Reclaiming History (313 page)

Ferrie cursed Jack Martin (true name, Edward Stewart Suggs), a part-time private detective and former friend of his (see later discussion), during the interview, saying Martin started the investigation of him because Martin was jealous of his relationship with attorney G. Wray Gill.
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Martin, he said, was trying to ruin him and was “a screwball who should be locked up.” When Sciambra asked Ferrie, “Dave, who shot the President?” Ferrie answered, “Well, that’s an interesting question and I’ve got my own thoughts about it.” Ferrie then proceeded to sit up and draw a sketch of Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository Building and “went into a long spiel about the trajectory of bullets in relation to the height and distance.” He then gave a “lecture on anatomy and pathology [and] named every bone in the human body and every hard and soft muscle area” and concluded that one bullet could not have caused all the damage the Warren Commission claimed it did. To the question of whether he knew Clay Shaw, Ferrie responded, “Who’s Clay Shaw?”

“How about Clay Bertrand?”

“Who’s Clay Bertrand?”

“Clay Bertrand and Clay Shaw are the same person,” Sciambra said.

“Who said that?”

“Dean Andrews told us,” Sciambra answered.

“Dean Andrews might tell you guys anything. You know how Dean Andrews is.”
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Some time that same day, February 18, Ferrie went down to the FBI’s field office in New Orleans and told them he was a sick man, was disgusted with Garrison, intended to sue him for slander, and wanted to know what the bureau could do to help him “with this nut” Garrison.
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Around that time, Ferrie was also suffering from severe headaches.
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Carlos Bringuier, the anti-Castro activist with whom Oswald had the street confrontation in August of 1963, told author Gerald Posner he saw Ferrie two days before he died and “he looked real sick. He told me, ‘I feel very sick. I should be in bed. My physician told me to stay in bed. I have a big headache. Garrison is trying to frame me.’”
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All of this tension—being a suspect in the murder of the president of the United States, particularly when you know the charge is spurious—may very well have contributed to his death. Dr. Ronald A. Welsh, who conducted the autopsy on Ferrie, told author Patricia Lambert that there was “scar tissue indicating that Ferrie had had another bleed, a small one, previously,…one or two of them at least two weeks before he died. This is a common occurrence with berry aneurysms. People have one or two before they blow out completely…His headaches were from the…early bleeds.”
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The last known person who spoke to Ferrie before he died was
Washington Post
reporter George Lardner Jr., who arrived at Ferrie’s apartment around midnight and stayed until almost 4:00 a.m. on the day Ferrie died. Ferrie told Lardner that he “didn’t know [Oswald] and had no recollection of ever meeting him,” and that Garrison’s investigation was a “witch hunt.”
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The forty-eight-year-old Ferrie was found dead in bed around 11:40 a.m. later that morning, lying on his back under a sheet, nude, with two unsigned and undated typewritten notes nearby, one that began, “To leave this life is, for me, a sweet prospect,” and closed, “If this is justice, then justice be damned.” The other was addressed to “Dear Al” and read in part, “When you receive this I will be quite dead…I wonder how you are going to justify and rationalize things…All I can say is that I offered you love and the best I could. All I got in return, in the end, was a kick in the teeth. Hence, I die alone and unloved…I wonder what your last days and hours are going to be like. As you sow, so shall you also reap. Goodby, Dave.” “Al” is believed to be Al Beauboeuf, a homosexual companion of Ferrie’s to whom Ferrie left all his personal property in his will.
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On the day of Ferrie’s death, February 22, Garrison, calling Ferrie “one of history’s most important individuals,” told the media, “There is no reason to suppose there was anything but suicide involved.”
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Why, in Garrison’s mind, had Ferrie committed suicide? Garrison told reporters that Ferrie “knew we had the goods on him and he couldn’t take the pressure…A decision had been made earlier today to arrest Ferrie early next week” for being part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. “Apparently, we waited too long.”
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But this almost assuredly was not true, just loose talk on Garrison’s part. In his own book, where he discusses the circumstances of Ferrie’s death, he makes not the slightest allusion to having decided to arrest Ferrie. Indeed, he suggests the exact opposite. “With David Ferrie around to lead us, however unconsciously, to Clay Shaw…I knew we could have continued to develop an ever stronger case against Shaw. With Ferrie gone, it would be a lot harder.”
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Garrison’s lead prosecutor against Shaw, James Alcock, told author Patricia Lambert that “to my knowledge, there was no intent to arrest David Ferrie.”
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This is hardly surprising since, although Garrison suspected Ferrie of being somehow involved in the assassination, there was no evidence against Ferrie to base an arrest on. (Perry Russo’s allegation against Ferrie wasn’t made to Garrison’s office until February 25,
three days after Ferrie’s death
.) Former assistant Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler, who helped conduct the New Orleans phase of the investigation into Kennedy’s death, told the
New York Times
on the day of Ferrie’s death in 1967 that Edward Voebel, a high school classmate of Oswald’s, told local and federal investigators on the day of the assassination back in 1963 that he thought Oswald had served briefly in a New Orleans Civil Air Patrol unit commanded by Ferrie, and three days later they received reports that Ferrie had made a trip to Texas on the day of the assassination. “We checked all of this out, and it just did not lead anywhere,” among other things learning that Ferrie had gone to Houston rather than Dallas on November 22, 1963. “The FBI did a very substantial piece of work on Ferrie. It was so clear that he was not involved that we didn’t mention it in the Report. Garrison has a responsibility to indicate just why he thinks Ferrie might have been involved, and so far as I can determine he has given no reason.”
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But Garrison did not do this because he could not do this. All he could say to the media in a formal statement he issued to the press later on the day of Ferrie’s death was that “evidence developed by our office had long since confirmed that he was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy.”
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But what could that evidence have been, particularly since, as indicated, Perry Russo had not yet surfaced with his totally discredited story about Ferrie conspiring with Shaw and Oswald?

