Текст книги "The Bone Tree"
Автор книги: Greg Iles
сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 58 страниц)
CHAPTER 38
WHEN I WALKED out of the hotel by the river, I stepped into a different world than the one I’d left upon entering. It wasn’t merely that I’d been converted from a lone-gunman disciple to a believer in the possibility that John Kennedy had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy—and an eminently rational one. No, what shattered me was something personal. After ninety minutes of cagey give-and-take, Stone and Kaiser finally revealed their hole card: something that convinced me that for most of my life, my father hasn’t merely been hiding an extramarital affair (and its unintended offspring), or even information about a murder he happened to learn about by accident. If Stone and Kaiser are right, then Dad not only played a role in the Kennedy assassination, but he knew it and kept silent about it.
Now I’m sitting alone in Caitlin’s office at the Examiner, wondering where the hell she could be. No one on her staff will admit to knowing where she is, not even Jamie Lewis, her managing editor. And something tells me she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be.
With nothing to do but wait, I dig in Caitlin’s desk until I find a pair of earbuds, then plug them into my tape recorder. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but as convincing as Stone’s and Kaiser’s spin on the Lee Harvey Oswald story was, something about it rang false. I don’t feel like they lied to me, but rather like they might be missing something themselves.
Leaning back in Caitlin’s chair, I kick my feet up on her desk, I press PLAY and close my eyes. The voices instantly take me back to the hotel room beside the river, with my juvenile-sounding voice trying—and failing—to poke holes in the assertions of the two older men. As their words drift around me like smoke, I recall the smoldering eyes and sallow skin of Dwight Stone, a man intent on uncovering the truth before tomorrow afternoon, when death will hover watchfully above his OR table in Denver.
STONE: Carlos’s deportation trial was set for November of ’63 in New Orleans Federal Court. It began on November first, and believe it or not, closing arguments would begin and end on November twenty-second.
ME: Is that true?
STONE: Yes. And let’s stipulate that by, or during, the summer of 1963, Carlos had spoken to Frank Knox about killing Kennedy in the event that nothing else could be done to prevent his deportation in the fall.
ME: Fine. How does Oswald come into it?
STONE: A man named David Ferrie was the link between Marcello and Oswald, and we owe John for figuring out how. A few people suspected the nature of the link, but it was practically impossible to pursue as a lead.
KAISER: Remember I told you that Carlos had a New Orleans immigration lawyer on his payroll? His name was G. Wray Gill. Gill is only important because of two men he had listed on his payroll as investigators for the Marcello trial. One was a private detective named Guy Banister. The other was a former Eastern Air Lines pilot named—
ME: David Ferrie.
STONE: Do you know anything about Ferrie?
ME: Joe Pesci played him in the movie.
STONE: People who knew Ferrie say Pesci actually did an uncanny job, though Ferrie was tall and gangly in real life. Next to David Ferrie, Joe Pesci was a male model. Ferrie suffered from alopecia, and he wore the most horrible pasted-on eyebrows along with his hairpiece. Anybody who saw Ferrie never forgot him.
KAISER: That’s for sure. The Bureau has a surveillance photo of Ferrie leaning against a Ford Fairlane. I’m telling you, leaning against those big tail fins, he looks like the forward scout for an alien invasion of hairless Martians.
I bolt forward and hit STOP on the recorder, my heart clenching like a fist in my chest. That’s what I missed the first time I heard it. My parents owned a Ford Fairlane back in the early 1960s, a red-on-white behemoth with long tail fins like something out of Flash Gordon. I only know this because I’ve seen the car in very old family pictures, my parents looking young and carefree on a vacation, my older sister cradling me in front of it. They sold the flashy Fairlane around 1964 or ’65, I believe, so I don’t remember riding in it. But something about that car itches at my brain, like a thought trying to find its voice. There’s no way David Ferrie would have been in or near my parents’ Fairlane, of course. I don’t think they even got it until after they got back from Germany in 1961, and they never lived in New Orleans after that. But there’s something . . .
Unable to make the connection, I press PLAY again and lean back in Caitlin’s chair.
STONE: Ferrie was a crackpot in a lot of ways, but one thing he wasn’t was dumb. He’d worked as a contract pilot for the CIA, running guns into various countries and narcotics out. He ran guns to Castro before Fidel declared himself an ally of the Soviet Union. But at that point Ferrie became Castro’s mortal enemy.
