Curington said he also spoke with Hunt that morning, and all he wanted to talk about was the book on King. Then after a full weekend of work on the project he called it off as abruptly as he began. Curington speculated that someone, perhaps Hoover, pointed out to him that he should distance himself from King at that time and not call attention to his animosity toward him. It is clear that H. L. Hunt was enormously preoccupied with Dr. King during that first weekend after his death.
By the end of our session, I concluded that John Curington, twenty-five years later, still appeared to be in awe of the man who he said moved on an entirely different level from “the rest of us.”
THAT LAST WEEK IN APRIL I flew from Dallas to Miami and met Jim Johnson at the Hilton in Fort Lauderdale. He had spent the day talking with Harry, the American Indian with whom Rosenson had said he travelled to Mexico for various types of smuggling and gunrunning operations. In 1968 Harry lived in Miami and owned a white Mustang. Johnson told me that he was convinced that he was Raul. I thought it unlikely. The next morning I interviewed him for four hours. Though he had been involved in a wide range of covert activities for government agencies, Carlos Marcello, and even the Dixie Mafia (a loosely knit group of professional criminals-for-hire), he was clearly not Raul. Like many others, however, he may have come into contact with individuals who had some connection to the King killing.
Next I traveled to New Orleans to interview Randy Rosenson to see if he could identify the high-level Tennessee state official as the man who, just prior to him being interviewed by the HSCA in Richmond, Virginia, had urged him to admit knowing Ray. He was unable to do so.
A PAROLE HEARING FOR James was set for May 25. This would be the first time he had appeared before the board. Such hearings are confined to a review of conduct during time served and other factors related to an assessment of whether or not a person should be released. They are not concerned with any determination of guilt or innocence. I had no doubt that the decision would be made on purely political grounds and that the board would have made its decision before the hearing began. Consequently, we decided to use this hearing as a forum to focus on James’s innocence.
I was struck by the extent of media coverage, which included Court TV broadcasting throughout and extensive newspaper coverage, particularly in light of the fact that Jowers’s admissions on network television had been virtually ignored. Jim Lawson and Hosea Williams testified in favor of James being released. James’s former wife Anna was her usual vitriolic self in opposition. Attorney general John Pierotti—attending, so I was told, his first parole hearing—read from a prepared text and waxed on about the terrible loss of Dr. King. He maintained that James could never even in a hundred years repay his debt to society. Being well aware of the politics represented by the attorney general, I was sickened.
I challenged the board to act independently of the governor who appointed them and who had publicly expressed his wish that they deny parole, and also to disavow the previous statements of the board’s former executive director, who said James would not be paroled unless he admitted guilt. After three hours of the board focusing on James’s past record, it became clear that the decision had indeed been made before the hearing began. In fact, this was confirmed by a slip of the tongue of one of the members near the end of the hearing. Parole was denied. James was told he could apply again in five years after he had served a full thirty years. James, understandably, reacted angrily.
At a posthearing press conference, in response to a question about the testing of the rifle, Pierotti made the extraordinary statement that he didn’t know if James was guilty and he didn’t have to prove it. So much for the requirement that prosecutors shall be primarily concerned with justice.
I was more convinced than ever that our best hope lay in Judge Brown’s courtroom. Judge Brown had been pressing us for some time to submit our draft order for the testing of the rifle and the bullets in evidence. I believed it likely that once the judge granted our request the state would appeal his order and seek a delay pending review. It had therefore seemed advisable to submit our motion after the parole hearing so that the parole board would rule prior to any setback in the appellate courts, which I thought was distinctly possible.
