My Reddit AMA starts in 30 minutes.

I'll be on Reddit for a couple of hours answering questions about my knowledge of Jim Garrison and the Clay Shaw Trials, which I sat in on in 1969.

Jim Garrison and me

Jim Garrison was an enigma. He had a brilliant mind, but his mind was not analytical. He had a great sense of humor, but often others humor was lost on him. He was reasonably well read, but yet was confounded by well-known quotes from well-known sources. He was politically savvy; yet one of the most naïve elected officials when political savvy was most needed by him.

I first met Jim in late 1964 or early 1965 and instantly liked him. One of my good friends, Max Mercer was an assistant district attorney in his office and he introduced me to the “Giant;” a nickname given to him because of his massive size.

When the Clay Shaw trial arose in 1967, and Jim attempted to implicate him in the Kennedy assassination, I was practicing law in New Orleans. For about seven or eight years, I had coffee every morning with Irvin Dymond, who was the primary lawyer for Clay Shaw, the man charged by Garrison with conspiring to kill President Kennedy. Irvin had a beautiful mellifluous voice which offset the basso profondo of Jim Garrison. The anticipation of a brawl between those two legal titans was greatly anticipated by the locals and by the national media alike. What a disappointment when Garrison made an opening statement and then turned the trial over to his assistants, Jim Alcock and Al Oser. He was not seen again until he made one of the prosecution’s feeble closing arguments.

Al Oser was a fraternity brother of mine, and I met Alcock through Max Mercer; both were adequate lawyers but lacked the gravitas of the Giant. The trial lasted about three weeks and over fifty witnesses testified. Thanks to Irvin Dymond, I was able to sit through five or six days of this embarrassing display of justice, and like most people at the time, judged Jim’s case a farce. After three weeks of testimony from over fifty witnesses, it took the jury less than an hour to arrive at their not guilty verdict. It was hardly sufficient time for the jury to choose a foreman and take an up-or-down vote. Obviously, they were not impressed with the prosecution’s evidence.

I knew several witnesses, such as, Andrew Moo-Moo Sciambra, an assistant district attorney and Dean Andrews, a local hack lawyer, among them. It made no difference who testified, the case was flawed from the first. This judicial disgrace was beneath the lowest standard of any district attorney’s office.

Later, in 1971, Max and I attempted to goad Jim into running for the Senate of the United States and wrote a paper outlining the reasons he should run. The incumbent, Allen J. Ellender, was a long time member of that body and was firmly entrenched in the good-ole-boy network in Washington. North Louisiana’s Baptist majority was enamored with Garrison because he had attacked the drug and prostitution rings on Bourbon Street and in addition, his stature among the greater New Orleans population was never stronger. Only the Cajun areas were strongly for the reelection of the incumbent.

Ultimately, Jim shied away from the race, even though we thought he could easily have defeated Ellender. Suddenly, a North Louisiana politician, Bennett Johnson entered the race. Ellender dropped dead during the primary and the rest is history. Johnson served in the U.S. Senate from November of 1972 until January of 1997. Had Jim been more aware he would have been one of a hundred members of an august body and not one of the many thousands of D.A.’s throughout the country. Jim once told me, long after the jury had acquitted Shaw, that he had chosen the wrong venue for the trial. “The stage in New Orleans was too small. I needed the national stage in Washington if I could pull it off,” he said. I never knew if Jim believed Shaw was guilty or not, but I assumed he ultimately convinced himself of the man’s guilt. I saw Jim almost daily at the New Orleans Athletic Club, but never spoke to him again about the trial.

Later, after I supported Harry Connick’s successful run for DA against Jim, and before Jim ran for the Supreme Court and Court of Appeals in Louisiana, he was practicing law a few blocks from my office and asked if I would help him prepare a brief he was writing. It seems, Jim was a patient in a local hospital; fell out of bed, reinjured his bad back, and brought a malpractice case against the hospital. He represented himself at the trial and the jury awarded him a large sum of money. I worked with him on his brief to the Court of Appeals, but it was hopeless; the law was against us.

