Clipping Ferrie's Wings
Mental cures, moral panics, and the improbable afterlife of David Ferrie.
Part Two of a two-part series. Read Part One here.
I.
“People today are too concerned with trivial matters, things that could be dismissed if viewed in the light of the bearing on the eternal,” Dave Ferrie, a pilot with Eastern Airlines and self-described psychologist, told an audience of 75 Alabama businesswomen at Birmingham’s Episcopal Church of the Advent on December 1, 1954.1 “What has worry over everyday things have to do with eternity?”
The Birmingham News published a brief item about Ferrie’s lecture at the historic downtown church the following day. “Capt. Ferrie reported a tremendous increase in mental illness cases in the United States,” the paper noted. “He attributed the increase to two things: ‘The lack of parental and teacher discipline, and underdeveloped willpower.’ He said most mental illnesses can be cured through the patient’s will to be cured.”
David William Ferrie’s life serves as a vivid reflection of how mid-century America dealt with those who deviated from the norm, punishing difference while simultaneously craving spectacle. Long before the Mafia boss cast a shadow over his name, before the assassination and that sudden trip to Texas made him look suspicious, before the police and the press painted him as a child molester and a so-called deviant, David William Ferrie was seen as a respectable, upstanding man. To the people who actually knew him, there was nothing mysterious about Ferrie. He was quirky, yes—an eccentric bachelor with a mind packed full of history and mythology, living with his mother in a way that called to mind Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. Most people never guessed he was gay.
To the Birmingham women he addressed in 1954, Dave Ferrie had grossly misrepresented the mental health crisis at the time,2 but his rhetoric probably sounded familiar to the majority of those in attendance. Two years earlier, Norman Vincent Peale—like Ferrie, an Ohio native—published The Power of Positive Thinking, a runaway “self‑help” book that sold more than seven million copies. Peale, an ordained Methodist minister who became affiliated with the Reformed Church in America in 1932 upon becoming senior pastor at Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, emerged as one of the country’s most influential religious leaders, particularly among white conservatives. Ronald Reagan later honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.3 Donald Trump, who married his first wife, Ivana, at Marble Collegiate in 1977 with Peale officiating, repeatedly praised Peale’s sermons.4
Among mental health professionals, however, Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking was pilloried for shallow scholarship and potentially dangerous sloganeering that instructed readers to repress or ignore anything that disrupted their unbridled self‑confidence. In 1955, William Lee Miller—who would go on to a distinguished career as a writer and professor of religious studies—reviewed the book for The Reporter: “It is hard to see how any reader could get into serious trouble as a result of following Dr. Peale’s advice,” Miller wrote, “unless he happens to meet up with reality.”5
Dave Ferrie spent most of his adult life avoiding a confrontation with reality, revising his biography to bolster his academic credentials and inventing a series of wild stories to impress—and manipulate—people. And, as he proved to the audience at the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Ferrie, a devout Catholic and lapsed seminarian, had no qualms about standing behind the pulpit and delivering a stolen sermon. “You do not need to be a victim of worry,” Peale wrote in The Power of Positive Thinking. “Reduced to its simplest form, what is worry? It is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit.”6
It’s unclear how or why a group of prominent women in Birmingham decided to invite an obscure 36‑year‑old commercial airline pilot to share his thoughts on the treatment of mental illnesses, but it wasn’t the first time that Ferrie made news for an out‑of‑state speaking engagement.
In June 1952, The Houston Post and the Harris County Plymouth Dealers Association invited Ferrie to speak to a boys’ group of aspiring model‑airplane builders. “You have to study a lot of math, English, chemistry, and physics to become an airline pilot,” he told the boys.
On June 17, 1952, The Houston Post featured a photograph of Ferrie in its report on his talk to the model‑plane builders.
More than a year later, on December 14, 1953, Ferrie was the “principal speaker” at the weekly luncheon of the Rotary Club in Dothan, Alabama, a mid‑sized city in the southeast corner of the state that, at the time, had been intensely lobbying for a new airport. He put on a show for the Dothan Rotarians, bringing along a pair of flight attendants to serve lunch to the group and one of his flight‑school students, 15‑year‑old George Piazza,7 to showcase the aviation education he was receiving. Ferrie gave similar presentations to the Kiwanis and Exchange Clubs in New Orleans.
