False Witness (16 page)

Phelan was delighted to be handed this choice assignment, but worried about his late start (“everyone else was already there”). “Hoping that [Garrison] had solved this thing,” Phelan boarded a plane that night and arrived in New Orleans the evening of February 27. Encountering a madhouse at Tulane and Broad the next day, he left a note with a Garrison aide saying, “I'm over at the Royal Orleans hotel—I've joined the thundering herd—and if you ever get a minute give me a call.”
³

Sitting in the Press Club bar late the following afternoon, Phelan heard on television that Clay Shaw had been arrested. “Everybody,” Phelan later recalled, “was just flabbergasted. All the people who knew him couldn't believe it.” Phelan had never heard of him but was quickly filled in by other reporters. Clay Shaw, Phelan thought, “is one
hell
of a story.”

The next day, Phelan got his first look at the accused. Shortly before 2:00
P.M
. at the office of his attorney, Shaw read a prepared statement in a room jammed wall-to-wall with reporters, one of them Phelan. “I am shocked and dismayed at the charges which have been filed against me,” Shaw said. “I am completely innocent.” “I have not conspired with anyone at any time or at any place to murder our late and esteemed president,” for whom he had “only the highest and utmost respect and admiration.” He did not know Lee Harvey Oswald. He did not know David Ferrie. He had never been to Ferrie's apartment. He had never used the name “Clay Bertrand.” Phelan found Shaw “impressive,” “well-spoken” and “specific about having admired Kennedy,” but then, Phelan said, no one expected Shaw to say, “Okay, guys, I did it.”
⁴

That same day, Garrison sprang another surprise when one of his assistants filed a motion for a preliminary hearing, an extraordinary step for a district attorney to take.
*
Defense attorneys favor preliminary hearings because the prosecution must reveal enough of its case to convince the court that the defendant should be held for trial. But ordinarily, prosecutors prefer to avoid showing their hand. Phelan was as baffled as everyone else. “We do not understand the motivation of Mr. Garrison,” said one of Shaw's attorneys.
⁵
Even Judge Bernard J. Bagert, who granted the motion and set the hearing for March 14, termed it an “unusual” request for the state to make. The defense team decided that Garrison was planning to stage a performance. They moved to quash the hearing until Garrison filed a bill of particulars that identified the others allegedly involved,
^†
the confidential
informant, and the when, where, and what of the alleged conspiracy. Judge Bagert rejected their plea, granting only their request concerning the informant. “I disagree violently with this finding,” William Wegmann told the court. “We are entitled to cross-examine. We are entitled to be prepared and not come in here and shoot off the cuff. We don't want to come in here Tuesday and have the state go wild and put on a big show.”
⁶
Bagert was unmoved. The
big show
was on its way.

But it was two weeks in the offing. Phelan began chasing down wild stories that were sprouting everywhere and waiting to hear from Garrison. On Friday, March 3, four days after Phelan arrived in New Orleans, Garrison finally called. He apologized for the delay, said he had “a proposal” for Phelan, and invited him to lunch. They met at the New Orleans Athletic Club, but had little opportunity to talk because of the people “coming up to the table and congratulating Garrison.” Afterwards, in the cab taking Garrison back to his office, he told Phelan he was going to Las Vegas “to get away for some rest” and some sun, and he wanted Phelan to join him. “I'll tell you the whole incredible story,” Garrison promised. To prevent the rest of the media from catching on, Garrison suggested they travel separately, with Phelan leaving first and Garrison following the next day. Phelan agreed and caught a plane out that evening.
⁷

Phelan thought he just had been handed an “
incredible exclusive story
,” he later wrote, “
on a silver platter
.” It appeared that way. Phelan knew nothing about Garrison's deal with
Life
and how it had “gone sour.” He thought Garrison had called him “because,” he later joked, “of my irresistible personality.” As he winged his way west, the six-foot, fifty-four-year-old Phelan knew only that he was about to hear from Garrison himself the inside story of the New Orleans plot that had killed the president, the story the whole world was waiting to hear.
⁸

