America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (32 page)

Finally, additional evidence for Ray jumping the gun comes from researcher Lamar Waldron. If Waldron's anonymous source can be trusted, Ray attempted to reach out to conspirators, but again in a haphazard fashion. Having fled Memphis in his white Mustang, Ray phoned Hugh Spake of the Lakeland auto plant. Spake was working on the assembly line, and the call came to a common phone that was available to all workers in the area. The call was likely about money. Calling such a phone at such a time suggests desperation. Coupled with Spake's reaction—he wasn't expecting the call—the call suggests
that Ray had a general idea about the bounty sponsors but wasn't in the loop about how to obtain the money. Before long Ray would return to Atlanta, leaving his Mustang at a public-housing parking lot not far from the Lakeland auto plant. Waldron developed further evidence suggesting that Joseph Milteer, the Swift follower who may have syphoned off money for a large King bounty with Spake's help, found his way to Atlanta in the days following King's murder.
¹⁵
Ray's subsequent activity indicates that he never received any money from anyone. He ultimately fled to Toronto and then to Europe, but he was forced to rob a bank in England to stay afloat. His actions in the years after his capture and conviction in June of 1968 speak to someone “threading the needle,” trying to get out of federal prison while holding out hope of collecting a bounty that he still believed he had earned.

One finds the most convincing evidence tying Ray to a white supremacist plot by examining his associations after the King murder. One must ultimately rely on Ray and his convoluted stories to make sense of his pre-assassination associations, leaving one to speculate as to the truth about his contacts with white supremacists or criminal go-betweens with access to groups like the KKK. But in the immediate aftermath of his capture, and in the decades that followed, Ray insisted on making use of known white supremacists as his legal counsel. That decision makes little or no sense—unless Ray was looking to use these men for some purpose other than simple legal representation.

The use of well-known bigots as attorneys is suspicious for two reasons. First, from 1968 to 1969, when Ray faced trial, it was obvious that to avoid conviction, Ray had to make every effort to distance himself from charges that he had killed King out of racial animus. Yet Ray went out of his way to pursue legal counsel with overt connections to white supremacist groups.

Initially, Ray attempted to elicit the legal services of Percy Quinn of Laurel, Mississippi. Quinn's only clients were members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, including Sam Bowers himself. Quinn did not even make an effort to secure other clients. Ray's brother had a great deal of difficulty finding Quinn because the lawyer did not have a storefront office or even a listed
telephone number. (It is still unclear who referred Quinn to James Earl Ray or how Ray's brother, Jerry, found him.) Why Ray would even consider Quinn is itself a mystery, as Quinn's only recent cases were public failures. Quinn turned Ray down, perhaps for fear of what the link might expose.
¹⁶

But almost on cue, Ray decided to take on another white supremacist attorney with an even higher profile: J.B. Stoner. Ray's other attorneys, including Arthur Hanes (himself a Klan attorney, but one with an excellent legal reputation), warned Ray against using Stoner. But Stoner remained one of Ray's major legal advisors for years and soon employed Ray's brother, Jerry, as a personal assistant at the NSRP. For two decades, Ray made use of an assortment of racist attorneys, including one neo-Confederate lawyer who commissioned a sculpture to honor KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.

These decisions become even less forgivable when one realizes that Ray had an assortment of talented investigators and attorneys already assisting his efforts to get out of prison. This group included noted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) attorney Jim Lesar, highly regarded New Left attorney Mark Lane, and diligent investigator Harold Weisberg, a legend in the field of JFK assassination research. Ray had no need for racist attorneys—unless perhaps they served another purpose.