Although Ferrie became one of the most intensely investigated New Orleanians of the 20th century, according to a 1967 memorandum by chief investigator Louis Ivon of the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, authorities were unable to determine where he resided from 1953 to 1955.8
In all likelihood, the peripatetic pilot lived out of the cockpit of his Stinson 150, bouncing between New Orleans, Houston, and Birmingham whenever he wasn’t visiting his mother back in Cleveland. On Christmas Day 1955, Ferrie gave the U.S. Coast Guard a scare when he neglected to inform Birmingham approach control after safely landing in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. As a result, the newly opened Coast Guard Air Station in New Orleans dispatched a search team that spent nearly 24 hours looking for Ferrie’s presumably crashed airplane. It was an embarrassing episode for the self‑important pilot, who excused his negligence by blaming an unnamed acquaintance he claimed to have tasked with closing out his flight plan.
II.
“I was returned to the East Bank Jail. For the first time, I learned the charges against me—but not from the police. When I learned these charges, I asked for a lie detector test. This was denied me. I was laughed at and called a ‘fruit,’ a ‘queer,’ a ‘cocksucker,’ and ‘queer as a three-dollar bill.’ This was from [Lieutenant Joseph] Bataglia, [Patrolman] Thompson, and [Detective Fred] Roth.”
—Dave Ferrie
The criminal case against Dave Ferrie began in early August 1961 when he was arrested in Jefferson Parish and charged with a single count of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” a misdemeanor typically associated with underage drinking that usually resulted in paying a fine, spending a long day or a short night behind bars, and enduring the brief humiliation of appearing in the fine print of the police blotter. But Ferrie wasn’t the typical culprit, and there was nothing typical about the case against him either.
Three days after his first arrest, Ferrie was arrested again, booked for “committing a crime against nature on a 15‑year‑old boy and indecent behavior with three other juveniles, including the 15‑year‑old.” Eventually, the story of Ferrie’s arrests earned the attention of Herman Kohlman—later an assistant district attorney—who was then working as a journalist with The Times‑Picayune. Kohlman filed a brief account under the headline “Boys Involved in Jeff Inquiry; Metairie Man Booked in Indecency Case” on August 26. Two days after Kohlman’s report appeared, Ferrie was arrested a third time, this time charged with witness tampering and intimidation. An acquaintance of one of his underage accusers claimed Ferrie was threatening the boy unless he recanted. The same boy would later retract his allegations and dispute the claim that Ferrie had threatened him.
Kohlman’s subsequent report, “Pilot Accused of Tampering, Intimidation Charged in Jefferson Case,” was hard to ignore. Captain Ferrie, he wrote, “apparently used alcohol, hypnotism, and the adventure of flying to lure the juveniles—mostly 15‑ and 16‑year‑olds—into committing indecent acts.” Kohlman made the pilot sound like a pederastic Rasputin.
Within hours, copies of Kohlman’s report were on the desks of Captain Ferrie’s bosses at Eastern Airlines in Miami, and on August 29, the airliner notified Ferrie that he was suspended “for an indefinite period and until such time as the charges against him are cleared.”9
Over the next year and a half, Ferrie would accumulate a string of criminal charges in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes—eleven in total. The arrests tarnished his name, but Ferrie, who steadfastly maintained his innocence, was a master of reinvention. He would not go gently, and neither would his lawyer, Wray Gill.
Although detectives denied doing anything unusual or improper in their investigation, there was ample evidence that they coerced Ferrie’s alleged victims into signing fraudulent affidavits. Ten of the eleven cases against Ferrie collapsed before they could be tried, and in the only case that made it to trial, he was found not guilty. By the time the Eastern Airlines board completed its review of Ferrie’s petition for reinstatement in early September 1963, the fact that he’d been effectively cleared was of little consequence.
