19
The Majesty of the Law
MY ARREST BY FEDERAL AGENTS came without warning.
It was early in the morning, June 30, 1971. I had just had breakfast and read the Times-Picayune. I was still wearing my pajamas and bathrobe and was going up the stairs when the bell rang.
I opened the door, and the men from the federal government poured in. The man in charge displayed an Internal Revenue Service badge and held out a piece of paper, while other agents crowded in behind him. As they fanned out through the rest of the house, he informed me that I was under arrest and asked if I was armed.
“How can I be armed, when I’m just going upstairs to get dressed?” I said.
“Well, we’re going up with you because we have to take you downtown to book you.”
After I had dressed, with several agents closely watching me, I came down the stairs. My wife and children were very upset. I told them there was nothing to worry about.
As I went out the front door flanked by federal agents, I was appalled to see that the sidewalks and driveway in the vicinity of the house were filled with new cars bearing large aerials. Men with walkie-talkies seemed to be all over the place. I noticed some neighbors peering out from their windows, and I could not blame them. Suddenly I was embarrassed.
I was taken downtown to the federal courthouse in a car packed full of agents. There I was mugged, fingerprinted, and put behind bars in a green-walled holding cell. Soon a guard brought me to a courtroom where the magistrate read the formal charges. It seemed that I stood accused of participating in organized crime, specifically of allowing payoffs on pinball gambling.
It is hardly a novelty to hear a man who has been charged by the government say that he was innocent. But for me to say merely that I was innocent would be an understatement of cosmic dimensions.
Put aside that I had never taken a single illegal dollar as district attorney and that it simply was not in my makeup to do so. The plain fact was—as the members of my staff and district attorneys of nearby parishes all realized—that I had enforced the law forbidding payoffs on pinball gambling more rigidly than any previous district attorney ever had. I had done this not because of any soaring sense of virtue or any particular rage about pinball payoffs but because I used my office to enforce every criminal law on the books, whether it was a felony or, as with pinball payoffs, a misdemeanor.
The federal government apparently had not realized this, assuming that like many of the district attorneys in Louisiana I kept one eye closed to pinball gambling payoffs. It had chosen this particular charge, I quickly figured out, because pinball gambling had a federal aspect and this was in its jurisdiction. The federal connection was pretty slender, resting solely on the fact that the pinball machines were manufactured in Illinois. But without such strained legal reasoning the government could come up with no reason to arrest me—unless, of course, it announced the real reason, which I assumed was that I had caused considerable trouble to everyone by investigating the J.F.K. assassination.
After I was released on my own recognizance, Frank Klein picked me up and drove me to the office. Once the initial excitement was over, it was a normal day—except that I made a long-distance call to Boston to talk to F. Lee Bailey, the distinguished trial attorney who was a friend of mine. Lee said he would be delighted and honored to represent me, but there would be one stipulation.
“What?” I asked.
“There will be no fee,” he replied.
The 26 months between my arrest and my trial were filled, as always, with trying to keep an understaffed and underfinanced office caught up with the endless overload of work. From time to time, I had to appear as the defendant in the local United States District Court for my own pre-trial proceedings. Bailey’s associates were excellent lawyers, and their preparation and court work during this period were splendid, to say the least, leaving me free to concentrate on the details of the district attorney’s office. As time went on, however, it became apparent to all of us that the government was in no particular hurry to bring this case to trial.
This simply gave us all the more time to study the material we had obtained from the government. As enunciated by the Supreme Court in the leading case of Brady v. Maryland, the federal government is required, during pre-trial discovery proceedings, to supply a criminal defendant with copies of all requested material relating to his case. In my case that material turned out to be prodigious, revealing that the government’s investigation of me, involving more than 40 Internal Revenue agents from five southern states, had been under way for several years at the very least. The agents’ primary problem had been to make it appear that I was in violation of some law. They had not been able to do this by the usual means of gathering statements from individuals in the pinball business because no one in that business actually knew me.
Accordingly, the federal agents handling my case appeared to have concluded that their only alternative was to create a “make believe” case against me. As most students of covert operations will recognize, the intelligence community is not above constructing such a case against a target individual when circumstances require.
