America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States

by Stuart Wexler

With that likely in mind, McManaman offered Nissen two possible roles in the omega plot. Nissen could be a scout who tracked King’s movements and reported the information to go-betweens, who could relay it to other contract killers. Or, if Nissen wanted to obtain a larger share of the $100,000 bounty, the soon-to-be-released con could also directly participate in King’s murder. In addition, McManaman hoped that Nissen would approach his cell mate, John May, about taking a role in the plot. May was an expert machinist, and McManaman hoped Nissen could convince his friend to help design a rifle specifically suited to kill the civil rights leader.

  Donald Nissen wanted no part of any murder plot against King—or against anyone else for that matter. In his previous crimes, he had used violence only once, reluctantly, to pacify an aggressive homeowner during a robbery. He had never even fired a gun. But McManaman’s offer placed Nissen in a compromising position. Nissen knew that by saying no to McManaman, he risked retaliation; McManaman might kill Nissen in fear that he would talk. On the other hand, saying yes would implicate Nissen in a criminal conspiracy. Nissen told his story to his cell mate, John May, more to talk through the dilemma than to recruit the machinist to design a special gun with which to kill King. Nissen ultimately decided to say nothing either way. He thought, incorrectly, that by waiting out McManaman, he could avoid violence and extricate himself from the plot. On the first account, Nissen was correct: He left Leavenworth prison in May 1967 without any attack from McManaman. But as it will become clear, McManaman took Nissen’s silence as tacit consent to a conspiracy. Nissen would come to understand that—but only later, after events had trapped him inside a conspiracy he wanted nothing to do with.2

  Nissen did not know that other bounty offers, similar to the one offered by the White Knights and fronted by McManaman, were circulating throughout America’s prison system. Records suggest, for instance, that also in 1967, a group of unidentified, wealthy Georgia businessmen bribed guards in a federal prison in Atlanta to approach prisoners with a bounty offer on King. The son of one of the prison guards (his sister confirmed the story to the author) reported the offer to the FBI in the mid-1970s, after his father had died under suspicious circumstances; the father apparently had taken affidavits from prisoners and used them to blackmail the businessmen.3 Following the father’s death, the mother hid or destroyed those records. But it is in another prison where offers of a bounty on King likely contributed to the leader’s ultimate death.

  At Missouri State Penitentiary (MSP) in Jefferson City, several prisoners reported either hearing about or being approached with a proposal to murder King for money. Some details are vague and difficult to make sense of, so it is hard to tell if the prisoners were describing the same bounty or more than one offer. That said, the general outlines suggest that some group, located in the South, offered a considerable amount of money to any MSP inmate who could help assassinate King. Some doubt the veracity of these claims, arguing that the prisoners fabricated reports of MSP bounty offers based on the promise of a large reward from law enforcement or reduced prison sentences for their help in apprehending King’s assassin. Some of the reports lack credibility. But several of the prisoners who spoke of a bounty had already been released from Leavenworth; some openly rejected a monetary reward. More importantly, in one instance, corroboration for a bounty came from an unpaid law enforcement source who had served time in the Jefferson City prison and had gone on to work for the police for three years.

  The specific plot, confirmed by two prisoners, traced back to two St. Louis businessmen with close ties to the National States Rights Party. The dollar amount was high: one prisoner said he was offered $50,000 to participate in a murder conspiracy against King.4

  This bounty offer, or something like it, likely captured the attention of the most significant figure in any discussion of the King assassination: James Earl Ray, the man who, according to official accounts, assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968. A St. Louis native with a history of arrests for armed robbery and similar offenses, Ray was motivated by the pursuit of money far more than anything else, according to his brothers and others. Several prisoners, some of whom were close to Ray, say that Ray spoke glowingly about the prospect of a King bounty. Some prisoners attributed this enthusiasm as latent racial animus on Ray’s part, but while the evidence suggests that Ray shared the kind of prejudice common to those raised in Jim Crow Missouri, he had never participated in any racial violence. On the other hand, a bounty prize of $50,000 or $100,000 represented far more cash than Ray had ever stolen in any robbery.

