Orders to Kill

by William F Pepper Esq

  Neither Teale nor Withers was able to produce any clear photographs of the bushes taken on the day of the shooting, nor was Withers able to locate the LeMoyne student. I also tried to find Mary Hunt who was in the Joseph Louw photograph of the people on the balcony pointing in the direction of the back of the rooming house. She appeared to be focusing her gaze on some point further to her left (south) than the others. I eventually discovered that she had died of cancer.

  One of our priorities was to gain a conclusive understanding of what happened to the backyard area of the rooming house. By 1992 the area was vastly different from the way it was in 1968. Then, the common backyard area of the connected wings of the rooming house led to a four-foot-wide alley running to a door that led down to the basement and, from the inside landing to the right, into Jim’s Grill.

  The backyard sloped slightly downward toward a high wall (about 7'6"-8') rising from the Mulberry Street sidewalk. As mentioned previously, the area closest to the wall was engulfed with a thicket of untamed mulberry bushes, small trees of up to twenty-five feet in height, untended grass and weeds, and a tall sycamore tree. The thick bushes extended for some distance from the wall back into the yard.

  We needed to interview as many people as we could who remembered the yard at the time. Wayne Chastain had gone up to the second floor of the rooming house on April 4 shortly after the shooting to get a view of the bushes and the backyard. He said he looked through the Stephens’s kitchen window and saw a very thick growth of bushes and brush.

  Press Scimitar reporter Kay Black repeated what she had told me in 1978 about the telephone call she received on April 5 from former mayor William Ingram, in which he said that there was a work crew behind the rooming house cutting down all the bushes and high brush and grass in the area. Ingram appeared to be suspicious of the purpose behind this activity.

  Later that morning, Black went over to the area and saw that the cutting and clearing had been completed. The bushes were gone, the brush was removed and debris was neatly raked and stacked in piles. No satisfactory reason was ever given to her, although there was some mention of a concern that tourists not be offended. Black agreed to testify. (SCLC field organizer James Orange had noticed the bushes at the time of the shooting and that they were gone the next morning. I made a mental note to contact him.)

  Cab driver James McCraw, who was familiar with the area and went out there occasionally through the rear door of the grill, said it was completely overgrown and never cared for or tended at all. While not knowing the exact time, McCraw did recall that the area was cut and cleaned by the city shortly after the shooting.

  Former MPD captain (lieutenant in 1968) Tommy Smith who had refused for a very long time to be interviewed, finally agreed. In our 1992 meeting he vividly remembered the state of overgrowth in the rooming house backyard. He described a “thicket” of mulberry bushes, which impeded him considerably as he attempted to gain access on the evening of the shooting.

  As to the presence of a person in the bushes, Earl Caldwell agreed to testify at the trial. I believed that the defense had found in him the strongest available witness that the shot had come from the brush area behind the rooming house. We were still looking for Solomon Jones, who had been away from Memphis for a number of years. It was rumored that he was in Atlanta, and since he had previously worked for funeral homes we began to check out the funeral homes there.

  HAVING LEARNED ABOUT THE FOOTPRINTS near the top of the alleyway between the two buildings and that three patrolmen had been in that area shortly after the shooting, I had been trying to locate the only one who was still alive—dog officer J. B. Hodges. He had long ago moved from Memphis out into the country. Since he had been in that area immediately after the shooting, I believed that if we could find him he would be able to give us a good description.

  In addition, I wanted to locate Maynard Stiles, who had been deputy director of the Memphis City Public Works Department in 1968. Since he was in charge of day-to-day operations it was likely that he would have been responsible for giving the orders for any cutting and cleanup activity.

  IT HAD OFTEN BEEN RUMORED that a tree branch was cut some time shortly before April 4. Jim Reid, the former Memphis Press Scimitar reporter/photographer who had told me fourteen years earlier that he had taken a picture of the cutting, was still unable to come up with the photograph.

