by Joan Mellen
In two months, Jim Garrison had to stand for reelection. To mount any campaign at all, he had to borrow money from loan shark “King Solomon,” who hesitated. Jim Garrison was a financial risk. Finally the loan shark agreed to take a second mortgage on Garrison’s house at an interest rate of 12 or 13 percent.
Garrison was exhausted and did almost no campaigning. He did not make an appearance even in Algiers where the assessor James Smith’s daughter had been murdered by a man who had a prior charge reduced. A longtime Garrison supporter, Smith couldn’t even reach Garrison, who owed him, at the very least, condolences, if not an explanation for why his office had chosen on that earlier occasion to treat his daughter’s future murderer with leniency. Smith also expected that Jim Garrison would reassure him that the man this time would face the ultimate penalty. Because Garrison did not make contact with Smith, at once he lost Smith’s support, and the Algiers vote.
Black organizations traditionally expected money for their endorsement, but not from Jim Garrison. All they wanted was a handshake. Garrison did not show up for a meeting with BOLD, one of the leading African-American groups. While BOLD leaders sat cooling their heels at Tulane and Broad, John Volz tried to reach Jim Garrison. Finally, Garrison called Volz, only, unperturbed, to say casually, that he had forgotten that he had an appointment with BOLD. At one television debate, Garrison was represented by an empty chair.
On election day, he didn’t even bother to vote for himself. Then, when Harry Connick beat him by 2,221 votes, he demanded a recount. Leaving office, Garrison talked about what mattered to him most. The day would come, he predicted, when it would be recognized that “we were not wrong in our inquiry into President Kennedy’s assassination.”
Garrison had to stand trial once more, on March 18, 1974, for not paying taxes on the pinball bribes for which he had already been acquitted of accepting. He represented himself and sat reading the newspaper at the defense table. “As a bookkeeper, I’d probably be a better garbage man,” he acknowledged. In his closing, he compared the ill-fated Louisiana Loan and Thrift to a “Chinese laundry in the middle of a thunderstorm.” It took the jury less than an hour to acquit him.
His career shattered, his marriage finally over and his health questionable, at the age of fifty-two Jim Garrison had to begin life over again. In a desultory way, he practiced law with Russell Schonekas, mostly providing referrals. For a generous fee, he represented Gordon Novel, who had been accused of conspiracy to fire bomb the United Federation of Churches building on St. Charles Avenue during Mardi Gras. Only later would Garrison and prosecutor and former Garrison assistant, Lawrence Centola Jr., learn that there was a moratorium on the demolition of buildings on St. Charles Avenue. “Including those you yourself owned,” Centola says with Garrison-like sardonic humor. Novel and his partner had planned a development on the site.
Novel wanted Garrison to introduce the CIA into the case, since Novel had been in touch with them. The Agency, fearing that “the Kennedy probe would be reinvigorated,” at once dissociated itself from Gordon Novel. One Agency document, denying they knew Novel, has the word “employed” by the CIA in quotation marks, suggesting the reverse. But when the new resident agent in New Orleans, Peter Houck, in court to testify against Novel, looked into Garrison’s eyes, he observed “a rather detached air.”
“We don’t want to get into that, Gordon,” Garrison said. “We want to win this case.” Although Novel’s partner was acquitted and the charge was conspiracy, Novel gained only a hung jury. “It takes two to tango,” Garrison had argued—in vain.
All that interested Jim Garrison was the Kennedy case. At the office, he screened the Zapruder film for his colleagues. His secretary, Pat Morvant, was wary as he spoke of telephone security. But one day there was a phone call about checking the equipment, although nothing was wrong. The next morning three men arrived. When they departed, the door to the phone equipment box was open and the contents of Morvant’s desk were in disarray. Garrison put a device on the telephones. If you heard clicking, it meant the phones were tapped. Morvant heard the clicking.
In 1974, he ran for the State Supreme Court. How would the founders of America feel being “bugged by most of sixteen federal intelligence agencies?” he asked, hoping voters did not want “silent men in the final bastion for the protection of your rights.” He had fought the Federal government, “the most powerful force on the face of the earth—based on personal conviction.” This time he failed even to make the run-off.