The centerpiece of the government’s case turned out to be my old wartime buddy Pershing Gervais. It may be recalled that Gervais was once my chief investigator and had come into conflict with Frank Klein over the Kennedy investigation. (See Chapter 10.) I had dropped Gervais from the office staff after an attorney informed me that Gervais had offered to get a particular case dismissed for him for $750 in cash.
Although Gervais strongly denied the allegation, my position was that the D.A.’s office had to be like Caesar’s wife. It was not enough for the office to be virtuous; its virtue had to be unquestioned. Reluctant to accuse my old Army friend of lying and also reluctant to “fire” him, I told him that for some time it had seemed to me that he really was not right for the job of chief investigator. The upshot of a long conversation was that he agreed to resign.
At the same time Gervais told me about the financial problems he was having. I was just beginning a re-election campaign and I had, at least temporarily, more cash from contributions than I needed immediately—although need for money later in the campaign was predictable.
I counted $5,000 out of what I was going to deposit in the campaign bank account within the next few days. I handed it to him, emphasizing that this was a loan and that I expected to be repaid. He accepted it readily and expressed his appreciation.
In early 1970, while federal agents already were constructing a criminal case against me, I became curious about what Gervais was up to since leaving our office. I was aware of his trademark, his large Cadillac, parked out in front of the Fontainbleau Motel at the intersection of Tulane and South Carrollton avenues. He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands, yet plainly was traveling first-class. I asked Lou Ivon to look into it. He began with his contacts on the police force, who knew Gervais, and in a few weeks he had what appeared to be the answer. Gervais, it seemed, had become an entrepreneur in a very unusual enterprise. His office was the lobby or the dining room of the motel, where he was available all day long. The ingenious core of his bizarre operation seemed to be the historical fact that he used to be my chief investigator and also knew half the police force.
Pershing Gervais apparently had become a master of what is known as “playing results.” He would select a criminal case which he learned, either from friends on the police force or from court attaches, was not very strong and which the district attorney’s office had a low probability of winning. His next stop was to contact the family of the defendant and inform them of his special connection with the district attorney.
After gaining the family’s confidence, Gervais would advise them that, despite the serious charges against their son, it was possible for him to arrange for the D.A. to lose the case. Let us say, for the sake of argument, the D.A.’s office lost two out of five such cases in court after a jury trial. Gervais then would call the families of those who were acquitted and announce his success in arranging the outcome of the case. He would collect from them $5,000 or whatever the named fee happened to be—part of which, he would imply, was to go to the district attorney as a payoff.
Evidently Internal Revenue Service agents caught on to what he was up to and developed a case against him. As it turned out, “playing results” was just the beginning of Gervais’s suspicious activities. He also collected large amounts of money from various individuals for “authorizing” everything from the operation of a house of prostitution to the opening of a massage parlor to the running of a high-stakes gambling game. By the time the federal agents had completed their investigation against him, they appear to have had him in a very tight vice. And because most of his activities were based on his presumed close relationship to me, they also realized that Gervais was a potential way for them to get at me.
At first, as we learned from the papers we obtained under the Brady rule, Gervais informed the I.R.S. agents that there was nothing he could tell them about me because I would not take money and he could not get me to do anything illegal. However, as the vice was tightened, they learned about the money I had loaned Gervais. That was what the federal agents had been looking for. It was all they needed to start building their fictional structure of “bribery.”
Sometime in early 1971 Gervais dropped around and explained to me that he had come into some good fortune. Friends in the pinball business had helped him in an enterprise, the particularities of which he never got around to describing. However, his point was that at last he was going to be able to pay back some of the money he had borrowed from me. He would not be able to pay it all at once, but from time to time he would give me $1,000. This seemed agreeable to me, and I let the subject drop from my mind.
After that, Gervais would come by the house to see me occasionally. Only now he was wired for sound—with a transmitter taped under his shirt and a receiver at some outside location, such as in the car of a federal agent near the house.
Inasmuch as I had just undergone painful back surgery, I usually was in bed during his visits. He would ask me how I was feeling, and there would be a brief conversation about nothing in particular. Then he would say something like, “Incidentally, I have another thousand for you. What do you want me to do with it?” My usual reply would be something like, “Just put it on the mantle.”
