ROOTS OF THE CIVIL TRIAL
A window open, slightly ajar
Affords an image
A change in what has long been the bar
An opening door of the timeless cage.
It was an extraordinary outcome. Judge Brown’s ruling could hardly have been more creative. If he had explicitly ruled in our favor and granted a trial or a full evidentiary hearing, the state would have appealed, and considering the inclination of the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, he would likely have been overturned. In any event, we would have been off on the appellate trial. By not finalizing any ruling, he kept the matter before him and could thus allow us to call witnesses and submit evidence. We intended, for example, to file a motion asking to test the rifle and the bullets in evidence. Whether or not the judge would go so far as to order a trial at the conclusion of our evidence remained to be seen.
I eventually decided to open up another legal front and sue Loyd Jowers on behalf of James. Jowers had, after all, actually admitted on primetime television that he played a key role in the case for which James had spent twenty-five years in prison. Jowers had also publicly admitted that James was a scapegoat and did not know what was going on. Thus, Jowers’s acts and his continued silence had resulted in the unjust imprisonment of James.
We filed the complaint for the civil suit against Loyd Jowers, Raul (unknown last name), and other unknown parties on Thursday, August 25, 1994. We alleged that Jowers had participated in the tort of conspiracy, as a result of which James had been deprived of his liberty, and been wrongly imprisoned. We added the newly developed ancillary tort of outrage, which was justified by the very nature and continuation of the wrongful acts. Damages sought were $6,500,000 actual and compensatory and $39,500 punitive.
Early on, we decided to depose Jowers, and the deposition took place over a nine-and-a-half-hour period. He had with him a typed clause asserting his Fifth Amendment rights ready for use. Nine hours would pass before he would use it. We began at a gentle pace as I took him from his childhood and early life in a large rural family to his days on the police force, which lasted roughly from 1946 to 1948. After that, he formed his own Veterans Cab Company staffed at first by Second World War veterans. It was during his brief career as a police officer that he met Memphis produce dealer Frank C. Liberto in 1946 or 1947. He said that back in 1946, he knew both patrolmen N. E. Zachary and Sam Evans. Jowers supplied details of his own six marriages (three to the same woman).
He recalled Frank Liberto in the late 1940s as a prominent produce man, whose business was located downtown in the market near Central Police Headquarters. Later, the market moved to Scott Street, and Liberto moved his business there. He denied knowing Frank Liberto well, although he believed that “Frank,” as he called him, did help him get some taxi business from the market.
He said that he didn’t see Frank Liberto again until 1965. He refused to acknowledge any business dealings with him. In 1966, he left Veterans Cab and went to work for the Yellow Cab Company as a dispatcher. The next year (1967), he opened a restaurant called the Check Off Inn and opened Jim’s Grill in the summer of 1967. He denied the Check Off Inn was a gamblers’ haunt.
When he opened Jim’s Grill, he hired Betty Spates and her sisters Alda Mae Washington and Bobbi Smith. He bought fresh vegetables from M. E. Carter, which were delivered daily. He said that the back door from the rooming house was boarded up, but he couldn’t explain why it appeared to be open in police evidence photographs that I showed him taken shortly after the killing.
Jowers said that on April 4, he drove a white Cadillac to work. Bobbi Smith worked on the morning of April 4 but left around 4:00 p.m.. He said Betty Spates did not work at all that day because one of her children was sick. Also, he said that Big Lena and Rosie Lee had been gone from his employ months earlier and that he himself had fixed breakfast for the “egg and sausage” man. Some time prior to Jowers’s deposition, I had located Rosie Lee Dabney, and she confirmed that she was waiting on tables in Jim’s Grill on the afternoon of April 4. She said she served eggs and sausage to a stranger on the afternoon of the shooting and again the next morning. An MPD report corroborated her story.
Jowers said he was drawing a pitcher of beer at the time of the gunshot. He confirmed with certainty that the bushes in the backyard had been cut down and he actually drew a line surprisingly close to the building up to where he said the thick bushes came. He acknowledged that the waitresses probably did bring food up to Grace Walden but denied telling Bobbi not to bring food up to her on the morning of April 4.
He denied driving Bobbi to work on the morning of April 5 or going out to the back or even looking out there on the morning after the shooting. Incredibly, he categorically denied having any relationship with Betty Spates. He did, however, admit to speaking with Betty on December 13, 1993, the night the Primetime Live program was filmed, to warn her, he said, that reporters were on the way to her house.