  Still, in 1967 Ray faced another twelve years of prison time at MSP, the result of a conviction for robbing a Kroger convenience store in 1959; participating in any conspiracy against Martin Luther King Jr. would be impossible—unless he escaped. To that end, Ray finagled his way into work detail at the prison bakery that “made the bread for the institution and its outlying farms and honor dorms. Every day, a truck laden with bread would head out of the prison away from the city toward the remote farms.” Ray, who had failed at escaping twice before, succeeded on April 23, 1967, when, with “the assistance of another prisoner,” he climbed “into a large 4-by-4 bread box, covering himself with a false bottom and having the accomplice cover the crate with loaves of bread. The box was pushed onto the truck with the other boxes and after a cursory search by guards.”5

  Ray’s decisions and actions in the first several months following his escape suggest that any bounty offer was of secondary importance to him. Ray assumed false identities and aliases, worked odd jobs, and raised money through criminal activity, first in St. Louis and then Chicago, with one goal in mind: reaching Canada. There he could obtain a fake passport and travel documents to escape North America. As will become clear, Ray’s failure to execute this plan likely made a King bounty more attractive to the fugitive. It would be several months before he became part of the omega plot.

  From the time of his conviction in 1969 to the day he died of liver disease in 1997, James Earl Ray insisted that he never knew of any bounty on King’s life. He claimed that he had never agreed to join any murder plot. He asserted that others, notably a mysterious criminal mastermind whom he knew only as Raul, had manipulated him into incriminating behavior, such as buying a sniper rifle. As the remaining narrative will make clear, the Raul story allowed Ray to deflect blame away from himself and the actual conspirators onto others, such as the U.S. government. It was a ploy to get him out of prison and possibly to help him collect a share of the bounty money he had failed to obtain prior to his 1969 conviction.

  The omega plot likely did involve a patsy—just not Ray. This individual came to the attention of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi at the same time that Leroy McManaman proposed the bounty to Donald Nissen, which was the same time that Ray escaped MSP in a breadbox. Thomas Albert Tarrants, then a twenty-year-old Christian Identity radical from Mobile, Alabama, had migrated to Laurel, Mississippi, in April 1967. He wanted to offer his services to the most actively violent white supremacist in the nation: Samuel Holloway Bowers. Despite his young age, Tarrants could point to a host of influential Christian Identity radicals to vouch for him, including Admiral John Crommelin, Noah Carden, and Sidney Barnes (all partners in the 1963 Birmingham assassination attempt on King). These men had mentored Tarrants and nourished his rage since the young man had quit high school in 1963 out of disgust with racial integration. Tarrants convinced the always-skeptical Bowers that they were like-minded in their opposition to racial equality, to communism, and most importantly to Jews.

  It is unclear whether Bowers identified Tarrants as a future scapegoat in a King murder plot during their first months of contact in 1967. For a while at least, Tarrants served another important purpose for Bowers, as leader of a team of outsiders who could perpetrate violence while eluding law enforcement. By 1967, with an ever-dwindling pool of native Mississippians to use in terrorist operations, someone like this became more and more necessary.


  Bowers already feared the kind of infiltration and surveillance employed by the FBI in its COINTELPRO operations. But in Mississippi the level of harassment from the Jackson FBI field office went far beyond the disruptive dirty tricks associated with COINTELPRO; it reached a level of intensity that stretched the bounds of legal propriety. The record now shows that during its investigation of the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer in 1966, the FBI used out-of-state mobsters to bully and threaten KKK members, pressuring them to reveal details of their crimes.6 Jackson’s FBI agents looked the other way as the local police fired warning shots into the homes of KKK members and physically accosted them in front of their families.7

  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. In 1967 a caravan of KKK members forced a team of FBI agents, who had been following other KKK members 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, Joe Daniel (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. He and the others knew that they could escape criminal liability because the White Knights had infiltrated and compromised Mississippi juries and local and state law enforcement agencies. That level of hubris infuriated the FBI even more.8