These conversations, of which I recall three or possibly four, presented a problem for the federal agents. In every case they lacked a peg, something that could give Gervais’s handing of $1,000 to me a sinister meaning. There was no discussion of my helping the pinball operators violate the law because he knew, perhaps better than anybody, that I would never go along with such a thing.
However, when listening to copies of the taped conversations, which we had obtained under Brady, we found that in every tape a lively line or two had been inserted at just the right spot so as to give the rest of the conversation its sinister context.
I happened to remember clearly one of the final conversations that Gervais taped. It had gone along these lines:
GERVAIS: You know, this coming legislature in Baton Rouge could be tough. Some of my friends in the pinball business will really need some help.
GARRISON: What are you telling me for? Why should I help them?
I remembered the conversation because of my longstanding and pronounced lack of interest in dealing with the legislature—except on rare occasions when, for example, I went up to Baton Rouge to obtain a law preventing felons from carrying loaded revolvers. Consequently, I was profoundly astonished when I listened to the copy of the government’s tape of this conversation. What I heard, in the presence of attorneys from Lee Bailey’s office and my own, was not what actually had been said but, rather, the following:
GERVAIS: You know, this coming legislature in Baton Rouge could be tough. Some of my friends in the pinball business will really need some help.
GARRISON: I don’t see any problem. Forget about it.
I could not recall from what other tape the new response had been obtained, but it was instantly clear that the reply supposedly coming from me had been inserted. We were appalled that the government would go so far, but I was pleased at the obvious desperation of its agents. If they were this hard up, if they had to be so downright sleazy in their attempt to develop evidence against me, then that meant that their case against me had to be pretty pathetic.
My trial was an elaborate government tableau in the tradition of Franz Kafka. The great issue to be determined was whether or not I had been a corrupt district attorney.
The Justice Department ultimately chose August 20, 1973, to begin the trial, which was expected to last four to six weeks. The election—in which I would be running for a fourth term—was scheduled for November 10. That meant I would be lucky to have five or six weeks afterwards to campaign, although at least four or five months usually is necessary in New Orleans.
Even before the opening of the trial, my major opponent—a former assistant United States attorney—began appearing on television spots. His advertisements provided the public with a colorful contrast. Every morning I was featured on the front page of the Times-Picayune as the defendant in a squalid federal bribery case. Meanwhile, every evening there was Mr. Spic and Span on television calling for a return of decency to the district attorney’s office.
This was the setting for the case of The United States of America vs. Jim Garrison, et al. The “et al.” was legalese for my co-conspirators, most of them men I had never set eyes on before my arraignment.[78]
Gerald Gallinghouse, the United States Attorney, announced that he personally would be in charge of the prosecution of the trial. All that meant to me was that his judicial district would be totally without the services of a United States Attorney for perhaps six weeks. However, he obviously recognized the paramount importance of this pin-ball case to the Justice Department, and he made his presence known through the pre-trial activities—a sheaf of legal papers always in his hands, a small American flag ever present in his lapel.
The judge was Herbert Christenberry, at the time the senior judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. There were far more complex and significant cases on the docket, but he moved them aside to devote his next six weeks or so to this pinball question.
Judge Christenberry was an austere, stone-faced individual whose stolid expression concealed a volatile temper. Years before, when I was in private practice, I had stood only a few feet away in his court office when he hurled a large law book at a co-counsel of mine who had protested the charge Christenberry had given the jury. He would have thrown one at me as well, but he had none left on his desk.
Christenberry also happened to be the judge who signed the order enjoining me from prosecuting Clay Shaw for perjury in spite of the valid federal statute explicitly forbidding federal interference with a state prosecution.
More than two years after my arrest, trial day finally arrived. My wife and children came to the door as I was about to leave my house that morning. Liz was still in her bathrobe, trying to control the tears welling in her eyes. My children were still very young at the time—young Jim was 14, Virginia 12, Lyon 10½, Elizabeth 9, and Darrow 7. The children sensed that something was happening but were not sure what it was. They would learn later in the day when my wife brought them to court. I kissed them all. “Don’t worry,” I said, “this is just another day for the D.A.’s office.”