I often wonder whether Jim would have brought his Kennedy conspiracy theory before the United States Senate had he been elected to that body. But I do know one thing; if he was standing at the lectern on the floor of the senate, it would have been damned interesting to find out.

Why did I do it?

One of the reasons I wrote Green in Judgment, Cold in Blood was because I had always been fascinated with the multiple conspiracy theories that constantly swirled around the corpus of JFK. Multiple shooters, CIA, FBI, Military Brass, Secret Service, Mafia, Lyndon Johnson, Castro, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald all contributed to the mystique surrounding the death of the president. A writer can make a certifiably accurate description of the assassination by extrapolating one or more of the above suspects, plug them into a November 22^nd scenario, and voila, you have a non-fiction account of the most talked about and written about event since the crucifixion of Christ.

I have a personal reason for wanting to know what happened that fateful day in Dallas. I voted for John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 8, 1960, and I don’t want my vote to be wasted. So I set about constructing my own skewed view of the facts and fictionalized a result based on an exhaustive research of the Kennedy years in office. I purposefully highlighted the frailties of JFK in order to best lend a modicum of credence to my protagonists desire to murder him.

The dialogue between the many non-fiction characters were, for the most part, a figment of my imagination. It isn’t often one gets to put words in great men’s mouths and I enjoyed the hell out of doing it. In the last fifty years, everyone has died who could reconstruct the events of that bleak November day in Dealey Plaza, so we will never know the true story. As memories fade about a young president and only Hollywood’s mischaracterizations remain, we will never know the accuracy of JFK’s contemporary’s opinions; nor will we ever know the true nature of our heroes and villains in that storybook ending. I like to think my fictional version is as accurate as the pundits like to think theirs are. 

Green in Judgement Cold in Blood Available now

Peter Abadie is launching his e-book today. Green in Judgment, Cold in Blood, may be purchased through Nook, Apple book store, Kobe, Smashwords, Sony, and Diesel. Kindle should be available either tomorrow or Sunday. If you prefer to wait, we will have a printed copy available at Amazon and hopefully, at a bookstore near you. We are presently in negotiations with a local New Orleans uptown bookstore to have a book signing in November and will notify you when the plans are finalized.

Today is my birthday. It is also the birthday of Lee Harvey Oswald, who would have been seventy-four, had he lived. I chose this release date because the book GJCB is an historical novel based on John F. Kennedy’s years in office, and to date, Oswald remains inextricably tied to the president. I wove two fictional characters into a fabric of historic events, while the fifty non-fictional characters compliment the backdrop. The book took two years to research and another year to write and should satisfy those assassination doubters and Warren Commission believers alike.

I hope you like the read and will please notify your friends on Facebook and other social media sites about the book. Also, if you could leave a comment about the book at the place you bought it, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you and hope to see you soon.  Peter Abadie

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/368698

http://www.amazon.com/Green-Judgement-Blood-Peter-Abadie-ebook/dp/B00G0037LS/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382911983&sr=8-1-fkmr2&keywords=peter+j+abadie
You can purchase the book at this link.

 

 

Green in Judgement Cold in Blood

A little information about Peter

Peter Abadie is a fictional writer who specializes in historically based novels. He takes a bland, newspaper account of an historical situation, uses the same timeframe and characters as the event produced, weaves in a few fictional characters, and emerges with an exciting, informing, and sometimes threatening story.

 In order to enhance his well-researched adventures, he often incorporates his background as a trial lawyer, an environmental company owner, along with his other many business experiences, combining them with his travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has used this methodology throughout ten of his fictional works, providing a reader with an alternative to history’s conventionally accepted dogma.

