False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  While Russo wasn’t the boy-next-door, on meeting him the first time people frequently found him likeable and surprisingly open. He was unusually verbal, with a large vocabulary and a substantial knowledge of New Orleans history. The satisfaction some find through writing, Russo achieved through talking. Talking was what he did best. Unfortunately for everyone, including the country at large, over a brief five-day period in 1967 Russo talked himself into a dangerously vulnerable legal position and Clay Shaw into a felony charge.

  The night he learned that Shaw had been arrested, Russo had a revealing reaction. “ ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘what have I done now?’ ” Because, he observed, “I could have been wrong. In my statement. I could have been mistaken.” “My God,” Russo said to Sciambra, “don’t tell me that they have arrested that man on what I said.” “No, not at all,” Sciambra replied, “we have [the case] locked up. It is a lead pipe cinch. You are just another witness and may not even be called [to testify].”38 In fact, he represented the entire legal basis for the charge filed against Clay Shaw.

  The day after he arrested Shaw, Garrison again benefited from the hand of fate. United States Attorney General Designate Ramsey Clark had a blundering encounter with the press in Washington and provided Garrison with another credibility boost. Emerging from a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination, Clark answered questions about events in New Orleans by saying that Clay Shaw had been investigated by the FBI in 1963 and cleared. Clark’s statement was a simple mistake. He should have said “Bertrand” had been investigated. Shaw at first took comfort in the report. Assuming he had been investigated because of Oswald’s pamphleteering in front of the Trade Mart, Shaw told reporters he had not known about the FBI investigation but was delighted and pleased that he had been cleared by them. That same day, the bureaucratic snafu was compounded when a befuddled spokesman for the Department of Justice, pressed on the issue, said of Bertrand and Shaw, “We think it’s the same guy.”39

  As the government paper trail now shows, this was a sensitive matter, an error of some magnitude by the brand new Attorney General of the United States.40 The problem heated up when Shaw’s attorney, Edward Wegmann, requested the information obtained by the FBI in its investigation of Shaw. Since there had been no investigation, both Clark and the FBI were now on the spot. As one exasperated Department of Justice employee told a friendly reporter who called asking for an explanation, “We can’t very well say that Clark has wood in his head.” Responding finally to Wegmann’s request for a “public clarification,” the Department of Justice explained that in 1963 “nothing arose indicating a need to investigate Mr. Shaw” and that Clark’s statement had been in error.41 This innocent explanation was never accepted by Garrison. Today, the incident is part of the lore of his case, one of those quirky events that fueled the possibility he might really be on to something.42

  Not everything was going Garrison’s way, though. When he arrested Clay Shaw, he did more than shock and divide the citizenry of New Orleans. He brought to a head the conflict at Life magazine over the Garrison issue that had been put on a back burner earlier in the year. According to David Chandler, shortly after Louis Ivon clapped handcuffs onto Shaw, several members of Life’s senior staff (including Managing Editor George Hunt) attended a dinner in a Miami restaurant. The main topic of conversation was Jim Garrison and the riveting events taking place in New Orleans; the talk quickly grew heated. The debate boiled down to whether Billings or Chandler was right about Garrison. At a crucial moment, a legendary former Time editor, Holland McCombs, who had known Clay Shaw fifteen years, scribbled a check (the amount is unclear) and slapped it down on the table. I’ll bet any part of this, McCombs declared, that Chandler is right. He “got no takers,” McCombs later told Chandler.43

  McCombs, whose prestige was matched that night by the force of his conviction, swayed Managing Editor Hunt and precipitated the first stage of his withdrawal from the arrangement with Garrison. While the final break would occur months later, the Miami dinner marked the beginning of the end of Life’s support.44 According to Chandler, Hunt killed the big story slated for April publication that Billings was preparing to write. Garrison’s picture would not be appearing on Life’s cover. Life would not be presenting Jim Garrison’s version of the assassination to the American people.

