Now it roared into court. Charged with bribery, extortion, and two counts of witness intimidation, Ford played the starring role in the prosecution’s undercover tapes, raging bigger than life on oversized courtroom video screens, thundering over courtroom speakers.
“Let me ask you a question. You ain’t working for none of them motherfuckers?” Ford menacingly asks a lobbyist whom he suspects of being an informant. “If you are just tell me. I got a gun.” Grainy videotapes showed the debonairly dressed senator pocketing stacks of cash—in hotel rooms, in parking lots, once even in his Nashville senate office. Ford accepted a series of payments—$55,000 in all—from an undercover agent posing as a corrupt businessman.
Months after his Memphis indictment, Ford was indicted in Nashville for the TennCare kickbacks. After years of unaccountability he now faced separate criminal charges two hundred miles apart. He bounded back and forth to pre-trial hearings. Yet, when he finally stood trial in Memphis in April 2007, it looked as though he might once again revive the old Ford magic. The jury acquitted him on two counts and deadlocked on a third. But on the one remaining count—bribery—they found him guilty. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
* * *
—
JOHN FORD WAS one of many distractions that led me away from Jim’s tip about Withers. But even when it was fresh, it seemed unworkable.
Jim wouldn’t go on the record. Over three or four conversations I had with him in 1997, he even said he’d deny it. I felt Withers would, too.
I reached this conclusion in the public library, where I located the published volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Jim said the committee learned of Withers’s identity as a paid informant while investigating King’s murder. Searching for clues, I found a passage that described an informant who fit Withers’s profile. My hopes rose—this person was interviewed in secret by committee staff. But, when asked, the informant declined to let the committee reveal his identity publicly. The condemnation from the black community over such a revelation would simply be too great, it seemed.8
In any case, the Withers story never connected directly to my focus over that long summer and fall of 1997: Dr. King’s assassination. As James Earl Ray’s conspiracy circus played out in court, my editors allowed me to work several angles we believed would untangle fact from fiction and advance the public’s understanding of this momentous historical event. Jim was one of a number of former law enforcement and intelligence agents I contacted while exploring Ray’s specious claims. This months-long effort resulted in a groundbreaking story that fall that raised serious doubts about a popular conspiracy claim endorsed by King’s family: that elements of the U.S. Army had stalked the civil rights leader and played a role in his murder. Then, in early 1998, we published a series of stories I wrote that added new insight into the congressional committee’s theory that Ray might have shot King hoping to collect a $50,000 bounty offered by St. Louis–based racists.9
Ray never did get out of prison. His lawyers tried in vain to arrange a liver transplant, but the state of Tennessee would have none of it. The confessed assassin died in prison on April 23, 1998, six weeks after his seventieth birthday and thirty years and nineteen days after he found King’s face in his crosshairs and squeezed the trigger. He died professing his innocence.
After months of writing exclusively on the King assassination, I was tired of it. So were my editors. There would be no Withers story. It was just another of many tips that go nowhere. After Ray died, I boxed up my notes and research materials and packed them into the small Morgan building—the shed—in my backyard. There they’d stay collecting dust for the next ten years.
*1 Charged with five counts of aggravated assault following the February 1997 incident, Ford received administrative diversion. He served two years of probation and two hundred and fifty hours of community service, after which the charges were dismissed.
*2 Ford resigned from the senate days after his indictment. Consequently, the ethics case against him was never resolved. Ford maintained the case was bogus, that he was a professional consultant and that his business was legal and didn’t conflict with his duties as a part-time senator. Indeed, his biography in the Tennessee Blue Book listed him as a consultant, an occupation he developed over the years after starting out in life as a mortician for his family’s funeral home. Nonetheless, Ron Ramsey, the Republican chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee who would later become speaker of the senate, said if Ford hadn’t resigned, the committee would have filed six charges of violating the chamber’s ethics code and would have recommended that the Senate oust him.
