The Journey 134. James Day: David Ferrie, Phony Bishops, and the Assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK

Publisher R. A. “Kris” Millegan speaks with James Day about his soon to be released THE MAD BISHOPS: The Hunt for Earl Anglin James and His Assassin Brethren, which tells how a peddler of phony degrees, who claimed to be a world-famous bishop, built a network of contacts that reached the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK. Also discussed are David Ferrie and other phony clerics in New Orleans in 1963.

Kris: I found these wandering bishops to be quite interesting.

James: I was reading about the Vatican bank scandals. I came across a reference to Clay Shaw, and to Permindex, Centro Mondiale Commerciale, and the International Trade Mart. That led to David Ferrie, who was from Cleveland, from a family of public servants – Cleveland firefighters and police, same as my family – and he and I went to the same Jesuit high school and the same college and even dormed in the same hall on campus.

He went on to a seminary in Cleveland, which I knew well because I considering doing that too, for a time. I knew that environment very well. And I really wanted to figure out what compelled this man who had such a faith foundation to become who he was in New Orleans and the deep south and, I think, a mentor to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Ferrie was a very well-spoken debate club member. He was in the choir. He played the piano. He played the organ. He graduated a year early from high school. He was a very smart man.

He was part of a cabal of phony bishops and phony clergy. It’s called “the old Catholic Church.” And he was a bishop in that. He got New Orleans people involved, too, like Guy Banister and Jack Martin – people JFK researchers would know.

These “mad” bishops, these “wandering” bishops, on the fringes, would otherwise have no [impact] on society, they would be forgotten. But they figured out, with a Roman collar, they could walk the streets and get waved on into buses and waved into hospital rooms as clerics – this was fantastic for these guys. They suddenly became very important.

Kris: What were they doing? Were they just fleecing people out of money?

James: There was that. Collecting money on the street for a good cause. If you were lucky, you could find a real bishop who would consecrate and ordain you, even though you had no seminary training, and build up your credentials.

But it became a front for deeper and darker things [and] that intrigued me. Ferrie made a series of calls in 1962 to a man named Earl Anglin James up in Canada. When James was asked about that six years later, he denied ever knowing Ferrie. He denied knowing Jack Martin. He said, “They’re followers of mine. They’re fans of mine. You see, I have two thousand, one hundred degrees to my name. I have a lot of followers around the world. I own this entire street.” He gestured down the whole street.

And you think, “Wow. This guy is crazy.” And it’s a wonderful cover for them [to be dismissed as crazy and not knowing anything], so they could keep doing what they’re doing, hiding in plain sight, even funding coup d’etats, which is what Earl Anglin James did.

Kris: Peter Levenda covered some of this in his SINISTER FORCES series.

James: He’s very competent about what goes on in these phony-front churches. He [encouraged me] to look at the deep things behind that world. As I put in the book, a lot of these guys were into the occult. Theosophy. Freemasonry. And Rosicrucianism. They saw themselves as the new Templars.

So much so, when Sirhan Sirhan was arrested, one of the books he asked for in prison was on Theosophy; by C. W. Leadbeater, who was a “mad bishop” in our [account]. You start to wonder, how was Sirhan influenced by all that? Spiritualism. Mesmerism. Hypnotism. And Aleister Crowley. These are all related.

Kris: When you see all this, you would think that intelligence agencies would use this milieu to spy, to gain information, and to game people also.

James: It’s important to note, not only the movements of Oswald and those around him with JFK, but also the movements of Sirhan Sirhan with RFK, and the movements of James Earl Ray with Martin Luther King. At every pivotal point in the narrative, there’s a reverend or a preacher who pops up to steer these guys into some new territory that advances the plot that would eventually implicate them in those assassinations.