When Congress reinvestigated the King murder in the late 1970s, it considered J.B. Stoner a prime suspect, as it should have. But it encountered a serious obstacle in attempting to investigate Stoner: attorney–client privilege. Because he provided legal services to Ray, Stoner could not be compelled to help or assist the congressional investigation. Ray had graciously waived attorney–client privilege for every one of the many attorneys who had helped his case to that point,
except J.B. Stoner
.
¹⁷
Ray spun the “Raul set me up” narrative in hopes of securing a new trial and an eventual acquittal. In the event that he succeeded (or escaped prison, as he did again in the early 1970s—only to be recaptured), Ray needed someone with access to the conspirators to get his bounty money. Was Stoner that man?

The congressional committee that looked into issues like this—the HSCA—investigated Stoner, Bowers, Gale, and other white supremacists as suspects in King's murder. It uncovered and analyzed
some of the leads and failed plots discussed in the past several chapters but missed others. For instance, the committee did not report or was not told (by the FBI) that the Ben Chester White murder was connected to a 1966 King murder plot conceived by Bowers. Additionally, the HSCA never addressed information, provided by Donald Nissen to the FBI in June 1967, describing the King bounty. Moreover, Congress analyzed each murder attempt as a separate, independent conspiracy. It did not understand that the individuals who tried to kill King shared a common bond of religion. It did not explore Christian Identity theology as the driving force behind many different assassination attempts. Unbeknownst to Congress, several of the main suspects identified in previous plots belonged to a subculture of religious zealots, who by the late 1960s had formed a social network bent on fomenting a race war.

Part of this oversight is forgivable in that it stems from the same limited worldview highlighted in this book and held by many—one that either ignores the anti-Jewish dimension to the violence of the 1960s or sees such violence as secular in nature rather than theological in motivation. Moreover, members of this subculture deliberately obscured their religious motivation to maximize their leverage over rank-and-file segregationists within their respective organizations, people who would never accept a radical view of Christianity but who could be manipulated for a common purpose.

But the HSCA had access to witnesses who could or should have challenged the conventional narrative. In 1976, as the committee was forming, a series of articles published by investigative reporter Dan Christensen highlighted the potential role played by Tommy Tarrants and his associates in the King assassination. We now know that Tarrants, having converted from Christian Identity to mainstream evangelical Christianity, was interviewed by Congress as an anonymous source. But it now appears that Christensen's articles touched off an FBI cover-up that prevented Congress from fully exploring Tarrants's connections to the King murder, a line of inquiry that might have exposed Tarrants—and not Ray—as the original and intended patsy in the King murder. Such an inquiry would have exposed the Bureau to charges that it could have prevented King's assassination.

Christensen's 1976 articles highlighted the importance of information developed by Miami police and FBI informant Willie Somersett in both the Kennedy and King murder investigations.
¹⁸
The reader will recall Somersett secretly taped conversations with Sidney Barnes in 1964. In these conversations, Barnes described the September 14, 1963, meeting of Swift followers on the eve of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He also taped Swift devotee Joseph Milteer predicting John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, two months before the Dallas murder. In the same tape, Milteer described another plot on Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. In fact, Somersett was one of law enforcement's most coveted informants on white supremacist activities for years leading up to 1963. His record of cooperation and his access to key racists prompted the Miami Police Department to use Somersett to explore potential leads in the King assassination. Somersett's tour of the Southeast in the summer of 1968, which brought him into contact with various white supremacists as well as labor leaders (Somersett worked for a labor union), became the focus of Christensen's series. In one article, Christensen focused on a reunion between Somersett and Barnes in Mobile, Alabama.

