False Witness (18 page)

Shaw was correct. Over the next day and a half, the defense was unable to shake Russo's basic story, though Dymond did elicit some damaging admissions. Yes, Russo said, he had undergone psychiatric treatment from October 1959 until sometime in 1961. He had last visited a psychiatrist around October or September of 1965 and he had perhaps talked to a psychiatrist “on the phone” in 1966. He denied
ever trying to commit suicide. Regarding his interview with a Baton Rouge television reporter, in which Russo stated he “had never heard of Oswald” until after the assassination, Russo explained that he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald, that he knew “Leon” Oswald (who was whiskered, dirty and had rumpled hair);
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Russo had said earlier that the similarity between “Leon” and “Lee” never occurred to him. When Dymond pointed out that in the same interview Russo had stated that David Ferrie's remarks about assassinating the president had been made “in a joking way,” Russo admitted that Ferrie did say it “jokingly” during the summer, but later, in September, “things” changed a bit.
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When Dymond noted that Oswald left New Orleans permanently on September 25 but Russo claimed he saw Oswald in October, Russo stuck to the later date.
^†
When Dymond wondered why Russo had failed to come forward sooner, Russo offered several explanations. He wasn't one to push himself onto people; Ferrie and the others “did not say anything about Dallas”; “Ferrie was never implicated,” and everyone said Oswald acting alone had committed the crime. Anyway, he didn't really think the plotting was meant seriously—he had heard many similar remarks from “people on the street” angry about integration. When Dymond suggested Russo had seized upon Ferrie's death to get himself “a little publicity,” Russo claimed that, until Ferrie died, he didn't realize the man under investigation was the Ferrie he knew.
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Toward the end of Russo's cross-examination, Dymond addressed the nature of the plotting session. “Was it understood,” he asked, “that these three men [Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw] would actively participate in the assassination?” “I did not get that impression,” Russo replied. Dymond directed his final questions to Russo's encounter with the defendant on Shaw's own doorstep shortly before his arrest. Russo admitted that knocking on Shaw's door had been “a risky thing” to do.
He was “sure” Shaw recognized him, Russo said, and insisted he had “absolutely” no trouble identifying Shaw.
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That ended it. Dymond had taken a toll, but Russo had survived.

The next two witnesses, Drs. Nicholas Chetta and Esmond Fatter, over strenuous defense objections, vouched for the credibility of Russo's story and his mental health. Dr. Fatter described hypnotizing Russo and declared that the hypnoses refreshed Russo's memory. Cross-examining him, William Wegmann asked if Russo was under the doctor's posthypnotic suggestion while on the witness stand. “He could have [been] if he accepted the suggestion,” Fatter replied, giving no indication that his actions might have been inappropriate. Dr. Chetta stated flatly that Russo fulfilled “all the requirements of legal sanity.” Chetta, too, recounted the three hypnosis sessions and, as oblivious as ever, declared that repeated hypnotic trances induce “better recall.” As for sodium Pentothal, he explained that it produces “a drug-induced state of hypnosis.” While admitting that a subject “can lie” while under its influence, he claimed that if the administering physician was experienced in using it that he could “pick up the fallacies.”
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A leading expert in the use of sodium Pentothal, psychiatrist Edwin A. Weinstein, was so troubled by Dr. Chetta's testimony that he answered him in a piece in the
Washington Post
. Chetta, he wrote, was “grossly distorting the medical facts” about both hypnosis and sodium Pentothal. Under their influence, “subjects may give highly fictional accounts of past events and describe incidents that never happened.” The action of the drug on recall, he explained, “is profoundly influenced by the stress of the situation in which it is administered and the relationship between the subject and his questioners.”
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But the court didn't hear Dr. Weinstein. The court heard Dr. Chetta.

His reassuring testimony took place Thursday afternoon. That same day, at Orleans Parish Prison, a brand new eleventh-hour witness was about to emerge. Inmate Vernon Bundy, a twenty-nine-year-old narcotics
addict, had written a letter to the court saying he had information. He was interviewed in prison that evening by William Gurvich and two other Garrison aides.
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The next day Bundy told his story again, this time in the D.A.'s office to Garrison himself. Afterwards, Garrison ordered a curious sort of lie-detector test.

