False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  The state’s next witness was a surprise in a variety of ways. Charles I. Spiesel, an accountant who had lived in New Orleans in 1963 but presently resided in New York City, was a nicely dressed, professional-looking man who spoke well and made quite a positive impression as Alcock led him though his story. On an evening in June 1963, at a bar in the French Quarter, Spiesel met David Ferrie, who was with two women and another man. Spiesel accompanied the group to a party at an apartment near “Dauphine and Esplanade.” This was Clay Shaw’s neighborhood, and Shaw was one of the ten or eleven men at the party. Spiesel was introduced to all but he remembered only Shaw by name. The women left, as well as the other man in Ferrie’s original group. Those who remained ended up sitting around a large table criticizing President Kennedy. At one point someone said, “Somebody ought to kill the son of a b!” The conversation, Spiesel said, seemed to amuse Shaw. Another man, “about five feet nine inches tall” with “a beard and dirty blonde hair and one finger in a splint” asked how it could be accomplished. The others concluded that “it had to be done with a high-powered rifle [with a] telescopic lens and about a mile away.” According to Spiesel, who “was quite alarmed by the tone of the conversation,” Shaw and Ferrie discussed how the killer could make his getaway, with Ferrie agreeing that it could be done by airplane.6

  People present in the courtroom that day speak about the hush that fell over the room as Spiesel spoke. “You could literally hear a pin drop,” a woman said recently. Spiesel told “a tidy story,” one reporter wrote. And he told it well. Shaw and his attorneys and supporters were stunned and grim. First the Clinton eight, followed by Bundy’s demonstration, and now this. About then, Salvatore Panzeca was being pestered by one of the court deputies. “I keep getting messages,” Panzeca recently recalled, “that my next door neighbor, Bill Storm, is calling me.” Panzeca was annoyed. Didn’t Storm know this trial was important? Finally he gave in, left the courtroom, and called Storm back. “He says, ‘Sal, I hear on the radio that Mr. Spiesel is testifying against your client. Let me tell you a little bit about him. I worked with him for many months in a CPA firm. And,’ he says, ‘I’m telling you the guy is a nut. He hears voices. He thinks the world is tape recording his life. He had his daughter, before she went away to college, fingerprinted.’ And he’s giving me all this in a real hurried way and I’m saying, ‘Bill, are you sure?’ ‘Oh, yes, Sal, I know the guy is kooky. He sued the City of New York.’ He’s telling me all this and I can’t write it down fast enough. I said, ‘Bill, stay by this number.’ I go inside and I start telling Bill Wegmann, I said, ‘When Irvin gets to cross-examine ask [Spiesel] these things about voices, tape recordings, people suing him for being too short,’ and Bill Wegmann thinks I’m crazy!”7

  The questions were passed to Dymond and when his turn came he coaxed some devastating admissions from Spiesel. In 1965 he had filed a 16 million law suit against a psychiatrist, a detective agency, a horse-racing association and others charging that they had, among other things, interfered with his sex life. The defendants had conspired to convince people that he and his family were Communists, Spiesel said, and during 1962, 1963, and 1964 had put him under a “hypnotic spell.” In 1964 he sued the City of New York for subjecting him to “hypnosis and mental torture.” Dymond also forced him to concede that he had tried to sell his conspiracy party story to CBS for 2,000. The defense arranged for a copy of the pleading in Spiesel’s multi-million-dollar lawsuit to be flown to New Orleans overnight. Dymond had it in hand when he resumed his cross-examination on Saturday morning and used it to glean more damaging details from the hapless Spiesel.8

  The grilling was winding down when Dymond requested that the witness point out the apartment in the French Quarter where the alleged plotting party occurred. Over the objections of the prosecution, Judge Haggerty agreed, ordering that the jurors and principals be transported to the French Quarter. “Carnival came a little early,” read one news account of the circuslike scene near Dauphine and Esplanade as the media hordes arrived, creating a monumental traffic jam. Back in the courtroom afterwards, Spiesel returned to the stand and confirmed that he had been unable to find the apartment in question.9

