The Ghosts of Mississippi (26 page)

With the heat on in Jackson, the Klan started targeting other cities. On May 26, 1968, two young Klansmen named Tommy Tarrants and Danny Joe Hawkins planted a huge dynamite bomb in a doorway of the Temple Beth Israel synagogue in Meridian. The explosion shook houses three miles away, but, incredibly, no one was hurt.

Two of the most valuable informants the FBI and the Jewish group developed were brothers from Meridian, Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts. They were able to supply amazingly detailed information, since they were trusted White Knights. Wayne Roberts was, at the time, appealing his conviction for depriving Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of their civil rights by murdering them. He was such a Klan hero that he was beyond suspicion. But in fact his conviction motivated him to cooperate with the FBI, and so did the seventy-five thousand dollars raised by the Mississippi Jewish community.

It’s not easy to catch a bomber in the act. Timing is everything. The Robertses’ FBI handlers, acting with the Meridian police, told the brothers to set up the time and place of the next bombing. That way the law could be waiting.

On June 29, 1968, Raymond Roberts called his contact at the Meridian police department: Tommy Tarrants was going to bomb the house of a prominent Meridian Jew named Meyer Davidson. Just after midnight Tarrants finished the final procedures to arm a bomb attached to twenty-nine sticks of dynamite. He set the timer for 2 a.m.

At 12:45 a green Buick without its headlights on cruised quietly up Davidson’s street and parked fifty feet away from his driveway. Davidson and his family were not home. Instead dozens of Meridian policemen and FBI agents were positioned around the house, waiting.

Tarrants carried the bomb in one arm and a Browning automatic in his right hand. Depending on who’s telling the story, when he reached the driveway, either the cops shouted “Halt! Police!,” Tarrants fired twice with his handgun, and the cops opened up — or the cops simply opened up without warning. The result was the same.

Tarrants was shot and captured after a fierce gunfight. His companion, a young schoolteacher and secret Klanswoman named Kathy Ainsworth, was killed by a bullet as she sat in the getaway car.

Three days later Byron De La Beckwith was on the road, carrying messages from Sam Bowers to other White Knights. The word was to lay low. There was a traitor among them.

The Meridian shootout marked the end of the Klan’s reign of terror in Mississippi. The bombings stopped and the remnants of the White Knights drifted apart, retired, or started serving jail sentences.

Beckwith had been continuously monitored by the FBI since his mistrials. His name appeared from time to time in intelligence reports that certain agents in the Jackson FBI office shared with Al Binder and other Jewish leaders in the region. Beckwith seemed to be a minor actor in the Klan drama of the late sixties. According to informants, he was mainly a messenger and recruiter who traveled across the South visiting fellow fanatics. Beckwith had a big mouth and a reputation as a loose cannon. The FBI believed that although he had access to Sam Bowers’s inner circle, he was not trusted.

When Sam Bowers finally went to prison for the Neshoba County murders in February 1970, the Mississippi Klan seemed moribund. A few radicals were, however, still on the loose and willing to strike. L. E. Matthews and Danny Joe Hawkins were among them. These were Beckwith’s friends.

After a long period of quiet, word began to percolate through the paid informants still active in the vestiges of the White Knights that another job was being planned. This time the bomber would be Byron De La Beckwith. The target was Bee Botnick, the New Orleans ADL leader, to avenge the ambush of Tarrants and Ainsworth.

The FBI still had at least one informant deep within the Klan. He was a respectable sign painter and printer named Gordon Clark, who was very close to Matthews and Beckwith. He was so close, in fact, that he traveled down to New Orleans with Beckwith to help scope out the target.

At first Beckwith was going to blow up the ADL headquarters downtown. He even walked up to Botnick’s office and tried to get in to see him. The ADL secretary told him that Botnick wasn’t in. Beckwith decided it would be easier to bomb Botnick’s house.

L. E. Matthews was a prosperous electrician and expert bomb-maker. Together he and Beckwith plotted the attack. According to the informant, Beckwith boasted to Matthews that it had only taken four or five weeks to set up the Medgar Evers murder. Matthews criticized him for bungling the job by leaving his rifle at the scene. Beckwith apparently brushed that off and asked Matthews for money to set up the job. As usual Beckwith was broke.

