As early as 1964, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail King into committing suicide. By April 4, 1968-40 years ago this week-King's audacious stands on two new fronts virtually guaranteed a tragic ending, as recalled in this book excerpt.

::::::::

On April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. defied the advice of some other civil rights leaders and took on a new fight, delivering a groundbreaking speech against the US government's war in Vietnam and policies in the Third World.

Later in the year he proposed the most radical vision of his career-a nonviolent campaign of civil obedience planned for the spring of 1968 designed to tie the Nation's Capital in knots, if need be, to force Congress into shifting massive resources from war abroad to human needs at home.

With these bold stands on two new fronts, the charismatic preacher began moving inexorably toward a risky showdown with the establishment.

J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had literally wanted King dead for years, having sent him a blackmail tape recording in 1964, allegedly from a bugged hotel room, accompanied by a note urging him to commit suicide "before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation."

In December 1963, shortly after the killing of President Kennedy, Hoover's agency declared its intention of "neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader." A 1964 FBI memo discussed the urgent need for "the removal of King from the national scene." The Bureau's unlawful tactics included extensive surveillance, a defamation campaign, disruption of King's efforts through dirty tricks, and planting of informants. In addition, as reporter Jeff Cohen wrote in The Rebel on November 22, 1983, Hoover "used anonymous phone calls and 'poison pen' letters to create dissension among King's staff and associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The struggle for black equality had always been inherently "subversive" to Hoover, who had mercilessly hounded the African-American leader Marcus Garvey during the 1920s, years before Martin Luther King, Jr. was born. The FBI chief's war on black America was an ongoing obsession that lasted a half-century, and he had always stepped up his surveillance efforts during wartime, claiming that dissatisfied black people would be tempted to join the enemy. During World War I he asked the FBI to spy on black leaders in order to learn their "political stand . . . toward the peace treaty and the league of nations;" and, acting on the assumption that the black community was susceptible to enemy propaganda during World War II-especially that of the non-white Japanese-initiated a campaign against black institutions and individuals that included the planting of paid informants, wiretapping of phones, bugging of offices, and a defamation campaign designed to undermine nonviolent organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League-the same tactics that would later be brought to bear against King during the Vietnam War.

By 1968, the already overwhelming pressures on King took on a whole new dimension. As the Church Committee found during the 1970s, FBI agents were told in March 1968 to neutralize King, lest he become a "messiah" who could "unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement." In addition, his opposition to the Vietnam War during his final year subjected him to Army surveillance as a perceived national security threat, as did his plans to bring his Poor People's Campaign to Washington in the spring.

In an eye-opening investigative report for the Memphis Commercial Appeal on March 21, 1993, Stephen Tompkins wrote that the Army's intelligence branch "spied on the family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for three generations," often targeting black ministers such as King's father. "The spying was born of a conviction by top Army intelligence officers that black Americans were ripe for subversion-first by agents of the German Kaiser, then by Communists, later by the Japanese and eventually by those opposed to the Vietnam War. At first, the Army used a reporting network of private citizens that included church members, black businessmen . . . and black educators . . . It later employed cadres of infiltrators, wiretaps, and aerial photography by U-2 spy planes."

"As the civil rights movement merged with anti-war protests in the late 1960s, some Army units began supplying sniper rifles and other weapons of war to civilian police departments," Tompkins reported. "Army Intelligence began planning for what some officers believed would soon be armed rebellion." As King planned a massive march on Washington, "the Army's intelligence system was keenly focused on King and desperately searching for a way to stop him . . . the review of thousands of government documents and interviews with people involved in the spying revealed that by early 1968 Army Intelligence regarded King as a major threat to national security."

If this sounds farfetched, it helps to put aside the incomplete image of Martin Luther King, Jr. presented to us every third Monday in January-the man with the eloquent "dream," a distant and non-specific vision conveniently kept frozen in that 1963 speech or deferred to an ever-receding future-and look at the Dr. King and the USA of 1968, both pushed by events to the breaking point.

