Orders to Kill Page 16

  It isn’t clear from Billet’s account whether the federal agents were simply communicating the availability of the contract or principally involved in ensuring that the job was done. Myron remembered the names of two of the agents—Lee Leland and Martin Bishop. In his earlier writings Billet also put a name to the third agent (Hunt), whom he had seen before. (It occured to me that he could have been referring to CIA agent E. Howard Hunt.)

  When I showed Myron some photographs, including those of Giancana, Gambino, and Roselli, without naming them, he recognized and named each of the mobsters. When he looked at Giancana’s photograph he smiled affectionately. “Yeah, that’s Sam.”

  My subsequent documentary research revealed that during much of late 1967 and early 1968 Sam Giancana was in Mexico. The meeting Billet referred to could have taken place only during one of his trips back to the United States, of which there were a number. Billet was in prison at the time he told his story to the HSCA, charged with concealing a body he had accidentally discovered. He remembered that the HSCA chairman himself, Louis Stokes, was with the group that interviewed him. The committee ultimately dismissed his allegations, but when he was released from prison and took up residence in Columbus some strange things began to happen.

  First, a man would appear regularly in the small shop on the ground floor of his building to ask about him. This man’s demeanor was such that Billet was sure he wanted him to know he was being watched.

  Second, at one time Billet had a heart attack. Sometime later a hospital administrator said that an official of the U.S. government had appeared at the hospital with instructions to remain outside Billet’s door until he was out of danger. Billet took this to mean that someone was concerned about preventing any death-bed revelations.

  Though suffering from some memory lapses which interfered with a detailed recollection of the twenty-year-old events, I believed Myron Billet to be sincere and his description of the working relationship between the mob and the federal government to be accurate.

  After leaving Billet, we went to visit Ray at Brushy Mountain Penitentiary. During the nearly ten years that had passed since I had last seen him, he had written a book, Tennessee Waltz, telling his side of the story. His account pulled together many of his previous recollections of his activity after his escape from prison on April 23, 1967.

  Ray had recently been denied an evidentiary hearing by the Memphis federal district court magistrate, but he was convinced he would have a chance with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was desperately looking for someone to represent him on the appeal. Mark Lane had long ago ceased to represent him. I offered to approach Russell Thompson, the Memphis attorney who had been involved in some peripheral legal and investigatory work when Art Hanes was Ray’s defense lawyer. Thompson said he would consider getting involved if I would assist and if April Ferguson, now a federal public defender, would help. I began to review a copy of Ray’s petition to the court.

  While in Memphis, I met for the first time with Art Hanes’s local investigator, Renfro Hays. Since he was also an investigator for Memphis attorney Walter Buford, who knew Jack Youngblood, he had come to learn about the government operative and mercenary. He maintained that Youngblood had been in Memphis a few days before the killing. Hays considered him to be very dangerous. He recalled that Youngblood owned a pickup truck and that the day before the killing he stood on it to cut down a tree branch at the rear of the rooming house that was obscuring a clear view from the bathroom window to the balcony of the Lorraine. It was not at all clear to me how Renfro knew this and I was skeptical, having become aware of earlier stories of his which mixed fact and fiction.

  Hays also went on about Raul Esquivel, the Louisiana state policeman stationed in Baton Rouge, who he thought was the salt-and-pepper-haired man Grace Walden allegedly saw in the rooming house. He believed that Esquivel, who he told me had once been a bodyguard for Louisiana governor Huey Long, was the shooter. Although it is of questionable reliability, Grace Walden identified a photograph of Raul Esquivel as the salt-and-pepper-haired man in front of Hays, Wayne Chastain, and her attorney at the time, Charles Murphy.

