17

“A Natural Hustler”

Missouri State Penitentiary, opened in 1836, was the only prison in Missouri for nearly one hundred years. A collection of Gothic-inspired limestone buildings perched on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River at Jefferson City, surrounded by massive walls and sixteen gun turrets, it was once dubbed “square foot for square foot the bloodiest 47 acres in America.”1 Prisoners called the imposing structure, which housed the state’s only active gas chamber, either Jeff City or MSP.² When Ray arrived in the spring of 1960, it had over 2,000 prisoners, nearly double the number for which it was built.³ It also had a reputation among many convicts as one of the worst places to serve time. A riot in 1954 had left five inmates dead, seven buildings burned completely, and a score of guards injured. A former Marine colonel, James D. Carter, who was brought in to run the prison after the riots, found the complex so unmanageable that he later told the Missouri legislature it was the “roughest damn prison in the country” and that his recommendation for improvement was simply to abandon it.⁴

Following the 1954 riots, violence among prisoners worsened each year for a decade.⁵ Once, in 1963, three inmates were murdered within twenty-four hours, prompting an investigation by the Missouri Legislative Committee on Prisons. Its study covered 1961–63—near the beginning of Ray’s term there—and concluded that the prison was “a medieval twilight zone.”⁶ The study documented nearly 500 acts of violence during the two years it dealt with, including 145 stabbings, 134 assaults with clubs or bats, and even 11 cases of attacks with acid or lye.7 Seven inmates died; others lost eyes or limbs or sustained other permanent injuries.⁸ The psychiatric ward was run by a man who had been booted from the Army for emotional instability. When committee members visited the hospital, they saw horrific conditions, ranging from “thousand of bugs scampering about” to medical experiments conducted on prisoners in return for sixty days “good time” off their sentences.⁹ Near the end of the legislative investigation, the warden, E. V. Nash, had killed himself with a pistol while a Christmas party was in full swing just outside his office.

An official prison history summarizes some of the problems that exacerbated the violence: “gambling; debts; sexual affairs; grudges; decline in the age of the prisoners; an atrocious physical plant that made it almost impossible to control the population; low morale among guards who were unarmed in a giant prison where one inmate testified, ‘Every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a knife.’”¹⁰ The legislative investigation discovered that guards—largely composed of farmers, bellhops, taxi drivers, and clerks who were “underpaid, undertrained, [and] uncertain of advancement”—mostly moonlighted to earn an adequate living.¹¹

It is not surprising that in this decaying atmosphere the prisoners largely ran Jeff City. Inmates were forced to pay other inmates for medical treatment (Ray paid $40 for some dental work). Some acted as “switchmen” and “lever men” with the right to open cells and allow inmates to transfer from one cell to another, usually for sex. For a price, prisoners could even “marry.” Guards often bought their own safety with favors and gifts.*

An elite group of inmates ran the prison when Ray arrived. Jeff City was essentially segregated into two prisons: seven and eight blacks were crammed into cells designed for three in the so-called A Hall.¹² The dining halls were segregated and blacks were not allowed into the television room.^†13 The white prison was run by an inmate, Jimmy Bradley, who lived in a cell with upholstered furniture, draperies, and a TV set. The warden had his picture taken with Bradley, his arm draped around the convict’s shoulders.14 Ray later wrote that when he first entered the prison, “immediately I saw that Jeff City had a live-and-let-live attitude. In the rec area, you could get into a poker game or buy and rent magazines or books of any kind.”¹⁵

Ray was held in isolation his first thirty days while prison officials decided where to place him. They finally assigned him to K Hall and a job in the dry-cleaning plant.¹⁶ He had been there only nine months when he received word that his mother had died at a city hospital in St. Louis from complications of cirrhosis of the liver—the same ailment that would afflict Ray some twenty-six years later. She was fifty-one years old. Except for James, the entire Ray family had gathered at Ceal’s bedside the night she died. In August 1961, within months of Ceal’s death, Speedy remarried (it lasted two years, until his new wife sued successfully for divorce on the grounds that he was an alcoholic).¹⁷ Ray never discussed his family with his fellow inmates. None of them learned of his mother’s death.*

