On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-Marine of skittish enough character to have defected both to and from the Soviet Union, was arrested for assassinating John F. Kennedy by firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building in Dallas, Texas, as the president rode in a motorcade below. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, killed Oswald. A commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded Oswald a solo act. This conclusion launched a thousand books, several films, and not a few careers selling counter-theories as to who the actual perps – CIA, FBI, Mossad, Mafia, a military-industrial consort, pro-and anti-Castro Cubans – had been and what role, if any, Oswald and Ruby played.
On January 21, 1969, Clay Shaw, a 55-year-old, socially prominent, Croix-de-Guerre-winning New Orleans businessman and closeted homosexual – closeted, in fact, with an assortment of whips and chains[1] – went on trial for his part in one such conspiracy, becoming the only alleged conspirator ever prosecuted by anyone. His prosecutor was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
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Garrison was 40. After serving with distinction in World War II and graduating law school, he had worked briefly for the FBI. He was reactivated with his National Guard unit for Korea, only to be cut loose for a “severe and disabling psychoneurosis of long disorder.” His career sputtered until election as DA in 1962 – and re-election in 1965. His critics portrayed him as publicity-hungry, politically ambitious, and unscrupulous. [2] His supporters saw him as willing to risk his own career to fight the powerful: business elites; the church; all arms of government. His primary war, though, was on vice: prostitutes; B-girls; homosexuals – especially homosexuals[3].
Oliver Stone based his film JFK (1991) on Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw, augmented by facts and fever dreams of anti-Warren-theorists. Starring Kevin Costner, a nobly heroic Garrison, and Tommy Lee Jones, a grotesquely evil Shaw, it was seen by 25 million people, becoming the probable primary source of what most Americans know about Kennedy’s assassination – and certainly Shaw’s trial.[4] Alicia P. Long’s Cruising for Conspirators (2021) aims to reveal a current of sewage running below the surface of this sea.
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Long’s book – clear. concise, well-focused – keeps its distance from the muck of who killed Kennedy. Looking through a “lens of sexuality,” she argues that Garrison prosecution – persecution – of Shaw stemmed from a prejudicial-to-the-point-of psychosis cultural belief “that homosexuals were clannish, secretive and liable to commit all manner of crimes up to and including murder.” Long reminds readers that homosexuality was still considered a psychiatric illness and homosexual acts crimes. Arrest – even disclosure of sexual preference – cost people jobs. Lawmen, from the FBI down, kept files on actual or rumored homosexuals with which they pressured those named into compliant behavior, including informing on others.
Long attributes America’s linking homosexuality to violent crime with Leopold and Loeb’s murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, reinforced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).[5] She sets the habit of coupling political conspiracy with sexual deviancy within a history extending back to accusations against Catholics and Masons in the 18th and 19th centuries and continuing through Q’anon’s brief against child-molesting Democrats today. “A homosexual thrill killing” is how Garrison characterized Kennedy’s murder shortly after Shaw’s arrest.[6]
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Personally, I doubt this belief’s pervasiveness. Long cites no public opinion poll documenting the extent of its existence. She refers to no peer-reviewed study confirming her assertion. I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when homosexuals were to be shunned; but the taunts directed at them – “fairy,” “pansy” – marked them as anything but inherently violent. When you took a four-point stance, you did not expect a homosexual charging across the line of scrimmage. When you lined up for a center jump, you did not expect a homosexual controlling the tip. When you read of a homosexual murder, like Ramon Novarro’s, it seemed in line with Bugsy Siegel’s reassurance to a nervous contractor: “We only kill each other.” Why Garrison subscribed to a slur no more widespread than, say, Jews making matzah with Christian children’s blood is not something Long explores.[7]
Still, even if a belief for the bats-in-belfries bunch, it was real. Long’s book suits these times of eying history from previously suppressed perspectives. And spurs you to ask your own questions.
Like what-the-fuck was State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw about?
II
Two unlikely characters had set this wheel in motion.
