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ORDERS TO KILL -- THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MURDER OF MARTIN LUTHER KING |
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Chapter 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 had 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 Law- son 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. Ac- cording 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 worked 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." This extraordinary statement, if true, meant that Ray was well and truly set up. Hanes told me that Canipe would have been a highly important witness for the defense. Hanes went on to tell me that when he had worked for the FBI, he had taken training in ballistics evidence. He said that he had examined the slug removed from Dr. King and that "there was certainly enough rifling left on the bullet to link it with a particular gun if the gun could have been found." Under oath, in his attempt to set aside the guilty plea in Ray's 1974 habeas corpus proceeding, Hanes testified that there was no question "that was a perfect evidence slug. If it had matched the rifle that was found in Canipe's amusement shop, the FBI testimony -- and of course we have seen dozens of times -- the FBI testimony would have been in my judgment, that the gun, to the exclusion of all others, fired this shot. What the testimony was going to boil down to was that this was a 30.06 rifle, and this was a 30.06 slug, and we were prepared to prove how many other 30.06's there were in the United States at the time, and in Memphis at the time, and in effect, completely investigate the firearms business." Ray, of course, didn't go to trial on November 12, 1968, but instead two days earlier dismissed Arthur Hanes and retained Percy Foreman. To this day, Ray maintains that that was a mistake. *** IN THE SUMMER OF 1979, Anna Ray insisted that I visit Knoxville lawyer Gene Stanley, a former assistant U.S. attorney for eastern Tennessee, who she learned had been attorney for Randy Rosenson, the man whose name was written on the government (L.E.A.A.) business card Ray had found. The L.E.A.A. stood for the Law Enforcement Administration, which at the time was sponsoring a number of pilot projects in selected cities. Anna had been tipped off by the manager of the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville. The manager had been approached by the HSCA, which was looking for Rosenson, who had previously stayed there while recovering from a car accident. The manager also told her that Stanley had previously represented Rosenson. Ray had always believed that there must be some connection between Raul and Rosenson, and in his search over the years for Raul, he tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to locate Rosenson, even having his brother jerry and a Tennessee lawyer go to New Orleans to pursue leads. In July 1979, Anna, Mark Lane, and I met with Stanley in his Knoxville offices. Stanley appeared nervous, although he had voluntarily agreed to see us. He had represented Rosenson when the latter was involved in a car accident in 1977, and later on a drug charge. He next heard from Rosenson in October 1977, when he was arrested and detained in Richmond, Virginia, on an Ohio warrant connected to a drug charge filed in the congressional district of the HSCA chairman, Louis Stokes. At that time, Stanley said, HSCA attorney Robert Lehner and staff investigators flew to Richmond to interview Rosenson. Stanley represented him during the interrogation and during a further two days of questioning by HSCA investigators in Atlanta. Stanley told us that Rosenson was connected to organized crime and had formed his associations in Miami and New Orleans as a result of drug use. He was employed in smuggling drugs and, while ostensibly in the import-export business, brought in a variety of wild animals to sell. He owned a pet shop and was involved in other types of contraband smuggling. When Rosenson was questioned about specific organized crime figures, he indicated that he knew them well. The HSCA continued its interrogation in Atlanta on October 26. According to Stanley, this time Lehner wasn't present and Chief Investigator Edward Evans and two other staff investigators conducted the extensive interrogation. Stanley maintained that the main line of questioning focused on Raul. He said he came away from the sessions with no doubt that the HSCA knew that there was a Raul, knew his identity, and believed that his operation was identical to the one Ray described. In informal conversations, the investigators told Stanley they had traced the man whom Ray referred to as Raul to Monterey, Mexico, claiming that he used the alias of "Raul de (or da) Gasso". They said that he smuggled contraband, particularly heroin, along a Mexico-Montreal-New Orleans triangle. Rosenson was able, said Stanley, to corroborate names, dates, and places of his contacts with this person, even to the point of identifying him from a portfolio of photographs the investigators showed him, although he didn't know him by the name they used. Stanley said he was mystified and greatly disappointed when the HSCA reported that, although it had found evidence that Randy Rosenson was in many of the same cities as James Earl Ray, it found no