The Plot to Kill King

by William F. Pepper

  Nathan played guitar and used to travel, but in between trips he would help out in the restaurant, where he would often serve beer to Mr. Frank. Nathan said Liberto wanted to appear like a big shot around him. He showed off a thick roll of bills and a jade, diamond, and gold ring purportedly given to him by Elvis Presley. They became reasonably friendly.

  Another customer of the restaurant once quietly advised Nathan to be careful since Liberto was in the Mafia. Nathan, who was about eighteen at the time, once asked Liberto if, indeed, he was in the Mafia and what the Mafia was anyhow. Liberto told him that the Mafia was a group of businessmen who “took care of business.” He added that as a youngster he used to push a vegetable cart with Carlos Marcello in New Orleans. At the time, this meant nothing to Nathan because he didn’t know who Marcello was.

  Upset about Mr. Frank’s conversation with his mother, he decided to confront him. One afternoon in 1978, just before Nathan was scheduled to go away on a trip, Liberto came in and ordered a beer. Nathan engaged the 300-pound produce dealer in conversation and then asked him directly if he had killed Dr. King. He said Mr. Frank looked as though he was going to be sick to his stomach. He immediately asked Nathan if he was wired. The boy thought Liberto wanted to know if he was on drugs, which he denied. Then, Liberto said, “You’ve been talking to your mother, haven’t you?” Nathan admitted that he had, and Liberto told him, “I didn’t kill the nigger, but I had it done.”

  Nathan said, “Well, that SOB is taking credit for it,” (referring to James).

  Liberto then responded, “Oh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri.” He added that James was a “front man,” a “set-up man.”

  Then, Nathan said Mr. Frank turned on him, saying, “You don’t need to know about this,” and after jumping to his feet and drawing his right hand back as though to hit him, he said, “Don’t you say nothing, boy,” and glared at him. He stomped around, thinking for a minute or so and then said, “You’re going to Canada, aren’t you?” Nathan said he was.

  Liberto became quiet, and Nathan went to the back of the restaurant to take care of something, when he returned Liberto’s beer was still on the table, but Mr. Frank was gone. He never saw Liberto again, but during his trip, in early 1979, his mother sent him a letter stating that Frank Liberto had died.

  Sometime later, Nathan would tell this story directly to the attorney general, after which he was interrogated by members of his staff. He said they tried to break down his account, but he stuck to his guns. Later, both Nathan and his mother told their stories under oath. John McFerren had been vindicated.

  On June 5, 1994, Wayne Chastain and I met for the first time with Willie Akins, Jowers’s old friend and enforcer. In a three-hour session, he discussed how he had come to know Loyd Jowers and how he gradually learned about Jowers’s involvement in the killing. He confirmed acts of violence against Betty but said he never took a contract on her life and never meant to kill her.

  Jowers had only recently begun to open up to him about the Dr. King case. When the BBC documentary aired in the United States, in which Earl Caldwell spoke about seeing a figure in the bushes, Jowers called Akins. He said, “Big N (Jowers always called him that; he said it stood for Big Nigger), you know that figure in the bushes he talked about—that was me.” He said that on one occasion, Jowers told him that the person who could do him the most damage was the chauffeur. He was referring to the long-missing Solomon Jones.

  Akins continued to pay lip service to the story about him being asked to get rid of Frank Holt. My sense was that Akins had pieced part of the story together but that Jowers certainly had not told him everything. He was clearly lying about some things, but Akins’s information only added more corroboration to Jowers’s involvement. The question still remaining, however, was whether or not he had been out there alone and whether he himself had pulled the trigger. I increasingly believed that the answer to both questions was no.

  The Hedge

  Back in London in September, we came across a photograph in the Commercial Appeal’s pictorial history, “I Am a Man.” It was a shot of MPD officer Louis McKay guarding the bundle allegedly belonging to Ray in Canipe’s doorway. It was taken pointing south toward the fire station and in the background in the upper right was a hedge running down to the sidewalk between the parking lot and the fire station. Although there had been rumors of a hedge in that spot, we had never seen any photographs of it. On checking the evidence photographs from the attorney general’s office, this hedge did not appear standing in any of the evidence photos. Then I came across a photograph of the hedge cut down to its very roots. From looking at all of the other photographs, one would have never known that a hedge had ever been there. This was highly significant. The official investigators had contended that on leaving the rooming house, James had seen a police car parked up near the sidewalk that caused him to panic and drop the bundle. No police car was in this position. Even if there had been, the hedge would have obstructed the view and made the official story untenable.

  Here was evidence that at the time of the killing, a hedge was there. Sometime shortly afterwards (probably the next morning when the bushes at the rear of the rooming house were cut), it was cut to the ground, and all traces of its existence were obliterated. At the trial, Hickman used a photograph that showed a police car in clear view pulled up to the sidewalk. That photograph and others like it must have been staged, taken after the scene had been physically altered. In fact, the staged photographs were clearly taken later since the billboard advertisements were different from the ones in place on the day of the killing and the day after.

