Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  Connick’s carefully scripted performance was blown to bits two weeks later. A former Connick staffer named Gary Raymond told a TV reporter friend of his that, once Connick had taken over the office, he almost immediately set about incinerating Garrison’s leftover files. Connick packed up the testimony of over forty Clay Shaw grand jury witnesses and told Raymond to incinerate it. This included testimony from Dean Andrews, Perry Russo, and Marina Oswald. When Raymond hesitated on the grounds that this material had historical value, Connick replied, “Burn this sonofabitch, and burn it today!” Fortunately for history, Raymond kept the boxes in his garage. When the ARRB came to town, he finally had an official agency to turn the records over to. Not wanting to get involved personally, he called up his friend, reporter Richard Angelico. He told Angelico to turn them over for him. But before doing so, Angelico decided to interview Connick and confront him with the dichotomy between what he told the Review Board and what had actually happened. Conanick had told the Board that his collection of Garrison’s assassination records was not complete because Garrison had taken parts of it with him. This was accurate as far as it went. But it was not the whole truth. For Raymond had signed a sworn affidavit saying that he and two or three others were ordered by Connick to incinerate anything Garrison left behind. Trapped on camera with Raymond’s affidavit, Connick at first tried to deny he had done what Raymond said he did. He then said, “I, I don’t recall that. I don’t recall that. But if I did do it, so what, it's done.”43 The day after Connick tried to deny he had burned the records, another former staffer, Ralph Whalen, told the local papers, that he recalled that Connick burned a “bunch of Garrison stuff … some things that related directly to the Shaw case.”44 The idea seems to have been that, without the actual evidence, the media could ridicule Garrison’s case based on the likes of Aynesworth, Phelan, and Walter Sheridan. In fact, Connick and Aynesworth had been friends for decades.45

  It’s hard to believe but even after Garrison was acquitted on the pinball protection scam, he was indicted again on a directly related charge. Namely, for not paying taxes on the money he never got in the first place.46 Garrison was acquitted again. Yet, this hurt his chances in his run for the State Supreme Court.47 Then there was a civil suit filed by Shaw in 1970. In this lawsuit, Shaw alleged that Garrison entered into a conspiracy with some of the leaders of the Truth and Consequences group in order to conduct a “fraudulent investigation for the assassination solely for the personal and political aggrandizement of the conspirators, particularly Garrison, Robertson, Rault, and Shilstone.”48 (Willard Robertson, Joe Rault, and Cecil Shilstone were the leading members of the Truth and Consequences organization.) It is hard to find these accusations credible since none of these men got any bit of aggrandizement out of the Shaw case. In the case of Garrison, one could effectively argue the opposite: it unraveled his life and career. Sal Panzeca told Harold Weisberg that the main targets of the lawsuit were: 1.) The money of the Truth and Consequences members, and 2.) To humiliate Garrison. The problem for the plaintiffs, as Weisberg stated to Panzeca, is that Shaw actually did perjure himself at the trial.49

  The trial was set for November of 1974. But Shaw died in August of that year. That did not stop Shaw’s lawyers, particularly Ed Wegmann. Contrary to what some have written, the case was not dismissed upon the plaintiff’s death. For Ed Wegmann filed a motion to have it continued in his name. Even though state law specifically stated that an action like this would survive “only in favor of a spouse, children, parents, or siblings. Since no person with the requisite relationship to Shaw was alive at the time of his death, his action would have abated had state law been adopted as the federal rule.”50 Surprisingly, Wegmann’s motion was allowed by the Christenberry influenced state court in 1975. As the U.S. Supreme Court eventually wrote, the Louisiana federal court refused to apply the specific state law in this particular case. Instead, it created “a federal common law of survival in civil rights actions in favor of the personal representative of the deceased.” In this case, Ed Wegmann. That decision was reversed by the United States Supreme Court in May of 1978.51

