Orders to Kill Page 14

  The HSCA further noted the MPD’s failure after the shooting to issue an all points bulletin (general alert describing the suspect) as well as a “Signal Y” alert (instructing cars to block off city exit routes). Pages were devoted to discrediting Grace Walden and hence her denial that a man she saw exiting the bathroom around the time of the shooting was James Earl Ray. In so doing the committee gave credibility to Charlie Stephens’s account of seeing someone running down the hallway after the shot. The committee maintained that it didn’t rely on him for an identification. The HSCA attacked Wayne Chastain’s report of his interview with Walden and his observations of a drunken Stephens as “improbable, if not an outright fabrication”55 (despite including in the volumes MPD detective lieutenant Tommy Smith’s affidvait stating that Stephen was indeed drunk).

  The report also raised the names of three individuals with intriguing possible connections to the case. One was Herman Thompson, a former East Baton Rouge, deputy sheriff. Ray had told the committee that Thompson was the owner of the Baton Rouge telephone number given to him by Raul. (Ray had discovered this by comparing the number he had with the phone numbers in the Baton Rouge telephone directory, beginning with the last digit. Eventually he matched the number he had with that listed for a Herman Thompson.) The second individual was Randy Rosenson, whose name was on the business card Ray said he had found in the Mustang before crossing the border from Mexico into California. The third person was Raul Esquivel, the Louisiana state trooper whose Baton Rouge state police barracks had allegedly been called by Ray in December 1967 on his trip with Charlie Stein from Los Angeles to New Orleans.

  The HSCA reported that all three people denied knowing Ray and concluded that none of them had any connection with a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. They noted that Esquivel’s work records made it impossible for him to have been Ray’s Raul.

  The information contained in the ancillary volumes published by the HSCA was much more valuable than the report itself. Though carefully edited, the ancillary volumes included sworn statements and documents that provided a useful place for me to start to analyze issues. For example, the HSCA staff interview of Aeromarine Supply Store manager Donald Wood on March 10, 1977, revealed Wood’s account of the conversation he had with Ray when the latter requested the change of rifle. He said that he remembered the man said “that he had, and I’m pretty sure these were his exact words, he had been talking to someone and that’s not the gun he wanted.” Wood then recalled that the man said what he really wanted was a Remington Model 760 Gamemaster pump-action rifle. He said he had the impression that the caller was probably reading it from something, since very few people ever referred to the gun as a “Gamemaster.” (This was compatible with Ray’s recollection of Raul pointing out the rifle from a brochure Ray gave him).

  The HSCA ballistics panel reported that they test-fired the evidence rifle and examined the markings on the test-fired bullets. They found that the markings on most of the test fired bullets varied from one to another. They concluded that no meaningful comparison could be made between the test-fired bullets and the death slug.

  The FBI laboratory had conducted neutron activation analysis tests on the evidence bullets and the death slug (such tests analyze the composition of lead in a bullet). The HSCA panel stated that the bureau’s April 29, 1968 report stated that the elemental composition of the bullets varied and therefore no meaningful comparison with the death slug could be made. The panel didn’t conduct its own neutron activation analysis.

  The panel noted that somehow the rifle and the scope were misaligned, resulting in the weapon not firing straight. It also noted that the death slug was originally delivered to the FBI in one piece but was received by the panel in three fragments produced as a result (so the panel believed) of the bureau’s laboratory testing procedures.

  The fingerprints report showed that Ray’s prints were found on the following items in the discarded bundle: the rifle, the scope, the binoculars, a beer can and the Commercial Appeal newspaper. There were none of Ray’s prints in the bathroom, the room he rented, nor elsewhere in the rooming house. The report also conceded that there were many unidentified fingerprints in the relevant areas of the rooming house and on Ray’s Mustang.

  A Memphis City Engineers analysis of the bullet’s trajectory couldn’t conclude whether it came from the bathroom window of the rooming house or the elevated brush area behind the rooming house. This uncertainty was due not only to confusion over Dr. King’s posture but also to the fact that the medical examiner, Dr. Francisco, hadn’t traced the path of the bullet in Dr. King’s body. When asked about this departure from normal procedure, Francisco took the curious position that he was loathe to cause further mutilation for no good reason.

