False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  The radio is how most Americans first learned about the shooting. We interrupt this program for a report from Dallas, Texas: Just minutes ago something happened in the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas . . . shots were fired . . . it’s believed that President Kennedy was hit.

  For the next hour, the country held its breath, hoping. Even when the news came that he was wounded in the head, the country continued to hope, while fearing the worst. That hour served as a sort of psychological buffer, blunting the shock when the announcement finally came. Ladies and Gentlemen, the president of the United States is dead.

  The assassination occurred on a Friday and the funeral took place the following Monday, a time span of four days, an overlong long weekend. Ordinary activity ceased. Life didn’t merely revolve around the television set; life it seemed was the television set. In the days and nights that followed, millions of tearful Americans sat in their living rooms fixated on the screen even after they had seen it all over and over and over again.

  But not everyone became permanently attached to their sofas that weekend, overwhelmed by it all, anguished and passive. A few reached out and thrust themselves into the flow of events. Jack S. Martin and Dean Adams Andrews, Jr., a couple of oddities in New Orleans, were two such volunteers. They could be called the First Fathers of Jim Garrison’s case. Martin and Andrews heard the news everyone else heard that Friday. They watched the television programs everyone else watched, but separately and independently of each other they saw something others did not. They saw opportunity.

  Their individual efforts to make the most of that opportunity over the next few days would become permanently embedded in the record of the Kennedy case. Among the many would-be witnesses whose names appear in the Garrison files, none was more responsible for what ensued than Martin and Andrews. What they did that weekend laid the groundwork for Garrison’s later investigation and all that followed.

  Yet, surprisingly, the complete story of what actually occurred with Martin and Andrews over that long November weekend in 1963 has never before been told.

  * A father-son snapshot, recently discovered in one of Garrison’s old office files, shows a well-dressed and handsome young man supporting a sturdy-looking infant standing on a porch railing.

  * He was sending fountain pens to dead people C.O.D.; relatives, believing they had been ordered, paid the charges.

  † He stole a cashier’s check in the amount of 1198, and bought a car, a typewriter, and clothes.

  * A former FBI deputy director under J. Edgar Hoover recently told this writer that “there are other facts to be known” regarding Garrison’s sudden departure from the FBI.

  * Sometime prior to this, he legally changed his name to “Jim Garrison.”

  * A Division Gunnery Officer on the Bismarck Sea, the last carrier sunk in the war (off the coast of Iwo Jima), Dymond was knocked unconscious when the first of two Japanese Kamikazes crashed into the deck. Thrown over the side by a friend, he survived four hours in the water and was wounded by a strafer.

  * But Gervais resigned his post prior to Garrison’s next election.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FIRST FATHERS:

  THE TIPSTER AND THE LAWYER

  I ruin everything I get my hands on.1

  —Jack Martin, 1956

  Once you make a fool out of yourself, that is it, you are stuck with it.2

  —Dean Andrews, 1969

  Two days after the president was shot, First Asst. D.A. Klein telephoned Jim Garrison at home concerning a tip the office had just received about a possible New Orleans link to the assassination. What Klein didn’t know was that the tipster, forty-eight-year-old Jack Martin, a thinnish, sometimes private investigator “with the red blotchy face of an alcoholic,” had been on a two-day binge. It had started the evening of the assassination.

  That night Martin boozed it up in a neighborhood bar called Katz & Jammer. He was with Guy Banister, whom Martin had worked for “from time to time.” Banister, a twenty-year veteran of the FBI, former assistant superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department and dedicated anticommunist, anti-Castro activist, was the owner-operator of Guy Banister Associates, an extremely modest New Orleans investigative firm.3 He and Martin left Katz & Jammer together and went to Banister’s nearby office.