  As the reader can see, the legal actions were meant to put Garrison in prison, remove him from the DA’s office, ruin his personal reputation, and to hurt him financially. But as pointed out, once Connick took office, his particular aim was not just to halt forever any investigation of the evidence rich New Orleans. Connick was intent on shoveling Garrison’s evidence into the incinerator. The author can attest to this from firsthand experience. Having seen an index of Garrison’s files done by the HSCA, this author visited Connick’s office in 1994 to ask if these files were still there. Connick called in an assistant and queried him about this single file cabinet. The assistant said it was still there. Connick’s eyes bulged and he said in exasperation, “We still have that stuff?” Clearly, the DA thought he had burned it all previously.52

  Accompanying the attempt by Connick to unseat Garrison, there was a supplementary propaganda war through the media conducted by Shaw’s allies. Aynesworth, Phelan, and their young protégé, playwright James Kirkwood, implanted their biased view of Garrison’s case onto the New Orleans public consciousness. Quite literally. At the close of the Shaw trial, local television station WYES, Channel 8, aired an hour long discussion of the Shaw case by those three men.53 This was on top of the reporting in the local papers by the likes of Chandler, James, and Snyder. And editorials demanded that Garrison resign.54 Kirkwood then went on to write a long book about the Shaw trial called American Grotesque. The idea for this book started with Clay Shaw himself. Shaw wanted a book which depicted Garrison as homophobic; the underlying thesis being that this caused him to go after the homosexual Shaw. He first asked novelist James Leo Herlihy to write it. He turned it down. But Herlihy got in contact with his friend Kirkwood and he took up the assignment.55 To say that Kirkwood came through for Shaw does not begin to do his book justice. One only has to read his descriptions of the trial presentation of the Zapruder film, and the testimony of Pierre Finck to understand what the man was up to. But the point is that, until Jim Garrison published On the Trail of the Assassins, Kirkwood’s book was the standard reference work for the Shaw trial. Mainly because no one had access to the trial transcript. The impression one would get from reading Kirkwood’s solipsistic work is that the transcript would not be worth reading, which of course, was the intended result. The combination of Phelan’s daily spin meetings, with the publication of Kirkwood’s book left the message that there was nothing of any value that came out of Shaw’s trial, which as we have seen, was far from the truth.

  In 1973, the federal government made sure no one would ever inspect the site from which Oswald carried out his anti FPCC campaign for Phillips and McCord in the summer of 1963. Sam Newman had sold the 544 Camp Street building in July of 1965. It was a weird transaction. It appears to have been sold for 58,000 dollars, and then resold on the same day, for a significantly lower price of 34,800 dollars. That price ended up being a steal. Because in 1973, Gerald Gallinghouse, the man who was prosecuting Garrison at the time, filed a motion for the federal government to purchase the building. The offer was one the present owner could not refuse. It was over four times the last sales price: 141,162.50 dollars. The motion was filed in the U.S. Eastern District Court for Louisiana. The court Christenberry was serving on at the time. The case was handled by Judge Edward Boyle. The Camp Street building was now razed. And the ultimate irony is that the new building was named the Hale Boggs Building, in honor of the local congressional representative who had served on the Warren Commission.

  The last stroke in creating a morass of doubt and confusion in the JFK case at this time was constructed in 1970. According to David Copeland, a rather obscure lawyer in Waco, Texas, he was then visited by two men who said they were from the Secret Service and the FBI.56 Why these men appeared to Copeland has never been explained. And Copeland never seems to have asked them to prove if they were really from the FBI and Secret Serv
ice either. For some bizarre and inexplicable reason they revealed to him one of the most wild, untenable and unsupportable tales ever related about the JFK case. One that makes Farewell America and its southwest oil millionaire assassination Committee look rather staid and conservative. According to Copeland’s retelling, the conspiracy to kill Kennedy was truly an interdisciplinary affair. One that involved scores of people beforehand, in addition to several different organizations. Including some rather overlooked ones like the American Council of Christian Churches, the security division of NASA, and something called DISC, Defense Industirial Security Command. There were also some overlooked personages involved: attorney Roy Cohn, General John Medaris, and mobster Joe Bonanno. In one of the most incredible statements in the entire fantastic essay, it is held that President Kennedy’s murder was planned and supervised by the domestic intelligence branch of the FBI.57 Incredibly, the essay then says that all the major tenets included were “established and documented by overwhelming evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.”58 Which is nothing more than a self serving lie.