  After many attempts, on November 30 I caught up with Captain Ed Atkinson, who in 1968 had been a staff assistant to Memphis fire and police director Frank Holloman. I thought that he might have seen or had access to some significant documentation. He didn’t, but he remembered being present in the aftermath of the killing at a discussion in police headquarters with two other officers. One of the officers said that he was present with two FBI agents at the bathroom window at the rear of the rooming house after the killing; one of the agents said that a tree branch would have to be cut, because no one would ever believe that a shooter could make the shot from that point with the tree in the way. The branch was cut down the next day. Atkinson didn’t remember who the officers were.

  Weeks later, Atkinson underwent hypnosis to enhance his memory. For some time he described two featureless faces, though he said one of the voices sounded familiar. Slowly he began to recognize the owner of the familiar voice and he identified him as Earl Clark (an MPD captain). Then he discerned that the other officer who was recounting the conversation he had witnessed was a sergeant. He wasn’t able to identify him, though he described him as wearing thick-rimmed glasses, and having a moustache.

  EVEN THOUGH JAMES NEVER DENIED BUYING THE GUN found in the bundle in front of Canipe’s, we obviously needed to learn as much as possible about that purchase.

  When Ken Herman interviewed Aeromarine Supply store manager Donald Wood in his Birmingham store, Mr. Wood more or less repeated his statements to the HSCA, saying that the buyer, whom he photo-identified as James Earl Ray, knew nothing about guns. He added that the buyer said he was going deer hunting in Wisconsin with his brother-in-law. Then, curiously enough, he volunteered that he had always believed that one of his customers, a Dr. Gus Prosch, was somehow involved in the killing. He said that Prosch had bought a lot of guns from him, was involved with gun dealings, and had also been involved in racial problems. When, months later, I interviewed Wood he confirmed his earlier statement to my investigator. Prosch’s name had surfaced on the periphery of the case before, in the affidavit of Morris Davis. We knew that for some reason his fingerprints had been compared by the FBI with some of the unidentified prints in this case with no success. Prosch had rebuffed Herman’s earlier attempt to interview him. Subsequently, I extensively interviewed Prosch, alone and in Morris Davis’s presence. He categorically denied any involvement.

  I also instructed Herman to try to confirm James’s movements between March and April 1, 1968, since I believed that the prosecution was going to contend that he had stalked Dr. King in Atlanta during that time. The motels James said he had stayed in on his trip from Birmingham to Memphis either no longer existed or had long ago discarded their records. We met similar frustration in Atlanta where potential witnesses were either dead or missing.

  Jim Kellum, a local investigator, had at my request developed a file on topless-club owner Art Baldwin, who had been named by inmate Tim Kirk as the person who put out the contract on James in June or July 1978. Kellum’s documents independently confirmed Baldwin’s connections with organized crime through mob leader Frank Colacurcio in Seattle and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, as well as his role as an informant and witness for the federal government against Tennessee governor Ray Blanton and members of his staff.

  Kellum, however, had no success in arranging access to produce man Frank Liberto’s mistress, or in pinpointing information about his organized crime associates referred to by writer William Sartor.

  Then suddenly, on November 17, 1992, Kellum asked to be released of any further work, saying some of his contacts weren’t taking kindly to
the thrust of my investigation. I understood. I discreetly approached private investigator Gene Barksdale, who had been close to the Liberto clan, for information on Frank Liberto’s activities. I pressed him to talk to Liberto’s mistress and for information on Liberto’s organized crime associates, one of whom, Sam Cacamici, I learned had died. Barksdale told me that some of his old friends in the Liberto family started behaving strangely when he approached them on these issues. He also got no cooperation from the mistress in his initial efforts.

