Guy Banister had died of a heart attack in 1964, so David Ferrie became Garrison’s chief suspect. Ferrie was a pilot and soldier of fortune who had been fired by Eastern Airlines after he was arrested on sex charges involving adolescent boys. Ferrie had known Oswald since he was a teenage cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, where the older man was a trainer. Ferrie moved in a shadowy world of anticommunist adventurism, where intelligence types, gangsters, and Cuban exiles all intermingled. As Edward Jay Epstein mordantly observed, he “was bizarre even by the relaxed standards of the French Quarter.” The victim of a disease that had robbed him of all his hair, Ferrie wore ill-fitting, homemade reddish wigs and dabbed on greasepaint to cover his missing eyebrows, giving his face the appearance of a “ghoulish Halloween mask,” in Garrison’s estimation. His filthy, ramshackle apartment was filled with cages of squealing white mice that Ferrie was using for cancer experiments—tests, he told some, to find ways of injecting Castro with the disease.
Garrison first brought Ferrie in for questioning a few days after the assassination, when he heard that he had made a mysterious trip to Texas on the day of the crime. He was on the verge of hauling Ferrie before a grand jury in February 1967 when word of Garrison’s investigation leaked in the press, and Ferrie suddenly found himself in the eye of a media storm. Though Garrison’s suspect was growing increasingly frantic in the public spotlight, the D.A. decided to hold off on bringing him in, apparently to sweat him a while longer. It was a fateful decision. Just as Garrison was telling his staff to “stay cool, hold our fire, and wait a little longer,” he received a call that Ferrie had been found dead in his apartment. The coroner ruled that the forty-eight-year-old man had died of natural causes—Ferrie suffered from high blood pressure and some of his friends speculated that his fatal brain hemorrhage was brought on by the stress of Garrison’s investigation. But Garrison always suspected it was a suicide or murder. Ferrie, he said, was a victim of forces much larger than himself, “swept up in the gales of history.”
By now, the New Orleans D.A. was also swept up in a tempest, a political and media hurricane never seen before in his city. Hundreds of reporters and camera crews from all over the world were swarming his office. The White House, Justice Department, FBI, and CIA were intensely focused on his underfinanced investigation. With Ferrie’s death, Garrison’s key suspect was gone and he suddenly had a gaping hole in his case. But the prosecutor was riding a wild animal, and instead of getting off the snorting, steaming beast to which he was strapped, he held on and declared that he had a new suspect.
In March 1967, Garrison announced he was arresting a New Orleans civic leader named Clay Shaw for the murder of John F. Kennedy. The stunned city knew Shaw as the respected founder of the International Trade Mart. But to Garrison, he was a CIA-linked international businessmen and—like David Ferrie, a man familiar to Shaw through gay circles—he had served as one of Oswald’s handlers in New Orleans. Shaw would not be brought to trial until January 1969. But in the intervening months, Garrison’s investigation sucked virtually all JFK activity into its swirling vortex. Among the millions of Americans who were riveted by the case was Robert F. Kennedy.
ONE EVENING SOON AFTER David Ferrie’s death, the phone rang at the home of Dr. Nicholas Chetta, the New Orleans coroner who had conducted the autopsy on the man who had been at the center of the Garrison whirlwind. The phone was answered by Chetta’s teenage son, Nicky Jr., who by then was growing fed up with the incessant calls from the press that had been set off by Ferrie’s sudden death. Garrison was not the only one who found the timing of his demise suspicious.
“Hello, this is Robert Kennedy,” the caller said. “May I speak with Dr. Chetta?”
“Yeah, and I’m the Lone Ranger,” replied the doctor’s son, who was in no mood for prank calls, slamming down the phone.
Shortly after, the phone rang again. “This is Robert Kennedy and I insist on speaking with Dr. Chetta.” This time the teenager surrendered the phone to his father, who held a hushed conversation with Kennedy for several minutes. The senator wanted to assure himself that Garrison’s key suspect was not the victim of foul play.
