Jesse Jackson

Cover Story

A deep dive into the 1978 House Committee on Assassinations’ conspiracy theory on the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1978, Russell G. Byers was fingered as a suspect in a St. Louis Art Museum heist before becoming a witness before the House Select Committee on Assassination’s probe into the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King.

BY C.D. STELZER
(first published in the Riverfront Times April 8, 1992)

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded there was a St. Louis-based conspiracy to murder the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Evidence gathered by the HSCA has been sealed until 2027. James Earl Ray, the convicted murderer of King, claims the congressional investigation itself was a cover-up.

Ray pleaded guilty to the crime in 1969, but immediately recanted. There has never been a trial. He is now a prisoner at River Bend Penitentiary in Nashville, Tenn. In the preface to Ray’s book, “Who Killed Martin Luther King,” published in 1992, the Rev. Jesse Jackson demands a special prosecutor be named and the case reopened.

The following story centers on the HSCA’s St. Louis-based conspiracy theory and is comprised of information gleaned from Ray’s book, congressional testimony and newspaper accounts.

At 7:55 a.m. Nov. 8, 1979, produce man John Paul Spica said goodbye to his girlfriend Dina Bachelier for the last time. He walked out of the two family flat at 1115 Claytonia Terrace in Richmond Heights and stepped into his 1977 black Cadillac. When Spica touched the break pedal, he detonated five to eight sticks of dynamite. The explosion blew both of Spica’s legs off. The driver’s door of the vehicle landed 30 yards away.

Moments later, Wellston police officer Nick Sturghill, saw a bearded white male in a yellow pickup truck speeding away. Spica, who had a speech impediment, mumbled a few unintelligible words to Sturghill before he died.

Spica’s violent death a year after his closed-door testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) has long been attributed to a war between competing organized crime elements. for the control of a St. But Spica served time in Missouri Penitentiary with James Earl Ray, and was also the brother-in-law of Russell G. Byers, the committee’s star witness, who testified that there was a St. Louis-based conspiracy to kill the civil rights leader. The HSCA final report concluded that Byers’ allegations were credible.

The HSCA findings suggest that Ray, the convicted assassin, did not act alone, but its findings raise more questions than answers. The doubt begin with the HSCA’s chief witness and Spica’s brother-in law. That’s because in 1978 Byers was the suspected mastermind of a St. Louis Art Museum burglary. He was arrested but never charged with the crime.

Sometime after his arrest, the FBI in St. Louis provided HSCA investigators with Byers’ name after a misfiled 1974 report surfaced, which stated that, according to a confidential informant, Byers had boasted of receiving an offer to kill King.

In 1978, Byers told the HSCA that the offer came from two prominent deceased St. Louisans: former stockbroker John R. Kauffmann and patent lawyer John H. Sutherland, who founded “whites rights” groups locally.

Spica, Byers’ brother-in-law, was a convicted murder contractor himself. Spica had served 10 years of a life sentence for negotiating the 1962 killing of John T. Myszak, a North St. Louis County realtor. Upon parole, Spica opened the Corner Produce, a vegetable stand at Shaw and Vandevanter, which may have been an organized crime front. Spica was known to have ties to the late Anthony Giordano, leader of the St. Louis mafia.

Police believe Spica’s slaying, and subsequent car bombings during the early 80s, began as a power struggle within then-mob-dominated Laborers’ Union Local 42. In a 1987 federal trial here, Raymond H. Flynn, the local’s business manager, was implicated in Spica’s bombing and found guilty of multiple racketeering and conspiracy charges.

But Spica had other interesting associations besides his brother-in law and the mafia: While in a Missouri prison, Spica shared the same cell block with James Earl Ray.

In 1978, after being subpoenaed and granted immunity by the HSCA, Byers publicly testified that in late 1966 or early 1967 he was approached by Kauffmann, a retired stockbroker and former aircraft company owner active in St. Louis County Democratic politics. Byers had been a friend of the elder Kauffmann’s late brother Gil, an assistant St. Louis County coroner. According to Byers’ account, Kauffmann introduced him to a neighbor, John H. Sutherland, an avowed racist who made the $50,000 contract offer to kill King.

