Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Ferrie’s contact at the DA’s office was Louis Ivon, one of Garrison’s investigators. Ivon worked hard to get Ferrie to cooperate with Garrison’s investigation and turn state’s evidence against Shaw. When Ferrie, within days of his death, called Ivon to complain about the media hounding him relentlessly since publication of a front-page article in the February 18, 1967, New Orleans States-Item with a photograph of Ferrie and captioned “Eyed as Pilot of ‘Getaway’ Craft-Flier,” Ivon put Ferrie up for two nights at a New Orleans motor hotel. The only reference to this in Garrison’s book was his writing that Ivon had rented a room for Ferrie at the “Fountainbleau Motel” under an assumed name on two separate nights, and Ivon had told Ferrie, “You call us anytime you need us, and we’ll give you a hand,” and suggested that Ferrie order whatever room service he wanted and that he try to relax. And the only reference in Garrison’s book to Ivon or anyone else in his office talking to Ferrie during this precise period about the assassination is Garrison’s saying that Ivon told Ferrie, “I only wish you were on our side. I can guarantee you that the boss would give his right arm to have your mind working with us.” No response from Ferrie is indicated, obviously meaning that nothing Ferrie said was of any significance.190 In JFK: The Book of the Film by Stone and coauthor Zachary Sklar, the source for the conversation wherein Ferrie allegedly indicated he had personal knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy is listed as Louis Ivon. “At times, however, we had to put words in Ferrie’s mouth,” The Book of the Film concedes on page 88 to its very small number of readers. How nice. But Stone, of course, did not acknowledge this to the millions of people who saw his film.

  Garrison’s book is close to four hundred pages of fluff and nonsense in which he desperately tries to convince his readers of a conspiracy to murder Kennedy. An implied confession from Ferrie to him and his assistants would have been the very centerpiece of his book. The highly incriminating words of Ferrie in Stone’s movie (“The shooters don’t even know. Don’t you get it?”) are not to be found anywhere in Garrison’s book because apparently even Garrison was unwilling to say that a man admitted complicity in a murder when he did not. But Oliver Stone had no such reservation. As indicated, Stone fabricated, for his audience, this dramatic admission by Ferrie of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Since I’m not a student of Hollywood films, I don’t know if JFK is a reflection on Oliver Stone’s other works, some of which, I’m told, are excellent. But if it is, the question has to be asked, Has there ever been a filmmaker who has taken more liberties with the truth? And does Stone have any qualms about what he did? Here’s what he told Newsweek: “Is Clay Shaw violated by my work? Is he going to come haunt me at night, drive me to the edge of madness? I have to live with my conscience and if I have done wrong, it’s going to come back on me. But John Kennedy might be in my dreams, too, saying, ‘Do it, go out there, find my assassins, bring them to justice.’”191

  22. David Ferrie was found dead in his second-floor New Orleans apartment on the morning of February 22, 1967. In the movie, Ferrie, shortly after his “confession” to Garrison and his assistants, is shown being murdered by two Latin men who are forcing something down his throat. Suspicious, right? But that’s only if you’ve already forgotten that Ferrie didn’t confess to Garrison. Moreover, the coroner’s report on the autopsy of Ferrie, conducted by Dr. Ronald A. Welsh, a pathologist for Orleans Parish, at 3:00 p.m. on February 22, 1967, listed the “Classification of Death” as “Natural”—that is, Ferrie had died from natural causes. The cause of death was a “rupture of berry aneurysm of Circle of Willis [a circle of blood vessels located along the undersurface of the brain between the brain and the skull base] with massive hemorrhage.” Of course, aneurysms have been known to rupture from severe, blunt trauma, but the report said, “There are no external marks of violence on the body at any point” and “there are no evidences of trauma or contusions to the scalp at any point.” Walsh found evidence of “hypertensive cardiovascular disease,” indicating high blood pressure.192*

  As to Oliver Stone’s showing his audience two men forcing something down Ferrie’s throat, a sample of Ferrie’s blood was taken on February 22 to determine the presence or absence of “alcohol, barbiturates, cyanide, heavy metals,” or “caustic agents.” The toxicology report dated February 24 from the Orleans Parish toxicologist, Dr. Monroe S. Samuels, and chemist, Angela P. Comstock, said the blood specimen “was negative” as to the presence of these substances.193 Oliver Stone, naturally, did not furnish his audience with this information.

