False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  32. Joe Newbrough, a private detective who worked for Guy Banister, described the building’s layout on the television program, Frontline, Nov. 16, 1993 (transcript, p. 12). Reporter David Snyder recently verified that the Lafayette Street offices were not linked interiorly with those at 544 Camp.

  33. Gurvich Conference, tape #3, p. 4.

  34. Jack Martin tried to share the blame for the library card story with his friend Hardy Davis, telling the FBI that during several telephone conversations with Davis the two of them “may have come to the conclusion that Oswald had used or carried Ferrie’s library card” (Martin, FBI interview, Nov. 27, 1963). David Ferrie categorically denied the library card story at its 1963 inception. At that time his card was in the New Orleans Police Department’s First District property room, having been confiscated with the rest of his personal effects when he was arrested following his ice skating trip to Houston (Ferrie, FBI interviews, Nov. 25 and Nov. 27, 1963). Ferrie was so baffled by the story that he paid a visit to Oswald’s former New Orleans apartment in a futile effort to resolve the mystery (Mrs. Jesse Garner, deposition, June 14, 1978, pp. 19–24, 33–37, 39–41). But the explanation, which follows, was buried in the files of the FBI, and wouldn’t be released to the public for many years: Jack Martin passed the library card story on to Hardy Davis. Davis repeated it to Ferrie’s employer, Attorney G. Wray Gill. Gill repeated it at least twice, to Ferrie’s roommate, Layton Martens, and to Ferrie himself (Hardy Davis, FBI interview, Nov. 27, 1963; Gill, FBI interview, Nov. 27, 1963). But the Committee’s references to the story begin and end with Gill, which is rather like omitting the first two acts of a three-act play (HSCA, Vol. 10, p. 113; HSCA Rpt., p. 144). By omitting Martin’s role as author of the story, and Davis’s as conduit of it, the Committee created the impression that Gill’s knowledge came from some mysterious, authoritative source. This curious presentation, cutting it off from its false roots, made the story sound like an authentic possibility instead of what it actually was—one of the most effective falsehoods Martin ever told.

  35. HSCA outside contact report, Nov. 22, 1977; HSCA Vol. 10, pp. 130, 131.

  36. Richard Billings, letter to Garrison, April 22, 1968; Garrison, letter to Billings, April 29, 1968; Billings, letter to Edward F. Wegmann, Jan. 8, 1969 (in the files of James Phelan).

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1. Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, report to Jim Garrison, June 20, 1967, regarding “Perry Russo Interview,” conducted June 19, 1967. O’Donnell’s report is included in this book as Appendix B, and discussed in chapter 9. The test by Roy Jacob, which is mentioned in O’Donnell’s report, was administered on March 8, 1967, and is discussed in chapter 7.

  2. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 152.

  3. Garrison interview, Playboy, Oct. 1967, p. 64.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 156.

  6. Kruebbe Interview; Kruebbe’s Work Report, dated March 18, 1967, regarding Bundy polygraph administered March 17, 1967 (in the files of James Kruebbe); Edward O’Donnell, Christenberry transcript, p. 301; Jim Garrison, Christenberry transcript, p. 247.

  7. Hugh Exnicios, Lynn Loisel, and Al Beaubouef, “Conference,” twenty-nine-page transcript, March 10, 1967; Hugh Exnicios and Mrs. William C. Super, Christenberry transcript, pp. 118–119 (Exnicios), 131–132 (Super); Trosclair Report; see also: Billings Personal Notes, pp. 35–38; New Orleans States-Item, May 10, 1967; New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 11, 1967; Hugh Aynesworth, “The JFK ‘Conspiracy,’ ” Newsweek, May 15, 1967; Exnicios, letter to the Louisiana State Bar Association, May 9, 1967.

  8. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 162; Trosclair Report. While the tape itself has not survived, a number of people heard it, among them two of Shaw’s attorneys, the U.S. Attorney in New Orleans, the D.A. in Jefferson Parish, Deputy Superintendent of Police Trosclair, and Mrs. William C. Super, the court reporter who made a verbatim transcription of it (Dymond et al. Interview; Hugh B. Exnicios, Jr., letter to Louisiana State Bar Association, May 9, 1967; the Trosclair Report; Mrs. William C. Super, Christenberry transcript, pp. 131–132). A copy of that document is today available in the JFK Collection at the National Archives (Hugh Exnicios, Lynn Loisel, and Al Beaubouef, “Conference,” twenty-nine-page transcript, March 10, 1967).

  9. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 131–132.

  10. “Garrison Predicts Success for Probe,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, Feb. 19, 1967; “Oswald Didn’t Act Alone, DA Says,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 19, 1967. Both of these Sunday articles describe the news conference Garrison held the day before.

  11. Shaw Journal, p. 105; Shaw Notes, Oct. 2, 1967; Steve Dorril, “PERMINDEX: The International Trade in Disinformation,” Lobster #2, 1983. Garrison pretends that the Permindex information was discovered after Shaw’s trial. It wasn’t. It was published in the New Orleans States-Item and the New Orleans Times-Picayune on April 25, 1967, two months after Shaw’s arrest and two years before the trial.

  12. Shaw’s contacts with the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service were summarized in a memorandum released by that agency in 1992; some of the reports based on Shaw’s information were released in 1994. Shaw was first contacted by the CIA’s New Orleans office in December 1948; between 1949 and May 25, 1956 (when Shaw ceased to be a contact), he was contacted a total of thirty times. Eight reports were written based on Shaw’s information. Six of those were “on hand” and described in the 1992 memorandum. Three concerned a trip Shaw made in March through May, 1949, to the West Indies, Central America, and Northern South America; and a fourth concerned a 1951 trip to Central and South America and the Caribbean area. The fifth report advised that Shaw had leased to the “CSR government” space for merchandise display in New Orleans for one year beginning in April 1949. The sixth, in March 1952, concerned a letter to the public relations director of the International Trade Mart from a trade consultant to the Bonn Government (CIA document, “Subject: Clay L. Shaw [201-813493],” “Enclosure 21”; “Approved for release 1992 CIA Historical Review Program”).

  13. The CIA report reads: “Shilstone, Cecil Maxwell. May have had contact with DCS, New Orleans. (Inquiry being made) Member of group of New Orleans businessmen supply Garrison with funds.”

  14. Victor Marchetti, quoted by Mark Lane in Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), p. 222; HSCA notes on Clay Shaw’s CIA file, referring to “2/10/69–TWX#0002 to contacts/Washington, 10/13/67” (Record No. 180-10143-10221, CIA Segregated Collection, Box 19).

  15. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 82–83.

  16. Ibid., p. 186. The witness was Richard Case Nagell.

  17. Ibid., pp. 188–190.

  18. Ibid., p. 202. Jim Garrison’s earlier assertions of Oswald’s innocence prompted James Alcock to say that “Garrison had ‘pulled our overt act out from underneath us.’ ” (Bethell Diary, p. 11.)

  19. Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 101–103. Garrison arrived at this notion when he discovered that the Warren Commission deleted from its exhibit 1365 an erroneous motorcade map (published the morning of the assassination in the Dallas Morning News), which showed the motorcade traveling down Main Street instead of turning onto Houston and then onto Elm. This is one of those peculiar leaps that characterize Garrison’s thinking.

  20. The motorcade route was published in both newspapers on Nov. 19, 1963 (WR p. 40).

  21. Iris Kelso, “Garrison’s book on JFK’s slaying,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jan. 12, 1989. (For additional reviews see Jack Wardlaw, “Retrying a losing case,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jan. 15, 1989; and Ronnie Dugger, “Reverberations of Dallas,” The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 29, 1989.)

  22. Edward Jay Epstein, “The Second Coming of Jim Garrison,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1993; Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, p. xvii. Oliver Stone’s introductory essay to Prouty’s book (“Oliver Stone Discusses His Film JFK and Introduces the R
eal ‘Man X,’ ”) reveals that Prouty “worked on” Garrison’s manuscript “before its publication,” and that he and Garrison were “well acquainted” through a long-standing correspondence.

  23. Scheer, “Oliver Stone Builds His Own Myths.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1. Phelan Interview, June 8, 1993.

  2. Richard Dodds, “Plot thickens: Garrison may shine in movie,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, Feb. 5, 1991; “Director Oliver Stone tells why he tackled the big story of his time,” Dallas Morning News, April 14, 1991.

  3. Frank Beaver, Oliver Stone: Wakeup Cinema (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994); Stephen Schiff, “The Last Wild Man,” The New Yorker, Aug. 8, 1994; Oliver Stone, interview with Charlie Rose, The Charlie Rose Show, KCET, Sept. 25, 1997; “Oliver Stone: Biography/‘JFK’ ” (in JFK press kit); David Baron, “Oliver’s Story,” Lagniappe (the New Orleans Times-Picayune Entertainment Guide), May 24, 1991; Stephen Talbot, “60s Something,” Mother Jones, March–April, 1991; Robert Scheer, “Oliver Stone Builds His Own Myths,” Los Angeles Times, Calendar, Dec. 15, 1991.

  4. Oliver Stone, interview with Hugh Hewitt, “Life and Times,” KCET, Dec. 16, 1993.

  5. “Director Oliver Stone tells why he tackled the big story of his time,” The Dallas Morning News, April 14, 1991; Stephen Talbot, “60s Something,” Mother Jones, March–April 1991; Sean Mitchell, “Stone’s Sixties,” USA Weekend, Feb. 22–24, 1991.

  6. Beverly Oliver is an example. She claimed to be the so-called babushka lady, the unidentified woman wearing the scarf and holding a camera who appears in some Dealey Plaza photographs. Oliver said she photographed the assassination but authorities confiscated her film. While few took her seriously, Stone did, and included her character in his story. He also seems to have included Ricky White’s story (which was thoroughly discredited) that his father, a former Dallas Policeman, was the shooter on the knoll, and the man who later shot Officer Tippitt. The phony Ricky White story was peddled to Stone by Larry Howard, an admitted huckster (and co-director of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas); Stone was so impressed that he hired Howard (and two colleagues) as “Consultants” and paid them 80,000.

  7. Dymond et al. Interview; conversation with Harry F. Connick, Feb. 26, 1996.

  8. Alcock Interview.

  9. The contemporary story line actually begins with a scene in which a blond woman, who was known by the alias Rose Cheramie, is shoved from a moving car. Later she is seen being treated in a hospital where she says the president is going to be assassinated, and later still her dead body is shown lying alongside a Texas road. What is really known about Cheramie, real name Melba Christine Marcades, is that she was a prostitute, heroin addict, and sometimes mental patient known to exhibit “psychopathic behavior.” She supposedly had foreknowledge of President Kennedy’s assassination and revealed it to a doctor at East Louisiana State Hospital and to Louisiana State Policeman Francis Frugé. She also allegedly claimed that she worked for Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald; that she saw Oswald with Ruby at his nightclub; and that Oswald and Ruby had been homosexual lovers for years. Cheramie’s story did not surface until Jim Garrison’s investigation of the assassination began. Francis Frugé, who was promoting the Cheramie story, was working for Garrison at the time, and searching for evidence to support Garrison’s theories. Eventually Frugé, a controversial figure, was forced to resign from the State Police.

  10. David Ferrie, interview with Asst. D.A. John Volz, transcript Dec. 15, 1966, p. 12. In a 1996 interview with this writer, Louis Ivon made the startling claim that, during his evening at the Fontainebleau with Ferrie, Ferrie admitted he knew Oswald and Shaw. (Ivon Interview, Feb. 27, 1996; and telephone conversation with author, June 28, 1996.) Ivon’s claim conflicts with every other statement Ferrie made about Oswald (Shaw was not yet an issue), both before and after that night at the Fontainebleau. Ferrie’s denials began in 1963 with the New Orleans Police Department, the Secret Service, and the FBI; they continued in 1966 with John Volz, in 1967 with David Snyder, and ended with George Lardner the night Ferrie died. Moreover, Jim Garrison never mentioned this crucial “admission” to the media, or, later, in his book, though Garrison trumpeted information to the press about Ferrie, and in his memoir wrote about the Ferrie-Ivon evening at the Fontainebleau. Nor did Garrison ever refer to Ferrie’s “admission” in connection with the perjury charges he filed against Shaw, though it bore directly on those charges. Apparently, Ivon, who testified at both Shaw’s trial and the Christenberry hearing, first went public with Ferrie’s alleged admission when he spoke to Oliver Stone.

  11. Alcock Interview.

  12. Frank Minyard, interview with Stephen Tyler, documentary film, He Must Have Something, 1992. Minyard, who has endorsed this bizarre notion, described a bruise “on the inside of [Ferrie’s] lip” that Minyard theorized was caused by “something that was traumatically inserted into [Ferrie’s] mouth,” citing the absence of any physical markings on the “outside” of Ferrie’s body. But Dr. Ronald Welsh, who conducted Ferrie’s autopsy, told me that an injury to the outside, from a fall, for instance, would manifest itself primarily on the inside. And he dismissed the bruise (described in the autopsy report as a “somewhat reddish brown” three-quarter-inch “area of dryness” with “no deep hemorrhages or swellings”) as entirely immaterial insofar as the cause of death was concerned (Welsh Interview; David W. Ferrie, Autopsy Protocol, Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office, Feb. 22, 1967, p. 1).

  13. Oliver Stone, “Stone’s JFK: A Higher Truth?” Washington Post, June 2, 1991; Ray LaFontaine and Mary LaFontaine, “First Look at Dallas’ JFK Files,” Houston Post, Feb. 2, 1992; George Lardner, Jr., “FBI Questions ‘Tramps’ at JFK Slaying Site,” Washington Post, March 4, 1992.

  14. George Lardner, “On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland,” Washington Post, May 19, 1991. “Almost all of Boxley’s nuttiness was feedback,” Harold Weisberg told Lardner. “He’d go out and make up the evidence to suit Garrison’s theories.”

  15. According to Stone, O’Keefe was a composite of three homosexual witnesses against Shaw: David Logan, Raymond Broshears, and Perry Russo. But Logan and Broshears played no part in the actual case. Only Russo counted.

  16. David Logan’s statement was not stolen. (For details, see item 25, Appendix A in this book.)

  17. Stone, “Oliver Stone Talks Back,” Premiere, Jan. 1992, p. 69. On at least one occasion Stone showed the pictures to a reporter. Stone also cited the pictures in a footnote to his screenplay. (JFK: The Book of the Film, pp. 511 [the reporter], 81 [the screenplay].)

  18. Both Garrison and Shaw’s attorneys investigated the pictures and Robert Brannon, who died in 1962, was positively identified by Mrs. Lawrence Fischer, who had been at the party, and Robert Cahlman, of Radio Station WYES, who knew Brannon well. Mrs. Fischer had in her possession some fourteen additional photographs from the party, as well as the one of the Brannon–Shaw group published May 12, 1967, in The Councilor. The pictures were taken around 1949 (before David Ferrie moved to New Orleans) by photographer Miles De Russey at a party given by a Tulane University student. Jeff Biddison was shown the “Ferrie” picture by a Garrison aide “about the time” of the preliminary hearing (March 1967), and Mr. and Mrs. Fischer were interviewed by Garrison’s investigator sometime prior to May 23, 1967 (report on “Citizens’ Council Newspaper The [Councilor],” regarding investigation conducted May 18, 19, and 23, 1967, on behalf of Shaw’s attorneys; memo, “re Bob Brannon,” by “CLS” [Shaw], undated).

  19. Epstein, “The Second Coming of Jim Garrison.” Epstein explains that the New York Times briefly took the book seriously because Dial Press, as part of the joke, had listed it as a non-fiction work.

  20. Shaw, trial transcript, Feb. 27, 1969, p 7.

  21. Carl Oglesby, The JFK Assassination (New York: Signet, 1992), pp. 286, 292.

  22. Rosemary James, “Letters,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 20, 1991.

  23. David Ehrenstein, “JFK
—A New Low for Hollywood: Oliver Stone’s Film Is Fueled by Jim Garrison’s Homophobia,” The Advocate, Jan. 14, 1992.

  24. David Baron, “Oliver’s Story,” Lagniappe, New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 24, 1991.

  25. Roger Ebert, “Interview with Oliver Stone,” Dec. 17, 1991, in JFK: The Book of the Film, p. 252.

  26. Robert Sam Anson, “The Shooting of JFK,” Esquire, November 1991, p. 174.

  27. David Baron, “Oliver’s Story,” Lagniappe, New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 24, 1991.

  28. Ehrenstein, “JFK—A New Low for Hollywood.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1. Scheer, “Oliver Stone Builds His Own Myths.”

  2. Phelan–Shaw Interview.

  3. New Orleans Times-Picayune, Nov. 20, 1983.

  4. Jim Garrison, letter to Jonathan Blackmer, regarding Thomas E. Beckham, July 18, 1977.

  5. Jim Garrison, memo to Cliff Fenton, regarding Shaw’s trip to San Francisco on Nov. 22, 1963, undated.

  6. New Orleans States-Item, May 12, 13, and 17, 1967; Brener, The Garrison Case, pp. 203–205.

  7. Nicholas C. Chriss, “Melodrama, but the Plot Is Obscure,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1967; Max Lerner, “New Orleans’ Carnival Duo: Mardi Gras and Shaw Trial,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 12, 1969; James Phelan, telephone conversation with author, Aug. 5, 1995.