  Everyone agreed that Dymond’s questioning of Spiesel was a turning point. “The sky fell in,” Alcock said.10 Until then, it seemed as though the Garrison juggernaut was about to flatten Clay Shaw. News accounts described Garrison’s men appearing “shocked” at Spiesel’s admissions. They weren’t. Before the trial began, Garrison sent two assistant district attorneys to New York to interview Spiesel. When they returned, one of them said, “Well, he’d make a great witness, but he’s crazy.” How crazy was he? “He fingerprints his children in the morning to make sure that the federal government hasn’t substituted dead ringers in the middle of the night.” That should have been crazy enough to keep him off the stand.* But as one of Garrison’s staff members later wrote, Spiesel’s variety of madness seemed unlikely to be exposed. His “demeanor was normal.” He had “a good job.” He did “professional work.” And what defense attorney “would think to ask a surprise witness, Do you fingerprint your children?”11

  Perry Russo took the stand Monday morning and testified two full days. “He was the star of the show,” author James Kirkwood wrote. “The state knew it, the defense and the defendant, the judge and the jury knew it—and Perry Raymond Russo knew it.” Kirkwood thought Russo appeared terrified at first. He had cause. He knew the defense was going to confront him with his statements to Edward O’Donnell and James Phelan. He knew that the gap in the Sciambra memorandum had to be closed. He could only wonder what else the defense had in store for him.

  Like Bundy, Russo recited basically the same story he had told at the preliminary hearing, though this time Russo didn’t mention his two friends* being at Ferrie’s apartment the night the plotting occurred. But he pointed to Clay Shaw as the big, “wide-shouldered, distinguished-looking” man he had seen there. In a preemptive move, Alcock launched into the major weakness of his own case, Sciambra’s memorandum, asking Russo the question. What did he tell Sciambra at that first interview in Baton Rouge? In a seemingly reluctant response, Russo referred to seeing Shaw at the Kennedy rally and the service station and then said he had told Sciambra about seeing Shaw “up at Ferrie’s apartment.” He meant the assassination plotting party, which Alcock now called a “meeting.” And did he tell Sciambra “essentially” what he had told the jury about that meeting? “Not in as great detail,” Russo said, “but in essence, yes.” Alcock later asked the same question again and Russo’s answer was virtually incomprehensible. That Russo did such a feeble job fixing the Sciambra memorandum may suggest the depth of his own personal struggle.12

  All 3,500 meandering words of that document were heard in the courtroom that day, after Dymond demanded it and the judge agreed. It was read by James Alcock with author Sciambra sitting at his side. Then Alcock guided Russo as he corrected some twenty-six errors in it. The most significant was the number of times Russo had seen Shaw—at least three, not two, as Sciambra had written. With that, Russo plugged the seepage around the larger hole.

  The defense now had its turn with Russo. This time, unlike the preliminary hearing, Dymond was quiet and non-aggressive in his questioning. Russo relaxed. And an odd bonding occurred, followed by a curiously sympathetic exchange. On both days Russo responded with helpful equivocations. He admitted that the conversation in Ferrie’s apartment had all the characteristics of an inconsequential bull session. He objected to Dymond’s description of Shaw, Oswald, and Ferrie as conspirators. “I don’t call them conspirators,” Russo said. “I have never used that word.” He conceded to the soft-talking Dymond that he never heard Oswald or Shaw agree to kill the president. Only Ferrie had said, as he had many times in the past, “We will kill him.” Since conspiracy requires agreement from two or more persons, this was a blow to the state’s case.13 The States-Item, on the street while Russo was still on the stand, bannered the news in its headline:
DIDN’T HEAR SHAW, OSWALD AGREE TO KILL, RUSSO SAYS.

  Russo had made damaging statements at the preliminary hearing and afterwards to various individuals, primarily James Phelan and Edward O’Donnell. Dymond now relentlessly pursued them. Russo hedged. He denied. He explained. He rambled. He performed a mind-numbing verbal tap dance. Yes, he had claimed that his two friends were at the conspiracy party, but only because Dymond had badgered him into it. Why had he told Edward O’Donnell that he didn’t know whether or not Shaw was at Ferrie’s party? Because the newspeople had made it “hard” for him to know one way or the other. Yes, he told O’Donnell that he identified Shaw at the preliminary hearing only because Dymond’s “God question” “turned [him] on.” But, after all, Dymond had “gone for the jugular.” Yes, he probably did tell Phelan he would like to sit down with Shaw to resolve doubts about his identification of him. But that was because he wanted to be 1,000 percent sure instead of just 100 percent. Yes, he had said to Phelan, “if Garrison knew what I told my priest in Baton Rouge after the Shaw hearing he would go through the ceiling.” But he had an explanation for that too. Bafflingly, it included the sort of “vague memories” one might have from a “basketball game.”14

