Killing King
Copyright © 2018 by Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock
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Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
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Images on pages 229–38 are reprinted courtesy of the authors.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wexler, Stuart, author. | Hancock, Larry J., author.
Title: Killing King : racial terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the plot to
assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. / Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054596 | ISBN 9781619029194
Subjects: LCSH: King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929–1968—Assassination. | Ray,
James Earl, 1928–1998. | Conspiracies—United States—History—20th
century.
Classification: LCC E185.97.K5 W473 2018 | DDC 323.092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054596
Jacket designed by Adrian Morgan
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Contents
Introductionix
part one
1.The Warning3
2.The Sponsors12
3.The Motive25
4.The Target46
5.The Money60
part two
6.Detour79
7.On Hold90
8.Back in Business100
9.In Waiting114
10.Stalking124
11.Zero Hour144
part three
12.Manhunt161
13.Misdirection181
14.Aftermath203
Acknowledgments227
Appendix229
Notes255
Index285
introduction
One of the first questions a homicide detective will ask in the wake of a murder, in the absence of direct evidence, is “Did the victim have any enemies?” A follow-up question, less apt to be answered, is “Did those enemies attempt to harm the victim in the past?” Intuitively, in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder on April 4, 1968, many Americans answered that question the same way. Dr. King himself, in his last sermon the night before his killing, foreshadowed the same culprit: “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?”
“Sick white brothers”—entire groups of racists—tried repeatedly to kill Martin Luther King Jr. Our work documents at least nine such attempts between 1958 and 1968. During that time, white supremacists killed civil rights icons like Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Viola Liuzzo, and dozens of civil rights activists. Dr. King enjoyed little more protection than these men and women. He was not a head of state; he was not protected by the Secret Service, or by the military. That he survived until 1968 is almost entirely a result of good luck and his tendency to change his itinerary at the last minute; occasionally, a government informant volunteered information that saved his life. In that sense, the solution to King’s murder is simple: the same kind of racists who had been trying to kill King for years finally succeeded that April 4.
Killing King is not simply the story of a murder; it is the investigation and documentation of a conspiracy to murder Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that began in 1964, and evolved month by month and year by year. The secrecy and convoluted motives of the plotters and the network that bound them together obscured that conspiracy from those investigating Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. Only one man was charged and convicted of the crime.
The murder of Dr. King was not the act of a single man, certainly not one whose motive was never made clear, even in his conviction. The murder was the culmination of a conspiracy involving many characters, many strands, and many twists.
James Earl Ray, the man convicted of King’s murder, remains the only person historically associated with the crime. In Killing King, we will show that Ray’s travels, plans, and contacts from the time of his escape from prison in 1967 to his ultimate appearance in Memphis, in a boardinghouse across from the Lorraine Motel where King and his aides were staying, are an important part of the conspiracy story. But Ray was neither a rabid racist nor an ideological fanatic. His entire criminal career was motivated solely by a desire to make money. And while he asserted, behind prison bars, his absolute innocence for decades until his death in 1997, his protests do not hold up to scrutiny. We will demonstrate that Ray was only one of the people involved and his role is only one strand in the web of the conspiracy. Building on research from the authors’ two previous works—The Awful Grace of God and America’s Secret Jihad—we will show how two other men, one a criminal on parole, the other a right-wing terrorist, connect the diverse strands of the conspiracy.
The heart of the conspiracy, which Ray only became aware of in 1967, was a cash bounty on the life of Dr. King, first offered to contract killers in 1964. The first person to take that offer belonged to the “Dixie Mafia,” a group we will be exploring in detail. That man, and certain of his associates, first engaged the bounty sponsors, violent white supremacists, in 1964. But these would-be patrons struggled to come up with the cash to make good on the offer. We will trace the connections between the Dixie mafia criminals and white supremacists from the time of the bounty’s first appearance in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 onward into federal prisons in 1967, then across the nation from California through Mississippi and Georgia—and ultimately to Memphis, Tennessee, and Dr. King’s death.
Beyond the King bounty, the Dixie Mafia, and James Earl Ray, we will also follow two other major strands in the web of conspiracy. The first involves members in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, who pursued King’s murder and committed other racial and religious terrorist acts over some four years. Ultimately it would be members of this group, under intense FBI pressure and with several members already scheduled to serve prison sentences, who would reach out to career criminals to accomplish what they could not do themselves.
