Legacy of Secrecy (109 page)

. . . he wanted Eddie to know he hadn’t talked, wasn’t going to talk.” As

another of Ray’s brothers later stated, “If [Ray] did kill King he did it

for a lot of money—he never did anything if it wasn’t for money—and

those who paid him wouldn’t want him sitting in a courtroom telling

everything he knows.”23

Ray said that he met with someone in New Orleans to talk about

“gunrunning into Mexico, and . . . Cuba.” The HSCA also investigated

a rumor that Ray met with three of Carlos Marcello’s associates in New

Orleans. (William Sartor uncovered information about the meeting

after the earlier cited Justice Department report had been completed.)

The HSCA, apparently lacking that report and its references to Sartor’s

sources who were close to Marcello and the Mafia, said it had “no infor-

mation about how he discovered that such a meeting occurred.”24

According to the HSCA, Sartor’s unpublished manuscript named

three people who allegedly met with Ray: “Sam DiPianzza, Sol La

Charta, and Lucas Dilles were also at the meeting. DiPianzza and La

Charta were described by Sartor as involved in organized crime, as well

as avid racists. Dilles, also a racist, was allegedly connected with the late

Leander Perez, Louisiana political boss and virulent segregationist.”25

Sartor had apparently only been told the names of the men who met

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

with Ray, and knew them only phonetically, but “further investigation

by the [HSCA] revealed that the correct spelling for names of the persons

alluded to by Sartor was Salvadore ‘Sam’ DiPianzza [and] Salvadore

La Charda,” and a New Orleans physician. “Sartor believed both DiPi-

anzza and La Charda had direct ties to Marcello”; the HSCA was able to

confirm that for DiPianzza. The HSCA called DiPianzza a “gambler and

bookmaker with reputed connections to Marcello and other underworld

figures . . . 3 weeks before the alleged meeting, DiPianzza was sentenced

to 10 years in prison on a gambling conviction [but] was free on bond

at the time of the alleged meeting.” Also, “DiPianzza [was] unable to

account for [his] whereabouts” at the time of the alleged meeting with

James Earl Ray. As for Salvadore La Charda, Congressional investigators

discovered he had worked for the “St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office

[and] had no criminal record,” but had “committed suicide in June

1968,” the same month James Earl Ray was arrested for assassinating

Dr. King. 26

Because of a mistaken middle initial, the HSCA misidentified the

physician who was apparently involved in the meeting. When two later

authors quoted and cited that part of the HSCA report, the physician

sued them in a New Orleans court in 1989. A federal judge dismissed his

lawsuits in 1990, but the US Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated them in

1991, and the physician won a $2 million judgment from a New Orleans

jury in February 1995. According to an interview with the physician’s

attorney, the publishers of both books later settled the suits for an undis-

closed amount.27 The doctor at the meeting was a different physician,

who had the same first and last name but a different middle initial.

This other physician was related by marriage to Carlos Marcello’s sister,

Rose.28

Sartor had reported that Ray’s meeting took place at either Marcel-

lo’s Town and Country Motel or the Provincial Motel in New Orleans.

From December 17 to 19, 1967, the HSCA found that Ray had stayed at

the Provincial, described by John H. Davis as “a mob hangout” at the

time. Records for the Town and Country “were no longer available” to

Congressional investigators. Finally, Ray admitted “to author William

Bradford Huie that he left New Orleans with $2,500 in cash and the

promise of $12,000 more for doing one last big job in 2 to 3 months.” Dr.

King was killed three and a half months later.29

Ray stayed in New Orleans from December 15 to December 22, 1967,

but the HSCA says Ray never “described his activities during [the last]

two days” of his visit. Marcello, Stein, and DiPianzza all denied to the

HSCA that any meeting with Ray took place. But we believe that the

weight of the evidence, including material not available to the HSCA,

shows that Ray became involved in the contract to kill Martin Luther

King at that time.30 Ray could have approached Marcello’s people about

the King contract after hearing about it in prison, or Marcello’s lieuten-

ants could have approached Ray after Milteer and Marcello had struck

a deal—or it could have been a combination of the two. The bottom line

is that when Ray left New Orleans, he was part of the plot.

