False Witness (15 page)

Only days before he was hypnotized, Russo had attended a dinner at the Royal Orleans Rib Room where his knowledge was substantially advanced. “Eight or ten people” were present, among them Garrison (who arrived late, about ten o'clock), his wife, Sciambra, Russo's friend Steve Derby and Richard Billings. Russo met Garrison for the first time that night. The two spoke “privately for ten or twenty minutes.” Garrison asked Russo to put his life on hold “for six months,” stay in New Orleans, and come under his “protection.” Russo agreed. After they joined the others, he quickly discovered that
he
was the star of the evening. Garrison “seemed charged up,” Russo later said. “He started introducing me to Billings as his prize, his secret weapon.” Russo was baffled by this. “Garrison kept offering suggestions of what to tell Billings. I never did understand why he was giving this to a magazine reporter.” The dinner turned into a grilling for Russo. “It was pressure, boy,” he said, “I felt like I had to convince Billings of things I hadn't even convinced myself of yet.”
Billings didn't know what questions to put to him, Russo said, “until Garrison showed him how it all worked.” Of course, in explaining how it all worked to Billings, Garrison was also explaining how it all worked to Russo. “Actually,” as Russo put it, “I found out more facts about the case that night than I'd ever been told before.” The conversation was “all about Clay Shaw and Oswald, stuff like that.”
³²

So two nights later, when Russo sat down in Dr. Chetta's crowded office to have his memory refreshed by Dr. Fatter, Russo probably knew as much about Garrison's thinking on the case as anyone.

Perry Russo didn't come to New Orleans expecting to end up being Jim Garrison's “prize” or “his secret weapon.” Nor was he an innocent lamb entangled merely by coincidence. He was an eager participant, at least in the beginning, seduced by the attention, the opportunity to be a player in this high-stakes historical event, and the promise of money. “Every time that I stayed here at one of the fancy motels [I] was told that there was no limit on what I could spend,” he later said. “I was permitted to invite all of my friends there for dinner and on more than one occasion had dinner checks in excess of one hundred dollars. This was always done in someone's name other than my own.” And though he never received it, Garrison guaranteed him “thirty dollars a day for all the days the investigation went on.” In addition, Russo said
Life
had promised Garrison
25,000 and he was told that he would be receiving “a lot” of that for his “trouble.” “They made me feel like I was the most important guy in the whole world,” Russo would later say, and “it all seemed so ‘right,' that we should punish these killers.”
³³

Before Russo appeared on the scene, Garrison was relying on the testimony of Jack Martin and David Lewis, an alcoholic mental case bearing a grudge and a private eye wannabe wearing a plastic gun. Russo, on the other hand, was young, athletic, attractive, a college man working for a large New York—based insurance company. Stepping forward in the footsteps of those two, Russo must have looked like a dream come true to Jim Garrison. But he was never the boy-next-door that he appeared to be.

Russo later revealed just how far removed he was from that wholesome image he projected. He referred to himself as a “sexual freak” who liked “sadism and masochism” and was “particularly enthused about bondage and submission and domination and the role playing
associated with it.” He explained that he preferred men but not exclusively. A former girlfriend, he reminded his interviewer, publicly had claimed she bore a child fathered by him.
³⁴

Another friend of his had said Russo turned that same girlfriend over to his friends. “It didn't cost you anything,” he explained, “it was free.” Russo enjoyed taking pornographic pictures of her with various men, pictures he kept “in a big shoe box” and showed to visitors.
³⁵
Russo, himself, later admitted to a police interviewer “that he considered all of his sexual activity to be of a perverted type,” that he “liked to engage in group sex” and “had a large collection of pornographic movies” that he exhibited at “sex parties.”
³⁶
The friend who knew about the girl and the porno pictures said he once entered Russo's apartment and found him with another man discussing basketball. Russo suddenly jumped up, ran into the bathroom and began “slicin' his wrist with a razor blade.” Frightened, the friend fled. He had seen blood and believed that Russo was genuinely trying to harm himself but had no idea why. He also recalled that Russo once said “a psychiatrist had told him that he had a split personality.”
³⁷

While Russo wasn't the boy-next-door, on meeting him the first time people frequently found him likeable and surprisingly open. He was unusually verbal, with a large vocabulary and a substantial knowledge of New Orleans history. The satisfaction some find through writing, Russo achieved through talking. Talking was what he did best. Unfortunately for everyone, including the country at large, over a brief five-day period in 1967 Russo talked himself into a dangerously vulnerable legal position and Clay Shaw into a felony charge.

The night he learned that Shaw had been arrested, Russo had a revealing reaction. “ ‘Well,' I said to myself, ‘what have I done now?' ” Because, he observed, “I could have been wrong. In my statement. I could have been mistaken.” “My God,” Russo said to Sciambra, “don't tell me that they have arrested that man on what I said.” “No, not at all,” Sciambra replied, “we have [the case] locked up. It is a lead pipe cinch. You are just another witness and may not even be called [to testify].”
³⁸
In fact, he represented the entire legal basis for the charge filed against Clay Shaw.

