A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  Charlie Ward ran against him, declaring that he, unlike Garrison, would have charged student demonstrators at Fortier High School and Southern University for taking down an American flag and raising a black liberation flag. But Garrison defended even the right to display a Confederate flag on your license plate. This, too, represented protected speech. Even Rosemary James had to admit that Garrison had been “extremely fair with Negroes, uncommonly so for a Louisiana district attorney.”

  Among Garrison’s opponents was Harry Connick, who attacked him for an increase of crime in New Orleans.

  “In cities where I’m not district attorney, [crime] is spiraling,” Garrison said dryly. He was unique in making no personal attacks on his opponents. Always he defended the Shaw case. “History will show that we were not wrong,” he told one audience. “Just be patient. When it’s over, you’ll be proud of your DA.”

  He still had an aversion to fund-raising and money in general. Buck Kreihs, who ran a marine repair company, knowing Jim Garrison would never bother to collect a campaign contribution, sent his friend Vic Carona to Garrison’s house with the money. There Carona suffered a brain hemorrhage and died. A bar owner friend of Moo Moo’s said if Garrison would just walk into his saloon and shake his hand, he would make a $5,000 contribution. Garrison never bothered to make the time to do it. He hated to campaign so much that reporter David Snyder wrote that Garrison was “the Howard Hughes of New Orleans . . . harder to find than a Saints’ victory.” The States-Item and the Times-Picayune endorsed Harry Connick.

  A mysterious poll suddenly surfaced. It claimed that 45 percent of voters favored Harry Connick, with 28 percent for Garrison. The poll turned out to be fraudulent, a product of “Eugene Newman’s Mid-South Opinion Surveys,” operating out of Little Rock. It received wide exposure from, among others, WDSU. When the Associated Press could not locate Newman, the Connick campaign insisted they had not “commissioned, sponsored or initiated the survey.”

  Although Connick spent $250,000 on his campaign to Garrison’s $20,000, Garrison won handily in the first primary. Among the defeated was his former assistant Ross Scaccia, who came in last.

  Depressed, sitting at home alone in his den on election night, Scaccia took a telephone call.

  “Is this ‘landslide Scaccia?’” Moo Moo said.

  “Jim will hate me forever,” Scaccia said. But Moo Moo invited him to headquarters: “Jim wants to see you.” There Garrison made certain to shake hands with Scaccia as the cameras rolled. Years later when Garrison was a judge and Scaccia was cited for contempt in his divorce hearing, Garrison was sympathetic. “You never did know any law,” Garrison told Scaccia, deadpan. Then he added, “I’ll take care of it,” and did.

  Garrison also stood up for Judge Haggerty when he was caught in a scandal that cost him his judgeship. He called Haggerty’s work on the Shaw case “the most distinguished work on the part of a District Judge that I have ever seen since I’ve been a lawyer.” Garrison went on to recommend Jimmy Alcock for Haggerty’s seat.

  As the CIA watched angrily, Garrison’s reelection allowed him to proceed with his Kennedy investigation. “Not only is subject case not dead, it is not even moribund,” John Schubert complained to the head of the Domestic Contact Service as he reported on the $100-dollar-a-plate dinner sponsored by Cecil Shilstone to retire Garrison’s campaign debt. “The CIA killed John Kennedy,” Garrison told the guests, vowing to continue his investigation. “I won’t compromise. And there’s nothing they can do to stop me because I know who did it.” He believed that “not much more evidence was really necessary.”

  He published a book about the case called A Heritage of Stone, distinguishing it from the work of other critics, whom he dubbed “the Baker Street Irregulars” who “meet annually at Sylvia Meagher’s.” (Meagher had written a congratulatory letter to Clay Shaw.) “We are all in accord that the earth is round,” he said. The issue was no longer flaws in the Warren Commission, but who planned the crime.

  Agent Max Gartenberg had brought the manuscript to feisty Arthur Fields at G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

  President Kennedy was not “just another escalating president,” but was “blocking any further expansion in Indo-China,” Garrison explained, warning Fields, “The people we are dealing with do not follow the Marquis of Queensburg’s [sic] rules.”

  “I hate it but I’m going to publish it,” Fields said. Because the perjury case was still pending, Clay Shaw’s name is not mentioned in A Heritage of Stone. Garrison speaks of his odyssey, how he discovered that the CIA operated within the borders of the United States, and how it took the CIA six months to reply to the Warren Commission’s question of whether Oswald and Ruby had been with the Agency. He enlisted his favorite conundrum: “Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” The final chapter, “The War Machine,” connects the intelligence agencies with the military that serves them.