Chapter Forty-five

After his cross-country trip to New Orleans and back, James Earl Ray

returned to Los Angeles. He would remain there for the next three

months, except for taking a brief New Year’s Day trip to Las Vegas. It

seems odd Ray would want to miss the Vegas New Year’s Eve celebra-

tions, especially given his recent free-spending ways, but on January 1,

1968, Ray probably had other business in the Mafia-dominated city.

During his early 1968 stay in Los Angeles, Ray became even more

obsessed with self-hypnosis, and, following several sessions with his

first therapist, he visited a new “psychologist-hypnotist” on January 4,

1968. Ray told William Bradford Huie that while he was in Los Angeles,

he visited “seven other psychiatrists, hypnotists, or scientologists.” At

the time, self-hypnosis was in vogue as a way for people to lose weight,

stop smoking, or accomplish other tasks for which they lacked the neces-

sary willpower. Though Ray was an armed robber, he had never killed

or even shot anyone, so it’s possible he wanted help in learning how to

focus his mind on his lethal goal.1

Ray continued his unusual spending spree in other ways, attending

frequent dancing lessons and enrolling in bartending school on Janu-

ary 19, 1968, apparently in anticipation of running a bar in some exotic

locale with his windfall from killing Dr. King. As for the money he was

spending in Los Angeles, a 1977 Justice Department Task Force states

that “the sources for Ray’s funds still remain a mystery today.”2

Until the time was right to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph

Milteer and Carlos Marcello needed ways to keep an eye on James Earl

Ray in Los Angeles. They had to use people they could trust; they appar-

ently chose two Los Angeles men who were later linked to Dr. King’s

murder. One of the men, Reverend Wesley Swift, was a longtime associ-

ate of Milteer, while the other man was tied to Ray by physical evidence

and had worked with Marcello for years: Johnny Rosselli.

According to the FBI, Milteer’s associate “Wesley Swift [was] the

single most significant figure in the early years of the Christian Identity

movement,” which later evolved into today’s Aryan Nations. Swift was

also a fanatical racist who considered black people subhuman. Veteran

journalist Peter Noyes wrote that Swift was “one of the most notorious

right-wing extremists in California,” created paramilitary groups, and

“was also identified by the California Attorney General as a Ku Klux

Klan organizer [and] a former KKK rifle team instructor.” Swift even

had a rifle range in his backyard.3

Joseph Milteer’s ties to Swift dated back to at least 1963: Four days

after JFK was assassinated, informant William Somersett gave a taped

interview to Miami police about his conversations with Milteer. Somer-

sett told police that after Milteer indicated that the JFK “conspiracy origi-

nated in New Orleans,” Milteer “mentioned Dr. Swift very often [and

said] what a great man he was.” An FBI report confirms that Milteer was

working closely with Swift at the time, and that the Bureau had received

information on December 31, 1963, that “Milteer advised that he had

been to the West Coast, where he was in contact with Dr. Wesley Swift

[in] Los Angeles. Milteer stated that the meeting with Swift was very

profitable,” and that they were making more plans for the future.4

In March 1968, a young man named Thomas Tarrants, arrested three

months earlier with Klan leader Sam Bowers for having “a machine gun

. . . in a stolen car,” jumped bail in Mississippi. According to Pulitzer

Prize–winning
Los Angeles Times
correspondent Jack Nelson, Tarrants

then “set out on a trip for the West, visiting the anti-Semitic Dr. Wesley

Swift. . . . Tarrants would later testify [that in March 1968] he bought a

rifle from Swift with plans to use it to shoot Martin Luther King. [Tar-

rants stated,] ‘That was my ambition, to shoot Dr. King.’”5

According to the
Jackson Clarion-Ledger
, “at the time Tarrants met

Swift . . . James Earl Ray was living in Los Angeles—about an hour

away.” Tarrants would apparently leave California around the same

time as Ray, as we’ll detail in Chapter 47. On March 23, 1968, Tarrants

would reportedly be in Alabama, less than sixty miles away from Dr.

