Tailing Ferrie's Comet

On Nov. 22, 1963, Dave Ferrie danced out of a courthouse, partied with a mob boss, & sped into the darkness to take an 18-year-old boy ice-skating in Texas, a trip that would haunt him to death.

“[New Orleans] is not a city prone to knowing what it’s doing before it arrests people.”

—Dave Ferrie

In the late evening of November 22, 1963, as Captain David W. Ferrie’s brand-new light blue 1961 Comet streaked westward through the blinding rain, escaping the vortex of New Orleans and into “the whirlpool of despair,”12 a massive flotilla of federal agents dropped anchor in the Crescent City, the first invasion of investigators dispatched to Louisiana in order to gather information about Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine and New Orleans native suspected of assassinating President John F. Kennedy earlier that day in Dallas. Dave Ferrie couldn’t have picked a worse possible time to skip town.

“All I wanted to do was relax,” Ferrie explained to 31-year-old Andrew “Moo Moo” Sciambra, a baby lawyer working for Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison. “As it turned out, it w…