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Jim Braden: Possible Link to David Ferrie

Investigator Peter Hoyes has turned up several pieces of information which indicate a possible connection between Jim Braden and the mysterious David Ferrie.

David Ferrie was the homosexual airline pilot and private investigator whom Jim Garrison accused of participating in the plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Six days after District Attorney Garrison's charges were made public, David Ferrie was found dead in his apartment in New Orleans. His mysterious death was finally ruled to have been a suicide.

David Ferrie has been a target of investigation by critics of the Warren Commission ever since the assassination. In fact the FBI and Secret Service both investigated a possible Ferrie role immediately after the assassination. It was widely rumored in New Orleans and Dallas that Ferrie was to have flown the alleged assassins out of the country following the assassination. The Warren Commission decided not to include the official Secret Service and FBI reports of Ferrie in the 26 Volumes of Hearings which were released after the Warren Report was issued. However, the Justice Department did finally release those reports to the National Archives in 1967 following Garrison's public accusations.

Author Hoyes has since established that both Jim Braden and David Ferrie worked out of the 17th floor of offices in a building in New Orleans in the month or two immediately preceding the assassination.

This is particularly significant due to the fact that at that time the mysterious David Ferrie was employed as a private investigator by Carlos Marcello, the top Mafia kingpin. It is widely believed by most federal authorities that Carlos Marcello ranks with his close friend Meyer Lansky as one of the two single most powerful leaders of the Mafia's national and international crime syndicate. Carlos Marcello heads the Mafia empire centered in New Orleans, Louisiana, and controls most of the Mafia activity in the southern part of the United States.

In September and October of 1963, just weeks before the assassination, David Ferrie was working out of the offices of Carlos Marcello's criminal attorney, G. Wray Gill. Ferrie, who was doing investigative work on a perjury charge that his boss Marcello was then facing, worked out of Room 1707 in the Pere Marquette Building in New Orleans.

At the same time, in September and October of 1963, Jim Braden was operating out of Room 1701 in the Pere Marquette Building.

have President Kennedy and his brother murdered. Reid has written that he was told of Marcello's threat by an informant who attended a secret meeting with Marcello in New Orleans in September of 1962.