Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  clearly things had not gone as Ray had hoped in Mexico; he had no path to Mexican citizenship and could not stay forever as a tourist. So, it was back to the United States and to a city that he had first visited many years before. Ray’s initial time in Los Angeles was similar in some ways to his Mexican interlude. At first he seemed to be unconcerned about money and continued to spend at an uncharacteristically high level. He arrived in L.A. on November 19, 1967, and moved into an apartment on North Serrano Avenue. It wasn’t a great neighborhood, but it was right off Hollywood Boulevard, a good place to pick up a prostitute or to sell drugs to the hippies. It also provided a number of the all-day bars that seemed to be standard hangouts for Ray.

  If the neighborhood sounds like a familiar one for Ray, one of his first acts was extremely uncharacteristic: he had a telephone installed. Ray would testify that he wanted it for job hunting, which he surprisingly did. At first it seemed there would be a delay with the telephone installation, but Ray told the telephone company that he was working with Governor Wallace’s American Independent Party and that there was limited time to work at getting Wallace on the ballot. In fact Ray had already called the local Wallace headquarters for information. This new interest in politics was also uncharacteristic for James Earl Ray. We can only speculate whether Ray’s newfound interest in politics was merely a cover to prospect the rumored King bounty among Wallace supporters. How much contact Ray may have had with members of the American Independent Party and with Wallace supporters is also a matter of speculation. We do know that he took people to the office to register them to vote, and, when questioned, these registrants stated that Ray appeared to be quite familiar with, and at home in, the office. Ray later denied that.10

  At first, Ray’s known activities in Los Angeles consisted of spending money, not making it. He booked a series of seven sessions with a Beverly Hills clinical psychologist; the sessions involved hypnosis, and Ray used his real name during the sessions. Later the specialist commented on Ray’s shyness, noted his dislike for blacks, and highlighted Ray’s belief that one could use hypnosis simply to look someone in the eye and make them do what he wanted them to.11 Ray also spent a good deal of time in bars and engaged in a variety of activities, enrolling in both bartending classes and another series of dance lessons. The dance lessons were at an exclusive and expensive dance school. He also took up with Marie Martin, a cocktail waitress and go-go dancer whom he had met in a club; Ray seems to have gone to some lengths to establish a relationship with her. He still had his camera equipment and perhaps still had hopes of getting into pornography. Ray knew that Marie had a boyfriend in prison for possession of marijuana and that she had some sort of criminal record of her own back in New Orleans. He met her cousin Charlie Stein, who also had quite a colorful past involving criminal possession of narcotics.

  Ray and Charlie Stein would make a much-discussed cross-country

  round trip to New Orleans in December 1967. It’s possible that Ray agreed to the trip under a misconception. Marie Martin said that it began with her telling Ray that her cousin Rita Stein had a serious problem: she urgently needed to get her two children out of New Orleans before they were placed in a children’s home. It seems plausible that Ray accepted the trip because he thought it would involve going off to New Orleans with Rita Stein, or possibly both women. Apparently Marie had asked Ray, “You wouldn’t want to drive me down to pick them up, would you?”12 Marie went on to say that Ray became extremely unhappy when he realized that, rather than heading east with the two women, he was going to be making the trip with Rita’s brother Charlie.

  As will become clear, Ray’s reluctance to join a joyride with someone like Charlie Stein was likely due to his other agenda. By December, before the trip, Ray began to run low on money. His previous efforts at raising money seemed to provide him with temporary reprieve at best until he could find his next con. Perhaps New Orleans would provide yet another opportunity for Ray to buy and sell drugs. Or perhaps Ray understood that New Orleans was just the right place to find a nexus between criminals and violent racists, one that could finally bring him into a criminal conspiracy.

  to an outsider, the fall and winter of 1967 should have looked like Sam Bowers’s lowest moment, not the time when he would be planning his most provocative acts of violence. In September 1967, Tommy Tarrants joined Kathy Ainsworth and a handful of other hardcore White Knights to begin a series of terrorist attacks that caught law enforcement completely off guard for months. Sam Bowers finally put Swift’s “underground hit squad” to use.