“Let me tell you about this person I loved,” he would say years later to another blonde who attracted him, the writer Christine Wiltz. He married his longtime girlfriend, Phyllis Weinert, in 1976, finally. “A man will cheat on his wife, but never on his type,” he had promised her; even so, the marriage would be brief. He tired easily now and complained about his heart. “You have the heart of a hundred-year-old person,” his doctor told him.
There were foreign editions of The Star-Spangled Contract and he was invited to Norway, Russia and France, but he refused to go, despite Phyllis’ entreaties. He remained so indifferent to money that when his mother died and he had the key to her safe deposit box, he asked a bank employee to open it for him; the man said it was empty. Then, not wanting to be bothered, he sold Jane Gardiner’s house for a fraction of its worth.
Only the Kennedy case aroused him. Mark Lane discovered an FBI receipt for a “missile removed by Commander James J. Humes” at the autopsy. Garrison nicknamed it “Bullet #399.5, brother of the notorious Magic Bullet 399” that had supposedly run through the bodies of both President Kennedy and Governor Connally. Had the FBI named it “John Edgar Junior?” Garrison joked, since the director appeared to have “adopted it?” He embroidered the conceit until the bullet “may have been removed from Commander Hume’s leg. This could be checked out by a reexamination of Specter’s computations—provided he hasn’t burned his notes by now.”
In 1978, Garrison ran for the Louisiana Court of Appeal, Fourth Circuit, mortgaging the property he owned with Dr. Fisher to finance his campaign. Alone of the old crowd loyal, Lou Ivon helped him. He defeated his former law partner Denis Barry, who spent $100,000 to Garrison’s $40,000. The black organizations supported Barry, but the black voters went for Garrison. “Rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated,” he said, quoting Mark Twain.
Word came to him that his father had died. Under “family” on Earling Garrison’s death certificate, it said “none.” Reading that, Jim Garrison burst into tears, the wound as fresh as the day Jane had seized the children and left Iowa for good.
He was childlike in his pleasure at being a judge. Always he supported the underdog, no matter that the record might not support an appeal. He ruled for a grandmother seeking parental rights; for a boy on crutches who fell at the Schwegmann Brothers supermarket; and for a young woman paralyzed for life in an accident as she exited a friend’s car. She will not ever have children, Garrison wrote, “and will never experience sexual fulfillment.”
“You’re a damned Robin Hood,” said Judge James C. Gulotta, once his Tulane classmate and now chief judge of the court and his closest friend.
“I thought you had empathy for people,” Garrison rejoined. His opinions were not predictable. In a case of police brutality, he ruled for the police. Once he sided with an oil company. When his old adversary Rosemary James came before the court to appeal a contempt citation, Garrison favored throwing out the case against her. It was a freedom of speech issue and he was always resolute on that principle. His sense of humor did not fail him. He voted to reverse the conviction of a man impersonating a lawyer and accepting a bribe from the family of an Angola inmate, a case that had been presided over by Jerome Winsberg, who had defeated Jimmy Alcock and cost him his judgeship. “This is the most pitiful and ridiculous decision I have seen in my entire life,” Winsberg wrote Garrison.
“I think you should know that some idiot has written a letter to me and is using your name,” Garrison replied.
He wrote two brilliant opinions. One was on behalf of a firefighter named Patrick M. Callaghan, who refused both to apologize to a superior whom he accused of abandoning his men in a burning building, and to work without pay. Callaghan’s speech was protected under the First Amendment, Garrison wrote. As for the apology, “such matters are better left to the province of Amy Vanderbilt and Emily Post.”
Even more imaginative was his invocation of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery in his defense of Callaghan’s reluctance to work without being compensated. “We are somewhat surprised,” Garrison wrote, “to learn that the Fire Department and the Civil Service Commission regard involuntary servitude as still in existence in the U.S. We thought the issue had been resolved some time ago.” He copied the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution into his opinion.
After thirteen years of service, Vincent Bruno was fired by the police department, ostensibly for disobeying sick leave regulations. In fact, as president of the policemen’s union, PANO, Bruno had infuriated his superiors by calling a strike leading to the cancellation of Mardi Gras. The court affirmed the lower court’s decision, only for Garrison to dissent in his most passionate opinion, which he titled “The Grinch Who Stole Mardi Gras.”