  In response to A Heritage of Stone, the CIA rounded up its media assets. Jerry Cohen, who with Lawrence Schiller had attempted to prevent Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard from talking to Jim Garrison, panned it in the Los Angeles Times. Life dismissed the book as “smoke.” Wegmann confidante, lawyer Elmer Gertz, who represented Gordon Novel in his libel case against Jim Garrison, in a flagrant conflict of interest, panned A Heritage of Stone in the Chicago Sun Times. In the Washington Post, George Lardner, the last person to see David Ferrie alive, writes, inaccurately, that the author Clay Shaw had in fact commissioned, James Kirkwood, had just appeared and wrote his book because he was “intrigued by the case after a chance meeting with Shaw.”

  John Leonard’s New York Times review went through a metamorphosis. The original last paragraph challenged the Warren Report: “Something stinks about this whole affair,” Leonard wrote. “Why were Kennedy’s neck organs not examined at Bethesda for evidence of a frontal shot? Why was his body whisked away to Washington before the legally required Texas inquest? Why?”

  This paragraph evaporated in later editions of the Times. A third of a column gone, the review then ended: “Frankly I prefer to believe that the Warren Commission did a poor job, rather than a dishonest one. I like to think that Garrison invents monsters to explain incompetence.”

  On WVUE television, Alec Gifford offered a rave. “If he had not become a lawyer,” Gifford said, “he could certainly have earned his living as a writer.” No sentence could have pleased Jim Garrison more. Lou Ivon thought Garrison’s greatest joy was in his writing.

  Resting in Palm Springs on his book tour, checked in as “Lamont Cranston” (“The Shadow”), Garrison wrote to Fields, his “Maxwell Perkins,” signing his letters “B. Traven” and “L. Tolstoi.” He then turned to fiction, studying The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man and The Day of the Jackal. His next work, The Star-Spangled Contract, would be a novel, its hero bearing a variation on one of Garrison’s family names, “McFerran.”

  The government’s attempt to thwart Jim Garrison had included an attempt to charge him with tax fraud, an effort that had begun at least a month before Walter Sheridan’s “White Paper.” On tape, on May 25, 1967, George Wyatt remarks to Sheridan’s assistant Richard Townley, “I thought you were going to get him on income tax evasion.”

  Three years of investigating Jim Garrison’s finances had not produced a case for the IRS. Working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Aaron Kohn offered “detailed information,” such as that the furnishings in the Garrison home were lavish, although the only valuable antiques had come from Liz Garrison’s family, she says. Even Orestes Peña learned that IRS agents were inquiring about how Garrison could afford his house.

  When Kohn could find no financial irregularities, he suggested that the government attack Garrison for tolerating pinball gambling. Although it was illegal for bars to pay off on pinball games with a gadget attached to the machine, no district attorney had ever been able to prosecute the elusive owners of these pinball machines. The gambling device was always add
ed later, after the machines had left their hands.

  In the company of Justice Department lawyer Mike Epstein, no longer bothering to call himself a television producer, Walter Sheridan visited Pershing Gervais at the Fontainebleau Motor Hotel. Your taxes are being investigated, Sheridan told Pershing. Owing back taxes of $8,000, Pershing had the choice of either helping them to nail Jim Garrison or going to jail himself for “three years.”

  Although Pershing had informed on Jim Garrison to the CIA and FBI on the Shaw case, this particular scheme promised little profit and Pershing had no taste for it. Jim Garrison was “an individual who did not care too much about becoming wealthy,” Pershing told the IRS agents assigned to him in May 1968. If Garrison owed back taxes, it was “because of Mr. Garrison’s carelessness.” Any mistakes Garrison made were likely to be “in favor of the government.” Garrison himself had told the IRS agents, “I guarantee you’ll end up paying me when you finish your investigation.” Pershing doubted if Garrison even knew the interest rate on his mortgage.

  Pershing knew that Mike Epstein, working closely with Walter Sheridan on this effort, was about himself to be indicted. Yet, Pershing was surprised to discover, the government was not afraid that this irregularity might jeopardize its determined attempt to destroy Jim Garrison, no matter even that Epstein, already in trouble, and Sheridan were employing blackmail.

