Journalist William Sartor, a stringer for Time magazine, pursued the organized-crime link to King's murder-only to die suddenly in Waco, Texas in 1971, the night before he was to interview a significant witness. His death was ruled a methaqualone overdose. (Sartor's sudden demise was not the only mysterious death connected to the King murder. A cabdriver who witnessed the assassination told what he knew to police and died violently that same night; and the two judges who appeared to promise James Earl Ray his best shot at getting a trial, in 1969 and 1974, both died suddenly in their chambers while reviewing his case.)
But much of the crucial information Sartor was seeking on organized crime's role has come out bit by bit over the years. In the 1992 book Double Cross, Sam Giancana's brother Chuck recalls him boasting that the Mafia killed King. Jules "Ricco" Kimbel, a US government covert operative and organized crime figure who appears to have been in Canada the same time as Ray, was interviewed two decades after the assassination and described obtaining aliases for Ray in Canada, his role setting up Ray as a patsy, and the role played by Sal and Frank Liberto in King's murder. Frank Liberto, Marcello's representative in Memphis, admitted his part in the assassination shortly before his death in 1978, just as gangster Myron Billet and Loyd Jowers confessed their roles late in life. And Liberto's admission echoes the earlier statement by black grocery store owner John McFerren, who said that one hour before King was shot, he overheard Liberto yelling into the phone, "Get him on the balcony, you can pick up the money from my brother in New Orleans, don't call me here again." It was McFerren's story which led Sartor to pursue the Liberto-Marcello connection. After sharing his information, McFerren was "threatened, burgled, beaten up, and shot at," report John Edginton and John Sergeant, producers of the BBC Television documentary Who Killed Martin Luther King?, in an article for Covert Action in 1990.
"There are other Memphis locals, particularly in the vicinity of the Lorraine Motel and Jim's Grill, who are still afraid to talk or who have suddenly changed their original stories," Edginton and Sergeant noted at the time. "At least one of them is still visited from time to time by a man reminding him to stay silent . . . Finally there was the known presence in Memphis on the day of the assassination as well as a week after, of a notorious anti-Castro mercenary and CIA contract employee. Years later, when questioned about why he was in Memphis on the day of the assassination, he admitted 'it was my business to be there.'"
On December 8, 1999, a Memphis jury found Jowers guilty of conspiracy in the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The alliance of lawless elements of the US government with organized crime during the 1960s has been well-documented. Mafiosi assassins had been hired by the CIA to target Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo, and Patrice Lumumba. And FBI Director Hoover's mob ties have also been detailed at great length. As James Dickerson points out in Dixie's Dirty Secret, "Hoover and Marcello had at least two things in common: both maintained a friendship with New York mobster Frank Costello-and both were unrepentant racists." A column by Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen further illuminates whose side Hoover was really on, describing the case of Dick Gregory: "In 1968, the activist/comedian publicly denounced the Mafia for importing heroin into the inner city. Did the FBI welcome the anti-drug, anti-mob message? No. Head G-man J. Edgar Hoover responded by proposing that the bureau try to provoke the mob to retaliate against Gregory as part of an FBI 'counter intelligence operation' to 'neutralize' the comedian. Hoover wrote: 'Alert La Cosa Nostra (LCN) to Gregory's attack on LCN.'"
The initial prevailing suspicion on April 4, 1968 was that King was struck down by a segregationist individual or group. That was not unreasonable as a first hunch-white-supremacist terrorists had indeed committed numerous murders during that decade-yet is unreasonable in light of all that we know today. In the scenario presented by several dedicated researchers, the killing of Dr. King looks less like the segregationists' murders of American civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, and more like an eerie repetition of the assassination of Congo's President Patrice Lumumba seven years earlier.
Like King, Lumumba was targeted as a threat to US national security, when in fact his actual offense was his declared intention to place the interests of his people above the interests of major corporations. In a storyline similar to what has been uncovered in the King case, a rogue element of the CIA hired Mafiosi-in this case, from Europe-as well as Belgian mercenaries to brutally eliminate Lumumba. And-in a plot that mirrored the high-level efforts to destroy King through the planting of black informants and the stoking of some African-Americans' resentments against him-CIA operatives enlisted the aid of Lumumba's jealous rivals whom he had defeated in the election, offering huge bribes to gain their treacherous cooperation.
The intelligence community's preferred methods of silencing dissidents during the 1960s were revealed in horrifying detail in a leaked memo that was included in a report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee report released on April 26, 1976: "Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death."
That's right: " . . . that may result in death."
And the dissenters who were the subject of this particular policy memorandum were not even genuine political leaders but merely leftist counterculture figures, particularly antiwar rock musicians. If rock stars were considered national security threats who had to be destroyed (and one now might wonder how many of their scandals and untimely deaths were really their own doing), a leader of the stature of Dr. King was not likely to last very long.
Congress' exposure of this high-level corruption during the 1970s, leading to extensive reforms, gives us reason for hope-although the 40 years since King's death consist of crosscurrents of progress and regression, in government and in society at large, leaving us far from completing his goals.
Dr. King's premonition of his death in his final speech was no mere morbid coincidence. He knew he was targeted for destruction, and he knew his antipoverty and antiwar efforts were likely to fail. Struggling with growing doubts about the usefulness of nonviolent action, and plagued by the deep depression that overtook him during his final weeks, he nevertheless saw no alternative but to continue to play his role the best he could. His solution for America's ills in 1968 was still rooted in the same spirit of love and understanding he had expressed 10 years earlier when he refused to press charges against the woman who stabbed him in the chest and nearly killed him (leaving him with permanent scar tissue in the shape of a cross over his heart after the knife's removal). "Don't do anything to her," he said. "Don't prosecute her; get her healed."
Edited excerpt from the book Witnesses to the Unsolved, in which renowned police psychics probe the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vincent Foster, Kurt Cobain, and others.
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