by Joan Mellen
“It’s a lot cooler in here than it is out there,” Jack says. “I’m waiting for someone. If you want to go, go.” Finally Jack has seen what he needs to see. “I’ve got to go back over there,” Jack says. “I left my damn package in Guy’s office. I’ve got to go get it. I want you to talk to Delphine.”
They walk back to 531 Lafayette. “Tell Guy I’m out here and I want my package,” Jack tells Delphine. “Tell Guy to hand me that package.”
“What package?” Delphine says.
He never had a package, Tommy thinks.
“He’s gone,” Delphine says.
“Well, hon, I’m gonna grab it and get out of your hair,” Jack says. He rushes into Banister’s office as Delphine continues to flirt with Tommy. Jack emerges with a brown envelope. He has a file folder tucked under his arm so that Delphine can’t see it.
“Come on!” Jack says as he walks out very fast.
Later Guy Banister telephones Tommy at his parents’ house. They must meet. His secretary told him Jack took an envelope, Banister says. Did he also take a file? “Yes, he did,” Tommy says when they meet.
“Do you know where he went with it afterwards?”
“He went to the Roosevelt Hotel,” Tommy says. The color seems to drain from Banister’s face. “There are documents that concern me. They could get me in a lot of trouble,” Banister says. Later Tommy would conclude that the file had been connected to the murder of John F. Kennedy. The pistol-whipping followed.
Before the assassination, Tommy is given one last assignment. He is sent to the law offices of G. Wray Gill in the Pere Marquette building at 150 Baronne Street. Clay Shaw is there, accompanied by a young man who, Tommy thinks, couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds soaking wet, and “queerer than a three dollar bill.” It’s Layton Martens. Ubiquitous, Jack Martin is present, as is David Ferrie.
“Do you want to make two hundred dollars?” Dave says.
Laid out on a desk are drawings of buildings, sketched in detail, with an automobile on the street below. The view is from a high angle looking down, as if the car were in a gully. There are also 8x10 photographs in black and white, mounted on heavy paper: charts, diagrams, maps, photographs. Someone scoops them up and places them in a large envelope. Tommy is to carry this package to Dallas and hand-deliver it to a man he knows from the Mission, Ferrie explains. Gill gives him money, and more directions. Ferrie, Tommy has noticed, never has any cash.
“No jewelry!” Gill says, looking at Tommy’s cheap watch and rings glittering with fake stones. “Get that jewelry off!” Jack says.
They drive Thomas Edward Beckham to the airport, where he is handed a magazine in which to secrete the envelope. “Tommy, I know how talkative you are,” Gill says. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but this is important.” Tommy is not to speak to anyone on the airplane. He is given a room number at the Executive Inn where he must deliver the package.
Arriving in Dallas, Tommy takes a taxi. But he doesn’t even have to enter the Executive Inn because waiting for him outside in an old Chevrolet is Lawrence Howard, he of the Pancho Villa mustache. Howard is mean-looking, Tommy thinks, as he hands him the package. As Howard ruffles through the envelope, his face darkens.
“Are you sure this is all of it?” Howard says. He seems to suspect that Tommy has stolen some money out of the package.
“I didn’t take nothing out,” Tommy says. “If you want to call them, go call them. I didn’t mess with nothing in that envelope.” He was not able to read what was inside.
President Kennedy was murdered so soon after Tommy delivered the package that he was certain it had contained plans for the assassination. One of the maps he took would in fact be found in Lee Harvey Oswald’s room.
“Lee did it!” Tommy tells Rozzy on November 22nd.
“No, he didn’t,” Thompson says. “Two of our guys did.”
When Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday, Tommy was outraged. “How could Jack kill Lee?” he said, well aware of their acquaintance.
When he asked how Jack had gained entry to the police station where Lee was held, he was told, “one of our friends, a CIA man, had walked him in, saying ‘he’s with me.’” David Ferrie would tell his friend, Raymond Broshears, that the Dallas police were informed by their superiors that Jack “was going to kill the bastard and that they would be patriotic to turn the other way.” Broshears already knew: Ferrie and Oswald were connected to the CIA, and Jack Martin, keeping a close rein on Beckham, had introduced Beckham to David Ferrie.