After Ferrie was acquitted in the first of four Jefferson Parish cases set for trial, the D.A. dropped one of the remaining three and delayed taking action on the other two—the final pair of charges against Ferrie.
Wray Gill asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of his client, but before the court could respond, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Frank Langridge conceded and withdrew those charges as well. In private correspondence to Eastern Airlines’ chief counsel, William Bell, the District Attorneys of Orleans and Jefferson Parishes made clear that they were no longer pursuing Ferrie: in nearly every case, the alleged victims had either recanted or refused to testify, leaving prosecutors without the evidence necessary to prove a crime.
While there were legitimate reasons to scrutinize Ferrie’s relationships with teenage boys, there was also support for his belief that he had been targeted. “[A]ttorneys like [Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim] Garrison actually benefited from the intensive policing of homosexuals in New Orleans, which provided numerous clients in need of representation,” Alecia P. Long writes in her 2021 book Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime. “Police officers also understood and exploited the legal vulnerability of gay men. In 1962, Jim Garrison promoted former officer Pershing Gervais to the position of chief investigator. Gervais would also serve as Garrison’s coconspirator in a shocking series of activities that sagely manipulated the still-robust prejudice against men who had sex with men. In effect, Gervais and Garrison used ideas about homosexuality as a weapon that they wielded to gather evidence and cultivate informants for later use—sometimes at the cost of people’s lives or liberty.”10
By September of 1963, Ferrie had come to terms with the fact that he was never getting his job back with Eastern, but he was still proud that he and Wray Gill fought until the bitter end, forcing the airline to spend money on a fight they’d already rigged. He would never work again as a commercial airline pilot, but on his way out, he managed to collect $1,635.90 from Eastern Airlines (about $17,300 today).
III.
“Ferrie is a pilot, but in complex cases involving science, several attorneys have found it advantageous to have me investigate for them.”
—Dave Ferrie to journalist David Snyder
For nearly three weeks, inside U.S. District Judge Herbert W. Christenberry’s opulent fourth-floor courtroom in the heart of the French Quarter, jurors heard a bizarre and fascinating story about a phony birth certificate, government corruption, bribery, and the stubborn determination of “a man without a country.”11
Two years earlier, Carlos Marcello, the purported boss of the New Orleans Mafia, snuck back into the country after the Department of Justice effectively kidnapped and left him for dead in the hellscape of Guatemala, a decision widely criticized as “totalitarian” and brazenly unconstitutional.
Until recently, Marcello had never been much of a sympathetic character, but in presenting its case against brothers Carlos and Joe Marcello, Jr., the Department of Justice managed to seem even less sympathetic. The brothers were accused of engaging in a conspiracy to defraud the federal government by bribing officials in Guatemala to produce forged documents under Carlos Marcello’s birth name, Calogero Minacori. As a result, the government claimed it had been thwarted from proceeding with plans to deport Marcello to Italy in 1956.
On the final day of the trial, November 22, 1963, after enduring the morning’s meandering closing arguments that Friday, everyone involved, including the jury, wanted to avoid dragging out deliberations through the weekend.
The entire room sat up straight as the bailiff approached Christenberry. He walked in a guarded stride, deliberately avoiding eye contact with anyone else, holding a handwritten note on a folded-up sheet of paper, like a military general delivering top-secret intelligence.
Mike Maroun, the longtime Marcello consigliere and one of the defense attorneys representing the brothers at trial, thought it was unusual. “The judge, in the middle of [reading] the charge, was given a note,” Maroun recalled more than 40 years later. “He stopped reading the charge, went back to his office, and, about 15 minutes later, sat on the bench and completed reading the charge to the jury.”
According to the trial’s transcript, the jury was ushered out at 1:45 p.m. Herb Christenberry had one more announcement to make. The stenographer did not record his precise words, but the moment would be seared into the memories of everyone there. President John F. Kennedy was dead.
