False Witness (53 page)

23
. Gill and Ferrie, himself, both ventured explanations for Martin's actions, but neither of them had any way of knowing about the beating. Gill said “that Ferrie and Martin were once close friends, until they got involved in an ‘ecclesiastical' deal.” When Martin did not get a job he wanted with “the Holy Apostolic Catholic Church of North America,” he blamed Ferrie and had “slandered” him “at every opportunity” (Gill, FBI interview, Nov. 27, 1963). Ferrie said that in June of 1963, at Gill's direction, he had “put Martin out” of Gill's office in an “undiplomatic” manner, and since then Martin had “bedeviled” him “in every manner possible” (Ferrie, FBI interview, Nov. 25, 1963).

24
. Edward Stewart Suggs, FBI information sheet, June 21, 1968; FBI Memorandum, “Jack S. Martin also known as Edward Stewart Suggs,” dated March 22, 1967, forwarded to the White House on March 24, 1967; “Informative Note,” dated March 10, 1967, attached to FBI Airtel dated March 8, 1967, from SAC New Orleans to the Director; Jack Martin, Mercy Hospital records, dated Dec. 23, 1956, to Jan. 28, 1957. “[Jack Martin] had a way of breathing up stories and being very positive about things,” Pershing Gervais said. “He would concoct things about someone and then he would talk to that someone” and construct a story “that would kind of jibe.” Martin was “pretty good at that.” When asked about Martin's
reliability
, Gervais laughed. “He couldn't be reliable if he intended to be” (Gervais, telephone conversation with author, Sept. 3, 1993).

25
. Ferrie, FBI interview, Nov. 25, 1963.

26
. Prentiles M. Davis, interview by New Orleans D.A.'s office, March 9, 1967; Memorandum by Louis Ivon re information from Joe Oster on March 6, 1967; R. M. Davis, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963. Dean Andrews referred to Davis in his Warren Commission testimony as “Preston M. Davis”; “R. M. Davis,” the name in his FBI report, is used in this book.

27
. Andrews, Clay Shaw trial testimony, p. 132.

28
.
Ibid
., p. 131.

29
. WC Vol. VII, p. 329; WC Vol. III, pp. 85–86. On Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, Oswald asked the president of the Dallas Bar Association, H. Louis Nichols, for help engaging Abt on his behalf; that same day Oswald made the same request of Ruth Paine.

30
. Dr. J. B. Andrews, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963. The doctor said that Dean Andrews was under heavy sedation the first four days, i.e., Nov. 20 to Nov. 24, 1963.

31
. The dialogue was reconstructed from Eva Springer's FBI interview of Dec. 5, 1963. Dean Andrews would later remember receiving the Bertrand telephone call between 6:00 and 9:00
P.M
. that Saturday. But Eva Springer said Andrews's call to her about representing Oswald occurred “shortly after four” in the afternoon, and she tied her recollection to her marketing, which she had just completed. (Andrews also had no recollection of his investigator's visit to the hospital that same day.) Since Eva Springer's recollection, which places the Bertrand call prior to four o'clock, is more reliable, the reconstruction in this chapter is based on it. Since the call from Eugene Davis to Andrews occurred after R. M. Davis departed (at 3:30
P.M
.) and
before
Andrews phoned his secretary (at 4:00
P.M.
), the call could only have occurred between 3:30 and 4:00
P.M.
(R. M. Davis, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963; Andrews, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963.)

32
. Dean Andrews later told the FBI that the “first independent recollection” he had of his stay in the hospital was the evening of Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, watching a television program about Oswald's life in New Orleans (Andrews, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963, p. 2).

33
. Andrews, Clay Shaw trial testimony, p. 132.

34
. The dialogue was reconstructed from Sam “Monk” Zelden's FBI interview of Nov. 25, 1963, and the following: Andrews, FBI interview, Dec. 3, 1963; WC Vol. XI, p. 337. Sometime that day, R. M. Davis again stopped by to see Andrews and during that visit Andrews told Davis about the call from “Clay Bertrand” (R. M. Davis, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963).

35
. In 1969 Milton Brener, who knew and interviewed Dean Andrews, was the first to go on record suggesting that Andrews's Oswald-was-my-client story was bogus. “Circumstances strongly suggest that Andrews may never really have laid eyes on Oswald,” Brener wrote (Brener,
The Garrison Case
, p. 58).

