by Joan Mellen
Damage control began at once. David Chandler invented a story that Donald V. Organ, who had represented Garrison in the defamation suit brought by the judges, had telephoned Shaw and offered to represent him for free. Organ says he never spoke to Shaw in his life.
Then a more persistent rumor took wing. Two weeks before Shaw’s arrest, Garrison and his wife, Liz, had been at dinner at Brennan’s with Charlie Ward and his wife, Lenore. They were seated in the middle of the room, as Garrison preferred.
He had no great admiration for Frank Sinatra, Garrison said. Sammy Davis Jr. was the most talented member of the “rat pack.”
“Say what you may,” Lenore Ward began, attempting to enliven the evening with the worst thing she could think of saying. “Sammy is a good entertainer, but he can’t carry a tune. He’s nothing but a one-eyed nigger Jew!”
Jim Garrison, she knew, was sometimes naive and always took people at face value.
“You’re the most bigoted person I’ve ever met!” Garrison told Mrs. Ward.
“I don’t think that’s quite fair,” Liz Garrison said, and Garrison threw his glass of water in her face. Retaliating, Liz threw her water back at him. He threw wine; she threw wine.
Seated just beyond Lenore Ward was a table of men. A Look magazine writer was dining with Jack Sawyer, who directed the news for the ABC affiliate, WVUE. At this table as well was Clay Shaw.
“He threw a glass of wine,” Shaw said. He got up and went over to the Garrison table. “I know you’re the district attorney, but you’re no gentleman,” Shaw said.
Jim Garrison looked at him, unperturbed.
Liz departed, ordering Lenore, “You go back and sit down and say, ‘you don’t scare me, you bastard.’”
Back home, Garrison showed the Wards the photographs he had taken at the Dachau concentration camp. It was his way of explaining why he could not tolerate any form of racism or bigotry.
But the story hit the streets. Shaw had “humiliated” Garrison, it was said, and this was the reason why Shaw had been arrested, a story Shaw would repeat four years later: “On one occasion, I saw him throw a glass of wine in his wife’s face and it’s very difficult to forgive anybody who has seen you at your most undignified.” Reporter Rosemary James, who numbered Pershing Gervais among her important sources, placed Ella Brennan at Shaw’s table, where Brennan says she had never been. Wilmer Thomas, that same Tulane student candidate, says Liz had thrown red wine only for Jim to duck, so that the wine landed on Shaw’s white linen suit. In another embellishment, Jim Garrison, drunk, had threatened to “get” Shaw, a threat Mrs. Ward says did not happen.
In Jack Sawyer’s memory, Shaw never got up from his seat.
Shaw was indubitably “Clay Bertrand.” The FBI knew it if only because informant Lawrence Schiller reported that three homosexual sources in New Orleans and two in San Francisco had confirmed that Shaw was “Clay Bertrand.” Between fifteen and twenty “independent and unrelated homosexual sources in New Orleans” had mentioned the name “Clay Bertrand.” The FBI told Schiller it had developed handwriting comparisons between Clay Bertrand and Shaw. Before long, the CIA would create a document including both names, “Shaw, Clay” and “Bertrand, Clay.”
Jim Garrison was not so fortunate as the FBI in garnering witnesses willing to testify on the record that they knew Clay Shaw as “Clay Bertrand.” Pat O’Brien’s chanteuse Barbara Bennett had turned on the television and seen Shaw being arrested: “There’s Clay Bertrand!” she shouted out. Shaw was a frequent visitor to Pat O’Brien’s, and Bennett his sometime party guest. She did not come forward. Nor did her friend, Quarter businesswoman Rickey Planche, who owned a dress shop at the corner of Pirates Alley and Royal. Only when she saw “Clay Bertrand” on television, Planche says, did she, too, learn that his real name was Clay Shaw. Neither Barbara Bennett nor Rickey Planche contacted Jim Garrison. “We were intelligent women,” Planche explains. Telling what they knew could only put their lives in jeopardy, they believed.
Fred Leemans Jr., owner of a Canal Street Turkish bath, saw “Clay Bertrand” with a fellow named “Lee” who was “always popping off about something.” Leemans wanted money for his testimony. Shaw’s maid Virginia Johnson told acquaintances but would not admit to Garrison investigators that she saw a letter addressed to “Clay Bertrand.”
