False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  Citing Garrison’s claim that the 70,000 provided by Truth and Consequences had “nothing to do” with the case against Shaw, Christenberry wrote that “the incongruity of this statement is apparent and appalling.” He noted that only Shaw’s arrest had given Garrison the “jurisdictional ground” to justify his investigation of the assassination. “Without Shaw,” Christenberry observed, “there could be no probe.” He also pointed out that “when Shaw was arrested the money came in; when he was acquitted, it stopped.” He noted that Garrison’s financial backers expected results and that “the perjury charge” was one of Garrison’s efforts “to produce” those “results.” It was brought in “bad faith,” represented “selective law enforcement,” and, Christenberry said, referring to Garrison’s recently published book, Heritage of Stone, was motivated in part by Garrison’s “desire for financial gain.”

  Nothing agitated Christenberry more than the circumstances of Shaw’s arrest after he had voluntarily presented himself to the D.A.’s office for questioning. “During this time,” Christenberry noted, “a representative of Life Magazine photographed Shaw through a two-way mirror unbeknownst to him.”* Christenberry called the manner in which Shaw’s arrest was accomplished “outrageous and inexcusable.” While Shaw could have been taken downstairs in the private elevator in Garrison’s office, instead he was led “handcuffed into the hallway” where cameramen and reporters had mysteriously materialized and “was shoved and pushed through the crowd,” all of which appeared on television. The private elevator had not been used, Christenberry concluded, because it “would not have afforded the publicity Garrison was obviously seeking.” Characterizing this as “a case of continuing harassment and multiple prosecutions,” with the likelihood that both would “continue in the future” without “direct federal court intervention,” Christenberry granted the request for a permanent injunction.† With it, he did more than free Clay Shaw. He convicted Jim Garrison.16

  The Jolly Green Giant finally had met his match.

  Garrison appealed to the District Court and lost. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost there as well. He did not take defeat quietly. After the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, he issued a nine-page press release asserting that the decision “puts the final nail in John Kennedy’s coffin.” He again charged that Oswald had been a scapegoat and that the CIA assassinated the president. But what Garrison did or said no longer mattered. The judiciary had finally dropped the curtain on his act. Shaw’s attorneys had saved him from another trumped up prosecution and the likelihood, based on the Clinton witnesses alone, of a conviction and a twenty-year jail term.

  Justice long delayed at last had prevailed.

  But Garrison had extracted a high price from those trapped in his web.

  David Ferrie “wasn’t a perfect person,” journalist David Snyder said recently, “but he was doing okay until Garrison went after him.” Ferrie’s friends speak bitterly about Garrison’s persecution of him and those in his circle. One of them recently attributed his success (he’s a prosperous businessman with a flourishing family) to the academic tutoring and general encouragement that Ferrie provided him (and others) during troubled times in earlier years. Ferrie’s funeral services (a Low Requiem Mass at St. Matthias Church and interment in St. Bernard Memorial Cemetery, arranged by a local law firm contacted by his brother), were virtually unobserved. Only two people attended, an unidentified man and woman. The pallbearers were hired.

  Dean Andrews appealed his 1967 perjury conviction and seven years later the charges were dismissed on what was reportedly a trumped-up technicality.17 No one wanted Dean to go to jail, a New Orleans attorney said recently. That was small solace for him. The indictment alone had ruined his private practice and cost him his job. As the father of four, eventually five, Andrews felt the financial squeeze. At one point, he was reduced to sleeping on a cot in the back of the Criminal District Court Library. He worked for a time at Mahogany Hall, a traditional jazz house in the French Quarter, serving as master of ceremonies and playing the bass fiddle. Later, he did a stint as a barker at a joint on Bourbon Street earning twelve dollars a night. Later still, he worked as a clerk at the Criminal District Court building. An out-of-town reporter who ran into him there said recently he was shocked by the change in Andrews. All the life had gone out of him. When he died in April 1981, no obituary was published.