  I was intrigued. Hays seemed to be both sincere and fearful. He also mentioned the Baton Rouge telephone number he said had been given to Ray by Raul, which was the number of the state police barracks in Baton Rouge where Esquivel was assigned. As discussed earlier, this number had been referred to as early as 1969 by Jeff Cohen and Harold Weisberg. Later I obtained a credit report on Esquivel that showed a fairly large deposit in 1968. I found no verification that he had ever been a bodyguard for Huey Long.

  Hays also contended that a twelve-year-old black boy had seen the shooter and run up Mulberry to Butler and into the fire station, where he told his story to one of the firemen, who later informed the police. The police came and took the boy away; he wasn’t heard from again. Hays said that the fireman was having an affair with a local married woman and that he had told her his story. (I later tried to confirm Hay’s story by speaking to the woman he mentioned. Now remarried to a local lawyer, she denied even having known a fireman, much less having had an affair with one. I dropped that line of inquiry. Although I later spoke to most of the firemen on duty at the time, none of them recalled the incident.)

  Hays also mentioned Harvey “Ace” Locke, a sometimes shoe repairman and safecracker of no fixed address who would often stop by the South Main Street rooming houses looking for a room where he could “squat” for the night. A day or so before the killing he had been told about 5-B being vacant, and on April 4, not knowing it had just been rented, he opened the door in the late afternoon to see three or four persons already there, none of them resembling James Earl Ray. He quickly closed the door and went away. Though I searched hard for Locke, I was unable to find him, and eventually came to believe that he had died. As we parted company, Hays said to me, “You’re a nice young man. Why do you want to get involved with these people—they’re really dangerous. You’ll get yourself killed.”

  I interviewed Floyd Newsom, one of the black firemen removed from the fire station diagonally across from the Lorraine the evening before the killing. He told me he received a phone call the night of April 3 ordering him to report not to his home fire station 2 but to a firehouse in the northern, all-white section of the city, making him an extra man while leaving his home station a man short. He said he never got a proper explanation, even when he later left the department and it was revealed to him that this transfer was at the request of the police. It made no more sense than the similar transfer from fire station 2 of black fireman Norvell Wallace, who also left the station a man short and made an extra man where he was sent.

  BACK IN ENGLAND I learned that Russell Thompson had decided against handling Ray’s appeal. My primary interest continued to be learning the truth about the murder, but there were some important constitutional issues that cried out to be raised. I reluctantly agreed to take the appeal on myself. (This appeal is discussed in a later chapter.)

  ON MY NEXT VISIT TO MEMPHIS, Renfro Hays introduced me to Ken Herman, another local investigator, whose services I engaged. Herman and some of his contacts introduced me to a number of current and retired MPD officers. Until the end of October 1988, when I formally filed Ray’s appeal with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, I was introduced as an overseas writer doing some historical research on the assassination.

  It was in this context that I interviewed retired inspector Sam Evans. My interest in Evans centered on the pull back of the MPD TACT units on the afternoon of April 4. In particular I was interested in TACT 10 which was originally based at the Lorraine Motel and pulled back to fire station 2 on South Main Street. At our first session he acknowledged that these emergency units were under his direct command, but was reluctant to admit he had given any orders that they be pull back. He tried to change the subject at one point, recounting how he had slaughtered a big brown bear that had escaped from the zoo; with nothing less than boastful glee he described
how he killed the animal with a machine gun. Returning to the TACT issue, I reminded him of Chief Crumby’s affidavit provided to the HSCA in 1978, which confirmed that the units were pulled back. He finally remembered that they had probably been pulled back, but only as a result of the request of someone in Dr. King’s group. He said he couldn’t remember who had made the request. He said he was personally familiar with local colleagues of Dr. King, and that he used to chair the regular morning meetings with Reverend Lawson and the others during the strike. He said that he had a number of close contacts in that group who were leaders in the black community and who regularly provided him with information. It was clear that he was talking about valuable local informants. In this context he spoke of Solomon Jones and Walter Bailey, the owner of the Lorraine. In a subsequent session, Evans boasted that he knew Rev. Billy Kyles very well and that they spoke frequently, leading me to believe that Kyles was one of his sources of information in the black community. According to writer Philip Melanson, in 1985 Evans had admitted to him that the request to move the TACT units came from Kyles, although Kyles had emphatically denied making any such request.3

  Chief Crumby later confirmed that the request to pull back the TACT units had come the “day before” from someone in Dr. King’s group, and that the units were under the direct command of Sam Evans.

