A Review of The Plot to Kill King by William
Pepper
MLK
DAY 2020. In commemoration of Martin Luther King’s assassination, we
bring to you this article by Edward Curtin first published on Global Research
in January 2017.
**
Very
few Americans are aware of the truth behind the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. Few books have been written about it, unlike other significant
assassinations, especially JFK’s. For almost fifty years there has been a media
blackout supported by government deception to hide the truth.
And
few people, in a massive act of self-deception, have chosen to question the
absurd official explanation, choosing, rather, to embrace a mythic fabrication
intended to sugarcoat the bitter fruit that has resulted from the murder of the
one man capable of leading a mass movement for revolutionary change in the
United States. Today we are eating the fruit of our denial.
In
order to comprehend the significance of this extraordinary book, it is first
necessary to dispel a widely accepted falsehood about Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. William Pepper does that on the first page.
To understand his death, it
is essential to realize that although he is popularly depicted and perceived as
a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent
revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for the long-overdue
social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.
In
other words, Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a non-violent spiritual
and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an
established order based on violence, racism, and economic exploitation.
He was a very dangerous man.
Revolutionaries
are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist
such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off,
they knock them off. Forty-eight years after King’s assassination, the
causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression , and
economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so
many respects. And King’s message has been enervated by the sly trick of
giving him a national holiday and urging Americans to make it “a day of
service.” Needless to say, such service does not include non-violent war
resistance or protesting a decadent system of economic injustice.
Because
MLK repeatedly called the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence on
earth,” he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that
later – once he was long and safely dead – praised him to the heavens.
This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.
But
William Pepper resurrects the revolutionary MLK, and in doing so shows in
striking detail why elements within the U.S. government executed him.
After reading this book, no fair-minded reader can reach any other
conclusion. The Plot to Kill King, the culminating volume of a
trilogy that Pepper has written on the assassination, consists of slightly less
text than supporting documentation in its appendices, which include numerous
depositions and interviews that buttress Pepper’s thesis on the why and how of
this horrible murder. It demands a close reading that should put to rest
any pseudo-debates about the essentials of the case.
Pepper,
an attorney who represented the King family in the 1999 trial that found U.S.
officials of the federal (in particular, the FBI and Army Intelligence), state,
and local governments responsible for King’s assassination, has worked on the
King case since 1977. He met MLK in 1967, after King had read his
Ramparts’ magazine article, “The Children of Vietnam,” that exposed the hideous
effects of U.S. napalm and white phosphorous bombing on young and old
Vietnamese innocents. The text and photos of that article reduced King to
tears and were instrumental in his increased opposition to the war against
Vietnam as articulated in his dramatic Riverside Church speech (“Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”) on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before
his execution in Memphis. That speech, in which King so powerfully and
publically linked the war with racism and economic exploitation, foretold his
death at the hands of the perpetrators of those abominations.
Devastated
by King’s death, and assuming the alleged assassin James Earl Ray was
responsible, Pepper retreated from the fray until a 1977 conversation with the
Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s associate, who raised the specter of Ray’s
innocence. After a five hour interrogation of the imprisoned Ray in 1978,
Pepper was convinced that Ray did not shoot King and set out on a forty year
quest to uncover the truth.
Before
examining the essentials of Pepper’s discovery, it is important to point out
that MLK, Jr, his father, Rev. M. L. King, Sr, and his maternal grandfather,
Rev. A.D. Williams, all pastors of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, were
spied on by Army Intelligence and the FBI since 1917.
All were considered communist sympathizers and dangerous to the reigning
hegemony because of their espousal of racial and economic equality. When
MLK, Jr. forcefully denounced unjust and immoral war-making as well, and
announced his Poor People’s Campaign and intent to lead a massive peaceful
encampment of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., he set off panic in
the bowels of government spies and their masters. Seventy-five years of
spying on black religious leaders here found its ultimate
“justification.” As Stokely Carmichael, co-chairman of the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee, said to King in a conversation secretly
recorded by Army Intelligence, “The man don’t care you call ghettos
concentration camps, but when you tell him his war machine is nothing but hired
killers, you got trouble.”
