A KEY PLAYER BEGINS TO TALK
A step closer to the shadowy truth,
Fear not guilt stood in the way,
The teller now far from youth,
His life waning day by day.
Early in 1997, I began to have discussions with Loyd Jowers’s lawyer, Lewis Garrison, about the possibility of Jowers meeting Dexter King and myself and setting out everything he knew about the killing.
The main impediment to such a meeting was Jowers’s fear of being indicted, convicted, and going to jail for the rest of his life. To overcome this, Dexter, on behalf of the family, and I agreed to give undertakings that we would support a grant of immunity for Jowers if he told us everything he knew about events leading up to the killing and the murder itself. I had no doubt Jowers was in the brush area at the time of the killing and that he knew who actually pulled the trigger. The rub, of course, was that he could have fired the shot himself. In any event, I argued he would be far better off with the support of the family, who were only interested in the truth and were not trying to seek retributive justice.
Jowers agreed to meet. But he kept backing off. The “investigation” of Judge Colton concerned him for a while. Then certain newspaper reports, focusing on his involvement, chilled his cooperation. Garrison received inquiries about our planned meeting from a Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter with contacts in the attorney general’s office. This led Garrison and me to believe that his phone was still being tapped. Then, at the request of the district attorney general, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation began to interview witnesses and visited members of Jowers’s family, telling them they were going to indict him. This seriously panicked Jowers, who threatened to leave the country.
Finally, a meeting was arranged. Dexter and I met with Jowers and Garrison at the Sheraton Inn in Jackson, Tennessee, on October 27, 1997. Over three hours, the truth—or at least, some of the truth—as known first-hand by Loyd Jowers, which he had kept bottled up for thirty years, gradually came out. Jowers continued to be fearful and tried to hedge his statements. I was able to interrogate him with Attorney Garrison, prompting him to confirm facts they had discussed since 1993.
I asked Jowers to start at the beginning. He said he first met Memphis produce dealer Frank Liberto when he was in the Memphis Police Department (MPD). He was told by another officer—John Barger, who acted as an unofficial mentor to the young Jowers—that Frank Liberto was a Mafia operative who could do a lot for a cooperative young policeman. When Jowers left the MPD and went into business—first running clubs and then bars and restaurants—the relationship continued. He learned early on that Liberto was into a variety of illegal activities, including gunrunning, drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Jowers would help handle money for Liberto, who would hand over a bundle of bills and instruct him to deliver the “package” to a particular person. He performed this task a number of times over the years. So when Liberto came to him in early 1968 and once again asked him to receive a bundle of money and turn it over to a man named Raul, who Liberto described in some detail, he was not surprised. When he received the money in a vegetable box, Jowers put it in a disused stove in the kitchen at Jim’s Grill, which is where Betty Spates remembers seeing it. When Raul turned up a day or two before the assassination, Jowers gave him the money.
I placed a photograph spread of six pictures in front of Jowers. He picked the photograph of the man who was also identified as Raul by Glenda Grabow, her brother Royce Wilburn, Sid Carthew, and James Earl Ray. Jowers wryly commented that Raul’s very distinctive face was not easily forgotten.
It is important to keep in mind that Jowers has, in the past twenty years, for understandable (though self-serving) reasons, given inconsistent accounts of what happened in and around Jim’s Grill on April 4, 1968. For example Jowers initially denied the presence of Betty Spates. He also initially claimed to be inside the Grill pulling beer at the time of the shot. He refused to acknowledge having any contacts with murder weapons after the shooting or involvement in planning meetings held in the Grill, or giving instructions that no one go upstairs.
Eventually these denials were refuted by evidence I obtained from Betty Spates, her sister, and taxi driver McCraw, and even by Jowers himself, who was boxed in by his earlier lies.
