THREE YEARS EARLIER our good fortune in stumbling across David Ferrie had been turned aside by the F.B.I.’s assurance that there was no need to investigate him. Now it seemed to me that the best way to get back where we had started was to locate the original source of the information that Ferrie had driven to Texas on the day of the assassination.
Early Monday morning at the district attorney’s office I met with Herman Kohlman, the assistant D.A. who had come up with that lead the Sunday after the assassination. He informed me that the source was Jack Martin, the victim of Guy Banister’s pistol-whipping.
Within a few hours we had tracked Martin down, and he was seated across my desk, his anxious gaze fixed on my every move. An on-again, off-again alcoholic, he was a thin man with deeply circled, worried eyes. Although he had been written off as a nonentity by many, I had long regarded him as a quick-witted and highly observant, if slightly disorganized, private detective. I had known him casually as far back as my days as an assistant D.A. and always had gotten along well with him.
“Jack,” I said, “why don’t you relax a little? You should know by now that you’re among friends here.”
He nodded nervously. He was seated in the roomy, upholstered chair across from my desk, but he looked most uncomfortable. I offered him some coffee. “You’re not under cross-examination, Jack,” I said. “I just want a little help. Understand?”
His head nodded jerkily.
“What I need is a little clarification about that day when Guy Banister beat you over the head with his Magnum. Remember that?”
“How could I forget it? He nearly killed me.”
“Here’s my problem, Jack,” I said. “You’ve told me you and Guy were good friends for more than ten years when that happened.”
“At least ten,” he said. “Could be more.”
“And he never hit you before.”
“Never touched me.”
“Yet on November 22nd, 1963—the day of the President’s murder—he pistol-whipped you with a .357 Magnum.”
His eyes were now fixed on mine.
“The police report says the reason Banister beat you was you had an argument over telephone bills.” I pulled a copy of the police report from my desk drawer and shoved it across to him. “Here, take a look at it.”
He bent his head over and examined it as if he had never seen it before. I was sure that he had seen it many times, probably even had a copy at home.
After a moment he looked up without saying a word. His eyes told me he was deeply concerned about something.
“Now, does a simple argument over phone bills sound like a believable explanation to you?” I asked.
I waited. Then, dreamily, he shook his head slowly. “No,” he admitted. “It involved more than that.”
“How much more?”
Again I waited. He breathed deeply, sucking in the air.
“It started like it was going to be nothing at all,” he began. “We’d both been drinking at Katzenjammer’s—maybe more than usual, because of the assassination and all. Banister especially.”
Pausing to chug down another cup of coffee, he made a real effort to collect his thoughts.
“Well, when we came back to the office, Banister started bitching about one thing and then another. He was in a mean mood. Then all of a sudden, he accused me of going through his private files. Now I never went through his private stuff ever—absolutely never. And that really ticked me off.”
He hesitated for a long moment.
“Go on, Jack,” I said gently.
“I guess I blew up,” he continued, his face flushed with memories of injustice. “That’s when I told him he’d better not talk to me like that. I told him I remembered the people I had seen around the office that summer. And that’s when he hit me. Fast as a flash—pulled out that big Magnum and slammed me on the side of the head with it.”
“Just because you remembered the people you’d seen at his office the past summer?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s all it took. He went bananas on that one.”
“And just who were the people you’d seen in the office that summer?” I prodded softly.
“There was a bunch of them. It was like a circus. There were all those Cubans—coming in and going out, coming in and going out. They all looked alike to me.”
Someone once commented that whenever you really want to do something unseen, whenever you go to great pains to make sure that you are unobserved, there always turns out to be someone who was sitting under the oak tree. At the strange place that was Banister’s office, Jack Martin, unnoticed in the middle of it all, was the one sitting under the oak tree.
He drew a long breath and then went on. “Then there were all these other characters. There was Dave Ferrie—you know about him by now.”
“Was he there very often?” I asked.
“Often? He practically lived there.”
Then Martin fell silent. I saw by the look in his eyes that he had come to a full stop.
I was not about to let my weekend visit to 544 Camp Street go down the drain that easily, so I gave him a hand. “And Lee Harvey Oswald?” I added.
Jack swallowed, then nodded. It was almost as if he felt relief in finally having a burden lifted from him. “Yeah, he was there too. Sometimes he’d be meeting with Guy Banister with the door shut. Other times he’d be shooting the bull with Dave Ferrie. But he was there all right.”
“What was Guy Banister doing while all this was going on?”
