Killing King

by Stuart Wexler

  an additional development pointing to a renewed bounty plot against King also occurred in December of 1967. Informants for the FBI revealed that James Venable, Grand Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, officially established himself as Grand Dragon of the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (CKKKK).7 Still living in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Venable allowed William V. Fowler to continue to manage the group’s day-to-day operations. While symbolic, it was nonetheless unusual, and significant, as it tied Venable to Swift’s network. Fowler ministered in Swift’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Indeed, he required that CKKKK members regularly attend Swift’s services. Swift’s FBI file indicates that Fowler was even a proxy for Swift, while he was running the CKKKK.8

  Like his support for violent activity, Venable’s allegiance to Christian Identity theology is often obscured by his “good ol’ boy” image. His most public anti-Jewish behavior was almost comical—an effort to establish a national boycott on kosher food. But Venable’s ties to Christian Identity were more substantial than this. His legal strategy in defending a group of men, who, under his friend J. B. Stoner’s conspiracy, blew up the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation in Atlanta in 1958, was to argue for a Jewish conspiracy. He would pen a book on the thinking of the KKK that celebrated those who persecuted Jews throughout Western history, including “Saint Adolf, of Bavaria, the greatest anti-Jew since Jesus Christ and the Greatest White Champion,” an obvious reference to Hitler.9

  The idea that Jesus Christ despised Jews is a major motif in Christian Identity teaching; Christian Identity scholars employ selectively quoted passages in which Jesus berates a subset of Jews, the Pharisees for instance, as a condemnation of the entire bloodline of Jews for all of eternity. One can find those ideas, for example, in the work of Thomas O’Brien, a rabid Christian Identity believer who, by 1967, became the editor of The Imperial Night-hawk, the periodical for Venable’s group.

  As with Bowers, the obvious changes in the Christian Identity direction by 1967 push one to wonder if the Christian Identity influence on Venable stretches back further, and perhaps even inspired Venable’s attempts at killing King. Venable’s failed effort to kill King in 1965 coincided with a foiled bombing plot against Black Nationalist targets with the goal of creating a race war. Venable had long sought to kill King, saying to an informant as far back as 1961, that “Martin Luther King Jr. should have been dead long ago” and that “he had to be killed.”10 But the 1965 plot had a different flavor to it. It closely echoed Bowers’s scheme in 1965: to polarize the races until they waged war with each other, fulfilling Christian Identity prophecy.

  Thus what is noteworthy is not Venable’s affinity for someone like Rev. Swift, but the coincidental timing of his outreach to Swift’s followers in California. Like his good friend Stoner, who first made major inroads into Mississippi via senior members of the White Knights, during the summer of 1967, Venable’s unprecedented relationship with Swift began at the same time Swift followers like Bowers were fronting a bounty on King’s life. Indeed, Venable’s first obvious connection to Fowler began in April of 1967, when the bounty was offered to Donald Nissen in Leavenworth; Venable even visited California to deliver speeches to the CKKKK on multiple occasions that month.11

  It is worth nothing again that the King bounty money had been given to Nissen by Venable’s employee, Floyd Ayers. In late June, Nissen then brought the bounty money, unwittingly, to go-between Sybil Eure in Mississippi, placing it in the domain of Bowers and the White Knights. If Lamar Waldron’s source is right, it was Joseph Milteer, a close associate of Venable’s, who likely raised the money for this bounty. As it happens, Milteer devoutly followed the teachings of Wesley Swift. In his cross-country visits, Milteer even attended meetings where Swift spoke.12

  All this activity seems too suspicious to be a coincidence. Rather, it appears as if a group of radicals who worked independently—sometimes even as rivals—to advance the cause of white supremacy had finally coalesced with the goal to murder Martin Luther King Jr. As the leading advocate of nonviolence, King was seen as the last buffer between right-wing whites and a growing number of militant blacks, between an “ungodly” world of race mixing and the ethnic cleansing of Armageddon that would bring the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. A different kind of resurrection, of a once-dormant bounty plot, would be in order.

