False Witness

by Patricia Lambert

  Considering Russo’s reaction, it seems remarkable that Sciambra managed to question him. But he did, and Garrison was tremendously impressed by the results. At last he felt he had evidence he could use to make an arrest. The following day he instructed Sciambra to arrange for Russo to see Clay Shaw. “We got Shaw,” Sciambra told Russo, “we need you to make a positive identification . . . [then] we’re gonna take it from there.” Sciambra withheld their intent to arrest Shaw and minimized Russo’s importance. “Then you will have done your duty,” Sciambra said, “[and] we’re probably not even gonna use you in the courtroom.”16

  Russo made the first identification from the back seat of a car parked outside Shaw’s residence where he, Sciambra and Oser “waited and waited and waited” for Shaw to appear. Later, Russo described the thoughts passing through his mind as he sat there. “Shaw was anti-Kennedy,” Russo said, and “enjoys being beat by whips . . . Kennedy represented youth to him” and since there would never be “a set of circumstances where [Shaw] could get whipped by Kennedy,” Shaw was driven to “kill him.” Someone in Garrison’s office told him that, Russo said.17 Shaw finally opened his front door for a friend and Russo said, “Yeah, that’s him.” But Garrison’s men weren’t satisfied. They sent Russo to knock on Shaw’s door.* Shaw opened it. Using a false name, Russo introduced himself as an insurance salesman and handed Shaw a business card. Shaw told him he didn’t need any insurance, and Russo went back to the car and confirmed the identification.18 He had now done his duty. Garrison wanted to arrest Clay Shaw immediately after Russo’s doorstep identification of him. But Asst. D.A. Charles Ward and Louis Ivon objected, and Garrison agreed to wait.19

  Russo later said that when he first arrived in New Orleans “he made it clear” to Sciambra and the others “that there was grave doubt in his mind as to the identity of Clay Shaw but the representative[s] of the DA’s office,” Sciambra in particular, “kept telling him that he was positive.” “The real culprit,” Russo insisted, was Sciambra, who “continually” implanted “the identification in his mind.” Sciambra, he said, would show him a picture of Shaw and say, “That is the man you saw there.” Russo called this “a complete brainwashing job,”20 which may be more accurate than he realized. For the information elicited by Sciambra’s leading questions while Russo was drugged was fed back to him afterwards to persuade him of its validity. This information also guided the upcoming first hypnosis session, which, in turn, reinforced and expanded Russo’s information. Garrison meant for these “objectifying” procedures to convince the public that Russo’s story was true. But the one they convinced was Russo himself. The plot that killed the president was transferred like a virus from Garrison’s imagination to Sciambra’s and, from there, to Russo’s recollections. Afterwards, as Russo would eventually admit, he could no longer distinguish what was real from what was not.21

  During the frenetic five days after Russo first emerged and before Shaw’s arrest, Garrison took Dean Andrews to dinner one last time. But this was no social occasion. Garrison had used all his wiles over the past few months trying to entice Andrews to identify Shaw as Bertrand. He had minimized the importance of the identification by falsely claiming he had “other witnesses” who could do it. And he had played the ego card. “We will ride to glory together,” he told Andrews. Nothing had worked. Now Garrison took a different tack. If Andrews wouldn’t cooperate, he would at least keep quiet. If he didn’t, Garrison made it clear he would end up in “the Bastille.” A deal was struck. Andrews agreed that although he would not say Shaw was Bertrand, he wouldn’t deny it either. Or, in Andrews’s words, “I won’t say he is and I won’t say he ain’t.” Andrews told writer Edward Epstein that he had no choice, that had he refused, “the Jolly Green Giant would pounce on me like a thousand-pound canary.”22 He was going to pounce anyway but Andrews had no way of knowing that. He thought he was saving his hide.

  Garrison had deftly neutralized the only man alive who could have rained on his parade. Only Andrews knew with certainty that Clay Shaw was not “Clay Bertrand,” that there was no such person. Garrison could now arrest Clay Shaw confident in the knowledge that Andrews would not call a press conference and contradict his scenario. For an agonizing time, Andrews respected the deal he had made but the increasing sense of guilt eventually caused him to speak out. By then, it was too late to save himself, and almost too late to help Clay Shaw. For once Perry Russo surfaced, Garrison had moved swiftly.