  The investigation of the Liberto connections to the killing was complicated by the fact that in 1968 there were no fewer than three Frank Libertos in Memphis alone, each with extended family connections in New Orleans. The first Frank Liberto (Frank Camille Liberto), the primary target of the investigation, was the produce dealer overheard by John McFerren who died in 1978. The second Frank Liberto had also been dead for over ten years. In 1968 he owned Frank’s liquor store and the Green Beetle Tavern on South Main Street, just up the block from Jim’s Grill. The third and probably wealthiest Frank Liberto was over 80 in 1992. Barksdale told me that despite his age he was still active in his automobile business. So in 1968 we had no fewer than three Frank Libertos with some, as yet unclear, family relationship. There was also another member of the Liberto family, apparently related to Frank C. Liberto, who owned and ran a business a short distance from the Lorraine.

  John McFerren told me about Ezell Smith, who worked for this business and around the time of the assassination saw a rifle being put together there. McFerren said Ezell learned later that this was the gun used to kill Martin Luther King.

  As noted earlier, in 1978 I had somehow acquired a photograph of a building with a note along the top margin indicating that a building within blocks of the scene of the crime owned by a relative of an organized crime figure, was where the rifle bought by Ray was stored until April 4, 1968.

  Ken Herman photographed the building where Ezell had worked. It was the same building as in the photograph sent to me. I saw this as the first crack in the silence that kept closed the involvement of local organized crime in the killing. We looked for Ezell, without success. The frustration of not being able to capitalize on such a tip was overwhelming.

  WE NEXT SOUGHT OUT Emmett DOUGLASS, the policeman whose car the MPD report states spooked James as he allegedly fled. The MPD report concluded that he entered the sidewalk looking south on South Main Street and saw Douglass’s “emergency cruiser” parked near the sidewalk at the north front side of the fire station. At that point he supposedly panicked, throwing the bundle down in Canipe’s recessed doorway before driving away in the Mustang parked nearby.

  The HSCA report hedged. It stated that James probably saw the Douglass cruiser that was parked “adjacent” to the station and pulled up to the sidewalk (a physical impossibility since the front of the station was set back about sixty feet from the sidewalk) or possibly saw policemen exiting from the fire station.

  A TACT 10 cruiser driven by Emmett Douglass was indeed parked at the north side of the fire station but not near the sidewalk. Douglass was sitting in the station wagon monitoring the radio during the break that afternoon, while the other members of his unit were in the fire station.

  On a chilly late November evening, Captain Douglass went with me to the fire station and showed me exactly where he was parked late in the afternoon of April 4, 1968. He insisted that he was not parked up to the sidewalk but was directly in front of the northwest side door of the station about sixty feet back from the sidewalk of South Main Street. (See Chart 5) In 1968, a set of billboards with frames that extended from the ground to a considerable height were located on the north side of the parking lot, right next to the rooming house building. These structures would have blocked the view of anyone looking toward his position from that spot.

  It was rumored that there had also been a hedge that ran between the edge of the fire station driveway and the parking lot next door extending out to the sidewalk, which would have impeded the view of anyone looking from the sidewalk near Canipe’s to the spot where the MPD alleged that Douglass’s car was parked. If the rumors were true that the hedge had been cut down soon after the shooting, it could have been done to bolster the MPD claim that James was frightened upon seeing the police wagon parked near the sidewalk.

  Douglass told me that he never told the MPD or the FBI that he was parked up near the sidewalk; it would have made no sense for him to park up where he would have obstructed both pedestrian and incoming vehicular traffic. By parking farther back alongside the building and opposite the door, he was out of the way yet readily accessible to his TACT unit fellow officers in the event of an emergency.

  CHART 5

  After the shot, Douglass got out of the car and began to run toward the rear of the station, but, remembering his radio duty, he returned to the car and called in to headquarters. Others had exited the station through the northeast side door and went over the low fence and wall. Douglass remembered two officers, one with a gun drawn, running from the front of the station, crossing his line of vision about sixty feet in front of him within a minute of the shooting. If he had been parked up near the sidewalk, they would have passed very close to the front of his car. They were nowhere near him.

  Douglass agreed to testify.

