.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/mlk-gp-speech.pdf.
29.Nate Jones, “Document Friday: ‘Garden Plot’: The Army’s Emergency Plan to Restore ‘Law and Order’ to America,” National Security Archive, accessed July 11, 2017, nsarchive.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/document-friday-garden-plot-the-armys-emergency-plan-to-restore-law-and-order-to-america.
30.U.S. Army Center for Military History, “US Department of the Army Civil Disturbance Plan ‘GARDEN PLOT’ 10-September-1968,” National Security Archive, accessed July 11, 2017, nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/garden-
plot.pdf. As we argue in the appendix to the book, the actions of the army in response to civil disturbances have been widely perceived as a sign that the national security state wanted to kill King—to prevent civil unrest. But as this chapter implies, anyone paying any attention to the conditions on the ground would realize that King was one of the only remaining voices of nonviolence with any influence left in the black community. Killing him would be more, not less likely to incite riots and unrest.
31.U.S. News & World Report, “Is Insurrection Brewing in the U.S.?” December 25, 1967, available online at the King Center, www.thekingcenter.org/archive
/document/us-news-and-world-report-insurrection-brewing-us#.
chapter 5: the money
1.Nissen, in discussion with Stuart Wexler, November 9, 2009.
2.FBI, “Re: Alleged Offer of $100,000 by the WKKKKOM to Anyone Who Kills Martin Luther King Jr.,” July 24, 1967, File 157-7990, Jackson Field Office.
3.Nissen, in discussion with Wexler.
4.Chester L. Quarles, The Ku Klux Klan and Related American Racialist and Antisemitic Organizations: A History and Analysis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1999), 89.
5.Ibid.
6.“Transcript of the Milteer-Somersett tape,” November 9, 1963, Mary Ferrell Foundation, accessed June 20, 2017, www.maryferrell.org/pages/Transcript_of_Milteer-Somersett_Tape.html.
7.Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2008), 604–605.
8.Ibid., 510–11.
9.Ibid., 511.
10.Chester Higgins, “Hair-Raising Experience: ‘Kidnap’ Try of King Sr. Foiled; Add More Police Protection,” Jet, May 2, 1968, 14–19, books.google.com/books?
id=UTgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14&dq=hair-raising+experience+kidnap+
king&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9BpjUb_nDJC30QHYtYCQDw&ved=0CDEQ6
AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hair-raising%20experience%20kidnap%20king&
f=false.
11.Rev. John Ayers, interview with authors, November 16, 2010. Ayers had no information about any involvement in any plot by his brother to kill Dr. King, but he did not dismiss the idea out of hand, either. He added that his brother went to Alabama during the Selma voting rights protests, demonstrations that earned national attention for the level of violence, including killings, inflicted against nonviolent protestors. Rev. Ayers noted that his brother returned from Selma in a state of panic and even went into a brief period of hiding with another brother. The minister has always wondered if his brother participated in the Selma violence.
12.Higgins, “Hair-Raising Experience,” 17. The article incudes an anecdote from civil rights activist Julian Bond. Bond described frequent and odd encounters with Floyd Ayers that both point to Ayers’s eccentricity and paint a picture of a man with conflicted ideas of race relations. In terms of the latter, Bond described an instance in which Ayers arranged for Bond to jump a line to eat at a restaurant. Bond did not know how Ayers had those connections. On the other hand, Ayers also told Bond that he worked for “the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI and the CIA,” an unlikely story, for which there is no evidence.
13.“James Earl Ray: Selected Chronology,” available online at the Harold Weisberg Archive at Hood College, accessed March 30, 2013, jfk.hood.edu/Collection
/White%20Materials/White%20Assassination%20Clippings%20Folders
/Miscellaneous%20Folders/Miscellaneous%20Study%20Groups/Misc-
SG-109.pdf.
14.“Gaol Fugitive Sought Over King Murder,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 22, 1968.
15.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Appendix to the Hearings Before the Select Comm. On Assassinations, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. xiii, 267–74, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer
/showDoc.do?docid=95664&relPageid=271.
