As most of you know, I have been researching the JFK assassination now for close to fifty years. I started out working as a teenage volunteer for Mark Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry in the mid-1970s. It remains my wheelhouse issue, and was my gateway into climbing down so many other rabbit holes.
It was inevitable that I’d write a JFK assassination book. Pipe the Bimbo in Red: Dean Andrews, Jim Garrison, and the Conspiracy to Kill JFK, has just been released. Co-written with William Matson Law, the foremost expert on the medical evidence in the case, the book emphasizes the ground level plot in New Orleans. Oliver Stone focused on two of these ground level conspirators, David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, in his 1991 film JFK. We go well beyond that, and examine their connections to powerful forces. In my view, all of the primary players in New Orleans were manipulated like Lee Harvey Oswald, who was overtly groomed to be the patsy.
The book was inspired by my decades long friendship with Dean Andrews III, son of the colorful Beatnik lawyer portrayed so memorably by John Candy in JFK. The title, in fact, comes from a comment by Candy (as Andrews) while eating lunch with Jim Garrison (portrayed by Kevin Costner). In one of those unlikely but true coincidences, Dean III met my brother Ricky circa 2000 and they eventually became best friends. Dean was embraced by my entire family, and was invited to all the birthday parties and holiday gatherings at my house, back when we entertained frequently. I was in awe of Dean’s connection to the central historical event of the twentieth century, and he was astonished at my knowledge of the case.
The book features the first interview with Dean III, in which he explains how the Garrison investigation impacted their lives, and in fact destroyed the Andrews family in many ways. Dean, Jr. was a high profile lawyer, and headed up the prestigious New Orleans Jazz Festival. I prevailed upon Dean III to bring his mother to my home for dinner some twenty years ago, and it was the first time she’d agreed to talk about her husband and the Kennedy assassination. I think I opened up her mind to the possibility that he hadn’t just been “crazy,” and had valid reasons to be as paranoid as he became. At any rate, I couldn’t blame her; life had been very good before Garrison discovered her husband’s gripping Warren Commission testimony.
Dean Andrews, Jr. was perhaps the key figure in Garrison’s investigation. Andrews was hospitalized at the time of the assassination, and received a bizarre phone call from a Clay Bertrand later on November 22, 1963, asking him to come to Dallas and represent Lee Harvey Oswald, who had yet to be silenced by Jack Ruby. Thanks to Dean III, we reveal new and troubling details about his father’s hospital stay. There are good reasons to believe that Bertrand was the oft used alias for Clay Shaw, well respected head of the New Orleans Trade Mart. Shaw’s intriguing connections go back to World War II, as is documented in Pipe the Bimbo in Red.
Garrison relied on Harold Weisberg’s groundbreaking research, which produced the rare and too often overlooked book Oswald in New Orleans. For unclear reasons, Weisberg turned against Garrison, and in later years became a bitter critic. Weisberg was a hero of mine, and one of my fondest memories is having dinner at his Frederick, Maryland home in the early 1980s. Weisberg’s resentment towards Garrison exploded with Oliver Stone’s film, to such an extent that the cranky old researcher leaked an advance copy of Stone’s movie script to George Lardner, Jr., Mockingbird media asset who had covered (dishonestly) the JFK assassination for many years. Weisberg appears to have been jealous at Stone casting Garrison as his hero, instead of him.
Like Jim Garrison, I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was an undercover agent for some intelligence agency- probably the FBI or CIA, and at the time of the assassination was on assignment to infiltrate what he was told was a brewing plot to kill the president. I suspect that David Ferrie, Jack Martin, Guy Banister, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Carlos Bringuier, and others may have been told the same thing. They all seem to have had intelligence connections. Ruby was an admitted FBI informant, and his mob connections went back to the days of Al Capone in Chicago. Ferrie was connected to both the CIA and organized crime through Carlos Marcello.
Jim Garrison was the victim of the most vicious media campaign in history. NBC News broadcast an attack so biased (which included the fanciful revisionist testimony of Dean Andrews, Jr.) that they were forced to give Garrison thirty minutes on air to respond. Walter Sheridan, a former aide to RFK who led the attacks on Garrison, was caught on tape trying to bribe star witness Perry Raymond Russo. Our book features a rare interview by Russo with co-author William Law. We also share a transcript from a talk given by former Garrison aide Anne Dischler, who recounted investigating the little known Oswald impersonations in New Orleans (researchers are familiar with the fake Oswald sightings in Dallas), among other things. We include the reflections of Hollywood legend John Barbour, my most cherished friend and the only man to interview Garrison after his unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw.
I was able to touch base with the family of Edward “Butch” Voebel, Lee Harvey Oswald’s best friend in high school. They speak out here for the first time. I had long suspected that Voebel’s extremely suspicious death at an early age was part of the extremely lengthy JFK assassination Body Count. Those connected to the Garrison investigation were seemingly dropping like flies. Ferrie’s death was beyond strange, and Eladio del Valle, connected to the key players at the ground level, was found with a hatchet to the head at the same time Ferrie died so conveniently. Others were beaten and/or threatened. Some important witnesses were understandably afraid to testify against Clay Shaw, the lone survivor that Garrison prosecuted.
As the sixtieth anniversary of what I call The Mother of All Conspiracies approaches, I will be very busy. I’ve already been asked to do three interviews on November 22. Those of us with limited platforms have to do the best we can to counter what we would assume is sure to be an avalanche of disinformation from the state controlled media. However, there was a strange report that broke in the mainstream press a few days ago, emanating from establishment mouthpiece Rolling Stone, based on the new Paramount + documentary JFK: What the Doctors Saw. The magazine’s headline says it all: “JFK’s Parkland Doctors Come Forward: Oswald Didn’t Act Alone.”
Much like the UFO reports in the mainstream over the past few years, in which sightings that had been ridiculed for many decades were suddenly treated seriously, the information in the documentary is hardly “new.” Those of us who have researched this know all too well how every doctor and nurse who attended JFK at Parkland Hospital described a massive blowout to the rear of his head, something indicating a frontal shot, and contradicted by supposedly authentic autopsy x-rays and photos, which show an intact back of the head. When the likes of Rolling Stone is promoting the idea that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy, we are forced to conclude that perhaps the assassination is going to get the UFO revisionist slant.
