False Witness (9 page)

At Garrison's urging, Martin now told Garrison everything, though what that amounted to is unclear. In a series of secret conversations, Martin led Garrison inside “the
sanctum sanctorum
,” Garrison later called it, “that secretly had harbored Lee Harvey Oswald.”
¹²
Garrison rewarded Martin by making him part of the investigative team.
¹³

Garrison was now convinced that his suspicions about Ferrie's Texas trip were justified. In addition to the timing, there was the weather, which had been stormy and dreadful. Garrison found it unbelievable that Ferrie, though eccentric and unpredictable, would drive all night through a rain storm to go ice skating. Ferrie's friend Alvin Beaubouef recently acknowledged that the weather was terrible but
so what
? he said. He and Ferrie were accustomed to
flying
though storms and “driving through one was no big deal.”
¹⁴
It was for Garrison and he never budged from that opinion. He obsessed on that trip the rest of his life. Ferrie, he believed, had been assigned to fly Lee Harvey Oswald to safety. It stuck in Garrison's craw that his office had had Ferrie in custody right after the assassination and released him. Though Ferrie was cleared by the Texas Rangers, the Houston Police, and the New Orleans Police Department, Garrison was soon claiming that the FBI let Ferrie “get away.”

In mid-December Garrison ordered Asst. D.A. John Volz to interview the villain of Martin's story. As he had three years earlier, David Ferrie denied everything
*
and told Volz he knew he was being questioned because of Jack Martin. Martin, Ferrie said, “somehow gets to be near the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” When asked if he would be willing to take a polygraph, Ferrie replied “certainly” and he volunteered to take truth serum. “I have no hesitation at all,” he declared.
¹⁵
Yet Garrison never gave these tests to Ferrie, his key suspect who eagerly sought them. (If Ferrie had taken them and passed, Garrison would have been left empty-handed, with no suspect,
no link to Dallas, and nowhere for his investigation to go.)

Unmoved by Ferrie's denials and his request to be tested, Garrison immediately began harassing his friends. Layton Martens, Alvin Beaubouef, Morris Brownlee, Melvin Coffey, and others were contacted on the job, called at home at night, embarrassed in front of their employers and families, and interrogated in the district attorney's office, some of them repeatedly. Layton Martens was questioned by the grand jury and soon charged with perjury. Morris Brownlee, Ferrie's godson, was rearrested on an old drug charge previously dropped for insufficient evidence. Ferrie was brought into the jail, given a look at Brownlee in his cell, and told he would be released if Ferrie would “cooperate.”
¹⁶
But Ferrie had nothing to tell Garrison. Nor did any of his friends. There was nothing to tell.
*

Unwavering in his certitude that Ferrie was guilty, Garrison instituted surveillance of him, which was eventually a twenty-four-hour watch. One of those Garrison asked to help with this was his estranged friend, David Chandler. Garrison reached out to Chandler through a mutual acquaintance who telephoned Chandler one night late in November. He said that Garrison was secretly reopening the Kennedy case and asked if Chandler was interested in meeting with Garrison and talking about it. Mindful of Garrison's visceral reaction to his
New Orleans
article, Chandler was surprised by this invitation, but happy at the opportunity “to mend fences,”
^†
which also promised a great story.
¹⁷

The two men met the next day. Sitting in Garrison's comfortable office, Chandler listened as Garrison presented his view of the assassination. Basically Garrison said “the CIA did it” and he identified the two CIA operatives involved. One was Clay Bertrand; the other, David Ferrie. “The case would be broken,” Garrison told Chandler “by cracking David Ferrie, ‘a very unusual type of person who made a very curious trip at a very curious time about the date of the assassination.' ”
¹⁸

Chandler was working as a stringer for
Life
magazine, which already
had begun its own inquiry into the assassination. He immediately contacted its New York office, described his meeting with Garrison, and requested that “a senior editor” be sent to New Orleans. A few days later, Richard Billings, author of “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” arrived. “We just might have the scoop of the century,” Billings said. The two went directly from the airport to a meeting in Garrison's office.
¹⁹

