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

by Stuart Wexler

  The incident underscores what Ayers’s brother told the author: Despite his connection to Venable, Floyd Ayers was not a violent racist;12 no hardcore member of the KKK would have given Julian Bond the time of day, much less helped him to an early dinner. But Ayers worked with Venable and did what Venable wanted because Ayers saw that connection as a way to burnish his fabulist résumé. It is not hard to imagine him agreeing to take part in a cloak-and-dagger operation against Martin Luther King Jr. At the same time, Ayers’s reputation for telling tall tales and exaggerating his background could help Venable in another way. No one would take Ayers seriously if he reported on the omega plot either before King’s murder or afterward. This is not idle speculation; witnesses reported that Ayers talked about the King assassination in the weeks before April 4, and he appears to have tried to clear his conscience about the crime afterward. In both cases, authorities dismissed him as a crank.

  As it stands, recent disclosures by historical researcher Lamar Waldron corroborate the idea that the Southeast hub of the Identity network was the source for the omega plot bounty money. A source told Waldron that a group of racist Georgians had for years been secretly diverting union dues from factory workers at the Lakeland auto plant in Atlanta and directing them toward a King assassination bounty. This group included Hugh Spake, who worked at the plant. By 1967 the diverted dues had grown into a sizable nest egg, coming from hundreds of workers earning what was then a solid middle-class salary. Some union members were aware that their dues were being used to fund fights against integration, but very few knew about the more sinister reason for collecting the money.

  A key figure in the latter effort was Joseph Milteer, an independently wealthy traveling salesman with close ties to the NSRP, to Venable’s top aides, and to Swift.13 (Milteer had obtained dozens of Swift’s taped sermons.) Milteer is well-known in the study of another assassination, the John F. Kennedy murder, for having predicted elements of the president’s assassination weeks in advance of November 22, 1963. As he had with Sidney Barnes in 1964 while gathering information on the Birmingham church bombing, Miami police and FBI informant Willie Somersett surreptitiously recorded Milteer saying that John F. Kennedy would be killed “from an office building with a high-powered rifle.” Less known is the fact that Milteer also spoke about an ongoing effort to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. That plot had involved a leader of the Tennessee-based Dixie Klans named Jack Brown. Brown enjoyed a close relationship with J.B. Stoner, and reports from a source inside Eastview Klavern 13 suggest that Brown helped train the Cahaba Boys to develop the explosive device for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.14 If that’s true, Brown was yet another Identity follower (he was on Swift’s mailing list) connected to the Birmingham murders. Those same Identity followers, as noted earlier, had tried to murder Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to eulogize the four young victims of the September 15, 1963, blast.

  The insider information provided to Somersett by Milteer suggests that Milteer was part of the Identity network trying to murder Dr. King as far back as 1963. That the well-connected Georgian would work to secretly hoard cash for a King bounty and provide it to someone like Venable is thus not surprising. Nor is it surprising that Venable would, in turn, move that money through intermediaries like Ayers to Sam Bowers. Bowers’s White Knights more than earned their reputation as the most violent KKK organization in the nation. Unfortunately, Waldron’s source would cooperate only if his identity was protected. The source remains anonymous, and it is thus impossible to fully evaluate his credibility.

  However Venable raised the money, the fact that a significant amount of cash transferred from Atlanta to Jackson becomes important in legitimizing the omega plot. It suggests that the operation was well past the planning stage and that the objective, King’s murder, was a top priority. In 1967 most white supremacist organizations were strapped for cash, devoid of dues-paying members and on the hook for legal fees, none more so than the White Knights in Mississippi. Yet nothing in the available record shows that Bowers ever attempted to use cash from the $100,000 pot for legal fees, assuming that he could even access the money or that he would even dare if the money was promised to a group as ruthless as the Dixie Mafia.