  someone else was coming to California from Georgia in the winter of 1967, and he likely was looking for James Earl Ray. Having failed to mention it in his first interview with investigators after the King assassination, Louis Dowda, Ray’s friend from Missouri State Penitentiary, finally told investigators that he traveled with his family by car from Atlanta to the Los Angeles area in the last week of November 1967. Dowda admitted that he stopped along the way to visit several former associates from MSP but that his ultimate destination was his brother-in-law for the Thanksgiving holiday. Dowda claimed that his trip had nothing to do with James Earl Ray, that he did not even know about Ray’s escape from MSP until some time after the trip. This is hard to believe.

  The men Dowda visited included a former prison guard at MSP and the man who once ran the prison kitchen, where Dowda had befriended Ray. Dowda also neglected to mention that he had visited the MSP. The guard who revealed this did not know Dowda’s reason for the visit, but he did suggest Dowda as a possible co-conspirator in a King plot with Ray, based on Dowda’s bigotry when he was incarcerated. Even more suspicious was Dowda’s activity when he got to his brother-in-law’s home in California. Dowda stayed only for dinner and then left for several days with his family. Dowda admitted having visited Jewell Rigger, the wife of another MSP prisoner who worked in a psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills. In a previous interview, Dowda identified that prisoner, Donald Rigger, as one of Ray’s closest friends at MSP.

  It would be amazing if none of these people bothered to mention Ray’s escape to Dowda. It seems more likely that Dowda visited these people for information about Ray’s escape and where he might be located. It is worth noting that Dowda made this visit from Atlanta just after someone from Oklahoma made a suspicious long-distance phone call to Dowda’s place of work at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit in Marietta, Georgia. The individual who received that call was the nephew of Floyd Ayers, identified by Donald Nissen as a go-between/bagman in the King assassination. Dowda, as noted in Chapter 5, told authorities years after King’s murder that he believed the manager and the owner of the Bonanza were somehow connected to King’s assassination. Dowda of course did everything he could to minimize his own role and knowledge of a plot. It may well be that he attempted to find Ray to relay information or rumors about a King bounty. There is no evidence that he found his former prison colleague, but given how little we know of Ray’s day-to-day activities in Los Angeles, it is certainly possible the two met.

  At approximately the same time as Dowda’s visit, Ray began to make phone calls to the headquarters for Alabama governor George Wallace’s presidential campaign. But Ray took no other suspicious steps that suggested he had obtained concrete information that could link him to the King bounty. Instead, James Earl Ray began to look for legitimate work in L.A. He answered classified ads in the Los Angeles Times, applied for a job as a vacuum cleaner salesman, and tried to get a job as a maintenance man. He placed two ads in the paper, one for restaurant work and one for general labor. Apparently, these efforts were frustrated because he had no social security card for Eric Galt and was afraid to use his long-established false identity of Rayns and its legitimate identification. His relatively energetic job-seeking (compared to earlier stops in Birmingham and Mexico) gives the impression that Ray was beginning to run short of money and that he was looking for any opportunity to generate cash.

  This may partly explain Ray’s decision to go on the road trip to New Orleans in mid-December 1967, ostensibly to take Charlie Stein to New Orleans so he could bring Rita Stein’s children back to California. Of course, it would be no surpr
ise to find Ray using the trip to New Orleans as an opportunity to generate some money based on contacts there. It was not Ray’s first exposure to the city; in 1955, he had stopped there during a multistate escape following theft of postal money orders. In 1958, he had spent time there following the armed robbery of a bar. Ray admitted he had done some minor cross-

  border smuggling after the New Orleans sojourn in 1958, as he passed through Texas and crossed the border at Matamoros into Mexico. On December 15, Ray departed for New Orleans in his white Ford Mustang, with Rita’s brother, the eccentric Charlie Stein, riding shotgun.