The weekend following the assassination, Jack Martin, a once-accused murderer and former mental patient, made a series of alcohol-fueled phone calls culminating in his telling the FBI that David Ferrie, a badly toupeed, false-eyebrowed, professional pilot, amateur hypnotist, spare-time cancer cure researcher, anti-Castro activist with a hard-on for Kennedy since the Bay of Pigs, and possessor a rap sheet high-lit by indecent acts with teenage boys, may have been involved. Martin’s suspicions stemmed from Ferrie owning a rifle similar to the one Oswald supposedly used and having once plotted a short story about the assassination of a president. When Martin learned that the teenage Oswald had been active in the Civilian Air Patrol while Ferrie was an instructor, his suspicions boiled and bubbled into his teaching Oswald to use a rifle with a telescopic site and planting a post-hypnotic suggestion in him to kill Kennedy.[8] Withing a few days, Martin seemed to have become the first Paul Revere to warn the citizenry of these red-coated “sex deviate(s)… capable of committing any kind of crime.”
Independent of Martin but over the same weekend, Dean Andrews, a lawyer whose reputation varied between “colorful” and “Whoa, Nellie!,” telephoned the FBI too – in his case from a hospital bed, while medicated. That past summer, he reported, Oswald had come to his office several times accompanied by Spanish-speaking homosexuals, none of whose names he recalled, and an Anglo “swish,” “Clay Bertrand,” which he suspected was an alias. The day after the assassination, Anthony said, Bertrand phoned him in the hospital to request he defend Oswald. Anthony described Bertrand as 22-23-years-old, 5’7″, 160 lbs., with a blonde crew-cut. A week later, he described Bertrand as 6′-6’2″, with brown hair. In July 1964, he said Bertrand was 5’8″, 165-175, and with sandy hair. (Clay Shaw was 53, 6’5″, and, in Long’s words, “barrel-chested,” with “wavy silver hair.”)
The Martin-Andrews tips initially left, Long writes, “the district attorney’s investigators, media sources, the FBI, the Secret Service, and local gadflies scrambling, searching, and in some cases exaggerating… the story of potential Oswald coconspirators in their midst.” But the scrambling, unsurprisingly, led nowhere.
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By late 1966 nearly two-thirds of America believed Oswald had not acted alone. National magazines had featured articles criticizing the Warren report. Prestigious newspapers had reporters digging into the killing. Books asserting conspiracies had hit best seller lists, and big name politicians called for further inquiry. If New Orleans, where Oswald had grown up and lived for several months before moving to Dallas, had been central to the planning, Garrison saw, he would have jurisdiction. For something. Which could lead him who knew where.
He ordered the entire 26-volume report.[9]
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Garrison sent investigators secretly plumbing contacts in the French Quarter’s homosexual community to identify “Clay Bertrand” and chasing leads from Miami to San Francisco. He interviewed Martin and Andrews himself. Martin added anti-Castro activists to his conspirators, but Andrews began a string of evasions that would include saying he may have imagined Bertrand’s phone call, that he would not say if Clay Shaw, whom Garrison had begun to focus on, was or was not he, and that Shaw wasn’t, but Gene Davis, owner of a New Orleans gay-bar, was.[10]
Garrison also questioned Ferrie. He placed him under 24-hour surveillance and bugged his apartment. On February 17th, a New Orleans paper broke the story of Garrison’s investigation and named Ferrie as a central figure. Journalists from around the world began flocking to the Crescent City. So did conspiracy buffs – Bugliosis names 16 – bouncing ideas off one other, fanning the flames, excited by a governmental body open to their cause.
Ferrie told reporters he did not know Shaw or Oswald. He called the investigation a “joke” and offered to take a lie detector test. On February 22, he was found dead in his apartment from, the coroner and pathologist agreed, a ruptured brain artery. Garrison called it “suicide” or “murder.”
He now had a conspiracy without a conspirator unless he could find Bertrand. His focus had fixed on Shaw, he told others, because he was homosexual, spoke Spanish, and was named “Clay,” and homosexuals “‘never chang(ed) their first names.’”[11] It was, Long notes politely, an “innovation” to link Oswald, Ferrie and Shaw, since neither Martin nor Andrews had. “The glue that held together (this) newly arranged cabal…, was the culture’s bedrock suspicion about homosexuals (and)… their inherent pathology and potential criminality.
Though most of his staff advised Garrison to forget it, he announced on February 24, the case was “solved.” He would prove it “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” He could “not lose.”