KAISER: Without that angle, Ferrie wouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of Carlos Marcello. He was an aggressive and unstable homosexual who’d been fired from Eastern Air Lines for giving young men free rides on Eastern planes in exchange for sexual favors. Also for molesting young men within the company. It’s difficult to imagine any less useful assistant on an immigration case than David Ferrie. He had no legal training whatever, yet Marcello admitted under oath he’d made at least one payment of over seven thousand dollars to him in November of 1963, for what he called “paralegal services.”
STONE: It was Guy Banister who brought Ferrie into Marcello’s orbit. Banister was a shady bastard. I’m embarrassed to say that he was the former special agent-in-charge of the Chicago FBI field office, the second largest in the country. I met him when I first joined the Bureau. He liked to tell you how he’d been present at the shooting of John Dillinger. He was a rabid anti-Communist. John Birch Society, the Minutemen, you name it. A real hater.
ME: How did a former FBI SAC wind up working for Marcello?
STONE: After Banister retired from the Bureau, he moved to New Orleans and became assistant superintendent of the NOPD. In 1955, you didn’t get that job without kissing Carlos’s ring. Banister was dismissed from the force for violent instability, and that’s when he opened his private detective shop at 544 Camp. It didn’t take him long to get into the anti-Castro business.
ME: What were Banister and Ferrie really doing for Marcello’s lawyer?
STONE: Managing Carlos’s illegal effort to beat the deportation case. Specifically, working to bribe judges and prosecutors, intimidate jury members, negotiate with crooked politicians in South America, et cetera. Carlos had Jack Wasserman for the actual legal work, but not even Wasserman could turn water into wine.
KAISER: That’s why Frank Knox was on tap. Frank was the court of last resort—the final solution, should all other efforts fail.
STONE: I doubt Ferrie or Banister knew that in the summer of ’63, although both men would have known Knox from the Bay of Pigs training camps. And neither Ferrie nor Banister was stupid. Sooner or later, they would have realized that their boss wanted Kennedy dead.
ME: So they approached Lee Harvey Oswald? That’s absurd.
KAISER: It’s not as crazy as you think.
At this point Kaiser gave Stone the floor. The old man paused as though to gather all he’d learned over decades and distill it to the most comprehensible narrative he could. His entire affect changed, as well. Talking about “Lee” seemed to bring him fully to life, and nowhere was this more evident than in his voice, which grew in both volume and power.
STONE: Lee Harvey Oswald was a creature of New Orleans. He was born there and raised there for the most part. He had the archetypal troubled childhood. Lee’s father was his mother’s second husband, and he died while Lee was still in his mother’s womb. Lee was largely raised by his aunt Lillian and uncle Dutz Murret. Now, Dutz Murret was a runner for a Marcello bookmaking operation. He worked for Sam Saia, out of Felix’s Oyster Bar in the French Quarter.
The mention of Felix’s hurled me back to last night, when my mother told me about my father and her meeting Carlos Marcello there (a meeting I did not mention to Stone and Kaiser).
KAISER: What is it, Penn?
ME: Nothing. I’ve been to Felix’s before, that’s all.
KAISER: Some people argue that Oswald didn’t see his uncle much, or that he, Ferrie, and Banister wouldn’t have known one another. But if you know anything about New Orleans back then, you know that’s ridiculous. The French Quarter was a village within a small town. Everybody knew everybody. Metairie was the same way. Oswald’s own mother, Marguerite, dated two different men who worked for Marcello. One was a lawyer who arranged for Lee to join the Marines while still underage. Bottom line, Marcello himself would have known all about Dutz Murret’s skinny, mixed-up nephew who spouted Marxism and then joined the Marines.
ME: But did Oswald know David Ferrie? Isn’t that the question?
KAISER: Yes. And that’s what brought me into this case. Back in the early nineties, I was consulting with Dwight about an old murder in Louisiana. We got to talking about criminal psychology, and he figured out pretty quick that I had special knowledge, based on the years I’d spent in the Behavioral Science Unit. During our third conversation, he told me about the Working Group, and he asked whether I’d be willing to make use of my presence in New Orleans to do some work for them, off the books.
STONE: And thank God we did. Because John’s behavioral science experience is what broke the case for us.
KAISER: They wanted me to try to prove a connection between David Ferrie and Lee Oswald in the summer of ’63. There’d been dozens of reports of the two men being seen together. For example, Guy Banister’s secretary claimed Lee had worked out of Banister’s office with Ferrie and Banister. But after exhaustive work, I found that nearly all those reports either had been discredited, were unprovable, or came from unreliable witnesses.
