Clay Shaw

From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project

Clay Shaw

Clay Laverne Shaw (March 17, 1913 – August 14, 1974) was a successful businessman in the U.S. city of New Orleans, Louisiana. He is notable as the only person to ever be tried for conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, for which he was acquitted.

Shaw possessed a fine war record ending with an honorable discharge as a major in 1946, having served as a secretary to the General Staff and having been decorated by the United States with the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star and by France with the Croix de Guerre.

After World War II, Shaw helped to start the International Trade Mart which facilitated the sales of both domestic and imported goods. He was also known locally for his efforts to preserve buildings in New Orleans' historic French Quarter.

District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested Shaw in 1967. He believed that Clay Shaw was the man named as 'Clay Bertrand' in the Warren Commission Report. A lawyer named Dean Adam Andrews, Jr. testified that Bertrand had asked him to defend Lee Harvey Oswald in court. Investigators working for Garrison began searching for Bertrand and amassed evidence that 'Clay Bertrand' was an alias which Shaw commonly used. Andrews had described Bertrand as a bisexual man who had previously brought gay clients to him. Shaw was a gay man, and indeed this is one of the reasons Garrison later cited as evidence of the two Clays being one and the same. Andrews had given different descriptions of Bertrand to investigators, at first saying that he was over six feet tall, (as was Shaw) then later saying that he was 5'8". Andrews also said flat out to the Orleans Parish Grand Jury and on an NBC news report that Bertrand was not Shaw but in fact a client of his named Eugene Davis. Davis denied being Bertrand, but Andrews never claimed Davis used Bertrand as an alias, only that he had ascribed the name to Davis without Davis' knowledge.

During the trial, Garrison called Perry Russo, an insurance salesman, as his main witness. Russo testified that he had seen Shaw with both Oswald and David Ferrie and had heard them plot to kill the president. Russo's testimony remains controversial to this day. Critics of Garrison argue that primary sources from the New Orleans District Attorney's office show Russo's story evolved over time. Garrison's defenders attribute the discrepancy to sloppy writing on the part of Assistant D.A. Andrew Sciambra, the author of the memos in question. They also point to Garrison aide Lou Ivon's search warrant request which cites Russo's story he told it at trial. That request was written before the controversial Sciambra memo.

Shaw's attorneys were successful in raising questions as to the validity of Russo's story. Other Garrison witnesses such as Charles Spiesel, a paranoid accountant who admitted under cross examination to regularly fingerprinting his daughter to make sure she had not been replaced by a double, destroyed the prosecution's credibility. Shaw was found not guilty less than an hour after the case went to the jury.

Garrison wrote a book on his investigation, On the Trail of the Assassins. When director Oliver Stone later adapted Garrison's book into the film JFK, Shaw's character was played by Tommy Lee Jones.

Shaw died in 1974 at age 61 of lung cancer.

Richard Helms, former director of the CIA, testified, under oath, in 1979 that Clay Shaw had from 1948 to 1956 been a part-time contact of the Domestic Contact Division of the CIA, where Shaw volunteered information from his travels abroad and specifically from his visits to countries behind the Iron Curtain. By the mid-1970s 150,000 Americans (businessmen, journalists, travelers) had provided such information to the DCS. It is unknown now whether this information would have influenced the outcome of the Shaw trial in New Orleans.