Killing King. Larry Hancock
of the White Knights with fellow religious radicals across the nation, from the home of Christian Identity in Los Angeles through a social network of its followers in the deep South. That racist network enabled the conspiracy in several ways, and ultimately raised and helped transport the money that was needed to draw career criminals into the plot against King. To fully comprehend the King conspiracy, it is necessary to understand the motives, characters, and abilities of the people within that network. That particularly applies to the Christian Identity leaders who used the White Knights for their own covert purpose, one unknown to many within the White Knights and fully understood and appreciated only by a handful within its inner circle.
Congress came close to identifying King’s killers in the late 1970s when it formed the House Select Committee on Assassinations (the HSCA) to uncover and reassess new leads. In 1968 the FBI had asserted that James Earl Ray had acted entirely on his own; the HSCA concluded that the “official version” was insufficient and that Ray likely worked with conspirators. They even investigated several of the key players discussed in this book. But they never fully resolved the crime, in part because they never considered the lead that would have pointed them to the middlemen who recruited the killers, or to the religious fanatics who put the plan in motion. The conspiracy could have been unraveled in 1968. As we will demonstrate, it should have been prevented in 1967.
1
the warning
June 2, 1967, might have gone down in history as a day that changed history. Donald Nissen, only recently released from Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, sat across from Dallas FBI agents in a Sherman, Texas, jail, arrested for cashing a bad check. But the agents were not there to deal with that minor charge, one that eventually was dismissed. Nissen had written to federal law enforcement, insisting he needed to deliver a warning about a threat to a national political figure.
Nissen shared his story with the agents. In the spring of 1967, a few weeks before Nissen’s release from Leavenworth, a fellow inmate, Leroy McManaman, approached him about a contract for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Though they were not friends, the two became acquainted while working alongside each other in Leavenworth’s famous shoe factory. Over the course of several months, they exchanged “war stories” about their criminal histories; Nissen shared his stories of home robberies and petty theft; McManaman’s résumé included everything from high-stakes bootlegging to the interstate transportation of stolen cars.1
Nissen’s intellect likely impressed McManaman. Nissen earned favor with fellow prisoners as a “jailhouse attorney” who could help with legal appeals. But two additional facts made the inmate even more attractive to McManaman as a potential co-conspirator: Nissen’s sentence was almost over, and the soon-to-be-released inmate had already planned to work in Atlanta, Georgia, hometown of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
MacManaman promised Nissen a share of a $100,000 bounty offer if he helped McManaman with King’s murder. As the agents recorded in their 1967 report, McManaman outlined two available roles: Nissen could conduct surveillance on King and report his movements to the actual killers, or he could be part of the killing itself. McManaman also asked Nissen to ask his cellmate, John May, a master machinist, whether May could construct a special gun for King’s shooting. Additionally, Nissen told the FBI that if he said yes to McManaman, a series of go-betweens would link Nissen into the conspiracy, allowing him to avoid the suspicion of law enforcement. The go-betweens included a female real estate agent in Jackson, Mississippi; someone named “Floyd” whose last name Nissen could not recall for the FBI; and an individual with connections to the U.S. Marshals office. McManaman also told Nissen the money for the assassination was coming through the most violent racist organization in America, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.2
Such threats against Dr. King were not unknown to the FBI. Files from FBI field offices around the country contained reports of bounty offers on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. spanning more than a decade. Such occurrences were so common, in fact, that the FBI accidentally stumbled upon another such offer in their first investigation of Nissen’s claims. When they interviewed Nissen’s cellmate, the machinist John May, he confirmed that Nissen had told him about McManaman’s scheme. It had not made any real impression at the time because he had heard of similar offers a few years before, at a bar in North Carolina.3 In other words, May thought discussions of bounties on King were little more than jailhouse gossip.
That is how the FBI treated Nissen’s warning, as simply another of the bounty reports. To be fair, many of the reports lacked specifics that could be corroborated. FBI reports of King bounties often took the form of “he-said/he-said” claims, in which a known racist would be mentioned as offering a contract on King’s life. The prominent racist would, as expected, deny said accusation, and federal agents would be left without any basis for further investigation.4
However, matters were much different with bounties circulating within federal prisons. The FBI simply did not have the kind of free access to prisoners that they had to civilians. Any prisoner who remained behind bars risked serious and violent payback for talking to law enforcement. There are no pre-assassination records released to date in which an inmate warned the FBI of a King assassination plot as it was forming: none except Nissen’s.
But information developed by the FBI, albeit after the assassination, shows that prison bounty offers were circulating and were deadly serious—having filtered into multiple prisons, with dollar offers that were substantial, fronted by socially prominent racists. Notably, the son of a prison guard in Georgia (confirmed, later, by the guard’s daughter) told the FBI that his father became aware of meetings between three unidentified Atlanta business leaders and prisoners in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary; in 1967 the businessmen offered large sums of money to any prisoner willing to murder King. The father attempted to provide this information to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation but was rebuffed.5 By 1968, the FBI asserted: “We have had several instances where persons incarcerated at various times advised that King had a bounty of $100,000 placed on his head.”6
As will become much clearer in later chapters, the bounty offers against King show a pattern, one that will become important in understanding what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Wealthy segregationists and white supremacists in the Southeast were becoming increasingly eager to kill King, increasing their dollar offers, from less than $2,000 in 1958 to $100,000 by 1968. Just as important was a change in their tactics, with radical groups turning from plots involving their own members or those of associated groups to those involving professional criminals.
One group of racists had explored contracts with criminals as early as 1964: the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, the group Leroy McManaman told Nissen was offering the 1967 bounty. That year the White Knights had offered a contract on King to an increasingly active criminal network—one growing both in its numbers and in its willingness to use brazen, wanton violence—now referred to as the Dixie Mafia.7 Called “rednecks on steroids,” these men (and women) were fundamentally different from their Sicilian counterparts in La Cosa Nostra.
For one thing, they often lacked a formal hierarchy with one godfather calling the shots; rather, the Dixie Mafia comprised several independent and loosely affiliated gangs of more-or-less co-equal members who worked out of two major territories in the Great Plains and in the Southeast. Modern-day desperadoes, members of what were first called the Traveling Criminals or Crossroaders, cut their teeth robbing homes and banks, heisting stolen cars across state lines, running illegal gambling operations, hatching extortion and bribery scams, and running drugs and guns in their theaters of operation. The core of a Dixie Mafia gang might include a bootlegger, a safe cracker, a getaway driver, a strong-arm man (or several), among others, and they would frequently augment their group with additional hoodlums outside of the core group if such expertise or additional manpower was needed.8
They were also more avaricious and less scrupulous than the Sicilian Mafia. The Italian mob famously shied away from killing government officials and members of law enforcement. But almost nothing stood between a Dixie Mafia gang and money. In one of the most brazen examples, gangster Donald Sparks, whose base of operations was in eastern Oklahoma, and