  Perry Russo was already on a downward slide, even before the Christenberry hearing. It began after Shaw’s acquittal in 1969. He lost his job with the insurance company and had difficulty finding another. He tried to join the New Orleans Police Department and was again administered a polygraph by Edward O’Donnell. During it, Russo admitted to buying “stolen property.” He also said “that he had engaged in homosexual acts approximately one hundred times,” first at the age of thirteen and the last time about six weeks prior.18 Russo had no difficulty completing the polygraph and all his answers were judged to be “truthful.” But the New Orleans Police Department declined to hire him. In 1974 he was arrested and charged with possession of barbiturates, amphetamines, and heroin, and of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. He finally hit rock bottom and was sleeping in the park. After that, he began driving a taxi.* When he was last seen by this writer, his taxi needed body work, new upholstery and a wash. He, too, overweight and unkempt, appeared in need of attention. The trim, well-groomed, confidential informant who had first appeared in public at the preliminary hearing twenty-seven years earlier was unrecognizable.

  A year later, Russo suffered a fatal heart attack. He was fifty-two. Dave Snyder, reflecting on Russo’s life, was asked if he didn’t feel a bit sorry for him. “Yeah,” he replied, “I know what you mean. But I remember when Russo was on top of things and back then he was a blustery, bragging, swaggering jerk.”19 Remember—one should. Anyone trying to understand this case must grapple with the enigma of this man’s motivations. His desire for celebrity and financial reward, and his psychological problems (whatever they were), surely affected his actions. But central to what occurred was his relationship with Moo Moo Sciambra. At their first meeting in Baton Rouge, if Russo had been less pliable, less eager to tell Sciambra what he wanted to hear, the entire prosecution might have been avoided. But Russo was pliable, was eager, then and in the days immediately following. The sense I had after studying the record and speaking at length with Russo is that, more than anything else, he was caught up in the emotional tide Garrison generated and passed on to those around him. Russo felt the full force of it in Sciambra, his chief contact.

  Three years after the hearing that freed him, Clay Shaw, a robust man whose only previous medical problem had been with his back, died of cancer at the age of sixty-one. Many believe the stress of his legal ordeal contributed to his death. He died without fulfilling his plans for further travel, without completing the plays he intended to write, living in reduced circumstances in a modest house, with two friends and a hired medical student caring for him. Though he experienced many long dark nights of the soul, Shaw never surrendered to bitterness. He did resort to alcohol, though. The journal he kept, which in 1996 a friend of Shaw permitted Dave Snyder to examine, reveals that. “The psychic pain was so intense,” Shaw wrote four days after his arrest, “that I found myself drinking a martini at six A.M.” Previously a light social drinker, he turned to it for solace as his life disintegrated, his mind “numbed with horror,” his heart “frozen with apprehension.”20

  He once thought of suicide as an option but decided he would endure. “Tomorrow,” he wrote as April approached, “I take up the burden of the second month in supporting the insupportable, tolerating the intolerable, and bearing the unbearable.” He tried but was unable to hate Garrison. “The big, shambling behemoth,” Shaw called him, “driven as he is by the lust for power and attention.” “But try as I would,” he wrote, “I could only feel that this poor son-of-a-bitch needs help far worse than I do.”21 Shaw kept going, helped by some close friends, hi
s religious faith, the counsel of Jesuit priests, and prayer. Throughout those terrible years, he was awesomely dignified and stoic, almost saintly.

  He behaved so splendidly that it was difficult to connect with him. Had he openly displayed just a bit of anger, or the anguish he poured into his journal, he would have seemed less distant and opaque. William Wegmann, a bespectacled, quick, and sardonic legal eagle, was asked recently if he would have done anything differently in retrospect. “No,” he said thoughtfully. Then wryly but with feeling, he added, “I’m sorry I didn’t take a poke at Garrison.” That, everyone can relate to. It is the type of reaction that makes Dean Andrews, who cried in public, and David Ferrie, who vented his rage to anyone who would listen, understandable. For almost three decades, until Snyder published the journal excerpts, Clay Shaw has seemed a tragic but remote figure frozen in time. We now know how difficult it was for him to go day after day “without showing any emotion.” Perhaps the control that enabled him to do that helped him through those grim final months. His ordeal ended shortly after midnight on August 15, 1974.

