America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (24 page)

A truly flexible plan to kill King would need people willing and able to kill at longer range, professional hit men. Bowers had already developed ties to a group with that kind of skill set: the Dixie Mafia. Someone in the White Knights had approached Donald Sparks as part of the 1964 alpha plot to kill King, but the WKKKKOM could not raise the $13,000 bounty money in time. In 1967, with apparent access to money from James Venable, and with help from many of the Identity radicals involved in previous attempts to kill King, Bowers reached out to criminals with a bounty on King's life. Thus began the omega plot.

8

THE OMEGA

the
FINAL PLOT
to
ASSASSINATE MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., 1967–1968

I
t would be inaccurate to say that the omega plot began in the spring of 1967. Rather, evidence shows that the omega plot refined and expanded upon the alpha plot from 1964. It would be more accurate to say that in executing the omega plot, Identity terrorists revived a dormant plan, developed by the White Knights, to use a contract killer to murder King, a plan that didn't succeed because the White Knights could not raise the bounty money in time. If the earlier concerns over money had given Dixie Mafia members pause when it came time to accept another contract offer on King's life, in 1967–1968, the new dollar amount likely overrode any qualms: From $13,000 in 1964, the offer had ballooned to $100,000.
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But by 1967 the original constituents of the 1964 alpha plot both were in prison. The FBI had finally arrested Donald Sparks in early 1967, after a spree of home and bank robberies that had landed the Tulsa-based criminal on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Convicted not long after, Sparks was sent to federal prison in Alabama. Sparks's fellow gang member Leroy McManaman was serving his sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, a result of a 1963 conviction for the interstate transportation of stolen cars. McMamanan joined Sparks in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 while out on appeal bond. (He lost the appeal in April 1964.) While in Jackson, McManaman stayed with a local businesswoman, real estate agent Sybil Eure. The record shows that Eure had maintained contact with McManaman since he had lost his federal appeal, visiting him more than any of McManaman's family members did and engaging in ongoing correspondence with the felon through the prison mail. It is possible that Eure provided McManaman with the update on the growing bounty offer. Or McManaman could have received the information through criminal contacts in Leavenworth. Increasingly, by 1967 not only
did the Dixie Mafia have a network of gangs inside prisons, but gang members also helped plan crimes while still serving time.

Such was the case when McManaman approached fellow prisoner Donald Nissen with an offer to kill King in the spring of 1967. Nissen did not belong to any Dixie Mafia gang, but he had enjoyed a successful criminal career in home robberies and similar crimes. Convicted in 1963 for forgery, Nissen kept to himself in Leavenworth. He did not associate with McManaman, although the two worked together in Leavenworth's shoe factory. But McManaman likely knew something about Nissen that made Nissen an attractive candidate for use in a King murder conspiracy. In a matter of weeks, Nissen would be released from Leavenworth with a prearranged job as a book salesman. As a traveling salesman, Nissen could travel across the country without raising alarms. Similarly, he could justify such travels to investigators if he became a suspect. To a criminal conspiracy that stretched across state lines, such mobility could be valuable. But however much he could travel without scrutiny, it was Nissen's ultimate base of operations that likely enhanced his résumé as a potential conspirator. Nissen's future residence would be in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr.'s hometown.

With that likely in mind, McManaman offered Nissen two possible roles in the omega plot. Nissen could be a scout who tracked King's movements and reported the information to go-betweens, who could relay it to other contract killers. Or, if Nissen wanted to obtain a larger share of the $100,000 bounty, the soon-to-be-released con could also directly participate in King's murder. In addition, McManaman hoped that Nissen would approach his cell mate, John May, about taking a role in the plot. May was an expert machinist, and McManaman hoped Nissen could convince his friend to help design a rifle specifically suited to kill the civil rights leader.