There “a secret deal” was worked out. It was agreed that
Life
and Garrison would “share
all
information” they might gather on the assassination. “It was a powerful alliance,” Chandler later wrote, “Garrison had the prosecutorial and subpoena powers” while
Life
had “a worldwide network of correspondents.” The arrangement was unorthodox and of arguable impropriety. Yet, theoretically, it could benefit all.
Life
would give Garrison free assistance and information on a global scale and in return obtain the inside story of his investigation, to be written by Richard Billings.
*
Chandler and Billings set up headquarters in the Richelieu apartment building in the French Quarter where they rented a suite of rooms. They formed the two-man core of the operation, which was supplemented by “a variety of reporters and photographers” who were “shuttled” in and out of New Orleans on a regular basis. On hand at any given time over the next few months were at least four additional
Life
reporters and as many photographers.
²⁰
Life
's management was investing heavily in Garrison's effort.
^†

The morning after the deal was struck, Chandler arrived at Garrison's office and received his first assignment: He was to make “undercover contact” with Ferrie. Chandler and a
Life
photographer drove to the lakefront airport, where Ferrie was working as a charter pilot, and wasted two days trying to bump into him “accidentally.” He wasn't what Chandler expected. From Garrison's description Chandler was prepared for a sideshow freak with false eyebrows and a homemade
red wig. But “up close” Ferrie “didn't seem all that garish” to Chandler. It's an opinion some others shared.

On the third day, they had an early-morning conversation with him in the airport coffee shop. Ferrie astonished them with what he had to say. He had a tip for them about what he called “a big secret”: The local district attorney, “Big Jim” Garrison “had hot leads to the Kennedy Assassination.” His information, Ferrie said, came from one of Garrison's own men, who was sitting in a booth at the far end of the room “doing his best to disappear.” But the real shock came when Ferrie chuckled and said, “Garrison had me pegged as the getaway pilot in Dallas.” This knocked Chandler for a loop; he was still laughing about it years later. “Here we were working on the scoop of the century, a major secret,” he said, “and the
suspect
 . . . was telling us all about it.” David Ferrie “just didn't act like a CIA assassin,” Chandler said. Ferrie invited them for a ride in his plane, the first of many such flights. Chandler found him “harmless, even likeable,”
²¹
another observation others shared.

This “undercover” work with Ferrie stirred Chandler's first doubts about Garrison's case and he began “taking a hard look” at what was going on in the D.A.'s office. He didn't like what he saw or what he was hearing about abuses by Garrison and his aides. Before long Chandler decided that what Pershing Gervais had told him was true, that Garrison
had
“gone nuts” over the assassination. A few days before Christmas, Chandler and Billings were summoned to Garrison's office. What happened there left a lasting impression. As soon as they were seated, Garrison announced that he had “deduced” the identity of Clay Bertrand. “One, Bertrand is homosexual,” he said. “Two, Bertrand speaks Spanish. Three, his first name is Clay.” Then he triumphantly flipped up a photograph that was lying face down on his desk. It was a picture of
Clay Shaw
.
*
Shaw fit these criteria; therefore, Shaw was Bertrand. Chandler was astonished.
²²
Clay Shaw, a well-known and respected New Orleans businessman and civic leader, was the last person anyone would suspect of participating
in the president's assassination.

Modest and well-liked, Shaw moved in the city's wealthiest social circles. Among his friends were playwright Tennessee Williams and Sears Roebuck heiress Edith Stern. He was regarded as one of the city's most eligible bachelors and was often seen in the company of women, but he was gay, though discreet and in the closet. Some knew, but no one seemed to care; those who did turned a blind eye. A dedicated supporter of the arts, especially music and theater, and a linguist, at ease in several languages, Shaw was basically self-taught. After graduating from Warren Easton High School, he worked for Western Union as a local manager. As with Garrison, writing was Shaw's long-range lifetime goal,
*
but as a young man he found it a poor source of the income needed to sustain a life. In his early twenties, he moved to New York City, took some courses at Columbia University, and supported himself by again working for Western Union, this time as a district manager in mid-Manhattan. He turned his writing skill into free-lance work in public relations and advertising, and eventually headed one of the country's leading lecture bureaus. What successes Shaw might have enjoyed in those fields or in New York's theatrical world died a-borning on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He enlisted at the age of twenty-nine, a private in the Army Medical Corps. He was discharged in 1946 a major with a chest full of decorations from three countries. He had served with distinction as Deputy Chief of Staff to General Charles Thrasher, commander of United States Forces in Northern France and Belgium. Shaw later said that coordinating supplies for three armies as they fanned out across Europe had developed his organizational skills.
²³

