www.mattkprovideo.com/2021/10/01/fred-litwin/

A conversation with lifelong JFK conspiracy buff and author Fred Litwin.

http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/

http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/blank-page-5

I am going to use this as part of my forthcoming documentary debunking (most) JFK conspiracy theories.

This is all uncut, and after the first minute, I didn’t even attempt to have the video match with what we’re talking about.

A rough YouTube transcript of our conversations with many grammatical and transcribing errors:

All right Fred, and testing one two three one two three testing

Can I interview you for my documentary?

Absolutely

All right tell me about becoming a jfk buff what led to it
I was basically 18 years old i’m sitting at home on a thursday night watching Geraldo Rivera

and he shows the Zapruder film for the first time on national tv a

And i had never seen it never heard of it and just blew my mind and after i saw it i realized i wanted to learn more
But more about why did the warren commission not find that evidence compelling why did they say that JFK was hit from behind
As i wanted to find the answers so i immediately went to the library and the first book i got out was mark lane’s rush to judgment
and that started me on the path led to Cyrill Wecht

and the doctors and the autopsy x-rays and photos a

nd i was hooked

how old were you when when this started?

i’m 18 years old 18

okay and what what led you from thinking it was a conspiracy to thinking it wasn’t

i
I was uh sort of lucky in that i was in montreal canada and one of my best friends basically said

look you know if there was a conspiracy it had to be a really small one

it couldn’t be huge

so i never believed in a really big conspiracy
I went to mba school in 1978 and i decided i really wanted to focus on my studies so i literally put the jfk assassination to the side

i didn’t go back to it u until the 1980s many many years later and and then by then i was starting to rethink some of my positions

Largely based on the house select committee on assassinations

and i had gotten a cd-rom of all their volumes of evidence and i started reading it and it blew my mind

All the scientific testing they did and every single scientific test they did supported the lone gunman and uh i it changed me all

Right now what led you to do your book on Garrison oh also if you could answer in a form of a complete sentence as if i didn’t ask it.

I decided to do a book on Garrison after my first book because people said oh you know what you don’t really know garrison that well you didn’t go through garrison’s papers you’re relying on a lot of secondary authors and so you know you really don’t know the story
And so i decided to look into this and just at the same time somebody email emailed me a link to all the garrison papers they are all online so i said you know what i might as well have a look
And i started looking at these papers and i started noticing crazy memo after crazy memo after crazy memo and after i started accumulating like 20 or 30 of these crazy memos
i started saying you know what maybe there’s a book here because this guy was crazier than i really thought and that was the the genesis
Now the people of my generation it’s funny jim garrison’s name doesn’t come up in other people’s conspiracy books
no his other conspiracy books show up in his but they don’t talk about him and to my generation you’re gonna choke on this but you know where i’m going with this , jim garrison is kevin costner , uh moby dick standing up against the white whale of the federal government and he was on the to the truth but they had infiltrated him with spies and and betrayers and and in the end he was telling the truth and
Look, Jim Garrison was on the way to nowhere um he he bombed out with his case against clay shaw he was living in obscurity he wrote a book in 1991 it really didn’t do all that well nobody was really paying attention to him and he got resuscitated by Oliver Stone and so oliver stone made him the centerpiece of his movie JFK and that brought Garrison back to life he was back from the dead and with a vengeance and all of a sudden his book started selling like crazy and he made a lot of money and unfortunately for him he died a year later

well tell me what is wrong with the public perception of jim garrison

Well i think the public perception again is largely based on the movie for those who even think about him it’s largely based on the movie and this heroic figure who has stood against the government and stood up for the truth and and was this this this crusader um who uh was really really phenomenal and the truth was that he was a charlatan who really uh investigated the jfk assassination not only came up with nothing he had to invent a conspiracy out of thin air and the process ruined the life of an innocent gay man

