America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (28 page)

For his part, Bowers escaped conviction for the firearms charges in mid-January. While the Justice Department convicted other White Knights for their roles in the 1966 Dahmer murder, Bowers was acquitted due to a mistrial. But in January 1968, Bowers's luck with the law ran out. He was free but on appeal bond for his conviction for the MIBURN murders. Arrangements were already being made to transfer Grand Wizard power to L.E. Matthews once Bowers went to prison. By early 1968, almost every major player in the White Knights faced or would face some kind of criminal charges. Many, including Bowers, temporarily kept a low profile. Increasingly, they worked through a front organization, Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, to raise money for legal costs. Through that same front, senior WKKKKOM members continued to actively promote Stoner's National States Rights Party in
Meridian and Jackson, mailing out the NSRP's radical newspaper,
The Thunderbolt.

The lull in Mississippi Klan violence came to an end on February 20, 1968, when the White Knights burned down a grocery store belonging to Wallace Miller, a onetime KKK member who had become an FBI informant and testified in the Neshoba prosecution. Two weeks later, the White Knights bombed the Blackwell Realty Company in Jackson for selling homes to blacks in white neighborhoods. Having endured months of bombings, local and federal law enforcement fought back in unprecedented ways. Unable to secure convictions in local cases, Meridian police formed a special squad under Sergeant Lester Joyner. According to historian Michael Newton, “Joyner's guerillas,” as they were known, “fired into Klansmen's homes and detonated explosives on their lawns.”
²⁷
As noted earlier, the Jackson field office of the FBI was already experienced with fighting dirty against the local Klan. Clueless as to the perpetrators of the recent bombings, the office doubled down on its efforts to, in the words of Special Agent Jim Ingram, catch the “mad dog” bombing Mississippi's black and Jewish institutions.

No one in federal law enforcement appeared to be paying much attention to the escaped fugitive from Missouri State Penitentiary, James Earl Ray. But Ray began to behave like the notorious figure he would soon become: the most wanted fugitive in the United States. On March 2, 1968, the man known to his classmates as Eric Galt graduated from bartending school in Los Angeles. In the graduation photo, James Earl Ray deliberately closed his eyes to make future identification more difficult. On March 3, 7, and 11, Ray spent a sizable amount of his remaining money on plastic surgery to alter his appearance. Ray later said that the surgery was done to make a future identification more difficult, claiming that he expected his operations with Raul—specifically a gunrunning operation that had started in New Orleans—to become more serious. To believe this, one would have to believe that Ray, a career criminal who had escaped from a federal penitentiary, thought that being an accomplice to a minor gunrunning operation would earn him the same respect from J. Edgar Hoover as John Dillinger had in 1934. Ray was not as foolish as he pretended to be or as others have assumed. If helping a
fictional gunrunner wouldn't get Ray on the FBI's Most Wanted list, conspiring to kill Martin Luther King Jr. certainly would.

Ray's recruitment into a King conspiracy was further suggested by Allan O. Thompson, manager of the St. Francis Hotel, where Ray had been staying since late January. Thompson told investigators that he remembered his switchboard operator reporting a series of phone calls to Eric Galt sometime in March, possibly as early as March 1. The calls came from either New Orleans or Atlanta or both, and the caller left the name J.C. Hardin. Sometime in the middle of the month, a stranger who Thompson presumed was Hardin actually visited the St. Francis looking for Galt/Ray.

The likely identity of J.C. Hardin emerged after reexamination of the FBI's investigation into Thompson's claims. Having mined its national files for individuals who used the alias J.C. Hardin, the FBI presented Thompson with a number of pictures. Thompson noted a striking overall similarity between the man who had visited the hotel and a man in one of the FBI photographs. Inexplicably, the FBI dismissed the match because the hair in the photo was different, ignoring the fact that the J.C. Hardin photo had been taken more than a decade before the King murder. Newly released files make clear that Thompson identified James Wilbourne Ashmore from Texas as J.C. Hardin. Ashmore had a steady history of criminal offenses, mostly for theft and forgery, and had served more than one stint in prison. Nothing directly indicated that he was connected to a group like the Dixie Mafia, but such information does not appear in the FBI files of either Donald Sparks or Leroy McManaman, two known Dixie mobsters. Law enforcement only was just beginning to understand the phenomenon that was the Dixie Mafia in the late 1960s.

