America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (27 page)

While Ray moved from Birmingham to Mexico to Los Angeles, Sam Bowers's activities in Mississippi suggest that the omega plot may have been on hold. One could expect this if word of the FBI's visit to Sybil Eure had reached the paranoid Imperial Wizard. Always cautious, Bowers may have waited to see if Eure was under surveillance or if the FBI continued to investigate the bounty. Of course, Bowers also listened to the sermons of Wesley Swift and discussed them with his newest acolyte, Tommy Tarrants. Back in February of 1967, Swift had spoken about the reaping of tares, the weeds that resemble wheat but that rob genuine wheat of its nourishment. During the end-times, God has these tares harvested for destruction. But in Swift's rendition, the metaphorical weeds are satanic Jews. If Bowers paused the omega plot, he still initiated his plan to target Jewish Mississippians and their subhuman minions (blacks) at a never-before-seen rate.

Tommy Tarrants and his colleagues in the Swift Underground began their reign of terror on September 18, 1967. The target: the Temple Beth Israel in Jackson. Two dynamite bombs caused $25,000 worth of damage to the Mississippi capital's only synagogue. Within a few weeks, the same crew bombed the home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, who had for years associated himself with
the cause of civil rights, creating much controversy even within Mississippi's small Jewish community. The next target on the list was William T. Bush, dean of the all-black Tougaloo College. The attacks continued: the rectory of black minister Allen Johnson in Laurel, Mississippi, on November 15; the home of civil rights activist Robert Kochitzky on November 19.

The bombings shocked southern Mississippi and deflated some of the hope that law enforcement entertained in light of recent federal prosecutions of key violent racists. In October 1967, seven men, including Grand Wizard Sam Bowers, were convicted of civil rights violations in the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney (the MIBURN killings) and were sentenced to three to ten years in prison. In November trials began for thirteen men, again including Bowers, accused of killing activist Vernon Dahmer. The White Knights began to make arrangements for a transfer of power from Bowers to L.E. Matthews, a bomb maker from Forrest County, Mississippi. Yet the plan Bowers hatched for using outsiders like Tarrants and Ainsworth worked to perfection, baffling Mississippi police and special agents of the FBI's Jackson field office even as law enforcement maintained constant surveillance of Bowers and his remaining loyalists.

For Tarrants, soon to be known by the FBI as simply The Man, times were good. He reached out directly to Swift, impressing the racist theologian so much that Swift invited Tarrants to California to serve as his understudy.

In December 1967, life was also going fine for Donald Nissen. He was making a good living selling books. He had remarried, and his new wife was pregnant. He dutifully maintained his parole requirements and avoided criminal activity. The concern he had over the McManaman offer and the package delivery for Floyd Ayers was a distant memory—or so it seemed. Everything changed when Nissen visited his probation officer. Nissen cannot recall if it was the first or second of December, but when he left his parole officer at the Atlanta Federal Building, a man accosted him outside. “Are you Donald Nissen?” he asked. When Nissen answered in the affirmative, the man made a vague reference to Leroy McManaman and then issued a veiled threat to Nissen about “talking too much.” At
that moment, the man who had driven Nissen to the building called for him, and the mysterious figure quickly left.

Nissen was convinced that the incident involved his decision to tell the FBI about the White Knight bounty offer on King. As he has related in a series of interviews since 2009, his fears intensified when the windows of his car were shot out in the days that followed. Equally scary was something he remembered from McManaman's initial offer: A federal marshal was one of the cutouts in the plot. To Nissen, this opened the possibility that his own probation officer, or someone connected to him, might be involved in the King plot. Paranoid, Nissen resolved that he could not go to federal law enforcement again. Even with a new marriage, a pregnant wife, and a well-paying job, Nissen jumped parole—a crime that would send him back to federal prison if he were to be caught.
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Luckily for Nissen, officials did not discover his absence until April 2, 1968, two days before King's assassination.

