Legacy of Secrecy (123 page)

in the fall, but that he wasn’t sure and simply had “a gut feeling the man

was an itinerant hood, probably laying low for a while.” Sartor’s first

article about McFerren made it clear that there was “no way of know-

ing if” the man who’d worked briefly at Liberto’s was Ray, and initial

FBI memos accurately conveyed the tentative nature of McFerren’s first

identification.13

However, later FBI memos turned McFerren’s cautious comments

into a definite identification that was incorrect, which the FBI then used

to discount the story about Liberto’s yelling over the phone that we

related earlier. (Years later, McFerren even adopted the FBI’s version

of his identification.) Similarly, when the FBI summarized William

Sartor’s interviews with McFerren’s and Sartor’s underworld sources,

the latter’s references to Carlos Marcello weren’t included in the sum-

mary; they were provided only as an attachment—which the FBI appar-

ently never gave to Congressional investigators.14

J. Edgar Hoover had many reasons to be sensitive about any King

leads that led to Carlos Marcello or his associates. The previous year,

Hoover had been worried about the revelation in Ed Reid’s
The Grim

Reapers
, describing Marcello’s fall 1962 threat to assassinate JFK, and the

Director had tried unsuccessfully to get Reid to remove it. (The book

would not be published until April 1969.) Reid’s investigator, Ed Becker,

who witnessed Marcello’s outburst, maintained he had reported it to

the FBI at the time—and there is some evidence that Becker did, though

no FBI files have been found to confirm it.

Present at the Marcello threat that Becker heard was Jack Liberto,

Marcello’s lieutenant, who doubled as his personal barber and some-

times driver. FBI files from April 1968 discuss Jack Liberto’s activities

with Marcello. However, though the FBI interviewed Frank C. Liberto’s

brother and other family members in New Orleans as part of its King

investigation, there is no indication that agents ever talked to Jack Lib-

erto about it, or that the FBI looked at Jack’s relationship to Frank. Natu-

rally, Frank C. Liberto and his New Orleans relatives with whom the

FBI spoke denied any connection to, or knowledge of, King’s assassina-

tion. Their denials allowed the FBI to decide by April 22, 1968, while

Ray was still at large, that no “further inquires along these lines are

warranted”—even though by that time, the FBI knew that Ray had gone

to New Orleans with a known drug trafficker who had lived in the

Crescent City.15

Sartor, on the other hand, kept investigating and didn’t shy away

from those connected to Marcello. As for McFerren, he stuck to his story

about Liberto’s phone call, and a brief mention of the incident appeared

in the press. After the FBI’s inquiries in New Orleans about it, and after

Ray was announced as the prime suspect, the Justice Department memo

about McFerren and Sartor noted that McFerren was frightened by an

unexpected visitor from New Orleans. Sartor described the New Orleans

man as someone “who has been in the penitentiary . . . [was] involved

in bootlegging . . . is believed to have murdered at least one man [and]

it seems clear that he is mixed up in the rackets.” The man was white

and “well-dressed,” drove up in a Cadillac, and actually reached out

to shake McFerren’s hand, something his family said that white folks

never did there. The man’s visit to McFerren seemed to have no real

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

purpose, but it left McFerren feeling threatened and thinking the man

“wanted to know what I looked like so he could point me out to some

trigger man.”16

Aside from Marcello’s 1962 threat to kill JFK that Becker reported,

J. Edgar Hoover had other reasons to avoid leads pointing toward Carlos

Marcello. Like Rosselli, Marcello was facing trial in May 1968, for punch-

ing an FBI agent. If the reports Anthony Summers obtained are true,

Hoover had gone easy on Marcello for years because of sexual blackmail.

Younger FBI agents in New Orleans clearly wanted to go after the notori-

ous New Orleans godfather and probably couldn’t understand Hoover’s

reluctance—and the Director couldn’t explain it to them. That’s probably

why one or more FBI agents arranged the public confrontation at the

New Orleans airport, which resulted in Marcello’s arrest.

Marcello’s trial, slated for May 1968, appeared to be a rare slam-

dunk case against the mob boss, since he had swung at the FBI agent

in front of numerous witnesses and a photographer even captured the

moment. But tying Marcello into the King assassination, before or dur-

ing the trial, could have let Marcello assert what his friend Hoffa had

wanted to do back in 1964: that he was simply being persecuted by the

government.

The other reason Hoover might have avoided Carlos Marcello in the

King investigation had to do with the JFK assassination. The FBI had

interviewed fourteen associates of Marcello and his lieutenants after

JFK’s murder, but had never bothered to talk to Marcello himself about

the JFK assassination or Ruby’s shooting of Oswald. In April 1968, Jim

Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw was still dragging on, and Hoover

knew that less than a year earlier, Garrison had toyed with the idea of

going after Marcello. The more the FBI stuck to the simple assault case

and avoided looking at Marcello for anything assassination-related, the

better the chance that the press and public would continue to overlook

the FBI’s failure to investigate Marcello before or immediately after

JFK’s death.

Even more glaring than the FBI’s reluctance to investigate King leads

pointing to Rosselli and Marcello was the FBI’s seeming lack of interest

in Joseph Milteer after the King assassination. Many FBI staff members

had thought Milteer’s associate J. B. Stoner a logical suspect in Dr. King’s

murder—but he had an airtight alibi. Stoner was in Meridian, Missis-

sippi, at the time, holding a meeting in a barbershop that happened to

be across the street from Meridian’s FBI office. Agents were looking

through a window at Stoner when they heard on the radio about Dr.