Even the 1963 March on Washington, a memory that now seems to radiate a benign, rosy glow, in fact took place in an atmosphere of controversy, amid fears of violence. President John F. Kennedy, the courageous war hero in the White House only a few blocks away from the historic gathering, did not dare attend or lend his name to the event, for fear that rioting or some other unforeseen development might occur and hurt him politically. So it is not difficult to imagine how much higher the stakes were five years later, when the immensely popular preacher dared to threaten the establishment by blending the civil rights movement with the growing antiwar movement and, at the same time, took on the highly charged issue of economic inequality, a crisis he said justified a Poor People's March designed to cause "major, massive dislocations" until specific demands were met. Some of the nation's most powerful people were determined to stop King, one way or another, before he could do any such thing.

Controversy continues to surround the role of James Earl Ray, the small-time crook who pled guilty on March 10, 1969, and withdrew his guilty plea three days later, saying he had been threatened and coerced. Ray spent the next 30 years fighting for a new trial. Several leading assassination researchers have maintained, after years of investigation, that Ray is an innocent patsy, a view eventually shared even by King's family. The bullet that killed King was never matched to Ray's rifle; and although Ray's fingerprints were found on his rifle found lying on the sidewalk outside the boarding house, his fingerprints were not found in the room from which he allegedly shot King.

Dr. Philip H. Melanson, author of The Martin Luther King Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-up, 1968-1991, meticulously presents a compelling case that Ray was being manipulated by powerful conspirators. Melanson explores the curious and revealing fact that Ray, who was in the habit of using the names of people he knew as aliases, suddenly began using the names of four men from the Toronto area after his escape from prison in1967, although he had never been to Toronto. Three of the four men bore a close physical resemblance to Ray. Melanson notes that the man whose name became Ray's primary alias, Eric S. Galt, "also had two scars-one on the palm of his right hand, another on his forehead (just barely to the right of his nose). So did James Earl Ray." Ray came to resemble Galt even more closely when he, like Galt, had plastic surgery to change the shape of his nose-a highly unusual way for a small-time crook to change his appearance.

Melanson explores the possibility that the US intelligence community-which had access to Canadian government files on defense-contractor employee Galt and the other aliases, and which viewed the antiwar King through its own distorted lens as a national security threat-was directing the actions of Ray. Revealingly, the earliest wanted posters referred to Ray as Eric S. Galt, despite his having used one of his other aliases at the Memphis rooming house-further evidence that Ray was a pawn unwittingly playing out his role according to a pre-written script.

Decades later, a disturbing new scenario of the King murder finally began to be revealed. Loyd Jowers, owner of Jim's Grill across from the Lorraine Motel, broke his silence during the 1990s, claiming to have played a role in the assassination. According to the chronology constructed by attorney and former King colleague William Pepper in his book Orders to Kill, "On the weekend of March 15 James [Earl Ray] was instructed by Raul [Ray's alleged handler] to leave Los Angeles and drive to New Orleans where he would receive further instructions. At this time Memphis produce man Frank Liberto asked Loyd Jowers to repay a 'big' favor. Jowers, who had been alerted earlier by another mutual acquaintance, was told by Liberto that the brush area behind his Jim's Grill was to be used as a sniper's lair for the assassination of Dr. King, who would at some time in the next three to four weeks be staying at the Lorraine Motel . . ."

"Jowers was told that the police would not be there," wrote Pepper. "A patsy was also going to be provided and Jowers would be handsomely paid. Liberto explained that the money came out of New Orleans."

The New Orleans connection was Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, who, according to Pepper's research, accepted a contract to kill King. Pepper cites the deathbed confession of gangster Myron Billet, who said he "attended a meeting in the small town of Apalachin, New York, a favorite mob meeting place . . . three government agents (from the CIA and FBI) offered one million dollars to Carlo Gambino and Sam Giancana to arrange for the killing of Dr. King. The offer was not accepted. The agents indicated that it would be placed elsewhere." It was eventually handed over to the fiercely racist Marcello.

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.'"

Jowers allegedly received a large cash payment hidden at the bottom of a bag of produce delivered by one of Liberto's companies. According to Pepper, Jowers was visited twice by the mysterious Raul to be instructed on his role in the planned assassination; after the fatal shot rang out at 6:01 P.M. on April 4, Jowers picked up the rifle that had been dropped by the shooter, ran back into Jim's Grill, and broke down and hid the weapon.

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.

Authors Bio:
Edward Olshaker is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in History News Network, The New York Times, and other publications. His book Witnesses to the Unsolved, an exploration of the uses of parapsychology in criminal investigation, was named a 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards finalist in the True Crime category.