The Plot to Kill King
Page 9
As my investigation proceeded during these early days, I reviewed a copy of a most unusual affidavit executed by Blakey on February 4, 1976. It was prepared and submitted to the court in a civil action brought by Cleveland-Las Vegas crime syndicate leader Morris (Moe) Dalitz against Penthouse magazine as a result of an article that alleged the involvement of organized crime in the development of Rancho La Costa California resort. The allegation of criminal involvement was tied to Dalitz’s involvement with the project.
Blakey, as an expert witness, contended that Moe Dalitz had no connection with organized crime. This was extraordinary because it was by then a well-established fact that Dalitz was a long-time major syndicate operator. Subsequently, on September 10, 1979 the Wall Street Journal noted that Dalitz had long been identified by federal authorities as an ongoing senior advisor to organized crime.
Because the murder of Dr. King could well have involved elements of organized crime, I was concerned that the counsel steering the investigation would take such a position for only a short time before he took over control of the HSCA. (Blakey’s expert opinion was ultimately not accepted and Penthouse’s defense of the piece was successful.)
I was also very uneasy with the new chief counsel’s apparently cozy relationship with the CIA and the FBI, which moved him to give the intelligence agencies influence over his staff’s requests for files, documents, and records. Other factors were unsettling as well: the early removal of twenty-eight staffers, the insistence on secrecy (even the requirement that all staff sign nondisclosure agreements, with harsh penalties for violation), the instruction to staff members that they were to have no contact with critics without Blakey’s personal authorizations, and the absence of accountability of committee leadership. I was thus led to conclude early on that the reconstituted committee leadership had no intention of conducting an independent investigation.
My misgivings about the HSCA were reinforced when in the summer of 1978 I learned about a clandestine assignment given to previous FBI informer and HSCA undercover agent Oliver Patterson to establish a relationship with Ray’s brother Jerry, and to provide as much information as possible from these contacts. He was instructed to obtain hair samples from Jerry and to go through his personal things from time to time, looking for anything that might be of interest, including correspondence.
In August 1978, Patterson was instructed to publicly discredit Mark Lane, who was James Earl Ray’s lawyer at the time.
In a sworn statement dated August 14, 1978, Patterson stated that his HSCA handlers instructed him to give a private interview to New York Times reporter Anthony J. Marro on Monday, August 7, 1978, in which he was told to accuse Mark Lane of being gay, state that Lane had told him that he knew there was no person named Raul, and further allege that his (Patterson’s) own undercover work had confirmed James Earl Ray’s guilt.
When Lane (tipped off by Susan Wadsworth, a friend of Patterson’s) uncovered the plot and confronted Patterson, Patterson agreed to cooperate with him. Consequently, when Marro arrived at noon at the designated St. Louis hotel he found himself in a room filled with news cameras and reporters. He ran from the room with Lane behind him asking whether he wanted the truth. Lane then addressed a press conference, and with Patterson and Wadsworth present revealed the history of the HSCA’s illicit use of Oliver Patterson. Affidavits setting out details about this matter were executed by Wadsworth and another friend of Patterson, Tina Denaro.
Chief Counsel Blakey subsequently issued a statement in which he said that a complete investigation of Patterson’s allegations would be made but on the basis of a preliminary investigation, “The Committee categorically denies each and every allegation of wrongdoing. It states with assurance that no federal, state, or local law, or any rule of the House or of the Committee has been violated by the investigator or by any other member of the Committee staff.”
Patterson never repudiated his allegations against the committee.
Chapter 5
THE PRISON INTERVIEW
Who knew then what would emerge
From the quiet calm in a small space?
Slowly questions and truth would surge,
From a quiet voice and placid face.
He was not the man we expected to see
The media concealed it well.
Though unlikely he would ever be free,
Our opinion of justice slowly fell.
