Sidney Barnes refused to cooperate, too. The HSCA gave renewed attention to Barnes’s involvement in the September 1963 plot against King involving Carden, Gale, and Crommelin. It was one of the few plots detailed in their final report. But when it came time to interview Barnes about these matters, he steadfastly refused to be interviewed.10
This illustrates a clear weakness in the HSCA investigation of the King murder. Congress has some subpoena power, but resisting such efforts or lying to Congress does not carry the same kind of consequences as one would face in confronting the Department of Justice and a possible grand jury investigation. Even if one does cooperate or comply with a congressional subpoena, it is incredibly rare for charges of perjury to result from false testimony to such a committee. One can simply wait out a select committee, which is formed by Congress for only a specified amount of time and with a limited budget.
As a shrewd attorney, Stoner would have been more aware of this advantage than anyone, but his status as a one-time attorney for Ray gave Stoner even more cover, for he was protected by the cloak of attorney-client privilege. As detailed, James Earl Ray waived this protection for all his other attorneys. But Ray refused to do so for Stoner, meaning that the extremist could not testify about his personal exchanges with Ray, even before a secret, executive session of Congress. This was suspicious enough for Congress to call attention to Ray’s exceptional treatment of Stoner in their final report.11
The limits of their budget and subpoena power meant that the HSCA continued to suffer from the flaws of the original FBI investigation in 1968, even as they criticized the FBI for those flaws. Budget and time constraints, for instance, prevented the HSCA from interviewing Deavours Nix or Sam Bowers. Yes, the HSCA castigated the FBI for the silly notion that someone would have to be in Memphis to participate in a conspiracy. But the reality was that unless they could conduct serious interviews with the likes of J. B. Stoner, the HSCA was still left with an FBI investigation that cleared the racist lawyer based on his whereabouts. The same was true for Barnes and Bowers; if the original FBI investigation was limited, so too was any effort to build on that investigation, especially if follow-up interviews were hampered by uncooperative witnesses.
The willingness to widen the scope of the investigation by cross-referencing the various streams of files the FBI produced could take the HSCA only so far. Without the sophisticated data-mining capabilities that exist today, the likelihood of missing information was significant. If the HSCA even learned about the Nissen story, much less took the account seriously, it does not show up in their final report, and the HSCA never approached Nissen. There is no mention of the Dixie Mafia or individuals like Donald Sparks or LeRoy McManaman in the HSCA report. The HSCA investigated information from Willie Somersett, but their report focused on a different angle: the claim by Somersett’s benefactor in the Miami Police Department, Lieutenant Charles Sapp, that Somersett provided information about King’s murder in the days immediately prior to the crime in Memphis.12 The final HSCA report makes no mention of Somersett’s informant reports on Capomacchia or Barnes, which implicated the White Knights in King’s homicide. Although the Barnes material was not provided to the FBI in 1968, journalist Dan Christensen quoted from Somersett’s reports to the Miami Police Department in a series of articles at the same time.13 Christensen leaves out Barnes’s name but identifies Tarrants as the person whose car was used in a radio diversion in Memphis.14
Administrative records show the HSCA was interested in Tommy Tarrants, likely spurred by Christensen’s articles, but do not disclose why; in any event, it appears as if the FBI destroyed their Mobile field office file on Tarrants just before Congress became interested in the one-time terrorist.15 It was that file that contained the picture of Tarrants that the FBI showed the employees of the gun store in Birmingham; that his picture was included at all, and before the FBI showed photos of other known racist killers, is a mystery the HSCA also failed to explore. Tarrants says the HSCA interviewed him,16 but his name does not appear in HSCA’s final report. It appears, by process of elimination, that Tarrants was one of two identity-protected sources the HSCA referenced in their analysis of potential white supremacist conspirators in the King murder. As someone who was on the verge of being released from prison after turning from Christian Identity theology to mainstream Christianity, Tarrants would have been an invaluable source on right-wing Christian extremists. He had personal connections and interactions with Barnes, Bowers, Carden, Crommelin, and key members of the Minutemen and the National States Rights Party, all of whom the HSCA investigated in connection with the King murder. Of course, disclosing Tarrants by name—someone who had just turned against what these violent men stood for—would have been dangerous to the new convert. Most of these men were still alive and could pose a threat to him. Lacking the cooperation of many of these extremists but limited by the FBI’s premature decision to clear them of a conspiracy based on their alibis, the HSCA dug deeply into the separate sets of files compiled on these men and their groups; this material was independent of the King crime and connected to investigations into other violent acts and conspiracies.
The HSCA deserves credit for thoroughly examining this material. But the files on these individuals and groups were housed in dozens of field offices across the country. If any of these extremists moved or did business in a different state, if any of the groups had affiliates in a different region of the country, FBI field office investigations were opened and files were created. It is not clear that the HSCA had access to, for instance, the Jackson field office file on Sidney Barnes or the Birmingham field office file on the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In the case of Barnes, the Jackson file not only details his extensive connections to the White Knights—something the HSCA left for a footnote in their final report—but also shows that the Jackson office thought he was a bomb maker for Klan groups.17 Most relevantly, Barnes’s Jackson file also included the Mobile field office reports showing that Barnes possessed and intended to deliver a rifle to Noah Carden as part of the plot on King’s life in 1964, a plot that was not even mentioned in the HSCA report. Perhaps most intriguingly, the Jackson field office file on Barnes includes an exchange between Barnes and one of L. E. Matthews’s associates, Elaine Smith, in 1969, in which Barnes is reported to have said that he was “friends with James Earl Ray.”18 If the HSCA learned of any of this, they left it out of their report.
