Jim Garrison and the trial of Clay Shaw

On 1 March 1967 Garrison arrested Clay Shaw, a well-known New Orleans businessman, and charged him with conspiring to kill President Kennedy. Two years later a jury acquitted him. [1]

The core of the case was Perry Russo, a young man who knew Ferrie. At trial in February 1969 he testified that at a gathering in Ferrie’s apartment in September 1963 he was introduced to a man named “Clem Bertrand,” whom he identified as Shaw, and to Ferrie’s roommate, “Leon Oswald.” He described Ferrie talking about a crossfire, a diversionary shot and a scapegoat. [2]

Under cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Andrew Sciambra agreed that he had interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on 25 February 1967 and written a detailed seven-page memo, and that the memo did not mention the conspiracy meeting. Sciambra said the meeting was covered in a second memo, written about a session in which Russo was given sodium pentothal. [3]

The House committee said it was aware that Garrison “had been fairly criticized for questionable tactics” and checked his material on its own. It found that six witnesses in Clinton, Louisiana, among them a state representative, a deputy sheriff and a registrar of voters, were “credible and significant.” Some said Oswald came with two older men they identified as Ferrie and Shaw. [1]

The committee concluded that it was “inclined to believe that Oswald was in Clinton, La., in late August, early September 1963, and that he was in the company of David Ferrie, if not Clay Shaw.” It also found “at least a possibility” that Oswald and Guy Banister, a former FBI agent running a detective agency at 531 Lafayette Street, knew each other. The building’s other entrance was 544 Camp Street, the address Oswald stamped on his leaflets. [1][3]

Ferrie, an anti-Castro activist and pilot, also did investigative work for a lawyer representing Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans mob boss. He denied knowing Oswald. Allegations that the two met when Oswald was a Civil Air Patrol cadet in 1954–55 were investigated by the committee. [2]

Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK starred Kevin Costner as Garrison and ended by saying millions of pages of records were still secret. The National Security Archive describes the 1992 JFK Records Act as passed “in the wake of a public uproar” over the film. The Review Board’s report says Congress was “disturbed by the conclusions of Oliver Stone’s JFK.” [1][2]

The Review Board later secured Garrison’s investigative records, Shaw’s diaries, Shaw’s defense files and the grand jury records for the public collection. [2]