False Witness (3 page)

Feeling as though he had been “hit by a two-by-four,” Panzeca left to inform his client. Jim Garrison was known to be impulsive but neither Panzeca nor Shaw had expected such an outcome. Shaw, especially, felt “that surely this was all some mistake which could still be cleared up.” Panzeca went into the anteroom and told Shaw he was going to be arrested. “I don't think he responded except to listen to me,” Panzeca said. “The man was totally obedient.” Shaw and Panzeca now assumed the arrest was inevitable. But two key members of Garrison's staff made an effort to prevent it. Asst. D.A. James Alcock and private investigator William Gurvich had been out of town and returned in the midst of this. Surprised to find Shaw there, they were dismayed to learn his arrest was “imminent.” They decided to object “vehemently” and requested a meeting with Garrison. The three convened in the office of First Assistant District Attorney Charles Ward. Garrison told them about a new witness who incriminated Shaw. Garrison was persuasive. Gurvich and Alcock backed down. The arrest would proceed.
⁸

Panzeca called Criminal District Judge Thomas Brahney, who knew
Shaw, to arrange for bail. Judge Brahney was aware of what was happening—he was watching it on television. Garrison requested
25,000 but Brahney later reduced it to
10,000.
⁹
*
William Wegmann arrived with a bail bondsman around 5:00
P.M
. Some thirty minutes later, Louis Ivon entered the room where Shaw was waiting and formally placed him under arrest “for conspiracy to murder the president, John F. Kennedy.” Shaw listened in “a state bordering on shock,” and later referred to those words as “unbelievable and outrageous.” A short time later, one of Garrison's investigators announced Shaw's arrest to the 200 or so media representatives waiting outside Garrison's office. Garrison himself soon emerged and told reporters he had “no doubts about the case.”
¹⁰

Unaware of the momentous events taking place at the Criminal District Court building, Edward Wegmann had returned home from his business trip to Atlanta. His daughter, herself an attorney today, described how her father learned about his client's dilemma. The telephone rang just as he entered the front door. “He was still wearing his hat and coat when he answered it,” Cynthia Wegmann said. The caller was a friend of Shaw who told Wegmann that Shaw was being charged with conspiracy to murder the president. “I'm in no mood for jokes,” Wegmann said, and hung up the phone. It rang again immediately. This time Shaw's friend convinced Wegmann he wasn't joking. Wegmann left at once for the district attorney's office.
¹¹

Shaw later wrote “how happy” he was to see Wegmann “and the flame of indignation surrounding him as he came into the office.” “What the hell is this all about?” Wegmann asked. “Your guess is as good as mine,” Shaw replied. It was now about 7:00
P.M
. A long conference followed. Their immediate concern was the search warrant on Shaw's home, which they had learned about only a short time before.
^†
Edward Wegmann decided to stay with Shaw. Panzeca and William Wegmann (who had left and was summoned from a social event) headed for Shaw's house to handle the search. When they arrived on
the scene, the process was already underway. About a dozen of Garrison's men had descended on Shaw's red-door carriage house at 1313 Dauphine and were photographing and boxing up material. An irate William Wegmann, doing what he could to protect Shaw's rights, demanded that Shaw's private papers be inventoried before they were removed. One of Garrison's assistants threatened to arrest him. Garrison's men would leave that night with five cardboard boxes filled with Shaw's possessions.
¹²

Meanwhile, Garrison's aides prepared to transfer Shaw to the police department's Central Lockup for booking. Louis Ivon insisted on handcuffing Shaw. Edward Wegmann objected, angrily and loudly. “He isn't going anywhere,” Wegmann said. Ivon clamped on the handcuffs. Shaw was then transferred. That scene was captured on television. Shaw later recalled being “led forward into the dazzling glare of the TV cameras and the stacatto flash of flashbulbs.” He was guided down a corridor full of jostling reporters and camera crews. Wegmann, trying to shield the handcuffs from view, told Shaw to stay behind him, but Shaw found it impossible to do so. Dressed in a conservative brown suit with a green and light-orange striped tie, Shaw remained silent and stoic as he walked “what seemed an interminable distance” to the elevator. It deposited him and his contingent of “guards” on the ground floor at approximately 8:30. From there, sitting between Edward Wegmann and investigator Lynn Loisel in the back seat of a car, he rode the short distance to the recently opened Central Lockup. To Shaw “it looked very clean and efficient, all gleaming white and yellow tile.” He emptied his pockets, removed his tie and belt, and was booked for conspiring to murder John F. Kennedy.
*
Then he was fingerprinted and photographed. Released on bail, he left with Wegmann at 9:20 that night.
^13
†

Clay Shaw was a commanding figure. His curly white hair was clipped short, his face was square, features strong, and his eyes a remarkable shade of blue. Like Garrison, he was huge, six feet four
inches, 225 pounds, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. That morning his physical stature was more than matched by his stature in the community, which he had served for almost two decades. He entered Garrison's office at noon a respected civic leader. He left some nine hours later accused of the American equivalent of regicide.

