False Witness
Page 38
15. Russo–Gurvich Interview, pp. 11–17.
16. Russo–Defense Team Interview, p. 7.
17. Ibid., p. 8. Garrison discussed this homosexual-thrill-killing theory, which made headlines in one of the tabloids of the period, with members of his staff and various journalists, including Richard Billings, James Phelan and Nicholas Chriss (Gurvich Conference, tape #2, p. 18; Billings Personal Notes, pp. 16, 18, 28; James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels [New York: Random House, 1982] pp. 150–151; Nicholas Chriss, “New Orleans: Melodrama, but the Plot Is Obscure,” Los Angeles Times, Opinion, Section G, March 26, 1967, p. 2).
18. Russo–Defense Team Interview, p. 8; Perry Russo, preliminary hearing transcript, p. 76; Phelan–Shaw Interview.
19. Billings Personal Notes, March 3, 1967, p. 18.
20. Memorandum (untitled, unsigned, five-pages), by Edward F. Wegmann, “Jan. 27, 1971,” describing interview with Perry Russo on Jan. 26, 1971 (hereinafter Wegmann Memorandum), pp. 1, 4. This interview took place in F. Irvin Dymond’s office. Present were Perry Russo, F. Irvin Dymond, Edward F. Wegmann, and William J. Wegmann (F. Irvin Dymond, interview with author, Nov. 2, 1995).
21. James Phelan, memorandum, “Discrepancies and Contradictions in Russo’s Story” (undated), item 25, p. 6 (Russo admitted this to Phelan on May 28, 1967).
22. Brener, The Garrison Case, pp. 64–65; Epstein, Counterplot, pp. 95–96.
23. James Kirkwood, “Surviving,” Esquire, Dec. 1968.
24. Russo–Gurvich Interview, pp. 30-33; Wegmann Memorandum, p. 1.
25. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 3, 1967; James and Wardlaw, Plot or Politics? p. 53; Brener, The Garrison Case, p. 113; Gurvich Conference, tape #2, pp. 12–13.
26. Milton Brener, telephone conversation with author, Feb. 7, 1994. Brener’s information was obtained from William Gurvich. The date and time of the hypnosis session is found in the preliminary hearing testimony of Dr. Fatter (transcript, p. 385).
27. Charles B. Clayman, ed., Encyclopedia of Medicine (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1989) p. 559.
28. Kirkwood, American Grotesque, p. 152 (citing an affidavit obtained from Dr. Spiegel by Clay Shaw’s defense team). In 1967 Dr. Spiegel was Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Director of courses in Hypnosis at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Assistant Attending Psychiatrist, Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
29. For Dr. Fatter’s technique, see “First Hypnotic Session,” transcript labeled “Exhibit F,” March 1, 1967. Courts in some states, California for one, do not allow testimony that has been influenced by hypnosis. Guidelines necessary to assure that posthypnotic testimony would be “taken seriously” were well known in 1967 and stipulated in a 1981 New Jersey criminal case, State v. Hurd (The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 1991, p. 116). Far from working “independently of either side,” Dr. Fatter was working solely for District Attorney Jim Garrison; whatever information Fatter received beforehand was not recorded; Russo did not give Fatter “the facts” as he remembered them “before the hypnosis”; and, instead of “only the hypnotist and the witness” being present, five others were in attendance. Andrew Sciambra actually took over the questioning at one point (transcript, p. 10).
30. The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 1991, p. 116.
31. James Phelan, memorandum, “Discrepancies and Contradictions in Russo’s Story,” undated, item 20.
32. Russo–Gurvich Interview, pp. 42–43, 46; Wegmann Memorandum, p. 2; Russo, interview with author, Feb. 7, 1994; Russo–Wegmann et al. Interview, p. 2.
33. Wegmann Memorandum, pp. 1–3; Russo-Wegmann et al. Interview, p. 2. Russo said the arrangement between Life and Garrison was in the form of “written contracts”; he also claimed that as of 1971 Garrison owed him about 3,000 in per diems which had never been paid.
34. Perry Russo, interview with author, Feb. 7, 1994.
35. Don Jordan, television interview, undated transcript, p. 12.
36. New Orleans Police Department, Report, re pre-employment screening of Perry Russo, Aug. 10, 1970.
37. Don Jordan, television interview, undated transcript. At the Clay Shaw trial, Russo denied he had cut his wrists. Another Russo friend stated that he had told her about the “split personality” diagnosis (Sandra Moffett, television interview, undated transcript).
38. Russo–Gurvich Interview, p. 50; Wegmann Memorandum, p. 2.
39. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 3, 1967; “Justice Admits Error in Shaw-Bertrand Tie,” Washington Post, June 3, 1967.