As Garrison sparked fireworks, Bobby Kennedy began taking steps to determine the validity of his investigation. His direct call to Chetta notwithstanding, Kennedy relied on his usual method of using surrogates to look into the New Orleans probe. Among those he pumped for information was his old friend and former press spokesman, Ed Guthman. After leaving the Justice Department in August 1964, shortly before his boss, Guthman had returned to the newspaper business, as the national editor of the Los Angeles Times. Guthman insists today that Kennedy did not ask him to investigate Garrison. He says that he decided on his own to put five of his best reporters on the story. He even traveled to New Orleans himself to look into the case, taking Garrison and one of his investigators—a private eye named Louis Gurvich—to lunch. Despite Guthman’s insistence today that his motivations were journalistic, the two men assumed that he was on a mission for Kennedy. “He probably was sizing up our intelligence quotient for Bobby,” said Gurvich at the time. “Bobby’s always been leery of the kooky [assassination] critics.”
Guthman’s team of reporters descended on New Orleans shortly after the news broke about Garrison’s case in February 1967 and stayed with the story into the fall. They quickly developed a scornful attitude towards the prosecutor and his case, after interviewing sources like Jack Ruby’s sister, whom they found in Southern California; Perry Russo—the handsome, twenty-five-year-old insurance trainee and self-described “sexual freak” who became Garrison’s star witness after tying Ferrie, Oswald and Shaw together in the plot against JFK; and, most important, Gurvich’s brother and investigative partner, William, who had become one of Garrison’s most damaging critics after breaking with him on the case. Fed numerous tales of Garrison’s eccentricities by William Gurvich, one Times reporter filed a memo with Guthman that seethed, “If it weren’t so deadly serious because of the injury it is doing to innocent people, [the Garrison investigation] would be comic, a burlesque.”
Guthman’s reporters convinced him that Garrison was “a phony.” Looking back on the case today, he says, “I sent some of our best people down there, mostly from our Washington bureau, great reporters like Jack Nelson. And I went down there myself. But all my guys concluded there was nothing to it. And they were damn good reporters.”
Guthman later met with Kennedy in Washington and reported to him what the Los Angeles Times team had decided about Garrison. “I talked to Bob. He wanted to know what we had found out and I told him. So he accepted that. My feeling was that it was possible [there was a conspiracy], but with Garrison, the evidence wasn’t there.”
But the man who had the most impact on Kennedy’s view of the New Orleans investigation was Walter Sheridan. The former chief of RFK’s “Get Hoffa” squad at the Justice Department played a central, yet little-known, role in Kennedy’s secret search for the truth about Dallas. There was no person in his inner circle on whom Bobby depended more to help him ferret out the full story of what happened to his brother. Sheridan’s word on Garrison was bound to carry enormous weight with Kennedy. Bobby once confided to New York reporter Jack Newfield, who had drawn close to the senator while covering him, that he had “assigned different aspects of the assassination case to Goodwin, Mankiewicz, and Sheridan.” But Newfield knew that the key player here was Walt Sheridan. He was the man whom Kennedy intimates assumed would one day lead the way in cracking the case.
Kennedy’s deep trust and affection for Sheridan had been forged during the Senate rackets investigation and then reinforced during their long quest to put Jimmy Hoffa behind bars. He was slight and soft-spoken but—like Bobby—fierce and unrelenting when on the trail of corrupt figures like Hoffa, a man to whom they both applied the word “evil.” Kennedy and Sheridan shared a black and white view of the world, rooted in their Catholic faith, when they joined forces in the 1950s. They were determined to cleanse go
vernment—which they believed, like the Church, was meant to uplift the needy and suffering—of the moral rot they feared had spread even to the loftiest echelons of Washington. “We must kindle an enthusiasm for the good and the right and the just,” Sheridan told the Adoration Society, a Catholic group in his native Utica, New York, in 1960. “It is time to reaffirm the basic toughness and moral certitude that motivated our country to its position of greatness.” Bobby’s Justice Department crusade against organized crime would become Sheridan’s vehicle for the nation’s moral revival. The crusade would take both men into the darkest corners of American power, expose them and their families to frequent physical danger, and finally bond them like soldiers who had shared the same blood-soaked trench.
Sheridan was loved “as a brother and as a member of the family,” recalled Teddy Kennedy. He and Bobby, who were born on the same day, celebrated their birthdays together. He and his family were frequent guests at Hickory Hill, where despite his unimposing build, Sheridan was an enthusiastic participant in the Kennedys’ rough and lawless touch football games, once suffering a near concussion when he bashed heads with charging former All-American Byron “Whizzer” White. Sheridan’s wife, Nancy, was equally fond of Bobby, who often invited the Sheridans’ five children to parties in the Justice Department courtyard and spoke at their daughter’s high school graduation.
