Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (27 page)

Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, remembered Ferrie as “one of the agents. Many times when he came into the office, he used the private office behind Banister’s, and I was told he was doing private work. I believed his work was somehow connected with the CIA rather than the FBI.” Ferrie certainly was associated with Guy Banister and the Cuban exiles. On one of the days Oswald handed out pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans, Ferrie led an anti-Castro demonstration a few blocks away. As with Banister, moreover, there have been repeated allegations that Ferrie was involved with Oswald.

After the
assassination, there was perfunctory inquiry into Oswald’s membership, as a youth of nearly sixteen, in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). Oswald, who had then been living in New Orleans with his mother, joined the Patrol as a cadet in 1955—when David Ferrie, already a skilled airman, was a leading light of the unit. After the assassination, one of Banister’s employees said he thought he recalled seeing a photograph of Oswald, along with other onetime CAP members, in Ferrie’s home. Asked about this on more than one occasion, Ferrie claimed he remembered nothing about Oswald and had had no relationship with him. Since he also denied knowing that the Cuban Revolutionary Council operated from 544 Camp Street, a fact he certainly did know, the denials should have raised suspicion.

The FBI, however, conducted only a nominal inquiry into Oswald’s membership in the CAP, and the matter was dropped. There was no further action when one of Oswald’s former schoolmates, Edward Voebel, first stated that he and Oswald had been in the Patrol “with Captain Dave Ferrie”—and then abruptly changed his mind. Suddenly, he “could not recall” the matter. The fact that Voebel had been scared, by a “crank-type telephone call” and a visit to his home by a strange man, left the FBI unphased.

Nor was the Bureau stung into action when another former cadet said Ferrie had scurried around to see him after the assassination to ask whether any old group photographs of Ferrie’s squadron featured Oswald. Most of the squadron records, supposedly, had been “stolen in late 1960.” Even in 1978, however, the House Assassinations Committee did better.

Investigators established that Ferrie’s service with the Civil Air Patrol fitted with that of Oswald. They identified six witnesses whose statements tended to confirm that
Oswald had been present at patrol meetings attended by Ferrie. Compelling evidence, from records and witnesses, indicates that Oswald became a CAP cadet in summer 1955, when Ferrie was a volunteer instructor. Jerry Paradis, another former instructor, told the author, “I was a lieutenant coinciding with the months Oswald was a recruit… . I recall him as a very quiet, serious young man … David Ferrie was sort of the scoutmaster.”
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In 1993, researchers for PBS’s
Frontline
program discovered an old photograph that appears to settle the matter. Apparently taken in 1955, it shows CAP cadets at a cookout (see Photo 34). Former cadets, one of whom is himself in the picture, told
Frontline
they recognized both Oswald and Ferrie in the picture.

The Ferrie connection introduces another element into this baroque story—homosexuality. Ferrie’s homosexuality, and his weakness for young males in particular, is a matter of record. Over the years, it repeatedly led him into trouble, and sometimes into police custody.
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In the mid-1950s, Ferrie’s misconduct with youths in the CAP led to scandal. There were reports of drunken orgies, of youngsters capering about in the nude, and in the end, it was this that ended Ferrie’s tenure with the New Orleans unit. The Assassinations Committee noted that—homosexuality aside—Ferrie exerted “tremendous influence” through his close associations with his pupils in the Patrol.

Was Oswald so influenced, and did he—at the age of sixteen and on the threshold of adult sexual life—have a sexual encounter with Ferrie? While he later lived an active heterosexual life with his wife, Marina, there are straws in the wind on this subject. Oswald may have attended some of Ferrie’s bacchanalia. On one occasion while he was in the CAP, the then teenager worried his mother by staying out at a unit party until two in the morning.
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In the Marine
Corps, some did wonder about Oswald’s sexuality. He reportedly took friends to the Flamingo, a bar for homosexuals on the Mexican border that he appeared to have visited before. In Japan, he seemed comfortable in a “queer bar.” One former Marines comrade, David Murray, said he kept his distance from Oswald because of a rumor that he was homosexual. “He had the profile of other homosexuals I’d known or come in contact with,” former U.S. Marines Sergeant Dan Powers recalled, “The meekness, the gentleness—just that type of person. Having worked at YMCAs, etc., for me he just fitted into that category.” The possible sexual connection aside, another lead may point to an Oswald-Ferrie link.

