America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (25 page)

But in 1967 the scales of official justice finally began to turn against the White Knights. Increasingly, the Justice Department began to use early civil rights laws, some dating back to the Reconstruction era, to charge KKK members with crimes in federal, rather
than local, courts. Such cases were far less apt to be corrupted by tainted juries or racist law enforcement officers. In February 1967 the Justice Department leveled federal charges against several of the conspirators in the Neshoba murders, including Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, Wayne Roberts, and Sam Bowers himself. With the Imperial Wizard and his longtime followers under constant harassment and scrutiny, Bowers decided on his most brilliant move yet: assembling a team of dedicated terrorists, unknown to the FBI, to perpetrate one of the worst waves of arson and bombing ever seen in Mississippi. As part of Bowers's plan, Tarrants, the outsider from Alabama, became, in his own words, “the chief terrorist for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.”

Bowers took this devious plan to another level when he teamed Tarrants with a female, Kathy Ainsworth. Historically, women served an auxiliary role for the Klan. At rare times, some women assumed positions of leadership. But women were never used to perpetrate acts of violence—that is, before Kathy Ainsworth.

A pretty young married elementary schoolteacher, Ainsworth defied all profiles of a KKK operative. But she was a true believer, raised on hate in Florida by her single mother, Margaret Capomacchia, a woman whose bigotry made George Wallace look like a Freedom Rider. Capomacchia took her daughter on trips to Mobile to visit Sidney Barnes, where Kathy became indoctrinated into the teachings of Wesley Swift. She roomed with Barnes's daughter at college in Mississippi, and Barnes gave Kathy away at her wedding to Peter Ainsworth. Privately, Barnes did not approve of the marriage, as Peter Ainsworth did not belong to any radical white supremacist groups. Barnes had wanted Kathy to marry Tommy Tarrants; the two young Identity believers had met at Barnes's home in Alabama sometime before Tarrants had moved to Mississippi, before Kathy Ainsworth had met her future husband.

Unbeknownst to her husband, Kathy Ainsworth began training in firearms and explosives in 1967. Along with Hawkins and another young KKK member, Benny Waldrup, Tarrants and Ainsworth became part of what another KKK leader Laude E. (L.E.) Matthews called the Swift Underground.

As summer approached, the always-paranoid Sam Bowers insisted that he and Tarrants meet in the woods of Laurel to elude surveillance. Even then, the Imperial Wizard demanded that they communicate by exchanging notes on paper, for fear that the FBI might be listening. They burned the correspondence after each meeting. Tarrants later said that the get-togethers often involved exchanging ideas about Swift's latest sermons and planning future violent operations in Mississippi. Today, having long abandoned Christian Identity theology and racial violence, Tarrants asserts that he never heard of any plot to kill King. Bowers may have been compartmentalizing his operations to limit exposure to infiltration and disruption. His choosing to outsource the omega plot to contract killers suggests exactly that. In betting on the Dixie Mafia's cooperation and silence, Bowers was placing his faith in a group whose members rarely cooperated with law enforcement as informants and who routinely murdered their own on account of disloyalty.

But Donald Nissen was not part of the Dixie Mafia. While Tarrants and Bowers discussed Christian Identity theology in the forests of Laurel, Nissen, just released from Leavenworth Penitentiary, encountered a roadblock on his trip to Atlanta. Having gone to Texas to pick up a company car to travel to Georgia, Nissen was arrested by officers in Sherman, Texas, on charges of check fraud that predated his stay at Leavenworth. Privately, Nissen knew he was guilty of the crime, but he also knew that the case was too weak to be successfully prosecuted. Apparently, so did the local sheriff, who detained Nissen in jail while refusing to arraign him in court. In essence, Nissen found himself detained without charge, with nothing to suggest that the situation would change. He knew that if he could get word to federal authorities, the situation would likely be resolved. But he also saw this as an opportunity to fully divorce himself from any murder conspiracy hatched by Leroy McManaman. Nissen managed to sneak a note out to the Bureau of Prisons, making sure to say that he had information about a murder conspiracy.
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On June 2, 1967, two FBI agents from the Dallas field office visited Nissen in the Sherman, Texas, jail. According to their report, the agents told Nissen that they would not promise to help him with his current dilemma. Nissen chose to provide them with information on
the King plot anyway. He relayed McManaman's offer to the FBI: the $100,000 bounty fronted by the White Knights to kill King; the two available roles in the conspiracy (as a scout or as a direct participant in the murder). He told them about John May, his cell mate, whom McManaman hoped would design a gun to kill King. He even gave them details on the go-betweens, the people Nissen would use to maintain indirect connection to McManaman. One of these cutouts was a federal law enforcement officer out of Mississippi, but Nissen could not remember either his first or last name. Nissen did know the first name, but only the first name, of the second go-between: someone named Floyd. Nissen knew the full name and location of the third go-between: Sybil Eure of Jackson, Mississippi. The Dallas FBI passed that information on to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
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Either the FBI or officials in the Bureau of Prisons soon told a judge about Nissen's legal predicament, and as Nissen had predicted, the Sherman, Texas, prosecutors could not develop a case against him. Within days, Nissen was released from the Sherman jail and had found his way to Atlanta. He thought, wrongly, that he had exculpated himself from the omega plot by revealing the details to the FBI.