  There they began discussing various “personal and political subjects,” which led to the topic of some “unauthorized” long-distance telephone calls that Banister accused Martin of making. Martin denied it. The conversation “became heated,” with Banister warning Martin not to call him “a liar” and Martin claiming he wasn’t. At that point Banister “became enraged” and struck Martin on the head “five or six times” with the barrel of a .357 Magnum. When he began to bleed, Banister stopped.* Martin washed up in the rest room and left.4

  Twice that night he received treatment for his injuries, “three small lacerations on the forehead” and “one on the rear of his head,” first at Charity Hospital, where he took himself, and later at the Baptist hospital, where a police lieutenant drove him after he reported the attack. Twice Martin refused to file charges, both times saying that Banister was “like a father” to him (which may explain Martin’s troubled psyche) and remarking that the attack “was nothing to get irritated about.” But he claimed he couldn’t understand why Banister had walloped him with the gun. Banister explained it later to the owner of his office building. He “had warned Martin to stay out,” Banister said, “and he didn’t.”5

  Martin had had a busy day—a presidential assassination, drinks at Katz & Jammer, a pistol-whipping, high-level police attention, and trips to two different hospitals. For most that would have been ample excitement for one weekend. But for Martin the events of that Friday were only the beginning.

  The following day, he and a close friend, W. Hardy Davis, a New Orleans bail bondsman, like everyone else were discussing the president’s assassination. But their conversation was unique. It focused on a local man, a former Eastern Airlines pilot with a hairless body (due to the disease alopecia) and a checkered past. His name was David Ferrie, and Martin harbored a simmering hostility toward him. He and Davis both agreed that Ferrie was a “gun fancier.” Martin thought the rifle allegedly used to kill President Kennedy was “similar” to one Ferrie owned “several years ago.” And, Martin recalled, Ferrie once mentioned a short story plot about a presidential assassination. With nothing more than that, the two “speculated on the possibility” that Ferrie “might have had something to do with killing President Kennedy.”6 This flimsy gossip would propel David Ferrie into a principal figure in this case; he would become Jim Garrison’s favorite suspect and a stepping stone to Clay Shaw.

  That evening, after Hardy Davis left, Martin watched a television program about the life of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. One of Oswald’s classmates told an interviewer that while they attended Beauregard Junior High School he had persuaded Oswald to join the Civil Air Patrol (CAP).* When Martin heard that, he completely “flipped,” as he later put it. For he knew that David Ferrie had once been active in the CAP Here was a connection—as Martin saw it—between the man he and Davis had been speculating about and the accused assassin of the president.

  Martin spent the rest of that long weekend drinking and making one telephone call after another, spreading the word about Ferrie’s involvement in the assassination. Many in New Orleans heard from Martin in the next two days; and many others heard his escalating accusations from the grapevine. Ferrie had taught Oswald “to fire foreign weapons.” He “had flown Oswald to Dallas.” He was “communicating with Oswald” and had been with Oswald in Dallas “within the last ten days.” Ferrie had said “Kennedy should be killed.” He had “outlined plans” to accomplish it, and he had given Oswald a posthypnotic suggestion to do the deed. Martin also claimed that when Oswald was arrested, he had in his possession Ferrie’s library card.† And he told virtually everyone he spoke to that Ferrie was homosexual. Except for the latter, all of
Martin’s information was fabricated.7

  Two of Martin’s first targets were the New Orleans Police Department and television station WWL-TV.8 As Martin’s stories about Ferrie ricocheted like a hockey puck around the New Orleans telephone system, several of those he spoke to reacted by calling the local office of the Secret Service.‡ One misdirected telephone call Martin made resulted in three separate individuals contacting that agency. Special Agent-in-Charge John Rice responded by driving to Ferrie’s home that same evening, hoping to interview him. He crossed paths there with a representative of television station WDSU, who had learned of Martin’s charges secondhand. Jack Martin’s humming telephone line turned David Ferrie’s doorstep at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway into the busiest spot in New Orleans. But Martin wasn’t satisfied. His main objective, the police department, refused to take him seriously.

  So he telephoned one of Jim Garrison’s assistant district attorneys. Martin didn’t go directly to the top because Garrison, like the police, was acquainted with him.9 Instead, he called Herman Kohlman, a cunning choice, for Kohlman had once worked as a newspaper reporter and written some articles about Ferrie; so Kohlman knew more about Ferrie than most, and less about Martin than some. Kohlman passed on Martin’s information to First Asst. D.A. Klein, who called Jim Garrison.10 This was when Garrison first heard of David Ferrie’s alleged connection to the assassination. Garrison ordered the police to join the hunt. Martin finally had accomplished his goal. Ten officers were soon “scouring” the streets for David Ferrie.11 He was the most wanted man in New Orleans. The media, the FBI, the Secret Service, the district attorney’s office, and the police were all beating the bushes, looking for him.

