Clay Shaw was a businessman
in New
Orleans. He joined
the U.S. Army and took part in the fighting
in Europe. He served as an aide to General Charles Thrasher and by
the time he retired in 1946 he had reached the rank of major general.
He played an important
role in the restoration of historic New Orleans sites and in 1962
he established the city's International Trade Mart. He was a
member of the World Trade Development Committee and a member of the
board of directors of Permindex.
In 1961, Jim
Garrison was
elected as the city's district attorney. He developed a good reputation
and in his first two years he never lost a case. Garrison took a keen
interest in the case of Lee
Harvey Oswald.
After investigating the matter he became convinced that a group of
right-wing activists, including Shaw, Guy
Bannister, David Ferrie and Carlos
Bringuier were involved in a conspiracy with the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill John
F. Kennedy. Garrison
claimed this was in retaliation for his attempts to obtain a peace
settlement in both Cuba
and Vietnam.
Two of those being investigated
died: Guy Bannister (June, 1964) and
David Ferrie (February, 1967), but in
March, 1967, Shaw was charged with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy,
with the help of Oswald, Ferrie,
and others. At the trial in February, 1969, Perry
Russo claimed
that in September, 1963, he overheard Shaw and 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 prosecution. 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.
In 1973 Jim
Garrison lost
the office to Harry Connick. After leaving his post as district attorney
Garrison wrote a book about his investigations of the Kennedy assassination,
On the Trail of the Assassins
(1988).
Clay Shaw died in 1974.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Pershing
Gervais, who worked for Jim Garrison,
was interviewed for Patricia
Lambert's book, False Witness, in 1998.
Garrison inverted the criminal investigatory process. You should begin
by assembling the facts and from the facts you may deduce a theory
of the crime. . . . Garrison did the opposite. He started with a theory
and then assembled some facts to support it. Those facts that fit
the theory, he accepted. Those that did not, he either ignored or
rejected as CIA misinformation.
(2)
Jim
Garrison, interviewed
by Playboy Magazine (October 1967)
Playboy: Frank McGee claimed that NBC investigators had discovered
that your two key witnesses against Clay Shaw - Perry Russo and Vernon
Bundy - both failed polygraph tests prior to their testimony before
the grand jury. In the case of Russo, who claimed to have attended
a meeting at David Ferrie's apartment where Shaw, Oswald and Ferrie
plotted the assassination, NBC said that "Russo's answers to
a series of questions indicate, in the language of the polygraph operator,
'deception criteria.' He was asked if he knew Clay Shaw. He was asked
if he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. His 'yes' answer to both of these questions
indicated 'deception criteria.'" Did Bundy and Russo fail their
lie-detector tests?
Jim Garrison: No, and NBC's
allegations in this area are about as credible as its other charges.
The men who administered both polygraph tests flatly deny that Russo
and Bundy failed the test. I'll offer right now to make Russo's and
Bundy's polygraph tests accessible to any reputable investigator or
reporter the day Clay Shaw's trial begins; I can't do it before that,
because I'm restrained from releasing material pertaining to Shaw's
guilt or innocence. Just for your information, though, the veracity
of Bundy and Russo has been affirmed not only through polygraph tests
but through hypnosis and the administration of sodium amytal - truth
serum.
I want to make a proposition
to the president of NBC: If this charge is true, then I will resign
as district attorney of New Orleans. If it's untrue, however, then
the president of NBC should resign. Just in case he thinks I'm kidding,
I'm ready to meet with him at any time to select a mutually acceptable
committee to determine once and for all the truth or falsehood of
this charge. In all fairness, however, I must add that the fact Bundy
and Russo passed their polygraph tests is not, in and of itself, irrefutable
proof that they were telling the truth; that's why we administered
the other tests. The lie detector isn't a foolproof technique. A man
well rehearsed and in complete control of himself can master those
reactions that would register on the polygraph as deception criteria
and get away with blatant lies, while someone who is extremely nervous
and anxiety-ridden could tell the truth and have it register as a
lie. Much also depends on who administers the test, since it can easily
be rigged. For example, Jack Ruby took a lie-detector test for the
Warren Commission and told lie after outright lie - even little lies
that could be easily checked --- and yet the Warren Commission concluded
that he passed the test. So the polygraph is only one weapon in the
arsenal we use to verify a witness' testimony, and we have never considered
it conclusive; we have abundant documentation to corroborate their
stories.