all right all right let’s talk about that it uh as if um we’ve talked about this online a lot let’s pretend like we never talked about it before
um from the beginning what why how did this dallas conspiracy in in his mind somehow start in new orleans well he he realized that he was involved in two leads back in 1963 because Lee Harvey Oswald lived in New Orleans for five months in the spring and summer of 1963
and there were two leads that garrison was involved with back in 1963 investigating them the first lead was about david ferry who was a a pilot who had basically taken a trip to houston on the weekend of the assassination and there was a drunk in new orleans who called up garrison’s office and said this guy ferry is involved uh he knew lee harvey oswald they served together in the civil air patrol um
He’s involved that was one lead was that Jack Martin jack martin was the one who called garrison’s office he called everybody in fact okay and the second lead was related to dean andrews who was this attorney who was in the hospital the weekend of the assassination and claimed that a man by the name of clay bertrand phoned him in the hospital and said would you go to dallas and represent Lee Harvey Oswald and so those were the two leads that garrison was involved in investigating back in 1963
and so when the assassination was a big controversy in 1966 garrison said well you know what maybe i should go back and reinvestigate those two new orleans leads
maybe there’s something there
maybe that was the genesis of the ultimate conspiracy and how how did he go get uh
and we talked about i’m going to cut this out but because i wanted to say this as short as possible but um

