Legacy of Secrecy (137 page)

Sr. was willing, and he flew to England.3 Though he was a segrega-

tionist, Hanes Sr. was respected and admired in Alabama’s legal and

political circles. According to author Jeff Cohen, Hanes “was formerly a

CIA contract employee,” which is probably why Hanes had previously

represented the widows of several Alabama pilots killed during the

Bay of Pigs invasion, while they were flying for the CIA. The resulting

compensation for the widows handled by Hanes had come from the

Cuban Revolutionary Council, the group organized and managed by

E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips.4

Throughout the time he represented Ray, Hanes later testified, he felt

that “there was a conspiracy” in Dr. King’s assassination, and that Ray

had been a paid hit man. According to Cohen, on one occasion, Hanes

“told the
Washington Post
that that if black militants weren’t behind the

murder [of Dr. King,] the CIA was.” However, most of Hanes’s public

suspicions didn’t implicate the CIA, and instead pointed toward Castro,

as when he said, “My client is a tool of revolutionary groups financed

by Cuba.”5

Hanes’s comments to reporters didn’t cast suspicion on racist groups,

perhaps for good reason. A former Klan leader told the HSCA that the

United Klans of America had given Hanes $10,000, ostensibly to repre-

sent a small group of Klansmen in North Carolina, but in actuality to

pay for Ray’s defense. Hanes firmly denied the charge, but the HSCA

found two independent sources that corroborated the surreptitious Klan

payments to Hanes for representing Ray.6 The involvement of North

Carolina Klansmen in the scheme certainly raises the possibility that

Milteer and his partners were involved in the payments, and Milteer

almost certainly had associates in common with Hanes.

However, Hanes’s motivation appears to have been primarily

financial, and Hanes was not knowingly part of the plot with Milt-

eer. Even before Ray was extradited from England, Hanes had been

approached by William Bradford Huie, a noted author who was also a

prominent checkbook journalist. In his most infamous case, more than a

decade earlier, Huie had paid $4,000 to two of the Klansmen who killed

black teenager Emmett Till. Since a Mississippi jury had found the men

not guilty, Huie was able to buy and publish their account of the killing

in a popular national magazine. Huie told Hanes that Ray’s story would

be worth at least ten times as much, and offered to pay them a $40,000

advance (almost $250,000 today) for the exclusive rights, against a 60

percent share of the profits. Hanes agreed, as did Ray.7

Even before Ray returned to the US, the publishing deal began to

affect Ray’s defense and legal status. After the British court ruled that

Ray could be extradited, Hanes could have appealed and dragged out

the process, but he didn’t. Perhaps he was influenced by the fact that

he wouldn’t receive the $40,000 advance until Ray was back in the US.

In addition, Hanes was soon making side deals with Ray about that

advance, which resulted in a bigger share for Hanes. (Over the next

year and through changes in attorneys, Ray’s share would dwindle to 18

percent, then lower still, until he eventually received none of the profits

from Huie’s book.)8

Some authors have pointed out that Hanes also failed to take advan-

tage of an English legal technicality that could have benefited Ray

greatly. British author Mel Ayton noted the “extradition treaty between

Britain and the United States which stipulated, ‘A fugitive criminal shall

not be surrendered if the crime . . . ’ is one of a political character.” Ayton

pointed out that “had any right-wing group in the United States claimed

responsibility for hiring Ray, or if Ray had claimed he had been hired by

any group or organization with a political agenda, he may have won his

[extradition] case and remained in Britain.” Ray still might have had to

face robbery and firearms charges there, but those were far less serious

than the charge of first-degree murder.9

Hanes could have used that strategy even after Ray returned to the

US, since Ayton found that the treaty “also stipulated that once a fugi-

tive had been extradited he cannot be charged with offenses other than

the crime with which he had been charged. Ray, therefore, could never

have been tried for ‘conspiracy’ or ‘conspiracy to murder,’” since he had

been charged only with murder (and unlawful flight) in the extradition

request. Author Gerald Posner, whose book about Dr. King’s assassi-

nation was far more objective and better documented than his book

on JFK’s murder, wrote that “if, upon his return, Ray had admitted

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his involvement, but instead claimed it was a conspiracy of which he

was only the provider of the weapon or the getaway driver, the pros-

ecutors could not have tried him.” Even Ray eventually realized the

legal maneuver Hanes should have employed, as Ray explained to Dan

Rather in a television interview in 1977. However, an experienced crimi-

nal like Ray knew in 1977, and in 1968, that he could never admit the

conspiracy he was really involved in, if he hoped to stay alive.10

With no appeal, Ray was returned to the US on July 19, 1968, three

and a half months after Martin Luther King’s murder. William Pepper

noted that “tipped off about Ray’s return, Memphis produce man Frank

[C.] Liberto flew” out of Memphis, heading for Detroit.11 Ray was soon

being held at the Shelby County Jail in Memphis. When the jail’s doctor

asked Ray if he had shot Dr. King, Ray replied, “Well, let’s put it this

way: I wasn’t in it by myself.”12

Joseph Milteer had the means to potentially influence Hanes through

intermediaries, using either mutual associates in groups like the Citi-

zens’ Councils or money from North Carolina—but one of Milteer’s

partners in the racist movement, J. B. Stoner, quickly began trying to

become Ray’s attorney. Soon after Ray’s capture, Stoner made it clear to

the press that he’d welcome the chance to represent Ray. Arthur Hanes

Sr. told Ray to avoid Stoner, but the white supremacist was persistent,

and by September 1968, the FBI discovered that Stoner had been writing

Ray and offering to represent him for free. The FBI also received reports

saying that Stoner was paying Hanes, but other files disprove that alle-

gation, and Stoner admitted that his NSRP didn’t have the money to pay

an expensive attorney like Hanes for defending Ray. Despite Hanes’s

dislike of Stoner, by early October 1968, Stoner was able to visit Ray in

jail.13

Meanwhile, William Bradford Huie continued his unique role as both

a privileged defense investigator and a journalist, using information he

obtained from Ray to run down numerous leads in the US and Canada.