  With its libertine culture and its easy access to imported contraband through its ports, New Orleans always was a haven for criminals. But it was also a city in America’s Deep South, one whose reputation for cultural exchange often fell short when it came to genuine racial integration. In 1958, the same year Ray passed through New Orleans, black enrollees at the University of New Orleans (a newly formed branch of Louisiana State University) faced daily chants of “two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.” Just two years later, a mob of angry whites shouted epithets and threats at six-year-old Ruby Bridges as she integrated an all-white public school; federal marshals had to provide her with a security escort. As nexus for both criminal activity and anti-integrationist resistance, New Orleans offered James Earl Ray several possible access points into a King bounty plot.

  Even before leaving for the Big Easy, Ray dragged his traveling companion, Charlie Stein, to the presidential campaign headquarters for Alabama governor and arch-segregationist George Wallace, insisting that Stein register to vote. Ray also called Wallace headquarters more than once. This may have been in keeping with Charles Faulkner’s assertion that Ray was developing a background legend as an extreme racist, either to attract people with knowledge of a bounty plot and/or to legitimize his own interest in such a plot if he found the sponsors. It could also be that Ray was looking for a specific person.13 A Swift follower and one-time member of the NSRP, James Paul Thornton, worked out of the same Wallace campaign office. Thornton was a one-time high-level official for the NSRP in Birmingham before 1965, and he developed relationships with several of the NSRP members who went to Canada, and who were investigated by Congress in the late 1970s, for their possible connection to King’s assassination. After he returned to his home state of California, Thornton became active in the California Rangers, the antigovernment group founded by Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale. If Ray sought out Thornton in person, he would have just missed him, as Thornton was fired from his job for his extremist connections.14

  Stein told investigators that Ray made frequent stops on his trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans and on at least a couple of occasions used pay phones for unknown reasons. Ray himself would admit to making two calls, but only to his brother Jerry. The FBI rightly assumed that Ray, who was out of Stein’s sight on a number of occasions, could have made far more than two calls. Bureau agents canvassed the route Ray and Stein took to New Orleans and attempted to trace all calls from pay phones during the relevant period.15 The available FBI “MURKIN” (MURder of KINg) records lists dozens of numbers that were eventually traced to people who were then interviewed and cleared. But there are some interesting gaps in the Bureau’s call accounting that were not accounted for and, unfortunately, are unable to be traced today.

  Ray stayed in New Orleans for two days, from December 16 to 17. With Charlie Stein, he dropped off the materials Marie Martin had asked them to deliver to her family and, on the recommendation of the Steins’ relatives, registered at the Provincial Motel. Charlie Stein stayed with his relatives, and both men affirmed that Ray spent most of his time outside of Stein’s company. Much of what we know of Ray’s activities comes from Stein’s secondhand account of what Ray told him and Ray’s firsthand account in books and interviews—both of which have question marks as to their reliability. Stein clearly attempted to profit and make a name for himself based on his limited association with Ray, and Ray attempted to, as always, use the New Orleans trip to paint a picture of himself as an innocent dupe in King’s eventual murder. But both men gave indications that the trip had some conspiratorial purpose. Ray, of course, claimed the visit to New Orleans coincided with yet another meeting with Raul, where once again Raul continued to promise Ray he would eventually provide the fugitive with fake identification and a passport out of North America if he continued to assist Raul in his various gun- and drug-smuggling schemes.

  Stein never mentioned the name Raul in any of his numerous early post-assassination interviews with either the press or the FBI. But Stein did tell both the press and law enforcement that Ray expressed a goal of meeting someone in the Industrial Canal area of New Orleans; Stein recalled Ray describing this man as an “engineer” or an “industrialist” but he could not remember his name.16 After the assassination, Ray played coy with his own investigators on these leads, convincing researcher Harold Weisberg that the accused assassin had far more intimate knowledge of New Orleans than he ever let on or wanted to share.17

  Weisberg never found any engineer or industrialist, but he did investigate New Orleans addresses that Ray provided to one of his attorneys after the assassination. Weisberg’s follow-up investigation revealed one of the addresses as a site for criminal activity, but he could never get James Earl Ray to discuss it. Weisberg came to believe that Ray was covering for whatever criminals he met in New Orleans. Still sympathetic to Ray, Weisberg nonetheless wrote: “He is the only link to the conspirators of which I know with certainty. That is the area in which he held out from me and he was frank about it, in his own way, saying he would not do the FBI’s work for it.”18