I showed Jowers a copy of the transcript of the ABC Primetime Live program, and he agreed it was an accurate statement. I then entered it into the record. When I began to question him on the statements he made on the program, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. I noted for the record that the transcript had already been agreed to and entered into evidence and that in my opinion the protection of the Fifth Amendment was not available to him. Garrison then agreed to stipulate “… that the questions were asked and Mr. Jowers gave these answers” (the answers being those responses given during the television program).
Jowers’s testimony was extraordinary for the number of untruths he told, many of which were clearly contradicted by other evidence and testimony and some of which were the result of him contradicting his earlier statements. For reasons best known to himself and his counsel, Jowers insisted on deposing Betty Spates. Lewis Garrison served a subpoena on her, and she came along in a hostile frame of mind. Before beginning, I took her aside and explained that Jowers, who had denied having any relationship with her, had insisted that she be called. Gradually, she decided to cooperate, confirming the factual truthfulness of the affidavit she had given to me earlier.
Willie Akins was also deposed and stated that a few years after the event, Jowers admitted that he was involved in the killing. Jowers described his meeting with Raul, who brought the gun to him at the Grill, and Frank Liberto, arranging for a delivery of a large sum of money in a produce box included in a regular delivery. The scene was striking. Jowers greeted Akins cordially, and then Akins, under oath, proceeded to incriminate his old friend. Akins continued to maintain that years later he had been asked by Jowers to kill Frank Holt. At the end of the deposition, Jowers and Akins went off talking about old times.
Betty’s sister Bobbi Smith was also subpoenaed and appeared on December 22. Under oath, she confirmed what she had told me in an informal interview on December 18, 1992, two years earlier. Jowers had told her not to bring breakfast upstairs to Grace Walden on the morning of April 4. She usually did this about twice a week around 10:00 to 10:30 after the morning rush was over. I had always thought that this was significant because it meant that something was going on up there well before noon that day—some four or more hours before James arrived to rent the room. Bobbi also said that Jowers picked her up on the mornings of April 4 and 5, as usual, in his brown station wagon, which he parked just north of the Grill in front of the store fixtures building.
On the way in on the morning of April 5, Jowers told Bobbi about the rifle being found in the backyard after the killing. She also confirmed that Jowers often spent the night at the Oakview House, where she lived with her mother and Betty in 1969, and that he had a long-standing affair with Betty during all of this time. Finally, she said that she had told the same story to the FBI and attorney general’s investigators sent by Pierotti, and she did not understand why they would say that she knew nothing or had retracted her story. They told her not to discuss the matter with anyone.
On Saturday, March 11, 1995, Attorney Lewis Garrison, with Loyd Jowers present, began to depose James in a small conference room at the Riverbend Penitentiary. Throughout the session, Jowers listened intently as James gave the usual answers to the questions he had heard a thousand times before. As he left the prison that afternoon, Loyd Jowers seemed to be more amenable than ever before to revealing details that I believed would ultimately establish James’s innocence.
Jowers agreed to answer some further critical questions about the killing through his lawyer. There would be no recordings of his statement, and Lewis Garrison would take the follow-up questions to him for his response. On March 14, 1995, the process began in Garrison’s 400 North Main Street office while he provided some new details of the conspiracy. Much of what he said confirmed information obtained previously from Betty Spates, Betty’s sister Bobbi Smith, and taxi driver James McCraw.
At the outset, Garrison stressed the Holt story was not concocted by his client, but had to acknowledge Jowers went along with it for a while. He was uncertain whose brainstorm it was but believed it originated with Willie Akins and Ken Herman.
Jowers contended that in March 1968, he was first approached not by Liberto but by a local businessman who dealt in securities and bonds and whom he had come to know from his gambling activity with Frank Liberto. This man told him that because of the location of Jim’s Grill, he was going to be asked to provide certain assistance to the carrying out of a contract to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. He would be paid handsomely.
Sometime between March 18 and March 28, soon after this conversation, Jowers was approached directly by produce man Frank C. Liberto, to whom he admitted that he owned a very large debt. For some time, I believed that the debt was a gambling loss. More recently, I have come to believe, following further conversations with Garrison, that it was more sinister. I believe that Liberto got rid of the body of a Mexican that Jowers killed after finding him in bed with Betty. Betty confirmed to me that Jowers came in and took the Mexican, whom she had brought home, at the point of a gun. She never saw him again. This debt would be forgiven, and Jowers would receive a large amount of money if he would help. Specifically, Liberto said that $100,000 would be delivered to him in cash in the bottom of an M. E. Carter vegetable produce box. The money came from New Orleans, as apparently did the contract on Dr. King’s life.
