Southern Research Company

Southern Research Company, Inc., is a private investigations firm chartered in Shreveport on December 2, 1958, and still in business there. It absorbed Truth Verification of Louisiana, a polygraph company, and two other firms in 1973, and has had sister companies in Baton Rouge and Lake Charles. Its president in the 1990s and since has been Thomas J. Ostendorff III.¹

New Orleans

A credit report of July 1960 in a CIA security file describes "Southern Research, Inc., whose home office is in Shreveport," as a firm of ten or twelve employees, and its vice president and New Orleans manager, Joseph Oster, as having come to it a year and a half before from Guy Banister's agency. The Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans kept an investigative report on Oster and the firm dated April 5, 1960. The New Orleans office was at that date a branch of the Shreveport company. A separate Louisiana corporation, Southern Research Company of New Orleans, Inc., was chartered on September 5, 1963. The online register retains no officers or incorporators for it, and nothing but the name ties it on the record to the Shreveport company. The Ferrie investigation of 1962 and 1963 was for the most part the work of the earlier branch office, and the file was in the Shreveport company's hands in 1996.¹²

In 1962 and 1963 the firm investigated the pilot David Ferrie for Eastern Air Lines, which was dismissing him. Its file on the case was numbered 11-N-224. Oster went with the district attorney's investigators to Ferrie's apartment on the night of November 22, 1963.³

The Shaw Case

The records of Edward Wegmann, lawyer for Clay Shaw, show according to the Assassination Records Review Board "that the Shaw defense team had retained Southern Research Company as of mid-1967." A file on Gordon Novel records that the firm interviewed his lawyer, Steven Plotkin, on April 7, 1967, and a witness before the Orleans Parish grand jury in January 1969 was asked whether he had been "interviewed by Southern Research or any investigating firm that is doing Shaw's investigation." The same defense files hold reports of the same months from agents of the Wackenhut Corporation, which had qualified to do business in Louisiana on May 3, 1965. The New Orleans company filed notice of dissolution on October 5, 1967, and was dissolved on December 13.¹³⁴

The Committee's Request

On January 6, 1978, the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey, asked the CIA for "all materials pertaining to Southern Research Corporation, presently known as Wackenhut Corporation." The agency's replies repeated the phrase. Its cover staff reported "no record" of Southern Research and "100 to 150 documents covering the period 1963 to 1977" on Wackenhut, and its domestic contacts division listed source files under both names. A researcher who read the Wegmann files in 1997 wrote that Wackenhut "was the same company that did the reports for Eastern Airlines in the dismissal proceedings against David Ferrie. The firm was then called Southern Research." The Louisiana register shows the Southern Research companies and the Wackenhut Corporation as distinct entities, the first a Louisiana firm still active under its own name and the second a Florida corporation admitted to the state in 1965, and records no merger, sale, or change of name connecting them.¹⁴⁵

The review board wrote to Ostendorff, and issued a subpoena, for the Ferrie file. He sent a copy. Oster told the board's lawyer in January 1996 "that neither he nor Southern Research had worked for the Clay Shaw defense team." The lawyer's memorandum ends: "Given the conflicting accounts we have found, we should contact Shaw's defense attorneys (or their families) and specifically ask whether they retained any investigative firms."³