During his early months in prison, Ray focused on how to escape. “My job in the dry cleaning plant offered a reasonable opportunity for such an undertaking,” he later said. “That and my 20-year sentence were all the encouragement I needed to plan an escape.”^†18

Ray was one of only seven inmates in the dry-cleaning plant. A head count was done nightly at 8:00 P.M. To Ray, that meant that during the fall and winter hours he had “about two hours of weak light in which to pull off an escape before I’d be missed.”¹⁹ One evening in November 1961, when the small crew left work at six o’clock, Ray hid behind boxes in the rear of the workroom.²⁰ He then fashioned a makeshift ladder from the oak shelves on which supplies were kept. Once he had assembled a ladder almost twelve feet long, he dragged it behind him “toward the clothing shop 50 feet away.”21 The guard who was supposed to be watching the pathway did not see him. Once at the clothing plant, Ray pulled the ladder along a narrow passage that put him within twenty feet of the wall. When he scurried to the wall, the ladder in tow, another watch-tower guard failed to spot him. Ray placed the ladder against the fourteen-foot wall and began climbing. He was halfway to the top when the ladder collapsed and he slammed into the ground. Astonishingly, none of the watchtower guards heard the commotion.²² Ray quietly gathered the broken pieces and hurriedly returned to the cleaning plant to implement a backup plan. Using pipe from the metal racks on which the prison’s dry cleaning was hung, he quickly screwed together another makeshift ladder.²³ He returned—again unseen—to the same section of wall that he had tried to scale fifteen minutes earlier. “This time I made it two-thirds of the way to the top before my ladder gave way,” Ray remembered. “I landed in a heap, and a section of pipe crashed onto my head.”²⁴ Ray thought the tower guard did not notice him, but the ruckus finally attracted attention. When he returned to the cleaning plant, guards arrested him.

Ray’s bungled attempt did not increase his prison sentence, but he did lose his “good time” and he was put into long-term segregation, a harsh section on the upper floor of E Hall.²⁵ There, with only a straw-filled mattress and a blanket, he spent six months. The few windows were so loose that the winter cold kept many prisoners pinned under their mattress and blanket. According to Ray, his neighboring cells were filled with “head cases, who would harass the guards, provoking them into shooting tear gas into the offending parties’ cells.”²⁶ The gas would spread throughout the cell block, forcing Ray to lie on the floor and try to suck in fresh air from the cracks next to the cell’s plumbing.

When he was returned to the general prison population in May 1962, the first thing he noticed was that “a large spotlight atop the clothing plant was aimed at the stretch of wall I’d tried to scale.”²⁷ He was assigned to the “spud room,” peeling potatoes. That area was considered one of the worst in the prison, staffed usually by sex offenders—“not exactly my cup of tea,” said Ray.²⁸ So he refused to work, which prompted another ten days in solitary confinement, with only a single meal daily. This time, upon his release, Ray better understood how Jeff City worked—he slipped $10 to one of the convict clerks, who allowed him to pick his own job.²⁹ He selected the bakery, where he remained for the next three years.

Ray had decided to adapt to prison life at Jeff City. He has described his time there as innocuous and without incident, similar to his stretch at Leavenworth. But there is a jumble of conflicting statements from fellow prisoners about how Ray spent those years, and the truth of Ray’s assertions is key to understanding what kind of person he was.³⁰

The few inmates who knew him from Leavenworth found Ray bitter at Jeff City, complaining he had been framed on his robbery charge and that the arresting police had concocted evidence against him.31 But to others, who had never met him before, James earned the same reputation he had at his earlier prisons—as a quiet man who enjoyed country-and-western music and liked being alone. He made no real friends.³² “Anyone who says they knew Jim Ray real well are liars,” the Jeff City barber later said.³³ Ray continued to be interested in baseball, and was a reader, devouring the James Bond series and going through a broad range of periodicals from newspapers to Time and Argosy to the National Enquirer.³⁴ He also read travel books.³⁵

His time at Jeff City, however, was anything but uneventful. Did Ray apparently decide that if he was going to do time in a place where prisoners ran a host of illegal rackets, he should profit from them? Since he had dealt successfully in the black market when in the Army, and had learned from his uncle Earl how to fence stolen goods, wasn’t he a natural to become one of the prison’s “merchants,” who smuggled contraband—such as drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, and so on—into the prison?*

