IT WAS FEBRUARY 22, 1967, and the special team, as we had begun to refer to each other, was meeting at my house out in Lakeview, alongside Bayou St. John on the eastern side of New Orleans. Jim Alcock, Andrew Sciambra, D’Alton Williams, Lou Ivon, and I were having coffee at the roundtable in the combination kitchen-dining room. Every now and then my family’s big boxer, Touchdown, would race by, pursued by my children, pursued in turn by three cats—and my wife, Liz, valiantly trying to corner the menagerie and get them out to the backyard.
Although less than a week had passed since the stunning and premature revelation of our investigation by the press, already I was learning a lesson: Time and necessity seem to head for your doorstep of their own volition, with a profound disregard for your particular problems. Because of my own foolishness, Frank Klein, our best mind, was not with us. Nevertheless, it was decision-making time. And the decision staring at us was whether or not the time had come to call David Ferrie before the Grand Jury.
The unexpected result of the previous week’s newspaper stories had been the sudden, stark deterioration of the long-maintained savoir faire of David Ferrie. The day the news hit the front page of the States-Item Lou Ivon, who was trusted and admired by Ferrie as well as virtually everyone else who knew him, had received an odd telephone call. The caller was halfway through his question before Lou recognized the voice. It was David Ferrie asking if our office had planted the big smear that hit the papers that morning.
“Dave,” Ivon said, “do you think we’re out of our minds? This building is crawling with reporters grabbing at you when you try to walk through the hall.”
Ferrie had responded that he believed Ivon. It was then that Ivon became aware of his caller’s unusual excitement. “You know what this news story does to me, don’t you?” said Ferrie. “I’m a dead man. From here on, believe me, I’m a dead man.”
“What are you talking about, Dave? There’s no reason to be jumping to a conclusion like that.”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” said Ferrie. “You’ll see.”
The following day, Ivon again had a call from Ferrie. This time Ferrie seemed a bit calmer, but his nervousness was still detectable. Now, to Ivon’s astonishment, Ferrie asked directly how the investigation was coming along. As Lou mumbled a reply, Ferrie blurted out: “You think your investigation has been all that secret? You know, when you talk to people, they talk to other people.”
“Yeah,” Lou replied, “I can’t argue with that.”
Then Ferrie asked if we were still questioning any Cubans.
Ivon followed his instincts and leveled with the man. “Dave,” he said, “you know we are. You know that’s where this road leads.” And then he added, “I only wish you were on our side as a guide. I can guarantee you that the boss would give his right arm to have your mind working with us.”
I do not know whether it was the words Ivon used, or the way he used them, but within 24 hours Ferrie called again—this time asking for help. The media somehow had sniffed out that he was one of the targets of our investigation, and they were surrounding his apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway like bees on a candy bar.
Ivon told him to wait by the phone. Within ten minutes he would call back with a solution to Ferrie’s problem. Lou immediately called the Fontainbleau Motel and reserved a first-class suite under an assumed name. He then called Ferrie back and told him to go to the Fontainbleau, where a suite would be waiting for him. He brushed aside Ferrie’s attempts to thank him. “Don’t worry about it,” Lou had said. “You call us anytime you need us, and we’ll give you a hand.”
As recently as several nights before, just before midnight, Ferrie had called Ivon at his home and said that the press was still keeping his home surrounded. Ivon had picked him up at a bar on Tulane Avenue, driven him over to the Fontainbleau and again had obtained a suite for him. He also suggested that Ferrie order whatever room service he wanted and try to relax.
You did not have to be a psychiatrist to see that Ferrie was rapidly deteriorating. His emotional stability seemed so precarious that we could not ignore the situation another day. “We have to make a decision, and we’re going to make it this morning,” I said to the others around the table. I glanced at Ivon. “You saw Frank Klein. What did he say about calling Ferrie to the Grand Jury right now?”
“He said he would wait. His instincts tell him that Ferrie is going to keep on deteriorating and we’ll end up getting a lot more out of him. And he also feels that if we call Dave in now he may freeze up and we could lose the best shot we’ll ever have.”