  Ferrie had been under enormous stress from Garrison’s investigation of him, and was angry about Garrison’s harassment, which included staking out his apartment. “The DA’s men established a 24-hour surveillance in the basement of a house across the street from Ferrie’s apartment building where they set up motion picture cameras to record the movements in and out of Ferrie’s building.”194 On February 17, Ferrie told Dave Snyder, an investigative reporter for the New Orleans States-Item, in a long interview that he was giving serious thought to filing a lawsuit against Garrison. Snyder noticed that Ferrie’s “steps were feeble” and Ferrie said he had encephalitis (inflammation of the brain causing abnormal sleepiness). Ferrie told Snyder of his fear of arrest and his anger and bitterness over Garrison’s accusations against him.195

  The following day, four days before Ferrie’s death, Andrew Sciambra and Louis Ivon of the New Orleans DA’s office went to Ferrie’s apartment pursuant to Ferrie’s telephone request that they do. Per their memorandum to Garrison of their interview of Ferrie, Ferrie said “that the reason he had called us was that he was getting concerned over our investigation. He had heard all kinds of rumors that he was going to be arrested and that he wanted to find out if these rumors were true.” But the memo is silent as to what, if anything, Sciambra and Ivon told Ferrie in response to his question about whether the rumors were true. Sciambra, the writer of the memo, said that Ferrie had greeted him and Ivon at the bottom of the stairs to his apartment and told them he would follow them up the stairs because “it would take him some time to climb up the stairs as he was sick and weak and had not been able to keep anything in his stomach for a couple of days. He moaned and groaned with each step he took up the stairs.” Once inside his apartment, Ferrie “laid down on the sofa…with two pillows under him” as they spoke to him. Sciambra went on to say he did not believe Ferrie was “as sick as he pretended to be,” but did not spell out why he formed this opinion. During the interview, Ferrie complained that the media was “hounding him to death” and, indeed, a reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune called him shortly thereafter while they were there.

  Ferrie cursed Jack Martin (true name, Edward Stewart Suggs), a part-time private detective and former friend of his (see later discussion), during the interview, saying Martin started the investigation of him because Martin was jealous of his relationship with attorney G. Wray Gill.* Martin, he said, was trying to ruin him and was “a screwball who should be locked up.” When Sciambra asked Ferrie, “Dave, who shot the President?” Ferrie answered, “Well, that’s an interesting question and I’ve got my own thoughts about it.” Ferrie then proceeded to sit up and draw a sketch of Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository Building and “went into a long spiel about the trajectory of bullets in relation to the height and distance.” He then gave a “lecture on anatomy and pathology [and] named every bone in the human body and every hard and soft muscle area” and concluded that one bullet could not have caused all the damage the Warren Commission claimed it did. To the question of whether he knew Clay Shaw, Ferrie responded, “Who’s Clay Shaw?”

  “How about Clay Bertrand?”

  “Who’s Clay Bertrand?”

  “Clay Bertrand and Clay Shaw are the same person,” Sciambra said.

  “Who said that?”

  “Dean Andrews told us,” Sciambra answered.

  “Dean Andrews might tell you guys anything. You know how Dean Andrews is.”196

&nbs
p; Some time that same day, February 18, Ferrie went down to the FBI’s field office in New Orleans and told them he was a sick man, was disgusted with Garrison, intended to sue him for slander, and wanted to know what the bureau could do to help him “with this nut” Garrison.197 Around that time, Ferrie was also suffering from severe headaches.198 Carlos Bringuier, the anti-Castro activist with whom Oswald had the street confrontation in August of 1963, told author Gerald Posner he saw Ferrie two days before he died and “he looked real sick. He told me, ‘I feel very sick. I should be in bed. My physician told me to stay in bed. I have a big headache. Garrison is trying to frame me.’”199 All of this tension—being a suspect in the murder of the president of the United States, particularly when you know the charge is spurious—may very well have contributed to his death. Dr. Ronald A. Welsh, who conducted the autopsy on Ferrie, told author Patricia Lambert that there was “scar tissue indicating that Ferrie had had another bleed, a small one, previously,…one or two of them at least two weeks before he died. This is a common occurrence with berry aneurysms. People have one or two before they blow out completely…His headaches were from the…early bleeds.”200