I RETURNED HOME TO ENGLAND only to turn around eight days later and fly back to Memphis to prepare for the test-firing of the rifle which we planned to attempt on Monday morning, June 6. The judge had ordered the rifle to be tested in Shelby County (preferably at the sheriff’s department firing range), but there was no adequate facility there to accomplish this. After consulting with our ballistics expert, Chuck Morton, I decided to build one myself in a designated area at the sheriff’s range. We acquired a 600-pound bale of cotton and seventeen 2’ × 3’ × 1.5’ cardboard boxes, which I planned to pack with cotton and join together to form a cotton tunnel receptacle into which the experimental bullets would be fired by investigator Cliff Dates, who had agreed to be the shooter. I bought a box of 150-grain Remington soft points bullets and at Morton’s suggestion another box of bronze tips, or military bullets. He advised firing the different bullets in alternate fashion, with each test-fire being retrieved and sealed in an evidence packet before the next one was fired.
Local teacher Wallace Milam, who was knowledgeable about trace element analysis in general and the process of neutron activation analysis in particular, agreed to coordinate the taking of lead samples from the evidence bullets, to weigh and seal them, and then deliver them to a designated laboratory. It would have been preferable, of course, to have the chemist performing the analysis collect the sample himself, and I would have preferred to have Chuck Morton present at all stages of the ballistics test activity, but there were simply no funds available for this.
AROUND 10:30 THAT SATURDAY evening (June 4) I received a call from Nathan Whitlock, who had known Frank Liberto in the 1970s, and who I heard had been told by Liberto himself that he had arranged to have King killed. Whitlock usually drove a cab at night; on that evening he was driving a limousine and I rode with him so we could talk. He told me about his conversation with “Mr. Frank” (Frank C. Liberto) some sixteen years earlier. He said that his mother, Lavada, had owned a restaurant that lay on the route between Liberto’s home and his LL&L produce company business in the Scott Street market. Nearly every day the produce man would stop in there for breakfast in the morning on his way to LL&L and for drinks in the afternoon on his way home. Nathan said that when he had had a few drinks, Liberto took to baring his soul to Lavada. She would often leave her post at the bar, sit down at a table, and talk with him. His conversation ranged from complaints about his wife (who he said was a compulsive gambler) and his girlfriend (who he said was only interested in his money) to his admission that he arranged for the killing of Martin Luther King. Nathan said that when his mother told him about this he became upset that Mr. Frank would involve his mother in this “gangster” talk. Nathan played guitar and used to travel, but in between trips he would help out in the restaurant, where he would often serve beer to Mr. Frank. Occasionally he would play the guitar for him—Liberto, he said, liked to hear “Malaguena.” Nathan would sometimes also drive Liberto’s truck back to the market to pick up something Liberto had forgotten. For these favors Liberto would tip him ten or twenty dollars.
Nathan said Liberto wanted to appear to be a big shot around him. He showed off a thick roll of bills and a jade, diamond, and gold ring purportedly given to him by Elvis Presley. They became reasonably friendly. Liberto told Nathan that his relationship with his mother reminded him of Liberto’s relationship with his own mother.
Another customer of the restaurant once quietly advised Nathan to be careful since Liberto was in the Mafia. Nathan, who was about eighteen at the time, once asked Liberto if indeed he was in the Mafia and what the Mafia was, anyhow. Liberto told him that the Mafia was a group of businessmen who “took care of business.” He added that as a youngster he used to push a vegetable cart with Carlos Marcello in New Orlean
s. At the time this meant nothing to Nathan because he didn’t know who Marcello was.
Because he was upset about Mr. Frank’s conversation with his mother, he decided to confront him. One afternoon in 1978, just before Nathan was scheduled to go away on a trip, Liberto came in and ordered a beer and sat down at a table in front of his photograph, which hung on the wall along with those of other regular patrons. Nathan engaged the 300-pound produce dealer in conversation and then asked him directly if he had killed Dr. King. He said Mr. Frank looked as though he was going to be sick to his stomach. He immediately asked Nathan if he was wired. The boy thought Liberto wanted to know if he was on drugs, which he denied.
Then Liberto said, “You’ve been talking to your mother, haven’t you?” Nathan admitted that he had, and Liberto then told him, “I didn’t kill the nigger, but I had it done.”