As the plans took shape, Clark reported regularly to the FBI and to Al Binder, who was apparently paying him for the information in an arrangement similar to the Tarrants operation. Binder later said it had cost his group ten thousand dollars to find out when the Botnick bombing was going to take place.

Agent Thompson B. Webb, who was in charge of the operation, says he knew nothing of Binder’s alleged relationship with Clark. On September 18, 1973, Webb alerted the New Orleans FBI office, which in turn notified New Orleans police intelligence about the bomb plot. Sergeant Bernard Windstein, who was acting chief of the subversives unit, was briefed by an FBI agent. They knew Beckwith would be driving an Oldsmobile, tag number 42D4112 or 42D412. The FBI man added that the subject usually carried a loaded .45 automatic on his person and a .30-caliber carbine in his car. The agent told Windstein where Beckwith planned to enter the city and what route he would take. They just didn’t know when.

It occurred to Windstein that this sort of tip was out of the ordinary. It’s pretty rare that a federal agency will turn over a bust to local police, especially if there’s some glory to be had. But there it was. He wasn’t about to question it.

So Windstein chose John Evans, the biggest, toughest cop in intelligence, to be his partner. He put the special units on alert and prepared to intercept the bomber.

On Wednesday morning, September 26, Byron De La Beckwith turned his Oldsmobile onto Highway 49 and headed down to Jackson. He got there just before noon. He went to the Mayflower Cafe, a modest old Greek seafood place in the downtown business district and one of the city’s most popular lunch spots. From there he made several phone calls. One was to Elmore Greaves, who wasn’t in. Then he called L. E. Matthews and Gordon Clark.

Al Binder later told many people that he had been tipped off that Beckwith was going to be given the bomb at this meeting. He said he was watching from another booth in the restaurant when Clark and Matthews joined Beckwith for lunch. Binder said he was so nervous that sweat dripped into his plate of fish. He saw Matthews hand Beckwith a large paper bag. Beckwith got up and carried the bag to his car, which was parked out front, and drove off.

This story has passed into local legend, but it seems unlikely that even dolts from the Ku Klux Klan would pass a large sensitive time bomb in a crowded restaurant frequented by cops and agents.

According to FBI sources, Beckwith drove to Matthew’s house in Florence on the rural outskirts of Jackson. Matthews assembled the bomb in his shed and gave Beckwith a lesson in how to arm it after he arrived at his target. Clark, who was at the scene, called Webb as soon as he could get to a phone.

At 5:30 p.m. the FBI contact called Windstein and told him that Beckwith was on his way. Bee Botnick and his family had been warned of the plot and had gone into hiding. Windstein was told that Beckwith would be carrying a powerful dynamite time bomb in a black wooden box measuring 8 by 9 by 22 inches. He was due in New Orleans between 11 p.m. and midnight, and he would be entering the city from Slidell, traveling west on 1-10, and taking the Twin Bridges across Lake Pontchartrain.

Windstein briefed the intelligence officers, then alerted the Headquarters Tactical Unit, the bomb squad, the emergency medical services, and whoever else might be useful. By 10 p.m., they were all in place.

It was decided that the bomber would be arrested right after he came off the bridge. But just in case Beckwith changed his route, snipers and other specialists were positioned around Botnick’s neighborhood to take him there.

At 10:15 p.m. Dick Huth at intelligence headquarters radioed an update. The subject was driving a 1968 Oldsmobile 98, white over dark blue, with two antennas on the rear fender, one a whip type fastened down. The car had a different — probably stolen — set of Mississippi plates: 61D2390. The driver was alone.

When Beckwith’s car was spotted crossing the Louisiana line, two unmarked units pulled up behind him and fell back, blocking both lanes of the highway and slowing traffic, so that by the time he hit the five-mile span across Lake Pontchartrain, he would be isolated. At the same time, traffic was diverted from the eastbound lanes.

Windstein and Evans waited in a patrol car just beyond the bridges. The lights of New Orleans glowed softly to the west. It was a perfect spot. There were no houses, no commercial buildings. Just miles of lonely swamp and landfill that had been prepared for a development that was never built. Instead there were a series of turnarounds — “no-name exits,” they were called — leading to nowhere. The turnarounds were ideal for hiding squad cars.

Nobody knew what Beckwith would do, but they figured that he would stop for a patrol car and uniformed officers. That’s where the psychology came in. According to his FBI profile, the subject was a law-and-order type. He liked cops. He would think that it was an ordinary traffic stop and he could talk his way out of it. Windstein and Evans were wearing navy blue summer uniforms as they sat beside the loneliest stretch of highway in New Orleans, waiting to grab a man with a bomb.

