False Witness (6 page)

Two of Martin's first targets were the New Orleans Police Department and television station WWL-TV.
⁸
As Martin's stories about Ferrie ricocheted like a hockey puck around the New Orleans telephone system, several of those he spoke to reacted by calling the local office of the Secret Service.
^‡
One misdirected telephone call Martin made resulted in three separate individuals contacting that agency. Special Agent-in-Charge John Rice responded by driving to Ferrie's home that same evening, hoping to interview him. He crossed paths there with a representative of television station WDSU, who had learned of Martin's charges secondhand. Jack Martin's humming telephone line turned David Ferrie's doorstep at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway into the busiest spot in New Orleans. But Martin wasn't satisfied. His main objective, the police department, refused to take him seriously.

So he telephoned one of Jim Garrison's assistant district attorneys. Martin didn't go directly to the top because Garrison, like the police, was acquainted with him.
⁹
Instead, he called Herman Kohlman, a cunning choice, for Kohlman had once worked as a newspaper reporter and written some articles about Ferrie; so Kohlman knew more about Ferrie than most, and less about Martin than some. Kohlman passed on Martin's information to First Asst. D.A. Klein, who called Jim Garrison.
¹⁰
This was when Garrison first heard of David Ferrie's alleged connection to the assassination. Garrison ordered the police to join the hunt. Martin finally had accomplished his goal. Ten officers were soon “scouring” the streets for David Ferrie.
¹¹
He was the most wanted man in New Orleans. The media, the FBI, the Secret Service, the district attorney's office, and the police were all beating the bushes, looking for him.

Unaware of his notoriety, Ferrie was on a vacation with two friends. They had gone to Texas, but to Houston not Dallas, and then on to Galveston, traveling by car. And the timing of their trip had nothing to do with the assassination in Dallas. Ferrie had been assisting Attorney G. Wray Gill in his defense of New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello on immigration charges. On the day the president was shot, the jury returned a verdict in favor of Marcello, which meant Ferrie (who was sitting in the New Orleans federal courtroom at the time)
¹²
was free for awhile. His work on the case had been intensive and he had planned that as soon as it concluded “he would take a trip for the purpose of relaxing” with his friends. Their original plan was to go ice skating in Baton Rouge, but when they learned the rink there was closed they switched to Houston.
¹³
This remarkably mundane journey will later assume near-mythic dimensions.

The trip began with a telephone call about six hours after the assassination. Ferrie spoke to the manager of Houston's Winterland Skating Rink and obtained its schedule. Then he, Alvin Beaubouef and Melvin Coffey set out in Ferrie's blue '61 Comet station wagon. They arrived in Houston Saturday around 4:30
A.M
. This was sixteen hours after Kennedy had been shot. They slept a few hours at the Alamotel, shopped at Sears for warm clothes, then showed up that afternoon at the skating rink. Ferrie skated for a while, “looking the situation over.” But he wasn't enthusiastic and went onto the ice only briefly to show Beaubouef “he could do it.” Ferrie
was considering the “possibility of opening a rink in New Orleans,” and discussed “the cost of installation and operation” with the manager. The trio stayed about two hours. Back at their motel, Ferrie tried twice to reach attorney Gill to find out if he was needed for a trial scheduled to begin the following Monday. Ferrie failed to reach him.
¹⁴

That night, after a stop at the Manned Space Craft Center, the three drove to Galveston. This was the same evening Jack Martin launched his telephoning enterprise. By the time Ferrie and his friends arrived at their motel, Martin had already placed the first of his calls. Ferrie fell asleep that night unaware that television newsmen and an agent of the Secret Service were hammering on his apartment door in New Orleans.

Intending to visit relatives of Beaubouef, they drove north the next day. Ferrie again tried unsuccessfully to reach Gill. Then he telephoned his own apartment and temporary house guest Layton Martens answered.
*
It was from Martens that Ferrie first learned he was being accused “of being implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy.” “Very much disturbed,” Ferrie turned his station wagon south and headed home. He had learned what was being said about him, but he didn't know the source of the accusations, nor the extent of them. At another telephone at another service station along the way, he at last managed to reach attorney Gill and discovered the initiator was Jack Martin. It was early Sunday evening.
¹⁵

When they arrived in New Orleans, Ferrie drove to the vicinity of his apartment and dropped Alvin Beaubouef off so he “could check to see if anyone was waiting”—to act, as Beaubouef described it, as “a decoy,” though he wasn't expecting what occurred. Ferrie and Coffey then drove to a nearby grocery store. When they returned, they saw a “bunch” of cars and “a lot of people.” Figuring it was the police, Ferrie telephoned his apartment. “Some dumb ox,” he later said, answered and tried “to sucker” him into a conversation. Ferrie hung up.
¹⁶

It
was
the police. Five of them had arrived after Beaubouef entered. They “burst through the door,” Beaubouef said recently, with warrants, looking for Ferrie. Beaubouef told them he didn't know where Ferrie
was and they arrested him. They arrested Layton Martens as well and charged him with “vagrancy, under investigation of subversive activities.” They also confiscated a batch of embarrassing photographs. (Three years later these pictures would reappear in one of the minidramas in Jim Garrison's investigation.)
¹⁷

The police staked out the apartment and waited for Ferrie to show up. But after dropping Coffey off, he headed north again, at Gill's suggestion, and spent the night with a friend at Southeastern Louisiana College in Hammond. The following day, he returned to New Orleans and, accompanied by Gill, surrendered at the district attorney's office. Ferrie was questioned by a police officer and two of Garrison's aides. Then he was booked, oddly, with “vagrancy, pending investigation of being a fugitive from the State of Texas.” How he could have been a fugitive from a state where no charge was filed against him is unclear.
¹⁸