Phelan found Las Vegas an odd and distant locale for a New Orleans district attorney to choose for a retreat, but he later learned it was a favorite vacation spot for Garrison.
⁹
Phelan had written several articles about that improbable gambling town, invented and operated by gangsters, and he, too, was familiar with it. He checked into the Dunes, where he had stayed in the past. Garrison arrived on Saturday and Phelan picked him up at the airport. At Garrison's instructions, Phelan drove him to the Sands, where Garrison registered under the alias “W. O. Robinson,”
which was Garrison's maternal grandfather's name. Garrison said he needed some sleep, so they arranged to rendezvous on Sunday. To Phelan that meant another day wasted and he began to wonder why he was there. Unbeknownst to him, Garrison was not alone. Two companions had accompanied him. He may have wanted sleep that night or he may have wanted some entertainment. As Phelan said, “I was never part of Garrison's social life.”
¹⁰

In two lengthy meetings the next day, Garrison laid out his thinking and described his “evidence.” He began their first session, which took place in the Sands Garden Room over brunch, by criticizing the Warren Report (“junk” gathered by “squirrels”) and explained that he had solved the Dallas puzzle through “imagination and evaluation.” He said they had “uncovered a whole series of odd connections” by examining “old street directories, [and] old telephone books” and “to understand the overall picture” Phelan had to keep in mind “that the Kennedy assassination was like Alice in Wonderland:
Nothing was what it seemed to be. Black was white, white was black
.” Soon he latched onto his favorite subject, “the trip that Ferrie made to Houston the day after Kennedy was killed.” It was, Garrison told Phelan, as he had told others in the past few months and would continue to repeat, in one form or another, the rest of his life, “a most curious trip, by a curious man to a curious place at a curious time.” That trip, Garrison said, was the initial “thread” that when he “tugged it” had “unraveled this whole case.”
¹¹

By now, Garrison had assigned Ferrie a new role. His destination that day, the Winterland ice skating rink, was actually “the message center,” Garrison said. And he insisted that Ferrie “never put on his skates,”
*
but had spent the afternoon hanging around the telephone. When Phelan asked what message Ferrie had received, who had called him, or whom Ferrie had called, Garrison admitted that he didn't know that “yet.”
^†
When Phelan pointed out the story's lack of substance (he repeatedly asked “where's the evidence?”), Garrison gave him a dossier on Ferrie prepared by a private investigative firm. It catalogued Ferrie's schooling, his tortured personal life, and his peripatetic employment record,
but contained nothing that linked him even remotely to the assassination. Phelan read it, told Garrison it was interesting but he couldn't see its relevance. Garrison responded with more of the same.
¹²

Suddenly, Garrison ended the meeting. He said three men in a nearby booth were FBI agents, that the Bureau had him under surveillance, following him everywhere and in New Orleans tapping his phones. He asked Phelan to come that evening to his room at the Sands. Phelan headed back to the Dunes with his once-soaring expectations beginning to sag. That night he showed up at Garrison's room and found him in shirt-sleeve wearing a gun in a shoulder holster. Garrison removed the gun, emptied its shells into his hand, and showed Phelan one of them. It was, Garrison said, a “magnum load” that his gun couldn't handle and he couldn't figure out who had put it into his gun. If it were fired, he said, the weapon would explode. As Phelan watched, Garrison put all six shells back into the gun.
¹³

Then Garrison returned to his narrative. He described the group of CIA-supported anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans that Ferrie had joined. Oswald, too, was involved with them, but he hadn't fired “a shot at anyone,” Garrison declared. (He defined Oswald's role in the president's murder as that of a “participant, decoy, and patsy.”) David Ferrie, Garrison explained, had spun the group off from the original plan against Castro and created “an assassination team to kill the president.”
¹⁴

