SHOWTIME—INVESTIGATIVE HEARINGS
Public money, official lies
Serve the pawns who rule
Who serve to conceal unholy ties
And use the media as their tool.
Truth is blasphemed by their deceit
With the masses regarded as fools,
As foot soldiers are given unbridled conceit
Not constrained by time-honored rules.
Jerry Ray testified before the HSCA in open session on Thursday, November 30, 1978. Mark Lane was not permitted to represent Jerry because he already represented James and there might be a conflict of interest. Jerry had asked me to consider appearing with him. There were two problems. First of all I was obviously concerned that my appearance on his behalf—special appearance though it was—was not to be construed as a commitment at that stage to the unequivocal innocence of his brother. Second, my family feared that this overt action would be unwise. Nevertheless, I decided to represent Jerry for the specific purpose of protecting his rights.
I overrode family opposition by inviting New York lawyer, feminist, and civil rights activist Florynce Kennedy (Flo) to be co-counsel. As one of the nation’s most prominent black women lawyers with considerable experience in opposing abuse of process, Flo added considerable strength to the witness table.
I believed that the question of James’s and his brothers’ alleged involvement in a 1967 bank robbery in Alton, Illinois (James’s birthplace), was likely to be a key element of the committee’s interrogation. In attempting to disprove the existence of Raul and thus the existence of a conspiracy, the committee would most likely claim that the money James received during his time on the run had been obtained from the $27,000 robbery of the Alton bank.
It was evident that after his July 13, 1967, escape and during his stay in Canada, James Earl Ray had acquired money. The Alton bank robbery occurred on the day before some of his purchases began, and had thus been seized upon as the explanation for the source of his funds. James, however, said he initially obtained funds in Canada by robbing a Montreal brothel and that Raul subsequently gave him money. The HSCA speculated that rather than James escaping from prison, spending two and a half months in the States, traveling to a strange city in Canada in a destitute condition, and committing an armed robbery, it would be more reasonable to assume that he escaped from prison, made contact with his brother John in St. Louis, got a job while they planned a crime, then, after committing the robbery in a familiar area, fled to Canada.
On November 17, 1978, The New York Times published a front-page article by Wendell Rawls Jr., stating that the results of a Times investigation agreed with the conclusions of a separate investigation by HSCA that the Ray brothers, including Jerry, were guilty of robbing the Alton bank.
On Wednesday, the 29th, the day before Jerry’s appearance before the HSCA, I placed a call to East Alton police lieutenant Walter Conrad. I advised him that in an effort to put to rest the continuing allegations that my client had been a participant in that robbery, I had counseled him to return once again to East Alton and offer to be charged and stand trial (Jerry had previously surrendered himself on August 18, 1978, offered to waive the statute of limitations, take a lie detector test, and, if charged, stand trial for the robbery). I then told Lieutenant Conrad about The New York Times article.
Lieutenant Conrad said that he had told Jerry Ray during his August visit that neither he nor his brothers were suspects, nor had they ever been suspects in that crime. He told me explicitly that neither he nor any member of the Alton police department, nor, to the best of his knowledge, any employee or official of the Bank of Alton, had ever been questioned by The New York Times or any investigator of the HSCA. He said that he couldn’t imagine what the basis was for The Times’s claims or the committee’s allegations.
He advised me that there would be no need for Jerry Ray or any of his brothers to return to Alton.
I later acquired an FBI “airtel” of July 19, 1968, to the director from the Springfield SAC, reciting details of an interview conducted in Madison County Jail in Edwardsville, Illinois, with a suspect in the Alton robbery. The report of this interview states that the individual being questioned “meets physical description … in above bank robbery; has history of using automatic pistol similar to that used by op. sub. Number 1 and was employed part time for the cab company which had a stand directly across street from Bank … and invested heavily in cabs shortly after Bank robbery.”
In my view, there was no question that on August 1, 1968, the FBI was on the trail of the suspects for the Alton robbery, and that those suspects didn’t include the Ray brothers. Yet in August 1978 the HSCA, through Counsel Blakey, contacted Philip Heymann, Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, seeking the prosecution of John Ray for allegedly giving false testimony to the HSCA regarding the Alton bank robbery.