Asst. D.A. Charles Ward arrived at the polygraph office with Bundy in tow about noon. Ward told examiner James Kruebbe that Bundy might testify in court that very day and then he gave Kruebbe what Kruebbe later termed “peculiar” instructions. Ward told him to find out if Bundy was acting on instructions from anyone,
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and if “certain information” that Ward refused to divulge, which Bundy had given Garrison about Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald, was true. Withholding the central information from the examiner was unusual, but Kruebbe administered the test anyway. Immediately afterwards, he went upstairs to the district attorney's office and in the presence of Charles Ward and James Alcock told Garrison that Bundy “wasn't telling the truth.” But, Kruebbe said, “no one put him up to it,” that Bundy “was doing it of his own accord,” and he was “looking for something.” (That
something
, Kruebbe later said, was “out of prison.”) Kruebbe listened as Garrison and his two aides argued. I told you so, is how Ward and Alcock reacted. They insisted that Bundy “wasn't necessary” to establish “probable cause” and shouldn't be used as a witness in any event. Garrison disagreed strenuously, and he had the final word. “We didn't tell him what to say,” Garrison declared, “let the jury decide whether or not he's telling the truth.”
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A short time later, Garrison entered the crowded courtroom for Friday's afternoon session. His sunburn was beginning to peel and he was looking fit. It was his first appearance since Wednesday morning. His presence brought an excited buzz from the audience, which realized that his arrival signaled “another major happening.” Vernon Bundy's name was called and a stocky black man in a plaid shirt walked quickly to the stand, raised his hand, and swore to tell the truth.
¹⁵

As Garrison led him through it, Bundy told the following story. One Monday morning in June or July 1963, he was near the seawall at the Pontchartrain lakefront about 9:15, preparing to give himself a heroin
fix, when a black four-door sedan pulled up and parked. A tall white man with grey hair wearing a suit and tie emerged. “It's a hot day” he said, as he passed behind Bundy. The man then walked away from Bundy a distance of some twenty or twenty-five feet. About “five or seven minutes” later he was joined by a “young fellow” who arrived “on foot.” The young man needed a shave and haircut and Bundy referred to him as a “beatnik.” Bundy watched the two men talk and heard the young one in an “outburst” say, “What am I going to tell her?” The older man replied, “Don't worry about it. I told you I'm going to take care of it.” Bundy claimed he then saw the older man hand the other one what looked like “a roll of money.” The young man stuck the money in his pants pocket and Bundy noted that in the same pocket the man was carrying what looked like “pamphlets.” After a while, the two men left, going their separate ways, and Bundy injected his heroin. Afterwards, looking for something to wrap his equipment in, he retrieved a yellow paper from the ground with “something about Cuba written on it.”
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Garrison showed Bundy photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Bundy identified as the younger man, and Clay Shaw, who Bundy said was the other one.
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Then, following the same instructions that Garrison had given Russo, Bundy stepped down from the witness stand, crossed to the defense table, and placed his hand above Clay Shaw's head, identifying him as the man he saw with Oswald.

On cross by Dymond, Bundy admitted that he sometimes stole to support his drug habit, that he was presently serving time in the parish prison, and that he was uncertain about the month and the time of day that he witnessed the encounter at Lake Pontchartrain. But, like Russo, Bundy stuck to his basic story.

A series of exhibits were entered into the record. Then Asst. D.A. Alvin Oser rested Garrison's case against Clay Shaw.

Irvin Dymond attempted (for the second time) to introduce the Warren Report into the record, but the court, by a two-to-one vote (Judge O'Hara dissented), rebuffed him. Dymond then rested for the defense.