Playboy:
Two convicts, Miguel Torres
and John Cancler, told NBC that Vernon Bundy admitted having lied
in his testimony linking Clay Shaw to Lee Oswald. Do you dismiss this
as just another NBC fabrication?
Jim Garrison:
Messrs. Cancler and Torres were both convicted by my office, as were
almost half the men in the state penitentiary, and I'm sure the great
majority of them have little love for the man who sent them up. I
don't know if they fabricated their stories in collusion with NBC
or on their own for motives of revenge, but I'm convinced from what
I know of Vernon Bundy that his testimony was truthful. NBC manipulated
the statements of Cancler and Torres to give the impression to the
viewer that he was watching a trial on television - my trial - and
that these "objective" witnesses were saying exactly what
they would say in a court of law. Actually - and NBC scrupulously
avoided revealing this to its audience - their "testimony"
was not under oath, there was no opportunity for cross-examination
or the presentation of rebuttal witnesses, and the statements of Cancler,
Torres and all the rest of NBC's road company were edited so that
the public would hear only those elements of their story that would
damage our case. The rules of evidence and adversary procedure, I
might add, have been developed over many years precisely to prevent
this kind of phony side show.
Of course, these two convicts
have been used against my office in variety of respects. Miguel Torres
also claims I offered him a full pardon, a vacation in Florida and
an ounce of heroin if he would testify that Clay Shaw had made homosexual
overtures to him on the street. What on earth that would have established
relevant to this case I still don't know, but that's his story. I
think it was actually rather cheap of me to offer Torres only an ounce
of heroin; that wouldn't have lasted out his vacation. A kilo would
be more like it. After all, I'm not stingy. Torres' friend John Cancler,
a burglar, has also charged that one of my investigators tried to
induce him to burglarize Clay Shaw's house and plant false evidence
there, but he refused because he would not have such a heinous sin
on his conscience. I suppose that's why Cancler's prison nickname
is "John the Baptist." I can assure you, if we ever wanted
to burglarize Shaw's home --- which we never did - John the Baptist
would be the last man on earth we'd pick for the job. By the way,
Mr. Cancler was called before the grand jury and asked if he had told
the truth to NBC. He replied; "I refuse to answer on the grounds
that my answer might incriminate me" - and was promptly sentenced
to six months in prison and a $500 fine for contempt of court.
Playboy:
The NBC special also claimed
to have discovered that "Clay, or Clem, Bertrand does exist.
Clem Bertrand is not his real name. It is a pseudonym used by a homosexual
in New Orleans. For his protection, we will not disclose the real
name of the man known as Clem Bertrand. His real name has been given
to the Department of Justice. He is not Clay Shaw." Doesn't this
undermine your entire case against Shaw?
Jim Garrison: Your faith
in NBC's veracity is touching and indicates that the Age of Innocence
is not yet over. NBC does not have the real Clay Bertrand; the man
whose name NBC so melodramatically turned over to the Justice Department
is that of Eugene Davis, a New Orleans bar owner, who has firmly denied
under oath that he has ever used the name Clay, or Clem, Bertrand.
We know from incontrovertible evidence in our possession who the real
Clay Bertrand is - and we will prove it in court.
(3)
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.