From a rework of the John F. and Robert Kennedy assassinations (Green in Judgment, Cold in Blood and A Serpent’s Egg); to an early life of Henry Morton Stanley – the most famous African explorer – (The Adventures of John Rowlands); to a robbery of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (The Murder of Jane Style); to the motley lives of two thieves crucified at the side of Jesus (Maledicto), Abadie’s mastery of his subjects is riveting. Throw in a few crime books and several thrillers and you have the lot. 

Abadie used the French Quarter in New Orleans as his setting in The Great Reprimand; Chinatown in Boston is the crime scene of another thriller in Serial is not a Breakfast Food; a convoluted romance emerges in the castles of Wales, where the travails of the coal mining industry, meshed with a backdrop of World War I, provide additional color in Pygmalion’s Last Stand. Two psychiatrists, one a serial killer, match wits to see who will be the last one standing in Time’s Up. Finally, in his novel Privately Held, a thriller set in Boston, Abadie unearths the soft underbelly of the corporate world, and the even softer underbelly of Brahmin high society. 

 Protagonists become so intertwined with history in one of Abadie’s stories, it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.  His expert background in geology, physics, and law emerge as backdrops in many of his dramas. In 2004, the government of The Federal Republic of Nigeria and The Democratic Republic of São Tomé e Principe accepted his work, The Environmental Guidelines applicable within the Nigeria-São Tomé e Principe Joint Development Zone, as the controlling law in their offshore waters.

 Abadie brings an abundance of self-deprecating humor to his one non-fiction work, The Stigma of Jeanne, as he traces his roots from Syria, to Spain, to France, and finally to the United States where he was born and embarks on the most inexplicable and hysterically funny adventures. A reader might feel they were being led down a fallacious path; but they were not. It’s all true.

The Misty Lady

The Stigma of Jeanne

            On February 11, 1858, three young girls approached the River Gave outside the small town of Lourdes located at the foothills of the Pyrénées Mountains in Southern France. They were sent on a mission by their parents to gather wood for the homes of two of the little girls. Marie-Bernard Soubirous, her younger sister, Toinette, and her friend, Jeanne Abadie were products of the families of impoverished Basque-French workers. Marie-Bernard was still in shock over her father losing his main asset, the town’s mill; a loss caused by a downturn in the local economy. Her malaise was further exacerbated when her father was accused of defrauding his customers at the mill by shorting their processed grain.

            When the three girls neared the river, Jeanne and Toinette crossed over to the opposite side and left Marie-Bernard to forage for wood on her own. Marie was physically weaker than the other two, and played on that fact to remain by herself; but she was wily, and always was able to manipulate Jeanne and her sister to do her bidding. The two less mentally endowed children began picking up wood, while Marie-Bernard sat watching the River Gave go by and contemplated her bleak future. Marie-Bernard knew she must do something to cut herself away from the herd and return to the placid life she had experienced prior to the economy decimating her father’s assets.

            When Jeanne and Toinette came back to Marie-Bernard’s side of the river, they found her sitting on a rock near the mouth of a cave, and noticed she had not picked up any wood.

            “You haven’t done anything, Marie. Why?” Jeanne asked.

            Marie, who was prone to daydreaming, began stammering about, looking for an appropriate excuse for her nonperformance. “I couldn’t gather any wood because when I came to this cave to look for some, I saw this beautiful lady,” she said sheepishly. “She just appeared out of the mist and told me the Lord had great plans for me.” Marie figured if she invoked the Lord’s name, it might divert the other two girls’ attention away from her laziness.

            “What are you talking about, Marie. There’s no misty lady in that cave,” said Jeanne, as she peered deeply into the shadows of the grotto. “You just fell asleep, didn’t you?”

            “I know what I saw and she told me to keep coming back to this cave and she would appear and talk to me every day,” said Marie, with more gusto this time.

