Authors: Lamar Waldron
three Marcello associates, just two weeks after this Atlanta incident, as
we’ll detail shortly. While Ray and the parolee had both served time at
Leavenworth, their stays were years apart, and there was no known con-
nection between the two. The same is true for the Mississippi bootlegger
at Leavenworth who originally mentioned the contract.26
As for the source of the $100,000 for the King contract, the conduit
was said to be the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the small, violent
Mississippi group led by Sam Bowers, who was also linked to the 1965
offer in North Carolina. However, Bowers was a small-time business-
man who didn’t have that kind of money. Wealthy members of the Citi-
zens’ Council would have been cautious about giving it to him, because
on October 20, 1967, Bowers was one of seven people convicted for the
murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and
Michael Schwerner. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jack Nelson noted
that it was “the first time a Mississippi jury had convicted members of
the Klan—and a white law enforcement officer as well—for crimes com-
mitted against civil rights workers.”27
Bowers was thus occupied during much of the fall of 1967, and likely
not an active participant in the contract on Dr. King. Bowers hated Jew-
ish people as much as blacks and, while free on bond, would continue
his violent behavior in late 1967 and 1968—he was caught in a car with
a submachine gun in December 1967. Jack Nelson documented that
Bowers’ attacks focused primarily on bombings of Jewish homes and
buildings, in conjunction with a small handful of trusted associates.28
Another prison report of a contract on Dr. King’s life may shed addi-
tional light on the offers circulating at Leavenworth and in St. Louis. This
FBI report concerned the Texas State Prison at Huntsville, and authors
Hancock and Wexler note that it mentioned “$100,000 and the White
Knights.” The offer said that “interested parties were to make contact
via cutouts, they were expected to ‘case’ King in Atlanta, and payment
would be made only ‘after’ King were killed. Remarks were also made
that would indicate that the bounty itself or the rumor of it was coming
out of North Carolina.” Hancock adds that $50,000 was also payable to
the person handling only surveillance for the hit, but anyone involved
had to have a certain level of criminal experience, at least at the level of
armed robbery—hence the logic of spreading word of the contract in
prisons. The FBI report also indicated that someone in law enforcement
would be a contact for the hit, which might explain how the mystery
man was able to find the Leavenworth parolee in Atlanta.29
The threads running through all the FBI reports of a contract on
King—the large amount of money, links to members of the Klan and
White Citizens’ Council and organized crime, as well as to North Caro-
lina and Atlanta—indicate a likelihood they were tied to the efforts of
Milteer and his three Atlanta partners. However, none were effective in
locating an appropriate hit man. While the White Knights’ Sam Bowers
was the focus of more legal pressure in October 1967, that same month
Milteer was being freed from what little scrutiny he had been under
from law enforcement since the articles about him had appeared in the
Miami press back in February 1967.
On October 9, 1967, the Intelligence Division of the US Secret Service
in Washington told the head of its Atlanta office that it had “reviewed”
the file on Joseph Milteer and saw “nothing to indicate that this subject
presents a danger to any person under our protective jurisdiction [and]
508
LEGACY OF SECRECY
that quarterly investigations should be discontinued at this time.” The
Atlanta office received a report about Milteer from their Valdosta office
in South Georgia on October 10, and two days later told the Intelligence
Division, “[We] heartily agree with you in this action,” and that they
would “discontinue [their] quarterly investigations” of Milteer. The FBI
had been kept abreast of the Secret Service activities related to Milteer,
and would have been told of the investigation’s termination.30
Though the decision was legally justified, it’s tragic that the Secret Ser-
vice abandoned their Milteer investigation because they felt he wasn’t
“a danger to any person under our protective jurisdiction,” without
making some type of referral to another agency. A serious investigation
of Milteer would have shown that he was still a danger to civil rights
leaders like Dr. King, even if he was no longer an active threat to Presi-
dent Johnson or Vice President Hubert Humphrey. While racial attitudes
in the Secret Service had likely progressed somewhat since Abraham
Bolden’s complaints in 1963 and 1964, problems persisted: In 2008, sixty
black Secret Service agents were supporting discrimination suits, and
the Associated Press reported a black “employee found a noose in one
of the Secret Service’s training centers,” resulting in the suspension of
a white agent.31
Even if the Secret Service felt Milteer was no longer a presidential
threat and was thus out of its jurisdiction, it could have recommended
that the FBI or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation continue to monitor
Milteer. However, the Atlanta FBI office’s attitude toward Milteer had
been unusually tolerant dating back to 1963, when FBI agent Don Adams
wasn’t given crucial information about Milteer, the Miami police tapes,
or the Tampa threat.
This raises the possibility that Milteer was aware that the Secret Ser-
vice had closed its case on him, either from a contact in law enforcement
or because agents stopped questioning his associates and neighbors. In
later Congressional hearings, retired Atlanta FBI agent Arthur Murtagh
testified about the racist attitudes of many agents and supervisors in the
Atlanta FBI office in 1967 and 1968. Murtagh was part of the “security
squad” in the Atlanta office, which handled “investigations of Black
extremist organizations” that for the FBI, included Dr. King and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The security squad
was also responsible for “investigations of the Ku Klux Klan” and Cuban
matters, including Cuban exiles. That meant the same FBI agents look-
ing for informants in the Klan were also operating against King and the
SCLC, creating an opportunity for racists who wanted to manipulate
the system.32
Murtagh said that many agents in the Atlanta office and on the secu-
rity squad were racists themselves, who saw King as the enemy. Another
former Atlanta security squad agent admitted in later testimony that in
1968, he saw Dr. King’s death as the “removal of a threat to our national
security.” This Atlanta agent admitted those feelings were based on
“his own personal prejudice” and not “on anything [he saw] as an FBI
agent.”33
Hoover encouraged such attitudes, and they were all too common
not just in the FBI but in other branches of law enforcement as well.