At court, as the bits of business which mark a trial’s beginning were getting under way, I informed Judge Christenberry I was going to represent myself during the trial. The judge promptly ordered all attorneys to meet him in the conference room. In the smallish chamber, to which the courtroom led directly, I sat down on one side of the table with my attorneys Louis Merhige and Fred Barnett; the United States Attorney and his two assistants sat on the other as we waited for the judge. The prosecutors were looking at me in utter disbelief. All they had ever known me to do as district attorney was to farm out my cases to trial specialists. They had never heard of me during the preceding years when I had earned my keep trying jury cases every day.
My decision to try the case myself had been made after wading, along with Lee Bailey’s attorneys, through the mountain of material which represented the government’s case against me. It had become increasingly apparent that the whole affair was a fabrication consisting of two separate parts. The first, some sort of financial arrangement which undoubtedly had pre-existed between a number of the pinball operators and at least one member of the police force, was the large one. This pinball arrangement apparently did constitute a conspiracy under the technicalities of federal law, and that made it of value to the federal government if, somehow, it could be connected to my coat tails.
And that is where Pershing Gervais and the government’s doctored tapes—the second part of the prosecution’s case—came in. This was the small case which they wired to the larger pre-existing case to make the big bomb which they were going to haul into court.
It was plain to me that the government’s fraud in connecting me to the pre-existing pinball case had been a criminal activity. However, I also realized that this was almost too much to ask the members of a jury—who had grown up under a government they regarded highly—to believe. An out-of-town lawyer—even one with the great ability of F. Lee Bailey—might not be able to communicate the essentially unbelievable fact of the government’s corruption in setting me up.
That was when I decided that I had to do it. I knew that most New Orleanians had to be aware of my long fight with the federal government. I knew that most of them sensed, even though they might not know all the details, that my motivation was genuine. Consequently, I concluded, my defense should be nothing less than a continuation of my fight against Washington—with me doing the fighting.
Now Judge Christenberry strode into the chamber and seated himself at the head of the table. He was not enthusiastic about the development, but there really was not much he could do to prevent me from representing myself. He listened as I explained that, while I felt my representation had been excellent, we had a difference of opinion as to how the trial should be handled. Merhige and Barnett confirmed this.
Judge Christenberry turned to me and said that he would go along with my motion to represent myself, so long as I had another attorney at the defense table. He emphasized that he could not have the record show that he let me go to trial unaided.
That was fine with me. When the trial resumed, my longtime friend Lou Merhige was seated at the defense table by my side. The government’s first witness was one of the owners of the pinball machines. I had never seen the man before (nor had I ever seen anyone employed by him), and he had never seen me.
Gallinghouse, the United States Attorney, a large, imposing man in a dark blue suit, carefully drew his testimony from him. Yes, the pinball operator said, he had contributed to a fund intended to minimize law enforcement interference with pinball operations in the city. To whom did that money go? To Sergeant Fred Soule of the New Orleans Police Department, the operator replied.
The time came for cross-examination. To whom did Sergeant Soule give the money? He had no idea. Had he ever given any money to me? No, he had not. Had he ever given any money to anyone connected with my office? No. Had anybody in my office ever done any favors of any kind for him or his pinball business? No one had. There were no further questions.
One pinball owner after the other testified, and the pattern continued. Same questions on each direct examination, same answers. Same questions on each of my cross-examinations, same answers.
The next morning I brought a book to court. Lou Merhige picked it up. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Something for me to read,” I said, “while the United States Attorney continues with his pinball case. Do you really expect me to go along with the pretense that all of this testimony is relevant to anything?”
“You can’t do this in Christenberry’s court,” he said. “He’ll stop you.”
“No, he won’t,” I replied. And he did not. I sensed that the judge was restless at first, as I read while the owners testified at length, but apparently he got used to it. Later on, as the seemingly interminable testimony continued, I glanced at the jury. I saw several of its members yawning.
When each machine owner completed his tedious direct testimony, I put my book down and questioned him briefly. I established that we did not know each other, that neither I nor my office ever had done anything for him in connection with his pinball business, and that he had never given any money to me or to anyone representing me. Having established the total irrelevance of the witness insofar as I was concerned, I dismissed him, picked up my book, and resumed reading it.
Finally the government finished with its parade of pinball machine owners. “Call Sergeant Frederick Soule,” Gallinghouse announced.
