Legacy of Secrecy (103 page)

pursuing leads the FBI had missed. They even released to the news

media a sketch of “Ralph,” whom the
Washington Star
described as “a

hard-faced young man with dark hair,” though the sketch produced

no results. Investigators also tried to find links to the Sutherland St.

Louis offer “because of their similarity and proximity in time,” but were

unsuccessful.38

At that time, Milteer and his small group were trying to find some-

one to assassinate Dr. King, and we believe it’s likely they were behind

the offer. Since it came after unsuccessful offers floated in other states,

Milteer’s group might have decided to try finding willing hit men closer

to home. Also, as with the offers in St. Louis and the prisons, they didn’t

try to recruit someone with ties to any of the known racist organizations,

a precaution that would protect Milteer and his partners after Dr. King’s

death. In addition, because of the cash they collected each week at the

Lakewood plant, Milteer’s group could easily have had the ready cash

available for the offer. Finally, though the two brothers weren’t seasoned

criminals, Milteer was probably willing by this point to settle for some-

one with a violent reputation, since even a failed attempt would give

him credibility with his anxious contributors. That may be why “Ralph”

had been willing to pay $25,000 in advance just for the Powell brothers

to make the attempt.

However, like the earlier attempts to find a hit man, this one didn’t

work. While Milteer’s group may have made a few other such approaches

in Atlanta, Milteer’s group couldn’t have done many without attracting

attention or risking making the offer to someone who might immedi-

ately go to the police. Then, too, recruiting someone who lived in Atlanta

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

carried a danger of investigators’ being able to trace the recruit back

to Milteer, Spake, or their two partners. Yet Milteer’s group had few

options left. Using a local Klansman could increase the pressure on the

allies and organizations of Milteer and his associates, even if the plot-

ters escaped detection. Hiring a hit man who was not an experienced

criminal increased the chance he might talk or get caught.

Milteer’s group needed a way to hire a seasoned criminal who had

used guns before and knew how to keep his mouth shut. He should be

someone who wasn’t a longtime resident of Atlanta, or even Georgia,

and who wasn’t a member of any of the usual racist organizations—yet

would still be willing to accept a contract to murder Dr. King. The hit

man would need to be an experienced traveler, so he could stalk King

and shoot him away from Atlanta. Killing Dr. King near his home or

office in Atlanta could bring too much heat to Milteer’s local associates,

especially since Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins was on good terms

with Dr. King’s father. It would also help Milteer’s group if the hit man

worked for a powerful person or organization that the hit man wouldn’t

dare cross, even if he wound up in prison. Basically, Milteer needed a

professional at arranging such things, someone with a proven ability to

find hit men that could get away with even high-profile killings.

Joseph Milteer knew about such a man, having worked on his big-

gest hit back in 1963. Using Carlos Marcello to broker the contract on

Dr. King would be expensive, but nothing else had worked, so Milteer

and his partners apparently had no other option.39

Chapter Forty-one

Shedding important new light on Martin Luther King’s assassination

is the following 1968 Justice Department memo, which was withheld

from Congressional investigators and is quoted here for the first time.

The memo—based on confidential information, including that of a “well

placed protégé of Carlos Marcello in New Orleans”—says “the Cosa

Nostra [Mafia] agreed to ‘broker’ or arrange the assassination [of Martin

Luther King] for an amount somewhat in excess of three hundred thou-

sand dollars ($300,000) after they were contacted . . . by representatives

of ‘Forever White,’ an elite organization of wealthy segregationists [in

the] Southeastern states. The Mafia’s . . . interest was less the money than

the investment-type opportunity presented, i.e., to get in a position to

extract (or extort) governmental or other favors from some well placed

Southern white persons, including the KKK and White Citizens’ Coun-

cils. Quitman . . . was said . . . to be a possible base of ‘Forever White’s’

operations.”1

The Justice Department memo says the Mafia group involved was

based in New Orleans, and that two participants in the plotting were

“Frank [C.] Liberto . . . a Memphis racketeer and lieutenant of Carlos

Marcello, the southern Mafia chieftain in New Orleans,” plus “Joe Cara-

meci (phonetic)” who was described as a “professional” killer. When the

Justice Department referred the information to the FBI after Dr. King’s

murder, the Bureau said “Joe Carameci” was “unknown to this office.”

Though not acknowledged in any of the FBI’s King files, the Bureau

had opened a criminal intelligence file on a “Frank Joseph Caracci” on

October 9, 1967, almost six months before Dr. King’s assassination. The

FBI described him “as an associate of Carlos Marcello, New Orleans La

Cosa Nostra leader.”2

History shows that Frank Joseph Caracci was the type of Marcello

operative who could be involved in a major hit. On November 27, 1963,

the FBI had interviewed Caracci about his contacts with Jack Ruby in

the five months before JFK’s assassination. According to witnesses and

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

phone records, Ruby had met with Caracci at least twice during that

time, in addition to visiting and making eight phone calls to Caracci’s

nightclubs.3

The Justice Department memo about Marcello and the contract on Dr.