40. Director, FBI, communiqué to The Attorney General, regarding Clay Shaw’s attorney, Edward F. Wegmann, and the alleged FBI investigation of Clay Shaw, March 10, 1967. At the bottom of this document is the following internal Bureau “NOTE”: “On March 2, 1967, Attorney General Clark made remarks to the press which the press had interpreted as stating that the FBI had investigated Clay Shaw in New Orleans in Nov. and Dec., 1963. This of course is not true. We did not investigate Clay Shaw in connection with our investigation of the assassination. . . . The Attorney General contacted Mr. DeLoach 3/3/67 . . . [and] stated he had been misquoted by reporters.” Clark was not misquoted, however, as the transcript of his press conference establishes (“CBS Interview with Ramsey Clark after his nomination hearing, March 2, 1967”).
41. “Justice Admits Error in Shaw-Bertrand Tie,” Washington Post, June 3, 1967. All the fault does not appear to lie with Ramsey Clark. The record suggests that the FBI’s communications with Clark on March 2, 1967, contributed to his confusion and may have been the principal source of it. That day in an early morning telephone conversation, FBI Deputy Director C. D. DeLoach, responded to Clark’s inquiries about Garrison’s arrest of Clay Shaw the previous day by telling Clark that Shaw’s name “had come up” in the FBI’s 1963 investigation, a reference to the Bureau’s search for “Clay Bertrand,” which was specifically mentioned in the conversation. DeLoach also told Clark that “it had been alleged that this was an alias used by Shaw.” This may have sounded to Clark as though that allegation was made in 1963 but the comprehensive memorandum sent to Clark that same morning by J. Edgar Hoover clearly stated that the allegation about Shaw using the alias was received by the FBI on February 24, 1967, from two sources. If it had come from fifty sources, it would be just as meaningless. For the allegation originated in Jim Garrison’s office. Garrison had been saying it for at least two months, since December 1966 when he proclaimed it to David Chandler. (The rumor was so widespread that, as noted earlier, Shaw himself heard it on February 26, 1967.) As for Shaw’s name having “come up” during the 1963 search for “Bertrand,” Hoover’s March 2, 1967, memorandum makes no mention of it. But Hoover’s memorandum, in describing the Bureau’s knowledge (dating from 1954) of Shaw’s homosexuality, provides an explanation for why Shaw’s name might have surfaced in the Bureau’s 1963 search for Clay Bertrand—the Bureau knew Shaw’s sexual orientation fit Bertrand’s alleged profile (and the first name was the same). Those, of course, were two of the factors that had led Garrison to jump to the conclusion that Shaw was Bertrand. (C.D. DeLoach, Memorandum, to Mr. Tolson, March 2, 1967; J. Edgar Hoover, memoranda, concerning Garrison-Shaw matter, March 2, 1967 and March 3, 1967 [attachments to letter from Hoover to Dir., Bureau of Intelligence and Research, State Department, dated March 9, 1967].)
42. Two erroneous ideas are being promulgated by pro-Garrison writers: (1) that the FBI actually was investigating Clay Shaw in 1963; and (2) that the FBI was investigating “Clay Bertrand” prior to Dean Andrews’s telephone call to the Bureau. Neither of these claims is supported by any evidence. Even if Clay Shaw’s name came up in 1963 that does not mean he was being investigated. The notion of a pre-Andrews Bertrand inquiry is based on a gross misreading of the trial testimony of FBI Agent Regis Kennedy. If Kennedy had acknowledged investigating Bertrand earlier, as one monograph being circulated indicates, the prosecution would have made a major issue of it at the time.
43. Chandler Interview; Shaw J
ournal, pp. 32–33.
44. In Sept. 1967 Life published a series of three articles “detailing activities of organized crime in Louisiana and the New Orleans area” (New Orleans States-Item, Nov. 8, 1967). These articles marked the final rupture of Jim Garrison’s relationship with Life magazine (Chandler Interview).
45. Chandler Interview. How Jim Garrison first heard that Life was backing off is unknown. He apparently had supporters at the Miami dinner and one of them may have telephoned him; Garrison probably heard the news before Richard Billings did. Whatever the source of Garrison’s information, David Chandler insisted that Garrison was informed prior to his contacting Phelan on March 3, insisted that Garrison contacted Phelan because of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Kirkwood, American Grotesque, p. 76.
2. Phelan Interview; Phelan, Scandals, p. 138.
3. Phelan Interview.
4. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 3, 1967; Phelan Interview.
5. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 3, 1967. This statement was made by Guy Johnson, who assisted in the early stages of Shaw’s defense.
6. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 9, 1967.
7. James Phelan, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1967; Phelan Interview. Phelan left New Orleans on Friday, March 3, and checked into the Dunes in Las Vegas after midnight on the fourth. His hotel bill, which was entered into evidence when he testified at Shaw’s trial, indicated he departed March 7. Jim Garrison had been planning the trip prior to Clay Shaw’s arrest (Billings Personal Notes, Feb. 25, 1967, p. 14), and didn’t alter his plans because of it.
8. Phelan, Scandals, p. 145; Phelan Interview.
9. Phelan Interview. Garrison told Phelan, among other things, “that the air [in Las Vegas] was better.” According to David Chandler, Garrison liked Las Vegas “because the gangsters treated him like a king” (Chandler Interview).
10. James and Wardlaw, Plot or Politics? p. 72 (not alone); Phelan Interview.
11. Phelan, “Rush to Judgment”; Phelan, Scandals, pp. 145–146; Phelan Interview.
12. Garrison described to Phelan a nightclub entertainer named Breck Wall, tying him into the conspiracy because Wall, like Ferrie, had traveled to Galveston the weekend of the assassination and, while there, had received a telephone call from Jack Ruby. Garrison knew that Ruby’s call and Wall’s trip to Galveston were somehow linked to Ferrie’s brush with that city and to Kennedy’s murder. Yet Ruby and Wall, a union representative, had given the FBI the same explanation for the call. Ruby had closed his club out of respect for the fallen president and was upset and complaining to Wall because the competition hadn’t followed suit.
13. Phelan Interview; Phelan, Scandals, p. 149.
14. Phelan, Scandals, p. 150.
15. Ibid.; Phelan Interview.
16. Phelan Interview; Phelan, Scandals, p. 151.
17. Ibid.
18. Phelan Interview.
19. Phelan, Scandals, p. 154. A combination of factors contributed to Phelan’s quick grasp of the documents. He was married to a clinical psychologist “familiar with the use of hypnosis”; he had researched and written about the Bridey Murphy past lives regression under hypnosis phenomenon; and he had flown to Copenhagen in 1959 and covered the “landmark” Palle Hardrup trial that centered on the “misuse of hypnosis” (Phelan Interview; Phelan letter to author, May 18, 1994).
20. Phelan Interview.
21. At the Desert Inn Phelan called Robert Maheu, former CIA employee and major-domo to billionaire Howard Hughes, who owned the place. This later became the subject of conspiratorial speculation by pro-Garrison researchers, who also challenge Phelan’s motives for making the trip to Las Vegas. As a journalist who sometimes wrote about Hughes, Phelan’s acquaintance with Maheu was unremarkable.They met in 1962 when Maheu unsuccessfully tried to persuade Phelan to kill a story he was writing about a loan Hughes made to Richard Nixon. Phelan’s call to Maheu that morning was a simple matter of proximity and expediency: Copying machines in those days were scarce (Phelan Interview).
22. Phelan, Scandals, p. 155.
23. Ibid., pp. 155, 156.
24. The Las Vegas Review-Journal published the details about Garrison’s stay in that town, which was noted in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on March 16, 1967.
25. “Statement of 2 on ‘Plot’ Doubted,” New York Times, June 21, 1967; “NBC Tactics on Garrison Inquiry Hit,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1967; Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Report to Jim Garrison, regarding Perry Russo Interview (which refers to the test administered by Roy Jacob), dated June 20, 1967 (Appendix B in this book); Brener, The Garrison Case, p. 109; Leonard Gurvich, telephone interview with author, April 2, 1996. The Jacob polygraph examination occurred on March 8, 1967.
26. Brener, The Garrison Case, p. 110. At this point Russo had been hypnotized three times, in Chetta’s office on March 1, 1967, in Asst. D.A. Ward’s office on March 9, 1967, and again in Chetta’s office on March 12, 1967. (Eventually, according to what Russo told this writer, he may have been hypnotized five times.) Transcripts of only two of these hypnosis sessions have survived.
27. “2nd Hypnotic Session” (actually the third), “Taken March 12, 1967,” labeled “Exhibit G.”
28. Ibid.
29. Russo–Wegmann et al. Interview, p. 3.
30. Russo–Gurvich Interview, p. 24.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Shaw Journal, p. 1.
2. Clay Shaw, nineteen-page narrative, “PH” (hereinafter Shaw Narrative), p. 7; Shaw Journal, p. 60; The Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1967.