  When Garrison learned of Life’s decision, he moved at once to fill the void. From the flock of journalists perched in New Orleans, he selected the one from the magazine that had given him his first major publicity, The Saturday Evening Post.45 It was a decision Garrison would live to regret. For writer James Phelan, a logical man with an eye for detail, would soon pen an article that exposed the gaping hole in the testimony of Perry Russo, the second near-fatal catastrophe to befall Jim Garrison’s case.

  * Private financing of the public prosecutor is today prohibited by the American Bar Association’s rules of ethics (Posner, Case Closed [New York: Random House, 1993], note at page 432).

  * That evening Russo repeated his innocuous story to three radio and television reporters. When asked if he had known Lee Harvey Oswald, he added a remark that would come back to haunt him. Russo stated that he never heard of Oswald until he saw his picture on television after the assassination (Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1967).

  * He was “around 25 years old”; wore a “wedding band”; “was a bug on history” and “read a lot.” He was also a “nut about guns,” owning, as Oswald did, both a pistol and a bolt action rifle (with a telescopic sight), which, Russo said, he saw him cleaning one day.

  * It was Sciambra’s prodding for “details about Clay Bertrand being up in Ferrie’s apartment” that led Russo to “remember” the plotting session.

  * This was a peculiar move. For if Russo really did recognize Shaw from the evening they shared at Ferrie’s plotting session, Shaw should have recognized Russo too. (Shaw later said he had never laid eyes on Russo until he knocked on his door.)

  * Shaw later explained that the unusual items were all “residue” from old Mardi Gras costumes. He noted that Garrison’s men left behind Greek and Japanese outfits, which, if taken, would have indicated the context of the others (Shaw Journal, March 1, 1967, p. 19).

  † Garrison also showed them to some reporters and researchers.

  * The discussion that follows is based on the transcript of that March 1, 1967, interview, labeled by Clay Shaw’s defense team: “First Hypnotic Session”—“Exhibit F,” for presentation at the trial, but never admitted into evidence.

  * This was a reference to Russo’s friends, Lefty Peterson and Sandra Moffett, who later denied being there. Moffett signed a sworn affidavit stating she did not meet David Ferrie until 1965 (Sandra Moffett McMaines, deposition, June 24, 1968, p. 11).

  * As noted earlier, suggestibility is also a problem with sodium Pentothal, and Andrew Sciambra, who conducted that interview, was even less cautious than Dr. Fatter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JAMES PHELAN AND THE SATURDAY

  EVENING POST

  [Phelan was] a gravel-throated mick-faced journalist of the old school. Lean and spare and in his fifties, he would be at home in a revival of The Front Page. I could easily picture him in another era, panning for gold up in the Yukon.1

  —James Kirkwood, 1970

  When news of Garrison’s investigation first broke, James Phelan was unaware of what was happening in New Orleans. He was working on another story and trapped five days in a Chicago airport by a snow storm. By the time he returned to New York, David Ferrie was dead, Garrison had proclaimed the case “solved,” and the media had flooded into New Orleans, but not the Post. Believing Phelan had an inside track with Garrison, Chief Editor Don McKinney held the assignment for him. McKinney and Post publisher, Otto Friedrich, were excited about the events in New Orleans. “This could be one of the biggest stories of our times,” McKinney told Phelan. “If Garrison has what he says he has, he is going to rewrite history.”2

  Phelan was delighted to
be handed this choice assignment, but worried about his late start (“everyone else was already there”). “Hoping that [Garrison] had solved this thing,” Phelan boarded a plane that night and arrived in New Orleans the evening of February 27. Encountering a madhouse at Tulane and Broad the next day, he left a note with a Garrison aide saying, “I’m over at the Royal Orleans hotel—I’ve joined the thundering herd—and if you ever get a minute give me a call.”3

  Sitting in the Press Club bar late the following afternoon, Phelan heard on television that Clay Shaw had been arrested. “Everybody,” Phelan later recalled, “was just flabbergasted. All the people who knew him couldn’t believe it.” Phelan had never heard of him but was quickly filled in by other reporters. Clay Shaw, Phelan thought, “is one hell of a story.”