  FORMER FBI AGENT ARTHUR MURTAGH, who had testified before the HSCA as to the bureau’s extensive COINTELPRO activities against Dr. King, agreed to take the stand. His profound disillusionment over the bureau’s disregard for the Constitution and his first-hand knowledge of the bureau’s illegal activities against Dr. King made Murtagh an invaluable asset to the defense.

  WHEN I HAD BEGUN MY EXAMINATION OF THE FILES in the attorney general’s office in the Criminal Justice Center Building, Investigator Jim Smith was assigned to assist me. He had a long-term interest in the case, and his assistance proved to be of immeasurable value. Gradually, Smith began to talk about his experiences in 1968.

  As a young policeman, he attended a clandestine training course run in Memphis. It covered such activities as riot control and physical and electronic surveillance techniques. The sessions began in late 1967 and were conducted in strict secrecy by federal trainers paid by one or another federal agency. None of the Memphis participants understood why the training was necessary, because Memphis had never experienced the type of riots seen in other cities. The events of early 1968, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, caused some of those select Memphis policemen to rethink their reactions at the time. Perhaps Holloman knew something that they didn’t. Some of this training was conducted in secret facilities, the location of which was not even known by the participants, who were picked up at police headquarters and driven in a van (from which it was not possible to see outside) directly inside the training facility somewhere in Memphis. The Memphis officers couldn’t understand the reason for the cloak and dagger behavior. It occurred to me that these were typical of the training sessions mentioned earlier that the CIA conducted during this period for selected city and county police forces. Such sessions were coordinated by its Office of Security (OS), often in conjunction with the FBI and army intelligence which had similar programs.

  Smith also told me of a shadowy federal contract agent who was assigned to run some of these sessions. Cooper, who went by the name of Coop, arrived in January 1968. Jim thought it strange that, unlike the other trainers, Coop didn’t stay at an up-market hotel but rather at the Ambassador Hotel on South Main Street, in the area of Jim’s Grill. He remembered meeting Coop at Jim’s Grill, in the Arcade Restaurant, and at the Green Beetle. When Smith asked why he “hung out” in such places, Coop replied that this was where he had to go to get information he needed. Coop drew detailed maps of the area, and told Smith that he was with army intelligence before he became an FBI agent. He had been dismissed because of a drinking problem, and he seemed to drift into this contract work. It occurred to Smith that Coop was really on some sort of intelligence gathering mission and that the traini
ng activity was a cover.

  Coop dropped out of sight just before the assassination. Smith never saw him again.

  Since there was considerable confusion about where Dr. King stayed in his previous trips to Memphis, I asked Jim Smith what he knew. He knew that on at least one occasion—the evening of March 18, 1968—Dr. King stayed at the Rivermont. Smith knew this because he was assisting a surveillance monitoring team. The unit operated with the collaboration of the hotel and placed microphones throughout the suite. The conversations in Dr. King’s penthouse suite were monitored from a van parked across the street from the hotel. Since Smith hadn’t placed the devices he didn’t know exactly where they were. Another source—who must remain nameless—described the layout to me. Every room in Dr. King’s suite was bugged, even the bathroom. My source said they had microphones in the elevators, under the table where he ate his breakfast, in the conference room next to his suite, and in all the rooms of his entourage. Even the balcony was covered by a parabolic mike mounted on top of the van. That mike was designed to pick up conversations without including a lot of extraneous noise because it used microwaves that allowed it to zero in on conversations.

  The surveillance team had about a dozen microphones—“bugs”—each transmitting on a different frequency, which prevented feedback. The multiple bugs enhanced the recording by providing a stereo effect, which was a trick allegedly learned from the movie industry. There was a repeater transmitter mounted on top of the hotel, which picked up each transmission and relayed it to one of the voice-activated recorders in the van. The recorders were all labeled according to where their respective bugs were located, and a light on the control panel came on when activity was being recorded from a particular bug. The person monitoring listened to it for a moment to decide whether something was being said that needed to be reported immediately. If it didn’t seem urgent, it was simply recorded and at the end of the shift it was sent to the office to be transcribed and filed for future reference.