Indeed, in early June 1967, not long after Nissen arrived in Atlanta, someone named Floyd approached him to ask a favor. Floyd Ayers, a fellow salesman, asked Nissen to drop off a package at a real estate office in Jackson, Mississippi. Such requests were routine among salesmen, and Nissen agreed, thinking nothing of it. When he next visited Mississippi, sometime in late June or early July by his reckoning, Nissen visited the address provided by Ayers. Nissen was surprised to see that the real estate office was not an office but someone's home; he was also surprised that the manager of the office was a relatively tall, modestly attractive middle-aged woman. He gave her the package, and they barely exchanged words.

Nissen did not know that the woman was Sybil Eure, the same woman whom McManaman had named in Leavenworth as the third go-between in the King operation, the same woman who had provided shelter to McManaman during the alpha plot in 1964. Nissen knew nothing about any alpha plot to begin with. (Larry Hancock and I established the particulars of the 1964 Sparks/McManaman
assassination attempt only after 2006.) Nissen did not realize that Floyd Ayers was likely the Floyd whom McManaman had named as the second go-between in the omega plot. In several interviews with the author since 2009, Nissen asserted that he always assumed the go-between Floyd was a Mississippian, as was the case with other two cutouts (Eure and the unknown federal law enforcement officer). Moreover, Nissen, understandably, did not realize, after their interaction in prison, that McManaman viewed his nonanswer as some sort of affirmation that Nissen wanted to help murder Martin Luther King Jr.

Some of these revelations came into focus only recently, but others became clear within weeks of Nissen's trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1967. Nissen cannot recall if it was weeks or months later, but Floyd Ayers eventually revealed to Nissen the contents of the package that the ex-con had delivered to the real estate office in Mississippi: money for a bounty offer on Martin Luther King Jr. As it turns out, Floyd Ayers had worked closely with James Venable, the Grand Wizard of the NKKKK, who had fronted $25,000 for a bounty on King in 1965.

An eccentric individual, Ayers was a perfect conduit to move money from white supremacists in the Southeast to Bowers's group in Mississippi. Accounts of Ayers's behavior, from magazine articles to interviews with his brother, point to a Walter Mitty–type personality: someone who wanted to be a mover and shaker in the world of crime or espionage. Atlanta-based civil rights activist Julian Bond described an illustrative incident with Ayers to
Jet
magazine. Ayers recognized Bond waiting on a long line to enter a popular restaurant, and Ayers told the future leader of the NAACP that he could arrange for Bond to move to the top of the queue. Ayers attributed this ability to his background in the CIA and the Secret Service—both fabrications that Bond found laughable. But for all his zaniness, Ayers did manage to get Bond into the restaurant ahead of everyone else, just as he had promised.
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The incident underscores what Ayers's brother told the author: Despite his connection to Venable, Floyd Ayers was not a violent racist;
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no hard-core member of the KKK would have given Julian Bond the time of day, much less helped him to an early dinner. But
Ayers worked with Venable and did what Venable wanted because Ayers saw that connection as a way to burnish his fabulist résumé. It is not hard to imagine him agreeing to take part in a cloak-and-dagger operation against Martin Luther King Jr. At the same time, Ayers's reputation for telling tall tales and exaggerating his background could help Venable in another way. No one would take Ayers seriously if he reported on the omega plot either before King's murder or afterward. This is not idle speculation; witnesses reported that Ayers talked about the King assassination in the weeks before April 4, and he appears to have tried to clear his conscience about the crime afterward. In both cases, authorities dismissed him as a crank.

