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Perry Raymond Russo (May 14, 1941 – August 16, 1995)Social Security Death Index.Transcript of Russo’s testimony at Clay Shaw's trial on February 10, 1969, HSCA Record 180-10097-10190, p. 10. was an American insurance salesman who became the key witness for the prosecution in the trial of Clay Shaw in New Orleans in 1969. Russo claimed that in September 1963, he witnessed businessman and civic leader Clay Shaw conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie to assassinate U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
Russo said nothing in the interviews about Oswald, Shaw, or a conspiracy. Perry Russo interviews. When a television reporter asked him on February 24 if Ferrie had ever mentioned Oswald's name, Russo said, "No. I had never heard of Oswald until the television coverage of the assassination."Transcript of Jim Kemp’s interview of Perry Russo on p. 213 of transcript of Russo’s testimony at Clay Shaw's trial on February 10, 1969, HSCA Record 180-10097-10190.
However, when he was interviewed by Garrison's office on February 27, Russo described a roommate of Ferrie's in New Orleans as having "sort of dirty blond hair and a husky beard … a typical beatnik, extremely dirty." When Russo was shown a picture of Oswald, he said that Oswald was the person whom Ferrie had introduced to him as his roommate sometime between May and October 1963.After moving by himself to New Orleans in late April 1963, Lee Oswald lived at the home of his aunt, Lillian Murret, until he got his own apartment on May 10. (Warren Commission Report, Appendix 13: Biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, p. 725–726.) Marina Oswald testified at the Clay Shaw trial that Lee had been home with her every night the couple lived in New Orleans (May 11 to September 23, 1963), except the one night he had been in jail. When shown a picture of Shaw, Russo said he saw him and Ferrie talking in a car at Ferrie's filling station. But still Russo said nothing about Shaw or Oswald conspiring with Ferrie to murder Kennedy.Andrew J. Sciambra, Memo to Jim Garrison, February 27, 1967. Russo added that if he were hypnotized he may have total recall on names and places and dates.
Garrison arranged to have Russo interrogated three times while hypnotized, the first time while also under an injection of sodium thiopental, known popularly as "truth serum". Russo described a conspiracy plot, with Shaw (using the alias "Clay Bertrand") and a rifle-toting "Leon" Oswald at Ferrie's apartment when Russo was visiting in mid-September 1963. Russo said Ferrie told him, "We are going to kill John F. Kennedy" and "it won't be long." According to Jim Garrison, Russo had already testified to this, and that the hypnosis interrogation was for the purposes of verification of testimony.
Russo named two witnesses who could corroborate his story of attending a party at Ferrie's apartment in September 1963 in which the assassination plot was made. The first, Russo's former girlfriend, appeared on an NBC News program about the Garrison investigation on June 19, 1967, and denied being at Ferrie's apartment, and said that she never even met Ferrie until 1965. The second, a friend of Russo's, told NBC News that he was at Ferrie's apartment then but saw nobody resembling Oswald or Shaw. The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison, NBC News White Paper, June 19, 1967.
Russo failed two polygraph examinations ordered by Garrison, on March 8 and June 19, and during the second he confessed to the polygraph operator that his story was not true.Jefferson Parish Deputy Sheriff Roy Jacob, who administered Russo's first polygraph examination, personally told an NBC News reporter that Russo had failed it. The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison, NBC News White Paper, June 19, 1967.Edward O'Donnell, Memo to Jim Garrison, June 20, 1967. Walter Sheridan, a former FBI agent and aide to Robert F. Kennedy who was investigating the Garrison accusations for NBC News, reported,
At a press conference with Garrison the day after the NBC broadcast, Russo accused Sheridan of attempting to bribe him into changing his story, and of alternating between promises and threats in seeking his help to "wreck the Garrison investigation." NBC News denied the allegations, and Sheridan said that Russo had solicited offers from them. George Lardner of The Washington Post who reported on the story said a week or two earlier that Russo solicited a bribe from him in order to divulge "weaknesses" in his testimony.
Garrison had Russo testify two years later at the Clay Shaw trial, which ended in a not-guilty verdict after less than an hour of jury deliberation.
In 1971, two years after Shaw's not-guilty verdict, Russo told one of Shaw's lawyers that he never saw Shaw at Ferrie's apartment, and that Garrison's office had done "a complete brainwashing job" on him. Memo by Edward F. Wegmann of interview with Perry Russo, January 27, 1971.Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison's Investigation and Oliver Stone's Film, M. Evans, 1998, p. 305, footnote 20. . In a second, tape-recorded interview with a former Garrison investigator and two of Shaw's attorneys, Russo spoke of Garrison and his staff telling him before the trial that they had a contract with Life magazine for $25,000, and that "after the Shaw conviction" they would "either give that to me or see somehow that I got a lot of it for my trouble." Russo also said, "I guess I always knew Shaw had nothing to do with anything."Transcript of interview of Perry Russo by William Gurvich, Edward Wegmann, and Irvin Dymond on April 16, 1971, pp. 2–3, quoted by Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, p. 1375. . But to others, Russo continued to assert that he had seen Ferrie, Shaw, and Oswald conspiring to kill President Kennedy.William Matson Law, " Conversations With Perry", 1998.
Journalist James Phelan, who covered the Garrison investigation for The Saturday Evening Post, later explained,
Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK has Russo's testimony given by a fictional character named "Willie O'Keefe". Stone has said that in addition to Perry Russo, O’Keefe was a composite of three other Garrison witnesses — David Logan, Raymond Broshears, and William Morris.Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film, Applause Books, 2000, p. 66. . In addition, Russo made a cameo appearance as an angry bar patron in the scene where news of the President's death is received. George Lardner of The Washington Post, noting that in June 1967 Russo had invited him to "bribe him to disclose 'weaknesses' in his testimony", wrote that it was a "convenient device" for Stone to have eliminated Russo from his script.
Offering a counter view to Stone's JFK, author and New Orleans native Nicholas Lemann wrote an opinion piece in the January 1992 issue of GQ criticizing Garrison's prosecution of Shaw and expressing the view that it had embarrassed the city of New Orleans. Lemann's only reference to Russo described him as "a young insurance salesman-cum-grifter who claimed to have overheard Shaw and Ferrie discussing the assassination at a party." In November 1992 Russo lawsuit the publisher, Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. trade name Conde Nast Publications, for defamation. Noting that "Lemann intended to communicate both the longstanding controversy over Russo's testimony against Shaw, and Russo's admittedly strange existence on the fringes of respectable society", District judge Charles Schwartz Jr. dismissed Russo's claims against the publisher.
He was interviewed for the 1992 documentary The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes. Russo, who had been working as a driver for United Cab in New Orleans, died of a heart attack at age 54."Key Witness in '69 Shaw Trial Dies", New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 17, 1995, p. B1."Coroner: Tests Still Out, Russo Had Bad Heart", New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 18, 1995, p. B2. The headline refers to toxicology tests.
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