A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  Andrews sought help from the FBI. In panic, he lied to Townley and to the Shaw defense, enlisting that lie that Clay Bertrand was “married and the father of four children,” as he settled on the strategy of implicating Eugene Davis, to Davis’ extreme indignation. Andrews told Garrison that Bertrand’s voice was “deep,” while telling Life’s Marc St. Gill that Bertrand had a “soft voice.”

  Among Andrews’ perjuries before the grand jury was his denial that Ferrie had ever called him on behalf of a client. The grand jury only that morning had heard Thomas Lewis Clark testify to the reverse. Andrews swore he never told his investigator Prentiss Davis the name “Clay Bertrand.” Davis testified that he had.

  Andrews knew how important it was for Garrison to identify Shaw as Bertrand: “If Giant gets past that, he is home clear,” Andrews admitted. He wanted “to live,” he told a radio interviewer. “I love to breathe,” he told Harold Weisberg, admitting that Shaw was Bertrand. He had confided to Mark Lane, “They told me if I said anything I would have a hole blown in my head.”

  Jim Garrison indicted Dean Andrews for perjury on April 12th. In the hallway, Andrews paraphrased Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, referring to Oswald: “Of all the offices, he has to walk into mine.”

  On the “White Paper,” after Andrews denies on camera that Shaw is Bertrand, host Frank McGee stares earnestly into the camera and confides that they have learned the real name of Clay Bertrand, which they have sent to the Justice Department. No name is mentioned.

  Other “White Paper” witnesses include two convicts, Miguel Torres and John Cancler (“John the Baptist”). Both insist Vernon Bundy admitted that he made up his story of seeing Shaw and Oswald at the sea wall. Cancler adds that Ivon and Loisel had asked him to plant “something” in Clay Shaw’s house, and that Garrison had promised he would be paroled out of his nine-year prison sentence if he lied and said Shaw, using the name “Bertrand,” had approached him sexually. In August, Torres would demand of Nina Sulzer that in exchange for his having lied for Sheridan, Judge Frederick Heebe should suspend his three-year federal prison sentence.

  James Phelan repeats his Sciambra-memo story, adding another lie, that Russo’s lie detector test had indicated deception. Sheridan did not dare put polygrapher Roy Jacob on camera. Sandra Moffett appears, insisting that Jim Garrison had offered her money to appear before his grand jury, a lie that NBC found it worth traveling to Iowa to tape.

  Fred Leemans, taped in Aaron Kohn’s office, lies by denying he saw Shaw with Oswald at his Turkish bath, a denial he would repudiate. Leemans later swore that Sheridan’s people had threatened that unless he said he was bribed by Jim Garrison’s office, he and his family “would be in physical danger.” He had been visited “by a man with a badge,” claiming to be a “government agent,” and checking Slidell bar owners for “possible income tax violations.” It had to have been Sheridan, wearing his familiar Internal Revenue Service hat.

  On camera, Alvin Beaubouef looks grim. On March 9th, Ivon and Loisel had visited Beaubouef at home. The next day, Beaubouef accused Loisel of trying to bribe him with three thousand dollars to lie about Ferrie. Ivon says he went along precisely to witness the events and be certain nothing untoward occurred. Witness or criminal or suspect, virtually everyone in this story agrees that Ivon was always, as even Gordon Novel puts it, entirely “honorable.”

  Loisel did offer Beaubouef money, and a job, but the offer was predicated on Beaubouef’s telling the truth and taking a lie detector test to prove it. Lies were of no interest to Garrison, who was determined to prove who killed President Kennedy for history. “We would never suborn perjury,” he said.

  The next day, at the office of Beauboeuf’s lawyer, Hugh Exnicios, Loisel repeated his offer. Exnicios secretly taped him, as a sleazy scenario began to unfold. Even as the tape was doctored, Exnicios attempted to sell it. He first approached Jefferson Parish attorney Frank Langridge, who wasn’t interested. Then district Exnicios peddled the tape to the Shaw defense, which was. Irvin Dymond wound up with the tape.

  At Tulane and Broad, Beaubouef admitted in the presence of Alcock and Ivon that he had been told they wanted only the truth. Beaubouef even signed an affidavit that there had been “no bribe.” Soon Beaubouef was accusing Ivon of putting a gun down his throat, and of having signed the affidavit under duress. Aynesworth reported to the FBI that Beaubouef had been “offered bribe and later intimidated.”