At this time, Kauffmann lived in Jefferson County and operated the Bluff Acres Motel on Highway 67 in Barnhart. Byers claimed the motel was actually a front for illegal activities and told the committee he used the premises for his stolen car operations. When asked by the committee whether he had informed Spica of the contract offer to kill King, Byers said he had not, but said that his brother-in-law, who was in state prison at the time, may have learned of the offer through other sources. Also in the same prison at the same time, was James Earl Ray, who was serving a sentence for the robbery of a Kroger’s supermarket on Ohio Avenue in South St. Louis. Both he and Spica, for a brief period, worked in the prison hospital together. Newspaper accounts cite rumors that Spica and Ray were dealing drugs inside.

Interestingly, the prison doctor, with the keys to the medicine chest, was Hugh W. Maxey — an old friend of Kauffmann’s. One shady business Kauffmann operated out of his motel was Fixaco, Inc., a pharmaceutical company. Seven people connected with Fixaco, including Kauffmann, were arrested on April 4, 1967 for conspiracy to illegally sell 725,000 amphetamines pills. Among those charged were two New Yorkers: Bernard Chubet, a former stockbroker and Anthony K. Chang, a Chinese Nationalist (Taiwanese) exchange student. Also arrested was Sgt. Henry Geerdes, a Jefferson County deputy. Former Jefferson County Sheriff Walter “Buck” Buerger claimed his deputy was acting as an undercover agent when arrested by the U.S. Bureau of Drug Abuse Control. However, the HSCA testimony of one of Byers’ former lawyers, the late Murray Randall, indicates the Jefferson County sheriff — not a deputy — purchased drugs from Kauffmann.

Within weeks of Kauffmann’s speed bust, Ray, with another inmate’s help, smuggled himself out of prison in a bread box. Inexplicably, charges against one of his earlier failed escape efforts were dropped not long before the breakout, allowing Ray back into the main prison population.

Fred Wilkinson, the Missouri director of corrections at the time, was a former federal prison official with ties to the CIA. In 1962, Wilkinson helped exchange a Russian spy for Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union.

Ray wasn’t the only one taking leave of the prison in those days. Maxey, the prison physician, released at least one inmate to work at Kauffmann’s motel as part of a “rehabilitation program.” And in a 1978 interview, Kauffmann’s widow said that in 1966, Spica visited the motel with Byers, while Spica was serving his life sentence. According to prison records, Spica received his first official prison furlough in 1972.

The other St. Louis businessman implicated by Byers, in the alleged assassination plot, was the late John H. Sutherland, a neighbor of Kauffmann’s and a patent attorney who had offices in the Shell Building on Locust Street where The Riverfront Times is now located. The firm of Sutherland Polster and Taylor represented clients such as Monsanto. When he died in 1970, Sutherland left a portfolio of mainly oil and chemical stocks worth more than $300,000, including investments in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

In 1978, another St. Louisan was linked to a local firm — Hydro-Air Engineering, Inc. — which was being investigated for illegal trade with the same white-supremacist nation. The allegations came soon after federal Judge William Webster was confirmed as FBI chief. While the African business may be unrelated, Webster had a closer tie to the case, which is harder to dismiss.

Richard O’Hara, an art restorer, was the FBI informant who purportedly reported Byers’ assassination claims in 1974 to the FBI. O’Hara had been arrested in 1972 for his knowledge of a Maryland Plaza jewel robbery. Two suspects in that case were murdered, another was acquitted here in a federal trial racked with improprieties. Judge Webster presided over the questionable judicial proceedings.

Webster and Sutherland also both belonged to the then-all-white Veiled Prophet society. Sutherland’s membership in the organization was posthumously investigated the HSCA the same year Webster’s VP connection was questioned during his Senate confirmation hearings. The reason the HSCA showed interest in the VP was because of Byers’ testimony that Sutherland represented a “secret Southern society,” with a lot of money. The wealthy Veiled Prophet organization was founded in the post Civil War era by Southern sympathizers.

