Legacy of Secrecy (102 page)

three Marcello associates, just two weeks after this Atlanta incident, as

we’ll detail shortly. While Ray and the parolee had both served time at

Leavenworth, their stays were years apart, and there was no known con-

nection between the two. The same is true for the Mississippi bootlegger

at Leavenworth who originally mentioned the contract.26

As for the source of the $100,000 for the King contract, the conduit

was said to be the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the small, violent

Mississippi group led by Sam Bowers, who was also linked to the 1965

offer in North Carolina. However, Bowers was a small-time business-

man who didn’t have that kind of money. Wealthy members of the Citi-

zens’ Council would have been cautious about giving it to him, because

on October 20, 1967, Bowers was one of seven people convicted for the

murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and

Michael Schwerner. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jack Nelson noted

that it was “the first time a Mississippi jury had convicted members of

the Klan—and a white law enforcement officer as well—for crimes com-

mitted against civil rights workers.”27

Bowers was thus occupied during much of the fall of 1967, and likely

not an active participant in the contract on Dr. King. Bowers hated Jew-

ish people as much as blacks and, while free on bond, would continue

his violent behavior in late 1967 and 1968—he was caught in a car with

a submachine gun in December 1967. Jack Nelson documented that

Bowers’ attacks focused primarily on bombings of Jewish homes and

buildings, in conjunction with a small handful of trusted associates.28

Another prison report of a contract on Dr. King’s life may shed addi-

tional light on the offers circulating at Leavenworth and in St. Louis. This

FBI report concerned the Texas State Prison at Huntsville, and authors

Hancock and Wexler note that it mentioned “$100,000 and the White

Knights.” The offer said that “interested parties were to make contact

via cutouts, they were expected to ‘case’ King in Atlanta, and payment

would be made only ‘after’ King were killed. Remarks were also made

that would indicate that the bounty itself or the rumor of it was coming

out of North Carolina.” Hancock adds that $50,000 was also payable to

the person handling only surveillance for the hit, but anyone involved

had to have a certain level of criminal experience, at least at the level of

armed robbery—hence the logic of spreading word of the contract in

prisons. The FBI report also indicated that someone in law enforcement

would be a contact for the hit, which might explain how the mystery

man was able to find the Leavenworth parolee in Atlanta.29

The threads running through all the FBI reports of a contract on

King—the large amount of money, links to members of the Klan and

White Citizens’ Council and organized crime, as well as to North Caro-

lina and Atlanta—indicate a likelihood they were tied to the efforts of

Milteer and his three Atlanta partners. However, none were effective in

locating an appropriate hit man. While the White Knights’ Sam Bowers

was the focus of more legal pressure in October 1967, that same month

Milteer was being freed from what little scrutiny he had been under

from law enforcement since the articles about him had appeared in the

Miami press back in February 1967.

On October 9, 1967, the Intelligence Division of the US Secret Service

in Washington told the head of its Atlanta office that it had “reviewed”

the file on Joseph Milteer and saw “nothing to indicate that this subject

presents a danger to any person under our protective jurisdiction [and]

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that quarterly investigations should be discontinued at this time.” The

Atlanta office received a report about Milteer from their Valdosta office

in South Georgia on October 10, and two days later told the Intelligence

Division, “[We] heartily agree with you in this action,” and that they

would “discontinue [their] quarterly investigations” of Milteer. The FBI

had been kept abreast of the Secret Service activities related to Milteer,

and would have been told of the investigation’s termination.30

Though the decision was legally justified, it’s tragic that the Secret Ser-

vice abandoned their Milteer investigation because they felt he wasn’t

“a danger to any person under our protective jurisdiction,” without

making some type of referral to another agency. A serious investigation

of Milteer would have shown that he was still a danger to civil rights

leaders like Dr. King, even if he was no longer an active threat to Presi-

dent Johnson or Vice President Hubert Humphrey. While racial attitudes

in the Secret Service had likely progressed somewhat since Abraham

Bolden’s complaints in 1963 and 1964, problems persisted: In 2008, sixty

black Secret Service agents were supporting discrimination suits, and

the Associated Press reported a black “employee found a noose in one

of the Secret Service’s training centers,” resulting in the suspension of

a white agent.31

Even if the Secret Service felt Milteer was no longer a presidential

threat and was thus out of its jurisdiction, it could have recommended

that the FBI or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation continue to monitor

Milteer. However, the Atlanta FBI office’s attitude toward Milteer had

been unusually tolerant dating back to 1963, when FBI agent Don Adams

wasn’t given crucial information about Milteer, the Miami police tapes,

or the Tampa threat.

This raises the possibility that Milteer was aware that the Secret Ser-

vice had closed its case on him, either from a contact in law enforcement

or because agents stopped questioning his associates and neighbors. In

later Congressional hearings, retired Atlanta FBI agent Arthur Murtagh

testified about the racist attitudes of many agents and supervisors in the

Atlanta FBI office in 1967 and 1968. Murtagh was part of the “security

squad” in the Atlanta office, which handled “investigations of Black

extremist organizations” that for the FBI, included Dr. King and the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The security squad

was also responsible for “investigations of the Ku Klux Klan” and Cuban

matters, including Cuban exiles. That meant the same FBI agents look-

ing for informants in the Klan were also operating against King and the

SCLC, creating an opportunity for racists who wanted to manipulate

the system.32

Murtagh said that many agents in the Atlanta office and on the secu-

rity squad were racists themselves, who saw King as the enemy. Another

former Atlanta security squad agent admitted in later testimony that in

1968, he saw Dr. King’s death as the “removal of a threat to our national

security.” This Atlanta agent admitted those feelings were based on

“his own personal prejudice” and not “on anything [he saw] as an FBI

agent.”33

Hoover encouraged such attitudes, and they were all too common

not just in the FBI but in other branches of law enforcement as well.