And so it was the trusted Walt Sheridan to whom Kennedy immediately turned on November 22, 1963, dispatching him to Dallas to find out what he could. Even from the outset, neither man trusted the FBI to get to the bottom of the crime. At the beginning of his career, Sheridan had spent four years with the FBI, recruiting Communists as undercover agents. But he finally quit after getting fed up with Hoover’s extremism. “I was a cut liberal, and the FBI is a right-wing organization,” he later explained. He would denounce the FBI chief as “somewhat of a dictator and somewhat of a son of a bitch.” After he quit, his fellow FBI agents were warned to have no contact with him. It must have galled Hoover when Sheridan’s name began being floated in the press as a possible replacement for the aging “dictator” in a second Kennedy term. When Sheridan dug up evidence within forty-eight hours of JFK’s assassination that Jack Ruby had received a “bundle of money” from a Hoffa associate, the FBI showed no interest in pursuing this tantalizing piece of evidence.
Sheridan and Bobby Kennedy quickly came to the same conclusion: JFK was the victim of a powerful conspiracy. But for the rest of his life, Sheridan was extremely cautious in his public remarks about the assassination. Another trait the Kennedys deeply valued in the investigator was his discretion. A submarine sailor during World War II, Sheridan knew how to “swim underwater,” one Kennedy aide remarked. “Business or pleasure, secrets were safe with Walter,” an appreciative Teddy Kennedy eulogized Sheridan at his 1995 funeral. “Whether working on an investigation or planning a surprise party, nothing ever leaked. On that point we all agreed—Walter Sheridan kept his mouth shut.”
Nonetheless, Sheridan shared a crucial piece of information with his wife—he and Bobby were determined to crack the assassination of President Kennedy. When first contacted for this book, Nancy Sheridan was as reticent as her late husband to talk about the assassination. But gradually, during five separate interviews extending over a two-year period, she revealed more about the two men’s collaboration on the case.
Sheridan’s widow stated that Walt and Bobby pursued leads in the years after Dallas and planned to reopen the case if Kennedy succeeded in winning the presidency. “They continued working on the case even after Bob left the Justice Department. The two of them would sometimes go back to the Justice Department to look over evidence together,” she said, sitting in her modest, one-story home in suburban Maryland. She spoke in a soft, halting voice, choosing her words carefully.
While Nancy Sheridan knew that her husband was working on the highly sensitive case with Kennedy, Walt never told her what they were finding. “He didn’t tell me anything specific,” she said. “That would have been a major obligation, a terrible burden on his family.”
“You mean that he did not want to put his family at risk?” I asked.
“Yes.”
In a later interview, she reiterated this point. “I’ve said to our children, ‘Whatever Walt knew about what went on in Dallas, he took with him.’ He would never put that responsibility on his family.”
Again, seeking to be certain of what she was saying, I asked, “Because he didn’t want to put the family in jeopardy?”
“Well,” she replied, “it would be an awful responsibility for anybody, don’t you think?”
Did Sheridan ever write down his thoughts about the case?
“No, he wouldn’t have written that down.”
In February 1965, Sheridan left Kennedy’s staff to pursue a career as an investigative journalist, taking a job as a producer with NBC News. “I want to hit people between the eyes. I want to talk about things that have not yet been talked about,” he announced. Before he started his new job, he made an agreement with Kennedy not to investigate Dallas for NBC. They would wait until they could reopen the case together. “When Walt was offered the job at NBC,” Nancy recalled, “he went to Bob and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do, what do you think about it?’ And their decision was, the only thing Walt wouldn’t do for NBC was to investigate the assassination. It was because they had something going together.”
Two years later, the Garrison probe exploded in the press. Kennedy and Sheridan were both eager to find out what the D.A. had. Bobby told Arthur Schlesinger that he thought Garrison might be onto something. But Sheridan, who decided to go to New Orleans to check out the investigation, quickly came to a different conclusion, putting the Kennedy camp and the Garrison camp on a fateful collision course.