  By January 1969, even before the Shaw case had gone to trial, Pershing was making secret tape recordings to incriminate Jim Garrison. All the while he complained to anyone who would listen that the government was trying to “use him to get to Garrison.” Sheridan, in concert with lawyer Edward Baldwin, had threatened him if he didn’t cooperate, Pershing charged, pleading to be left alone. On March 12th, he appealed to IRS Special Agent Walter G. Gibson, reporting that Sheridan had threatened to have his income tax returns investigated if he didn’t help them to implicate Garrison. Pershing also telephoned Senator Russell Long and requested his help. But Long was not powerful enough to fight Walter Sheridan, who operated as a law unto himself.

  In May 1969, the Intelligence Service of the IRS met with Pershing and hammered out a final deal. Pershing would provide information on payoffs to Garrison. His own identity would not be disclosed. He would not have to testify in court. No information he volunteered could be used against him in a criminal case. The government’s case against Garrison would rely solely on Pershing Gervais. They could find not a single other witness or any physical evidence that he had accepted bribes from the pinball owners.

  Much of what Pershing reported had no value, such as that Garrison had purchased a piece of property with Dr. William Fisher— Garrison’s mother had provided the money. Pershing claimed that Garrison had told the office to go easy on the pinball owners, although John Volz and Jimmy Alcock were to deny that this was so. Pershing charged that John Aruns Callery had paid Garrison $2,000 to lay off pinball machines, with Pershing keeping $500 for himself, but no one who knew Pershing would believe that particular distribution of the spoils. When Garrison’s son Jasper fell off his bicycle and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, Pershing told the federal agents that Garrison was “deeply distraught.” Garrison did not care about the issues at hand, “one way or the other.” He was an easy mark.

  In June 1969, in a whispering campaign, Garrison was accused of sexually molesting a thirteen-year-old boy at the New Orleans Athletic Club. The scenario was orchestrated by Layten Martens, who “spun it to Walter Sheridan,” claims Gordon Novel, no friend of Jim Garrison’s. The boy’s name was Pierre Bezou. His uncle was Monsignor Henry Charles Bezou, superintendent of the Catholic Schools; his father, James F. Bezou, was chancellor of the Belgian consulate at the International Trade Mart and a good friend of Clay Shaw’s.

  Garrison, James Bezou and two of Bezou’s sons were in the “Slumber Room” of the NOAC, where cots were lined up for men to nap after swimming in the saltwater pool and enjoying their massages. According to Pierre Bezou, Garrison lifted Pierre’s blanket and lightly flicked his genitals. He did not grab Bezou. He did not arouse him. He did not fondle him. Bezou contends that this occurred twice.

  At the age of thirteen, Pierre Bezou admits, so repressive was the environment of his upbringing that he didn’t even masturbate. That Garrison would have molested a child in the presence of his father and older brother strains credulity.

  Garrison at once told Bezou senior, “There’s a misunderstanding here.” No charges were ever brought, and his monsignor uncle, according to Pierre Bezou, urged his father to back off. A week later, an NOAC member named Lamar Chavin reportedly observed Garrison having a drink with James Bezou at the Old Absinthe House, the two chatting amiably. A short time later, according to Numa Bertel, another of Pierre’s brothers, Jacques, applied to Jim Garrison for a job as an assistant district attorney, hardly the action of a family member who believed Jim Garrison had really molested the boy.

  One day at the Orleans Parish grand jury, a member named Velman demanded, “When are we going to hear these charges against Garrison at the NOAC?” He was so vehement that foreman William Krummel felt obliged to take it up. The only media person to cover the story was Jack Anderson—on February 23, 1970, eight months after the event was said to have taken place. Anderson wrote, obviously utilizing an inside source, that the grand jury was investigating. Anderson added, erroneously, that at the Shaw trial Garrison had “made much of Shaw’s alleged homosexuality”; Shaw’s sexuality had not been mentioned once.

  The adviser to the grand jury was William Alford. Jimmy Alcock told Alford not even to tell Jim Garrison that the Bezou issue had come up. But Alford trooped up to Garrison’s bedroom where he was confined with extreme back pain. Garrison insisted upon getting out of bed and meeting with Krummel. The Bezous never came forward to testify, even before the secret proceedings of the grand jury. When Velman again raised the issue, Krummel demanded, “If you’re going to leak a story to Jack Anderson, but when it comes to ball cutting time nobody shows up, as far as I’m concerned, it never happened.”