(4)
Jim
Garrison, closing
speech at the trial of Clay Shaw (28th February, 1969)
There have been indications since November the 22nd of 1963 - and
that was not the last indication - that there is excessive power in
some parts of our government. It is plain that the people have not
received all of the truth about some of the things which have happened,
about some of the assassinations which have occurred - and more particularly
about the assassination of John Kennedy...
The government's handling
of the investigation of John Kennedy's murder was a fraud. It was
the greatest fraud in the history of our country. It probably was
the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of humankind. That
doesn't mean that we have to accept the continued existence of the
kind of government which allows this to happen. We can do something
about it. We're forced either to leave this country or to accept the
authoritarianism that has developed - the authoritarianism which tells
us that in the year 2029 we can see the evidence about what happened
to John Kennedy.
Government does not consist
only of secret police and domestic espionage operations and generals
and admirals - government consists of people. It also consists of
juries. And cases of murder - whether of the poorest individual or
the most distinguished citizen in the land - should be looked at openly
in a court of law, where juries can pass on them and not be hidden,
not be buried like the body of the victim beneath concrete for countless
years.
You men in these recent
weeks have heard witnesses that no one else in the world has heard.
You've seen the Zapruder film. You've seen what happened to your President.
I suggest to you that you know right now that, in that area at least,
a fraud has been perpetrated.
That does not mean that
our government is entirely bad; and I want to emphasize that. It does
mean, however, that in recent years, through the development of excessive
power because of the Cold War, forces have developed in our government
over which there is no control and these forces have an authoritarian
approach to justice - meaning, they will let you know what justice
is.
Well, my reply to them
is that we already know what justice is. It is the decision of the
people passing on the evidence. It is the jury system. In this issue
which is posed by the government's conduct in concealing the evidence
in this case - in the issue of humanity as opposed to power - I have
chosen humanity, and I will do it again without any hesitation. I
hope every one of you will do the same. I do this because I love my
country and because I want to communicate to the government that we
will not accept unexplained assassinations with the casual information
that if we live seventy-five years longer, we might be given more
evidence.
In this particular case,
massive power was brought to bear to prevent justice from ever coming
into this courtroom. The power to make authoritive pronouncements,
the power to manipulate the news media by the release of false information,
the power to interfere with an honest inquiry and the power to provide
an endless variety of experts to testify in behalf of power, repeatedly
was demonstrated in this case.
The American people have
yet to see the Zapruder film. Why? The American people have yet to
see and hear from the real witnesses to the assassination. Why? Because,
today in America too much emphasis is given to secrecy, with regard
to the assassination of our President, and not enough emphasis is
given to the question of justice and to the question of humanity.
These dignified deceptions
will not suffice. We have had enough of power without truth. We don't
have to accept power without truth or else leave the country. I don't
accept either of these two alternatives. I don't intend to leave the
country and I don't intend to accept power without truth.
I intend to fight for the
truth. I suggest that not only is this not un-American, but it is
the most American thing we can do--because if the truth does not endure,
then our country will not endure.
In our country the worst
of all crimes occurs when the government murders truth. If it can
murder truth, it can murder freedom. If it can murder freedom, it
can murder your own sons - if they should dare to fight for freedom--
and then it can announce that they were killed in an industrial accident,
or shot by the "enemy" or God knows what.
In this case, finally,
it has been possible to bring the truth about the assassination into
a court of law--not before a commission composed of important and
powerful and politically astute men, but before a jury of citizens.
Now, I suggest to you that
yours is a hard duty, because in a sense what you're passing on is
equivalent to a murder case. The difficult thing about passing on
a murder case is that the victim is out of your sight and buried a
long distance away, and all you can see is the defendant. It's very
difficult to identify with someone you can't see, and sometimes it's
hard not to identify to some extent with the defendant and his problems.
In that regard, every prosecutor
who is at all humane is conscious of feeling sorry for the defendant
in every case he prosecutes. But he is not free to forget the victim
who lies buried out of sight. I suggest to you that, if you do your
duty, you also are not free to forget the victim who is buried out
of sight.