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And then the gods delivered Perry Russo.
The weekend after Ferrie’d died, Russo, a bi-sexual, S&M-practicing 25-year-old insurance-salesman-trainee, who had been having sex with men since he was 13, announced to the press he had heard him once threaten Kennedy in the presence of fatigue jacketed, helmeted Spanish-speaking men. (He also said he had never met Oswald or heard of Bertrand or Shaw.) But on February 27, in Garrison’s office, Russo identified a photo of a bearded man as someone he had seen with Ferrie, named “Leon Oswald.”[12] Shown a photo of Shaw, Perry said he had seen him with Ferrie too.
Garrison had Russo administered “truth serum” (sodium pentothal) and hypnotized.[13] Now he recalled a party in Ferrie’s apartment where Oswald, Ferrie and Bertrand, (“a queer,” tall, slim, and with white “kinky” hair) had discussed assassinating Kennedy through a tri-angulation of fire. After seeing Shaw in person, Russo identified him as Bertrand.
Garrison had Shaw arrested March 1st for conspiring with Ferrie and Oswald to kill Kennedy. Shaw denied knowing either.[14] [15]
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In felony cases, preliminary hearings determine if prosecutors have a prima facie case. That is, if its witnesses are believed, could a jury convict.
Russo, who’d had three more sodium pentothal-supplemented sessions – and failed a lie detector test – augmented his story with the conspirators plotting to have someone let himself be caught, so others could escape. His testimony was buttressed by Vernon Bundy, a 29-year-old heroin addict, who’d been in prison facing five-years for a parole violation, when he recalled that, four years earlier, while shooting up at Lake Ponchartrain, he’d seen a tall, grey-haired man (Shaw), pass money to another man (Oswald). Bundy’s failing his own lie detector test did not keep Garrison from having him testify. Or releasing him once he had.
A three judge-panel held Shaw for trial.
III
Events of the intervening 22-months allowed room for two competing narratives.
In one, “the most powerful machinery of the government (was) unleashed against Garrison”[16] in a CIA-led effort to destroy his case. He was subjected to a blitz of jury-pool poisoning coverage in newspapers, magazines, and an NBC documentary.[17] Because his investigation had become vast and his staff remained small, he had accepted help from virtually anyone who walked in the door, from dedicated professionals to those all-but-wearing aluminum foil caps, leaving him vulnerable to “infiltrators,” intelligence “assets,” double-agents, and a “personal” representative of Allen Dulles, who sabotaged and side-tracked the investigation.[18] He was blocked from access to important witnesses and denied crucial documents. Witnesses he found were beaten, poisoned, and hit by trucks. Someone tossed a grenade at one and someone sabotaged the car of another. One spotted a prowler on his lawn and one was shot at after he testified.[19]
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Narrative Two has Garrison slowly and steadily losing his marbles.
His theory of his case came to embrace the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, doctors in Dallas and Bethesda, White Russians, John Birchers, Minutemen, Cubans, oil millionaires, the police, Mafia, Warren Commission members, the Chief Justice, Attorney General, and President, and a member of the International Council of Christian Churches. The number of those he involved in the actual shooting grew to five, seven, 14, at least 15, and 16, not including Oswald. Their shots came from three buildings, the grassy knoll, and a sewer in front of Kennedy’s limo. He tarred anyone who defected from his staff – whether professing dislike for its direction or his behavior or a belief in Shaw’s innocence – as a CIA-op.
Garrison also de-emphasized his “homosexual thrill killing” analysis (Long posits this was because of media blow-back from his preying upon the “vulnerable.”)[20] But he wrote the forward to a book by a Warren-critic on his staff, which emphasized the “homosexuals and other sex deviates” central to the assassination; and the August 1968 issue of Confidential magazine, its circulation a twenty-fifth of what it had been when it was outing Rory Calhoun and Barbara Payton, climbed from its grave to shriek of the “Homosexual Ring That Killed Kennedy.”
So the issue retained relevance for some.
IV
The trial lasted 39-days.
Jury selection took five. The 12 selected were male, working class, five under 30, three over 50. The only two apparent homosexuals, Long writes, were excused, one by each side, as if in prior wink-and -nod agreement.