  He was buried with an unmarked tombstone.

  Later, Edward Wegmann arranged for a memorial plaque to be installed at the Spanish Stables, one of the buildings Shaw had restored in the French Quarter. The brief message on the plaque mentions Shaw’s restoration work and his conception of the International Trade Mart. The final sentence reads: “Clay Shaw was a patron of the humanities and an invaluable citizen, respected, admired and loved by many.”*

  When he died, a glitch in the Louisiana law terminated his multi-million-dollar damage suit against Garrison, the founding members of Truth and Consequences, Dr. Fatter and Perry Russo, which was close to being settled out of court in the “six-figure range.” But Garrison and his financial backers knew they had been in a fight and had escaped serious monetary loss by the skin of their teeth. Garrison was beset by other problems as well. In 1973 he was acquitted of taking bribes to protect illegal pinball operations. In his bid for reelection three months later, he lost to a boyishly attractive opponent, Harry F. Connick, who accused Garrison of abusing the powers of his office. Garrison twice ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the State Supreme Court. But in 1978 he won a spot on Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and slipped quietly into obscurity.

  That should have been the end of it.

  Then in 1979, the Committee established by the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King reviewed the events in New Orleans. The Committee concluded “that the Clinton witnesses were credible and significant.” While admitting that “points” existed that could challenge their credibility, the Committee decided the Clinton witnesses were “telling the truth as they knew it.” The Committee thereby applied its imprimatur to a corner of Garrison’s investigation. The Committee’s Chief Counsel, G. Robert Blakey, later called Garrison’s case “a fraud.” But the damage was done. The first official government statement issued on the assassination since the Warren Report had extended respectability, however narrowly, to Jim Garrison’s mad charade.22

  Garrison’s phenomenal comeback was underway.

  Yet even some in Garrison’s own camp have questioned the reliability of the Clinton witnesses,* and rightly so. For I discovered a previously unknown Garrison investigator who, unwittingly, has cast serious doubt on the credibility of the Clinton scenario. This investigator, whose participation in the Clinton area Garrison concealed over the years, supplied new evidence that supports what many have long suspected—that the Clinton story was a complete fabrication.

  * Clay L. Shaw v. Jim Garrison, Civil Action No. 71-135, May 27, 1971, 328 F.Supp. 390, p. 392.

  * Prior to his arrest Shaw was interviewed only once about the assassination, and Garrison did not find that session incriminating at the time (see Appendix A, item 29). The day Shaw was arrested he was questioned for an hour or more with no attorney present and without being advised of his rights (trial transcript, Feb. 19, 1969, pp. 14–15; Christenberry transcript, pp. 369, 372 [Louis Ivon], pp. 459, 473–475 [Clay Shaw]).

  † See note p. 134. Also, Garrison testified that “no witness could have been used [at Shaw’s trial] without my passing on it” (Christenberry transcript, p. 246).

  * One of those “other witnesses” was New Orleans Police Lt. Edward O’Donnell, who was present during the Bundy conference (see chapter 14).

  * In an infamous 1935 incident at the Desoto Hotel in New Orleans, Herbert Christenberry was the “shorthand expert” who jotted down the surreptitiously gleaned conversation that Huey Long later described on the floor of the U.S. Senate as a plot to murder him. Long’s supporters had used a Dictagraph on the end of a pole extended between two windows to overhear the discussion by anti-Longites in the adjoining room (T. Harry Williams, Huey Long [New York: Vintage Books, 1981], p. 840).