King, though Ray would be much closer. After Tarrants spotted FBI

agents at his house several days before Dr. King’s murder, Jack Nelson

writes that Tarrants fled to “a safe house located in the mountains near

Franklin, North Carolina, staying with friends who were followers of

Swift.” Franklin is nine miles from Otto, North Carolina, where Milteer

and his three Atlanta partners had been buying up mountain land with

the money they collected at the Atlanta auto plant.6

Though Nelson wrote that “upon hearing the news [of King’s mur-

der] Tarrants danced for joy,” Tarrants told the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger

in 2007 that he “had nothing to do with King’s assassination” and was

546

LEGACY OF SECRECY

in Franklin, North Carolina, at the time. Tarrants also told the news-

paper that while he didn’t know of any plot to kill King involving Bow-

ers’ Klan associates, “I’m not saying they didn’t,” just that “I wouldn’t

have been told about it.” On June 29, 1968, police shot Tarrants after he

attempted to bomb the home of a Jewish leader in Meridian, Mississippi.

His accomplice, attractive schoolteacher and avowed white supremacist

Kathy Ainsworth, was killed. Tarrants was sent to prison, where he con-

verted to mainstream Christianity, and was released shortly before the

House Select Committee on Assassinations interviewed him. By then,

Tarrants had renounced violence; he later became a prominent religious

author, speaker, and leader.7 We believe Tarrants’ assertions that he was

not involved in King’s murder in Memphis, and that he didn’t meet Ray.

However, the cross-country proximity of Tarrants and Ray to Dr. King

yields the possibility that Tarrants was being unknowingly manipulated

or monitored by Milteer associates like Swift, perhaps in case anything

happened to Ray before he could kill Dr. King.

Because Wesley Swift was willing to sell a rifle to kill Dr. King in early

1968, it’s quite conceivable Swift would have aided his friend Milteer

in the King assassination plot. This assistance could have involved his

keeping track of James Earl Ray in Los Angeles, where Swift’s church

was located, or giving Ray a secure place to practice shooting, since no

one has been able to document Ray’s taking target practice in the years

prior to King’s murder. Swift died in 1971, though white supremacists

and the Aryan Nations continue to lionize him.8

The other person tied to Milteer who could have helped with surveil-

lance on James Earl Ray in Los Angeles was Johnny Rosselli. Both Milt-

eer and Rosselli had been involved in JFK’s assassination with Carlos

Marcello, and each had met with Guy Banister in New Orleans in the

summer of 1963. James Earl Ray definitely had some connection to Ros-

selli, based on a hand-marked, detailed street map of Los Angeles that

the FBI found in Ray’s Atlanta room shortly after Dr. King’s murder. The

map, with its few markings, has long been known to authorities and was

available to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.9

Compared with Marcello and Trafficante, the HSCA devoted rela-

tively little time to Rosselli in its investigation of JFK’s assassination,

even though Rosselli’s own murder had helped to launch the HSCA’s

investigation. Johnny Rosselli’s name didn’t surface at all in the HSCA’s

King investigation, and one reason for their lack of focus on Rosselli

was that the CIA and FBI withheld important information about him

from both the HSCA and the Miami police. The withheld information

included AMWORLD exile leader Manuel Artime’s work on Rosselli’s

CIA-Mafia plots in 1963, and FBI Miami surveillance reports on Rosselli

from the fall of 1963, when Rosselli allegedly met twice with Jack Ruby.

Further complicating matters was that Rosselli’s slaying, tied to Traf-

ficante, was an open murder case during the HSCA hearings. The HSCA

also had not heard about Rosselli’s confession to JFK’s assassination,