The surveillance detection equipment generally available wasn’t sophisticated enough to pick up the bugs used, because they emitted a very weak signal. In fact, they transmitted the signal only about forty or fifty feet, to the rooftop repeater. My source said that there was nothing on the market at that time that would allow them to pick up such a weak signal.
The source said the repeater on the roof picked up the weak signal and amplified it many times before transmitting it to the van. Since the bugs could transmit about fifty feet and the ceilings in King’s suite were about eight feet high with the repeater directly above them, there was forty feet or so to spare.
If Dr. King hadn’t been on the top floor, the repeater would have been placed in the room directly above him or in one of the rooms on either side of his room.
I was advised that this surveillance effort wasn’t undertaken to learn about Dr. King’s strategies. The intelligence operation was mounted to catch him in sexually compromising situations which could be exploited at the right time.
At the time of the surveillance Jim Smith was detailed to special services and assigned to the MPD intelligence bureau. He said he actually acted as a gofer for the two federal agents who ran the surveillance and manned the headphones. They told him that they were instructed to obtain any incriminating information they could about Dr. King’s personal activities, plans, and movements. They operated from a van parked near the hotel. This confirmed what I had suspected for years.
Dr. King also stayed at the Rivermont on the night of March 28, just after the march. As mentioned earlier, he was routed there by the MPD, led by motorcycle lieutenant Marion Nichols, who also arranged for his suite. Although Smith wasn’t detailed to the surveillance team on that evening, it is reasonable to assume that the same surveillance program was in effect.
Smith, of course, was aware that the bureau had electronically surveilled Dr. King all over the country, and he quite rightly believed that these activities were no longer a secret. He may not have appreciated that the bureau had always denied there had been any electronic surveillance in Memphis. Illegal electronic surveillance conducted so close to the time of the assassination wasn’t an operation with which the bureau would want to be associated. At the time Smith and I assumed that the surveillance was being conducted by the FBI, because the operation appeared to have their “M.O.” stamped all over it.
I now understood why Dr. King was routed to the Rivermont on March 28 (where he had no reservation) instead of the Peabody (where he was supposed to stay that evening). The change had never made sense to me because the Peabody was sufficiently removed from the violence and was accessible. Lt. Marion Nichols wasn’t available for an interview at any time before the trial. When interviewed subsequently he denied any personal or departmental responsibility for the decision to go to the Rivermont, stating that it was a decision made by someone in Dr. King’s party.
After checking with his chief, Fred Wall, who had no idea what he would say but told him to go ahead and just tell the truth, Jim Smith agreed to testify.
Smith also recalled the outbreak of violence in the march of March 28 when he was part of a phalanx of police officers stretching across South Main Street at McCall as the marchers came up Beale Street. He said that he and his fellow officers were told not to break ranks even though some isolated individuals between them and the main line of the march began to break windows.
The violent disruption of that march was of interest because there were indications that provocateurs were present. This was the only violent march ever led by Dr. King, the violence coming apparently from within the group itself. It necessitated his return to Memphis on April 3, when he was moved to a highly visible accommodation in a most vulnerable motel where he wouldn’t normally have stayed.
Rev. Jim Lawson’s recollections dovetailed with Jim Smith’s. He remembered leading the marchers up Beale Street and out to Main, where they were confronted by riot police. This was ominous in itself to those committed to a peaceful march, but then Lawson saw a group of youths on the sidewalk in the area between the marchers and the police. He knew the Invaders and most of the other young black activists but did not recognize any of these youths as being from Memphis. They had begun to break shop windows, yet the police remained impassively in place, just watching.
Lawson knew then that the police were going to use the gang activity as a justification to turn on the marchers. He stopped the march and tried to turn the line around, worried as much about Dr. King’s safety as anything else. King didn’t want to leave but eventually let himself be spirited away by Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy.
On another tack Jim Lawson agreed to travel to Washington to speak with Walter Fauntroy, intending to explore the entire HSCA investigation with him, and assess his willingness to help. Lawson and I agreed to meet in Memphis in late December.
THE DEFENSE HAD TO BE CONCERNED about the statement of the prosecution’s only eyewitness. Under our rules of procedure, in Stephens’s absence his official statement could be read into the record. His drunkenness wouldn’t be evident in a statement taken after the event. He would have to be impeached.
I saw Grace Walden, Stephens’s common-law wife, on November 29 at the convalescent home where she now lived. She again confirmed that Charlie Stephens was drunk on the afternoon of April 4 and that he didn’t see anything. This corroborated information already gathered through interviews with Wayne Chastain, MPD captain Jewell Ray and homicide detective Roy Davis and his partner, lieutenant Tommy Smith. Captain Ray had gone into the rooming house before 6:30 p.m. He was unable to interview Charlie Stephens because he was so drunk. Detective Davis tried to interview Stephens that evening too but also found he was simply too drunk, and lieutenant Smith confirmed that he had tried to interview Stephens on that evening but found him incoherent and barely able to stand up.
