Who Were Dr. King's Real Murders?

Who Were Dr. King's Real Murders?

by Joe Davis

Startling new information about the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King s making it harder than ever to believe the government when it continues to insist that James Earl Ray did the foul deed by himself.

The most recent revelations suggest not only that the FBI may have gotten the wrong man, but that the Bureau may have conspired to obstruct justice following the murder - or even conspired n advance with the CIA, the Mafia, and/or wealthy right-wing militarists to knock off King.

In late November, FBI officials admitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the agency had authored a "poison pen" letter, offering King a choice between suicide and being blackmailed. The threat was only part of the FBI 's massive seven-year effort to eliminate King from American politics.

In December, a CIA gunman who killed for bounties as low as $500 was named and directly implicated in the King assassination.

In late January, Ray's Memphis Attorney, Robert Livingston, announced that King's actual assassins were ready to turn themselves in and finger the men who hired them: four wealthy, socially prominent, conservative extremists who decided to take "national security" into their own hands.

Newsday reported last month that undercover FBI agents "actively participated" n the street violence that brought King back to Memphis, and that some of the same agents were assigned to provide security for King when he returned.

The FBI and the Justice Department still consider the King case closed. But can the same FBI that threatened King with a "blackmail or suicide" ultimatum be expected to conduct an unbiased investigation?

James Earl Ray himself has charged that the FBI set King up for the murder. and that his mysterious boss "Raoul" had ordered him to Memphis on March 28, 1968 - prior to the April 1 announcement of King's plans to return.

Both Ray and his former attorney, Percy Foreman, claim that the FBI shadowed King for the two years prior to his death. The New York Times reported that six agents at a time followed King's every movement. The bureau's response: "We don't offer protection to individuals." If they weren't protecting him, what is it they were doing?

During King's stay at the Lorraine Motel, the Internal Security Division of the Memphis police - headed by FBI veteran Frank Holloman, a close associate of Hoover as former Washington, D.C. bureau chief - staked out the area n around-the-clock shifts. Holloman had testified at an April 4 court hearing (to prevent King's Memphis march in support of striking sanitation workers) that he would be unable to prevent possible KKK-planned violence.

Tips on other sordid schemes abounded in the days before the assassination. Investigators Matt Herron and Harold Weisberg reported several such leads to an uninterested FBI. Rev. James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Philadelphia office, gave police a letter indicating this danger, but again they ignored it.

Did the FBI rule out possible police complicitv in its investigation? How else can one explain the killer 's escape through the heavy security dragnet surrounding the Lorraine Motel? Or the failure of the Memphis Police to put out an all-points bulletin for the alleged white Mustang escape car?

If the FBI wanted to cover up a conspiracy - police-directed or not - they had plenty of local help to rely on.  Besides FBI loyalist Holloman, Memphis homicide Inspector N.E. Zachary and Shelby County Sheriff William Morris were both FBI Academy graduates. Ray's first lawyer. Arthur Hanes Sr., was a former FBI and CIA agent (among his duties had been the silencing of Bay of Pigs widows). His second attorney, Percy Foreman, was Jack Ruby's counsel. Neither was the sort to raise questions that would disturb the FBI.

Ray's attorneys are now saying that Walter A. Youngblood, the CIA gunman, "might have pulled the trigger." Ray himself has identified Youngblood from photographs as the man who shadowed him during the hours immediately before the killing. At the time, Ray assumed that Youngblood was a customer of his boss "Raoul" in the gun-running scheme to Cuba (SUN, Jan. 22).

In January, author-investigator Donald Freed claimed to have evidence placing Youngblood at the St. Francis Hotel in Los Angeles two weeks after Dr. King's death. He was accompanied by a man resembling, and claiming to be, James Earl Ray. According to Freed, they "hinted broadly about another and bigger hit coming up in L.A."

Two Memphis ministers, Rev. John Baltensperger and Rev. James M. Latimer, also heard this Youngblood claim. "Mark my words," he had said, "Robert Kennedy is next on the Mafia's list. He's going to get it real soon- especially if he wins the California primary." Six weeks later Kennedy was dead in Los Angeles.

One cannot reckon lightly with Youngblood's past. He is a veteran of three Latin American revolutions and was an officer n Fidel Castro's army, probably a double agent. In 1969, FBI agents whisked him away from a Florida courtroom where he was to stand trial for a conspiracy to kidnap Rolando Masferrer, Fulgencio Batista's unofficial executioner, who carried a $100,000 price tag on delivery to Fidel's firing squad.

Why was Youngblood at the scene of King's assassination? He is the sort of man who could only have been there on business.

Youngblood was dentified by Lloyd Jowers (manager of Jim's cafe, across from the Lorraine) and by the waitress who served him there 90 minutes before the murder. Police arrested Youngblood outside the cafe the next day, apparently at the FBI's request. That night a police captain remarked to Jowers: "That guy you put us on to must must have had real connections. One phone call and he was gone ... He wasn't in the station for more than an hour."

Five days later, Youngblood began to spread rumors of Mafia involvement n the killing. Memphis attorney Russell X. Thompson and the aforementioned ministers were also told that the King killer had impersonated a black man in setting up the killing.

A day before King arrived n Memphis, and two days before his death, the manager of the black owned-and-operated Lorraine Motel was visited by an "advance security man for Dr. King." When the advance man saw that King's suite was on the first floor he told the manager, "No, Mrs. Bailey, This simply won't do. Dr. King always likes to stay on the second floor, overlooking the swimming pool." When the "advance man" departed, the manager scoffed at an employee's suspicion that the man had been "a white man imitating a black."

King's accommodations were moved upstairs, where he was shot on the second-floor balcony.

The "advance man" remains a mystery to King's associates. No advance man had been assigned for his Memphis arrival, and no one in King's entourage fit the description.

A reputable Tennessee businessman, John McFerren, told Inspector Zachary (in the presence of an FBI agent, an ACLU lawyer, and a tape recorder) that he overheard an apparent plot to kill King exactly an hour before the event on April 4, in the office of an Italian-American Memphis vegetable wholesaler with family ties to New Orleans Mafia figures. McFerren says he heard one man say over the telephone: "Get that black bastard on the balcony of the Lorraine, and my brother will pay you off in New Orleans."

The FBI verified most details of McFerren's story, but discounted the lead because the figures involved said they were discussing a personal loan.

Author William Bradford Huie (He Slew the Dreamer), to whom James Earl Ray gave his own exclusive hand-written, book-length inside story, said in a radio interview

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