7.
INFORMANT ME 338-R
OCTOBER 2007
SHADOWS STRETCHED ACROSS DOWNTOWN MEMPHIS as the funeral procession turned onto Beale Street. It moved to a slow, mournful beat, toward the Withers photography studio.
Rudy Williams pressed his trumpet to his lips and blew. Decked in a flamboyant white top hat and a somber dark suit, Williams, sixty-six, the graying “Mayor of Beale Street,” led a brass band marching at the head of the procession. Next came the motorcade—the hearse followed by a line of white limousines. Tenderly, the band began to play.
“Precious Lord,” the music wafted, “take my hand.” It was Dr. King’s favorite song. But today it would honor another.
Ernest Columbus Withers was dead.
It seemed he would live forever. At eighty-five, Withers had still made regular appearances at his studio, so cluttered now in 2007 with six decades of photographs, picture frames, and assorted junk it looked more like a rummage store. It was a photography business still. Yet at times it seemed more like a community center. Tourists, students, curiosity seekers—all stumbled down the long, darkened hallway now and then to the cloistered studio, so unlike the rest of glittering Beale Street.
The place screamed history. Here was a portrait of Medgar Evers, the slain NAACP executive. There was Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul. A banner depicting Dr. King hung from the ceiling, emblazoned with his famous words, “I Have A Dream.” Photos of countless others cluttered the walls—local politicians, preachers, a portrait of Withers as a young city police officer. When he ran out of room on the walls, he stacked more photos on the floor, propping oversized prints up against sofas and piling others, loose and frameless, atop filing cabinets or cramming them into corners to collect years of dust.
Withers was synonymous with Beale Street, yet his up-and-down fortunes meant he couldn’t always keep an office there. He ran a series of studios on Beale from the 1940s to the ’70s. But by the ’90s he’d been gone for years, driven out by the economic decline of the once-bustling black business district. It’s said Beale never fully recovered from the disorder that erupted during Dr. King’s 1968 march. Like a runaway beer truck, the downturn was swift and violent, bowling over all in its path. One by one, the street’s once-great venues were shuttered: the New Daisy Theatre, the Hippodrome, Harlem House, the Elks Club, the Palace Theatre.
The city of Memphis finally halted the blight in the ’80s, reviving Beale with an infusion of federal redevelopment funds. The street would never be the same. The city created the exuberant row of nightclubs and restaurants that today attract tourists from around the world. But gone forever was a culture, a way of life. The city’s black Main Street was history.
The street’s newfound prosperity initially bypassed Withers. In the early ’90s, misfortune led him to South Memphis, where he ran a photography studio from the hull of an old dry-cleaning business. There, on a cold winter’s day, Beale Street real estate developer John Elkington rediscovered him. A personable smooth-talker, Elkington had secured a lucrative contract to manage the city-owned Beale Street Historic District and he was recruiting tenants. He’d heard of Withers and his rare photo collection, so he figured he’d take a look for himself. What he saw startled him. The photographer’s historic prints and negatives were in tatters; some had suffered water damage.
Elkington
made a pitch: come back to Beale Street. He’d set up the photographer in a modern studio—charging just a dollar a year in rent—on the west end of the historic district. That end continued to struggle even after Beale’s recovery, but business was picking up and Withers had no better offers. He accepted.
“If we hadn’t got him out of there and moved him onto Beale Street no one would have ever heard of him,” Elkington said. It was the start of an Ernest Withers renaissance.1
In 2000, the Chrysler Museum of Art published Pictures Tell The Story, a glossy, 192-page coffee table book of Withers’s civil rights photos, one of four Withers picture books that would be published. Exhibits of his photos made national and international tours. Withers became a much-in-demand speaker at symposiums where he’d entertain audiences with graceful, poignant, and often humorous stories.