Soule was a smallish, mustachioed man, neatly dressed and wearing a bow tie. He perched carefully on the edge of the witness chair like a parakeet in a bird cage. His testimony for the prosecution added up to a confirmation of his being the receiver of “protection” money from the pinball owners. The high point was his acknowledgment that he had saved up his part and buried it in a large container in his backyard. After his arrest he had dug it up and turned it over to the arresting authorities.
His testimony corroborated that the owners had paid into a protection fund, but it never brought out who had received the money from him and what they did in exchange for it. In short, it did not address the performance end which completed the bribery transaction.
I knew from the witness list that the government was not going to call any other officers from the police force. So, I had reasoned, the action on the law enforcement end would have to come from Soule. It never came.
Thus, the cross-examination of Sergeant Soule turned out to be unexpectedly brief. The former police commander of the vice squad testified that I had never asked him to do anything improper. He testified further that my office never had any prior knowledge of pinball raids and that we had a high percentage of convictions in pinball cases.
Now it was time for the star witness for the prosecution. “Call Pershing Gervais,” Gallinghouse announced in a stentorian voice.
After some bustle around the entrance doors to the courtroom, Gervais appeared. His hair was gray now, and he was huskier than he had been in our early Army days back at Camp Shelby. He was natty in a cream-colored knit suit, matching shirt, and dark brown tie. He was wearing large, steel-rimmed glasses. Casually strolling down the aisle, he seemed as much at ease as if he were a member of the United States Attorney’s staff. He made himself comfortable in the witness chair, then nodded at the members of the jury with a broad smile.
I listened carefully to Gervais’s lengthy testimony. Gallinghouse, well aware that the trial had been going for some days without my name coming up once, made the Gervais presentation the crown jewel of his case. The full details of how the hidden recording microphone had been taped to Gervais’s body were described. Then the tape recordings were introduced as evidence and played for the jury. Every juror, the judge, the prosecutors, and I all wore earphones while the U.S. Attorney labored at converting overnight a misdemeanor involving the pinball machine owners and a police sergeant named Soule into a major bribery conspiracy involving the district attorney. And with the magic of electronics he made distinct progress in that direction.
My stomach turned each time I heard my voice on the tapes follow Gervais’s innuendos with remarks such as “Sure” and “Sounds all right to me.” I knew, of course, that each phrase had been selected from another tape and had been taken completely out of context, but the jurors did not. The agents of the intelligence community engineering this particular project had done a good job not only of bottling me up but of tightly screwing on the lid.
There was no doubt in my mind that if a vote had been taken of the jurors at that moment, they would have found me guilty as charged by a vote of 12 to nothing. And I knew full well that, following their verdict, the stone-faced man in the black robe would not have sent me to one of those minimal security “country club” resorts to which some public figures go after a federal conviction. No, it would be the federal penitentiary. Even Lou Merhige, who had made a point of always being upbeat and encouraging, was noticeably unhappy.
There was very little in Gervais’s direct testimony that I had not expected. But I was astonished when Gervais said calmly from the witness stand that I had received $150,000 from the pinball operators. I knew that he would have to go along with the three or four $1,000 payments which matched the secret tapings of his repayments to me, but I had no idea why he had come up with an incredible sum like $150,000.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Gervais’s gigantic figure of $150,000 would be useful to me. The pinball people—or anyone else, for that matter—would have expected gigantic services for that gigantic amount. On the pad in front of me I wrote, “services?” I had the working title for the presentation of my case.
I began my cross-examination of Pershing Gervais in a distinctly laid-back manner. I wanted him to sense that his testimony had not angered me. I understood the jam the Internal Revenue agents had put him in as the result of his highly original short-order brokerage operation at the Fontainbleau Motel. I also understood that he had had no alternative but to answer the United States Attorney’s lengthy questioning, which set up the introduction of the government’s tapes.
I wanted him to know that none of this had changed me. I was still the same fellow who had served with him when we were both non-commissioned officers back in the Army days.
“Do you remember,” I asked, “when we first met?”
“At Jackson Barracks,” he said.
“Do you recall when?”
“It would have been prior to World War II.”
“Do you remember where we went from Jackson Barracks?”
“I recall we went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi.”
“What outfit were we in?” I continued.
“The Washington Artillery of the Louisiana National Guard,” he replied.
