Legacy of Secrecy (138 page)

in the aftermath of King’s assassination. The FBI’s internal summaries

of the Justice Department reports eliminated or minimized most of the

important information, such as that relating to Marcello or “Forever

White,” the small racist clique for whom he brokered King’s murder.

Searches of the FBI’s King files have so far revealed no investigation of

“Forever White,” or interviews with Marcello or his close associates

about the brokering allegation. There is no sign that the FBI tried to find

or interview Sartor’s prime source, described by the Justice Department

as a “well-placed protégé of Carlos Marcello.” Then again, the FBI had

developed several of its own Marcello informants by that time—most

of whom have never been identified—and one (or more) of them could

have been talking to Sartor. One justification—or rationalization—for

not pursuing the Marcello leads about King’s murder was that it could

have compromised other FBI sources, investigations, and the Bureau’s

recent conviction of Marcello for hitting an FBI agent.

FBI files do exist for a few of Sartor’s other sources, like civil rights

worker John McFerren. However, the FBI seemed determined to dis-

credit his claims against Frank C. Liberto. Comments McFerren made

hesitantly or tentatively were sometimes firmed up in FBI summaries,

and then used by the FBI to dismiss much of what he said. Other obvi-

ous ties that needed to be investigated—such as any between Frank C.

Liberto, in Memphis, and Marcello’s aide Jack Liberto, in New Orleans—

were apparently not explored by the FBI at all, even though the Bureau

had been maintaining files on Jack Liberto since before King’s assassina-

tion. There are other leads in the Justice Department’s Sartor memo that

the FBI apparently never pursued, and while some of the information

may have been inaccurate, there was no way to know unless it was

checked out.21

The HSCA pointed out that the FBI found various fingerprints in

Ray’s Mustang that weren’t Ray’s, yet it didn’t seem to make a serious

effort to identify them. Given the evidence available to the FBI in 1968,

it would have been logical to check them against known violent racists

in the places where Ray had stayed recently. While Milteer was probably

too cautious to have left prints in Ray’s Mustang, even today, it would be

worthwhile to check the Mustang prints against those of Milteer, Spake,

and their partners, as well as those of known Marcello associates, such

as Frank Joseph Caracci, Frank C. Liberto, Jack Liberto, and others.22

In general, by the summer and fall of 1968, the FBI avoided or

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

minimized information that indicated a conspiracy, despite Ray’s incred-

ibly far-flung travels, his unknown source of funds, and an FBI report

saying the scope on Ray’s rifle would have caused a shooter to miss by

“4 inches left and 3 inches below,” enough to at least call into question

whether that rifle really was the murder weapon.23 While the FBI spent

inordinate amounts of time running down things like the manufacturer

of the beer can found in Ray’s bag dropped in the doorway of Canipe’s

Amusement company, it devoted seemingly little effort to uncovering

troubling leads like the “military ammunition . . . with machinegun link

marks” found in the same bag. Apparently, the FBI didn’t bother explor-

ing whether that ammunition connected Ray to the usual suspects who

used automatic weapons: white supremacists, the Mafia, or CIA-backed

Cuban exiles.24

As we noted earlier, William Bradford Huie uncovered many impor-

tant facts about Ray’s activities before the FBI did, in the months prior

to King’s murder. Sometimes Huie attempted to trade that information

to the FBI, but other times the FBI first learned about some of Huie’s

discoveries when his explosive, three-article series began to appear in

Look
magazine, on November 12, 1968. At that time, Huie was firmly

convinced that Ray had been part of a conspiracy and planned to title

his eventual book
They Slew the Dreamer
.25

As James Earl Ray’s trial was getting ready to start, Ray was under-

standably nervous that someone with the special access he and Hanes

had given Huie was essentially proclaiming him guilty in one of the

nation’s biggest magazines. That was one reason why, less than two

days before the scheduled start of his November trial, Ray fired Arthur

Hanes Sr., hoping that in doing so, he would be rid of Huie.26

Ray’s second American attorney was the well-known Percy Foreman,

whose main concern also seems to have been money. If Ray thought that

by getting rid of Hanes he’d be rid of Huie, he was wrong: Foreman said

his fee would be $165,000, plus expenses. The attorney was soon dealing

in percentages with Huie and even having Ray sign over to Foreman his

Mustang and rifle, with an eye toward their eventual sale.27

In hindsight, Foreman was a logical choice, given what we know now

about Ray and Marcello’s heroin network. Based in Marcello’s territory

of Houston, Foreman had briefly been Jack Ruby’s attorney. Foreman

boasted to Huie that he had represented “members of the Mafia, some of

whom direct the running of heroin across the Canadian border.” As we

noted earlier, that’s why Foreman was able to tell Huie that Ray’s actions

in Canada “were standard operating procedure for bringing heroin in

from Canada,” and how Ray was probably recruited.28

Soon after Foreman took over, the way both Foreman and Huie viewed

Ray’s case changed. Huie went from believing in and writing about a

conspiracy involving Ray’s mysterious “Raoul,” to writing that Ray had

acted alone, with no confederates. In his third
Look
article, published five

months after the second, Huie took the unusual step of saying his first

two articles had been erroneous in their comments about a conspiracy.

Percy Foreman would later testify that “there was no Raoul. Ray told

me he invented him to feed conspiracy theories.”29 In private, Foreman

didn’t rule out a conspiracy, but said it wasn’t his legal concern.