  Richard Townley sent Beaubouef and his lawyer, Dymond intimate Burton Klein, to Washington, a trip Klein says was entirely “wasted.” Even Walter Sheridan’s designated polygrapher would not ask Beaubouef whether Lou Ivon had put a gun down his throat.

  Herbert J. Miller Jr. wanted the CIA’s lawyers to talk to Beaubouef, but Richard Lansdale backed away. “This matter is not within our authority,” Lansdale wrote for the record, “notwithstanding that we obviously are involved.” Beaubouef would report he was “jockeyed all around Washington, not knowing who he was seeing or what he was saying to whom.” The trajectory of information went from Hoover to CIA Counter Intelligence and James Angleton.

  Eventually the New Orleans police, led by Major Presley Trosclair, investigated Beaubouef’s charges against Loisel and Ivon. Trosclair quickly unearthed that Beaubouef had helped Garrison, contacting a witness named James Louviere—after Loisel and Ivon’s visit, and after the Loisel taping. Burton Klein was unable to offer specifics. “Read Newsweek,” Klein had told Trosclair, defiantly. Klein insisted that Beaubouef had called to hire him, although that was not so: it was Shaw’s lawyer, Irvin Dymond, Klein’s close friend, who had arranged for him to represent Beaubouef.

  Exnicios would not permit the police to copy the tape, even in his presence, and Beaubouef’s wife would not corroborate his accusation that Loisel had threatened him with “lead being sent in the direction of his posterior.” What statement of Loisel’s gave you the impression that he wanted you to fabricate a story?” Trosclair asked. “The whole conversation,” was all Beaubouef would say. The police discovered that the tape had been altered, and the exoneration of Loisel and Ivon made the front pages.

  For Sheridan’s “White Paper,” the WDSU director had to tell Beaubouef, as they taped, “Don’t drop your eyes so quickly.” Beaubouef, clearly nervous, insists he and “others” were intimidated, but names no names. The NBC correspondent holds a binder purporting to be the “full” transcript of Loisel’s “bribery offer,” but it is never opened. Sheridan does not mention that Ivon and Loisel had been cleared. Nor does Sheridan reveal that Exnicios had offered to sell him the Loisel tape for five thousand dollars.

  Appalled by Aaron Kohn’s public endorsement of the “White Paper,” Jim Garrison summoned him to Tulane and Broad. Kohn was questioned by the fiercest of Garrison’s assistants, Richard Burnes. Honest, ethical and relentless, Burnes had a master’s degree and was skilled in the cornering of a suspect. Liars wilted when they faced Richard Burnes.

  Burton Klein had requested of Garrison’s office that he, Klein, instead of his client Beaubouef, who was “uneducated,” be permitted to appear before the grand jury. “If I am wrong, tell me to leave,” Klein told the wrong man.

  “You are wrong,” Burnes said.

  Like the FBI, Kohn withheld evidence from Garrison. Jimmy Hoffa’s private investigator, Bernard Spindel, possessed tapes and evidence about the Kennedy assassination that he wished to make public. Spindel asked Kohn what he should do. “The Bureau won’t touch it,” Spindel said. “The CIA won’t touch it because their people are involved. The DIA won’t touch it because they won’t interfere. NSA won’t touch it.” Jim Garrison never received these materials.

  Timed with the “White Paper” was the defection of William Gurvich, who, having called Perry Russo “a most convincing witness” and his evidence “sound,” now, in a scenario directed by Sheridan, publicly denounced Jim Garrison. Gurvich flew to New York, where he was “hiding out,” he told Joe and Shirley Wershba.

  Sheridan phoned Gurvic
h at the Wershba apartment. For his compliance, Sheridan then rewarded him with a private meeting with Bobby Kennedy, both at his office and in a car as Kennedy was driven to the airport. When Bobby learned that an article on Gurvich’s visit would appear in Bill Moyers’ Newsday, he asked Moyers not to run it. Moyers laughed and ran it anyway. “Bobby was ‘extremely grateful’ to learn Jim Garrison had nothing,” Gurvich says in Newsday. He had promoted himself to being Garrison’s “chief assistant,” and is so described. He had never read the Warren Report, and Bobby had confided that he had never read it either, Gurvich adds.