The Louisiana mob, always present at those meetings in Algiers, not to mention at Carlos Marcello’s Town and Country, apparently lent a hand in arranging for Ruby to kill Oswald, just as the CIA had enlisted the Mafia in its attempts to murder Fidel Castro. Marcello’s man Joe Civello, of St. Landry Parish, whose responsibilities were in Dallas, had dealt with the Dallas police, being close to Sergeant Patrick T. Dean, who was in charge of basement security at the Dallas police station. Civello was also close to Egyptian Lounge owner Joe Campisi, whose family hailed as well from St. Landry Parish, and who was designated to be Jack Ruby’s first jailhouse visitor. A Louisiana politician visiting Dallas had listened to Campisi brag at length about his role in helping Ruby murder Oswald.
Terrified, Tommy decided to leave town. He knew too much. They might kill him, too.
“There’s $8,000 in your post office box,” Jack Martin told Tommy. With the assistance of Fred Lee Crisman, Tommy embarked on the wandering life of a con man. Jim Garrison did not discover that Thomas Edward Beckham had delivered that package until years after his investigation had ground to a halt, although he would locate traces of the charts, maps and diagrams.
For years Tommy kept silent. But David Ferrie began to carry around a manila file, which he nicknamed “the Bomb.” It would “blow this city apart if he ever released it,” Ferrie said. A Ferrie acolyte named Jimmy Johnson, who worked undercover for Jim Garrison, went through Ferrie’s papers one day and found a notebook marked “Files, 1963,” which included a “loose-leaf paper with a diagram on it.” Johnson would later describe what he had seen:
[A] diagram of a figure of a man with . . . what could be called a bullet hole in the back of his head and right shoulder. Also, a diagram of a man side-facing with arrows pointing starting from the back coming to the front of his throat. At the top of the page there is a triangular line going up with markings 60 feet high with a line coming down 2,500 feet long. At the bottom is a diagram of an airplane.
Jimmy Johnson would later elaborate: “They had a building ten stories high, a drawing. It implied that it was 109 stories high and so many feet, and there was a convertible. It had a drawing of the street, there was a convertible, a few people in it, and it had an airplane . . . the line was the airplane, coming down over the building and over the convertible and in, going up at a high angle of attack.”
In 1969, Jim Garrison learned more about these maps and diagrams from a friend of conservative congressman F. Edward Hebert, no supporter of his. Her name was Clara (Bootsie) Gay, and she was an antiques dealer. On the Tuesday after the assassination, November 26th, Gay saw a batch of those same diagrams as David Ferrie’s desk was being cleaned out at the offices of G. Wray Gill. Gay was there because Gill was her lawyer.
Bootsie Gay had met Ferrie at Gill’s offices, and at first had sympathized with him as he described the injustice of his having been fired by Eastern Airlines. At the very persuasive Ferrie’s request, Gay had sought Congressman Hebert’s help on Ferrie’s behalf. “Officials of airlines like to keep members of Congress happy,” Ferrie had said. He’s a “Saint on Earth,” although a “little fanatic,” Gay said of Ferrie, her explanation for why “he has been so tormented.” A feisty widow, Gay herself had been broke and Ferrie had made flying trips for her business at no charge. At Gill’s offices, “he seemed always to be saying his rosary.”
Hebert turned her down. When she told Ferrie, he became furious, and never spoke to her aga
in. “Talking religion is one thing, but living it is another,” Gay wrote in a note to Ferrie. A Gill stenographer later told her Ferrie “went into a fit” when he read it.
Learning that Ferrie had been questioned by the district attorney in connection with the Kennedy assassination, Gay telephoned Gill’s office to find the secretaries “in a turmoil.” One told her, “Mr. Gill knew nothing about Ferrie—it was all new to him.” Bootsie knew otherwise. She went to Gill’s office only to find Gill employee Regina Franchevich packing up Ferrie’s papers. If Ferrie walked into the office, we would all walk out, someone said.
Bootsie sat watching as Regina took a chart, it looked like a diagram, of an automobile from a high angle looking down, surrounded by buildings at what was clearly Dealey Plaza. When Franchevich tossed it into a wastebasket, Bootsie fished it out.
“This should be turned over to the FBI or the Secret Service,” Bootsie said.