This would emerge as a main criticism of him in the June 2000 Department of Justice limited investigation report discussed below. Now, he said he recalled that after Frank Liberto approached him there was at least one, and probably up to three meetings in Jim’s Grill to prepare for the assassination. While he maintained that he did not sit in on these planning sessions, he remembered them taking place and recalled most of the participants. They included his old, now-deceased friend John Barger—by then an MPD officer—and undercover police officer Marrell McCollough, whose military intelligence role was unknown to Jowers. At an earlier time, Barger had brought McCollough to the Grill and introduced him as his new sidekick. In his 1977 testimony to the HSCA, McCollough had denied any intelligence role at the time of the assassination. Now with the CIA, McCollough was interviewed in April 1997 by ABC Primetime Live. He confirmed he knew Loyd Jowers. When asked about Jowers implicating him in the King assassination he said he had no comment and put the phone down. Local contacts have attempted to get McCollough to talk to me without success.
Another MPD inspector who Jowers said was at the planning sessions has had a high profile in the case from the outset. He is still alive. The fourth participant was MPD officer Lieutenant Earl Clark, who died in 1987. Clark ran the MPD firing range out at the Armour Center and was regarded as perhaps the best shot in the force. Jowers also confirmed something I had learned some years ago—Clark was exceptionally close to Frank Liberto. Jowers said Liberto had told him that the police would not be around at the time of the killing and they had a “fall guy” in place. Jowers had previously told Attorney Garrison that he received the murder weapon from Raul the day before the killing and gave it back to him near the actual time of the assassination. He had also said he did not leave the Grill for a night or two before the killing.
In our session he stated that the weapon was picked up by Earl Clark on the afternoon of the killing. Jowers said that he was instructed to go out through his kitchen into the brush area just before 6:00 p.m. and wait. He had the impression someone in Dr. King’s group was going to get Dr. King out onto the balcony around that time.
After the shooting, he was to take the gun and keep it until it was picked up by Liberto’s man the next morning. Liberto, he said, made it clear to him that the weapon was his “personal property.” The following morning, a “Mexican” employee of Liberto’s came to the Grill, drank coffee, and waited until customers had left. He then picked up the gun and took it away. Jowers never saw him again. At other times, he had said that Raul picked up the weapon.
While he continued to deny that Betty Spates was there on the afternoon of the killing, he effectively confirmed her account. His attorney, Lewis Garrison, noted that Jowers had, for some years, essentially validated her story. Betty Spates, as noted earlier, remembered two rifles. Jowers brought one in from the brush area around noon on the day of the killing and broke it down in front of her. She saw him carrying the second gun into the kitchen seconds after the fatal shot.
Jowers confirmed Betty’s recollection that he placed the murder weapon under the counter. Taxi driver James McCraw always insisted that this was where he had seen it on the morning after the killing, though Jowers previously denied showing it to him. Jowers admitted being in the brush area with the shooter and taking the rifle “still smoking” from the assassin and running inside with it. Jowers made this crystal clear. He even said that he attempted to flush the extracted cartridge shell down the toilet off the kitchen and that it stopped it up. Though never emphatic, he indicated that the other man in the brush area—the actual assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.—was the MPD’s best shot, Lieutenant Earl Clark. He said that the shooter passed the rifle to him and took off. Jowers was too busy making tracks himself to notice where he went but seemed to recall that he headed back toward the building. I have now come to question not Clark’s involvement—I believe that he was totally involved and was one of the people in the bushes at the time of the shooting—but the allegation that he pulled the trigger. I had always been uneasy with Jowers’s less than completely positive statement of Clark’s responsibility. There was an ever-present hedge. Now I believe that I know why.
As for Clark, in a sense I had come full circle. I had strongly suspected him of being the assassin in 1988 and 1989. When I interviewed his former wife, Rebecca, in 1992 she gave him what appeared to be a cast-iron alibi. She insisted he had been at home and asleep at the time of the killing and that when he was called in over his police “walkie-talkie,” she had to drive to the cleaners to pick up his uniform. She seemed believable. She had been divorced from Clark, who had remarried, and therefore had no reason to stand up for him. However, she was still raising his son who sat in on our interview and who had obviously been very attached to his father.
