Reclaiming History (307 page)

The prosecutor whose name Bethell did not want to give me was James Alcock. He had interviewed Spiesel on July 13, 1967, at a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Alcock’s three-page memorandum of the interview to Garrison on July 17 makes no reference to learning of Spiesel’s fingerprinting his daughter, and closes by saying, “Mr. Spiesel is willing to testify and only requests that we attempt to get him some per diem accounting work while he is in the city.”

The FBI had a file on Spiesel, dating back to 1949, that chronicled his bizarre accusations, including the charge that his enemies had placed people in his home disguised as his father and mother. Spiesel’s father, Boris, a New York City fur merchant, told the FBI his son was mentally disturbed.
¹⁰⁹

The sad-sack prosecutors couldn’t even put a U.S. postman on the witness stand without evoking smirks and ripples of laughter from the courtroom audience. Garrison was alleging that the name Shaw used as an alias when he conspired with Ferrie and Oswald to murder Kennedy was Clay Bertrand (see later discussion). In the summer of 1966, Shaw executed a change of address form so his mail would be sent to the home of his friend, one Jeff Biddison at 1414 Chartres Street, while Shaw was on vacation. The postal worker, James Hardiman, told the jury that he delivered several letters addressed to Clem (not Clay) Bertrand to Biddison’s house that summer. On cross-examination, he was asked, “Did you ever deliver any mail to that address, that is, 1414 Chartres Street, addressed to a Mr. Cliff Boudreaux?”

Yes, the postal worker answered.

“Now, Mr. Hardiman, if I told you I just made that name up, would your testimony be the same?”

“Maybe you made it up,” Hardiman answered, “but I have delivered Boudreaux mail there, too.”
¹¹⁰

One may wonder why Garrison was beset by so many goofy witnesses. But as author James Phelan pointed out, “There are certain sensational cases that have a fascination for unstable people and fetch them forth in droves…Celebrated cases also attract witnesses who are not psychotic, but who falsely identify key figures out of faulty memory or a desire to lift themselves out of dull anonymity into the spotlight.” The difference between Garrison and most responsible prosecutors in these high-visibility cases is that the latter don’t call the kooks to the witness stand. Garrison did. Phelan says, “The Garrison case had a disastrously low threshold, across which trooped a bizarre parade of people eager to bolser his conspiracy scenario.”
¹¹¹
And Garrison welcomed them with open arms.

Garrison’s star witness at the Shaw trial, and the one around whom he virtually built his entire case, was Perry Russo (David Ferrie died before the trial—see later text), a twenty-five-year-old Baton Rouge insurance salesman who was a friend of David Ferrie’s. Russo claimed that he was in Ferrie’s apartment in New Orleans in mid-September of 1963 when he heard Ferrie, Shaw (using the alias Clay Bertrand), and Oswald conspire to kill Kennedy.
¹¹²
The only problem is that cross-examination revealed that the first four times Russo told everything he knew about Ferrie—including to
Baton Rouge State-Times
reporter Bill Bankston on February 24, 1967 (two days after Ferrie’s death), and later in the day to Jim Kemp of TV station WAFB in Baton Rouge—he never mentioned any such thing, not even bringing up the names Oswald, Shaw, or Bertrand, much less any conspiracy by them. In fact, when Kemp asked him if Ferrie had ever mentioned “Lee Harvey Oswald’s name,” Russo answered, “No. I had never heard of Oswald until the television [coverage] of the assassination.”
¹¹³
Russo only spoke about the Shaw-Ferrie-Oswald conspiracy meeting when he was put under sodium pentothal and hypnosis four years later in 1967, and even then, only after being asked leading questions.

But one can see why Russo needed truth serum and hypnosis to recall hearing three people plot to murder President Kennedy four years earlier. Without truth serum and hypnosis, a plot to murder the president of the United States just wasn’t important enough for someone like him to remember. But what about around the time of the alleged incident? Surely he must have remembered the incident at least for a while back then, right? And if so, why, he was asked at Shaw’s preliminary hearing on March 15, 1967, hadn’t he gone to the authorities when, just two months after the meeting of conspirators he claimed he was privy to, the president was murdered? Again, apparently a plot to murder the president of the United States just wasn’t important enough to Russo. He responded casually, “I had an involvement with school, which was
more pressing to me
.”