The threat to Nissen suggests that conspirators had resumed the omega plot by December of 1967. Perhaps not coincidentally, that December marks the first instance when James Earl Ray's behavior became indicative of someone making serious inroads into a King murder conspiracy.

Ray used money, most likely from minor drug dealing in Mexico, to settle in a residential Los Angeles neighborhood. He stayed there for several weeks and would later claim that he wanted to find a job with the merchant marine, more or less giving up on Raul as a source for immigration papers. He continued to pursue dance lessons, in efforts to meet potential performers for his films, and he began to see a hypnotist, purportedly to overcome his problem with shyness.

He also continued to frequent bars, where he met Marie Martin, who eventually introduced him to her two cousins, Charles Stein and his sister, Rita. The family originated in New Orleans and had relatives in the area, notably Rita Stein's children. Charles Stein asked Ray to drive him to New Orleans to pick up Rita's children. Ray agreed, although Stein was convinced that Ray had a separate agenda. If so, Ray's next act offers a hint at what he might have been up to.

In a very strange series of events, Ray insisted that as a condition of the trip, Marie Martin and her cousins register for onetime Alabama governor and arch-segregationist George Wallace's American Independent Party (AIP). He took them to campaign headquarters, where they completed the forms. Ray was never known to be motivated by politics; money was his inspiration.

Ray's own explanation for the visit contradicts the account of Martin and the Stein siblings. Unlike Ray, who for a number of reasons wanted to avoid associating himself with racists like those in the AIP after his arrest for King's murder, Marie Martin, Rita Stein, and Charles Stein had no reason to lie. Ray may have seen the AIP as the safest avenue to ingratiate him with would-be plotters without attracting the attention of law enforcement.

But Ray himself did not register for the AIP, suggesting that he either did not think it was safe enough or that he had another purpose in visiting that building; one possibility is that Ray was looking for a particular individual who worked for the Wallace campaign. While the AIP avoided the violence associated with more radical groups, it was still known to attract radical supporters. One such individual was James P. Thornton, a California native nurtured in his racism by Stoner and Fields in Alabama in the early 1960s; Thornton also belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian. Thornton's life as a white supremacist had been interrupted by a brief stint in the military. Following his service, Thornton returned to California to start the state's chapter of the NSRP. When Ray visited Birmingham in 1967, Thornton had already left the city. Perhaps members of the Birmingham NSRP suggested that Ray find Thornton in Los Angeles at AIP headquarters. If so, Ray was late again, as Thornton had moved to Atlanta a few months earlier, after being fired by the AIP for his radicalism. Whatever Ray's interest was in the AIP, he and Charles Stein began their road trip to New Orleans on December 15, 1967.

If Ray wanted to find a gateway to a King bounty plot, New Orleans was a hub for both racist and criminal activity. Indeed, according to a senior WKKKKOM official, New Orleans was where his group obtained guns and weapons for its criminal activities. The Dixie Mafia had connections to New Orleans through several former
members of Sicilian Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello's criminal enterprise—some of whom shifted their allegiance to the less formal Dixie Mafia after Marcello faced federal prosecution in 1967. Dixie Mafia members also used New Orleans to sell weapons to the Klan. But no direct evidence confirms any contacts between criminals, be they members of the Dixie Mafia or the Sicilian Mafia, and Ray. Again, Ray's own dissembling renders any definitive understanding of his preassassination connections and associations all but inscrutable.

It does appear likely, however, that Ray met someone in New Orleans who provided him with access to additional money—either in the form of a cash advance or, more likely, drugs to sell in Los Angeles. An analysis by government investigators showed a clear and unusual spike in Ray's spending habits immediately after he returned to Los Angeles. Ray's actions became increasingly suspicious as the weeks proceeded, suggesting his recruitment into a very real conspiracy. Ray ultimately claimed that he was framed for the King killing, an assertion that does not stand up to scrutiny. But concurrent events in Mississippi in December suggest the possibility that Sam Bowers may have been testing Tommy Tarrants, with an eye toward setting up the young terrorist as a patsy.

