In early 1967 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison shocked the world when he announced that there had been a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, and he and his staff had solved it. Garrison arrested New Orleans businessman Clay L. Shaw, and charged him with the crime of conspiracy to murder the President. It took nearly two years for the case to come to trial; three weeks were consumed by the testimony and arguments; the jury deliberated for less than an hour before setting Shaw free.1
“In retrospect,” John Seigenthaler, a former Justice Department assistant to Robert F. Kennedy, writes, “Garrison’s charges seem far-fetched because the evidence he finally produced against Shaw seemed so ludicrous, so insulting to human intellect, that the jury rejected it out of hand.”2
Since that time few have been as critical of Garrison’s antics as the conspiracy theorists whose credibility was so badly undermined by the events in New Orleans. For example, Anthony Summers, author of Conspiracy (later republished as Not in Your Lifetime), writes that the Garrison investigation “has long been recognized by virtually everyone – including serious scholars who believe there was a conspiracy – as a grotesque, misdirected shambles.”3 “What angers investigators about . . . Jim Garrison,” Summers adds, “is that his cockeyed caper in 1967 was more than an abuse of the justice system. It was an abuse of history, and – more than any other single factor – [responsible] in discrediting . . . genuine researchers . . .”4
 Jim Garrison |
David Lifton, author of the best-selling conspiracy book Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (and who worked alongside Garrison for a short time), called Garrison “intellectually dishonest, a reckless prosecutor, and a total charlatan.”5 As Lifton sees it, the D.A. was “one of the biggest frauds that ever came down the pike. He prosecuted innocent people, did an enormous disservice to the [anti-Warren Commission] movement, and when the jury acquitted Shaw, it was ‘good riddance.’”
Groundbreaking researcher Harold Weisberg – author of the Whitewash series of conspiracy books, and regarded by many as the “dean” of Kennedy assassination researchers, noted caustically that “as an investigator, Jim Garrison could not find a pubic hair in a whorehouse at rush hour.”6 “What [Garrison] did not crib and enlarge upon he just made up. [There was no] substance to anything at all from him.”7
Joan Mellen, a professor of English and creative writing at Philadelphia’s Temple University, was a personal friend of Jim Garrison’s;8 her book, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History,9 toils to prove once and for all that Garrison was anything but the fraud history has branded him.
Possibly the most striking of the early reviews comes from an unexpected source – the Baltimore Sun, a newspaper for which Mellen herself occasionally writes, and which she once used as a platform to bash Patricia Lambert’s definitive book, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK.10
Writing for the Sun, author Steve Weinberg appears to be sympathetic to Mellen; he praises her as “a polymath seemingly able to write about anything. . . . Her range and intellect can leave a mere mortal breathless.”11
But Weinberg labels A Farewell to Justice “a conspiracy of confusion,” calling its narrative “incomprehensible” and its organization “a puzzle.” “I read several chapters multiple times, but understanding eluded me,” he laments. “Mellen is normally an excellent stylist, but in the face of the Kennedy assassination her wordsmithing implodes until backward the mind reels.” “In some sections,” Weinberg observes, “it seems as if she wrote say, 20 paragraphs, cut them apart, threw them in the air, then arranged them in whatever order she retrieved them from the carpet.”12
“Not only the phrasing but also the content of those sentences often confuses rather than enlightens,” Weinberg notes. “. . . Accuracy, or at least factual imprecision, is a problem too.” He concludes: “It is painful to write a negative review of a book about Garrison, who fascinates me; about the Kennedy assassination puzzle, which fascinates me; and by an author I have admired for so many decades. But there is no polite way to say it: A Farewell to Justice is a mess.”13
Is Mellen right? Does she reliably present worthwhile information? Did Jim Garrison really unearth a conspiracy in the John F. Kennedy assassination? Should his case against Clay Shaw really have changed the world? |
While Weinberg’s observations are undeniably on-target, larger questions remain. His review may instill caution in those with a merely casual interest in Mellen’s subject matter, but others may want to know: Is Mellen right? Does she reliably present worthwhile information? Did Jim Garrison really unearth a conspiracy in the John F. Kennedy assassination? Should his case against Clay Shaw really have changed the world?
According to Mellen, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. Mellen alleges that Clay Shaw was a secret operative of the CIA who participated in the assassination plot. But this is a fiction unsupported by the documents she cites, and the prosecution never even so much as mentioned the CIA during the Shaw trial.
What was the real basis of Jim Garrison’s case?
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office acted on a tip that Lee Harvey Oswald may have known a local man named David Ferrie during the mid-1950s, when Oswald and Ferrie were both involved with activities of the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans. Though no evidence linked the two men during Oswald’s brief New Orleans residency in the summer of 1963, the D.A.’s office was suspicious of a car trip to Houston that Ferrie made with two friends, beginning some twelve hours after the assassination. The D.A.’s men investigated it, and, at their instigation, so did the New Orleans Police Department, the Houston police, the FBI, and even the Texas Rangers. Investigators pored over phone records from stops Ferrie made along the way, interviewed witnesses, and grilled Ferrie and the two men who had accompanied Ferrie on the trip. Ferrie was cleared of suspicion.
 Joan Mellen |
When D.A. Jim Garrison began reinvestigating the assassination in 1966, David Ferrie was his prime suspect, but the D.A. was unable to come up with any credible evidence against him. When Ferrie died of a stroke shortly after revealing himself to the media as Garrison’s prime target, it caused a worldwide sensation. Although insiders knew that Garrison had nothing on Ferrie,14 Garrison capitalized on the tragedy by falsely claiming, “Evidence developed by our office has long since confirmed that [Ferrie] was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy.”15 Proclaimed Garrison, “The apparent suicide [sic] of David Ferrie ends the life of a man who, in my judgment, was one of history’s most important individuals.”116
Ferrie’s death, however, drew forth a 25-year-old Baton Rouge insurance sales trainee named Perry Raymond Russo, an acquaintance of Ferrie’s with some memories to share – and more.
Prior to Russo’s emergence Jim Garrison had some vague suspicions that the retired Managing Director of New Orleans’s International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw, might be one and the same as “Clay Bertrand,” a shadowy figure who may or may not have existed, may or may not have been linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, and may or may not have had some undefined connection to the murder of John F. Kennedy. “Bertrand” was introduced to the world by New Orleans attorney Dean A. Andrews, Jr., who described him to the Warren Commission as a shadowy figure who apparently knew Oswald and sought legal counsel for him.
Clay Shaw had an outstanding reputation in business, civic, and cultural circles; and was an open admirer of John F. Kennedy17 – but, as Jim Garrison knew, Shaw was also a closeted homosexual. The “Bertrand” described by Dean Andrews was gay, the D.A. surmised; so was Shaw.18 But Garrison had no evidence linking Shaw to the elusive “Bertrand.” Garrison’s staff couldn’t verify that such a person even existed.
Although Joan Mellen only devotes a few pages to the subject of Perry Russo, she acknowledges that he was . . . a lynchpin in Garrison’s case, establishing . . . Shaw’s relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie . . . and establishing that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. |
Although Joan Mellen only devotes a few pages to the subject of Perry Russo, she acknowledges that he was, at the very least, a lynchpin in Garrison’s case, establishing (as far as the prosecution was concerned) Shaw’s relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie, both of whom Shaw denied knowing, and to the name “Clay Bertrand,” which Shaw denied he had ever used; and establishing that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.19 “The best direct evidence Garrison had that Shaw knew he was participating in the murder of President Kennedy,” Mellen writes, “was in Perry Russo’s testimony.”20
In fact, Perry Raymond Russo was the sole basis for the indictment of Clay Shaw for conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States21 and the State’s star witness against Shaw. At trial, the D.A.’s men admitted that, in the words of lead prosecutor James Alcock, “the State’s case rises or falls upon the testimony of Perry Raymond Russo . . .”22 Jury foreman Sidney Hebert agreed, telling author James Kirkwood, “Actually the whole case rested on the testimony of Perry Russo.”23
In Jim Garrison’s own words, Perry Russo was “the witness who ties this whole case together. He’s my case against Shaw.”24
Russo would testify that, during the fall of 1963, he attended a party at Dave Ferrie’s apartment, where, later in the evening when the crowd had thinned out, he witnessed Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw plotting the assassination of President Kennedy.25
 Perry Russo |
Russo originally claimed there were witnesses to corroborate his story, but this turned out to be untrue.26 So in the end it comes down to a case of Perry Russo’s word against Clay Shaw’s. Perry Russo, Mellen states, “never wavered in his story.”27
Is this true?
