American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (9 page)

That same Justice Department memo stated that one participant in the plotting was “Frank [C.] Liberto ... a Memphis racketeer and lieutenant of Carlos Marcello.” What's noteworthy about this is that Liberto's name came up in recent years with two other people tied to the King case. One was Lloyd Jowers, who owned Jim's Grill across the street from the Lorraine Motel. In 1993, facing a possible indictment by Ray's last attorney, William Pepper, Jowers went public with Sam Donaldson on ABC's
Prime Time Live
.

Jowers said he'd been asked to help in the King plot by a gambling associate of his, a Memphis produce dealer named Frank Liberto who had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant.
¹¹
Jowers claimed Liberto told him that there would be a decoy, apparently Ray, and that the police “wouldn't be there that night.” We know from other research that four tactical police units pulled back from the vicinity of King's motel on the morning of the assassination, making it much easier for an assassin to get away.

In a taped confession he later gave to King's son, Dexter, and ex-U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, Jowers elaborated that planning meetings for the assassination had taken place at his restaurant. The plotters included three Memphis cops he knew, and two men who he believed were federal agents. Shortly before the assassination, Jowers was promised a substantial sum if he'd receive a package and pass it along to someone else. When it arrived he opened the package, found a rifle inside, and stashed it in a back room until another man came to pick it up on the day of the murder. Jowers said he had been instructed to be standing outside his back door that night at 6 PM. That was when one of the same Memphis policemen handed him a still-smoking gun, which Jowers broke down into two pieces, wrapped in a tablecloth, and hid in his shop until it was picked up the next day.
¹²

This crucial bit of information was contradicted by another witness, who indicated Jowers was in deeper than that. This witness testified at the King family's civil trial that a deceased friend, James McCraw, more than once asserted that Jowers had given him the rifle, rolled up in an oil cloth, right after the shooting and told him “to get it out of here now.” Supposedly McCraw did, tossing the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.
¹³
Jowers was deemed, at 73, too ill to testify at the trial, so the transcript of the interview he'd done with Sam Donaldson was read to the jury.

Frank Liberto, the Mob-connected produce dealer named by Jowers, was also implicated by John McFerren, a store owner who said he came to Liberto's warehouse to pick up some produce about 45 minutes before King was shot. He overheard Liberto on the phone saying, “Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony.” A café owner friend of Liberto's testified at the 1999 civil trial that Liberto flatly told her he “had Martin Luther King killed.” The friend's son backed up her testimony: “[Liberto] said, ‘I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done,'” and that Ray “‘was a front man, a set-up man.'”
¹⁴
Liberto was dead by the time of the civil case.

At the same trial, quite a few witnesses also backed up Ray's story of a mysterious figure he knew as “Raul,” whom he'd first met in Montreal three months after he escaped from prison. Ray had long claimed that it was Raul who gave him funds to purchase the rifle and the Mustang and then set him up in Memphis. The House committee had concluded that Ray's story was “not worthy of belief, and may have been invented partly to cover for help received from his brothers John and Jerry.” But from a series of photographs shown him by attorney Pepper, Jowers picked out a passport photo of Raul as the guy who'd brought him the rifle to hang onto before the assassination. Glenda Grabow, who'd known Raul as a gunrunner, testified he'd once flown off the handle and told her that he'd killed Dr. King.
¹⁵

It so happens that the Army's 111th Military Intelligence (MI) Group was keeping King under round-the-clock surveillance during the garbage strike in Memphis that spring of 1968. One of the MI guys, Marrell McCollough, was undercover with the Memphis police—and, according to Jowers, was also involved in the planning sessions for the assassination. A repeat of the kind of thing we saw with Malcolm X. In a famous photograph, McCullough was also the man seen checking Dr. King for a pulse on the motel balcony. Attorney Pepper's investigation found that McCullough went on to work for the CIA in the 1970s.
¹⁶

In a speech given in 2003, Pepper said he'd come to believe that “a back-up operation” also involved a Special Forces unit known as Alpha 184.
¹⁷
Here's what he reported being told by an informant, a former Navy Intel guy, about a six-man sniper team: “King was never going to be allowed to leave Memphis. If the contract that was given didn't work these guys were going to do it. The story they told was that the six of them were briefed at 4:30 in the morning at Camp Shelby. They started out around 5 o'clock. They came to Memphis. They were briefed there. They took up their positions.