evidence that his former client had contact with Raul. He was disturbed that the committee even explicitly quoted Rosenson as saying that he knew nothing about' 'a Raul." I was excited about the confirmation of Raul's existence, but Anna Ray was upset. She said that Stanley had previously told her that the HSCA investigators had told him they believed Raul had been killed in a car accident in Mexico in or around 1972. *** DURING THIS TIME I acquired what might have been a hot tip or a piece of disinformation: a photocopy of a photograph of a building. I tried unsuccessfully to locate the source of this photocopy. In the top margin there was a handwritten note indicating that the building, which was within blocks of the scene of the crime, was owned by a relative of an organized crime figure and was where the rifle purchased by Ray was stored until April 4, 1968. *** IN THE DEFENSE FILE I came across the statements of two wit- nesses who seemed to provide Ray with an alibi and was astounded that no mention had ever been made of them. These statements were made by Ray Alvis Hendrix, a member of the Corps of Engineers working on a barge on the river; and William Zenie Reed, a photographic supplies salesman. The two men had been drinking together in Jim's Grill on the afternoon of April 4. Hendrix and Reed were staying at the nearby Clark's Hotel on Second Avenue. They left the bar sometime between 5:30 and 5:45. Hendrix realized that he left his jacket in the bar and went back in to retrieve it. Meanwhile, Reed, waiting outside, examined a Mustang parked in front of Jim's Grill. Since he was considering buying a car and was interested in the model, he gave it a fairly close look. When Hendrix emerged, the two men walked north on South Main, reaching Vance Avenue a couple of blocks away. They were about to cross the street when a white Mustang, also going north on South Main, caught up with them and made a right turn on to Vance. If they hadn't stopped, they could have been struck, though the car wasn't moving very fast. Reed observed that it was being driven by a young dark-haired man. Just a short time later, after they had reached their hotel, they heard sirens. Reed stated that while he couldn't be certain, the car turning on to Vance seemed to be the same car that he had been inspecting. Hendrix recalled that Reed had commented to that effect. The statements of Reed and Hendrix appear to corroborate Ray's story that he parked his Mustang in front of the grill and that he drove it away prior to the shooting to see about having a tire repaired. *** IN THE AUTUMN OF 1979, I was able to meet with the Louisville, Kentucky, police officer, Clifton Baird, whose story I had come across in the HSCA report. His allegations were so credible that their dismissal by the HSCA was on its face incomprehensible. Everyone who had worked with Baird or had known him agreed that he was an honest, diligent cop who played strictly by the rules. The HSCA agreed. On September 18, 1965, Louisville police officer Arlie Blair accepted Baird's offer to drive him home at the end of the 3-11 p.m. shift. As they had done on previous occasions, the two rode to Blair's house, parked for a while in the driveway around midnight, and talked. Arlie Blair was unaware that, on some of these occasions, Baird had taped their conversations with a recorder that he placed in a rear speaker with the micro- phone under his seat. Baird had come to distrust Arlie. Fearful of any kind of setup, for some time he had regarded his growing collection of tapes as a kind of insurance. Blair said he belonged to an organization that wanted Martin Luther King dead and was willing to pay $500,000 to accomplish this. He wanted to know whether Baird would participate in such a conspiracy. Baird told him he wanted no part of it and advised his fellow patrolman to stay away from such activity. At the time he was approached, Baird was himself under intense investigation by the FBI and police officials in his home town of Owensboro, Kentucky, in connection with the operation of a "dynamite ring" in western Kentucky. Consequently, he believed that the FBI and certain fellow police officials might have been preparing to compel him to take part in the King assassination plot by holding the investigation over him. He was also concerned that they might be trying to set him up. The investigation of Baird was completed long before the HSCA was formed, having concluded that he had no involvement whatsoever in the "bombing conspiracy." Sources close to the committee were quoted in a Scripps-Howard syndicated article published on March 28, 1977, as saying that Baird's claims of attempted blackmail' 'would explain why a veteran but low ranking policeman would have been approached by the alleged King conspirators." At afternoon roll call the day after he recorded Blair's offer, he saw Blair talking to a group of men, some of whom he recognized as Louisville police officers and others as FBI agents who, over a period of some sixteen years or more, had developed a close relationship with members of the force. He identified the FBI agents he knew as special agents William Duncan (the FBI liaison with the Louisville Police Department) and Robert Peters. The HSCA has also reported that the Louisville special agent in charge, Bernard Brown, was present. Baird