by Jim Marrs
The Italian media reported that Nagy was president of Permindex and the board chairman and major stockholder was Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a powerful Montreal lawyer who represented the Bronfmans, a Canadian family made wealthy by the liquor industry, as well as serving US intelligence services. Reportedly Bloomfield established Permindex in 1958 as part of the creation of worldwide trade centers connected with CMC.
According to a special report by investigative reporters David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg in 1981, Bloomfield was recruited into the British Special Operations Executive in 1938, during the war was given rank within the US Army, and eventually became part of the OSS intelligence system, including the FBI’s Division Five, reportedly a small unit within the bureau dealing with counterespionage. According to this report, Bloomfield became quite close with J. Edgar Hoover.
Permindex began to draw attention in 1962, when French president Charles de Gaulle publicly accused the company of channeling funds to the outlawed Secret Army Organization (OAS), which had made several attempts on de Gaulle’s life. De Gaulle identified several major and well-known international companies as investors in Permindex.
In tracing the money used to finance the assassination plots against de Gaulle, French intelligence discovered that some $200,000 in secret funds had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Credit Internationale.
For years researchers have been intrigued by information Jim Garrison gathered early in his investigation: that in 1962 Guy Banister had dispatched an associate, Maurice Brooks Gatlin—the legal counsel to Banister’s anticommunist League of the Caribbean—to Paris with a suitcase full of cash for the OAS, reportedly about $200,000.
As Garrison began to probe this area of interest, he discovered that Gatlin had been killed when he fell or was thrown from the sixth-floor window of a hotel in Panama.
To further complicate this maze of business, finance, European money, holdover Nazis, and intelligence agents, various investigators—including some from Life magazine—found that some of the banking connections from this secret empire reached to Mafia chief Meyer Lansky and his gambling operations in the Bahamas.
Whatever the truth behind Centro Mondiale Commerciale and its companion company, Permindex, the Italian government saw fit to expel both in 1962 for subversive activities connected to those in the much-publicized Propaganda-2 Masonic Lodge scandal of more recent years in Italy in which the lodge was accused of attempting to overthrow the Italian government and set up a fascist regime.
The news media in France, Italy, and Canada had a field day tying the two discredited firms to the CIA. And there is now evidence that Shaw indeed was connected to the CIA. Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA and author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, has revealed that in early 1969, he learned from CIA director Richard Helms that both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie had worked for the agency.
Marchetti said Helms repeatedly voiced concern over the prosecution of Shaw and even instructed top aides “to do all we can to help Shaw.” Further, a CIA memo dated September 28, 1967, to the Justice Department, finally made public in 1977, revealed that Shaw had provided the agency with some thirty reports between 1949 and 1956.
It may also be pertinent that in May 1961, just after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, Shaw introduced CIA deputy director General Charles P. Cabell to the Foreign Policy Association of New Orleans.
By late 1966, Garrison had two suspects in mind in the murder of President Kennedy—the strange David Ferrie and the socially connected Clay Shaw.
David William Ferrie was a character straight out of some fiction novel, but he was frighteningly real. With his painted eyebrows and reddish wig, Ferrie looked like a clown. Yet he was an aggressive homosexual with an appetite for young boys. Ferrie considered himself a master hypnotist, a philosopher, a psychologist, a scientist, a cancer researcher, and a religious “bishop” in the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America.
Cashiered as a pilot for Eastern Airlines following publicity over a homosexual arrest, Ferrie continued his flying activities, which included work for both the CIA and reputed New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello.
Ferrie also was closely connected to anti-Castro Cubans. In 1961, Ferrie often was seen in the company of Sergio Archaca-Smith, New Orleans director of the virulently anti-Castro Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front.