  On September 18, 1967, two dynamite bombs caused $25,000 worth of damage to Temple Beth Israel in Jackson, the Mississippi capital’s only synagogue, one of the oldest temples in the American South. Dozens of black churches had been bombed or set ablaze for over a decade in Mississippi and in the rest of the South. But Jewish houses of worship had largely been spared since J. B. Stoner’s wave of attacks in the late 1950s. The timing of the attacks baffled law enforcement as much as the target. Without question, Perry Nussbaum, the temple’s rabbi, had been an outspoken advocate for civil rights reform. But Nussbaum had taken those courageous and unpopular stances for years without eliciting a violent response. What’s more, with the federal trial for the 1964 Neshoba killings set to start—three years after state charges had been dropped—Bowers and his followers remained under constant law enforcement and media scrutiny. Someone outside the watchful eye of federal law enforcement had made an unprecedented and brazen statement.

  Behind the scenes, Tarrants was pursuing a goal that had long eluded Sam Bowers: targeting Jews alongside blacks. Whereas the membership of the Mississippi White Knights had dwindled after the passage of civil rights legislation mid-decade, a growing number of the remaining members were becoming sympathetic to that goal. Some racists held listening parties where tapes of Swift’s sermons were played. Bowers was able to augment Tarrants and Ainsworth’s secret team with men like Danny Joe Hawkins, whose entire family devoted themselves to the Klan, and Bennie Waldrup, Hawkins’s hard-drinking friend.

  Sometime in October 1967, as James Earl Ray made his way to Mexico, Tommy Tarrants reached out to Wesley Swift. It is unclear if this was by mail or by phone. But Tarrants impressed Swift enough that Swift invited Tarrants to come to California and become his understudy. Tarrants did not make his pilgrimage to Swift for several months.13 In the meantime, Swift’s sermons continued to beckon men like Bowers and Tarrants to action.

  Swift’s October 9 sermon, “Confusion Throughout the Land,” reflected the past summer’s urban rioting and general social upheaval. The minister told his audience that the chaos “comes from the mind of Lucifer”—world “Jewry,” as Swift called it—who are using the “the processes of integration today of your society to gain . . . complete control of the instructions in your nation.” From the “the Netherworld comes a constant revolution and ferment into your society, and this continues until it is destroyed.” As to the “revolutionists,” they included black activists—“the Carmichaels, and the Rap Browns” all of whom were “communists.” But Swift gave special attention to Martin Luther King Jr., whom he rarely referenced by name in hundreds of sermons. “And the government has those records but you cannot get them for they know that Martin Luther King is a communist. And they are willing to cover this up of Martin Luther King being a communist.” On King he added, “But I think that he is about ready to come to an end anyhow.”14

  On October 18, federal judge William H. Cox forced a deadlocked jury to re-deliberate; two days later the jury offered a compromise decision, convicting seven men while acquitting seven other defendants for violating the civil rights of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. The jury failed to reach a decision for three defendants. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, who had held the three activists like bait in his jail, was among the “not guilty,” but his deputy Cecil Price received five years and triggerman Alton Wayne Roberts received ten. Most import
ant to federal prosecutors, Judge Cox sentenced the mastermind, White Knights Grand Wizard Sam Bowers, to ten years in prison.

  The White Knights already had been making plans to shift leadership in the event of a conviction. L. E. Matthews, an electrician from Jackson who made bombs for the Mississippi White Knights, was next in line.

  But appeal bonds meant that most of those convicted would have months before they set foot in a federal prison. A new lawyer arrived in town to help with those appeals: J. B. Stoner. Stoner developed strong relationships with several of the Mississippi KKK members, including Danny Joe Hawkins and his father, Joe Denver. For the first time, the NSRP began to make a major push to develop chapters in Mississippi. The nationwide cross-affiliations between white supremacists had grown deeper by 1967, in part because of the glue of Christian Identity ideology.

