It was the greatest of fortunes that a helicopter carrying an oil executive happened to be flying over downtown New Orleans at the moment of the explosion. The pilot dropped his passenger on the grassy field in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court building and headed for the roof of the faming building. Nine people were trapped there, but his small helicopter could only carry three passengers at a time. Some would have to wait for the next trip. The rest would have to wait for the third trip. So three separate times, this determined pilot landed on the roof surrounded by onyx smoke and orange fames. Rault was the last person to leave the roof. He was lucky. The women who were trapped in their beauty salon on the fifteenth floor were not. Fire investigators estimated the bomb contained five gallons of gasoline, and had exploded in the utility closet right outside the door of the salon. The hallway was immediately filled with fames, blocking the women’s exit. The helicopter could not help them. Faced with certain death by fire, or jumping to their deaths, seven women jumped. There was no net. No air bag. Six died on impact. The camera crews were there. They filmed it all. That night veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite warned his viewers that he was about to show the “grimmest footage” of his career. The nation watched helplessly. I turned off the television and went back to the library, trying to concentrate on thousand year- old hieroglyphs buried in a Mayan grave. One question has smoldered since the fire: Was the Rault Center firebombing the result of Rault’s financing of Garrison’s JFK investigation?9
When Christmas break came, Barbara gave me a key to her apartment and asked me to keep an eye on it while she few home to see her family. A couple of days after she left, I dropped by for a routine check and found that her waterbed mattress, which was resting on the hardwood floor without a frame, had started to leak. I quickly went outside, borrowed a hose from a neighbor’s lawn, and drained the mattress. But the damage had already been done. The wooden floors were severely buckled. It was hundreds of dollars of damage. The landlord would certainly flip. That night I called her at her family’s farm and told her about the leak. She said that she would call the landlord in the morning and tell him.
Several days later, New Orleans woke up to yet another incredible event: Someone had set fire to the Howard Johnson Motel.10 It was directly across the street from the Rault Center, but these arsonists were not experts. And the fire was small in comparison, one smoky hotel room. But in light of what happened at the Rault Center, the hotel guests panicked and ran to the street. And having recently been humiliated in the national news by their inability to do anything to help the seven women who jumped, the New Orleans Fire Department rushed to the scene, hoping to redeem its reputation. The longest ladder was raised to reach the fifth floor window. The bravest firemen rushed up the ladder with no other thought than trying to save someone’s life. As they approached the window, a rifle barrel slid through the opening. The sniper squeezed off round after round, murdering the very men who had come to save him.
The police department broke into a fit of rage. Nearly 600 policemen swarmed to the building in pre-SWAT chaos. Two snipers were reported. The Deputy Chief of Police grabbed several men and led them into a stairwell to find the snipers. Somebody thought he saw something. Somebody fired a high powered rifle in the concrete and steel stairway. When the bullet finished ricocheting, the Deputy Chief of Police was dead.
On the roof, one of the snipers rushed to get a better position. A police rifle team in the Rault Center overlooking the roof shot him with a high-powered rifle and killed him. The second sniper was believed to be at large in the building.
Police sealed the building. As the situation developed, a police spotter thought he saw something in the blockhouse on the roof. Twelve police fanned out and approached the blockhouse like they were going to a western shootout. Standing in a semi-circle in front of a steel door cemented into a concrete wall, they opened fire. As one might expect, the bullets ricocheted off the concrete wall and steel door, right back at the very men who fired them. Yes, live on national television, they shot themselves. Several policemen fell wounded on the building’s roof. One officer charged the blockhouse. It was empty.
They never found the second sniper. Some believe he walked out the front door before the building was sealed. Others think there was only one sniper. The FBI seemed to know all about these guys, and had apparently been tracking them since Kansas City. Militant black radicals they claimed.
I turned off the TV and drove to the airport to pick up Barbara, who was returning from Christmas break. It seemed like she had been gone a long time. Her flight was early and I found her entering the terminal. Knowing that I had worked at the Rault Center, she asked if I had heard anything new about the fire. I told her I had heard it was a bomb. Somebody was trying to kill somebody. As we rode the escalator leading down to the baggage claim, she noticed a big lighted sign advertising the Howard Johnson’s Motel rising above our heads. She had been traveling most of the day but had heard rumors of something happening at Howard Johnson’s in New Orleans.
I filled her in as quickly as possible, and then asked her if she had called her lawyer landlord about the floor damaged by her leaky waterbed. Yes, she had, but he said it was not a problem. “In fact,” she continued in an astonished voice, “he didn’t seem concerned about it at all.”
I had seen a lot of strange things in the past months. But it all made some kind of twisted sense. In the Rault Center fire, somebody was mad. They were either mad at Rault for some reason and were trying to destroy him, or they were mad at society and chose his building and his success as a target. In the Ho-Jo Massacre, an angry and frustrated black man (or men) decided to strike back at a white racist society. He died venting his anger. Others died with him.
