American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (8 page)

By now, Gene Roberts, the security guard sent in as an infiltrator by the NYPD, had become a friend and admirer of Malcolm X. “I learned to love the man; respect him. I think he was a good person.” So when he observed a false disruption scene in the audience at one of Malcolm's talks, Roberts called his supervisors and said: “Listen, I just saw the dry run on Malcolm's life,” adding that he thought it might happen at the Audubon Ballroom the next Sunday.
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“And they said, okay, we'll pass it on,” Roberts remembered. “What they did with it I don't know ... I don't think they really cared.” The same day of Roberts's alert, Malcolm X said to a friend: “I have been marked for death in the next five days. I have the names of five Black Muslims who have been asked to kill me. I will announce them at the [Sunday] meeting.”
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Malcolm X didn't carry a gun. He even ruled against anybody getting searched before being allowed in to his last speech. That Sunday morning, he was awakened by a phone call to his room at the New York Hilton: “Wake up, brother,” the voice said. Malcolm called his sister, Ella, in Boston, and told her: “I feel they may have doomed me for this day.”
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Five men from Newark Mosque 25 had checked out the Audubon Ballroom's floor plan at a dance there on Saturday night. The next afternoon, the men entered the ballroom with their weapons concealed under their coats. Talmadge Hayer sat in the front row left, carrying a .45 automatic; next to him was Leon Davis, with a Luger. A few rows behind them sat William X with a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun. The organizer of the killing squad, Benjamin Thomas, was next to him. Toward the back of the ballroom, Wilbur X waited to start the disturbance that would divert everyone's attention.

Before he came onstage, Malcolm X told his aides that what was happening to him lately went far beyond what the NOI alone could do. He walked out to a standing ovation. When he soon heard what seemed like a fight, he left the podium and went to the front of the stage. “Now, now, brothers break it up. Hold it, hold it,” he said. Those were his last words. Bodyguard Gene Roberts, seated toward the back, recognized the tactic he'd seen before and headed down the aisle. In the rear, Wilbur X threw a smokebomb. The audience started screaming. William X, from fifteen feet away, made a circle in Malcolm X's chest with a dozen shotgun pellets. Hayer and Davis then riddled his body with shots from their pistols. As Hayer ran for the exit, Roberts grabbed a chair. Hayer fired again, hitting his suit jacket but not penetrating Roberts' body, who then knocked Hayer down with the chair. When he rose limping, another security guard shot him in the left thigh. Outside, the gunman found himself surrounded by an angry crowd that started beating him. The one policeman stationed in the vicinity then pulled Hayer away and shoved him into a cop car. Onstage, Roberts found a hint of a pulse and tried to resuscitate Malcolm X, but couldn't do it.

All the assailants except Hayer escaped. Two New York enforcers for the NOI were hauled into custody a week after the assassination. The three of them went on trial a year later. Some questionable witnesses, contradicting testimony they'd given to a grand jury, claimed they'd seen them all shooting. On the stand, Hayer confessed to his own role and truthfully said that the other two were not involved. But he wouldn't name the actual coconspirators, so his testimony was dismissed. All three were convicted and received life prison sentences. The FBI had kept close tabs on the trial, their main concern being to protect from exposure the informants and undercover agents they'd planted in Malcolm's organization.
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It wasn't until the late 1970s that Hayer named the others involved, hoping to get the House Committee on Assassinations to conduct a new investigation. That didn't happen, and the other killers have never been brought to justice. As of 1989, Leon Davis was still living in the vicinity of Paterson, New Jersey. William X (Bradley) was doing time in Bergen County for another crime, but refused to talk to an author who tried.
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There is also a confidential FBI report to Hoover about a witness who said: “John Ali met with Hayer the night before Malcolm X was killed.”
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It's a known fact that John Ali “had come in from Chicago on February 19th, checked into the Americana Hotel in midtown Manhattan and checked out on the evening of February 21”—meaning he'd arrived just in time for the final rehearsal of the murder.

When Leon Ameer, a 32-year-old aide to Malcolm X, went to the FBI about ten days after the assassination to talk about a conspiracy that included elements of the government, he was found dead a few days later in his Boston apartment. First it was ruled a suicide, then a drug overdose, and finally “natural causes.”
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The official history is that Malcolm X's was a “revenge killing” by men connected to Elijah Muhammad. But notice how nearly all of them were never caught, only the one guy that got injured. All signs point to a conspiracy that went way beyond the Nation of Islam. We didn't know at the time about the CIA's “Executive Action”program to get rid of certain foreign leaders. For years, the agency had been plotting to assassinate Castro. In 1960 they'd come up with a plan to kill the Congo's Patrice Lumumba by infecting his toothbrush with a fatal disease. At least eight foreign heads of state were targeted during those Cold War years, and five of them died violent deaths. Given this fact, how can we not believe they'd also go after an “undesirable” like Malcolm X?