            When the three girls got to Marie’s house, she told her mother the story of the misty lady as an explanation for why she didn’t have any wood as the other two did. Her mother was justifiably unmoved, and figured Marie had told the story because she wanted to get out of performing the chore. She forbad her from returning to the cave the next day and began to admonish her. But Jeanne Abadie was a smooth talking little devil and convinced Marie’s mother she might have seen the mystery lady too, and should allow Marie to return to the cave with her, just to check out the story. Marie’s mother, having been congenitally inbred, and therefore terribly naive, bought Jeanne’s package without objection and allowed the girls to return to the riverside grotto several days later.

            By this time Marie had convinced herself and several other girls in the town she actually had seen a holy lady. Her insistent behavior allowed the story to take on a life of its own, gaining momentum with each day of her telling it.

            Marie and Jeanne returned to the cave for the promised reappearance of the illusion. Marie carried a vile of holy water, recently blessed by the parish priest, to toss over the apparition’s head in case it was the devil disguised as the Virgin Mary. She was trailed by a skeptical Jeanne, who still believed Marie merely wanted to get out of work and hadn’t seen a damned thing in that cave.

            When the two girls neared the cave’s mouth, Marie sprinted forward and shouted, “There she is! There she is!” She spilled the entire vile of holy water onto the ground. Jeanne Abadie, in a fit of frustration, because she couldn’t see anything in the cave, picked up a stone and threw it as hard as she could in the general direction Marie had indicated the apparition had appeared to her for a second time.            The stone rattled harmlessly inside the grotto.

            Marie kept asking Jeanne, “You saw her didn’t you, Jeanne? You saw her?”

            “Marie, you just want to get out of working,” a perceptive Jeanne replied. “I told you, if you did see anything it was the devil, and that’s why I threw a stone at it.”

            When the two girls returned to the town of Lourdes, Marie insisted she saw an angelic figure; that Jeanne Abadie hurled a stone at this beautiful lady, chasing her away; and this lady implored her to return to the grotto so she could tell her something important.

            Marie-Bernard Soubirous returned again and again to the cave, each time without Jeanne, sixteen times in all, and on each occasion claimed she had spoken with the mystery lady. The story quickly morphed into a local legend where Marie could heal people because she had met with God’s representative, who bestowed curative powers on her. If one went on a pilgrimage to the grotto, bathed in the River Gave, or drank from some local spring, miraculous things would happen to one with a deformed body.

            The Catholic Church, in their infinite wisdom, methodically changed her name and canonized Marie-Bernard Soubirous as Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, and thousands of inflicted humans flock to the cave and river each year to seek her cure.

            When the town elders of Lourdes realized what a wonderful and profitable thing it was to have pilgrims genuflecting at Bernadette’s cave and river, they felt it did their economy no good to have Jeanne Abadie hanging about debunking this miracle as a figment of Marie’s imagination. So they immediately railroaded Jeanne and her family out of the area, forever stigmatizing the Abadie clan as miserable hucksters, naysayers, and frauds.

My grandfather, Bernard Abadie, le boucher du village, probably had endured enough criticism because of the ‘Stigma of Jeanne,’ and shortly before the turn of the century, migrated to the United States from the Lourdes area in France, depositing nine children on his newfound soil. My father, one of Bernard’s nine, spoke French until he was approximately thirteen years old. He was raised in the Irish Channel area of old New Orleans. I have no earthly idea why the area was called the Irish Channel since it was populated primarily by people speaking French, German, and Italian, and was renowned for being one of the roughest areas in the city. All three cultures were first generation settlers and all three had their separate Catholic Church located within a two block radius.

I once asked my father why he lost his French language, because when I knew him, he couldn’t say “hello” in French. He told me if he was speaking French on the street with a friend, and one of the rival Italian or German gangs overheard him, they pummeled him until he spoke English. Presumably, he did the same to them when armed with his bande de francais. He literally got the French beaten out of him by other children, who spoke primarily German and Italian, in an area called The Irish Channel, located within an English speaking country. Go figure!

Ultimately, my father married a young local gal and moved across the Mississippi River from New Orleans with his new bride.

