Did Clay Shaw Get the Help He Deserved?, Part One
- Fred Litwin
- 4 hours ago
- 10 min read
The Setting in New Orleans
This is Part One of a ten-part series on attempts by Clay Shaw and his attorneys to get help from the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. As you will see, nobody stepped to help.
In 1995, Patricia Lambert, author of the magisterial False Witness, started submitting proposals to publishers for a biography of Clay Shaw. She ultimately turned her research into her book False Witness. She then revamped her outline for a new book in 2005.
Here is her proposal:
It's a shame that Lambert did not finish her book, but Don Carpenter has written a superb biography -- Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw.
Lambert had finished writing one chapter:
Here is her description of Chapter Seventeen:
I found this chapter in her papers at the Sixth Floor Museum when I visited in March 2020, just before Covid-19 shutdowns.
It's an important contribution and it details the efforts of Shaw's attorneys to convince the FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department to help them. Unfortunately, they were turned down at every opportunity.
I used parts of it for the conclusions to my book On the Trail of Delusion -- Jim Garrison: The Great Accuser. I was able to find many of the documents referenced in this chapter on the Mary Ferrell website, and some of them were in the papers of Irvin Dymond. But I was missing some important memos which I was fortunate to retrieve in my visit to NARA in August 2023.
So, this ten-part series presents Lambert's material along with associated documents, letters, and court filings. Since this chapter was not finished, there are some discontinuities in the narrative. I've done my best to coherently present the essence of Lambert's writing.
The chapter opens on March 1, 1967. Edward Wegman, Clay Shaw's real estate lawyer, was in Albany, Georgia on business that day and returned early in the evening. He received a phone call telling him that Clay Shaw had been arrested and "charged with conspiracy to murder the president." Wegmann hung up the phone thinking that it was a joke. The phone rang again, and Wegmann headed down to the DA.'s office.
A preliminary hearing was held two weeks later. There were two witnesses against Shaw, one being a drug addict [Vernon Bundy] with an improbable story about meeting Shaw with Oswald on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.
Why was Bundy in prison?
Bundy failed a lie detector test but was still asked to testify.
Garrison testified that they found Bundy after Shaw was arrested.
Lambert writes that "No honest prosecutor puts a witness like that on the stand: An inmate from the Parish Prison, an eleventh-hour volunteer, who would say anything to get out of jail."
The other witness was Perry Russo, who had seemingly been at a conspiracy meeting with Shaw and Oswald at David Ferrie's house. However, when he first came forward, right after David Ferrie had died, Russo said nothing about such a meeting. This story only came out after he had been hypnotized three times and had also been interviewed under the influence of sodium pentothal.
Russo went to the press before he was interviewed by Sciambra.
James Phelan wrote a memo about the contradictions in Perry Russo's story.
An interview with Perry Russo from 1971.
Tom Bethell sends a memo to Sylvia Meagher about Dick Billings and Andrew Sciambra.
Jim Garrison's hypocrisy is on display in this post.
Russo was interviewed by Shaw's defense team.
In August 1967, Wegmann learnt that Garrison had a "pipeline directly" into his office. The private firm they had hired to investigate leads was leaking everything back to Garrison.
Transcript of interview of William Gurvich, August 129, 1967
Edward Wegmann refused to pay one of Wackdenhut's bills:
Wegmann realizes that he can't even trust his own investigators, and that "there seems to be no limit to Garrison's reach. Perhaps there isn't."
Garrison doesn't represent law enforcement in New Orleans; he is law enforcement in New Orleans. He not only has the final say on who is prosecuted and who isn't, he controls the "political system" at Tulane and Broad, meaning that he determines, to a large extent, who sits on the criminal court bench. He enjoys virtually unlimited investigatory resources in addition to the handpicked police officers on his staff, bolstered by two dollar-a-year private detectives. Garrison can (and does) call upon the manpower of the New Orleans Police Department and the Louisiana State Police Department as well. His coffers are brimming with money from a group of wealthy local businessmen who formed a committee called Truth and Consequences for the specific purpose of allowing Garrison to conduct his JFK investigation in secret, with no public disclosure of his expenditures. This means there is no oversight of his actions; Garrison is free to do whatever he wishes. It also means that the business community Clay served for twenty years, until his recent retirement, the business community he helped enrich as managing director of the International Trade Mart, that community is now the de facto financial enabler of his prosecution. And that's not all.
