The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  The Attorney General continued to make enemies. He energetically intervened in civil liberties, and supported desegregation in the South, thus alienating white Dixie (and the ultra-racist Hoover); he banished CIA officer William Harvey after Harvey sent illegal teams to Cuba to assassinate Castro; he unsuccessfully attempted to deport Mafia boss Carlos Marcello; he angered the military-industrial complex by proposing withdrawal from the Vietnam War; he dismayed Southern California ranchers by supporting the rights of migrant workers to the extent that the ranchers, according to the FBI, put a $500,000 contract on RFK’s head.

  After John F. Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas, the younger Kennedy headed for the top spot in US politics. In 1968 RFK formally announced that he was standing as a Democratic presidential candidate in 1968. Just after midnight on 4 June that year, after victory in the California primary, Kennedy was shot as he walked through the kitchen area of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

  It seemed an open and shut case. Dozens of witnesses saw the assailant fire. Sirhan Sirhan was apprehended with the smoking gun in his hand. Evidence presented at Sirhan’s trial showed him to be a misfit loner who had written in a notebook found by the LAPD: “My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming the more [sic] of an unshakable obsession.” Of Jordanian descent, Sirhan had been enraged by pro-Israeli comments made by RFK. An open and shut case was followed by an open and shut trial. Sirhan admitted culpability: “I killed Robert Kennedy wilfully, premeditatedly, with twenty years of forethought.” Convicted of first-degree murder, Sirhan was sentenced to the gas chamber; his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

  But there were holes – literally – in the prosecution case. In his exhaustive analysis of RFK’s murder, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (1991), Professor Philip H. Melanson shows that at least 11 bullets were fired that night in the Ambassador kitchen. Sirhan’s Iver-Johnson .22 revolver, the only weapon Sirhan had that evening, held eight bullets. Moreover, coroner Thomas Noguchi recorded that the bullet which actually killed Kennedy was fired from very close – inches at most – behind his head, leaving powder residue on his body. But every witness agreed Sirhan was to RFK’s front, and no closer than a yard (1m) at most from him. Sirhan was thus not the only shooter on the scene, and likely was not the killer. Various eyewitnesses recalled a woman in a polka-dot dress running from the scene shouting, “We shot him!”

  For almost 20 years the LAPD sat on its RFK assassination documents, and when Melanson and others were finally allowed to view the records many were found to have been lost, crudely censored or destroyed by the LAPD. Among the evidence destroyed were 2,400 photographs, including a roll of film taken of the actual shooting, 3,000 transcripts of interviews, and the door frame from the kitchen in which a number of bullets had lodged.

  If there was another gun, who fired it? Aside from the mysterious woman in the polka-dot dress, the light of historical inquiry has begun to shine brighter and brighter on Thane Cesar, the Ace security guard who stood directly behind RFK in the Ambassador kitchen. Several bystanders testified that Cesar pulled a gun during the shooting. Don Schulman, an eyewitness and a journalist for KNXT-TV, reported live: “The security guard . . . hit Kennedy all three times.” Despite being mortally wounded, RFK turned around and grabbed at Cesar and pulled his bow tie off. It can be seen clearly on the ground next to the stricken RFK in photographs. Was Kennedy’s lunge at Cesar an attempt to get to grips with his assailant? Cesar, a vociferous right-winger, lied and contradicted himself in his testimonies to the police. He declared that he had sold his own .22 handgun before 4 June, but it was subsequently proved that he had sold it afterwards. Nevertheless, the LAPD refused to investigate Cesar.

  Assuming a second gun killed RFK, the role of Sirhan Sirhan requires explanation – after all, Sirhan declared on oath that he was Kennedy’s killer. William Turner and John Christian, in The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1978) and Philip Melanson in The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination suggest the Manchurian Candidate theory – that Sirhan was programmed by hypnosis to kill RFK. The Manchurian Candidate theory is fantastic – but viable; in 1954 a CIA memo on the “Artichoke” project, undertaken as part of the notorious MK-ULTRA programme, proposed using a hypno-programmed assassin to assassinate “a prominent [deleted] politician or, if necessary, against an American official”. One leading expert, Dr Herbert Spiegal, estimates that Sirhan is among the 10 per cent of the population most susceptible to hypnosis. The CIA had a possible motive as well as the means to kill Kennedy: on RFK’s accession to the White House he would have discovered the Agency’s complicity (if any) in the killing of his brother. Or maybe the CIA just wanted revenge for RFK’s criticisms of its Bay of Pigs fiasco. On 20 November 2006 BBC’s Newsnight presented research by Shane O’Sullivan alleging that several CIA agents were present in the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the assassination, even though the CIA had no reason to be there (it doesn’t even have domestic jurisdiction). Three of those accused were ex-senior officers from JMWAVE, the CIA’s main anti-Castro station based in Miami, and included David Morales, sometime Chief of Operations. Since Sirhan Sirhan was also revealed to be member of the Rosicrucians, it is believed by some conspiracists that the cult was behind Bobby Kennedy’s offing.