  The narrative suggests that Sybil Eure, given her role as a conduit for the bounty money, somehow found herself in a critical position inside the omega plot, at the junction between the Dixie Mafia and the White Knights. If the money remained in her hands, Eure would be the person to pay Dixie Mafia hit men once King had been killed. Her relationship with McManaman establishes her connection to the criminal element. Her family ties may provide the connection to the White Knights. One of Eure’s associates was Robert C. Thomas, a clerk for the federal district courts in Mississippi. Before assuming that position, Thomas worked as a lead investigator for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a group formed by the Mississippi State Legislature to help public officials oppose integration. The commission spied upon and developed informants inside civil rights groups and collected dossiers on activists. If his work with the commission suggests that Thomas was a southern nationalist, his malfeasance as a federal court clerk reinforces that impression. The records show that Thomas secretly helped Sam Bowers rig juries to win court cases, a criminal offense in its own right.

  Thomas also fits the description that Donald Nissen gave for the first cutout mentioned by Leroy McManaman. Nissen told the FBI that the first go-between, per McManaman, was a federal law enforcement official from Mississippi, but he could not remember his name. In interviews with the author after 2009, Nissen recalled another important detail: The official worked for the marshal’s office. In fact, McManaman had said that this man was the last person to assume the role of deputy marshal in Mississippi.

  On the surface, this information would suggest that the individual was Charlie Sutherland, who by coincidence was also a cousin of Sybil Eure. But this seems very unlikely, based on interviews with Sutherland and with several people who knew him. Photographs show that in 1964, Robert C. Thomas was temporarily deputized as a federal marshal to help stop civil rights protests at the Jackson courthouse steps. Everything, including the fact that Thomas helped rig juries to benefit Dixie Mafia members in Mississippi, points to Thomas as the federal law enforcement officer who participated in the omega plot. As a federal court clerk, Thomas would have been in a convenient position to help McManaman in 1964, when he was violating his federal appeal bond as part of the alpha plot with Donald Sparks. But one is forced to speculate, in large part because the FBI failed to adequately follow up on leads provided by Nissen.

  The FBI did interview Nissen’s friend and Leavenworth cell mate, John May, who confirmed that Nissen had once discussed the $100,000 bounty from McManaman. But if agents placed any stock in May’s report, their confidence in Nissen’s story evaporated in a fog of male chauvinism once they found and interviewed Sybil Eure.

  Agents from the Jackson FBI field office visited Eure in August 1967—not long after Donald Nissen left the package of bounty money as a favor to Floyd Ayers. By all accounts, the real estate woman maintained her composure. She denied ever hearing about any bounty offer on Martin Luther King Jr. She admitted knowing Leroy McManaman; in the spring of 1964, friends had introduced the two, and McManaman had stayed at Eure’s home for several weeks. The married woman insisted that her relationship with McManaman was strictly professional and that McManaman, whose only previous experience with property management consisted of running an illegal gambling operation out of a motel in Colorado, was some sort of authority on real estate.

  The Jackson FBI agents did not ask any follow-up questions. They did not inquire as to why Eure shared mutual acquaintances with a lifelong criminal or why her friends would suggest that she allow a dangerous felon to stay with her. They did not challenge her characterization of McManaman as a real estate expert. They did not ask Eure about the contents and context of her ongoing correspondence and visits with McManaman. Ins
tead, convinced that the White Knights would never use a woman in any operational capacity, especially a respectable businesswoman like Eure, the FBI closed the book on the Nissen investigation. Agents did not even interview Leroy McManaman until several months after King’s assassination.15

  Of course, the record now shows that at the very moment the FBI dismissed Eure as a suspect because of her gender and social status, Sam Bowers intended to use a woman to help bomb Jewish and black targets in Mississippi. The FBI can be forgiven for its oversight, as it would not discover Kathy Ainsworth’s role in Bowers’s hit squad until late June 1968, when police officers shot her dead in a sting operation that also nearly killed Tommy Tarrants. Bowers chose Ainsworth and Tarrants for his terrorist operations precisely because neither party was known to or scrutinized by the local FBI. The wave of violence would begin in earnest one month after the FBI interviewed Eure.