  The HSCA discussed the possibility that the shot had been fired from the brush and also the contention that the brush had been cut down the next morning. It concluded that the bullet had been fired from the bathroom, discounting (as noted earlier) Solomon Jones’s statement. Also, after supposedly reviewing the work records of the Memphis Sanitation Department and the Department of Parks it concluded that no cutting had taken place. The committee didn’t interview Kay Black or James Orange.

  Occasionally, some testimony before the committee appeared to contradict Ray’s story. For example, Estelle Peters, an employee of the Piedmont Laundry in Atlanta, contended that her records indicated that Ray left laundry with her on April 1. If this was the case, it could be alleged that Ray was in Atlanta with the alleged murder weapon at the same time as Dr. King, and could have been stalking him. Ray maintained that he had put in the laundry earlier and that he was nowhere near Atlanta on April 1, having been well along on his trip to Memphis and spending that evening at a motel in Corinth, Mississippi.

  Often, more questions were raised than answered.

  The MPD agent whom Redditt had told Mark Lane had infiltrated the Invaders was revealed to be Marrell McCollough. Under oath, McCollough admitted that he furnished regular reports on the Invaders’ activity to Lieutenant Arkin, his MPD intelligence bureau control officer. One of the first people to reach Dr. King after the shooting, McCollough had been in the parking area of the Lorraine, having just dropped off SCLC staffers Orange and Bevel. He immediately raced up the stairs after the shot. During his HSCA testimony, McCollough acknowledged that he was the mysterious figure kneeling over the fallen Dr. King on the balcony, apparently checking him for life signs. He also admitted to subsequently being involved as an agent provocateur in a number of illegal activities for which various Invaders were convicted and sentenced. He explicitly denied being connected, at the time of the assassination, to any federal agency. When I tried to locate McCollough later, I learned he had disappeared from Memphis; it was rumored that he had gone to work for the CIA.

  The HSCA raised the issue of the withdrawal of some MPD TACT units from the area of the Lorraine. This had been confirmed in an affidavit provided to the HSCA by MPD chief William O. Crumby, who attributed the withdrawal to a request made by a person in Dr. King’s group. This withdrawal contributed to the reduced police presence in the immediate area of the assassination.

  Several conspiracy scenarios, some implicating the Mafia, were covered and dismissed in the HSCA report. I was interested in some of the scenarios, if only for the leads provided and resolved to follow them up.

  THE HSCA’S REPORT had only strengthened my growing conviction that Dr. King’s murder had not been solved.

  14

  Following the Footprints of Conspiracy: January–September 1979

  IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1979 I commuted to Memphis to follow up on some issues only summarily covered by the HSCA.

  First was a meeting with John McFerren, the owner of a gas station/grocery store in Somerville, Tennessee. I had been trying to meet with him for over four months, ever since Jim Lawson had told me about his story. Lawson said that McFerren had been a courageous and reliable black civil rights leader in Fayette County, whose activities h
ad put his life under constant threat and caused his insurance to be canceled and his store to be periodically blacklisted by white suppliers. On the afternoon of February 8, 1979, I traveled with two associates of Mark Lane—April Ferguson, a lawyer, and Barbara Rabbito, a stenographer—to the small town of Somerville, about forty miles outside of Memphis.

  When we reached McFerren’s store around 6:15 p.m., I was immediately struck by the impression of a place under siege. The huge plate glass window in front of his store was cracked from top to bottom and taped together, the result, McFerren said, of a drive-by shooting, one of many he had experienced since 1968. Not long ago, he told us, he shot and wounded a man contracted by the Mafia to kill him. He said that he was tipped off three weeks before the attempt and was waiting for the hit man—a black who was not from the area. Unshaven and dressed in working clothes with an old baseball cap, McFerren stood about 5'8". Solidly built and very alert, he peered cautiously over his glasses at us.

  Although he knew we were coming and led us to a back room furnished with only a crude table and a couple of chairs, he seemed increasingly uneasy. He had closed the store and shut off the lights, but there was still a steady stream of traffic in and around the gas station. As it grew dark, his nervousness increased. Though his old friend Jim Lawson had arranged the meeting, it was obvious that McFerren didn’t completely trust the three white strangers in front of him. We would accomplish little on that visit, and we left with the understanding that Lawson would be back in touch to arrange for a more secure meeting. Three more weeks of sporadic contact followed. He refused to talk on any local phones, being convinced that they were tapped.

