Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  Not surprisingly, certain Dixie mobsters earned reputations as killers for hire, among them Don Sparks, who some suspect was involved in the still-unsolved murder of Pauline Pusser.13 Sparks, in fact, earned such a strong reputation as a contract killer that Sicilian crime families hired him for professional murders.14

  In 1964, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi reached out to Sparks and at least one other criminal, in hopes of murdering King when he came to Mississippi. On the run after another string of robberies, Sparks revealed outlines of the plot to a fellow Oklahoma-based gangster, Hermit Eugene Wing, who, within months, revealed the information to the FBI in 1965. When the FBI followed up they approached a Jackson, Mississippi, police officer, John Chamblee, who confirmed hearing rumors that the KKK had “hired a ‘killer’; from the State of Oklahoma to murder Martin Luther King Jr. when King was in Jackson. The ‘killer’; was known as ‘Two Jumps’ and came to Jackson, Mississippi to ‘case’ the layout and while in Jackson, stayed at the Tarrymore Motel was to use a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights. This deal allegedly fell through when the Klansmen could not raise the $13,000 demanded by ‘Two Jumps.’”15

  Donald Sparks earned the nickname “Two Jumps” because of his fondness for rodeo, something the FBI learned, in part, during their 1965 investigation, when a Mississippi Klansman also reported hearing vague rumors of a plot against King. Asked about Sparks, the Klansman, whose name is still hidden in government records, responded, “You mean Two Jumps?” That the Klansman was familiar with Sparks is not surprising given that, according to Klan expert Michael Newton, the Mississippi White Knights used Dixie Mafia men in “strong-arm operations.”16

  But the FBI had dismissed the 1964 White Knights assassination rumor as unreliable—a decision that was to have dire implications for Dr. King. The FBI did so because they could not corroborate another crime mentioned by their Oklahoma informant, implicating Sparks in the murder of a Dixie Mafia drug trafficker. Even though the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation gave credit to that claim, the FBI chose to dismiss both it and the allegation that Sparks had been involved in a White Knights plot against King. The FBI chose to dismiss the primary allegations despite the strong corroboration from Detective Chamblee. Those FBI decisions helped seal Martin Luther King Jr.’s fate three years later. In retrospect it appears clear that the threat that Nissen was relaying was simply a second attempt by the White Knights to use Dixie Mafia members to kill Dr. King. In 1967, the White Knights would rely on outsiders to provide the money they could not raise in 1964.

  Independent corroboration for Wing’s account of the Sparks–White Knights bounty came from another Dixie Mafia member, William Kenneth Knight, who, in the late 1960s, became a valued cooperating witness for federal prosecutors in trials of other hoodlums. Knight participated in criminal activity with both Wing and Sparks, including the aforementioned robbery in Fort Payne. According to post-assassination documents from 1968, Knight told FBI agents that Sparks described the 1964 bounty offer to him (Wing was also present, according to Knight) while they were on the run from law enforcement in 1966; the account closely matched what Wing attributed to Sparks and relayed to the FBI in 1965. Since the conversation between Knight and Sparks occurred in 1966, it had to be an independent discussion of the plot. Knight recalled the dollar figure as $10,000 and he did not remember whom Sparks identified as the sponsor, if he identified anyone at all. The FBI report stated:

  Knight stated that Sparks is perfectly capable of committing a murder and is a known hater of Negroes. According to Knight, Sparks is not known to make jokes and it was believable to Knight that an actual offer was made to Sparks by someone.

  When the FBI followed up on Knight’s reports and interviewed Sparks, they found him in detention in an Alabama prison. He denied involvement in any King plot, then adamantly refused to answer follow-up questions. The FBI correctly noted that Sparks had been in detention for months and could not have been in Memphis, and used that to dismiss him as a suspect. This ignores the well-established modus operandi of the Dixie Mafia, of organizing crimes from behind prison bars (the murder of Judge Vincent Sherry by Kirksey Nix is only the most famous example.) A more thorough investigation of the aborted effort by the White Knights to pay Sparks to kill King in 1964 would have led to just such an operation. It would have led to Leroy McManaman and the bounty offer he made to Donald Nissen in Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1967.