It is
against this “trouble” that Pepper’s investigation must be set, as that “trouble”
is also the background for the linked assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, and
RFK. Understanding the forces behind the military, the spies, and the
gunmen who, while operating in the shadows, are actually the second layer of
the onion skin, is essential. The government and mainstream corporate
media form the outer layer with their collusion in disinformation, lying, and
truth suppression, but Pepper correctly identifies the core as follows.
Bombastic, chauvinistic,
corporate propaganda aside, where the slaughter of innocents is, and always
was, justified in the name of patriotism and national security, it has always
and ever been about money. Corporate and financial leaders trusted with
the keys to the Republic’s treasure moved from boardrooms to senior government
positions and back again. Construction, oil and gas, defense industry,
and pharmaceutical corporations, their bankers, brokers, and executives thrive
in a war economy. Fortunes are made and dynasties created and perpetuated
and a cooperating elite permeates an entire society and ultimately contaminates
the world in its drive for national resources wherever they are ….Vietnam was
his [King’s] Rubicon …. Here, as never before, would he seriously challenge the
interests of the power elite.
MLK
was assassinated on April 4, 1968 at 6:01 PM as he stood on the balcony of the
Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was shot in the lower right side
of his face by one rifle bullet that shattered his jaw, damaged his upper
spine, and came to rest below his left shoulder blade. The U.S.
government claimed the assassin was a racist loner named James Earl Ray, who
had escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary on April 23, 1967. Ray
was alleged to have fired the fatal shot from a second-floor bathroom window of
a rooming house above the rear of Jim’s Grill across the street. Running
to his rented room, Ray allegedly gathered his belongings, including the
rifle, in a bedspread-wrapped bundle, rushed out the front door onto the
adjoining street, and in a panic dropped the bundle in the doorway of the
Canipe Amusement Company a few doors down. He was then said to have
jumped into his white Mustang and driven to Atlanta where he abandoned the
car. From there he fled to Canada and then to England where he was
eventually arrested at Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968 and extradited to the
U.S. The state claims that the money Ray needed to purchase the car and
for all his travel was secured through various robberies and a bank heist.
Ray’s alleged motive was racism and that he was a bitter and dangerous loner.
When
Ray, under extraordinary pressure, coercion, and a payoff from his lawyer to
take a plea, pleaded guilty (only a few days later to request a trial that was
denied) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison, the case seemed to be closed,
and was dismissed from public consciousness. Another hate-filled lone
assassin, shades of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, had committed a
despicable deed.
In
the years leading up to Pepper’s 1978 involvement, only a few lonely voices
expressed doubts about the government’s case – Harold Weisberg in 1971 and Mark
Lane and Dick Gregory in 1977. The rest of the country put themselves and
the case to sleep. They are still sleeping, but Pepper is trying with
this last book to wake them up. Meanwhile, the disinformation specialists
continue with their lies.
While
a review is not the place to go into every detail of Pepper’s rebuttal of the
government’s shabby claims, let me say at the outset that he emphatically does
so, and adds in the process some tentative claims of which he is not certain
but which, if true, are stunning.
As
with the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, Robert (two
months after MLK), all evidence points to the construction of patsies to take
the blame for government executions. Ray, Oswald, and Sirhan all bear
striking resemblances in the ways they were chosen and moved as pawns over long
periods of time into positions where their only reactions could be stunned
surprise when they were accused of the murders.
It
took Pepper many years to piece together the essential truths, once he and
Abernathy interviewed Ray in prison in 1978. The first giveaway that
something was seriously amiss came with the 1979 House Select Committee on
Assassinations’ report on the King assassination. Led by Robert Blakey,
suspect in his conduct of the other assassination inquiries, who had replaced
Richard Sprague, who was deemed to be too independent, “this multi-million
dollar investigation ignored or denied all evidence that raised the possibility
that James Earl Ray was innocent,” and that government forces might be
involved. Pepper lists over twenty such omissions that rival the
absurdities of the magical thinking of the Warren Commission. The HSCA report
became the template “for all subsequent disinformation in print and visual
examinations of this case” for the past thirty-seven years.