The presiding judge in the case, the hard-drinking Edward A. Haggerty, Jr., regularly rules in Garrison's favor, and Wegmann may know why. He has heard Garrison "covered and collected" several checks Haggerty "bounced" around town and is keeping them "in a file" to ensure the judge's "cooperation." The grand jury, as well as a substantial segment of the local citizenry, appears to be on Garrison's side. Nationally, too, Garrison has a following -- generated by his media exposure and bolstered by the first wave of articles and books critical of the Warren Report's findings. The foreign press, especially that in the Soviet Union and its left-leaning counterparts in Europe, are interviewing Garrison and publishing sympathetic articles about him.
Garrison had power over the judges because he was able to recommend or endorse candidates running for judgeships.
Here is an excerpt from Milton Brener's The Garrison Case: (page 24 - 25)
In August 1963, Executive Assistant Frank Shea was one of the eleven candidates that qualified for a Criminal Court judgeship vacated by the death of Judge Shirley Wimberly. Many of the other candidates had political support in varying strength. Shea had no support, save that of his boss, Jim Garrison. He led the field in the first primary and entered a second primary with the runner-up Guy Johnson. In the second primary, almost to a man, the defeated candidates threw their support to Johnson, who also garnered practically all organized political support, as well as the endorsement of the city's newspapers. Unabashed, Garrison scheduled a victory party for election night at one of the city's major hotels. The gathering was not to be disappointed. Shea's margin of victory was just enough to discourage a contest of the results. Garrison now had a friend on the bench.
This was the first public test of Garrison's popularity. The significance was not lost on the judges, as was soon to be demonstrated.
Here is another excerpt from Brener's book (page 33)
Later that summer, Rudolph Becker, a veteran criminal attorney and former Assistant District Attorney, ran for the Judgeship of Division "E" of the Criminal District Court in opposition to Judge Cocke. A number of Becker's newspaper advertisements, as well as his campaign literature, bore the unmistakable imprint of Garrison's clever and fertile creativity. Cocke was an inept campaigner, and his support by several former District Attorneys, State legislators and other city officials, as well as many members of the Bar was scarcely adequate to answer the ridicule heaped upon him. Toward the end of the campaign, Garrison actively and openly supported Becker, who entered a second primary with Cocke. Cocke was ultimately defeated. Becker became the second judge to be elected with Garrison's support.
And here is a third excerpt from Brener's book (page 39)
In March, 1966, a vacancy was created on the Criminal Court Bench by the retirement of Senior Judge George Platt. Under State law, Governor McKeithen could fill the vacancy with his own appointee. At the urging of the District Attorney, the Governor selected Matthew Braniff, a close friend of Garrison. He was the third man to ascend to the bench through Garrison's efforts.
And have a look at this article from the June 5, 1967, edition of the Los Angeles Times:
Money Quote:
A New Orleans lawyer said, "Most of the public officials and even the judges are scared of Garrison. He's got too much voter sympathy on his side, and his investigation and its implications are too volatile."
On the other hand, Clay Shaw's "circumstances are a stark contrast."
His retirement nest egg is hemorrhaging from legal costs and is not being replenished (to raise money he already sold his home). Aside from family, devoted friends, the four attorneys defending him, and some in the media who see through Garrison's rhetoric, the only group that represents a base of support is the New Orleans social world that has long been Clay's milieu. These people stand by Clay. They believe in his innocence and keep their doors open to him, affording indispensable emotional and psychological support. Yet, oddly, though some are wealthy -- Sears heiress Edith Stern is Clay's long-time close friend -- they give Clay little financial help. This high-profile circle should represent a threat to Garrison, but they fail to provide Clay with what his defense team needs most: An organization spearheaded by one or more prominent citizens working publicly on his behalf, demonstrating their confidence in him, and most important, establishing the equivalent of Garrison's Truth and Consequences, a legal defense fund to help defray his spiraling expenses.
One of Shaw's relatives told Lambert that "if Garrison could do this to Clay, Garrison could do this to anyone." And thus, people were terrified. Another relative spoke of "waiting for the knock on the door."