  As will become clear in later chapters, McManaman not only knew Sparks well, he almost definitely worked with Sparks in the unrealized project to kill King in Mississippi in 1964. The second iteration of the White Knights plot, the one revealed by McManaman to Nissen, was a continuation of the effort that had failed to assassinate King in 1964. Only this time, the bounty plot would succeed on April 4, 1968.

  The White Knights, and the network of racist zealots who supported them, never wavered in their aim to kill King—engaging in multiple plots until they found their mark, literally and figuratively, in 1968. But in the highly compartmentalized FBI, reports deemed “unreliable” had no currency, so Sparks’s account to the informant never reached the agents tasked with investigating Nissen’s report of a bounty three years later. It was only revisited in the investigation that followed King’s murder.

  Nissen himself knew nothing about any connection to the 1964 bounty. The authors developed the connection between the two events by collating and corroborating often minor details in newspaper accounts, interviews, and never-before-released government records. McManaman only relayed the details of the most up-to-date 1967 bounty offer to Nissen. There was no mention of Sparks or “Two Jumps” and a high-powered rifle at the Tarrymore Motel. Nissen wanted no part of it. He was a career burglar and con man, not a murderer. He had used guns in his crimes, but he had never shot anyone. But saying no to someone like McManaman, while both remained at Leavenworth, was dangerous. Knowing too much already, Nissen could have been killed before his release, before he went to Atlanta and the sales job he had waiting for him. Nissen told his cellmate John May about the offer, but not with any intent to recruit May. Nissen was thinking out loud, debating how to thread the needle between avoiding involvement in a potential capital offense and avoiding being the victim of one at the hands of McManaman. Ultimately, he decided to keep to himself and bide his time until he was released.17

  This tactic—never saying “yes” or “no” to McManaman—seemed smart at the time, but it would cause Nissen more trouble than he ever expected. On that Friday, June 2, 1967, sitting across from two special agents from the FBI, Nissen thought he had his opportunity to safely extricate himself from future association with the plot against King. Hundreds of miles away from Leavenworth and McManaman, he had no intention of going back to prison on a life sentence, and he gave information to the Dallas FBI as much to protect himself as to save King from being killed.

  It now appears likely that Donald Nissen’s June 1967 story to federal agents might have preempted King’s tragic murder on April 4, 1968—if only the FBI had investigated it more fully. Instead they conducted a superficial investigation in the summer of 1967 that did nothing but expose Nissen to danger.

  The FBI did not revisit Nissen’s story until April 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Nissen, they discovered, had jumped parole and disappeared.18 Despite his desire to disentangle himself from the plot against King, Nissen’s unwilling involvement had only just begun on that summer day in June 1967.

  2

  the sponsors

  The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi formed in the state’s cauldron of anti-integrationist resistance in the early 1960s. No white supremacist group committed more acts of violence in the nation. As one of the few states with a majority nonwhite population, Mississippi’s white establishment vigorously opposed efforts to give equal rights to minorities. Yet some white Mississippians did not feel that the reactionary mo
ves made by the wealthy White Citizens Councils and the government-backed Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission went far enough. To some, even the existing Klan regime in Mississippi was too passive, and they abandoned their county-based subgroups (known as Klaverns) in large numbers, coalescing to form the White Knights, led by the devilishly brilliant Samuel Holloway Bowers and eventually becoming the most successfully violent KKK subgroup in the nation.