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1968 I was living a sheltered life in south Minneapolis, enjoying being a kid with my GTO and playing defensive end on my undefeated high school football team. There were never any racial tensions at my school. My best black friend in a predominantly white school was elected Winter Sports King. To me, Dr. King was a TV personality, whom you always saw walking arm-in-arm in front of a group of people and they had a cause. At the time, protests were peaking against the Vietnam War. But I was the flag-waving young American, being naïve and believing what I was taught in school, the domino effect of Communism and all that. After I graduated, I joined the navy.

So, while I remember being shocked by Dr. King's assassination, Minneapolis didn't see much if any rioting as happened in other cities. Two months later, when James Earl Ray was picked up in London and charged with the killing, I accepted what the authorities said and figured justice would be served. It was many years later when I began to question the official line. This happened in 1997, when King's son, Dexter, met face-to-face with Ray in a Tennessee prison. Ray was dying of liver disease. I read about Dexter King asking him point-blank, “Did you kill my father?” Ray answered him, “No, I didn't.” And Dexter King said, “I believe you, and my family believes you.”
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I thought, wow, if that's the case, then there's a lot more to Dr. King's killing than meets the eye.

Then, in 1999, the King family brought a wrongful death lawsuit in a Tennessee Circuit Court. A nearly month-long trial ensued. Seventy witnesses were called. It took the jury only two and a half hours to come back with a verdict that Dr. King was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.
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In the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial where TV had gavel-to-gavel coverage, you'd think the media would have been all over this. Trial of the century, maybe? Not so. I read where only one Memphis TV reporter, and one freelance journalist, covered the whole proceeding. I consider this another indictment of our media. Because O.J.'s trial, regardless of what a major personality he was and how entertaining it was to everyone, didn't affect anyone really. Not to the level of Martin Luther King's killing, which affected masses of people and had a far-reaching impact on society as a whole. Has the United States been so “dumbed down” that people are more concerned about the titillating news of a celebrity sports star and his murdered white girlfriend, than about the killing of a great leader like King? (If you want to find out what happened at the trial, the entire 4,000-word transcript is at
www.thekingcenter.com
.)

Let's start with a little context for what happened in the early evening of April 4, 1968, when a single shot struck Dr. King as he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He'd just come from leading a peaceful march of Memphis sanitation workers who'd gone on strike. Very soon he was planning to go to Washington for the Poor People's Campaign, prepared to inspire massive civil disobedience and shut down the Capitol if that's what it took to put poverty on the front burner. He was also going beyond civil rights and speaking out strongly against the Vietnam War.

A year to the day before his death, Dr. King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In essence, Dr. King said things just as inflammatory as Obama's minister, Reverend Wright. I think King would probably be locked up for talking like that now. We have streets named after him, and a holiday in his name—how come we're not listening to what he said? We completely ignore the very teachings he taught and the honesty that he showed. We also ignore that the powers that be got rid of him.

The FBI's attempt to destroy Dr. King as the leader of the civil rights movement involved “attempts to discredit him with churches, universities, and the press,”
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the Senate's Church Committee concluded a decade later. Walter Fauntroy was a colleague of Dr. King's who served 20 years in Congress and, between 1976 and 1978, was chairman of the House subcommittee looking into the assassination. Their report concluded that Ray did assassinate King, but that he probably had assistance. “It was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces,” Fauntroy testified at the civil trial, saying he'd found electronic bugs on his TV set and phone. Fauntroy later said that, after he left Congress, he found information from Hoover's logs, showing that the FBI director had a series of meetings with persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence (MI) in the three weeks before King's assassination; also that there were MI agents as well as Green Berets in Memphis the night he was shot.
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So was James Earl Ray, a petty crook who escaped from a Missouri prison a year before the murder, a patsy like Oswald? Supposedly, he fired from the bathroom window of a rooming house a little more than 200 feet away. A tenant on the second floor said he heard a shot “and saw a man fleeing down the hallway from the direction of the bathroom,” according to the House committee report. Ray went down some outside stairs and jumped into his white Mustang in an alley. Along the way he allegedly dropped a bundle that happened to include a Remington 30.06 rifle, some binoculars, and a sales receipt for ammunition. Ray's prints were on the rifle, which had one spent shell in the chamber.

Isn't it interesting how these lone-nut assassins seem to incriminate themselves in advance with dumb moves? I suppose they wouldn't want to be seen walking with the weapon, which could draw attention, but why on earth leave a weapon behind with your fingerprints all over it? Wouldn't you have a predetermined place where you're going to ditch it? Certainly not out in the open where anyone could find it! Or, in the case of Oswald, taking the rifle to the other side of the floor and tossing it behind some book boxes. What gets me is, the assassins are so “successful” in accomplishing the mission, but then utterly inept in the evacuation from the mission. They leave clues that point straight to themselves, and seem to always get caught fairly easily. Here they supposedly did all this sophisticated stuff up until it came time to pull off the killing. Yet it's like they never planned for the escape. I guess we're supposed to believe their minds are so focused on delivering the death blow that escape never enters into the plan. Then after they shoot, it's “oh, well what do I do now?” In the case of Oswald, it's run home and then go to the movies!

