Quarles adds that several notable Klan leaders belonged to Citizens Councils, among them Byron de la Beckwith, the racist who assassinated Medgar Evers. According to investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, de la Beckwith’s son intimated that the Mississippi White Citizens Council ultimately encouraged Evers’s assassination. Clearly murder did not fall outside the moral boundaries of elite racists. They simply needed others to do the dirty work for them.5
Evidence first revealed by researcher Lamar Waldron, and corroborated with new data uncovered by the authors, now strongly suggests that Southeastern businessmen raised the money to kill King, then transferred it to Venable, who then turned to the most reliably violent and determined racist group in the country, Sam Bowers’s White Knights, to finish the deed in 1967 and 1968. The transfer of “the package” by Nissen became the catalyst for this plot.
A key figure in understanding the Atlanta connection is Joseph Milteer, someone who bridged the worlds of the elite Citizens Councils and the less august Ku Klux Klan. Milteer, a stridently racist sixty-six-year-old former traveling salesman from Quitman, Georgia, described himself as a “non-dues paying member” of Atlanta’s White Citizens Council. While he officially helped run the racist Constitution Party, he also enjoyed close ties to more violent groups and individuals. Notably, he commingled with members of the National States Rights Party (whose chief spokesperson, J. B. Stoner, shared a friendship and a law office with James Venable) and also with the National Knights and specifically with Venable and his close aid, Calvin Craig.
Like Venable and Stoner, Milteer had a history with assassination plots against national figures. Weeks before November 22, 1963, he famously told a friend, Willie Somersett, that John F. Kennedy would be killed. Like fellow racist Sidney Barnes, Milteer did not know that Somersett was an FBI informant secretly taping the conversation. On the same tape, Milteer described an ongoing effort by a leader in the Tennessee-based Dixie Klans to kill Dr. King. Milteer was in a position to know about such plots. Government records show that he attended at least two national meetings in 1963, ostensibly for racists trying to coordinate anti-integration activity, where assassination plots were discussed.6
Milteer never stopped pursuing the King murder, and Waldron’s research reveals that Milteer worked with a crew of southeastern businessmen to raise a much larger bounty on King. Waldron developed an anonymous source who described how the plotters raised a pool of money without having to commit too much of their own, conceivably traceable dollars to the cause. According to this source, Milteer and two other unnamed Atlanta businessmen secretly siphoned off union dues from factory workers at the Lakeland General Motors auto plant in Atlanta, creating a nest egg for a major King bounty. With the help of Hugh Spake, a factory manager, the three men convinced those in control of the fund that the money was being used for general anti-integration activities. Meanwhile, they quietly redirected portions of it to fund a plot against Dr. King. Over several years, the total amount raised became quite substantial.7
This Atlanta bounty scenario also fits with the bounty offer referenced in earlier chapters connecting criminals to businessmen in Atlanta. Here again, unidentified Atlanta businessmen reached out to prisoners in Atlanta’s Fulton County jail with a $100,000 bounty to kill Martin Luther King Jr. A jailer’s son, an officer at MacDill Air Force Base, reported this to the FBI in 1975. His sister, Janet Upshaw, later confirmed the story to the authors. This is consistent with another story revealed in the 1970s, of an Atlanta-sponsored bounty offer on King’s life. Two brothers, Claude and Leon Powell, house painters who had a reputation for violence, claimed to have been approached by a friend in an Atlanta bar who told them that an acquaintance could put them in touch with someone with a serious cash offer for killing Dr. King. A few days later the brothers were approached by a man in the bar who showed them a briefcase full of cash (as much as $25,000) and promised that amount up front plus an equal amount after the murder. The brothers declined the offer and later passed a lie detector test on their story. However, they eventually refused to give testimony to Congress in the late 1970s, even under subpoena, and replied to threatened contempt charges by saying it was not worth risking their lives.8 The FBI had not learned about the Atlanta offer until 1976, and upon investigation they were “unable to . . . discredit the story.”9 The offer of such large bounties in a bar is also not unusual in the King case. When the FBI interviewed Nissen’s cellmate, John May, about the McManaman offer, May casually relayed that he overheard talk about a $100,000 bounty offer on King at a bar in North Carolina in 1965, before he was convicted for the crime that ultimately sent him to Leavenworth.