  Unaware of his notoriety, Ferrie was on a vacation with two friends. They had gone to Texas, but to Houston not Dallas, and then on to Galveston, traveling by car. And the timing of their trip had nothing to do with the assassination in Dallas. Ferrie had been assisting Attorney G. Wray Gill in his defense of New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello on immigration charges. On the day the president was shot, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Marcello, which meant Ferrie (who was sitting in the New Orleans federal courtroom at the time)12 was free for awhile. His work on the case had been intensive and he had planned that as soon as it concluded “he would take a trip for the purpose of relaxing” with his friends. Their original plan was to go ice skating in Baton Rouge, but when they learned the rink there was closed they switched to Houston.13 This remarkably mundane journey will later assume near-mythic dimensions.

  The trip began with a telephone call about six hours after the assassination. Ferrie spoke to the manager of Houston’s Winterland Skating Rink and obtained its schedule. Then he, Alvin Beaubouef and Melvin Coffey set out in Ferrie’s blue ’61 Comet station wagon. They arrived in Houston Saturday around 4:30 A.M. This was sixteen hours after Kennedy had been shot. They slept a few hours at the Alamotel, shopped at Sears for warm clothes, then showed up that afternoon at the skating rink. Ferrie skated for a while, “looking the situation over.” But he wasn’t enthusiastic and went onto the ice only briefly to show Beaubouef “he could do it.” Ferrie was considering the “possibility of opening a rink in New Orleans,” and discussed “the cost of installation and operation” with the manager. The trio stayed about two hours. Back at their motel, Ferrie tried twice to reach attorney Gill to find out if he was needed for a trial scheduled to begin the following Monday. Ferrie failed to reach him.14

  That night, after a stop at the Manned Space Craft Center, the three drove to Galveston. This was the same evening Jack Martin launched his telephoning enterprise. By the time Ferrie and his friends arrived at their motel, Martin had already placed the first of his calls. Ferrie fell asleep that night unaware that television newsmen and an agent of the Secret Service were hammering on his apartment door in New Orleans.

  Intending to visit relatives of Beaubouef, they drove north the next day. Ferrie again tried unsuccessfully to reach Gill. Then he telephoned his own apartment and temporary house guest Layton Martens answered.* It was from Martens that Ferrie first learned he was being accused “of being implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy.” “Very much disturbed,” Ferrie turned his station wagon south and headed home. He had learned what was being said about him, but he didn’t know the source of the accusations, nor the extent of them. At another telephone at another service station along the way, he at last managed to reach attorney Gill and discovered the initiator was Jack Martin. It was early Sunday evening.15

  When they arrived in New Orleans, Ferrie drove to the vicinity of his apartment and dropped Alvin Beaubouef off so he “could check to see if anyone was waiting”—to act, as Beaubouef described it, as “a decoy,” though he wasn’t expecting what occurred. Ferrie and Coffey then drove to a nearby grocery store. When they returned, they saw a “bunch” of cars and “a lot of people.” Figuring it was the police, Ferrie telephoned his apartment. “Some dumb ox,” he later said, answered and tried “to sucker” him into a conversation. Ferrie hung up.16

  It was the police. Five of them had arrived after Beaubouef entered. They “burst through the door,” Beaubouef said recently, with warrants, looking for Ferrie. Beaubouef told them he didn’t know where Ferrie was and they arrested him. They arrested Layton Martens as well and charged him with “vagrancy, under investigation of subversive activities.” They also confiscated a batch of embarrassing photographs. (Three years later these pictures would reappear in one of the minidramas in Jim Garrison’s investigation.)17

  The police staked out the apartment and waited for Ferrie to show up. But after dropping Coffey off, he headed north again, at Gill’s suggestion, and spent the night with a friend at Southeastern Louisiana College in Hammond. The following day, he returned to New Orleans and, accompanied by Gill, surrendered at the district attorney’s office. Ferrie was questioned by a police officer and two of Garrison’s aides. Then he was booked, oddly, with “vagrancy, pending investigation of being a fugitive from the State of Texas.” How he could have been a fugitive from a state where no charge was filed against him is unclear.18