Following Dave Ferrie’s untimely death in February 1967, Perry Russo contacted Baton Rouge reporter Bill Bankston and told Bankston that, in “general conversation” with Russo, Ferrie had threatened the President’s life.28 Russo had never met Lee Harvey Oswald, he said, and had never heard Ferrie speak of him.29 In a television interview filmed that same day, Russo stated, “Oswald didn’t exist in my mind until the assassination. I read about him in the papers. I heard about him on TV. I don’t know anything at all about Oswald. If [Ferrie] mentioned Oswald, I don’t remember it.”30
Russo said nothing whatsoever about a gathering at Ferrie’s apartment, and revealed no knowledge of a plot to kill the President; on the contrary, he said he “he did not take any of Ferrie’s statements seriously” at the time.31 (Russo was not asked about Clay Shaw, as it would be another week before the public found out that Shaw was considered a suspect by the D.A.’s office.)
Russo told essentially the same thing to other reporters that day, and affirmed in a filmed interview, “I never heard of Oswald until on television [after] the assassination.”32
The following day, Jim Garrison dispatched Assistant D.A. Andrew Sciambra to Baton Rouge to interview Perry Russo.33 Sciambra brought with him a number of photographs to show Russo, including one of Clay Shaw (still Garrison’s prime suspect for the mysterious “Clay Bertrand”).
According to Sciambra’s memorandum of his initial interview with Perry Russo, when he showed the witness the photograph of Clay Shaw, Russo volunteered that he had seen “this man twice. The first time,” Sciambra writes, “was when he pulled into Ferrie’s service station to get his car fixed [long after the assassination had occurred]. Shaw was the person who was sitting in the compact car talking with Ferrie. He remembers seeing him again at the Nashville Street Wharf [in 1961] when he went to see JFK speak. He said he particularly remembers this guy because he was apparently a queer. It seems that instead of looking at JFK speak, Shaw kept turning around and looking at all the young boys in the crowd.”34
“Is his name Bertrand?” Sciambra asked him.
“I’m not sure,” Russo replied. “Is that his name?”
“That’s the name he went as,” Sciambra informed the witness.35
Russo also described a roommate of Ferrie’s, whom he said had “sort of dirty blond hair and a husky beard which appeared to be a little darker than his hair.” He looked like “a typical beatnik, extremely dirty, with his hair all messed up, his beard unkept [sic], a dirty T-shirt on, and either blue jeans or khaki pants on. He . . . wore white tennis shoes which were cruddy and had on no socks.”36
Shown a photo of Lee Harvey Oswald, the witness “began shaking his head and said that he doesn’t know if he should say what he’s thinking. . . . He then said that the picture of Lee Harvey Oswald was the person that Ferrie had introduced to him as his roommate. He said the only thing that doesn’t make him stand up and say that he is sure beyond the shadow of any doubt is the fact that the roommate was always so cruddy and had a bushy beard. He then drew a beard on the picture of Oswald and said this was Ferrie’s roommate.” He added that the name “Leon” rang a bell.37
Once again, there was no mention whatsoever of a gathering at Dave Ferrie’s apartment or any inkling that Russo knew anything about a plot to assassinate the President of the United States.38
That evening Andrew Sciambra met with Jim Garrison, along with LIFE Magazine editor Richard Billings, who was working closely with the D.A.’s office on the assassination case. Sciambra “came in excited,” Billings would recall, “and told them that he had just interviewed Perry Russo in Baton Rouge. He was excited because Russo said he had seen Shaw and Ferrie together on one occasion – in a car at Ferrie’s gas station . . .”39
On Monday morning, February 27th, Sciambra phoned Russo and asked him to come to New Orleans. As Sciambra described it, “we went down to the Detective Bureau in order to draw a composite sketch of Lee Harvey Oswald, and then from there we went back up to the District Attorney’s office . . . in an effort to get the beard of Lee Harvey Oswald properly drawn on the photograph.”40 It may have taken as long as six hours to complete,41 as Oswald did not appear “dirty and disheveled” enough to suit the witness.42
It did not seem to bother anyone that Perry Russo’s description of the roommate sounded nothing at all like Lee Harvey Oswald, who had short, neatly trimmed, dark hair; was extremely neat in his appearance; was always well groomed and clean-shaven; was wholly unlike anyone’s physical conception of a “beatnik”; and who spent the summer of 1963 living in New Orleans with his wife Marina and daughter June, not David Ferrie.
It did not seem to bother anyone that Perry Russo’s description of the roommate sounded nothing at all like Lee Harvey Oswald, who had short, neatly trimmed, dark hair; was extremely neat in his appearance; was always well groomed and clean-shaven . . . . |
Following further questioning about Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw, and “Bertrand,”43 Perry Russo underwent the first step in a process Jim Garrison called “objectifying” his testimony.44 The witness himself would later refer to his experience with the DA’s office as a “complete brainwashing job.”45
In the emergency room operating ward of Mercy Hospital, coroner Nicholas Chetta administered to Russo a dose of sodium Pentothal – so-called “truth serum.”46
However, as Patricia Lambert notes in her groundbreaking study of the Garrison case, False Witness, sodium Pentothal only tends to suppress inhibitions, “including those against fantasizing. If a person is trying to hide something, he may be more likely to reveal it because he is more relaxed. But if a person is inclined toward fantasizing, the drug may encourage that.”47
Dr. Edwin A. Weinstein of the Washington School of Psychiatry observed in 1967, “The drug is not a ‘truth serum.’ Its action on recall is profoundly influenced by the stress of the situation in which it is administered and the relationship between the subject and his questioners.” “Under the influence of sodium Pentothal,” Dr. Weinstein states, “subjects may give highly fictional accounts of past events and describe incidence that never happened.”48
The interrogation that followed would be the turning point in Jim Garrison’s investigation. By this time, Perry Russo had heard enough about Clay Shaw and his alleged alias to make the connections his interrogators needed.49 As the witness described to Saturday Evening Post reporter James Phelan, he “had picked up a lot of information from Garrison’s people . . .” The D.A.’s staff “asked me a lot of questions and I’m a pretty perceptive guy. I was able to figure out what they wanted to know from the questions they asked.”50
Under the influence of the drug, Russo denied knowing Clay Shaw. But when asked by Sciambra whether he knew “Clay Bertrand,” Russo said that he did know a “Bertrand.” “Russo said that Ferrie had introduced him to Bertrand while he was at Ferrie’s apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway,” Sciambra writes. At Sciambra’s prompting, Russo described “Bertrand” as a “queer,” and “a tall man with white kinky hair, sort of slender.” He said that “Bertrand” was the man he’d seen once at Ferrie’s service station and once at the Nashville Street Wharf.51
At Sciambra’s prompting, Russo described being in Ferrie’s apartment with “Bertrand” and “Leon Oswald.” According to Russo, Ferrie had stated, “We are going to kill John F. Kennedy” and “it won’t be long.” Sciambra asked whom Ferrie had meant when he said “we,” and Russo responded, “I guess he was referring to the people in the room.”52
When the sodium Pentothal wore off, Russo forgot much of what he had said under its influence.53 That night, over dinner at the Royal Orleans Rib Room with Jim Garrison and Richard Billings, Russo found that he was “the star of the evening.”54 Garrison “seemed charged up,” Russo would later recall. “He started introducing me to Billings as his prize, his secret weapon.”55
Joan Mellen claims (without citing any source) that Russo had identified Clay Shaw as “Bertrand” during his very first interview with Andrew Sciambra; she even invents dialogue illustrating this point.56 But LIFE editor and (for a short time) Garrison confidante Richard Billings (cited frequently as a witness by Mellen),57 recorded an altogether different account in his contemporaneous journal.