You know, Tennyson once
said that, "authority forgets a dying king." This was never
more true than in the murder of John Kennedy. The strange and deceptive
conduct of the government after his murder began while his body was
warm, and has continued for five years. You have seen in this courtroom
indications of the interest of part of the government power structure
in keeping the truth down, in keeping the grave closed.
We presented a number of
eyewitnesses as well as an expert witness as well as the Zapruder
film, to show that the fatal wound of the President came from the
front. A plane landed from Washington and out stepped Dr. Finck for
the defense, to counter the clear and apparent evidence of a shot
from the front. I don't have to go into Dr. Finck's testimony in detail
for you to show that it simply did not correspond with the facts.
He admitted that he did not complete the autopsy because a general
told him not to complete the autopsy.
In this conflict between
power and justice - to put it that way - just where do you think Dr.
Finck stands? A general, who was not a pathologist, told him not to
complete the autopsy, so he didn't complete it. This is not the way
I want my country to be. When our President is killed he deserves
the kind of autopsy that the ordinary citizen gets every day in the
State of Louisiana. And the people deserve the facts about it. We
can't have government power suddenly interjecting itself and preventing
the truth form coming to the people.
Yet in this case, before
the sun rose the next morning, power had moved into the situation
and the truth was being concealed. And now, five years later in this
courtroom the power of the government in concealing the truth is continuing
in the same way.
We presented eyewitnesses
who told you of the shots coming from the grassy knoll. A plane landed
from Washington, and out came ballistics expert Frazier for the defense.
Mr. Frazier's explanation of the sound of the shots coming from the
front, which was heard by eyewitness after eyewitness, was that Lee
Oswald created a sonic boom in his firing. Not only did Oswald break
all of the world's records for marksmanship, but he broke the sound
barrier as well.
I suggest to you, that
if any of you have shot on a firing range - and most of you probably
have in the service--you were shooting rifles in which the bullet
traveled faster than the speed of sound. I ask you to recall if you
ever heard a sonic boom. If you remember when you were on the firing
line, and they would say, "Ready on the left; ready on the right;
ready on the firing line; commence firing," you heard the shots
coming from the firing line - to the left of you and to the right
of you. If you had heard, as a result of Frazier's fictional sonic
boom, firing coming at you from the pits, you would have had a reaction
which you would still remember.
Mr. Frazier's sonic boom
simply doesn't exist. It's part of the fraud - a part of the continuing
government fraud.
The best way to make this
country the kind of country it's supposed to be is to communicate
to the government that no matter how powerful it may be, we do not
accept these frauds. We do not accept these false announcements. We
do not accept the concealment of evidence with regard to the murder
of President Kennedy. Who is the most believable: a Richard Randolph
Carr, seated here in a wheelchair and telling you what he saw and
what he heard and how he was told to shut his mouth - or Mr. Frazier
with his sonic booms? Do we really have to reject Mr. Newman and Mrs.
Newman and Mr. Carr and Roger Craig and the testimony of all those
honest witnesses--reject all this and accept the fraudulent Warren
Commission, or else leave the country?
I suggest to you that there
are other alternatives. One of them has been put in practice in the
last month in the State of Louisiana--and that is to bring out the
truth in a proceeding where attorneys can cross-examine, where the
defendant can be confronted by testimony against him, where the rules
of evidence are applied and where a jury of citizens can pass on it--and
where there is no government secrecy. Above all, where you do not
have evidence concealed for seventy-five years in the name of "national
security."
All we have in this case
are the facts - facts which show that the defendant participated in
the conspiracy to kill the President and that the President was subsequently
killed in an ambush.
The reply of the defense
has been the same as the early reply of the government in the Warren
Commission. It has been authority, authority, authority. The President's
seal outside of each volume of the Warren Commission Report--made
necessary because there is nothing inside these volumes, only men
of high position and prestige sitting on a Board, and announcing the
results to you, but not telling you what the evidence is, because
the evidence has to be hidden for seventy-five years.