“Personally, I think a man is born to be a hustler,” said Jerry Ray, “like he’s born to be a baseball player. Not everybody’s got it in them to be a hustler. I haven’t.… A lazy person can’t be a hustler. There would be ten or twelve of them in Jeff City, but most of them got too well known, had to go out of business at one time or another. Like, many of those hustlers live good and show off.… Then the heat gets on you, and the guards don’t want to fool with you. But Jimmy was so quiet. Mostly, there’d be a shakedown only if somebody was under suspicion, and Jimmy didn’t do anything to make them suspicious of him. He just wanted to make money, didn’t put on no show. He was a natural hustler.”³⁶

James, according to Jerry, started trading such commissary goods as steaks, candies, and soups from the bakery and kitchen where he worked.³⁷ By 1963, he had graduated to dabbling in the prison’s most profitable trade: drugs. To deal in dope, a merchant had to have the aid of a guard, who served both as a local protector and as a conduit to send money out of the prison.38 “That’s the key to being a merchant,” said Jerry, “the guard’s trust.… You have to be close-mouthed. Jimmy talked to a lot of people but he didn’t have no friends. They could shake him down and nobody could break him. Nobody could make Jimmy talk.”³⁹ Even James himself later said that the reason Jeff City officials could not control the internal drug traffic was “because the guards, like other prison officials, didn’t share [any] enthusiasm. Prison administrators seem to appreciate the way drugs serve to divert prisoners from their more dangerous propensities.”⁴⁰

When Ray did deal in drugs, it evidently was amphetamines. According to Jerry, a guard brought some of the dope to James, who then sold it to prisoners. Ray also bought his own supply from other inmates. Then he gave cash to the guard, who took his share before sending it by mail, usually to Jerry Ray and sometimes to John.⁴¹ When Jerry received the money, he wrote “OK” on a piece of paper and mailed it back to the guard.⁴² Jerry considered that money as “Jimmy’s account” and was supposed to hold it for his brother.*

“He was a peddler at Jeff City, all right,” said Raymond Curtis, a fellow inmate who had served time with Ray at two previous jails including Leavenworth.⁴³ Curtis confirmed Jerry’s account of Ray’s prison dealing, saying that it started with stolen goods from the kitchen—one dollar a dozen for eggs to several dollars for steaks, butter, even gallons of homemade beer or “potato water”—and graduated to drugs. Curtis, who pinpointed Ray’s main source of contraband as another inmate in the commissary, admitted that he sometimes hid Ray’s stash of pills when there was a prison shakedown.⁴⁴ “A fella like Ray would end up paying about seven hundred fifty dollars a pound [for amphetamines]. With pills you make more. You buy a thousand for fifty cents apiece, and sell them for a dollar apiece.”⁴⁵ Also, Curtis said Ray was one of only a handful of dealers who sold small baggies containing a mixture of powdered sugar and speed, at prices ranging from $50 to $75 per bag, depending on the demand.⁴⁶

Others confirmed Curtis’s account. Cecil Lillibridge, one of Ray’s cellmates, said that Ray sold amphetamines during his entire term at Jeff City.⁴⁷ James Owens, who robbed the Kroger supermarket with Ray in 1959, was also jailed at the prison. He became aware that Ray was dealing speed when he saw other prisoners pay Ray for their purchases.⁴⁸ Inmates Paul Lail and Kenneth Lee Wade confirmed not only that Ray peddled dope but also that he was directly connected to the prison’s main suppliers.49 Richard Menard, who knew Ray for four years at Jeff City, said Ray told him he had a brother in St. Louis who helped supply his drugs (both John and Jerry lived near St. Louis for different periods of Ray’s imprisonment).⁵⁰ Ray averaged $200 monthly from his dope sales, estimated Menard, although depending on the supply, there might be no sales in some months and $1,000 in business in others.⁵¹ Even John Ray, who told the FBI that his brother first started using drugs while in the Army, admitted that when James finally escaped from Jeff City in 1967, he had money stashed away from selling amphetamines.⁵²