I began to question Mrs. Clark’s credibility in 1995. Taxi driver McCraw told me that on the night of the shooting, he had picked her up in downtown Memphis and taken her miles away from home. McCraw had also made it clear to me that Clark, a Jim’s Grill regular, had openly boasted that he would kill Dr. King when he came to town. I had dismissed it as so much racist talk. But in 1995 McCraw told me he had seen Clark emerge from the south side of the rooming house around 6:20 p.m. wearing his MPD uniform. Jowers recalled him wearing light-colored civilian clothes at the time of the shooting.
There were, and continued to be, inconsistencies about these and other details, but the scenario was coming together. The facts have been there, capable of discovery from the beginning. The first glimpse of the Liberto connection surfaced with John McFerren’s courageous report of the fat man screaming down the telephone to his shooter, “Shoot the son of a bitch when he comes on the balcony.” This was further confirmed by his own admissions to Whitlock, ten years later. There were other independent corroborating sources. But it would take the courage of Betty Spates and James McCraw to force Loyd Jowers to come forward in 1993, offering to tell all he knew in return for a grant of immunity. The reluctance of the authorities to hear what Jowers had to say was understandable, given how far up the line the conspiracy went.
The Marcello/Liberto/Memphis PD assassination operation provided the government with a plausibly deniable alternative to the use of its own trained professionals who were waiting in the wings and ultimately not required. We have seen that organized crime frequently fulfills this need and insulates federal, state, and public officials and agencies from responsibility for a variety of illegal acts. The underlying financial arrangements, even commercial collaboration, such as gunrunning and drug dealing joint ventures, which finance the illegal covert operations, rarely come to light. When they do surface, massive damage limitation and cover-up operations are mounted. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was a tragedy for the American people. The shameful truth behind its execution and subsequent cover-up is a searing indictment of betrayal and abuse of power.
James Dies
During the last stage of James’s life, as a part of the Shelby County district attorney general’s investigation, I agreed to allow the two lead investigators, Marvin Glankler and MPD officer Tim Cook, to interview James. My former investigators, Ken Herman and John Billings, while not trusting Glankler, initially believed that Cook was trying to get the truth out. I was skeptical, but in the interests of not giving the state the opportunity to say that he did not cooperate with them, I agreed to allow this access, and the visit took place in the Lois DeBerry medical unit at Riverbend. Jerry Ray was also present.
After some initial conversation, Cook began to lean heavily on James to admit his guilt. I had difficulty believing what I was hearing. Would they never learn? He took the line that he could quickly arrange for James to be released and allowed to die outside of the prison in the bosom of his family. He got nowhere. James had not professed his innocence and fought for a trial for thirty years to finally give in to the shameful entreaties of a Memphis Police Department officer. In a brief exchange with the officer near the end of his visit, I learned that Lieutenant Earl Clark’s partner, hunting buddy, and friend John Coletta was a member of Cook’s family by marriage—an intriguing coincidence.
James died on April 23, 1998, the thirty-first anniversary of his escape from Jefferson City Penitentiary. I was in London and immediately left for the United States. I agreed to do a Today Show interview at Heathrow Airport just before leaving. Author Gerald Posner was to follow me, but there was an understanding that I would have an opportunity, however briefly, to rebut his comments. In response to a question, I noted that I could name some eighteen individuals who had significant information and that Posner had not spoken to any of them. After that challenge, Posner claimed that James had made a secret tape recording before he died, probably admitting his guilt. He accused me or Jerry of having and hiding the tape, indignantly calling on me to surrender the recording, stating that the American people had a right to know. It was, of course, an outrageous lie, but I was not given the promised opportunity to reply. Even with James dead, nothing had changed.