You heard in this courtroom
in recent weeks, eyewitness after eyewitness after eyewitness and,
above all, you saw one eyewitness which was indifferent to power -
the Zapruder film. The lens of the camera is totally indifferent to
power and it tells what happened as it saw it happen - and that is
one of the reasons 200 million Americans have not seen the Zapruder
film. They should have seen it many times. They should know exactly
what happened. They all should know what you know now. Why hasn't
all of this come into being if there hasn't been government fraud?
Of course there has been fraud by the government.
But I'm telling you now
that I think we can do something about it. I think that there are
still enough Americans left in this country to make it continue to
be America. I think that we can still fight authoritarianism--the
government's insistence on secrecy, government force used in counterattacks
against an honest inquiry--and when we do that, we're not being un-American,
we're being American. It isn't easy. You're sticking your neck out
in a rather permanent way, but it has to be done because truth does
not come into being automatically. Individual men, like the members
of my staff here, have to work and fight to make it happen - and individual
men like you have to make justice come into being because otherwise
is doesn't happen.
What I'm trying to tell
you is that there are forces in America today, unfortunately, which
are not in favor of the truth coming out about John Kennedy's assassination.
As long as our government continues to be like this, as long as such
forces can get away with such actions, then this is no longer the
country in which we were born.
The murder of John Kennedy
was probably the most terrible moment in the history of our country.
Yet, circumstances have placed you in the position where not only
have you seen the hidden evidence but you are actually going to have
the opportunity to bring justice into the picture for the first time.
Now, you are here sitting
in judgment on Clay Shaw. Yet you, as men, represent more than jurors
in an ordinary case because of the victim in this case. You represent,
in a sense, the hope of humanity against government power. You represent
humanity, which yet may triumph over excessive government power -
if you will cause it to be so, in the course of doing your duty in
this case.
I suggest that you ask
not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your
country.
What can you do for your
country? You can cause justice to happen for the first time in this
matter. You can help make our country better by showing that this
is still a government of the people. And if you do that, as long as
you live, nothing will ever be more important.
(5)
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."
(6)
Robin
Ramsay, Who Shot JFK
(2002)
Shaw was a director
of the World Trade Centre in New Orleans and was brought into a similar
project in Italy involving a company called Permindex (Permanent Industrial
Exhibitions), which proposed to create a network of World Trade Centres:
propagandising for American business. Around these bare facts was
created a story in which all these companies were CIA fronts for covert
operations and assassinations. Permindex had been involved in trying
to assassinate General de Gaulle and then had killed JFK. This story
was planted on a Soviet-sympathising Italian newspaper; was then picked
up by a left-wing magazine in New York and a magazine in Canada; and
thence made its way to the Garrison investigation. And Garrison believed
it without checking it. His 1988 book. On The Trail Of The Assassins,
carries a couple of pages on Permindex in which he quotes only the
Canadian and Italian versions of the story. Parts of this Permindex
story - itself disinformation - were then picked up and used to form
the centrepiece of the most famous and most durable piece of disinformation
generated by the case, the Nomenclature Of An Assassination Cabal
by 'William Torbitt,' better known as the Torbitt Memorandum. 'Torbitt'
took Garrison's inquiry into the ClA's links to the assassination
and converted them into a story about the FBI's responsibility for
the assassination. (This, in my view, tells us that the author/s of
Torbitt were working for the CIA, trying to diminish the 'Garrison
effect.') At the beginning of the first chapter 'Torbitt' tells us
that the assassination was the work of the FBI and the Defense Intelligence
Agency, who jointly ran 'the Control Group.' These two agencies ran
another really secret agency, the Defense Industrial Security Command
(DISC). Clay Shaw, David Ferrie et al., previously identified as CIA,
were in fact DISC. Because it was 'underground' and - because it was
full of interesting and authentic-sounding bits and pieces, Torbitt
was 'sexy.' However, as soon as I began trying to check the few citations
in it, they proved to be useless: either they didn't exist, were impossible
to get or, when tracked down, didn't say what Torbitt' said they did.