He would be visited by a man who would bring him a rifle and leave it with him for pick-up at the right time. (Upon consideration, it appears that this was not the murder weapon but a throw-down gun bought by James.)
At a subsequent point with his client’s consent, attorney Garrison confirmed that there would be a scapegoat or decoy to distract attention.
The police—some of whom were involved—would be nowhere in sight.
Jowers agreed. As Liberto said, a man did come to see him. Jowers thought that he introduced himself as “Raul” or “Royal,” and appeared to have a Latin or Indian appearance. He was about five feet nine inches in height and weighed approximately 145 to 155 pounds. He had dark hair and appeared to be between thirty-five and forty years old.
They discussed the plans for the killing. Raul told Jowers that his role would be to receive and hold the weapon on the day of the killing until it would be picked up. After the shooting, Jowers would have to take charge of the actual murder weapon and keep it concealed. Jowers was also expected to keep his staff out of the way at all times. He confirmed Bobbi’s story that he instructed her not to follow her usual practice of taking food up to Grace Walden.
On the morning of April 4, sometime around 11:00 a.m. after the rush was over, Raul, according to plan, came into Jim’s Grill, bringing with him a rifle concealed in a box that he turned over to Jowers to hold. Jowers said that Raul told him that he would be back later that afternoon to pick it up. Jowers put the gun under the counter and carried on with his work. He next admitted that he went away to take a rest sometime around or after 1:00 p.m. when the lunch crowd had gone. When he returned to work, it was around 3:30 p.m. Sometime later, Raul returned briefly and took the gun from him and went back into the kitchen area with it. Jowers claimed to be uncertain as to whether he remained in the rear of the Grill or went upstairs by the back stairway. (According to James’s recollections, Raul was upstairs off and on during the afternoon. It therefore seems more likely that Raul took the gun upstairs to room 5-B and concealed it there.)
Jowers said that sometime before 6:00 p.m., he went out into the brush where he joined another person. He did not provide any more details except to admit that immediately after the shot he picked up the rifle that had been placed on the ground and carried it through the back door of Jim’s Grill. As he ran into the back of the Grill, he was confronted by Betty who, as she had said, stood near him as he broke the gun down, wrapped it in a cloth, and quickly put it under the counter in the Grill. Jowers finally confirmed her recollection of the events was basically correct. He also admitted that the next morning between 10:00 and 11:00, he showed the rifle in a box under the counter to taxi driver James McCraw, thus confirming McCraw’s recollection. Sometime later that morning, Raul reappeared in the Grill, picked up the gun, and took it away. Jowers said he never saw the rifle again and has no idea where it was taken or where it is today. The version of events just laid out was completely at odds with the answers Jowers gave in his deposition. Jowers had altered some of these details, probably to cast his role in a slightly better light. Some years later, he would bring us closer to the more complete truth about the events leading up to and taking place on April 4, 1968.
New Strands and Connections—H. L. Hunt
Billionaire oilman H. L. Hunt, who had been dead since 1974, had close ties with people and institutions emerging as pivotal players in the conspiracy now unfolding.
I approached his former chief aide, John Curington, who offered many new revelations on Hunt’s close ties to the FBI and the Mafia. Curington had worked for Hunt Oil for fifteen years and for nearly thirteen of them had worked for H. L. Hunt personally, occupying the office right next to him. He frequently worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and often traveled with Hunt.
As he explained it, he was basically Mr. Hunt’s “follow-through” guy. He did whatever was necessary to get a job done. While not directly engaging in the “dirty” work, he made the arrangements at the old man’s request. According to one of my investigators, at one point he had even referred to himself as Hunt’s “bat man,” saying that he carried and delivered cash, sometimes in very large amounts, to any number of places, organizations, and individuals in support of right-wing activities. Some went to pay for specific operations.
