By the way, the part of this mob connection that runs through David Ferrie is either hilarious or sad, when you think about it.
Ferrie was brought into this ambit by Jim Garrison, the insane Louisiana prosecutor who believed that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy of gay men for the thrill of it all.
Ferrie was a weird looking guy. He had alopecia, and made up for it by wearing a wig and fake eyebrows.
He was also gay and therefore ripe for Garrison’s abuse.
At the time of the assassination, Ferrie was working in New Orleans as a private investigator for an attorney named G. Wray Gill, who had just won a court case for Carlos Marcello (a mobster). With the case settled, Ferrie had received a nice payday.
Flush with cash, he had a business idea!
Ice Skating!
He wanted to open an ice skating rink. There were no rinks in New Orleans, but his friend (an excellent roller skater) wanted to go to Houston to try it out.
So, on November 22, 1963, Ferrie and two friends drove to Houston, arriving in the early hours of the 23rd and got a hotel. They went ice skating and returned home. Ferrie was said to have hung out by the pay phone, but he was apparently trying to get in touch with his boss (the attorney) about another client.
From that, he has been accused of being the getaway pilot for the assassins.
And when I say that Garrison was nuts, he really was. He brought a case against Clay Shaw, a prominent (and gay) New Orleans philanthropist.
Why?
Because of a lawyer named Dean Anderson, who was another crazy character. Dean always wore sunglasses, and actually said things like “he was a hep cat” and “you know, daddy-o”. He represented a lot of gay clients, and was known as a big talker who never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
On November 23, 1963 (the day after the assassination) Anderson was in the hospital suffering from pneumonia when he unexpectedly called his secretary at home (something he had never done before) and told her that he had been hired to represent Lee Harvey Oswald.
The secretary flat refused, but when she asked who had hired him, Anderson said “Bertrand.”
His flight of fancy ended when Ruby killed Oswald the next day, but he called the FBI insisted that he had previously represented Oswald, who had been accompanied by Clay Bertrand.
His secretary could find no record of a file regarding Oswald, had no idea who Clay Bertrand was, and affirmed that she had never seen Oswald or this Bertrand person at the office.
The FBI and local authorities could find no record of anybody named Clay Betrand, either.
Eventually, Dean Anderson reported to the FBI that he must have made it up and the call he received was a dream.
Now, it is true that he went back to his pontificating about Clay Bertrand before the Warren Commission, but Anderson was a goofball (And he kept changing his physical description of Bertrand).
Jim Garrison ate it up. And he used this nonsense as his impetus for bringing criminal charges against Clay Shaw.
What’s that you say? Clay Shaw isn’t the same name as Clay Bertrand? No worry. According to Garrison, all gay people use fake names.