Yet potential witnesses kept surfacing. One Valentine Ashworth insisted he had seen Oswald with “Clay Bertrand” and was able to identify a photograph of Shaw. Near Baker, Garrison’s driver, police officer Steve Bordelon, found a witness who said Shaw had been asking about jobs for people using the name “Clay Bertrand.” In Abita Springs, a homosexual named Greg Donnelly knew Shaw, sometimes as Bertrand, sometimes as “Le Verne” or “Lavergne,” Shaw’s middle name. In California, William Turner said he discovered a man named Thomas Breitner who claimed that on the day after the assassination Shaw was introduced to him as “Bertrand.”
In the process of corroborating the identification of Shaw as Bertrand, and of connecting Shaw with Oswald and Ferrie, Garrison inevitably uncovered details of Clay Shaw’s sexual life. Many in New Orleans knew Shaw as the head of a “disciplinary crew of queers,” as businessman Charles Franks, who traveled with Shaw to Latin America, put it. If a homosexual called attention to the group by being arrested, Shaw, dressed as a French executioner, held a tribunal with punishment dispensed in a sadomasochistic ritual. The culprit was chained and lashed with the cat-o’-nine-tails. There was a sign in Murphy’s Barber Shop on Iberville: “Hair cuts—xxx. Shave—xx. Whippings—See Clay Shaw for prices on request.”
Years later Joseph Newbrough would talk about how when David Ferrie was arrested on one of his “crimes against nature” charges, bail bondsman Hardy Davis had been paid by the “Clement Bertrand Society.” The name derived from Pope Clement V (hence “Clem” Bertrand), whose surname was “Bertrand D’Agout or De Got.” In the fourteenth-century church, this pope had sheltered homosexuals. Clay Shaw was Pope Clement V’s spiritual descendant, offering legal help to homosexuals. The FBI soon uncovered the “Clement Bertrand Society” with Bertrand “the name adopted by Clay Shaw and Doug Jones and other Uptown homosexuals.”
Under the name “Clay Bertrand,” the Clement Bertrand Society rented an apartment on Chartres Street. It was a mail drop for pornographic literature and photographs, and for those transactions for gay men caught in the web of an intolerant legal system. Cash by courier was the means of payment to help these young men. An envelope bearing the name “Clay Bertrand” and this Chartres address was spotted by a Bureau informant. The postal carrier reported the delivery of a letter to “Clay Bertrand” to Garrison’s former girlfriend, Evelyn Jahncke.
Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie figured prominently in Shaw’s sexual pursuits. The Reverend Raymond Broshears of the Universal Life Church told Jim Garrison that one day Ferrie introduced Shaw to him as “Clara” at Dixie’s Bar of Music. Ferrie had confided that Oswald did not kill President Kennedy. His own assignment had been to fly two of the assassins from “south of Houston on down through Central and South America.” Shaw was close to Kent Courtney, Ferrie had told him, corroborating other witnesses. Shaw knew arms dealer, Richard Lauchli. Ferrie had also introduced Broshears to Kerry Thornley, with whom Broshears had sex. “I had sex with Thornley and I know his slender hips,” Broshears bragged. Back in California, Broshears sent back praise for the professionalism of Louis Ivon: “Mr. Ivon is one of the best cops I’ve ever met,” Broshears wrote, “in the South, that is.”
Evidence accumulated and continued to accumulate that, despite Shaw’s denials, he certainly was close to David Ferrie. One day Guy Banister asked Joe Newbrough to get Clay Shaw on the telephone. Then he handed the receiver to Ferrie, a scene Newbrough did not convey to Jim Garrison. A Shaw secretary named Aura Lee told a group of doctors at Ochsner that “she had seen Ferrie go into Shaw’s office on a number of occasions,” that Ferrie had privileged access. Herb Wagner never came forward to tell Ji
m Garrison that Shaw had cosigned a loan for Ferrie, although he did identify Shaw as possibly the “big fellow who walked with a very slight limp . . . who used to go around Dave’s service station.”
There were others, such as businessman L. P. Davis, who called Charlie Ward to report that Ferrie had made a reservation for Shaw to go fishing on Free Mason Island. At the fishing camp the owners identified Ferrie and Shaw, remembering them because the trip had occurred so close to the time of Hurricane Betsy in 1965. In Hammond, the owner of a funeral home, Carroll S. Thomas, a friend of Clay Shaw’s, told the FBI he met Ferrie through Shaw; he wondered how Shaw, so conservative, could have been involved with someone so “left wing” as Oswald. Even Layton Martens admitted to Jim Garrison that Oswald “apparently knew someone by the name of Clay.”