  Finally, I got McFerren’s story after another face-to-face meeting was arranged. McFerren maintained that on the afternoon of April 4, 1968, while he was shopping at the Liberto, Liberto and Latch (LL&L) Produce Company in Memphis, he saw the company’s president, Frank Liberto, talking on the telephone, having been handed the phone by one of the bosses who had answered it. As McFerren went to the back of the store, where there was an office on the other side of the wall, he heard Liberto’s conversation through the open door. He insisted that he heard Liberto say, “I told you not to call me here. Shoot the son of a bitch when he comes on the balcony.” Liberto told the caller that he should collect his money from Liberto’s brother in New Orleans after he had finished. The sum of $5,000 was mentioned.

  McFerren had heard rumors that Frank Liberto had some underworld connections; this was none of McFerren’s business, he thought, and so he just put the conversation out of his mind. He was jolted, however, when just an hour later, after he arrived back in Somerville, he heard of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

  After agonizing for two days, McFerren called Baxton Bryant, the executive director of the Tennessee Council on Human Rights, at his home in Nashville. Bryant, a Methodist minister, had been involved behind the scenes trying to mediate the garbage strike. McFerren asked Bryant to come to Somerville.

  When Bryant got to Somerville and heard McFerren’s story, Bryant insisted that he tell it to the FBI. McFerren was reluctant until Bryant promised him that either his name would be kept secret or he and his family would receive protection.

  That night Bryant drove to Memphis, where he telephoned Frank Holloman at home and insisted on seeing him immediately. Around midnight they met in Holloman’s office at police headquarters; soon after, homicide chief N. E. Zachary and FBI agent O. B. Johnson arrived. The three listened to Bryant’s story and asked to see McFerren at once.

  Bryant, knowing that McFerren wouldn’t talk on the telephone, drove back the forty miles to Somerville and managed to convince his friend to get out of bed and go to Memphis. On Monday, April 8, at 3:00 a.m., Zachary and Johnson began interrogating McFerren in Bryant’s room at the Peabody. Also present was David Caywood, an ACLU attorney.

  They finished around 5:00 a.m. Zachary and Johnson taped McFerren’s account and had him sketch the office in which he had seen Liberto and another one of the bosses, down to its furnishings, the position of the men, and where he himself had stood in the corridor, listening. They promised to check it out thoroughly.

  Three days later, Bryant was told that the FBI believed that if McFerren overheard the telephone call at all, it wasn’t related to the assassination. McFerren told me that as a result of the way he was treated he was most uncomfortable. He felt he was looked on as a criminal himself.

  The HSCA had uncovered another independent reference to the possible involvement of a Frank Liberto (the story told by Morris Davis, summarized below), noted Liberto’s well-known racial bias, and even ascertained that his brother, Salvatore, who lived in Louisiana, was indirectly connected to organized crime leader Carlos Marcello (a fact that was unknown to McFerren). Nevertheless the HSCA elected to dismiss McFerren’s story, just as the MPD and the FBI had. Shortly after the assassination, Time magazine stringer William Sartor had investigated McFerren’s story. He concluded that organized crime was responsible for the killing, having connected to his own satisfaction Memphis produce dealer Frank C. Liberto with Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Mafia leader. The HSCA concluded, after what it termed an extensive investigation, that no evidence existed to tie either Liberto or Marcello to the assassination.

  I had previously obtained an affidavit dated February 21, 1977, sworn by Morris Davis of Birmingham, Alabama. I would have dismissed Davis’s account out of hand had I not heard about McFerren’s allegations. His independent reference to the involvement of a Frank Liberto was troubling. Davis maintained that in early 1968 he became aware of a plot to kill Dr. King which involved a local Birmingham doctor/gunrunner named Gus Prosch, a Mafia-connected man named Frank Liberto from Memphis and also, incredibly, King’s close friend Ralph Abernathy and Birmingham SCLC leader Fred Shuttlesworth. Davis said he observed Abernathy and Shuttlesworth meeting with Prosch and Liberto on two occasions in the parking lot of the Gulas Lounge in Birmingham, and that late on the afternoon of April 3 Prosch actually showed him the gun that he said was to be used in the killing.