“Hell, he was the one running the circus.”
“What about his private detective work?”
“Not much of that came in, but when it did, I handled it. That’s why I was there.”
“So, Jack,” I said. “Just what was going on at Banister’s office?”
He held up his hand. “I can’t answer that,” he said firmly. “I can’t go into that stuff at all.” Unexpectedly, he stood up. “I think I’d better go,” he said.
“Hold on, Jack. What’s the problem with our going into what was happening at Banister’s office?”
“What’s the problem?” he said. “What’s the problem?” he repeated, as if in disbelief. “The problem is that we’re going to bring the goddamned federal government down on our backs. Do I need to spell it out? I could get killed—and so could you.”
He turned around. “I’d better go,” he mumbled. He wobbled as he headed for the door.
Even after talking to Martin, it was still too early for me to create a formal investigative team to look into the assassination. The office was shorthanded,[12] and we did not yet have enough data. By avoiding the urge to climb onto a horse and ride off in all directions, I felt, we were more likely to be successful.
Informally, I assigned Louis Ivon the job of wooing Martin and persuading him to overcome his mental block about the action at Banister’s place. Ivon was a lanky, laconic young police investigator whose seemingly casual manner belied his intensity of purpose. I knew that Ivon, easily the brightest of the police assigned to my office, had a good relationship with Martin. On occasion, when Martin was given the cold shoulder by the police force on one of his investigations, Ivon had given the man a helping hand.
I also gave Ivon the assignment of developing all possible information about David Ferrie and of establishing liaisons with the police and sheriff’s offices in adjacent Jefferson Parish, where Ferrie had lived for many years.
I had already informally brought in Frank Klein. In recent weeks I had been providing him with more and more of the background information I had come across. I even took him on a drive through the back streets in the vicinity of the post office and the Reily Coffee Company. Although I had found much of the Warren Commission material to be worse than useless, I loaned him the volumes so that he, too, could savor the deception—and uncover useful leads.
What I needed from the outset was someone with whom I could brainstorm—trade thoughts and acquire more understanding. In Klein, who had a first-class analytical mind, I had the perfect person.
Finding Klein, and making him the chief assistant D.A., had been a big step forward in forming the kind of prosecutor’s office I had in mind. During my years in the field artillery I had observed a characteristic common to the operation of the very best battalions. Invariably, the commanding officer delegated the details of running the organization to what the military calls his “executive officer.” This put him in a better position to see his outfit with a bit of perspective as it actually functioned. At the same time, the relative freedom from the day-to-day details gave more opportunity to evaluate policy, implement innovations, and make major decisions.
Klein had served in the Marines, having been decorated in combat in Korea. He was almost Teutonic in his appreciation of discipline and order in administration. I, on the other hand, was more comfortable with the command of a loose ship. We complemented one another perfectly.
One morning about a week after my initial interview with Jack Martin, I came into my office and found Frank Klein stacking papers on my side table.
“Why,” I asked, “are you desecrating my office?”
“Jack Martin stonewalled you on what was happening at Guy Banister’s,” he said, “so I thought of a way we might find out for ourselves.”
“And just what would that be?”
“I’ve been spending some time at the public library,” he said. “These piles are photocopies of the front pages of the Times-Picayune for June, July, and August of 1963.”
“And what are we going to do with them?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “we might get some idea of what’s bothering Martin—of what Guy Banister was up to that summer.”
“Seems to me that any operation Banister was running would have too low a profile to show up on the front pages of the paper.”
“Maybe so,” Klein said, “but I think I found something interesting.” He laid in front of me a photostat of the front page of the Times-Picayune dated Thursday, August 1, 1963. The heading on the right side story read:
CACHE OF MATERIAL
FOR BOMBS SEIZED
Probe of St. Tammany
Case Continues
I scanned the first paragraph:
More than a ton of dynamite, 20 bomb casings three-feet long, napalm (fire-bomb) material and other devices were seized Wednesday by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in a resort area in St. Tammany Parish, between Mandeville and Lacombe.
The story went on to say that the dynamite, bomb casings, and other materials, according to the special agent in charge of the New Orleans F.B.I. office,
… were seized in connection with an investigation of an effort to “carry out a military operation against a country with which the United States is at peace.” This is in violation of Title 18, Section 960 of the U.S. Code.
For such an adventurous foray the local F.B.I. official, with his broad generalities, appeared to me to be keeping his cards very close to his vest. He had not mentioned the country involved and had not mentioned any arrests. Yet the news story had no particular impact on me.