A new ideology came to unite a small subset of the most devoted and influential members of these groups in ways that have not been adequately explored by historians. We explore a set of unsettling apocalyptic religious beliefs, known as Christian Identity, which linked the leaders of the White Knights with fellow religious radicals across the nation, from the home of Christian Identity in Los Angeles through a social network of its followers in the deep South. That racist network enabled the conspiracy in several ways, and ultimately raised and helped transport the money that was needed to draw career criminals into the plot against King. To fully comprehend the King conspiracy, it is necessary to understand the motives, characters, and abilities of the people within that network. That particularly applies to the Christian Identity leaders who used the White Knights for their own covert purpose, one unknown to many within the White
Knights and fully understood and appreciated only by a handful within its inner circle.
Congress came close to identifying King’s killers in the late 1970s when it formed the House Select Committee on Assassinations (the HSCA) to uncover and reassess new leads. In 1968 the FBI had asserted that James Earl Ray had acted entirely on his own; the HSCA concluded that the “official version” was insufficient and that Ray likely worked with conspirators. They even investigated several of the key players discussed in this book. But they never fully resolved the crime, in part because they never considered the lead that would have pointed them to the middlemen who recruited the killers, or to the religious fanatics who put the plan in motion. The conspiracy could have been unraveled in 1968. As we will demonstrate, it should have been prevented in 1967.
1
the warning
June 2, 1967, might have gone down in history as a day that changed history. Donald Nissen, only recently released from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, sat across from Dallas FBI agents in a Sherman, Texas, jail, arrested for cashing a bad check. But the agents were not there to deal with that minor charge, one that eventually was dismissed. Nissen had written to federal law enforcement, insisting he needed to deliver a warning about a threat to a national political figure.
Nissen shared his story with the agents. In the spring of 1967, a few weeks before Nissen’s release from Leavenworth, a fellow inmate, Leroy McManaman, approached him about a contract for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Though they were not friends, the two became acquainted while working alongside each other in Leavenworth’s famous shoe factory. Over the course of several months, they exchanged “war stories” about their criminal histories; Nissen shared his stories of home robberies and petty theft; McManaman’s résumé included everything from high-stakes bootlegging to the interstate transportation of stolen cars.1
Nissen’s intellect likely impressed McManaman. Nissen earned favor with fellow prisoners as a “jailhouse attorney” who could help with legal appeals. But two additional facts made the inmate even more attractive to McManaman as a potential co-conspirator: Nissen’s sentence was almost over, and the soon-to-be-released inmate had already planned to work in Atlanta, Georgia, hometown of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
MacManaman promised Nissen a share of a $100,000 bounty offer if he helped McManaman with King’s murder. As the agents recorded in their 1967 report, McManaman outlined two available roles: Nissen could conduct surveillance on King and report his movements to the actual killers, or he could be part of the killing itself. McManaman also asked Nissen to ask his cellmate, John May, a master machinist, whether May could construct a special gun for King’s shooting. Additionally, Nissen told the FBI that if he said yes to McManaman, a series of go-betweens would link Nissen into the conspiracy, allowing him to avoid the suspicion of law enforcement. The go-betweens included a female real estate agent in Jackson, Mississippi; someone named “Floyd” whose last name Nissen could not recall for the FBI; and an individual with connections to the U.S. Marshals office. McManaman also told Nissen the money for the assassination was coming through the most violent racist organization in America, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.2
Such threats against Dr. King were not unknown to the FBI. Files from FBI field offices around the country contained reports of bounty offers on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. spanning more than a decade. Such occurrences were so common, in fact, that the FBI accidentally stumbled upon another such offer in their first investigation of Nissen’s claims. When they interviewed Nissen’s cellmate, the machinist John May, he confirmed that Nissen had told him about McManaman’s scheme. It had not made any real impression at the time because he had heard of similar offers a few years before, at a bar in North Carolina.3 In other words, May thought discussions of bounties on King were little more than jailhouse gossip.
That is how the FBI treated Nissen’s warning, as simply another of the bounty reports. To be fair, many of the reports lacked specifics that could be corroborated. FBI reports of King bounties often took the form of “he-said/he-said” claims, in which a known racist would be mentioned as offering a contract on King’s life. The prominent racist would, as expected, deny said accusation, and federal agents would be left without any basis for further investigation.4
However, matters were much different with bounties circulating within federal prisons. The FBI simply did not have the kind of free access to prisoners that they had to civilians. Any prisoner who remained behind bars risked serious and violent payback for talking to law enforcement. There are no pre-assassination records released to date in which an inmate warned the FBI of a King assassination plot as it was forming: none except Nissen’s.