Tommy Smith offered another unsettling revelation relating to a photograph I found in the attorney general’s file showing a lump just below Dr. King’s shoulder blade. It appeared to be where the death slug had come to rest just under the skin (see photograph #16.) Smith confirmed that fact and said that he pinched the skin and rolled what appeared to him to be an intact slug beneath his fingers. He said that at the time he was certain they had a good evidentiary bullet.
The death slug in the clerk’s office was in three fragments and the official story that had evolved was that it had always been in three fragments. However, in the HSCA volumes there was a photograph of the slug, apparently taken at the time of removal by Dr. Francisco, showing it to be in one piece at that point. Francisco’s report referred to a single slug.
WHEN I INTERVIEWED CAPTAIN JEWELL RAY I told him that I had noticed in one report that he had met with an army intelligence officer named Bray on the evening of the murder. He confirmed the meeting. He said that Bray was the liaison with the Tennessee National Guard.
Jewell Ray was Lt. E. H. Arkin’s superior in the MPD intelligence bureau. He said that Arkin was so close to the FBI that he (Jewell) locked his desk drawer to prevent documents from being routinely turned over to Bill Lawrence of the local FBI field office. Captain Ray resented the FBI’s practice of taking everything and giving little or nothing in return. Arkin wouldn’t agree to be interviewed before the trial.
CALVIN BROWN HAD LIVED AT THE LORRAINE after the assassination. I asked Ken Herman to locate him to see if he knew or heard anything during that time about the death of Mrs. Bailey or the killing itself. I eventually interviewed him sitting in Herman’s car in front of Brown’s house. Brown surprised me by declaring that he had heard that Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, did it. He couldn’t recall the source of his information.
I LOCATED A TELEPHONE REPAIRMAN named Hasel Huckaby who according to a supplement to the MPD report was working near the scene of the crime on April 4. Huckaby said that on April 4 he and his partner, Paul Clay, were assigned to complete some work at Fred P. Gattas’s premises on the corner of Huling an
d South Main Streets. At one point Huckaby noticed a well-dressed though apparently intoxicated person sitting on the steps by a side entrance of Gattas’s place on Huling. Parked across the street was a plain dark-blue sedan that Huckaby associated with the man. Huckaby said that the man would occasionally stagger over to him and pass some inane remark. He felt there was something phoney about the person. He was too well-dressed for the neighborhood and his behavior didn’t ring true.
The man was still there when Huckaby and Clay left late that afternoon. Huckaby gave a routine statement following the assassination but was puzzled as to why MPD detective J. D. Hamby wanted him to detail each minute of his working assignments for a period of two weeks prior to the day of the assassination. About five years later, he was working on a line in the central headquarters of the police department when he saw Lt. Hamby. On impulse he asked Hamby if he had ever found out who the “drunk” was whom he saw on April 4, 1968. He was told that the man’s name was Smith and that he was really an FBI agent under cover. If true, this was the first indication of an FBI presence at the scene prior to the shooting.
Apparently this was information that Huckaby shouldn’t have learned—later he received a package in the mail containing half a burned match, half of a smoked cigarette, and rattles from a rattlesnake. After asking around, he came to believe that this parcel was a threat; a warning for him to keep his mouth shut about what he had learned if he wanted to finish the rest of his life. I found it interesting that none of this information appeared in his MPD statement. Huckaby agreed to testify.
Another person whose name appeared in the MPD report with no apparent significance was Robert Hagerty, who at the time was employed at the Lucky Electric Supply Company on Butler, just behind the Lorraine. During the afternoon of April 4 he noticed a sedan parked diagonally across from his shop just off Butler Street in such a way as to allow anyone inside a clear view of the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. There were two men dressed in civilian clothes sitting in the car, holding walkie-talkies. Hagerty didn’t recognize the men as local detectives. The issue of walkie-talkies to MPD officers at that time was very limited. This was another indication that they could have been federal officers.
A second surveillance team, then, seemed to be operating on Butler, so that the Lorraine was literally sandwiched in between the two posts. We had apparently stumbled upon the first indications of a federal surveillance presence in the proximity of the Lorraine within hours of the assassination.
This surveillance presence must be viewed along with five other factors: (1) the removal of security for Dr. King, (2) the removal of Detective Redditt from his surveillance detail, (3) the transfer of firemen Newsom and Wallace, (4) the pullback of the TACT units, particularly TACT 10 and (5) the presence of Chief MacDonald in the area of the Lorraine with a walkie-talkie in hand.
Chief William Crumby had told me in 1988 that a pullback of the TACT units had occurred and that the request came in “the day before.” As to who made the request, he said, as noted earlier, “It could have been Kyles.” He noted, however, that the emergency vehicles were under the direct command of Inspector Sam Evans. Crumby was willing to testify to what he knew about the pullback. Inspector Sam Evans had died in 1993.
I was astounded to hear for the first time in late 1992 that Dr. King had always been provided with a small personal security force of black homicide detectives when he came to Memphis. Its very existence and function had never been made public or mentioned. The only security unit referred to by the HSCA or otherwise publicly known was the squad of white detectives formed and removed by Inspector Don Smith on the first day of Dr. King’s last visit.