I looked up at Klein. “This is interesting,” I said. “But what’s the point?”
“Wait a minute,” said Klein. “You haven’t seen the whole story yet.” He pushed another sheet in front of me. This one was a copy of the front page for Friday morning, August 2, 1963. On the left side of the page, I read:
BOMB CACHE COTTAGE LOANED
TO NEWLY-ARRIVED REFUGEE
Owner’s Wife Says Mate
Did Cubans Favor
The wife of the owner of a cottage on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain where a large quantity of explosives and war materials were seized said Thursday that the house was loaned to a newly-arrived Cuban refugee three weeks ago.
Mrs. William Julius McLaney, 4313 Encampment, said that neither she nor her husband, who operates a race horse feed business, had knowledge that the munitions were stored at the house near Lacombe until agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned her husband Wednesday before making the seizure.
She said that the place was loaned to a Cuban they knew only as “Jose Juarez” as a favor to friends of theirs in Cuba.
The McLaneys had operated a tourist business in Havana, but came to New Orleans in 1960 “because Castro made things impossible down there.”
I looked up at Klein, waiting for his comment.
“Remember when we raided Dave Ferrie’s apartment three years ago?” he asked. “Remember the map of Cuba that Ferrie had on his wall?”
I nodded, still listening. “Remember the Army equipment and the rifles laying around? He even had an artillery shell sitting there. It was a 155 millimeter.”
“And Jack Martin has connected Ferrie with Banister’s office,” I answered, thinking out loud, “so you think that this news story about the bombs connects with Banister’s operation—the one that Martin’s afraid to tell us about?”
Klein shrugged his shoulders. “I’m just suggesting a working theory,” he said. “Remember Martin mentioned a lot of Cubans being at Banister’s place, too. Look at this reference in the second story to the Cuban named Jose Juarez.”
“So?”
“So,” Klein responded, “what was Lee Oswald handing out? Were they Fair Play for Russia leaflets? Were they Fair Play for Rumania pamphlets? No. They were Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. Did he ever show any interest in Cuba before 1963 when he started handing out those circulars with Guy Banister’s address on them?”
“Okay,” I said. “You’ve given me something to chew on. Let me look at these news stories some more.”
However, I did not chew on it at all. So, some ammunition had been found north of Lake Pontchartrain. The local F.B.I. chief had not indicated that anything had happened. There had been no announcement of any arrests. I pushed the news story off to the side.
Later I would recall having almost tossed away a major lead. The F.B.I. announcement about the “ammunition raid” north of the lake would come to stand as a small milestone. It would represent the last federal government announcement relating to the intelligence community’s activity or President Kennedy’s assassination that I would not regard dubiously.
Soon we got a new break. Guy Banister’s widow unexpectedly agreed to grant us an interview. She was very cooperative, but clearly never knew much about what Guy Banister had been doing at his office. He never had been very communicative about details of his work. However, she did recall one curious thing. After his death, in 1964, she had been removing his effects from his office when she came across a stack of leaflets that she found very peculiar. They had said either “Hands Off Cuba” or “Fair Play for Cuba”—leftovers from Lee Oswald’s performances as an agent provocateur.
Asked about what had happened to Banister’s office files, she recalled that federal government agents had arrived within an hour or two of his death—long before she reached his office—and carted off the locked filing cabinets. She was told that the men had been from either the F.B.I. or the Secret Service—she could not recall which. However, the state police, she added, did not arrive until after she had.
The state police? Apparently in a routine check, possibly because a brother of Banister’s had been connected with it, several state police officers had gone through his office. They departed with the index cards to Banister’s files, which the federal agents incomprehensibly had failed to take with them.
I had Lou Ivon on the road to Baton Rouge, the state capital, within the hour. That afternoon he returned with a small handful of file cards. They were all that remained of what the state police had found in Banister’s office.[13]
It apparently had occurred to one of the state police officers that the back of these cards would be handy for informal office messages. And so, for three years, this thrifty move had expedited inter-office communications at the headquarters of the Louisiana State Police.
Nevertheless, the few remaining index cards spoke volumes. No local or private matters were referred to whatsoever. The subjects covered were national and even international in scope. From this index list we were able to determine the general nature of the Banister files seized by the federal government:
American Central Intelligence Agency 20-10
Ammunition and Arms 32-1
Anti-Soviet Underground 25-1
B-70 Manned Bomber Force 15-16
Civil Rights Program of J.F.K. 8-41
Dismantling of Ballistic Missile System 15-16
Dismantling of Defenses, U.S. 15-16
Fair Play for Cuba Committee 23-7
International Trade Mart 23-14
Italy, U.S. Bases Dismantled in
General Assembly of the United Nations 15-16
Latin America 23-1
Missile Bases Dismantled—Turkey and Italy 15-16
Thus ended the myth of Guy Banister’s “private detective agency.”