“Judge Herbert Christenberry made an announcement [about the assassination] in open court,” Maroun said. The irony that he, of all people, Herbert William Christenberry, had the responsibility of announcing the assassination of President Kennedy would not have been lost on him. Herb Christenberry was a 65-year-old federal judge, seated at the throne of an opulent room that the Louisiana State Supreme Court would later reclaim, but he was also the same young lawyer who believed in the politics of possibility and dared to challenge the wisdom of convention and convenience.
At 12:40 p.m., around the same time Christenberry opened the trial’s final afternoon session, Walter Cronkite of CBS interrupted the broadcast of the soap opera “As the World Turns” to deliver the first televised reports of an assassination attempt against President John F. Kennedy.
The bailiff’s interruption likely occurred between 1:25 p.m. and 1:30 p.m., because the only way Christenberry could have known that Kennedy had already been pronounced dead before he sent the jury out to deliberate was if he’d watched Cronkite break the news at 1:38 p.m.12
“The jury did not know about [the assassination] until after the verdict,” Maroun recalled.
Soon, the nation would be transfixed by accounts of the scene: Thousands lining the streets of downtown Dallas and the nation’s charismatic young president with his glamorous young wife waving from a custom-built 1961 Lincoln convertible limousine, under a gloriously blue, wide-open Texas sky, the unmistakable sound of gunfire reverberating through Dealey Plaza. Most would only experience the pandemonium of the crowd or catch a glimpse of the limousine speeding away.
A few years later, inside another New Orleans courtroom, for the very first time, members of the public would watch the 26.6 seconds of 8 mm footage that Abraham Zapruder filmed from his perch at Dealey Plaza that day.
After only an hour and 35 minutes, at exactly 3:20 p.m., the jury reached a verdict in the trial of Carlos and Joseph Marcello, finding both men not guilty of conspiracy. It was a spectacular embarrassment for the Department of Justice, which had devoted considerable time and resources to a case that hinged entirely on the testimony of a star witness named Carl Noll, the alleged conduit between Marcello and corrupt Guatemalan officials.
U.S. Attorney Louis LaCour, Edward Molenof, Owen Neff, and John Powell Diuguid (pronounced “do-good”), a 31-year-old Department of Justice staff attorney whom Bobby Kennedy had personally assigned to the case, stood stone-faced as the verdicts were read. They had presented themselves as men of moral conviction and characterized their efforts to put the Marcello brothers behind bars as a patriotic fight against the country’s “top hoodlums.” Diuguid, whose career would end with a cloud of professional misconduct in 1995, had spent the past two years gathering evidence against the Marcellos, an effort that required plunging into the New Orleans underworld and either taking or coordinating multiple trips deep into the Guatemalan countryside. Fortunately for the four prosecutors, the walk from Judge Christenberry’s courtroom to their offices was short; the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana rented suite #403, right down the hall.
Captain Dave Ferrie sat behind the Marcellos and their three defense attorneys throughout the entire trial, and he was there when Christenberry directed his clerk to read the jury’s verdict and then gaveled the case closed at 3:20 p.m. Ferrie marched alongside the brothers as they led a victory parade out of the courthouse, across St. Louis Street, and into the Touché Lounge, the swanky new bar inside the Royal Orleans Hotel.
A New Orleans transplant from Cleveland, Ferrie wasn’t a mobster or a member of the Marcello “family.” He wasn’t their friend either. But he shared in their victory.
In the two months since he first met the Marcello brothers, Dave Ferrie had spent practically every waking hour immersed in the investigation of the fraudulent Guatemalan birth records for “Calogers [sic] Minacore” (a misspelling of Carlos’s Marcello’s legal name at birth, Calogero Minacori) that mysteriously materialized in the rolls of the tiny rural village of San Jose Pinula. It was, he said, an intense, seven-day-a-week job. In October, the former airline pilot made two trips to Guatemala City from New Orleans, a five-and-a-half-hour flight following directly down the same longitudinal line, 90°. While he’d never be credited publicly, Ferrie played an essential role in securing the freedom of Carlos and Joseph Marcello. He’d won.