STONE: We desperately needed that link. I’d studied Ferrie and Oswald like a goddamned biographer—especially Lee, all the way from childhood—but I couldn’t find it. Lee always had difficulty in school. When he was twelve years old, his mother moved him from New Orleans up to the Bronx to live with his half brother. He caused havoc there and had to be psychologically evaluated. A reformatory psychiatrist described Lee as immersed in a “vivid fantasy life, turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations.” She diagnosed a “personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies” and recommended continued treatment. Needless to say, he never got it. Mama took him straight back home to New Orleans.
KAISER: Which eventually delivered him into the grasp of David Ferrie. I started looking into Ferrie’s life as a favor, but the more I did, the more the case began to consume me. The only provable link between Ferrie and Oswald dated to 1955 and ’56, when Oswald was sixteen and a member of the Civil Air Patrol at Moisant International Airport. Ferrie had been the commander of that unit for some time. In Case Closed, Gerald Posner wrote that Ferrie and Oswald couldn’t have known each other, because they were never in the CAP unit at the same time—that Ferrie had been removed from his position prior to Oswald’s entry. But the very year Posner’s book was published, a photo surfaced that showed Ferrie and Oswald in a small, relaxed gathering around a CAP cookout fire.
STONE: Ferrie lost his job as CAP chief, for molesting young cadets. We’ve verified that. He was a documented pedophile. Ferrie had initially hoped to be a priest, but he was kicked out of seminary for the same kind of nocturnal recreation—teenage boys. He almost certainly took that CAP job because hundreds of teenage boys came through the program.
ME: You believe Ferrie molested Oswald as a teenager.
STONE: Yes.
KAISER: In 1963, David Ferrie told Jim Garrison that he’d never met Oswald. After being confronted with the Civil Air Patrol link, he backed off and said he simply didn’t remember him. Penn, I’m sure you had plenty of experience with pedophiles in the Houston DA’s office. Do you think a predator like David Ferrie didn’t remember every boy who came through his unit? Especially a vulnerable kid like Oswald? No father, insecure, confused sexuality, so desperate to be different that he’s spouting Marxist theory at sixteen?
ME: Ferrie would have zeroed right in on him, no question. But you don’t have any objective evidence? No witness statements? Nothing?
KAISER: Only deduction. I had to ask myself what kind of relationship could have—or would have, by necessity—remained secret for years. Like you, I’ve worked more murder cases than I can count, and that experience taught me that illicit sex is the one thing people will stay silent about, if they possibly can. Especially molestation of a minor. And remember, this was the 1950s. There were no cell phones, no text messages, no e-mail, none of the crap that traps people nowadays.
STONE: Oswald sure wasn’t going to tell anybody about it. He took a lot of teasing from guys saying he was queer, all the way through the Marine Corps.
KAISER: Neither was Ferrie. The stigma from a homosexual relationship could be lethal back then, even in New Orleans. More telling still, if you look at Oswald’s life after the summer that CAP photo with Ferrie was taken, the kid’s downward spiral really accelerated. He couldn’t do his schoolwork the following fall, and he dropped out of the tenth grade.
ME: Hmm.
KAISER: Trying to emulate his big brother, Lee tried to join the Marines at sixteen, but they turned him down. He then went to work at a dental lab. He remained in New Orleans until the following July, when his mother moved him back to Fort Worth, Texas. Obviously, Ferrie could have been having sexual liaisons with Lee throughout the period prior to this move, or only sporadically, or not at all. We just don’t know. But that next fall, at Arlington Heights High School in Texas, Lee only made it to the end of September before dropping out. Does that not sound like a kid who might have experienced something too big to process? Like an affair with an older man?
ME: It does. But that’s still supposition.
KAISER: I don’t deny it. But tell me it doesn’t feel right.
ME: Look, you’re preaching to the choir here. After my years as a prosecutor, this is the easiest part for me to believe. But you still haven’t sold me that Carlos Marcello would employ this mixed-up kid when it came to a serious crime, much less an assassination.
STONE: It wasn’t Marcello’s idea. It was Ferrie’s. Marcello’s JFK plans had nothing to do with Oswald. But Ferrie was working at the heart of Carlos’s effort to avoid deportation, and that’s what led to Oswald being brought in.
ME: How?