3. Gurvich Conference, tape #2, p. 19.
4. Phelan, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans.”
5. Perry Russo, preliminary hearing transcript, p. 58; New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 15, 1967.
6. Shaw Journal, pp. 61–62; Perry Russo, preliminary hearing transcript, p. 76.
7. Perry Russo, preliminary hearing transcript, p. 96; Shaw Journal, pp. 64–65.
8. Perry Russo, preliminary hearing transcript, pp. 112–114, 182, 184–185, 206, 223–224.
9. Ibid., pp. 190–191, 197, 202, 203, 205.
10. Ibid., pp. 293, 311–313.
11. Dr. Esmond Fatter and Dr. Nicholas Chetta, preliminary hearing transcript, pp. 408, 423 (Fatter), 339, 372, 321–322 (Chetta).
12. Edwin A. Weinstein, M.D., “Truth Serum,” The Washington Post, March 27, 1967. In WWII Weinstein was Chief of the Fifth Army Neuro-psychiatric Center in Italy where they used sodium Pentothal “to treat combat stress casualties.”
13. Vernon Bundy, Jr., interview at Orleans Parish Prison, by William Gurvich, Charlie Jonau, and Cliency Navarre, March 16, 1967; Gurvich, interview on WWL-TV, June 27, 1967; Times-Picayune, March 18, 1967.
14. James Kruebbe, telephone interviews with author, Nov. 30, 1993, Dec. 2, 1993, and Dec. 3, 1993 (hereinafter Kruebbe Interviews); James Kruebbe, Work Report, dated March 18, 1967, regarding Bundy’s polygraph examination (in the files of James Kruebbe). Kruebbe said Bundy’s “polygrams and related data were given to Mr. Garrison to retain.” Edward O’Donnell testified later in federal court that he too was present during Kruebbe’s verbal report to Garrison (Christenberry transcript, p. 301).
15. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 18, 1967. Bundy’s polygraph occurred around noon and he took the stand at 2:30 P.M. on Friday, March 17, 1967.
16. Vernon Bundy, preliminary hearing transcript, pp. 431, 433–436, 441.
17. New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 18, 1967. In the official preliminary hearing transcript the summations, or “Arguments,” are indicated as “Not Transcribed.” William Wegmann recently explained that “not transcribing summations was customary in those days.”
18. Shaw Journal, pp. 61, 68–69.
19. Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1967.
20. Sam Angeloff, memorandum, “summary of the day’s findings,” to Richard Billings, March 21, 1967 (O’Hara’s statement to Life); Phelan, Scandals, p. 158 (Judge Bagert)
; Dymond et al. Interview (“done deal”); Wegmann Memorandum (“cut and dried”).
21. Phelan Interview; Jerry Cohen, “Garrison Records on Russo Tend to Discredit Investigation,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1967.
22. Phelan Interview.
23. Ibid.; James Phelan, memorandum, “Discrepancies and Contradictions in Russo’s Story.”
24. Phelan Interview.
25. Ibid. Garrison didn’t try to explain the hole in Russo’s story. He never addressed it. Thirty years later that still baffled Phelan.
26. Phelan Interview; Phelan, Scandals, p. 159; Kirkwood, American Grotesque, p. 165. Matt Herron never corroborated James Phelan’s account publicly but he did so privately to members of Garrison’s staff (Bethell Diary, pp. 34–35). Richard Billings, who was present when Sciambra orally briefed Garrison on the Baton Rouge interview, later said Sciambra did not mention the plot party at that briefing, and that he specifically told Garrison that Russo had seen Shaw twice—at Ferrie’s service station and the Kennedy rally (Epstein, Counterplot, pp. 57, 58, 67; Billings, letter to Edward F. Wegmann, Jan. 8, 1969 [in the files of James Phelan]).
27. Russo–Wegmann et al. Interview, p. 3.
28. Phelan Interview.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Clay Shaw, quoted by Warren Rogers, “The Persecution of Clay Shaw: How One Man ruined Another and Subverted Our Legal System,” Look, Aug. 26, 1969.
2. Alvin Beaubouef, interview with Louis Ivon, Dec. 28, 1966, transcript, p. 13 (Beaubouef was also interviewed by Ivon and Asst. D.A. John Volz on Dec. 15, 1966).
3. Billings Personal Notes, p. 36.
4. Hugh Exnicios and Lynn Loisel, “Telephone Conversation,” two-page transcript, March 10, 1967; Report to Joseph I. Giarrusso, Supt. of Police, from Presly J. Trosclair, June 12, 1967 (hereinafter Trosclair Report); Billings Personal Notes, pp. 36–38; Brener, The Garrison Case, pp. 163–164.