Trial, Mardi Gras Make 2-Ring Circus

By JOHN P. MacKENZIE

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L.A. Times/Washington Post Service NEW ORLEANS With only three days of the Clay Shaw trial under its belt, this city of charm and diversity is well on its way to accepting the trial as one of the two great circuses in town.

The other one, of course, is the Mardi Gras celebration that is building to a high point a week from Tuesday.

Unlike past years, Shaw is not taking part in the annual festivities. It would be

"most imprudent," he says "he declining to elaborate because of trial restrictions on newspaper interviews.

Friends of Shaw, less reticent, say the reason is that “Jim Garrison would find a new way to frame Clay.”

GARRISON, THE district attorney of Orleans Parish, has mustered the full powers of his office to bring Shaw to trial on a charge of conspiring to murder President John F. Kennedy.

His investigation has both terrified and entertained

much of New Orleans, where Lee Harvey Oswald lived in 1963 and where Garrison says plots were hatched.

It is still far from clear why Garrison happened to fasten on Shaw with the charge that the prominent social figure and business promoter used the alias "Clay Bertrand" or "Clem Bertrand" in conspiratorial dealings with Oswald and the late David Ferrie.

Edward Jay Epstein, a harsh critic of the Warren Commission but now an even harsher critic of Garrison's methods, says the prosecutor worked from a story by a New Orleans lawyer who claimed, and later denied, that a Clem Bertrand had sought legal help for Oswald after his arrest in Dalias.

IN EPSTEIN'S new book, "Counterplot,” the author says Garrison theorized that the lawyer was covering up for "a wealthy client with homosexual associates."

Shaw, 55, who built this port city's International Trade Mart after World War II and pioneered the restoration of the French Quarter, is widely respected by his social peers in easy going New Orleans as an able, genial man whose personal life is strictly his own business.