The witness seemed puzzled, Billings observed, when Garrison brought up the name, “Bertrand.” To Billings’s surprise, Russo denied knowing anyone by that name.558 “I don’t remember [the] name ‘Bertrand’ now,” Russo told the gathering of people, “so I’m very skeptical of what [I’ve been saying under the influence of the sodium Pentothal].”59 The D.A. suggested that the “truth serum” had jogged his memory.60
“Garrison kept offering me suggestions of what to tell Billings,” Russo recounted later. “It was pressure, boy. I felt like I had to convince Billings of things I hadn’t even convinced myself of yet.”61 His willingness to do so may have been facilitated in part by a financial incentive floated by the District Attorney that evening.62
The following day, Perry Russo was brought to Clay Shaw’s house. He knocked on the door, posing as a door-to-door insurance salesman. (“This was a peculiar move,” observes Patricia Lambert. “For if Russo really did recognize Shaw from the evening they shared at Ferrie’s plotting session, Shaw should have recognized Russo too.”)63 After a brief exchange, he took his leave, and informed the D.A.’s office that Shaw was definitely “Bertrand.”64 Shaw was arrested the following day, March 1, and charged with conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
That same day, Russo underwent another step in the “objectifying” process when he was interrogated under the influence of hypnosis by Dr. Esmond Fatter and Andrew Sciambra. Jim Garrison would later claim that these procedures were conducted in order to verify that the witness was telling the truth.65
The D.A. and his men seemed unaware that in a hypnotic trance, “False ideas and beliefs can be implanted upon the mind of a subject . . . if the subject thinks that the examiner or hypnotizer desires him to entertain such beliefs or if such beliefs seem to be necessary to support other beliefs or to please the hypnotizer or whomever he represents.” Hypnosis is, by definition, a “trance-like state of altered awareness that is characterized by extreme suggestibility.”66
The D.A. and his men seemed unaware that in a hypnotic trance, “False ideas and beliefs can be implanted upon the mind of a subject . . . if the subject.”. . . Hypnosis is, by definition, a “trance-like state of altered awareness that is characterized by extreme suggestibility.” |
Remarkably, although Clay Shaw had been arrested on the basis of Perry Russo’s testimony alone,67 it is Dr. Fatter, having been fully briefed about the case by the D.A.’s men,68 who introduces the key elements into the witness’s interrogation.
Russo fails to describe anything but himself and “Dave Ferrie just sitting around,”69 until Dr. Fatter explicitly sets the scene. Using the visual device of an imaginary television screen, Fatter tells the witness, “A picture is going to come on and you are in Ferrie’s apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. Would you look at that picture and tell us the story that you see?”70
“[Ferrie] introduced me to his roommate who was a kook!” Russo replies. The roommate “Looked like he would be about as tall as I and he had sandy brown hair, dirty white shirt and dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty [sic].”71
“And Perry, his name was – ?” “Leon.” “His last name?” “Oswald.”2
“Who else is in the apartment?” Fatter asks. “Nobody,” Russo says, “just me and him.” “Just you and – Ferrie?” “And Oswald.”73
Despite Dr. Fatter’s prodding, the witness still fails to volunteer any recollection of the man he had identified as a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination. Fatter instructs him to “continue to go deeper and deeper. Now, picture that television screen again, Perry, and it is a picture of Ferrie’s apartment and there are several people in there and there is a white-haired man.”74 (Emphasis added.)
Russo says, “We are having a party and I came in and everybody is drinking beer. There are about ten of us and I am there, the roommate, Dave, some young boys and some other friends of Dave’s . . .”75
“And how about the white-haired man?” Fatter prompts him again. (Emphasis added.) “That is a friend of Dave’s.” “His name?” “Clem [sic] Bertrand,” Russo responds, garbling the purported alias.76 (Dean Andrews had told the Warren Commission about a Clay Bertrand, and it was primarily for this reason that Jim Garrison targeted Clay Shaw as a suspect in the first place. When homosexuals use aliases, Garrison claimed, “They always change their last names, but never their first names.”)77
“Had you seen him before?” “Yes, I saw him at the Nashville Street Wharf.” “I wonder where else –” “Nowhere.” “Is that the same white-haired gentleman in the service station?” “I don’t remember the service station.”78
At this point Fatter abruptly changes the subject to introduce another key element of the story: “I wonder who that is sitting on the sofa with the rifle?” (Emphasis added.) “Leon.” “What is he doing with the rifle, Perry?” “He always had a rifle; he liked guns and many times he would have a rifle.”79
 Dean Andrews |
“Continue looking at the television program,” Dr. Fatter instructs him, “Clay, the white-haired man, is going to come into the room.”80 . . . See that television screen again, it is very vivid. [Now] notice the picture on the screen.81 There will be Bertrand, Ferrie and Oswald, and they are going to discuss a very important matter . . . they are talking about assassinating somebody. Look at it and describe it to me.” 82 (Emphasis added.)
What is left to describe? Esmond Fatter has unwittingly fed the witness the entire story. For the first time on record, Russo now describes a full-blown “assassination plot" involving Dave Ferrie, Ferrie’s supposed roommate, “Leon,” and the white-haired “Clem Bertrand.”83
Russo was again hypnotized and interrogated on March 9, 1967. No transcript or report of this session is known to exist. Apparently, the witness only came up with one “new” item of information: that “Clem Bertrand” had purportedly stated he would establish an alibi for the assassination by being “in the public eye” on the West Coast, far from the scene of the crime. The New Orleans press had reported on March 2nd that Clay Shaw had been in San Francisco on business the day of the assassination,84 and Russo would later state, “I read every scrap the papers printed about the case before the Shaw hearing.”85 (It never seems to have occurred to the D.A. or his men – or Joan Mellen, who repeats the bizarre “alibi” claim86 – to wonder why someone would travel from New Orleans to San Francisco for an alibi in Dallas.)
Russo was interrogated a third time under hypnosis on March 12th.87 The following day, no less than five of the D.A.’s men helped prepare the witness for his testimony at Clay Shaw’s preliminary hearing, in a lengthy session conducted at the Ramada Inn on Tulane Avenue. The witness was asked “to repeat things over and over and over. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat . . . non-stop,” as Russo later described it.88 With the hypnosis transcripts in hand, Garrison’s men would recite the questions Dr. Fatter had asked, with Russo reciting his responses. “It was like a script to play,” Russo recalled later. “You say your lines and I’ll say mine.”89
Learning his lines was precisely what the witness was doing. By this time, as he would later admit to several people, he found it difficult to distinguish for certain between what was true and what was false in his testimony.90 He told Saturday Evening Post reporter James Phelan that Shaw’s defense attorney “could destroy me as a witness with five questions.” All he had to do “is study the hypnosis transcript – it’s all right there before him.”91
Jim Garrison personally offered James Phelan a rare glimpse of Andrew Sciambra’s initial interview report on Russo and the transcript of the first hypnosis session, and Phelan called the D.A.’s attention to the glaring discrepancies between them.92 Garrison ultimately informed Phelan that he had “discussed [the discrepancies] at length with Perry Russo and I now know he’s telling the truth.”93
But Jim Garrison apparently found the written record of Perry Russo’s accounts so damaging that, prior to submitting the transcripts of Russo’s two documented hypnosis sessions to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee reinvestigating the JFK assassination during the late 1970s, Garrison personally altered the documents, and, in his accompanying letter to the House committee, invented a false chronology for the sessions, to further obscure the evolution of Russo’s tale.94 You can’t read about this, however, in Professor Mellen’s book; there is no mention of the incident whatsoever.
Prior to a preliminary hearing on the Shaw case, Garrison ordered a polygraph examination for Perry Russo; the test indicated “deception criteria” when Russo claimed to have known Lee Oswald and Clay Shaw. Russo admitted to the polygraph operator, Jefferson Parish Deputy Sheriff Roy Jacob, that his story “wasn’t true,” and he was “just trying to help Mr. Garrison,” because he believed in what the D.A. was trying to accomplish.95 The National Broadcasting Company learned of the failed polygraph exam from Jacob, whom Mellen says “could not be trusted”96 (why not?), and whom she states (again, without explanation) that NBC “did not dare put . . . on camera”97 during their eye-opening White Paper on the Garrison investigation, broadcast June 19, 1967.
Following NBC’s scathing report Garrison ordered a second polygraph exam with a different examiner, even though Russo had already given his full story under oath at the preliminary hearing in March.