That evening Ferrie was interviewed by agents of the Secret Service and FBI. Ferrie acknowledged that he had criticized President Kennedy “both in public and in private” over his failure to provide “air cover” during the Bay of Pigs invasion and may have used the expression “he ought to be shot.” But he said he had “never made any statement that President Kennedy should be killed with the intention that this be done” and had “never at any time outlined or formulated any plans or made any statement as to how this could be done or who should do it.” To everyone who questioned him that day and into the evening, and on November 27, and still again on December 13, David Ferrie rejected all the charges Martin had made against him. Among others, Ferrie emphatically denied being in Dallas in the last eight to ten years, or knowing Lee Harvey Oswald in the CAP
*
or any capacity. He also denied ever loaning Oswald his library card. Or being implicated in the assassination of President
Kennedy in any manner. Ferrie said his four-passenger monoplane hadn't been airworthy since 1962 (which was later confirmed by the FBI) and that he hadn't flown it to Dallas since 1949.
¹⁹

The FBI, as well as the New Orleans police, quickly verified Ferrie's movements that weekend. They checked registers, interviewed motel clerks and the manager of the skating rink,
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and they obtained a record of the telephone numbers Ferrie called from Houston. At the request of Garrison's office, the Texas Rangers investigated Ferrie's trip as well and “were unable to implicate” him in the assassination. The Houston police also corroborated Ferrie's visit to their city and to Galveston the following day. The New Orleans police reported that they were “unable to uncover any evidence which would link Ferrie to the assassination.” There was no reason to hold Ferrie and he and his friends were released.

The instigator of all this chaos, Jack Martin, recanted his tales about Ferrie to the FBI and two days later made an even more sweeping disavowal to the Secret Service. Martin, who the Secret Service agents noted in their report had “every appearance of being an alcoholic,” admitted suffering from “telephonitis” when he drank. He said “that it was during one of his drinking sprees” that he telephoned the D.A.'s office and told his “fantastic story” about Ferrie being involved with Oswald. Yet even in this confession Martin didn't tell the truth. He reduced his manic exercise with the telephone to a single ill-advised call.
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It is often reported that Ferrie was linked to the assassination that weekend by
various
reports, the sheer number lending credibility to the charges. What few seem to realize is that all of them originated from a single source, Jack Martin's red hot telephone line.

The missing element was his motivation.
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That was rooted in something personal. The most likely possibility is that Martin's pistol whipping by Banister Friday night was unwittingly triggered by Ferrie. Ferrie told the FBI he had discovered that Martin, when “moving around” the United States, was making long-distance telephone calls and charging them to Gill's and Banister's offices. Ferrie probably passed that information to Banister, prompting the quarrel that escalated into the beating. So when Martin was sitting at home nursing his cranial “lacerations” and speculating about Ferrie's crimes, the crime
Martin had in mind wasn't the assassination in Dallas. It was closer to home, right there on his head in fact. And the word for what motivated Martin that weekend, as he strove to link David Ferrie to the president's murder, was
revenge
.
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Jack Martin—who always wore a black hat and a black trench coat, apparently to enhance his “private eye” image—was clearly a world-class troublemaker. Many in New Orleans recall his excessive drinking and “big talk.” But few knew the truth about him. Martin was born in 1915 in Phoenix, Arizona. His real name was Edward Stewart Suggs. An FBI rap sheet on Suggs lists a string of arrests and charges dating from 1944, the most serious being a 1952 murder charge in Dallas, Texas, which somehow was cleared up the following year. The subject of Martin's psychological health is a recurring theme in his government records. “Several sources have reported Martin is a mental case,” reads an Informative Note in his FBI file. He was confined to a mental hospital in 1956 and diagnosed as having a “sociopathic personality disturbance, antisocial type.” Given Martin's prominent role in Jim Garrison's later investigation, whether or not he belonged in a rubber room is no minor issue.
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Martin was not just ornery, irresponsible, and vengeful. He was exploitative, malicious and cunning, and he knew how to work the system.
²⁴

His relationship with David Ferrie had been a troubled one since they met in the fall of 1961. Ferrie had assisted Martin in an investigation of ecclesiastical certificate frauds in the so-called diploma mills. Ferrie claimed that Martin had defrauded him of one of his fees and that Martin, himself, “was dealing in phony certificates.” Martin, Ferrie told the FBI, was an “unethical and dangerous person.”
²⁵

The short-term upshot of all that tumult in 1963 was negligible. Ferrie was cleared and Martin humiliated. That should have been the end of it. Of course, it wasn't. For this episode was now lodged in Jim Garrison's memory bank.

Jack Martin drew Garrison into his conniving almost immediately. But Dean Andrews's scheming, which eventually would spark Garrison's interest in Clay Shaw, escaped Garrison's attention that weekend.

At the time of the assassination, the five-foot-seven-inch, 240-pound Andrews, a colorful small-time lawyer with a deep thirst for the limelight, was in a New Orleans hospital being treated for pneumonia. He had been there three days, would remain seven more, and was seriously ill. He was so feverish and heavily medicated that later he was unable to recall much of what had taken place that weekend. But his condition failed to dampen his passion for talking, which he did in an idiom all his own. Unfortunately, his room was equipped with a telephone and a television. The absence of either would have altered the history of this case. The television brought the assassination and related information into Andrews's realm of consciousness. The telephone enabled him to exploit it.