Oswald's Tale (68 page)

2

“He Walks and Talks Like a Man”

The Big Easy—a.k.a. New Orleans—may be the only American city where the middle levels of the Mafia are all but indistinguishable from the middle class, but then New Orleans may be more tolerant than other places. Perhaps it is the permissiveness offered by sub-tropical heat; to own a strip-joint and also be a dedicated churchgoer offers little inner contradiction. It is as if people in the Big Easy take it for granted that humankind is a spiritual house of cards built on flimsy, and therefore is full of contradiction and ready to collapse. Opposites in oneself, consequently, are given equal welcome.

It could also be said that Lee had unfinished business in New Orleans, having spent part of his adolescence (once Marguerite could no longer afford the rent at Myrtle Evans’ apartment) living in an apartment over a pool hall on a street on the edge of the French Quarter, Exchange Alley, which had its share of whores, small-time hoods, and petty gamblers. Rare is the adolescent who listens to such nocturnal action from a second-story window without expectations building up in him of a dramatic street life to come.

One cannot say, however, that he was drawn back to New Orleans entirely by old memories. Marina, as we know, wanted to get him out of Dallas as quickly as possible. So, she encouraged him to go and promised she would follow as soon as he found a job. In the meantime, she would live with a new friend, Ruth Paine. On April 24, therefore, Lee had gotten on a bus to New Orleans, where, on arrival, he telephoned his aunt, Lillian Murret, and asked if he could be put up for a few days. Actually, it turned out to be a couple of weeks before he and Myrtle Evans found the apartment on Magazine Street.

McMillan:
[The Murrets] were extremely conservative, they disapproved of his going to Russia, and he was afraid they might not welcome him to New Orleans. Anticipating this, Lee had confided to Marina that he suspected the Murrets lived beyond what his uncle’s earnings would support. Lillian’s husband, Charles Ferdinand, or “Dutz,” Murret, as he had been known since his prizefight days, was a steamship clerk, and Lee thought that his uncle might be engaged in some other activity on the side, like bookmaking. There is no evidence that this was so . . .
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On the contrary, there is some. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) probed Dutz Murret’s activities and decided he was well connected to

significant organized crime figures associated with the Marcello organization . . . . an associate of Dutz Murret reportedly served as a personal aide or driver to Marcello at one time. In another instance, the committee found that an individual connected to Dutz Murret, the person who arranged bail for Oswald following his arrest in August 1963 for a street disturbance, was an associate of two of Marcello’s syndicate deputies.
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MR. JENNER.
What kind of boy was Lee Harvey Oswald?

MR. MURRET.
Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t take that much interest in him. I couldn’t tell you anything about that, because I didn’t pay attention to all that. I do think he was a loud kid, you know what I mean; he was always raising his voice when he wanted something from his mother, I know that, but I think a lot of times he was just the opposite. He liked to read, and he stuck by himself pretty much in the apartment.

MR. JENNER.
Did you and Marguerite get along all right?

MR. MURRET.
Not too well . . .

MR. JENNER.
What was your impression of Lee then, after he appeared at your house after all those years?

MR. MURRET
. . . . I just couldn’t warm up to him, but he said he wanted to find a job and get an apartment and then send for his wife in Texas, so I wasn’t going to stand in his way.
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Murret would have spoken in much the same manner if he had had a good deal to do with Oswald in New Orleans in 1963, but we do have Lillian Murret’s testimony for corroboration, and it gives a clue: Murret may have had his Mob relations, but he and his wife cherished their hard-won respectability and the college education they had been able to provide for their children. Oswald, given his stint in Russia, would not have been Murret’s first choice for a houseguest. Like just about every other semi-respectable figure on the periphery of the Mafia, Dutz was an ardent patriot.

Because of Murret, much has been made of Oswald’s possible connections to the Mob, but no evidence has arisen that uncle and nephew did anything but keep their relations at a good arm’s length. Lee’s blood tie was with Lillian; indeed, it may have been Lee’s good fortune that it was his aunt, not his uncle, who picked up the phone when he called from the bus station. She told him to come right over.

MRS. MURRET
. . . .he was trying to find a job, he told me, and then he said he would send for Marina, his wife, and the child, and I asked him . . . to describe her, and he said, “Well, she’s just like any other American housewife.” He said, “She wears shorts.”

. . . He said he would have to have a newspaper to scan the want ads and try to find himself a job and [then] he would go out every morning with his newspaper . . . and he wouldn’t come back until the afternoon, till supper time. I had supper anywhere from 5:30 to 6:00 o’clock, and he was there on time every day for supper, and after supper he didn’t leave the house. He would sit down about 6:30 o’clock or 7:00 o’clock and look at some television programs and then he would go right to bed, and he did that every day while he was at the house, and so then on the first Sunday he was there, he was talking—we were talking about relatives and he said to me, “Do you know anything about the Oswalds?” and I [told him] “I don’t know any of them other than your father,” . . . Now what he didn’t tell me was that on Sunday he must have gone to the cemetery where his father was buried . . . I guess he went to ask the person in charge about the grave.
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One morning, his older cousin John Murret gave him the white short-sleeved shirt and tie that he would be wearing ten weeks later, when he would distribute pamphlets on Canal Street for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee:

MRS. MURRET.
Yes, Lee was getting ready . . . and John was in the back getting dressed to go to work, I think, and he didn’t think Lee looked presentable. John . . . said it in such a nice way—he can do it, you know, but he asked Lee, he said, “Lee, here’s a shirt; take it; it doesn’t fit me. You put it on and here’s a nice tie to go with it.” He said, “Come on, kid, you want to look good when you go for that job, you know,” and so he gave the white shirt and the tie to Lee to go after the job, and Lee took them.
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On May 9, the same day in which he will later find his apartment, he manages to get hired by the Reily Coffee Company.

