Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

"I hear you're becoming famous," he said at last, for the Warren Report, in which my testimony was quoted, had just been published.

"Yeah, I guess so," I said, standing there uncertainly.

"Hey, come over here," Slim called to a passer-by. "This is Kerry Thornley. He knew Oswald."

"Yeah," I said upon being introduced, "I master-minded the Kennedy assassination."

Brother-in-law chuckled. He liked that one.

The passing stranger, with whom I was now shaking hands, asked me what I thought of the conclusions of the Warren Commission and I defended them.

Slim repeated the same introduction with someone else afterwards and I again quipped that I had master-minded the assassination, and so on, with maybe half a dozen different individuals.

Brother-in-law sat there all the while, puffing his pipe and gloating. Everyone Slim introduced asked me something about the assassination and possibilities that Oswald was innocent or others were involved. In each instance, I defended the lone-assassin theory.

Brother-in-law and Slim then indicated that they had to go somewhere. I was puzzled. Why had he gone out of his way to meet with me if he wasn't going to say anything?

As Slim went up to the cash register to pay their check, Brother-in-law and I waited at a little table just inside the back door.

I looked at him and asked, "Well, how are things going with you these days?"

"Wonderful," he said. "Just great. You know, I really like living in that little house way out in the country, because there are no neighbors around, to hear the screams in the middle of the night!" A villainous leer accompanied his words.

Certainly the remark startled me. I must have knitted my brow and given him a questioning look.

Obviously, he expected some other kind of response because, for the first time since I had met him more than three years before, Brother-in-law lost his composure.

Fumbling with his pipe, he hemmed and hawed and then said, "Yeah, one of these nights I'm going to go out and catch me a nigger woman, and then take her home and torture her to death."

Slim came to the rescue and together they departed into the night.

I stood in the doorway of the Quorum watching them disappear down the street. An awful thought struck me. If that weird man really meant what he just said to me, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

I could just imagine myself walking into a New Orleans police station and saying, "Listen, I know a Nazi who says he is going to kidnap and murder a black woman some night."

"Sure, buddy. If he ever goes through with it, don't forget to call us."

Not then and not for years afterwards did I think of this unusual meeting in connection with what Brother-in-law had said one day at his house during one of those tedious conversations: "I'm going to talk to everyone in the country who wants Kennedy dead about assassinating him. Then I'm going to do it. Then I'm going to pay a visit to each and every one of them. I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to look at them and smile, so they'll get the idea. After that, I'll feel free to call on them for favors."

That my friend Slim Brooks may have been a navigational consultant for the Bay of Pigs Invasion was something I'd never have suspected at the time. Yet he was perfectly adept at precisely such work. Something about the coffee stains on his charts seemed to rule out that possibility then.

In a Ramparts Magazine article by William Turner titled "The Garrison Commission" that is reprinted in The Assassinations , an anthology edited by Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch and Russell Stetler (Random House, 1976), there appears a reference to a man who happened to know the address of Guy Banister's office next to the drugstore where Slim and I waited that day when Brother-in-law ran his quick and mysterious "errands."

Ordinarily, the fairly common last name, "Brooks," would not seem more than coincidental. In this instance, however, I received additional information from a personal contact indicating that perhaps this individual mentioned in Turner's article resembled the man I knew as Roderick R. Brooks both in appearance and mannerisms.

My lack of certainty is due to my inability to determine the reliability and intent of my informant. That Slim Brooks might actually have been one Jerry Milton Brooks is a nagging possibility I cannot ignore, since Slim never used what he told me in private was his first name in the company of others, always preferring to be called "Slim."

Here is what Fred Turner says in "The Garrison Commission," first published in January of 1968, about Jerry Milton Brooks:

"The dilapidated building at 544 Camp Street is on the corner of Lafayette Place. Shortly after news of Garrison's investigation broke, I went to 531 Lafayette Place, an address given me by Minutemen defector Jerry Milton Brooks as the office of W. Guy Banister, a former FBI official who ran a private detective agency.

"According to Brooks, who had been a trusted Minutemen aide, Banister was a member of the Minutemen and head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean, assertedly an intermediary between the CIA and Caribbean insurgency movements. Brooks said he had worked for Banister on 'anti-Communist' research in 1961–1962, and had known David Ferrie as a frequent visitor to Banister's office.

"Banister had died of an apparent heart attack in the summer of 1964. But Brooks had told me of two associates whom I hoped to find. One was Hugh F. Ward, a young investigator for Banister who also belonged to the Minutemen and the Anti-Communist League. Then I learned that Ward, too, was dead. Reportedly taught to fly by David Ferrie, he was at the controls of a Piper Aztec when it plunged to earth near Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, May 23, 1965.

"The other associate was Maurice Brooks Gatlin Sr., legal counsel to the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. Jerry Brooks said he had once been a sort of prote of Gatlin and was in his confidence. Brooks believed Gatlin's frequent world travels were as a 'transporter' for the CIA… The search for Gatlin, however, was likewise futile: in 1964 he fell or was pushed from the sixth floor of the El Panama Hotel in Panama during the early morning, and was killed instantly."

Guy Banister is claimed by another researcher, as I previously mentioned, to have been undercover for Division Five of the FBI at the time he ran the detective agency in New Orleans. As Turner goes on to note, 531 Lafayette and 544 Camp are two entrances to the same building. Located next to Waterbury's Drugs, at the corner of Camp and Canal, it stands at the other end of a very short block at Camp and Lafayette.

As for David Ferrie who, according to Jerry Brooks, frequented Banister's office, I met him very briefly and casually once at a party and, as I've mentioned already, I met Guy Banister one evening in the Bourbon House.

What of Maurice Brooks Gatlin, though? Notice that Jerry Brooks claimed this man trusted him and also seemed unaware of his death four years earlier in Panama. Going with my assumption that Jerry Milton Brooks could have been Slim Brooks, and with my further assumption would be that Gary Kirstein, Slim's alleged Brother-in-law, was actually E. Howard Hunt using another man's name, a fascinating hypothesis suggests itself.

According to Torrbit's thesis, the CIA's Double-Check Corporation of Miami was on loan to Division Five for anti-Castro activities, and both were involved in the Cuban Revolutionary Council headquartered in Banister's office. In that case, Banister almost certainly would have known and could have been working with E. Howard Hunt.

Suppose that with Brooks, Hunt was using a false identity, that of Maurice Brooks Gatlin. Then it is easy to imagine how Slim could have become involved in the assassination plot. Moreover, Slim continued to meet with Brother-in-law in the years that followed, which would explain why Jerry Milton Brooks seemed unaware of the death of Gatlin.