  Sciambra first interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25. Russo arrived in New Orleans February 27, and Garrison ordered the sodium Pentothal questioning that same day. Russo knocked on Clay Shaw’s door and identified him February 28. The next day, March 1, Garrison issued the subpoena for Shaw to appear for questioning at the district attorney’s office and had him arrested.

  Three days earlier, NBC reporter Walter Sheridan had told Shaw about the “rumor” that he was the “mysterious Clay Bertrand.” Shaw had replied that it would be absurd for him to assume an alias, that he was too well-known. His picture had been in the local newspapers and on television, he said, and his “size alone” made him conspicuous. The idea was so ridiculous Shaw didn’t connect it to the subpoena when he heard about it.23

  That afternoon, as he sat in the interrogation room trying to reach his attorney, Shaw was unaware of what was happening a few feet away. In addition to hidden microphones, the room he was in was equipped with a viewing “mirror” that allowed people in an adjacent room to see inside. From there a Life magazine photographer was snapping pictures of him. Others joined the photographer from time to time, among them Perry Russo and Andrew Sciambra. Shaw, unsuspecting, was seated at a desk facing what looked to him like an ordinary mirror. On the other side, Russo stood up close to what he later referred to as “the window,” observing Shaw. Russo later said that Sciambra told him, “That is the man you saw.” Russo agreed. Then Sciambra took him back into his office and Russo left the building by climbing down the fire escape.24

  He went down alone. Garrison didn’t want anyone to see Russo with his aides for fear someone might discover the identity of his new witness. The media learned of his existence from the application for the search warrant on Shaw’s home. But he was referred to only as a “confidential informant.” Speculation was intense and the news representatives made every effort to identify him, but only Garrison and his top aides knew it was Perry Russo.

  The following day Garrison released to the press a list of some of the articles seized at Shaw’s home. Included were a black gown, a net hat, a black hood and cape, a chain and five whips.* (Though none of these articles had any bearing on the assassination, a Life photographer took pictures of them that evening at Garrison’s home.)25 † Shaw’s homosexuality was now public knowledge. Garrison had accomplished that part of his goal.

  As a veteran of World War II, Shaw had experienced the madness of war. He had joined the U.S. Army as a private and risen to the rank of major. He had served in France and received that country’s Croix de Guerre, the U.S. Legion of Merit, and Bronze Star. But nothing in his past prepared him for the bolt of legal lightning that struck him that day. It was the beginning of an ordeal that he said made him “feel like a character in a Kafka novel.”

  About two hours before Shaw was booked and released on bail, at seven o’clock that same evening, Perry Russo was further “objectified,” this time by hypnosis. The hypnosis had been scheduled for the evening hours to minimize the possibility that someone would spot Russo and identify him.26 It went forward despite the unexpected arrest of Clay Shaw. Al Oser and Andrew Sciambra again took Russo to the office of Coroner Nicholas Chetta. Also on hand were Russo’s friend Steve Derby, a stenographer, and the New Orleans family physician who performed the hypnosis and conducted the interview, Dr. Esmond Fatter.

  Dr. Fatter didn’t set out to “plant a story” in Russo’s mind. But he posed his questions in a way that virtually guaranteed that a story would be planted. Using hypnosis to elicit i
nformation is not the same as using it in medical treatment. A different technique is required. Dr. Fatter seemed unaware of that. The problem is the phenomenon of heightened suggestibility, that is, the inclination of the subject “to believe what others desire [him] to believe.” The very definition of hypnosis is “a trance-like state of altered awareness that is characterized by extreme suggestibility.”27