  As Russo’s marathon appearance concluded, he handed the defense another gift. Dymond asked about the “conspiratorial meeting” Russo had sat in on. “I never said anything about a conspiracy,” Russo declared. “I didn’t sit in on any conspiracies.” Dymond finished by inquiring about Russo’s failure to tell reporter Bill Bankston about the plotting session during his first interview in Baton Rouge. Russo again dodged and weaved. But his final response indirectly acknowledged his testimony’s transformation. The story he told Bankston, he admitted, was “that I knew David Ferrie.” That ended Russo’s star turn. His personal saga would lumber on into the next decade and beyond. But his fifteen minutes of celebrity were over.15

  He had taken the stand the day before, facing an impossible task of his own making. He knew he had to stick to his story or Garrison would charge him with perjury or worse. Yet some part of him wanted to tell the seductive Dymond the truth. He tried to do both, and ended up sounding almost delusional. Reading the three-inch-thick transcript is like being immersed in a dark and tangled mental terrain.

  Appropriately, Russo’s sanity was the next subject. Alcock requested that the court allow the preliminary hearing testimony of the deceased coroner, who vouched for Russo’s mental health, to be entered into the record. The next morning William Wegmann argued energetically against its admission. “The question,” Wegmann said, “is not whether Russo was sane in 1967. The question is whether he is sane in 1969!” The prosecution won but it was no great victory. As the sixty-seven-page transcript was read, “three jurors slept,” a wire service reported, “Shaw napped and the judge’s eyelids drooped.” Those who could, fled.16

  Andrew Sciambra took the stand afterwards and brought the room to life again. Attractive and pugnacious, he was there to salvage the state’s case by trashing his own document. “That memorandum was hastily done,” he said, “it was incomplete, it was inaccurate, there were omissions in it, and it does not reflect what Perry Russo told me during my first interview.” Despite that acknowledgment and the twenty-six errors catalogued by Russo the previous day, Sciambra insisted that he had captured correctly the “essence” in all instances. He even admitted including his own “interpretations” and “assumptions” rather than always reporting what Russo had actually said. This impressionistic approach to evidence gathering was a damaging confession. It suggested that he had behaved more like a writer molding a story than an attorney seeking information.17

  As for the absence of the conspiracy party, Sciambra provided a three-pronged explanation: the distracting atmosphere of Russo’s apartment; his oral briefing of Garrison; and his being less “concerned” with the memorandum’s content because the sodium-Pentothal report (which he claimed he wrote first) covered the same ground. William Wegmann, handling the cross-examination, suggested that as a “practicing criminal attorney,” Sciambra should have known that the memorandum on the first interview would be admissible in court, but the sodium-Pentothal report would not be. Unfazed, Sciambra replied that he “didn’t think about it.” Wegmann’s cross-examination grew progressively more heated and culminated with Sciambra calling James Phelan an out-of-state “journalistic prostitute,” unable to “objectively report what he should.” Invited by Wegmann to characterize Edward O’Donnell as a prostitute, Sciambra declined. When Wegmann asked if Sciambra believed he had “objectively reported” what Russo said to him in Baton Rouge, Sciambra admitted he might be “a sloppy memorandum writer” but that didn’t make him “a prostitute.”18

  In his irrational attack on Phelan, Sciambra was expressing more than anger about his own embarrassing situation. He was giving voice to the loss of reason in the district attorney’s office over the past two years toward newsmen who reported negatively about Garrison’s investigation. Though Garrison exploited the national and historical import of the Kennedy assassination to the hilt, Sciambra’s “out-of-state” comment is a glimpse of the parochial attitude that prevailed then and still lingers today among some of Garrison’s former staff. Phelan was seen as an outsider meddling in a local matter.