Milteer had close relationships with people both in North Carolina and in Georgia, including in Atlanta. He emerges as a logical bagman for those in elite circles hoping to raise cash to kill King. Notably he had connections with many white supremacists around the entire country and could move freely without suspicion as someone who continued to sell items, notably guns, around the nation. But Milteer’s connection to Venable ultimately closes the circle on the bounty that found its way to Mississippi. According to newspaper and magazine articles10 and interviews with Floyd Ayers’s brother,11 Venable personally employed Ayers. Ayers’s biography, in fact, suggests a man who desperately wanted to be important, to be considered a mover and a shaker. He earned a reputation for exaggerating his own accomplishments and connections.12 He may have suffered from some form of mental illness or personality disorder; he spent time in mental institutions. Together this made him a perfect conduit for the bounty money. On the one hand, Ayers would be desperate to earn favor with a prominent person like Venable. On the other hand, anything he said after King’s murder could be passed off as yet one more crazy assertion by an eccentric. This is not idle speculation. As the timeline to King’s murder advances, it will become clear that this is exactly what happened.
in july of 1967, at approximately the same time Donald Nissen was establishing himself in Atlanta, John L. Rayns, a dishwasher at the Indian Trail Restaurant in Winnetka, Illinois, purchased a 1959 Chrysler from a private owner. Fellow employees described him as “nice . . . efficient and dependable.” He was quiet, too, and kept to himself—for good reason. “John L. Rayns” was an alias for James Earl Ray, and Ray was a fugitive from justice.13
Three months before, in April, about the same time that Leroy McManaman offered Donald Nissen a role in the King assassination, Ray escaped from Missouri State Penitentiary (MSP) in Jefferson City. A career criminal who, like Nissen, was known for robberies, Ray was serving twenty years as a habitual offender, his career in crime marked by well-planned offenses foiled by poorly executed escapes. In 1954, Ray stole from a cleaning business and escaped through a broken window. But police discovered his shoes literally stuck in the mud, where Ray had lost them before he made it to his getaway vehicle. They found a tired, muddy, and stocking-footed Ray heading out of town along the railroad tracks. Neither law enforcement nor the jury believed Ray’s claim that he was simply out on an early morning walk.
Things improved by his next major crime—a series of armed robberies. But at one store, a brave employee followed Ray as he escaped with his partner in crime, and observed the two men cleverly changing cars. Ray was easily traced to their rooming house and, when faced with his pursuers, admitted, “I cannot deny, and I won’t admit it.” A jury convicted him in twenty minutes, and Ray found his way to MSP.14
But on April 23, 1967, his luck improved: he slipped out of the prison in a truck that delivered bread from the prison bread factory, where he worked, to another part of the “farm.” He hid himself in a bread box.
Ray escaped MSP with more than just the scent of yeast on his prison clothing. One inmate, James Brown, recalled that as far back as 1963 Ray had expressed displeasure with King’s marches; Ray had insisted that he “would get Martin Luther King when I get out” of MSP. Ray then mentioned that a prison group called the Cooleys “wo
uld pay $10,000 to have King dead.” Asked years later to revisit his claims, Brown confirmed Ray’s promise to get King, but claimed ignorance of the Cooley group. The partial retraction likely was motivated by fear. Another former MSP inmate, Thomas Britton, independently confirmed the existence of the “Cooley Club,” a small group of “old cons” who would provide protection for prisoners against other prisoners. He also, independently of Brown, connected Ray to the group.15 But Britton refused to accept or even be associated with any reward for information on King’s murder for fear of retaliation by the Cooleys, even though Britton was out of prison at the time. His fears may have been well warranted, as an FBI investigation not only confirmed the existence of the group in MSP, but raised the possibility that the group existed across the federal prison system.16
Britton did not even specifically associate the Cooley Club with an assassination bounty, but he did provide important corroboration for the idea that Ray was aware of and intrigued by bounties on King’s life. According to Britton, Ray discussed a $100,000 offer to kill King from a “businessman’s association.” Expressing an interest in pursuing such a bounty if he ever got out of prison, Ray added: “There is more than one way to make money than by robbing banks.”