Curington had participated in many of the illegal activities he detailed and was remarkably frank. While continually referring to documents in an old brown leather suitcase, the then–sixty-seven-year-old Texan confirmed that a closer relationship than had ever been publicly known existed between his ex-boss and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, which even included a direct-line red telephone in Hunt’s desk drawer. Their association went back to the early 1950s. Apparently, they had been poker-playing friends for many years, and their compatible right-wing political views, though differing sexual orientations, made them allies. Hoover had even seconded one of his trusted FBI agents, Paul Rothermel, to Hunt to be his head of security. Rothermel left the bureau in late 1954 and joined Hunt in 1955.
Curington was present at various meetings between Hoover and Hunt when Dr. King was discussed. Usually, Hoover came to the old man’s hotel room. While the two men shared a dislike for Dr. King, Hoover’s animosity was more passionate and obsessive, more personal. Hoover regularly provided Hunt with a considerable amount of documentation and material to be used as ammunition against Dr. King in his extreme right-wing, daily nationally syndicated “Lifeline” radio broadcasts. Dr. King was a favorite and a regular target of “Lifeline” venom.
Curington recalled one meeting in June 1967 in Chicago between Hunt and Hoover in Hunt’s hotel room. Hunt told Hoover he could finish Dr. King by constantly attacking him on his daily radio broadcasts. Hoover replied that it would not work. He said the only way to stop Dr. King would be to “completely silence” him. After Dr. King’s murder, Hunt acknowledged to Curington that Hoover had won that argument.
In April 1968, “Lifeline,” Hunt’s program, produced a fifteen-minute daily program, six days a week, on 429 stations in 398 cities across America. Between 1967 and 1968, Hunt spent nearly $2 million on this program alone. Curington revealed that the entire effort, as well as other shadowy, often deeply covert, political activities, was funded by moneys diverted by Hunt from H. L. H. Products, Inc.
Curington ran this company, which the “old man” had established as a front for funding such political activity. He also acknowledged that his boss and Hoover shared many of the same friends, including several kingpins of organized crime. Not only was Hunt close to gamblers Frank Erickson (to whom he once owed $400,000), and Ray Ryan (who at the same time owed him a large amount), but he associated with Frank Costello, the mob’s liaison to Hoover. Hunt’s top-level mob ties also included Carlos Marcello and Dallas boss Joe Civello.
In politics, Curington noted that Sam Rayburn, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, and his protégé Lyndon Johnson were both lifelong close political assets of Mr. Hunt. Curington also said that H. L. Hunt’s daily liaison with President Lyndon Johnson on political matters was former FBI agent Booth Mooney, who was personally close to the President. Mooney not only delivered communications between Johnson and Hunt but also wrote over half of the “Lifeline” broadcast tracts, including many of those attacking Dr. King.
On April 5, the day after Dr. King’s assassination, Hunt told Curington to make arrangements for him (Hunt) and his wife to travel to a Holiday Inn Resort hotel in El Paso, Texas. For whatever reasons, the old man wanted to be away and inaccessible in the aftermath of the killing of Dr. King. Curington said that on the evening of the assassination shortly after the shooting, Hoover called Hunt and advised him to cancel his anti-King “Lifeline” programs, which were to be aired that evening and the morning of April 5. After that call, Curington said he was called to Hunt’s home and told to put together a team of secretaries to call the radio stations.
By the end of our session, I concluded that John Curington, twenty-five years later, still appeared to be in awe of the man who, he said, moved on an entirely different level from “the rest of us.”
James’s Last Parole Hearing
A parole hearing for James was set for May 25, 1994. This would be the first time he appeared before the board. Such hearings are largely confined to a review of conduct during the time served. They are not concerned with any determination of guilt or innocence. I had no doubt that the decision would be made on purely political grounds and had already been made. Consequently, we decided to use this hearing as a forum to focus on James’s innocence.
I challenged the Board to act independently of the governor who appointed them and who had publicly expressed his wish that they deny parole and also to disavow the previous statements of the board’s former executive director, who said James was told he could apply again in five years after he had served a full thirty years.
At a post-hearing press conference in response to a question about the testing of the rifle, Pierotti made the extraordinary statement that he didn’t know if James was guilty and he didn’t have to prove it—so much for the requirement that prosecutors shall be primarily concerned with justice.
I was more convinced than ever that our best hope lay in Judge Brown’s courtroom. Judge Brown had been pressing us for some time to submit our draft order for the testing of the rifle and the bullets in evidence. I believed it likely that once the judge granted our request, the state would appeal his order and seek a delay pending review. This, of course, is what ultimately happened with our efforts resulting in a May 8, 1955 Criminal Court of Appeals ruling endorsing the Judge’s action.
