The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Some seventy witnesses and thirty days later, a jury took fifty-nine minutes to find for the King family and against Loyd Jowers and agents of the government of the United States, the state of Tennessee, and the city of Memphis. Jowers’s liability was assessed at 30 percent, while the government’s liability was put at 70 percent. The extraordinary array of verbal testimonial and documentary evidence is set out in detail in my second book An Act of State. Suffice it to say, the roles and link between the Mafia, the military, local law enforcement, and government officials became crystal clear.

  Raul’s existence, identity, and role was established, as were the extraordinary efforts made by federal agents to protect him, including visiting him and his family and advising them on what to say and do, while wiring their telephone. These were extraordinarily personal protective services for a retired, alleged automobile plant assembly line worker. This extensive government involvement was revealed to us by a Portuguese journalist who was proudly told about it by Raul’s wife, whom she interviewed. Members of Dr. King’s own organization were implicated, and the long-standing lie of a local pastor who claimed to have been with him during his last half hour on earth was revealed. A local official investigator who headed up a reinvestigation effort admitted on the stand that he had not interviewed, or even known about, twenty-four of the twenty-five key witnesses from whom the jury had already heard.

  That 1999 trial led to the opening of the final act of this American tragedy. It is another matter entirely that the corporate mainstream media have ignored the jury’s verdict and that the majority of citizens remain prey to the official story, manipulated by the media and their masters.

  The chapters that follow will set out the extraordinarily detailed and conclusive evidence as to how this horrible event in American history came about and who was responsible. Witnesses, now nearing their graves, who have long since held vital information have come forward and revealed what they know about aspects of the events leading up to and including the assassination itself.

  The evidence presented will once and for all uncover the crucial role of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; his Deputy, Clyde Tolson; the ultimate assassins; the medical officials at St Joseph’s Hospital; and finally, the identification of the shooter, including my interview with the primary assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.

  Since much of the evidence is provided under oath and is against the penal interests of the declarant, it has significant credibility.

  Ultimately, however, that is for the reader, and history, to judge.

  Can we at last defy the history of previous human civilizations and the existential reality of our species and move to another level, not for us, the living, but as trustees for future generations yet unborn?

  Can we finally listen to their silent pleas? To attempt this feat is to imagine the unimaginable to dream by day of a world that has never been and ask “why not?”

  So, let us begin this journey using one of the most significant events in the history of our world as a springboard for a consideration of what is the human condition in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  When one is confronted with the assassination of a major leader who personifies the most treasured values of the species and it becomes clear that those responsible for the murder are officials of his own government acting with the sanction of those in the shadows who actually rule, surely one should strive to understand what that means now and for the future. In other words, when the removal of a leader who has offended powerful forces and special interests in the Republic takes on the status of an act of state, citizens must contemplate what this reveals about their culture and its civil and political systems, their freedom, the quality and status of the rule of law, and their entire way of life.

  Accordingly, in an ever more integrated and mutually dependent world, our brothers and sisters, fellow human beings, wherever located, should be concerned.

  Concern, however, must inevitably be preceded by an understanding of the factual events (to which this thirty-seven-year investigation has been devoted) and also to the dynamics and reality of underlying power and how it impacts public policy. Any void in this process may result in a deficient analysis and inevitably lead to a superficial assessment. In other words, to see government agents carrying out a scenario in collaboration with private contractors—the Mafia—and view this team effort as an understandable alliance that affords plausible deniability to the state officials, while accurate, does not go to the next, and most important, level of operative power.

  This deeper-level analysis requires one to view the involved state agents as more than governmental officials acting on behalf of the state—following the orders of their superiors. In fact, these officials, and their superiors, function in such instances as messengers for and agents of those entities and individuals who wield the real hidden power. Decisions are taken by these corporate/financial masters and implemented by the appropriate governmental bodies by way of law enforcement, intelligence, and defense/security apparatus. All of this will come as no surprise to many readers, but it will to others because of the degree of deception used by those in authority from the very outset. Yukio Mishima makes the salient point in his The Decay of the Angel that when deception is used at the starting point by authority, the authority will only be able to sustain itself by continuing and spreading deception like a given culture. More insidious is the effect on the citizen whereby the external deception is believed to the extent that he/she engages in self-deception, which itself becomes integrated into the individual’s self-image. For many people, a subsequent rejection of their previously perceived truth amounts to a denial of self.

  As much as I reject Cicero’s enlarged adoration of the protection of private property, above all, in Rome, I am compelled to agree with his belief that the “frailty” of man’s character, if unrestrained by the rule of law, will lead to tyranny. In another era, Lord Acton saw the human lust for power and the corrupting effects of too much as leading to absolute corruption and an unjust government, one that rules in the interests of a few rather than the common good.