  † In the 1960s he issued an injunction ordering the Ku Klux Klansmen to cease all “acts of terror”; decreed unconstitutional a series of laws passed by the state legislature to prevent integration of Louisiana’s school system; and ordered school desegregation in Plaquemines Parish, a particularly pro-segregation region.

  * Mostly the defense claimed the testimony was irrelevant because it didn’t bear directly on the perjury charge.

  * In March 1967 Garrison called late one night from Las Vegas and told Gurvich to fly out and “bring him six bullets and a green sports shirt,” which Gurvich did. He also attended a show at the Las Vegas Thunderbird Hotel, called “Bottoms Up,” whose star performer (Breck Wall) had been in Dallas the day of the assassination and was regarded by Garrison as a suspect. As James Phelan later described, a Life photographer with a hidden camera snapped pictures of that show while Gurvich recorded the audio on a hidden tape recorder (Scandals, pp. 154, 164).

  * A transcription of the recording, authenticated by the court reporter who typed it, was placed into evidence.

  † Struggling to understand why Garrison targeted him, Shaw once told his cousin that he and Garrison had not been friends for years, and Shaw thought the animosity was caused by their disagreement over the French Quarter. Shaw wanted to preserve it, and Garrison wanted to develop it (telephone conversation with Willie Joe Yarbrough, Jr., July 16, 1996).

  * This is described in chapter 16.

  * Judge Christenberry, responding to an objection from Asst. D.A. William Alford, inquired why, if Garrison’s representatives wanted Russo to testify, they didn’t grant him immunity from prosecution. “We can’t do that,” Alford replied (Christenberry transcript, p. 484).

  † What would this crusty judge have said, I wonder, had Garrison’s “silly syllogism” been recited in his courtroom and the truth been revealed—that Garrison’s suspicions about Shaw were based on casual marginalia jotted by Asst. D.A. Frank Klein in a paperback copy of the Warren Report (see note p. 47).

  * One of those pictures is today in the National Archives.

  † Christenberry’s decision broke new ground in the area of equitable estoppel and is today taught in law schools.

  * Over the years, whenever it suited his purpose, Russo reverted to his fabricated story. He was able “to get away with it” because only a handful of people knew about his wide-ranging admissions to the defense team in 1971.

  * In 1994 Perry Russo took me to see this plaque. Sitting behind the wheel of his taxi, he recited the inscription from memory.

  * Louis Ivon, when asked if he had ever stated that the Clinton witnesses weren’t credible, replied that he would never make such a statement about anybody, “whether I believed them or not.” Asked directly if he believed the Clinton witnesses, Ivon replied, “That’s a difficult question for me to answer. I don’t know if I believe them. I just don’t know” (telephone conversation with author, June 28, 1996). When the subject of the Clinton witnesses arose during an interview with James Alcock, he insisted that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the Clinton investigation, that it was entirel
y the responsibility of Andrew Sciambra (Alcock Interview). Ivon made a similar statement.

  GARRISON EXPOUNDS ON THE ASSASSINATION:

  A SAMPLING OF HIS 1967 THEORIES

  In late February, Garrison confided to various reporters that the plotters first planned to assassinate Fidel Castro, with Lee Harvey Oswald as the shooter. But when Oswald was denied entry to Cuba, they switched to President Kennedy.1

  In March, Garrison said the assassination was the work of “one master planner, a few idiots, and the passive involvement of many others.” The “mafia” was not involved.2

  That same month, he explained that besides anti-Castro Cuban refugees and homosexuals, masochists (who would do anything for a thrill) were a part of the plot. “If you placed a masochist in a room along with a button that would blow up the White House,” Garrison said, “he probably would press that button for the thrill of it.”3

  By May, Garrison was claiming that “it was not that hard to find out what happened and how President Kennedy was killed. . . . We have even located photographs in which we have found the men behind the grassy knoll and stone wall before they dropped completely out of sight. . . . Although they are not distinct enough [that] you can make an identification from the faces.”4