The following, from AMERICAN GROTESQUE (pp. 163-164), marks what had to have been the turning point for William Gurvich. The narrator is James Phelan, to whom Garrison had given the Sciambra Memo and the transcript of the hypnosis session (apparently without reading them). When Phelan discovered that Garrison was actually willing to *use* Russo's testimony, his first reaction was to go to Garrison, apparently on the assumption that Garrison was acting in good faith, and didn't realize the fraudulent nature of Russo's testimony. ------------------------------------------------------------- Then I attend the preliminary hearing and I sit there and listen to Russo tell this marvelously detailed story about the party [the "assassination party"] that he'd not mentioned when he first appeared as a witness. The following day I called Garrison at his home and told him there was something deeply troubling me and he said, "Come out here and tell me about it." I went out to his house and he was there with his wife and children and shortly after I got out there Bill Gurvich and his wife came out and I told Garrison that--I said, "How come Perry Russo told two different stories? How come when he first appeared he did not identify Shaw as Bertrand, he did not say Shaw knew Oswald, and he said nothing at all about an assassination plot at any party." His mouth kind of dropped open and he said, "He didn't?" At that point I realized Garrison had not read the memos he'd given me. He said, "Well, I'll have to get Moo-Moo [Sciambra] out here and explain it." Sciambra comes out there. They shoo the women out of the room and sat down and Garrison said, "Okay, tell him your problem." I did, and Sciambra came back at me real hard and said, "Mister, you don't know what the shit you're talking about!" I said, "Look, I've got some bad news for you, Moo." I said, "I've read your memo, I've got a copy of your memorandum, and I've read it six, seven, eight times. I can almost recite it from memory and there ain't nothing in there about the assassination plot. I'll tell you how sure I am." I said, "I'll make a deal with you. If that memo isn't the way I've described it, I'll resign from the Saturday Evening Post tomorrow if it is the way I described it, you resign from the D.A.'s office tomorrow. We'll shake hands and then read the memo and tomorrow one of us is going to be out of work." At that point he immediately backed off, like that [Phelan snapped his fingers]. I said, "Jim, get a copy of the memo" because I'd left mine in the safe down at the hotel so Garrison is rummaging around in the drawer alongside his desk trying to find the memo. Then Sciambra changed his story. Now he says, Well, he wrote the memo in a big hurry and he said maybe he forgot to put in about the assassination plot. And I told him to come down off the wall I said, "Come on, now, you found a witness to the crime of the century and you come down and write a 3,500-word memo and leave the crime out of it--put in all this other chicken-shit stuff--but you leave the crime out!" I said, "Nobody can be that stupid. . . . Besides, this hypnosis transcript shows how the thing was pulled out of him." So we ding-donged it back and forth and Gurvich sat there and never said a word, over in the corner. I said, "You know the thing that really hangs me up is that you said Russo said he saw the man twice and named the two times, once on the Nashville Wharf and once in a car with David Ferrie. So if he told you about the party you not only had to forget to leave out about the party but you also had to change the number of times to conform with what you told here, and that won't work." Sciambra was pretty hostile. We broke up and nobody was very friendly with anybody else. I said, "I'll call a cab and go back." And Gurvich says, "No, I'm going back to town, I'll drive you back." I get in the car with Gurvich, who was his chief investigator, and this thing made a terrible impact on him. He said, "Man, you have just blown up the only witness we've got." He said, "I'll never forget Sciambra sitting there lying to you." He said, "This little son of a bitch, this was his little magnum opus and he sits there telling you he had a half-dozen other things to do. This was the one big thing that this little S.O.B. did and he sat there saying, 'Maybe I forgot'" Gurvich said, "Man, he worked that memo over and polished it and repolished it." Gurvich was terribly upset.