told me that was possible because he didn't know Brown; there were other "men in suits" he didn't recognize. As he watched, one of the agents was introduced to Blair, and the entire group went into a room and closed the door. Listening in from out side the room, Baird heard the offer discussed in heated tones. He also heard himself referred to as a "nigger lover." Determined to get more information, Baird drove Arlie home the next evening, September 20, 1965. Once again, he tape recorded Blair's account and the reference to the $500,000. The tape that was made on September 18 has somehow disappeared, so the recording of September 20 is the only account in existence. Baird told me that he kept a copy and provided the original to the HSCA. He testified before the HSCA in executive session on November 30, 1977. Special agent Duncan admitted that the discussion took place but maintained that it was a joke inspired by Louisville police sergeant William Baker, deceased at the time of the hearings, and that agents Peters and Brown would con- firm his account. Contrary to Duncan's prediction, Peters and Brown denied any knowledge of the offer, as did Blair, who, however, admitted that the voice on the Baird tape recording was his own. Blair attributed his failing memory to physical and mental deterioration due to alcoholism. The committee completed a thorough background check of Clifton Baird, concluding that he was highly credible. A technical evaluation of the tape verified that it was of a type used in 1965. Nevertheless, the HSCA refused to connect in any way the subject of Baird's testimony -- the offer made on September 18, 1965 -- with the assassination of Dr. King in 1968. The committee dismissed it as a joke or, in any event, unrelated to later events. In a three-hour interview with me at the Louisville airport on September 5, 1979, Baird said he has never doubted that those agents were coordinating an offer to kill Dr. King, who was a frequent visitor to Louisville (King's brother A. D. lived there) .He said they clearly used Arlie Blair in an attempt to involve him in what he called a "serious business." Baird didn't believe they wanted him to be the gunman -- as he said, "they have access to professionals for that" -- but possibly they wanted him to be a "patsy ... like James Earl Ray probably was." As for Sergeant Baker's alleged joke, Baird said that it was incredible. Baker was assigned to Juvenile at that time and would have had little or no contact with those involved. He said he believed that Baker was named because "dead men make sorry witnesses." He also wondered why, if it was just a joke, ranking officers of the Louisville police department and the local FBI office would be involved; and why Peters and Brown would deny it ever happened? During our interview, Baird recounted numerous incidents from the summer of 1965 through spring of 1968 when at odd times and places -- the hospital, the police parking lot, and elsewhere -- he would be confronted by four FBI agents he knew who would block his path just staring impassively at him, as though trying to "spook" him. He also found indications that his mail was being opened. He believed that he was being watched and warned to keep quiet. Then, after Dr. King was killed, the harassment stopped; the pressure was off. Baird also told me that there was an unprecedented whole sale transfer of all the Louisville FBI agents to other field offices just before the assassination. He remembers the move coming as a real surprise because the staff had remained unchanged for such a long time. He believed that when the assassination plans had been formulated Hoover found it desirable to move the agents who had been involved in the previous attempt out of Louisville. (It was bureau policy that no agent be transferred without Hoover's personal approval.) Clifton Baird's account of his experience left me with little doubt that there was a serious effort made in September 1965 to organize an assassination attempt on Dr. King in Louisville. Although it wasn't clear who the sponsors were, federal agents were involved and they sought the assistance of their friends on the Louisville police force. The timing of this effort made sense. In 1965 Dr. King's prestige was considerable. Despite the efforts of the bureau and its allies within the previous year, and to the manifest outrage of bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover, King had received the Nobel Prize and had successfully fought off every subversive effort to discredit him. As I left the Louisville airport that day, I couldn't help but wonder when the decision to eliminate King was initially made and how many other scenarios had preceded the one carried out in Memphis on April 4, 1968. It occurred to me later that Clifton Baird's story may have been the basis for the information received and provided by Daniel Ellsberg, since Brady Tyson had referred to "a group of off duty FBI agents" as- signed the task of organizing the assassination of Dr. King. As this initial stage of my research drew to a close, sadly it was becoming ever more clear to me that the HSCA's failure to look closely at a number of leads guaranteed that the major questions surrounding Dr. King's murder had not been considered much less answered.
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