I turned to Alcock. “Jim, what’s your vote?”
Alcock, predictably conservative, shook his expressionless face solemnly. “Looking at it as a lawyer, I don’t think it quite adds up to a basis for calling him to the Grand Jury yet.”
I looked at Sciambra. “Andrew?” I said.
“Most of me,” he replied, “says call him, call him as soon as possible. I’ve got about fifty questions to ask him, and I’m dying to hear how he answers them. But, speaking as a lawyer, I feel like it may be just a few weeks too early.”
I turned to D’Alton Williams.
D’Alton shook his head. “The last thing I like to do is pass when it’s decision-making time,” he said. “But I don’t have the feel yet about what makes Ferrie tick, so I have to abstain.”
“Lou?” I asked.
“You know how I’ve got to vote,” he said, flashing an unexpected grin. “I feel sorry for Dave, and I really kind of like the guy. I saw him the other night and I tell you, something or somebody is putting tremendous pressure on him and—well, I’m not a lawyer like the rest of you all. I think if we sit on our behinds too long while we examine the legalities, we’ll find we waited too long. I’m for calling him in right now.”
“Okay, chief,” said Sciambra, looking at me. “How does the vote add up?”
I paused, then said slowly, “We stay cool, hold our fire, and wait a little longer.”
The telephone rang, and Liz went over to answer it. “Lou,” she called, “it’s for you.”
Lou was on the phone speaking in low tones. I saw from the intensity on his face that something had happened. Then he turned to look at us.
“Dave Ferrie’s dead,” he said quietly. “The coroner’s already picked up the body at his place.”
It took us all a moment to recover from the shock. “Hold onto that phone, Lou,” I said. “Before you hang up, get five or six of your best policemen over to Ferrie’s place. We’re going over there right now and sweep it from one end to the other. And make this clear. This case is in our jurisdiction. I don’t want a single man from any federal agency taking over at Ferrie’s. Not without an explicit federal court order.”
We piled into the cars outside and arrived at Ferrie’s apartment less than ten minutes after our own investigators. There was no danger of federal intruders. Our men had sealed it off so a ten-ton tank could not have gotten within 50 yards of the late David Ferrie’s apartment.
The first thing that hit me when I went through the door was the smell of the white mice. There had been hundreds of them in the place, kept in wire cages in the living room and dining room as part of the cancer experiments Ferrie had conducted with an established local doctor. The doctor now was long gone, and so were the white mice. But the cages and that unforgettable, stale, oddly sweet smell continued to hang in the air.
The apartment was filthy. It seemed that nothing in it had been washed for years. There was an eclectic accumulation of furniture, no single piece matching any other. An overwhelming library flowed from the living room into the dining room and kitchen. In the bathroom, along both sides of the mirror, we found globs of purplish glue, the residue from Ferrie’s periodic application of his homemade wig. And, at one end of his bedroom closet, otherwise cluttered with shabby jackets, we found ourselves staring at the neat but faded lace and satin of some sort of priestly garments.
Ferrie’s body long since had been hauled off by the coroner’s people. He had been discovered lying nude on the living room sofa, which he often used as a bed, with a sheet pulled over his head. Two suicide notes were found, one on the table alongside of him, and the second on top of the old upright piano against the wall. The table next to him had a variety of medicine bottles on it, several completely empty, the caps removed. I wondered how the coroner’s men could have treated potential evidence with such disregard.
Both suicide notes had been typed, and neither bore Ferrie’s signature. The first began: “To leave this life is, for me, a sweet prospect. I find nothing in it that is desirable and on the other hand, everything that is loathsome.” From that point on the letter became rambling, almost incoherent, as it wandered into a bitter diatribe about the unfairness of life. It made a passing reference to a “messianic District Attorney.” The second note, just as bitter, was addressed to a personal friend by name. It began: “When you read this I will be quite dead and no answer will be possible.”