Further confirmation of Ray’s knowledge of a high-dollar prison offer comes from former inmate Donald Lee Mitchell. In an affidavit to the Shelby County prosecutors in May of 1968, Mitchell stated:
In 1961, I had the opportunity to meet one James Earl Ray. I was introduced by a friend of mine by the name of Hawks, who was doing twenty four (24) years . . . Ray showed great contempt for the colored convicts, as he very seldom talked to them except on business deals for dope or money. He was always telling me how the boys from St. Louis and K.C. always kissed their ass. He said he never would, because if it hadn’t been for Lincoln they would still be shining his shoes.
When he first mentioned escape I thought he wanted me to leave with him, but I quickly explained that I got out on June 1, 1966, that year. He said no, I want you to help me . . . Then after I make it I’ll wait on you in St. Louis . . . [Ray said] some people (friends in St. Louis) fixed it with someone in Philadelphia, for him to kill Dr. Martin Luther King . . .17
One is justified in wondering if Ray exaggerated his role in and knowledge of a plot to Mitchell. Ray had no bona fides as a killer himself and no background in assisting in capital crimes. It is possible that Ray could have volunteered to help track King’s movements, but the conspirators would be counting on someone whose participation in any plot would require that he escape from a federal prison—not a promising contingency. Indeed, Ray’s immediate activities after his escape point away from him leaving with a King bounty as his top priority.
Once out of MSP, Ray made no immediate effort to engage any would-be plotters. Instead, he burglarized a trailer for a blanket and food, took a train to his hometown of St. Louis, and then fled by bus to Chicago, until May of 1967, when he found work at the Indian Trails restaurant for eight weeks under the Rayns alias. Ray wanted to make enough money to flee North America. Fellow MSP prisoners confirmed that a widely known criminal network in Montreal could help obtain fake Canadian identification; with that in hand, Ray could exit to a country without extradition treaties with the United States. In the early summer of 1967, Ray began to write the Canadian consul in Chicago about its immigration procedures. He would soon be on his way north of the border.18
His immediate efforts to escape the law also undermine the idea that Ray was some kind of violent bigot, fixated on killing Martin Luther King Jr. Ray may have harbored racial animus toward blacks, as evidenced by the statements of people like Brown. But other prisoners did not describe Ray as someone stewing with deep prejudice. He asked to work in a segregated prison environment, but Ray also worked amicably with people of color at places like Indian Trails after he escaped. It is not surprising that Ray, who grew up in Jim Crow Missouri, would share the same bigoted worldview (and a distaste for those, like King, who challenged it) as millions of others who lived below the Mason-Dixon line. But few people, outside of Klan members and their core sympathizers, directly participated in violence in the name of racism. None of those who knew Ray best described him as being politically motivated, much less a KKK member. What they did describe, almost to a person, and what is borne out by Ray’s life, is a man motivated by the love of money. Mitchell said Ray promised him $50,000 for help in killing King.