You can read about the power of Garrison's grand juries at the link below.
And Clay Shaw faced some serious obstacles in preparing for trial.
There was no discovery in Louisiana criminal courts and thus Shaw had no access to Garrison's investigative reports.
A look at some of the tasks facing Shaw's attorneys.
Gay people were especially scared of Garrison:
Dave Snyder, a New Orleans reporter, told Lambert that the anxiety level of the gay community in New Orleans "had to be off the charts."
In 1967, Frank Manning, the chief investigator for Louisiana Attorney General Jack Gremillion, went to the FBI to discuss a serious problem. He had evidence that Jim Garrison was involved in a shakedown racket against homosexuals in the French Quarter. His boss had learned the hard way that it was dangerous to go after Garrison, so Manning was asking for assistance.
J. Edgar Hoover refused to intervene, claiming that this was a state matter. Ramsey Clark, attorney general of the U.S., also received anonymous complaints.
There was never any investigation into these allegations, so we don’t know if they were true. Historian Alecia Long points out that “tallies of arrests by vice squad officers for crimes considered as ‘homosexual’ were routinely exceeding the number of arrests for every other category in the book, including prostitution.” She noted that in 1963 alone, “the vice squad made 249 arrests of homosexuals versus 193 for prostitution.”
While Garrison’s crackdown on B-drinking abated over time, his war on homosexuals continued. Rosemary James noted that “one benefit” of Garrison’s raids on homosexuals “may have been the creation of a body of homosexual informants for the district attorney’s office—informants possibly involved in his Kennedy plot investigation.”
Others noticed something deeper that might have been driving his war on gay people. In July 1967 Aaron Kohn, head of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, wrote a memorandum on the “emotional incapacity or perhaps insanity” of Jim Garrison. He commented on Garrison’s use of “emotionally disturbed persons (homosexuals, narcotic addicts, sociopaths, extreme neurotics) as witnesses to support his claims and as victims of his prosecutive actions.” Kohn consulted with Dr. Harold Lief, a psychiatrist at Tulane Medical School who told him that “he had already concluded Garrison to be paranoid schizophrenic, based upon his personal contacts with Garrison, his knowledge of Garrison’s extraordinary personal sex life, indicating him to be obsessed with fear of his own active or latent homosexuality, coupled with the use of his prosecutorial power in an attempt to destroy homosexuals.”
Two incidents seem to corroborate the accusation. First, Garrison wrote in his book On The Trail of The Assassins about a 1968 incident at the LA airport. He had been in in the baggage claim area and went to buy a magazine. There were no seats in the waiting section, so he decided to go to the men’s room to read it. While sitting in an empty stall, he said that he heard the door in the adjoining cubicle open and then close. “Within minutes there were six policemen at the entrance to the men’s room … and they started questioning Garrison. He escaped the situation when two women at the rent-a-car counter recognized him.”
It’s hard to know if this really happened. Garrison claimed that he “always went to the men’s room, sat down in a toilet booth, and read a magazine for ten minutes.” Frankly, I’m skeptical. This reminds me of the incident involving Senator Larry Craig in 2007 when he hung out in a stall at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport and started playing “footsy” with an undercover police officer in the next stall.
A second incident occurred in 1969. Garrison supposedly fondled a thirteen-year-old boy at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Author Patricia Lambert interviewed the victim and his brother in 1993, and they told her that Garrison invited the boy, his older brother, and father into a “slumber room” at the club. The boys weren’t interested, but the father thought he might learn something new about the JFK assassination. The room was dark, and Garrison reached over and touched the boy. The family received a lot of pressure not to pursue the case; an attorney warned them “terrible harm” would come to the boy. Worried about his safety, the family dropped the issue.
Lambert notes that "anyone within Garrison's jurisdiction who is on his bad side (meaning anyone who fails to give him the information he believes they have, or works against him in any way_ is at risk. Garrison's favorite tactic was to call people to testify before the grand jury and then charge them with perjury - which is a felony. They would have to lawyer up, and then typically right before a trial, Garrison would drop the charges.
This was the environment facing Clay Shaw but fortunately he had some good lawyers working for him.
NEXT: The DOJ is Told Not to Get Involved. The FBI Follows Suit.