STONE: Let’s fill in the years between Lee’s Civil Air Patrol summer and the summer of ’63. This is the trajectory everybody knows. Marine sharpshooter qualification at seventeen. Working at the U2 base in Japan, two courts-martial for self-destructive accidents. First marine to defect to Russia . . . marrying Marina while in the USSR. Disillusioned by the reality of Russia, Lee returned to America without being arrested or even debriefed—which we still can’t explain, I’m afraid—and settled in Dallas. Marina fell in with the Russian émigré community, but those people couldn’t stand Lee. During this time, he mail-ordered the pistol and rifle he would later use on November twenty-second. With those weapons he promptly stalked and nearly succeeded in killing General Edwin Walker, the right-wing extremist. It was in the wake of that failure that Lee came up with the idea of defecting to Cuba. His first step in this process was to move back to New Orleans, which he did on April twenty-fourth, 1963, seventeen days before his pregnant wife and his child came to join him.
ME: That all sounds familiar. So what about the summer of ’63? You couldn’t find any proof of contact between Oswald and Ferrie? Or Oswald and Marcello?
KAISER: I did find one reliable source. An old Marcello soldier told me that Oswald worked part of that summer as a runner for Sam Saia, out of Felix’s Oyster Bar, just like his uncle Dutz had. But he wouldn’t testify to it, and he died two months ago. Oswald worked as a maintenance man at Reily Coffee for a while, but they fired him, so the runner job makes sense. He had no other source of money. And there’s no doubt that the old crowd knew Lee was back in New Orleans. He was making a real ass of himself, handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets on the street, getting into fights with anti-Castro Cubans, and going on TV for a debate. If you accept the exploitative sexual relationship back in 1955 and ’56, you’ve got to figure it was only a matter of time before David Ferrie came around to renew contact with his long-ago victim.
ME: I buy that, all right.
KAISER: Even if Ferrie didn’t initiate contact, I think Oswald would have sought him out. Lee had no real friends in New Orleans, and based on all my experience as a profiler, he would have been dying to tell Ferrie about all the big things he’d done since he’d last seen him.
ME: Oswald wouldn’t have felt any attraction for the guy who’d taken advantage of him when he was a kid, would he?
KAISER: Probably not, though it’s possible. But let’s assume Lee hated Ferrie. The summer of ’63 was still his chance to tell his abuser that he’d grown up and married a hot Russian girl, which proved he’d gotten past his sexual confusion. He had the baby to prove it.
STONE: What does your gut tell you, Penn? As a prosecutor, listening to a story?
ME: If you accept the secret sexual relationship, then further Ferrie-Oswald contact that summer makes sense. But even so, we’re back to square one. If Carlos had Frank Knox ready to kill Kennedy as a last resort, why bring Oswald into it at all?
STONE: Desperation.
KAISER: Genius, on Ferrie’s part. Think about his position. Marcello’s deportation trial was set for November first. Ferrie and Banister were trying to figure a way to fix the verdict, but they weren’t having any luck. Carlos was expecting them to pull a rabbit out of their asses, and they didn’t have one. Neither did Jack Wasserman in D.C. With every passing week, it looked more like it was going to be arrivederla to Carlos Marcello come November. But if Ferrie met Lee that summer, and Lee caught him up on his recent past, then Ferrie would have seen instantly that Oswald was a gift from the gods.
STONE: Only three pieces of information had to pass between Oswald and Ferrie for this theory to be valid. One, that Lee had taken a shot at General Walker in April. Two, that he owned the scoped Mannlicher-Carcano he’d taken that shot with. Three, that he was trying to defect to Cuba.
ME: You’re saying Oswald wasn’t brought in as a patsy, but as the main shooter? And a signpost pointing to Castro?
KAISER: I don’t think Lee was brought in at all at that point. I think Ferrie just filed the information in the back of his mind and let it simmer. It represented a potential manipulation, that’s all. For one thing, Lee wasn’t exactly stable. And he was trying to get into Cuba. Even if Ferrie had the idea that early, he would have to wait and see how the Cuba thing worked out before he tried to sell Marcello on using the kid.
ME: Go on.
KAISER: On September twenty-sixth, after a truly shitty summer, Lee left New Orleans for Mexico City, hoping to get a visa to Cuba. Marina had left New Orleans three days earlier with an older friend, Ruth Paine. She was pregnant and tired of Lee’s bullshit. She moved back to Texas to have her baby.
STONE: For three days in Mexico Lee tried without success to get a visa for Cuba, so that he could defect. He visited both the Cuban and Russian embassies. He had no luck at either place.