  Art Baldwin’s Account

  On October 15, 1994, I drove out to the Shelby County Correctional Center and finally met with Arthur Wayne Baldwin, the government informant who worked closely with the Marcello organization in Memphis. He said that he now sympathized with James. He volunteered having heard that James was assisted in escaping from the prison in June 1977 and that he was not supposed to be brought back alive. It seemed to me that some things never change. He told me about two contracts on James’s life, with which he was involved. The first came from the “Memphis godfather” who in 1977 told him that the people in New Orleans wanted this matter cleared up once and for all. Ray was supposed to have been killed in Memphis, but it had been botched.

  Baldwin was not keen to get involved but did not want to offend the Man. He had been present on other occasions when the godfather talked to Frank Liberto on other matters. He said that Liberto was treated like a “puppy dog” and ordered about in brutal fashion. Baldwin said he offered the contract to Tim Kirk. It went nowhere. The approach from the Bureau comes some months later.

  Under the proposed scheme, he and a state official would go to Brushy Mountain prison with transfer papers for James under the pretext of moving him to Nashville. They would arrive around 3:00 a.m. and take him. Baldwin was expected to kill James en route. They would then bury the body. James would go out from the Brushy Mountain population “count,” and since Nashville was not expecting him, he would not be missed for some time. The transfer papers at Brushy Mountain would then be pulled. Baldwin said he became uneasy when he could not get answers to questions concerning how long they expected the story to be kept quiet and what the ultimate explanation was to be. He began to believe that he and even the official were to be killed as well as Ray. He pulled back.

  He said they offered him lifetime immunity from all prosecution. His Nashville control FBI agent also knew about the scheme and had heard the two agents discussing other efforts to get rid of James. Both the mob and the government wanted him dead. They believed that it was only his continued presence that kept questions about Dr. King’s assassination alive. Baldwin was willing to take a lie detector test. His candor surprised me. It was obvious that he was fed up with being used by the government. His disclosure was the first time that I had heard the details about the Memphis godfather’s (Luchese) involvement in the cases alth
ough Mafia protocol would have required that Marcello process the contract through his Memphis boss and not deal directly with a local lieutenant like Liberto.

  As noted earlier, James’s former attorney, Jack Kershaw, revealed that at an earlier time, an offer of money and parole had been made through author William Bradford Huie, who had collaborated with and funded James’s first attorney, Arthur Hanes. But James would have to admit his guilt. James rejected it out of hand. Shortly afterward, Jerry Ray (James’s brother) received a telephone offer for James from Huie with a substantially greater sum on the table. That attempt was recorded and transcribed.

  After James had rejected these approaches, a more lethal scenario involving Art Baldwin was introduced.

  Another Marcello Scenario

  Sometime after telling me his story about Frank Liberto, Nathan Whitlock told me about a rumor of an earlier Dr. King murder contract put out to a member of a family named Nix who lived in Tipton County, Tennessee. Nathan said he understood that Red Nix had been given a new car and a rifle and paid $500 a week to track and kill King. If he succeeded, he was to get $50,000. He thought the offer came from Frank C. Liberto. Red had been killed not too long after Dr. King was shot. At Nathan’s suggestion, I met with Red’s brother, Norris. He and Bobby Kizer jointly owned and ran the New Moon night club in East Memphis. They confirmed that Red was given a new car and was put on a payroll for a job. “He was after someone all right,” said Norris Nix, “but I don’t know who.” They believed that Tim Kirk, who was a friend of Red Nix, would know who hired Red and offered to ask him to tell me what he knew. Tim, they said, could free my client.

  I was surprised. I thought I knew everything Kirk had to say. Eventually, I visited Tim Kirk again to ask him about the Red Nix murder contract. He said with certainty that the contract was put out by Carlos Marcello, not Frank C. Liberto. It was sometime in mid-1967. He said Red knew Marcello and undertook various jobs for him. A car had indeed been provided to him. Here was another indication directly linking Marcello to a contract on Dr. King. Based on his experience, Nathan Whitlock had formed the impression that Liberto had also been behind the Nix contract. Kirk said there was no way. It came directly from New Orleans and Carlos Marcello.

  More than ever the trail of the Memphis contract that resulted in Dr. King’s death led to New Orleans and pointed toward the involvement of the Mafia organization of Carlos Marcello. Marcello had not just given his approval but had taken on the job and had attempted to subcontract it on more than one occasion—the last time successfully through his Memphis associates (the details of whom I would later learn) that included the Memphis godfather and Frank C. Liberto.

  Louie Ward’s Account

  For a number of years, there had been rumors about a Yellow Cab taxi driver who saw someone jumping from the wall just after the shooting. In autumn 1994, a driver came forward. At first, he tried to tell his story to the attorney general, but he encountered a total lack of interest. He contacted Garrison after reading an article about the case. Garrison passed his number on to me.