  The next witness was R. C. Rolland, president of the Winterland Skating Rink in Houston. He testified that on November 23, 1963, when Ferrie and his friends visited the rink, Ferrie had deliberately called attention to himself, implying that Ferrie wanted to be remembered. Ferrie made several telephone calls, Rolland said, and he didn’t skate.* Whether or not Ferrie put on skates was irrelevant except to Garrison, who had incorporated Rolland’s information into his sinister view of Ferrie’s trip.19 That Garrison believed it would advance his case against Shaw for the jury to hear about Ferrie, the day after the assassination, making himself conspicuous (which he often did), skating or not skating, and using the telephone, tells us nothing about Ferrie but speaks volumes about Garrison.

  A black postman, James Hardiman, then took the stand. During the summer of 1966, while Shaw was on vacation, Hardiman said he delivered mail addressed to “Clem Bertrand” to the home of Clay Shaw’s longtime friend, Jeff Biddison. On cross Hardiman “recognized” a fictitious name—Cliff Boudreaux—that Dymond had just made up. Hardiman said he had delivered mail to Biddison’s home addressed to Boudreaux as well. As James Kirkwood pointed out, it may be pertinent that nine months earlier Hardiman’s twenty-year-old-son had been arrested for theft, and two years later no action “appeared to have been taken by the district attorney’s office.”20

  After the postman the thrust of the evidence shifted dramatically. For six and a half days, the focus had been on the New Orleans conspiracy. But now Garrison and his men commenced their attack on the conclusions of the Warren Report. In the period that followed, Clay Shaw went unmentioned for days. He became, literally, the forgotten man.

  * Just before the trial began Dymond received a telephone call from a man identifying himself as Perry Russo who said he wanted to meet with him at the lakefront late that night. Dymond, uncertain what to expect, borrowed a gun from his next-door neighbor and drove to the location specified, but no one showed up (Dymond, interview with author, Nov. 2, 1995).

  † Like Garrison, Shaw, and Dymond, the Wegmann brothers were veterans of WWII. As the skipper of an LST, Navy Lieutenant (j.g.) Edward Wegmann had seen action in the Pacific campaign. So had Army Corporal (later Second Lieutenant) William Wegmann, also serving on an LST, who was creased on the head by a bullet while standing on the beach at Saipan.

  * Recently a former assistant district attorney under Garrison (who had no involvement in the Shaw case), said it wasn’t unknown for the D.A.’s men to file charges and then go out and “gather” evidence to make the charges work. What Bundy did, picking out a particular characteristic and identifying it as the basis for an identification, he said, is how it’s done.

  * When I pointed out to Ja
mes Alcock that Garrison in his memoir blamed him for putting Spiesel on the stand, Alcock stared down at his desk and replied tightly, “He was the district attorney. I was an assistant district attorney” (James Alcock, interview with author, Dec. 3, 1993).

  * Niles Peterson and Sandra Moffett.

  * Rolland wasn’t at the rink when Ferrie arrived. Since Ferrie skated only a little, he was probably off the ice before Rolland arrived (Rolland, interview with Andrew Sciambra, May 21, 1968; Ferrie, FBI interview, Nov. 25, 1963; Beaubouef Interview).

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE TRIAL, PART TWO:

  THE WARREN REPORT

  I only wish the press would allow our case to stand or fall on its merits in court.1

  —Jim Garrison, 1967

  The prosecution began this phase of Garrison’s case by calling Abraham Zapruder, the dress manufacturer famous for his home movie of the assassination. Garrison had subpoenaed the film, which was then owned by Life magazine. Zapruder’s testimony paved the way for the trial’s most sensational event, the showing of his movie in the courtroom. The other Dealey Plaza witnesses were a mixed lot, some impressive, some not. Ironically, a defense rebuttal witness, Kennedy autopsy pathologist Dr. Pierre Finck, gave the most significant medical testimony. None of this evidence had any bearing on the charge against Clay Shaw.

  Dymond made that point when he objected to the entire Dallas line of inquiry. The events there, he said, were irrelevant “as to what happened here.” Despite past rulings to the contrary and as expected, Judge Haggerty sided with the prosecution and the trial of the Warren Report was officially sanctioned.* Props were quickly unveiled: a mockup of Dealey Plaza, an aerial photograph, and a survey plat for topography. Jim Garrison made his third appearance in the courtroom for the occasion, remaining about thirty minutes. Handling this segment of the prosecution’s case were Asst. D.A.’s Alvin Oser, with a crew cut and ringing delivery, and large, baby-faced William Alford.