Donald Nissen wanted no part of any murder plot against King—or against anyone else for that matter. In his previous crimes, he had used violence only once, reluctantly, to pacify an aggressive homeowner during a robbery. He had never even fired a gun. But McManaman's offer placed Nissen in a compromising position. Nissen knew that by saying no to McManaman, he risked retaliation; McManaman might kill Nissen in fear that he would talk.
On the other hand, saying yes would implicate Nissen in a criminal conspiracy. Nissen told his story to his cell mate, John May, more to talk through the dilemma than to recruit the machinist to design a special gun with which to kill King. Nissen ultimately decided to say nothing either way. He thought, incorrectly, that by waiting out McManaman, he could avoid violence and extricate himself from the plot. On the first account, Nissen was correct: He left Leavenworth prison in May 1967 without any attack from McManaman. But as it will become clear, McManaman took Nissen's silence as tacit consent to a conspiracy. Nissen would come to understand that—but only later, after events had trapped him inside a conspiracy he wanted nothing to do with.
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Nissen did not know that other bounty offers, similar to the one offered by the White Knights and fronted by McManaman, were circulating throughout America's prison system. Records suggest, for instance, that also in 1967, a group of unidentified, wealthy Georgia businessmen bribed guards in a federal prison in Atlanta to approach prisoners with a bounty offer on King. The son of one of the prison guards (his sister confirmed the story to the author) reported the offer to the FBI in the mid-1970s, after his father had died under suspicious circumstances; the father apparently had taken affidavits from prisoners and used them to blackmail the businessmen.
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Following the father's death, the mother hid or destroyed those records. But it is in another prison where offers of a bounty on King likely contributed to the leader's ultimate death.

At Missouri State Penitentiary (MSP) in Jefferson City, several prisoners reported either hearing about or being approached with a proposal to murder King for money. Some details are vague and difficult to make sense of, so it is hard to tell if the prisoners were describing the same bounty or more than one offer. That said, the general outlines suggest that some group, located in the South, offered a considerable amount of money to any MSP inmate who could help assassinate King. Some doubt the veracity of these claims, arguing that the prisoners fabricated reports of MSP bounty offers based on the promise of a large reward from law enforcement or reduced prison sentences for their help in apprehending King's assassin. Some of the reports lack credibility. But several of the prisoners who
spoke of a bounty had already been released from Leavenworth; some openly rejected a monetary reward. More importantly, in one instance, corroboration for a bounty came from an unpaid law enforcement source who had served time in the Jefferson City prison and had gone on to work for the police for three years.

The specific plot, confirmed by two prisoners, traced back to two St. Louis businessmen with close ties to the National States Rights Party. The dollar amount was high: one prisoner said he was offered $50,000 to participate in a murder conspiracy against King.
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This bounty offer, or something like it, likely captured the attention of the most significant figure in any discussion of the King assassination: James Earl Ray, the man who, according to official accounts, assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968. A St. Louis native with a history of arrests for armed robbery and similar offenses, Ray was motivated by the pursuit of money far more than anything else, according to his brothers and others. Several prisoners, some of whom were close to Ray, say that Ray spoke glowingly about the prospect of a King bounty. Some prisoners attributed this enthusiasm as latent racial animus on Ray's part, but while the evidence suggests that Ray shared the kind of prejudice common to those raised in Jim Crow Missouri, he had never participated in any racial violence. On the other hand, a bounty prize of $50,000 or $100,000 represented far more cash than Ray had ever stolen in any robbery.

