In April 1967, I went to New Orleans to interview Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans District Attorney Garrison. William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, had asked me to write a profile of Garrison— my first assignment for the New Yorker Garrison, the previous month, had stunned the media world by arresting Clay Shaw, a prominent New Orleans businessman foe "participating in a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy." Could a local district attorney have solved the mystery that had defied the Warren Commission?

I met Garrison for dinner at Broussards. Six-foot six inches tall, and slightly wobbly on his feet, he stopped at virtually every table in the popular French Quarter restaurant to extend his political glad hand to acquaintances. When he finally reached my table, his welcome to me was exceedingly gracious. He began by saying, almost solemnly, that my book on the Warren Commission had helped shape his decision to launch his investigation. He then fixed me with his intense, almost walleye, stare, and told me he traced his own intellectual development to two heroes: Ayn Rand, whose lone-wolf protagonist in The Fountainhead had exemplified to him the need for higher-conscious individuals acting like supermen; and Huey Long, the assassinated Governor of Louisiana, whose speeches attacking elite conspiracies, had attracted immense popular support.

Over the next three hours, and five courses, Garrison spelled out the conspiracy he had uncovered. Like the specialities, which the chef personally delivered dish by dish to the tables, his narrative was rich but sporadic. Its central character was David W. Ferrie, an ex-airline pilot and self-styled soldier of fortune, who was bizarre even by the relaxed standards of the French Quarter. He professed to be a bishop in a quasi-political cult called the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America and worked on and off as a free-lance pilot, a pornography trafficker, a hypnotist and gas station operator. Garrison said that on November 23, 1963, when Oswald was still allive, he got a tip alleging that Ferrie had trained Oswald in marksmanship. So he detained Ferrie for questioning. But the tipster, Jack Martin, who was known for providing false leads in other cases, recanted his story, so he released Ferrie. He said he subsequently found other witnesses that established, at least to his satisfaction, that Ferrie had become involved with Oswald but, before he could re-arrest Ferrie, Ferrie was found dead, either "suicide or murder," he told me. But he had arrested in his stead Clay Shaw. What was Shaw's connection to Oswald, I asked?

"Its exactly like a chess problem," he said. "The Warren Commission move the same pieces back and forth and got nowhere. I made a new move and solved the problem." To understand it, he suggested I examine Shaw's personal papers which he offered to make available to me.

April 2,1967 I went with my research associate, Jones Harris, to his office suite in the Criminal District Court Building, where Garrison had left word with his assistant I "should start going through the evidence"-- six cardboard cartons that contained such Shaw's personal paraphernalia as letters, photographs, manuscripts, checkbooks, address books, calendars, blueprints for the renovation of houses in the French Quarters (which had been one of his civic projects) and a Mardi Gras costume.

Harris found something of possible interest in the boxes. a 5 digit number in Shaw's address book that almost matched an entry in Lee Harvey Oswald's book. Oswald's phone book contained the number 19106 preceded by the Cyrillic letters DD. Shaw's book contained the same number in an entry "Lee Odom, PO Box 19106, Dallas, Tex." Harris immediately told Garrison who then announced to the press that he had linked Shaw to Oswald. He stated without equivocation that Shaw and Oswald's address books had the identical entry in them "PO 19106" (which was untrue), that this number was "nonexistent" (which he had not yet determined) and that the number was a code, which when deciphered, produced the unlisted telephone number of Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, and "no other number on earth" (which was also false). When asked by a reporter for the Times-Picayune how "PO 19106" became Ruby's number "WH 1-5601," Garrison, without missing a beat, explained that one simply transposed its third and last digit (so it became PO 16901) and then arbitrarily subtracted 1300. Since this nonsensical hocus-pocus still did not produce the "WH" portion of the number, Garrison added that the code was "subjective."

[ it turned out the Post Office Box 19106 in Dallas not only existed but had been assigned to precisely person listed in Shaw's book, Floyd Odom. It could not possibly have been the number in Oswald's address book because, as the Dallas Post Office confirmed, that Post Office box number did not exist in Dallas before it was assigned to Odom in 1965.]