Later, Ray claimed that somebody else had left behind the bundle so as to incriminate him. In fact, one witness, Guy Canipe, said the package was actually dropped in the doorway to his store about ten minutes
before
the shot was fired. Makes a little more sense, doesn't it? Another witness, Olivia Catling, saw a fellow in a checkered shirt running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine soon after the killing, who went screaming off in a green '65 Chevy. Ray, though, fled the scene in a white Mustang.

Judge Joe Brown, the first judge on the King family's civil case, spent two years examining technical questions about the murder weapon, and said that “67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle.” When he called for more tests, he was taken off the case for showing “bias” by a Tennessee appeals court. “What you've got in terms of the physical evidence relative to ballistics is frightening,” he said later. “First, it's not the right type of rifle. It's never been sighted in. It's the wrong kind of scope. With a 30.06, it makes a particularly difficult shot firing at a downward trajectory in that circumstance.” Above all, according to Brown, “Metallurgical analysis excludes the bullet taken from the body of Dr. King from coming from the cartridge case they say was fired in that rifle.”
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The actual sniper seems to have fired from behind some tall shrubs facing the second floor motel balcony. A Memphis newspaper reporter named Wayne Chastain had arrived at the scene within ten minutes. He was told by two witnesses, King's chauffeur and a lawyer, that the shot came from those bushes. Andrew Young told the FBI that he heard a sound like a firecracker come from the bushes above the retaining wall across the street from the motel.

By the next morning, according to the Reverend James Orange, an associate of King's, “the bushes were gone. The authorities were said to be cleaning up the area.”
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Why in all these cases does the government come in and make the most cardinal error you possibly could—and that is, disturb the crime site! When there's a violent crime, they're not supposed to do that! It's one of the first procedures any cop is taught, basic Police 101. So who gives the order to do this? Don't any of them sit and wonder, why are we not doing this according to the book, but instead breaking a cardinal rule of police work. But when there's an assassination, all local and state laws go out the window, and authority comes down from above about what's to happen. Isn't that the fox guarding the chicken house? The feds doing all the investigating and questioning just reeks of potential abuse.

So Ray has a car waiting to drive away in, then goes up to Canada and overseas, where he ends up getting caught two months later at the London airport. All by himself, right? No one aiding or abetting him in any way, shape, or form. Like Judge Joe Brown put it: “You want to say that a three-time loser, an escaped convict with no obvious financial resources and no technical knowledge, is going to not only miraculously learn how to become a good marksman: This one individual is able to acquire the resources to get identities of deceased individuals, come up with very good forgeries for passports and fake identification, and somehow acquire funds for a very expensive itinerary and travel schedule? Now, be real! ... what you've got in this case was a stooge whose task was to throw everybody off the trail.”
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While he was being held in a British jail before getting extradited, Ray told an officer that he'd expected to profit from being involved in the killing; later, he testified to the House committee that he figured he'd only be charged with “conspiracy.” His second attorney, Percy Foreman, convinced Ray to cop a plea or else face the death penalty. Foreman later said he didn't give a damn whether there was a conspiracy or not, and never asked Ray about it. Ray reluctantly agreed to plead guilty, but pretty soon felt he'd been hung out to dry. When he died in prison in 1998, he was still saying he was innocent.

It would be a stretch to say that Ray wasn't involved at all. For one, there was big money being floated by Klan types that he certainly could have heard about. The question is, who was directly involved with Ray, and how far did the plotting go? But—no trial. Why aren't we having trials in such high-profile cases even when the guy pleads? It should go ahead anyway, just for the country's peace of mind. Then we'd know, well, he was tried and convicted and there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Or let the chips fall where they may, let the trial show enough evidence to get a couple more indictments. Just because you get a plea, isn't there any suspicion that someone is doing that to cover up for someone else? Is this guy simply falling on the sword?

In a book published in 2008,
Legacy of Secrecy
, we finally learned about a 1968 Justice Department memorandum that got withheld from congressional investigators. Based on confidential information from informers, including a “well placed protégé of Carlos Marcello in New Orleans,” the memo says, “the Cosa Nostra [Mafia] agreed to ‘broker' or arrange the assassination [of King] for an amount somewhat in excess of three hundred thousand ($300,000) after they were contacted by representatives of ‘Forever White,' an elite organization of wealthy segregationists [in the] Southeastern states. The Mafia's interest was less the money than the investment-type opportunity presented, i.e., to get in a position to extract (or extort) governmental or other favors from some well placed Southern white persons, including the KKK and White Citizens' Councils.”
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The memo was based on sources located by a journalist named William Sartor. The FBI didn't show much interest in going after his leads, but Sartor had uncovered information about a pre-assassination meeting between Ray and three of Marcello's associates in New Orleans—after which Ray left town with $2,500 cash and a promise of $12,000 more “for doing one last big job in 2 to 3 months.”
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Turns out that journalist Sartor was in Texas in 1971, preparing to interview a nightclub owner linked to Marcello, when he was found murdered.
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