If that wasn’t unbelievable enough, when Shaw’s lawyer asked, “You claim you were present at a meeting where the assassination was planned and you say you did not know whether your testimony would be valuable to the Warren Commission?” Russo answered, “Now, they [“Bertrand, Oswald, Ferrie”] did not say anything about [the specific city of] Dallas,” as if their not doing so was some justification for his not coming forward. Russo, who had to know how pathetic his answers were, tried to inject some plausibility into his story by adding some other reasons why he hadn’t come forward back in 1963. One was that even though the man he saw conspire to murder Kennedy was introduced to him as “Leon Oswald,” and over TV the president’s killer was called “Lee Harvey Oswald,” the two men “did not look alike exactly.” Also, he had confidence in the FBI, and “if they wanted me, [to] ask me anything, they could,” not explaining how they could possibly contact him if he never told them he existed.
¹¹⁴

On January 26, 1971, close to two years after Clay Shaw’s not-guilty verdict on March 1, 1969, Russo told Edward Wegmann, one of Shaw’s lawyers, that he never saw Clay Shaw in Ferrie’s apartment (“absolutely not”), and Garrison’s office had done “a complete brainwashing job” on him.
¹¹⁵
On April 16, 1971, Russo gave a tape-recorded interview to William Gurvich (the former Garrison investigator) and two of Shaw’s attorneys, Wegmann and F. Irvin Dymond. Russo told of Garrison and his staff telling him before the trial that they had a contract with
Life
magazine for twenty-five thousand dollars, and that “after the Shaw conviction” they would “either give that to me or see somehow I got a lot of it for my trouble.” Saying, “I guess I always knew [Shaw] had nothing to do with anything,” Russo stated that Garrison’s staff threatened him: if he went back on what he said under hypnosis, “the courthouse [would be] planted on top of me.”
¹¹⁶
*

Jerry Cohen, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter I knew who covered the Shaw trial for the
Times
, told me when he returned to Los Angeles after the not-guilty verdict was reached, “Vince, the trial was the most unbelievable joke you could ever imagine. Though no one was confident of what the New Orleans jury would do, nearly everyone in the courtroom, including the media, knew that Shaw was innocent and Garrison had no evidence against him. The jury returned with their verdict in forty-five minutes or so [actually, fifty-four minutes]. The consensus was that they had a cup of coffee, chose their foreman, and could have returned in ten minutes, but they sat it out a few more minutes for appearance purposes.
†
I tell you, Garrison should be in jail for what he did. This is a sick, dangerous man.” Salvatore Panzeca, Shaw’s original defense attorney who remained on his team throughout the trial, told me, “Garrison knowingly prosecuted an innocent man. In my forty-one years as a criminal defense attorney, I have never had a client more cooperative, intelligent and innocent than Clay Shaw.”
¹¹⁷
Milton Brener, who was a prosecutor in Garrison’s office before the Shaw case and ended up writing a book about the case, told me, “Of course Shaw was innocent. The entire case against him was a figment of Garrison’s imagination. He pulled it completely out of thin air.”
¹¹⁸
Indeed, Garrison’s case against Shaw was so outrageous and so lacking in any credible evidence against Shaw that even Garrison’s own wife, as Oliver Stone himself acknowledged in an article, didn’t believe in his case, and she and Garrison separated right after the trial.
¹¹⁹
When a prosecutor’s own wife isn’t on his side, that’s pretty bad, isn’t it? I mean, can it get any worse?