King was sent to the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Divi-

sion five months after King’s murder, and will be covered in additional

detail in Chapter 60. The memo was based on sources found by journal-

ist William Sartor, described in the memo as “a contract writer for
Time

[magazine who] covered Memphis, particularly racial matters.” The

Justice Department investigator said that Sartor “appears to be known

and trusted by those Negro leaders in Memphis with whom I have

talked.” After citing Sartor’s most recent article in
Time
, the investigator

says that Sartor “is a ‘low key’ fellow who is not apparently irrational

or fanciful.” In addition to the “protégé of Carlos Marcello,” Sartor’s

sources in the underworld included “four or five petty racketeers in

Memphis, New Orleans, and elsewhere.”4

According to one of James Earl Ray’s attorneys, in 1971 William Sartor

was in Texas, completing research on what would have been the first

book (or article) to tie Carlos Marcello to Dr. King’s murder. But “the

night before he was to interview a significant witness”—a nightclub

owner Congressional investigators had linked to Marcello—Sartor was

murdered. It took twenty-one years until the Waco, Texas, district attor-

ney “officially declared [Sartor’s] death a homicide.”5

The essence of what Sartor’s sources told him about Marcello’s bro-

kering the contract on Dr. King appears to be based on Milteer and his

Atlanta associates. Sartor was getting his information about the plot

second- and thirdhand, so some details are wrong. For example, he (or

his source) assumed that the town of Quitman being discussed was the

one in Mississippi, the state where Sartor lived, instead of Quitman,

Georgia, the home of Joseph Milteer. But other sources and documents

corroborate many aspects of Sartor’s basic story.6

There are several reasons why it took forty years for any book or article

to reveal the Justice Department memo about Marcello’s “brokering” the

contract to kill Dr. King for a group of “segregationists.” Sartor’s death

no doubt had a chilling effect on his mob-connected sources. While the

House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had some of Sartor’s

unpublished notes and his partial manuscript, the Committee never

cited the Justice Department memo quoted above. The FBI apparently

didn’t give the memo to the HSCA, but we can’t determine that with

certainty, since the HSCA’s files on Dr. King’s assassination are sealed

until the year 2029. At any rate, the HSCA appears to have not been

aware of Sartor’s most important sources, and was not informed by the

FBI that one of Sartor’s sources personally told a Justice Department

investigator his story in 1968. When FBI agents summarized the Justice

Department memo for Hoover in 1968, they left out the most important

information about Marcello and the Mafia—and even this sanitized ver-

sion appears to have not been given to the HSCA. Though the HSCA

had investigated Marcello and Milteer closely for any connections to

JFK’s assassination, its 1979 report contained only a few lines dismissing

Marcello as a suspect in King’s death (for lack of evidence), and nothing

at all about Milteer and Dr. King’s murder.

Not until 1989 would Marcello’s biographer, John H. Davis, first raise

the prospect of Marcello’s having a role in King’s death in a widely avail-

able book. But the hundreds of pages Davis wrote about Marcello and

JFK’s murder overshadowed his few pages about Marcello’s possible

role in Dr. King’s murder. When Congress unanimously passed the 1992

JFK Assassinations Records Act, it covered only government files about

President Kennedy’s murder, not those about Dr. King’s.

In the 1990s, more ties between Marcello and Dr. King’s death were

exposed by James Earl Ray’s last attorney, William Pepper, an associate

of King who had the support of King’s family. However, like any good

defense attorney, he attempted to use the Marcello information to exon-

erate Ray. Pepper tried to blame King’s murder on a massive conspiracy

involving Army Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, and the Memphis police.

Because of that, and the use of some questionable sources, the press

largely overlooked the Marcello aspect of the story.

Pepper won a 1999 civil court verdict for the King family, which

found that a conspiracy involving Marcello killed Dr. King. In 2000, at

the request of Coretta Scott King and her family, President Clinton and

Attorney General Janet Reno had the Justice Department review the

case and Pepper’s evidence. However, their report didn’t mention, let

alone address, their Department’s own 1968 memo about Marcello’s

brokering the King contract. The Justice Department’s 2000 report left

out much more relevant information, such as Marcello’s detailed 1985

FBI confession to JFK’s assassination, and the FBI’s hundreds of hours

of still-unreleased prison audio tapes of Marcello, which could shed

additional light on both assassinations.7

We uncovered those Marcello files at the National Archives in 2006,

where they had finally been released because of the JFK Act. The Sartor

files about Marcello are also at the National Archives, and since early

2008 have been available on the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s website

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

(www.maryferrell.org). The Mary Ferrell site’s computerized ability to

search the text of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents—a

feature that was not available to the FBI for decades—enabled us to find

the relevant pages in a short time. The Sartor/Marcello documents are

part of the FBI’s files about Dr. King’s assassination (codenamed MUR-

KIN) that were released due to the efforts of attorneys specializing in

the Freedom of Information Act, like Bernard Fensterwald and his law

partner, Jim Lesar.

Four years after successfully pulling off JFK’s murder, it is not surpris-

ing that two of the men involved considered working together again on

another, much easier, high-profile hit. By the fall of 1967, of the dozen or

so Marcello and Milteer associates who had participated knowingly in

JFK’s murder, several had died (Ferrie, Banister, Ruby, Herminio Diaz),

and none of the others had talked. The Secret Service and the FBI were

no longer investigating Milteer, and Marcello had escaped unscathed

from the Garrison investigation and any fallout from the September

1967
Life
magazine articles.

Since the media hadn’t followed up on
Life
’s revelations, Marcello

would soon resume attempting the Spring Hoffa bribes that the
Life

articles had tried to expose. The second
Life
article had destroyed what

little credibility Garrison had left with the mainstream press, and the

District Attorney was now focusing almost completely on Clay Shaw,

who had no connections to Marcello. (The only other person to receive

serious attention from Garrison was a right-winger from California,

fingered by a Trafficante associate to take the heat off an alleged mob

courier with a similar name.) Ed Reid’s
Grim Reapers
, with its informa-