The day after he arrested Shaw, Garrison again benefited from the hand of fate. United States Attorney General Designate Ramsey Clark
had a blundering encounter with the press in Washington and provided Garrison with another credibility boost. Emerging from a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination, Clark answered questions about events in New Orleans by saying that Clay Shaw had been investigated by the FBI in 1963 and cleared. Clark's statement was a simple mistake. He should have said “Bertrand” had been investigated. Shaw at first took comfort in the report. Assuming he had been investigated because of Oswald's pamphleteering in front of the Trade Mart, Shaw told reporters he had not known about the FBI investigation but was delighted and pleased that he had been cleared by them. That same day, the bureaucratic snafu was compounded when a befuddled spokesman for the Department of Justice, pressed on the issue, said of Bertrand and Shaw, “We think it's the same guy.”
³⁹

As the government paper trail now shows, this was a sensitive matter, an error of some magnitude by the brand new Attorney General of the United States.
⁴⁰
The problem heated up when Shaw's attorney, Edward Wegmann, requested the information obtained by the FBI in its investigation of Shaw. Since there had been no investigation, both Clark and the FBI were now on the spot. As one exasperated Department of Justice employee told a friendly reporter who called asking for an explanation, “We can't very well say that Clark has wood in his head.” Responding finally to Wegmann's request for a “public clarification,” the Department of Justice explained that in 1963 “nothing arose indicating a need to investigate Mr. Shaw” and that Clark's statement had been in error.
⁴¹
This innocent explanation was never accepted by Garrison. Today, the incident is part of the lore of his case, one of those quirky events that fueled the possibility he might really be on to something.
⁴²

Not everything was going Garrison's way, though. When he arrested Clay Shaw, he did more than shock and divide the citizenry of New Orleans. He brought to a head the conflict at
Life
magazine over
the Garrison issue
that had been put on a back burner earlier in the year. According to David Chandler, shortly after Louis Ivon clapped handcuffs onto Shaw, several members of
Life
's senior staff (including Managing Editor George Hunt) attended a dinner in a Miami restaurant. The main topic of conversation was Jim Garrison and the riveting events taking place in New Orleans; the talk quickly grew heated. The
debate boiled down to whether Billings or Chandler was right about Garrison. At a crucial moment, a legendary former
Time
editor, Holland McCombs, who had known Clay Shaw fifteen years, scribbled a check (the amount is unclear) and slapped it down on the table. I'll bet any part of this, McCombs declared, that Chandler is right. He “got no takers,” McCombs later told Chandler.
⁴³

McCombs, whose prestige was matched that night by the force of his conviction, swayed Managing Editor Hunt and precipitated the first stage of his withdrawal from the arrangement with Garrison. While the final break would occur months later, the Miami dinner marked the beginning of the end of
Life
's support.
⁴⁴
According to Chandler, Hunt killed the big story slated for April publication that Billings was preparing to write. Garrison's picture would not be appearing on
Life
's cover.
Life
would not be presenting Jim Garrison's version of the assassination to the American people.

When Garrison learned of
Life's
decision, he moved at once to fill the void. From the flock of journalists perched in New Orleans, he selected the one from the magazine that had given him his first major publicity,
The Saturday Evening Post
.
⁴⁵
It was a decision Garrison would live to regret. For writer James Phelan, a logical man with an eye for detail, would soon pen an article that exposed the gaping hole in the testimony of Perry Russo, the second near-fatal catastrophe to befall Jim Garrison's case.

*
Private financing of the public prosecutor is today prohibited by the American Bar Association's rules of ethics (Posner,
Case Closed
[New York: Random House, 1993], note at page 432).

*
That evening Russo repeated his innocuous story to three radio and television reporters. When asked if he had known Lee Harvey Oswald, he added a remark that would come back to haunt him. Russo stated that he never heard of Oswald until he saw his picture on television after the assassination (
Chicago Tribune
, March 16, 1967).

*
He was “around 25 years old”; wore a “wedding band”; “was a bug on history” and “read a lot.” He was also a “nut about guns,” owning, as Oswald did, both a pistol and a bolt action rifle (with a telescopic sight), which, Russo said, he saw him cleaning one day.

*
It was Sciambra's prodding for “details about Clay Bertrand being up in Ferrie's apartment” that led Russo to “remember” the plotting session.

*
This was a peculiar move. For if Russo really did recognize Shaw from the evening they shared at Ferrie's plotting session, Shaw should have recognized Russo too. (Shaw later said he had never laid eyes on Russo until he knocked on his door.)

*
Shaw later explained that the unusual items were all “residue” from old Mardi Gras costumes. He noted that Garrison's men left behind Greek and Japanese outfits, which, if taken, would have indicated the context of the others (Shaw Journal, March 1, 1967, p. 19).

†
Garrison also showed them to some reporters and researchers.

*
The discussion that follows is based on the transcript of that March 1, 1967, interview, labeled by Clay Shaw's defense team: “First Hypnotic Session”—“Exhibit F,” for presentation at the trial, but never admitted into evidence.

*
This was a reference to Russo's friends, Lefty Peterson and Sandra Moffett, who later denied being there. Moffett signed a sworn affidavit stating she did not meet David Ferrie until 1965 (Sandra Moffett McMaines, deposition, June 24, 1968, p. 11).

*
As noted earlier, suggestibility is also a problem with sodium Pentothal, and Andrew Sciambra, who conducted that interview, was even less cautious than Dr. Fatter.

When news of Garrison's investigation first broke, James Phelan was unaware of what was happening in New Orleans. He was working on another story and trapped five days in a Chicago airport by a snow storm. By the time he returned to New York, David Ferrie was dead, Garrison had proclaimed the case “solved,” and the media had flooded into New Orleans, but not the
Post
. Believing Phelan had an inside track with Garrison, Chief Editor Don McKinney held the assignment for him. McKinney and
Post
publisher, Otto Friedrich, were excited about the events in New Orleans. “This could be one of the biggest stories of our times,” McKinney told Phelan. “If Garrison has what he says he has, he is going to rewrite history.”
²