Like Guthman, Sheridan insisted he did not go to New Orleans on Kennedy’s behalf. But soon after arriving there, he began feeding his former boss information about the investigation. Sheridan’s scathing reports on Garrison would turn Kennedy against the prosecutor, and his scorching NBC special—“The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison”—would turn the media tide sharply against the New Orleans lawman.
According to Nancy Sheridan, her husband decided that Jim Garrison was “a fraud—a dishonest man, morally and intellectually” within twenty-four hours of his arrival in New Orleans. “He talked to enough people to say this guy’s crazy—and crooked,” she recalled. As with Guthman’s Los Angeles Times team, Garrison defector Bill Gurvich was a principal source for Sheridan as he reached his withering assessment of the prosecutor. After abandoning Garrison’s camp, Gurvich would be described in the press as the D.A.’s chief investigator. But Garrison himself would dismiss Gurvich as merely a chauffeur and photographer, one of the many people who floated through his rambling, disorganized operation, which was soon peppered with colorful personalities from all over the country, including informants for the CIA and FBI.
Sheridan thought enough of the disgruntled Garrison employee to set up a meeting for him with Kennedy at Hickory Hill on June 8, 1967. Their ninety-minute conversation continued in a cab ride to the airport and ended as the two men sat on a luggage conveyor. Gurvich later explained that he had met with Kennedy because he worried that he would think “there actually was something in New Orleans and might be overly optimistic and hopeful” about solving his brother’s murder. In their conversation, the investigator bluntly told Kennedy, “Senator, Mr. Garrison will never shed any light on your brother’s death.”
“Then why is he doing this?” Kennedy asked him.
“I don’t know,” Gurvich replied. “I wish I did.”
Walt Sheridan had his own explanation for Garrison’s media-circus investigation. He thought the D.A. was trying to deflect the spotlight from New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello and his banker, Jimmy Hoffa—two men who were high on Sheridan’s list of suspects in the assassination. Sheridan believed that Garrison was on Marcello’s payroll. Why else didn�
�t the prosecutor pursue the gangster, who had more obvious ties to David Ferrie than Clay Shaw did? At the time of the assassination, Ferrie and Banister were both working as investigators for Marcello in the deportation case brought against the Mafia lord by Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. Ferrie was also reported to have flown Marcello back from Guatemala, after Kennedy’s men grabbed him under dubious legal circumstances and hustled him out of the country in 1961. But curiously, Jim Garrison never bothered to investigate Marcello’s connections to Dallas, a city that was under his criminal dominion and whose local Mafia underboss—Joseph Campisi—was the first person to visit Jack Ruby in jail. Since Ferrie and Banister also did work for the CIA, the agency that he believed had masterminded the plot, Garrison chose to focus only on this aspect of their employment record.
Throughout his years as district attorney, Garrison gave Carlos Marcello a pass, going so far as to insist that the mobster, who called himself a tomato salesman, was “a respectable businessman.” In his 1988 memoir, Garrison wrote that he never came “upon evidence that [Marcello] was the Mafia kingpin the Justice Department says he is.” He conceded that the Mafia sometimes acted as a shadowy partner of the CIA, but the only significant role he believed the mob played in Dallas was as a convenient scapegoat for the intelligence agency. Kennedy had a more astute understanding of the way power in America worked; he recognized that institutions like the CIA sometimes became so entwined with the criminal underworld, it was difficult to tell them apart at the operational level.
Sheridan felt his suspicions about Garrison were confirmed in late June 1967, when—locked in what was now a very public brawl with the NBC producer—the D.A. leaked word to the press that he was investigating Ed Partin for a possible connection to the Kennedy assassination. Partin, the renegade leader of the Teamsters’ Baton Rouge local, had been the key witness in the Kennedy-Sheridan case against Jimmy Hoffa. After Hoffa was finally convicted and sent to jail in March 1967, the Teamsters and their organized crime allies began pulling every string they could to pressure Partin into switching sides and helping free Hoffa. Sheridan immediately concluded that Garrison’s press leak about Partin was the latest move in this campaign on Hoffa’s behalf. For Walt Sheridan and Bobby Kennedy—who had devoted much of their professional lives to hunting down Hoffa—there were few other affronts they would have taken more seriously than tampering with their hard-won conviction of the Teamster boss.
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Page 46