  DURING ONE OF MY trips to Memphis in early 1979 I learned about Arthur Baldwin, a Memphis topless club owner who had become a very useful asset of the federal government. Previously in trouble with the law, he had received leniency in exchange for being the government’s chief witness against high-ranking officials in Governor Ray Blanton’s administration, exposing a “pay for pardon” operation and other corrupt practices. Baldwin came to my attention in connection with the assassination, or rather its cover-up. On February 16, 1979, Mark Lane’s associates Ferguson and Rabbito executed affidavits resulting from a visit conducted a few days before with William “Tim” Kirk, an inmate of the Shelby County Jail. According to the affidavits, Kirk had called their office several times to request that Mark Lane visit him at the jail. He said he had some information that might be of value. Since Lane was unavailable, Ferguson and Rabbito went out to see him the next day. He declined to let them tape the conversation or use his name, but he permitted them to take notes. Kirk stated that he had been in and out of the Shelby County Jail since 1972 on robbery and extortion charges. Between October 15, 1977, and February 1978, while in jail, he befriended Arthur Baldwin, another prisoner. He kept in occasional contact with Baldwin after Baldwin was released.

  In June or July of 1978 Baldwin mentioned a murder contract for $5,000. The target was James Earl Ray. Kirk, who was in jail at the time, believed that he wasn’t necessarily being asked to do the job himself but that the $5,000 was for putting out the contract and making the appropriate connections for Baldwin so that it could be carried out.

  Kirk remembered being puzzled as to why Baldwin who had a comfortable home on Balboa Circle, occasionally took rooms at the Executive Plaza Inn near the airport for business meetings. Baldwin’s wife had told Kirk to call her husband at that hotel; it was at that number that he had the conversation about the contract on Ray. Kirk did some checking. From talking to other inmates who had work
ed for Art Baldwin, Kirk concluded that Baldwin, who he believed had soon after been officially removed from the Tennessee area and placed with a new identity in a new location, was a member of the federal government’s Witness Protection Program as a result of his participation in an operation being mounted against certain state officials. He further concluded that the offer against Ray put out by Baldwin could have originated only with the government, because someone in Baldwin’s position, being a significant government informant, would be completely under their control. He said that he had heard from contacts at Brushy Mountain prison that James Earl Ray was “good people.” He therefore decided to get the word to Ray’s attorney at the time, Mark Lane.

  It was evident to both Ferguson and Rabbito that Kirk was in a state of considerable anxiety. He didn’t stand to benefit; in fact, it was a statement against his own interest. He didn’t ask for anything in exchange for the information, only emphasizing that his name should not be used.

  I MET WITH ARTHUR HANES, SR., Ray’s first lawyer, in February 1979 in his Birmingham law offices. He was cordial and cooperative. He said that he first viewed the balcony at the Lorraine from the bathroom in early September 1968. He said that even then it would have been extremely difficult to sight and shoot accurately through the remaining tree branches and tall bushes. Hanes noted that in September the foliage would have been fuller than it was in April, but nevertheless the tree branches themselves would have been an obstacle to challenge even the most competent marksman, which he said Ray certainly was not.

  Arthur Hanes said, “We were ready. We thought we had a terrific chance to win the case and we were very disappointed when we were released. We felt like the state’s case was largely circumstantial. In fact, I have not heard one new piece of evidence since we left the case. I believe I can fairly say we developed every piece of evidence that is available to this good day. As we neared trial time, of course, don’t forget the burden was not on us to prove or disprove anything. We were trying to use the holes in the state’s case to create the doubt it merited…. There was really no good testimony available to the state that the shot came from anywhere except those bushes…. And then you have the natural inconsistencies of the state’s case. The ballistics, the state couldn’t match this gun that Jimmy purportedly bought with a slug that was found in King’s body…. Then there was the package in Guy Canipe’s doorway. Mr. Canipe would say the package was thrown down there some two to five minutes before the shot was fired.”