But Torbitt lives on. Like all good conspiracy theories, it is immune
to refutation.
(7) Robert D. Morrow, First Hand Knowledge (1992)
It is known that Ferrie suffered from hypertension. A physician: friend confirmed to Garrison that if someone suffering from hypertension took a whole bottle of this specific drug, it would cause death very quickly. Garrison later wrote: "I phoned immediately but was told that no blood samples or spinal fluid from Ferrie's autopsy had been retained. I was left with an empty bottle and al number of unanswered questions."
Eladio del Valle was also killed the same day in Miami. For three days Garrison's men had been looking for him. He was eventually found. He had been tortured, bludgeoned, shot, and left in his car in a parking lot. Because Guy Banister had succumbed to a heart attack in 1964, that left only one person to indict, Clay Shaw. Shaw would be the most difficult of the New Orleans group to convict. He was receiving help from CIA Director, Richard Helms.
Damning proof of Helms's concern about Shaw surfaced in 1975. It was in an interview of a former, high ranking CIA staff officer, Victor Marchetti. Marchetti disclosed in True magazine: "I, was then told, 'Well... Shaw, a long time ago, had been a contact of the Agency.... He was in the export-import business ... he knew people coming and going from certain areas-the Domestic Contact Service' -he used to deal with them ... and it's been cut off a long time ago'. .. and then I was told, `well of course the Agency doesn't want this to come out now because Garrision will distort it, the public would misconstrue it.'"
In the interview, Marchetti added: "At that time or shortly thereafter this guy Ferrie came up ... and I was given a similar kind of explanation, that he's been involved in the Bay of Pigs and been a contract agent or contact at the time."
After a disastrous trial, Shaw received a verdict of not guilty within hours of the judge's instructions to the jury.
The events surrounding Shaw's death were, according to Garrison,' also mysterious. On August 14, 1974, a neighbor saw some men carrying a body on a stretcher in the front door of Shaw's carriage house. The entire body, including the head, was covered with a sheet. The neighbor, finding this unusual, called the coroner's office, which promptly sent its investigators to Shaw's residence. By the time they arrived, the place was empty. After a day of inquiry, the Orleans Parish coroner's investigators learned Shaw had just been buried in Kentwood, in Tangipahoa Parish where he was born.
The New Orleans coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, concerned about the circumstances and the speed of the burial, decided to exhume Shaw's body so that he could assure himself that Shaw had not died a victim of foul play. Before he could obtain the court order, however, word of the proposed exhumation reached the media. This caused the .local New Orleans papers to publish scathing editorials protesting the callous desecration of Shaw's remains. With the heated publicity, the coroner reconsidered. There was no exhumation."
Although I was concerned about Garrison's investigation and the deaths of Clay Shaw and Dave Ferrie, I was particularly worried by Helms's admission that Shaw had worked as a contract man for Tracy Barnes's Domestic Contact Division (known facetiously as the Domestic Dirty Tricks Operation Division).
In a 1979 trial, Helms was asked if he knew Clay Shaw. He responded, under oath: " The only recollection I have of Clay Shaw and the Agency is that I believe that at one time as a businessman he was one of the part-time contacts of the Domestic Contact Division (Tracy Barnes's operation), the people that talked to businessmen, professors, and so forth, and who traveled in and out of the country."
In a subsequent trial, in 1984, this answer was repeated to Helms, and he was asked, "Do you recall making that statement under oath on May 17, 1979?" He responded, "If it says here I did make it under oath, I guess I did." " Helms also conceded then that he had publicly this fact when he was the Director of the Agency.
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