The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Dr. King, however, along with the shadow NCNP movement, stepped up his antiwar efforts and threw himself into developing the Poor People’s Campaign, which was scheduled to bring hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poor blacks, Hispanics, whites, and intellectuals to Washington in the spring of 1968. He would, of course, not live to see it.

  All of these efforts came to naught as a result of government infiltration and subversion, and ultimately with Dr. King’s assassination. The country moved further to the right over the next ten years, and as a result, I withdrew from active participation in national political activity. The assassination of Bobby Kennedy, barely two months after Dr. King was cut down, reinforced the dismay and cynicism of many, myself included.

  What was beyond our understanding at the time, and is discussed in detail later in this work, was the close association of powerful individuals and corporate interests, with their foot soldiers in government and, in particular, the military and the intelligence establishments. Over one hundred cities were burned or seriously disrupted in 1967 to 1968. The nation was on edge. A revolution was barely averted in France. Opposition to the war and growing economic disparity at home led to growing dissent, which in turn fed the peace and freedom movement.

  The army’s reserves were virtually depleted and there was serious concern as to whether forces were available to put down a concerted rebellion on domestic shores. Dr. King was regarded, as the shooter has revealed to me (discussed later), as a “shit starter” who must be removed. The unease of the military and intelligence forces and their liaison with each other during that last year reflects this fear. Chronological notes (see Appendix A) of significant meetings and events are included during this time, primarily of the military, but also referencing FBI and CIA participation. The degree of surveillance of Martin King and Robert Kennedy reveals the threat they posed.

  Not for a moment, however, during that turbulent time did I hesitate to believe that someone other than James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan (in regards to the RFK assassination) had been responsible for the back-to-back assassinations. What a difference the evidence from over nearly four decades has made.

  The actual upending of my initial Dr. King assassination perceptions began with my conversation with Ralph Abernathy in 1977. This eventually led to my many months’ long preparation for the interrogation of James Earl Ray at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary that took place in August 1978—and changed everything.

  Calmly and quietly, James left us with a multitude of issues and unanswered questions. The five-hour interrogation session was observed by body language specialist, Dr. Howard Berens. After the interrogation, Reverend Abernathy, Reverend Lawson, Dr. Berens, and I agreed that regardless of what role James may have played, he was not the shooter.

  Thus began a personal investigation that only now, in the autumn of 2015, has been completed.

  The first book, while not a prerequisite to reading this one, set out the details of that initial investigative work from 1978 through 1995 and my relationship with James. (I agreed to represent him in 1988, ten years after beginning to investigate the case, when I finally became convinced that he was an unknowing scapegoat.)

  During those initial seventeen years, I spent much time on the streets in the bowels of Memphis, Tennessee. The pressures on me and my family increased from all sides, including an instance in which my four-year-old son picked up the phone to hear a threat on his father’s life. It culminated with an offer from an undesirable source to buy our family home. Raising a young family under these circumstances was untenable. We moved to England in 1981, where I became a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, and regularly commuted to the United States for the case.

  Formal habeas corpus proceedings, which I took on James’s behalf through the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and up to the Supreme Court, failed to get him a new trial or even an evidentiary hearing. Gradually, more and more issues arose concerning unasked and unanswered questions by the House of Representatives investigation. It also became abundantly clear that James’s final lawyer, Percy Foreman, who initially pledged to go to trial and then abruptly pressed James to plead guilty, ignored a considerable volume of exculpatory evidence as well as significant indications of official governmental involvement not only in a cover-up, but of the assassination itself. Foreman went to the extreme by agreeing to give James’s brother Jerry $500 in exchange for James’s guilty plea in court without causing any “unseemly conduct” in court (see Appendix C).

  With the failure of getting the case in court, I took advantage of an offer, by Thames Television in the UK, in collaboration with HBO, to do an unscripted television mock trial of James. This trial resulted in an independent jury finding James not guilty, and this opened the floodgates through which new evidence poured.

  For example, James’s shadowy handler and controller Raul was identified and spoken to by one courageous witness, Glenda Grabow, in a six-minute telephone conversation, documented by her telephone bill (see Appendix E). She knew Raul well in the late 1960s, while he was in and out of Houston, and she was in no doubt that it was the same person. I also spoke with him. When his daughter was shown the same US immigration photograph of him, which had been independently identified by Glenda, her brother, her husband Roy, Loyd Jowers, and James, the daughter unthinkingly said anyone could get that photograph of her father—confirming his identity.

  What was also to emerge were the direct roles of Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, from the back lot of which the fatal shot was fired, and Frank Liberto, a local Mafia lieutenant close to the New Orleans Southwestern organized crime family of Carlos Marcello. At the time, I knew nothing about the crucial Dixie Mafia connection to J. Edgar Hoover and his personal emissary Clyde Tolson, and the assassination effort led by the family of Russell Adkins. This involvement would later surface with the information provided under oath by the Adkins family’s youngest son, Ron Tyler Adkins.