  And Christian Identity ideology meant that Sam Bowers would not sit still, even when facing impending prison time. The attacks by Tarrants and his elite group intensified in November. Two months after bombing his synagogue, terrorists bombed Rabbi Perri Nussbaum’s home, destroying “the kitchen, living room, kitchen, and part of the bedroom.”15 No one was killed. That November, Tarrants and company also bombed a church rectory, the home of a civil rights activist, and the home of the dean of Tougaloo College, Mississippi’s historically black institution.

  Stoner did not lose his lust for violence, or his morbid sense of humor. Seeing that no one had died in these attacks, he advised a White Knight that the group should go from using one or two sticks to a “whole case of dynamite.”16

  The FBI was not laughing. They increased their surveillance of the Klan. The White Knights countered the FBI with a level of bravado not seen in other Klan-FBI rivalries throughout the nation. The White Knights even placed FBI agents on hit lists. Shortly after the Nussbaum bombing, a caravan of KKK members forced a team of FBI agents, who had been following other Klansmen as part of a surveillance operation, off the road. The Klan members held the FBI agents at gunpoint while the target of their surveillance mission, Danny Joe Hawkins, exited his vehicle and confronted the agents. A young precocious racist whose entire family, including his father and mother, dedicated their lives to the White Knights, Hawkins proceeded to smack one of the FBI agents, Sam Jennings. Later, Tarrants and his cadre would place Jennings on a hit list.17

  But Bowers’s biggest plan, to assassinate King, appears to have been on hold. By this time, it is likely that the Dixie Mafia gangsters, like McManaman, finally realized the full extent of the problems caused by Donald Nissen’s actions that summer. Additionally, McManaman’s close ally, Donald Sparks, was on the run, having been placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list that August. Plans would have to be reconstituted and reconsidered if these criminals wanted to collect their money, and if Bowers wanted to ignite his race war. Anyone on the outside looking in for the bounty would have to wait.

  8

  back in business

  By December 1967 life had stabilized for Donald Nissen. He was making a good living selling books, he had remarried, and his wife was pregnant. He dutifully maintained his parole requirements and avoided criminal activity. The concern he had over the McManaman plot, and his package delivery for Floyd Ayers, registered as a distant memory. Or so it seemed.

  Everything changed when Nissen visited his probation officer. Nissen cannot recall if it was the first or second of December, but when he left his parole officer at the Atlanta Federal Building, a man accosted him outside, asking, “Are you Donald Nissen?” When Nissen answered in the affirmative, the man made a vague reference to Leroy McManaman, then issued a veiled threat to Nissen about “talking too much.” At that moment his friend who’d dropped Nissen off at the parole office called for him, and the other man quickly left. Nissen was convinced the incident arose from his decision to tell the FBI about the White Knight bounty offer on King.1

  As Nissen related to the authors in 2009, his fears intensified significantly when someone shot out the windows of his car in the days that followed. Equally frightening was something he remembered from McManaman’s initial offer: a federal marshal was one of the go-betweens in the plot. To Nissen, this opened the possibility that his own probation officer, or someone connected to him, could be involved in the King plot. Paranoid, Nissen resolved that he could not go to federal law enforcement again. Even with a new marriage, a pregnant wife, and a well-paying job, Nissen jumped parole—a crime that would send him back to federal prison if caught.2

  The threat against Nissen suggests that, whatever chilling effect the visit to Sybil Eure may have had on their murder conspiracy, the Dixie Mafia still wanted to collect the enormous bounty on Martin Luther King Jr.’s head. This is implied in the exact nature of the threat. Rather than tell Nissen that they were going to get even with him for having snitched on them to the FBI, they warned Nissen against saying anything further about the bounty in the future. In the time it would have taken for ideas to spread from Eure to McManaman and from McManaman to the other participants in the plot, nothing happened. The FBI did not even bother to interview McManaman himself. While McManaman’s partner in the 1964 King plot, Donald Sparks, was finally caught in December 1967, Dixie Mafia gangs were known for reconstituting themselves with new criminals from crime to crime, often using prison contacts to do so. And for the kind of money being fronted by the White Knights to kill King in 1967, it is unlikely that Dixie Mafia members would have been deterred by a single FBI visit to Sybil Eure’s home that did not result in any

  follow-up investigation. But the December threat to Nissen in Atlanta is just one indication that the King bounty was back in play.