By mid-October 1978, pursuant to Ralph Abernathy’s request several months earlier, I was finally ready to meet Ray at the Brushy Mountain prison in Tennessee. Mark Lane agreed to arrange for as long a session as we wished, which we could record in any way we chose. Our group was to include Ralph Abernathy; psychiatrist Howard Berens of Boston, who specialized in interpreting body language; and two photographers.
I had learned as much as possible about our subject’s life. James Earl Ray was born on March 10, 1928, in Alton, Illinois. He and his family, which included his two brothers, Jerry and John, moved some six years later to Ewing, Missouri, where his father gave the family the name of “Rayns” to avoid an association with some of James’s uncle’s petty criminal activities. Ray’s first alias was provided to him by his own father when he was six.
Ray finished elementary school (eighth grade) and promptly dropped out. He moved back to Alton, and at age sixteen he worked at the International Shoe Tannery in East Hartford, Illinois. He enlisted in the army in January 1946. Eventually, he was stationed in West Germany.
In December 1948, he received a general discharge, which cited his “inaptness and lack of adaptability to military service.” He returned to Alton and soon began drifting from job to job.
In September 1949, he left Chicago for California, and in October he was arrested for a minor burglary, a charge he has always denied. He was sentenced to ninety days in prison. After returning to Illinois in 1950, he worked in supermarkets and factories and attempted to earn his high school diploma by going to night school. In May 1952, he robbed a cab driver of eleven dollars. He was sent to the state penitentiary at Joliet and later transferred to the state prison farm in Pontiac, where he remained until he was released on March 12, 1954.
Though he stayed out of trouble for a while, at a bar he met Walter Rife, who persuaded him to sell US postal money orders Rife had stolen. They were caught, and on July 1, 1955, Ray was sentenced to forty-five months at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. It is interesting to note that Rife, who apparently turned informer, received a lesser sentence even though he had actually stolen the money orders.
Q. Now we are talking about Leavenworth, the federal prison.
A. The federal prison. I was inside the walls and they offered—I could go outside and work in the dormitories and one of the other prisoners told me that people had been getting drug charges out there. If you get—I think the procedures was if you were arrested, if there was marijuana, if you were arrested, you could get two years if you entered a guilty plea. If you went to trial, you got ten years. And their position was that, it seemed to me, the general consensus was most of the blacks smoked marijuana and whites were drinking alcohol. So I didn’t want to go out there under those conditions where everyone was mixed up in the same dormitory room. So I didn’t go out there.
Q. You turned it down?
A. Yes. It had nothing to do with any race issue.
(Deposition of James Earl Ray, Transcript of proceedings, December 6, 1999, Vol. XII pp. 1746–1747)
In a subsequent interview (March 12, 1979) Ray would reflect philosophically on the issue of informing, saying that he didn’t want to end up like Joe Valachi, the mob informant. He felt that if someone else wanted to inform that was their business, but he would neither inform nor assist in the prosecution of anyone. Over the years, I have become impressed with the strength of this commitment. For Ray, this was more than a way to stay alive in prison. He believed it was wrong and would not relent. In this respect Ray was an old-fashioned con, respected wherever he had
done time.
He was paroled from Leavenworth in early 1959, only to be tried and convicted for a grocery store robbery in St. Louis in December 1959. In March of 1960, he began serving a twenty-year sentence at the Missouri State Penitentiary.
He was always on the lookout for ways to escape. After two unsuccessful attempts, he succeeded on April 23, 1967, when he began the odyssey that was to end over a year later with his extradition from the United Kingdom. As discussed later, we would eventually learn that after being profiled for use as a scapegoat, his escape was arranged by the warden, who was paid $25,000 that was delivered from Hoover by Clyde Tolson, and taken to the prison by their Dixie Mafia collaborator Russell Adkins Sr. Ray would never become aware of this high-level plot.