Postmortem Events
James’s death left us with one last option to have the evidence tested under oath in a court of law—a civil action against Loyd Jowers. Jowers, of course, had voluntarily revealed and discussed his involvement in separate meetings with Dexter King and myself, and with Dexter King and Ambassador Andrew Young. These sessions were the culmination of his attempt to obtain immunity from prosecution that had begun in 1993 when he learned that we had uncovered enough evidence for him to be indicted (had there been any official interest in doing so). His account was continually and expectedly dismissed by the attorney general as having been made in anticipation of a book or movie deal. This was arrant nonsense. In fact, as a result of being forced into the open, Jowers had lost everything. Even his wife left him. There was no book or movie deal, and he was, for the most part, telling the truth.
ABC News convinced him to take a lie detector test, using a former FBI polygrapher, and then announced that he failed. In fact, their claims and program notwithstanding, he passed the test. This was revealed by the taxi driver who drove the ABC team to the airport and who overheard their conversation including the lament of the polygrapher who admitted that he couldn’t get Jowers “to waver.” The same polygrapher would be fined by the relevant Tennessee supervisory body for his conduct of the test. ABC has (also contrary to the law) to this day shamefully refused to provide Jowers with a copy of the transcript and the video of the examination.
Jowers, however, had provided the degree of detail required for a civil action. The family and I discussed the option at length after James’s death in the spring of 1998. There were concerns. Would such an action do any good? Would it not bring the media down on the family again? How would it be financed? I could not speak to or resolve many of the personal concerns of the family. They had to bear the burden. I could only advise them that I thought we had a strong case and that the action would provide us with perhaps the last opportunity to test evidence that had never been brought before a judge or jury. As to cost, I would not charge and believed that some of our friends would raise funds to help us. Since we would be bringing witnesses from every part of the United States and even England, it was going to be an expensive endeavor.
Dexter, who had been in the forefront for the family since they had become involved in 1997, and who had received the brunt of the attacks, was the most cautious. He knew that if the action went ahead, once again he would bear the major responsibility. Mrs. King expressed the feeling that we all had come too far not to complete this effort, which I had begun twenty years before and had kept alive in the face of formidable opposition. We would go to trial.
Wayne and I wasted no time in drafting the complaint against Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators. Without any publicity, the action entitled Plaintiffs the Family of Dr Martin King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King III, Bernice King, Dexter King, and Yolanda King v. Defendants Loyd Jowers and other unknown co-conspirators, docket kit #97242TD was filed for trial in Division IV on October 2, 1998.
It would take more than a year for it to get on the calendar. We were scheduled to be first out on November 15, 1999, but the judge—James Swearingen—was off and on the bench due to illness, and it was not clear that he would be fit to try the case. At various times, we considered transferring the case to another judge, but in the end we waited, and the judge recovered. It could be the last case of his long and distinguished career.
In the interim, on June 7, 1999, Wayne Chastain died. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer and he finally succumbed. I felt a great personal and professional loss.
Don Wilson’s Materials
Donald Wilson lives in the Chicago area. He is a former FBI agent who joined the Bureau as a young man with a desire to facilitate the civil rights of minority Americans. He became greatly disillusioned, but he had a young family to support and decided to stick it out, eventually retiring after having received a number of commendations from J. Edgar Hoover.
In early 1997, Don Wilson contacted the King family and me, providing us with some extraordinary new information. At first, we communicated through his son, who was a lawyer in a Chicago law firm. When we eventually met, it was on April 15 in the lounge of the Admirals Club at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He recounted two incidents. He said that shortly after the assassination, he and another agent were riding in the Peachtree area of Atlanta, and they spotted a person who, they were certain, was the man wanted for the murder of Dr. King. The person matched the photograph being circulated of the suspect. Wilson said he and his partner were inclined to apprehend the person they had spotted and radioed the field office for permission to do so. The operator told them to hold on, went off the line for instructions, then came back on, and instructed them to “return to base.” Surprised and disappointed, they did as they were told. To this day, Don Wilson finds it strange and unacceptable that they were not allowed to detain the suspect and yet were not given any explanation.