Around 10:30 p.m. on the evening of June 4, 1994, I received a call from Memphis cab driver Nathan Whitlock, who had known Frank Liberto in the 1970s and who, I heard, had been told by Liberto himself that he had paid to have Dr. King killed. Whitlock usually drove a cab at night, and on that evening, he was driving a limousine. I rode with him, so we could talk. He told me about his conversation with “Mr. Frank” some sixteen years before. He said that his mother LaVada had owned a restaurant that lay on the route between Liberto’s home and his LL&L produce company business. Nearly every day, the produce man would stop in for breakfast in the morning on his way to LL&L and for drinks in the afternoon on his way home. Nathan said that when he had had a few drinks, Liberto took to baring his soul to LaVada. She would often leave her post at the bar, sit down at the table, and talk with him. One day, as the congressional committee’s work was being reported on the television in the restaurant, he told her he had arranged for the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. Nathan said that when his mother told him about this, he became upset that Mr. Frank would involve his mother in this “gangster” talk.
Nathan played guitar and used to travel, but in between trips he would help out in the restaurant, where he would often serve beer to Mr. Frank. Nathan said Liberto wanted to appear like a big shot around him. He showed off a thick roll of bills and a jade, diamond, and gold ring purportedly given to him by Elvis Presley. They became reasonably friendly.
Another customer of the restaurant once quietly advised Nathan to be careful since Liberto was in the Mafia. Nathan, who was about eighteen at the time, once asked Liberto if, indeed, he was in the Mafia and what the Mafia was anyhow. Liberto told him that the Mafia was a group of businessmen who “took care of business.” He added that as a youngster he used to push a vegetable cart with Carlos Marcello in New Orleans. At the time, this meant nothing to Nathan because he didn’t know who Marcello was.
Upset about Mr. Frank’s conversation with his mother, he decided to confront him. One afternoon in 1978, just before Nathan was scheduled to go away on a trip, Liberto came in and ordered a beer. Nathan engaged the 300-pound produce dealer in conversation and then asked him directly if he had killed Dr. King. He said Mr. Frank looked as though he was going to be sick to his stomach. He immediately asked Nathan if he was wired. The boy thought Liberto wanted to know if he was on drugs, which he denied. Then, Liberto said, “You’ve been talking to your mother, haven’t you?” Nathan admitted that he had, and Liberto told him, “I didn’t kill the nigger, but I had it done.”
Nathan said, “Well, that SOB is taking credit for it,” (referring to James).
Liberto then responded, “Oh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri.” He added that James was a “front man,” a “set-up man.”
Then, Nathan said Mr. Frank turned on him, saying, “You don’t need to know about this,” and after jumping to his feet and drawing his right hand back as though to hit him, he said, “Don’t you say nothing, boy,” and glared at him. He stomped around, thinking for a minute or so and then said, “You’re going to Canada, aren’t you?” Nathan said he was.
Liberto became quiet, and Nathan went to the back of the restaurant to take care of something, when he returned Liberto’s beer was still on the table, but Mr. Frank was gone. He never saw Liberto again, but during his trip, in early 1979, his mother sent him a letter stating that Frank Liberto had died.
Sometime later, Nathan would tell this story directly to the attorney general, after which he was interrogated by members of his staff. He said they tried to break down his account, but he stuck to his guns. Later, both Nathan and his mother told their stories under oath. John McFerren had been vindicated.
On June 5, 1994, Wayne Chastain and I met for the first time with Willie Akins, Jowers’s old friend and enforcer. In a three-hour session, he discussed how he had come to know Loyd Jowers and how he gradually learned about Jowers’s involvement in the killing. He confirmed acts of violence against Betty but said he never took a contract on her life and never meant to kill her.
Jowers had only recently begun to open up to him about the Dr. King case. When the BBC documentary aired in the United States, in which Earl Caldwell spoke about seeing a figure in the bushes, Jowers called Akins. He said, “Big N (Jowers always called him that; he said it stood for Big Nigger), you know that figure in the bushes he talked about—that was me.” He said that on one occasion, Jowers told him that the person who could do him the most damage was the chauffeur. He was referring to the long-missing Solomon Jones.