the problem with logic is why would somebody in new orleans call up a municipal lawyer who’s not licensed in Texas and had no experience in murder trials tell if you can talk about that
well you know this this whole i mean dean andrews was the kind of guy who liked to embellish stories and he had a big mouth and liked to talk and in fact he was when he got the so-called phone call to represent Lee Harvey Oswald he was under heavy sedation in a hospital in new orleans being treated for double pneumonia so even he after a few days of being questioned said you know what maybe i made this up maybe this really didn’t happen
Nobody else knows about this probably was a figment of my imagination but what really surprised garrison i think is when dean dean andrews testified before the warren commission that year in 64 and told the same story again
he resuscitated the story and i think that’s what surprised uh garrison why did he do that why did he say tell that story under oath can he just say i made it up or i don’t remember i don’t know well he could have i think he uh decided he had to be the center of attention and i think that he got caught up like he did before with being uh sort of a star who knew something
it’s kind of boring when you say i don’t know anything it’s much more interesting when you say i do know something and i think he went with it not realizing there would be real life consequences both for him in later life because he was charged with perjury by garrison but also he never expected that clay shaw’s life would be ruined
how do you go from clay bertrand to clay shaw well
it’s a good question how do you go from clay bertrand to clay shaw so garrison was convinced that clay bertrand was real who was he and he sort of uh with the help of some of his assistant da’s put together the concept that um clay bertrand was clay shaw because clay shaw also spoke spanish clay bertrand spoke spanish
clay shaw was gay as was clay bertrand and they shared the same first name and so to garrison this made sense that he had this unique belief that gay people when they use pseudonym keep the same first name change the second name um and so it made sense that clay shaw must be clay bertrand
where would he get that idea from that did gays use pseudonyms they used
That’s a good question where did he get it from maybe he got it from his own experience in gay bars
i don’t know uh but he certainly uh that was i mean he picked up his d.a or is that like do you think that was a thing in the 60s that gay man would closeted would use fake names i think there was uh probably some use of pseudonyms but i think a lot of gay people just go by one name
yeah okay i’m my mal or i’m bill or whatever you know there’s no real actually no need for a second name but uh because you go to gay bar and bill just go home with the guy i mean it’s pretty common right
so it doesn’t it doesn’t make any sense that anybody would hire dean andrews to be no i mean he wasn’t that kind of lawyer but also by going back to Clay Shaw
i mean Clay Shaw was really uh everybody knew him in new orleans he was on tv often he was in newspapers a lot he stood he was six feet four um with his magnificent white hair
He was very very well known it really would have been tough for him to use a pseudonym uh from people not know who he was okay but we know you’ve got the fallacy of him saying that this was uh glacial clay bertrand now and you’ve they made the connection
Was it the pamphlet the 544 camp street that made him think there was a connection to uh somebody who was under the same roof but not really the same office uh banister
Well that was all you know that was all related yes banister there was the guy banister connection uh which was part of the david ferry link right so david ferry did some work for guy bannister so that was a whole what did it work what did he do some investigative work for uh uh well no actually he was involved more involved with guy bannister with the anti-castro cuban cause in the early 60s like 60 to 61.
But you had these two different story lines which was the david ferry and guy bannister connection and then you also had this sort of bertrand stuff with Dean Andrews and what dean what jim garrison did was he melded the two together into one story and that was sort of a genius move on his part to meld it all together into one story and he did that through perry russo through the use of hypnosis and sodium pentathol and he melted the two stories together
All right tell the folks about 544 camp street which was one roof with many rooms
But that most people don’t know well it was a building on camp and lafayette so there was a building there and it had two entrances one on camp street and one on lafayette and so guy bannister had an office in the building and and sergio arcata smith who ran a cuban organization he had an office in the same building but they used different entrances because they went to different parts of the building and so oswald not on the pamphlets he handed out but one of his fair play for cuba pamphlets about the organization he stamped on it with a hand stamp the 544 camp street address on a few of them and so the question was why did he pick that was he there did he know guy bannister did he know sergio arcacha smith how was he connected and that that was a big thing that tied oswald into this whole thing uh jim moore he said on the radio interview that bannister and clay shaw would have gotten along with oil and water they would not have gotten along on any level would you do any research on that well bennett the problem with banister is banister normally was anti-communist and hated castro but he was a segregationist he was very very anti-civil rights and that’s not that’s not who clay shaw was clay shaw was very very much for civil rights and that’s why i have a hard time believing that lee harvey oswald was secretly working with guy bannister i mean i just can’t see how the two of them would have would ever see eye to eye on things like civil rights all right now what did he what what material did he have okay let’s start with the grand jury in new orleans because i’ve read that it to me you know to an outsider it seems like well you can’t get a grand jury indictment unless you’ve really got some solid evidence but i’ve heard that in new orleans under garrison it was he had it rigged that he could pretty much convict you of being donald duck well first off he had the power in new orleans to indict anybody on his own didn’t need the grand jury for a non-capital crime garrison could just sign a piece of paper and you were indicted so he didn’t have to go to the grand jury he could go to the grand jury as an option but he didn’t have to in the case of clay shaw he did three things he filed a bill of information which is his own indictment he went to the grand jury for an indictment and he went to a preliminary hearing to get an indictment from the judges and he did i think all three to cover his ass so that he could say later on you see i had all this evidence everybody else agreed with me i think that’s why he did it did we talk this morning we could retell that story about the uh the alias card the the arrest card well in the trial all of a sudden the the garrison wanted to bring up the fact that when clay shaw was booked at the police station after his arrest that on the arrest form it asks you they asked him what alias he was known as and on the form on one of the copies that says clay bertrand and so the policeman testified that yes that was what what clay shaw said he said his alias was clay bertrand and that’s why i typed it out but on there were many copies of that form and it was only on one copy of the form and it was there were actually witnesses there was another policeman there who actually testified at the trial and said he faishah was not asked the question and he did not say that and so the judge even the judge haggerty who was quite biased in the case ruled against the admissibility of the arrest card

now in both his book and the movie you get the impression that he had a rock solid case and he was being undermined by the cia and they corrupted some of his people and that the um bill of broussard uh sent in like fake or crazy witnesses or extremely unreliable witnesses to undermine garrison what do you say to that well it’s patently untrue i mean garrison really undermined his own investigation by using dodgy witnesses in the trial i mean he could only blame himself charles spicell who is the big witness that really undermined the case uh was interviewed by james alcock who was the second in command and spicell said on the stand in the trial i told garrison about my you know but the things i believed he was the guy who was fingerprinting his own daughter right every time she went to university and came home um so they should have known that and they didn’t and uh yeah it’s easy to blame the cia but in fact it was their own their own malfeasance all right um