Nathan said, “Well, that S.O.B. is taking credit for it,” (referring to James), to which Liberto responded, “Oh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri.” He added that James was a “front man,” a “set-up man.” Then Nathan said Mr. Frank turned on him, saying, “You don’t need to know about this,” and after jumping to his feet and drawing his right hand back as though to hit him, he said, “Don’t you say nothin,’ boy,” and glared at him. He stomped around, thinking for a minute or so, and then said, “You’re going to Canada, aren’t you?” Nathan said he was. Liberto became quiet and Nathan went to the back of the restaurant to take care of something. When he returned, Liberto’s beer was still on the table but Mr. Frank was gone.
He never saw Liberto again, but in early 1979 during his trip his mother sent him a letter stating that Frank Liberto had died. Nathan said he was somewhat sad because they had parted with some hostility between them.
On Monday Nathan gave me a written account of his encounter with Frank Liberto and also showed me photographs of Liberto sitting at a table in his mother’s restaurant. (See photograph #18.)
Sometime later Nathan would tell this story directly to the attorney general, after which he was interrogated by members of Pierotti’s staff. He said they tried to break down his account, but he stuck to his guns. (Later both Nathan and his mother told their stories under oath.)
ON JUNE 5, WAYNE CHASTAIN and I met for the first time with Willie Akins. In a three-hour session he discussed how he had come to know Loyd Jowers and how he gradually learned about Jowers’s involvement in the killing. He basically confirmed the acts of violence against Betty but cast them in a different context. He said that he never took a contract on her life but admitted that he had fired shots into Betty’s sofa late one afternoon—but not because he was trying to kill her. He wouldn’t have missed if he was really trying to kill her. He had been going with her at the time and found her with someone else on the sofa when he came in. He said that the cause of the later incident, in the early 1980s, was his anger with her for intruding when he was with another woman in a bus belonging to Jowers.
It appeared that Jowers had only fairly recently begun to open up to him regarding the King case. He said that on the evening John Edginton’s documentary aired in the States (in which Earl Caldwell spoke about seeing a figure in the bushes), Jowers called him and said, “Big N [Jowers always called him that, he said it stood for Big Nigger], you know that figure in the bushes he talked about—that was me.”
Akins left me in no doubt that he had come to learn that Betty’s story was true. Jowers was out in the bushes at the time of the shooting. He said that on one occasion Jowers told him that the person who could do him the most damage was the chauffeur. He was, of course, referring to the long-missing Solomon Jones. Akins also commented on the whereabouts of the actual murder weapon, contending that so far as he understood it, Jowers had kept control of it for a period of time. He said he believed that even today Jowers knew where the gun was. I thought that was unlikely, considering the fact that Jowers was probably a low-level participant.
Akins continued to pay lip service to the story about being asked to get rid of Frank Holt. My sense was that Akins had pieced part of the story together but that Jowers certainly had not told him everything.
Although he was clearly lying about some things, Akins’s information only added more corroboration to Jowers’s involvement. The question still remaining about the actual killing, however, was whether or not he had been out there alone and whether he himself had pulled the trigger. I increasingly believed that the answer to both questions was no. Someone, or some others, were there as well.
THAT MONDAY MORNING, June 6, after having breakfast with Nathan Whitlock, I went out to the sheriff’s range with investigator Cliff Dates and began to build the bullet trap. Wayne went along to court with Wallace Milam and his associate.
Dates and I were in the process of hand-packing the boxes when a sheriff’s deputy came out to tell us that there would be no firing of the rifle that day. The attorney general had requested that an FBI ballistics expert be present, and this would require time to arrange. Though this issue had never been raised before, the judge thought it was a reasonable request and granted it, not only with respect to the ballistics firing but also the taking of the lead sample for trace element analysis. Once again we were on hold. I returned to London.