In the high emotion of that time, many people were convinced of his guilt by the charge alone. After all, no district attorney would bring such a charge unless he had substantial evidence to back it up. Only a few of those closest to Garrison knew the truth, that Shaw was arrested on the basis of statements made by a single witness while he was in a drugged and semi-conscious condition.

That witness and his statements were the end point of certain unlikely events set in motion at the time of President Kennedy's death. But Shaw's arrest was primarily the consequence of the strange and complex character of the man who ordered it, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

*
A reporter on the scene that day recently remarked that a mere
10,000 bail for plotting to assassinate the president caused considerable comment among his colleagues in the media and injected a note of unreality into the proceedings.

†
The application for that warrant contained information that Garrison's statement to the press did not contain. It identified the other alleged conspirators: David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald.

*
Louis Ivon, Lynn Loisel, Al Oser, John Volz, and James Alcock were listed on the Register as the arresting officers.

†
They went to Wegmann's office, where Shaw revealed to Wegmann (a deeply religious, conservative man) the facts about his personal life. “None of these problems,” Shaw later wrote, “made any difference in Eddie's attitude” (Shaw Journal, p. 19).

Jim Garrison gave no sign in his early years that he would later emerge the central figure in an international controversy of historical importance involving the political crime of the century. Born Earling Carothers Garrison on November 20, 1921, in Denison City, Iowa, he was the first child and only son of Jane Ann Robinson and Earling R. Garrison. His parents divorced when Garrison was two and he and his younger sister, Judith, were raised by their mother, a former school teacher, and a woman of large physique, a Robinson-family trait (her father and two uncles were seven feet tall), and reportedly of a domineering nature. His maternal grandfather, Garrison wrote in his memoir, was successful in coal and real estate and one of the leading citizens of Knoxville, Iowa, where his mother was born.

The great mystery about Garrison's life has been his father.
*
When Garrison was thirty, according to his military medical records, he had seen his father only once. Even his name was unknown until the release recently of Garrison's FBI file. Prior to that the only public reference to
him was a single sentence Garrison wrote in his memoir that described him as “an attorney.”
¹
He was also a convicted felon.

Earling R. Garrison, alias Waldo Morrison, born June 2, 1898, in Denison City, Iowa, was arrested seven times. He was first picked up on May 16, 1928, in Des Moines for mail fraud,
*
and served two years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. On April 26, 1930, he was convicted of larceny
^†
and received a five-year sentence in the penitentiary at Anamosa. How much time he actually served is unclear, but only three years later he was arrested again in Des Moines for “uttering [a] forged instrument,” disposition unknown. After that he was arrested at various times for drunkenness, and for selling liquor to Indians in the southwest. On April 8, 1943, he applied for a “storekeeper” job in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. What became of him afterwards is not known.
²
How all this affected his son is unclear.

The year after his father was sent away for larceny, Garrison's mother moved her family to New Orleans. Garrison was ten. He attended several different elementary schools and graduated from Fortier High. He joined the U.S. Army on January 12, 1941, almost a full year before Pearl Harbor thrust the country into World War II. Garrison first served in an artillery company, along with another young man from New Orleans named Pershing Gervais, and the two formed a close relationship that would endure for more than two decades.

They were separated on June 23, 1942, when Garrison was appointed a First Lieutenant and began to pilot observation aircraft, but Garrison stayed in touch by writing Gervais long letters, some of which have survived.
³
Garrison liked the military. “It became a surrogate family for me,” he later wrote, and he recalled his wartime experiences with nostalgia. In addition to flying thirty-five combat missions and receiving the European Theater Campaign Medal with two battle stars, he attended American University in England for eight weeks where he studied the history of philosophy, business law and play writing prior to his discharge on March 1, 1946. Less than four months later he tried
to reenlist but his “efficiency index” was too low and the Army declined his request. Garrison apparently was trying to rejoin the military about the time of his mother's marriage to Lyon Gardiner, later described in an FBI report as being “from probably the wealthiest family” in Laurel, Mississippi.
⁴
Rebuffed by the Army, Garrison returned to school, studying law at Tulane University. In 1949, because of his veteran status, he was automatically admitted to the Bar without taking the examination. The following year at the age of thirty, Garrison, who had been a student and a soldier but had never held a job, applied to the FBI.