Meanwhile Jack Martin had resurfaced. He had been out of town, and on his return Ivon brought him to my office. After we’d had some coffee, I shoved the August 1, 1963, news story across the table.
“Jack,” I said, “is this part of the business Guy Banister was involved in?”
He glanced at the Times-Picayune news story and nodded.
“You already know the answer to that,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have this newspaper on your desk.” He read another paragraph or two while I recovered from my pleasant surprise.
“Yeah. That was part of Banister’s deal.” He looked up. “Can I read the whole story?” he asked.
I nodded and handed him the follow-up story as well.
Martin slowly read through both news stories. Finally he looked at me, a curious frown on his face.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t say anything about the main raid. And it doesn’t say a damn thing about all the Cubans who were arrested.”
Arrests? The F.B.I.’s statement had not mentioned anything about arrests. Least of all anything about Cubans plural.
“All right then, Jack,” I said, “why don’t you straighten it out for us? Tell me about the entire operation at Guy Banister’s. The whole thing.”
And so Jack Martin started to talk. This was the beginning of many long talks—each with frequent interruptions for coffee, upon which he appeared to subsist.
The talks took place over a period of weeks. There were days when I was tied up with other witnesses, there were days when we could not locate Martin, and there even were days when he had found himself a client.
I had to assure him that I would never connect his name with what he told me. Aware of the importance of finally having obtained access to the sanctum sanctorum that secretly had harbored Lee Harvey Oswald, I observed this agreement scrupulously. Now that Martin has passed away, I feel released from that vow of silence. Jack would put nothing in writing, nor would he sign his name to anything. But he did tell whatever he could recall about the business at Guy Banister’s—although only to me. There must have been occasions later when my staff thought I was psychic when I was able, time and again, to describe the inside workings of Banister’s office.
As it turned out, Martin, the tarnished “alcoholic,” had told the complete truth about the training camp and the arrests made by the F.B.I. It was the vaunted Federal Bureau of Investigation that had been lying and concealing the full story from the American people.
The actual F.B.I. raid included not only the ammunition described in the news story but also the nearby undescribed training camp at which trainees had been arrested (nine of them Cuban exiles and two of them Americans).[14] This group, later aptly described by two of the better informed journalists as “the Pontchartrain Eleven,” was preparing for future C.I.A.-sponsored attacks on Cuba. The F.B.I. raid had come in response to pressure from President Kennedy, who wanted the Bureau to stop the C.I.A.’s unending violations of the Neutrality Act.
In addition to what Martin told me, we learned the full truth about the raid from a supplementary report that the Bureau had sent to U.S. Customs—apparently a matter of course when suspects are arrested for violating the Neutrality Act. A private detective, whose firm worked closely with Customs in its patrol of the New Orleans docks, obtained a copy of the report naming all of the arrested men and turned it over to my office.[15] The apparent intended effect of the F.B.I.’s public pronouncements about the raid was to protect and continue to conceal the curious activities at Banister’s office.
The Banister apparatus, as Martin described it, was part of a supply line that ran along the Dallas–New Orleans–Miami corridor. These supplies consisted of arms and explosives for use against Castro’s Cuba. The security control was so careful that ammunition was kept far-flung in outlying areas. Dispersal was the rule. On the occasions when such explosives were held in New Orleans only small amounts were kept at Banister’s office at any one time.
As we later learned from one of the participants, a former C.I.A. employee named Gordon Novel, it was on just such a mission to acquire combat ammunition that David Ferrie, one of the leaders of the local Cuban Revolutionary Front, and a handful of others from Banister’s office drove down one night to the blimp air base at Houma, a town deep in southern Louisiana. They entered one of the Schlumberger Corporation’s explosives bunkers and removed the land mines, hand grenades, and rifle grenades stored there.
The Schlumberger Corporation was a huge French-owned company, which serviced oil producers worldwide by using explosives and geological measuring devices to determine the probable geology underground. It had been a supporter of the French counter-revolutionary Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.), which attempted to assassinate President Charles DeGaulle several times in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his role in freeing Algeria in North Africa. The C.I.A., which was also supportive of the French O.A.S. generals, had supplied Schlumberger with anti-personnel ammunition and in this operation at Houma, following the demise of the O.A.S., was simply getting its ammunition back.