Somersett did not record the conversation this time, and Christensen protected the still-living Barnes's identity, referring to him simply as X, a house painter. But what Barnes told Somersett in 1968 was no less shocking than what he told the informant in 1964. Barnes referred at first to an incident that earned Tarrants national attention two months after King's murder. In June 1968, Mississippi police ambushed, shot, and wounded Tarrants in a sting operation. Tarrants and his fellow terrorist Kathy Ainsworth were attempting to blow up the home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum. Neither knew, however, that the men who had encouraged the attack, Alton Wayne and Raymond Roberts, had been turned by the FBI, using private money raised by the Anti-Defamation League. On a cue from an as-yet-unidentified informant in Jackson, Mississippi, law enforcement and the FBI lay in wait for Tarrants. They expected Danny Joe Hawkins to join him, but Hawkins pulled out at the last minute, with Ainsworth taking his place. Research by Jack Nelson makes it clear that the sting had one purpose and one purpose only—to kill
Tarrants. Law enforcement's war against the Klan in Mississippi had reached that point. Instead, Tarrants survived with serious injuries and wound up in prison on a thirty-year sentence for his bombing spree. Ainsworth died in the crossfire, becoming a martyr, which she remains to this day to racists across the country.
¹⁹

Barnes expressed great alarm to Somersett about the potential for Tarrants to expose white supremacists to legal justice. But then he added something else, as Christensen described in his article:

X says that the car that was used to jam the police cars on relaying messages of the killing of King on Aug. 4 [
sic
] was a car used by Thomas Tarrants. X says that they have information from the police that Tarrants is talking to the FBI and it looks as if several people may be indicted by the federal government in connection with a bank robbery and murder in the state(s) of Mississippi and Tennessee, including himself, X, who allowed Tarrants to stay at his home a week or ten days after the killing of Martin Luther King.
²⁰

What Christensen did not know was that this was not the only report placing Tarrants in Memphis on April 4. Independently, Somersett reported to the FBI on a separate visit that he made that summer: to the grieving mother of Kathy Ainsworth, Margaret Capomacchia. Capomacchia also told Somersett that Tarrants—as well as several other White Knights—had participated in a conspiracy on King's life. She reinforced the story that Tarrants had participated in the CB radio diversion and that he had fled to Sidney Barnes's mobile home before escaping to a Christian Identity stronghold in North Carolina.
²¹
The FBI investigated the whereabouts of several of the people Capomacchia named in connection with the plot and concluded that most or all had alibis for April 4. The Bureau dismissed the story. But just as the Miami Police Department appeared to lack corroboration from Capomacchia, the FBI may never have learned about the information from Barnes.

As it turned out, both Barnes and Capomacchia may have been using Somersett to plant false stories, for whatever reason, to sully Tarrants's reputation. The two were very close. And the record makes it clear that by 1968, those in white supremacist circles had
“made” Somersett and were using the informant, unwittingly, to send disinformation to law enforcement. J.B. Stoner circulated such speculation as early as 1962, and records make it clear that when the FBI followed up on Somersett's surreptitious taping of Barnes in 1964, it ruined Somersett's cover. Not surprisingly, by 1965 Somersett had begun to provide increasingly unreliable information to the FBI, to the point where the FBI ceased using him as a source (though the Miami Police Department continued to trust Somersett). That Barnes would call Somersett and invite him to Mobile clearly points to another disinformation campaign; the decision by Capomacchia to invite Somersett to speak with her in Miami soon after his visit to Barnes only reinforces that impression.

The FBI did not buy Capomacchia's story (and never learned about Barnes's similar tale), but it may have had other motives in ignoring the Tarrants lead. For one thing, the FBI does not appear to have even interviewed Tarrants about the allegation. Nor did it make any effort to retrace other leads on Tarrants—equally as tantalizing—in it own files, from earlier in the MURKIN investigation. For example, on April 5, 1968, with the investigation just starting, the FBI did something inexplicable given what we know about the information available to it at the time. Having traced the GameMaster rifle in the green blanket to a gun store in Alabama, the agents showed a handful of pictures—including one of Tommy Tarrants—to staffers at the store.
²²
The problem with this, as noted by former Jackson FBI agent Jim Ingram, was that on April 5, 1968, Tommy Tarrants was not on “our radar.”
²³
The bombings in Mississippi for which Tarrants would soon become famous had not yet been linked to any individual; the perpetrator was simply known as The Man. The FBI connected Tarrants only to the wave of violence against black and Jewish targets at the end of May 1968.