Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (104 page)

Ferrie even went so far as to claim he had helped set up the JFK
assassination and told Whalen that Lee Oswald was a CIA agent who had
been well taken care of until he made some mistakes that necessitated his
death. Whalen believed Ferrie's story to be unfounded boasts, and he
again declined the murder contract.

By the time Whalen revealed this plot to Garrison in September 1967, it
was too late to verify it. On February 22, 1967, less than a week after the
newspapers broke the story of Garrison's investigation, David Ferrie-his
chief suspect-was found dead in his cluttered apartment.

His death was not entirely unexpected by Garrison. The day the newspaper
story first ran, Ferrie had telephoned Garrison aide Lou Ivon to say: "You
know what this news story does to me, don't you. I'm a dead man. From
here on, believe me, I'm a dead man."

Ferrie's nude body had been discovered lying on a living-room sofa
surrounded by prescription medicine bottles, several completely empty.
One typed suicide note was found on a nearby table while a second was
discovered on an upright piano. Three days later the New Orleans coroner
ruled that Ferrie had died from "natural causes," specifically a ruptured
blood vessel in the brain.

Unconvinced, Garrison checked the empty medicine bottles found near
Ferrie's body and discovered one had contained a drug designed to greatly
increase a person's metabolism.

It is known that Ferrie suffered from hypertension. A physician friend
confirmed to Garrison that if someone suffering from hypertension took a
whole bottle of this specific drug, it would cause death very shortly.
Garrison later wrote: "I phoned immediately but was told that no blood
samples or spinal fluid from Ferrie's autopsy had been retained. I was left
with an empty bottle and a number of unanswered questions."

Garrison also was left without the man he later described as "one of
history's most important individuals."

And Ferrie was not the only person connected to the case to die.
Banister reportedly died of a heart attack in June 1964, less than a month
after his business partner, Hugh Ward-an investigator who had worked
closely with Ferrie-died in a Mexico plane crash that also took the life of
New Orleans mayor DeLesseps Morrison.

Yet another man closely connected to Ferrie was Eladio del Valle, a
wealthy former Cuban congressman under Batista who had fled Cuba to
become a well-known organizer of anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. Del
Valle reportedly had paid Ferrie $1,500 a mission to make air raids against
Cuba.

Three days before Ferrie's death, Garrison's investigators began trying
to locate del Valle. Just twelve hours after Ferrie's death, del Valle's
mutilated body was discovered in a Miami parking lot. Police reported that
del Valle had been tortured, shot in the heart at point-blank range, and his
skull split open with an ax. His murder has never been solved.

With Ferrie and del Valle dead, Garrison began to focus his attention on
Clay Shaw. Fearing that Shaw might meet the same fate as Ferrie,
Garrison moved rapidly. He and his "special team" had Shaw arrested on
March 1, 1967.

Loud and long, Shaw protested his innocence, stating flatly: "I never
heard of any plot and I never used any alias in my life."

The question of an alias came up as Shaw was being booked into jail. A
police officer filling out forms asked Shaw if he had any aliases. Shaw
replied, "Clay Bertrand," thus confirming the information that Garrison
had been receiving from various sources around New Orleans. The officer
duly noted this alias on his form.

Between the time of his arrest and his trial, Shaw was allowed to go free
after posting a $10,000 bail bond.

As Garrison's men searched Shaw's house they found several interesting
things such as two large hooks screwed into the ceiling of Shaw's bedroom
along with five whips, several lengths of chain, and a black hood and
cape. Shaw tried to shrug off this kinky collection as simply part of a
Mardi Gras costume.

Harder to shrug off was Shaw's personal address book, which contained
the names of important persons in Italy, Paris, and London.

But most intriguing was a listing for "Lee Odum, P.O. Box 19106,
Dallas, Texas." What made this so intriguing was that the address "P.O.
19106" also appears in the address book of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Garrison announced that "P.O. 19106" actually was a code for Jack
Ruby's unlisted Dallas telephone number and noted that the number was in
the address books of both Shaw and Oswald.