But this? A lawyer holding a damage deposit did not care about hundreds of dollars of damage done by a tenant to his client’s building? It didn’t make sense. Whatever was going on, it was clear that this was no ordinary apartment. All I could think of was “those terrible men and the horrible things they did to those animals.” One month later, when she moved out of the apartment, Barbara got her full security deposit back. The person or persons pulling the strings on this building had succeeded in their objective, and that was a lot bigger than Barbara’s security deposit. They got a real live human being to live in a virtually haunted apartment.
And not just any human being. They had placed a naive and studious graduate student from out of town, who would not know any of the local history and who would not have the time or inclination to find it out. Now that the apartment was warmed up, they could put it back on the market for real.
I SCRATCHED MY HEAD about this apartment for years. Frankly, I was afraid to understand it. It was so close and so strange that it scared me. I could have gone back and talked to the old woman who lived in the basement, but I didn’t. I was afraid of what she might tell me. I was afraid of what I might learn. I denied it. I didn’t go find out where Mary Sherman lived, or where David Ferrie lived. I just went sailing, played music, and worried about things like Mayan hieroglyphs from Guatemala.
It was not until 1992, when I realized the possibility that the Ferrie and Sherman cancer experiments might have something to do with the most deadly epidemic in history, that I finally woke up. At that point my choices narrowed. It was time to find out everything I could. I started by reading everything on the shelf about AIDS and then everything that was written by or about Jim Garrison. It was then that I realized that David Ferrie had lived on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. A sick feeling came over me as Garrison described the smell of white mice in Ferrie’s apartment: “The special fetid smell of hundreds of unattended white mice in the dining room added to the unique rank odor of the dwelling, making it difficult for visitors to enter.”11 Then he described Ferrie’s medical books and laboratory equipment and the medical treatise he had written on the viral theory of cancer.
But Garrison did not give the exact address. For a brief time, I pondered the possibility that my
girlfriend had lived in David Ferrie’s apartment, perhaps on the spot where the plot to kill Jack Kennedy was hatched. It was more than I wanted to wonder about. I had to find out the exact address. So I called the library in New Orleans. Ferrie was not listed in the phone book, but they found the address in his obituary, 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway. For a brief moment I was relieved. That must be a block away from 3225. But what to make of everything I had seen and heard myself. What about the smell in Barbara’s apartment? What about the old lady in the basement? What about “those terrible men and the horrible things they did to those animals?” What about Garrison’s estimate of nearly 2,000 mice?
Now, that was worth thinking about! Nearly 2,000 mice! Say five mice per cage. That’s 400 cages of mice. What would an apartment look like with 400 cages of mice in it? It would be wall-to-wall cages! And consider the mice. Consider the food. Consider the excrement. Consider the smell. Consider the diseases! No one could live in such a place. Let me repeat that: “No one could live in such a place.” Four hundred cages would take a dedicated facility.
Then it hit me: Ferrie’s underground medical laboratory was not in his apartment, and he did not live in the lab! No one could. He lived near the lab, so he could manage its day-to-day operations, and kept a small number of mice back at his apartment for convenience. No, I had not been in Ferrie’s apartment: I had been in his laboratory!
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1 I have omitted Big Mike’s last name to protect his privacy.
2 I have omitted Barbara’s last name to protect her privacy.
3 My research showed that many of Dr. Ochsner’s financial backers were Jewish. Therefore, I believe the claim of his association with Nazis was untrue, unless he was debriefing them for the U.S. government. The comment is, however, an example of a Latin American perception of Ochsner’s politics.
4 Miguel told her the bar was in the vicinity of Washington Avenue and Magazine Street. I assured her that she did not want to go to any bar in that neighborhood.
5. The date of the Rault Center Fire was November 29,1972.
6. Claire was Claire de la Vergne Rault, wife of the building’s owner Joseph M. Rault, Jr. Born Claire de la Vergne, she was a member of the de la Vergnes, one of the families that founded New Orleans. Claire died of cancer in 1999.
7. Congressman Hale Boggs disappeared on Oct. 16,1972 when his plane went down in the Gulf of Alaska, so he was presumed to be dead at the time of the Rault Center fire. U.S. Senator Russell Long was scheduled to be at the Rault Center for a meeting later that afternoon, but had not yet arrived by the time the fire started.
8. The only place that this particular synthetic paneling proved to be “fireproof” was in the laboratory where the test conditions required the paneling to be horizontal. On walls, where it is installed vertically, it proved to be extremely flammable. Rault had no way of knowing this when he purchased the paneling, and certainly would not have headed to the roof if he had.
9. The last time I spoke to Congressman Boggs was when he visited Rault in the Lamplighter Club shortly before his death on Oct. 16,1972. It should be mentioned that Congressman Hale Boggs who was very close to Rault had been on the Warren Commission in 1964. But by 1972 Boggs had grown increasingly uncomfortable with its conclusions and was starting to claim the J. Edgar Hoover had lied to the Commission about Oswald, the rife, and other things. As previously stated Rault helped finance Jim Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination.