“There are a number of photographers that go around the country and say they were Martin King’s official photographer. Well, Martin King didn’t have no budget to hire no photographer,” Withers said to great laughter before a crowd in Boston in 2004. “I was the official photographer of Negro newspapers and they paid a very l-e-a-n bit of pay.”2
He continued working at a brisk pace through much of 2007.
Then, in September, Withers suffered a stroke, and quickly deteriorated. His final days were spent at the Veterans Administration hospital, where, on October 15, he died.
The funeral was an eclectic affair. As a World War II veteran, Withers received military honors, with an American flag draped over his coffin.
But it was hardly a traditional military ceremony.
Punctuated by the beat of Nigerian ceremonial drums played by men in flowing African gowns, the services at Pentecostal Temple Institutional Church of God in Christ wound on for four hours. The service was offbeat; the length was not. Anyone who’s ever attended a Memphis “home-going” funeral knows to calendar nothing else that day. The service is simply too long. There is music—and cheering. It’s a celebration, after all. The deceased has gone home to heaven. Speaker after speaker pays tribute; a speech scheduled for two minutes soon becomes ten. And if the deceased is a celebrity, like Withers, then that goes double.
Mayor Willie Herenton, a six-foot-six former Golden Gloves boxer, delivered the eulogy. He called Withers “a giant and a genius,” telling the gathering, “They don’t put just anybody’s obituary in The New York Times.”
As local television news crews filmed, the service ended at last. The funeral procession pulled down Linden Avenue, past the stone tower of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church and nearby Clayborn Temple, where Withers shot his famous “I AM A MAN” photo in 1968 of striking city garbagemen lined up to march, dressed in their Sunday best. It wound over to Beale, past Withers’s studio one last time, before heading to Elmwood Cemetery, the city’s oldest active burial ground.3
* * *
—
FOUR MONTHS AFTER the great photographer died, I thought again of Jim. More than ten years had passed since we last talked. I’d been so busy with news I never looked back. Pressure never abated for stories to fill the paper—feeding the beast, they call it. But now, in February 2008, I had time to reflect. John Ford’s Memphis trial was out of the way. His second trial, set for the summer in Nashville on the TennCare kickbacks scheme, was still months off. There was time to think.
As I cleared mounds of paper from my desk, I remembered the banker’s boxes in my shed, filled with materials from my James Earl Ray coverage. I’d taken copious notes of everything, including my interviews with Jim. At home that night, I rolled up my sleeves and dug through the boxes in the Morgan building in our backyard. I unearthed a blue three-ringed binder, about three inches thick, containing typed notes from interviews with retired police, intelligence agents, and others connected to the government surveillance surrounding Dr. King’s visits to Memphis in March and April 1968.
About halfway in I found Jim.
“Ernest was in it for the money,” he said from the dry, smooth pages.
For a moment again I saw that cynical smile.
“Ernest should write a book.”
Writing a story on any of this still seemed nearly impossible. But I had nothing to lose. Journalists and researchers regularly file Freedom of Information Act requests after historically significant people die. Privacy rights diminish with death. If federal agencies like the FBI hold records on a deceased individual they often must release them, though they may withhold certain pieces of information pursuant to exemptions protecting national security, the privacy of living persons, and other interests.
Like most things these days, filing a FOIA starts with the Internet. Between news assignments I logged on to the FBI’s FOIA web page, downloading and printing a form, scribbling my request in a field slugged “Purpose”: Mr. Withers was a famous Memphis photographer who’d recently died, I wrote. I attached a copy of his obituary. My research aimed to inform the public that Withers had “doubled as an FBI informant” during the civil rights movement, I wrote. Months passed before I heard anything.
* * *
—
IN NASHVILLE, JOHN Ford’s second trial got under way in July. This time, he was a beaten man. He’d been in prison several months already following his Memphis conviction. He looked horrible. He wore the same loose-fitting brown suit every day—no Armani jackets or Gucci shoes this time. His hair was flecked with gray. One of the restrictions of federal prison is that inmates can’t dye their hair. Now sixty-six, Ford was a shell of his old self.