The motive? “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime,” Garrison stated, reciting the outlandish story Perry Russo had heard. Garrison compared it to the famous 1920s Loeb-Leopold murder of Bobby Franks in Chicago. “John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not—a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man,” Garrison said. “You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.” Garrison had deduced this, he said, because Ferrie, Ruby, Oswald, and Shaw were all homosexual. Phelan pointed out that Oswald was married and the father of two children. Oswald, Garrison replied, was “a switch-hitter who couldn't satisfy his wife.” The thrill-killing notion coupled with the episode with the shells gave Phelan pause—it crossed his mind that Garrison might be unhinged.
¹⁵

Phelan also was having difficulty piecing together a coherent picture.
He had heard nothing solid, he told Garrison, nothing that he could possibly write. He continued to press for
evidence
. “It doesn't hang together,” Phelan insisted. Garrison replied that it did. He then retrieved a fat manila envelope covered with stamps from the dresser, tore into it, examined the documents inside, and handed two of them to Phelan. They contained the information that his witness would give at Shaw's preliminary hearing the following week, Garrison said, and only his key aides knew about it. This witness tied everything together, Garrison stated. “He's my case against Shaw.” Garrison told Phelan to read the documents that evening and then he would see the whole picture. They would meet the next morning, Garrison said, and see if Phelan had changed his mind.
¹⁶

Phelan left with his expectations climbing again. For the past two weeks people throughout the world had been wondering what it was that Garrison had discovered. And I had the answer, Phelan later said, in my pocket. As he walked back to the Dunes, Phelan considered the possibility that Garrison had been teasing him—feeding him peripheral information while deliberately withholding the central evidence. Then, at the end, delivering the goods. This wishful thinking would soon evaporate.
¹⁷

The two documents Phelan took away from Garrison's hotel room that night described two interviews with Perry Russo. One was Andrew Sciambra's 3,500-word memorandum detailing his first conversation with Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25. The other was a thirteen-page transcript of Russo's March 1 interview conducted by Dr. Fatter while Russo was hypnotized. Phelan read the documents through once. Then, incredulous, he read them again. Finally, he read them a third time. He said later that after reading all the material (about 6,000 words) the first time, “I thought I must have missed something. I went back and read it again” and experienced “an epiphany.” He was up all night. “I kept reading them and then going back and checking them, and reading, and checking, and reading.” What he realized as he pored over those pages, he said, “
knocked me out of my chair
.” What he realized was that the incriminating story Perry Russo told under hypnosis about hearing Ferrie, Oswald, and Shaw plotting the president's murder in Ferrie's apartment was entirely absent from Russo's first statement in Baton Rouge. And the omission could be no mere oversight, for the memorandum specifically stated that Russo had seen Clay Shaw
twice
and described those two occasions. The plotting session wasn't there.
¹⁸

It was clear to Phelan, who was knowledgeable about hypnosis, its suggestibility and the neutral questioning it required, that the
third
Shaw sighting, the one at Ferrie's party, had been developed during Russo's hypnosis session by the leading questions posed by Dr. Fatter.
*
The hypnosis transcript, Phelan noted, “discredited Russo as a witness” and the Sciambra memorandum “directly impeached him.”
¹⁹
It was inconceivable to Phelan that Garrison had arrested Clay Shaw on the basis of these statements by Russo. Yet Garrison had said it himself: “He's my case against Shaw.” At that moment, Phelan was the first person outside Garrison's inner circle to learn the identity and story of Garrison's confidential informant. He also was the first person, inside or out, who recognized and could prove the enormous injustice underway in New Orleans.

Phelan arose the next morning with his mind “reeling,” wondering what he should say to Garrison. “I'm there representing the Post,” Phelan explained later, “and I got a hell of a story, but I know the story they want, and I ain't got it; I got something else.” So he called his boss, Don McKinney, and told him he was in Las Vegas with Garrison and “yes it was wonderful but the story ain't what we thought.” He then summarized the situation, explaining that he was due to meet with Garrison at ten o'clock. McKinney said he wanted to speak to Managing Editor Otto Friedrich and told Phelan to call back in thirty minutes. Friedrich, Phelan knew, “thought there was something wrong with the Warren Report” and wanted the other story.