What he told me next was more significant. When the field office received a request from the Atlanta police to check out a white Mustang, which had been parked for some days at the Capitol Homes Housing Project, he went along with a senior colleague to the scene. The suspicion was that the car, with Alabama license plates, had been involved in the King assassination. Wilson said that when he opened the car door on the passenger’s side, an envelope and some papers fell out. Instinctively, he put his foot on the papers, bent over, picked them up, and put them in his pocket. The young agent was nervous, thinking that he might have disturbed the evidence at the crime scene. Later, when he had an opportunity to examine the individual sheets of paper, he was shocked and realized that if he turned them over to his superiors, they would never see the light of day.
He kept them hidden for twenty-nine years.
One piece came from a 1963 Dallas, Texas, telephone directory. It was part of a page that had been torn out. The telephone numbers on the page included those of the family of H. L. Hunt, but more significantly, in handwriting at the top of the page, was the name “Raul,” the letter “J” and a Dallas telephone number, of a club in Dallas which at the time was run by Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The second piece of paper contained several names; alongside of each were sums of money. It appeared to be some sort of payoff list, and at the bottom was Raul’s name and date for payment. Wilson also said that he had recovered a third piece of paper, on which was written the telephone number and extension of the Atlanta FBI field office.
The Wilson materials raised the serious issue of the potential collusion of the Atlanta field office, or at least the connection of one or more persons in that office, with someone who had access to James’s white Mustang. From that, we knew that the most likely candidate for the FBI liaison had to be Raul. I believed that every effort would be made to discredit Don and his materials.
After considerable discussion with the King family, it was agreed that Don would provide the materials to the Atlanta district attorney, ask them to investigate, and immediately thereafter release the information to the media.
Don and I eventually met with the district attorney who said that he did not have the staff resources necessary for such an investigation, but that he would formally request that the US attorney general institute a full investigation.
The reaction to our press conference was quiet and predictable. The FBI dismissed the materials without even seeing them and attacked Wilson as a fraud, saying that there was no record of him being a part of the team which examined the Mustang. He never said he was. He had access to the Mustang in the Capitol Homes parking lot before it was towed to (and examined by others in) the FBI garage.
Don initially made an offer directly to the attorney general to meet with her and show her the materials. When the FBI attacks began, he withdrew the offer. Eventually, he allowed Atlanta Journal Bulletin reporter Arthur Brice to come to Chicago and review the original materials. Brice did so and wrote a fair, descriptive story, a rarity in respect of this particular development—of course, in respect of any of the new evidence.
Don Wilson’s material pointed me in a direction that I did not want to go, toward connections between the Dr. King and John Kennedy assassinations. Glenda Grabow had told me how in 1963 she had occasionally seen a man whom she only knew as “Jack” with Raul. At one point, in the autumn of that year, she had been intimate with him. It was about a month or two before Roy was released from prison.
She only realized who he was when his photograph was flashed across the world after he had killed Lee Harvey Oswald. I decided not to introduce the element of Glenda’s story into our legal submissions on behalf of James. I knew that James’s efforts for a trial would not be well served by this linkup. As it was, we were always being depicted as conspiracy nuts. Imagine what our enemies would do with this new information.
Then, along came Don Wilson and his material, on which the name of Raul was written next to the letter “J” and the telephone number of Jack Ruby’s Vegas Club. It was problematical in terms of James’s interests, but I decided to travel to Dallas in order to interview some former strippers who had worked for Ruby and were around him a good deal.
I met separately with Beverly Oliver, Chari Angel, and Madeleine Brown. Madeleine had not worked for Ruby but was Lyndon Johnson’s mistress for years, and, in fact, had given birth to his only son; she also knew Ruby and frequented his main club—the Carousel.
