by Gus Russo
On April 24, 1963 Oswald took an overnight bus from Dallas to New Orleans. Marina and their baby daughter June went to live, temporarily, with Ruth Paine in a Dallas suburb called Irving. The Oswalds planned to re-unite when Lee found work in New Orleans.
Upon arriving in New Orleans, Oswald called his aunt Lillian Murret, and she agreed to allow him to stay with her until he gained employment and had an apartment of his own. From his first days in New Orleans, Oswald began looking for work. He found it on May 9th, two weeks after his arrival. He became a maintenance man at the Reily Coffee Company, oiling and greasing the machinery. Landing the job initially delighted him, but actually performing it was something else again. As with school, the Marines, and his time at the Minsk radio factory, Oswald quickly lost interest.
On the same day of his hiring, he found a small apartment at 4907 Magazine Street. That day, Ruth Paine, with her two children, drove Marina and daughter June the 500 miles to New Orleans. Marina would later tell friends that her first weeks in New Orleans were the happiest times for her and Lee. For an instant, life seemed almost normal. However, it wasn’t long before Lee reverted to form and began behaving erratically. He vacillated between wanting to return to Russia, and wanting to send Marina back alone. He had forced her to write to the Soviet Embassy asking to be readmitted, which she did. Lee Harvey Oswald had obviously reached another crossroad in his life. He hated his life and was desperate to change it. Marina’s biographer Priscilla McMillan describes this period:
Lee was having trouble in his sleep again—the first time since February [1963]. One night he cried, yet when he woke up he could not remember what his dream had been about. He started having nosebleeds. Once or twice he talked in his sleep, and one night toward the very end of June he had four anxiety attacks, during which he shook from head to toe at intervals of half an hour and never once woke up.1
Marina said that the last time Lee had experienced sleep problems was in the spring of 1963, before he went to New Orleans, indeed before his attempt on General Walker’s life. Whenever Lee was going through a painful decision-making process, he seemed to have trouble sleeping.
And Lee was again becoming abusive. As in Texas and Minsk, neighbors were disturbed by the sound of loud fights coming from the Oswalds’ apartment.2 Marina’s letters to Ruth Paine describe in painful detail the sorry state of her marital relationship. In one such letter, Marina wrote, “As soon as you left, all ‘love’ stopped. . . He insists that I leave America. . . And again he has said he doesn’t love me. . . How will it all end?”3
Their landlady, Mrs. Jesse Garner, later recalled, “I tried to talk to Marina and the baby. . . [Marina] would put her hands over her eyes and start crying.”4
Marina’s own personality didn’t help matters. A consummate “tease,” she spared no energy in finding ways to emasculate Oswald, according to her biographer. For example, she constantly referred to an earlier love, Anotoly. He was Marina’s partner in a Minsk tryst that had taken place when Lee was out of town. She would often compare Lee to Anatoly, telling Lee that if he spent his whole life trying, he could never learn to kiss as well as Anatoly. The stories of Anatoly and others would drive Lee to scream, “Stop it! I can’t stand it. I don’t want to hear about your boyfriends.”5
Perhaps the worst insult was that Anatoly physically resembled President Kennedy. Marina even bought a picture of the president, and displayed it in the apartment to remind her of Anatoly. She told Lee of Kennedy, “He is very attractive—I can’t say what he is as President, but, I mean, as a man.” She knew just how to push Lee’s buttons, and this kind of baiting blinded him with jealousy.6
Oswald let his personal hygiene deteriorate: not brushing his teeth regularly; bathing infrequently; shaving every second or third day; walking around the apartment stark naked. Later investigation located three neighbors who complained about a ghostly pale Oswald spending days in the apartment’s backyard, clad in a yellow bathing suit and thongs, armed with bug spray, incessantly battling garden pests. The corner grocer recalled how Oswald often came into his store, argued about his prices, and left without ever making a purchase.7
The neighbors also complained that it was more than a little unsettling watching Oswald on his front porch at night, regularly “dry firing” his rifle as fast as he could, aiming at passing cars. Marina herself was horrified by Oswald’s front porch displays of machismo.8
One evening, returning from a stroll with daughter June, Marina caught Lee on the porch, perched on one knee, aiming the rifle toward the street. Marina scolded him, yelling, “What are you doing, playing with your rifle again?”