  In recent years the public has learned much about this in the controversy over recovered memories. But even in 1967 the medical community was aware of the nature of the hypnotic state. “False ideas and beliefs can be implanted upon the mind of a subject who is in a trance without any intent on the part of the questioner to implant such beliefs,” Dr. Herbert Spiegel, an expert on the subject, wrote in 1967, “if the subject thinks that the examiner or hypnotizer desires him to entertain such beliefs or if such beliefs seem to him to be necessary to support other beliefs or to please the hypnotizer or whomever he represents.”28 How the questioner interacts with the subject is clearly a tricky business, requiring finesse and a high degree of awareness. Dr. Fatter exhibited neither.29

  A later report from the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs, which dealt with the use of hypnosis on “witnesses” of crime, warned that hypnosis “leads to an increased vulnerability to subtle cues and implicit suggestions that may distort recollections in specific ways.” Simply “the manner in which a question is framed can influence the response and even produce a response when there is actually no memory.” The “transformation” of a “suspicion” into a “vivid pseudomemory” during hypnosis, the report concluded, may result in “serious consequences to the legal process.”30

  Dr. Fatter followed a line of questioning that leaves little doubt about what he was told to explore.* He also had in hand a copy of Sciambra’s report on the sodium Pentothal session and used it as a guide. Dr. Fatter had been well-briefed and the cues and suggestions he communicated to Perry Russo were far from subtle. Fatter was quite explicit.

  The visual image he used throughout the interview was “the television screen.” He invoked it in his opening sentence and referred to it fifteen times. It turned out to be a powerful device. Russo quickly pinpointed a date, September 16, 1963, when a beer party was underway. The place was Ferrie’s apartment but Russo didn’t volunteer that, Dr. Fatter told him the location. Fatter also placed the “white-haired man” there with him. And it was Fatter who put the “white-haired man” inside an automobile at a “service station.” Russo then obliged him by saying, “He is sitting with Dave.” But Fatter had difficulty eliciting the man’s name. He referred to him six times before Russo said, “That is a friend of Dave’s.” Fatter then asked for his name and Russo said, “Clem [not Clay] Bertrand.” It was once again Dr. Fatter who first mentioned the name “Clay.”

  It was also Fatter who interjected “the rifle” into Russo’s television program, saying, “I wonder who that is sitting on the sofa with the rifle?” Russo, predictably, said “Leon,” Ferrie’s roommate, whom Russo earlier in the interview had described, as he had consistently and repeatedly in the past, as “dirty, dirty, dirty.” It was Fatter who conjured up the assassination conversation. “See that television screen again,” he said, “there will be Bertrand, Ferrie, and Oswald and they are going to discuss a very important matter and there is another man and girl* there and they are talking about assassinating somebody. Look at it and describe it to me.” Not too surprisingly, Russo did. “They planned to assassinate President Kennedy,” he said. “Dave paced the floor back and forth and he talked and talked and told them if they were to get the president they would fly to Mexico or Cuba [and] on to Brazil and Clem said they could not go to Mexico and Brazil—it involved too much gas expense and the cooperation of Mexican authorities and that wouldn’t be possible.” Russo then described a bit of squabbling that occurred between “Leon” and “Bertrand.”

  At the end of the interview, Dr. Fatter urged Russo to provide more details about “how they were going to assassinate the president” and Russo replied that Dave “said there would be a cross fire and a mob in between and if everybody was looking at the guy who is the diversionary and made the diversionary shot, the other guy could make the good shot.” And who was going to take which shot? “They never said,” Russo stated.

  Russo had finally provided a more fully developed assassination plot. Yet the process that spawned it was grossly flawed.* And why hadn’t Russo remembered any of it before? As one writer would later point out, it was difficult to believe Russo’s life was so filled with intrigue and high adventure that he had to be drugged and hypnotized to recall a plot to kill the president.

