American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [39]
The memo was based on sources located by a journalist named William Sartor. The FBI didn’t show much interest in going after his leads, but Sartor had uncovered information about a pre-assassination meeting between Ray and three of Marcello’s associates in New Orleans—after which Ray left town with $2,500 cash and a promise of $12,000 more “for doing one last big job in 2 to 3 months.”9 Turns out that journalist Sartor was in Texas in 1971, preparing to interview a nightclub owner linked to Marcello, when he was found murdered.10
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