Some of Shaw’s sexual partners drew a highly graphic picture of his proclivities. A Northwestern University professor named Henry Lesnick persuaded a young friend named David Logan to contact Jim Garrison about his having been Clay Shaw’s lover. Logan had seen Shaw and Ferrie together at a party and at Dixie’s Bar of Music, where Barbara Bennett also ran into Shaw. Bennett had spotted Oswald there as well. Oswald seemed to “want to associate with gay guys.”
After dinner, Shaw took Logan up to the bedroom where the hooks extended from the ceiling beams. He asked Logan to beat him with a whip, then “to shit in his mouth and pee in his mouth and all over him.” Logan’s testimony is in part corroborated by his knowledge that Shaw had only one nipple. Another witness described Shaw defecating over him on glass, and also said Shaw had one nipple.
Yet another witness, a Texas inmate, imprisoned on a crimeagainst-nature charge, had been introduced to “Clay Bertrand” by Eugene Davis for “sexual purposes.” Bertrand “wasn’t the butchest thing in the world,” Willie Morris reported. He also identified a short, fat man he had seen with Bertrand as Jack Ruby. On whether he knew Morris, Eugene Davis was evasive: “I wouldn’t say yes and I wouldn’t say no,” he said while his lawyer, G. Wray Gill, looked on. But Morris’ testimony was confirmed by the doorman of The Court of Two Sisters, Leander D’Avy. He had seen Oswald, he had seen Ferrie with Eugene Davis, and Oswald had asked to see “Clay Bertrand.”
In December 1968, still refusing to admit he had met Oswald, Eugene Davis did reveal that he knew Shaw and had seen him in a “long black car,” perhaps a Cadillac or a Chrysler. FBI informant Betty Parrott knew Davis had been fired as night manager at The Court of Two Sisters for bringing Oswald upstairs. Only in the late 1970s would D’Avy tell the whole story. Oswald had come up and asked “if there was a Clay Bertrand working there.” D’Avy didn’t know. Then Eugene Davis had ambled by.
“Send this young man in. I’ll talk to him,” Davis said. A few moments later, Davis told a waitress. “He’s just come from behind the Iron Curtain!” D’Avy had seen Shaw talking with Eugene Davis and Oswald and Ferrie, all together in the upstairs apartment.
Jim Garrison was to use none of these witnesses. “Throughout our trial,” he would say, “in every thing I have ever written and in every public statement I have ever made—I never once made any reference to Clay Shaw’s alleged homosexuality.” It had only been in his attempt to identify Shaw as Bertrand that details of Clay Shaw’s sexual life had been exposed. In the public proceedings of the district attorney’s office regarding Shaw, his homosexuality was never mentioned.
At a playful moment in December 1966, Clay Shaw signed the guest book at the VIP lounge at the Eastern Airlines terminal at Moisant International Airport: “Clay Bertrand.” There was a witness, Ronald R. Raymond, a sergeant on the Kenner police force, who confirmed that Shaw was there on that day. Then he told Jim Garrison that he “did not want to be involved.”
Exhibiting greater courage was the hostess of the VIP room, Mrs. Jessie Parker. Among Parker’s assignments was to request that people who entered the VIP room sign the registration book. Mrs. Parker identified Clay Shaw as the man who on December 14th had signed “Clay Bertrand.” Numa Bertel checked her out since she was the seamstress for a family he knew and worked for an established funeral home. When Mrs. Parker’s statement for Jim Garrison leaked out, she began to receive telephone calls threatening, among other things, that she would lose custody of her little boy. Numa reassured her in his avuncular way. Mrs. Parker passed her polygraph, as Jim Garrison, with photographs of the guest book in hand, began to search for corroborating witnesses.
On the same page as Clay Bertrand’s appeared the signature of a businessman named Alfred J. Moran, a member of the board of the International Trade Mart. Well-acquainted with Clay Shaw, Moran was also a CIA operative, part of the clandestine services under the “Deputy Director for Plans,” Richard Helms. Like Shaw, Moran wore the hat of two CIA components and was an asset of the Domestic Contact Service. Moran also served the Miami CIA station, JMWAVE. Only nine days before Jim Garrison reached him, he had performed a task to the satisfaction of his Miami CIA handlers. In New Orleans, Moran was so close to the CIA field office that he was the “personal surety” on Hunter Leake’s notarial bond, testifying to the solvency of the field office.
Jim Garrison sent James Alcock to interview Moran. A handwriting expert has confirmed that the signature “Clem Bertrand” was written by Shaw, Alcock said, Perry Russo’s testimony obviously in mind. The signature reads “Clay.”