Still, in 1967 Ray faced another twelve years of prison time at MSP, the result of a conviction for robbing a Kroger convenience store in 1959; participating in any conspiracy against Martin Luther King Jr. would be impossible—unless he escaped. To that end, Ray finagled his way into work detail at the prison bakery that “made the bread for the institution and its outlying farms and honor dorms. Every day, a truck laden with bread would head out of the prison away from the city toward the remote farms.” Ray, who had failed at escaping twice before, succeeded on April 23, 1967, when, with “the assistance of another prisoner,” he climbed “into a large 4-by-4 bread box, covering himself with a false bottom and having the accomplice cover the crate with loaves of bread. The box was pushed onto the truck with the other boxes and after a cursory search by guards.”
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Ray's decisions and actions in the first several months following his escape suggest that any bounty offer was of secondary importance to him. Ray assumed false identities and aliases, worked odd jobs, and raised money through criminal activity, first in St. Louis and then Chicago, with one goal in mind: reaching Canada. There he could obtain a fake passport and travel documents to escape North America. As will become clear, Ray's failure to execute this plan likely made a King bounty more attractive to the fugitive. It would be several months before he became part of the omega plot.

From the time of his conviction in 1969 to the day he died of liver disease in 1997, James Earl Ray insisted that he never knew of any bounty on King's life. He claimed that he had never agreed to join any murder plot. He asserted that others, notably a mysterious criminal mastermind whom he knew only as Raul, had manipulated him into incriminating behavior, such as buying a sniper rifle. As the remaining narrative will make clear, the Raul story allowed Ray to deflect blame away from himself and the actual conspirators onto others, such as the U.S. government. It was a ploy to get him out of prison and possibly to help him collect a share of the bounty money he had failed to obtain prior to his 1969 conviction.

The omega plot likely did involve a patsy—just not Ray. This individual came to the attention of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi at the same time that Leroy McManaman proposed the bounty to Donald Nissen, which was the same time that Ray escaped MSP in a breadbox. Thomas Albert Tarrants, then a twenty-year-old Christian Identity radical from Mobile, Alabama, had migrated to Laurel, Mississippi, in April 1967. He wanted to offer his services to the most actively violent white supremacist in the nation: Samuel Holloway Bowers. Despite his young age, Tarrants could point to a host of influential Christian Identity radicals to vouch for him, including Admiral John Crommelin, Noah Carden, and Sidney Barnes (all partners in the 1963 Birmingham assassination attempt on King). These men had mentored Tarrants and nourished his rage since the young man had quit high school in 1963 out of disgust with racial integration. Tarrants convinced the always-skeptical Bowers that they were like-minded in their opposition to racial equality, to communism, and most importantly to Jews.

It is unclear whether Bowers identified Tarrants as a future scapegoat in a King murder plot during their first months of contact in 1967. For a while at least, Tarrants served another important purpose for Bowers, as leader of a team of outsiders who could perpetrate violence while eluding law enforcement. By 1967, with an ever-dwindling pool of native Mississippians to use in terrorist operations, someone like this became more and more necessary.

Bowers already feared the kind of infiltration and surveillance employed by the FBI in its COINTELPRO operations. But in Mississippi the level of harassment from the Jackson FBI field office went far beyond the disruptive dirty tricks associated with COINTELPRO; it reached a level of intensity that stretched the bounds of legal propriety. The record now shows that during its investigation of the murder of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer in 1966, the FBI used out-of-state mobsters to bully and threaten KKK members, pressuring them to reveal details of their crimes.
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Jackson's FBI agents looked the other way as the local police fired warning shots into the homes of KKK members and physically accosted them in front of their families.
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The White Knights countered the FBI with a level of bravado not seen in other Klan–FBI rivalries throughout the nation. The White Knights even placed FBI agents on hit lists. In 1967 a caravan of KKK members forced a team of FBI agents, who had been following other KKK members as part of a surveillance operation, off the road. The Klan members held the FBI agents at gunpoint while the target of their surveillance mission, Joe Daniel (Danny Joe) Hawkins, exited his vehicle and confronted the agents. A young precocious racist whose entire family, including his father and mother, dedicated their lives to the White Knights, Hawkins proceeded to smack one of the FBI agents. He and the others knew that they could escape criminal liability because the White Knights had infiltrated and compromised Mississippi juries and local and state law enforcement agencies. That level of hubris infuriated the FBI even more.
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