During Russo’s initial interview with the second polygraph operator, New Orleans Police Sgt. Edward O’ Donnell, O’Donnell noted that “it was impossible to obtain a polygram which could be evaluated. This was because of the subject’s erratic pneumograph tracing which could be caused by general nervous tension or by the fact that the person intended to lie during the test.”98
Another attempt was made three days later. “After asking three questions,” Sgt. O’Donnell noted in his report on the examination, “the test was stopped due to Perry Russo’s erratic pneumograph tracing and his physical movements. Upon shutting off the instrument and taking the attachments from Perry Russo’s body, the interview continued. Perry Russo expressed that he was under a great deal of pressure and wished that he had never gotten involved in this mess. I told him to forget about the pressures[,] that I only wanted to obtain the truth from him relative to this case. It was explained to him that for his own peace of mind he should examine his conscience and determine what the truth is and once he does this he can stand on the truth now or ten years from now, and not have any misgivings about what he has done.”99
Referring to the alleged gathering at Dave Ferrie’s apartment, O’Donnell asked Russo, “Was Clay Shaw at this party?”
“Do you want to know the truth?” Russo replied.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if he was there or not,” the witness said.100
O’Donnell described in his report, “I told Perry that Shaw [who stood 6'4", weighed a barrel-chested 225 pounds, and had hair that was almost pure white] was the type of a man that if you were to see him, he would stand out in your mind and I asked him if he would give me a no or yes answer to this question. He stated that if he had to give a yes or no answer, he would have to say no.”101
O’Donnell asked Russo “why he went into court and positively identified Shaw as being at this party at David Ferrie’s apartment.” Russo explained that he had gone into the preliminary hearing with the intention of testifying that he wasn’t sure whether Shaw had been at the party. But then, Russo said, Shaw’s defense attorney, F. Irvin Dymond, had made him angry (“turned him on”) when he asked Russo whether he believed in God. (“This is an area which I am highly sensitive about,” he told O’Donnell.)102
Russo said that the events in question were “very vague in his mind” and characterized the conversation he recalled from the party as just “another bull session . . .” Russo “then expressed a desire . . . to meet with Clay Shaw,” “to talk to Clay Shaw to size him up to determine if he was the kind of a person that would take part in such a plot.” (Russo said the same thing to journalist James Phelan, who was covering the case for The Saturday Evening Post.103 Mellen predictably attacks Phelan at some length, labeling him a “CIA and FBI media asset.”)104 Russo expressed a desire “to know the contents of Mr. Garrison’s complete case against Shaw,” as “this would help him to come to a decision.”105
O’Donnell told Russo “that regardless of what Mr. Garrison has or does not have, he should make his own decisions after examining his conscience and determining what the truth is.” At this point, Russo asked that they terminate the interview, assuring O’Donnell he would return later.106 He never did.
When Sgt. Donnell informed Jim Garrison about what had transpired, the District Attorney flew into a rage and accused Russo of selling out “to the CIA” and “to NBC.”107
Both polygraph examiners, Roy Jacob and Edward O’Donnell, were instructed by Garrison’s staff to never mention the examinations to anyone; O’Donnell was instructed not to even write a report on the incident. O’Donnell refused to obey this instruction, and promptly wrote a full report, which he hand-delivered to Jim Garrison.108
Later, O’Donnell was called into Garrison’s office, along with Perry Russo, James Alcock and Andrew Sciambra. Garrison showed the report to Russo and asked if it was accurate. Russo equivocated until O’Donnell, bluffing, hinted that the polygraph examination might have been tape-recorded. With the D.A. and two of his top assistants as witnesses, Russo then admitted the report was accurate.109 Garrison buried the document and made an unsuccessful attempt to have Edward O’Donnell fired from the New Orleans Police Department.110
On September 22, 1967, Jim Garrison took the witness stand to testify with regard to the defense’s motion to quash the indictment against Clay Shaw. When asked, under oath, if Perry Raymond Russo had failed several polygraph examinations: No, Garrison replied, “certainly he has not.”111
In a 1967 interview with Playboy magazine, Garrison claimed that both Roy Jacob and Edward O’Donnell “flatly deny” that Russo failed a polygraph test. It was Roy Jacob who told NBC that Russo had failed the examination he had administered; and Edward O’Donnell testified at length about the incident at the trial of Clay Shaw, affirming the information in his report.112 (O’Donnell reaffirmed this in a November 2000 episode of the History Channel program, Time Machine.)113
As with Roy Jacob, Joan Mellen wishes the reader to discard all that Edward O’Donnell had to say. After all, O’Donnell was “the man said to have the coldest eyes in New Orleans,” she declares, and also – she informs us without a whiff of evidence – “a bitter enemy of Jim Garrison,”114 who was “ever anxious to sabotage the Garrison case . . .”115
Professor Mellen neglects to mention that Perry Russo admitted under oath that O’Donnell’s information was “in essence” accurate,116 and reaffirmed in 1971 that O’Donnell had been “completely honest in his testimony . . .”117
Astonishingly, in his 1988 memoirs, Jim Garrison claims that Perry Russo never took a polygraph examination at all: that he and his staff considered administering such a test to Russo, but “since such tests are highly imperfect and inadmissible in court we rejected the idea”! (Emphasis added.)118
Interviewed by former Justice Department investigator Walter Sheridan for NBC, Russo “stated that his testimony against Clay Shaw may be a combination of truth, fantasy, and lies. He said he wishes he had never gotten into this, but now he feels he has no choice but to go through with it,” Sheridan reported. “He said that he’s afraid if he changed his testimony, that Garrison might indict him for perjury.”119 (Mellen dismisses Sheridan as a “federal agent [sent] to pose as a journalist,”120 with ties to the FBI, the National Security Agency,121 and the IRS;122 and – without a trace of evidence – Mellen claims that Sheridan “disposed over the personnel and currency of whole units of the Central Intelligence Agency.”123
Sheridan, who denied any relationship whatsoever with the CIA, was actually a close confidante of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and had been a personal friend of the late President John F. Kennedy.124 (This matters little to Mellen, who insists that Robert Kennedy “did everything possible to stop Jim Garrison from investigating the murder of the President . . .”125 – in fact, did “everything in his power to destroy Jim Garrison’s investigation.”126)
“Russo, the state’s ‘star witness’ . . . was made to look ridiculous by his own contradictory statements from the witness stand . . .” |
The jury dismissed Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw in less than an hour. Jury foreman Sidney Hebert told author James Kirkwood, “Actually the whole case rested on the testimony of Perry Russo. And his testimony didn’t prove a thing to me.”127 Juror Oliver Schultz ridiculed Russo’s testimony, and said everyone on the jury held the same opinion.128 Juror Larry Morgan agreed with Schultz, adding, “We just couldn’t imagine the state had brought up a case against Clay Shaw – [they had] absolutely nothing! . . . There was just no possibility, there was no question [that] the jury would find Clay Shaw innocent.”129
John Seigenthaler sums up Perry Russo’s credibility: “Russo, the state’s ‘star witness’ . . . was made to look ridiculous by his own contradictory statements from the witness stand . . .”130 “Clay Shaw should never have been required to stand trial. The evidence against him would have been considered comic had the charge not been so deeply serious.”131
William T. Gossett, President of the American Bar Association, denounced the trial as a charade, and said that proceedings such as this one “tend to create doubt about our judicial process . . . our system of jurisprudence.”132 “Certainly [Garrison’s] principal witnesses seemed to be wholly unreliable,” Gossett added, calling Perry Russo’s story “unreal and unbelievable.”133
“District Attorney Jim Garrison should resign,” editorialized the New Orleans States-Item. “He has shown himself unfit to hold the office of district attorney or any other.” “Mr. Garrison has abused the vast powers of his office. He has perverted the law rather than prosecuted it. His persecution of Clay L. Shaw was a perversion of the legal process such as has not been often seen.” Garrison’s case for conspiracy was “built upon the quicksands of unreliability and in the end it did not stand up.”134 The editorial page of the city’s other daily newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, expressed the same opinions.135
Years later, in a GQ article on Jim Garrison, award-winning author Nicholas B. Lemann would refer to Perry Russo as an “insurance salesman-cum-grifter.” Russo sued for defamation, but the suit was thrown out by Judge Charles Schwartz, Jr., who reviewed Russo’s history and concluded that “it is undisputed that Russo’s role in history is that of a testimonial con man.”136
Two years following Shaw’s acquittal, Perry Raymond Russo recanted his entire story in a series of interviews with Clay Shaw’s defense team.137 As to whether he “now thinks that Clay Shaw was the man [he had allegedly witnessed] in Ferrie’s apartment,” Russo said “absolutely not.” Had he ever been positive that Shaw was the man? “Not really,” he said. He described his conditioning by the District Attorney’s office as “a complete brainwashing job.”138
Two decades on, Russo revived his conspiracy tale for Oliver Stone, who hired him as a consultant for his revisionist Garrison whitewash, JFK. But Russo would continue to confide to interviewers that he believed Clay Shaw had been innocent, and had he himself been a member of the Shaw jury, he would have voted to acquit.139
Does Perry Raymond Russo sound like someone you would trust to tell you the truth?