  One might expect that the FBI’s visit to Eure would deter the Dixie Mafia from pursuing the King contract. But members of the Dixie Mafia were no ordinary criminals. They took enormous risks for money. Donald Sparks, for instance, once robbed the home of the mayor of Payne, Alabama, and then escaped in a police car when he was arrested at the scene. (It turned out that the local sheriff and an officer were in on the robbery scheme.)16 Some suspect that Sparks participated in the murder attempt on Sheriff Buford Pusser, whose one-man war against the Dixie Mafia was immortalized in the movie Walking Tall. A long-range shot missed Pusser but killed his wife. The very fact that a Dixie Mafia gang even tried to kill a law enforcement officer placed them outside of the informal code of ethics honored by other violent groups, such as the Sicilian Mafia. Many believe that a Dixie Mafia gang assassinated Attorney General Albert Patterson in Phenix City, Alabama, in 1954, after the prosecutor tried to bring law and order to a town beset by vice and violence. Decades later, in 1987, Dixie Mafia members with connections to Oklahoma and Mississippi assassinated a federal judge, Vincent Sherry, and his wife, Margaret. Pusser, Patterson, and Sherry had all put themselves between the Dixie Mafia and its money, and the Dixie Mafia criminals remained undaunted.

  August 1967 could have represented a turning point for the omega plot had the FBI done more to prod Sybil Eure. In one key respect, the path of the operation did change, in a way that ultimately contributed to Martin Luther King’s murder. In Canada James Earl Ray failed in his mission to obtain false travel documentation that would allow him to flee North America. In reality, Ray simply misunderstood the process involved in acquiring a fake passport. Living under the alias Eric Galt, Ray mistakenly assumed that a Canadian citizen would have to vouch for his credentials before he could acquire the papers to leave. To that end, he began dating an attractive Canadian woman, in hopes of convincing her to help him. The woman grew very fond of Ray, but Ray soon learned that she worked for the Canadian government. Fearing that she might soon discover who he was and turn him into Canadian authorities for extradition to the United States, Ray abruptly abandoned the relationship. For reasons that are still unclear, Ray decided to risk recapture and return to the United States. More perplexingly, he decided to visit a city completely unfamiliar to him: Birmingham, Alabama.17

  In 1969, after he agreed to plead guilty to avoid a death sentence for the King murder, Ray retracted his confession and insisted that he had met the Machiavellian figure Raul in Montreal and that Raul had convinced him to participate in a drug-smuggling scheme based in Birmingham. In Ray’s telling, Raul spent the fall of 1967 through the spring of 1968 involving Ray in various drug-running and arms-trafficking schemes, stringing Ray along with the promise that he would soon provide Ray with the false documentation that he needed to flee North America. In reality, according to Ray and to those who favor Ray’s total innocence, Raul simply manipulated Ray like a puppet, in ways that implicated the fugitive in the King murder several months later.

  But there are many problems with the Raul story. For one thing, Ray’s physical description of Raul changed with almost every retelling. In various narratives, Raul appears as a “blonde Latin,” as a “red-haired French Canadian,” as an “auburn-haired Latin,” and as a “sandy-haired Latin.”18 In the early 1970s, Ray said that Raul bore a “striking resemblance” to one of the suspicious-looking hobos seen in pictures of Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who reopened an investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination from 1966 to 1969, showed images of these tramps on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, highlighting the vagrants’ uncharacteristically fashionable attire and insisting that the hobos were really presidential assassins in disguise. In making the comparison, Ray was thus connecting the King assassination to the JFK assassination at a time when Americans became increasingly convinced that the latter was a conspiracy.19

  Yet two decades later, Ray positively identified Raul as a Portuguese immigrant to America, selecting his picture from a poorly constructed photo array.20 The problem is that the hobo in Dealey Plaza looks nothing like the Portuguese native in the photo array; in both cases, Ray simply told sympathetic investigators what they wanted to hear and then watched as these individuals worked tirelessly to clear him of involvement in MLK’s murder. Inventing fake individuals to deflect blame away from himself was nothing new to Ray. When under arrest for an earlier crime, Ray had invented a figure named Walter McBride, whom he had blamed for masterminding the crime in question.