On December 22, 1967, Sam Bowers did something highly unusual: He convinced Tommy Tarrants to join him on a trip to Collins, Mississippi. The purpose was to machine-gun the home of Ancie McLaurin, a black man accused of shooting a white police officer. This represented a major departure from Bowers's usual cautious behavior. Bowers ordered crimes but rarely participated in them in any direct way. What's more, federal prosecutors had already convicted Bowers for his role in ordering the Mississippi Burning killings that October, although Bowers had escaped with a relatively minor sentence. Out on appeal, Bowers was now risking a capital sentence by going on this mission. Indeed, he was risking not only himself but also his secret operative, Tarrants, to potential exposure.

Bowers may have been testing Tarrants's willingness to participate in a crime. For Bowers to have accepted Tarrants into his fold without suspicion is odd to begin with, as Bowers came to suspect even his closest allies of snitching to federal law enforcement. The fact that no one died in any of Tarrants's many bombings may have raised alarms
with Bowers, and now he had the opportunity to see firsthand if Tarrants would kill for the cause. Bowers never got the chance to implement this test, however, as Collins police officers, suspicious of the Alabama license plates on Tarrants's car, approached the men when they pulled into a gas station. The car was stolen, and the men were arrested; police found an unlicensed machine gun in the vehicle.

Whether Bowers was testing Tarrants or not, the arrest had the effect of suspending the recent wave of violence in Mississippi. If the pause was due to caution, the charges did little to raise alarms about Tarrants among law enforcement figures. Bowers escaped conviction for the gun charges that following January, and Tarrants's arraignment was set for later in 1968. Yet the subsequent lull in activity in Mississippi suggested that Bowers was exercising caution. If events on the ground had delayed the plot against King in the fall, then this most recent brush with the law likely had the same impact. James Earl Ray's activity after his suspicious trip to New Orleans suggests just that.

Not long after Tarrants and Bowers encountered law enforcement in Collins, Ray returned to Los Angeles after his sojourn to New Orleans. His activities in the weeks immediately following his return hint that he was more entwined in a King murder conspiracy, but he was far from operational. It is as if Ray expected that he might be used in the crime but was ignorant of when and how. On December 28, 1967, Ray wrote to several groups connected with countries such as Rhodesia and South Africa for information about immigrating to those nations. Both were English-speaking countries that lacked extradition treaties with the United States; they were also highly segregated countries with a well-publicized record of apartheid against native blacks. To burnish his résumé, Ray specifically referenced the John Birch Society, a right-wing, antigovernment organization but one that distanced itself from racist violence. Of course, Ray had been trying to flee North America for months. But his financial expenditures suggest that he was delaying that escape, something with no innocent explanation. Something like the high-money bounty offer on King's life was probably keeping him stateside.

By the end of January, whatever extra money he had obtained in New Orleans seemed to have vanished for Ray. Sticking with the
Galt alias, he moved from more comfortable surroundings on North Serrano Street to a room at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. One person described Ray's new community as a “den of iniquity, teeming with prostitution and drug trafficking.” Ray had prepaid for a number of side activities, such as dance lessons and bartending classes, so for a while money issues weren't pressing. Now they were. Through February at least, Ray still looked like someone on the periphery of the omega plot. He continued his mundane life, posing as Eric Galt. This lull coincided with a similar break in activity from the people we believe were organizing the plot in Mississippi. Both with the White Knights and Ray, this appears to have been the calm before the storm

As Ray continued to elude federal authorities in California, Tarrants found himself in law enforcement's crosshairs for the first time since 1965, when he was arrested, as a teenager, for carrying an illegal firearm. Two years later, no one knew of his terrorist bombings and shootings in Mississippi, but his arrest with Sam Bowers meant that for the second time he was facing federal firearms charges.

On his attorney's advice, Tarrants returned to his family in Mobile and registered for classes at a community college, ostensibly to clean up his image in anticipation of a court date. But records show that Tarrants was not much of a student. His mind was still dedicated to fighting the “Jewish–communist conspiracy” against white America.