Instead, the HSCA relied on new interviews with unnamed sources to all but clear Barnes, Bowers, and others. One source, who claimed to have had personal relationships in 1968 with Barnes, Carden, and Crommelin, insisted that he did not know of any plot against King’s life. This same source said that Barnes was all bark and no bite and that he would talk about violence but never participated in any actual crimes. If the HSCA lacked the Jackson field office report on Barnes, it may have been difficult for HSCA investigators to challenge their source.19 Separately, the report notes an anonymous source who was once involved with White Knights terrorist activities in the 1960s. This source argued that the White Knights were a local group who did not operate outside Mississippi. In other words, the source maintained the White Knights could be discounted because they would not have been involved in any attack on King across state lines in Tennessee.20
That Tarrants is one of the two sources is, from his own account, as noted previously, obvious. This also makes sense in light of the interview cited in earlier chapters, in which Tarrants admitted getting a rifle to kill King from Wesley Swift, two weeks prior to the assassination. What is unclear is if Tarrants gave his information to the FBI or to the HSCA directly, and this is important. Because if the HSCA received the information directly, they did not disclose it to the public in their report. It certainly undermines the credibility of at least one of their sources. If, instead, the FBI interviewed Tarrants on behalf of Congress, it may be they were trying to protect something else—something that could have blown the case wide o
pen but would have exposed the FBI to an unprecedented level of embarrassment.
This raises serious questions about the identity of the second, undisclosed source, whose description closely matches that of L. E. Matthews. In fact, it is hard to imagine any investigation into white supremacists, especially the White Knights, ignoring Matthews. He knew all the key players and assumed leadership of the group after Bowers went to prison. Notably, he is identified as being in John’s Café at the relevant times when Myrtis Hendricks reported suspicious activity. But Matthews’s name is conspicuously absent from the HSCA report, making him a very strong candidate to be the anonymous source.
But if he was the second source, one who cleared the White Knights and others from suspicion, Matthews himself should have been a suspect. Not only was he at John’s Café at the relevant times, documents indicate he was, in the two weeks prior to the King murder, engaged in some vague but important “out-of-state project.”21 By itself, this undermines the source who claimed the White Knights would never work out of state. But one must also remember that Matthews housed both Tarrants and suspect Eugene “Sunset” Mansfield in the weeks leading to King’s murder. It is important to note, again, that there is an informant report saying that Matthews and Mansfield discussed a “hit” for money, something that caused the FBI to investigate Mansfield. There is no evidence that the HSCA considered any of this.
That may be because Matthews was a source for the government long before he gave anonymous information to the HSCA. Even as he was poised to assume leadership of the White Knights, Matthews may have been what the FBI calls a Top Echelon informant, the most valued and most carefully protected of assets. Four key pieces of information point in this direction. The first is the fact the FBI and the DOJ never sent—or really even attempted to send—L. E. Matthews to prison for his crimes after 1968. They tried repeatedly for almost every other senior White Knight, but not Matthews, whom their files nonetheless identify as one of the White Knights’ chief bomb makers. The most conspicuous example of this “negligence” involves Byron de la Beckwith’s attempt to provide explosives to individuals wanting to blow up the offices of Jewish lawyer A. I. Botnick in New Orleans. Authorities in New Orleans intercepted de la Beckwith on his way to the bombing, itself a clear sign that an informant was involved. When it came time to try de la Beckwith, the most damning evidence against him were the reports by FBI agents who claimed to have witnessed de la Beckwith receive the bomb, which de la Beckwith then placed in his vehicle; they were found when he was arrested in New Orleans. But the man who gave de la Beckwith the materials—Matthews—was never charged, much less convicted for his role in the crime, even though he was the leader of the White Knights at the time! This represents the second piece of evidence pointing to Matthews’s role as an informant. The next piece is more circumstantial but suggestive—KKK activity petered out to a mere drizzle once Matthews assumed his role as the Grand Wizard.
Finally, there is the fact that the FBI will not provide to the authors more than five pages of material (two of which are duplicates!) on Matthews from his headquarters file. This is unheard of for anyone of any influence in the KKK—their files often run into thousands of pages. In fact, the FBI did not release any material on Matthews from before 1983! Experts on the government’s handling of Freedom of Information Act requests say this suggests that Matthews was some kind of informant. In normal cases, when there is sensitive information, the FBI will withhold material or redact large portions of material. But if the person is a top-flight informant, the FBI may release some material on the individual and simply pretend as if other material does not exist (they have to say how much material they withheld otherwise).