  The last known person who spoke to Ferrie before he died was Washington Post reporter George Lardner Jr., who arrived at Ferrie’s apartment around midnight and stayed until almost 4:00 a.m. on the day Ferrie died. Ferrie told Lardner that he “didn’t know [Oswald] and had no recollection of ever meeting him,” and that Garrison’s investigation was a “witch hunt.”201 The forty-eight-year-old Ferrie was found dead in bed around 11:40 a.m. later that morning, lying on his back under a sheet, nude, with two unsigned and undated typewritten notes nearby, one that began, “To leave this life is, for me, a sweet prospect,” and closed, “If this is justice, then justice be damned.” The other was addressed to “Dear Al” and read in part, “When you receive this I will be quite dead…I wonder how you are going to justify and rationalize things…All I can say is that I offered you love and the best I could. All I got in return, in the end, was a kick in the teeth. Hence, I die alone and unloved…I wonder what your last days and hours are going to be like. As you sow, so shall you also reap. Goodby, Dave.” “Al” is believed to be Al Beauboeuf, a homosexual companion of Ferrie’s to whom Ferrie left all his personal property in his will.202

  On the day of Ferrie’s death, February 22, Garrison, calling Ferrie “one of history’s most important individuals,” told the media, “There is no reason to suppose there was anything but suicide involved.”203 Why, in Garrison’s mind, had Ferrie committed suicide? Garrison told reporters that Ferrie “knew we had the goods on him and he couldn’t take the pressure…A decision had been made earlier today to arrest Ferrie early next week” for being part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. “Apparently, we waited too long.”204 But this almost assuredly was not true, just loose talk on Garrison’s part. In his own book, where he discusses the circumstances of Ferrie’s death, he makes not the slightest allusion to having decided to arrest Ferrie. Indeed, he suggests the exact opposite. “With David Ferrie around to lead us, however unconsciously, to Clay Shaw…I knew we could have continued to develop an ever stronger case against Shaw. With Ferrie gone, it would be a lot harder.”205 Garrison’s lead prosecutor against Shaw, James Alcock, told author Patricia Lambert that “to my knowledge, there was no intent to arrest David Ferrie.”206

  This is hardly surprising since, although Garrison suspected Ferrie of being somehow involved in the assassination, there was no evidence against Ferrie to base an arrest on. (Perry Russo’s allegation against Ferrie wasn’t made to Garrison’s office until February 25, three days after Ferrie’s death.) Former assistant Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler, who helped conduct the New Orleans phase of the investigation into Kennedy’s death, told the New York Times on the day of Ferrie’s death in 1967 that Edward Voebel, a high school classmate of Oswald’s, told local and federal investigators on the day of the assassination back in 1963 that he thought Oswald had served briefly in a New Orleans Civil Air Patrol unit commanded by Ferrie, and three days later they received reports that Ferrie had made a trip to Texas on the day of the assassination. “We checked all of this out, and it just did not lead anywhere,” among other things learning that Ferrie had gone to Houston rather than Dallas on November 22, 1963. “The FBI did a very substantial piece of work on Ferrie. It was so clear that he was not involved that we didn’t mention it in the Report. Garrison has a responsibility to indicate just why he thinks Ferrie might have been involved, and so far as I can determine he has given no reason.”207 But Garrison did not do this because he could not do this. All he could say to the media in a formal statement he issued to the press later on the day of Ferrie’s death was that “evidence developed by our office had long since confirmed that he was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy.”208 But what could that evidence have been, particularly since, as indicated, Perry Russo had not yet surfaced with his totally discredited story about Ferrie conspiring with Shaw and Oswald?