Franchevich angrily snatched the diagram back. “It’s nothing,” she said. She threw it back into the trash. Again Bootsie plucked it out. “I’ll give it to the FBI,” she said. Franchevich grabbed the paper, this time for good, if not before Bootsie Gay spotted on that diagram the words “Elm Street.”
Bootsie Gay later reconstructed the diagram for Jim Garrison. She drew a square, denoting a building. Inside a second square, she wrote “VIP,” explaining that this square represented a vehicle. She had come forward, she explained, because she considered herself “a good citizen and a damn good and loyal American.” David Ferrie, she now believed, “must have done something pretty evil.”
As Bootsie Gay had left Gill’s office that late November day, one of the secretaries imparted a word of advice. “Mrs. Gay, if I were you I wouldn’t call Mr. Gill’s house for a while. I’m sure his phones are tapped.”
Still determined to locate the Cubans pictured with Oswald, Garrison extended his investigation to Dallas and to Miami. In Dallas in late September of 1963, three men had visited a Cuban exile named Sylvia Odio. Two of the men, calling themselves “Angelo” and “Leopoldo,” were Latins, with one, Odio thought, speaking not with a Cuban, but with a Mexican accent. The third was an American whom the others called “Leon Oswald.” They had just come from New Orleans, and were, they claimed, collecting for Odio’s father’s organization, JURE.
A day or two later, “Leopoldo” called Odio and confided that “Leon” had raved about wanting President Kennedy dead. He was an ex-Marine, and wanted to help in the Cuban underground, exactly what Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans had told Arnesto Rodriguez and Carlos Bringuier.
“Leon” had accused the Cubans of lacking “guts.” He insisted that “President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba. . . .”
During the weekend of the assassination, both Sylvia and her younger sister Annie at once recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as “Leon.” The visit demonstrated at once foreknowledge of the assassination as being committed by somebody named “Oswald,” in an obvious conspiracy. Odio would not identify the other two, although she did describe the unusual configuration of “Leopoldo’s” forehead.
J. Edgar Hoover then adopted for Sylvia Odio the same policy he had enlisted for all inconvenient witnesses. Regis Kennedy had called Jack Martin a “nut.” Oswald’s Marine friend Nelson Delgado, who testified that Oswald was a poor shot, was not only a liar and overweight, but “immature and below average in intelligence.” Sylvia Odio, Big Regis now said, “was suffering from a mental condition described as ‘grand hysteria.’” She was “unstable,” and suffered from a “crying need for recognition.” Warren de Brueys said that Garrison was a “nut.”
Alberto Fowler, on Jim Garrison’s behalf, flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico, in an attempt to interview Sylvia Odio, with no success. Having accused the FBI of persecuting her, she remained too disillusioned by her treatment by the Warren Commission and the FBI to cooperate with Jim Garrison’s investigation. Garrison did locate Odio’s uncle, Augustin Guitart, a physics professor at Xavier University in New Orleans. “The FBI asked me many questions about Sylvia’s possible insanity,” Guitart told Frank Klein. “I do not feel that she is insane and [I believe] that she is telling the truth about what happened in Dallas.”
“There is no question about her honesty,” Garrison concluded. Sylvia Odio’s story remained, as researcher Sylvia Meagher put it, “proof of the plot,” proof that there had been a conspiracy. Spies in his office were everywhere, and Joe Oster, Banister’s former partner, reported to Regis Kennedy that the “testimony of Sylvia O . . . was of considerable interest” to Garrison.
By now Garrison was so immersed in the investigation that he instructed his secretary to interrupt him only for calls from Willard Robertson or Governor McKeithen. One day Garrison told her he would not take any calls, “not even if it’s Jesus Christ.” A few moments later, a call came in from the governor’s mansion.
“Governor McKeithen, if he’s not going to take a call from Jesus Christ,” Sharon Herkes said, “I know he’s not going to take a call from you.”
At home, Jim Garrison was permissive, a district attorney who did not believe in punishment, his daughter Elizabeth says. “What purpose did that serve?” he might ask an errant child, and you walked out of the room feeling terrible because you had let down your dad. Jim Garrison was not a conventional father and did not attend Little League games. He did recite “The Cat and the Fiddle,” which he knew by heart, and taught those of his children old enough about Graham Greene and Shakespeare. Liz encouraged the children to appreciate their father and their love for him grew stronger as the investigation took its toll.