um

i think we you did a blog or something about uh even if he was going around gay bars calling himself Clay Bertrand
plot well this is it he was in this he was supposedly in this top secret assassination plot in 1963 and then he can he continues to use the same pseudonym it doesn’t make sense to to keep the same pseudonym year after year after year after you’ve just plotted to kill the president of the united states
but that was what they were alleging and if they were a part of some super secret plot to kill the president why would they talk about it in front of strangers at a party well
exactly they talked about it in front of him they talked about this so-called conspiracy in front of perry russo and not only did they talk about it but then kennedy is killed and perry russo doesn’t even ask david ferry hey what was going on there you talked about this kennedy was killed
russo doesn’t go to the warren commission
he doesn’t go to the fbi he said he was too busy at school um so you just belie’s belief that this guy actually heard anything like that and then you know did nothing
tell us about the James Phelan story that perry russo originally said i knew david’s very
maybe i could help you and then that story changes well the whole story about perry russo started when david ferry died and was in the papers and perry russo was living in baton rouge
He was an insurance agent and he saw the newspapers and he knew david ferry
and so he called the local baton rouge newspapers he called the baton rouge tv station
said hey i knew perry i knew david ferry and david ferry always talked about getting kennedy and that was the story
there was no assassination party
there was no lee harvey oswald there was no clay shaw t
here was no clay bertrand
it was just i knew david ferry and he once said he was going to get kennedy
that was it
that was the story in baton rouge

and then under shaumbra who worked for garrison

went to baton rouge to talk to perry russo

who instantly told him

you know you should hypnotize me because perhaps i could remember more details about what happened

And so they took him to new orleans and they gave him sodium pentathol a

nd all of a sudden he started remembering this so-called assassination party with david ferry and clay bertrand

did he actually remember it or isn’t there like tapes that he gets pretty clear they’re implanting memories

well we don’t have the tape of the sodium pentathol session so we don’t know

we have a memo about what happened there and that’s where they they sort of u

h started their whole melding of the thing

but you there are some interviews with perry russo with the clay shaw defense team in 1971

and he said when he got to new orleans he just by the questions that he was asked he knew what to say they were shaping the questions and leading them

and he knew exactly what to say and what they wanted what what

why would he why would he want to do that though? Was he being bribed or coerced or…?

you know there’s no shortage of people in this case who came forward with stories okay

people sometimes people just want to get involved for whatever reason they don’t know what they’re really getting into and they come forward i just uh last week blogged the story of arthur strout

i don’t know if you heard of arthur strout but he was a dishwasher

he was a dishwasher in up in boston and he contacted Garrison and said

you know what i i have pictures of david ferry and Lee Harvey Oswald

and i i knew them i knew i have all these stories

and they gave him a plane ticket to come to new orleans and he takes the plane ticket and halfway there he decides
you know what i really didn’t see anything
and goes home
but there are many people like that who came forward with all sorts of information
many prisoners would call garrison’s office and say
yeah i know david ferry i knew clay shaw i knew this
And so there was no shortage of people coming forward
Perry russo came forward and he was malleable and fit the bill

But now wasn’t there going to be a a is it a second trial or hearing or something and he pled the fifth?

Well there was a there was a hearing in 1971 and this was a hearing to determine if Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw for perjury should go forward

So they held three days of hearings in january 1971
and perry russo was called to the stand and he took the fifth
he wouldn’t testify and uh

the clay shaw defense team asked the asked the judge asked garrison

would you give perry russo immunity so he can testify freely

and they would not grant him immunity

and so rousseau knew that if he testified that shaw that the whole thing was made up

he would have been charged with perjury

and so that’s why he took the fifth

now we talked a lot about uh people anybody connected to the assassination
that if you knew Lee Harvey Oswald or you were there in Dealey Plaza you became something of a micro celebrity and it seemed like a lot of people like said i want to be one of those too

Yeah you know look anytime you have a big crime like this with publicity across the country around the world people pop up everywhere

yeah i saw lee harvey oswald

there were people in my coming from montreal

there were people in montreal city i saw the rv ozil in montreal the summer of 63 at a pro cuba rally the rcmp the royal canadian mounted police investigated big huge file

you can get about their investigation of lee harvey oswald and they actually got pictures of all the people at this little demonstration there was only like eight people there oswald wasn’t there

but there were people who came forward and said he was in wisconsin

and he was out west and he was in florida

this happens in almost any big crime where you get a lot of

if publicity hadn’t died would he would he was he gonna he was about to sue garrison

clay shaw sued garrison for five million dollars in damages

and uh the case was whinding through the courts

and the problem was that clay shaw was getting sick

he had cancer and he started telling his lawyers to hurry up

let’s go with this case let’s get it going

and unfortunately he got sicker and he died before the case could be heard.