I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was not on the same frequency with me. It was an evanescent warning that the relationship I thought existed did not exist anymore. I brushed it aside and went ahead. This man had been my best friend back in those early Army days.
“What kind of relationship would you say we had in those years?” I asked.
“As related to what?” Gervais asked.
“You recently described our relationship as being acquaintances,” I said. “Would you say that when we were in the Army, we were good friends?”
“My good friend was Charlie Weiss,” Gervais answered. “You were a friend. We did not socialize.”
That reply brought a sudden end to my being laid back. I did not know where the man had gone whom I had known in the Army, but this was not the same person at all. This man, I realized, was as cold as the steel rims on his glasses.
I left the past behind and moved at once to the subject at hand. Directing his attention to the period before he began cooperating with the government, I asked if it was not true that he had told I.R.S. agents I was not concerned with money. He acknowledged this was true. I asked if he had not also told the I.R.S. agents that if I made a mistake on a tax return it would be the result of carelessness, that I was just as likely to overpay my tax as to underpay it. Gervais acknowledged that he had made this statement. Was it not also a fact, I asked, that he had complained that he could not get me to do anything for him at all? He confirmed that this was correct.
Now I took from the table a handful of material and walked back in front of him. I asked him if it was true that the government had obtained a job for him at General Motors of Canada. And that he had to show up only several times a week to collect a salary of $22,000 a year. He answered yes to both questions.
I asked what his title was. He replied that he was a division field manager, the top position at the plant. I then inquired about his qualifications for the job. When he replied that he had none, I walked back to the table.
I busied myself searching through some of the exhibits. I knew what I was after, but I wanted the fact of Gervais’s getting $22,000 a year for showing up a couple of times a week to sink into the minds of the jurors.
I picked out copies of two birth certificates and walked back to the witness stand with them in my hand where he could see them. Now I asked him whether, when he joined the Witness Relocation Program, the government had required him to change his name.
Yes, he replied, he had changed his name to Mason, and the Justice Department had given him new birth certificates for his children, bearing the new last name.
I asked whether these birth certificates had shown the states in which his two children truly had been born, and his reply was that they had not.
I then asked whether this necessarily meant that the two birth certificates, obtained for him by the Justice Department, were forgeries. Gervais looked at the two certificates I had. He agreed that this necessarily was so. Whereupon I handed the two forged birth certificates to the jurors so that they could see what a professional forgery looked like. I remained silent as they examined the art work from the Justice Department. When the jurors had finished, I moved for a recess. I wanted the jurors to have plenty of time to ask themselves why the United States Justice Department would be so interested in convicting someone that they would have birth certificates forged to assure the conviction. I wanted them to reflect upon the majesty of the law.
When Gervais resumed the witness stand, I asked if he remembered any details about the agreement he had made with the Justice Department. He indicated that he did.
Then I showed him a copy of a letter written to him by John Wall, the attorney in charge of the organized crime and racketeering field office of the Justice Department. Gervais recalled receiving the letter.
That meant that I could introduce it into evidence and read it to the jury, which I proceeded to do. The last paragraph concerned the conditions of his keeping the $22,000 position (referred to in the letter as “subsistence”) with General Motors of Canada. This paragraph said:
It was further determined on September 8, 1971, the subsistence is paid on condition that you not re-enter the United States without the prior approval of the Criminal Division and that all future payments will be cancelled and the Department of Justice will be relieved of any responsibilities if this condition regarding reentry is breached.
[Emphasis supplied.]
The federal Witness Relocation Program had been a measure ostensibly for use in the government’s fight against organized crime. The change of name for a witness, for example, was intended to protect the witness from being murdered by the mob or otherwise harmed or intimidated. To go to such lengths when the defendant was a district attorney was absurd. It seemed clear to me that the government had put Gervais into the program solely to make him inaccessible to me for interview or questioning. Although a defendant (or his attorney) has the right to interview all likely witnesses against him prior to his trial, there was no way I could locate this man, whose name had been changed to Mason and who even had been sent off to another country.
Near the end of his Canadian exile, Pershing Gervais finally rebelled against the Justice Department’s confinements and gave an interview in May 1972 in Canada to reporter Rosemary James for a New Orleans television station. I had obtained a copy of the transcript and now, in the courtroom, I questioned Gervais about it.