According to his mother, Marguerite, Oswald was first encouraged to join the Marines by a “recruiting officer” in uniform who “influenced [him] while he was with the Civil Air cadets.” The man came to the Oswald apartment with Lee in tow, she said, to try to persuade her to let the boy join up while still underage. Her son, she said, “wanted me to sign a birth certificate saying that he was seventeen.”

Is it likely that a genuine Marine Corps recruiting officer would have tried to persuade a cadet’s mother to connive at breaking the law? An Assassinations Committee analysis notes that David Ferrie, for his part, “urged several boys to join the armed forces.” Jack Martin, who worked for the Banister detective agency, would tell the FBI within three days of President Kennedy’s assassination that Ferrie had helped Oswald get into the Marine Corps.

Ferrie, moreover, was no stranger to the fakery of personal documents—his own application form to join Eastern Airlines was but one example. Although a phony
Oswald birth certificate was created, the Marines spotted the forgery. Oswald spent the next year studying the Marine Corps manual until “he knew it by heart,” then joined up just days after his seventeenth birthday.

It was, of course, during this same period that Oswald started to manifest an interest in Marxism and far Left politics. The conventional view, ignoring the stream of anomalies in Oswald’s career, has been to regard this as the start of an authentic lifelong commitment. With Ferrie’s possible influence on Oswald in mind, consider the ambivalent approach Ferrie had to politics. He was “rabidly anti-Communist,” yet sometimes described himself as a “liberal.” Of Ferrie’s position on Cuba, Delphine Roberts said, “Well, he had to act a part of being what many people would call wishy-washy,
one side and then the opposite side
[author’s emphasis]. It was important for him to be that way… . He knew both sides.”

Consider once again, then, Oswald’s alleged teenage interest in socialism. The Warren Report failed to mention another comment by Oswald’s former schoolfriend Edward Voebel. Reports that Oswald was already “studying Communism,” according to Voebel, were “a lot of baloney.” The comment recalls the plethora of incidents that have somehow rung false. How much of Oswald’s parroted politics was also “baloney”?

We cannot know, but the potential influence of David Ferrie, looming darkly at a formative time in Oswald’s life, is sobering. Whether or not Ferrie steered the mind and actions of Oswald the youth, some evidence suggests they were involved with each other in the summer of 1963.

Dean Andrews, a New Orleans lawyer, claimed after the assassination that
Oswald came to his office several times to ask for help in appealing his undesirable discharge from the Marine Corps Reserve. Andrews, whose account was partially corroborated by office staff, said Oswald was accompanied on the first visit by some Mexican “gay kids,” one of whom appeared to be Oswald’s companion. Ferrie, the homosexual, had business links to Andrews.
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Ferrie had links, too, to the Louisiana Mafia boss who had spoken of assassinating President Kennedy, Carlos Marcello.

By the summer of 1963, two summers had passed since the Kennedy administration had unceremoniously deported Carlos Marcello from the United States. He had soon returned, in defiance of the Attorney General, and was seen openly around New Orleans, back in control of his crime empire. So far as Robert Kennedy was concerned, however, the battle was not over. On his personal order, the Justice Department stepped up the pressure against Mafia operations in the South and against Marcello personally. It was now war between the Kennedys and Marcello, just as there was war with Marcello’s friend Hoffa.

Like Hoffa and Florida crime boss Santo Trafficante, Marcello is said to have confided—as noted in an earlier chapter—that he planned to have President Kennedy killed. In public, he fought renewed efforts to deport him—and two of those recruited to help were Guy Banister and David Ferrie.

The Marcello-Ferrie connection went back a long way, perhaps as far as 1961, when Marcello had sneaked back from exile in Guatemala. Of the several theories as to how exactly the Mafia boss came home, one long favored by investigators is that he was flown in by private plane. Although Marcello denied it, a contemporary
Border Patrol report said the pilot of the aircraft had been David Ferrie.

From early 1962, by his own account, Ferrie had been employed as “investigator and law clerk” in the office of G. Wray Gill, one of Marcello’s posse of attorneys. Ferrie also associated with Dean Andrews, another lawyer who provided his services to Marcello—and who was to claim he met Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. In the three months leading up to the assassination, Ferrie was employed specifically to help Marcello fight the government’s case of deportation. This involved at least one flight to Guatemala to gather evidence for the defense, work that one of Ferrie’s associates described as that of “research librarian.”