That same year, Ferrie was introduced to a meeting of the New Orleans Civic Club as one of the pilots involved in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion. There, Ferrie made a bitterly anti-Kennedy talk. He also made an anti-Kennedy talk to the New Orleans chapter of the Military Order of World Wars in which he said Kennedy “double-crossed” the invasion force by failing to authorize needed air support. Ferrie’s speech was so vitriolic that several members of the audience walked out.
As Garrison continued his investigation, he found abundant evidence that Ferrie, who had been in contact with Oswald, also was connected to Clay Shaw.
Raymond Broshears, a longtime friend of Ferrie’s, had seen Ferrie and Shaw together on several occasions. Furthermore, Broshears told Garrison how Ferrie once became intoxicated and detailed how he had driven to Houston the day of Kennedy’s death to meet two members of the assassination team from Dallas. The pair was to have arrived in Houston in an airplane piloted by one of them, a Cuban exile known only as “Carlos.” Ferrie was to have taken Carlos and his fellow assassin out of Houston. Ferrie told Broshears that something had gone wrong. The two men never showed up.
Whether or not the Broshears account of Ferrie’s comments is accurate, Garrison soon found others who had known of the relationship between Ferrie and Shaw. Jules Ricco Kimble, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, told Garrison of being introduced to Shaw by Ferrie, as did a Ferrie acquaintance named David Logan. Nicholas Tadin, the head of the New Orleans musicians’ union, told Garrison that he and his wife had sought out Ferrie for flying lessons when they saw Ferrie and Shaw together at New Orleans Airport.
As Garrison’s investigation broadened to include trips to Dallas, Houston, and Miami by members of his team, the secrecy surrounding his probe began to crumble. On February 17, 1967, the dam broke when the New Orleans States-Item published a story on Garrison’s activities with the headline: DA HERE LAUNCHES FULL JFK DEATH PLOT PROBE. The story noted that the district attorney’s office had spent more than $8,000 in travel and “investigative expenses.” Countering the charge that he was simply seeking publicity, Garrison later wrote, “We had operated as secretly as possible, assuming this was the most efficient and responsible way to handle such a potentially explosive situation. However, the voucher requests were public records, so they could not legally be concealed.”
The local news story brought a deluge of media attention from across the nation. Reporters began arriving in New Orleans. The next day, Garrison was forced to come out in the open, announcing, “We have been investigating the role of the City of New Orleans in the assassination of President Kennedy, and we have made some progress—I think substantial progress. . . . What’s more, there will be arrests.”
Also arriving in the city were some odd characters who would add to the carnival atmosphere that was beginning to take shape. One was a self-styled Denver oilman who told Garrison he could “guarantee” him a federal judgeship if he would drop his investigation into the president’s death. Garrison showed him the door.
Not long after this attempt at bribery a more sinister plan came to light. A professional criminal from Philadelphia named Edward Whalen came to Garrison and said he had been approached by David Ferrie with a proposal to kill Garrison for $25,000. When Whalen declined the offer, he said, Ferrie took him to Clay Shaw’s apartment, where both men tried to persuade him to carry out the assassination of Garrison. This time Whalen not only was offered money but was told that if he did the job there would be top medical care and a college education for his daughter, who suffered from polio.
Fer
rie even went so far as to claim he had helped set up the JFK assassination and told Whalen that Lee Oswald was a CIA agent who had been well taken care of until he made some mistakes that necessitated his death. Whalen believed Ferrie’s story to be unfounded boasts, and he again declined the murder contract.
By the time Whalen revealed this plot to Garrison in September 1967, it was too late to verify it. On February 22, 1967, less than a week after the newspapers broke the story of Garrison’s investigation, his chief suspect, David Ferrie, was found dead in his cluttered apartment.
His death was not entirely unexpected by Garrison. The day the newspaper story first ran, Ferrie had telephoned Garrison aide Lou Ivon to say, “You know what this news story does to me, don’t you? I’m a dead man. From here on, believe me, I’m a dead man.”
