IN 1963 Clinton was a rural hamlet in deep south Louisiana. It was a relic of the long-ago time when cotton had been king, a farmers’ center where the cotton crops were weighed and buyers bid for them.
Clinton was the kind of place whose continued survival had no visible basis. Its importance to the cotton industry had faded; it remained only because it had always been there. But in early 1967 we picked up a lead that made that sleepy town very important indeed.
It seemed that back in late summer or early autumn of 1963, Lee Oswald had been seen in Clinton in the company of two older men. The descriptions of these men closely fit Clay Shaw, whose hometown of Hammond we knew was just east of Clinton, and David Ferrie, who had spent a lot of time at Guy Banister’s anti-Castro camp a little farther east on Lake Pontchartrain.
It was a slim lead, little more than a whisper in the air which most law enforcement agencies would have waved away impatiently, but such thin leads were what we had been forced to work with from the beginning.
Clinton was a good ways off the beaten path, and I decided that sending assistant D.A. Andrew Sciambra by himself from the city might not be the right way to approach this rural town. Sciambra needed someone else with a bit of country background. I called Governor John McKeithen, and he ordered Lieutenant Francis Frugé, a state police officer of Cajun descent, accent included, to join Sciambra in Clinton immediately.
We soon had an unexpected strike of good fortune. It developed that Oswald’s two older companions had selected the most memorable occasion in decades to show up with Lee Oswald in a country town in the Deep South. For the first time in history, a major voter registration drive supported by the federal government was under way. This effort to register more black voters was strongly supported by the blacks in the town and intransigently opposed by the whites. From sunup to sundown almost every adult in Clinton was milling about the vicinity of the registrar’s office, the blacks to make sure that the whites did not prevent the registration of new black voters, the whites to make sure that no “outsiders” had come in to encourage the blacks. It was an occurrence never seen before and not likely ever to be seen again. In fact, the first two witnesses located by Sciambra and Frugé traced their recollection of Oswald’s presence with the older men in Clinton to the month of September 1963 because that is when the voter registration drive was under way.
A number of the Clinton citizens interviewed found the scene unforgettable because most of the time Oswald was the only white man standing in a long line of blacks. Just as memorable were the two older men who were with Oswald. All of the witnesses described one of the two as wearing a crazy-looking wig and painted eyebrows. There was no doubt that this was David Ferrie.
Ferrie and the other man, who was driving, stayed mainly in the car, which everyone recalled as a large black limousine. One after the other, the Clinton townsfolk described the driver as a tall, very distinguished man. His hair was described as gray or white. Everyone recalled his fancy manners, mentioning that whenever someone passed by the limousine, he nodded politely and said hello.
The town marshal suspected that the two might have been sent from the federal government to help black people register. He called in the limousine license plates to the state police and had them checked. The car, it turned out, was registered to the International Trade Mart, which Clay Shaw—obviously the tall, distinguished-looking man—happened to manage.
The weather was unexpectedly cool, perhaps an early harbinger of summer’s end. However, the temperature of the townspeople was warmer than usual, superheated by the emotion of the situation. Everyone seemed to be on the lookout for strangers.
To the townspeople who kept glancing in their direction, Shaw and Ferrie must have presented an incongruous picture. Ferrie, with his wig and painted eyebrows, must have looked like a large, incredibly strange bird. Next to him, Shaw, chain-smoking cigarettes in his imperial manner, must have appeared even more debonaire than usual, even more out of place in this dusty small town. Yet, interestingly enough, Shaw, whose father was an agent for the U.S. Treasury Department, had been born in Kentwood and had grown up in Hammond, just 30 miles east of Clinton.
Those townsfolk who were not staring at the two men in the limousine must have stared long and hard at Lee Oswald. And several months later when the news flashed out that he had murdered the President, a number of them remembered him. Later, at Clay Shaw’s trial in New Orleans, Edwin McGehee, the town barber, would recall on the witness stand the moment he saw Oswald for the first time. He had just turned off the air conditioning and opened the door to his barber shop when a young man walked in. Several months later, when the assassination occurred, he promptly recognized that same young man as Lee Harvey Oswald.
McGehee said that he gave Oswald a haircut, which took about 15 minutes, and Oswald showed him his Marine discharge card. Oswald then mentioned that he was trying to get a job at the hospital in nearby Jackson. When McGehee informed him that it was a mental hospital, Oswald seemed genuinely astonished, but continued to express interest in the job. McGehee suggested that he see Reeves Morgan, the state representative for the parish. He also suggested to Oswald that he might have a better chance of getting the job if he were a registered voter.
Oswald then went to Morgan’s house. There was a chill in the air, Morgan recalled, and he sat with Oswald in front of a new fire in the fireplace. He also told Oswald that he would have a better chance for the job if he registered as a voter in the parish. After the assassination he recognized Oswald from the pictures in the newspapers as the young man who had come to see him about the job.
By the time Sciambra and Lieutenant Frugé finished their work in Clinton, they had talked to more than 300 townspeople. After Sciambra returned to New Orleans, I assembled Frank Klein, Jim Alcock, and Lou Ivon in my office. I also called in D’Alton Williams in an effort to strengthen our loose handful of men working on the Kennedy case. D’Alton, unlike the other attorneys present, was not primarily a trial lawyer. His specialty was administrative supervision. However, he was exceedingly intelligent, he long had expressed interest in the project, and there simply were no more trial assistants I could remove from courtroom duty at that time.
As they gathered around the long table in the conference room, it occurred to me that for the first time since we had stumbled into this affair, we had what might be called “a team.” We listened and asked questions while Andrew Sciambra reviewed his weeks in Clinton. Alcock wanted to know what conceivable objective could have been accomplished by getting Lee Oswald a job in the state mental hospital in Jackson—if indeed that had been the objective of Shaw and Ferrie. Sciambra replied that he had wondered the same thing. Remembering Oswald’s surprise when the town barber informed him that the place was a mental institution, Sciambra had gone to Jackson to see whether or not Oswald had ever filed a job application there.
“And did he?” I asked.
Sciambra nodded. “Yes. I found the lady in personnel who interviewed him. But when she went to the files to get a copy of his application—which she remembers him filling out—it was gone.”
By that time we had become so used to the systematic disappearance of evidence that no comment was necessary. The fact remained that Oswald had applied for a job at the mental institution, and that would have been all that his sponsors needed for another touch of sheepdipping. A few weeks of menial work there would have been enough to complete the picture of Oswald wandering haplessly from one job to another, each more obscure than the last. With a bit of luck and a little orchestration, it might even have been possible—with a switch of cards from “employee” to “patient”—to have the right psychiatrist at Jackson describe the problems he had in treating this strange outpatient named Lee Oswald.
Perhaps the most important result of the Clinton work was that we had succeeded in connecting David Ferrie and Clay Shaw. Knowing that Shaw and Ferrie were friends, or even more, that they were jointly engaged in some clandestine association, gave us a better chance to develop information. To investigate Shaw alone—a highly controlled, discreet man with powerful connections—would have been difficult. Now, however, we had found a handle on Shaw. His name was David Ferrie.
When I showed up at the Pere Marquette Building, Wray Gill came out to his waiting room to meet me. One of the city’s best trial lawyers, Wray bowed and extended a welcome in his ornate fashion all the way back to his private office, which looked down on the winding Mississippi River, 18 floors below. I was there because David Ferrie had worked as a part-time investigator for Gill in 1962 and 1963.
In Gill’s office I waved the small talk aside. “Wray,” I said, “I need a favor from you.”
“No problem,” he replied.
“My intuition tells me that Dave Ferrie might have charged some long-distance calls on your phone when he was around here.”
His white eyebrows rose up. “Some long distance calls? God almighty! The man almost bankrupted me.”
“Can you give me copies of his calls?” I asked.
He sent his secretary to search the bills for 1962 and 1963.
“This is what we have, Mr. Gill,” she said when she returned. “You let him go in January 1964. Remember?”
“How can I ever forget?” he muttered. He put his finger on the bill for that month. “I told Dave adios. I told him I could put up with his eccentricities, but not his long-distance calls.”
Gill instructed his secretary to draw a penciled line through every call made by the office, leaving exposed the calls made by Ferrie. “They’re easy to pick out,” he said. “Those cities there didn’t have a damned thing to do with this office. You know better than anyone that about ninety percent of my business is right here in New Orleans.”
In the course of striking through the office calls, the secretary discovered that the bills for November 1963—the month of President Kennedy’s assassination—were missing. She had no idea who had removed them but pointed out that Ferrie still had access to the office files then.
That night I began going through Ferrie’s long-distance bills for 1962 and 1963. The first thing I noticed was their remarkable diversity. The calls were not only to many domestic cities but to such distant locales as Guatemala, Mexico, and Canada. Just whom he was calling could have been discovered in short order by a federal agency such as the F.B.I. with its resources and authority. But it had become apparent that no such agencies were going to be willing to help us out.
We had neither the telephone company connections nor the investigative staff to undertake the kind of broad-based, logical approach I would have chosen. Instead, I painstakingly collected and correlated all of the Warren Commission exhibits listing phone calls made by, to, or otherwise connected with witnesses encountered by the federal investigation.
After many evenings of comparing Ferrie’s long-distance calls to those in the Commission exhibits, I made a connection. The local telephone bill indicated that one of Ferrie’s calls had been made from New Orleans to Chicago on September 24, 1963. This was, according to the Warren Commission’s later conclusion, the day before Lee Oswald left New Orleans. The number Ferrie called in Illinois that day was WH 4-4970. The local phone bill did not identify the recipient. Was Ferrie calling, perhaps, to report to some intermediary that the sheepdipping job had been completed or that “the kid is leaving New Orleans” or something of the sort?
In Commission exhibit number 2350 (page 335 of Volume XXV) I found a call made to exactly the same number: WH 4-4970 in Chicago, Illinois. Under Additional Information in the Commission volume was listed “Person call [sic] at 9:09 a.m. credit card used, Kansas City Missouri to Miss A. Asie Room 1405.” That exhibit did not identify the caller. However, now at least I had someone’s name to connect with the number Ferrie had called.
Some nights later I located Miss Asie—now spelled Aase—in Commission exhibit number 2266. There an F.B.I. report identified her more fully as “JEAN AASE” of Chicago, Illinois. The F.B.I. report, dated December 4, 1963, described how she had accompanied “LAWRENCE V. MEYERS” on a business trip to Dallas, Texas, where they arrived the evening of November 20, 1963—two days before President Kennedy’s assassination. They checked into the Ramada Motel, the report continued, where they spent the night. On November 21 they moved to the Cabana Motel.
Aase then stated, according to the F.B.I. report, that on the evening of November 21, Meyers took her to the Carousel Club, where he introduced her to Jack Ruby and “the three of them sat at a table near the doorway and chatted.”
Considering that Lee Oswald’s New Orleans friend Dave Ferrie had called her Chicago number, I wondered if Miss Aase was later curious when Jack Ruby, her partner in casual conversation, killed Oswald three days later.
As I searched through the Warren Commission volumes, my confusion about Jean Aase increased. There had been no index to the testimony volumes to indicate that Jean Asie or Jean Aase existed. As for the exhibit volumes, there was no index to indicate the existence of anyone.
Then, in an F.B.I. interview with Lawrence Meyers, I found that she had become Jean West. I looked at the Warren Commission’s discussion of Meyers. From his interview, Meyers certainly appeared to have been a fairly typical, successful, middle-class businessman. His daughter worked for the government nuclear reactor at Argonne, Illinois,[41] and his son was in Army Intelligence. As for Meyers’s friendship with Jack Ruby, they had happened to meet a few years back—and Meyers had grown fond of the future murderer of Lee Oswald. The members of the Warren Commission were evidently satisfied with this testimony. Meyers was never asked whether or not he knew David Ferrie. Nor did he have anything to add about the mysterious Miss Aase.
Miss Aase, or Miss West, or whatever her name was, never appeared before the Warren Commission or gave a deposition to Commission lawyers. I did find a third F.B.I. mention of the mystery woman, this time described as “JEAN WEST,” in the same Commission exhibits volume, but it added no illumination. She was not asked whether she knew David Ferrie or how he could have had access to the very phone number by which Meyers also later reached her. Nor did the report reveal a flicker of curiosity about her pre-assassination chat with Jack Ruby.
The timing of this woman’s meeting (along with Lawrence V. Meyers) with Jack Ruby was provocative enough. However, the constant changing of her name, which would confuse anyone who wanted to know about her, confirmed for me that something about her—or her phone number—was suspicious.
As I puzzled over this perplexing problem, it suddenly occurred to me that I had stumbled across the use of a “message center”—a customary intelligence community device to throw off the would-be pursuer of a phone-call listing. And in this instance the message center apparently had resulted in a communication with Jack Ruby.
The use of message centers is standard operating procedure for any large government bureaucracy. The message center is so important to the Army, for example, that every unit—from an infantry division headquarters all the way down to a company headquarters—has one and would have difficulty functioning without one.
In the Army, a unit’s message center invariably is located by the nearest road of approach and identified for message couriers by a small sign alongside the road. On the other hand, American domestic intelligence does not like to advertise. So shy is it, in fact, that it claims it does not even exist. Nevertheless, its agents also have a need to communicate, and quite often, especially where the circumstances are delicate, they want to obtain indirection as well—as appears to have been the case where Jean West, who was contacted by Ferrie, ended up the day before the assassination talking to Jack Ruby.
The time had come for some brainstorming about clandestine message centers, so I got the team together at the office. I used a blackboard to illustrate the routing I had stumbled across: Ferrie calling to West’s Chicago telephone; West and Meyers flying to Dallas on November 20; West and Meyers meeting with Ruby the day before the assassination.
D’Alton Williams, our newest recruit, pointed to the diagram. “Your message center idea looks like a probability to me,” he said. “But I think the picture could be made clearer.”
We waited for D’Alton to continue.
“Ruby was from Chicago, wasn’t he?” he asked.
“Sure,” I replied, “and so were Jean West and Lawrence Meyers. Some of these people must have known each other. That’s what makes the message center fit so well.”
“But there’s one problem,” said D’Alton. “What if we’re dealing with a C.I.A. message center here? Dave Ferrie obviously didn’t have enough status to be deciding what message was going to be sent and where. Remember we’re assuming this communication went right on through to Jack Ruby.”
“Ruby wasn’t that much,” interjected Ivon.
“That’s not D’Alton’s point,” Klein said. “He’s saying that someone—like the original instigator of the message—knew what was on the schedule for Ruby.”
“Right,” said D’Alton. “So why don’t we start off asking ourselves who Dave Ferrie’s boss was.”
He paused, then asked innocently, “Didn’t Guy Banister used to be the head of the Chicago office of the F.B.I.?”
“I’ll be damned,” said Ivon. “Chicago to Chicago all the way through to Chicago.”
“Do I get a gold star,” asked D’Alton, “for figuring out that Guy Banister probably knew Jack Ruby?”
“No,” I replied, “because Ruby left Chicago for the Air Force in the late 1940s and there’s nothing to indicate that Banister knew Ruby that early. But you get a silver star.”
I walked over to the blackboard, scratched out Ferrie’s name, and replaced it with Banister’s.
“The probability,” I went on, “is that, with their Chicago connections, they knew some of the same people there.”
“But how do we get to know for sure,” asked Alcock, nodding toward the blackboard, “that our message center up there is the real thing?” That was standard Jim Alcock. He was always unhappy with uncertainty.
“I don’t know,” I said. “For now, all we have is a model of a message center. We’ll just have to work with that.”
About this time, in early 1967, we had an unexpected lucky break. Dick Billings, an editor from Life magazine, arrived at the office. He was a slender man with a quick mind and delightful wit. After talking with me at some length, he informed me confidentially that the top management at Life had concluded that President Kennedy’s assassination had been a conspiracy and that my investigation was moving in the right direction. Inasmuch as Life was conducting its own investigation, Billings suggested that we work together. The magazine would be able to provide me with technical assistance, and we could develop a mutual exchange of information.
The offer came at a good time. I had been wanting to increase my stakeout coverage of David Ferrie’s home but did not have the personnel to spare, particularly an expert photographer. We had succeeded in establishing a friendly relationship with the couple who lived directly across the street from Ferrie on Louisiana Avenue Parkway. Like him, they lived on the second floor of a duplex and also had a screened porch in the front. I described this situation to the Life editor, and within days a top-flight photographer arrived in town. We promptly installed him at his observation post on the second-floor porch across the street.
