Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (103 page)

One starting point was New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews, who told
the Warren Commission that he had received a call from a "Clay Bertrand"
the day after the assassination asking him to fly to Dallas and legally
represent Lee Harvey Oswald. Andrews reiterated this story to Garrison and claimed that while he had "Clay Bertrand" as a client, he had
never actually met the man.

As Garrison's investigators pried into the seamier areas of New Orleans
nightlife, they began to piece together information from various sources
that it was common knowledge in the homosexual underground that "Clay
Bertrand" was the name used by none other than Clay Shaw, the respected
director of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans.

Clay Shaw, like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, was not simply a
lone individual with no connections to persons and/or organizations that
may have played a role in President Kennedy's death.

Shaw had some of the most intriguing and unprobed connections of any
person involved in the assassination case. Even when some of these
connections were brought to the attention of the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, the Committee was either unable or unwilling to fully
investigate them.

Shaw, a tall, distinguished man with silver hair and a polished manner,
was born in Kentwood, Louisiana, on March 17, 1913. During the 1930s,
Shaw was in New York City working as an executive for Western Union
Telegraph Company and later as an advertising and public-relations
consultant.

By 1941, Shaw was with the U.S. Army and, while his official biography states simply that he was an aide-de-camp to Gen. Charles O. Thrasher,
Shaw later admitted he was working for the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) as a liaison officer to the headquarters of Winston Churchill. It was
here that Shaw may have become entangled in the murky world of
intelligence.

Although there is precious little reliable information on exactly what
Shaw's wartime experiences included, he did retire from the U.S. Army in
1946 as a major-later he was made a colonel-with the Bronze Star, the
Legion of Merit, France's Croix de Guerre, and Belgium's Order of the
Crown.

After the war, Shaw returned to New Orleans where he was known as a
wealthy real-estate developer. He also became director of the International
House-World Trade Center, a "nonprofit association fostering the development of international trade, tourism and cultural exchange." Soon Shaw
left this organization to found the International Trade Mart, which was
quite profitable sponsoring permanent industrial expositions in the Carribean.

According to several separate sources-including Garrison's files and an
investigation by the U.S. Labor Party-Shaw's International Trade Mart
was a subsidiary of a shadowy entity known as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale ("World Trade Center"), which was founded in Montreal,
Canada, in the late 1950s, then moved to Rome in 1961.

The Trade Mart was connected with Centro Mondiale Commerciale
(CMC) through yet another shadowy firm named Permindex (PERManent
INDustrial EXpositions), also in the business of international expositions.

It is fascinating to note that in the 1962 edition of Who's Who in the
South and Southwest, Shaw gave biographical information stating that he
was on the board of directors of Permindex. However in the 1963-64
edition, the reference to Permindex was dropped.

In the late 1960s, both Permindex and its parent company, Centro
Mondiale Commerciale, came under intense scrutiny by the Italian news
media. It was discovered that on the board of CMC was Prince Gutierrez
di Spadaforo, a wealthy aristocrat who had been undersecretary of agriculture under the dictator Benito Mussolini and whose daughter-in-law was
related to Nazi minister of finance Hjalmar Schacht; Carlo D'Amelio, an
attorney for the former Italian royal family; and Ferenc Nagy, former
premier of Hungary and a leading anticommunist.

The Italian media reported that Nagy was president of Permindex and
the board chairman and major stockholder was Maj. Louis Mortimer
Bloomfield, a powerful Montreal lawyer who represented the Bronfman
family as well as serving U.S. intelligence services.

Reportedly Bloomfield established Permindex in 1958 as part of the
creation of world-wide trade centers connected with CMC.

According to a special report by investigative reporters David Goldman
and Jeffrey Steinberg in 1981, Bloomfield was recruited into the British
Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1938, during the war was given
rank within the U.S. Army, and eventually became part of the OSS
intelligence system, including the FBI's Division Five. Reportedly Bloomfield became quite close with J. Edgar Hoover.

Attention began to be drawn to Permindex in 1962, when French
president Charles de Gaulle publicly accused Permindex of channeling
funds to the outlawed Secret Army Organization (OAS), which made
several attempts on de Gaulle's life. De Gaulle identified several major
and well-known international companies as investors in Permindex.

In tracing the money used to finance the assassination plots against de
Gaulle, French intelligence discovered that some $200,000 in secret funds
had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Credit
Internationale.

Researchers for years have been intrigued by information gathered by
Jim Garrison early in his investigation, that in 1962 Guy Banister had
dispatched an associate, Maurice Brooks Gatlin-the legal counsel to
Banister's Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean-to Paris with a
suitcase full of cash for the OAS, reportedly about $200,000.

As Garrison began to probe this area of interest, he discovered that Gatlin had been killed when he fell or was thrown from the sixth-floor
window of a hotel in Panama.

To further complicate this maze of business, finance, European money,
holdover Nazis, and intelligence agents, various investigators-including
some from Life magazine-found that some of the banking connections
from this secret empire reached to Mafia chief Meyer Lansky and his
Bahamas gambling operations.

Investigators Goldman and Steinberg, after noting the extensive and
sophisticated satellite-computer system maintained by the World Trade
Center Association, wrote:

Among the fifty-plus world trade marts hooked into the [World Trade
Center Association] satellite-computer complex is the Hong Kong World
Trade Center. . . . [This] is the single largest and highest-priced chunk
of real estate in Hong Kong. The international drug cartel, through this
Hong Kong center, thus maintains a transnational tracking system [of
international trade routes, carriers, inventories and rates] that is more
sophisticated and technologically advanced than the capabilities at the
disposal of any government attempting to combat its deadly traffic.