  The next day, Phelan got his first look at the accused. Shortly before 2:00 P.M. at the office of his attorney, Shaw read a prepared statement in a room jammed wall-to-wall with reporters, one of them Phelan. “I am shocked and dismayed at the charges which have been filed against me,” Shaw said. “I am completely innocent.” “I have not conspired with anyone at any time or at any place to murder our late and esteemed president,” for whom he had “only the highest and utmost respect and admiration.” He did not know Lee Harvey Oswald. He did not know David Ferrie. He had never been to Ferrie’s apartment. He had never used the name “Clay Bertrand.” Phelan found Shaw “impressive,” “well-spoken” and “specific about having admired Kennedy,” but then, Phelan said, no one expected Shaw to say, “Okay, guys, I did it.”4

  That same day, Garrison sprang another surprise when one of his assistants filed a motion for a preliminary hearing, an extraordinary step for a district attorney to take.* Defense attorneys favor preliminary hearings because the prosecution must reveal enough of its case to convince the court that the defendant should be held for trial. But ordinarily, prosecutors prefer to avoid showing their hand. Phelan was as baffled as everyone else. “We do not understand the motivation of Mr. Garrison,” said one of Shaw’s attorneys.5 Even Judge Bernard J. Bagert, who granted the motion and set the hearing for March 14, termed it an “unusual” request for the state to make. The defense team decided that Garrison was planning to stage a performance. They moved to quash the hearing until Garrison filed a bill of particulars that identified the others allegedly involved,† the confidential informant, and the when, where, and what of the alleged conspiracy. Judge Bagert rejected their plea, granting only their request concerning the informant. “I disagree violently with this finding,” William Wegmann told the court. “We are entitled to cross-examine. We are entitled to be prepared and not come in here and shoot off the cuff. We don’t want to come in here Tuesday and have the state go wild and put on a big show.”6 Bagert was unmoved. The big show was on its way.

  But it was two weeks in the offing. Phelan began chasing down wild stories that were sprouting everywhere and waiting to hear from Garrison. On Friday, March 3, four days after Phelan arrived in New Orleans, Garrison finally called. He apologized for the delay, said he had “a proposal” for Phelan, and invited him to lunch. They met at the New Orleans Athletic Club, but had little opportunity to talk because of the people “coming up to the table and congratulating Garrison.” Afterwards, in the cab taking Garrison back to his office, he told Phelan he was going to Las Vegas “to get away for some rest” and some sun, and he wanted Phelan to join him. “I’ll tell you the whole incredible story,” Garrison promised. To prevent the rest of the media from catching on, Garrison suggested they travel separately, with Phelan leaving first and Garrison following the next day. Phelan agreed and caught a plane out that evening.7

  Phelan thought he just had been handed an “incredible exclusive story,” he later wrote, “on a silver platter.” It appeared that way. Phelan knew nothing about Garrison’s deal with Life and how it had “gone sour.” He thought Garrison had called him “because,” he later joked, “of my irresistible personality.” As he winged his way west, the six-foot, fifty-four-year-old Phelan knew only that he was about to hear from Garrison himself the inside story of the New Orleans plot that had killed the president, the story the whole world was waiting to hear.8