When I put the spread of photographs in front of each of them on separate occasions, each one independently confirmed that she had seen Ruby with the man we had identified as Raul. In fact, Beverly remembered Raul giving Ruby what appeared to be a large amount of cash in what she described as a Piggly Wiggly grocery store paper bag.
There was no doubt that each of these women corroborated Glenda Grabow’s information that Jack Ruby and Raul knew each other. Don Wilson’s materials appeared to fortify that fact.
Prior to James’s death, the King family and I discussed the possibility of calling for a new investigation or one conducted by the Justice Department. But we’d rather have one conducted by a truly independent body with subpoena power and the authority to grant immunity from prosecution in exchange for information. In reality, we wished for a commission modeled after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The family met with President Clinton and explained their wishes. He eventually refused their request and instead asked Attorney General Reno to conduct a limited investigation, which would focus on the new evidence provided by Don Wilson and the admissions of Loyd Jowers.
This was clearly unsatisfactory, for it was one more instance of the government investigating itself, but we had little choice but to cooperate with the effort that was to be led by the Justice Department’s senior civil rights criminal trial attorney Barry Kowalski.
Kowalski’s team moved quickly into high gear as they promptly reached out for Don Wilson. The early contacts were amicable, but it soon turned ominously nasty.
I was in touch with Don off and on during his experience in the summer of 1997. He said that, initially, he was inclined to cooperate, and then he learned that the attorney general’s team had placed a surveillance officer outside of the bank where he kept the materials in a safe deposit box. A bank officer became suspicious of this lingering person and called the police, who came and apprehended him. When the officer flashed the documentation of a federal marshal, Don knew that he was a part of the attorney general’s team, and he was livid. He refused to cooperate and became hostile to the attorney general’s team’s effort to acquire his materials.
His life changed drastically after he went public with his story. Before he surfaced he ran a profitable talent agency, representing a number of music groups. After he went public, it all went away. Clients were contacted and told that their careers would not be benefited if Don Wilson continued to be their agent.
His business was ruined. In order to make a living, he took a teaching job. It got worse. One day after he had left for work, his wife received a call and was told that they had access to her health records and knew about her asthmatic condition, which was aggravated by stress. The caller said that her husband was a liar and that if he didn’t turn over the materials he would go to jail. Eventually, in response to a subpoena, Don gave them the original Dallas telephone directory page and the pay list. Wilson told me in no uncertain terms that these people were not friends of ours, nor did they want the truth in Dr. King’s assassination. He said they verbally attacked Dexter King and myself.
I spoke with Barry Kowalski from Eastern Europe when this was going on. I raised the issue of the treatment of the Wilsons, and he defended his actions, saying that they were necessary in order to obtain the materials. He said that otherwise Wilson was not going to surrender the materials to them or, he said, to me.
Shortly afterward, Don told me that his wife was shopping in a suburban shopping area near their home. When she returned to her car, she found the tires slashed. This type of vandalism was unprecedented in that area. They filed a police complaint to no avail. Don was outraged, but he felt powerless and alone, and he began to question the wisdom of coming forward and trying to help. He was concerned about the strain and pressure on Fran, his wife. When we filed the civil action in October 1998, he made it clear that we could not count on his testimony when the case came to trial. By the time the trial date rolled around—November 15, 1999—it was firm. Don would not be moved by any entreaties. I considered him and his story to be a casualty of the attorney general’s investigation.
The task force seemed to be attempting to speak to a wide range of people, each of whom had various pieces of information. In November 1999 I learned that the previous June they had obtained what work records of Raul’s were available. This was revealed to me when I obtained the same records. Those records, however, indicated a history of extended absences and time off—strange for a simple automobile worker.
The Justice Department team never did speak to Loyd Jowers. Jowers understandably wanted immunity before he would meet with them. While they indicated that they could arrange it with the Shelby County district attorney’s office, in fact, an offer never materialized, and they would not be able to interview him. Though they appeared to be close to finalizing their report in the summer of 1999, the trial would come to an end in December without a report being issued.