16.FBI, “Memo from Rosen to Deloach” (August 23, 1968), King Assassination FBI Central Headquarters File, section 69, 58, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation,accessed March 30, 2013, www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive
/viewer/showDoc.do?mode=searchResult&absPageid=1131852. It is important to point out that several prisoners told the FBI that they were not aware of any Cooley organization and that they had not overheard any bounty offers on King’s life. Here one is faced with two issues. First, there is the classic argument from silence. The offers could easily have been floated to a select few people whom certain inmates could trust. To do otherwise would risk exposing the plot to prison authorities and snitches. Beyond that, many of these interviews were of people in prison. Any prisoner who knew of either the Cooley organization or plots against King would be risking retaliation from fellow inmates. The fact that Britton, Brown, and Louis Raymond Dowda (discussed later in this chapter) spoke of a prison bounty offer when they were out of prison, and confirmed parts or all of their statements years later, gives them an air of credibility one does not find in the other stories. As will become clear later on, Dowda appears to have had inside information that he withheld from investigators, that goes even further in explaining his insights about Ray looking for the “right price” to kill King. It is also worth pointing out that the authors dismissed the claim by another prisoner, Raymond Curtis, who clearly wanted to profit by creating an exaggerated story about insider information of a bounty on King.
17.W. Pate McMichael, “The Plot to Kill a King,” St. Louis Magazine, September 17, 2009.
18.“James Earl Ray: Selected Chronology.”
19.U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: Final Report, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., 360–64, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, maryferrell.org/showDoc
.html?docId=800&search=byers#relPageId=390&tab=page. Both attorneys and
Byers confirmed the story to the committee, but Randall pointed out that Byers may have been inventing a King bounty story to smoke out the FBI informant. In this scenario, as envisioned by Randall, Byers would have harbored (apparently justifiable) suspicions about the informant; he would have given the King story to both attorneys in the presence of the informant in 1973 and then wait to see if law enforcement would later confront him about the King bounty later. If they did, Byers would know who the snitch was by process of elimination. But the attorney admitted this was only speculation, and Weenick, the other attorney, asserted that “there seems to be no credible reason why he would have made it up and told it to me and Randall.”
20.Ibid.
21.McMichael, Klandestine, 336.
22.Martin Hay, “Stuart Wexler & Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.” (review), Two Kennedys and A King, July 26, 2013, kennedysandking
.com/martin-luther-king-reviews/wexler-stuart-and-larry-hancock-the-
awful-grace-of-god-religious-terrorism-white-supremacy-and-the-unsolved-murder-of-martin-luther-king-jr. Hay’s critical review of our earlier work is riddled with egregious errors that will be discussed in various endnotes and in the epilogue. The pull quote, at the beginning of the review for instance, claims that we “put Ray” at the Grapevine when we, in fact, never say that. Instead, we argue t
hat Ray could have maintained some form of contact with the plotters by way of his brothers, who ran the bar. In the earlier book we say that Ray did not immediately pursue the plot after escaping prison; in this update we do. Hay goes on to claim that we have no credible evidence that Ray ever heard of a bounty. But to make this claim Hay dismisses the accounts of prisoners like Britton. He makes a blanket statement that all the prisoners who directly heard of Ray discussing a plot were looking for more lenient prison sentences and/or bounty rewards. But he has no actual evidence of this for any prisoner—Hay is the one speculating, not us. As a point of fact, Thomas Britton, who heard Ray discuss a $100,000 offer from a businessman’s association, was not even in prison at the time he made his claim and expressly said he did not want a reward. Brown confirmed hearing Ray discuss a bounty years after the fact.
23.FBI, “Interview of Louis Raymond Dowda” (April 26, 1968), Memphis Murkin Field Office File. Sub K, vol. 2, serial 143A.