Tom Bethell, the researcher and keeper of the files at the New Orleans DA’s office during this period, tells the story about Mark Lane coming into his office one day having been authorized by Garrison to look at Ferrie’s file. “You know, Mark,” Bethell told Lane, “the Ferrie file is embarrassing. There’s absolutely nothing in it of any importance”—by that, he told me, he meant that the DA’s office had “nothing at all connecting Ferrie to the assassination.” Lane responded that if anyone else looked at the file and couldn’t find anything of any value, “just tell them the important stuff is kept in a different file.” Bethell told me that this “convinced me that Lane wasn’t troubled at all by the fact that Garrison was proceeding against Ferrie without any evidence.”
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In fairness to Oliver Stone, just as the New Orleans coroner’s medical conclusion that Ferrie died from a ruptured blood vessel in the brain virtually forecloses his having been murdered, if, indeed, the two notes found in his room were suicide notes, they would likewise virtually
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foreclose his having died, as the coroner said, from a ruptured aneurysm in the brain. Whether the notes were, in fact, suicide notes is not completely clear, though the “To leave this life” one obviously goes in that direction. Of course, Ferrie was in very ill health at the time of his death, and he may very well have written the subject notes at some earlier time in possible contemplation of impending death. In any event, there is absolutely no evidence that David Ferrie was murdered. But in Oliver Stone’s fine hands, there is no question that he was. Stone shows Ferrie being murdered (which, as we’ve seen, even Stone’s hero, Garrison, didn’t believe), obviously to silence him before he elaborated on his incriminating statements to Garrison, statements we know he never made.

23. In the movie, Jack Martin (played by Jack Lemmon), a down-and-out alcoholic private eye sidekick to Guy Banister, ’fesses up to Garrison at a racetrack (and why would any moviegoer disbelieve Jack Lemmon?) that at one time or another he had seen Oswald, Ferrie (whom, as indicated, he actually did know), and Shaw together in Banister’s office. Garrison, in
On the Trail of the Assassins
, says that in late 1966 Martin told him about seeing Ferrie and Oswald in Banister’s office in the summer of 1963.
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Martin didn’t say anything about seeing Clay Shaw there, but no problem. In his movie, Oliver Stone decided to gratuitously toss in Shaw for good measure.