Besides drugs, Ray also dealt in other contraband. Billy Miles, who worked in the bakery with Ray, did not know about his drug dealing, but did operate a small prison bookmaking operation with him.⁵³ William Turner, the first black guard to have general jurisdiction over the Jeff City recreation yard, also did not know about Ray’s drug trade, but knew he dealt in cigarettes for cash and sometimes loaned books and “girlie magazines” for money.*⁵⁴

Ray’s contraband business must have been profitable. Author George McMillan, and Phil Canale, the chief Memphis prosecutor on the King assassination, later estimated that Ray smuggled nearly $7,000 out of prison in the five years he was a merchant.⁵⁵ When asked in a 1977 interview if he had made “a substantial amount of money from dope peddling in prison,” Ray did not directly deny his involvement, but he downplayed it—“I’ve never been any type of big operator in drugs in Missouri. [emphasis added]”⁵⁶

While the actual amount is not verifiable, it may not be as much as speculated.^† The reason is that Ray evidently broke the cardinal rule of drug dealers—he began using the drugs he sold. He partially denies it: “I’ve never used any kind of, what you call hard narcotics. That’s cocaine, heroin. Of course, everybody in the penitentiary, at one time or another, take tranquilizers, something of that nature.”⁵⁷ However, it was impossible to keep such a secret in the close prison confines.

Jimmy Carpenter, who was close to Ray at Jeff City, said that Ray was a drug user and that he often came to Carpenter’s cell and offered him dope.⁵⁸ Inmates Walter Nolan and Harry Sero also knew Ray was an amphetamine abuser, and Frank Guinan said he was addicted to “bennies.”59 Jimmy Bradley, who lived near Ray in K Hall, was one of several inmates who claimed Ray mainlined amphetamines, sometimes with two to three shots daily, but that he had difficulty because of his small veins.⁶⁰ Orlan Eugene Rose, who knew Ray at both Leavenworth and Jeff City, recalled that Ray shot amphetamines whenever he could get them, paying between two and five dollars a shot.⁶¹ The chief cook, Lewis Raymond Dowda, worked with Ray in the culinary section. He remembered that Ray not only sold dope, but also had a $35- to $40-a-week habit.⁶² Ray kept his user’s kit, a nose dropper with a needle with which he could shoot an amphetamine solution, in his cell.⁶³ Inmates noticed that Ray was often nervous and slept little, and his weight fluctuated frequently and rapidly within a ten- to fifteen-pound range, further evidence of amphetamine use.*⁶⁴

Ray often complained of headaches and stomach problems, and he became a regular at the infirmary.⁶⁵ Even in his own book Tennessee Waltz, Ray observed that when a prisoner did too much speed, he would be taken to the fifth floor of the prison hospital and the “doctor would hold his patient there three or four days, or until he dried out, then return him to the prison population.”⁶⁶ James Richardson, who was on death row in Jeff City, worked in the hospital. He recalled that Ray was not only one of the “cowboys” involved with petty thievery and gangsterism, but also used whatever type of medication he could obtain.⁶⁷

Some prisoners thought he developed into a hypochondriac, as he started complaining of symptoms, imagined or real, and reading medical literature in the prison library.⁶⁸ Cecil Lillibridge said Ray took six to seven pills daily, imagining that he had a “cranial depression” and a “rapid palpitation of the heart.”⁶⁹ Carl Craig also recalled that Ray always complained about stomach trouble, so much so that he stopped smoking.⁷⁰ He used a fellow inmate’s watch with a second hand to time his pulse. Anxious that he might one day develop arthritis, Ray even got pills from an inmate to treat the disease.⁷¹ He told another prisoner that he lifted weights to combat a heart problem he imagined he had.⁷² Insomnia led him to fret about “serious nervous troubles such as severe depression or even suicidal tendencies.”⁷³ Jerry admitted that by his last year in prison, James complained frequently in his letters “about more and more headaches.”⁷⁴ In mid-1965, Ray wrote to his local congressman pleading “that the state legislature appropriate funds to pay the Doctors.” He had, he said, “contacted some kind of illness which has caused me to be admitted to the hospital three times.”75 Ray complained that he had not yet seen a doctor despite several requests for examinations, and also claimed that Jerry had written to one of the prison doctors and offered to pay for the exam.⁷⁶

Amphetamine abuse could produce many of the physical symptoms of which Ray complained, and might also induce a level of paranoia and fear that might exacerbate any tendency toward hypochondria.