When coupled with the fact that the FBI assigned those responsible for
investigating the Klan to also run surveillance on King, it was a recipe
for disaster. There is no evidence that the Atlanta FBI (or Secret Ser-
vice) office was involved in King’s assassination, something Rep. Carl
Stokes and the House Select Committee on Assassinations looked at
very closely. But it is possible that Milteer or his partners on the White
Citizens’ Council were able to exploit the racist attitudes of some agents
and supervisors.
In 1967, law enforcement usually didn’t consider the White Citizens’
Councils to be a hate group like the Klan. While they weren’t regarded
as highly in Atlanta as they were in more conservative areas (where the
Citizens’ Councils evolved and persist to this day), they still provided
a forum in which types like Milteer could network with respectable
businessmen, professionals, and officials. FBI agents were barred from
Klan membership, but it’s unclear if there was any such policy about the
White Citizens’ Councils, since their views largely mirrored Hoover’s.
Another way Milteer could have learned that the Secret Service had
closed his case was through the Florida Police Intelligence Unit, since his
case had originated in Miami. Trafficante’s man Sgt. de la Llana headed
the statewide unit that shared information with other states and federal
authorities, he could easily have learned that Milteer’s case had been
closed. Both de la Llana and Milteer had been involved in the Tampa
attempt on JFK, so they could have been in communication about this
matter as well.34
The FBI agents in Atlanta were subject to the same fears about block-
busting and school integration that stoked contributions to Milteer’s
group, and those concerns were reaching a crescendo by October 1967.
The school year which began that fall was the first in which Atlanta’s
schools were fully integrated, triggering an increased wave of “white
flight” documented in Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse’s 2005 book
of the same name about Atlanta. However, the school integration
was based primarily on geographic location, meaning it didn’t affect
510
LEGACY OF SECRECY
Atlanta’s affluent Northside, still largely closed to blacks. Even the
governor’s mansion, occupied by segregationist Lester Maddox, was
moved from midtown (increasingly home to rooming houses and, soon,
to James Earl Ray) to the exclusive Northside Buckhead area. In contrast,
the middle-class areas surrounding the Lakewood General Motors plant
were hit especially hard by blockbusting, causing massive transition
and turmoil.35
While that upheaval probably increased contributions to Milteer’s
group, it also increased the pressure on him to have King killed, as he’d
been promising his most faithful supporters for several years. Some of
his supporters at the Lakewood auto plant were Klan members, and
Milteer would have been all too aware of the August 25, 1967, murder
of George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, by one
of his own disgruntled followers. Milteer certainly wanted to see King
killed, but even an attempt on King by a nonprofessional—an effort
that Milteer could take credit for with his contributors—would help to
ensure that Milteer didn’t meet the same fate as Rockwell.
Apparently, Milteer hadn’t been able to find a contract killer who
couldn’t be traced back to him by going through the prison grapevine,
or through Bowers’ White Knights, or by using Sutherland’s approach
to the lower levels of the St. Louis Mafia. The media coverage of Bowers’
trial in Mississippi made using Klan members even more risky, and Milt-
eer would have wanted to avoid recruiting anyone connected to groups
he belonged to, like the Citizens’ Council or Stoner’s NSRP. Milteer had
apparently tried to recruit someone with no ties to Atlanta or Georgia, by
looking to North Carolina, Kansas, Texas, and Missouri—but it hadn’t
worked. His lack of success may have led to an attempted recruitment
in Atlanta that had some similarities to the one in St. Louis.
In the fall of 1967, two men in Atlanta were offered $50,000 to kill Martin
Luther King, according to testimony that the House Select Committee on
Assassinations “concluded . . . was credible.” The two men, the Powell
brothers, were house painters who the Committee said had “a reputa-
tion for violence.” They hung out at an Atlanta bar, where a mutual
friend “told them he could put them in touch with a person who would
pay a large sum of money to anyone willing to kill Dr. King. Several days
later, at the same bar [the brothers] were approached by a white male
who introduced himself only as Ralph.” After explaining that he was
the man their friend had told them about, “Ralph displayed an open
briefcase full of money . . . said it contained $25,000 and promised that
if they took the job, they would receive $25,000 more when it had been
completed. The Powells hesitated to accept the offer” of $50,000 to kill
Martin Luther King.36
Seeing their reluctance to accept the contract, “Ralph closed his brief-
case and left the bar,” and one of the brothers said they “never saw or
heard from this person again.” The other brother initially cooperated
with Congressional investigators and passed a lie-detector test about
the incident. But when it came time to give testimony, he refused, even
when subpoenaed, saying “he feared for his life.” He was so afraid to
testify he “subsequently pleaded guilty to contempt of Congress for his
refusal,” rather than risk talking about the offer.37
The FBI hadn’t learned about the incident until 1976, and was “unable
to . . . discredit the story,” even after what it called “a full investigation.”
Two years later, the HSCA “conducted an extensive field investigation,”