  With his knowledge of the King assassination bounty placing his life in danger, Donald Nissen approached his boss, Harold Fitzgerald, with his predicament. With a pregnant wife and no real desire to return to a life of crime, Nissen wanted to continue selling books. With Fitzgerald’s blessing, they decided that Nissen should assume the name of another employee, William Edward Gibson, and move to nearby Florida.

  As close as he was to danger in Georgia, Nissen took every opportunity to sell materials on the road. This first led him to New Hampshire, where a sales associate brought unwanted attention to him. Bill Gordon took the company car, registered to Nissen, on a drunken joyride. Arrested for DUI, Gordon finagled his way out of trouble. Matters became even tenser for Nissen when he went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Two FBI agents came looking for Nissen, and even approached the hotel clerk asking about him. Another company car, also last registered in Nissen’s name, disappeared in New York. But the agents had only Nissen’s real name, and no picture to allow them to distinguish between Nissen and the real William Gibson. The incident encouraged Nissen to leave New England and head to Ohio, where he stayed for a while before heading back down south.3

  Nissen’s excursion south took him through Oklahoma and then to Central and West Texas. In San Antonio, he once again faced a close call. At Lackland Air Force Base, Nissen resumed his established sales operation, which included a friendly and long-standing relationship with a non-commissioned officer, Sergeant Hesten Kelly. But the officer knew him under his real name, not the fake name (Gibson) he provided to officials at Lackland. Realizing this, Nissen convinced the sergeant that he was ducking an alimony problem from a divorce.

  His quick thinking saved him in San Antonio, but he faced a much graver danger just a few weeks later, in Del Rio, Texas. Nissen frequently stayed at a local motel where he enjoyed an intimate relationship with the manager. Nissen began to notice odd things at the hotel. Most alarmingly, he saw a large contingent of law enforcement officers around the premises on a regular basis. When someone broke into his car one evening, Nissen became convinced these officers were suspicious of him. Having broken his parole requirements for months, he became worried his days were numbered. But it turned out that a separate set of people attempted the robbery—fellow criminals. The government arr
anged for almost twenty individuals, charged with interstate prostitution and bank robberies, to be housed at the hotel while they awaited a federal trial. The motel was almost evenly divided between alleged lawbreakers and the lawmen, marshals, prosecutors, and others, biding their time until trials could start in April.4

  Nissen did not realize how dangerous the situation was. The men and women awaiting trial belonged to a Dixie Mafia group, commonly referred to as the Overton Gang, with close ties to the Tulsa-based Dixie Mafia gang that included Donald Sparks, Leroy MacManaman, and Rubie Jenkins—men who, as noted many times previously, had connections to a King assassination bounty both in 1964 and (in the case of McManaman) 1967. One of the leaders of the Overton Gang, Jerry Ray “Fat Jerry” James, also was a leader in the Tulsa gang. In fact, law enforcement officers arrested Fat Jerry with Donald Sparks when the latter finally was brought into custody after a string of robberies the previous December.5 For several days, Nissen slept just feet away from men who could easily kill him—and would have had no qualms about doing so—had they known about his interactions with the FBI.

  But in March of 1968, Nissen continued to avoid both law enforcement and the Dixie Mafia gangsters looking for retribution. In fact, federal law enforcement did not even realize Nissen violated his parole and left Atlanta until April 2, two days before King’s murder in Memphis.6 As will become clear, the coincidental timing of that discovery would prompt a reexamination of Nissen’s June 1967 revelations.