  Someone claiming to be John Downie called my military contact on January 1, 1996, when the first book had been out for only a few months. He asserted that I was basically correct on the facts and offered to fill in the details. He said he had only followed orders and that he had not been given too much independent decision-making authority. He also said he was officially dead and had been given a new identity.

  The conversations continued for some eighteen months, occasionally in Bermuda, where I would have a shadow presence, well out of sight. The informant would never meet with me personally since I was Ray’s lawyer, but the intermediary (Steve Tompkins) carried the questions and answers back and forth as he had done with two former Special Forces members of the Alpha 184 back-up sniper unit who fled to Mexico in the early 1970s after discovering that a clean-up operation was underway. I gradually realized that the informant was a clever disinformation agent whose mission was ultimately to redirect our investigation.

  A decade later I would spend hours with one of the daughters of the real John Downie and, as a result of our conversation, developed an unexpected respect for this most unlikely recipient. Information relayed to me about his previous exchanges with President Johnson on the Vietnam War required an expanded assessment of his role; more on that later.

  My foray into the military involvement understandably engendered hostility and it became clear that my investigation must be discredited. In one instance, Forrest Sawyer and ABC, in a program entitled Turning Point, interviewed me with Billy Ray Eidson, who I had named as the leader of the Alpha 184 back-up sniper unit. I only named him because all of my investigations and investigators had told me he was dead. We dropped that ball. He was involved in a barroom murder, had killed a couple of people in Birmingham, and fled to Costa Rica, where he remarried and lived in obscurity. The army, knowing he was alive, brought him onto the television program. It was a short, sharp hit, but had nothing to do with the primary allegations that he led the back-up sniper team.

  When I confronted Sawyer afterwards,
telling him we could have had a meaningful discussion if he had told me Eidson was alive, in which I could have brought documentation to confront him, he shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

  Eidson, and his National Guard General Henry Cobb, Commander of the Twentieth Special Forces Group (who also participated in the ABC interview), denied any involvement in the assassination. Eidson, who in 1968 was a fireman in Birmingham, subsequently said he was off duty on the day of the assassination—April 4, 1968—building a house for a friend a good distance away from Birmingham. Sometime later in a BBC interview, General Cobb separately stated that he knew Eidson could not have been involved in the assassination because he had seen him that day around the firehouse in Birmingham a number of times.

  They had obviously not coordinated their Eidson alibi story.

  Similar problems arose during our efforts to obtain copies of the photographs taken by the Psy-Ops team from the roof of the fire stations. These photographs showed (according to the few who saw them) the shooter lowering his rifle, and he was not James. My colleague, Steve Tompkins, was tailed and photographed by FBI agents as he went to a meeting with one of the Psy-Ops officers. He made the mistake of traveling under his own name. His office—in the Georgia State Capitol, no less—was broken into one night before he was to meet with me and turn over a sensitive file. When I arrived that morning, the file was missing.

  When I made a similar error of registering in my own name in a Birmingham, Alabama, Holiday Inn, my room was entered in my absence and my daybook and telephone list—left behind in haste—were taken.

  Those were tumultuous times. It was one thing for the Mafia to carry out a contract killing of Dr. King, but quite another to learn that a super-secret military intelligence group, housed in the Pentagon, under the ultimate command of the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, with close working liaison with the FBI, played a significant role. These revelations only worsened when we learned that the 902nd MIG was involved in a clandestine joint venture operation with Carlos Marcello’s Mafia family, whereby stolen weapons from US military bases, camps, and arsenals were delivered to Marcello’s property, loaded onto barges, and shipped to the Gulf at Houston, where they were off-loaded, repackaged, and sold to right-wing forces in Latin and South America. The profits were split 50–50 between the 902nd and the mob, with the 902nd using the profits to fund further black operations. This particular operation, the assassination of Dr. King, was not only confirmed by two members of the Alpha 184 sniper team, who were themselves drivers at various times, but also independently corroborated by Glenda Grabow, who was a friend of the Houston operatives and present at some of the unloading activity led by Raul. Thus, she personally observed the Houston side of the enterprise.

  A further link, beyond any credible notion of coincidence, emerged from the 902nd’s working relationship with a Canadian facility of the Union Carbide Corporation. The manager of the facility’s warehouse, with National Security Agency clearance, was one Eric S. Galt. This was the identity given to James by someone he believed was trying to help him. With an NSA- cleared identity, should the escaped con ever be stopped or picked up, he would immediately have been let go and not returned to prison. I obtained a 902nd document that revealed that one of Colonel Downie’s subordinates met with the real Eric Galt in August 1967, only days before we believe that James was given this identity. A photograph of the real Galt was given to me at one point; the resemblance to James was striking.

  But there was more. Two other sources, along with Steve Tompkins, one of whom I have called “Herbert” and the other, whose name was Jack Terrell, but was known as “Carson” prior to his death, confirmed separate aspects of the Dr. King back-up sniper operation. Herbert was a longtime official and quasi-official military/CIA operative and mercenary, who boasted about his role in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, the Guatemalan president who was ousted in 1954. As early as 1978, seventeen years before Tompkins, he offered to take me to meet with the very same members of the back-up sniper unit who Tompkins knew and with whom he met in 1995. At that very early stage in my work, the price was too high and the level of trust too low.