  Tom Bethell, the researcher and keeper of the files at the New Orleans DA’s office during this period, tells the story about Mark Lane coming into his office one day having been authorized by Garrison to look at Ferrie’s file. “You know, Mark,” Bethell told Lane, “the Ferrie file is embarrassing. There’s absolutely nothing in it of any importance”—by that, he told me, he meant that the DA’s office had “nothing at all connecting Ferrie to the assassination.” Lane responded that if anyone else looked at the file and couldn’t find anything of any value, “just tell them the important stuff is kept in a different file.” Bethell told me that this “convinced me that Lane wasn’t troubled at all by the fact that Garrison was proceeding against Ferrie without any evidence.”209

  In fairness to Oliver Stone, just as the New Orleans coroner’s medical conclusion that Ferrie died from a ruptured blood vessel in the brain virtually forecloses his having been murdered, if, indeed, the two notes found in his room were suicide notes, they would likewise virtually* foreclose his having died, as the coroner said, from a ruptured aneurysm in the brain. Whether the notes were, in fact, suicide notes is not completely clear, though the “To leave this life” one obviously goes in that direction. Of course, Ferrie was in very ill health at the time of his death, and he may very well have written the subject notes at some earlier time in possible contemplation of impending death. In any event, there is absolutely no evidence that David Ferrie was murdered. But in Oliver Stone’s fine hands, there is no question that he was. Stone shows Ferrie being murdered (which, as we’ve seen, even Stone’s hero, Garrison, didn’t believe), obviously to silence him before he elaborated on his incriminating statements to Garrison, statements we know he never made.

  23. In the movie, Jack Martin (played by Jack Lemmon), a down-and-out alcoholic private eye sidekick to Guy Banister, ’fesses up to Garrison at a racetrack (and why would any moviegoer disbelieve Jack Lemmon?) that at one time or another he had seen Oswald, Ferrie (whom, as indicated, he actually did know), and Shaw together in Banister’s office. Garrison, in On the Trail of the Assassins, says that in late 1966 Martin told him about seeing Ferrie and Oswald in Banister’s office in the summer of 1963.210 Martin didn’t say anything about seeing Clay Shaw there, but no problem. In his movie, Oliver Stone decided to gratuitously toss in Shaw for good measure.

  Naturally, Stone doesn’t tell his audience that Martin’s credibility was so bad that as desperate as Garrison was to show the Shaw jury that his three alleged co-conspirators knew each other, he never called Martin to the stand during Shaw’s trial to tell the jury what Stone had Martin (Lemmon) tell his audience. That tells you more than anything just how total Martin’s lack of credibility was. In the previously mentioned, secretly taped conversation in the law office of Hugh Exnicios (the lawyer representing Ferrie’s friend, Al Beauboeuf, a potential witness at the time in Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw) with Garrison investigator Lynn Loisel on
March 10, 1967, when Loisel mentions an “informer,” Exnicios asks, “You’re talking about Jack Martin?”

  Loisel: “No, no, no. Phew…that sack of roaches…believe you me, anything that he said, 99 percent of it was checked out to be false, you know, made-up, lies, jealousy, everything else. Oh, boy.”

  Exnicios: “I’m glad to hear that it’s not Jack Martin.”

  Loisel: “Man, we will be torn to pieces, but not like that.”211

  So Oliver Stone’s own protagonists, Garrison and his staff, didn’t believe a word that Martin said, yet Stone presented Martin to his audience, unchallenged, as a highly believable witness who had seen Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw together. And of course Stone doesn’t tell his audience that Martin had been in mental wards in two states, including the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1957.212 When FBI agents went to the hospital on January 17, 1957, to speak to him about his claim he was an FBI agent, his psychiatrist informed them that Martin was suffering from a “character disorder,” and that an interview of him by the agents might prolong his hospitalization. Indeed, people like Aaron Kohn, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission in New Orleans, as well as others routinely described Martin as a “mental case.”213 Yet Garrison himself implicitly acknowledges that Martin is the person whose information started his aborted investigation of the assassination in November of 1963, and his full-scale investigation in December of 1966.214*