male-dominated hierarchy of American medicine in bone and joint surgery a field that to this day has extremely few female physicians. Self-made, financially successful, and professionally respected, Dr. Sherman was a sophisticated and powerful woman during an era when the future feminists of the 1960s were still sitting at home watching Leave it to Beaver. Yet the glimpses we see of her very private personal life show a complex and sensitive woman who loved theater, literature, music, wine, flowers, and international travel, and who carried with her some terrible personal burdens. But we see no discernible political interest.1 None of this seems to explain, or even hint at, her involvement with a politically violent, emotionally unstable, drug-addicted social outcast like David Ferrie, who had no formal medical training.

  Most of what we know about Mary Sherman comes from newspaper articles, an unusual police report, and her will. To that we add insights from a few medical articles, and a handful of interviews with people who knew her, to produce a sketch of an unusually talented woman who met an unusually horrible end.

  Born “Mary Stults” in Evanston, Illinois in 1913, she was one of several daughters of a musical voice teacher.2 At the age of sixteen, Mary went to France for two years to study at L’ecole de M. Collnot, and later taught French while working on a masters at the University of Illinois. Marrying Thomas Sherman, she became Mary Sherman.3

  The pattern of an academic superstar is immediately obvious from her Phi Beta Kappa membership to her graduate work at the University of Chicago. For those unfamiliar with this institution, please note that within academic circles, the University of Chicago is an intellectual powerhouse which rivals Harvard, Stanford, and any other famous university one might name. It was founded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and was designed on the model of the European research university, rather than the American teaching college. This was done at a time when the Rockefeller fortune was heavily involved in the drug companies, and their sponsorship of biochemical research helped develop new commercial drugs. Today, the University of Chicago continues on the leading edge of genetics and cancer research.

  As an outgrowth of this biochemical medical research, the University of Chicago became one of the first major centers of nuclear research. The landmark event of this nuclear effort was the construction of the first “atom smasher,” a huge nuclear accelerator hidden in the bowels of UC’s sports stadium. In 1937, it produced the first sustained nuclear reaction for UC physicist Enrico Fermi. This is where Mary Sherman did her post-graduate work. She was trained at the headwaters of nuclear, bio-chemical, and genetic research in America.

  Before she became involved in human medicine, Mary did ground-breaking research into botanical viruses which lived in soil. Her early articles were so profound and so insightful that they were frequentl
y quoted in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Though she had been dead for thirty years, the Scientific Citation Index shows ten medical articles published in 1993 which contained references to her scientific writings published between 1947 and 1965. The names of the journals tell the story of her state-of-the-art use of radiation for the treatment of bone cancers:

  Radiology Acta Radiologia

  Skeletal Radiology Histopathology

  Pathologic Research Bone

  From this, we can see the evidence of her breakthrough thinking. This young woman, who studied in France at the time when Madame Curie’s name was at the top of the scientific heap, was one of America’s most promising minds. With the proper training, encouragement and opportunities, she could be within striking distance of the legendary Curie herself, and could possibly become the most important woman in science. Maybe it would be Mary, who at such a young age had understood the basic life of viruses better than anyone before her, who would break through “the cancer barrier.” The great minds at UC saw her potential and brought her along. During the 1940s she became Associate Professor of Orthopedic Surgery, and practiced medicine at UC’s Billings Hospital.4

  In the early 1950s, Mary Sherman’s life changed. Her cancer work at the University of Chicago had attracted the attention of a famous and wealthy doctor who was president of the American Cancer Society, president of a famous medical clinic which bore his name, and Chief of Surgery at Tulane Medical School, one of the most respected medical schools of the day. The doctor was Alton Ochsner, M.D., of New Orleans.

  Ochsner’s offer to Dr. Sherman was considerable. She would be a partner in Ochsner’s clinic, the head of her own cancer laboratory, and, to keep her place in the academic side of medicine, she would be an Associate Professor at Tulane Medical School. Additionally, she would also have the personal support of one of the most politically powerful and well-connected doctors in America, a conduit for a constant flow of research funds.