If Matthews was a Top Echelon informant for the FBI, it would help explain one of the key mysteries of the King case, described in this book: the early and significant interest in Tommy Tarrants as a suspect in the crime. As noted earlier, it makes no sense that an agent visited Tarrants’s home on April 4, after King’s murder, or that agents displayed Tarrants’s picture in Birmingham and Los Angeles on April 6 and April 16, before he had been connected to any serious acts of racial violence in Mississippi. But that assumes the FBI did not know about the substance of Tarrants’s visit to California to get a rifle from Wesley Swift with the intent to kill King. If someone informed the FBI of that, it makes perfect sense that the FBI paid close attention to Tarrants in connection with King’s murder. It also explains why, per Tarrants, his Mobile home was subject to around-the-clock surveillance from law enforcement the week before the King murder. If Matthews, who knew Tarrants and housed him before his trip to California, was the source who tipped off the FBI on Tarrants’s visit to Swift in March 1968, everything becomes clearer.
But it also means that a top FBI informant knew about the King assassination and may have participated in the planning of the murder, and the FBI failed to prevent the killing. In this scenario, the FBI may not have had a sense of urgency about Matthews’s reports or they may have been waiting to catch someone like Bowers in the act. In either case, they miscalculated, and then they were left deciding whether to follow through on the information and risk exposing a valued informant, or let the informant continue to do his job. This kind of catch-22 is not unknown in FBI history. It happened in the case of Gary Rowe, an FBI-paid KKK infiltrator who was in a car when Klansmen murdered civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. It happened when Boston mobster Whitey Bulger murdered rivals while working for the FBI. In both cases, the FBI avoided taking action against their assets until it was absolutely necessary, often when they had no choice because of public revelations. But as embarrassing as those cases were, they would have paled in comparison to the scandal that would have been caused had the FBI revealed that one of their assets was involved with and/or failed to prevent the King assassination.
This might also explain why the FBI chose to destroy the Mobile file on Tarrants in 1977, in violation of standard FBI procedure, and why they apparently at least considered destroying the entire Miami MURKIN file at some point. In the case of the Miami file, the FBI told the authors that they had destroyed it, when, in fact, they had provided a copy to the National Archives. Internal records show that the Miami file, alone among MURKIN files, was one the FBI wanted to avoid providing to Weisberg in FOIA requests. No one has yet to see it, but it is the file that likely contains all the information from Capomacchia (and possibly Barnes) related to Tarrants. Any hardcore investigation of Tarrants by Congress or anyone else, as the authors noted earlier, would lead to an investigation of the White Knights, and possibly alarming questions about L. E. Matthews.
The net effect of these HSCA interviews with unnamed sources was the same as when the FBI cleared Stoner, Barnes, and Bowers for having alibis outside of Memphis on April 4, 1968. Their operating principle—that the Klan was parochial—was just as misleading. It was generally true that most Klans operated within their own states or local jurisdictions, but we have developed extensive information that, especially when it came to murdering Dr. King, the White Knights and members of the Swift network were more than willing to work across state lines. J. B. Stoner had offered to bring his “boys from Atlanta” to kill King and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Alabama in 1958. William Potter Gale traveled from California to Alabama to join a plot against King in 1963. A very close associate of White Knight Burris Dunn’s, who overheard conversations between Dunn and Bowers about King over several years, was confident that, however parochial the White Knights were, they would have made a special exception in working across state lines if King was the intended victim. Informant Delmar Dennis told investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell that the White Knights were national in their reach.22
Part of the problem for the HSCA was their preconceived notion—one shared by many—that the Klan was a bunch of local hillbillies, fractured by internal rivalries, limited in their tactics, and with no particular strategy. With such prejudices, the Klan appears very much lik
e a modern-day inner-city gang. They have their turf that they control, but they do not broaden their activities outside their immediate region. For the most part, this is true, as author Patsy Sims amply details in her excellent work on the Klan (appropriately titled The Klan).
But what the HSCA missed was the power of Wesley Swift’s Christian Identity End Times vision to unify key leaders at the top of organizations such as the National States Rights Party and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Especially from 1967 to 1969, these men increasingly came together to join forces; Stoner, whose closest associate, Connie Lynch, was a Swift minister, became very active with members of the White Knights in Mississippi starting in 1967. Bowers used Barnes’s protégés Tarrants and Ainsworth—members of the Swift Underground—for his bombing campaign in Mississippi in 1967 and 1968. After Ainsworth’s death, Barnes moved to Jackson where he and his wife, Pauline, preached Swift’s theology to anyone who would listen. At Barnes’s invitation, Gale visited Mississippi on multiple occasions to minister and deliver Swift’s message. Imperial Wizard James Venable accepted and embraced a California affiliate of his National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan that was run by one of Swift’s closest aides. Joseph Milteer, an associate of Venable and Stoner, traveled the country, meeting with and attending functions organized by Swift’s followers. Swift’s message had captured the imagination of people like Bowers and Stoner, to the extent that his taped sermons were played at parties across the South. Just as modern terrorist leaders do now, Wesley Swift motivated a group of diffuse adherents in states across America to pursue an End Times race war. And killing King was a fundamental plank in the strategy to induce that race war.
Killing King Page 23