“Fidel Castro needs defenders,” came Lee’s reply.9
Marina and her neighbors were not alone in their observations. Oswald’s fellow employees considered him odd as well, especially his habit of pointing his index finger at them and saying “Bang,” as if shooting them. Charles LeBlanc, who trained Oswald in his job at Reily Coffee, would later testify that Oswald seemed to care little about learning to perform his job tasks. He would lie about greasing machines he hadn’t even touched.10 Lee’s 15-minute work breaks turned into 45-minute disappearances from the workplace. He would spend this time next door at the Crescent City garage, where he and the owner, Adrian Alba, would discuss guns, debating which ones were the most deadly. True to form, Oswald kept to himself at Reily, never associating with other employees. From the beginning, the personnel manager wanted to fire him, but because of á shortage of employees in Oswald’s department, he was kept on. The situation was similar to the one in Minsk, where his manager had wanted to fire him but was prevented because of government fears that Oswald would stage another suicide attempt. However, by July 19th, the Reily manager had had enough, and Oswald was fired.
The firing may have been an immediate disappointment to Oswald, but there was one major benefit. His painful decision had been reached. He would devote no further energy to his job, or to thoughts of living in America or Russia. Lee was now free to devote all his energy to defending Castro and moving to Castro’s Cuba.
Castro’s Champion
“Fidel Castro needs defenders. I’m going to join his army of volunteers.”
—Lee Oswald to his wife, Marina11
“Fidel Castro was his hero.”
—Marina Oswald12
“The one thing we know from all the investigations of Oswald, from the Warren Commission’s to Jim Garrison’s to my own and to every other one conducted, was that when Oswald got to New Orleans, his central focus was Castro’s Cuba. Almost everything he did concerned Castro. Whether it was to try to hand out leaflets in support of Castro or organize a Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his correspondence or his attempts to infiltrate the anti-Castro groups and even provoke fights with them, can be related to Cuba. This is also true of his appearances on radio and television—whatever he did during this period.”
—Author Edward Jay Epstein13
There is no evidence that Oswald’s employment at Reily was anything but coincidental. But if he had intended to penetrate the anti-Castro operations of the Kennedy administration, he couldn’t have placed himself in a better location. In 1963, the Reily Company was located on Magazine Street, in the heart of the New Orleans intelligence community. The CIA, FBI, and Office of Naval Intelligence all surrounded Lafayette Square, a two-block walk from Oswald’s place of work. The anti-Castro “Grand Central Station,” 544 Camp Street, was a mere block away. That location, on one side of the Newman building, had formerly housed Bobby Kennedy’s friend Sergio Arcadia Smith and his Cuban Revolutionary Council. The Lafayette Street side housed the offices of Guy Banister, the anti-Castro former FBI Special Agent in Charge. On the first floor corner, where the two streets—Lafayette and Camp—intersected, was Mancuso’s restaurant, a hangout for the community of Cuban exiles. Some of them were volunteers being trained at the camps on Lake Ponchartrain, an extension of the Kennedy administration’s “autonomous operations” aimed at retaking t
he island. Adrian Alba, with whom Oswald shared many an extended workbreak, reported that he often saw Oswald at Mancuso’s.14
One of the first things Oswald did in New Orleans was to obtain a borrower’s card from the New Orleans Public Library. The first book he took out was Portrait of a Revolutionary: Mao Tse Tung, by Robert Payne. He also withdrew a book on the assassination of Louisiana Senator and presidential candidate Huey Long. But another book may have played an even more significant part in Oswald’s accelerated political activism—John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. With chapter titles such as “Courage and Politics” and “The Meaning of Courage,” Kennedy exhorted the reader to be bold enough to take decisive political action, in spite of public disapproval—to have the courage of one’s convictions. “Always do what is right,” Kennedy wrote, “regardless of whether it is popular.”15 Kennedy elaborated, “In the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy.”16
Whatever his inspiration, Oswald’s pro-Castro activities greatly increased during his stay in New Orleans. An early example was Oswald’s request to the pro-Castro organization, the Fair Play For Cuba Committee (FPCC), for permission to open a New Orleans chapter, explaining that he was going to rent an office for that purpose. There was little question that Castro’s government was behind the organization. Cuban exiles interviewed in Miami and New Orleans reported that the FPCC received its funding from Havana, by way of Montreal, Canada. The FPCC was also known to work closely with the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, a center for Cuban-sponsored espionage and terrorism.