  Under the alias of William Torbitt, Copeland actually typeset this fantasy and published it. The title was “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal.” It became popularly known as the The Torbitt Document. Which is a very misleading title, since it is not a document at all. And it contains little documentation to support its grandiose claims. It does allude to documents, which it says will back up its spurious claims. But those references are often to the files of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. Having searched through many of those remaining files, this author can certify that little, if any, of the acts described by Copeland are attested to by Garrison’s files. And why Copeland would write that they were, without seeing the actual evidence, shows how careless and irresponsible he was to accept what the two men told him. For instance, Copeland actually names William Seymour and Gordon Novel as Oswald impersonators. He then says that these claims are backed up by Warren Commission evidence. They are not. Novel is not mentioned in the Commission volumes. And, as shown previously, Seymour was proven not to have been at Sylvia Odio’s apartment impersonating Oswald.

  Once Copeland printed this spurious tale, it was then distributed by Texas based researchers like Penn Jones. In the vacuum which existed after Shaw’s acquittal, it took on a life of its own. The sheer volume of names in the essay, plus its intimations of a colossal conspiracy between so many different public and private organizations, plus its dubious claims of supporting documentation, all this managed to hypnotize people into overlooking one crucial fact. Although Copeland wrongly used Garrison as a source, and although he often referred to his inquiry, if one looks at the list of people accused by him, there is one group that is missing. It happens to be Garrison’s number one suspect: the CIA. Like Bill Boxley, Copeland’s work was pointing people almost everywhere: the Mafia, President Johnson, the FBI, Texas oil millionaires, DISC, NASA, John Connally, the Tyrall compound in Montego Bay. All this misdirection, this creation of a colossal and multi-faceted Rube Goldberg conspiracy, this was all a foreshadowing of what was laying ahead in the road. For now would come an outpouring of books and essays which would indicate a laundry list of suspects with very little evidence to back the assertions. The cabal that was arranged to release Shaw and bury Garrison had succeeded. At least temporarily.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Blakey Buries the Case

  “No, no, no. You don’t have time to do that! Like I said, that’s the real world. That’s irrelevant. ”

  —HSCA Deputy Counsel Gary Cornwell

  When Garrison subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Time-Life, he said that it would show that President Kennedy was killed from the front, not from behind.1 The night before the Zapruder film was shown at the Clay Shaw trial, he told his assistants the same. There is no doubt that the jury felt the film was compelling, since they asked to see it several times. The problem was that the American public had not seen the film. In 1975, they finally did see it. This was on an ABC television program, hosted by Geraldo Rivera, in prime time. Robert Groden and Dick Gregory were the only guests. The showing of the film on network television was, in a word, electric. The day after, the Kennedy assassination was a hot topic around the office water cooler. Further, since the film was shown in the midst of Senator Frank Church’s investigations into the crimes of the CIA and FBI, popularly known as the Church Committee, that created the proper background to the inquiry into possible intelligence community malfeasance in the JFK case.

  One of the people who got his own private screening of the Zapruder film was Representative Tom Downing of Virginia. His son obtained a copy of the film to show to his father.2 This galvanized Downing into action. He placed a bill on the floor of the house to create a special committee to reopen the murder case of John F. Kennedy. In a tactical move, he later added the murder of Martin Luther King to get the support of the Black Caucus. It took over a year, but Downing finally got his bill passed in September of 1976.3 Celebrated Philadelphia prosecutor Richard Sprague was nominated as Chief Counsel and Executive Director. Sprague then picked New York homicide prosecutor Robert Tanenbaum to be his Deputy Counsel for the John F. Kennedy probe. One could hardly ask for two more successful lawyers to helm the case. As interested parties like Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi and pathologist and Commission critic Cyril Wecht stated, Richard Sprague was a perfect fit to helm this inquiry.4 Both Sprague and Tanenbaum had tried scores of homicide cases. And Sprague had supervised a long and complex special prosecutor investigation into the murder of labor reform leader Jock Yablonski. After a series of trials, Sprague convicted corrupt United Mine Workers boss Tony Boyle, the man Yablonski was trying to unseat.