  Law enforcement estimates connected the group to at least “10 murders; to the burnings of an estimated 75 black churches, to at least 300 assaults and beatings and bombings.”1 The violence included the famous Mississippi Burning (abbreviated as MIBURN by the FBI), murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County. Klansmen firebombed the home of voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, in Forrest County, Mississippi, nearly killing his wife and children, who luckily survived.2 Dahmer died from burns suffered in the attack. Although the group had not officially formed when Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in June 1963—shot in the back by sniper fire, just yards away from his home and his wife and children—many suspect that a budding version of the White Knights had some role in the attack. The man eventually convicted of the Evers murder, Byron de la Beckwith, became a leading member of the White Knights. Like de la Beckwith, who liked to taunt law enforcement with quasi-confessions of the sniper attack, the White Knights were the boldest of any Klan group in the country, certain that a Mississippi jury would never convict them of a crime. They even put local law enforcement and FBI agents on hit lists.3

  But developments in 1967 brought a new wave of hope for law enforcement. Using federal civil rights laws rather than local murder statutes, the Justice Department finally brought nine Klansmen to account for their roles in the murder of civil rights martyrs Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in Neshoba County in 1964. The FBI had devoted a tremendous amount of resources over some three years to establish the facts of the case and, in fact, had developed most of the story by the end of 1964. The sheriff of Neshoba County, Lawrence Rainey, a closet member of the White Knights, arrested the three activists under false pretenses, with the help of his deputy, Cecil Price. While Rainey held the men incommunicado, a posse of Klansmen assembled and traveled to Neshoba, when Rainey obligingly released his prey the evening of June 20. The Klansmen, with Price’s help, followed the activists down a dark highway, forced them off the road and out of their vehicle, and killed them in the nearby woods. White Knights Grand Wizard Sam Bowers had set the outlines of the plan in motion more than a month before, and it worked to perfection.

  The disappearance of two white men, Schwerner and Goodman, galvanized the nation in ways that most other racial crimes, directed solely at blacks (like Chaney), did not. At the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, a dogged FBI investigation uncovered the victims’ bodies buried under an earthen dam, but a Southern judge dismissed the murder case against Rainey and Price in 1964. In 1967, the FBI developed a high-level informant, Delmar Dennis, inside the White Knights, and the Department of Justice used civil rights statutes to retry the perpetrators. Prized targets among the accused included the infamous brothers Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts; the latter, according to accounts from those involved in the ambush, shot at least one of the victims. Most importantly, the DOJ set its sights on finally sending the kingpin, Samuel Bowers, to prison.4

  Born in 1924 to a wealthy New Orleans family, Bowers grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He enlisted in the navy in World War II and briefly spent time in California before returning to southern Mississippi. He owned a vending machine company, Sambo Amusement Company, but focused his energy on directing the activities of the White Knights. But Bowers was not a typical “redneck,” as he called his followers. He had studied engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and then at Tulane University in New Orleans. If other Klan leaders played checkers, Bowers played chess, plotting crimes months in advance, using spy-like tradecraft to avoid law enforcement surveillance and always remaining careful—almost paranoid—not to leave his “fingerprints” on his crimes.5 He would plot crimes in new locations to divert FBI resources away from major investigations and even considered framing rival Klan groups for his own offenses.

  Bowers alone had the ability to issue a “code four”—White Knights parlance for a bombing or killing. He did so for both the MIBURN killings and the Dahmer firebombing.6 But nothing occupied the attention or energy of Bowers like the prospect of killing Martin Luther King Jr. From 1964 on, Bowers attempted to assassinate Dr. King at least four times.

  The first attempt, referenced in Chapter 1, involved outsourcing to Dixie Mafia hitmen. Specifically, the White Knights offered a bounty to a bank robber and highly respected contract killer from Oklahoma, Donald Sparks, to eliminate King if he came to Mississippi, as the minister eventually did in July 1964 in response to the Mississippi Burning murders. Government files describe Billy Buckles, one of Bowers’s senior lieutenants, telling a group of Klansmen at a summer meeting that the White Knights were contracting with criminals to perform an act of violence that would “make the death of Medgar Evers look sick [by comparison].”7 Bowers himself told an FBI informant at the end of 1964 that “two men with high powered rifles were assigned to kill” King when he “last toured the state of Mississippi.” Bowers claimed that the two men continued “working on the matter,” when in reality the White Knights could not raise a sufficient amount of money ($13,000) to satisfy Sparks. But this 1964 plot, which we will refer to from this point forward on as the “Sparks-McManaman plot,” did not die as much as it remained dormant until 1967, when Leroy McManaman presented it to Donald Nissen in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