William Wegmann, in what the local newspaper would describe as “an impassioned summation,” attacked the case the prosecution had presented, declaring it failed to justify holding Shaw for trial. “At best it's evidence that might warrant further investigation, but it was not sufficient to say to this man, ‘You are one of the people who might have killed the president of the United States.' ” And if the court did so, it would be subjecting Shaw “to all kinds of ridicule and risk.”
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Summarizing for the prosecution, Asst. D.A. James Alcock said the state was basing its case on the testimony of its two key witnesses, Perry Russo and Vernon Bundy.
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James Kruebbe, learning from a newspaper account what Bundy's “certain information” was, found it ridiculous and was shocked that Garrison had actually put him on the witness stand. His doing so exemplifies much.

The three-judge panel deliberated thirty-four minutes. Shaw smoked, drank water, and walked aimlessly around the defense table, the strain of the past few days etched in his grim expression and the circles beneath his eyes. In his courtroom demeanor, he had followed the instructions of his lawyers, but had found it “very difficult” to sit listening to the accusations made against him “without showing any emotion.” Shaw realized that those who knew him would reject Russo's testimony, knowing “that I would have better sense than to plot with two nuts like that in the presence of a twenty-two-year-old boy I'd never seen before.” Bundy's testimony struck Shaw as so improbable that Garrison's introducing it seemed to him “almost a contemptuous gesture toward the judges.” Shaw still “hoped against hope” that the case would end here.
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When the panel returned, Shaw stared straight ahead as the presiding judge read the unanimous verdict.
Probable cause had been established; further legal steps were justified
.
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Clay Shaw would stand trial for having conspired with David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others to kill
President John F. Kennedy.
*
It was Clay Shaw's fifty-fourth birthday.
^†
He was admitted to Southern Baptist Hospital the following day for rest and treatment of chronic back trouble. His calm outward appearance masked a fierce internal turmoil. “It was like living a nightmare,” he later told a friend, “like the end of the world.”
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In the hallway outside the courtroom, Garrison was asked for his reaction. “The judges have made the statement,” he said. “Is there anything else to say?” Garrison had won a substantial victory. The ruling, as one writer observed, “made him a national media celebrity” and “gave an aura of substance to his conspiracy solution.” This moment was the high point of his career. Yet Garrison had presented the court with no substantive evidence of conspiracy and none whatever of an overt act in furtherance of it, a requirement under Louisiana law. Many found Bundy's testimony, as Shaw had, almost laughably improbable.
^‡
The three judges were well aware of the shortcomings of Garrison's evidence. One of them, Malcolm O'Hara, in a conversation with a
Life
representative four days after the verdict “continuously referred to the hearing as: ‘that shit last week.' ”
^§
Judge Bagert defended their ruling, claiming if they had cut Shaw loose, “the nation and the world would have charged a fix.” Irvin Dymond believed nothing could have prevented the outcome, that it was “a done deal” from the beginning. It probably was. “The decision is cut and dried,” Perry Russo later said he was told beforehand, “unless he fell absolutely to pieces on the witness stand.”
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James Phelan now had the answer to the question his editor posed when Phelan called him from Las Vegas. He knew what Russo would say under oath. Phelan's next step was to confront Garrison and “get an
explanation.” He called Garrison at home, said he was bothered by something, and Garrison invited him over. Phelan found Garrison spending the evening with his wife and children. Almost immediately, William Gurvich and his wife showed up. Phelan explained that Sciambra's first report “contained nothing about a party, a plot or a Bertrand.” Garrison's “jaw dropped.” “It doesn't?” he said. “That's when I
knew
he hadn't read it,” Phelan later said. “I thought, oh man, what are you doing? You've arrested the man. They're going to hold him to trial and Garrison never even read the basic document. I said, ‘No, it doesn't.' He said, ‘Well, I'll have to get Sciambra out here to explain it.' ”
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Garrison telephoned and Sciambra arrived straight away. The women were shooed out of the study and Garrison said to Phelan, “Tell him what the problem is.” Phelan did. “You don't know what the shit you're talking about!” Sciambra said. “Yes, I do,” Phelan replied. “I got a copy of your memorandum. It's down in the hotel safe. I've read that memo so many times I can almost recite it verbatim for you. And I'll make a bet with you. If there's anything about a plot to kill Kennedy in [it], I will resign from the
Post
. If it isn't there, you resign from the D.A.'s office.”
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