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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.