  Considering that Reverend Kyles had no role in Dr. King’s organization, it is unlikely that he would have been authorized to make such a request. It is also unlikely that the MPD would have acceded to any such suggestion because the TACT units were primarily antiriot forces and the city was expecting the worst.

  Some MPD officers who had worked with Marrell McCollough, the undercover officer attached to the Invaders, told me they had found him very much an outsider. He was originally from Mississippi and joined the police force after serving with the military in Vietnam. It was rumored that he went to work for the CIA some time in the early 1970s and was last heard of being in Central or South America.

  To FIND OUT MORE about the so-called hoax broadcast, Ken Herman took me to interview the people who were principal MPD dispatchers during the time of the assassination. The most informative was Billy Tucker, who said that he had handled the entire broadcast. In our noon meeting on October 29, 1988, he set out his recollections quite clearly.

  It was officer Rufus Bradshaw, Tucker said, who relayed the details of a chase in the northeast side of the city involving a blue Pontiac in pursuit of a white Mustang. At first Bradshaw said he was in pursuit himself, but later it became clear that he was relaying information from a CB operator—William Austein—who was parked alongside him. Austein was supposedly taking the details of the chase directly from the driver of the blue Pontiac, narrating over his CB. Soon it became obvious to Tucker that there was neither a chase nor a blue Pontiac but that the broadcast was designed to divert police attention toward the northeast area of Memphis. Tucker also confirmed that no all points bulletin, (general alert describing the suspect) as well as a Signal Y alert (instructing cars to block off city exit routes) were issued.

  Many of the other MPD interviews led nowhere. Officers whom one would have thought to be in a position to know details of what had happened were often graciously unhelpful.

  IN A RUN-DOWN ROOMING HOUSE on Peabody we found former taxi driver James McCraw, the driver who shortly before the killing had refused to transport the heavily intoxicated State’s chief witness Charlie Stephens. In his mid-to-late sixties McCraw spoke through a voice box that he held to his throat. He said that he was driving a taxi on the afternoon of April 4 and was dispatched to the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens in room 6-B on the second floor. He said that he arrived shortly before 6:00 p.m. and double-parked in front of the rooming house opposite the northernmost door. As he left his cab to go inside he noticed a delivery van parked outside and two white Mustangs parked within one hundred feet of each other, one in front of Jim’s Grill and the other just south of Canipe Amusement Company.

  He entered Stephens’s room and saw “old Charlie” passed out on his bed. He left, saying that he wasn’t going to “haul him.” He remembered seeing that the hall bathroom door was open and that the bathroom was apparently empty, both as he approached and as he left Stephens’s room. He said he got into his cab and went to pick up another fare. He hadn’t gone very far when an announcement came over his radio from the dispatcher about the shooting of Dr. King with an instruction for all drivers to stay away from the downtown area. McCraw insisted that he couldn’t have been gone from the rooming house more than a few minutes when he heard the announcement.

  This was an exciting discovery. If true, as the degree of detail indicated was likely, then the MPD, FBI, and HSCA’s conclusion about the shot coming from the bathroom made no sense at all. McCraw had been telling this story for a number of years and said he had told each and every investigator who asked him about the empty bathroom. His confirmation of Charlie Stephens’s drunken state within minutes of the shooting was further evidence which both supported Ray’s contentions and contradicted the official scenario.