He noted that Bruno had been fired the day after PANO affiliated with the national AFL-CIO. Breaking the union was the real motive behind Bruno’s dismissal. Garrison’s opinion quotes Kafka, Alice in Wonderland and P. G. Wodehouse and compares the sick leave rules to the “much vaunted ‘crime of the century,’” in an oblique reference to the Kennedy assassination. “They couldn’t break the union, so they broke the union leader,” Garrison concludes, calling the court system a “secret officials” club.
One day Bruno received a telephone call from Garrison friend and public relations aide, Silvio Fernandez, requesting that they meet at La Louisiane, still Garrison’s favorite restaurant. When Bruno arrived, Jim Garrison was waiting for him.
“You lost your case, Vincent,” Garrison said. “We had a meeting and we decided to put you back to work. We were going to rule in your favor.” Then, Garrison revealed, that decision was reversed 2 to 1. Mayor Dutch Morial had telephoned all three judges on the panel to ensure that Bruno would not be reinstated. Judge Israel Augustine was planning to run for Congress and required Morial’s support (he got it, only to lose anyway). Judge Charles Ward required Morial’s help in retiring his campaign debt.
“Two of us capitulated,” Garrison said. He wanted to hold a press conference, but Fernandez and Bruno talked him out of it. It would ruin his judgeship and nothing could be done for Bruno now anyway.
A single day did not go by without his mentioning the Kennedy assassination or the CIA. His clerk Sallee Boyce thought his hero worship of the Kennedys was like his admiration for the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Julie Sirera, skeptical of his view that, had Kennedy have lived, he would have ended the Vietnam war, thought Garrison’s opinion of John F. Kennedy was idealized. To his clerks, he described what he had seen at Dachau, adding he never wanted to return to Europe.
When in the spring of 1976 he learned that the government was planning another investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Jim Garrison was dubious. He didn’t believe any congressional committee had “that much courage.” He changed his mind when he met Gaeton Fonzi, then working with Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker.
Fonzi arrived in New Orleans believing that Jim Garrison had “minimized the relationship between organized crime and the intelligence community.” But Garrison was nothing like what the media made him out to be. Garrison in fact acknowledged at once that organized crime was a “key part of the assassination conspiracy.”
Describing his own investigation as only a beginning, Garrison stated that he did not want personally “to get into the act.” He hoped to help Fonzi “avoid the mistakes” he had made, to “separate out the false leads and identify the Greek coming in with the gifts.” He was particularly bitter about Bill Turner who, “using false statements,” and a “totally false picture,” had led him to charge Edgar Eugene Bradley mistakenly.
Fonzi had his own doubts once Turner told him about a supposed meeting between Enrique (“Harry”) Ruiz Williams, E. Howard Hunt and Richard Helms in a CIA safe house in Washington D.C., on the very morning of the assassination as they planned a second Bay of Pigs. It seemed to Fonzi that Turner was directing him back to a CIA story discarded even by the Warren Commission, that Fidel Castro had ordered the assassination.
Fonzi confirmed many of Jim Garrison’s suspicions. Seth Kantor, a journalist who studied Jack Ruby, suggested that Fonzi visit the Royal Street gallery of one E. Lorenz Borenstein. Up a “junkstrewn winding stairway” Fonzi trudged. Then he pushed open a door only to discover a “stoop-shouldered, bald-headed little man with a drooping gray mustache and thick glasses perched at the end of a bulbous nose.”
Six months to a year before the assassination Ruby had bought a “vulgar water color scene,” Borenstein told Fonzi. It had been CIA operative William Gaudet, working simultaneously for the FBI, who had told the Bureau of Ruby’s visit.
Ruby had revealed that his real name was Rubenstein,” Borenstein said. His own uncle was Lev Bronstein, Leon Trotsky, he claimed. (“I’ve never heard of him,” laughs Esteban Volkov, Trotsky’s grandson, who would be Borenstein’s relative, if Borenstein was in fact Trotsky’s nephew. “How many people have claimed to have a family relationship to the Old Man!”
“A pleasant enough slob,” Borenstein remembered Ruby.
“I didn’t know I sold paintings to Jack Ruby until the FBI told me,” Borenstein had confided to his old friend Mary Ferrell.