“At the briefing at 4:30 they were shown two photographs who were their targets. One was Martin King and the other was Andrew Young.... But they never got the order. Instead they heard a shot. And each thought the other one had fired too quickly. Then they had an order to disengage. It was only later that they learned that, as they call it, ‘some wacko civilian' had actually shot King and that their services were not required.”
¹⁸

Carlos Marcello was also said to be “involved in a joint venture with the 902nd Mililtary Intelligence Group,” splitting the profits after receiving stolen weapons and arranging to get them shipped into Latin America.

Now let's look at another strand in this spiderweb—the ultra-right. Soon after the assassination, a judge in Miami's Dade County, Seymour Gelber, wrote the U.S. Attorney General's office. Gelber said that an investigation ought to look at three men with a history of racial violence and a plot against Dr. King's life in 1964.
¹⁹
The FBI, within 48 hours, had gotten other leads that pointed to Sam Bowers, leader of the White Knights, and his associates in the Klan. FBI field offices were starting to check all this out, when Hoover ordered it be put on hold because they'd identified a fingerprint and were pursuing one fugitive (Ray).
²⁰

When Ray abandoned his car in an Atlanta housing project the morning after the assassination, he was overheard making a phone call to a partner of the notorious Georgia racist Joseph Milteer.
²¹
Before he died in a fire in 1973, Milteer's name never surfaced in connection with the King case. But Milteer was the likely fundraiser for Ray, as a conduit to the Marcello organization. Consider this curious fact: Ray's third attorney (after he'd already pled guilty) was a fellow named J.B. Stoner, who also happened to run the militant National States Rights Party. The same man who said, before Ray was apprehended, that “the white man who shot King ... should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor and a large annual pension for life.”
²²
Stoner and Milteer were cronies. When Stoner became Ray's lawyer, he casually tossed it out that Hoover and the FBI might be behind the assassination. It gets even stranger. One of Ray's brothers ended up working for Stoner for more than a decade. When Stoner ran for governor of Georgia in 1970, he served as his campaign manager—until Stoner got trounced by Jimmy Carter.
²³

There's one other weird aspect we need to consider. While temporarily in Los Angeles early in 1968, Ray got into practicing self-hypnosis. Besides seeing a “psychologist-hypnotist,” he visited “seven other psychiatrists, hypnotists, or scientologists.”
²⁴
One of these was “head of the International Society of Hypnosis,” who later said that Ray was “impressed with the degree of mind concentration which one can obtain.”
²⁵
This was a German-born fellow named Xavier von Koss, who recommended several books on hypnosis that Ray was carrying when he got arrested in London. Von Koss seems to have also been involved in intelligence work.
²⁶
According to one of Ray's brothers: “When Jimmy left Los Angeles he knew he was going to do it.”
²⁷
Meaning, be involved in the plot to assassinate Dr. King.

A recent book by Ray's brother, John Larry Ray, alleges that when Ray was in the army in the late 1940s, he did some moonlighting for the new CIA and the FBI—and was part of the Agency's early attempts to control human behavior that later became known as MK-ULTRA. Brother John recalls Ray telling him “that he thought the feds were messing with his mind.... My brother was a changed man when he returned from Germany [in 1948] . To be frank, he seemed drugged, even though I never saw him take anything. My dad and other family members commented that ‘he must be on goof balls.' Also, he seemed easily persuaded to do things he never would have done before.”
²⁸

In 1970, when Congressman Mendel Rivers tried to get Ray's entire army file, he received a response from Major General Kenneth Wickham that this would not be possible: “This is particularly true since there are medical aspects that cannot be disassociated from any discussion of Mr. Ray's military background.”
²⁹

Ray's brother also describes an encounter in Montreal with a CIA asset who had ties to the Klan, Jules Ron “Ricco” Kimble, an identities specialist who got Ray his alias as “Eric S. Galt.” Kimble said that “an older man came out from McGill University's Allen Memorial Institute to hypnotize” both Ray and him. Verification for this, as far as Kimble, came from Royal Canadian Mounted Police files. At that time, there wasn't any public knowledge about Dr. Ewen Cameron's mind-control experiments being conducted at McGill under the CIA's MK-ULTRA Sub-project 68.
³⁰