Ferrie’s nude body had been discovered lying on a living-room sofa surrounded by prescription medicine bottles, several completely empty. One typed suicide note was found on a nearby table while a second was discovered on an upright piano. Three days later the New Orleans coroner ruled that Ferrie had died from “natural causes,” specifically a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.
Unconvinced, Garrison checked the empty medicine bottles found near Ferrie’s body and discovered one had contained a drug designed to greatly increase a person’s metabolism.
It is known that Ferrie suffered from hypertension. A physician friend confirmed to Garrison that if someone suffering from hypertension took a whole bottle of this specific drug, it would cause death very quickly. Garrison later wrote, “I phoned immediately but was told that no blood samples or spinal fluid from Ferrie’s autopsy had been retained. I was left with an empty bottle and a number of unanswered questions.” Garrison also was left without the man he later described as “one of history’s most important individuals.”
And Ferrie was not the only person connected to the case to die. Banister reportedly died of a heart attack in June 1964, less than a month after his business partner, Hugh Ward—an investigator who had worked closely with Ferrie—died in a Mexico plane crash that also took the life of New Orleans mayor DeLesseps Morrison.
Yet another man closely connected to Ferrie was Eladio del Valle, a wealthy former Cuban congressman under Batista who had fled Cuba to become a well-known organizer of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. Del Valle reportedly had paid Ferrie $1,500 a mission to make air raids against Cuba.
Three days before Ferrie’s death, Garrison’s investigators began trying to locate del Valle. Just twelve hours after Ferrie’s death, del Valle’s mutilated body was discovered in a Miami parking lot. Police reported that del Valle had been tortured and shot in the heart at point-blank range, and his skull split open with an ax. His murder has never been solved.
With Ferrie and del Valle dead, Garrison began to focus his attention on Clay Shaw. Fearing that Shaw might meet the same fate as Ferrie, Garrison moved rapidly. He and his “special team” had Shaw arrested on March 1, 1967.
Loud and long, Shaw protested his innocence, stating flatly, “I never heard of any plot and I never used any alias in my life.”
The question of an alias came up as Shaw was being booked into jail. A police officer filling out forms asked Shaw if he had any aliases. Shaw calmly replied, “Clay Bertrand,” thus confirming the information that Garrison had been receiving from various sources around New Orleans. The officer duly noted this alias on his form.
Between the time of his arrest and his trial, Shaw was allowed to go free after posting a $10,000 bail bond.
As Garrison’s men searched Shaw’s house they found several interesting items, such as two large hooks screwed into the ceiling of Shaw’s bedroom along with five whips, several lengths of chain, and a black hood and cape. Shaw tried to shrug off this kinky collection as simply part of a Mardi Gras costume.
Harder to shrug off was Shaw’s personal address book, which contained the names of important persons in Italy, Paris, and London.
But most intriguing was a listing for “Lee Odum, P.O. Box 19106, Dallas, Texas.” What made this so intriguing was that the address “P.O. 19106” also appears in Lee Harvey Oswald’s address book.
Garrison announced that “P.O. 19106” actually was a code for Jack Ruby’s unlisted Dallas telephone number and noted that the number was in the address books of both Shaw and Oswald.
Interest in this issue dissipated rapidly following a May 17, 1967, story in the Dallas Times Herald revealing that Lee Odum was a real person living in Dallas.
Odum, then thirty-one, told the newspaper that he had traveled to New Orleans in 1966 to promote a bullfight and had been sent to Shaw as a businessman who might be interested in his scheme. He said he gave Shaw the P.O. box number, which had been rented in the name of a barbecue company he operated at the time.
This seemed to clear up the issue, except that the Times Herald noted that P.O. Box 19106 did not exist until 1965, when the post office substation involved was remodeled. Therefore, it remains to be explained why that particular box number appeared in Oswald’s address book in 1963 and to what it truly pertained.
To further titillate Garrison’s interest, he found on an unused page of Shaw’s address book the words “Oct” and “Nov” and, following an indecipherable scribble, the name “Dallas.”