  That evening Ferrie was interviewed by agents of the Secret Service and FBI. Ferrie acknowledged that he had criticized President Kennedy “both in public and in private” over his failure to provide “air cover” during the Bay of Pigs invasion and may have used the expression “he ought to be shot.” But he said he had “never made any statement that President Kennedy should be killed with the intention that this be done” and had “never at any time outlined or formulated any plans or made any statement as to how this could be done or who should do it.” To everyone who questioned him that day and into the evening, and on November 27, and still again on December 13, David Ferrie rejected all the charges Martin had made against him. Among others, Ferrie emphatically denied being in Dallas in the last eight to ten years, or knowing Lee Harvey Oswald in the CAP* or any capacity. He also denied ever loaning Oswald his library card. Or being implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in any manner. Ferrie said his four-passenger monoplane hadn’t been airworthy since 1962 (which was later confirmed by the FBI) and that he hadn’t flown it to Dallas since 1949.19

  The FBI, as well as the New Orleans police, quickly verified Ferrie’s movements that weekend. They checked registers, interviewed motel clerks and the manager of the skating rink,20 and they obtained a record of the telephone numbers Ferrie called from Houston. At the request of Garrison’s office, the Texas Rangers investigated Ferrie’s trip as well and “were unable to implicate” him in the assassination. The Houston police also corroborated Ferrie’s visit to their city and to Galveston the following day. The New Orleans police reported that they were “unable to uncover any evidence which would link Ferrie to the assassination.” There was no reason to hold Ferrie and he and his friends were released.

  The instigator of all this chaos, Jack Martin, recanted his tales about Ferrie to the FBI and two days later made an even more sw
eeping disavowal to the Secret Service. Martin, who the Secret Service agents noted in their report had “every appearance of being an alcoholic,” admitted suffering from “telephonitis” when he drank. He said “that it was during one of his drinking sprees” that he telephoned the D.A.’s office and told his “fantastic story” about Ferrie being involved with Oswald. Yet even in this confession Martin didn’t tell the truth. He reduced his manic exercise with the telephone to a single ill-advised call.21 It is often reported that Ferrie was linked to the assassination that weekend by various reports, the sheer number lending credibility to the charges. What few seem to realize is that all of them originated from a single source, Jack Martin’s red hot telephone line.

  The missing element was his motivation.22 That was rooted in something personal. The most likely possibility is that Martin’s pistol whipping by Banister Friday night was unwittingly triggered by Ferrie. Ferrie told the FBI he had discovered that Martin, when “moving around” the United States, was making long-distance telephone calls and charging them to Gill’s and Banister’s offices. Ferrie probably passed that information to Banister, prompting the quarrel that escalated into the beating. So when Martin was sitting at home nursing his cranial “lacerations” and speculating about Ferrie’s crimes, the crime Martin had in mind wasn’t the assassination in Dallas. It was closer to home, right there on his head in fact. And the word for what motivated Martin that weekend, as he strove to link David Ferrie to the president’s murder, was revenge.23

  Jack Martin—who always wore a black hat and a black trench coat, apparently to enhance his “private eye” image—was clearly a world-class troublemaker. Many in New Orleans recall his excessive drinking and “big talk.” But few knew the truth about him. Martin was born in 1915 in Phoenix, Arizona. His real name was Edward Stewart Suggs. An FBI rap sheet on Suggs lists a string of arrests and charges dating from 1944, the most serious being a 1952 murder charge in Dallas, Texas, which somehow was cleared up the following year. The subject of Martin’s psychological health is a recurring theme in his government records. “Several sources have reported Martin is a mental case,” reads an Informative Note in his FBI file. He was confined to a mental hospital in 1956 and diagnosed as having a “sociopathic personality disturbance, antisocial type.” Given Martin’s prominent role in Jim Garrison’s later investigation, whether or not he belonged in a rubber room is no minor issue.* Martin was not just ornery, irresponsible, and vengeful. He was exploitative, malicious and cunning, and he knew how to work the system.24