Gill paid him $7,093.02 ($74,500 in today’s dollars) for the investigative work Marcello case, and even after putting nearly $1,700 down on the new car, he still had a balance of $5,353.02 ($56,200 in today’s dollars) in his account at Whitney National Bank.
IV.
“[Ferrie] may not be the assassin, but he’ll do.”
—Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison to Life magazine’s Richard Billings
On the afternoon of February 18, 1967, a day after the New Orleans States-Item broke the story that local DA, Jim Garrison, had launched a secret investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Garrison dispatched Lou Ivons, a gruff police officer whom he appointed chief of detectives, to the home of David W. Ferrie.
Moo Moo Sciambra asked Ivons if he could tag along. Sciambra had been a minor celebrity in college boxing, winning three consecutive Golden Glove championships, and was now the newest and youngest assistant district attorney on Garrison’s payroll. Sciambra had also known Ferrie years ago, when they both worked out of Lakefront Airport.
Captain Ferrie lived on the second floor of an eclectic Spanish Colonial Revival with a red tile roof at 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway, a broad, oak-lined street in the Broadmoor neighborhood. His apartment was a cluttered mess: papers and pill bottles and cigarette butts and dank brown carpeting. He stuffed the small living room with an oversized sofa, a pair of heavy wooden chairs upholstered in dark red velvet, and a neglected baby grand piano collecting dust in the back corner.
Ferrie trudged down the stairs to let them in, a task that had become increasingly challenging for him over the past two years, and said they should go ahead of him and make themselves comfortable. It was going to take him two or three minutes to climb back up. “[Ferrie] moaned and groaned with each step he took up the stairs from the bottom to the top,” Sciambra wrote in a memo to Garrison. “This behavior by Ferrie impressed me as [a] phony act, and I am sure he was not as sick as he pretended to be.”
“What are you doing here with Ivon, Moo Moo?” he asked Sciambra once the three men sat down in Ferrie’s living room.
“I’m an Assistant D.A. now,” Sciambra replied, “and I thought I would come along with Ivon since we knew one another from the airport.”
“I thought you went into private practice. I know a lot of former assistant D.A.s, and they’re all dumb.”
Moo Moo Sciambra eventually cut to the chase. “Where were you on November 22, 1963,” he asked, “and what were you doing?”
He was annoyed by Sciambra’s questions. “You’re a newcomer in this game,” Ferrie told him. “Your office knows more about my trip than you do. Ask your boss. He had me arrested when I got back into town. I was booked as a fugitive from Texas, and I’ve never [lived] in Texas.”
“Tell me about the arrest,” Sciambra replied. “I’m having a tough time believing they would arrest a man who was perfectly innocent.”
“Well, you have a lot to learn about life,” Ferrie said. “You’re a starry-eyed kid right out of law school who still believes the inscriptions on the courthouse walls. After a while, though, when you get a little smarter, you’ll see that this is a stinking world.”
“That may all be true, but that still doesn’t tell me about the arrest.”
“All right,” Ferrie replied. “I’ll go through the spiel again for your benefit.”
It had been more than three years since President Kennedy’s assassination, and
Dave Ferrie had already been interviewed multiple times by multiple agencies: the FBI, the Secret Service, the New Orleans Police Department, and the District Attorney’s office. FBI agents were able to corroborate Ferrie’s movements that day and quickly cleared him as a suspect. Following the publication of the Warren Commission’s report, the FBI declassified 16 pages of records concerning Ferrie, which were released to the public by the National Archives and included, among other things, the following report:
On 11-26-63, it was learned that FBI agents had talked with Jack S. Martin, who admitted that he had been the informant with regard to David William Ferrie; that Martin had admitted to FBI agents that the information he furnished Assistant District Attorney Kohlman was a figment of his imagination and that he had made up the story after reading the newspapers and watching television; that he remembered Kohlman, a former newspaper reporter had written an article or story about Ferrie a couple of years ago and that he pieced the whole thing together in his mind and had given it to Kohlman as facts….
Martin, who has every appearance of being an alcoholic, admitted during the interview that he suffers from ‘telephonitis’ when drinking and that it was during one of his drinking sprees that he telephoned Assistant District Attorney Herman S. Kohlman and told him this fantastic story about William David Ferrie [sic] being involved with Lee Harvey Oswald….