He knew Shaw “fairly well,” Moran admitted, but he was positive Shaw was not at the airport on that day. He would have recalled his presence since he disliked him so much. He approved of Jim Garrison’s investigation 100 percent, Moran told Alcock heartily. The only true statement Alfred Moran made to Alcock that day was that, offended by Shaw’s homosexuality and objecting to the CIA’s enlistment of homosexuals, he disliked Shaw intensely.
The next day, November 14, 1967, Moran hosted a cocktail party. Among his guests was the CIA’s Hunter Leake. He had been contacted by a member of Jim Garrison’s staff, Moran confided. They had the names of people who had been at the VIP room on the day Shaw signed the guest book as “Clay Bertrand.” I saw Clay Shaw that day, Moran admitted to Leake. He despised Shaw, he added. He had “objected strenuously” when Shaw was appointed Managing Director of the Trade Mart because “of his alleged homosexual tendencies and consequent susceptibility to blackmail.”
“Jim Garrison has an ironclad case,” Moran said.
All Leake registered, as he reported to his superior, Lloyd Ray, were the words “ironclad case.” He forgot that Moran had, dutifully, despite his personal abhorrence of Shaw, not told Alcock the truth. Ray wrote to CIA headquarters for instructions. At once CIA ran a check on Moran and examined his complex history with the Agency.
The CIA now turned to protecting its operative Shaw, who had revealed so carelessly that he was the Bertrand who had telephoned Dean Andrews for Oswald. First, it had to be determined whether Moran “knows Jim Garrison personally? Is he favorably disposed toward him, his staff or his investigation?” So sensitive was the matter of Moran and Shaw that it was handled by the CIA’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston himself.
Deciding to cleanse the record, Houston chose the strategy of neutralizing Lloyd Ray’s memo of November 15th in which he had put into writing Moran’s having told Leake that Garrison had “an ironclad case” against Shaw. The files had now to be sanitized, altered so as to contradict and deny the veracity of Ray’s original memo.
Houston was not overly worried. Moran would certainly do whatever the CIA asked since he had “always been most helpful and cooperative with the Agency.” Houston would cleanse the files and erase the Lloyd Ray memorandum by having Moran explicitly deny that he had seen Shaw in the VIP room. Further, Moran was to declare his certainty that Shaw and Bertrand “were two different people.” The entire enterprise reveals of course that Houston knew perfectly well that Shaw was Clay Bertrand.
A duck hunt in which both Moran and Leake were already scheduled to take part would be the venue for Leake’s extracting Moran’s den
ial that he had seen Shaw at the VIP room. Then a slipped disk sent Moran to bed, canceling his attendance at the duck hunt. Under the pretext that Leake required Moran’s signature on the annual affidavit of solvency for the CIA field office, a bedside visit was planned. Houston wanted this visit to be “as soon as propitious.” Leake was to “obtain casually the additional information desired.”
On December 11th, Leake appeared in Moran’s bedroom. He poured forth a tale of Jim Garrison’s absurdities, fortified by press reports. Garrison has “flipped his lid,” Leake said, referring to Garrison’s having considered whether a shooter at Dealey Plaza had been concealed in a sewer manhole.
Two days later, Lloyd Ray reported to Lawrence Houston that the mission had been accomplished. The file had been cleansed. Moran was on the record as having denied that he ever “independently” said he saw Shaw at the VIP room that day. He had, rather, only repeated Alcock’s assertion that a handwriting expert had made a positive identification. Moran asserted that he had no independent knowledge of Shaw’s having been at the VIP room. Having told the truth to Leake at the cocktail party, now he lied.
Ray infused his final memorandum to Houston on the subject with a defense of Clay Shaw. It is “inconceivable to us,” he wrote for the record, that Clay Shaw would use an alias at the VIP room since he was so well known to the Eastern Airlines officials. Ray was, however, worried. Should Moran and Arthur Q. Davis, an architect, whose name appears directly above Shaw’s in the registration book, identify their signatures, and should a handwriting expert also identify “Clay Bertrand” as Clay Shaw, “then Clay Shaw is in serious trouble.”
Had Clay Shaw’s use of the alias Clay Bertrand not implicated Shaw in the Kennedy assassination, Houston would not have felt the need to sanitize CIA files with lies. Nor would the CIA have enlisted such highly placed personnel as Houston in an effort to sabotage Jim Garrison’s investigation.