  The Manchurian Candidate theory also explains the enigmatic girl in the polka-dot dress. Under hypnosis by prosecution psychiatrist Dr Seymour Pollack, Sirhan answered the question, “Who was with you when you shot Kennedy?” as follows: “Girl the girl the girl …” A year later, when he was interviewed by NBC, Sirhan recalled having coffee with a girl immediately before the shooting. Of the shooting itself he could recall nothing; the incident was a complete blank. The temptation is to conclude that the polka-dot girl was Sirhan’s handler. She has never been traced. But then the LAPD has never looked for her.

  Today, Sirhan Sirhan protests his innocence. The official version remains that he alone killed RFK. Few believe it.

  RFK was assassinated by a conspiracy which used Sirhan Sirhan as a patsy: ALERT LEVEL 9

  Further Reading

  Donald Freed, The Killing of RFK, 1975

  Robert Blair Kaiser, RFK Must Die!, 1970

  Gerald Kurlan, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 1973

  Philip H. Melanson, The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover Up, 1991

  Dan E. Moldea, The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, 1995

  William Turner and John G. Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: A Searching Look at the Conspiracy and Cover-up 1968–1978, 1978

  MARTIN LUTHER KING

  Dr Martin Luther King Jr had a dream, a dream of black and white Americans living in harmony. For some, however, King’s dream was a nightmare.

  King was only too aware of the forces arrayed against him. On 3 April 1968, while visiting Memphis to mediate in a strike, King told the euphoric congregation of the Mason Temple:

  It really doesn’t matter what happens now . . . some began to . . . talk about the threats that were out – what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers . . . Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain! And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the Glory of the coming of the Lord!

  The next day at 6.01 p.m., as he lounged on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King was fatally shot. Colleagues inside the motel room from King’s civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on hearing shots ran out on to the balcony to find him severely wounded in the neck. The world’s youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize was pronounced dead at St Joseph’s Hospital at 7.05 p.m. The murder led to riots i
n more than 60 American cities.

  The shot which killed King was quickly traced to a flophouse opposite the motel, where police discovered a sniper’s eyrie, complete with binoculars and rifle with telescopic sights. The fingerprints of one James Earl Ray were found on the rifle and other equipment. Two months later, after a massive manhunt, Ray was captured at London’s Heathrow Airport while trying to leave Britain on a false Canadian passport in the name of Ramon George Sneyd. Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee, where on 10 March 1969 he confessed to the assassination of King and was sentenced to a 99–year prison term.

  Only days after his conviction, Ray began protesting his innocence, saying he had made a guilty plea on the advice of his attorney, Percy Foreman, to avoid a trial conviction and the possibility of execution. Ray declared he had been framed by a gun-smuggler called “Raul” or “Raoul”.

  Ray was not alone in protesting his innocence. For many observers, aspects of the King assassination simply didn’t stack up. Ray was a two-bit petty criminal who somehow had found the financial wherewithal to fund an elaborate escape, complete with false passport, to Britain, whence he was intending to fly to South Africa. It beggared belief, too, that he could be so incompetent as to drop his private papers fleeing from the sniper den, not to mention leave his fingerprints behind. Ray was not a trained sniper, yet King’s assailant pulled off a flawless single-shot kill. The drunk who supposedly identified Ray in the flophouse just after the shooting, Charles Stephens, repudiated his own identification when sober and shown a picture of Ray on camera in a CBS special report. (Stephen’s uncooperative wife was put in a mental institution after disputing her husband’s initial identification of Ray.) The bullet from King’s body was never matched to the gun, despite a retesting of the rifle in 1997. Moreover, witnesses surrounding King at the moment of his death say the shot came from another location, from behind thick shrubbery near the flophouse, not from the flophouse itself.

  In 1977 Ray testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that he did not shoot Martin Luther King Jr. The committee disbelieved him – although it allowed the “likelihood” that he did not act alone. Evidence was examined that the CIA supplied him with fake ID found on him at the time of his arrest. One alias belonged to a Canadian called Gait, who was known to be a trained rifleman.

  The CIA was not the only party under suspicion for assisting the MLK assassination. In 1993 Loyd Jowers, the owner of the grill opposite the Lorraine Motel, informed ABC Television that he had hosted meetings between the Memphis police, the Mob and government agents at which King’s killing had been planned. Ray’s lawyer, William Pepper, in his book Orders to Kill (1995), pointed the finger of suspicion at the US 20th Special Forces Group. In another twist of the plot, an FBI agent called Donald Wilson announced in 1998 that he had seen papers in Ray’s Mustang car with “Raul” and FBI phone numbers written on them. This evidence dovetailed with the FBI’s known hostility to King; the Bureau had tried to discredit him with allegations of adultery and had even sent a letter urging him to commit suicide.