Besides Ray’s dope dealing and abuse, the last contentious issue about his years at Jeff City is whether or not he was an avowed bigot.⁷⁷ “There are no nigger lovers in prison,” Jerry Ray once defiantly said.⁷⁸ James evidently agreed. John Ray said that James was “crazy about niggers”—and not in a good way.*⁷⁹ When a black guard, William Turner, was placed in his cell block, Ray told another inmate “that’s one Nigger that should be dead.”⁸⁰ James Brown, a fellow inmate who knew Ray for two years, recalled that after John Kennedy was shot, Ray said, “That is one nigger-loving S.O.B. that got shot.”⁸¹ Glen Buckley remembered that Ray “hated Negroes.”⁸² Inmate Harry Sero said Ray had a great dislike for blacks.⁸³ Ray once got into a fight with a black inmate after a group of blacks had refused to work when a guard called them “boys.”⁸⁴ When Jeff City’s intramural sports were finally integrated, Ray refused to attend since blacks comprised a majority on the teams.⁸⁵ He often talked of moving to other countries when he got out of prison, and Australia was high on the list because Ray thought there were no blacks there.⁸⁶ James’s brother John later told the FBI that during his prison visits, James spoke highly of the government of Rhodesia, then one of two segregationist African countries.⁸⁷

Cecil Lillibridge said that although Ray never expressed any particular hatred toward Martin Luther King—he simply disliked blacks in general. However, Lillibridge, who described Ray as a reader of weekly newsmagazines whose main ambition was to make a “score of $20,000 to $30,000 and hide out in Mexico,” overheard Ray refer to King as “Martin Luther Coon” and witnessed his agitation about the publicity received by King, H. Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael.⁸⁸ Sometimes Ray even talked to Lillibridge about whether a splinter group might offer money for the murder of Brown or Carmichael, but he never mentioned King in that way.⁸⁹

Harry Sero actually put the idea of killing King for money to Ray—he once speculated, in front of Ray and other inmates, that if King attempted economic boycotts, it would be worth a lot for businessmen to have him killed.⁹⁰ Others recalled that Ray himself sometimes talked about the possibility of killing King for money.* Lewis Dowda, who worked with Ray, was an avowed racist who said that Ray “definitely hated Negroes.” Dowda also claimed that Ray had boasted that he would kill King if the price were right.⁹¹ Fellow inmate James Brown claimed that Ray cursed and became considerably aggravated whenever he read newspaper articles about King and his civil rights work. Ray boasted to Brown that when he got out of Jeff City, he could get $10,000 to kill King.⁹² Ray made the boast, according to Brown, on several occasions to other prisoners, including Johnny Valenti, an inmate with mob connections. Valenti denied even knowing Ray after the assassination.⁹³

Thomas Britton knew Ray from his cell block and recalled him as “money crazy” and a “day dreamer” who was usually “solemn faced … never laughed or enjoyed a good story.”⁹⁴ Ray once told him “there are more ways of making money than robbing banks.”⁹⁵ When Britton asked what he meant, Ray said there was a “businessman’s association” that was offering up to $100,000 for King to be killed. “King is five years past due,” Ray told Britton. When Britton asked Ray what the businessman’s group was, Ray said, “I don’t know but I will find out.”^†96

It is surprising that the normally close-mouthed Ray would openly threaten King if he thought that one day he might undertake such an assignment. He may not, however, have been serious about the threats. His braggadocio could have resulted from an amphetamine binge, as the drug tends to produce aggressive and boisterous behavior. Also, the boasts might have been merely the venting of white anger. Fearful whites like Ray unleashed their frustration over social progress and the sweep of black power on King, who had become the embodiment of the civil rights movement. While Ray’s threats may not have been unusual in prison, or even serious on his part, there is the more daunting question of whether that idle chatter brought him to the attention of some group that wanted the civil rights leader dead.*