MRS. MURRET
. . . .he came home waving the newspaper, and he grabbed me around the neck and he even kissed me and he said, “I got it; I got it!” . . . I said, “Well, Lee, how much does it pay?” and he said . . . “It don’t pay very much, but I will get along on it.”

I said, “Well, you know, Lee, you are really not qualified to do anything too much. If you don’t like this job, why don’t you try to go back to school at night time and see if you can’t learn a trade . . .” And he said, “No, I don’t have to go back to school. I don’t have to learn anything. I know everything.” So that’s the way it was. I couldn’t tell him any more . . .

MR. JENNER.
Did you get the impression when you were talking along those lines that he really believed he was that smart?

MRS. MURRET.
He believed he was smart; yes, sir.
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The William B. Reily Company distributed a product called Luzianne Coffee, and Oswald was taken on as a greaser for the large grinding machines.

McMillan:
On his brief application there, he may have set his own record for lies. He said that he had been living at 757 French Street (the Murrets’) for three years; that he had graduated from a high school that he had attended for only a few weeks; and he gave as references his cousin John Murret, whose permission he did not ask; Sergeant Robert Hidell (a composite of his brother Robert and his own alias “Hidell”), “on active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps” (a fiction from beginning to end); and “Lieutenant J. Evans, active duty U.S. Marine Corps” (the surname and first initial of [Myrtle Evans’ husband], combined with a fictitious Marine Corps rank and identification).
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He understands how to give job references. At low levels of employment, who will spend the time to check? Yet what a creative liar is Oswald! Every name he offers is taken from a different sector of his experience. Past, present, and future, family, Marines, and Myrtle Evans’ husband, whom he has not even met, are drawn upon to shape his lies. He is comfortable with a wealth of sources. If only he had been a poet instead of a liar.

With it all, the false facts have a purpose. He never knows when he will be on the lam, and so he likes to leave a trail with a plethora of offshoots to befuddle future pursuers.

Besides, he is now obliged to come down from the monumental high of knowing that he had taken a shot at a General. Now, he will only be lubricating big-bellied machines.

He may also be losing the freedom of his daylight hours. It is possible he had been having a lively time for himself in New Orleans until he found work. There is certainly some testimony from Dean Adams Andrews to contemplate. How true it may be is another matter. As described by Gerald Posner, Andrews was a “three-hundred-pound, forty-four-year-old jive-talking attorney with a reputation for exaggeration and showmanship.”
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MR. LIEBELER.
I am advised by the FBI that . . . Lee Harvey Oswald came into your office . . .

MR. ANDREWS.
I don’t recall the dates, but briefly, it is this: Oswald came in the office accompanied by some gay kids. They were Mexicanos. He wanted to find out what could be done in connection with a discharge, a yellow paper discharge, so I explained [that] when he brought the money, I would do the work . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
The first time he came in he was with these . . . gay kids. By that, of course, you mean people that appeared to you to be homosexuals?

MR. ANDREWS.
Well, they swish. What they are, I don’t know. We call them gay kids . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Have you seen any of them since? . . .

MR. ANDREWS.
Yes . . . . First district precinct. Police picked them up for wearing clothes of the opposite sex.

MR. LIEBELER.
How many of them were there?

MR. ANDREWS.
About 50 . . . . I went down for the ones I represented. They were in the holding pavilion. I paroled them and got them out . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
You say that some of the gay kids [that] the police arrested . . . were the ones that had been with Oswald?

MR. ANDREWS.
Yes . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
Let me try and pin down how long it was after the first time Oswald came in that these kids all got arrested . . . . Was it a month? . . .

MR. ANDREWS
. . . . Ten days at the most.

MR. LIEBELER.
I suppose the New Orleans police department files would reflect the dates these people were picked up?

MR. ANDREWS.
I checked the first district’s blotter [and] they wear names just like you and I wear clothes. Today their name is Candy; tomorrow it is Butsie; next day it is Mary . . . . Names area very improbable method of identification . . . . You know them by sight mostly.

MR. LIEBELER.
Do you remember what date it was that that large arrest was made?

MR. ANDREWS.
No; every Friday is arrest day in New Orleans . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
In May of 1963?

MR. ANDREWS.
Yes . . .
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MR. LIEBELER.
Did Oswald appear to you to be gay?

MR. ANDREWS.
You can’t tell. I couldn’t say. He swang with the kids. He didn’t swish, but birds of a feather flock together . . . .

MR. LIEBELER.
When you say he didn’t swish, what do you mean by that?

MR. ANDREWS.
He is not effeminate; his voice isn’t squeaky; he didn’t walk like or talk like a girl; he walks and talks like a man.

MR. LIEBELER
. . . . Was there anything striking about the way he carried himself?

MR. ANDREWS.
I never paid attention. I never watched him walk other than into and out of the office. There’s nothing that would draw my attention to anything out of the ordinary, but I just assumed that he knew these people and was running with them. They had no reason to come. The three gay kids he was with, they were ostentatious. They were what we call swishers. You can just look at them. All they had to do was open their mouth . . . . With those pronounced ones, you never know what the relationship is with anyone else with them, but I have no way of telling whether he is gay or not, other than he came in with what we call here queens. That’s about it.
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