And so the course the case went to a court to determine if the if it could go forward because clay shaw had no Heirs.

he was a gay man with no children and the court initially the courts ruled that it could move forward under the terms of the will his lawyer was named as the plaintiff in the case

but ultimately it went right up to the supreme court and because of a because of louis louisiana laws

the case could not go forward because clay shaw had no Heirs and so the case was dropped

Unfortunately tell us what the clinton witnesses

suppose the supposed clinton was

well it was a very big surprise at the start of the trial the clay shaw trial in 1969

right at the start and there were these witnesses who came forward from clinton louisiana which is a small town 150 miles north of uh of new orleans

it was a town that was embroiled in a lot of controversy in the early 60s over voting rights for black citizens

and these witnesses came forward who said that they had seen lee harvey oswald with david ferry and clay shaw in clinton

um in which they were um trying to get a job for lee harvey oswald at the mental hospital in jackson louisiana

and so there were all these witnesses the white and black witnesses who came forward

and they who saw these these men

and it sort of it shook the clay shaw defense team because they knew nothing about this

and really had no because there was no discovery back then in the louisiana courts

and that helped the case that Lee Harvey Oswald knew Shaw and knew Ferry

but it was all a fix

somehow it was a fix

i mean some this was a kkk town and somehow it was all pieced together

um this story was incredibly implausible.

All right tell us about the story that supposedly it came out years later that Clay Shaw did work for the CIA?

but if you dig into that story it’s not what it sounds like

yeah well there was basically right after clay shaw was arrested there was a series of articles in a communist controlled newspaper in rome italy called paesa serra

and it was a series of six articles about clay shaw

he was on the board of the directors of a world trade center in rome called centro mondial commercial

and the newspaper charged that that was a CIA front organization

that was funneling money to right-wing extremist groups and so that was the linkage of they claimed the clay shaw was involved

and clay shaw was working for the CIA

with this right-wing organization the reality that was completely made up

it was most probably a KGB planted story

but the reality was that clay shaw did have a cia connection from 1948 to 1956

clay shaw was a domestic contact of the cia

because he was head of the international trade mart he knew a lot about trade with communist countries

and so on several occasions he provided information to the cia about international trade

and that ended in 1956

and that was the extent of his involvement with the cia

Speaking of which there’s one theory that all of us the mark lane books all of this was some commie plot to undermine americans confidence in their government sounds like a crazy theory but people thought

this is not so crazy tell me about that

well there’s there’s no question there’s no question that the cia the kgb there’s there’s no question that the kgb would like to try to help put into the minds of the american people that the cia was responsible for the assassination

and they actually ran several operations to help this first they funneled money to mark lane

secondly if you remember that operation there was a letter that was sent to a mr hunt

i don’t know if you remember this but it was a letter sent to mr hunt and it was from lee harvey oswald

and it said if if i could be of any help to you or any assistance please contact me blah blah blah

and that letter was sent anonymously to Harold Weisberg and a couple of other critics of the warren report

now what’s interesting is that that was most probably a KGB operation

and the hunt the mr hunt that they were referring to was e howard hunt of watergate fame

but to the warren commission critics they all thought it was h.l hunt the oil billionaire in texas

and so it’s slightly backfired

uh didn’t quite work

but that was most probably a kgb operation then

there’s the Pias Sera that i talked

about trying to say that clay shaw was was connected to the cia

that was most probably a kgb operation a

And i keep on saying the most interesting files that have yet to be released are not in washington

they’re in moscow

and those files in the kgb that talk about perhaps other kgb plots or

KBG operations to help prove that the cia was behind the assassination

those are the files i really want to see

hmm okay do you think there’s any possibility that Oswald was involved in some kind of in full sentence

bio weapons program,

did he supposedly have a mistress who brought him into a bio weapons program in new orleans?

