Perry Russo was born in
1943. Russo lived in New
Orleans where
he worked as an insurance salesman for Equitable Life.
In 1969 Jim
Garrison persuaded
Russo to give evidence against Clay Shaw.
Russo claimed in September, 1963, he overheard Shaw and David
Ferrie
discussing the proposed assassination of John
F. Kennedy.
It was suggested that the crime could be blamed on Fidel
Castro.
During
Shaw's trial Russo's testimony was discredited by the revelation that
he underwent hypnosis and had been administered sodium pentathol,
or "truth serum," at the request of the persecution. It
claimed that Russo only came up with a link between Clay
Shaw ,
David
Ferrie and
Lee Harvey Oswald after these treatments.
The jury found Shaw not guilty of conspiring to assassinate John
F. Kennedy.
Perry Russo, who worked
as a taxi driver in his later years, died of a heart attack in New
Orleans in August,
1995.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Jim
Garrison,
On the Trail of the Assassins (1988)
Russo was significant because
he was the first eyewitness to have overheard Shaw and Perrie engaging
in a discussion of the prospective murder of John Kennedy. In my judgment,
even without Russo we had sufficient evidence to support a charge
against Shaw of participating in the conspiracy to murder the President.
But that evidence was circumstantial. As an experienced trial attorney,
I knew that laymen are particularly responsive to eyewitness testimony,
and Russo provided that in full measure. Consequently, upon first
learning how strong the conversation between Shaw and Ferrie was,
I decided to take the additional precaution of confirming the veracity
of Russo's recollection. The lawyers on the special team and I considered
using a "lie
detector" test, but since such tests are highly imperfect and
inadmissible in court we rejected the idea. Instead, we chose to use
hypnosis and Sodium Penrothal. Both treatments were administered to
Russo
under close medical supervision. And both revealed that Russo was
indeed telling the truth.
So when we called Perry
Russo to the witness stand at Shaw's preliminary hearing we were confident.
After the usual preliminary questions, bringing out his background
and allowing him to relax in the courtroom surroundings, assistant
D.A.'s Ward and Oser asked Russo about a gathering at David Ferrie's
apartment.
Russo responded that when
he dropped in at Ferrie's place, "somewhere around the middle
of September 1963," an informal gathering - which he described
as "some sort of party" - was just breaking up. Some of
Ferrie's usual bevy of youngsters were there but soon left. Russo
said a former girlfriend of his, Sandra Moffett, was also there for
a while. After she departed, there remained, according to Russo, a
scattering of anti-Castro Cubans - a group which occasionally came
by to visit Ferrie. A few of them stayed on for a little while.
(2)
Clay
Shaw, diary entry (17th March, 1967)
The press of course had a field day with the entire preliminary hearing
and there have been many descriptions of my grim expressions, my chain
smoking, etc, etc. etc. One of the curious things about Russo's testimony,
was that he did not feel that we had made any definite plans for the
assassination of the President but had talked about it in general
terms. He did say, of course, that there was much talk about the need
for a scape goat, and that none of the three of us could possibly
appear at the time of the assassination. It was agreed, according
to him, that Ferrie was to go to Hammond, I would be on the West Coast
traveling for my firm, as he put it, and it wasn't very clear what
was going to happen to Harvey Lee Oswald [sic]. Another startling
defect in his testimony was his insistence that the man he had known
as Leon Oswald, and whom he identified as Ferrie's roommate, had always
been very unkempt, unshaven, with lots of hair. In fact, he was not
able to identify Leon Oswald as Lee Harvey Oswald until a police artist
had sketched an unshaven beard onto the chin of the photograph he
had originally been shown. This of course was directly contrary to
all the evidence of people who knew Oswald which indicates that he
was psychopathically neat and tidy in his personal appearance. The
other incredible part of his story is that Oswald lived with his wife
until September 23 and she returned to Dallas and then he himself
left for Mexico on the 25th, which would have given him very little
time to be Mr. Ferrie's roommate. Above all, the real damaging thing
in Russo's testimony is why he did not come forward previously. He
says he was busy with school work, had a lot of things on his mind,
didn't want to push himself on people, felt the FBI knew what they
were doing, and therefore he felt no necessity as a citizen to come
forward and describe to the FBI the assassination plot he alleges
he overheard sometime in late September or early October, in the apartment
of Ferrie. This is manifestly absurd, as is the notion that I would
ever undertake such a plot under the conditions he describes.
I can only assume that
he is acting out of self-interest, or for publicity, or because he
has been hypnotized and this information fed to him. He is certainly
not averse to publicity, and some very rapid investigation on the
part of our people indicates that he has a very bad reputation in
several areas, particularly for his operations in the French Quarter.
He has also, by his own admission, been under psychiatric treatment
for some time. All in all, not a very reliable witness, but sufficient
for the DA to have me bound over.
(3)
John
Kelin, Fair
Play Magazine, Perry
Russo (November,
1994)
At the Shaw trial,
Russo testified that several months before the JFK assassination,
he was at a party also attended by Shaw, Lee Harvey Oswald, and David
W. Ferrie, and that assassinating President Kennedy was discussed.
"Ferrie was in control
of the gathering," Russo said years later in a videotaped interview.
"He was in one of his obsessive evenings concerning his hatred
of the President of the United States."
In 1967, before the Clay
Shaw trial began, NBC broadcast a documentary on the case, which Garrison
defenders generally agree was an attempt to discredit the prosecutor.
The documentary's producer, Walter Sheridan, appeared on the program
and said, "In my conversations with Perry Russo he has stated
that his testimony against Clay Shaw may be a combination of truth,
fantasy, and lies."
Russo, however, said Sheridan
"was not investigating any facts. His only purpose was - and
he stated it pointedly - he said, 'I'm going to take Garrison out
of this.' He says, 'You're going down with him.'"
Russo said that Sheridan
offered to relocate him, get him a job, and protect him from extradition.
In exchange for that, Russo said, Sheridan wanted him to retract his
identification of Shaw and his testimony about the party attended
by Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald, where Russo said an assassination plot
was discussed.
"What Walter Sheridan
was asking me to do was an absolute lie," Russo said. "Shaw
was there. Ferrie was there. Oswald was there."
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