  For the most part, one must rely on Ray himself to piece together his movements and associations after his escape from MSP, and Ray’s tendency to dissemble and prevaricate for his own self-interest clouds any hope of fully understanding what—and who—motivated his decisions. Some researchers, such as Dartmouth professor Philip Melanson, argue that Ray fabricated the Raul character as a composite of individuals who really did assist or guide him into a conspiracy. One of the main investigators on Ray’s early defense team, Harold Weisberg, became convinced that the convicted assassin had offered false leads (or withheld legitimate leads) to protect actual conspirators. Weisberg postulated that Ray did this for fear of retaliation in prison and that he did not play a major role in the King murder. Whatever his motives, and whatever conspirators may have influenced those motives, one is forced to speculate on Ray’s choices.21

  Ray’s choice to return to the United States from Montreal, risking recapture, lends itself to much speculation, especially when one considers that the risk is amplified if a criminal goes to a city with which he is unfamiliar and where he lacks any support network, as Ray did when he visited Birmingham. The money-obsessed Ray may have frequented bars in Montreal, just as he said he did, hoping to find more information about the King bounty referenced at MSP. Canada was not short on white supremacists who could have pointed Ray in the right direction. Some evidence suggests that that’s what happened.

  One woman in Quebec told investigators that her boyfriend, whom she knew as Rollie and whose real name was Jules Ricco Kimble, had associated with Ray in Canada. She said that Kimble carried guns and monitored police radio broadcasts in Montreal. Records show that Kimble frequently went back and forth from his native United States to Canada, including during the relevant time period in the summer of 1967. Moreover, Kimble enjoyed close working relationships with the Ku Klux Klan in his home state of Louisiana and had engaged in various acts of Klan-inspired violence. Kimble himself claimed to be involved in the King murder, but his stories of intrigue worthy of a Robert Ludlum novel are difficult to believe or corroborate.22

  Records of the congressional reinvestigation of the King murder in the late 1970s show that the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) developed two other possible contacts for Ray in Canada. House investigators asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to provide information on two Americans, both connected to the NSRP, who had moved to Canada sometime after 1963. Unfortunately, records that explain why the committee became suspicious of these two men, and more importantly what it learned about the two individuals,
are still sealed. What is known is that both of these men once worked closely with Stoner and Fields in Birmingham.23

  Perhaps this is why Ray, when he moved to Birmingham in September 1967, chose to stay (under the alias Galt) at a rooming house not far from NSRP headquarters on Bessemer Road. None of the other boarders saw Ray interact with anyone at the rooming house (or with anyone resembling Raul, for that matter). And we know only some of what Ray did when he was outside of the rooming house.

  He purchased a white Ford Mustang, the vehicle that would become famous as the getaway car after the King murder. We also know that he took dance classes and purchased photographic equipment, the latter almost definitely with the intent of producing amateur pornography. He rented a safety deposit box at the Birmingham branch of Trust National Bank, the first and only time he is known to have done so.

  The safety deposit box may be more significant than previously thought. Researcher Charles Faulkner discovered that in 1966, government investigators identified the Trust banks as the primary banks for the United Klans of America.24 Information obtained from the investigation of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church indicates that several notable NSRP members, including J.B. Stoner, used the Birmingham branch. When, decades later, researcher Gerald Posner asked Edward Fields if he had any direct contact with Ray—if Ray had ever visited NSRP headquarters on Bessemer Road—Fields said no. But the longtime Identity radical qualified his answer, saying that while he personally never interacted with Ray, he could not discount the possibility that other NSRP members had engaged with the fugitive that September.25

  It seems clear that if Ray pursued a King bounty in Birmingham, he failed to immediately introduce himself into such a conspiracy. Within weeks he would be in Mexico, where he stayed for almost two months, possibly engaging in low-level drug dealing but most definitely pursuing a career as a pornographic film producer, even enticing two Mexican women into salacious photo sessions. Ray’s Mexican jaunt and his initial efforts to produce pornographic films ended in the middle of October 1967, with little to show for them. There is no sign of any direct connection of Ray to a King plot during his time in Mexico. Restless, Ray moved to Los Angeles in November. There, in the spiritual capital of the Christian Identity world, Ray appears to have continued exploring a possible bounty on Martin Luther King Jr. As will become clear, the evidence suggests that in December, Ray finally began to make progress in entering the omega plot.