After Shaw’s arrest, the US government “awakened like an angry lion,” according to Garrison.
Attorney general Ramsey Clark told news reporters that Shaw had been checked out and cleared of any responsibility in the Kennedy assassination. But since Shaw’s name had never before come up in connection with the assassination, questions arose over who in the federal government had investigated Shaw and why. Quickly a Justice Department spokesman tried to backpedal for Clark by issuing this statement: “The attorney general has since determined that this [report of Shaw’s investigation] was erroneous. Nothing arose indicating a need to investigate Mr. Shaw.”
This explanation was further clouded when a Justice Department official tried to explain that the department had been aware that Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand were the same man and that the FBI had investigated a Clay Bertrand.
Despite the federal government’s protest that Garrison was on a “witch hunt,” when his evidence was presented to a New Orleans grand jury, a true bill was returned. Clay Shaw was indicted on a charge that he “did willfully and unlawfully conspire with David W. Ferrie, herein named but not charged, and Lee Harvey Oswald, herein named but not charged, and others, not herein named, to murder John F. Kennedy.”
To assure the public that he was doing only his sworn duty, Garrison even took the unprecedented step of having himself—the prosecutor—file for a preliminary hearing for Shaw. This hearing, usually the providence of the defense, took place on March 14, 1967, before three judges, who reviewed Garrison’s evidence. After studying Garrison’s case for three days, the three-judge panel upheld the indictment and ordered Shaw to a jury trial.
For the next year and a half, as the world waited for Garrison’s case to be presented at Shaw’s trial, the major US news media lambasted the events in New Orleans. Garrison later wrote:
Some long-cherished illusions of mine about the great free press in our country underwent a painful reappraisal during this period. The restraint and respect for justice one might expect from the press to insure a fair trial not only to the individual charged but to the state itself did not exist. Nor did the diversity of opinion that I always thought was fundamental to the American press. As far as I could tell, the reports and editorials in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, the New York Post, The Saturday Evening Post, and on and on were indistinguishable. All shared the basic view that I was a power-mad, irresponsible showman who was producing a slimy circus with the objective of getting elected to higher office, oblivious to any consequences.
Garrison also commented on further efforts to give Shaw every consideration:
In this particular case, I’ve taken unusual steps to protect the rights of th
e defendant and assure him a fair trial. Before we introduced the testimony of our witnesses, we made them undergo independent verifying tests, including polygraph examination, truth serum, and hypnosis. We thought this would be hailed as an unprecedented step in jurisprudence. Instead, the press turned around and hinted that we had drugged our witnesses or given them posthypnotic suggestions to testify falsely.
This comment might have been aimed at James Phelan, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post who, after hearing Garrison’s account of his evidence, reported that Garrison’s key witness, Perry Russo, came up with his story of a Ferrie-Oswald-Shaw conspiracy only after being “drugged” and hypnotized by Garrison’s people.
Phelan’s account has been accepted by some researchers who failed to note that Russo told the press of the conspiracy meeting well before undergoing hypnosis. In fact, when Phelan appeared as a defense witness for Shaw, Russo soundly disputed his claims, though Russo’s conviction that Shaw was the man at the meeting appeared to weaken.
Particularly galling to Garrison was an account by Hugh Aynesworth, then working for Newsweek, claiming Garrison had offered an unwilling witness $3,000 and an airline job to testify in the upcoming trial. The story added that the entire bribery attempt had been tape-recorded.
Aynesworth was a writer for the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination and was at the scene of each important event. In 1988, Aynesworth wrote extensively for a special edition of the Washington Times commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination. While admitting “flaws” in the Warren Commission investigation, he nevertheless supported its conclusions by writing, “That report has been proven to have been considerably more honest, more objective and of far greater depth than any subsequent ‘probe’ or ‘inquiry.’”