Early in 1968, Ray “began writing certain phrases over and over on paper. These are included in the FBI file on the assassination. [Robert Kennedy's assassin] Sirhan did the same thing. One of the phrases James wrote was, ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.'”
³¹

Was that somebody's idea of a bad joke? I never believed
The Manchurian Candidate
was more than fiction until I got into doing this book. But there are records that prove MK-ULTRA did exist, it's undeniable. Then when you start looking at these different assassinations and how the assassins acted and reacted, you start to wonder. During the course of filming the TV show on conspiracies, we brought in an innocent person who had volunteered and put him under hypnosis with an expert. We went through a whole scenario where the guy comes out the door, starts walking and talking with me about baseball, then gets a call on his cell phone. All he needed to hear was a particular word, and that would cause a subconscious reaction to where he'd start limping, although he'd deny he was doing it. In his mind, he's not limping because he's been
told
that he's not.

Then we put him back in the room, and the hypnotist asked us, “Do you want him to remember this or not?” We chose that he not remember, because we wanted to see what would happen. When he came out of the hypnotic state, he swore to us that he'd only been in the room for a couple of minutes, when it was really nearly an hour and a half. When we told him the various things he'd done, you could clearly see that he did not believe us. Then we told him to look at his watch. That's when he freaked out, realizing how much time had passed.

So I've witnessed hypnosis firsthand. I was told that pretty much anyone who's willing can be hypnotized, because it comes from within, and the hypnotist is just someone who leads you down the path. Some people accept it more than others. To get someone to the level of an assassin, it would require you to work with them for more than a year. The hypnotist also said, “Remember this, a military man is much more predisposed to be a Manchurian Candidate than a civilian, because when you get indoctrinated into the military, you are told there are times when killing may be necessary. And that's already settled in your mind, so you might not have such an adverse reaction under hypnosis.”

It's impossible to say whether the self-hypnosis that James Earl Ray was practicing, and what his brother is now claiming, actually fell under the CIA's MK-ULTRA program or something similar. But we shouldn't rule it out. Since the congressional committee's report already concluded that Ray probably had help, and the King family's court case saw a jury return a verdict of conspiracy that included
agencies of our government
, wouldn't you say that justice for Dr. King remains a long way from being served?

At the time Robert Kennedy was gunned down in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. on June 5, 1968, I viewed it more as a copycat political murder—this young Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, who didn't like Kennedy's policies toward Israel, much like five years earlier Oswald had been a disgruntled Communist. It was now a trend, a cycle, where if a Kennedy decided to run for president, some idiot would put an end to it. At that point, I still didn't believe the government would lie to me. This was before my doubting the of the Warren Commission, which didn't start until I got out of the military and heard Mark Lane speak. Later, the death of Robert Kennedy became the turning point where I felt either their father Joe had done something that was never going to be forgiven, or there certainly were forces out there ensuring another Kennedy would never occupy the White House. To say that my trust of the Establishment had deteriorated would be an understatement.

Robert Kennedy was only 42 when he was assassinated and, having just won the California primary, was on his way to the Democratic nomination and likely the presidency. He would have begun withdrawing our troops from Vietnam and saved thousands of American lives. He'd already been talking with his aides about reopening the investigation into who killed his brother. I think it's safe to say that, if he'd lived, we'd have a different kind of country than what we've become. Robert would have led a “compassionate” revolution—because he was a man not only of courage, but of compassion.

That night in the Ambassador Hotel, it seemed a pretty open-and-shut case that Sirhan was another “lone nut.” After all, he was wrestled to the ground after firing his .22-caliber revolver from a few feet in front of Kennedy. The police soon found a diary, in which Sirhan wrote over and over that “RFK must die.” We soon learned he'd been stalking the senator, which again raises the question in my mind as to how come nobody in authority picked up on Sirhan as a potential threat. The curious thing, even at his trial, was that Sirhan had no memory of committing the killing. He still doesn't.