Pepper’s
decades-long investigation, not only refutes the government’s case against
James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government
conspiracy led by the FBI, Army Intelligence, and Memphis Police, assisted by
southern Mafia figures. He is right to assert that “we have probably acquired
more detailed knowledge about this political assassination than we have ever
had about any previous historical event.” This makes the silence around
this case even more shocking. This shock is accentuated when one is
reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a
thirty day trial and over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty
in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and William
Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed,
but saddened by the way the findings were buried once again by a media in
cahoots with the government.
The
civil trial was the King family’s last resort to get a public hearing to
disclose the truth of the assassination. They and Pepper knew that Ray
was an innocent pawn, but Ray had died in prison in 1998 after trying for
thirty years to get a trial and prove his innocence (shades of Sirhan Sirhan
who still languishes in prison). During all those years, Ray had
maintained that he had been manipulated by a shadowy figure named Raul, who
supplied him with money and his white Mustang and coordinated all his
complicated travels, including having him buy a rifle and come to Jim’s Grill
and the boarding house on the day of the assassination. The government
has always denied that Raul existed.
Blocked
at every turn by the authorities and unable to get Ray a trial, Pepper arranged
an unscripted, mock TV trial that aired on April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the assassination. Jurors were selected from a pool of
U.S. citizens, a former U.S. Attorney and a federal judge served as prosecutor
and judge, with Pepper serving as defense attorney. He presented
extensive evidence clearly showing that authorities had withdrawn all security
for King; that the state’s chief witness was falling down drunk; that the
alleged bathroom sniper’s nest was empty right before the shot was fired; that
three eyewitnesses, including the NY Times Earl Caldwell, said that the shot
came from the bushes behind the rooming house; and that two eyewitnesses saw
Ray drive away in his white Mustang before the shooting, etc. The
prosecution’s feeble case was rejected by the jury that found Ray not guilty.
As
with all Pepper’s work on the case (including book reviews), the mainstream
media responded with silence. And though this was only a TV trial,
increasing evidence emerged that the owner of Jim’s Grill, Loyd Jowers, was
deeply involved in the assassination. Pepper dug deeper, and on December
16, 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live that
aired nationwide. Pepper writes, “Loyd Jowers cleared James Earl Ray,
saying that he did not shoot MLK but that he, Jowers, had hired a shooter after
he was approached by Memphis produce man Frank Liberto and paid $1,000,000 to
facilitate the assassination. He also said that he had been visited by a
man names Raul who delivered a rifle and asked him to hold it until
arrangements were finalized …. The morning after the Primetime Live broadcast there was no coverage of
the previous night’s program, not even on ABC …. Here was a confession, on
prime time television, to involvement in one of the most heinous crimes in the
history of the Republic, and virtually no American mass-media coverage.”
In
the twenty-three years since that confession, Pepper has worked tirelessly on
the case and has uncovered a plethora of additional evidence that refutes the
government’s claims and indicts it and the media for a continuing
cover-up. The evidence he has gathered, detailed and documented in The Plot to Kill King, proves
that Martin Luther King was killed by a conspiracy masterminded by the U.S.
government. Much of his evidence was presented at the 1999 trial, while
other was subsequently discovered. Since the names and details involved
make clear that, as with the murders of JFK and RFK, the conspiracy was very
sophisticated with many moving parts organized at the highest level, I will
just highlight a few of his findings in what follows. A reader should
read the book to understand the full scope of the plot, its execution, and the
cover-up.
- Pepper
refutes the government and proves, through multiple witnesses, telephonic,
and photographic evidence, that Raul existed; that his full name is Raul
Coelho; and that he was James Earl Ray’s intelligence handler, who
provided him with money and instructions from their first meeting in the
Neptune Bar in Montreal, where Ray had fled in 1967 after his prison
escape, until the day of the assassination. It was Raul who
instructed Ray to return to the U.S. (an act that makes no sense for an
escaped prisoner who had fled the country), gave him money for the white
Mustang, helped him attain travel documents, and moved him around the
country like a pawn on a chess board. The parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald
and Sirhan Sirhan are startling.