KAISER: This would have been a major stressor, coming on top of several others. Lee left Mexico by bus, in despair. He didn’t go back to New Orleans, but to Texas, where Marina was living with Ruth Paine and her husband. Marina didn’t want Lee back, of course. But two weeks later, a friend of Ruth’s got Lee an interview for the job at the Texas School Book Depository.
STONE: At that point, John Kennedy had thirty-seven days to live. But Lee Harvey Oswald had no idea he would be a part of his death.
KAISER: Marcello was scared shitless by this time. His trial started on November first, and every night was consumed by strategizing for the proceedings. Banister had been working a deal to bribe one of the jurors, but Carlos couldn’t rely on that. He had to be thinking about pulling the trigger with Frank Knox.
STONE: We know for a fact that Carlos spent the two weekends prior to Kennedy’s assassination at Churchill Farms. We also know that Ferrie was there with Carlos for one of those weekends. That was the bill I mentioned, for “legal services.” And Marcello actually paid it.
ME: Isn’t this pretty late in the game to be planning something?
KAISER: It had to be late in the game. Remember Stone’s Razor? This is the only timeline that eliminates coincidence from the plan.
ME: So when and how did Oswald get recruited for Frank Knox’s job?
STONE: The final weekend. November fifteenth through seventeenth. There’s no other possibility. The motorcade route was finalized on Friday the fifteenth. It wasn’t made public, but Dallas police officers were made privy to the route on that day.
KAISER: The Joseph Civello mob in Dallas had hundreds of cops on their payroll. They could easily have passed that information to Marcello. He was their overboss, after all. By Commission law, Carlos owned Dallas.
STONE: Imagine that final weekend. A heatwave had just broken in New Orleans that November. They’ve turned on the heat out at Marcello’s swamp house. Ferrie’s there with him, sweating like a pig. Marcello is crazed with rage. He can give orders to judges, governors, even senators, yet Bobby Kennedy is about to kick his butt out of the country. It was intolerable, and I think that sometime on that last weekend—probably Friday night—Carlos snapped. Maybe the scheme to bribe the juror fell through, or maybe Carlos just didn’t trust it. But he made the decision to have Frank Knox kill JFK. Of course, he needed a cutout to send the message to Frank, and also to pass on the motorcade information. And who was ready to hand?
ME: David Ferrie.
KAISER: Ferrie was a good courier because he was an ace pilot. And Carlos had easy access to planes. He was a big-time marijuana smuggler. So it would be easy for Ferrie to fly up to Natchez or Vidalia with Frank’s go order.
STONE: Only Ferrie didn’t take that flight. Because after Carlos gave him the motorcade info—which had to be either a map or a list of streets and turns—Ferrie had the epiphany of his life.
ME: Oh, my God.
STONE: You see now? Ferrie saw that the presidential motorcade was going to run right past the warehouse where Lee Harvey Oswald was working. He was one of the few people in the world who knew that.
ME: How did Ferrie know? Oswald told him at some point?
STONE: He must have. We’re not sure how. My guess is by letter. Lee was a big letter writer, and I think Ferrie would have told him to send word about whether he’d made it to Cuba or not. If Lee wrote to Ferrie any time between October fifteenth and November twelfth, Ferrie could have received the letter and learned where he was working.
KAISER: Ferrie could have visited Lee sometime during those four weeks. I wouldn’t rule that out, but there’s no need to go that far. All we need is for Lee to have let Ferrie know he’d gotten the job at the Book Depository.
STONE: When Ferrie saw that motorcade route, he must have felt like he was witnessing divine intervention. Like God was reaching down to save him and Marcello at the last possible moment.
KAISER: I think Ferrie turned it over in his mind for one night. Using Oswald would be a risk, but the advantages were too great to ignore. Lee had a rifle and the ability to use it. The attack on General Walker proved that he had the will to use it. And best of all, Lee had spent the summer publicly agitating for the Castro regime. Hell, he’d defected to Russia! And he’d tried to defect to Cuba. If Lee killed JFK, nobody was even going to think about Carlos Marcello.
STONE: And with any luck, the whole country might start screaming for LBJ to invade Cuba, which would get Marcello and the mob their casinos back.
ME: That’s how he sold Carlos.
STONE: Bingo. The whole Oswald-as-patsy, blame-it-on-a-nut angle has always been too much of a stretch. There was a Sicilian tradition of using mental defectives to take the fall for gang murders, but Carlos wouldn’t have taken the risk had he not had a lot more to gain from Oswald than that.