King’s shooting. FBI agent Jack Rucker said, “Damn, J. B. Stoner’s got an

alibi. If he wasn’t down there right now, he’d be tops on our list of sus-

pects.” Instead, they had to watch as Stoner and his men celebrated the

news. According to Jack Nelson, Stoner proclaimed, “He’s been a good

nigger since he got shot.” Stoner would later say in his racist newspaper,

the
Thunderbolt
, that “the white man who shot King . . . should be given

the Congressional Medal of Honor and a large annual pension for life,

plus a Presidential pardon.”17

The FBI did investigate other violent racists in their files, including

those affiliated with some of the same groups as Milteer, like a former

“director of the National States Rights Party,” Stoner’s group for which

Milteer had been an organizer.18 But there is no sign in the FBI’s King

files that the Bureau interviewed or investigated Joseph Milteer, even

though the FBI had had an open case on Milteer the previous year. As

the FBI was fully aware at the time, and had been reminded just a year

earlier, Milteer had even spoken on a Miami police undercover tape in

November 1963 about an associate who tried to kill Dr. King.

Some of the names of racists the FBI investigated are censored in

the released files, but Milteer’s small hometown of Quitman, Georgia,

coupled with the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s online search capabilities,

make it clear that Milteer is not named in any of the released FBI files,

since the city of residence is almost always given for FBI suspects. One

of the many investigative failings the HSCA noted was that “FBI files

indicate only limited efforts to investigate the possible involvement of

extremist organizations, such as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

of Mississippi,” and other groups who “had demonstrated both a pro-

pensity for violence and a clear antagonism toward Dr. King.”19 But

because Milteer in particular had recently figured so prominently in FBI

files, his absence seems unusual.

If Milteer’s name had ever surfaced publicly in the King assassina-

tion, it would have been a potentially career-ending embarrassment for

Hoover. Imagine how it would look if the public learned that the FBI and

the Secret Service had closed their case on Milteer eight months after

newspaper articles detailed his talking about an earlier plot to kill Dr.

King—just six months before King was actually murdered. Hoover and

high-ranking FBI officials had also mishandled the Milteer investiga-

tion immediately before and after the JFK assassination, withholding

important information from the agent sent to interview Milteer before

JFK’s murder.20

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

It’s a tragedy that Milteer wasn’t investigated in the aftermath of Dr.

King’s murder, since the FBI did get at least one report of a King assas-

sination plot that might have involved Milteer’s scheme. The FBI memo

sent from Miami to Director Hoover quotes an informant as saying that

“after [the] assassination of King [name censored] proceeded to Atlanta,

Ga., and then to the residence of [name censored] who resides near

Topton, N.C.” Topton was just twenty miles from Otto, North Carolina,

where Milteer and his partners had been buying up mountain land.21

It is possible that Milteer was investigated for Dr. King’s murder, but

then, to avoid potential embarrassment, those files were routed only to

Hoover’s private “official and confidential” files. The FBI could have

secretly investigated leads in King’s slaying involving Milteer, Marcello,

and Rosselli, the same way the Bureau had handled the Tampa attempt

to kill JFK on November 18, 1963. However, by 1968 the stream of articles

in
Ramparts
by former FBI agent William Turner was a constant reminder

to Hoover that any current agent could one day decide to expose the

FBI’s wrongdoing and mistakes. In some ways, it was better for Hoover

to simply avoid having agents pursue leads pointing to Milteer, Mar-

cello, or Rosselli, rather than risk generating information and files that

could later damage the FBI and his reputation.

Some of Ray’s defense attorneys, starting with J. B. Stoner, suggested

that Hoover and the FBI were behind Dr. King’s assassination. Rep.

Louis Stokes and the HSCA looked at that possibility very closely and

could find no evidence of their involvement. It would have been illogical

for Hoover to kill Dr. King using people the FBI was helping to prosecute

in trials only weeks away, like Marcello and Rosselli. It also wouldn’t

have made sense for Hoover to use Joseph Milteer in a plot to kill Dr.

King, since his activities were known not just to the Secret Service and

the Miami police, but also to
Miami News
reporter Bill Barry and his

editors. Likewise, allowing a small-time hood like Ray to stay on the

run for eight weeks across two continents would have been senseless

for Hoover, since it harmed the reputation of Hoover’s FBI. Finally, for

the FBI to have requested that J. B. Stoner claim publicly that the Bureau

was behind King’s murder is irrational—but it makes perfect sense for

Joseph Milteer to have his associate Stoner blame King’s death on the

FBI, to divert suspicion from the real culprits.

However, the HSCA and the Senate Church Committee documented

such pervasive racism in some parts of the FBI that we don’t rule out

at least the inadvertent sharing of information between FBI agents, or

supervisors, and associates of Milteer or Marcello. An Atlanta FBI agent

in April 1968, Arthur Murtagh, later testified about the racist comments

he heard in the office from some of his fellow agents. On the night of

King’s assassination, he was so upset by one Atlanta FBI agent’s anti-

King remarks that they got into an altercation in the parking lot after

leaving the office.22 Still, the presence of good agents like Murtagh illus-

trates how difficult it would have been for the FBI as an agency to have

killed Dr. King.

Chapter Fifty-four

After Dr. King’s funeral, Bobby Kennedy resumed his quest for the Dem-

ocratic nomination for president. Before he left Atlanta, Bobby met with

a group of black celebrities, including Bill Cosby and Sammy Davis Jr.,

along with black Georgia politicians like state senator Julian Bond. But

the meeting didn’t go smoothly, and some of the celebrities took so much

credit for the civil rights movement that Cosby left in a huff. Bobby then

met with former aides of Dr. King, including Andrew Young and Ralph

David Abernathy. Young said the gathering was serious and blunt, but

Bobby “handled himself well.”1

Bobby resumed his grueling campaign schedule in the remaining pri-