  Back in New Orleans, Gurvich handed the Shaw defense all that he hadn’t yet given them of Garrison’s “Master File.” He accused Garrison of ordering the “arrest and physical beating of two newsmen, Townley and Sheridan,” and easily “passed” a Roy Jacob polygraph not only on this question, but also on his assertion that Jim Garrison planned to raid the FBI field office “with red pepper guns”—reflecting an Ivon office joke: “If we catch anybody, we’ll shoot them with red pepper guns.” Gurvich was sheltered by Sheridan’s lawyer, Edward Baldwin, whose CIA-employed brother worked for Clay Shaw.

  Before the Orleans Parish grand jury, Richard Burnes demanded that Gurvich name any members of Garrison’s staff who had done anything illegal. Gurvich could not under oath offer a single name. Then, in the company of Baldwin, he visited the publisher of the Times-Picayune, George Healy, himself a frequent FBI informant; like Phelan, Healy requested only that the Bureau protect his identity. When Gurvich complained about the pro-Garrison reporting of Hoke May and Ross Yockey, both were at once removed from covering the Garrison case.

  On July 27th, Garrison charged Sheridan and Townley with four counts of public bribery as well as intimidation of a witness, including “violence, force and threats upon Marlenę Mancuso, with intent to influence her conduct in relation to her duties as a witness.” Sheridan was also charged with conspiracy to commit burglary over the photograph of the truck stolen for him by Gordon Novel. Sheridan fled to Detroit. He would emerge unscathed from Jim Garrison’s indictment. In 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court disposed of the charges against Sheridan and Townley.

  On Sheridan’s behalf, Bobby Kennedy went public: “It is not possible that Mr. Sheridan would do anything that would in the slightest degree compromise the truth in regard to the investigation in New Orleans,” Bobby said. As for Sheridan the man, “I have the utmost confidence in his integrity, both personal and professional.” Robert F. Kennedy now had less than a year to live; it was not his finest hour.

  Bobby apparently felt he had no choice but to do everything in his power to destroy Jim Garrison’s investigation. As will be shown later, in the months preceding the assassination Oswald had become well-known to Bobby and his closest colleagues in the anti-Castro movement, among them Angelo Murgado, Manuel Artime, and Manolo Reboso. Were even his awareness of Oswald to emerge, Bobby might seem in the public perception to have been complicit in the death of his brother, and no better than his CIA adversaries.

  Gerald Patrick Hemming tells a tale that might serve as a metaphor to explain Bobby’s conundrum. Without corroboration, offering none, Hemming spins a story of Bobby choppering from Palm Beach to a training facility near Homestead Air Force base. There, Hemming imagines, Bobby met with Cubans, many of them Bay of Pigs veterans, who were part of his Special Group. According to Hemming, among the Cubans that day stood one Lee Harvey Oswald, even as independent corroboration does indeed place Oswald in Miami that summer of 1963. The story recalls the scene in the Oval Office witnessed by attorney F. Lee Bailey.

  Hemming postulates that Bobby greeted these Cuban men who considered themselves patriots so that they would know that this time, unlike the Bay of Pigs, the highest authority was backing them. Bobby wanted to know the names and view the faces of those involved. Along with Oswald, Hemming places in that company Bernardo de Torres, whose role was to tail Oswald; this was indeed a de Torres’ assignment.

  The scene may or may not have taken place as Hemming colors it. That Robert Kennedy did everything possible to stop Jim Garrison from investigating the murder of the President is certainly true. That Bobby repeatedly insisted that he would investigate what had happened once he became president, is also true, although it makes little sense—who could guarantee such an electoral outcome? Rumor has it as well that at a Kennedy family meeting Bobby told those assembled that he would have to gain the presidency to deal with the facts of his brother’s death. Only his own complicity in Castro’s planned assassination, however, his acquaintance with the people who turned against his brother, explains Bobby’s active effort to sabotage Jim Garrison’s investigation, and, in that cause, to assist the CIA in its cover-up.

  John Cancler was not so fortunate as Walter Sheridan. Before the Orleans Parish grand jury on July 12th, he was asked by Richard Burnes whether he had made statements for an NBC newscaster. Cancler invoked the Fifth Amendment, and Alcock at once cited him for contempt. In September, Cancler called his FBI handler, Delbert Hahn, and offered him supposedly compromising photographs of Jim Garrison and an “unidentified Negro female.”

  Burnes disposed with equal proficiency of Miguel Torres, who was represented by Burton Klein. “Have we ever asked you to tell us anything but the truth?” Burnes demanded. “No,” Torres had to admit.