  The driving force in this process is, of course, money—profit in all its attendant forms—and the control of access to it as well as control over any use of it and through its use in controlling others.

  The use of power is inextricably linked to and essential for any understanding of the acquisition of wealth. Since, throughout history, the road to power is paved with money or numbers, any movement or leader who denies or defies the established values and priorities optimized by corporate, consumer capitalism, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and who has the potential to mobilize large numbers, indeed masses, of the body politic must be ultimately discredited or physically removed. Such a person is out of place—such as Ruskin, Gandhi’s mentor, who believed that the most precious jewels in any family are the children produced and that the quality of a good soul is far more valuable than manufactured wealth.

  Dr. King was such an inconvenient person for the corporate/ financial power interests. Let us look at the reasons.

  His commitment and energy of leadership was against war and toward the establishment of a public domestic and foreign policy dedicated to living in peace with cooperation as an all-embracing ethic. He saw all of mankind as related and sincerely believed that death and destruction imposed on another people—no matter where they were located—was an injury and insult to all other human beings. He was a man of peace in his deepest being. For him, truth and peace were inseparable. Like Gandhi, he equated personal truth with the personal readiness to suffer for it. Gandhi also embraced this principle. It constitutes the only dogma in Gandhian philosophy—that the only real test of truth is action based upon a refusal to do harm. One should be prepared to get hurt in defense of the truth, but not to hurt. Dr. King traveled along this Gandhian pathway and combined a commitment to nonviolence with self-suffering. As for the war being fiercely waged at the time, he was committed not only to ending
it when his leadership was at its most influential, but to the total disarmament of nations and the gradual elimination of the forces and implements of war. If anyone epitomized the vision of turning weapons into plowshares it was Dr. King. Instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on more efficient killing machines, he advocated converting those huge resources to address social and economic needs and long-standing injustices and massive poverty in the United States as well as throughout the world.

  I believe that it is fair to say that at the end of his life he began to realize that the civil and political rights for which he had long fought were seen as secondary to the long-ignored social, economic, and cultural international human rights that were anathema to his capitalist homeland. In many ways the focus on the highly manipulatable political civil rights provided a drug-like distraction from the real human deprivation resulting from the ever-increasing disparity in wealth and income between the privileged few and the struggling masses. This reality, today, is indeed much worse, overwhelmingly so. In this realization he was in the company of Franklin Roosevelt, whose last State of the Union speech addressed this great national issue. His widow, Eleanor, represented the United States from 1947 to 1951 and drafted parts of the covenant language for the UN International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, which focused on the social, economic, and cultural rights. The United States has never subscribed to that commitment, only ratifying the Civil and Political Rights Covenant in 1992.

  These values and this proposed redirection of American public policy were in direct conflict with the Cold War garrison state and corporate profiteering engine that had driven America during the last twenty-five years of King’s life. The ever-increasing devotion of the Republic’s resources to keeping American society on a war footing and the consolidation of the military/industrial/political complex that dominated American life and public policy and that was feared by Dwight Eisenhower—himself a product of that culture—could not have been more opposite to the orientation advocated by Dr. King.

  Bombastic, chauvinistic, corporate propaganda aside, where the slaughter of innocents is, and always was, justified in the name of patriotism and national security, it has always and ever been about money. Corporate and financial leaders trusted with the keys to the Republic’s treasure moved from boardrooms to senior government positions and back again. Construction, oil and gas, defense industry, and pharmaceutical corporations, their bankers, brokers, and executives thrive in a war economy. Fortunes are made and dynasties created and perpetuated and a cooperating elite permeates an entire society and ultimately contaminates the world in its drive for national resources wherever they are.

  This American militaristic ethic held sway before Dr. King was born, with the seizure of massive land areas belonging to Mexico, the subjugation of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba. In Dr. King’s, lifetime, after World War II, American corporate/military power overthrew governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Brazil, to name only a few, and even brought to power a young, ambitious assassin in Iraq named Saddam Hussein.

  If this commitment to militarism had a focus in King’s life, it was the brutal war against the ancient, beautiful people and culture of Vietnam. He would have shed equal tears had he been alive to witness what his beloved nation has been doing to the impoverished masses, not only of Iraq, but against Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, resulting in the creation of the greatest number of refugees since the Second World War.

  In his time, Vietnam was his Rubicon and it was here that he and I joined forces. Once he appreciated the extent of his beloved country’s barbarism, he was not for turning his back—not for shying away from this defining struggle. Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the interests of the power elite. Those interests all came down to money. The reader should keep in mind President Lyndon Johnson’s outburst at his CIA Vietnam briefer, Colonel John Downie, who in 1966 regularly urged him to get out of Vietnam. Finally in their ultimate session, a frustrated LBJ pounded the table and exclaimed: “I cannot get out of Vietnam, John, my friends are making too much money.”