- He
presents the case of Donald Wilson, a former FBI agent working out of the
Atlanta office in 1968, who went with a senior colleague to check out an
abandoned white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray’s car, to which Raul had
a set of keys) and opened the passenger door to find that an envelope and
some papers fell out onto the ground. Thinking he may have disturbed
a crime scene, the nervous Wilson pocketed them. Later, when he read
them, their explosive content intuitively told him that if he gave them to
his superiors they would be destroyed. One piece was a torn out page
from a 1963 Dallas telephone
directory with the name Raul written at the top, and the letter “J” with a
Dallas telephone number for a club run by Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer. The
page was for the letter H and had numerous phone numbers for H. L. Hunt,
Dallas oil billionaire and a friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
Both men hated MLK. The second sheet contained Raul’s name and a list of
names and sums and dates for payment. On the third sheet was written
the telephone number and extension for the Atlanta FBI office. (Read Jim
Douglass’s important interview with Donald Wilson in The Assassinations, pp.479-491.)
- Pepper
interviewed four other witnesses who confirmed that they had seen Raul
with Jack Ruby in Dallas in 1963 and
that they were associated.
- Pepper
shows that the alias Ray was given and used from July 1967 until April 4,
1968 – Eric Galt – was the name of a Toronto operative of U.S. Army
Intelligence, Eric St. Vincent Galt, who worked for Union Carbide with Top
Secret clearance. The warehouse at the Canadian Union Carbide Plant
in Toronto that Galt supervised “housed a top secret munitions project
funded jointly by the CIA, the U.S. Naval Surface Weapons Center, and the
Army Electronics Research and Development Command …. In August 1967, Galt
met with Major Robert M. Collins, a top aide to the head of the 902nd Military
Intelligence Group (MIG) Colonel John Downie.” Downie selected four
members for an Alpha 184 Sniper Unit that was sent to Memphis to back up
the primary assassin of MLK. Meanwhile, Ray, set up as the patsy,
was able to move about freely since he was protected by the pseudonymous
NSA clearance for Eric Galt.
- To
refute the government’s claim that Ray and his brother robbed the Alton,
Illinois Bank to finance his travels and car purchase (therefore no Raul
existed), Pepper “called the sheriff in Alton and the president of the
bank; they gave the same statement. The Ray brothers had nothing to
do with the robbery. No one from the HSCA, the FBI, or The New York Times had sought their
opinion.” CNN later reiterated the media falsehood that became part
of the official false story.
- Pepper
proves that the fatal shot came from the bushes behind Jim’s Grill and the
rooming house, not from the bathroom window. He presents
overwhelming evidence for this, showing that the government’s claim, based
on the testimony on a severely drunk Charlie Stephens, was absurd.
His evidence includes the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses and that of
Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, who said he took the rifle from the
shooter in the bushes and brought it into the bar where he hid it.
Thus, Ray was not the assassin.
- He
presents conclusive evidence that the bushes were cut down the morning
after the assassination in an attempt to corrupt the crime scene.
The order to do so came from Memphis Police Department Inspector Sam Evans
to Maynard Stiles, a senior administrator of the Memphis Department of
Public Works.
- He
shows how King’s room was moved from a safe interior room, 201, to balcony
room, 306, on the upper floor; how King was conveniently positioned alone on the balcony by members of his own
entourage for the easy mortal head shot from the bushes across the
street. (Many people only remember the iconic photograph taken after-the-fact with Jesse Jackson, Andrew
Young, et al., standing over the fallen King and pointing across the
street.) Pepper implicates that Reverends Billy Kyles, Jesse
Jackson, and, to a lesser extent, Ralph Abernathy were involved in these
machinations. He uncovers of the role of black military intelligence
agent Marrell McCollough, attached to the 111th MIG,
within the entourage. McCollough can be seen kneeling over the
fallen King, checking to see if he’s dead.