  Other authors, such as William Bradford Huie, have noted, like Weisberg, that Ray was excessively concerned about investigations into his time in New Orleans and refused to talk when confronted about his time there. Some, like Lamar Waldron, have speculated that Ray must have met with organized crime elements working for New Orleans Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello. Waldron makes much of the fact that Ray and Stein were involved with procuring drugs and that this would certainly place Ray in Marcello’s domain. While the likely (but not definitive) reason for Ray’s New Orleans venture included the procurement of some quantity of drugs, it is equally likely that these could have come from criminals, such as Louis “The Mechanic” Smith, who were shifting allegiances to the rapidly expanding Dixie Mafia. This network was very much at odds with the old-line Marcello organization. Certainly low-level drug sales would not necessarily catch Marcello’s eye, as he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from shipping literal barges full of heroin into the ports of New Orleans. It seems more likely that other members of the Dixie Mafia, as the proverbial second fiddles in New Orleans, interacted with Ray.

  Criminal elements in New Orleans enjoyed particularly close relationships with the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, unsurprising, given their geographic proximity to southern Mississippi. A 1970s informant report relayed a conversation with White Knights terrorist Danny Joe Hawkins (and close friend of Tommy Tarrants) in which Hawkins told the informant that contacts in New Orleans were the primary weapons providers to the Mississippi Klan.19 Sam Bowers had attended college and had deep family contacts in New Orleans, and Deavours Nix, the White Knights’ intelligence chief, previously worked in New Orleans publishing racist tracts. When in 1973 police arrested White Knights member Byron de la Beckwith, he was reportedly carrying a bomb for an attack in New Orleans, intended for the home of Adolph Botnick, a Jewish attorney.

  Publicly, of course, Ray would claim that everything he did was part of some kind of puppet show engineered by the mysterious Raul to frame him for the crime. In later years, he introduced leads from Louisiana that threw off investigators, including Weisberg.20 Raul, again, could indeed be a composite character that includes references to real criminals Ray met in New Orleans. But Ray was not an ignorant dupe, mindlessly moved around as
a pawn to set him up in the King murder. Indeed, the plotters did not even turn to Ray for another couple of months. They had a real patsy to begin framing in the meanwhile.

  on december 22, 1967, Sam Bowers did something highly unusual: he convinced Tommy Tarrants to join him on a trip to Collins, Mississippi. The purpose: to machine-gun the home of Ancie McLaurin, a black man accused of shooting a white police officer.21 This represented a major departure from Bowers’s usual cautious behavior. This was a man who ordered crimes and rarely participated in them. Indeed, he employed tradecraft worthy of James Bond to avoid government scrutiny. What’s more, two months earlier, federal prosecutors had convicted Bowers for his role in ordering the Mississippi Burning killings; he escaped with a relatively minor sentence. Out on appeal, Bowers was now risking a capital sentence by going on this mission. Indeed, he was risking potential exposure not only of himself, but also his secret operative, Tarrants.22

  It now seems likely that this was precisely Bowers’s goal. His caution in avoiding police surveillance was exceeded only by his paranoia about informants. At one time or another, Bowers suspected almost every member of his group, including even his most loyal sycophants, like Burris Dunn, whom FBI documents describe as worshipping Bowers. This was not without justification. Several men, including senior White Knight operatives such as Delmar Dennis and one-time Grand Giant Robert Earl Wilson, had recently testified against Bowers in federal trials. Indeed, the FBI, especially in Mississippi, went to great lengths to plant and turn informants inside the KKK through a program simply known as Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). These informants not only provided evidence in trials, but they also created a climate of suspicion that helped destroy targeted groups from within, parasitic behavior amplified by dirty tricks and provocations crafted by the FBI. No one was spooked by this more than Bowers himself.