Does Jim Garrison?
Does Joan Mellen?
1 The two most comprehensive and insightful books on the Garrison affair are Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), and Milton E. Brener, The Garrison Case: A Study in the Abuse of Power (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1969). The most detailed coverage of the Shaw trial can be found in James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
2 John Siegenthaler, A Search for Justice (Nashville, Tennessee: Aurora Publishers, Inc., 1971), p. 20. Seigenthaler’s credentials would likely work against him, where Mellen is concerned. As noted elsewhere in this text, Mellen insists that Robert Kennedy, brother of the slain President, “did everything possible to stop Jim Garrison from investigating the murder of the President . . .” (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History [Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005], p. 202.) According to Mellen, RFK did “everything in his power to destroy Jim Garrison’s investigation.” (Mellen, p. 201.) Mellen’s opinion recalls Garrison’s own; Garrison stated that Robert Kennedy was “without any question of a doubt . . . interfering with the investigation of the murder of his brother,” and was making “a real effort to stop it.”
3 Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (New York: Paragon House, 1989: 1992 update), Update . . . November 1991: unnumbered front matter, first page.
4 Anthony Summers, Conspiracy (New York: Paragon House, 1989: 1992 update), Update . . . November 1991: unnumbered front matter, first page.
5 Paul Hoch, Echoes of Conspiracy, Vol. 13, No. 1.
6 Robert Sam Anson, “The Shooting of JFK,” Esquire, November 1991; reprinted in Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 221.
7 Harrison Livingstone, Killing the Truth (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), p. 377.
8 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), pp. xviii-xix.
9 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005).
10 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998). Mellen’s review appeared on March 14, 1999; Lambert’s response can be found here.
11 Steve Weinberg, “New JFK book a conspiracy of confusion,” The Baltimore Sun, December 4, 2005.
12 Steve Weinberg, “New JFK book a conspiracy of confusion,” The Baltimore Sun, December 4, 2005.
13 Steve Weinberg, “New JFK book a conspiracy of confusion,” The Baltimore Sun, December 4, 2005.
14 From New Orleans District Attorney’s Office investigator Tom Bethell’s journal: “[Assistant D.A. James] Alcock discussed Ferrie and pointed out he saw no reason to believe Ferrie was involved.” ( October 2, 1967.) “I had been boiling up for a row with Mark Lane and his lieutenant Gary Sanders, and it burst today. I confronted Lane with his right to read and xerox [sic] our files – he was in the process of reading the Ferrie file when this occurred. I asked him how he felt that xeroxing [sic] the files contributed to the investigation. He kept quite calm and replied that Garrison set policy in the office, not me, and that therefore he could xerox [sic] them if he wanted to, which was I suppose a reasonable answer. I also told Lane that it was my belief he had lied to me about some information provided him by David Lifton. Lifton, a friend of Wesley Liebeler in Los Angeles, had managed to get some information from Liebeler about the classified pages on David Ferrie in the National Archives. Liebeler worked on this area for the Warren Commission and had copies of the classified pages, which he read out to Lifton one evening. (He would not let Lifton have copies of them.) Lifton ran home and wrote down all he could remember. He then later met Lane and told him he had this material written down. Lane told him that he had to have it because he was on his way to New Orleans and Garrison would like to see it. Lifton gave him the material, as well as some info from some columnist. Lane says he only got the columnist material, not the other. Lifton was quite surprised to hear this, and surprised to hear that we did not have the Ferrie material in the office by now. Their stories are in flat contradiction, and there is no doubt in my mind that Lane is lying. The fact is the Ferrie material is worse than useless to Garrison, because it indicates that the FBI is not hiding anything significant about Ferrie, and thus deprives Garrison of an excuse to talk about governmental secrecy, etc. Lane is smart enough to realize this, and no doubt decided that the best thing would be simply not to show the Lifton material to Garrison at all.” ( November 3, 1967.) “I saw Lane later in the afternoon, and we more or less agreed to stop the feud. I told him, however, what it was that concerned me more than anything: some of the files, which I was supposed to be in charge of, were something of an embarrassment to me. The Ferrie file contains no evidence that Ferrie knew Oswald, which is the relationship which the investigation was originally predicated on. The Ferrie file is, in fact, simply a report on a negative investigation. Under the circumstances then, it was somewhat embarrassing to have outsiders like Gary Sanders coming round reading the file. Lane reacted as though he appreciated my problem and then said: “Well, in future, if anyone looks at the Ferrie file, just tell them that the important material from it has been put into a confidential file somewhere.” By saying this, of course, Mark Lane was acknowledging the lack of basis for the investigation.” ( November 4, 1967.) “When I arrived in the office in the morning, Steve Burton was already there, going through some of the files in my office. Evidently Ivon had let him in. Of course, most of the sensitive files (Shaw, Bradley, Thornley) are not there, but in Louis Ivon’s office. Burton had, however, made a bee line for the next most interesting file – Ferrie (actually two files on Ferrie). He had looked through them already and was looking at something else. I started to talk to him a bout something and then he said: “I think it’s a good idea not keeping the Shaw file here where people could see it. I notice you have got all the important material withdrawn from the Ferrie file as well." I said nothing, just vaguely nodded. Of course, he had seen the Ferrie file in its entirety.” ( February 26, 1968.) “Billings feels that Garrison was in possession of important and convincing information implicating Ferrie early on in the investigation – information which he has never made available to anyone. Billings feels this because Garrison was so positive, so sure, so convincing, about Ferrie. I do not believe this is true for a minute. Garrison has a way of being very sure and very convincing about things on precious little evidence.” ( March 15, 1968.)
15 Milton E. Brener, The Garrison Case: A Study in the Abuse of Power (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1969), p. 83.
16 Milton E. Brener, The Garrison Case: A Study in the Abuse of Power (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1969), p. 83.
17 Although it is undoubtedly an exaggeration, one New Orleans reporter compared Shaw’s stature in New Orleans to that of renowned parks commissioner Robert Moses in New York. (James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter [New York: Random House, 1982], p. 143.) Shaw supported JFK’s bid for the presidency in 1960, and praised his “youth, imagination, style and élan.” He was a supporter of Kennedy’s political programs, particularly the Alliance for Progress for Latin America. A friend of Shaw’s stated, “If there was one person in New Orleans who believed in John F. Kennedy, it was Clay Shaw.” (Lambert, p. 49.)
18 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 47.
19 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), pp. 114-15.
20 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 301.
21 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 65-81. The arrest warrant for Shaw states that his arrest was predicated on information from a single confidential witness, revealed two weeks later at the preliminary hearing as Perry Russo. (Lambert, p. 76.) His indictment charged Shaw with participating in one or more conspiratorial meetings with Lee Harvey Oswald, the late David Ferrie, and unnamed others; at the time the indictment was drafted, Garrison had no witnesses against Shaw but Perry Russo. (See for example the detailed contemporaneous accounts of NODA insiders Richard Billings and Tom Bethell.) Lead prosecutor James Alcock confirmed in sworn testimony in 1971 that Perry Russo was the sole basis of the indictment. ( Clay L. Shaw v. Jim Garrison, et al., Civil Action 71-135, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, New Orleans Division. Lambert, p. 167.)
22 Alcock stated, “Mr. Dymond [Shaw defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond] will say that the State’s case rises or falls upon the testimony of Perry Raymond Russo, and essentially I agree . . .” ( Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 28, 1969, (2049) p. 154.)
23 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 508.
24 James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 151. Mellen says Phelan cannot be trusted. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History [Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005], pp. 142, 144-45, 151-52, 235, 313.)
