American Conspiracies
Page 9
Let’s start with a little context for what happened in the early evening of April 4, 1968, when a single shot struck Dr. King as he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He’d just come from leading a peaceful march of Memphis sanitation workers who’d gone on strike. Very soon he was planning to go to Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign, prepared to inspire massive civil disobedience and shut down the Capitol if that’s what it took to put poverty on the front burner. He was also going beyond civil rights and speaking out strongly against the Vietnam War.
A year to the day before his death, Dr. King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In essence, Dr. King said things just as inflammatory as Obama’s minister, Reverend Wright. I think King would probably be locked up for talking like that now. We have streets named after him, and a holiday in his name—how come we’re not listening to what he said? We completely ignore the very teachings he taught and the honesty that he showed. We also ignore that the powers that be got rid of him.
The FBI’s attempt to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement involved “attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press,”3 the Senate’s Church Committee concluded a decade later. Walter Fauntroy was a colleague of Dr. King’s who served 20 years in Congress and, between 1976 and 1978, was chairman of the House subcommittee looking into the assassination. Their report concluded that Ray did assassinate King, but that he probably had assistance. “It was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces,” Fauntroy testified at the civil trial, saying he’d found electronic bugs on his TV set and phone. Fauntroy later said that, after he left Congress, he found information from Hoover’s logs, showing that the FBI director had a series of meetings with persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence (MI) in the three weeks before King’s assassination; also that there were MI agents as well as Green Berets in Memphis the night he was shot.4
So was James Earl Ray, a petty crook who escaped from a Missouri prison a year before the murder, a patsy like Oswald? Supposedly, he fired from the bathroom window of a rooming house a little more than 200 feet away. A tenant on the second floor said he heard a shot “and saw a man fleeing down the hallway from the direction of the bathroom,” according to the House committee report. Ray went down some outside stairs and jumped into his white Mustang in an alley. Along the way he allegedly dropped a bundle that happened to include a Remington 30.06 rifle, some binoculars, and a sales receipt for ammunition. Ray’s prints were on the rifle, which had one spent shell in the chamber.
Isn’t it interesting how these lone-nut assassins seem to incriminate themselves in advance with dumb moves? I suppose they wouldn’t want to be seen walking with the weapon, which could draw attention, but why on earth leave a weapon behind with your fingerprints all over it? Wouldn’t you have a predetermined place where you’re going to ditch it? Certainly not out in the open where anyone could find it! Or, in the case of Oswald, taking the rifle to the other side of the floor and tossing it behind some book boxes. What gets me is, the assassins are so “successful” in accomplishing the mission, but then utterly inept in the evacuation from the mission. They leave clues that point straight to themselves, and seem to always get caught fairly easily. Here they supposedly did all this sophisticated stuff up until it came time to pull off the killing. Yet it’s like they never planned for the escape. I guess we’re supposed to believe their minds are so focused on delivering the death blow that escape never enters into the plan. Then after they shoot, it’s “oh, well what do I do now?” In the case of Oswald, it’s run home and then go to the movies!
Later, Ray claimed that somebody else had left behind the bundle so as to incriminate him. In fact, one witness, Guy Canipe, said the package was actually dropped in the doorway to his store about ten minutes before the shot was fired. Makes a little more sense, doesn’t it? Another witness, Olivia Catling, saw a fellow in a checkered shirt running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine soon after the killing, who went screaming off in a green ’65 Chevy. Ray, though, fled the scene in a white Mustang.