After being convicted and eventually incarcerated at Brushy Mountain, Ray again tried to escape. His second attempt was successful. On June 10, 1977, he went over the wall but was caught and returned in just over two days. At that time it had become clear that the HSCA (the future of which had been in doubt) was going to continue. I was uneasy when I learned that a large number of FBI agents appeared extraordinarily quickly on the scene, and were only dispersed when the governor—at the request of the HSCA Chairman Stokes—went quickly to the prison and ordered them to leave.
On October 16, the day before our meeting was to take place, the members of our small group gathered at a hotel on the outskirts of Knoxville. Later that evening we were joined by Mark Lane and one of his assistants, Barbara Rabbito. For several hours that evening. Ralph and I went over questions I had drafted, preparing for the next day’s interview.
The next morning, we were joined by Ray’s wife, Anna. She had been an NBC courtroom artist sketching scenes at the trial following Ray’s escape attempt in 1976, apparently was smitten with him, and began to visit him regularly. They eventually were married by Dr. King’s old friend, Jim Lawson, who shared Mark Lane’s belief that Ray was not the killer. (In March 1993, James and Anna divorced acrimoniously.)
Around 10:00 that morning we set out for Petros, the remote home of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Mark Lane, Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Howard Berens, and I visited with James in a small interview room outside the maximum security area. From what I had read about him I was prepared to meet a racist, a hardened criminal whose tendency for violence lay not far below the surface.
I was very surprised. He seemed serious and shy, almost diffident, and shook hands weakly. He was trim but exceedingly pale, for he had been doing much of his time in solitary “for his own safety” as a result of an escape attempt. By that time he had been in prison for eight years and seven months. He sat at the head of a small table, and after Dr. Berens and I arranged the tape recorders, Abernathy began the session with a prayer.
Ralph’s prayer did little to ease the tension that had been building from the moment we passed through the prison gate. As a result of my research, I leaned toward the belief that Ray had not killed Dr. King; I hoped that he would be able to convince us of his innocence. I suppose that this hope stemmed, at least in part, from an unwillingness to accept that such a singular life and work as Dr. King’s could be snuffed out so unceremoniously by a “lone nut” who was by all appearances a nonentity. I knew, however, that if Ray’s answers didn’t measure up and we came to believe he was guilty, then Ralph would have to declare as much in his statement to the media. To do or say anything else would be like spitting on Dr. King’s grave.
The story we got from James Earl Ray that day, confirmed by him over the years, is significantly different from the one that would be embodied in the conclusions of the HSCA.
When Ray escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson in 1967, he had escaped by concealing himself in a bread box, being taken out with the delivery to the prison farm. When he left he had approximately $1,250 in cash, a small transistor radio, and a Social Security number in the name of John L. Rayns that his brother John had given him.
No one at the trial had a clue that his escape had been arranged. As previously noted, we would eventually learn that FBI Director Hoover’s number-two would deliver the funds to Russell Adkins Sr., who paid the warden in December 1966 to arrange the escape, which took place in April of 1967.
Ray eventually made his way to Chicago, where he found a job working at the Indian Trail restaurant in Winnetka. Under the Rayns name he obtained some identification papers, bought an old car, and acquired a temporary driver’s license. During this period he was in contact with his brother Jerry.
Concerned about staying too long in the area, Ray left the job after approximately six weeks and decided to go to Canada to get a false passport and then leave the country. He got a pistol from an ex-con he knew, sold his car, bought another, and drove to Montreal. Upon arriving in Canada, Ray began using the name Eric S. Galt (he wasn’t clear as to how he came to choose the name).
In Montreal, he robbed a brothel of $1,700. Soon after, he called a travel agency to find out what documents were necessary to get a Canadian passport. He was told he had to have someone vouch for him who had known him for two years, which he later found not to be true. He intended to travel to a country in Africa or South America from which he could not be extradited. He also started hanging out around the docks and local bars, seeking passage out of Canada on a freighter, or perhaps hoping to find some drunken sailor from whom he might steal merchant marine documents.
