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?