In view of the above, this phase of the investigation involving [David W. Ferrie] will be considered closed.
FBI Field Investigation, Nov. 24-29, 1963. Final Report on Investigation of David William Ferrie in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by SAC Anthony E. Gerrets and SAC John W. Rice
Dave Ferrie knew that Jim Garrison and his men were bluffing. Their investigation hadn’t uncovered any evidence of an elaborate conspiracy, as Garrison now was claiming.
The night before, after reading the story in the States-Item, Ferrie decided to call their bluff. He phoned reporter David Snyder and declared himself to be Garrison’s prime suspect. Over the course of several hours, Ferrie pieced together and methodically dismantled Garrison’s case against him. That afternoon, the same afternoon that Moo Moo Sciambra and Lou Ivon showed up on the stoop of Ferrie’s home on Louisiana Avenue Parkway, the States-Item carried Snyder’s exclusive report about the elusive pilot at the epicenter of Garrison’s investigation. This time, Ferrie would out himself.
Although it’s impossible to know, it seems likely that Ferrie would have been able to discredit Garrison’s investigation and prevent him from making the manifestly absurd case that he subsequently pursued against Clay Shaw. But on February 22, 1967, just four days after Moo Moo and Lou paid him a visit, Dave Ferrie died after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.
Sciambra was wrong. There was nothing phony about Ferrie’s deteriorating health. David William Ferrie was 48 years old.
Jim Garrison immediately took advantage of Ferrie’s death, stirring up rumors that Ferrie had been murdered and characterizing him as both a mysterious villain and “one of history’s most important individuals.” On February 24, less than 48 hours after Ferrie’s body descended the steps of his apartment on Louisiana Avenue Parkway for the last time, Garrison boasted about his quixotic Kennedy investigation. “My staff and I solved the case weeks ago,” he claimed. “I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t have evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved, and how it was done. The key to the whole case is through the looking glass. Black is white. White is black. I don’t want to be cryptic, but that’s the way it is.”
Nothing he said was true: Garrison and his staff had never “solved the case.” Their investigation had been a colossal failure and an enormous waste of money. And he definitely wanted to be cryptic.
On March 1st, a week after Ferrie’s death, Garrison arrested Clay Shaw, a prominent New Orleans businessman, and charged him with conspiring to murder President John F. Kennedy. The following day, Garrison held a press conference to announce the arrest, and suddenly, the entire world began to pay attention. Almost instantly, Jim Garrison became a celebrity. He was the most well-known district attorney in the country, and he basked in the spotlight.
Three months earlier, Garrison had tipped off David Chandler, a stringer with Life magazine, about his investigation. Chandler immediately phoned Life’s offices in New York and managed to convince them to send a “senior editor” to New Orleans. Within days, Richard Billings, who had recently reported on the possibility of a second shooter in a November 1966 article titled “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt,” appeared at Garrison’s office. Garrison, Billings, and Chandler immediately began negotiating an extraordinary exclusive.
“It was agreed that Life and Garrison would ‘share all information’ they might gather on the assassination,” Patricia Lambert wrote in False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s JFK. “The arrangement was unorthodox and of arguable impropriety. Yet, theoretically, it could benefit all. Life would give Garrison free assistance and information on a global scale and in return obtain the inside story of his investigation, to be written by Richard Billings…. [Chandler and Billings] formed the two-man core of the operation, which was supplemented by ‘a variety of reporters and photographers’ who were ‘shuttled’ in and out of New Orleans on a regular basis. On hand at any given time over the next few months were at least four additional Life reporters and as many photographers. Life’s management was investing heavily in Garrison’s effort.”13
The media, at least initially, had given Garrison the benefit of the doubt. Even though the notion that Clay Shaw had any involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy seemed utterly ludicrous to those who knew him, the truth—that Garrison’s entire case was a fabricated, delusional fantasy about the private lives of gay men stitched together with fragments of other conspiracies and a roster of dubious and deranged witnesses—would have seemed even more absurd. Jim Garrison had been afforded credibility out of deference to his office, but eventually, the facts would catch up with him. Life magazine’s Richard Billings and David Chandler were among the first to lose confidence in Garrison’s investigation. Less than six months after the magazine forged a secret agreement with the DA, Life pulled out of New Orleans. Managing Editor George Hunt nixed the sprawling cover story Billings had been writing for April.