Ray later complained, and the HSCA confirmed, that Foreman did

little to actually help his client. The HSCA said that “Foreman did not

conduct a thorough and independent investigation into the death of

Martin Luther King on behalf of Ray,” and frequently used young

interns to do important legal work.30 Perhaps Foreman didn’t want to

expend too much effort, because he knew there wouldn’t be a trial. On

February 13, 1969, Foreman first suggested that Ray plead guilty. Ray

strongly rejected the idea and was apparently planning on taking his

chances with a Southern jury. Even if Ray were found guilty of murder

and received a life sentence, he would be eligible for parole in thirteen

years. But if he pled guilty in return for a life sentence as part of a plea

bargain, according to Tennessee law, he wouldn’t be eligible for parole

for forty-five years.31

Foreman began pressuring Ray’s family to encourage him to plead

guilty, but they were against the idea as well. However, Foreman lied

to Ray, telling him that his family was in favor of a guilty plea, in order

to spare Ray the possibility of a death sentence. However, Foreman

apparently didn’t tell Ray that no one had been executed in the state of

Tennessee for seven years, and that Memphis’s Shelby County was an

especially hard place in which to earn a death sentence.32

Ray was in a bind: The fact that Foreman wasn’t doing a good job on

his case could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if Ray went to trial, pos-

sibly yielding a death penalty for Ray. Also, given Foreman’s previous

clients, Ray might have thought that Foreman’s plea recommendation

represented the wishes of the underworld figures both men had worked

for. On March 9, 1969, Ray agreed to Foreman’s demand that he plead

guilty.

The plea bargain was agreed to by Coretta Scott King, US Attorney

General Ramsey Clark, and Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington. The

following day in court, when Ray was asked if he was guilty of murder-

ing Dr. King, Ray replied, “Yes, legally, yes.”33

Within the criminal-justice system, that guilty plea would seal James

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Earl Ray’s fate for the rest of his life, while leaving many important

questions unresolved. As Foreman was leaving the courthouse, he was

asked about a conspiracy and replied, “I don’t give a goddamn if there

was a conspiracy or not. No. I never asked him that.” Even one of the

prosecutors who worked out the plea bargain later said, “Whether some-

one had paid him $25,000 to do it, I didn’t know.” The presiding judge,

W. Preston Battle, soon indicated that Ray might have been part of a con-

spiracy, but said the plea deal was still the best solution, since “the trial

would have muddied our understanding of the substantial evidence

which established Ray as the killer.” Battle and other officials seemed

to feel that as long as the likely shooter was punished, it was better to

move on than to look too closely at who might have paid Ray or been

involved with him in the killing.34

On the other hand, Ray felt he’d been hung out to dry, and he soon

began the quest that he would pursue for the rest of his life: to withdraw

his guilty plea. Ray wrote a letter to Judge Battle on March 13, 1969, firing

Foreman and asking for “a post conviction hearing.” Now that he’d fired

Foreman, Ray knew he had to be careful in asking to withdraw his plea

and go to trial, so as not to arouse suspicion among the criminals who’d

hired him. According to the HSCA volumes, on March 15, Ray told one

of his brothers about “Eddie . . . his dope contact in New Orleans.” Ray

wanted his brother to “call [Eddie] and tell him everything [was] okay

from James. . . . He wanted Eddie to know he hadn’t talked, wasn’t

going to talk.”35

Ray officially requested that his sentence be reversed on March 26. On

March 31, Judge Battle died of a heart attack. Within days, Ray engaged

a new attorney to continue his legal fight to avoid spending his life in

prison: J. B. Stoner.36

Having Stoner become Ray’s attorney in the critical time following

Ray’s guilty plea was a perfect situation for Joseph Milteer and his part-

ners in King’s assassination. Milteer had worked with Stoner for years,

and would now have a direct means of influencing Ray and his legal

strategy. Stoner was soon promoting to the press the theory that the FBI

had killed Dr. King. One of Ray’s brothers went to work for Stoner, and

four months after Stoner became Ray’s lawyer, Ray’s brother made the

statement, noted earlier, that Ray had been involved in gunrunning and

Cuban-exile activities designed to overthrow Fidel Castro.37

While Stoner floated a variety of stories designed to both appeal to his

base and worry officials, he worked with more competent attorneys on

Ray’s legal challenges. Various appeals were tried, to no avail. Likewise,

a lawsuit filed on Ray’s behalf against Huie and attorneys Foreman and

Hanes was dismissed.

While J. B. Stoner was of no help to James Earl Ray, one of Ray’s

brothers developed a close relationship with Stoner and worked for

him for more than a decade in a variety of positions, including driver

and bodyguard. When Stoner ran for governor of Georgia in 1970, Ray’s

brother was Stoner’s campaign manager. The moderate Jimmy Carter

trounced Stoner, who garnered just over 2 percent of the vote.38

Even as the Ray and Sirhan stories played out in the press, yet another

assassination trial was going on in New Orleans. On January 21, 1969,

Jim Garrison finally began his trial with Clay Shaw. While it exposed

much important information about the Kennedy autopsy, the magic bul-

let, and Oswald’s unusual activities, the evidence against Shaw himself

was extremely thin. Shaw was acquitted on March 1, 1969, after the jury

deliberated for just forty-five minutes.

By the spring of 1969, when Sirhan’s was the last of the three assas-

sination-related proceedings remaining, America—or at least the main-

stream press—seemed tired of such coverage. When Ed Reid’s book

The Grim Reapers
finally appeared in April 1969, the few paragraphs

about Carlos Marcello’s 1962 threat to assassinate JFK received almost

no attention in the press, and none at all from network news. Marcello

had finally been convicted for assaulting an FBI agent, at his retrial in

Houston in August 1968, and received a two-year sentence. But Marcel-

lo’s high-powered legal team immediately appealed and seemed well

poised to keep him from serving time anytime soon.39

By the summer of 1969, Carlos Marcello was still free on appeal and

making more money than ever with associates like Santo Trafficante.

Along with Rosselli’s, their names had never surfaced in the press in

any of the coverage of the assassinations of JFK, King, or Bobby. Johnny