Prison officials denied the existence of a Ku Klux Klan chapter, but there was a loosely organized alliance of white supremacists. A Jeff City equivalent had a standing offer for King’s death.⁹⁷ A few of these prisoners wore white sheets over their heads and killed a black inmate when the warden tried to integrate in 1964.⁹⁸ A $100,000 offer from the White Knights of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had evidently filtered into the prison system.⁹⁹ A few inmates claimed to know of a Cooley’s Organization, supposedly a Jeff City protection and enforcement group that had put forth a King bounty of up to $100,000.¹⁰⁰

In its 1976–79 investigation into the John Kennedy and Martin Luther King murders, the House Select Committee on Assassinations discovered yet another group that may have wanted King dead and may have crossed paths with Ray at Jeff City. In late 1966 or early 1967, Russell G. Byers, a low-level St. Louis hoodlum, was supposedly offered money to kill King.^†101 According to Byers, who was granted immunity by the Select Committee, he was approached by John Kauffmann, a local real estate and motel developer with some underworld connections, and asked if he wanted to earn up to $50,000.102 When Byers showed interest, Kauffmann drove with him to the home of John Sutherland, a wealthy lawyer and segregationist who lived in nearby Imperial, Missouri. According to Byers, the three men met in Sutherland’s study. The room was filled with Confederate memorabilia, and Sutherland himself was wearing a Confederate colonel’s hat.¹⁰³ After a brief conversation, Sutherland offered Byers $50,000 to kill, or arrange to kill, Martin Luther King. Sutherland told Byers the money was coming from a wealthy, secret Southern organization he would not name.¹⁰⁴ Byers was not interested and when he left the house with Kauffmann, he turned down the offer.¹⁰⁵

By the time Byers testified before the Select Committee, both Kauffmann and Sutherland were dead. Yet, in an extensive effort to investigate the story, the committee interviewed dozens of associates of the three men, and also reviewed local, state, and federal files about them. Although the deaths of the principals made the investigation a difficult one, the committee discovered corroborating evidence, including two attorneys that confirmed Byers had told them about Sutherland’s offer.¹⁰⁶ The committee finally concluded, “The Byers allegation was essentially truthful.”¹⁰⁷

Did Ray learn of Sutherland’s $50,000 offer, or could Ray’s idle threats against King have reached Sutherland?

Kauffmann, the go-between for Sutherland and a potential assassin, was convicted of the manufacture and sale of amphetamines—more than one million pills to undercover agents—in 1967.¹⁰⁸ Testimony at his narcotics trial revealed that one of Kauffmann’s accomplices smuggled some of the amphetamine supply into Jeff City, where Ray was dealing in and using the very same drug.¹⁰⁹

Inside the prison was John Paul Spica, Byers’s brother-in-law, who was incarcerated there from 1963 to 1973 for a contract murder. During part of his sentence, he was in the same cell block as Ray.¹¹⁰ Byers visited Spica regularly at Jeff City.¹¹¹ Spica worked in the hospital for the prison doctor, Hugh Maxey. It was there that Ray, according to other inmates, kept checking himself in to try and get all types of drugs.¹¹² Ray also pushed a food cart in the hospital in late 1966 and early 1967, the same time the Sutherland offer was made.¹¹³ “One of the prisoners I got to know while working in the hospital was a St. Louis guy named John Paul Spica,” Ray later wrote, “who was doing life for conspiracy to commit murder. He was said to have heavy mob connections.”¹¹⁴

In addition to Spica, Dr. Maxey was a close friend of John Kauffmann’s.¹¹⁵ Maxey supplied inmates, under a work release program, to Kauffmann, and there were even allegations—unproven by the Select Committee investigation—that Maxey had been involved with Kauffmann in the distribution of amphetamines at Jeff City.116 Prison records reveal that Maxey had contact with Ray.¹¹⁷ Maxey, if he was informed of the standing bounty by Kauffmann, did not necessarily have to pass the information directly to Ray, but merely placing it into the prison population at Jeff City would have been enough to circulate it.*

Not surprisingly, all of the people who might have informed Ray of the King bounty, or informed Sutherland of Ray’s possible interest in the job, denied any complicity. When interviewed by the Select Committee, Dr. Maxey, then in his eighties and of failing health, claimed he never knew about the bounty on King, much less discussed it with Ray.¹¹⁸ As for John Paul Spica, he said he had never learned of any King bounty before the assassination.^†119

Despite the denials, Ray may have learned of the offer. Another Jeff City inmate, Donald Lee Mitchell, worked with Ray in the commissary. In 1966, shortly before Mitchell was released from the prison, Ray told him that some friends in St. Louis had arranged for him to collect $50,000 for killing King, and that if Mitchell wanted, he could join the plot and also pocket $50,000. Ray assured him they would not get caught, and even if they did, a good lawyer would get them off since “who in the South like niggers?”¹²⁰ Mitchell told that to the FBI only five months after King’s murder.