The research also involved weekend visits to two of Marcello’s bases of operation, the Town and Country Motel in New Orleans and his estate outside the city, Churchill Farms, where Marcello had reportedly made his threat against President Kennedy’s life. Hatred of the President was, we have seen, something Ferrie and Marcello had in common.

The high point of Ferrie’s work on behalf of the Mafia leader came at exactly the period in 1963 that Ferrie was frequenting Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street. Banister, it seems, had reversed the zest for hunting gangsters that had once brought him distinction in the FBI. He, too, now lent his expertise to Marcello’s cause, as the Assassinations Committee confirmed.

One secretary who worked in Banister’s office during the crucial summer and autumn of 1963, Mary Brengel, recalled a day when, as she was taking dictation from Banister, he referred in a letter to his work in helping Marcello fight deportation. Brengel expressed surprise that her employer was involved with organized crime, and Banister responded curtly, “There are principles being violated, and if this goes on it could affect every citizen in the United States.” He left no doubt that he was firmly on
Marcello’s side.

Then there was the family of the alleged assassin himself. We now know that key members of the Oswald family were touched by the Mafia—and specifically by the Marcello network. His father having died before he was born, Oswald had spent most of his childhood and formative years in the sole care of his mother, Marguerite. When he was fifteen, they had moved into an apartment at 126 Exchange Alley in New Orleans. The alley was in the French Quarter, amid the razzmatazz and sleaze synonymous with New Orleans. “Exchange Alley, specifically that little block that Oswald lived on,” said New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission director Aaron Kohn, “was literally the hub of some of the most notorious underworld joints in the city.”

The Oswalds had lived in substandard accommodation above a pool hall, a known hangout for gamblers. Not much is known of young Lee’s teenage pursuits, but one episode suggests that the atmosphere of lawlessness was infectious. Edward Voebel, Oswald’s schoolfriend, recalled having to dissuade his pal from a plan to break into a gun shop and steal a weapon. Boys in bad neighborhoods are prone to being rascals, but Oswald was more at risk than most. His mother had close connections to the gangster milieu.

A relative once said of Marguerite Oswald, “She’s a woman with a lot of character and good morals, and I’m sure that what she was doing for her boys she thought was the best at the time. Now, whether it was or not is something else, I guess.” Indeed, the touching portrait of Marguerite the embattled single parent is somewhat tarnished. The Assassinations Committee took a closer look at her known friends.

One was a New Orleans attorney named Clem Sehrt. He was, the
Committee said, an “associate, lawyer, and financial adviser to a Louisiana banker associated with Carlos Marcello.” Sehrt had himself been “long involved in a series of highly questionable undertakings, both business and political.” Mrs. Oswald turned to Sehrt at the time her son Lee was trying to join the Marines, when underage, in the wake of his apparent association with the suspect David Ferrie. Sehrt was involved in the false birth certificate caper. After the assassination, according to information that reached the New Orleans Crime Commission, Sehrt was asked to represent Oswald. It is not known who asked him to do so.
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Marguerite’s friendship with Sehrt was not a solitary brush with organized crime. She worked for some time for Raoul Sere, a lawyer who went on to become an assistant district attorney in New Orleans. According to former Crime Commission director Kohn, Sere was strongly suspected of being involved with “The Combine,” a group of New Orleans figures who obstructed the course of justice with bribery and corruption. Kohn added, “The district attorney’s office was then under the corrupt influence of the gambling syndicate—Carlos Marcello and others—to a very significant degree.” Though reluctant to discuss the matter, Oswald’s mother acknowledged having consulted Sere for advice after her son Lee went to the Soviet Union.

The Assassinations Committee found evidence, too, that Mrs. Oswald had been friendly with a man called Sam Termine. Termine was “a Louisiana crime figure who had served as a ‘bodyguard’ and chauffeur for Carlos Marcello.” Investigation of Termine revealed that he was close to Oswald’s uncle, Charles Murret. Murret, who was married to Marguerite’s sister, Lillian, had a great deal of contact with Lee Oswald. He, too, it turns out, tracks back to the Mafia apparatus of Carlos Marcello.