Now Borenstein shared his opinion on who killed President Kennedy with Gaeton Fonzi.
“The CIA did it,” Borenstein said.
“Larry, did you ever do any work for the CIA?” Mary, ever sharp, asked him one day.
“In any port city, businessmen are asked to do things for our government,” Borenstein said.
The HSCA investigation sparked new public interest in Jim Garrison. He told New Orleans magazine in June 1976 that the involvement of the “federal intelligence community” in the murder of John Kennedy was so obvious that it was as if “I were to get into the habit of giving interviews to explain that the sun rises in the east.” Had the entire Agency been involved? he was asked. Those involved were not underlings, he replied, but “powerful elements,” which was why the assassination had to be “ratified by the entire Agency . . . as a policy.”
Three CIA components reacted to this article: the Chief of Domestic Collection (formerly Domestic Contact Service); the Office of General Counsel; and the Deputy Chief of Operations (formerly Plans), the clandestine services. A memo from J. Walton Moore in Dallas is titled, “Request For Guidance In Responding To News Media Inquiries.”
HSCA was headed by distinguished former Philadelphia prosecutor Richard A. Sprague and a brilliant prosecutor out of Frank Hogan’s New York office, Robert K. Tanenbaum. Sprague at once set down guidelines. He would hire no one connected to the FBI, CIA or any federal agency because “to do a thorough investigation, those agencies’ actions would be part of the investigation.” He would “delve deeply into the methods of the FBI and CIA.” Richard Helms at once began to lobby the Kennedy family not to cooperate with the Committee. When Sprague called Edward Kennedy, he refused to come to the telephone. Bobby, of course, had already silenced the family, for all time, it would seem.
Sprague subpoenaed CIA records. They never arrived. Representative Henry Gonzalez himself, chairman of the committee, told the CIA just to ignore the subpoenas. When the CIA demanded security checks on everyone looking at the few materials it did supply, along with confidentiality agreements, Sprague refused. “I’ll be damned if they’ll investigate us before we investigate them,” Tanenbaum said. The CIA retaliated by marshalling its media and congressional assets to accuse Sprague of trampling on people’s rights, the same false charge they had
leveled against Jim Garrison.
Like Fonzi, Tanenbaum was at first wary of Garrison. Then he was shown a list of CIA plants in Garrison’s office, a list also witnessed by researcher Eddie Lopez and by Louisiana investigator, L. J. Delsa. There were at least nine names: Among them were Raymond Beck, William Martin, Gordon Novel, Thomas Bethell, William Gurvich, Bill Boxley and Pershing Gervais.
Tanenbaum also found a companion document, an internal memo from Richard Helms’ office. It revealed how the CIA had followed, harassed and attempted to intimidate Jim Garrison’s witnesses. When Jim Garrison had complained of CIA sabotage of his investigation, it had been true.
A Team #3 was created to investigate the Louisiana leads. Homicide detective L. J. Delsa, a burly ex-Marine with flashing green eyes enlisted Robert Buras, soft-spoken and introspective; Buras had once investigated radical groups for New Orleans police intelligence. L. J. was flamboyant, his language salty; Buras, conservative and religious, remained determined to withhold judgment on Jim Garrison. Fonzi dubbed them “the odd couple.” Their involvement led Jim Garrison to believe that a genuine homicide investigation of the president’s death had begun. Speaking in May 1977 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was elected to the Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame, Garrison said he hoped for arrests “before the year is out.”
Sprague was soon forced to resign. Former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg was willing to replace him under the condition of full CIA cooperation, which he explained in a telephone call to CIA director Stansfield Turner. Silence filled the airwaves. Goldberg repeated his concerns.
“I thought my silence was my answer,” Turner said coldly.
Sprague was replaced by G. Robert Blakey, an “expert” in organized crime, a man who had never seen the inside of a homicide investigation. Blakey was making his third appearance in Jim Garrison’s story. At once Blakey cut a deal with the CIA. Larry Strawderman, the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator, on July 27, 1977, wrote out the terms of the CIA’s control of Blakey’s investigation. “Certain areas relating to the assassination of President Kennedy,” he decreed, “should be entirely disregarded based upon our contention that they are without merit or corroboration.” It was as if the CIA were judging the evidence before the Committee even collected any.