25 For links to all available testimony and statements made by Perry Russo, click here.
26 Russo initially claimed that both his friend Niles Peterson and another witness, a former girlfriend, Sandra Moffett, could corroborate that “Leon Oswald” and “Clem Bertrand” had been at Ferrie’s apartment that evening, as both had attended the party with him. Peterson, however, could recall no one resembling Clay Shaw or Lee Harvey Oswald in attendance; and Moffett denied attending the party at all, stating in a sworn affidavit that she never even met David Ferrie until 1965. (Joan Mellen claims that political forces conspired to keep Sandra Moffett from testifying at the Clay Shaw trial when it was actually Jim Garrison’s own prosecution team that argued against allowing Moffett to testify.) (Niles Peterson and Moffett: Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967, re: Perry Russo interview on February 25, 1967 [in Baton Rouge]. Trial testimony re: Peterson and Moffett: Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 6, 1969, [2005] p. 6; February 10, 1969, [2010] pp. 53, 237, 240-5, 299, 314, 381-5, 387. At trial, Russo equivocated about whether Peterson and/or Moffett had been there, even going so far as to accuse counsel Irvin Dymond of goading him into testifying falsely at the preliminary hearing. [Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 10, 1969, (2010), pp. 239-46.] Peterson denials: NBC White Paper, “The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison,” broadcast June 19, 1967. Moffett denials: Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 78 fn. Mellen on Moffett: Mellen, p. 147. State argues against extradition of Moffett: Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 6, 1969 [2005], pp. 5-13.)
27 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 115.
28 Bill Bankston, “Local Man Reports Ferrie Threat on Life of Kennedy,” Baton Rouge State-Times, February 24, 1967. During the summer months, according to Russo, Ferrie “never referred directly to JFK, and always used the President of Mexico or President Eisenhower as an example.” In an FBI interview of November 27, 1963, conducted in response to allegations made by Jack S. Martin, Ferrie said he had “been critical of any president riding in an open car and had made the statement that anyone could hide in the bushes and shoot a president.”
29 Bill Bankston, Local: Man Reports Ferrie Threat on Life of Kennedy,” Baton Rouge State-Times, February 24, 1967.
30 He Must Have Something, documentary film, 1992.
31 Bill Bankston, “Local Man Reports Ferrie Threat on Life of Kennedy,” Baton Rouge State-Times, February 24, 1967.
32 Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 10, 1969, (2010) pp. 201-21. At trial, Russo affirmed the overall accuracy of the transcript. (Ibid., p. 221.) At Clay Shaw’s preliminary hearing, he explained this discrepancy by insisting it had been Leon Oswald he had known, not Lee Oswald, and had never suspected the two were one and the same. (Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans, State of Louisiana, No. M-703, Clay L. Shaw, Arrestee [Preliminary hearing transcript, March 15, 1967], p. 182.) But at trial, he stated that he did connect the two alleged individuals, Lee and “Leon,” in November 1963. “I told a couple of friends of mine that I knew [Lee Harvey Oswald] or I had known him,” he testified. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 11, 1969, [2011] p. 333.) Asked in 1971 if he could say that he had “actually been in the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald and actually conversed with him,” Russo replied, “No.” (James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter [New York: Random House, 1982], p. 175.)
33 Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969, (2013) pp. 39-41.
34 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967, re: Perry Russo interview on February 25, 1967 [in Baton Rouge]. As developed at the Shaw trial, Russo’s description of this individual does not fit Clay Shaw, although Shaw was present at that same event.
35 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 72. Russo did not remember for certain when Sciambra said this to him; it was either during their initial interview of February 25th or early in the day of their next encounter on February 27th. He was certain it was prior to their sodium Pentothal session on the afternoon of the 27th. At trial, Sciambra denied naming any of the photograph subjects to Russo on February 25th. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969, [2014] p. 24.) It would not be unusual for Sciambra to inform a prospective Shaw witness that Shaw was “Bertrand,” however, as Sciambra, by his own admission, said the same thing to David Ferrie in their interview of February 18, 1967. He also told Ferrie, falsely, that attorney Dean Andrews had identified Shaw as “Bertrand.”
36 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967, re: Perry Russo interview on February 25, 1967 [in Baton Rouge].
37 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967, re: Perry Russo interview on February 25, 1967 [in Baton Rouge].
38 In A Farewell to Justice, Mellen turns cartwheels trying to explain away the contents of Andrew Sciambra’s memorandum and lashing out irrationally at Saturday Evening Post reporter James Phelan, the first outsider to read the memorandum and bring to light what it said. (Mellen, pp. 150-151.) Mellen endorses Sciambra’s story, given under oath, that there had been no need to include any information about the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy in the memorandum (dated February 27, 1967) of his February 25 interview with Perry Russo because, by the time he got around to dictating it, he had already reported the full story in his memorandum (dated February 28, 1967) documenting Russo’s February 27th sodium Pentothal interrogation at Mercy Hospital. Sciambra claimed that while he began writing the memorandum of the February 25 interview on February 27th, but did not complete it until sometime between approximately Saturday, March 4, and Tuesday, March 7. Jim Garrison personally handed a copy of the document to James Phelan on March 6th during a meeting in Las Vegas. (Sciambra testimony: Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969 [2013], pp. 57-59; [2015], pp. 39-45; Phelan and Garrison: James Phelan, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans,” Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1967. Defense attorney William Wegmann asked Sciambra if, as a practicing criminal attorney, he wasn’t aware that a memorandum of interrogation under the influence of sodium Pentothal would be inadmissible in court, whereas the memorandum on the initial interview would be admissible. “I didn’t think about it,” Sciambra replied. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969, [2015] p. 17.)
Nothing can change that fact that the memorandum of the initial Baton Rouge interview is entirely consistent with Russo’s prior statements to the news media, not with his later testimony. Nothing can change the fact that the Baton Rouge memorandum states specifically that Russo believed he had seen Clay Shaw precisely twice in his life – not with Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie at a party, but only at a service station with Dave Ferrie and at a speech given by John F. Kennedy. There was no party; there was no assassination plot.
When Jim Phelan initially confronted Sciambra with the omission of the conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States from the Baton Rouge memorandum, Sciambra explained that he had been “awfully busy with a half dozen other things.” “Maybe I forgot to put it in,” he said. (James Phelan, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans,” Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1967. As Phelan observed, this would mean that Sciambra had composed a 3,500-word memorandum on the crime of the century – and neglected to mention the crime.)
Garrison aide William Gurvich was present (along with Jim Garrison) when Phelan confronted Sciambra. “Man, you have just blown up the only witness we’ve got,” Gurvich told Phelan afterwards. “I’ll never forget Sciambra sitting there lying to you. This little son of a bitch, this [memorandum] was his little magnum opus and he sits there telling you he had a half-dozen other things to do. This was the one big thing that this little S.O.B. did and he sat there saying, ‘Maybe I forgot!’ Man, he worked that memo over and polished it and repolished it.” (James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans [New York: Harper Perennial, 1992], p. 164.) (As for Sciambra’s report that Russo had seen Clay Shaw merely twice, not three times, this “was an error on my part,” Sciambra would testify under oath at trial. [Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969 (2015), p. 40.])
Furthermore, Russo privately confirmed to Phelan and LIFE photographer Matt Herron that the memorandum was an accurate record of his interview with Sciambra, and he reaffirmed this during a 1971 interview. When Phelan asked him when he had first mentioned the party and the assassination plot, Russo said it was, not during the initial interview at his home in Baton Rouge, but during a subsequent one, “Down in New Orleans.” (James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans [New York: Harper Perennial, 1992], p. 165.) (Russo denied this under oath at the Shaw trial, but both Herron and Sciambra himself confirmed it to NODA investigator Tom Bethell. (Russo denial: Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 10, 1969, [2010] p. 126. Herron and Bethell: Tom Bethell diary, June 25, 1967. Sciambra and Bethell: Tom Bethell diary, March 5, 1968.)
Defense attorney William Wegmann questioned Sciambra about the one item of evidence that could prove Russo had indeed mentioned “Bertrand,” the party, and an assassination plot in his original interview:
WEGMANN. Now, Mr. Sciambra, you took notes [of this interview], is that correct?
SCIAMBRA. I did.
WEGMANN. Where are those notes today?
SCIAMBRA. Those notes were burned.
WEGMANN. When did you burn those notes?
SCIAMBRA. Sometime after I completed the memorandum.
WEGMANN. How long after?