Interest in this issue dissipated rapidly following a May 17, 1967, story
in the Dallas Times Herald revealing that Lee Odum was a real person
living in Dallas.

Odum, then thirty-one, told the newspaper that he had traveled to New
Orleans in 1966 to promote a bullfight and had been sent to Shaw as a
businessman who might be interested in his scheme. He said he gave Shaw
the P.O. box number, which had been rented in the name of a barbecue
company he operated at the time.

This seemed to clear up the issue, except that the Times Herald noted
that P.O. Box 19106 did not come into existence until 1965, when the post
office substation involved was remodeled. Therefore, it remains to be
explained why that particular box number appeared in Oswald's address
book in 1963.

To further titillate Garrison's interest, he found on an unused page of
Shaw's address book the words "Oct" and "Nov" and, following an
indecipherable scribble, the name "Dallas."

After the arrest of Shaw, the U.S. government "awakened like an angry
lion," according to Garrison.

Attorney General Ramsey Clark told newsmen that Shaw had been
checked out and cleared of any responsibility in the Kennedy assassination. But since Shaw's name had never before come up in connection with
the assassination, questions arose over who had investigated Shaw in the
federal government and why. Quickly a Justice Department spokesman
tried to backpedal for Clark by issuing this statement: "The attorney
general has since determined that this [report of Shaw's investigation) was
erroneous. Nothing arose indicating a need to investigate Mr. Shaw."

This explanation was further clouded when a Justice Department official
tried to explain that the department had been aware that Clay Shaw and
Clay Bertrand were the same man and that the FBI had investigated a Clay
Bertrand.

Despite the federal government's protest that Garrison was on a "witch
hunt," when his evidence was presented to a New Orleans grand jury, a true bill was returned. Clay Shaw was indicted on a charge that he:
"... did willfully and unlawfully conspire with David W. Ferrie, herein
named but not charged, and Lee Harvey Oswald, herein named but not
charged, and others, not herein named, to murder John F. Kennedy."

To assure the public that he was doing only his sworn duty, Garrison
even took the unprecedented step of having himself-the prosecutor-file
for a preliminary hearing for Shaw. This hearing took place on March 14,
1967, before three judges, who reviewed Garrison's evidence. After studying Garrison's case for three days, the three-judge panel upheld the
indictment and ordered Shaw to a jury trial.

For the next year and a half, as the world waited for Garrison's case to
be presented at Shaw's trial, the major news media of the United States
lambasted the events in New Orleans. Garrison later wrote:

Some long-cherished illusions of mine about the great free press in our
country underwent a painful reappraisal during this period. The restraint
and respect for justice one might expect from the press to insure a fair
trial not only to the individual charged but to the state itself did not
exist. Nor did the diversity of opinion that I always thought was
fundamental to the American press. As far as I could tell, the reports
and editorials in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, the New York
Post, The Saturday Evening Post, and on and on were indistinguishable.
All shared the basic view that I was a power-mad, irresponsible showman who was producing a slimy circus with the objective of getting
elected to higher office, oblivious to any consequences.

Garrison also commented on further efforts to give Shaw every
consideration:

In this particular case, I've taken unusual steps to protect the rights of
the defendant and assure him a fair trial. Before we introduced the
testimony of our witnesses, we made them undergo independent verifying tests, including polygraph examination, truth serum, and hypnosis.
We thought this would be hailed as an unprecedented step in jurisprudence. Instead, the press turned around and hinted that we had drugged
our witnesses or given them posthypnotic suggestions to testify falsely.

This comment might have been aimed at James Phelan, a writer for The
Saturday Evening Post who after hearing Garrison's account of his evidence, later reported that Garrison's key witness, Perry Russo, came up
with his story of a Ferrie-Oswald-Shaw conspiracy only after being
"drugged" and hypnotized by Garrison's people.

Phelan's account has been accepted by many researchers who failed to
note that Russo told the press of the conspiracy meeting well before
undergoing hypnosis. In fact, when Phelan appeared as a defense witness for Shaw, Russo soundly disputed his claims although Russo's conviction
that Shaw was the man at the meeting appeared to weaken.