  But in 1967 the scales of official justice finally began to turn against the White Knights. Increasingly, the Justice Department began to use early civil rights laws, some dating back to the Reconstruction era, to charge KKK members with crimes in federal, rather than local, courts. Such cases were far less apt to be corrupted by tainted juries or racist law enforcement officers. In February 1967 the Justice Department leveled federal charges against several of the conspirators in the Neshoba murders, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Wayne Roberts, and Sam Bowers himself. With the Imperial Wizard and his longtime followers under constant harassment and scrutiny, Bowers decided on his most brilliant move yet: assembling a team of dedicated terrorists, unknown to the FBI, to perpetrate one of the worst waves of arson and bombing ever seen in Mississippi. As part of Bowers’s plan, Tarrants, the outsider from Alabama, became, in his own words, “the chief terrorist for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.”

  Bowers took this devious plan to another level when he teamed Tarrants with a female, Kathy Ainsworth. Historically, women served an auxiliary role for the Klan. At rare times, some women assumed positions of leadership. But women were never used to perpetrate acts of violence—that is, before Kathy Ainsworth.

  A pretty young married elementary schoolteacher, Ainsworth defied all profiles of a KKK operative. But she was a true believer, raised on hate in Florida by her single mother, Margaret Capomacchia, a woman whose bigotry made George Wallace look like a Freedom Rider. Capomacchia took her daughter on trips to Mobile to visit Sidney Barnes, where Kathy became indoctrinated into the teachings of Wesley Swift. She roomed with Barnes’s daughter at college in Mississippi, and Barnes gave Kathy away at her wedding to Peter Ainsworth. Privately, Barnes did not approve of the marriage, as Peter Ainsworth did not belong to any radical white supremacist groups. Barnes had wanted Kathy to marry Tommy Tarrants; the two young Identity believers had met at Barnes’s home in Alabama sometime before Tarrants had moved to Mississippi, before Kathy Ainsworth had met her future husband.

  Unbeknownst to her husband, Kathy Ainsworth began training in firearms and explosives in 1967. Along with Hawkins and another young KKK member, Benny Waldrup, Tarrants and Ainsworth became part of what another KKK leader Laude E. (L.E.) Matthews called the Swift Underground.

  As summer approached, the always-paranoid Sam Bowers insisted that he and Tarrants meet in the woods of Laurel to elude surveillance. Even then, the Imperial Wizard demanded that they communicate by exchanging notes on paper, for fear that the FBI might be listening. They burned the correspondence after each meeting. Tarrants later said that the get-togethers often involved exchanging ideas about Swift’s latest sermons and planning future violent operations in Mississippi. Today, having long abandoned Christian Identity theology and racial violence, Tarrants asserts that he never heard of any plot to kill King. Bowers may have been compartmentalizing his operations to limit exposure to infiltration and disruption. His choosing to outsource the omega plot to contract killers suggests exactly that. In betting on the Dixie Mafia’s cooperation and silence, Bowers was placing his faith in a group whose members rarely cooperated with law enforcement as informants and who routinely murdered their own on account of disloyalty.

  But Donald Nissen was not part of the Dixie Mafia. While Tarrants and Bowers discussed Christian Identity theology in the forests of Laurel, Nissen, just released from Leavenworth Penitentiary, encountered a roadblock on his trip to Atlanta. Having gone to Texas to pick up a company car to travel to Georgia, Nissen was arrested by officers in Sherman, Texas, on charges of check fraud that predated his stay at Leavenworth. Privately, Nissen knew he was guilty of the crime, but he also knew that the case was too weak to be successfully prosecuted. Apparently, so did the local sheriff, who detained Nissen in jail while refusing to arraign him in court. In essence, Nissen found himself detained without charge, with nothing to suggest that the situation would change. He knew that if he could get word to federal authorities, the situation would likely be resolved. But he also saw this as an opportunity to fully divorce himself from any murder conspiracy hatched by Leroy McManaman. Nissen managed to sneak a note out to the Bureau of Prisons, making sure to say that he had information about a murder conspiracy.9