Akins continued to pay lip service to the story about him being asked to get rid of Frank Holt. My sense was that Akins had pieced part of the story together but that Jowers certainly had not told him everything. He was clearly lying about some things, but Akins’s information only added more corroboration to Jowers’s involvement. The question still remaining, however, was whether or not he had been out there alone and whether he himself had pulled the trigger. I increasingly believed that the answer to both questions was no.
Back in London in September, we came across a photograph in the Commercial Appeal’s pictorial history, “I Am a Man.” It was a shot of MPD officer Louis McKay guarding the bundle allegedly belonging to Ray in Canipe’s doorway. It was taken pointing south toward the fire station and in the background in the upper right was a hedge running down to the sidewalk between the parking lot and the fire station. Although there had been rumors of a hedge in that spot, we had never seen any photographs of it. On checking the evidence photographs from the attorney general’s office, this hedge did not appear standing in any of the evidence photos. Then I came across a photograph of the hedge cut down to its very roots. From looking at all of the other photographs, one would have never known that a hedge had ever been there. This was highly significant. The official investigators had contended that on leaving the rooming house, James had seen a police car parked up near the sidewalk that caused him to panic and drop the bundle. No police car was in this position. Even if there had been, the hedge would have obstructed the view and made the official story untenable.
Here was evidence that at the time of the killing, a hedge was there. Sometime shortly afterwards (probably the next morning when the bushes at the rear of the rooming house were cut), it was cut to the ground, and all traces of its existence were obliterated. At the trial, Hickman used a photograph that showed a police car in clear view pulled up to the sidewalk. That photograph and others like it must have been staged, taken after the scene had been physically altered. In fact, the staged photographs were clearly taken later since the billboard advertisements were different from the ones in place on the day of the killing and the day after.
Art Baldwin’s Account
On October 15, 1994, I drove out to the Shelby County Correctional Center and finally met with Arthur Wayne Baldwin, the government informant who worked closely with the Marcello organization in Memphis. He said that he now sympathized with James. He volunteered having heard that James was assisted in escaping from the prison in June 1977 and that he was not supposed to be brought back alive. It seemed to me that some things never change. He told me about two contracts on James’s life, with which he was involved. The first came from the “Memphis godfather” who in 1977 told him that the people in New Orleans wanted this matter cleared up once and for all. Ray was supposed to have been killed in Memphis, but it had been botched.
Baldwin was not keen to get involved but did not want to offend the Man. He had been present on other occasions when the godfather talked to Frank Liberto on other matters. He said that Liberto was treated like a “puppy dog” and ordered about in brutal fashion. Baldwin said he offered the contract to Tim Kirk. It went nowhere. The approach from the Bureau comes some months later.
Under the proposed scheme, he and a state official would go to Brushy Mountain prison with transfer papers for James under the pretext of moving him to Nashville. They would arrive around 3:00 a.m. and take him. Baldwin was expected to kill James en route. They would then bury the body. James would go out from the Brushy Mountain population “count,” and since Nashville was not expecting him, he would not be missed for some time. The transfer papers at Brushy Mountain would then be pulled. Baldwin said he became uneasy when he could not get answers to questions concerning how long they expected the story to be kept quiet and what the ultimate explanation was to be. He began to believe that he and even the official were to be killed as well as Ray. He pulled back.
He said they offered him lifetime immunity from all prosecution. His Nashville control FBI agent also knew about the scheme and had heard the two agents discussing other efforts to get rid of James. Both the mob and the government wanted him dead. They believed that it was only his continued presence that kept questions about Dr. King’s assassination alive. Baldwin was willing to take a lie detector test. His candor surprised me. It was obvious that he was fed up with being used by the government. His disclosure was the first time that I had heard the details about the Memphis godfather’s (Luchese) involvement in the cases although Mafia protocol would have required that Marcello process the contract through his Memphis boss and not deal directly with a local lieutenant like Liberto.
As noted earlier, James’s former attorney, Jack Kershaw, revealed that at an earlier time, an offer of money and parole had been made through author William Bradford Huie, who had collaborated with and funded James’s first attorney, Arthur Hanes. But James would have to admit his guilt. James rejected it out of hand. Shortly afterward, Jerry Ray (James’s brother) received a telephone offer for James from Huie with a substantially greater sum on the table. That attempt was recorded and transcribed.
After James had rejected these approaches, a more lethal scenario involving Art Baldwin was introduced.