The expedition, consisting of a car followed by a large laundry truck, returned to New Orleans with its explosive haul, which was then divided equally between Ferrie’s apartment and Banister’s inner office until the time arrived for its transport to Miami.
Banister’s operation also included the processing and handling of anti-Castro trainees passing through the city. Some wearing green combat outfits with black boots and others wearing civilian clothes, they arrived and departed in a steady stream. However, they always were taken in and out of the city in small numbers so that there never would be a conspicuously large gathering at the office.
Many of the exiles were recruits from the West arriving for guerrilla training at the camp north of Lake Pontchartrain. Others were sent on to Florida for similar training being conducted by the C.I.A. there. Occasionally a handful of graduates of the Florida training program would stop at Banister’s—a road stop as well as a headquarters—for lodging and eating arrangements to be made on their way back to their homes in the vicinity of Dallas or points west.
As my informal team[16] talked it out in our brainstorming sessions, we were most conscious that Banister’s hidden war games had been played out directly across the street from the offices of the O.N.I. and the Secret Service. Furthermore, across Lafayette Park and a short walk down St. Charles Avenue was the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
It seemed to all of us that, by the late summer of 1963, the parade in and out of Guy Banister’s place would have been hard for these intelligence agencies to ignore. We put ourselves in the position of the federal agents in the vicinity and visualized the scene.
To begin with, there was David Ferrie, the defrocked novitiate priest and defrocked commercial pilot. A raffish adventurer with a crudely cut, homemade thatch of reddish mohair, and large greasepaint eyebrows which never quite matched, Ferrie suffered from alopecia, a rare disease that renders its victims completely hairless. Constantly in and out of the office—except when he was across Lake Pontchartrain supervising the guerrilla training of the Cuban exiles—he frequently was garbed in his green combat outfit and combat boots.
There was Guy Banister himself. The austere and downright regal former chief of the Chicago F.B.I. office would necessarily have known a good number of his intelligence community cousins and frequently would have been greeting them, if not stopping to chat.
Then there was the ill-starred Lee Harvey Oswald, a thin young man still ramrod straight from his Marine years, periodically marching out of Banister’s with a handful of leaflets sufficiently inflammatory to make the average federal agent’s hair stand straight up.
Anti-Castro Cubans, many unshaven and wearing green combat garb and boots, regularly tramped up the stairs to Banister’s office. More often than not they were talking to each other in Spanish. On their way to and from the guerrilla training camp north of the lake, some of them no doubt dragged Army duffle bags with them.
And, as if all of this was not enough, the Secret Service and Naval Intelligence agents across the street must have grown bored witnessing the movement of ammunition boxes to and from Banister’s office: rifles, hand grenades, land mines, whatever had been collected for the secret war against Cuba. During that long busy summer of 1963, it must have been all that the Secret Service and O.N.I. agents could do to concentrate on their business at hand—whatever that might have been.
My small team and I wondered aloud at how it was known in advance that Banister’s operation—in such systematic and open violation of the Neutrality Act—was to be protected by the various elements of the intelligence community. For indeed, the F.B.I.’s grossly incomplete announcement of its raid north of Lake Pontchartrain had amounted to an enormous concealment of Banister’s continual and considerably more substantial violations of the Neutrality Act within the very heart of the New Orleans intelligence community. It seemed clear to me that the F.B.I.—in its well-publicized “raid” on the ammunition pile supposedly owned by one “Jose Juarez,” who never materialized—was going through the motions of giving President Kennedy what he had ordered while its heart continued to belong to the missions being carried out by Guy Banister.
I obtained a copy of the Secret Service’s report of its investigation of 544 Camp Street—the entrance to Banister’s office—and made it available to my staff. The synopsis of the report, dated December 9, 1963, indicated that “extensive investigation” had revealed that no one at that address ever recalled seeing Lee Harvey Oswald. It went on to indicate that nothing of any consequence had been found at that address. [17]
Even a layman, across from whose house Barnum & Bailey was operating a circus, would not have to see too many elephants before he realized that this was not an ordinary neighbor. It was the consensus of my informal team that the circus at 544 Camp Street could not have been as invisible as the Secret Service report sought to make it seem.
We did not yet realize it, but we were encountering the first signs that there was a force in this country that—no matter what the cost— wanted the Cold War, and the hot war in Vietnam, to continue.