The media savaged Garrison, who didn’t have the courage to show up in court throughout a good part of the trial (averaging about one day a week), not even when the all-male (nine whites, three blacks) jury returned its verdict of not guilty at one in the morning on March 1, 1969, two years to the day after Shaw had been arrested in the case. In a front-page editorial on March 1, the
New Orleans States-Item
said, “District Attorney Jim Garrison should resign. He has shown himself unfit to hold the office of District Attorney or any other office. Mr. Garrison has abused the vast powers of his office. He has perverted the law rather than prosecuted it. His persecution of Clay Shaw was a perversion of the legal process such as has not been often seen. Clay Shaw has been vindicated, but the damage to his reputation caused by Mr. Garrison’s witch hunt may never be repaired. This travesty of justice is a reproach to the conscience of all good men and must not go unanswered. Mr. Garrison himself should now be brought to the bar to answer for his conduct.”
¹²⁰
The
New York Times
opined in an editorial that Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw was “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence.”
¹²¹

The
Los Angeles Times
editorial observed that “the really frightening thing” is that since Garrison only used Shaw to further his own ends, “Shaw could have been any man.” Saying “the processes of justice had been outrageously abused” by Garrison, the
Times
concluded that “if there is one fact proven beyond all dispute in the Shaw case it is that Jim Garrison is unfit to hold public office.”
¹²²

For his part, Shaw would later say, “If a jury could convict me on such shoddy evidence as Garrison presented, I would gladly have gone to jail—it would be the safest place in a world gone mad.”
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*

Again, Garrison is the man whom Stone presented to his audience as the most solid and rational of men, one with impeccable ethics who was an intrepid fighter for justice.

Unbelievably, the shameless and unconscionable Garrison, after the irreparably grievous harm he had already inflicted on an innocent man, decided to inflict further harm on Shaw, his model obviously not being common sense and decency, but again, Victor Hugo’s maliciously tenacious Inspector Javert in
Les Misérables
. On March 3, 1969, the first business day after the not-guilty verdict came down, Garrison, instead of skulking away into the night with his tail between his legs, filed two counts of perjury against Shaw for denying on the witness stand that he knew Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie. (It is extremely rare, almost unheard of, for a defendant, after his criminal trial, to be prosecuted for committing perjury in his defense, whether or not he was convicted of the offense for which he was on trial. It’s just not done, even where there is no doubt in the DA’s mind the defendant committed perjury. It’s a perjury that is almost invariably overlooked and even expected by prosecutors. After all, if the defendant were going to admit having committed the crime, he would have pled guilty and there would not have been any trial.)
†

On January 18, 1971, Shaw made a motion for a temporary restraining order to prevent Garrison from proceeding against him. Shaw contended that Garrison was acting “in bad faith” and was abusing his prosecutorial powers. The motion was granted, and on January 25, a three-day hearing commenced on the issue of whether Garrison should be permanently enjoined from prosecuting Shaw on the perjury charges. Numerous witnesses testified, including Shaw, who again said he had never met Oswald or Ferrie. Russo was also called to the stand but invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. U.S. federal district court judge Herbert W. Christenberry ruled on May 27, 1971, that Shaw was entitled to the relief sought, and signed a permanent injunction on June 7.

In his ruling Christenberry scathingly denounced Garrison, using words like “appalling,” “outrageous,” and “inexcusable” to describe Garrison’s conduct in different areas of the case. He said, “Garrison undertook his baseless investigation [of Shaw] with the specific intent to deprive Shaw of his rights under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.” In one part of his written opinion, he in essence accused Garrison of subornation of perjury, writing that Garrison “resorted to the use of drugs and hypnosis on Russo, purportedly to corroborate, but more likely to concoct his story.”
¹²⁴

Garrison appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. Garrison had succeeded, however, in torturing Shaw for two years after the not-guilty verdict on the conspiracy-to-commit-murder charge. In his diaries, Shaw referred to the “Kafkaesque horror” Garrison had put him through to further some perceived greater good.

In an address on the Bill of Rights (and its progenitor, the English Magna Carta) at Tulane Law School on October 30, 1964, Garrison had dwelled on the fact that the Bill of Rights, which he properly elevated to sacred status, was adopted “to protect the governed from the men who govern them,” and that attacks on these fundamental rights can invariably be “identified by the great
superior
virtue which the attackers bear inscribed on their battle flag.” The attacks are always ostensibly “for the good of the state,” some “great virtue of the day.” A twenty-four-hour watch is needed to protect our Bill of Rights, he said, because someone is always trying to deprive us of them “in the interest of justice, of course.” I believe Jim Garrison believed those words when he spoke them, but somewhere down the line, and for whatever reason, he became the precise embodiment of the villains he feared and denounced in his 1964 speech.