  As for Jack Terrell, I sought him out after reading his book Disposable Patriot, in which he referred to a member of the Thirtieth Special Forces group from Mississippi named J. D. Hill. According to Terrell (whose name was also on a list of Alpha 184 participants provided to me by Tompkins), Hill had participated in the Memphis operation and had begun to talk about the assignment. He had allegedly been killed by his diminutive wife, who fired five bullets from a .357 Magnum, carving a circle in his chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. Jack thought it very unlikely that she could handle such a weapon.

  Terrell was blocked by the widow’s protector/boyfriend from talking to her. She was never prosecuted or charged with what appeared to be an act of murder. The case was closed.

  Even with this type of independent corroboration of Steve Tompkins’s information and documentation, I knew it was likely that he would feel enormous pressure to recant his work on my behalf. Therefore, being continually prodded to do so by my extraordinary assistant, Jean Obray, I asked him to read the military chapters and confirm the accuracy of the details. He did so under oath in the form of an affidavit.

  This section of Orders to Kill was too hot for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation’s publisher Harper Collins, which had won the auction for the book and life-story rights. At the last minute, they demanded that I exclude the military chapters on the basis that since it had been a Mafia, and not a military, killing, the truth would be confirmed. At the same time, the corporate interests and the bottom line would be protected. Military intelligence, the army, and the Mafia were too intertwined, in my view, for this approach. We rejected the ultimatum and the book went to a small house that published it intact. It would, however, not be reviewed in the mainstream media, with one New York Times reviewer confiding (after he had a review ready) that this was the first time in twenty-five years that he had been told not to publish a review of a book. That was in November 1995.

  The story of the following six years is referenced in this book.

  The alleged murder weapon was tested and the results were inconclusive. Ordinarily, if a weapon cannot be matched to the death slug, that is the end of the story; there is no murder weapon. In this case, however, the state and the media reversed the burden. We were expected to conclusively eliminate the rifle that had been thrown down (in fact, we would learn that the throw-down possibly took place nearly ten minutes before the fatal shot rang out). By not ruling and reserving judgment, Judge Joe Brown denied the State the opportunity to appeal.

  As this matter was pending before him, however, he was curiously approached with a very lucrative offer to become a television court judge, an offer he eventually accepted. In the meantime the State eventually moved to recuse him, saying he had become prejudiced toward the petitioner. When Judge Joe Brown refused, the State appealed, and without allowing any argument, the appellate court removed him and remanded the case to the administrative judge. We knew that there was no hope in such a system.

  During all of this time, James saw his hopes rise and fall as his health deteriorated. His liver disease had progressed to such a level that only a transplant would save his life. I traveled to the University of Pittsburgh’s renowned Thomas E. Starzl Transplant Clinic and met with Dr. John Fung, head of the Division for Transplantation. Eventually, subject to an extensive examination, and with the confirmation that James could not receive an organ in Tennessee, he agreed to accept him as a patient. We traveled to Tennessee to conduct a preliminary workup and the Pittsburgh doctors agreed to admit him at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital and provide him with an available organ.

  I was elated.

  I prepared an application to the court seeking an order for the Department of Corrections, requiring them to cooperate in facilitating this surgery. We offered to cover the costs of transportation and security. The
hospital would absorb the medical and care costs. It would therefore cost the State of Tennessee nothing. The Department of Corrections opposed the motion, saying that there was no legislative authority for them to administratively grant such permission.

  After an emotional appeal and argument, the judge reserved his decision only to come back hours later and again deny our application.

  I was devastated.

  This, of course, was a death sentence. Any appeal would have been useless. It was clear that, once and for all, they wanted James dead. Former mob associate Arthur Wayne Baldwin had long ago told me that the Memphis godfather, Gene Luchese, Marcello’s man in Memphis, had tried to have James killed in prison on more than one occasion, in one instance using Baldwin himself to coordinate the attempted hit.

  Now was their chance, and his death would be by natural causes. But this was not enough. They still wanted him to confess. They sent an intelligence officer to offer him an opportunity to die outside of prison if he would only confess to the assassination and close the story.

  James was incredulous. I was appalled at their audacity. He had not protested his innocence for all those years, suffering an unjust incarceration for decades, to fold on his deathbed and give his persecutors, his executioners, their sordid victory.

  Without the liver transplant, James died, and the King family and I arrived at what appeared to be the end of the road.

  However, I proposed that we use the vehicle of a civil trial as a means of putting our evidence before a court and testing it under oath. We had hard evidence against Loyd Jowers, some of which only emerged from Jowers’s own admissions in interviews with Dexter King and me, within the statute of limitations. In such a civil trial, the family and heirs of Dr. King would be able to sue him, and it would enable us to finally expose much of the evidence we had gathered. So in the autumn of 1999 we went to trial in Judge James Swearingen’s Memphis courtroom. It would be the black judge’s last case.