It was obviously important to speak with the small cadre of black homicide detectives on the force in 1968. After two interviews with officers who were not on duty on the 4th, Tom Marshall and Wendell Robinson, I met with one who was: Captain Jerry Williams, now retired from the MPD. He described how as a young homicide detective in the 1960s he was given the task by Inspector Don Smith to put together a team of four black plainclothes homicide officers to provide security for Dr. King when he came to Memphis. Such visits were infrequent; King had been in the city only a handful of times before the visits connected with the sanitation workers’ strike. The four-man team would apparently remain with Dr. King wherever he went, on a twenty-four-hour detail, staying in the same hotel. Williams recalled organizing a group on two previous occasions when Dr. King was in the city. Jim Lawson subsequently told me that he remembered this group of detectives as sincere and proud of being assigned to guard Dr. King.
I told Williams that for a number of years I had been very interested in where Dr. King stayed on his various visits to Memphis. In light of the FBI-generated criticism of him prior to his decision to stay at the Lorraine on his last visit, I wanted to know whether he had, in fact, ever stayed at that motel before.
Williams said that on the previous visits he remembered Dr. King staying at the Rivermont and the Admiral Benbow Inn but didn’t recall him ever staying overnight at the Lorraine Motel. He said, however, that he might take a room there to receive local blacks who could visit more comfortably than in the white-owned hotels. (At that time, only a couple of motels didn’t exclude blacks.) As Williams spoke, I remembered seeing a photograph taken by Ernest Withers of Dr. King during such a visit standing at the door of room 307.
“I was always troubled that I wasn’t instructed to put together the security team for Dr. King’s last visit,” Williams said. He was certain that no one else had been given the assignment because he had discussed it with various black officers after the killing. When asked whether he ever asked Don Smith why the detail wasn’t formed, he smiled and gently said no, that it wasn’t something you would do in those days. Back then a black police officer couldn’t even arrest a white person. The most he could do was to detain a suspect and call for a white officer to arrive.
Williams had formed the detail at Inspector Smith’s request as recently as March 18, when Dr. King came to town to address a strike rally for the first time. On that visit Dr. King stayed in the top floor suite at the Holiday Inn Rivermont Hotel, and Detective Williams and his team posted a man in front of his door and stayed in nearby rooms. Williams believed that a unit was also in place on the evening of March 28, after the march broke up in violence, but he didn’t recall who formed it, speculating that it was R. J. Turner, who had since died.
In his testimony before the HSCA, Inspector Smith stated that he had put together a security group that met Dr. King at the airport and followed him to the Lorraine on April 3. This detail consisted entirely of white detectives. They were Lt. George Kelly Davis, Lt. William Schultz, and Detective Ronald B. Howell, joined by Inspector J. S. Gagliano and lieutenants Hamby and Tucker at the Lorraine. Not one of them had any previous history of being assigned to Dr. King, nor would they have been regarded as suitable in terms of relating to the civil rights leader or his purposes. But since information about this previous black security detail had been concealed until now, Smith’s white security force was never viewed in its proper context.
The detail was removed at Smith’s own request later that same afternoon when he stated that he believed that the King party wasn’t cooperating with them. (Jim Lawson and Hosea Williams maintain that there was no lack of cooperation from the King party.)
According to the HSCA report, when Inspector Smith asked for permission to withdraw the detail, chief of detectives William Huston allegedly conferred with Chief MacDonald who gave permission for the withdrawal, though MacDonald maintained that he did not recall the request, or removal. The HSCA also noted that Director Holloman maintained that he knew nothing about these decisions8 and further stated that it “… tried to determine if Dr. King was provided protection by the MPD on earlier trips to Memphis but it could not resolve the question.”9
This wasn’t surprising, since no one from the FBI or the HSCA ever questioned Jerry Williams or any member of the previous se
curity details he pulled together: Elmo Berkley, Melvyn Burgess, Wendell Robinson, Tom Marshall, R. J. Turner, Caro Harris, Ben Whitney, and Emmett J. Winters.
Williams was certain that if his usual team had been in place it could not and would not have been removed as easily as could some other white officers. The prosecution would say it was another coincidence. I regarded the omission of black security officers on Dr. King’s last visit as one of the most sinister discoveries yet.
I SPENT SIX HOURS WITH MORRIS DAVIS in Birmingham on November 28. As previously mentioned years earlier, I had acquired an affidavit in which Davis contended that he had become aware of a plot to kill Dr. King involving Birmingham medical doctor Gus Prosch, a Frank Liberto, Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth. The HSCA had summarized Davis’s allegations in its report, before dismissing them. Though giving little credence to most of his allegations, I was interested to learn what he knew about any involvement of Frank Liberto.
He said that in 1967 and 1968 he frequented the Gulas Lounge in Birmingham. There he became friendly with a Dr. Gus Prosch, who some years later would be convicted for illegal gun dealing and income tax evasion. Prosch introduced him to a man named Frank Liberto.
It soon became clear to me that Davis wasn’t talking about any of the three Memphis Frank Libertos we had come across, but another Frank Liberto, whom he described as being dark haired and dark complected, between thirty-five and forty years old, about six feet tall and around 190 pounds. This Liberto allegedly had businesses in both Memphis and New Orleans.
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