With the fighting over, he returned not to New York but to the city where he grew up. He never again left New Orleans except on business trips and vacations. The pivotal moment in Shaw's career occurred in 1947 when a group of prominent local businessmen asked him to help create a center for international trade. To them he was a “highly decorated war hero,” and one of their own, Louisiana-born. A native of
Kentwood, Shaw had lived in New Orleans since he and his parents moved there when he was five years old. His grandfather was a turn-of-the-century sheriff in Tangipahoa Parish and one of the state's best-known lawmen. Shaw later said he had no qualifications for the job the businessmen offered him but realized no one else did either, “because the mart idea had never been attempted before in this country.” So he gladly accepted. The city's original Trade Mart, which opened in 1948, was Shaw's creation—he directed its financing, its construction and its operation. When he retired nineteen years later, on October 1, 1965, the legacy he left behind included the thirty-three-story International Trade Mart building at the foot of Canal Street, which was Shaw's idea. One of his friends said recently that Shaw did everything but build it himself.
²⁴

He could have lent a hand there as well. For years he worked restoring structures in the city's famous but run-down French Quarter—it was his principal avocation.
*
Others followed his lead and today it is one of the most highly prized areas of the city. A carriage house (with a bright red door) that Shaw restored at 1313 Dauphine Street became his home. Often seen at cultural affairs, Shaw also liked to hang out at the Press Club and drink with the newsmen. Politically a lifelong registered Democratic, Shaw described himself as a Wilsonian-Franklin-Delano-Roosevelt “liberal.” He supported John Kennedy's campaign for the presidency in 1960 and thought he was “a splendid president.”
^†
Kennedy's “youth, imagination, style and elan” appealed to Shaw, and so did his political programs, especially Kennedy's Alliance for Progress for Latin America. Shaw believed it would benefit all concerned economically, and be a boon to the shipping business in New Orleans. “If there was one person in New Orleans who believed in John F. Kennedy,” a friend later said, “it was Clay Shaw.”
²⁵

When Garrison held up Shaw's picture and proclaimed him “Clay Bertrand,” it wasn't just Shaw's stature in the community that astonished
David Chandler. It was Garrison's rationale for selecting him, what Chandler called “Garrison's silly syllogism.” Chandler found it ridiculous. Garrison cited no evidence whatever. No district attorney in his right mind would make such a leap on that basis. Chandler wasn't the only one to think so. Dean Andrews, who had given “Clay Bertrand” life, shared that sentiment.

Around the time Garrison staged his photographic revelation for Chandler and Billings, he treated Andrews to another dinner at Broussard's and informed him, too, that he believed Clay Shaw was Bertrand. Andrews, as amazed as Chandler had been and alarmed, tried to dissuade Garrison, but he had made up his mind. Now he wanted Andrews to corroborate it. Andrews refused. Garrison continued to press the idea at later meetings, trying to coax Andrews into admitting it, and Andrews began to wonder about Garrison's tactics. “[Garrison] wanted to shuck me like corn, pluck me like a chicken, stew me like an oyster,” Andrews later complained. “I wanted to see if this cat was kosher.” To test Garrison's integrity, Andrews invented a fictitious Cuban guerrilla fighter, whom Andrews called “Mannie Garcia Gonzales,” after a client of his named “Manuel Garcia,” to which he added “Gonzales.” Not long afterwards, Garrison announced that the “triggerman” in the assassination was “Manuel Garcia Gonzales.” Garrison charged this fictitious person with selling narcotics and informed Andrews that Gonzales had been arrested. Dismayed, but with his suspicions confirmed, Andrews told Garrison that he had the wrong Gonzales. Or as Andrews put it, he had “the right ha-ha but the wrong ho-ho.”
²⁶