  Russo was no tabula rasa when he was put into that trance. Shortly after he arrived in New Orleans, he “had picked up a lot of information from Garrison’s people just from the way they asked questions,” he later said. “I’m a pretty perceptive guy and besides, when they got through asking me questions, I asked them a lot of questions—like ‘Why is this man important?’ and so on. I also read every scrap the papers printed about the case before the Shaw hearing.”31

  Only days before he was hypnotized, Russo had attended a dinner at the Royal Orleans Rib Room where his knowledge was substantially advanced. “Eight or ten people” were present, among them Garrison (who arrived late, about ten o’clock), his wife, Sciambra, Russo’s friend Steve Derby and Richard Billings. Russo met Garrison for the first time that night. The two spoke “privately for ten or twenty minutes.” Garrison asked Russo to put his life on hold “for six months,” stay in New Orleans, and come under his “protection.” Russo agreed. After they joined the others, he quickly discovered that he was the star of the evening. Garrison “seemed charged up,” Russo later said. “He started introducing me to Billings as his prize, his secret weapon.” Russo was baffled by this. “Garrison kept offering suggestions of what to tell Billings. I never did understand why he was giving this to a magazine reporter.” The dinner turned into a grilling for Russo. “It was pressure, boy,” he said, “I felt like I had to convince Billings of things I hadn’t even convinced myself of yet.” Billings didn’t know what questions to put to him, Russo said, “until Garrison showed him how it all worked.” Of course, in explaining how it all worked to Billings, Garrison was also explaining how it all worked to Russo. “Actually,” as Russo put it, “I found out more facts about the case that night than I’d ever been told before.” The conversation was “all about Clay Shaw and Oswald, stuff like that.”32

  So two nights later, when Russo sat down in Dr. Chetta’s crowded office to have his memory refreshed by Dr. Fatter, Russo probably knew as much about Garrison’s thinking on the case as anyone.

  Perry Russo didn’t come to New Orleans expecting to end up being Jim Garrison’s “prize” or “his secret weapon.” Nor was he an innocent lamb entangled merely by coincidence. He was an eager participant, at least in the beginning, seduced by the attention, the opportunity to be a player in this high-stakes historical event, and the promise of money. “Every time that I stayed here at one of the fancy motels [I] was told that there was no limit on what I could spend,” he later said. “I was permitted to invite all of my friends there for dinner and on more than one occasion had dinner checks in excess of one hundred dollars. This was always done in someone’s name other than my own.” And though he never received it, Garrison guaranteed him “thirty dollars a day for all the days the investigation went on.” In addition, Russo said Life had promised Garrison 25,000 and he was told that he would be receiving “a lot” of that for his “trouble.” “They made me feel like I was the most important guy in the whole world,” Russo would later say, and “it all seemed so ‘right,’ that we should punish these killers.”33

  Before Russo appeared on the scene, Garrison was relying on the testimony of Jack Martin and David Lewis, an alcoholic mental case bearing a grudge and a private eye wannabe wearing a plastic gun. Russo, on the other hand, was young, athletic, attractive, a
college man working for a large New York—based insurance company. Stepping forward in the footsteps of those two, Russo must have looked like a dream come true to Jim Garrison. But he was never the boy-next-door that he appeared to be.

  Russo later revealed just how far removed he was from that wholesome image he projected. He referred to himself as a “sexual freak” who liked “sadism and masochism” and was “particularly enthused about bondage and submission and domination and the role playing associated with it.” He explained that he preferred men but not exclusively. A former girlfriend, he reminded his interviewer, publicly had claimed she bore a child fathered by him.34

  Another friend of his had said Russo turned that same girlfriend over to his friends. “It didn’t cost you anything,” he explained, “it was free.” Russo enjoyed taking pornographic pictures of her with various men, pictures he kept “in a big shoe box” and showed to visitors.35 Russo, himself, later admitted to a police interviewer “that he considered all of his sexual activity to be of a perverted type,” that he “liked to engage in group sex” and “had a large collection of pornographic movies” that he exhibited at “sex parties.”36 The friend who knew about the girl and the porno pictures said he once entered Russo’s apartment and found him with another man discussing basketball. Russo suddenly jumped up, ran into the bathroom and began “slicin’ his wrist with a razor blade.” Frightened, the friend fled. He had seen blood and believed that Russo was genuinely trying to harm himself but had no idea why. He also recalled that Russo once said “a psychiatrist had told him that he had a split personality.”37