  For me, that says it all.

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS

  The elite say

  You are what you do

  There is no other way.

  Discard illusions that you woo

  Pick up the trash

  Do not complain

  About the petty cash

  And then, ignore the rain.

  Beginning in February 1968, Dr. King had received regular reports from his friend, Memphis clergyman James Lawson, pastor of Centenary Methodist Church, about the sanitation worker’s dispute in the city. Ninety percent of the thirteen hundred sanitation workers in the Memphis were black. They had no organization, union or otherwise, to defend their interests and no effective means to air grievances or to seek redress. However, to most of the citizens of Memphis, black and white, a strike against the city was nothing less than rebellion.

  In a bitter and frustrating setback for the black community, Henry Loeb, who had been the mayor from 1960 to 1963, retuned and defeated incumbent William Ingram, who was regarded as friendly to black Memphians, in the mayoral election. Considering the new mayor’s history and reputation, there was no reason for black workers to hope that their working conditions or salaries might improve.

  The grievances were many. Salaries were at rock bottom, with no chance of increase. Men were often sent home arbitrarily, losing pay. Much of the equipment was antiquated and poorly maintained. In early 1968 two workers, thirty-five-year-old Echole Cole and twenty-nine-year-old Robert Walker were literally swallowed by a malfunctioning “garbage packer” truck. We would later learn this was a planned murder by the Dixie Mafia family of Russell Adkins, in coordination with Memphis Police Department Director of Police and Fire Frank Holloman, in order to compel Dr. King to return to support the strikers. There was no workmen’s compensation and neither man had life insurance. The city gave each of the families a month’s pay and $500 toward funeral expenses. Mayor Loeb said that this was a moral but not a legal necessity. After the deaths of Cole and Walker, talk of a strike was widespread.

  Maynard Stiles, who was second-in-command at the Memphis Public Works Department, told me years after the event that T. O. Jones, the head of the local union, called him the night before the strike with what Stiles regarded as a very reasonable list of demands. Stiles said that Jones wanted him to go to the union meeting scheduled for that night and announce the city’s agreement with the terms. An elated Stiles called Loeb to advise him that a settlement was at hand on very reasonable terms. Loeb ordered him not to dignify any such meeting with his presence and insisted that no terms be accepted under any circumstances. The union meeting went ahead that evening without Stiles. The next day the strike was on.

  The national office of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) sent in professional staff to handle the negotiations, which the mayor insisted on conducting in public, giving neither side any opportunity to change position. With no solution in sight, an interdenominational group of clergy intervened but made no progress.

  The deadlock led to a protest march on February 23, which got out of control in the face of heavy police provocation. Ultimately, the police used Mace on men, women, and children marchers and bystanders. Afterward, a strike strategy committee was formed with the Reverend James Lawson as its chairman. Reverend Lawson had been one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and had worked with the organization for a decade. Dr. King regarded him highly and he was Dr. King’s best friend in Memphis.

  Meanwhile, Dr. King was closing a leadership conference in Miami. While knowing that most of his audience disagreed with the Poor People’s Campaign, he insisted that the nation had to be awakened to the issues of poverty and hunger. The shantytown he planned to erect in Washington would ensure that the plight of the American poor would be foremost in
the consciousness of the people of the nation, even the world.

  “We are Christian ministers and … we are God’s sanitation workers, working to clear up the snow of despair and poverty and hatred….” he told them.

  In Memphis, a city injunction against the strike intensified the black community’s support for the sanitation workers, and consumer boycotts and daily marches through the downtown areas were organized. The director of the Memphis police and fire departments, Frank Holloman, who had agreed that he would allow the marches if they were peaceful, withdrew many of the visible, uniformed police. Holloman had been a special agent of the FBI for twenty-five years. For seven of those years (1952–1959), he had been in charge of Director Hoover’s Washington office. In Memphis he had no support from the black leaders. Internally he relied heavily on his chief, J. C. MacDonald (who in 1968 was close to retirement), a group of seven assistant chiefs, and Inspector Sam Evans (who was in charge of all special services), and Lieutenant Eli H. Arkin of the police department’s intelligence bureau.

  The growing involvement of young blacks, particularly high school students who were being organized by the Invaders and their parallel organization, the Black Organizing Project (BOP), brought increased volatility to the strike. During a boycott of the local merchants, these young people harassed blacks who made purchases in downtown stores. The militants made themselves heard throughout the dispute; various Invaders were arrested for disorderly conduct for trying to persuade students to leave school and for blocking traffic. In retrospect, the Invaders’ actions seem mild in comparison with those of black power groups in other parts of the country. I interviewed each of the members of the Invaders.