One of these waterside taverns was the Neptune Bar at 121 West Commissioner’s Street. Here in August 1967, he met the shadowy character Raul, who Ray insists coordinated and directed his activity from that day through April 4, 1968. The meeting at the Neptune was the first of eight or ten. Eventually, Ray told Raul that he needed identification and passage out of the country. Raul replied that he might be able to help if Ray would help with some smuggling schemes at the US border. Ray had no way of contacting Raul at this time. They simply made arrangements to get together, usually at the Neptune. (Over the years, Ray’s description of Raul has varied slightly, but he has basically described him as being of Latin extraction, weighing between 145 and 150 pounds, about 5 feet 9 inches tall, and having dark hair with reddish tint.)
Eventually discarding the idea of finding a guarantor, Ray resumed meeting with Raul and tentatively agreed to help smuggle some unspecified contraband across the border from Windsor to Detroit. Raul promised him travel papers and money for this service. Ray said he expected to receive only a small payment for the operation, but he never negotiated or even asked about his fee. This was typical of Ray’s behavior throughout. He didn’t believe he was in a position to ask questions—he was being paid to follow instructions.
Ray was told by Raul that if he decided to become further involved he would have to move to Alabama, where Raul would buy him a car, pay his living expenses, and give him a fee. In return, Ray would be expected to help Raul in another smuggling operation, this time across the Mexican border.
Shortly afterward, he met Raul at Windsor, and in two separate trips smuggled two sets of packages across the border to Detroit. He thought the first trip was a dry run to test him. On the second trip he was stopped at customs, but the inspector was interrupted by his superior and sent elsewhere. The second official discontinued the search and simply had him pay the $4.50 duty for a television set he had declared.
When he got to Detroit, Raul nervously asked why he had been delayed; Ray showed him the receipt from the customs officer. Raul gave him about $1,500 and a New Orleans telephone number where a message could be left. He told Ray that if he would continue to cooperate, he would eventually obtain not only travel documents but more money as well.
Raul told Ray to get rid of his old car and go to Mobile, Alabama, where they would meet at a place yet to be decided. Ray said that he convinced Raul to go to Birmingham instead because it was a larger city and Ray thought he’d be more anonymous there. Raul said that he would send a general delivery letter to Birmingham with instructions on where and when to meet.
Raul instructed him to buy some photography equipment. He also gave Ray a new number in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which he could call for instructions as a backup to the New Orleans number. Raul gave him $1,000 for the photography equipment and his living expenses, and at Raul’s request Ray gave him a set of keys to the Mustang. He ordered the photography equipment by mail from a Chicago firm but didn’t understand why Raul wanted it.
Ray had previously received his driver’s license and a set of Alabama tags under the name of Eric S. Galt. He kept the old Rayns license in a rented safe deposit box at a local bank, along with some of the cash Raul had given him and a pistol he had bought through a classified ad two or three weeks after he arrived in Birmingham.
Sometime in late September or early October, Ray received a general delivery letter from Raul asking him to call New Orleans, which he did. This would be the first of several such calls he would make. Raul himself never got on the phone, but Ray instead always talked with a man who knew where Raul was and relayed instructions. Ray never met the man he spoke to on the phone and didn’t think he could now identify his voice, but he had the impression that the contact kept tabs on persons other than Raul. Ray was told to drive to Baton Rouge and make another phone call to receive instructions for a rendezvous in Mexico.
When Ray got to Baton Rouge, Raul was gone, having left instructions for Ray to go directly to a motel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, just across the border. Ray checked in there on October 7. Raul joined him and they went back across the border to the United States carrying some kind of contraband inside the spare tire. Ray surmised that it was drugs or jewelry. Raul gave him $2,000 and assured him that he would get the travel documents next time, along with enough money for Ray to go into business in another country. Raul gave him a second New Orleans number to replace the first and told him that his next operation would involve transporting guns and accessories. Raul said he would contact him again, when the time came, through general delivery.