Naturally, Stone doesn’t tell his audience that Martin’s credibility was so bad that as desperate as Garrison was to show the Shaw jury that his three alleged co-conspirators knew each other,
he never called Martin to the stand during Shaw’s trial to tell the jury what Stone had Martin (Lemmon) tell his audience
. That tells you more than anything just how total Martin’s lack of credibility was. In the previously mentioned, secretly taped conversation in the law office of Hugh Exnicios (the lawyer representing Ferrie’s friend, Al Beauboeuf, a potential witness at the time in Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw) with Garrison investigator Lynn Loisel on March 10, 1967, when Loisel mentions an “informer,” Exnicios asks, “You’re talking about Jack Martin?”

Loisel: “No, no, no. Phew…that sack of roaches…believe you me, anything that he said, 99 percent of it was checked out to be
false
, you know, made-up, lies, jealousy, everything else. Oh, boy.”

Exnicios: “I’m glad to hear that it’s not Jack Martin.”

Loisel: “Man, we will be torn to pieces, but not like that.”
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So Oliver Stone’s own protagonists, Garrison and his staff, didn’t believe a word that Martin said, yet Stone presented Martin to his audience, unchallenged, as a highly believable witness who had seen Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw together. And of course Stone doesn’t tell his audience that Martin had been in mental wards in two states, including the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1957.
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When FBI agents went to the hospital on January 17, 1957, to speak to him about his claim he was an FBI agent, his psychiatrist informed them that Martin was suffering from a “character disorder,” and that an interview of him by the agents might prolong his hospitalization. Indeed, people like Aaron Kohn, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission in New Orleans, as well as others routinely described Martin as a “mental case.”
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Yet Garrison himself implicitly acknowledges that Martin is the person whose information started his aborted investigation of the assassination in November of 1963, and his full-scale investigation in December of 1966.
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Naturally, Stone also didn’t tell his audience that the HSCA thoroughly investigated Martin’s allegations and concluded that “in light of Martin’s previous contradictory statements to authorities shortly after the assassination in which Martin made no such allegation about having seen Oswald [in Banister’s office], it may be argued that credence should not be placed in Martin’s statements to the committee.”
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24. Without having any evidence to support their suspicions, for years conspiracy theorists have believed that the militantly anti-Communist and anti-Castro Guy Banister, who retained his connections to the intelligence community when he retired from the FBI in 1954, played some type of undefined role in the assassination, the various players in the assassination (Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw) being connected to each other through him. Stone tried his best to link Oswald to Banister and hence prove that Oswald was really right wing, not Marxist, and Oswald to the CIA, which undoubtedly had a hand in the paramilitary anti-Castro activities being partly coordinated out of Banister’s office. Garrison is shown in the movie taking two of his assistants to the corner of Camp and Lafayette streets one Sunday morning and pointing out that the office address Oswald used on his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets was 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. (Actually, Oswald only used this office address on some of the leaflets. Other addresses he used were his home address and his post office box number. Number 544 Camp Street was a block away from where he worked at the Reily coffee company.) Garrison (Kevin Costner) then notes that 531 Lafayette Street, the address for Banister’s office, is around the corner in the same building (Newman Building), and “both addresses go to the same place, Banister’s office upstairs.” But they didn’t. As Joe Newbrough, a private detective in Banister’s office, told
Frontline
in 1993, 544 Camp Street and 531 Lafayette had “totally separate entrances, and [were] probably 60 steps apart.” He said that once you entered 544 Camp Street, you could not, from there, get to Banister’s office. The Camp Street entrance, he said, “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.”
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The three-story Newman Building on the corner of Camp and Lafayette has long since been replaced by the Federal Courthouse, which takes up the whole block, but in 1996 author Patricia Lambert asked New Orleans
Times-Picayune
assistant metro editor David Snyder, who covered the Shaw trial and was very familiar with the old Newman Building, if Newbrough was correct, and he verified for her that Banister’s Lafayette Street offices were not linked interiorly with those of 544 Camp Street.
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