However, the HSCA gave more credence to the theory that one of three overtly racist political groups may have been involved in the conspiracy. The HSCA theorized that word may have been passed to Ray through his family. In 1968, Ray’s brother, John, operated the Grapevine tavern at 1982 Arsenal Street adjacent to Benton Park. The saloon was the gathering place for American Party workers who had a campaign office nearby. The third-party movement was created to support the George Wallace’s presidential bid. Sutherland was a Wallace supporter. Another possibility mentioned by the HSCA was the St. Louis Metropolitan Area Citizens Council, a “whites’ rights” group. Sutherland had been the group’s first president. But the outfit the HSCA took most seriously was the Nashville-based Southern States Industrial Council to which Sutherland belonged. A position paper published by the council quotes FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s belief that the “Negro movement” was being subverted by communists.

Case Not Closed

James Earl Ray’s attorney points his finger at the FBI

Mark Lane and his client James Earl Ray appearing before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. Lane died in 2016.

first published in The Riverfront Times (St. Louis), April 2, 1997

Mark Lane, former attorney for James Earl Ray, has spent much of his career questioning the official version of events concerning the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He is the author of “Rush to Judgment,”the seminal critique of the Warren Commission., published in 1966. In 1977, he co-wrote, with Dick Gregory ,”Code Name Zorro: The Murder of Martin Luther King Jr.” A revised edition of the latter book was reissued in 1993 under the title ,”Murder in Memphis.”

As founder of the Citizens Commission on Inquiry in the mid 1970s, Lane lobbied Congress to form the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) . He later, however, became one of the harshest critics of the HSCA’ s findings. Now 70 years old, Lane maintains a private law practice in Washington, D.C. He spoke to The Riverfront Times by telephone about the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from his office in the nation’s capital.

RFT: Why do you believe the political establishment is so intent upon covering up the evidence in the Martin Luther King murder case?

Lane: Because I think all the evidence points to the FBI. All the black leaders in America have been saying that from the very beginning. Everybody — Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Dick Gregory. …

If that is true, why did the FBI want King assassinated?

People can say that the removal of one person doesn’t change history, but the civil rights movement ended with his death. We had riots in cities all around the country, and have never gotten back on track in terms on any serious leadership in that movement. Killing King was very effective in that regard.

We know Hoover hated him. … He hated the idea that King was given the Nobel Prize. Hoover thought he should have gotten one. That was nuts.

We also know Hoover wanted King dead. He sent a tape (recording) to King with the suggestion that he `do the appropriate thing.’ Everybody agreed that what Hoover was saying was, `kill yourself.’ You don’t tell someone to kill himself unless you want him dead. If you have that kind of power, and you want him dead, you might (also) be able to put some wheels in motion.

You represented James Earl before the HSCA in 1978, correct?

I didn’t represent him at the time of the non-trial (in 1969). He was (then) represented by (Arthur) Hanes and then Percy Foreman. But after he was convicted and sentenced to 99 years he then asked me to represent him.
The civil rights movement and black activists wanted a trial, too, because they never believed the story that Ray did it. They believed that it was much more involved. So when Ray heard that I was writing about the assassination, and looking into it, he asked me to represent him. …

I myself was part of the civil rights movement. In fact, as a member of the (New York) state legislature, I was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Jackson, Miss in 1961. I’m the only public official, I think, ever arrested as a Freedom Rider.

Of course, we couldn’t get a trial, although he was entitled to one by Tennessee law. The law says that if you make an application for a new trial and it’s pending and the judge dies or becomes permanently insane, you’re entitled to a trial. That’s what happened in this case. Judge (Preston W.) Battle died, after he got the application from James Earl Ray asking for a trial.

When was that?

Just a couple of days after the plea (in 1969). James wrote a letter (recanting his admission of guilt) at that time.
James was in that cell in Memphis 24-hours a day with lights on him, the room bugged completely the entire time. He was under surveillance for eight months. Finally, when he entered the plea, they put out the lights. He had one night’s sleep, and (then) wrote a letter to Judge Battle saying, `I was coerced into pleading guilty, I’m innocent and I want a trial.’

Battle went away on vacation, came back and dropped dead. That’s when the Tennessee annotated code should have came into play. He was entitled to a trial, but the state court said no in this case. It wasn’t possible because the law has nothing to do with justice when there are big political considerations. We could never get a trial.
Now Ray has asked me again to get information from the (government) under the Freedom of Information Act. His current lawyer Bill Pepper refused to because the King family doesn’t want him to do it.