Judge Joe Brown, the first judge on the King family’s civil case, spent two years examining technical questions about the murder weapon, and said that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle.” When he called for more tests, he was taken off the case for showing “bias” by a Tennessee appeals court. “What you’ve got in terms of the physical evidence relative to ballistics is frightening,” he said later. “First, it’s not the right type of rifle. It’s never been sighted in. It’s the wrong kind of scope. With a 30.06, it makes a particularly difficult shot firing at a downward trajectory in that circumstance.” Above all, according to Brown, “Metallurgical analysis excludes the bullet taken from the body of Dr. King from coming from the cartridge case they say was fired in that rifle.”5
The actual sniper seems to have fired from behind some tall shrubs facing the second floor motel balcony. A Memphis newspaper reporter named Wayne Chastain had arrived at the scene within ten minutes. He was told by two witnesses, King’s chauffeur and a lawyer, that the shot came from those bushes. Andrew Young told the FBI that he heard a sound like a firecracker come from the bushes above the retaining wall across the street from the motel.
By the next morning, according to the Reverend James Orange, an associate of King’s, “the bushes were gone. The authorities were said to be cleaning up the area.”6 Why in all these cases does the government come in and make the most cardinal error you possibly could—and that is, disturb the crime site! When there’s a violent crime, they’re not supposed to do that! It’s one of the first procedures any cop is taught, basic Police 101. So who gives the order to do this? Don’t any of them sit and wonder, why are we not doing this according to the book, but instead breaking a cardinal rule of police work. But when there’s an assassination, all local and state laws go out the window, and authority comes down from above about what’s to happen. Isn’t that the fox guarding the chicken house? The feds doing all the investigating and questioning just reeks of potential abuse.
So Ray has a car waiting to drive away in, then goes up to Canada and overseas, where he ends up getting caught two months later at the London airport. All by himself, right? No one aiding or abetting him in any way, shape, or form. Like Judge Joe Brown put it: “You want to say that a three-time loser, an escaped convict with no obvious financial resources and no technical knowledge, is going to not only miraculously learn how to become a good marksman: This one individual is able to acquire the resources to get identities of deceased individuals, come up with very good forgeries for passports and fake identification, and somehow acquire funds for a very expensive itinerary and travel schedule? Now, be real! ... what you’ve got in this case was a stooge whose task was to throw everybody off the trail.”7
While he was being held in a British jail before getting extradited, Ray told an officer that he’d expected to profit from being involved in the killing; later, he testified to the House committee that he figured he’d only be charged with “conspiracy.” His second attorney, Percy Foreman, convinced Ray to cop a plea or else face the death penalty. Foreman later said he didn’t give a damn whether there was a conspiracy or not, and never asked Ray about it. Ray reluctantly agreed to plead guilty, but pretty soon felt he’d been hung out to dry. When he died in prison in 1998, he was still saying he was innocent.
It would be a stretch to say that Ray wasn’t involved at all. For one, there was big money being floated by Klan types that he certainly could have heard about. The question is, who was directly involved with Ray, and how far did the plotting go? But—no trial. Why aren’t we having trials in such high-profile cases even when the guy pleads? It should go ahead anyway, just for the country’s peace of mind. Then we’d know, well, he was tried and convicted and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Or let the chips fall where they may, let the trial show
enough evidence to get a couple more indictments. Just because you get a plea, isn’t there any suspicion that someone is doing that to cover up for someone else? Is this guy simply falling on the sword?
In a book published in 2008, Legacy of Secrecy, we finally learned about a 1968 Justice Department memorandum that got withheld from congressional investigators. Based on confidential information from informers, including a “well placed protégé of Carlos Marcello in New Orleans,” the memo says, “the Cosa Nostra [Mafia] agreed to ‘broker’ or arrange the assassination [of King] for an amount somewhat in excess of three hundred thousand ($300,000) after they were contacted by representatives of ‘Forever White,’ an elite organization of wealthy segregationists [in the] Southeastern states. The Mafia’s interest was less the money than the investment-type opportunity presented, i.e., to get in a position to extract (or extort) governmental or other favors from some well placed Southern white persons, including the KKK and White Citizens’ Councils.”8
The memo was based on sources located by a journalist named William Sartor. The FBI didn’t show much interest in going after his leads, but Sartor had uncovered information about a pre-assassination meeting between Ray and three of Marcello’s associates in New Orleans—after which Ray left town with $2,500 cash and a promise of $12,000 more “for doing one last big job in 2 to 3 months.”9 Turns out that journalist Sartor was in Texas in 1971, preparing to interview a nightclub owner linked to Marcello, when he was found murdered.10
That same Justice Department memo stated that one participant in the plotting was “Frank [C.] Liberto ... a Memphis racketeer and lieutenant of Carlos Marcello.” What’s noteworthy about this is that Liberto’s name came up in recent years with two other people tied to the King case. One was Lloyd Jowers, who owned Jim’s Grill across the street from the Lorraine Motel. In 1993, facing a possible indictment by Ray’s last attorney, William Pepper, Jowers went public with Sam Donaldson on ABC’s Prime Time Live.