Before formally referring this matter to the Department of Justice, Mr. Blakey met with US Attorney Earl Silberg and a representative of the Criminal Division on May 24, 1978. Blakey admitted that the primary reason he wanted John Ray charged with perjury was to convince James Earl Ray to testify before the committee concerning his knowledge of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Blakey tried to persuade the Justice Department that John Ray had, in fact, committed perjury in denying his participation with his brothers in the robbery.
He also stated that “returning an indictment against John Ray in order to pressure his brother James Earl Ray into cooperating could and should be viewed as an abuse of process. It is one thing to use the criminal laws to pressure an individual into cooperating with the government. It is another thing to use the criminal laws against someone to pressure another individual into cooperating with the government. This is particularly true when the individuals involved are close family relatives such as brothers.”
During Jerry Ray’s appearance on November 30, HSCA Counsel Mark Speiser did indeed focus one aspect of his questioning on the Alton bank robbery. I informed Speiser that Jerry was not and had never been a suspect in that case and that this had been confirmed to me by the Alton authorities as late as the previous day. I also put on the record Jerry’s willingness to waive the statute of limitations and stand trial for that crime if any authority was willing to try him.
Jerry explicitly denied any participation in the robbery, pointing out that at the time of the Alton robbery he was working at the Sportsman’s Club in Northbrook, Illinois. His employment records would confirm that in the three years he worked there he never missed a day and that he frequently worked seven nights a week, making it impossible for him to have been in Alton at the time of the crime. Jerry’s factual responses fell on deaf ears.
Throughout the hearing, Flo and I frequently locked horns with the committee counsel. They continually attempted to tie Jerry and John to James during the time when James was a fugitive. Any facts to the contrary were ignored.
Though Flo and I believed as counsel that we had taken some of the bite out of the HSCA’s persistent attack on the facts, we expected the HSCA report to confirm the Committee’s predetermined conclusions.
We were right.
In January 1979, the House Select Committee published its final report on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. It found no evidence or complicity on the part of the CIA, the FBI, or any other government agency in the assassination of Dr. King. Ray, it concluded, was a lone gunman. Raul did not exist, so Ray couldn’t have been a fall guy manipulated by others (even though racism was not the motive). The report itself was widely publicized, but the accompanying thirteen volumes had a very limited distribution. Only the interested few would learn that information buried in these documents frequently conflicts with conclusions in the report itself.
The volumes provide a detailed account of the FBI’s wide-ranging legal and illegal communist infiltration organization (COMINFIL) and counterintelligence programs and activities (COINTELPRO) conducted both before and after the assassination. They were designed to tie Dr. King and the SCLC to the influence of the Communist Party and to discredit Dr. King.
Back in 1957, when the SCLC was founded, FBI supervisor J. K. Kelly stated in a memo that the group was “a likely target for infiltration.” As the SCLC mounted an increasingly high-profile challenge to segregation and the denial of voting rights to blacks across the South, the Bureau began actively infiltrating meetings and conferences.
On October 23, 1962, Hoover sent a memo authorizing the Atlanta and New York field offices to conduct a general COMINFIL investigation of the SCLC and asked the New Orleans office to explore COMINFIL possibilities. COINTELPRO activities specifically targeting Dr. King began in late October 1962. The Bureau’s campaign embodied a number of felonies, according to a Justice Department report in 1977. This was noted in the HSCA report.
In December 1963, less than a month after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Bureau officials met in Washington to explore ways of “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” The conference focused on how to “produce the best results without embarrassment to the Bureau.” Officials agreed that hidden microphones be placed in Dr. King’s hotel rooms as he traveled in an effort to pick up evidence of extramarital sexual activity that could be used to tarnish his reputation or even to blackmail him. Numerous hotels nationwide were bugged from late 1963 to the end of 1965.
Documents reveal that wiretaps of the SCLC Atlanta office ran from October 1963 to June 21 1966. Dr. King’s home was tapped from November 8, 1963, to April 1965 when he moved. In 1966, FBI Director Hoover, fearful of a congressional inquiry into electronic surveillance, ordered that the monitoring of Dr. King be discontinued. When Dr. King and the SCLC turned their attention to Vietnam and the Poor People’s Campaign, a request to Attorney General Ramsey Clark to approve renewed telephone surveillance was refused. We would learn that surveillance never ceased.