But information developed by the FBI, albeit after the assassination, shows that prison bounty offers were circulating and were deadly serious—having filtered into multiple prisons, with dollar offers that were substantial, fronted by socially prominent racists. Notably, the son of a prison guard in Georgia (confirmed, later, by the guard’s daughter) told the FBI that his father became aware of meetings between three unidentified Atlanta business leaders and prisoners in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary; in 1967 the businessmen offered large sums of money to any prisoner willing to murder King. The father attempted to provide this information to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation but was rebuffed.5 By 1968, the FBI asserted: “We have had several instances where persons incarcerated at various times advised that King had a bounty of $100,000 placed on his head.”6
As will become much clearer in later chapters, the bounty offers against King show a pattern, one that will become important in understanding what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Wealthy segregationists and white supremacists in the Southeast were becoming increasingly eager to kill King, increasing their dollar offers, from less than $2,000 in 1958 to $100,000 by 1968. Just as important was a change in their tactics, with radical groups turning from plots involving their own members or those of associated groups to those involving professional criminals.
One group of racists had explored contracts with criminals as early as 1964: the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the group Leroy McManaman told Nissen was offering the 1967 bounty. That year the White Knights had offered a contract on King to an increasingly active criminal network—one growing both in its numbers and in its willingness to use brazen, wanton violence—now referred to as the Dixie Mafia.7 Called “rednecks on steroids,” these men (and women) were fundamentally different from their Sicilian counterparts in La Cosa Nostra.
For one thing, they often lacked a formal hierarchy with one godfather calling the shots; rather, the Dixie Mafia comprised several independent and loosely affiliated gangs of more-or-less co-equal members who worked out of two major territories in the Great Plains and in the Southeast. Modern-day desperadoes, members of what were first called the Traveling Criminals or Crossroaders, cut their teeth robbing homes and banks, heisting stolen cars across state lines, running illegal gambling operations, hatching extortion and bribery scams, and running drugs and guns in their theaters of operation. The core of a Dixie Mafia gang might include a bootlegger, a safe cracker, a getaway driver, a strong-arm man (or several), among others, and they would frequently augment their group with additional hoodlums outside of the core group if such expertise or additional manpower was needed.8
They were also more avaricious and less scrupulous than the Sicilian Mafia. The Italian mob famously shied away from killing government officials and members of law enforcement. But almost nothing stood between a Dixie Mafia gang and money. In one of the most brazen examples, gangster Donald Sparks, whose base of operations was in eastern Oklahoma, and an associate, William Kenneth Knight, robbed the mayor of Fort Payne, Alabama, in his home, at gunpoint—and then, when caught, stole the victim’s car and fled the scene of the crime. (It turned out that members of local law enforcement were “in”
on the plot.)9
More alarmingly, in 1967, Dixie Mafia members infamously killed the wife of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, lionized in the drive-in movie classic Walking Tall; she died in the sheriff’s arms, from a rifle bullet that, whether meant for Pusser (and missed) or for his spouse, was no doubt intended to stop the lawman from shutting down Dixie Mafia gambling and liquor schemes at the Tennessee-Mississippi border.10
Many in what became known as the State Line mob fled to McNairy and Alcorn Counties (in Tennessee and Mississippi respectively) following a crackdown on Dixie Mafia activity in the vice-
infested city of Phoenix, Alabama, in 1954—the year of another bold political assassination. In that instance, a hitman, most believe on orders from local Dixie Mafia lords, killed the law-and-order attorney general elect Albert Patterson. Author Faith Serafin described the horrible encounter:
Patterson . . . left his office at about 9:00 p.m. As he exited the building, approaching his car that was parked in the alley . . . an assailant approached him and shoved a pistol in his mouth. Without hesitation, the killer fired, shooting Patterson once in the mouth, once in the arm and again in the chest. Albert Patterson fell to the ground bleeding and mortally wounded.11
The shocking crime inspired Alabama governor Gordon Persons to call in the National Guard to crack down on the crime-infested metropolis using limited martial law, encouraging the exodus into nearby states. Years later, that led to the Dixie Mafia showdown with Pusser in Tennessee.
More than thirty years after Patterson’s killing, Dixie Mafia gangsters murdered Judge Vincent Sherry and his politician wife, Margaret, in their Biloxi, Mississippi, home. The crime was motivated by what turned out to be false suspicions that Sherry was involved in, and skimming money from, a Dixie Mafia extortion scheme. The killing was arranged by Kirksey Nix, a one-time enemy of Pusser, who “maintained tight control over the mob’s operations in Louisiana and Mississippi despite spending two decades in prison for killing a grocer.”12
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