Whatever the truth behind Centro Mondiale Commerciale and its companion company, Permindex, the Italian government saw fit to expell both
in 1962 for subversive activities identical to those in the much-publicized
Propaganda-2 Masonic Lodge scandal of more recent years.

The news media in France, Italy, and Canada had a field day tying the two
discredited firms to the CIA. And there is now evidence that Shaw indeed
was CIA connected. Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the
deputy director of the CIA and author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,
has revealed that in early 1969, he learned from CIA director Richard
Helms that both Clay Shaw and David Ferrie had worked for the Agency.

Marchetti said Helms repeatedly voiced concern over the prosecution of
Shaw and even instructed top aides "to do all we can to help Shaw."
Further, a CIA memo dated September 28, 1967, to the Justice Department
finally made public in 1977-reveals that Shaw had provided the Agency
with some thirty reports between the years 1949 and 1956.

It may also be pertinent that in May 1961, just after the disastrous Bay
of Pigs Invasion, Shaw introduced CIA deputy director Gen. Charles P.
Cabell to the Foreign Policy Association of New Orleans.

Garrison wrote:

It would certainly have helped our case against Shaw to have been able
to link him definitely with the CIA. Unfortunately, however, with our
limited staff and finances, and many leads to follow, our investigation
was not able to uncover any of this crucial background information
when we needed it most.

By late 1966, Garrison had two suspects in mind in the murder of
President Kennedy-the strange David Ferrie and the socially connected
Clay Shaw.

David William Ferrie was a character straight out of some fictional
novel, but he was frighteningly real. Ferrie looked like a clown with his
painted eyebrows and reddish wig. Yet he was an aggressive homosexual
with an appetite for young boys. Ferrie considered himself a master
hypnotist, a philosopher, a psychologist, scientist, and a religious "bishop"
in the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America.

Cashiered as a pilot for Eastern Airlines following publicity over a
homosexual arrest, Ferrie continued his flying activities, which included
work for both the CIA and reputed New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello.

Ferrie also was closely connected to anti-Castro Cubans. In 1961, Ferrie
often was seen in the company of Sergio Archaca-Smith, New Orleans
director of the virulently anti-Castro Cuban Democratic Revolutionary
Front.

That same year, Ferrie was introduced to a meeting of the New Orleans
Civic Club as one of the pilots involved in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs
Invasion. Ferrie made a bitterly anti-Kennedy talk. Ferrie also made an
anti-Kennedy talk to the New Orleans Chapter of the Military Order of
World Wars in which he said Kennedy "double-crossed" the invasion
force by failing to authorize needed air support. Ferrie's speech was so
vitriolic that several members of the audience walked out.

As Garrison continued his investigations, he found abundant evidence
that Ferrie-who had been in contact with Oswald-was connected to Clay
Shaw.

Raymond Broshears, a long-time friend of Ferrie's, had seen Ferrie and
Shaw together on several occasions. Furthermore, Broshears told Garrison
how Ferrie once became intoxicated and detailed how he had driven to
Houston the day of Kennedy's death for the purpose of meeting two
members of the assassination team from Dallas. The pair were to have
arrived in Houston in a single-engine airplane piloted by one of them, a
Cuban exile known only as "Carlos." Ferrie was to have taken Carlos and
his fellow assassin out of Houston in a four-engined plane. Ferrie told
Broshears that something had gone wrong. The two men never showed up.

Whether the Broshears account of Ferrie's comments are accurate,
Garrison soon found others who had known of the relationship between the
pilot and Shaw. Jules Ricco Kimble, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, told
Garrison of being introduced to Shaw by Ferrie, as did a Ferrie acquaintance named David Logan. Nicholas Tadin, the head of the New Orleans
musicians' union, told Garrison that he and his wife had sought out Ferrie
for flying lessons when they saw Ferrie and Shaw together at New Orleans
Airport.

As Garrison's investigation broadened-including trips to Dallas, Houston, and Miami by members of his "team''-the secrecy surrounding his probe began to crumble. On February 17, 1967, the dam broke when the
New Orleans States-Item published a story on Garrison's activities with the
headline: DA HERE LAUNCHES FULL JFK DEATH PLOT PROBE. The story noted
that the district attorney's office had spent more than $8,000 in travel and
"investigative expenses." Countering the charge that he was simply seeking
publicity, Garrison later wrote:

We had operated as secretly as possible, assuming this was the most
efficient and responsible way to handle such a potentially explosive
situation. However, the voucher requests were public records, so they
could not legally be concealed.

The local news story brought a deluge of media attention from across
the nation. Reporters began arriving in New Orleans. The next day,
Garrison was forced to come out in the open, announcing:

"We have been investigating the role of the City of New Orleans in the
assassination of President Kennedy, and we have made some progress-I
think substantial progress... what's more, there will be arrests."

Also arriving in the city were some odd characters who were to add to
the carnival atmosphere that was beginning to take shape. One such was a
self-styled Denver oilman who told Garrison he could "guarantee" him a
federal judgeship if he would drop his investigation into the President's
death. Garrison showed him the door.

Not long after this attempt at bribery a more sinister plan came to light.
A professional criminal from Philadelphia named Edward Whalen came to
Garrison and said he had been approached by David Ferrie with a proposal
to kill Garrison for $25,000. When Whalen declined the offer, he said
Ferrie took him to Clay Shaw's apartment, where both men tried to
persuade him to carry out the assassination of Garrison. This time Whalen
not only was offered money but was told that if he did the job there would
be top medical care and a college education for his daughter who suffered
from polio.