  Aaron Kohn wrote Krummel that Garrison had “twice fondled” the boy, a gross exaggeration, one even Pierre Bezou never employed. When five years later James Bezou committed suicide, Coroner Frank Minyard ruled the death “accidental” since it was “witnessed by no one.” Jim Garrison made no comment. It was a full decade later that William Gurvich claimed he had obtained affidavits from James Bezou, Pierre and his brother, affidavits that have never surfaced.

  Aware that Pershing Gervais could not be trusted, Sheridan sought others he might force to implicate Jim Garrison. One day in the summer of 1969 Ross Scaccia, now an assistant U.S. attorney, was at an LSU football game when he was summoned to report to security. Fearing that one of his children was hurt, he rushed over, only to be met by a Justice Department lawyer.

  “We want you to come to Washington,” the lawyer said. “We want to know everything you know about Jim Garrison.” Irritated, Scaccia complied, traveling to Silver Spring, Maryland, where, in a stately mansion, thirty people grilled him about Jim Garrison. Why had Scaccia quit Garrison’s office? What did he know about Garrison’s connections? Did he know anything about Pershing’s partner, Red Strate? Was Jim Garrison in with the pinball people?

  “There isn’t anything to say about Jim,” Scaccia said. Yes, he had heard about kickbacks. Yes, he had heard about the incident at the New Orleans Athletic Club.

  “I don’t believe any of that,” Scaccia said.

  “You work for us,” a Justice Department lawyer said. Scaccia decided that being a federal prosecutor had lost its savor. He resigned and went into private practice.

  On June 1, 1970, a Justice Department Strike Force opened for business in New Orleans. Pinball gambling stood at the top of its list of criminal activity in Louisiana. Some noise issued about Carlos Marcello and organized crime. The sole purpose of the “Strike Force,” however, was to bring down Jim Garrison.

  Pershing proceeded with his taping. He taped Gar
rison so persistently that once, suspecting they were being taped, Steve Bordelon joked, with a reference to the Bezou rumors, “I got a young boy in the car!” Bordelon had driven Garrison for years and never once had Garrison revealed any homosexual or pedophile proclivities. He knew Garrison did not take money because he emptied Garrison’s pockets every night.

  Pershing tried to cobble together a case for the government. Garrison, separated from Liz now, kept a room at the Fontainebleau. He was not a domestic man—his fatherless childhood with a controlling mother had all but precluded that—nor a faithful husband. “I couldn’t take it any more,” Liz had said, finally. “I just couldn’t put up with that anymore.”

  Now Pershing offered to help him pay his Fontainebleau bill with a “little cash.” On one occasion, as soon as Bordelon paid, Pershing rushed over to the cashier to retrieve his marked bills. Pershing promised an ex-convict named Robert Murray $300 to hand Garrison an envelope while pictures would be snapped. But Murray reported him to assistant district attorney Byron P. LeGendre.

  The government harassment had taken its toll as the seasons of tragedy rolled by. On a 1971 trip to Miami, Garrison insisted that he be met at the airport by Richard Gerstein’s chief investigator, Martin F. Dardis. It was late. As the two proceeded through the deserted Eastern Airlines terminal, Garrison glanced at two black janitors mopping the floor.

  They’re FBI agents,” Garrison said. “They’re everywhere. You don’t know how they operate.”

  Unaware of what Garrison had been through and was continuing to endure, irritated because he had tickets for a Dolphins’ game that night, which he was missing, Dardis could not resist a sarcastic comeback.

  “They don’t have any black guys,” Dardis said with his customary harsh realism. “The only black guy in the FBI is the one emptying J. Edgar Hoover’s wastebasket!”

  Three years passed. Pershing grew adept at manipulating the tapes. On February 25, 1971, Pershing seemingly gives Garrison $1,000. On the tape, Gervais makes it seem as if Garrison grabbed the envelope, crying, “You burned my fingers!” Garrison talks about legalizing pinball, but the context is McKeithen’s self-interest, not Garrison’s. If McKeithen supported banning the gadget that permitted pinball gambling, Garrison jokes, “Carlos Marcello will be the next Senator from New Orleans.” Later he would tell William Alford to go easy on pinball owners whom Alford had personally subpoenaed to the grand jury. It came at that moment when Garrison wanted to help McKeithen in his race for the Senate by opposing the law making the knock-off device on the pinball machines illegal. Soon, disillusioned, Alford resigned from the office.