A truck driver by trade, Ashmore was exactly the kind of individual the Dixie Mafia liked to recruit for its missions: someone who could routinely cross state lines without drawing the attention of law enforcement. More work needs to be done to develop the case that Ashmore, who died in 1973 in California, was possibly an accessory in the King conspiracy.
²⁸
But it seems probable that he was another go-between in the Dixie Mafia/White Knights bounty plot and, quite importantly, the one who finally integrated James Earl Ray into the scheme. Newly discovered information makes this
idea even more tantalizing. The FBI originally located the Hardin alias for Ashmore in files that connected him to the 1962 Ole Miss race riots.
²⁹
Those riots not only incited many future members of the WKKKKOM but also drew the attention of radicals from around the nation, notably Identity radical Oren Potito, southeastern leader of the National States Rights Party.

And as of March 17, 1968, James Earl Ray was leaving Los Angeles for good and heading to the Southeast. He promised Marie Martin that he would stop in New Orleans on his way and drop off a package for her family. It was only a detour on his intended destination: Martin Luther King Jr.'s hometown of Atlanta. In a pattern that would repeat itself, King also left Los Angeles on March 17, en route to Memphis.

At approximately the same time Ray was making arrangements to move to Atlanta, Tommy Tarrants took a pilgrimage to the home of his hero, the Reverend Wesley Swift, in Lancaster, California. According to Tarrants's autobiography, he had made contact with Swift some months earlier and, as mentioned previously, had impressed the reverend enough to be invited to become his understudy. Tarrants's interaction with Swift has enormous implications for the King assassination. In writing his excellent 1993 book on anti-Jewish violence in Mississippi,
Terror in the Night,
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Jack Nelson used Tarrants as a major source. Nelson quotes a 1991 interview with Tarrants, in which Tarrants admitted buying a rifle from Swift for the purpose of shooting Martin Luther King Jr. “That was my ambition,” Nelson quoted Tarrants as saying, “to shoot Dr. King. I hated Dr. King.”
³⁰
In a 2007 interview with the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger,
Tarrants seemingly backed off from such comments. By this time he had undergone a dramatic religious conversion to mainstream, evangelical Christianity, a process that he began in the 1970s and that resulted in an early release from prison. (He was convicted in 1969 for his role in the 1967–1968 Mississippi bombing spree and had been sentenced to thirty years behind bars.) To reporter Jerry Mitchell, Tarrants acknowledged that he bought the rifle from Swift in March 1968, but he insisted that he did so to “get acquainted with Swift. I thought a lot of him and listened to his recordings, was under that influence.” As to the other quote in Nelson's book about
his “ambition” to shoot King, Tarrants acknowledged “having those views,” but he said, “A lot of people in the south hated Martin Luther King.”
³¹
Tarrants gave Mitchell's readers the impression that the Swift visit had little to do with a King murder plot.

Newly uncovered information brings this matter into sharper focus. Audio files that Nelson's wife, Barbara Matuszow, donated to Emory University, contain the original Nelson interviews with Tarrants. Nelson first asked Tarrants if the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had interviewed him. It is likely that Nelson confused HUAC—which did not exist after 1975 but which at one time investigated the KKK—with the HSCA. The HSCA had run concurrent reinvestigations of the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King murders from 1976 to 1979. Indeed, Tarrants told Mitchell in 2007 that HSCA investigators did see him in the late 1970s. For reasons that are still unclear, Nelson then turned directly to the issue of the rifle purchase:

N
ELSON:
They must have quoted your testimony at some point in their report or something. Did you say anything about buying a rifle to assassinate King?

T
ARRANTS:
Yeah . . . yeah I told them that.

N
ELSON:
When did you do that?

T
ARRANTS:
I think I bought that from Wesley Swift as a matter of fact.

N
ELSON:
Is he still around?