Makes for a great story but

uh that’s absolutely false and there’s nothing to that

i say it in a full sentence but my voice

well the the whole concept of lee harvey oswald having a mistress and bio weapons

and any sort of fanciful conspiracy is just ridiculous

and no basis in fact

and whether it’s Judy Vary Baker

anybody else it’s just completely false

okay um tell us about what some people would call uh Norman Mailer called

” the sickness”

where you just can’t shake your obsession with the Kennedy assassination?

well i think you know the question is about the sickness

and the kennedy assassination

I call it “Assassination fever”

And once you get assassination fever

particularly if you believe in conspiracy

uh we’re not even if you believe

even if you don’t believe in conspiracy

once you get the fever it’s hard to shake it

i mean for me myself i mean i was very very much interested in the 1970s

i let it go i stopped it and i even gave away all my correspondence with cyril wacht and harold weisberg

threw it out gave away all my books

and then it was sort of rekindled in the 1980s and 1990s

And i literally had to buy back all the books that i had thrown out

or given away like i think i bought Crossfire three times over the course of my of many years

it’s hard to shake and once you get into it i feel sort of like Adam West and batman

you know adam west played batman in the tv series and all of a sudden you get type cast

and he was very different he actually felt you know what

i’m typecast as batman let me play to it i’m going to be batman i’m going to enjoy it i’m going to spend the rest of my life playing to my fans

and he had a great life

and i think right now for me you know what i don’t know if i could shake this fever so i might as well debunk as much stuff as i can um a

nd and uh be productive uh in the assassination uh stuff e

QUESTION:

Even people who haven’t read the conspiracy books and just have only the basic knowledge it’s it’s i think for a lot of it it’s hard to believe it’s one it’s hard enough to believe that Oswald did what he did then it’s even more difficult to believe about jack ruby

who got away with what he got away

we expect us to believe one crazy night i’ll buy two crazy nuts on the same weekend

really difficult to buy

and then it gets worse with what we are told was the single bullet scratch that the magic bullet theory that ziggy zag then came out Pristine

and the “Back and to the left” thing and the fact that they won’t that the files are locked

i think that basic stuff is what most people think of when the kennedy assassination

Fred Litwin responds:

Look after i wrote my first book i had a lot of people coming up to me when i would tell them

that i was writing on the JFK assassination

they’d look at me like there’s something funny about that r

Right something happened

what was it with the shot from the front

a lot of people don’t know very much about it

but they know there’s something strange something weird something going on

something funny it’s

i get this all the time from people who know nothing

oh was it jack ruby

what was that guy’s name

well there’s something strange there

and so yeah it’s in people’s consciousness

this psyche that that yeah there’s i don’t know any of the details

but there’s something really weird and funny about the assassination

All right and is there a simpler way to debunk all that rather than just go on and on about

Well you know actually it was an exit one that caused the head to go back into the left

You know it’s hard to debunk something like that

because it’s it’s sort of people just have a general feeling

and so it’s how do you feel with the general feeling

you could say

okay you’re wrong there’s nothing to it i

i’ve had a lot of friends who were like they won’t argue with me but they just think there’s something there

but they can’t put it into words

they don’t know enough about it they don’t want to read anymore

they’re not really particularly interested in reading my books

but they know there’s something there and that’s it and there’s nothing you can do for some people

for some other people they they’re very very convincible and they can understand what’s going on

now

Wasn’t there some a witness to the tip assassination that didn’t want to come forward because he was in that neighborhood paying a social visit to a woman other than his wife i i i

there probably was i don’t know that much about it to be honest i’m not uh but yeah i’m sure there was and

of things these uh you know these these things happen all the time about uh about

mistresses and affairs and

uh i’m always drawn to the song

the long black veil do you know this is the song the long black veil i might so johnny cash

saying it a lot of people made it famous but the song is about a man who was accused of murdering somebody else and he said i don’t know what i don’t know what to do

