The D.A. Wins a Round

Even in the somber setting of a courtroom, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's spectacular investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was barely distinguishable from a circus sideshow. In a hearing to determine whether retired Businessman Clay Shaw, 54, should be tried on charges of conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald and others to murder the late President, "Big Jim" produced only two prosecution witnesses. One was a confessed heroin addict. The other was a young insurance salesman whose impeccable clothing concealed a mind in considerable disarray and whose memory had to be jogged by means of hypnosis. Yet their testimony was enough, in the view of a three-judge panel in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, to establish "probable cause" and require Shaw to stand trial.

Triangulation of Crossfire. Garrison's star performer was Baton Rouge Insurance Salesman Perry Raymond Russo, 25, who seemed a perfect witness for the prosecution--until the defense began questioning him. Russo said that in September 1963 he heard a plot to kill Kennedy revealed during a late-night party at the New Orleans apartment of David Ferric, the ex-airline pilot who died last month. Also present were two men whom Russo knew as "Clem Bertrand" and "Leon Oswald."

Russo said he had seen Oswald, who was "half-shaven and dirty," once before in Feme's apartment--cleaning a rifle. Like the rifle found in the Texas Book Depository, the weapon had a bolt action and a telescopic lens.

During the 1963 party, Russo testified, Ferrie paced up and down, throwing out ideas about "triangulation of crossfire," the need for more than one gunman in the assassination attempt, and the probability that "one of those there on the scene would be a kind of scapegoat--one had to be sacrificed." Discussing escape routes, Ferrie suggested flying to Brazil with a refueling stopover in Mexico, or directly to Cuba. Played in court later was a television interview that Russo gave to a Baton Rouge station last month in which he quoted Ferrie as saying, only a month before the assassination: "We will get him, and it won't be very long."

Garrison turned to the subject of "Clem Bertrand." In a brief note in the Warren Commission exhibits, a "Clay Bertrand" was named as the man who phoned an attorney on the day after the assassination and asked him to defend Oswald. Was Bertrand in the court room? Garrison asked Russo. Without a word, the witness strode melodramatically to Clay Shaw and held his right hand above Shaw's head. Shaw did not look up.

Lakeside Fix. Clear as Russo's memory was for the prosecution, it clouded under defense crossexamination. Shaw's lawyers established that Russo had once been under psychiatric care for 18 months, that he had been hypnotized three times by the prosecution physician and that he had been injected with sodium pentothal, the "truth serum," to help him "remember" details. With the defense hammering away, he was unable to recall exactly when or where he met Ferrie, how and when he had arrived at Ferrie's apartment the night he heard of the "plot," how he had traveled home afterward. Shaw's law yers also noted that Russo said in the TV interview only last month that he did not know a Lee Harvey Oswald. Why had he changed his story? Simple. The "Leon" Oswald he met had a fouror five-day stubble. He had not connected "Leon" with "Lee Harvey" Oswald, he said, until the D.A.'s office spent several hours drawing whiskers on photographs of Oswald. "We tried beard after beard," Russo said.

Equally puzzling was why Russo had not come forward with his story until last month. "I have never pushed myself on anybody," he explained. Besides, he added loftily, he had heard that "every screwball in the street" was talking to the Warren Commission and he did not want to be a part of such company.

Garrison's second witness, Junkie Vernon Bundy, said that he had seen Shaw and Oswald talking together in the summer of 1963 near Lake Pontchartrain, where he had gone to give himself a fix. He identified Oswald from photographs, picked Shaw out in the courtroom.

In persuading the judges to bind Shaw over for a formal trial, Garrison won Round 1 in his effort to prove that he has "solved" the assassination. But the D.A. will have to produce more than he has so far to obtain a conviction, and he has yet to introduce any evidence to show that Shaw, Ferrie or anyone else helped out when Lee Harvey Oswald squeezed off his murderous shots in Dallas.

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