Authors: Lamar Waldron
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would not be published until April 1969.)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
616
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-