False Witness (10 page)

Andrews regarded the “Gonzales” caper as amusing and harmless but it was worse than that. He had provided Garrison with additional false information about a Latin connection to the crime. To his credit, Andrews had not embellished his Warren Commission testimony. Most importantly, he had refused to falsely identify Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand. There he stood firm. He would not do it. Garrison wasn't through trying but for now he had to look elsewhere for help. He turned to the man in question.

Early in the morning the day before Christmas, Garrison had one of his detectives telephone Clay Shaw and ask him to come down to the
D.A.'s office to answer some questions. Shaw agreed, having no idea that Garrison suspected him of being the mysterious “Clay Bertrand.” Shaw assumed they wanted to ask him about the incident that occurred on August 16, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald had distributed Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in front of Shaw's place of business, the Trade Mart building at Camp and Common Streets.

The detective picked Shaw up and drove him to Tulane and Broad where he was “questioned extensively” by Andrew Sciambra. Lee Harvey Oswald knew a man named “Clay” who lived in the French Quarter, Sciambra said, and we wondered if you were that man. Shaw said he was not, that he had not known Oswald. He had “almost” met him, Shaw said, the day he passed out leaflets in front of the Trade Mart. Oswald had come to his office that day but had spoken to his assistant, asking permission to distribute them. The assistant denied the request. Later that afternoon, Shaw was on a long-distance telephone call when a “commotion” occurred downstairs. Oswald, distributing his leaflets, had attracted police and television cameras. When Shaw finished his conversation, he went outside, but by then Oswald and the police were gone and the television crews were packing up. Shaw told Sciambra that was all he knew about the incident. Most of Sciambra's questions focused on the Cuban consulate that had been housed in the Trade Mart and Shaw's contacts with the people there.
*
It was Shaw's understanding that the consulate was the reason Oswald chose the site. Had Shaw ever joined any anti-Castro group? Shaw had not. Did he know David Ferrie? Shaw did not. Had he ever heard of a Clay Bertrand? Shaw had not.
²⁷

Garrison entered the room and Shaw briefly repeated what he had told Sciambra. Then Shaw left and went to City Hall where a Christmas party was underway. Before he departed the D.A.'s office, Shaw later said, Garrison “thanked me profusely for being a good citizen, for being cooperative and coming in.” Shaw thought that was the end of
the matter. Temporarily it was. The Jolly Green Giant had been favorably impressed by Clay Shaw, an impressive man. Garrison told his aides to “forget Shaw.” Earlier Garrison had mentioned Shaw's name to two newsmen; he now told them that Shaw had “absolutely nothing to do with it.”
²⁸

Garrison would shortly change his mind.

*
Sen. Long's family history may have made him especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories. In 1935, his father, the legendary Louisiana political figure, Huey P. Long, was assassinated by a lone gunman, and the assassin was then shot and killed by Long's bodyguards.

†
“Garrison just can't stand [criticism],” an aide later said. “It drives him crazy. He forgets everything he's doing” (William Gurvich, Conference with defense team, Aug. 29, 1967 [hereinafter Gurvich Conference], tape #2, p. 3).

*
His actions in that parole, Andrews admitted, had not been “a strictly legal move for an assistant D.A. to make,” a damaging admission that Garrison tucked away for future use.

†
Oswald's use of the Camp Street address may mean nothing (see chapter 13).

*
Ferrie informed Volz that the CAP cadet who introduced Oswald to that organization, Edward Voebel, had said that he and Oswald, along with some other cadets, once stopped by Ferrie's house. But, Ferrie said, he didn't remember the visit (Ferrie, interview with Asst. D.A. John Volz, Dec. 15, 1966).

*
Ferrie's friends got the message—being around him was an invitation to trouble. They stopped calling and dropping by, leaving him isolated (Beaubouef Interview).

†
Garrison's contacting Chandler, who had written the most negative report published about him to date, was a peculiar move. He was using his Kennedy investigation to regain his previous stature in Chandler's eyes, an odd priority.

*
Garrison boasted to some on his staff that his picture was going to be on the cover of
Life
(Gurvich Conference, tape #2, p. 12).

†
Life
provided Garrison a variety of assistance. In Miami a
Life
researcher investigated the alleged Latin assassins supposedly hiding there;
Life
's lab provided photographic enlargements and prints (whatever Garrison requested); and wherever Garrison went he was trailed by a
Life
photographer recording his activities for posterity. In return,
Life
received a copy of Garrison's master file, which was mailed to New York “as things were printed,” and the possibility of the biggest journalistic coup in recent memory.

*
Garrison's “insight” was inspired by notes scribbled in the margin of a paperback copy of the Warren Report by Asst. D.A. Frank Klein. Ruminating on Dean Andrews's Warren Commission testimony, Klein had asked himself who he knew with the first name “Clay” who lived in the French Quarter and was gay, and dashed off the name Clay Shaw and a “question mark” (Gurvich Conference, pp. 13–14; Bethell Diary, p. 11).

*
By the time Shaw was nineteen he had co-written and published three one-act plays (one of them,
Submerged
, has been staged thousands of times) and in 1948 his first full-length play, In
Memoriam
, was produced in New Orleans.

*
Shaw rehabilitated and restored sixteen structures, including a house where naturalist John James Audubon lived in 1921, and the so-called Spanish Stables.