SCIAMBRA. Very shortly, shortly and may I explain why I burned my notes? . . . Ever since this case began we have had tremendous problems in the District Attorney’s office trying to keep information from flowing out of the District Attorney’s office to others. . . .
WEGMANN. Isn’t it a fact that James Phelan subsequently . . . came to you and asked you for those notes?
SCIAMBRA. That is exactly right and I went to look for them and couldn’t find them there.
WEGMANN. There weren’t any leaks in the District Attorney’s office at that time?
SCIAMBRA. We always had leaks in the District Attorney’s office.
WEGMANN. From the very inception?
SCIAMBRA. From the inception.
WEGMANN. If you knew you had burned them why did you go look for them?
SCIAMBRA. I wanted to see if – the main reason is I wanted to see that I had done it. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969 [2015], pp. 9-20.)
The following exchange brought Sciambra’s testimony to an end:
WEGMANN. You said that Phelan was a prostitute . . . for not having objectively reported [the facts]?
SCIAMBRA. That was obvious.
WEGMANN. And do you feel you objectively reported what Russo told you on February 25 in Baton Rouge?
SCIAMBRA. I reported it to the best of my ability. That would make me a sloppy memorandum writer but it doesn’t make me a prostitute.
WEGMANN. What?
SCIAMBRA. Some twenty-six inaccuracies, twenty-six inconsistencies, differences between my interpretation and Perry’s words.
WEGMANN. How many omissions?
SCIAMBRA. It had some omissions but the obvious omission was the fact I did not report in that memorandum that Perry had told me about a meeting in Ferrie’s apartment between Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald and that was the big omission and that I pointed out. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969 [2015], pp. 44-45.)
39 Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), p. 209; Tom Bethell diary, March 15, 1968. Sciambra later denied that Billings or any other reporter was present at this meeting. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969, [2015] p. 9.)
40 Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969, (2013) pp. 54-55.
41 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 71. Perry Russo said six hours; Andrew Sciambra testified it was more like one or two. (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 12, 1969, [2015] p. 19.)
42 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 71.
43 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 72. See also Memorandum (untitled, unsigned, five pages) by Edward Wegmann, January 27, 1971, describing interview with Perry Russo on January 26, 1971.
44 Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy (New York: Meredith Press, 1969), p. 295.
45 Memorandum (untitled, unsigned, five pages) by Edward Wegmann, January 27, 1971, describing interview with Perry Russo on January 26, 1971.
46 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum, February 28, 1967, “Interview with Perry Russo at Mercy Hospital [under influence of sodium Pentothal] on Feb. 27, 1967.”
47 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 72.
48 Letter to The Washington Post, March 27, 1967.
49 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967, re: Perry Russo interview on February 25, 1967 [in Baton Rouge].
50 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 79.
51 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum, February 28, 1967, “Interview with Perry Russo at Mercy Hospital [under influence of sodium Pentothal] on Feb. 27, 1967.”
52 Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum, February 28, 1967, “Interview with Perry Russo at Mercy Hospital [under influence of sodium Pentothal] on Feb. 27, 1967.”
53 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 79-80.
54 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 79-80.
55 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 79.
56 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 114. Mellen writes, “The events described in the sodium pentothal session make it clear that Russo had already identified Clay Shaw from his photograph at the first meeting in Baton Rouge.” (Mellen, p. 425.) She produces no evidence for this, fails to mention that Russo would state on at least three occasions that this was not true, fails to mention the contradictory evidence from Richard Billings, and provides no source whatsoever for the quoted dialogue she attributes to Russo and Sciambra. (Russo denials: Russo privately confirmed to reporter James Phelan and photographer Matt Herron that the memorandum was an accurate record of his interview with Sciambra, and he reaffirmed this during a 1971 interview. When Phelan asked him when he had first mentioned the party and the assassination plot, Russo said it was, not during the initial interview at his home in Baton Rouge, but during a subsequent one, “Down in New Orleans.” [James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 165.] Russo denied this under oath at the Shaw trial, but both Herron and Sciambra himself confirmed it to NODA investigator Tom Bethell. Russo himself confirmed it in 1971, noting that during his first interview with Sciambra in Baton Rouge, he had never identified Shaw as “Clem” or “Clay Bertrand”; “the name Bertrand was first voiced by Sciambra.” [James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 175-76.] Russo testimony: Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 10, 1969, [2010] p. 126. Herron and Bethell: Tom Bethell diary, June 25, 1967. Sciambra and Bethell: Tom Bethell diary, March 5, 1968.])
57 Cf. Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), pp. 32, 62, 115, 142, 146, 249, 259, 356, and numerous references in Mellen’s endnotes.
58 Richard Billings, “Dick Billings’s personal notes on consultations and interviews with Garrison,” February 28, 1967 (p. 17).
59 Richard Billings, “Dick Billings’s personal notes on consultations and interviews with Garrison,” February 28, 1967 (p. 17).
60 Richard Billings, “Garrison’s Star Witness: Heard ‘Plot’ Plans,” Miami Herald, April 23, 1968. Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), p. 202. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 79-80.
61 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 79.
62 Russo would later recall Garrison peeling off hundred-dollar bills for him and “telling him not to worry about expenses.” ( Memorandum (untitled, unsigned, five pages) by Edward Wegmann, January 27, 1971, describing interview with Perry Russo on January 26, 1971.) He was given $3,000 for “expenses.” (Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 11, 1969, [2011] pp. 442-43.) Russo also said that LIFE had promised Garrison $25,000 in exchange for what was to be their exclusive entrée into his investigation, and that Russo was told he’d be receiving “a lot” of that for his trouble. (Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 80.) He would grumble later that he never got all he was promised. ( January 27, 1971, report of January 26, 1971, interview with Perry Russo by Shaw defense team.)
63 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 73 fn.
64 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 73.
65 NBC White Paper, “The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison,” broadcast June 19, 1967.
66 The American Medical Association’s Encyclopedia of Medicine (Random House, 1989); Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 77.
67 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 65-81. The arrest warrant for Shaw states that his arrest was predicated on information from a single confidential witness, revealed two weeks later at the preliminary hearing as Perry Russo. (Lambert, p. 76.) His indictment charged Shaw with participating in one or more conspiratorial meetings with Lee Harvey Oswald, the late David Ferrie, and unnamed others; at the time the indictment was drafted, Garrison had no witnesses against Shaw but Perry Russo. (See for example the detailed contemporaneous accounts of NODA insiders Richard Billings and Tom Bethell.) Lead prosecutor James Alcock confirmed in sworn testimony in 1971 that Perry Russo was the sole basis of the indictment. ( Clay L. Shaw v. Jim Garrison, et al., Civil Action 71-135, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, New Orleans Division. Lambert, p. 167.)
68 James Phelan, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans,” Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1967.
69 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 1.
70 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 4.
71 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 4.
72 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 4.
73 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 4.
74 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 5.
75 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 5.
76 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 5.
77 Hugh Aynesworth, “The Garrison Goosechase,” Dallas Times Herald, November 21, 1982.
78 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 6.
79 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 6.
80 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 6.
81 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 6.
82 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F ”), p. 6.
83 Transcript of March 1, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“First Hypnotic Session, Exhibit F”), p. 8. Less significant a fabrication, but similar in method, was the addition of two short-lived Garrison suspects to Russo’s story. Prior to the time Russo came forward, the DA was seeking two individuals for questioning in connection with the assassination. Julian Buznedo, a veteran of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion attempt, was being sought as a known associate of David Ferrie’s in the early Sixties. From such slender “evidence,” Garrison had decided that Buznedo was probably the “field general” of the assassination squad in Dealey Plaza. (Richard Billings, “Dick Billings’s personal notes on consultations and interviews with Garrison,” February 25, 1967 [p. 15]. “Field general”: Richard Billings, “Dick Billings’s personal notes on consultations and interviews with Garrison,” February 27, 1967 [p. 16].)