The Bureau also engaged in surreptitious activities and burglaries against Dr. King and the SCLC. The HSCA estimated twenty such events took place between 1959 and 1964. The Bureau would maintain that Dr. King was not officially a COINTELPRO target until late 1967 or early 1968. In fact, a massive campaign was under way from 1964 aimed at destroying him through dirty tricks and media manipulation.
The HSCA revealed FBI infiltration of the SCLC through a “black probe” operation. Former agent Arthur Murtagh, assigned to the Atlanta field office between 1967 and 1968, testified that the office’s primary informant was a member of the SCLC right up to the assassination, providing details of Dr. King’s itinerary and travel plans.
The HSCA firmly rejected the FBI’s contention that Ray was a racist and that was why he shot Dr. King. But it advanced a convoluted scenario that he carried out the killing to collect a bounty from two St. Louis racists, both dead by the time the committee reported.
The report accepted the fingerprint evidence of the dropped bundle but also noted that many unidentified prints were in the rooming house and on Ray’s white Mustang.
The Memphis City Engineers analysis of the fatal bullet’s trajectory could not conclude whether it came from the bathroom window of the rooming house attached to Jim’s Grill or the brush area behind the building. But the HSCA dismissed the possibility that the shot had been fired from the brush area. It concluded that the bullet had been fired from the bathroom, ignoring the statement from witnesses including Solomon Jones, Dr. King’s Memphis driver, that it came from the brush area, where he saw someone right after the shooting. Any person seen in the brush, the HSCA concluded, must have been a quick-responding Memphis Police Department (MPD) policeman already on the scene. It also concluded that no cutting back of the brush had taken place after the killing—and did not interview Reverend James Orange, who said he saw smoke “rise from bushes right by the fire station” seconds after the shot.
MPD undercover agent Marrell McCollough said that he was the mysterious figure kneeling over Dr. King after he was shot on the balcony. He had infiltrated the Invaders, a black group trying to address local needs in the city, supplying Lieutenant Eli Arkin, his MPD intelligence division control officer, with regular reports. He subsequently acted as an agent provocateur in activities as a result of which members of the Invaders were convicted and sentenced. He has never admitted that he was recalled to military service on June 11, 1967 and assigned to the MPD from the 111th Military Intelligence Group, as I learned years later.
Several conspiracy theories, some implicating the Mafia, were covered and dismissed in the HSCA report. It strengthened my growing conviction that Dr. King’s murder had not been solved. It also provided me with leads.
In early 1979, I traveled to Memphis to follow up on some issues touched on by the HSCA. John McFerren, a civil rights leader in 1968, eventually told me how he had heard Frank Liberto, president of the Liberto, Liberto, and Latch Produce Company in Memphis, shouting down the phone on the afternoon that Dr. King was killed. McFerren, who was at the back of the store, heard Liberto say, “I told you not to call me here. Shoot the son of bitch when he comes on the balcony.” Liberto told the caller he should collect his money—$5,000 was mentioned—from Liberto’s brother in New Orleans. McFerren heard Liberto had underworld connections—and was astonished when, an hour later, he learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
McFerren told Baxton Bryant, Executive Director of the Tennessee Council on Human Rights, who insisted that he tell the FBI. McFerren was reluctant until Bryant promised his name would be kept secret or he and his family would receive protection. In the early hours of April 8, he told his story to Frank Holloman, Director of the Memphis Police and Fire Departments; MPD Homicide Chief N. E. Zachary; and FBI agent O. B. Johnson at the Peabody Hotel. They taped McFerren’s account, had him sketch the scene, and promised to check it out thoroughly. Three days later, Bryant was told that the FBI believed that if McFerren had heard the call at all, it was not related to the killing. McFerren was left feeling like a criminal.
The HSCA had similarly dismissed allegations from Louisville police officer Clifton Baird that there was an attempt to assassinate Dr. King in 1965, emanating from named Louisville police officers collaborating with FBI agents. The claim, backed up with a tape recording he took, mentioned a $5,000 contract to kill Dr. King. It was another glaring instance of the HSCA’s failure to follow leads and solve the crime. Since Dr. King’s brother A. D. lived in Louisville, Dr. King visited that city from time to time. In a lengthy meeting in a darkened bar, Baird shared his evidence with me. He impressed me as an honest, courageous policeman.