I showed him the transcript, then read it aloud to him, and asked him if he could confirm that he had made the following statements:
ROSEMARY JAMES: You were forced to work for the government?
GERVAIS: But more than that, I was forced to lie for them, that’s a better description.
ROSEMARY JAMES: What were you forced to do?
GERVAIS: Well, it became clear in the beginning, it was obscure, it was always hence [sic], you know what we want, you know what we are doing, see … Through the beginning of harassment until that time where I, for the want of a better description, was seduced by the Justice Department, you, know, if I could be seduced, as if there was some question somewhere in there, it became clear that they were really interested in but one man, Jim Garrison, and in their minds, they knew that I was the guy who could get him.
ROSEMARY JAMES: Are you saying you got him?
GERVAIS: Oh yeah, no question about that.
He recalled the interview and acknowledged that these had been his statements. Here is another comment which I requested him to confirm:
ROSEMARY JAMES: You are giving me a lot of double-talk here as far as most people are concerned, did they want to investigate people in the pinball industry and Jim Garrison?
GERVAIS: They wanted Jim Garrison.
ROSEMARY JAMES: What do you mean when you say they wanted Jim Garrison?
GERVAIS: They wanted to silence Jim Garrison. That was their primary objective, because if that were not true, I would still be in New Orleans.
ROSEMARY JAMES: Well, now, are you saying that you participated in a deliberate frameup?
GERVAIS: A total, complete political frameup, absolutely.
He agreed that these were his replies, although he suggested he might have been “irresponsible” to have given such an interview. Here is another series of statements which I asked if he recalled having made to the reporter:
ROSEMARY JAMES: What you are saying explicitly is that the government’s total case against Jim Garrison is a fraud?
GERVAIS: No question about it. Anything founded and based purely on politics can’t be anything but fraud.
ROSEMARY JAMES: It’s a whole lie?
GERVAIS: The entire thing.
He admitted that these were the replies he had made when interviewed. At that point, of course, the government’s case against me swirled down the drain into the sewer—where it had belonged all along.
But I was not yet through. Now I wanted to reveal the worthlessness of the government’s fraudulently altered tape recordings, once and for all. With the help of Lou Merhige I had located an expert, Dr. Louis Gerstman, a professor of speech and hearing science at the City University of New York.
When I called Dr. Gerstman to the stand, the United States Attorney objected vehemently. Nevertheless, the judge recognized Dr. Gerstman as an expert in his field.
Dr. Gerstman’s testimony was to the point: He had found the government’s prize evidence to be a fabrication of prior tapes that had been spliced together. He cited an example of my voice being out of context with the conversation taking place. He described “technical disparities” occurring between my voice and that of Gervais and the recurrence of inconsistent noise levels. In sum, his testimony was explicit that the government’s tapes had been doctored.
I then called as a witness Leon Hubert, a Tulane law professor and former district attorney, whose testimony, essentially, was that my office had done everything possible under Louisiana law to prosecute the pinball operators. In contrast, to show the differing attitudes of other prosecutors in the state, I called the president of the Louisiana District Attorneys’ Association. He testified that it had been his policy not to prosecute the owners of pinball machines. I called the district attorney of Jefferson Parish, which represents the other part of metropolitan New Orleans, and he testified that his office never prosecuted pinball cases because there were too many other crimes that required a higher priority.
My closing argument to the jury lasted three hours. I and my two co-defendants were found not guilty.[79] Unfortunately, there was not sufficient time to get a re-election campaign off the ground, and my opponent won by 2,000 votes.
My last day in the office where I had been district attorney for 12 years was a Saturday. The place was practically deserted. The floors were scattered with crumpled paper. The wastebaskets overflowed with artifacts collected by a group of people who had worked together for years.
I was cleaning off the top of my desk when I became aware that Andrew Sciambra was standing in front of me. He had tears in the corners of his eyes.
“Jim,” he said, “I have to ask you this before I go. I’ve been wanting to ask you for years.”
I looked at him. “Go ahead,” I said.
“During those years when we were working on the Kennedy case…”
“Yes?”
“Did you really, truly believe that we could beat the federal government?”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Andrew,” I said, “I never had a moment’s doubt.”