KAISER: Remember how desperate Carlos was. He was within days of being booted out of America. I think Ferrie pitched his plan as God’s deliverance, the miracle they’d been praying for. Carlos would have remembered Dutz Murret’s nephew, of course. You don’t get where Carlos was by forgetting people.
STONE: Marcello might have been skeptical at first, but it was hard to find a downside in Ferrie’s plan. If Lee lost his nerve or missed, Frank Knox could still take out the president, and Lee could still be blamed.
ME: But what if Oswald was captured? What if he talked?
STONE: I don’t think Lee was meant to live more than fifteen minutes after the assassination. The safest plan would have been for Frank to kill him shortly afterward. But that’s where the operation went wrong. When Oswald saw Kennedy’s head explode through his crappy little scope, he knew he hadn’t fired that shot. At that point, he probably panicked. Lee skipped whatever post-hit rendezvous he was supposed to make—probably with Ferrie, in his mind—and there Marcello’s plan went off the rails.
KAISER: It still worked. And Oswald died anyway.
ME: Let me guess. The mob had to hire Jack Ruby at the last minute to shut Oswald up before he could give away anything?
STONE: It’s possible. Ruby has been tied to the Civello mob, and through them to Marcello’s people. But it might be that Ruby was just what he seemed—a pissed-off loser who thought the world would call him a hero for killing the man who’d shot the president. Oswald actually died the way he did because he panicked, went home for his pistol, then killed Officer Tippit during his senseless flight.
ME: Wait—back up. When did Ferrie sell Oswald on killing Kennedy?
STONE: I think he flew to Dallas on Saturday, November sixteenth. Instead of flying north to give Frank Knox his go order, he flew west to Dallas.
ME: Is there any record of Oswald’s movements that weekend?
STONE: No. Those two days have always been a black hole in his timeline. No one has ever been able to pin down where Lee was either Saturday or Sunday. He disappeared Friday after work and reappeared Sunday night at the Paine house. Ferrie had plenty of time to sell him on the idea.
KAISER: And to buy the second Carcano.
ME: There’s no documented record of Ferrie being in Dallas between November fifteenth and the twenty-second?
I remember Stone and Kaiser looking at each other when I asked this. Then Kaiser nodded, and Stone seemed to make some silent decision.
STONE: No known record. In fact, there are two relevant reports that have never been seen by the public. One is among the sealed assassination records in Maryland. The other is in a special FBI archive in Washington. It was never turned over to the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee.
ME: What do those records say?
STONE: The sealed record contains a statement by FBI agent James Hosty, who was surveilling Oswald because of his earlier defection to Russia. Lee was just one of Hosty’s responsibilities. Anyway, that weekend, Hosty claimed to have sensed other surveillance on Oswald, or even on the both of them. Hosty—and Hoover—assumed this was probably CIA surveillance. But given what we know, my theory is that Hosty sensed either David Ferrie looking for a safe opening with Oswald, or Frank Knox.
ME: And the second record?
STONE: During Jim Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw in 1965, an FBI agent based in Dallas saw a close-up picture of David Ferrie. At that time he told his SAC that he believed he’d seen Ferrie in Dallas on the weekend prior to the assassination—at a diner, alone. With Ferrie’s fake eyebrows and hairpiece, it’s hard to believe that agent could have been mistaken.
ME: What happened to that report?
KAISER: Hoover ordered it buried.
ME: But why would Oswald have agreed to kill Kennedy for Ferrie? It may seem an obvious question, but I’m not sure I understand his motive.
STONE: This is where the psychologists are right. Lee strongly prefigured the later killers such as John Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, and the school shooters. His life had been one long string of failures. Emigrating to Cuba was his final fantasy. The Russians didn’t want him, employers didn’t want him, his wife had left him. When the Cubans said no to his defection, he basically had nothing left. Three weeks before the black hole weekend, Lee actually attended a rally where General Walker spoke, almost as if he was planning to try once more to assassinate him. Lee was truly ready for anything at that point, so long as it was sensational.
KAISER: In behavioral science parlance, Oswald was decompensating. He’d endured stressor after stressor. Killing Kennedy—who had been actively trying to overthrow and even kill Castro—would have made Lee a hero to Castro and the Cuban people. I’m sure Oswald could see himself driving along the Malecón with Fidel in a big convertible, waving to the adoring crowds.
ME: What about the Cuban student, Cruz? The one who bought the Carcano that was in Brody’s house?
