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Exceptional Crew. Inevitably, the Jolly Green Giant has become a sort of defendant himself. Critics have beaten a path to his door; TV commentators and magazine writers have accused him of bribing witnesses and threatening them or influencing them under hypnosis. Latest to join the attack has been Edward Jay Epstein, himself a critic of the Warren Report (Inquest). In a minutely detailed article in The New Yorker, Epstein systematically shredded almost every piece of evidence that Garrison has put forward. Epstein claims that Garrison even told his men at one early point in the investigation to forget about Shaw. Nonsense, reply the Garrison investigators. Epstein and the other critics could not possibly know how good the case against Shaw is, since there is a mass of evidence yet to be revealed.
Still, the critics, particularly Epstein, do raise serious questions about Garrison's tactics. Straining the likelihood of coincidence, Garrison has time and again met the publication of a major attack by dropping a bombshell to capture headlines that might otherwise have gone to the critics. On the day one critique was published, for instance, Garrison charged the CIA and the FBI with concealing evidence. When Epstein's piece appeared, Garrison announced the existence of an assassination study made by a foreign intelligence agency that agreed with the findings of his investigators. He frankly admitted that the timing of the news of the report was designed to rebut Epstein.
Insane. If some of Garrison's tactics seem dubious, some of the characters he has gathered around him seem even stranger. He has opened his files to Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, Mort Sahl and other Warren Commission critics (they call themselves the Dealey Plaza Irregulars). And he has also based many of his verbal charges on the stories of an exceptional crew of weirdos, convicts and homosexuals.
They include such well-known members as hairless David Ferrie, the homosexual onetime pilot who died just before Shaw's arrest, and Drug Addict Perry Russo, whose story of having seen Shaw and Oswald together was severely compromised by disputed claims that he was under the influence of hypnosis and a truth serum when he final ly remembered the complete details. Others include Donald Norton, who claimed to have delivered $50,000 for the CIA to a "dead ringer for Oswald" in Mexico in 1962; Garrison eventually stopped repeating the story when it turned out that Norton was a convicted embezzler. Richard Case Nagell, an inmate in a hospital for the criminally insane, said he had got himself jailed so that he would not have to carry out his part of the plot, which was to kill Oswald; Garrison repeated the tale until he was finally convinced that Nagell was not credible.
Just as disturbing is Garrison's treatment of those who refuse to help him. He has charged no fewer than eight men with offenses that include petty thievery and bribery. A New Orleans lawyer named Dean Andrews has already been sentenced to 18 months for perjury. Each of these Garrison targets has been accused of having information useful to the investigation, but none has been accused of actually having anything to do with the assassination. Indeed, despite his boast of having solved the case, Garrison has yet to charge anyone but Shaw.