  By now King’s own family was convinced that Ray was not MLK’s assassin, and in 1999 in Memphis won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and “other unknown coconspirators”. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that “governmental agencies were parties” to the assassination.

  Such was the cascade of allegations against government agencies that Attorney General Janet Reno felt obliged to order a probe by the Department of Justice. This concluded in 2000:

  After original investigation and analysis of the historical record, we have concluded that neither the Jowers nor the Wilson allegations are substantiated or credible. We likewise have determined that the allegations relating to Raoul’s participation in the assassination, which originated with James Earl Ray, have no merit. Finally, we find that there is no reliable evidence to support the allegations presented in King v. Jowers of a government-directed conspiracy involving the Mafia and Dr King’s associates. Accordingly, no further investigation is warranted.

  MLK, like JFK and RFK, was killed by a “lone nut”. America in the 1960s, it seems, was full of lone nuts who somehow managed to pull off the assassinations of great men.

  Or maybe not. In 2004 Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was with King at the time of his murder, noted:

  … I will never believe that James Earl Ray had the motive, the money and the mobility to have done it himself. Our government was very involved in setting the stage for, and I think the escape route for, James Earl Ray.

  Jackson voiced the beliefs of millions.

  MLK was murdered by an unidentified conspiracy in which James Earl Ray was patsy: ALERT LEVEL 8

  Further Reading

  William Pepper, Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King, 1995

  David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr, 1981

  DOCUMENT: THE SUIT OF THE KING FAMILY AGAINST LOYD JOWERS AND UNKNOWN CONSPIRATORS

  IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF TENNESSEE FOR THE THIRTIETH JUDICIAL DISTRICT AT MEMPHIS

  PLAINTIFFS

  CORETTA SCOTT KING,

  MARTIN LUTHER KING III,

  BERNICE KING,

  DEXTER KING, &

  YOLANDA KING

  vs.

  DEFENDANT S

  LOYD JOWERS &

  OTHER UNKNOWN CO-CONSPIRATORS

  DOCKET NO. 9724210

  DIVISION 4

  [. . .]

  Preliminary Statement

  1) Plaintiffs sue Defendant LOYD JOWERS and other unknown parties for having joined a conspiracy – both criminal and civil in origin in the year 1968 – to deprive the Hon. Dr Martin Luther King Jr of his life, Plaintiffs of the presence, companionship, love, benefits, both tangible and intangible, and available to them while he was alive.

  2) Only recently have the Plaintiffs had the opportunity to identify Defendant JOWERS as one of the key players in this conspiracy. This, with precision, occurred within the last year, hereof, when confessed Defendant JOWERS confessed his role in the 1968 murder conspiracy and admitted to have been paid a large sum of money to participate in the conspiracy. Defendant JOWERS made these admissions in the presence of his attorney and Plaintiff Dexter Scott King and Plaintiffs’ counsel and on another occasion, also within the last year, in front of Plaintiff Dexter Scott King and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young.

  3) On those occasions, Defendant JOWERS said he had owed a “big favor” to the now deceased FRANK C. LIBERTO, a Memphis produce house operator, who was alive in 1968. LIBERTO advanced the money to further the conspiracy to kill Dr King to JOWERS as part of the plot to shoot Dr King from the back of JOWERS’ cafe. This area was then heavily vegetated with large bushes and trees which could conceal a gunman with a clear view of the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

  4) Defendant JOWERS also admitted that the person accused of the crime, James Earl Ray, was not the gunman involved and that he, JOWERS, took the still smoking rifle from another person, carried it into the kitchen of his cafe, and concealed it until it was collected the next morning.

  5) Defendant JOWERS confirmed the existence and the role of a man he knew as “Raul”, who brought him the rifle to be used to kill Dr King. JOWERS, thereby, confirmed the existence of the person whom James Earl Ray had identified more than thirty years ago as the individual who lured him to Memphis on the pretext of participating in a gun-running scheme.

  6) Plaintiffs sue Defendant JOWERS for the tortious actions that constitute: 1) outrage; 2) the deprivation of the life, companionship and benefits, tangible and intangible, material and spiritual, emotional and intellectual, all of which were available to the Plaintiffs in life and taken from them with the death of their husband and father which was the direct result of the Defendant’s tortious actions. Such tortious actions grew out of an illegal conspiracy that had the common design, concert of action, and overt acts that included the killing of Dr Ki
ng and the coverup of that murder and the framing of another – James Earl Ray –for the murder of Dr King.

  Jurisdiction

  7) Memphis, Tennessee, in Shelby County, is the Lex Loci Delictus where the illegal conspiracy culminated and was consummated with the fatal shooting of Dr Martin Luther King Jr as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at approximately 6.01 p.m., said motel being in the city limits of Memphis.

  8) Memphis, Tennessee, in Shelby County, is also the Lex Loc Contractus where Defendant LOYD JOWERS admits he entered into the illegal conspiracy with FRANK C. LIBERTO and others, known and unknown, to kill Dr King.