Jowers said he’d been asked to help in the King plot by a gambling associate of his, a Memphis produce dealer named Frank Liberto who had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant.11 Jowers claimed Liberto told him that there would be a decoy, apparently Ray, and that the police “wouldn’t be there that night.” We know from other research that four tactical police units pulled back from the vicinity of King’s motel on the morning of the assassination, making it much easier for an assassin to get away.
In a taped confession he later gave to King’s son, Dexter, and ex-U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, Jowers elaborated that planning meetings for the assassination had taken place at his restaurant. The plotters included three Memphis cops he knew, and two men who he believed were federal agents. Shortly before the assassination, Jowers was promised a substantial sum if he’d receive a package and pass it along to someone else. When it arrived he opened the package, found a rifle inside, and stashed it in a back room until another man came to pick it up on the day of the murder. Jowers said he had been instructed to be standing outside his back door that night at 6 PM. That was when one of the same Memphis policemen handed him a still-smoking gun, which Jowers broke down into two pieces, wrapped in a tablecloth, and hid in his shop until it was picked up the next day.12
This crucial bit of information was contradicted by another witness, who indicated Jowers was in deeper than that. This witness testified at the King family’s civil trial that a deceased friend, James McCraw, more than once asserted that Jowers had given him the rifle, rolled up in an oil cloth, right after the shooting and told him “to get it out of here now.” Supposedly McCraw did, tossing the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.13 Jowers was deemed, at 73, too ill to testify at the trial, so the transcript of the interview he’d done with Sam Donaldson was read to the jury.
Frank Liberto, the Mob-connected produce dealer named by Jowers, was also implicated by John McFerren, a store owner who said he came to Liberto’s warehouse to pick up some produce about 45 minutes before King was shot. He overheard Liberto on the phone saying, “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.” A café owner friend of Liberto’s testified at the 1999 civil trial that Liberto flatly told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” The friend’s son backed up her testimony: “[Liberto] said, ‘I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done,’” and that Ray “‘was a front man, a set-up man.’”14 Liberto was dead by the time of the civil case.
At the same trial, quite a few witnesses also backed up Ray’s story of a mysterious figure he knew as “Raul,” whom he’d first met in Montreal three months after he escaped from prison. Ray had long claimed that it was Raul who gave him funds to purchase the rifle and the Mustang and then set him up in Memphis. The House committee had concluded that Ray’s story was “not worthy of belief, and may have been invented partly to cover for help received from his brothers John and Jerry.” But from a series of photographs shown him by attorney Pepper, Jowers picked out a passport photo of Raul as the guy who’d brought him the rifle to hang onto before the assassination. Glenda Grabow, who’d known Raul as a gunrunner, testified he’d once flown off the handle and told her that he’d killed Dr. King.15
It so happens that the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence (MI) Group was keeping King under round-the-clock surveillance during the garbage strike in Memphis that spring of 1968. One of the MI guys, Marrell McCollough, was undercover with the Memphis police—and, according to Jowers, was also involved in the planning sessions for the assassination. A repeat of the kind of thing we saw with Malcolm X. In a famous photograph, McCullough was also the man seen checking Dr. King for a pulse on the motel balcony. Attorney Pepper’s investigation found that McCullough went on to work for the CIA in the 1970s.16
In a speech given in 2003, Pepper said he’d come to believe that “a back-up operation” also involved a Special Forces unit known as Alpha 184.17 Here’s what he reported being told by an informant, a former Navy Intel guy, about a six-man sniper team: “King was never going to be allowed to leave Memphis. If the contract that was given didn’t work these guys were going to do it. The story they told was that the six of them were briefed at 4:30 in the morning at Camp Shelby. They started out around 5 o’clock. They came to Memphis. They were briefed there. They took up their positions.