For many Americans, however, Garrison’s reckoning occurred on January 31, 1968, when the Orleans Parish District Attorney was a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
It would take nearly two years before Garrison brought Shaw to trial, and less than an hour for jurors to return a verdict of not guilty.
The full story of Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw deserves to be treated separately, but if you are interested in learning more, Fred Litwin’s 2020 book On the Trail of Delusion: Jim Garrison, the Great Accuser is a funny, engaging, and comprehensive account. (It’s also available on Kindle for $2.99).
Coda
In 1993, a year after Jim Garrison died, an investigation by PBS’s Frontline unearthed a group photograph of a New Orleans Civil Air Patrol picnic in 1955 featuring, among others, Ferrie and a 15-year-old cadet named Lee Harvey Oswald. Although Ferrie claimed to have no memory of Oswald, he acknowledged the likelihood that the two had briefly crossed paths during Oswald's enrollment in the Civil Air Patrol.
As intriguing as the photograph may have seemed, it didn’t contradict or undermine Ferrie’s testimony, nor did it corroborate or substantiate any of the claims made by Garrison.It’s also worth noting that Jim Garrison was one of only a handful of people who knew what Ferrie uncovered when he made the trip down to Guatemala and investigated the federal government’s case against Carlos and Joe Marcello in October and early November of 1963. Garrison knew the details of Ferrie’s findings because he had copies of Ferrie’s correspondence with Marcello’s lead attorney, Jack Wasserman.
How, exactly, did Garrison end up acquiring Ferrie’s letters? He stole them, of course. Less than 48 hours after President Kennedy’s assassination, as Ferrie rushed back from Houston, Garrison dispatched police officers to 3330 Louisiana Avenue Parkway and tasked them with arresting the runaway pilot. Patrolman Raymond Comstock entered Ferrie’s apartment without a warrant and collected a pile of documents next to Ferrie’s typewriter.
Earlier this year, the FBI released unredacted copies of Ferrie’s letters.After his death, David Ferrie would be retrofitted into a seemingly unending number of conspiracy theories and unsolved mysteries. His little Stinson 150 airplane, which needed refueling every 500 miles, was suddenly capable of bending the laws of physics. Some claimed, for example, that Ferrie had made a series of surreptitious flights into Castro’s Cuba, a 700-mile journey from New Orleans.
Jim Garrison believed that Ferrie may have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s “getaway pilot,” notwithstanding the fact that the allegation had been wholly invented by a drunken Jack Martin (Garrison was similarly undeterred by the fact that attorney Dean Andrews, Jr. had wholly invented a man named Clay Bertrand, even though Bertrand’s existence was the riddle at the core of his case against Clay Shaw). If Ferrie had intended to whisk Oswald out of Dallas, he wouldn’t have gotten far. Love Field is 460 miles away from New Orleans International.
But the most enduring allegation is that Ferrie had smuggled Carlos Marcello out of Guatemala and back into the United States in late May of 1961. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations managed to work the allegation into its final report, claiming, without any corroborating evidence, that the U.S. Border Patrol had been advised of Ferrie’s rumored involvement in 1962. Never mind that Ferrie was working as a full-time airline captain in May of 1961, or that he wouldn’t meet Marcello until September of 1963, or that his plane would’ve broken down in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico had he attempted to make the 1,100-mile journey. The HSCA affixed a footnote to the claim about Ferrie piloting Marcello back to Louisiana: The Border Patrol report was “unconfirmed.” In reality, Robert Blakey, the author of the HSCA’s final report, had tried and failed to locate any evidence that either the Border Patrol or INS had been aware of the rumors about Ferrie in 1962. The document wasn’t “unconfirmed;” it was nonexistent. The allegation that Ferrie had flown Marcello home first surfaced in the press about a year after Ferrie’s death.