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The prosecution case began well.
Six people placed Oswald, Ferrie and Shaw together, in the summer of 1963, in a small town 109 miles from New Orleans, where Oswald sought work at a mental hospital.[21] Bundy re-played his get-out-of-jail-free card of Shaw passing Oswald money. Russo repeated his post-hypnotically cast party – but, on cross-examination, conceded that the Ferrie-Oswald-Shaw conversation had seemed more bull-shoot than plot; only Ferrie used the word “murder”; and he, Russo, had never called it “conspiracy.” The state fared even worse with Charles Spiesel, an accountant, who testified he too had been with Shaw, Ferrie and someone who resembled Oswald at a party where they discussed killing Kennedy. But Spiesel also admitted to suing a psychiatrist, detective agency, and horse racing association for ruining his sex life and to fingerprinting his daughter each time she went back to college to make sure the same girl returned home. (The staff attorneys who’d vetted Spiegel reported he’d be a good witness, except for being “crazy.” Garrison thought that wouldn’t come out – then blamed the assistant DA who’d used him.)
The prosecution next launched a six-and-one-half-day assault on the Warren Report. Film showed Kennedy’s head snap backwards. Witnesses recalled more than three shots, coming from multiple directions. A pathologist described an entrance wound in the front of Kennedy’s head. If you believed this evidence, you had to conclude more than one shooter involved. If you believed more than one shooter involved, you had to conclude the Commission wrong.
But the CIA went unmentioned. So did motive. Homosexuality came in obliquely through testimony that Shaw wore “tight” pants and walked funny; but when his sexuality was made clear, through a “queer”-laced memorandum of Russo’s first interview, prepared by the assistant D.A. who’d conducted it, the impact was over-shadowed by the omission of the meeting at the party and the plot. The D.A. said he had forgotten to include it, which, Shaw’s lawyer quipped, would be like returning from a hunting trip where you had killed a tiger and a rabbit and only mentioning the rabbit.
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Defense expert and lay witnesses contradicted the prosecution’s on everything from the entrance wound to Shaw’s taste in slacks. Perhaps the most impressive was Andrews, since, according to Garrison, Shaw’s “link” to the conspiracy “depended largely” upon him being the “Clay Bertrand” who’d called Andrews in the hospital. Risking new perjury charges, Andrews denied Shaw was Bertrand and said he had imagined the call. (Also, notably a police officer, defying the traditional “Blue Wall of Silence,” appeared voluntarily to report administering a lie detector test Russo had failed.
Shaw denied that he had ever used the name “Clay Bertrand” or that he knew Ferrie or Oswald. His cross-examination didn’t lay a glove on him – leather or otherwise.
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Garrison’s closing argument was eloquent, powerful and compelling.[22] He rang the carillons of truth, justice, and the duty of ordinary people to stand up to the powerful – without tarnishing them by mention of Bundy, Russo, or, for that matter, any witness. “(A) profound moment,” says Long, “and the jurors must have been affected by Garrison’s impressive person and passionately argued close.” “Most members of the press,” Lambert wrote, “including Shaw’s most ardent supporters believed the jury would vote to convict…. because Garrison’s persona and his remarkable power of speech enthralled so many.”
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It acquitted Shaw in 54 minutes. To put that in perspective, Jack Ruby’s jury took two-hours 14-minutes to reach its verdict. And he shot Oswald on live TV.[23]
xxx V.
I could not figure out Garrison’s case.
To prove a criminal conspiracy, it is not enough that some jokers planned a caper. At least one must commit an act to move it to fruition. In his opening statement, Garrison said the acts here were Shaw being in California when the assassination occurred, Ferrie being in Houston – both of which occurred but neither of which seems particularly conspiracy-furthering to me – and Oswald’s bringing a rifle to the depository – which he’d denied. Probably he did, but others say that rifle wasn’t fired – or, if it was, not by Oswald – so how did that further anything?
Moreover, Garrison wrote that Shaw’s role was “essentially to set up Oswald as the patsy.” If Oswald was a “patsy,” why would he need to plant a file in a mental hospital to prove he was screwy? And since, according to Russo, he knew someone was to give himself up – which he didn’t – what was he doing in Dallas? Delivering a rifle? Couldn’t the assassins have carried their own?