“At the briefing at 4:30 they were shown two photographs who were their targets. One was Martin King and the other was Andrew Young.... But they never got the order. Instead they heard a shot. And each thought the other one had fired too quickly. Then they had an order to disengage. It was only later that they learned that, as they call it, ‘some wacko civilian’ had actually shot King and that their services were not required.”18
Carlos Marcello was also said to be “involved in a joint venture with the 902nd Mililtary Intelligence Group,” splitting the profits after receiving stolen weapons and arranging to get them shipped into Latin America.
Now let’s look at another strand in this spiderweb—the ultra-right. Soon after the assassination, a judge in Miami’s Dade County, Seymour Gelber, wrote the U.S. Attorney General’s office. Gelber said that an investigation ought to look at three men with a history of racial violence and a plot against Dr. King’s life in 1964.19 The FBI, within 48 hours, had gotten other leads that pointed to Sam Bowers, leader of the White Knights, and his associates in the Klan. FBI field offices were starting to check all this out, when Hoover ordered it be put on hold because they’d identified a fingerprint and were pursuing one fugitive (Ray).20
When Ray abandoned his car in an Atlanta housing project the morning after the assassination, he was overheard making a phone call to a partner of the notorious Georgia racist Joseph Milteer.21 Before he died in a fire in 1973, Milteer’s name never surfaced in connection with the King case. But Milteer was the likely fundraiser for Ray, as a conduit to the Marcello organization. Consider this curious fact: Ray’s third attorney (after he’d already pled guilty) was a fellow named J.B. Stoner, who also happened to run
the militant National States Rights Party. The same man who said, before Ray was apprehended, that “the white man who shot King ... should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor and a large annual pension for life.”22 Stoner and Milteer were cronies. When Stoner became Ray’s lawyer, he casually tossed it out that Hoover and the FBI might be behind the assassination. It gets even stranger. One of Ray’s brothers ended up working for Stoner for more than a decade. When Stoner ran for governor of Georgia in 1970, he served as his campaign manager—until Stoner got trounced by Jimmy Carter.23
There’s one other weird aspect we need to consider. While temporarily in Los Angeles early in 1968, Ray got into practicing self-hypnosis. Besides seeing a “psychologist-hypnotist,” he visited “seven other psychiatrists, hypnotists, or scientologists.”24 One of these was “head of the International Society of Hypnosis,” who later said that Ray was “impressed with the degree of mind concentration which one can obtain.”25 This was a German-born fellow named Xavier von Koss, who recommended several books on hypnosis that Ray was carrying when he got arrested in London. Von Koss seems to have also been involved in intelligence work.26 According to one of Ray’s brothers: “When Jimmy left Los Angeles he knew he was going to do it.”27 Meaning, be involved in the plot to assassinate Dr. King.
A recent book by Ray’s brother, John Larry Ray, alleges that when Ray was in the army in the late 1940s, he did some moonlighting for the new CIA and the FBI—and was part of the Agency’s early attempts to control human behavior that later became known as MK-ULTRA. Brother John recalls Ray telling him “that he thought the feds were messing with his mind.... My brother was a changed man when he returned from Germany [in 1948] . To be frank, he seemed drugged, even though I never saw him take anything. My dad and other family members commented that ‘he must be on goof balls.’ Also, he seemed easily persuaded to do things he never would have done before.”28