  Burnes also reexamined Dean Andrews, as on July 18th new perjury charges were filed. Just the statement that Shaw positively was not Bertrand made the case against Andrews, Burnes thought. If Andrews really didn’t know who Bertrand was, how could he be so certain it was not Shaw? Alcock had sought testimony from Wesley Liebeler, who had interviewed Andrews for the Warren Commission. Liebeler refused.

  “We could subpoena you,” Alcock said, and did. A Vermont judge made the New Orleans summons evaporate.

  It had done Andrews no good to name Eugene Davis as Bertrand. Andrews was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in jail.

  Ross Scaccia, now an assistant U.S. attorney, wanted to know for sure whether Andrews was lying. They met in the parking lot of a filling station. Andrews was morose. Was Clay Shaw Clay Bertrand? Scaccia asked. Andrews did not deny it. He seemed terrified.

  In 1970, Scaccia became Eugene Davis’ lawyer, taking care of his homosexual friends, as once Dean Andrews had done. “Gene, you and I are very close,” Scaccia said. “Is Clay Bertrand Clay Shaw?”

  “Yep,” Davis admitted. “He is.”

  Jim Garrison had filed a six-page complaint with the FCC, demanding equal time and arguing that Walter Sheridan had interfered “with the prosecution of an open case.” NBC offered half an hour, in a panel format, an offer Garrison rejected. He would have to spend half his time educating the panelists, he feared, because they wouldn’t have read the Warren Report. The Shaw defense attempted to enjoin Garrison from appearing at all, but Judge Haggerty ruled that Jim Garrison, too, enjoyed “a citizen’s right to free speech.”

  Garrison chose “a low key fireside chat,” in contrast with what even Tom Bethell called Sheridan’s “shrill” program. He had compiled a list of the people Sheridan had attempted to bribe in the Hoffa case, and a retired police officer named Herman Frazier had agreed to send a confirming affidavit. Garrison did not use it.

  Dressed in a light-colored suit, pipe in hand, Garrison perches on the edge of a desk and speaks directly to the viewing audience. He raises the question of whether Oswald acted alone, and whether there had been a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. This country was not built on the idea that a “handful of nobles” should determine what the people are allowed to know, he says.

  He lays the conspiracy to murder President Kennedy at the door of men “once connected with the Central Intelligence Agency.” Oswald himself was “in the employ of U.S. intelligence agencies,” he says. He ridicules Arlen Specter’s single bullet theory, without which Oswald could not have been condemned as having acted alone. One bullet somersaulting through both Kennedy and Connally was like “an e
lephant hanging from a cliff with his tail tied to a daisy; it may be mathematically possible, but it is not likely.”

  Garrison also defended his office against the charge that they had used “improper methods.” I have always defended the rights of individuals, he says. He mentions that Beaubouef’s charges had been repudiated by the police, and that Cancler and Torres had not stood by their stories when faced by a grand jury.

  “If we still live in the same country in which we were born,” Garrison says, “the attempt to conceal the truth will be a failure.” The people will decide, not a handful of men in Washington and New York. “As long as I am alive,” Jim Garrison promises in a passionate closing, “no one is going to stop me from seeing that you obtain the full truth and nothing less than the full truth and no fairy tales.”

  Garrison was being optimistic. As amateurish, as unbalanced as Sheridan’s “White Paper” appears today, despite its NBC imprimatur, it had its effect. In September, three months after the “White Paper” aired, Lyndon Johnson sat perusing a Harris poll. He was pleased that, whereas in March 1967, 45 percent of respondents thought Jim Garrison would “shed light on JFK death,” by September the figure had dropped to 32 percent. Now 60 percent of those polled had lost faith that much would come of Jim Garrison’s investigation.

  SMOKING GUNS IN Λ A RURAL PARISH

  13

  Why was his name erased?

  —Francis Fruge

  W HILE WALTER SHERIDAN was spending six months traveling back and forth to New Orleans attempting to destroy Jim Garrison’s case, evidence entirely unknown to him was emerging in two rural Louisiana hamlets north of Baton Rouge. The Garrison investigators were Francis Fruge—a lean, shrewd Cajun state police officer specializing in narcotics, an intense man with piercing black eyes—and Anne Dischler—an undercover investigator for sheriff’s’ offices and for the State Sovereignty Commission whose role was to thwart the desegregation of Louisiana’s public institutions. In her thirties, Dischler was a strong, determined woman, strikingly attractive with hazel eyes that took on the color purple. She was the mother of seven children.