Huie managed to interview many witnesses before they had talked to

the FBI, and his investigation far outpaced that of the Bureau on many

fronts.

The FBI’s past track record against Martin Luther King, and its unusual

treatment of Carlos Marcello and Joseph Milteer, meant that no agency

was in a position to do an objective, thorough investigation of James Earl

Ray and Dr. King’s assassination. No Southern law enforcement agency

could do the job, and LBJ wasn’t about to anger his longtime friend

Hoover by giving the investigation to another federal agency. However,

it is possible that the FBI conducted a more thorough investigation of

areas related to Milteer and Marcello than the released files indicate.

The FBI looked at the activities of other noted racists for any ties to

Dr. King’s assassination, but no such files for Milteer have ever surfaced,

even though he was a logical and obvious suspect to investigate. Like

any inquiries into Carlos Marcello’s ties to King’s murder—or Johnny

Rosselli’s apartment building’s being marked on James Earl Ray’s

map—those files may have been sent to FBI headquarters and J. Edgar

Hoover’s “personal and confidential” files. Appeals were continuing

in the Marcello and Rosselli cases, so any overt investigation of the

two mob bosses could complicate their convictions. As with Milteer,

Hoover also had embarrassing intelligence failures to hide regarding

Marcello and Rosselli in the months before JFK’s murder, further reduc-

ing any incentive for him to allow FBI field offices to pursue those leads.

As when FBI investigators tried to follow conspiracy leads after JFK’s

assassination, it wouldn’t take field agents in the King assassination

investigation long to get the message, even if no overt orders to stop

investigating were issued.

William Sullivan, an FBI assistant director in 1968, later said that he

“was convinced that James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King, but I

doubt if he acted alone. . . . Someone, I feel sure, taught Ray how to get

a false Canadian passport, and how to slip out of the country. And how

did Ray pay for the passport and the airline tickets?”14 Yet in spite of

such a high-ranking FBI official’s suspicions, the Bureau could not take

advantage of the new law that Congress passed on June 19, 1968, which

finally allowed “the use of court authorized electronic surveillance by

law enforcement officers in certain . . . crimes, including murder.” The

HSCA noted that when President Johnson signed the bill, he announced

that wiretaps would be confined “to national security cases,” meaning

that “a law which was passed in part because of Dr. King’s assassina-

tion would not be considered by the FBI during the investigation of

that crime.”15

Still, the FBI could have relied on more traditional methods against

obvious suspects, such as the racist or criminal associates of some of

Ray’s brothers, but the Bureau’s efforts in that regard seem to have been

very limited. As we noted earlier, the FBI did interview some of Sartor’s

sources, but the Bureau seemed more interested in trying to discredit

their allegations than in fully investigating them.

Based on the Justice Department’s memos about its very productive

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dealings with Sartor, Sartor clearly believed that much of his information

would emerge during Ray’s trial. Sartor was dealing with the deputy

section chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, for the

central portion of the country, and Sartor expected that the government

would use his sources in some way. He told the Justice Department

attorney that “his informants will probably be willing to talk to [the

Department], but that they will ask for money, immunity, or protec-

tion or all three.” Lacking the inside access of a wealthy checkbook

journalist like Huie, Sartor hoped to trade information with the Justice

Department, and asked only that it “contact his principal informants

through him,” until they had a deal. As a sign of good faith, we noted

earlier that he arranged for the Justice Department attorney to person-

ally interview one of his confidential sources, about a mobster tied to

James Earl Ray.16

The Justice Department’s dealings with Sartor occurred in June,

August, and September 1968, at which time the US Assistant Attorney

General, Civil Rights Division, sent their information to J. Edgar Hoover.

The official asked Hoover to “please follow out all leads indicated in the

attached memorandum if you have not already done so.”17 From that

point on, the FBI appears to have made no progress in pursuing Sartor’s

leads and sources.18

Instead, the reverse was true. By November 1968, the FBI wrote a

memo stating that one of Sartor’s sources said he hadn’t given Sar-

tor the information the journalist had claimed he had. The FBI’s own

memos show they knew that very source had personally repeated his

information to the Justice Department attorney in Sartor’s presence, but

the FBI omitted that fact from the memo written for the record and later

provided to the HSCA. Because the original Justice Department memos,

and the FBI’s copies of them, were withheld from the HSCA, the HSCA’s

Final Report referred to the man only as a “purported Sartor source.”19

That source’s reticence with the FBI in 1968 was understandable,

since William Pepper says the man was threatened the following year

with a knife, on the instructions of an associate of Frank C. Liberto,

because of information the man had given Sartor. The source managed

to talk his way out of the situation, but was reluctant to speak about

the case for years afterward. Sadly, that source was “one of the last

persons to speak with William Sartor” on the day before the journalist’s

1971 murder, when Sartor was in Texas to meet with a man whom John

H. Davis described as the former “chauffeur and bodyguard to Carlos

Marcello.”20

What happened to the FBI interviews of other Sartor sources is often

not clear, as is true for much of the FBI’s investigation in New Orleans