The whole thing makes no sense. If the CIA planned to kill the president, wouldn’t it’ve wanted Shaw, Ferrie, and Oswald convicted, unless they were part of its operation; and since this operation supposedly had alternate plans in place should some not work out, why would by-Garrison’s-own-judgment “marginal” players – like these three pishers be planning one at a party in New Orleans?[24]
Even DiEugenio was stumped. “(N)obility,” he proposed, as a reason Garrison went forward, “stubbornness, stupidity, or a death wish…?”
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I have two theories.
It is common for law enforcement personnel, confident in the truths of what they believe, to plant evidence, search unlawfully, coerce confessions, commit perjury to put bad people away. One of Garrison’s most steadfast consultants – the first person he thanks in his first book – an attorney devoted to the theory that Kennedy was killed to prevent his withdrawing from Vietnam, achieving rapprochement with Cuba, and nuclear disarmament with Russia, has said he believes it proper for a lawyer to present false testimony if it serves a greater good. Maybe Garrison, realizing he could not convict Shaw – even that Shaw had nothing to do with the assassination – believed it worth proceeding in order to reveal the “truth” about who killed Kennedy.
Oliver Stone said, “Garrison was trying to force a break in the case. If he could do that, it was worth the sacrifice of one man.”
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Second, the well-respected Warren Report critic Sylvia Meagher has said Garrison’s actions “put the whole case into cold storage for years.” And the journalist Robert Sam Anson, author of a book on Kennedy’s “Murderers,” wrote it was a long time after Garrison “before anyone would take the notion of conspiracy seriously again.”
So maybe Garrison was CIA.
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Lambert’s view is more grounded. She views Garrison – charming, charismatic, devoid of empathy or conscience – as your garden-variety “well-functioning psychopath.” He heard his call to carve his name in history. It led him up a scaffold and handed him a noose.
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Appendix “A”
Two days after Shaw’s acquittal, Garrison charged him with perjury for denying he knew Oswald or Ferrie. A federal judge dismissed the case, calling it “harassment” of a man against whom no “factual basis” for charges had existed. Russo’s story, the judge said, had “likely (been) concoct(ed)” by Garrison.
Garrison was re-elected District Attorney but defeated in 1973. He twice ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana Supreme Court before winning election as an appeals court judge. He died at 70.
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Shaw exhausted his life savings defending himself and was left a social outcast. He sued Garrison for violating his civil rights but died from cancer, at 61, before it concluded. Since he had no wife or child to carry it forward, it was dismissed, another consequence of being homosexual in America.
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Garrison wrote three books about the case. A Heritage of Stone (1970) never mentions Shaw. It spends only one of its 198-pages on the trial, says nothing about the evidence, and concludes that he had failed to “prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Mainly, it recounts how “an enormous domestic intelligence organization” killed Kennedy to establish “a military takeover of the United States.”
The Star-Spangled Contract (1976) was a novel based on the case. I skipped it.
On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) was called by Long “extremely creative nonfiction.” Lambert said, “Nothing (Garrison) wrote can be trusted. Not even a or the…. It’s all wrong” (This was the book Stone optioned for $250,000.) In it, Garrison wrote the jury “accepted my argument there had been a conspiracy,” which, given the time they spent deliberating, seems unlikely. And given public opinion going in, eight of them probably already believed that.
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In 2021, Stone released ‘JFK’ Revisited a documentary, written by – of all people – James DiEugenio. I was curious about Stone’s present view of Shaw and Garrison. Admittedly, I fast-forwarded through portions, but I did not see Garrison mentioned and Shaw only briefly.
When the film had shown at Cannes, Stone lamented to Variety that his inability to obtain financing in America had been due to “self-censorship” within a country “scared of hearing the truth.” Fortunately, this fear had not kept it from SHO.
I suspect funding was not blocked by fear but the doubt anyone cared. America had seen many murders. It had heard many lies.
Who-killed-Kennedy may linger, a burr under saddles, like who-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays.
Maybe the Earl of Oxford did both.
NOTES
[1]. Parts of Mardi Gras costumes, he claimed.