For help in Miami, Alberto Fowler enlisted fellow Bay of Pigs veteran Bernardo Gonzalez de Torres Alvarez, a rangy thirty-three-year-old with thinning black hair, large dark eyes and olive skin, now set up in a Miami detective agency. Unknown to both Fowler and Jim Garrison, de Torres had been working for the CIA since December of 1962. When a CIA/FBI liaison offered the FBI information about members of Brigade 2506 (Bay of Pigs) which “CIA had some knowledge of or indirect contact with,” that document was placed in de Torres’ FBI file. A CIA document, informing the FBI of those CIA supported as part of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, also contains the name “Bernardo R. Gonzalez de Torres Alvarez.” De Torres informed against fellow members of Brigade 2506 to the Bureau.
Among de Torres’ efforts was an alliance with Luis Somoza, former Nicaraguan dictator, to use a B-26 bomber to hit Fidel Castro. The FBI, alarmed, reported these plans to the CIA, which yawned. That report had come from de Torres’ own father, who, by August of 1966, was still informing against his son. The word in Miami was that de Torres worked with Charles Siragusa, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and Gene Marshall, both of whom also worked for the CIA. Under CIA protection, Bernardo de Torres told the FBI that he “cannot and will not cease his efforts to fight Communism in Cuba.”
Jim Garrison sent Sergeant Thomas Duffy to Miami to recruit Bernardo de Torres, who was all too eager to work only for expenses. De Torres contributed nothing true to Jim Garrison’s effort. Visiting Jim Garrison in New Orleans, he insisted that Sylvia Odio had inquired whether the men who visited her had been sent by a man named “Leonardo.” He insisted that Leopoldo’s real name was “Antonio.” As will later be revealed in this story he had reason to know otherwise.
De Torres imposed another name: Jorge Rodriguez Alvarado, the person the Warren Commission suggested might have sent Odio her visitors. Soldier of Fortune Gerald Patrick Hemming, who knew de Torres well, suggests that the visit to Odio’s was arranged by a CIA agent, working simultaneously for U.S. Customs, named Steve Czukas, who was also the supervisor of Bernardo de Torres in his real assignment. This was the surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Jim Garrison welcomed de Torres, FBI informant and CIA operative, as he speculated that the men who visited Mrs. Odio, plus Oswald, plus “t
he people who organized it here,” comprised the “assassination plotters,” which was not quite the truth. De Torres repeatedly fed him disinformation: that Oswald was in Tampa when President Kennedy was there, four days before Oswald went to Dallas; that a person involved in the assassination named “Lolita Matamoros” was a “Communist”; that a man named Rafael Mola had flown to Cuba “a few days after the Smith event,” information that came to de Torres, he claimed, through “an agent of the 26th of July.” None of this went anywhere.
Jim Garrison was dubious. One thing he did know was that Oswald was no Communist. He became suspicious when de Torres said he had classified information about an Oswald visit to Miami, and told a tale about the “Miami planning in the summer of 1963,” what seemed like an attempt to draw Jim Garrison’s attention away from New Orleans, although it was in fact true: Oswald had been in Miami. By January 7th, Garrison had ordered his staff “under no circumstances” to offer any information to de Torres. On January 11, 1967, Garrison wrote at the top of one of de Torres’ memos: “His reliability is not established.”
Pershing had begun to inform to the FBI on Jim Garrison’s investigation, insisting he himself had told Garrison to “forget the matter”; he “would not assist Garrison in the investigation.” Now Gervais and Gurvich were joined by de Torres, who told his handlers at JMWAVE everything he knew about the Garrison investigation. “Everybody is looking for me,” de Torres said. CIA passed the news on to the FBI. Hoover paused. Bernardo de Torres had been a useful informant up to this point; now they must hold him at arm’s length. “Be certain . . . don’t use Torres as an informant now in any capacity,” Hoover scrawled. Soon the FBI was insisting that Bernardo de Torres had never been one of their informants.
De Torres gave Alberto Fowler the name of Ferrie’s contact, “Eladio del Valle,” to keep Garrison interested. The expenses de Torres claimed to have generated were hefty—by mid-February $1,500— catastrophic for the investigation. One bill was for $598, the single largest expenditure for the Garrison investigation to date. For the three months he “worked” for Jim Garrison, de Torres accounted for half the total expenditures up to that time.