When coupled with the fact that the FBI assigned those responsible for

investigating the Klan to also run surveillance on King, it was a recipe

for disaster. There is no evidence that the Atlanta FBI (or Secret Ser-

vice) office was involved in King’s assassination, something Rep. Carl

Stokes and the House Select Committee on Assassinations looked at

very closely. But it is possible that Milteer or his partners on the White

Citizens’ Council were able to exploit the racist attitudes of some agents

and supervisors.

In 1967, law enforcement usually didn’t consider the White Citizens’

Councils to be a hate group like the Klan. While they weren’t regarded

as highly in Atlanta as they were in more conservative areas (where the

Citizens’ Councils evolved and persist to this day), they still provided

a forum in which types like Milteer could network with respectable

businessmen, professionals, and officials. FBI agents were barred from

Klan membership, but it’s unclear if there was any such policy about the

White Citizens’ Councils, since their views largely mirrored Hoover’s.

Another way Milteer could have learned that the Secret Service had

closed his case was through the Florida Police Intelligence Unit, since his

case had originated in Miami. Trafficante’s man Sgt. de la Llana headed

the statewide unit that shared information with other states and federal

authorities, he could easily have learned that Milteer’s case had been

closed. Both de la Llana and Milteer had been involved in the Tampa

attempt on JFK, so they could have been in communication about this

matter as well.34

The FBI agents in Atlanta were subject to the same fears about block-

busting and school integration that stoked contributions to Milteer’s

group, and those concerns were reaching a crescendo by October 1967.

The school year which began that fall was the first in which Atlanta’s

schools were fully integrated, triggering an increased wave of “white

flight” documented in Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse’s 2005 book

of the same name about Atlanta. However, the school integration

was based primarily on geographic location, meaning it didn’t affect

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

Atlanta’s affluent Northside, still largely closed to blacks. Even the

governor’s mansion, occupied by segregationist Lester Maddox, was

moved from midtown (increasingly home to rooming houses and, soon,

to James Earl Ray) to the exclusive Northside Buckhead area. In contrast,

the middle-class areas surrounding the Lakewood General Motors plant

were hit especially hard by blockbusting, causing massive transition

and turmoil.35

While that upheaval probably increased contributions to Milteer’s

group, it also increased the pressure on him to have King killed, as he’d

been promising his most faithful supporters for several years. Some of

his supporters at the Lakewood auto plant were Klan members, and

Milteer would have been all too aware of the August 25, 1967, murder

of George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, by one

of his own disgruntled followers. Milteer certainly wanted to see King

killed, but even an attempt on King by a nonprofessional—an effort

that Milteer could take credit for with his contributors—would help to

ensure that Milteer didn’t meet the same fate as Rockwell.

Apparently, Milteer hadn’t been able to find a contract killer who

couldn’t be traced back to him by going through the prison grapevine,

or through Bowers’ White Knights, or by using Sutherland’s approach

to the lower levels of the St. Louis Mafia. The media coverage of Bowers’

trial in Mississippi made using Klan members even more risky, and Milt-

eer would have wanted to avoid recruiting anyone connected to groups

he belonged to, like the Citizens’ Council or Stoner’s NSRP. Milteer had

apparently tried to recruit someone with no ties to Atlanta or Georgia, by

looking to North Carolina, Kansas, Texas, and Missouri—but it hadn’t

worked. His lack of success may have led to an attempted recruitment

in Atlanta that had some similarities to the one in St. Louis.

In the fall of 1967, two men in Atlanta were offered $50,000 to kill Martin

Luther King, according to testimony that the House Select Committee on

Assassinations “concluded . . . was credible.” The two men, the Powell

brothers, were house painters who the Committee said had “a reputa-

tion for violence.” They hung out at an Atlanta bar, where a mutual

friend “told them he could put them in touch with a person who would

pay a large sum of money to anyone willing to kill Dr. King. Several days

later, at the same bar [the brothers] were approached by a white male

who introduced himself only as Ralph.” After explaining that he was

the man their friend had told them about, “Ralph displayed an open

briefcase full of money . . . said it contained $25,000 and promised that

if they took the job, they would receive $25,000 more when it had been

completed. The Powells hesitated to accept the offer” of $50,000 to kill

Martin Luther King.36

Seeing their reluctance to accept the contract, “Ralph closed his brief-

case and left the bar,” and one of the brothers said they “never saw or

heard from this person again.” The other brother initially cooperated

with Congressional investigators and passed a lie-detector test about

the incident. But when it came time to give testimony, he refused, even

when subpoenaed, saying “he feared for his life.” He was so afraid to

testify he “subsequently pleaded guilty to contempt of Congress for his

refusal,” rather than risk talking about the offer.37

The FBI hadn’t learned about the incident until 1976, and was “unable

to . . . discredit the story,” even after what it called “a full investigation.”

Two years later, the HSCA “conducted an extensive field investigation,”