The other individual being sought was one Manuel Garcia Gonzales. This was actually a name Dean Andrews had invented, based on the similar name of a client of his. During one of several meetings with Garrison in late 1966, in which the DA tried to convince Andrews to identify Clay Shaw as “Clay Bertrand,” Andrews devised a ploy to test Garrison’s intentions. The DA had been after him for the names of the individuals Andrews claimed had accompanied Oswald to his office during the summer of 1963. Andrews had fabricated this story, so he had no names to offer. But he told Garrison that Manuel Garcia Gonzales was one of these men, describing him as a “Cuban guerrilla fighter.” Within days, the DA publicly announced that he had identified the “trigger man” in Dealey Plaza as one Manuel Garcia Gonzales. (Edward Jay Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992], p. 228. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 50.) An intensive search for “Gonzales” followed, including several trips by the DA and his men to Miami, where someone with that name had been reported. Andrews eventually informed Garrison that he had invented the name, and the DA may well have believed him, as “Gonzales” is not mentioned in either of Garrison’s books on the assassination. Some assassination researchers still consider “Gonzales” a valid suspect, however. Henry Hurt’s Reasonable Doubt (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1985) even includes a photograph of him!
Perry Russo’s first two interviews for the DA’s office refer to two Cuban friends of David Ferrie’s. In both cases Russo stated he could not remember the name of either man. (Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967, re: Perry Russo interview on February 25, 1967 [in Baton Rouge]; Andrew Sciambra, Memorandum, February 28, 1967, “Interview with Perry Russo at Mercy Hospital [under influence of sodium Pentothal] on Feb. 27, 1967.”) During his first hypnosis session of March 1, 1967, Russo named the Cubans for the first time. One was “Manuel,” he said, and the other was named “Juliana,” “Julie,” “Jules,” or something similar. By the time of his third hypnosis session of March 12, the witness was referring to the men as “Manuel” and “Julien [sic].”
During Clay Shaw’s preliminary hearing, the DA’s office was granted subpoenas for information from the New Orleans office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service on Julian Buznedo and Garcia Manuel [sic] Gonzales. Soon, however, the NODA succeeded in locating Buznedo himself. (Richard Billings, “Dick Billings’s personal notes on consultations and interviews with Garrison,” March 22, 1967 [p. 27].) Garrison soon lost interest in both “suspects.”
84 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 93.
85 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 79.
86 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), pp. 113, 148.
87 Transcript of March 12, 1969 hypnotic interrogation (“Second Hypnotic Session, Exhibit G”).
88 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 94.
89 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 94.
90 James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 166. NBC White Paper, “The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison,” broadcast June 19, 1967. Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
91 James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 165.
92 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), pp. 162-63. See also James Phelan, “Rush to Judgment in New Orleans,” Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1967.
93 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 172.
94 This particular example of Garrison’s subterfuge was first reported in Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 254-55. Click here for an in-depth analysis of the incident.
95 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 92-93.
96 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 112.
97 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 198.
98 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
99 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 288.
100 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
101 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
102 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
103 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 167. Phelan attempted to set up a meeting between Russo and Shaw, but Russo backed out.
104 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 142. See also Mellen, pp. 144-45, 151-52, 235, 313. Award-winning reporter Tom Wicker has praised Phelan for his “ingenuity, sound instincts, perseverance, integrity and not inconsiderable courage . . .” (James Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels: The Casebook of an Investigative Reporter [New York: Random House, 1982], p. x.)
105 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
106 Memorandum, To: Jim Garrison, From: Sgt. Edward O’Donnell, Subject: Perry Russo Interview, June 20, 1967. Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 289.
107 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 92-93, 114-15.
108 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), pp. 93 (re: Jacob), 115 (re: O’Donnell).
109 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 115.
110 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 115.
111 New Orleans States-Item, September 26, 1967. See also Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy (New York: Meredith Press, 1969), p. 240.
112 Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 26, 1969 (2043), pp. 2-20; Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 27, 1969 (2045) pp. 2-3; Milton E. Brener, The Garrison Case: A Study in the Abuse of Power (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1969), p. 259; James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992),pp. 401-02; Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 172.
113 Time Machine (hosted by Roger Mudd), “False Witness,” History Channel, original air date: November 13, 2000.
114 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 147.
115 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 309.
116 Transcript, State of Louisiana v. Clay Shaw, February 11, 1969 (2011), p. 448-56.
117 Memorandum (untitled, unsigned, five pages) by Edward Wegmann, January 27, 1971, describing interview with Perry Russo on January 26, 1971, p. 1.
118 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins (New York: Warner Books, 1991), p. 177.
119 NBC White Paper, “The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison,” broadcast June 19, 1967.
120 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 187. She flatly refers to Sheridan at one point as a “National Security Agency, FBI and CIA veteran.” (Mellen, p. xix.)
121 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 186.
122 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 187.
123 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 187. Mellen is quoting author Jim Hougan.
124 When Jim Garrison charged Walter Sheridan with public bribery, Robert F. Kennedy spoke up on Sheridan’s behalf. “I have been fortunate to know and work with Walter Sheridan for many years,” Kennedy stated. “Like all of those who have known him and his work, I have the utmost confidence in his integrity, both personal and professional. This view was shared by President Kennedy himself, with whom Mr. Sheridan was associated for many years in a relationship of utmost trust and affection.” “His personal ties to President Kennedy, as well as his own integrity, insure that he would want as much as, or more than, any other man to ascertain the truth about the events of November, 1963. It is not possible that Mr. Sheridan would do anything which would in the slightest degree compromise the truth in regard to the investigation in New Orleans.” (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy [New York: Meredith, 1969], p. 322. Gus Russo, Live by the Sword [Baltimore: Bancroft, 1998], p. 407.)
John Seigenthaler writes:
NBC sent a team of news staff men to New Orleans, including Walter Sheridan, a crack investigator who had a background with the FBI, and who had worked in the U.S. Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy, heading the so-called “task force” that was assigned to delve into the machinations of Teamsters President James R. Hoffa. Sheridan had worked with Kennedy on the old McClellan Committee in the United States Senate, then had helped out in the 1960 presidential campaign as a coordinator in Pennsylvania. He was a friend of the late President, a closer friend of his brother, Robert, and a professional investigator who took pride in detail work. If there was some government conspiracy involved in the Kennedy assassination, Sheridan would have been a man committed to exposing it for NBC. (John Siegenthaler, A Search for Justice [Nashville, Tennessee: Aurora Publishers, Inc., 1971], p. 119.)
125 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 202.
126 Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005), p. 201.
127 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 508.
128 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 512.
129 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 550.
130 John Siegenthaler, A Search for Justice (Nashville, Tennessee: Aurora Publishers, Inc., 1971), p. 112.
131 John Siegenthaler, A Search for Justice (Nashville, Tennessee: Aurora Publishers, Inc., 1971), p. 112.
132 John Siegenthaler, A Search for Justice (Nashville, Tennessee: Aurora Publishers, Inc., 1971), p. 113.
133 John Siegenthaler, A Search for Justice (Nashville, Tennessee: Aurora Publishers, Inc., 1971), p. 115.
134 James Kirkwood, American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw–Jim Garrison Kennedy Assassination Trial in the City of New Orleans (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 472.
135 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 161.
136 Perry Russo v. Conde Nast Publications d/b/a Gentleman’s Quarterly, Civil Action No. 92-1219 Section “A,” United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Thanks to Jerry Shinley for forwarding this information.
137 Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998), p. 173. The commencement of these interviews coincided with Russo’s appearance as a witness in the U.S. district court case, Clay L. Shaw v. Jim Garrison, et al, where, instead of delivering his expected testimony in support of Garrison, Russo repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment.
138 Memorandum (untitled, unsigned, five pages) by Edward Wegmann, January 27, 1971, describing interview with Perry Russo on January 26, 1971, p. 1.
139 Later in life, Russo seemed to tailor his story to the preferences of his listener, affirming its integrity to pro-Garrison conspiracy theorists like Oliver Stone, while insisting to others that Clay Shaw had been innocent of the charges against him. For example, Russo strongly reaffirms his trial testimony in the 1992 interview entitled, “The Last Testament of Perry Russo.” In a 1993 interview with William Matson Law, Russo goes even farther, embellishing his story in new and novel ways. On the other hand, he told Patricia Lambert that Shaw “was in fact innocent” and “he did not conspire to kill the president”; that “there was no conspiracy” and “in retrospect I don’t think they should have prosecuted him.” “Garrison never should have done it.” (Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK [New York: M. Evans and Co., 1998], pp. 173-74.) He told Gerald Posner, “I believe that Shaw was innocent. I do not disagree with the jury. I agree with it. The bottom line is that history must recall that Shaw is innocent. If I was on the jury, I would have come to the same conclusion.” (Posner, Case Closed [New York: Random House, 1993], p. 451 fn.)