This dollar figure and other aspects of Mitchell’s account later intrigued congressional investigators when they reinvestigated King’s murder in the late 1970s as part of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Mitchell’s reference to St. Louis and Britton’s to a “businessman’s association” dovetailed with new leads suggesting that two St. Louis businessmen, Jack Sutherland and John Kauffman, arch-segregationists with documented connections to racist groups, fronted a King assassination bounty to criminals. The lead developed almost by accident when FBI agents investigating a 1978 St. Louis jewelry heist unearthed a report, submitted by an informant in 1974, claiming that Russell Byers, a career hoodlum, told two attorneys, Lawrence Weenick and Murray Randall, that he had received a high-money offer from the two businessmen to kill King. Byers did this in the informant’s presence. The FBI disclosed this information during the congressional investigation, and it became one of the most important leads explored by the HSCA. Byers, a career criminal who may have had motive to fabricate the account, was not without his skeptics. But Congress did locate a corroborating witness, someone who had infiltrated a criminal conspiracy outside of prison in the late 1960s, and heard relevant individuals discussing a bounty on King’s life in the course of his work.19
Something else tantalized congressional investigators even more about this St. Louis plot: it allegedly reached into Missouri Penitentiary through a prisoner, John Spica, who lived in the same cell block as James Earl Ray. Spica, like some other associates of Ray’s inside MSP, belonged to St. Louis’s criminal underworld. When interviewed by Congress, Spica distanced himself from any association with Ray: a claim contradicted by two other prisoners. Making matters more mysterious: Spica died shortly after his interview, from a car bomb, in 1979. Congress also discovered that Sutherland engaged in political activity—in support of segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 presidential candidacy—in and immediately around the Grapevine Tavern, owned by James Earl Ray’s brothers, John and Jerry.20 All three Ray brothers partook of the criminal lifestyle, and at least one author contends that they named the pub the Grapevine to telegraph its other purpose, that of an “underground communications network criminals use to commission and solicit new crimes.”21 As noted earlier, bounty offers circulated in similar haunts.
But the timeline of these associations presents further problems for the idea that James Earl Ray left prison with killing King as his top priority. The American Independent Party did not form until July of 1967, and the Grapevine Tavern did not officially open for business until January 1968.22 In other words, Ray did not have the means to engage the plotters once he escaped MSP in April 1967, and again, his documented actions comport with Ray’s account: his number one goal that summer was escaping North America. Absent specific knowledge of whom to contact, lacking any bona fides in white supremacist circles, Ray would be taking tremendous risks waiting and hoping to “make good” on a bounty offer. He knew that, as an escaped fugitive, law enforcement agencies across the United States soon would be looking for him.
A figure of $100,000—almost $800,000 in today’s money—certainly would be attractive to a con like Ray. This would be the total amount if one interprets Ray’s account to Mitchell as reflecting a bounty reward of $50,000 each for a King hit. The bounty total of $100,000 also echoes the dollar figure offered to Donald Nissen in Leavenworth by Leroy McManaman. But Mitchell’s statements go even further in associating the Leavenworth bounty with the bounties circulating in MSP. Ray told Mitchell that “som
eone in Philadelphia . . . fixed” the King murder. Mitchell never clarified (or Ray never clarified to Mitchell) what he meant with that reference. An observer’s first inclination is to associate the label with the City of Brotherly Love in Pennsylvania. But Philadelphia is also a city in Neshoba County, Mississippi, the scene of the famous Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights activists in 1964, one of many crimes orchestrated by the Mississippi White Knights. This is the same group who promised $100,000 to outside criminals, like McManaman, if they would assassinate Martin Luther King Jr.
Many suspect that, as Ray evaded the law, he monitored the plots through his brothers Jerry and John. The three men were close, and all had criminal backgrounds. Such speculation tends to lead investigators in the direction of the St. Louis bounty rather than a bounty emanating from Atlanta and working its way to Sam Bowers’s Mississippi. But Ray also had developed a few relationships with prisoners inside MSP, including people who were out before he escaped. Such men could also have forwarded information they heard about any potential King plot to Ray. New information suggests one such candidate, and provides very strong corroboration for the details of the bounty described in the first half of this chapter.
Louis Raymond Dowda developed a relationship with James Earl Ray when the two worked together in the MSP mess hall. On the surface, Dowda is not a likely candidate to have helped Ray access the men sponsoring the King bounty for a simple reason: he was one of the only people close to Ray—there were not many to begin with—who stridently insisted that Ray could have killed King and would have done so for money. In his first interview, Dowda told investigators that his one-time friend harbored extremely racist sentiments and that Ray “made several statements to the effect” that he would “kill Martin Luther King” if “the price was right.”23
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