Shortly after our arrival at Ferrie’s apartment, Lou Ivon had taken off for the morgue to look at the body. One of the numerous legends about David Ferrie and his adventures as a soldier of fortune pilot involved a take-off he had made from the Escambray mountains in Cuba, after delivering munitions to the anti-Castro rebels operating there. As the legend went, a counter-attack almost had trapped him and he was forced to take off in his plane while fighting one of Castro’s soldiers with his free hand. He had, according to this tale, received a bad stab wound in his stomach before he got the plane off the ground. When Lou Ivon returned from the morgue, he was holding a freshly taken photograph. The dead man on the slab, his bald head and aristocratic profile somewhat suggestive of Julius Caesar, bore the scar of a knife wound running up the center of his stomach.
The unexpected death of David Ferrie, along with the two suicide notes, created a frenzy of interest in the media, not merely nationally, but worldwide. Reporters descended upon New Orleans to await the coroner’s verdict. Each day the crowd of journalists grew larger, filling the halls outside my office and scrambling for every possible bit of information about our investigation.
I was amazed at this development. Previously, the media had scoffed at the idea that President Kennedy had been killed as a result of a conspiracy and that this had been concealed by the federal government. Now suddenly the newspapers, the television, and the radio people had decided that Ferrie’s death—and the possibility it may have resulted from suicide or foul play—may have validated my investigation.
On February 25 the coroner announced—rather belatedly, I thought—that Ferrie had died of “natural causes.” Instantly the excitement of the assembled journalists vanished, and within hours they were standing in lines at International Airport for flights out of town. Their departure was as mystifying to me as their arrival had been. For, in spite of the coroner’s pronouncement, we still were left with two suicide notes, each of which explicitly spelled out that Ferrie was about to depart from this vale of tears.
Unlike most of the media, my special team immediately addressed itself to learning more about the facts of Ferrie’s death. I sent the entire group back to Ferrie’s apartment to go through it again, this time with a fine-toothed comb.
Meanwhile, at my desk I studied the medicine bottles which had been left on top of the table alongside Ferrie’s bed. I wanted to know the effects of each of these drugs, so I looked them up in a thick volume on pharmacology.
I picked up the large bottle of Proloid®, and a recollection came to me. Some years earlier I had a low thyroid condition for a brief period. In order to raise the thyroid production level and increase my metabolism, the doctor had prescribed Proloid for me. Thumbing through the big book, I found that, sure enough, Proloid was medicine to be used only when it was desirable to increase bodily metabolism. But David Ferrie, we had learned from several sources, had no problem with low metabolism. On the contrary, he had suffered from hypertension.
I pushed the big book to the side and reached for the phone directory. One of the forensic pathologists at Louisiana State University medical school had been at the same boarding house with me when he was studying medicine and I was studying law. I had seen him off and on over the years. In a few minutes I had him on the phone and was summarizing the problem before me.
What would happen, I asked, if a man suffering from hypertension were to take—or be forced to take—an entire bottle of Proloid? His answer came without hesitation. Whoever did that, he said, would die shortly afterwards either of a “heart storm” or a brain aneurism (in effect, an exploding blood vessel). The coroner had stated in general terms that the death of David Ferrie was due to “natural causes,” but in the autopsy protocol the specific cause had been spelled out as a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.
I asked my pathologist friend if there was any way a coroner might ascertain whether an overdose of Proloid had caused Ferrie’s death. He replied that there would be no perceivable signs in a routine autopsy. However, he added that if an examination were made of the blood or of the spinal fluid, an extremely high level of iodine would be encountered, indicating the likelihood that an overdose of Proloid had been taken. He suggested I call the coroner’s office and find out if such samples from Ferrie’s autopsy had been kept in the refrigerator.
I phoned immediately but was told that no blood samples or spinal fluid from Ferrie’s autopsy had been retained. I was left with an empty bottle and a number of unanswered questions. Had Ferrie taken an overdose of Proloid? If so, had he taken it voluntarily? Was it possible that someone else had written the suicide notes and given him the Proloid? The more I reflected upon it, the less sense it made to me. Why should a man kill himself in a way which left no trace—and then leave two suicide notes? Or was I making more out of this than was there? Perhaps it had just been, as the coroner said, “natural causes.”