  VERNON DOLLAHITE, stuffed into his desk chair in full deputy sheriff’s uniform with gun belt and holster, said he found the bundle in front of Canipe’s after the shooting. He said he was with TACT 10 on break at the fire station and when he heard about the shooting ran out the northeast door and jumped over the fence and onto the sidewalk on Mulberry Street. He raced to the motel parking lot, dropped his gun, picked it up, and continued north on Mulberry to Huling, where he proceeded west to South Main, leaving a fellow officer to stay in the vicinity of Huling and Mulberry. He stopped briefly at Jim’s Grill and told everyone to remain there until he returned. He then continued south past Canipe’s, returning to find the bundle. He was joined shortly by Lt. “Bud” Ghormley, the TACT 10 unit leader. Ghormley took charge of the bundle and Dollahite retreated to the other side of the street.

  Dollahite said his entire run took him less than two minutes, and he was certain he didn’t see the bundle before he entered Jim’s Grill when he was coming up South Main. He also didn’t see anyone or any car leaving the scene.

  Herman and I looked at each other. Dollahite had to have missed the bundle and must have been mistaken about the time it took him to complete his run. From what he said it would have been impossible for an assassin fleeing the rooming house to drop the bundle after shooting Dr. King, then get into the Mustang parked in front of Canipe’s and drive off without being seen by him. Something was wrong. Either Dollahite was off in his timing or he had spent more time than he realized in Jim’s Grill. I had read the statement given by Ghormley (who was dead by 1988); he maintained that he found the bundle after first heading in the same direction as Dollahite, deciding against jumping the wall, and went back out to South Main, going north to Canipe’s. Ghormley too estimated it took him around two minutes to arrive at the scene of the discarded evidence. He also didn’t see anyone or any car leaving. The two stories conflicted, but on balance it appeared to me more likely that Ghormley reached Canipe’s and the bundle first.

  I had also read the statements of Guy Canipe and two customers—Bernell Finley and Julius Graham. Individually and together they told a story of hearing a thud when the bundle was dropped and seeing a white male walking briskly by in a southerly direction. Very soon after, they said a white Mustang pulled away from the curb heading north. Julius Graham remembered hearing what he thought was a shot before all this happened.

  I remembered Art Hanes telling me Canipe would testify that the bundle was dropped minutes before the shot, but I was unable to speak with Canipe, who has since died. I was, however, able to locate an account of an interview with him by George Bryan, which appeared in the April 11, 1968, Commercial Appeal. Bryan wrote that Canipe said he saw a man drop a bundle in the doorway of his store and then continue walking. Canipe left his two customers, who were in the rear, and walked to the door, looked out, and saw the back of the man walking away. Within a
minute his customers, apparently hearing some noise outside which could have been the shot, ran to the front of the store as the man was driving away in a white Mustang that was parked about twenty feet south of the store.

  If the state’s contentions were to be believed, then the timing of this escape was incredibly fine. Apparently it had to have taken place within a minute of the actual shot.

  The MPD investigation concluded that there was only one Mustang, as by implication did that of the HSCA. I was about to gain firsthand further evidence that this conclusion was wrong.

  Ray has pretty consistently maintained that he didn’t move the Mustang he parked in front of Jim’s Grill until he finally left the area before 6:00 p.m. He said that he walked to the York Arms, a few blocks north of the grill, when he was sent by Raul to buy binoculars. The Mustang was also there, according to McCraw, when he entered the rooming house shortly before 6:00.

  I located and interviewed Peggy and Charles Hurley. Back in 1968 Peggy Hurley worked for the Seabrook Wallpaper Company, directly across the street from the rooming house. Each day her husband, Charles, would arrive to pick her up when she finished work around 5:00. He would park virtually in front of Canipe’s until she came out. On that Thursday afternoon, a fellow worker told Peggy that her husband had arrived around 4:45, earlier than usual. When she looked out the window she saw that the car that had just pulled up wasn’t their white Falcon but a white Mustang—and the young, dark-haired man sitting in it certainly was not Charles.