†
Clay Shaw met the president once. When the former mayor of New Orleans de Lesseps Morrison was appointed Ambassador to the Organization of American States, Shaw was one of those who accompanied Morrison to Washington for the swearing-in ceremony.

*
After Castro severed relations with the United States and fired consulate officials abroad, Shaw had agreed to the request of the aging and ill Cuban consul (Carlos Marquez) and allowed the office to remain open for three months (rent free) in the hope that diplomatic relations might be restored (Shaw Journal, pp. 4, 5).

As 1967 began, Garrison had his men on the move. Armed with the tools of the sleuthing trade and Garrison's instructions,
*
they boarded planes to Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Miami, seeking Cubans who had known David Ferrie. Finding them, Garrison believed, would provide the link to the conspiracy that had killed President Kennedy. Expecting to land the fictional Manuel Garcia Gonzales, Garrison himself joined investigator Louis Ivon in Miami. When the capture failed, Garrison concluded that his presence had been a mistake that had “flushed” their quarry and sent him fleeing to Cuba or Puerto Rico. “Things,” Garrison said, were “moving too fast.”
¹

This manic scurrying about was prompted not only by the misinformation from Dean Andrews and Jack Martin but also from a Martin protégé—David F. Lewis. Martin and Lewis were so close they ended up living together. A dark-haired twenty-six-year-old in square, horn-rimmed glasses, discharged from the Navy for “psychiatric” reasons, Lewis was a baggage handler at a bus station. Working briefly in 1961 as a “leg man” for Banister, he had bolstered his image of himself as a private eye by wearing a plastic gun in a
17 shoulder holster purchased from F. W. Woolworth. Lewis claimed he met Lee Harvey
Oswald in Mancuso's coffee shop and later saw him in Banister's office with Ferrie and two anti-Castro Cubans.
*
He came forward with his story at Martin's urging. Martin had dug up a “witness” to corroborate his own testimony. Garrison embraced Lewis as enthusiastically as he had Martin. David Ferrie was now plagued by a new source of incriminating “information” about him.
²

Lewis was first certain that Ferrie was present at the meeting in Banister's office but unsure about Oswald. Later he was positive about Oswald but denied Ferrie was there. Then he switched again and said both were present. He first said his sightings occurred in the summer of 1963. Then he said they occurred in the summer of 1962, when Oswald was in the Soviet Union or Texas. Later still, he moved them back to 1963.
³
Lewis told members of the press he knew the names of five people who plotted the assassination and tried to peddle a tape recording he made with Martin “naming names” to a UPI reporter for
1,000. The reporter declined. In January Lewis was Garrison's
primary witness
. Soon afterwards, Jack Martin bragged that Garrison's investigation “was based on information ‘made up' ” by himself and David Lewis. No one else supported it and the three accused who were still living—the two Cubans (Sergio Arcacha Smith and Carlos Quiroga) and David Ferrie—vehemently denied it. But their denials fell on deaf ears. Garrison continued to pursue Cuban conspirators, supposedly linked to Ferrie, while exercising tight control over his men. Their trips were closely managed, down to the precise time of their daily telephone reports. Alcock was to call from Houston at 11:00
A.M
. “sharp.” In Dallas, John Volz was scheduled at “12:00 Noon sharp.” But they produced nothing.
⁴

One Cuban Garrison did locate, Miguel Torres, ended up being an embarrassment. He claimed, among other things, that the district attorney's office had tried to bribe him. Garrison found Torres by employing his “propinquity theory,” the odd notion that the conspirators would be found living near each other, a geographical twist on guilt-by-association.
^†
Miguel Torres fit Garrison's criteria: he was
Cuban and he once lived only a block from Oswald on Magazine Street. “Garrison always said that he was going to solve the assassination with an Esso road map and the city directory and that's all he did all day long,” investigator William Gurvich later remarked. “I know; I got him the five city directories.” Garrison and his aides invested enormous time and energy chasing this eccentric idea but it was all for naught.
⁵

William Gurvich was given the job of proving that on the day of the assassination David Ferrie was in Dallas, sitting in a plane at the end of a runway, engines running, waiting to fly Oswald to safety. Gurvich was supposed to find the airfield. A pilot himself, Gurvich rented a plane and flew from one small field to another, examining records, talking to workers, and showing Ferrie's picture. No one recognized him. When Garrison focused on a tiny airport called White Rock, Gurvich obtained its gasoline receipts for September, October, and November—4,000 of them, which Garrison ordered photocopied and checked. Again, no one found anything. From the outset Gurvich was troubled by the conspicuousness of a “waiting getaway pilot.”
⁶
His doubts were confirmed when he discovered that Ferrie was telling the truth about his whereabouts on the day of the assassination. But when Gurvich first told Garrison he had learned from a federal marshal that Ferrie had been sitting in a federal courtroom in New Orleans, Garrison dismissed the idea. You know who
they
work for, he said.

The failure of Garrison's men to uncover any evidence against David Ferrie wasn't the only problem on Garrison's horizon. Since the day Garrison had recited his “silly syllogism” identifying Clay Shaw as Clay Bertrand, David Chandler had been heading off the reservation. Chandler didn't conceal his skepticism, and Billings and Garrison began regarding him with suspicion.
⁷
They had reason to worry. So did Chandler.