The FPCC’s National Director in New York, Vincent Lee, encouraged Oswald to start a New Orleans chapter, but tried to dissuade him from renting an office. It was about this time that the janitor of 544 Camp Street recalls a young man inquiring about renting an office in the building, but not following up on the inquiry. The man stuck out, the janitor noted, because hardly anyone came in desiring to rent space in the now run-down building, which was notoriously difficult to keep occupied with paying tenants. Of the handful of offices available, only two were occupied in 1963, with workers’ unions.17
The correspondence with Vincent Lee initiated a steady stream of Marxist literature that Oswald began receiving, not only from the FPCC, but from other pro-Castro organizations. Many of these documents have been widely reported; however, one that has not received any attention is entitled “Cuban Counter-Revolutionaries in the United States” by Vincent Lee. The pamphlet is nothing less than a diatribe against Cuban exiles in the United States. Vincent Lee wrote that the Kennedy administration, using these exiles, had “created a subversive army” and that “evidence is piling up for another invasion of Cuba.” The document went on to cite the two organizations to be used in these “crimes against Cuba”: the Cuban Student Directorate (headed by Carlos Bringuier in New Orleans), and the Cuban Revolutionary Council (created by the White House, with Bobby Kennedy as liaison). Lee ended the pamphlet by singling out RFK confidante Roberto San Román, who led the Bay of Pigs invasion force and fought against Castro in the mountains before the revolution, as one of Cuba’s most reprehensible turncoats.
If Vincent Lee’s pamphlet were not enough to alert Oswald to the Kennedys’ plans for Castro, surely word on the street would have been. “These Cubans were very public about what they were doing,” says Dave Ferrie’s godson, Morris Brownlee. “In fact, it was publicized—they were trying to enlist people.”18 Juan, who coordinated the MDC camp on Lake Ponchartrain, adds, “We Cubans have a bad habit of talking too much. There were no secrets.”19 Sergio Arcadia merely laughs when the subject of the exiles’ lack of secrecy is mentioned. “Everybody, including Castro, knew every move we made,” Arcadia says.
Without question, the combined preparations for AM/TRUNK, AM/LASH, and OPLAN 380 were among the Kennedy brothers’ worst-kept secrets. The laughable lack of security was beginning to resemble the fiasco of the pre-Bay of Pigs planning.
The final words in the Vincent Lee pamphlet were “fight for HANDS OFF CUBA!!!”20
Lee Oswald adopted the FPCC’s motto “HANDS OFF CUBA” as his own, and soon had 1,000 leaflets (see photo spread) made announcing meetings of his New Orleans “chapter.” As Lee explained to Marina, “These papers will help people be on the side of Cuba. Do you want them attacking little Cuba?”21 In the space under “Location,” Oswald hand stamped some of the handbills with his newly acquired Post Office Box number, and others with the address “544 Camp Street,” the very center of anti-Castro exile activity in New Orleans. As one of Arcadia’s co-workers at Camp Street told the author, “The plans were in place for a second invasion of Cuba. What we started at Camp Street was strategically coordinated with Washington.” Although Arcadia, by this time, had left for Miami, the building, still housing Ferrie, Banister, and Mancuso’s, continued as a virtual clearing house for anti-Castro Cuban exile activists, especially those training at the MDC and McLaney camps on Lake Ponchartrain. The Kennedys’ encouragement of the New Orleans exile movement logically excluded movement participants from conspiring in a Kennedy assassination. However, due to a post assassination coverup of Washington’s links to these New Orleans exiles, some concluded—quite erroneously—that they must have been in league with Kennedy’s killer.