[2]. Even James DiEugenio, a staunch supporter, in Destiny Betrayed (2012) shows Garrison threatening to jail witnesses who would not testify as he wanted and reporters who “interfered” with his cases.
[3]. During Garrison’s term as D.A., the Vice Squad busted 1.25 practitioners of “the crime against nature” for every hooker.
[4]. For a dissection of Stone’s film, see Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History (2007), which calls it “one continuous distortion in which Stone couldn’t find any level of deception and invention beyond which he was unwilling to go….a relentless perversion of reality.” For a defense, on the grounds of “dramatic license,” see DiEugenio’s The JFK Assassination (2018) – with a forward by Stone.
[5].The Frank murder had reverberated even more recently when it became the basis for Meyer Levin’s best-selling novel Compulsion (1956), which was adapted into a Broadway play (1957) and award-winning movie (1959).
[6]. There was speculation as to whether Oswald was homosexual – or bi-sexual – and, if so, with whom he had a relationship, Ruby, Shaw…
[7]. Rosemary James, a New Orleans newspaper reporter, has suggested Garrison envied Shaw’s “success and… that he lived as a homosexual without any repercussions.” Patricia Lambert, in False Witness (1998), the best account of the case I found, after noting accusations against Garrison of being a wife-beater and pederast, postulated “he was driven to pursue Clay Shaw by his discomfort with his own sexuality.”
[8]. A stronger example for Long’s case than Leopold and Loeb may be The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in which an American soldier is “brain-washed” into becoming a presidential assassin. The soldier is played by the purportedly homosexual Laurence Harvey, who is saddled with a – you-know-what-that-means – emasculating mother.
[9]. One source says he ordered three sets: home; office; car.
[10]. Garrison eventually had Andrews charged with – and convicted for – perjury.
[11]. Should this lead you to mouth, “Oh, Jesus!”, you have not read enough what-passes-for-logic among conspiracy thinkers.
[12]. A “Leon Oswald,” who resembled Lee Harvey, lived in New Orleans at the time, and Russo’s description accurately described a former roommate of Ferrie.
[13]. For the “suggestibility” of someone under hypnosis or administered sodium pentothal, see Lambert pp. 76-79.
[14]. Shaw would also deny involvement with the CIA. This was untrue. Like many businessmen who traveled abroad during the Cold War, he was often questioned by the agency. If he was an actual operative is less clear.
[15]. Someone charged with conspiracy to commit murder is usually charged with murder too. Shaw was not, Bugliosi suggests, because Louisiana only required nine jurors to convict for conspiracy, while murder required 12. So Garrison may not have been as confident as he let on.
[16]. Dick Russell. On the Trail of the JFK Assassins. (2008).
[17]. Said “blitz” did not keep Garrison from promoting his case from coast to coast. He appeared on Johnny Carson. His interview in Playboy was the longest it had yet run. NBC even gave him 30-minutes of his own.
[18]. This, despite DiEugenio praising Garrison as a “gifted supervisor.”
[19]. Those who report these incidents treat each equally. And do not wonder, as Bugliosi did, why no one shot at Garrison or ran him over. Or that none of the six “best” trial witnesses (DiEugenio’s term), reported a threat.
[20]. I wonder if this shift might be attributed to the attractiveness of the theories of the “experts” his investigation had attracted. The potential rewards for cracking a case involving the deep state far outweighed one restricted to local oddballs.
[21]. Lambert says it was three different men.
As to why Oswald wanted work in a mental hospital far from where he lived, the best reason I found was DiEugenio’s: To change his personnel file into a patient’s to later prove he was “demented.” Why a conspiracy that could allegedly doctor motion picture films and alter medical records could not plant such a file and spare Oswald the commute is not explained.
[22]. It was one of his few appearances, his absences blamed on a bad back, the flu, and the press of other business. He had not even cross-examined Shaw himself.
[23]. I would suggest the rapidity of the acquittal also argues against Long’s thesis of widespread belief in homosexual violence.
[24]. Conspiracy researchers have uncovered evidence linking or suggesting to link Ferrie and Oswald, as well as Shaw, to the CIA. (Sometimes it seems half of New Orleans had links to the CIA.) Which does not prove they plotted anything together.