Another Marcello Scenario
Sometime after telling me his story about Frank Liberto, Nathan Whitlock told me about a rumor of an earlier Dr. King murder contract put out to a member of a family named Nix who lived in Tipton County, Tennessee. Nathan said he understood that Red Nix had been given a new car and a rifle and paid $500 a week to track and kill King. If he succeeded, he was to get $50,000. He thought the offer came from Frank C. Liberto. Red had been killed not too long after Dr. King was shot. At Nathan’s suggestion, I met with Red’s brother, Norris. He and Bobby Kizer jointly owned and ran the New Moon night club in East Memphis. They confirmed that Red was given a new car and was put on a payroll for a job. “He was after someone all right,” said Norris Nix, “but I don’t know who.” They believed that Tim Kirk, who was a friend of Red Nix, would know who hired Red and offered to ask him to tell me what he knew. Tim, they said, could free my client.
I was surprised. I thought I knew everything Kirk had to say. Eventually, I visited Tim Kirk again to ask him about the Red Nix murder contract. He said with certainty that the contract was put out by Carlos Marcello, not Frank C. Liberto. It was sometime in mid-1967. He said Red knew Marcello and undertook various jobs for him. A car had indeed been provided to him. Here was another indication directly linking Marcello to a contract on Dr. King. Based on his experience, Nathan Whitlock had formed the impression that Liberto had also been behind the Nix contract. Kirk said there was no way. It came directly from New Orleans and Carlos Marcello.
More than ever the trail of the Memphis contract that resulted in Dr. King’s death led to New Orleans and pointed toward the involvement of the Mafia organization of Carlos Marcello. Marcello had not just given his approval but had taken on the job and had attempted to subcontract it on more than one occasion—the last time successfully through his Memphis associates (the details of whom I would later learn) that included the Memphis godfather and Frank C. Liberto.
Louie Ward’s Account
For a number of years, there had been rumors about a Yellow Cab taxi driver who saw someone jumping from the wall just after the shooting. In autumn 1994, a driver came forward. At first, he tried to tell his story to the attorney general, but he encountered a total lack of interest. He contacted Garrison after reading an article about the case. Garrison passed his number on to me.
On November 5, 1994, Louie Ward told me a story he had been holding back out of fear for twenty-six years. On the night of April 4, at around six o’clock, he was parked near the corner of Perkins Avenue and Quince Street. Suddenly, he heard the dispatcher over the radio, obviously responding to a driver’s call about an emergency. Any driver could only hear the dispatcher say that he would send an ambulance. In response to something else, the dispatcher said he would send one anyway and call the police. From what he had heard, Ward learned that the emergency was the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. He also realized that the driver was taking a fare to the airport.
Ward went straight to the airport and met up with the driver, who told him his story. Ward said that the driver, whom he knew as Buddy and whose full name he could not recall, was in his early sixties, and driving car 58. The driver said that he had gone to the Lorraine shortly before 6:00 p.m. to pick up a passenger with an enormous amount of luggage. As they finished loading up his taxi in the Lorraine parking lot, the driver turned to look at the area of dense brush and trees opposite the motel. His passenger quickly punched him on the arm in order to get his attention and (so the driver later thought) distract him from looking at the brush, and said, “Look up there—Dr. King’s standing alone on the balcony. Everybody’s always saying how difficult it would be to shoot him since he is always in a crowd. Now look at him.”
At that precise moment, the shot rang out, and the driver saw Dr. King get struck in the jaw and fall. The driver said he grabbed his microphone and told his dispatcher that Dr. King had been shot. The dispatcher said he would call an ambulance, and the driver said that considering the wound, he didn’t think it would do much good. Then Ward said the driver told him that immediately after the shot, he saw a man jump from the wall empty-handed and run north on Mulberry Street and get into a black and white MPD traffic police car that had stopped in the middle of the intersection of Mulberry Street and Huling Avenue. At that point, the driver told the dispatcher to tell the police that one of their units had the man. Meanwhile, the passenger was becoming irritable, saying that they had to leave immediately because the ambulance and other cars would box them in, and he had to make the plane. They left.
Ward heard the driver repeat the story to three MPD officers at the airport and observed a second interview being conducted later that evening in the Yellow Cab office by other policemen. After that evening, Ward said he never saw Buddy, the driver of car 58, again. Days later, he returned to the Yellow Cab office for the first time after the killing and asked after Buddy. Three or four of the drivers in the office told him that they understood he had fallen or had been pushed from a speeding car from Route 55, on the other side of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge, late on the evening of April 4.