- Pepper
confirms that all of this, including the assassin in the bushes, was
dutifully photographed by Army Intelligence agents situated on the nearby
Fire House roof.
- He
presents evidence that all security for Dr. King was withdrawn from the
area by the Memphis Police Department, including a special security unit
of black officers, and four tactical police units. A black detective at
the nearby fire station, Ed Redditt, was withdrawn from his post on the
afternoon of April 4th, allegedly because of a death threat against him.
And the only two black firemen at Fire Station No.2 were transferred to
another station.
- He
names and confirms the presence of Alpha 184 snipers at locations high
above the Lorraine Motel balcony.
- He
explains the use of two white mustangs in the operation to frame Ray.
- He
proves that Ray had driven off before the shooting; that Loyd Jowers took
the rifle from the shooter who was in the bushes; that the Memphis police
were working in close collaboration with the FBI, Army Intelligence, and
the “Dixie Mafia,” particularly local produce dealer Frank Liberto and his
New Orleans associate Carlos Marcello; and that every aspect of the
government’s case was filled with holes that any person familiar with the
details and possessing elementary logical abilities could refute.
- So
importantly, Pepper shows how the mainstream media and government flacks
have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and
disinformation, just as they have done with the Kennedy and Malcom X
assassinations that are of a piece with this one.
But
since this is a book review and not a book, I will stop listing Pepper’s very
detailed and convincing findings. While he may not have answered every
aspects of the case, and may be mistaken in some small details, he has proven
beyond a shadow of a doubt the basic fact that James Earl Ray did not kill
Martin Luther King, but that this great and dangerous leader was killed by a
conspiracy organized at the highest levels of government.
The Plot to Kill King will
mesmerize any reader seeking the truth about MLK’s assassination. Even
when Pepper, towards the end of the book, offers circumstantial and
non-corroborated testimony from witnesses Ronnie Lee Adkins and Johnton Shelby,
the reader can’t help but be intrigued and to consider their stories highly
plausible given all that Pepper has proven. Adkins claims that his
father, a friend of Clyde Tolson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy, and
then he himself, were part of the plot to kill King. This involved
politicians, the FBI, MPD, and mafia, including the aforementioned produce
dealer Frank Liberto and others, making payoffs with FBI money to various
people, including Jesse Jackson (whom Adkins, Jr. claims was a paid FBI
informer) and working closely on the details of the assassination. Johton
Shelby’s story as recounted in his deposition (2014) to Pepper (reproduced,
together with Adkins’ (2009), as appendices in the book), is that his mother,
who was working as an emergency room aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital when King
was brought there, inadvertently witnessed men spitting on Dr. King as he lay
in the emergency room and a doctor putting a pillow over his head and
suffocating him to death. Pepper tends to accept these accounts, but says
he isn’t completely convinced of all aspects of them. The reader is
offered plenty of food for thought concerning these claims.
Besides
clearly proving the government’s part in killing Martin Luther King, this book
is very important for the way Pepper links the case to those of JFK and RFK,
who was murdered two months after King. At the center of all these
murders is a trinity of men who were devoted to the ending the Vietnam War and
all wars, restoring economic justice for all Americans, and eliminating racial
inequality. That their goals were the same provides a motive for their murders
by forces opposed to these lofty objectives. That their murders clearly
involved highly sophisticated operations and cover-ups that could never have
been pulled off by “crazed lone assassins” points to powerful forces with those
means at their disposal. And when it comes to opportunity, when did the shadowy
forces of the deep state ever lack for that?
The
ramifications of the MLK assassination profoundly inform our current condition.
For anyone who truly cares about peace, love, and justice, The Plot to Kill King is essential reading.
William Pepper should be saluted. He has carried on Martin King’s noble
legacy.
Reprinted
with permission from GlobalResearch.ca.
Edward
Curtin [send
him mail] is a writer whose work has appeared widely. His website
is edwardcurtin.com.
Copyright
© GlobalResearch.ca