  Perhaps realizing that money could be a problem in luring professional killers to kill King, Bowers changed tactics and relied on his own men. Bowers devised the next plot in 1965, when Dr. King traveled through Mississippi on his way to Alabama, where civil rights activists pushed the case for voting rights in cities like Selma. The primary attack was to be by snipers, with a backup plan of exploding a highway bridge if King escaped the shooting. Advanced word of the attack appears to have come from the deeply placed government informant Delmar Dennis, a minister who had been close to Klan leader Samuel Bowers. Dennis turned on Bowers because he suspected Bowers’s patriotism and had reservations about the White Knights’ excessive violence. The attack did not occur, but only because King’s route was changed, thanks to Dennis’s information, at the last minute.8

  By this point, Bowers’s desire to kill King caught the attention of the highest levels of American government. President Lyndon Johnson personally ordered the FBI to provide additional protection to King when he passed through Mississippi in 1964 and 1965.9 On the heels of the MIBURN killings, Johnson worried about civil disorder in Mississippi if the Klan murdered King. Johnson and King worked closely together to push through landmark civil rights legislation, and as the nation waited for Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (in August), their working relationship, while contentious, remained relatively close. But Johnson knew that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed anything but a close relationship with the civil rights leader.

  King, in his capacity as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), made the cardinal mistake of publicly criticizing the FBI for its failures to resolve dozens of civil rights murders throughout the South. Hoover, maniacally protective of his agency’s reputation, responded by publicly labeling Dr. King as an enemy of law and order and insinuating that the activist enjoyed close relations with communists. Privately, Hoover pushed his agents to surveil the minister for the purpose of ruining his reputation and even worse. At one point Hoover’s agents sent King a letter with the goal of shaming the minister into committing suicide over his alleged extramarital affairs, a letter that arrived concurrently with a tape—sent to King’s wife, Coretta—purporting to be a recording of an intimate encounter.10 More relevant to King’s safe
ty, from 1965 on Hoover insisted that his agents discontinue the practice of telling King’s advisors about plots against King’s life. Instead, Hoover ordered his subordinates to inform relevant police agencies only—a dangerous policy for King because these groups often included large numbers of KKK members and sympathizers. Hoover knew full well the dangers of this policy from his experience providing protection to King on Johnson’s orders in 1964. When King went to Mississippi in the wake of the MIBURN murders, Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey protested the additional FBI security for King. His own men, Rainey insisted, could protect King. At that very moment, Hoover knew, Rainey and his subordinates were being investigated for their role in facilitating the MIBURN killings.11 Rainey, as noted earlier, belonged to Bowers’s group, and detained the three MIBURN victims in his jail on June 21, 1964.

  Bowers remained undeterred in his desire to assassinate King, but by 1966, King’s own prerogatives created problems for any would-be plotters. Having helped undo legal segregation and discrimination in the South, King increasingly focused his political attention on de facto discrimination in the north, in places like Chicago, Illinois, where King temporarily moved with his family in 1966, to highlight problems with poverty and housing. This brought King out of Bowers’s domain. But Bowers crafted an ingenious if unfortunate plan to overcome this logistical problem: he arranged to lure King into an ambush. Bowers approached three men, Ernest Avant, James Lloyd Jones, and Claude Fuller, misfits the White Knights had recently expelled from their ranks, and promised them readmission to the group if they murdered an innocent black man. The first phase of the plan succeeded with the murder of black farmer Ben Chester White in Natchez, Mississippi, on June 10, 1966. The men selected White mostly as a target of opportunity, but also, in part, because he had no substantive connection to the civil rights movement and his death would seem more senseless than politically motivated violence. Having convinced White to help them find their lost dog, the men lured the farmer into their pickup truck and then brought him to a bridge where they abruptly stopped. Using FBI records and court transcripts (the three men were convicted for murder in 1998), Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell described the subsequent scene four decades later: