Dr. Mary’s Monkey

by Edward T Haslam

  The entrance led to a small, dark, narrow, unadorned lobby. It was dark and dingy by comparison to the bright, shiny lobby of the Maison Blanche building. I felt like I was going in a side entrance. This was a building I had never been in before. I took the elevator to the top floor and started my search for the suite. As I walked the empty halls, I sensed the strange orientation of the horseshoe-shaped building. The elevators were obviously an after-thought, attached to the end of one of the horseshoe legs, rather than in the center. It was an old building, with chest-high marble walls and frosted glass doors. Many of the suites were vacant. I saw no one in the hall. Turn after turn, I looked for the number. Finally, at the farthest end of the third hall from the elevator, I found a plain windowless door. There was no identification other than the suite number. I knocked.

  I was immediately greeted by an energetic young man who said, “You must be Ed!” and fired a string of questions like, “Did you have any problems finding the place?” and, “How hot is it outside?” He followed that with a barrage of small talk.

  I realized that he was doing his best to control the conversation, and that he had not given me his name. But I did manage to get in a question: “What type of business is this?”

  He said it was a low-wattage AM radio station. So I asked him what the call letters were. His rapid reply was, “Let’s call it WNCA.”10

  Suddenly a door opened from the side of the reception area and an older man came in swiftly. He was in his sixties, with silver hair, a striped cotton suit, and a bowtie. His sudden entrance startled the younger man, who scrambled to conjure an important air in his voice to introduce him. The older man waved him off and introduced himself: “Hello, I’m Bill Fergerson. Thanks for coming.” His eyes sparkled with practiced warmth. Out the corner of my eye I saw the quick jerk of the young man’s head and the surprised expression on his face when the old man announced his name.

  The odds were even that he had given me a false name. My immediate read on the situation was that this older man was well known in town and, for some reason, wanted to keep his real name out of the conversation. This was consistent with the secretive nature of the invitation, the virtually unmarked office, and the fact that the younger man had not given me his name either. It was obvious that they wanted to talk to me about something sensitive.

  The surprise in the younger man’s voice was genuine when he asked the older man, “Where did you come from?” The older man gestured casually toward the corner of the room. The younger man said, “Even I didn’t know there was a room back there!”

  The older man laughed underneath his breath and said, “There are lots of things about this place you don’t know.”

  At this point I understood the pecking order pretty clearly. Whoever this younger guy was, he had been around for a long time but only in a marginal role. He obviously did not have the complete confidence of the senior members and did not really understand their operation as well as he thought. Then they had a brief conversation about what should happen next. There were some people they wanted me to meet, and they had some things they wanted to show me. They decided to show me “the operation” first and then meet the people. I remember the younger man agreeing, “Yes, the effect would be better.” What effect? I was standing in a seedy, unmarked office that seriously needed a decorator with two men who did not want me to know their names. Was I supposed to be impressed by something? Or even astonished? I waited to see what they had up their sleeves.

  As the older man left the room, he said he would be back in a minute. Curious about both my host, my location, and the reason for my visit, I turned to the younger man and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” He said it was not important. I smiled at him and said, “Then why don’t you give me your first name? If you’re going to be showing me around, I don’t want to have to say, ‘Hey, you!’”

  He laughed and said, “OK, that’s fair. My name is Ed.” I laughed back. “At least I won’t have any problem remembering that,” I said, wondering if he had given me his first name or mine. He suggested we start the tour and let the older man catch up.

  We went back into the hall and through a door to our right. There we found a modest recording studio with an antiquated control room. The vintage microphone reminded me of something Frank Sinatra would have used. The multichannel mixing board was the same model as the one I had used at Tulane’s radio station. And there was this cheap office desk that had a huge American eagle sculpture attached to the front of it. The desk was almost comical. The eagle’s wings were as wide as the desk. Whoever sat at the desk would look like they were riding on the eagle’s back. What an image for a freedom writer! I was getting the picture.

  Next we went to a room full of file cabinets and storage shelves. The shelves were stacked with audio and video tapes. My host described them as interviews with Cuban exiles and American political leaders. These tapes were clearly labeled and well organized. Then he started to explain what they wanted. They were trying to revive the station and were hoping our agency might help them promote it.

  At this point the older man came into the room. He interrupted without hesitating and asked the younger man if he had locked the door to the hall. He said he thought so, but the older man insisted he double check it. I was left alone with the older man for a minute and took the time to observe him more closely. He was about five-feet eight-inches and moved about constantly. He was obviously very respectable, but not overly concerned about his appearance. The hair on the back of his head was messed up like it had been blown in the wind, and he had not bothered to comb it. The back of his cotton suit was badly rumpled, like he had been sitting in a chair. My guess was that he was either retired or “so important” that it did not matter. Despite his rumpled appearance, he was confident, businesslike, and obviously considered himself in control of the others. So I asked him, “What goes on here?” He said laconically, “We’re trying to get the word out about Communism.” I waited for more. It never came. He paced silently.

  The younger man came back in the room. My curiosity was growing. I noted him in more detail. He was tall and slender, with a boyish charm about his appearance. He looked rather like a forty-year-old graduate student, with his sandy blond hair combed to the side and hanging a little in his face. He had a prep-school style from the late 1950s or early 1960s. Something about the way he wore his short-sleeved white shirt and baggy khaki pants made me think that he may have been in the military at some point. Then he started to tell me about the file cabinets. He called them “mysterious.”

  There were six file cabinets in a row, all black, each unit chest high. He apologized for the condition of the files, saying that they were very old and were very disorganized, but he was confident that they had “important information” in them. He started to tell me who the files had belonged to when the older man exploded, cutting him off in mid-sentence in a fit of exasperation. It was starting to get strange. The older man waved him over to the corner of the room. There they argued in tense, hushed tones about whether it was “all right to tell me” who the files belonged to. It was an awkward moment to say the least. I tried to ignore them and acted disinterested. I was uncomfortable with their whispering and did not care to be made part of the family secrets of what was obviously a right-wing propaganda mill. The older man did not want to tell me. The younger man did. The younger man suddenly broke off their discussion and said, “If he is going to work with us, he’s going to find out anyway.”

  He marched back to the file cabinets and said to me, “Did you know Guy Banister?”

  I said, “No,” abruptly, in hopes that he would drop the subject.

  Somewhat surprised, he said, “Are you sure? He was quite well known here in town a while back.”

  My reply was cautious: “If he was well known, maybe I heard the name. But I am quite sure that I didn’t know him.”

  (Actually, the name was familiar to me, but my memory was vague about the details. I did remember t
hat Garrison considered him a main figure in the anti-Castro operations in New Orleans. I had seen Banister’s name in Garrison’s interview in Playboy, and remembered Nicky Chetta discussing Banister in that memorable session at Jesuit back in 1969. But I was not going to get into all that with these people. They were obviously on the far fringe of the political right, and they were close enough to Banister to have his files! All my instincts told me to steer clear of these people.)

  The older man was obviously relieved by my answer and chimed, “Then it doesn’t matter. Let’s just say, ‘He was before your time.’”

  The younger man struggled to regain his momentum and explained that the files contained “a lot of very important information,” but there had been a “mysterious indexing system” which had been lost. He baited me with, “Nobody could decipher them,” and offered to let me look to see if I could figure them out. I opened some drawers and inspected the file headings. I had never seen a fling system organized like this before. All the headings were typed numbers like “25-14.” But without their index, they were completely unintelligible. Someone obviously wanted them that way. (Clerical staff could file and retrieve all day long without ever knowing what was in any given file.) He added, “You’d have to be an Egyptologist to figure it out.”

  “Well, at least hieroglyphs have pictures,” I countered. “These things are completely numeric. There’s no way to decode them without reading the files and reconstructing the index.”

  Then I looked at the contents of some of the files. What I saw were newspaper articles published in the late 1950s and early 1960s in New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, and Atlanta. Whoever put this collection together was very systematic, had subscriptions to lots of newspapers, and had adequate manpower to carefully prepare the material for orderly storage and retrieval. Then a wave of fear crashed over me. I realized that I was looking at the remains of an intelligence operation, part of the Cold War against Cuba.

  And I had two people staring at me, diagnosing every expression, analyzing every word, and evaluating every reaction. I knew I’d better be careful about what I said and did. I stood frozen, staring into the files. My mind raced. I pretended to read some of the articles as I tried to sort out my situation. All I could think about was Jim Garrison. I knew he believed to his core that he had discovered the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy. And that he figured Banister was the pivotal man in that group.

  Who were these people? And how did they get Banister’s files? Garrison had been through the wringer: humiliated and hounded by a belligerent press, embarrassed with a one-hour acquittal of his accused conspirator, and harassed by the federal attorneys for years afterwards. Could he possibly be interested in the whole subject of anti-Castro groups in New Orleans thirteen years after the Shaw trial? It was easy to imagine that Garrison might want to forget about the whole tragic event that ended his promising political career. Should I contact Garrison about these files?

  Then I realized that I’d better start thinking about my situation, not Garrison’s. If I was standing in the viper’s nest, I’d better watch my step. I emerged from my thoughts to say, “Well, it looks like you have got the complete history of Latin American Communism here, at least as reported by the American press.”

  They were pleased with my comments and began appealing to my interest in Latin American Political Science. The younger man said that these files would be a “great research asset if someone could take the time to go through them and make sense out of them.” I said that I wished I had known about this back when I was in graduate school just a few years before. It would have made a great independent study project. And I was sincere in this lament. I could see the virtually irreplaceable library being offered to me. I would have loved to have studied it. But my life had changed since graduate school. I had moved on to other things, like building my advertising career and raising a family. My time was already over-committed back at Fitzgerald, with none to spare for any non-lucrative academic projects, regardless of how interesting they were. Of course I kept these thoughts to myself. After all, I was on a courtesy call on behalf of Fitzgerald Advertising. My goal was to be polite to these “friends of the agency.” I closed the files.