I tossed the empty Proloid bottle in a desk drawer. Throughout the rest of the investigation I kept it as evidence, hoping it would one day be a useful piece of the puzzle. Finally, at a low point many years later, when I felt that my questions would never be answered, I threw it away. I did not want such a souvenir.
* * *
The sudden death of David Ferrie had brought to us, right on the heels of the previous week’s unwelcome front-page news story, our second straight disaster. I could not rid myself of Ferrie’s prophetic remark to Lou Ivon immediately following the news story: “I’m a dead man now.” Nor could I rid myself of the nagging possibility that his death might as easily have been caused by murder as by suicide. In either case we had lost our best chance for cracking the case.
With David Ferrie around to lead us, however unconsciously, to Clay Shaw and his offbeat companions, I knew we could have continued to develop an ever stronger case against Shaw. With Ferrie gone, it would be a lot harder.
Besides, I was now concerned about how much longer Clay Shaw— who certainly knew as much as Ferrie, if not more—would be around. Ferrie had shown signs of emotional deterioration, had clearly lost a grip on himself, and within five days was lying in the morgue. Would it be any different with Shaw? As with Ferrie, one had to assume that there were others who could see him more clearly than we could. Could we continue to wait for more breaks?
Already, only hours away from the morning meeting at my house, it was decision-making time again. My instincts told me that we had developed a good enough case against Clay Shaw to obtain a Grand Jury indictment of him for conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. My instincts also told me, however, that our office had been penetrated to some degree by now, although I had no idea to what extent. Consequently, I did not tell anyone on the staff that I felt it was nearly time to make our move against Shaw.
We had already questioned Shaw once at the office, back when we established that he was the “Clay Bertrand” who had called Dean Andrews about representing Lee Oswald. At that time he had fielded every question flawlessly. No, he had not known Lee Oswald. No, he had never even seen the young man. Did he know a David Ferrie? No, the name was unfamiliar to him. After he had departed, we realized he had given us absolutely nothing.
Now, out of caution, I decided we should interview him again. In response to a subpoena issued by the court, he appeared in our office and we questioned him at great length. This time, perhaps because of the accumulation of details which we had acquired, it was eloquently plain that he was lying. I made the decision that we should arrest him in the very near future, but I continued to say nothing about that to the staff.
On March 1, 1967, the day I had selected, I told the key members of the special team to meet me at 5:30 p.m. in my office. While we waited for the stragglers from the rest of the office to clear out, I reviewed the case we had developed against Shaw.
When the time was right, I walked down the hall, where a judge was waiting for me, and obtained the warrants for Shaw’s arrest and the search of his carriage house. While the others waited in my office, I took Lou Ivon and a selected handful of others from the team into another office down the hall. I instructed them to arrest Shaw and search his place thoroughly in accordance with the warrants. I then returned to the remainder of the group and informed them of what I had done.
When Ivon and his men returned to the office with Shaw, I had him taken to one of the senior assistants’ offices. We learned that his attorney was Salvadore Panzeca, contacted him, and requested that he come to our office to confer with his client. Then, satisfied that it was useless to question Shaw further at that point, I had Ivon and several of his men escort him to the Criminal Sheriff’s office.
An interesting thing occurred during Shaw’s booking. Police Officer Aloysius Habighorst, in filling out the booking form, routinely asked Shaw whether he had any aliases. Shaw replied with two words: “Clay Bertrand.” Habighorst noted this on the form, then turned to other duties. He had no way of knowing that this amounted to a virtual confirmation to me that it was indeed Shaw who had called Dean Andrews to represent Lee Oswald in Dallas.
Much later, police investigators in my office picked up a faint lead about this incident. In short order I found myself studying a police booking sheet for the first time, observing the name of Clay Bertrand under the classification of “alias,” and interviewing Officer Habighorst. A clean-cut young man with an excellent memory, Habighorst recalled the incident in detail, if somewhat stoically. Down the road this incident and his recollection of it would have a memorable result. (See Chapter 18.)