24.FBI, “Report of Alan G. Santanella” (May 17, 1968), Atlanta Murkin Field Office File 44-2386, at 29-41; and FBI, “Airtel, From SAC Los Angeles To Director, FBI, Re: Louis Raymond Dowda” (May 7, 1968), Memphis Murkin Field Office File. Sub E-686E. Dowda said that he stopped to visit a former prisoner in Kansas City, Paul Alvin Lail. Dowda said Lail would have known Ray but they were not especially close. He also stopped to visit a former prison guard from MSP, Pete Petrie, but Dowda claimed that they did not discuss Ray and that he did not even know, at that point—five months after the fact—that Ray had escaped. He also visited with the former supervisor of the kitchen at MSP, Lloyd Helt, and Jewell Rigger, someone he described as the wife of a former prisoner who worked at a California hospital. In other interviews, without mentioning his visit to Jewell, Dowda identified that inmate (the husband) as Donald Dean Rigger—one of the only other prisoners who had befriended James Earl Ray.
25.FBI, “Report of Alan G. Santanella,” at 35-36.
26.Ibid.
27.FBI, “Airtel from SAC, Jacksonville to Director, FBI re: Airtel: 1-22-74” (February 8, 1974). The source claimed that Dowda referenced six businessmen who helped sponsor the plot. He could not remember the first name of the GM executive, but thought the last name might be Collier. It is entirely possible, given the secondhand nature of the report, that the source accidentally confused the name of the GM executive with the man who owned the Bonanza Sirloin Pit, E. R. Collins. Either way, the reference to a GM executive is important confirmation of Lamar Waldron’s anonymous source on the King bounty.
chapter 6: detour
1.Gerold Frank, An American Death: The True Story of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Greatest Manhunt of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 300–301. Frank has come under deserved criticism for working, behind the scenes, with the FBI on his King assassination book, as well as others. The authors only use him for basic information.
2.Ibid., 315. Ray’s understanding was a common one for the time; in interviewing other convicts at Missouri State Penitentiary, the FBI determined that there was a general knowledge of how to get Canadian identification, and the descriptions were very much in line with the process Ray followed.
3.Ray would make a number of mistakes in acquiring his new identities including misspelling names.
4.Philip Melanson, The Martin Luther King Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up (New York: SPi Books, 1994), 42. Much of the controversy over Ray’s aliases involves issues developed by Professor Melanson. Melanson points out, among other things, that Ray selected names of men who bore a resemblance to James Earl Ray and that Ray adjusted the spelling of their names at suspicious times in ways that reflect someone with ongoing knowledge of the men. This is most notable with the Galt alias. At one point, Ray adjusted his use of the Galt alias to include the middle name Starvo—Eric Starvo Galt. Melanson points out that this occurred at the same time that the real Eric Galt began to use the middle initials “St.V.” The real Galt, Melanson notes, used rather large circles for periods, circles Melanson said could be confused with the letter “o.” Hence Ray’s use of Starvo, while initially a sign that he did not know what he was doing, becomes a shocking coincidence for Melanson—someone looking at St.V. on paper might read it as “StoVo” which is strikingly similar to “Starvo.” The problem here, again, is from two closely related issues. The first is that Ray himself insisted he developed his aliases. Melanson believes this is a lie, and even Ray’s last lawyer, William Pepper, doubted Ray’s story. But then what is the motive for Ray’s lie? If, as Melanson and Pepper imply, some intelligence agency (or someone like Raul) supplied Ray with the alias, why would he lie about it? Ray openly endorsed “the government did it theories” until he died. This gets to the second problem with Melanson’s theory—the assumption that, even if Ray had help with his aliases, that help, even if it was ongoing, came from U.S. intelligence operatives. Criminals used Canada as one of the major pipelines to acquire fake identification and/or leave the country. Underworld figures developed sophisticated procedures to meet that demand. Criminal groups were just as capable of supplying Ray with fake credentials and just as capable of making sure (for instance, reading Galt’s mail) that their clients updated the identities when necessary. Throwing investigators off the scent of criminal accomplices is a much better explanation for Ray’s lies, assuming they even were lies, than diverting them away from the kind of shady intelligence operatives Ray always was quick to scapegoat for his actions.
5.James Earl Ray, Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? The True Story by the Alleged Assassin (New York: Marlowe, 1997), 125; and William Pepper, Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (London: Verso, 2003), 248.