Meanwhile, out at New Orleans Lakefront Airport, Lou Ivon had located a former airplane mechanic of Ferrie’s named Jimmy Johnson and had persuaded him to go back to work for Ferrie but to keep contact with our office. This airport stakeout on Ferrie produced an early dividend. Ferrie told Johnson that a package would be arriving for him shortly. A white compact sports car would be parked squarely in front of the airport administration building, with the windows up but with the door unlocked. Ferrie asked Johnson to check every ten or fifteen minutes to see whether such a car had arrived. When it did, he said, Johnson was to reach under the front seat where he would find—taped to the bottom of the seat—a brown package, which he was to bring to Ferrie.
The car arrived, and Johnson followed the instructions. When Johnson brought the package into the administration building, Ferrie took it to the bathroom to examine the contents. He came out full of excitement and announced that he was going to buy a brand new car.
This cash apparently coming to Ferrie from a mysterious source only made more intriguing another fact that Jim Alcock had uncovered. By serving a subpoena on Ferrie’s bank, Alcock found that Ferrie had deposited more than $7,000 in cash to his account in the weeks immediately preceding Kennedy’s assassination.
One other lead about Ferrie yielded some provocative information. Ferrie, once a pilot for Eastern Airlines, had been investigated by a private detective agency. I obtained a copy of its report. The investigators had maintained a stakeout near his residence and found that Ferrie was visited frequently by a man named Dante Marachini.
A simple check of the phone book revealed that Dante Marachini resided at 1309 Dauphine Street. This was extremely interesting to me because right next door was the home of Clay Shaw. I wondered who else might be living next door to Shaw. Reaching for the red book (which lists individuals by address) I found that also living at 1309 Dauphine Street was a man named James Lewallen. I recalled from earlier research that James Lewallen had once shared an apartment with David Ferrie in the vicinity of Kenner, a New Orleans suburb.
Now I found myself looking at two unfamiliar names, Marachini and Lewallen, both of whom had in the past been associated with Ferrie and both of whom now lived next door to Clay Shaw. That was something to think about.
Sometime later, I came across the name of Dante Marachini again. I had wanted to talk to individuals at the Reily Coffee Company who had worked with Lee Oswald or at a level immediately above him, so I sent Frank Klein over to the company to get their names and respective positions.
He returned rather quickly. “They’re all gone,” he said. “Anyone who ever had any connection with Lee Oswald left the Reily Company within a few weeks after Oswald did.” He laid a sheet of paper in front of me. “Here are the names and the new jobs.”
I glanced down at the list. One name jumped out at me immediately: Dante Marachini. He had begun work at the Reily Coffee Company on exactly the same day as Oswald. Several weeks after Oswald’s departure, Marachini also left the coffee company and began life anew at the Chrysler Aerospace Division at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), on the eastern side of New Orleans.
I then noticed that Alfred Claude, who hired Oswald for Reily, had also gone to work for the Chrysler Aerospace Division.
Then I saw that John Branyon, who had worked with Oswald at the coffee company, had left for a job at NASA.
At just about the same time, Emmett Barbee, Oswald’s immediate boss at Reily, left the coffee company and also inaugurated a new career with NASA.
After seeing what happened to all of these men associated with Oswald at the coffee company and after seeing Marachini’s name again, my curiosity about 1309 Dauphine Street returned. I called Lou Ivon in and asked him to find out if James Lewallen, David Ferrie’s former apartment mate who now resided at 1309 Dauphine Street, had been as fortunate as some of the workers at Reily had been. It took Ivon a couple of days, but he came back with a now fairly predictable piece of information: Lewallen had gone to work for Boeing out at NASA. Lou and I kicked this interesting situation around a bit, and then we both became curious about what had happened to Melvin Coffee, who had accompanied David Ferrie to Texas on the eve of the assassination.
Ivon was back the next day. Melvin Coffee had been hired by the Aerospace Operation at Cape Canaveral.
Perhaps it was mere coincidence that all these men associated with David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, and Lee Oswald ended up working for NASA, but I doubted it. I knew by now that when a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no apparent reason, or a group of individuals inexplicably headed in the same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence piled on coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.