because i i didn’t commit the murder

but i was in the arms of my best friend’s wife

yeah well the exact that’s the kind of thing

like i didn’t commit that like he never came forward

and he was killed but so there’s lots of that all the time well i

sn’t that clay shaw that uh garrison had him by they the nards because he had to keep certain secrets

well clay shaw was in the closet and homosexuality was illegal and so you know it was something that clay shaw didn’t want to talk about

and he didn’t want to talk about
is interested in s m and and all of this made him extremely vulnerable

um but it also made a lot of people in the french quarter in new orleans extremely vulnerable to uh to threats and to uh coercion by garrison and his henchmen

Well, from your research i when i think in new orleans i i think of it as an anything goes city nobody really cares what you do is your business i just assume it’s always been like that
is that am i wrong about that?

You’re wrong about that because back in 1962 the police and the da’s office issued a statement that they were going to wage a war against uh drinking prostitution and homosexuality a

nd they did wow just shut down the city of new orleans i mean well you know it’s it’s the problem is it what what garrison did and it was going after gay people was an easy way to get informants

So you had the french quarter and so he really quickly figured out hey i can arrest people for crimes against nature i could turn them in from defendants to informant

okay and so he discovered yeah i can have a stable of all these informants who will tell me all sorts of things going on in the french quarter so the way of coercion

Something he discovered very early homosexuality was a good a good lever against people
And then he also shook down a lot of people for money so people were arrested for homosexuality and you pay enough money it goes away
it’s in my book
the letter uh that from the attorney general’s office to louisiana the one of the assistants wrote a letter to hoover so you’ve got to investigate
there’s a homosexual shakedown racket going on in new orleans and in fact i uncovered another letter in my book from an anonymous person to ramsey clark the attorney general saying you got to come investigate
i’m a gay person there’s they are shaking down gay people in new orleans

Do you think that this FBI and or the CIA was tapping or spying on Garrison?

no
i they weren’t they were certainly not tapping they were interested in what garrison was saying
why wouldn’t they
look garrison was going around accusing the cia accusing the fbi of all these crimes
if i accused you of a crime you’d want to know what i was saying
the cia had to understand what was garrison saying
what was garrison alleging because they themselves had to determine
did Garrison have any inside information any secret information?

that perhaps he shouldn’t so they had to monitor him they weren’t bugging him
and in fact there’s lots of memos it’s in my book
i’ll be doing some more blog posts about it
but that actually was hands off both the fbi and the cia told their people hands off garrison
don’t go near him
don’t talk to him
leave him alone hmm um

i just i lost i just lost my 2000 next question

oh didn’t garrison think that maybe if he cracked this case then it was on to be governor garrison and president garrison and he

well he was well on his way politically he was very very uh effective as a D.A in gaining political power he was even the governor was was scared of him

So he could have gone a lot further a
nd in fact had he not gone down the JFK rat hole he most probably would have been governor or vice president or senator.

He could have gone on to much bigger political office

didn’t his uh associates his underlings actually want him to drop it when david ferry they breathe a sigh of relief like he’ll drop it now

yeah so when david ferry died unexpectedly that was an opportunity for him to drop the case
and his assistants said to him
look now’s the time you could drop the case you could be a hero you could say that your chief suspect just died
you did your best
you tried hard
you wanted to crack the case
it’s time to drop it move on to something else
but he said
no this is the crime of the century and i’m going to solve it

did david ferry do you think he committed suicide or did he die of a berries aneurysm or

david ferry did not commit suicide

he died of a berry aneurysm which is a congenital defect

and so the autopsy had affected a full forensic autopsy

and not only did they find evidence of an aneurysm but they found evidence of an earlier bleed

and so it was definitely not suicide

it was definitely not murder

it was completely natural causes

And in fact in the weeks preceding his death he was complaining of headaches

he felt he was a very sick man

he thought he had encephalitis

he told many people he was dying um

and that’s why you have these so-called suicide notes they’re not really suicide notes

they are farewell letters because he thought he was dying okay