  On June 2, 1967, two FBI agents from the Dallas field office visited Nissen in the Sherman, Texas, jail. According to their report, the agents told Nissen that they would not promise to help him with his current dilemma. Nissen chose to provide them with information on the King plot anyway. He relayed McManaman’s offer to the FBI: the $100,000 bounty fronted by the White Knights to kill King; the two available roles in the conspiracy (as a scout or as a direct participant in the murder). He told them about John May, his cell mate, whom McManaman hoped would design a gun to kill King. He even gave them details on the go-betweens, the people Nissen would use to maintain indirect connection to McManaman. One of these cutouts was a federal law enforcement officer out of Mississippi, but Nissen could not remember either his first or last name. Nissen did know the first name, but only the first name, of the second go-between: someone named Floyd. Nissen knew the full name and location of the third go-between: Sybil Eure of Jackson, Mississippi. The Dallas FBI passed that information on to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.10 Either the FBI or officials in the Bureau of Prisons soon told a judge about Nissen’s legal predicament, and as Nissen had predicted, the Sherman, Texas, prosecutors could not develop a case against him. Within days, Nissen was released from the Sherman jail and had found his way to Atlanta. He thought, wrongly, that he had exculpated himself from the omega plot by revealing the details to the FBI.

  Indeed, in early June 1967, not long after Nissen arrived in Atlanta, someone named Floyd approached him to ask a favor. Floyd Ayers, a fellow salesman, asked Nissen to drop off a package at a real estate office in Jackson, Mississippi. Such requests were routine among salesmen, and Nissen agreed, thinking nothing of it. When he next visited Mississippi, sometime in late June or early July by his reckoning, Nissen visited the address provided by Ayers. Nissen was surprised to see that the real estate office was not an office but someone’s home; he was also surprised that the manager of the office was a relatively tall, modestly attractive middle-aged woman. He gave her the package, and they barely exchanged words.

  Nissen did not know that the woman was Sybil Eure, the same woman whom McManaman had named in Leavenworth as the third go-between in the King operati
on, the same woman who had provided shelter to McManaman during the alpha plot in 1964. Nissen knew nothing about any alpha plot to begin with. (Larry Hancock and I established the particulars of the 1964 Sparks/McManaman assassination attempt only after 2006.) Nissen did not realize that Floyd Ayers was likely the Floyd whom McManaman had named as the second go-between in the omega plot. In several interviews with the author since 2009, Nissen asserted that he always assumed the go-between Floyd was a Mississippian, as was the case with other two cutouts (Eure and the unknown federal law enforcement officer). Moreover, Nissen, understandably, did not realize, after their interaction in prison, that McManaman viewed his nonanswer as some sort of affirmation that Nissen wanted to help murder Martin Luther King Jr.

  Some of these revelations came into focus only recently, but others became clear within weeks of Nissen’s trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1967. Nissen cannot recall if it was weeks or months later, but Floyd Ayers eventually revealed to Nissen the contents of the package that the ex-con had delivered to the real estate office in Mississippi: money for a bounty offer on Martin Luther King Jr. As it turns out, Floyd Ayers had worked closely with James Venable, the Grand Wizard of the NKKKK, who had fronted $25,000 for a bounty on King in 1965.

  An eccentric individual, Ayers was a perfect conduit to move money from white supremacists in the Southeast to Bowers’s group in Mississippi. Accounts of Ayers’s behavior, from magazine articles to interviews with his brother, point to a Walter Mitty–type personality: someone who wanted to be a mover and shaker in the world of crime or espionage. Atlanta-based civil rights activist Julian Bond described an illustrative incident with Ayers to Jet magazine. Ayers recognized Bond waiting on a long line to enter a popular restaurant, and Ayers told the future leader of the NAACP that he could arrange for Bond to move to the top of the queue. Ayers attributed this ability to his background in the CIA and the Secret Service—both fabrications that Bond found laughable. But for all his zaniness, Ayers did manage to get Bond into the restaurant ahead of everyone else, just as he had promised.11