Windstein and Evans had nothing to do but sit and wait. They talked about their families. Evans was thirty-three and Windstein was thirty-seven. They had grown up in Catholic, working-class neighborhoods on opposite ends of Carrollton Street in New Orleans. Their fathers had both been firemen. They both liked country music. They had rarely worked together before this night.

They went over what would happen if Beckwith didn’t stop when they tried to pull him over. They would have to give chase. There were cars lined up in every no-name exit along the way. They would ram him, if necessary, to keep him from getting to the city. It was a kamikaze move, and they knew it.

“I just want to tell you that if that guy makes a move, either for his car or his gun, I’m gonna shoot him, Benny,” Evans said. “I just want to know now if you have a problem with that.”

Windstein shook his head. He had no problem.

The detectives saw the glint of headlights skimming across the lake.

“There he is.”

It was 12:02 a.m.

The blue-and-white Olds whizzed by, not speeding, not too slow, just driving steady down the blank, empty highway. Evans pulled out behind it, followed the car for about a mile, and then flipped on the blue lights. Sure enough, Beckwith pulled right over. As soon as they stopped, the subject was out of the Olds and jogging toward the patrol car along the edge of the highway.

Evans jumped out and stood behind the door with his shotgun pointed at a skinny little guy with rimless eyeglasses. “Stay where you are! Put your hands on the hood!” he shouted.

Beckwith did what he was told. He was dressed in gray trousers and a yellow sports shirt that hung loose over his belt. He said nothing. While Evans covered him, Windstein came around and patted him down. When he reached Beckwith’s waist, he stopped and pulled up the shirt for Evans to see. There was a Colt .45 automatic, nickel steel, tucked into his pants behind his left hip.

“What are you doing with a gun?” Windstein asked.

“I always carry a .45,” Byron De La Beckwith answered amiably in his rich Mississippi drawl.

Windstein checked it. Fully loaded.

“You’re under arrest for carrying a concealed weapon,” Evans said.

While Evans read Beckwith his rights, Windstein swept his flashlight beam over the Oldsmobile. He peered into the windows, careful not to touch the car — or to breathe on it too hard. On the front seat he saw a photocopy of a map of New Orleans with a route marked in red. In the well of the passenger seat he saw a black clothing bag covering all but one corner of a black wooden box.

A warm, damp breeze stirred the swamp grass. The back-up units and bomb squad hadn’t arrived yet. There was no one else around.

It was a routine question, so Windstein asked it: “Have you ever been arrested before?”

“Yessuh, I was arrested before,” Beckwith said mildly. “They say I killed a nigger in Mississippi.”

Within a minute or two a marked unit pulled up, and Evans loaded his handcuffed prisoner into the backseat for the ride to central lockup. Windstein waited with the Oldsmobile.

Beckwith was sweating in the backseat with the windows up, but he was calm, even chatty. Evans could hardly believe how friendly this guy was for someone who had just been jumped and handcuffed. Most guys would be screaming bloody murder. Beckwith made small talk.

Evans later said Beckwith set the tone for the evening. He behaved liked a gentleman, so Evans and Dennis DeLatte, the other officer in the car, treated him like one. Evans wanted to relax him, draw him out, get him to talk. Instead Evans ended up telling Beckwith about his relatives in Mississippi and how he liked to hunt up there. Beckwith invited him to come up sometime; he would show Evans some good squirrel hunting.

It went like that right through booking at central lockup. Beckwith said only one thing that night that could later be used against him, something the prosecution called a “spontaneous declaration.” He seemed to tell Evans and DeLatte that he didn’t hold a grudge over the arrest. “You have a job to do, and I have a job to do,” he said.

Beckwith later claimed he was misunderstood. All he meant was they were all workingmen.

When the men from the bomb squad got the black box in Beckwith’s car open, they found a very large bomb: six sticks of regular stump-blowing, construction-quality Hercules dynamite and one five-pound cartridge of Trojan seismograph dynamite, the kind oil companies use to find underground oil reservoirs. The police estimated that the bomb was big enough to blow up Botnick’s two-story house and take out both next-door neighbors for good measure. Who knows what would have gone up if the bomb had ruptured a gas line.