While Dates and I had been at the rifle range, a man named Robert McCoy arrived at the courthouse looking for me. He had driven all the way from Milwaukee to tell me his story. Being unable to find me he returned home, leaving a message on Chastain’s answering machine. I spoke to him five days later on June 11. He said he believed that in 1967, as an eighteen-year-old black civil rights activist in Carthage, Mississippi, he had stumbled on the conspiracy to kill Dr. King. The local sheriff regarded him as a troublemaker and had picked him up on the evening of December 1 on a phoney charge. This allowed them to hold him until an FBI agent was brought in to interview him. McCoy said they threatened to put him away unless he agreed to go undercover and work for them. In order to get out of the tight spot he was in, he agreed. The agent pulled out a black book and asked him about a number of black leaders and their influence on local movements. Specifically, they wanted him to become involved with the SCLC and to keep them informed about Dr. King’s movements and when he would be returning to Mississippi.
He said they were very interested in whether he had heard anything about Dr. King running for president or vice president with Robert Kennedy. After leaving the sheriff’s office, McCoy fled the area. Eventually he went to Wisconsin. McCoy’s experience only made it more evident how concerned the bureau and its allies were over the possible national political plans of Dr. King.
Early the following week the attorney general notified us that an FBI ballistics expert would be in Memphis on Thursday, June 16, in order to observe the test-firing of the rifle as well as the taking of lead scrapings from the evidence bullet and the death slug. At the same time, however, Pierotti indicated that he was going to appeal Judge Brown’s interlocutory order allowing ballistics testing and the proffer of evidence by the defense.
I left London on Wednesday to carry out the testing, but by the time I arrived, a stay had been granted by the Court of Criminal Appeals. There was little else to do but hold a press conference in order to object to the bad faith of the attorney general. He had obtained a delay on what appeared to be the pretext of getting an FBI expert to attend the testing, allowing him time to obtain a stay. We prepared a motion requesting that we be allowed to proceed.
Wayne and I met the local press corps. Two TBI agents sat off to one side taking notes during the entire press conference. I stated that the desperate action of the attorney general was a continuation of the historical cover-up of the truth and angrily challenged them to ask Pierotti why he was so afraid of allowing the weapon to be tested. In their session with the attorney general, the local reporters went no further than to ask him how he thought I could get this evidence out in the open. He replied tersely that I could always publish. It seemed to me that this might
indeed be our best way forward now.
I also advised the media that I was going to ask the United States attorney general to enter the case, not by means of a Justice Department investigation but rather by empowering a federal grand jury to hear testimony. The following week this request was formalized.
Once again I had that old feeling—the fix was in. My apprehension increased when Wayne gave me a set of the state’s motion papers. In sworn affidavits Pierotti had stated that our testing would “irretrievably damage evidence” (categorically untrue), rendering it unavailable for “future proceedings.” Would the court of appeals be naive enough to accept this rationale?
I WENT TO SEE Art Hanes, Sr., and Art Hanes, Jr. (now a judge). I hadn’t seen them in sixteen years but they graciously received me on short notice. I thought it would be useful to obtain any remaining defense file materials that could assist James. I was out of luck. In 1977 their entire file containing all of their initial investigation interview statements was sent off to the HSCA and never returned. Subsequently, it was sealed with the rest of the HSCA investigative files. This meant that James’s subsequent attorneys who were entitled to receive that file would be barred from having and using it. This was one more example of a violation of James’s sixth amendment right to a full and fair defense.
WAYNE CHASTAIN AND I finalized the response to the attorney general’s appeal against Judge Joe Brown’s decision to allow a proffer of evidence in support of James’s actual innocence.
The Tennessee court of appeals had set August 16 for oral argument of the state’s appeal. Since I had a conflict on that date we submitted a motion for a one-week continuance. It was denied because the court ruled that my admission on motion to appear before the lower court in this case was not binding on the appellate courts in the state. Thus, I would have to apply separately to each state appellate court, and there wasn’t time. Wayne had never heard of this technicality being asserted before. Consequently, Wayne appeared alone and argued. As expected, the court was hostile. A ruling was promised in September.
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