As it stands, recent disclosures by historical researcher Lamar Waldron corroborate the idea that the Southeast hub of the Identity network was the source for the omega plot bounty money. A source told Waldron that a group of racist Georgians had for years been secretly diverting union dues from factory workers at the Lakeland auto plant in Atlanta and directing them toward a King assassination bounty. This group included Hugh Spake, who worked at the plant. By 1967 the diverted dues had grown into a sizable nest egg, coming from hundreds of workers earning what was then a solid middle-class salary. Some union members were aware that their dues were being used to fund fights against integration, but very few knew about the more sinister reason for collecting the money.

A key figure in the latter effort was Joseph Milteer, an independently wealthy traveling salesman with close ties to the NSRP, to Venable's top aides, and to Swift.
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(Milteer had obtained dozens of Swift's taped sermons.) Milteer is well-known in the study of another assassination, the John F. Kennedy murder, for having predicted elements of the president's assassination weeks in advance of November 22, 1963. As he had with Sidney Barnes in 1964 while gathering information on the Birmingham church bombing, Miami police and FBI informant Willie Somersett surreptitiously recorded Milteer saying that John F. Kennedy would be killed “from an office building with a high-powered rifle.” Less known is the fact that Milteer also spoke about an ongoing effort to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. That plot had involved a leader of the Tennessee-based Dixie Klans named Jack Brown. Brown enjoyed a close relationship with
J.B. Stoner, and reports from a source inside Eastview Klavern 13 suggest that Brown helped train the Cahaba Boys to develop the explosive device for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing.
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If that's true, Brown was yet another Identity follower (he was on Swift's mailing list) connected to the Birmingham murders. Those same Identity followers, as noted earlier, had tried to murder Martin Luther King Jr. when he came to eulogize the four young victims of the September 15, 1963, blast.

The insider information provided to Somersett by Milteer suggests that Milteer was part of the Identity network trying to murder Dr. King as far back as 1963. That the well-connected Georgian would work to secretly hoard cash for a King bounty and provide it to someone like Venable is thus not surprising. Nor is it surprising that Venable would, in turn, move that money through intermediaries like Ayers to Sam Bowers. Bowers's White Knights more than earned their reputation as the most violent KKK organization in the nation. Unfortunately, Waldron's source would cooperate only if his identity was protected. The source remains anonymous, and it is thus impossible to fully evaluate his credibility.

However Venable raised the money, the fact that a significant amount of cash transferred from Atlanta to Jackson becomes important in legitimizing the omega plot. It suggests that the operation was well past the planning stage and that the objective, King's murder, was a top priority. In 1967 most white supremacist organizations were strapped for cash, devoid of dues-paying members and on the hook for legal fees, none more so than the White Knights in Mississippi. Yet nothing in the available record shows that Bowers ever attempted to use cash from the $100,000 pot for legal fees, assuming that he could even access the money or that he would even dare if the money was promised to a group as ruthless as the Dixie Mafia.

The narrative suggests that Sybil Eure, given her role as a conduit for the bounty money, somehow found herself in a critical position inside the omega plot, at the junction between the Dixie Mafia and the White Knights. If the money remained in her hands, Eure would be the person to pay Dixie Mafia hit men once King had been killed. Her relationship with McManaman establishes her connection to
the criminal element. Her family ties may provide the connection to the White Knights. One of Eure's associates was Robert C. Thomas, a clerk for the federal district courts in Mississippi. Before assuming that position, Thomas worked as a lead investigator for the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a group formed by the Mississippi State Legislature to help public officials oppose integration. The commission spied upon and developed informants inside civil rights groups and collected dossiers on activists. If his work with the commission suggests that Thomas was a southern nationalist, his malfeasance as a federal court clerk reinforces that impression. The records show that Thomas secretly helped Sam Bowers rig juries to win court cases, a criminal offense in its own right.