Jerry P. Shinley Archive:
Aaron Kohn on Banister, Martin and Ferrie

 

 

From: jpshinley@my-dejanews.com
Subject: Aaron Kohn on Banister, Martin and Ferrie
Date: 01 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <76j5oq$4n0$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>

AGENCY: HSCA
RECORD NUMBER: 180-10087-10439
AGENCY FILE NUMBER: 013261
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ORIGINATOR: HSCA
FROM: KOHN, AARON M.
TITLE: DEPOSITION of AARON M. KOHN
DATE: 11/07/78
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pages 75-78
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Mr. Kohn. The only time I ever saw David Ferrie was when a man by the name of Jack Martin came walking into my office with David Ferrie one day, and I don't mind telling you it was a shocking experience.
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    Jack Martin has always been a kind of harassing influence around here, somebody who wastes a lot of time but you discover the best thing to do is to let hime waste your time when he has things on his mind or else he wastes a lot more of your time when he gets drunk, waking you up in the middle of the night, threatening to kill you, some guy who was something of a private detective.
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    I think his name originally was Suggs. We have a record here of Martin, I think, under the name of Suggs when he was incarcerated in an institution over in Texas. I think he was put in a penal institution for the insane after an abortion killing or something, I think.
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    He came over here and he was something of a pseudo minister in some kind of an obscure religion. We have quite a file here of things that Jack Martin was always sending or dropping off. Anyhow, Jack Martin is the man who came in here about August 1966 to tell me the theory of the JFK assassination that came out of Jim Garrison's mouth in January 1967.
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    After years of all kinds of wild allegations on the part of Jack Martin, I threw him out of my office after he wound down to the point where he was "turnable awful," [sic, turn offable?] if that is any such thing.
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    Anyhow, he walked in here with David Ferrie one time, and they were working together on investigations and what they wanted to talk about was the payoffs for getting from the Attorney General of Louisiana, who was then Jack P. F. Gremyard [Gremillion], later indicted and convicted by the Federal Government for perjury [in the LL&T scandal], the payoff to the Attorney General's office for getting gun permits and for getting from the Attorney General's office special officers' authority in the form of a special assistant to the Attorney General for a price.
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    That's what they came to talk about. But David Ferrie was unbelieveable in his appearance. I found it difficult to understand anyone who was able to function normally to make himself look the way he does. He had little pieces of carpet for eyebrows and I mean not even carefully plucked.
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    They are just little swatches of carpet you paste on your eyebrows, and he had a similar lack of design on the piece of carpet he was wearing for hair. And quite frankly it kind of turned my stomach. I was most pleased when he departed the office.
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    I heard afterwards, both he and Jack Martin were working for, and I don't remember exactly when that happened, I would have to go back and check my files on it, that he both and Jack Martin were woking for G. Wray Gill doing investigative work on behalf of Carlos Marcello.
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...
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Mr Kohn. I had known Guy Banister back in the '30's in th FBI in Washington, and then never had any other contact with him until he came to New Orleans in 19 -- I guess it was December 1954, that he was brought to New Orleans by Mayor Morrison and appointed the number three man in the police department.
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    Banister subsequently told me that he had been told by the mayor who knew him because he, the mayor, had gone to LSU Law School with Guy Banister's bother and Guy Banister had just retired from the FBI as SAC ... in Chicago.
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    What I didn't know until after his death when I was told this by his widow, was when Guy Banister retired from the FBI and came to New Orleans to accept his job in the police department that it was already known that he had brain damage, that he had undergone some sugery in Chicago and that apparently he was working out the remainder of the time necessary for his pension, a relatively short period of time, but that his wife, Mary, had been told by the doctors to expect his pattern of conduct to change dramatically because of brain damage, and incidentally it was after his death she told me this, that things about Guy Banister's conduct for the first time made sense, including this very erratic conduct of his when he was in the police department when he would have moments that I would observe in which he did very irrational things and very hostile things.
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    It would be completely unrelated to the rest of the pattern of his conduct. He was finally fired by the police department for doing something that I thought at first he was framed for.
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    However, when we checked on it, we found that things actually happened and it had to do with his momentary erratic act in connection with a bartender down in the French Quarter in which he assaulted him. After he was fired, he went into this private detective business of his, Guy Banister Associates, or something like that, and then every nut in town gravitated, Jack Martin, another guy, who incidentally, was the unauthorized pilot of the plane in which Mayor Chet [Chep] died in a mountain crash in Mexico, Ulysses S. Ward [Hugh Samuel Ward]. He is another guy who thought of himself as a private investigator.

-     Incidentally, he didn't have a license to fly that plane. A lot of people like that just gravitated...
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Jerry Shinley

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