Guy Banister himself got caught up in this conspiracy talk; the rumors about his alleged involvement began when Warren Commission investigators seemingly excluded him from their probe. His former Bureau colleagues conducted a mere five-minute phone chat with Banister, and in that call to the private detective, the FBI investigator never even mentioned Oswald. The discovery of this fact increased the rumors that Banister had conspired with the FBI in the Kennedy assassination.
After much contention, it has become clear that Banister had nothing to do with Oswald or any Kennedy assassination attempts. The author has seen some of Banister’s so-called “secret files”—supposedly detailing his links to Oswald. In fact, the files contain salacious surveillance photographs of prominent New Orleaneans. Banister, it turns out, was part of a typical dirt-gathering operation that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had no intention of disclosing or compromising for the sake of the post-assassination investigation. Banister never exploited the file material for blackmail, but according to his assistants, it was funneled to Hoover, infamous for his desire to maintain the upper hand with potential political enemies.
The question remains: Why did Oswald claim Banister’s address as his own? The answer is—he didn’t. A thorough investigation reveals that, like so many other conspiracy allegations, the “shared address” claim was without merit. In fact, Banister’s address, around the corner, was technically on Lafayette Street, and locals never even thought of it as a Camp Street address, so the Banister-as-Oswald’s-partner allegation was misplaced from the beginning.
It got started, it seemed, because most people outside New Orleans could not understand the physical layout of the place. Few offices in the Newman building had entrances on both 531 Lafayette Street and 544 Camp Street. Banister’s office entrance was on the Lafayette Street side, which served only his first floor operation. (See photospread.) The Camp Street side consisted of a small lobby and stairs which led up to the few offices on the second floor, and only two were occupied (with trade unions) in 1963. Previously, and until February 1962, the second floor had also housed the offices of Arcadia’s Cuban Revolutionary Council, but these offices were unoccupied in 1963. The use of the 544 Camp Street address certainly didn’t imply a relationship with Banister, as the building was partitioned in such a way as to make it impossible to gain access to the detective agency on Lafayette Street from the Camp Street side. Banister investigator Joe Newbrough recently recalled:
If you entered 544 Camp Street, the only way you could have gotten to Banister’s office was to go out a window. . . . The Camp Street entrance went strictly to the second floor of the building. You had to exit the
second floor to the sidewalk, walk around the corner, and go into Banister’s office. Banister never even considered his office to be part of the Newman Building.22
But the question still lingers. If neither Banister nor Arcadia’s CRC were involved with Oswald, then why would Oswald stamp his leaflets “544 Camp St.”? Guy Banister’s explanation was simple and echoed that of many others at the time. “Oswald did it [used the address] to embarrass me,” the anti-Castro Banister told his brother Ross Banister before his death in 1964.23 Sergio Arcadia agrees. “Of course that’s why he did it. Is there really any doubt?” he asked incredulously. More pointedly, Oswald, the childhood fan of I Led Three Lives, may have been relishing the role of provocateur—causing the exiles to doubt each others’ true loyalties. Who, they would have wondered, was the true turncoat?
Oswald’s intention to embarrass the anti-Castro community is certainly a possibility. It was widely known on the streets of New Orleans that anti-Castro activities were centered in the Newman building. Lafayette Square, on whose edge the Newman building was positioned, was the epicenter of Cuban exile activity, which included fund-raising and leafletting. Oswald, known to lunch at the exiles’ hangout, Mancuso’s, which was in the Newman Building, could not have been unaware of the thick anti-Castro fervor that enveloped him.
Thus, the possibility is strong: Oswald was again demonstrating his ability to unintentionally establish a trail that would confuse and confound historians long after he had died. This talent would force the government to initiate coverups that seemingly implied the government’s own involvement in the Kennedy assassination. After Oswald was arrested for JFK’s murder, and his use of the 544 Camp Street address was publicized, those in the know quickly grasped the implication: like everyone else in Lafayette Square, Oswald had learned of the sabotage and invasion plans, and using an exile hangout as his address was Oswald’s way of embarrassing the exiles and their supporters— Robert F. Kennedy chief among them. RFK did not learn of the leaflets until the aftermath of Dallas, and at that time, embarrassment was the least of Bobby’s problems.24