Day after day he sat slouched at the defense table as prosecutors unfolded their case: since 2002, Ford had accepted a steady flow of secret payments from two TennCare contractors, failing to report any of that income on senate disclosure forms. A flow of witnesses told how egregious it became: while taking the payments, the senator openly advocated on behalf of the contractors, urging higher reimbursement rates and running interference with regulators. The jury found him guilty of two counts of honest services wire fraud and four counts of concealing material facts. Judge Todd Campbell sentenced Ford to fourteen years to be served consecutively with his five-year Memphis sentence.
Barring any reversal on appeal, he’d be eighty-five before he got out.*1
* * *
—
WHEN I RETURNED to work following a week’s vacation after the trial, a letter was waiting on my desk. It was from the FBI. More than five months had passed since I filed my FOIA request on Withers. Excited, I opened it.
“To promptly respond to requests, we concentrate on identifying main files in the central records system at FBI Headquarters,” the letter read. “No records responsive to your…request were located by a search of the automated and manual indices.” I read it over several times. Finally, it sunk in. The FBI had taken five months to announce it had no records on Withers, and that it had only conducted a partial search. They’d checked only headquarters records and not any field office records.
Surely, there was some type of file. Withers was prosecuted, after all. It didn’t add up. Frustrated, I called the Memphis FBI office. Having written on Memphis corruption for so many years, I knew some of the agents there, and felt we were on the same side. Patiently, legal counsel C. M. Sturgis heard me out: five months of waiting, and nothing, I complained. There have to be files. Sturgis agreed that if I faxed him my request, the local office would re-file it with Washington.
So I sent it over—and proceeded to wait another eight months.
Finally, in April 2009, a reply came—fourteen months after I first filed. As I approached my desk near the back of The Commercial Appeal’s cluttered, fluorescent-lit newsroom, I found a thick, letter-sized envelope in my chair, the return address dancing from its face: the FBI’s records management division in Winchester, Virginia. Inside were dozens of pages and a cover letter. David M. Hardy, chief of the records dissemination section, said the FBI had enclosed a redacted copy of Memphis field office file 194-ME-16, the portion of the FBI
’s Clemency for Cash investigation that focused on Ernest Withers. Opening with a memo dated September 14, 1977, it contained 115 heavily redacted pages (four pages were withheld entirely).
* * *
—
PAGE BY PAGE, the case against Withers unfolded:
“I can’t tell you a lie,” the photographer-turned-state-liquor-agent says in a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation. An FBI phone tap captured him trying to “walk” an inmate—sell his release.*2
“I ain’t never walked nobody,” he said. “But I have the contact to do so.”
On the phone with Withers was Sammye Lynn McGrory,*3 a lonely Memphis widow who’d fallen for a convict she desperately hoped to spring from prison. Withers offered to help—for a fee—but she became distrustful and turned to the FBI. Agents convinced the lovelorn McGrory to let them tape her call after hearing her incredible story.
She said she met Withers through a third party weeks earlier when he made a compelling offer. For $2,000, he said, he could get McGrory’s boyfriend moved from “the hole”—solitary confinement—at Fort Pillow State Prison and possibly into a work-release program. That was step one. Step two was much bigger—and pricier. For $12,000 to $16,000, Withers said he could get the inmate completely out of prison and back on the street.
But it wouldn’t be easy.
McGrory’s boyfriend had a long and violent record. Convicted of armed robbery, Clarence Jerry Cook had been serving a forty-five-year sentence when he escaped in 1973, only to be re-arrested and sent back to prison for killing a man with a shotgun while he was loose. As Withers and McGrory negotiated Cook’s release for cash, the inmate faced sentences totaling 150 years. Even in Tennessee’s thoroughly corrupt system, “walking” someone with such a record was problematic.
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