The Sutherland offer was not then publicly known. Both the city and the amount offered were correct, a strong indication that Ray may have plugged into the pipeline offering a bounty on Martin Luther King.

* Much has been written about the conditions at Jeff City during the 1960s, including the time Ray was incarcerated. To ensure those reports were accurate and not exaggerated, the author submitted one of the most damning descriptions, that presented by George McMillan in his book The Making of an Assassin, to Tim Kniest, the current public information officer for the Missouri Department of Corrections. Instead of taking issue with the brutal portrayal of Jeff City, Kniest, who spoke with those in the department who had worked there during the 1960s, confirmed the accuracy of the harsh portrait.

^† In June 1964, prison authorities tried to integrate the prison. Within a few days, a group of blacks was attacked by a dozen white inmates. One black convict was stabbed to death and three seriously injured. Jerry Ray initially boasted to author George McMillan that James was one of the attackers. But when confronted with prison records that showed that James was assigned to a different section of the prison when the attack happened, Jerry admitted he was wrong. However, several prisoners later told the FBI that Ray was “associated” with, or knew, the attackers.

* In his two published books, Ray refers a few times to his parents, but never mentions his mother by name, and does not even mention her death.

^† Ray, who makes numerous mistakes in recounting his past, wrote in Who Killed Martin Luther King? that he tried his first escape after serving seven months at the prison. Actually, he did not make his first attempt until eighteen months had passed. As Ray noted, not every prisoner thinks of escaping. “For a lot of prisoners, the idea of trying to escape is frightening, and they want nothing to do with it. For others, the outside wall is a challenge they can’t resist. It isn’t a matter of choice or heroism or bravery—they don’t have a choice. They have to try.” Ray’s willingness to try to escape is rare among prisoners. In one study by a penologist, inmates ranked escape attempts as the second-worst infraction of more than twenty listed, even outranking forcible sodomy. Even at Jeff City, there were only six to eight attempts a year, most by inmates with very long sentences who had nothing to lose if caught.

* After King’s assassination, Missouri corrections commissioner Fred Wilkinson insisted that Ray was “just a nothing here. If James Earl Ray had amounted to a hill of beans here, I would have had a card on him in this pack of Big Shots and Bad Actors. And Ray isn’t in here.” However, Wilkinson’s sweeping statement that Ray was a “nothing” at Jeff City because he was not in the three-by-five-inch index card file of troublemakers is misleading, since that file included only prisoners who were identified as violent troublemakers, usually those involved in fights or assaults. Ray certainly did not fall into that category. The only disciplinary mark against him at Jeff City was for a 1965 violation for carrying contraband—five packs of cigarettes, one jar of Maxwell House instant coffee, one pack of razor blades, and one can of Campbell’s soup—into the prison hospital.

* Jerry said his sister Carol had initially set up an account under her printing business that was supposed to handle the money James sent out of Jeff City, but there was never more than a few hundred dollars in it, and the account did not work as well as the letter system from the guard, so the Rays abandoned that idea. After that account was closed, Jerry claims that Carol was not involved in any of James’s prison money.

* Some inmates claim that Ray resorted to violence to protect his business. According to Julius Block, another inmate, Ray stabbed a competitor while a cohort held the victim. Ray did not kill him, and prison officials never learned that Ray was the perpetrator. Another prisoner said Ray arranged for two men to beat a convict who had failed to pay for amphetamines.

^† If Ray was making huge profits, it is unlikely that his family would have continued sending him money orders while he was in prison. Jeff City officials maintained a list. Ray received thirty-five, most from Jerry and John Ray, totaling $526.25. Those helped supplement his official $2.00 per month salary for his food-services job. He also sent several hundred dollars out of prison in money orders, most of it—$260—to Jerry.