  Downing was going to be the chair of the committee, and was prepared to back Sprague in his 6.5 million dollar budget request. This was submitted at the end of 1976. It marks the high water mark of the HSCA. Two things were clear from this budget request. First, Sprague was going to do a real investigation over every aspect of the Kennedy case. He was going to start anew, and not rely on any previous precedent. He wanted to hire people like document experts, and handwriting analysts. Second, unlike the Warren Commission, there was going to be no reliance on the FBI, Secret Service, or the CIA for any services. Sprague said that he could not do this since, if he was to do a thorough inquiry, the actions of those agencies would be part of that inquiry.5 Or as Bob Tanenbaum said more colorfully when the FBI wanted to review their applications for positions, “I’ll be damned if I will let them investigate us before we investigate them!”6 As Sprague later said, he was determined to do this as purely and as professionally as possible. For he felt that this was very likely the last opportunity for the American public to find out the truth about the Kennedy case.7

  The truly remarkable thing about all this is that Downing was in wholehearted support of what Sprague and Tanenbaum were going to do.8 And as he took Sprague around to visit the committee members, they all embraced him. Looking back at it, Sprague felt he should have questioned two things. First, Downing had announced he was going to retire at the end of his term. Which meant he was not going to be around once the actual investigation began. Sprague felt that Richardson Preyer of North Carolina would have been a good choice to succeed him. That was not to be. Second, Sprague did not talk to anyone higher up in the leadership than Downing. That is, he was not aware that Downing’s level of commitment to the inquiry was not reflected in say, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill or Majority Leader Jim Wright. In retrospect, Sprague said those were errors of judgment on his part. He should have checked on those contingencies in advance.9 Because as it turned out, the fact that Downing left ended up being a tipping point. And the support from the higher level of the Democratic leadership could not fill that breach.

  But in the interim, Sprague did some decent enough work. In addition to hiring some of the staff, he was interested in redoing some experiments in public. For instance, testing the Single Bullet Theory. He was interested in i
nvestigating Oswald’s mysterious journey to Mexico City in September and October of 1963.10 He was also interested in the physical evidence, namely the Zapruder film, the photographs taken in Dealey Plaza, and the autopsy evidence. They were also going to review the methodology and conclusions of the Warren Commission. When these seasoned professional prosecutors began to look at these things, they were literally taken aback by what they saw. For example, committee lawyer Al Lewis could not even describe in words his impression of the state of the medical evidence in this case.11 As Tanenbaum began to review the Warren Commission volumes he was appalled at the holes in the case against Oswald. And also, by how much evidence exculpatory of Oswald was left out of the Warren Report.12 After viewing a lengthy slide show on the assassination by three different photographic authorities from the critical ranks, Lewis stated that, of the 13 staff lawyers in attendance, only one still supported the Single Bullet Theory.13 After multiple viewings of the Zapruder film, Tanenbaum felt that the fatal shot came from the front and to the right of the president.14 His chief detective in New Orleans, based on Kennedy’s differing reactions, felt the president was was hit by two different caliber weapons.15 All this, combined with the fact that Sprague was going to perform a no holds barred investigation, leaving no stone unturned, no path untrodden, all this promised that the Kennedy assassination was finally going to be addressed as it should have been back in 1963. For instance, Tanenbaum told photographic analyst Bob Groden that he had concluded the Warren Report was an untenable cover-up, and he and Sprague were going to blow that cover-up sky high.16