Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [180]
In the old days in Chicago, Banister’s anti-Communist squad had been one of the most effective teams in the country. And in 1963 in New Orleans he ran penetration operations against the Left, hiring young men to inform on pro-Castro and civil rights organizations – just the sort of operation the FBI was running at the time.
Oswald was in New Orleans that summer, making a show of himself as a pro-Castro activist – the very sort of ‘Commie’ Banister deplored. Yet information suggests they had a secret working relationship with each other. According to his secretary, Banister even provided Oswald with office space. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Delphine Roberts quoted her boss as saying. ‘He’s with us, he’s associated with the office …’
One of Banister’s associates, former Eastern Airlines pilot David Ferrie, has also been linked to Oswald. They apparently met for the first time in the fifties, when Oswald was a teenage cadet and Ferrie an instructor in the Civil Air Patrol. By the early sixties Ferrie’s life, like Banister’s, had become a constant round of anti-Castro scheming and right-wing politics.
Numerous witnesses would recall having seen Oswald in the company of two men, one of whom was almost certainly Ferrie, less than three months before the assassination. They arrived together in a black Cadillac, acting oddly, during a black voters’ registration drive in Clinton, a town north of New Orleans. Even then, local civil rights activists suspected, they were undercover FBI agents.
One of Banister’s investigators, Jack Martin, blew the whistle on his boss and Ferrie immediately after the assassination. He made, then retracted, an allegation that Ferrie had been involved with Oswald and in planning the murder. Ferrie himself, meanwhile, charged frantically around New Orleans quizzing Oswald’s former landlady and neighbors about a library card. Other information suggests Oswald may have been carrying a library card when arrested, one with Ferrie’s name on it.
Banister, for his part, spent hours after the assassination drinking heavily with investigator Martin. The session ended with Banister accusing Martin of going through his confidential files, then beating him over the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. The fracas started, according to Martin, when he asked Banister: ‘What are you going to do, kill me like you all did Kennedy?’
This would seem to be more than enough to have become a serious focus of the investigation, yet the FBI let the matter drop after perfunctory inquiries. Guy Banister was interviewed, but was asked no questions at all about Oswald. Neither his name, nor Ferrie’s, appears in the Warren Report. Banister was found dead of an apparent heart attack, with a gun at his side, before the Commission finished its work. Ferrie was to die in 1967, a possible suicide, after New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had reopened the case and was about to call him before a grand jury.
A clue to the Banister connection was handed to the FBI on a platter, but it was not passed on to the Warren Commission. Some of Oswald’s pro-Castro leaflets had been stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, the building that housed Banister’s detective agency. Yet the FBI memorandum on the leaflets, which might have alerted the Warren Commission attorneys to this coincidence, concealed it. It listed Banister’s address as 531 Lafayette Street, a reference to the alternative entrance to the 544 Camp building, which stood on a corner. The Commission’s attorneys, poring over reports in Washington, had no way of knowing that fact. The FBI knew it very well, but kept the Commission in the dark.
Had Edgar provided the full picture on Banister and on David Ferrie, the Commission would have surely paid more attention to something very serious, the possibility that the Mafia had a