Probably the most interesting single item seized in the course of Shaw’s arrest was his address book. It offered some insight into his proclivity for developing casual friendships at lofty levels of European aristocracy. How many Americans have in their address books such fascinating names and addresses as the Marquesse Giuseppe Rey (Vicenza, Italy) the Baron Rafaelo de Banfield (Villa Tripcovich, Triesta, Italy), Sir Stephen Runciman (66 Whitehall Court, London), Princess Jacqueline Chimay (2 Rue Albert Thomas, Paris), Lady Margaret D’Arcy (109 Earl’s Court Road, London), Sir Michael Duff (Bangor, Wales) and Lady Hulse (7 Culross Street, London)?
It is true that such a listing could have represented a preoccupation with the past inasmuch as most of the world is no longer run by nobles. However, it is also true that the C.I.A. has a romantic infatuation with fading regimes and that Clay Shaw, with his polished Court of St. James manners, must have been precisely what the Agency needed for assignments involving foreign royalty—such as that in Italy in 1962. (See Chapter 6.)
Amid the names of the international blueblood set, the address book contained the following listing:
“LEE ODOM, P.O. Box 19106, Dallas, Texas.”
This odd item was revealed publicly when Shaw’s attorneys sought to have the address book returned to him. Our office opposed this move, and in our written opposition we called attention to an interesting fact: The citation of “P.O. 19106” appeared in Lee Oswald’s address book as well as Shaw’s.
After several days of silence, Shaw’s attorneys produced a man named Lee Odom, who at that time rented post office box number 174 in Irving, a suburb of Dallas. He stated that he was from Dallas and that, while P.O. Box 19106 had never been in his name, it had been used for several months by a barbecue company with which he was once associated.
Shaw’s attorneys, who now included Edward Wegmann as well as Panzeca, picked it up from there and explained that Odom had once met Clay Shaw to discuss the possibility of promoting a bullfight in New Orleans.
There were some problems with the bullfight explanation, which had been floated up as justifying the presence of “P.O. Box 19106” in Shaw’s address book. For one thing, anyone who was genuinely involved in the promotion of bullfights would have to know that New Orleans, by its very nature, is a city most unlikely to be enthralled by the prospect of death in the afternoon. Second, as we knew from having compiled a summary of all of Clay Shaw’s activities since graduating from high school, he had never engaged in any kind of promotion.
Finally, the bullfight explanation seemed weak when juxtaposed to the fact that virtually the same phrase, “P.O. 19106,” was memorialized forever on one of the pages of Oswald’s address book. The coincidence became even more suspicious when one considered that Lee Oswald had to have written his notation no later than 1963, the year he was murdered, and that as of 1963 Dallas had not yet acquired a post office box with a number as high as 19106.
To me, the explanation that Clay Shaw had written “P.O. Box 19106” in his address book because he was considering the possibility of treating the citizens of New Orleans to a bullfight and that Lee Oswald had written it in his address book years earlier for no reason at all stretched the limits of common sense by a long ways. Once again the people of this country were being asked to swallow a cannon ball, no matter how well lubricated.
Also found by our investigators at Shaw’s luxuriously appointed carriage house in the French Quarter were a few more novel items, including five whips, several lengths of chain, and a black hood and matching black cape. The whips had on them what appeared to be dried blood. In the bedroom, about two and a half feet apart, two large hooks had been screwed into the ceiling. These accouterments hardly were inculpatory in themselves. Different people have different hobbies. Had Shaw lived in an earlier era, however, the list of nobles in his address book might have included the Marquis de Sade.
With but one exception, Shaw’s entire address book consisted of addresses and phone numbers. That one exception appeared on one of the otherwise unused pages. There, inscribed in Shaw’s handwriting, were the words “Oct” and “Nov”—which would appear to mean October and November. Then, after an indecipherable scribble—there was scrawled simply: “Dallas.”