            One blustery October day in 1937, Ilda Boylan Abadie, my father’s bride, deposited this mass of human protoplasm onto a table in Hotel Dieu Hospital in New Orleans. The doctor performed the ritual ass-slap and I uttered my first sound. I haven’t cried much since then, although I probably should have, given the mistakes I’ve made along the way. I often felt the ‘Stigma of Jeanne’ followed my grandfather across the ocean and landed squarely on my shoulders. It has plagued my every move since birth.

            But in the prophetic words of little Édith Piaf, Je ne regrette rien. Even if I did regret something, it’s too damn late to change anything. I’m quite sure when my parents bent over the bassinette, trying to coax a smile from their newest arrival, they never anticipated their son would turn out the way he did.

            The way their son turned out is the subject of this book. I have taken various vignettes from my life and pasted them together in what I hope is a representative amalgam of one human’s time on this planet. I have not changed the names of people in this opus to fictional ones, to protect either the innocent or the guilty. I have portrayed each person as I remember them.

            New Orleans is a city replete with characters. I knew my share of them and have tried to represent their flavor to the best of my abilities. I also am a character, but I leave that to the reader to judge where I fit into the scheme of things.

            Some may look upon this work as a primer on how not to live one’s life; but I would have to disagree. I don’t know anyone else who has had as many experiences, good and bad, as I have, and survived to tell the tale. I still drink good wine; have wonderful and loyal friends, a loving family, and a wife I adore.            

            Who can top that? 

            “Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers,” said one wit.  So, here’s my preemptive strike, as told by an old man with plenty of life yet to live.

Speculation

“Diyanu!” shouted the little man. “Enough already. Pack your bags, we’re leaving this hellhole.”

That was my great, great...grandfather, many centuries ago, admonishing his life with his little Jewish family in what is now Syria. As soon as the clan heard him, they began gathering their belongings, mounted a few donkeys and slowly meandered their way to the west. Their homeland had been dominated by Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Persians, the Macedonian Greek, Alexander the Great took a turn, and then the Romans stayed for a few hundred years. All the while the old man’s family had remained in place, tending their sheep, saying their prayers and studying their Torah. It was the expansion of the Ottoman Empire that ultimately pissed the old man off and provoked him to move his family; as if the Turks were any worse than their predecessors.

They traveled across Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt; all the way to the Moroccan coast before they jumped across the Strait of Gibraltar and entered Spain. They continued their travels north and were finally stopped by the Pyrénées Mountains, as their exhausted donkeys wouldn’t go one step further. There they banded together with a group of Jews and began a new life; with a new batch of sheep, saying their prayers every night, and studying their Torah.  

            In the year 1492, Christopher Columbus took off from Spain seeking new routes to the Far East. He was funded by Queen Isabella who is generally described as, “a real bitch.” That same year, this austere lady had listened to her confessor and spiritual advisor, Tomás de Torquemada, and issued an edict of general expulsion, which drove any lingering Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. The Jewish locals were given a chance to convert to Catholicism before being lashed to a fiery stake. Those who did eschew the fire and convert were branded as conversos or new Christians.

            One of the families who converted from Judaism to Catholicism was my ancestors, the Abadie clan. The new clan-master began hanging out with a group calling themselves Basques, who had their own language and customs and accepted the Abadies’ into their group, as if they belonged there. Everything went along swimmingly until Torquemada ran out of recalcitrant Jews and began burning even those timid souls who had previously converted to the Roman church.

            My great, great…grandfather gathered together his brood of freshly minted Catholics and sped across the Pyrénées Mountains with Torquemada’s fires nipping at their heels. They settled in a small town known as Lourdes, where a group of French-speaking Basques had already planted their flag. After a few hundred years, and some serious inbreeding, you couldn’t tell an Abadie from any other original Basque. Therefore, my heritage dictates that I am a Jewish-Catholic – actually, I was raised Episcopalian – with Syrian-Basque-French-Spanish blood coursing through my veins and causing great confusion throughout my body and mind.

            It is here my story begins.