So, how did Marcello “sneak back” into the United States? I’ll tell you… in my book.
Selected Bibliography (Works Cited & Consulted)
Alecia P. Long. Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2021.
Patricia Lambert. False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s JFK. New York: M. Evans, 1998.
Fred Litwin. On the Trail of Delusion: Jim Garrison, the Great Accuser. Ottawa: NorthernBlaze, 2020.
Norman Vincent Peale. The Power of Positive Thinking. New York: Prentice‑Hall, 1952.
William Lee Miller, “Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale,” The Reporter 12, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 1955): 27–29.
House Select Committee on Assassinations. Report: Findings. U.S. National Archives.
FBI & NOPD records on David W. Ferrie (JFK Records Collection, National Archives).
“Capt. Ferrie Talks on Mental Health,” Birmingham News, Dec. 2, 1954.
In 1954, there wasn’t comprehensive, standardized nationwide data on the rates of mental illness, but the perception of a sharp, dramatic rise in “mental illness cases” was primarily a consequence of the introduction of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952 (DSM-I) and rapid advancements in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. In other words, there was a growing recognition of a series of mental disorders and illnesses that were already prevalent. The real crisis was that the American healthcare system relied on unsustainable and understaffed state mental hospitals, also known as asylums and sanitoriums, to provide care for a wide range of conditions. By 1955, 550,000 people were housed in state mental hospitals, the highest in American history, accounting for roughly half of all hospital beds in the country. The population didn’t suddenly spike in the early 1950s; it had been growing steadily since at least 1900. Federal legislation, particularly the enactment of the Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act in 1963 and the Medicare and Medicaid Act in 1965, would radically transform the financial and institutional model and eventually result in the closure of the vast majority of state mental hospitals. (Although it was popularly known as the Medicare and Medicaid Act, the law was officially titled the Social Security Amendments of 1965.)
Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom,” Mar. 26, 1984, The American Presidency Project.
“Ivana Trump,” Wikipedia, noting Apr. 9, 1977 wedding at Marble Collegiate Church officiated by Rev. Norman Vincent Peale; see also coverage of Trump’s praise for Peale’s sermons in InsideHook, Dec. 24, 2018.
William Lee Miller, “Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale,” The Reporter 12, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 1955): 27–29.
Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Prentice‑Hall, 1952), 78 (“You do not need to be a victim of worry… Worry is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit”).
In 1955, Eastern Airlines investigated Ferrie for allowing Piazza to fly unaccompanied and without a proper ticket on a return flight from Houston to New Orleans. According to Piazza, who, as a teenager, had traveled extensively with Ferrie, he had overslept and missed his scheduled flight with Ferrie to New Orleans. A month after Ferrie’s death in 1967, Piazza, who briefly served as an assistant district attorney for Orleans Parish DA Jim Garrison before taking a job with Delta Airlines, was killed while aboard a training flight that crash-landed in a residential neighborhood near the New Orleans airport. He was 30 years old.
Andrew J. Sciambra & Louis Ivon, “Memorandum of Interview: David W. Ferrie,” Feb. 18, 1967 (JFK Records Collection).
Eastern Air Lines to David W. Ferrie, suspension notice (Aug. 29, 1961); Eastern Board denial of reinstatement (Sept. 1963); settlement check to Ferrie, $1,635.90 (author’s files).
Alecia P. Long, Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), esp. chs. 2–3.
Temporary venue: In late 1963, while the federal courtrooms at 600 Camp Street were closed, EDLA proceedings—including the Marcello trial—were held in the Louisiana Supreme Court Building at 400 Royal Street (contemporary press coverage; building histories; author’s files).
NPR, “Look Back at 1963 Live TV Coverage of JFK’s Assassination,” Nov. 6, 2013; contemporaneous CBS logs.
Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s JFK (New York: M. Evans, 1998), esp. chs. 6–7.