Jim Garrison - Later Career

Later Career

In 1973, Garrison was tried for accepting bribes to protect illegal pinball machine operations. Pershing Gervais, Garrison's former chief investigator, testified that Garrison had received approximately $3,000 every two months for nine years from the dealers. Garrison, acting as his own defense attorney, called the allegations baseless, alleging they were concocted as part of a U.S. government effort to destroy him, because of his efforts to implicate the CIA in the Kennedy assassination. The jury found Garrison not guilty. In an interview conducted by New Orleans reporter Rosemary James with Pershing Gervais, James said Gervais admitted to concocting the charges.

In the same year, Garrison was defeated for reelection as district attorney by Harry Connick, Sr. On April 15, 1978, Garrison won a special election over a Republican candidate, Thomas F. Jordan, for a state Circuit Court of Appeals judgeship, a position that he held until his death.

In 1987, Garrison appeared as himself in the film The Big Easy.

After the Shaw trial, Garrison wrote three books on the Kennedy assassination, A Heritage of Stone (1970), The Star Spangled Contract (1976, fiction, but based on the JFK assassination), and the best-seller, On The Trail of The Assassins (1988). His investigation again received widespread attention through Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK, which was largely based on Garrison's book On the Trail of the Assassins as well as Jim Marrs' Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Kevin Costner played a fictionalized version of Garrison in the movie. Garrison himself had a small on-screen role in the film, playing United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

He died of cancer in 1992, survived by his wife and five children.