Let's start by looking at the physical evidence. First of all, Sirhan's revolver held only eight rounds and he never had time to reload. But a reporter's recording has what audio expert Philip Van Praag has determined are
thirteen
shots in a little more than five seconds.
¹
Two of those are what forensic experts call “double shots,” meaning they happened so close together that there's no way they came from the same gun. In pictures taken in the pantry later that night, you can see some policemen looking up at what they later said was a bullet hole in a ceiling panel. The trouble is, that's
behind
where Sirhan was shooting from.
²
The L.A. County coroner, Thomas Noguchi, said almost right away that the fatal shot had come from less than an inch away from Kennedy's head, behind the right ear. That, of course, also rules out Sirhan.
³

You'd think some of this might have come up at Sirhan's trial. But his defense attorneys decided not to challenge any evidence, because their claim was that Sirhan had “diminished capacity” (a nice way of saying he was crazy) and they were looking to get him a life sentence instead of the death penalty. Again, once he pled guilty, there was no real trial with witnesses who might contradict the official story. After a judge approved a citizen's petition to reinvestigate the firearms evidence, in 1977 the L.A. district attorney's office wrote that “the apparent lack of reports, both written and photographic, either made ... and destroyed, or never in existence, raised serious doubts as to the substance and reliability of the ballistics evidence presented in the original Sirhan trial.”
⁴

So, if not Sirhan, then who killed RFK? Well, several witnesses saw a security guard who was standing behind Kennedy draw his gun, and one witness even said that he fired it. This was a fellow named Thane Eugene Cesar. He was a plumber by trade, who'd been hired part-time by Ace Security less than a week before the assassination, his assignment being to guard the pantry that night. One of Cesar's first statements to the police was that he'd been holding Kennedy's arm when “they” shot him. Not “he,” but “they.” He said when he saw Sirhan's gun, he reached for his own. But the LAPD never asked to see his gun, or even to ask him what kind it was.
⁵

Years later, he passed a polygraph overseen by author Dan Moldea, who called Cesar “an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of history.”
⁶
Well, maybe he was. Or maybe not. Acoustics expert Van Praag did tests on an H&R 922 pistol of the type that Cesar had on him, and concluded that an H&R 922 had been fired at the same time as Sirhan's .
⁷
Then, too, besides Sirhan and Cesar,
another
man with a gun was mentioned by several more witnesses. Conceivably, that person could have gotten in between Kennedy and the security guard to fire the fatal shot, as RFK was falling back from Sirhan.
⁸

The strongest evidence that Sirhan had accomplices are no less than fourteen witnesses who all talked about a girl in a polka-dot dress. A 20-year-old Youth for Kennedy volunteer immediately reported seeing such a girl, both to the press and the police. Earlier in the night, Sandra Serrano said, she'd observed a young woman dressed in a white dress with black or dark-blue polka dots, walking up a back stairway of the hotel. She was with two men, one well-dressed in a white shirt and gold sweater, and the other rather disheveled and short with black bushy hair, who was likely Sirhan.

Then, after the assassination, Serrano saw the same girl, running down a fire escape out of the hotel and shouting, “We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!” Later, an LAPD interrogator put heavy pressure on Serrano to recant her story, which she did at the time. But when Serrano was interviewed again 40 years later, she stuck to what she'd originally said. And she wasn't the only one who reported seeing something like this. Police Sergeant Paul Sharaga, who was in the hotel's back parking lot six minutes after the shooting, also heard a young couple run past yelling about having killed Kennedy.
⁹
He put out an APB. But Sharaga said, when he went to look for the three copies he made of his report two weeks later, they had vanished.
¹⁰

Sirhan himself said: “I met the girl and had coffee with her. She wanted heavy on the cream and sugar. After that I don't remember a thing until they pounced on me in that pantry.”
¹¹
Could it be that the girl said some keyword or phrase that triggered his amnesia?

According to the LAPD logs, the cops were looking for two suspects besides Sirhan within minutes of the assassination. Then they stopped searching within the hour, because “they only have one man and don't want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy. This could be somebody that was getting out of the way so they wouldn't get shot.”
¹²
Huh? That makes no sense at all for an honest investigator to reason.