  Phelan found Las Vegas an odd and distant locale for a New Orleans district attorney to choose for a retreat, but he later learned it was a favorite vacation spot for Garrison.9 Phelan had written several articles about that improbable gambling town, invented and operated by gangsters, and he, too, was familiar with it. He checked into the Dunes, where he had stayed in the past. Garrison arrived on Saturday and Phelan picked him up at the airport. At Garrison’s instructions, Phelan drove him to the Sands, where Garrison registered under the alias “W. O. Robinson,” which was Garrison’s maternal grandfather’s name. Garrison said he needed some sleep, so they arranged to rendezvous on Sunday. To Phelan that meant another day wasted and he began to wonder why he was there. Unbeknownst to him, Garrison was not alone. Two companions had accompanied him. He may have wanted sleep that night or he may have wanted some entertainment. As Phelan said, “I was never part of Garrison’s social life.”10

  In two lengthy meetings the next day, Garrison laid out his thinking and described his “evidence.” He began their first session, which took place in the Sands Garden Room over brunch, by criticizing the Warren Report (“junk” gathered by “squirrels”) and explained that he had solved the Dallas puzzle through “imagination and evaluation.” He said they had “uncovered a whole series of odd connections” by examining “old street directories, [and] old telephone books” and “to understand the overall picture” Phelan had to keep in mind “that the Kennedy assassination was like Alice in Wonderland: Nothing was what it seemed to be. Black was white, white was black.” Soon he latched onto his favorite subject, “the trip that Ferrie made to Houston the day after Kennedy was killed.” It was, Garrison told Phelan, as he had told others in the past few months and would continue to repeat, in one form or another, the rest of his life, “a most curious trip, by a curious man to a curious place at a curious time.” That trip, Garrison said, was the initial “thread” that when he “tugged it” had “unraveled this whole case.”11

  By now, Garrison had assigned Ferrie a new role. His destination that day, the Winterland ice skating rink, was actually “the message center,” Garrison said. And he insisted that Ferrie “never put on his skates,”* but had spent the afternoon hanging around the telephone. When Phelan asked what message Ferrie had received, who had called him, or whom Ferrie had called, Garrison admitted that he didn’t know that “yet.”† When Phelan pointed out the story’s lack of substance (he repeatedly asked “where’s the evidence?”), Garrison gave him a dossier on Ferrie prepared by a private investigative firm. It catalogued Ferrie’s schooling, his tortured personal life, and his peripatetic employment record, but contained nothing that linked him even remotely to the assassination. Phelan read it, told Garrison it was interesting but he couldn’t see its relevance. Garrison responded with more of the same.12

  Suddenly, Garrison ended the meeting. He said three men in a nearby booth were FBI agents, that the Bureau had him under surveillance, following him everywhere and in New Orleans tapping his phones. He asked Phelan to come that evening to his room at the Sands. Phelan headed back to the Dunes with his once-soaring expectations beginning to sag. That night he showed up at Garrison’s room and found him in shirt-sleeve wearing a gun in a shoulder holster. Garrison removed the gun, emptied its shells into his hand, and showed Phelan one of them. It was, Garrison said, a “magnum load” that his gun couldn’t handle and he couldn’t figure out who had put it into his gun. If it were fired, he said, the weapon would explode. As Phelan watched, Garrison put all six shells back into the gun.13

  Then Garrison returned to his narrative. He described the group of CIA-supported anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans that Ferrie had joined. Oswald, too, was involved with them, but he hadn’t fired “a shot at anyone,” Garrison declared. (He defined Oswald
’s role in the president’s murder as that of a “participant, decoy, and patsy.”) David Ferrie, Garrison explained, had spun the group off from the original plan against Castro and created “an assassination team to kill the president.”14

  The motive? “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime,” Garrison stated, reciting the outlandish story Perry Russo had heard. Garrison compared it to the famous 1920s Loeb-Leopold murder of Bobby Franks in Chicago. “John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not—a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man,” Garrison said. “You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.” Garrison had deduced this, he said, because Ferrie, Ruby, Oswald, and Shaw were all homosexual. Phelan pointed out that Oswald was married and the father of two children. Oswald, Garrison replied, was “a switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife.” The thrill-killing notion coupled with the episode with the shells gave Phelan pause—it crossed his mind that Garrison might be unhinged.15