* When Ray was eventually arrested in June 1968 at Heathrow, the police found a hypodermic syringe in the room he had last occupied in London. They were not certain if it belonged to him or a previous boarder. However, prior to his extradition back to the United States, the authorities were so concerned about the quick evidence they discovered from former inmates about Ray’s amphetamine abuse that they feared he had used an alcohol method to allow an amphetamine solution to soak into his clothing, and that he might be able to later retrieve it. As a precaution, Ray was issued a new suit of clothing.

* William Bradford Huie said John told him that in 1969, but before the House Select Committee in 1978 John claimed, “I don’t recall making that statement.”

* That would not have surprised Jerry Ray. When he first learned that his brother might be involved in the assassination, his reaction was, “I knew there had to be a lot of money involved in it before he would get involved in anything like that” (HSCA Rpt. p. 432).

^† In addition to the above inmates who heard Ray make threats against King, another convict, Ray Curtis, said that Ray told him as early as 1963 that there was a bounty on King and that he intended to collect it. Except for Sero and Curtis, none of the above inmates knew one another, and they gave their statements independently to the FBI within days of one another. There are questions, however, about Curtis’s version, and that is why he is omitted from the main body of the text. After King’s assassination, Curtis sold a story to Jet magazine in which he said the Ku Klux Klan had offered a $100,000 bounty on King. Moreover, according to Curtis, Ray was agitated after Oswald killed JFK, and often critiqued that assassination while also talking about killing King himself. Curtis said that whenever King appeared on the television at Jeff City, Ray got very agitated and said, “Somebody’s gotta get him.” Mark Lane, the conspiracy buff and lawyer who represented Ray in the 1970s, claimed to have unmasked Curtis as a liar when the Jeff City warden told him there were no television sets in the cell blocks until 1970, three years after Ray escaped. However, Ray himself has confirmed that there were TVs at Jeff City while he was there, and that he primarily watched sports and the news. While the television issue does not discredit Curtis, the author discovered that he substantially contradicted himself in interviews with the FBI as early as 1968, as well as with House Select Committee investigators in 1977. He refused to give sworn testimony to either. It is also troubling that he tried to profit from his information. Therefore, while Curtis’s statements regarding Ray’s desire to kill King are discounted, elsewhere in this chapter his observations regarding Ray and possible drug dealing while at Jeff City are cited. Curtis did know Ray for an extended time, and he was not only an admitted drug dealer himself but also an avid user while at Jeff City. As opposed to his statements about Ray and King, his observations regarding Ray and his role with drugs are consistent and confirmed by other inmates.

* In this section, the author focuses only on groups or individuals that wanted King dead about whom Ray may have heard. For instance, when the author reviewed the FBI’s files on Martin Luther King, there were literally dozens of threats on King’s life, and standing bounties usually between $10,000 and $50,000, for most of the 1960s. Such right-wing groups as the Minutemen, the National Socialist White People’s Party, the American Nazi Party, various branches of the KKK, segregationist parties, and the like all seemed to target King at one point or another. The threats—such as a bomb scare for King’s February 1968 visit to Miami—kept coming into the FBI even in the weeks preceding King’s death in Memphis. As a result of the volume of threats, the Bureau has been justifiably criticized for not informing the King staff of the dangers. The difficulty, however, for historians is in figuring out not who wanted King dead—that list is extensive—but rather who wanted him dead and had some contact with Ray.

^† Byers had unwittingly told this to an informant in 1973, and the informant had passed it along to the FBI. The information was ignored until years later during an FBI file review in an unrelated investigation. It was brought to the HSCA’s attention in March 1978. The two special agents who had handled the informant were then inter viewed by the FBI and admitted they had failed to follow up on the lead when it came to their attention and therefore the trail of evidence had cooled.

* There is also the possibility that information between Sutherland and Ray was exchanged, after Ray’s 1967 escape, by one of his brothers, John or Jerry. This is discussed at length in Chapter 23.

^† In the fall of 1979, whatever possibility existed of learning more from Spica ended when he tried starting his Cadillac in the St. Louis suburb of Richmond. A trip-wired bomb ripped off his legs and he was dead before an ambulance arrived. The murder remains unsolved.