  We walked back through the reception area to another office. There I was to meet the “financial backers.” I remember my surprise when I entered the room. The high ceilings were emphasized by long drapes. The richly-colored carpet and the American flag hanging in the corner to my left added to the air of formality. A huge, expensive, federal-style wooden desk sat diagonally in the far corner. The objective of the decor was to look “governmental” and “authoritative.” This was someone’s seat of power. Suddenly, the scene struck me as tragic. It was like grown men playing dress-up. (“Let’s play Oval Office. I’ll be the President. You can be Secretary of State.”) Two men were waiting there, both of whom were of the older man’s generation and dressed in a similar manner. He introduced me to them. Both were doctors.

  The doctors immediately recognized my name, and said they had known my father as a teacher of orthopedics at Tulane Medical School during the 1950s and 1960s. So I asked them if they taught at Tulane, too. Yes, they had, but it had been twenty years. I inquired about their specialty. Both were radiologists.

  Trying to continue the conversation in a friendly manner, I said, “So you must have known ...,” but I got no further. It was impossible for me not to notice the sudden confusion on the face of the doctor I was talking to. His eyes began darting back and forth between me and the older man, now standing slightly behind me and to my right. Curious about this untimely distraction, I turned my head to the right and saw the older man draw his finger across his throat, signaling the doctor to shut up immediately. More secrets? I had obviously stumbled upon some very sensitive territory, something having to do with doctors these radiologists might have known in the Department of Orthopedics at Tulane Medical School twenty years before.

  My warning lights had been flashing for some time. Now, my danger buzzers were going off. If these two were radiologists at Tulane Medical School twenty years earlier, in 1962, then they would have known every professor of orthopedic surgery in the small school, just like they knew my father.

  Or to put it bluntly, both of these men knew the mysteriously murdered Dr. Mary Sherman personally. And they were experts in the medical uses of radiation, with access to x-ray machines and radioactive materials. And they were in possession of files belonging to Guy Banister, David Ferrie’s employer and a suspect in the assassination of the President of the United States. And no one, except my boss, knew where I was! I pondered my situation and told myself, “Keep smiling, act relaxed, and don’t mention Mary Sherman.”

  It worked. Fifteen minutes later, I found myself returning to Fitzgerald where I reported to my boss. I was very brief and said only that I did not think “the radio station was a business opportunity worth pursuing.” He concurred and dropped the subject.

  For the next ten years, I pondered the curious incident from time to time, but did nothing about it.

  IN 1992, I BEGAN WORKING in earnest on this material. One of my first priorities was to find out everything I could about David Ferrie. To that end, I read On the Trail of the Assassins, the Jim Garrison book upon which director Oliver Stone based his movie JFK. There I stumbled across a section which had little or nothing to do with Ferrie, but which changed my understanding of what I had seen in New Orleans forever.

  In this section, Garrison related how he had tried to find Guy Banister’s files in 1966, several years after Banister’s death in September 1964. His investigators sought out Banister’s wife, who told them that upon her husband’s death, his files had been promptly removed from his office, before she got there. She was told they were removed by federal agents.11 For some unknown reason, these federal agents neglected to take the file-indexing system when they removed the file cabinets. Without it, no one could use the files effectively. As luck would have it, the Loui
siana State Police also came to her husband’s office shortly after his death and independently confiscated the abandoned file-indexing system.

  Garrison immediately sent his investigator Lou Ivon to State Police Headquarters in Baton Rouge to search for Banister’s index cards. When Ivon arrived, he discovered that for two years the State Police had been writing messages on the blank side of Banister’s index cards and attaching them to intra-office correspondence. All that remained were a handful of index cards, none of which dealt with any so-called “private investigations.” From these cards Garrison and Ivon reconstructed this partial list of Banister’s files:

  Latin America. . ..................................................... 23 - 1

  Fair Play for Cuba Committee ........................... 23 - 7

  International Trade Mart .................................... 23 - 14

  B-70 Manned Bomber Force .............................. 15 - 16

  Dismantling of Ballistic Missile Systems ......... 15 - 16

  Dismantling of Defenses, U.S ............................. 15 - 16

  General Assembly of the United Nations ........ 15 - 16

  Missile Bases Dismantled - Turkey and Italy .. 15 - 16

  American Central Intelligence Agency ............ 20 - 10

  Anti-Soviet Underground .................................. 25 - 1

  Ammunition and Arms ....................................... 32 - 1

  Civil Rights Program of J.F.K ................................ 8 - 41

  Note how the subjects listed in the left column could be found in the file numbers shown in the right column. These were identical in form to the numeric fling system I had seen at the radio station ten years before, when they asked me to reconstruct a “mysterious” indexing system which had been lost, and then they argued over whether to tell me that the files belonged to Guy Banister. I was sure they were the same files. Now, I had to do something about it.