6.Report on Salwyn, President John F. Kennedy—Murder of—Assistance to the F.B.I, HSCA Administrative Folder U9, RC MP, available online at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, accessed September 15, 2010, www.maryferrell.org/mffweb
/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=10097&relPageId=153. Information pro-
vided by Marcelle Mathieu of Montreal.
7.Ibid.; information provided by Lise Robilland of Montreal.
8.Philip H. Melanson, The MURKIN Conspiracy: An Investigation into the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Praeger, 1989), 44–50.
9.Ibid.
10.John Nicol, “Was the King Assassination ‘Triggered’ in Canada?” CBC News, last modified January 7, 2009, accessed December 15, 2010, www.cbc.ca/world
/story/2008/04/28/fray-hearings.html. Nicol also cites an HSCA staffer, Melvin Kriedman, as saying that Congress came to believe that Ray was recruited into the plot in Canada.
11.Sims, The Klan, 143.
12.Charles Faulkner, “Murdering Civil Rights: Martin Luther King Jr., White Supremacy, and New Facts Supporting the Guilt of James Earl Ray,” March 2013, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, March 2013, www.maryferrell.org/wiki
/index.php/Essay_-_Murdering_Civil_Rights.
13.David Randall Davids, The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 195.
14.Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998), 170–71.
chapter 7: on hold
1.Ray, Who Killed Martin Luther King?, 77–80.
2.Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 531–32.
3.John Larry Ray and Lyndon Barsten, Truth at Last: The Untold Story of James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2008), 98–100.
4.William Bradford Huie, He Slew the Dreamer: My Search, with James Earl Ray, for the Truth about the Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Montgomery, AL: River City, 1997), 17–69.
5.Frank, An American Death, 303–305. Frank’s book, on larger points, should be treated with some caution. Frank enjoyed a
special relationship with the FBI, one that he did not disclose, but which gave him access to government information in exchange for friendly stories.
6.Ibid., 304–305. Frank provides additional details that portray the fight as being with a group of black men, Ray arming himself with his pistol and talking of killing them. This is one of the items for which Frank provides no specific citation. Congress, through the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) pursued this incident, interviewing the woman. She confirmed that there were two black sailors in the bar and that one was drunk, stumbling and touching her as he passed by; she felt Ray had lost his temper because the man had touched her rather than because of his race. The HSCA accepted her statement rather than favor the racial angle to the fight.
7.Ibid, 306.
8.Ibid.
9.James Earl Ray, Tennessee Waltz: The Making of a Political Prisoner (Saint Andrews, TN: Saint Andrew’s Press, 1987), 59.
10.Posner, Killing the Dream, 200.
11.Waldron and Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy, 540.
12.FBI, “Interview with Marie Martin” (April 13, 1968), MurKIN 1051-1175, section 9, at 263.
13.Tarrants, The Conversion of a Klansman, 59.
14.Swift, “Confusion Throughout the Land.”
15.Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 177–80.
16.FBI, “Memorandum from SAC Jackson to FBI director; Subj: Suspended Racial Informant on 6/2/68” (July 12, 1968), 157-3082-18. File obtained by the authors via FOIA.
17.Nelson, Terror in the Night, 134.
chapter 8: back in business
1.FBI, “Airtel from St. Louis to Director” (August 12, 1968), FBI Central Headquarters File, section 69.
2.Nissen, in discussion with the authors, November 9, 2009. Nissen says he told the FBI about the car-shooting incident when he was interviewed in August 1968, but the available files do not reflect this. It is possible that Nissen either neglected to tell them and is misremembering it or that the FBI did not note it in their summary report. The FBI does not tape its interviews and relies on notes. It is possible Donald told them about the car and they did not transfer the information to their report. The authors’ considerable experience with FBI documents suggests that the FBI can miss or misreport details in the transcription process. Specifically, Nissen may be confusing what he told the FBI in St. Louis with what he told a prison warden in 1969, when Nissen pushed for and received a transfer to a protection facility. In speaking to the FBI in August of 1968, Nissen could have been worried about an unidentified federal law enforcement official (referenced as a go-between for the King bounty by McManaman) and chosen to be coy with his interrogators.
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