Why was the HSCA trying to discredit you in 1978?

Because I was representing Ray. It’s kind of ironic since I wrote the legislation that set up the House Committee on Assassinations. I moved to Washington to do that. I got more than a hundred members of Congress to sign the petition to form that committee. I worked closely with Andy Young, then the chairman of the black caucus and his successor Yvonne Burke.

But the pressure was on them. I’ll tell you an example.
Dick Gregory is very well respected by the black leadership in this country. He called me after the Select Committee had been set up, and asked to meet with (U.S. Rep.) Walter Fauntroy at my house. Fauntroy was the delegate from Washington, D.C., and then the chairman of the subcommittee on the King assassination. He had worked with King.

I called Walter and said, `Greg wants to see you tonight at 8, can you come here?’ So they were here in the very same room from which I am in now talking to you. It’s my library on the second floor right across the street from the Supreme Court.

Fauntroy is a minister. … They’re sitting on the coach next to each other and Gregory says, `Let’s pray Walter.’ They both got down on their knees. I was sitting behind my desk watching this moment in history.
Gregory says: `This is the most important man in America — not the most important black man. Give him the courage, the ability to find out who killed Dr. King, and tell the truth to the American people.’ They both said amen and sat back down on the coach.

Walter, the chairman of the investigating committee, looks at Gregory, and says, `We know who did it.’

Gregory says, `Well, good.’

(Fauntroy says,) `We’ve discovered that already.’

Gregory replies, `Well, good. … All you have to do is tell everyone.’
Fauntroy says, `But, Dick, the FBI did it. The FBI is bugging my church, they’re bugging my home, they’re bugging my office. You can’t say what’s on your mind.’

Gregory says, `What do we love about Martin, Walter? He didn’t take private positions and public positions that were different.’

Fauntroy says, `Yeah, and they killed him, and I don’t want to be killed. I’m not going to say it.’

Gregory then looked at me like why did we do all this work to get this committee set up. … So that was the end of the investigation, just as soon as it began.

Didn’t the HSCA fire or dismiss the original head counsel Richard Sprague?

I got Dick Sprague as counsel. They were offering me the job as counsel to investigate the Kennedy assassination. I said, `I don’t think that would be useful because everybody knows my position. … I think you want to start with somebody who is tough and really doesn’t have a set position.’ I suggested Dick Sprague. I didn’t know Sprague, but he had just finished prosecuting Tony Boyle, the head of the United Mine Workers who murdered (dissident union leader) Joseph Yablonski.

So I went down to Philadelphia and spent hours with Sprague, and told him what I thought could be done. … (Then) I went back and I told that to the members of the committee, and they were very excited. … Then I returned to Philadelphia and met with Sprague. We took the train back into Washington, and I introduced him to members of the committee. That day they hired him.

Representatives from the FBI and the CIA (soon) came to see Sprague. They said, `Tell us who you’re thinking about having for your staff, we’ll do background searches. Furthermore, we’ll give you some documents that might help you.’

(Sprague replied:) `You guys are suspects at least in the coverup. You’re not clearing anybody for me. I’m going to back up trucks to your buildings and get all the documents that I want. I’m going to subpoena them. So don’t tell me you’re going to give me some selected documents.’

That started the campaign led by The New York Times and the Washington Post to get rid of Dick Sprague. They finally bounced him out.

The new head counsel Robert Blakey had subpoena power, but never subpoenaed a document. He closed down the investigation.That’s when everything went sour.

The committee decided that it was going to clear everybody. But there were enough members on that committee who had to go back to their districts and try to get re-elected. So while Blakey wanted the position to be that Oswald and Ray did it alone, no one would buy that. Instead, they took the position that there was a conspiracy in each case. But they didn’t know who did it (only that) Oswald and Ray were involved.

They then cleared the FBI and the CIA in a bizarre conclusion in which they said, We don’t know what group did it, but these groups didn’t do it. …

All the HSCA did was eliminate the FBI and CIA as suspects.