36
. Secret Service Report, regarding interview with Andrews, Dec. 6, 1963; Andrews, Clay Shaw trial testimony. Andrews told Warren Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler that Oswald had wanted to institute citizenship proceedings for his wife (WC Vol. XI, p. 327), which is contrary to what we know was going on in the Oswald marriage. Even today, Marina Oswald Porter is not an American citizen. Moreover, if Oswald had had a relationship with Andrews, Oswald most likely would have contacted him on Aug. 9, 1963, when he was involved in a street scuffle in New Orleans (while handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets) and arrested; to his dismay, Oswald was forced to spend the night in jail.

37
. The companions who supposedly accompanied Oswald to Dean Andrews's office are entirely inconsistent with what we know about Oswald's life and his
lifestyle. While in Russia Oswald was more social, but in this country he was a loner. No one else has described him going about with any sort of crowd, much less a group of overtly homosexual men. Not one scrap of paper, nor any credible testimony was ever produced to support this tale. Andrews probably peopled his Oswald fantasy with gay men because that was the clientele Andrews was accustomed to representing. Like any good storyteller, Andrews stayed with what he knew.

38
. Dean Andrews's uncontrollable loquaciousness was part of his defense at his later perjury trial. If Lee Harvey Oswald, this infamous man-of-the-hour, whose life story was being trumpeted on television, had actually been in Andrews's office the previous summer, Andrews would have talked about it that weekend to everyone who entered his hospital room—the doctors, the nurses, the person who emptied his trash.
Lee Harvey Oswald: I know that cat!
But he didn't even tell his investigator, his secretary, or Monk Zelden. When he called Eva Springer on Saturday he didn't say,
You won't believe this: Lee Harvey Oswald consulted me last summer; the accused presidential assassin sat in my office, not once, but several times telling me his problems!
He said not one word about it. When his investigator visited earlier that same day, they discussed Andrews's political campaign. On Sunday when he called Monk Zelden, Andrews was still mute about it. The next day Andrews again failed to inform his investigator. The story first surfaced on Monday, Nov. 25, 1963, when Andrews called the FBI and the Secret Service, twenty-four hours after Oswald was shot and killed. (In 1967, in an apparent effort to help Andrews in his difficulties with Garrison, investigator Davis would make statements to the D.A.'s office that conflicted with his earlier FBI interviews and with statements made by Andrews himself to the Warren Commission regarding Davis's knowledge about the alleged Oswald visits. See Prentiles M. Davis, Jr., interview by New Orleans D.A.'s office, March 9, 1967.)

39
. Andrews, FBI interview, Nov. 25, 1963; Secret Service Report, regarding interview with Andrews, Dec. 5, 1963.

40
. Andrews, FBI interview, Dec. 3, 1963. Investigator Davis told the FBI that “he has no doubt that Andrews is now convinced that the call he received at the hospital was a dream” (R. M. Davis, FBI interview, Dec. 5, 1963).

41
. WC Vol. XI, pp. 326, 338.

42
.
Ibid
., pp. 334, 337. Dean Andrews told Wesley Liebeler that Bertrand was “about five feet eight inches” tall, “sandy hair, blue eyes, ruddy complexion”; on Dec. 3, 1963, in his statement to the FBI, Bertrand had been six feet one inch to six feet two inches tall, with “brown hair”; and on Nov. 25, 1963, in Andrews's earliest description to the FBI, Bertrand had been “youthful,” twenty-two to twenty-three years old, five feet seven inches tall, with blonde crew-cut hair.

43
. WC Vol. XI, p. 334.

44
. The claim by some that Dean Andrews told Mark Lane about “Bertrand” is not supported by the record. According to Lane, in March 1966 Andrews refused to be interviewed on the subject because he had been threatened (
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, March 29, 1967).

45
. Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office: 1964), p. 325. The
paragraph, most of which was devoted to the alleged consultations with Oswald, pointed out that “Andrews was able to locate no records of any of Oswald's alleged visits, and investigation has failed to locate the person who supposedly called Andrews on Nov. 23, at a time when Andrews was under heavy sedation.” The name “Clay Bertrand” was not mentioned.

1
. James Kirkwood,
American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison Affair in the City of New Orleans
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 527.

2
. Brener,
The Garrison Case
, p. 61. Brener gives the date of the first dinner as Oct. 27, 1966. In a damage suit Andrews filed against Garrison on April 18, 1967, Andrews specified the date as Oct. 29, 1966 (
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, April 19, 1967; Dean Andrews, NBC Interview, Metropolitan Crime Commission transcript [hereinafter Andrews NBC interview], undated).

3
. Andrews NBC interview; Edward Jay Epstein,
Counterplot
(New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1969), p. 93.

4
. An article in
New Orleans
magazine claimed the Long–Garrison conversation occurred in Nov. 1966 (“The Garrison Investigation: How and why it began,” April 1967). But the earliest recorded reference to the conversation is Sen. Long's statement that it occurred “last Oct. [1966]” (
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, Feb., 22, 1967). This supports Andrews's claim that his first dinner with Garrison was in October.

5
. David Chandler, “The Devil's D.A.,” pp. 90–91 (the article); Chandler Interview (the reaction). Before writing it, Chandler had visited Garrison and told him what he had been hearing but Garrison gave no credence to it. Chandler told this writer he wrote the piece to try to bring Garrison to his senses.

6
. David Chandler, “The Assassin's Trail,”
Westword
, Nov. 25–Dec. 1, 1992.

7
. John Connally stated that he was hit by a bullet fired
after
the first one that struck the president. Since the time available was insufficient for Oswald to have fired the second shot that hit Connally, a second gunman was implicit.

8
. Richard J. Whalen, “The Kennedy Assassination,”
The Saturday Evening Post
, Jan. 14, 1967, pp. 22, 69.

9
. “The Garrison Investigation: How and why it began,”
New Orleans
magazine, April 1967, pp. 8, 50–51; Epstein,
Counterplot
, p. 41.

10
. Andrews NBC Interview; Epstein,
Counterplot
, pp. 93–94.

11
. Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins
, pp. 31–32; Jack Martin, interview with Pershing Gervais and Louis Ivon, at the Fontainebleau Motor Motel (hereinafter Martin Fontainebleau Interview), transcript, December 13, 1966 (AARC); Martin, “Statement” to Jim Garrison, December 26, 1966; see also cassette tape recording (contents unknown) labeled “Martin interview by J. Garrison,” December 14, 1966.

12
. Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins
, pp. 39–40. Garrison's memoir is stunningly unreliable but this admission of Martin's influence is supported by other documents that have survived (see notes 11 and 13, and chapter 16, note 10). That often-heard refrain, “Garrison must have something” applies here. He
did
have something he withheld: his secret meetings with Martin. While Garrison was listening to Martin and, according to Louis Ivon, paying
only
Martin's “expenses” (Ivon, interview with author, Feb. 27, 1996), Garrison was denying to the press that he was doing either (Merriman Smith, “JFK Plot Quiz: Seamy Suspects,”
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
, March 5, 1967).

13
. One of Martin's assignments was to establish liaison with Houston law enforcement (see undated handwritten letter on “Bellemont Motor Hotel” stationery from Martin to “Jim and Lou,” i.e., Garrison and Ivon). Another job was to telephone certain people and, in part, elicit damaging statements while recording the call. The newsmen didn't bite (“We don't buy information,” local reporter Richard Townley said over and over) and Aaron Kohn's lament, wearily repeated time and again, was for Martin to “stop playing games” and “finally tell the truth” (Jack Martin, telephone conversations with Aaron Kohn [7], Richard Townley [7], Walter Sheridan [1], Steve Plotkin [1], Anthony Garrich [1], Richard Robey [1], and Louis Ivon [1], transcripts, May 25, 1967 to Nov. 22, 1967).

14
. Beaubouef Interview.

15
. David Ferrie, interview with Asst. D.A. John Volz, December 15, 1966.

16
. Epstein,
Counterplot
, p. 92. In Jack Martin's Fontainebleau Interview, when Pershing Gervais asked if Sergio Arcacha Smith was “a Latin type kid with a crewcut” (apparently fishing for information about the “Mexican” invented by Dean Andrews who supposedly accompanied Oswald everywhere), Martin replied, “that's [Morris] Brownlee”; “he's Jewish but he looks Latin American and speaks Spanish.” This perhaps explains why Garrison pursued Brownlee so relentlessly.