Particularly galling to Garrison was an account by Nentsweek's Hugh
Aynesworth that Garrison had offered an unwilling witness $3,000 and an
airline job to testify in the upcoming trial. The story added that the entire
bribery attempt had been tape-recorded.

Aynesworth was a writer for the Dallas Morning News the day of the
assassination and was at the scene of each important event. In 1988,
Aynesworth wrote extensively for a special edition of the Washington
Times commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination.
While admitting "flaws" in the Warren Commission investigation, he
nevertheless supported its conclusions by writing: ".. . that report has
been proven to have been considerably more honest, more objective and of
far greater depth than any subsequent `probe' or `inquiry' . .."

When asked to present his evidence of Garrison's bribery attempt,
Aynesworth failed to come forward with either a witness or the tape
recording he mentioned.

During this time, the media made much out of a visit to Las Vegas by
Garrison, where reportedly he was given a $5,000 credit line at the Sands
Hotel.

In 1979, a report to the House Select Committee on Assassinations even
stated that Garrison met with Mobster Johnny Roselli less than a month
after Ferrie's death.

For his part, Garrison wrote to researcher John Judge: ". . . I have
never even seen John Roselli in my life-nor have I ever had a `secret
meeting' with any racketeer anywhere."

An NBC program stated that one of Garrison's witnesses had lied under
oath, but when requested to present their evidence to a New Orleans grand
jury, news executives declined. In that same NBC program, Frank McGee
claimed two of Garrison's star witnesses had failed their polygraph tests.
Garrison publicly offered to resign if the network could substantiate this
charge. Again, no proof was forthcoming.

CBS interviewed Garrison, but:

When the CBS program was shown across the nation, my half hour had
been reduced to approximately 30 seconds. This gave me just about
enough time to be a discordant bleep in the network's massive four-hour
tribute to the Warren Commission.

Shortly before the trial of Clay Shaw, Garrison believed he may have
been the object of a setup to implicate him with a known homosexual and
a former client. He escaped arrest and was shocked to learn that one of his
"special team" members-a former FBI man-may have been responsible
for the bizarre episode. However, before Garrison could question the man, he had hurriedly left New Orleans, taking many of the district attorney's
files with him.

Garrison also claimed that someone had "bugged" the telephones of his
office, his home, and even his staff.

The anti-Garrison media blitz coupled with the strange incidents surrounding his investigation prompted Garrison to claim that "a tremendous
amount of federal power" had been arrayed against him in an effort to
block his investigation of Kennedy's death.

He voiced his concern over a fair trial when he told interviewer Eric
Norden:

I'm beginning to worry about the cumulative effect of this propaganda blitzkrieg on potential jurors for the trial of Clay Shaw. I don't
know how long they can withstand the drumbeat obligato of charges
exonerating the defendant and convicting the prosecutor.

Garrison claimed this effort to stop him proved two things:

First, that we were correct when we uncovered the involvement of the
CIA in the assassination; second, that there is something very wrong
today with our government in Washington, D.C., inasmuch as it is
willing to use massive economic power to conceal the truth from the
people.

But Garrison was not without supporters. A group of New Orleans
businessmen, going under the name "Truth or Consequences," gave
Garrison both moral and financial backing.

Surprising solidarity came from Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing,
father confessor to the Kennedy family, who commented: "I think they
[the investigation in New Orleans] should follow it through.... I never
believed the assassination was the work of one man."

Another odd show of support for Garrison came years later from a most
unlikely source. Shortly before his disappearance, Teamster boss Jimmy
Hoffa stated: "Jim Garrison's a smart man . . . goddamned smart attorney. . . . Anybody thinks he's a kook is a kook themselves."

There is some evidence that Robert Kennedy also took Garrison's probe
seriously. He indicated to his friend Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., that he
believed Garrison might be onto something. But when his staff once began
to tell him about Garrison's findings, he turned away, saying: "Well, I
don't think I want to know."