The fact is, the LAPD had a long history of a “special relationship” with the CIA, from helping out with clandestine activities to training certain officers for double duty. When they formed Special Unit Senator (SUS) to look into the assassination, the two main cops through which all information flowed both had ties to the CIA. “In retrospect it seems odd that ... policemen who doubled as CIA agents occupied key positions in SUS, where they were able to seal off avenues that led in the direction of conspiracy.”
¹³
They also badgered any witness who didn't support the Sirhan-did-it-alone scenario.

Manuel Pena, a multilingual fellow who'd done special ops for the CIA, saw all the SUS reports and was the man responsible for approving all interviews. His partner, Sergeant Enrique “Hank” Hernandez, handled all the polygraph work, which he'd also done in Vietnam, South America, and Europe. Both Pena and Hernandez had been undercover CIA with the Agency for International Development (AID). Later, Hernandez started his own security firm and got rich handling big government contracts.
¹⁴

As soon as Sirhan's trial ended, the LAPD got busy destroying evidence, including the ceiling panels and door frames from the pantry that they'd taken pictures of showing extra bullet holes. Their rationale, when asked later, was these were “too large to fit into a card file”! Once again, we've got the authorities destroying evidence at a crime scene, just like with the King case. They also burned some 2,400 photographs, supposedly all duplicates, but we know some important ones are still missing—like the pictures taken by a 15-year-old kid named Scott Enyart. He was standing on a table so he could get a good view of Kennedy as he came in and took three rolls of Kodak film that the cops confiscated afterwards and said he could get back—if he came around in twenty years! Enyart had to fight in court to eventually be returned only 18 prints (no negatives), which were then promptly stolen out of the back seat of a car.
¹⁵

Also gone missing were “X-rays and test results on ceiling tiles and door frames, spectrographic test results [for bullets], the left sleeve of Senator Kennedy's coat and shirt, the test gun used as a substitute for Sirhan's gun during ballistics tests, and results from the 1968 test firing of Sirhan's gun.” Tapes of key interviews that raised the question of conspiracy disappeared, too.
¹⁶

When the LAPD declassified more files in 2008—forty years too late!—a fuller picture of Sirhan started to appear. He was raised a Christian, wanted to be a jockey, and spent a good bit of time betting on horses at the Santa Anita racetrack. He wanted to make a bundle of money, and seems to have had some gambling debts. His personality appeared to change after he fell off a horse in September 1966. That's when he began developing a curiosity about mysticism, such as the Rosicrucians, and got into learning self-hypnosis. Toward the end of 1967, Sirhan pretty much dropped out of sight for three months. His mother was worried because she didn't know where he'd gone. When he finally did come home, his interest in hypnosis escalated.
¹⁷
At the same time, somebody put Sirhan under clandestine surveillance for reasons that were never explained. Some 16-millimeter footage taken of Sirhan late in 1967—by whom or for what purpose we don't know—later showed up in a drawer of a private detective's office.

In mid-February 1968, Sirhan bought a .22-caliber Iver-Johnson, the pistol he would use the night of the assassination, for twenty-five bucks on the street. A gunshop owner remembered him coming in with several other people asking for “armor piercing ammunition,” for another weapon he doesn't seem to have owned.
¹⁸
So it sure looks like somebody was prompting Sirhan. He was also seen stalking Kennedy on two other occasions, both times with a young female companion (at a luncheon May 20 and a downtown L.A. rally four days after that). And he was seen doing target practice at tin cans with a young brunette and a tall guy who had sandy-colored hair.
¹⁹

What does it all add up to? A few weeks before RFK's assassination, the
Providence Evening Bulletin
ran a story headlined—“‘To Sleep': Perchance to Kill?” It told of a visiting professor of psychology at Rhode Island College, who had been a leading adviser to the military since the 1930s on the possible applications of hypnosis. Dr. George H. Estabrooks was quoted that “hypnotism is widely used by intelligence agencies of the United States and other countries.” He went on to say that the key to creating an effective spy—or assassin—revolved around splitting someone's personality: “It is like child's play now to develop a multiple personality through hypnosis.”

The professor added that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby “could very well have been performing through hypnosis. They would have been perfect cases but I doubt you will find anyone admitting this possibility, especially in the
Warren Report
.” Estabrooks concluded by referring to the novel and film,
The Manchurian Candidate
, as putting forth an “entirely possible” scenario.
²⁰