  On November 5, 1994, Louie Ward told me a story he had been holding back out of fear for twenty-six years. On the night of April 4, at around six o’clock, he was parked near the corner of Perkins Avenue and Quince Street. Suddenly, he heard the dispatcher over the radio, obviously responding to a driver’s call about an emergency. Any driver could only hear the dispatcher say that he would send an ambulance. In response to something else, the dispatcher said he would send one anyway and call the police. From what he had heard, Ward learned that the emergency was the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. He also realized that the driver was taking a fare to the airport.

  Ward went straight to the airport and met up with the driver, who told him his story. Ward said that the driver, whom he knew as Buddy and whose full name he could not recall, was in his early sixties, and driving car 58. The driver said that he had gone to the Lorraine shortly before 6:00 p.m. to pick up a passenger with an enormous amount of luggage. As they finished loading up his taxi in the Lorraine parking lot, the driver turned to look at the area of dense brush and trees opposite the motel. His passenger quickly punched him on the arm in order to get his attention and (so the driver later thought) distract him from looking at the brush, and said, “Look up there—Dr. King’s standing alone on the balcony. Everybody’s always saying how difficult it would be to shoot him since he is always in a crowd. Now look at him.”

  At that precise moment, the shot rang out, and the driver saw Dr. King get struck in the jaw and fall. The driver said he grabbed his microphone and told his dispatcher that Dr. King had been shot. The dispatcher said he would call an ambulance, and the driver said that considering the wound, he didn’t think it would do much good. Then Ward said the driver told him that immediately after the shot, he saw a man jump from the wall empty-handed and run north on Mulberry Street and get into a black and white MPD traffic police car that had stopped in the middle of the intersection of Mulberry Street and Huling Avenue. At that point, the driver told the dispatcher to tell the police that one of their units had the man. Meanwhile, the passenger was becoming irritable, saying that they had to leave immediately because the ambulance and other cars would box them in, and he had to make the plane. They left.

  Ward heard the driver repeat the story to three MPD officers at the airport and observed a second interview being conducted later that evening in the Yellow Cab office by other policemen. After that evening, Ward said he never saw Buddy, the driver of car 58, again. Days later, he returned to the Yellow Cab office for the first time after the killing and asked after Buddy. Three or four of the drivers in the office told him that they understood he had fallen or had been pushed from a speeding car from Route 55, on the other side of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, late on the evening of April 4.

  Chapter 11

  DISCOVERY

  Such a victim, unknowingly used

  A leaf in the wind was she,

  Used and hurt, terribly abused

  By a racist she could not foresee.

  On October 31, 1994, as part of our discovery in the civil suit against Loyd Jowers, Raul Coelho, and others, I prepared to take the deposition of Glenda Grabow. She had known a person named Raul in Houston, Texas, in the 1960s and came to learn of his involvement in Dr. King’s killing. She had contacted Lewis Garrison in autumn 1993, after reading about Loyd Jowers’s request for immunity. Garrison had brought Ken Herman into his first meeting with her in 1993. Glenda Grabow and Lewis Garrison both believed he was still working as my investigator.

  I had been denied access to Glenda. However, Lewis Garrison finally gave Chastain and me her name and telephone number, adding that Herman had told him categorically that she would not talk to us.

  We drove out to where Glenda Grabow and her husband Roy lived, a few hours from Memphis, and they appeared pleased to meet us. After that first meeting in Garrison’s office, they only met with Herman and former Thames Television producer Jack Saltman. They had wondered where the lawyers were, since they had come forward to help free an innocent man.

  Glenda told me her story. In 1962, when she was fourteen years old, she met a man who went by the nickname of “Dago.” Years later, she learned his real name was Raul Coelho. As she walked to school each day, she passed a small gas station on the corner of East Haven and College Boulevard. Dago didn’t seem to work at that station but just sat around in front. Since he was friendly to her and she was having a difficult time living with her aunt and uncle, where a pattern of abuse had been established over a number of years, she was happy to know him. She recalled that he was about five feet nine inches tall, a bit wiry, and weighed 155 to 160 pounds. His hair was dark with a reddish tint, and she thought that he would have been around thirty years old. When she was fifteen, she met and married Roy, who, by his own admission, drank continually and stayed out a good deal.

  Soon after they were married, Glenda and Roy came to know a man called Armando. With Roy go
ne much of the time, Glenda was very lonely. She began to spend more and more time with Armando and his friends, and she appears to have been exploited by them and some of their associates. Armando did not drive, and she frequently drove him places. One of the places they visited was the rented house of Felix Torrino’s on the corner of Seventy-Fourth Street and Avenue L. At Torrino’s house, sometime in 1970, she recalled seeing Dago again. At that time, Armando told her Dago was his cousin and that his real name was Raul Coelho. He said that they immigrated to the United States from Brazil or Portugal.

  Over time, Armando and Torrino independently told Glenda that Raul had killed Martin Luther King Jr. They even told her some details, mentioning some bushes and trees at the rear of the rooming house. Raul, they said, had leaned on and broken a tree branch while carrying out the killing. When she heard this, she was shocked. Raul did not know Glenda knew his link with the assassination, and his cousin thought it should stay that way.