T
ARRANTS:
No, he died of cancer years ago. [chatter]

T
ARRANTS:
That was my ambition, to shoot Martin Luther King. Oh yeah, I hated him worse than any of the blacks.
³²

Tarrants went on to give vivid detail on the weapon, a .243 Mannlicher (likely a Mannlicher-Schoenauer). His memory was fuzzy, however, as to when exactly he purchased the weapon, although it is fairly clear from the record that it was during his trip to California in March of 1968. Similar to his 2007 interview with Jerry Mitchell,
when he denied any involvement in King's murder, Tarrants told Nelson and Matuszow that he never tracked or got close to King. But in the interview with Mitchell, without ever directly commenting on buying the rifle to try to kill King, Tarrants again asserted that he had gotten the weapon simply to impress Swift. Taken in conjunction with the “that was my ambition, to shoot Martin Luther King” statement, the matter at least deserves further clarification from Tarrants. He has chosen not to speak on the matter since his 2007 interview with Mitchell. The immediate temptation is to see the 1991 quote and its timing as evidence that Tarrants was involved in King's murder. But a more likely possibility is that Tarrants's later claim to Mitchell that he had no role in King's murder is likely true. As will become more obvious in the next chapter, what appears to be a suggestive circumstantial case against Tarrants for some kind of involvement in King's murder looks more like the result of a carefully orchestrated effort to frame him for the crime.

The idea of a frame-up is well worn in theories on the King assassination. For decades, the only man convicted in the crime, James Earl Ray, insisted that he was a patsy in the murder. But Ray's actions from the end of March through the beginning of April substantively contradict this assertion. Instead they strongly suggest that he played a conscious role in the crime.

Having dropped off Marie Martin's package in New Orleans on March 21, James Earl Ray ventured to Atlanta, but not before making a highly suspicious stop that took him directly to the vicinity of Dr. King. Almost three years after civil rights marchers in pursuit of voting rights had stood their ground against club-carrying Alabama policemen on horses, King returned to Selma. He was there to give a speech on March 22, one that newspapers had publicized in advance. Any logical route to Atlanta would have taken Ray through Birmingham and not Selma, but Ray found his way to Selma at the same time as King, staying at the Flamingo Hotel. Confronted with this coincidence, Ray claimed that he had made a wrong turn. But Selma is completely out of the way, and maps from the time show that the “wrong turn” described by Ray wasn't even possible given the available exits. As it turned out, at the last minute, weather prevented King from coming to Selma.
³³

King returned to his hometown of Atlanta, and Ray followed, traveling through Montgomery and Birmingham. Ray had never spent any time in Atlanta before. On March 23, he rented a room at a cheap rooming house known to accommodate drunks and vagrants in the Peachtree section of the city. Again, he used the alias Eric Galt. There is little to account for Ray's precise behavior while he was in Atlanta. But evidence suggests that he made contact with someone. Investigators found a receipt for a dinner for two at Mammy's Shanty, a local dive that, according to researcher Lamar Waldron (an Atlanta native and lifelong resident), was frequented by racists.
³⁴
When one of Ray's earliest chroniclers, William Bradford Huie, confronted him about this dinner receipt, Ray was unable to explain it.

Also suspiciously, Ray obtained a commercial map of Atlanta and, as was often his custom, marked areas that were relevant to him. On this map, Ray circled his rooming house but also Martin Luther King Jr.'s home. The FBI claimed that Ray also marked King's church and SCLC headquarters on the map, but this appears to be mistaken or an outright fabrication. Interestingly, diligent efforts by researcher Jerry Shinley offer a different possibility for Ray's markings: They appear very close to a restaurant that served as a front operation for Cliff Fuller, a Dixie Mafia criminal who later turned federal informant. Another mark appears very close to a nightclub frequented by Fuller's partner-in-crime, Harold Pruett. Ray never offered an adequate explanation for why these areas were marked on the map, but the possible connection to Fuller—a man with contacts in the Dixie Mafia in Mississippi, among other places—is tantalizing. Certainly, the double circle around King's home clearly suggests that Ray stalked King not only in Selma but on through Atlanta. For this reason, the offer extended by Leroy McManaman to Donald Nissen takes on new significance. McManaman told Nissen that he could have a stake in the bounty in one of two ways. Nissen could participate in the actual killing or he could case King's movements and report them to the would-be killers. Specifically, McManaman mentioned casing King's movements in Atlanta—Nissen's destination following his immediate release.