10. The date of the incident at the Howard Johnson’s Motel happened on the morning of January 7,1973.
11. Garrison, A Heritage of Stone, p. 121.
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CHAPTER 5
A Bishop in His Heart
DAVID FERRIE HAS BE COME A CHARACTER of almost comic book proportions. A brilliant man rejected by society, he was a collection of contradictions. A man of high moral aspirations who was compromised by personal cravings. A respected airline pilot who became a tattered Bohemian rebel. The son of a police captain who helped defend a Mafia boss against prosecution. From his orange wig haphazardly glued to his head to his grease-paint eyebrows, to his wardrobe full of religious vestments, to his home-brewed cancer experiments, to his burning desire to help teenage boys, to his ability to land planes in jungle clearings at night, to his violent schemes against Castro, to his friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald, to his unrewarded genius, he was the most colorful figure dredged up during the JFK investigations. Today Ferrie has emerged as the keystone in several JFK assassination theories, including:
THE GARRISON CASE. Ferries trip to Texas on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 triggered Garrison’s suspicion that Ferrie was involved in the JFK assassination, perhaps as a getaway pilot. Next, based on additional evidence, Garrison suspected Ferrie may have been a prime organizer of the plot. Garrison finally concluded that a high-level faction within the CIA was ultimately responsible for Kennedy’s death, and that Ferrie had played a lesser role. Ferrie’s relationship with the CIA is well known. He trained pilots for the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, and flew covert missions into Cuba.
THE MAFIA HIT. In his book Mafia Kingfish, John Davis presented the theory that the Mafia killed John Kennedy in an effort to neutralize Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother and U.S. Attorney General. Bobby was prosecuting certain Mafia leaders, particularly Carlos Marcello, reportedly the head of the Mafia in Louisiana, and some say the entire nation. Davis proposed that Ferrie planned and organized the plot to kill the President on Marcello’s instructions. That Ferrie had some form of relationship with Carlos Marcello is beyond question, but the extent of that relationship is still unclear. Ferrie was sitting with Marcello in federal court at the moment JFK was assassinated.
Descriptions of Ferrie from those who knew him personally range from “a living god”1 to “a sexual deviant capable of any form of crime.”2 Unfortunately, most books which reference Ferrie devote little time to examining who he was and what made him that way. What do we really know about him today? What made him tick? Why was he experimenting with cancer? And who was he really mad at? Castro? Kennedy? Or God?
Much of what I am about to describe comes from a report none of us were supposed to see. It was a private investigation on David William Ferrie prepared by Southern Research Company Inc. of New Orleans, beginning in the winter of 1963,3 six months before Oswald arrived in New Orleans, nine months before the raid on the anti-Castro guerilla training camp, and eleven months before the JFK assassination. I do not know who authorized it or why, but I am told it was Eastern Airlines, which was building a case in order to dismiss Ferrie. An advertisement at the bottom of the report describes the Southern Research Company as “A firm principally staffed by former agents of the FBI.”
DAVID FERRIE BEGAN HIS LONG, TWISTED JOURNEY in the middle class suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1918. His father was James H. Ferrie, a captain in the Cleveland Police Department and later an attorney. Young David was baptized, confirmed, and raised as Catholic, and he was educated in a string of Catholic schools. First, he graduated from St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland in 1935. Readers familiar with Catholicism will recognize the name St. Ignatius as referring to “St. Ignatius of Loyola,” the militant crusader who founded the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as “the Jesuits.” Then Ferrie enrolled at John Carroll University from 1935 to 1938, a college also run by the Jesuits. There he studied Greek, Latin, history, and government, getting A’s or B’s in all subjects. Despite his scholastic success, other forces were obviously churning within him, and he dropped out during his senior year to begin his quest for the priesthood.
In 1938, he entered St. Mary’s Seminary in Cleveland, where he studied for the priesthood for three years. Then, in 1940, just prior to graduating, he had a nervous breakdown.4 This was his first failure in a long series of attempts to become a priest. Later, when he applied for re-admission, he was rejected. Having known him for three years, St. Mary’s did not want him back.
He seemed to have a problem with authority.
In 1940, Ferrie’s objective changed from becoming a priest to becoming a teacher. He entered Baldwin-Wallace College, and did student teaching at Rocky River High School from 1940 to 1941. A department chairman summarized his performance with a tongue-in-cheek statement: “His interest in teaching students is very closely tied up with his religious faith.”5 When questioned years later about her evaluation, she remembered Ferrie clearly, but this time she was less charitable. She quickly portrayed him as having an inflated self-image when, in fact, he was “the poorest teacher they ever had.” From there, she went straight after his personality describing him as “tricky, a bluffer, shrewd, and probably a liar.” She added that she received “complaints about his psychoanalyzing his students,” but never had “complaints involving moral problems.” However, she expressed her own doubts about his moral character, advising that he be kept away from both girls and young boys. He seemed to have “a particular interest in the younger students, more than a teacher should have.”
In August 1941, Ferrie made a second attempt to become a Catholic priest and entered St. Charles Seminary in Carthagena, Ohio. There he stayed for three years. During this time his father bought him a plane, and he learned to fly. In 1944, on the eve of ecclesiastical accomplishment, the faculty refused to allow him to continue his religious studies. Having spent six years of his life in seminaries studying for the priesthood, he was again formally rejected from a life of prayer. Ferrie was shattered.
Dr. Mary’s Monkey Page 9
