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 an associate, William Kenneth Knight, robbed the mayor of Fort Payne, Alabama, in his home, at gunpoint—and then, when caught, stole the victim’s car and fled the scene of the crime. (It turned out that members of local law enforcement were “in” on the plot.)9
More alarmingly, in 1967, Dixie Mafia members infamously killed the wife of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, lionized in the drive-in movie classic Walking Tall; she died in the sheriff’s arms, from a rifle bullet that, whether meant for Pusser (and missed) or for his spouse, was no doubt intended to stop the lawman from shutting down Dixie Mafia gambling and liquor schemes at the Tennessee-Mississippi border.10
Many in what became known as the State Line mob fled to McNairy and Alcorn Counties (in Tennessee and Mississippi respectively) following a crackdown on Dixie Mafia activity in the vice-
infested city of Phoenix, Alabama, in 1954—the year of another bold political assassination. In that instance, a hitman, most believe on orders from local Dixie Mafia lords, killed the law-and-order attorney general elect Albert Patterson. Author Faith Serafin described the horrible encounter:
Patterson . . . left his office at about 9:00 p.m. As he exited the building, approaching his car that was parked in the alley . . . an assailant approached him and shoved a pistol in his mouth. Without hesitation, the killer fired, shooting Patterson once in the mouth, once in the arm and again in the chest. Albert Patterson fell to the ground bleeding and mortally wounded.11
The shocking crime inspired Alabama governor Gordon Persons to call in the National Guard to crack down on the crime-infested metropolis using limited martial law, encouraging the exodus into nearby states. Years later, that led to the Dixie Mafia showdown with Pusser in Tennessee.
More than thirty years after Patterson’s killing, Dixie Mafia gangsters murdered Judge Vincent Sherry and his politician wife, Margaret, in their Biloxi, Mississippi, home. The crime was motivated by what turned out to be false suspicions that Sherry was involved in, and skimming money from, a Dixie Mafia extortion scheme. The killing was arranged by Kirksey Nix, a one-time enemy of Pusser, who “maintained tight control over the mob’s operations in Louisiana and Mississippi despite spending two decades in prison for killing a grocer.”12
Not surprisingly, certain Dixie mobsters earned reputations as killers for hire, among them Don Sparks, who some suspect was involved in the still-unsolved murder of Pauline Pusser.13 Sparks, in fact, earned such a strong reputation as a contract killer that Sicilian crime families hired him for professional murders.14
In 1964, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi reached out to Sparks and at least one other criminal, in hopes of murdering King when he came to Mississippi. On the run after another string of robberies, Sparks revealed outlines of the plot to a fellow Oklahoma-based gangster, Hermit Eugene Wing, who, within months, revealed the information to the FBI in 1965. When the FBI followed up they approached a Jackson, Mississippi, police officer, John Chamblee, who confirmed hearing rumors that the KKK had “hired a ‘killer’; from the State of Oklahoma to murder Martin Luther King Jr. when King was in Jackson. The ‘killer’; was known as ‘Two Jumps’ and came to Jackson, Mississippi to ‘case’ the layout and while in Jackson, stayed at the Tarrymore Motel was to use a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights. This deal allegedly fell through when the Klansmen could not raise the $13,000 demanded by ‘Two Jumps.’”15
Donald Sparks earned the nickname “Two Jumps” because of his fondness for rodeo, something the FBI learned, in part, during their 1965 investigation, when a Mississippi Klansman also reported hearing vague rumors of a plot against King. Asked about Sparks, the Klansman, whose name is still hidden in government records, responded, “You mean Two Jumps?” That the Klansman was familiar with Sparks is not surprising given that, according to Klan expert Michael Newton, the Mississippi White Knights used Dixie Mafia men in “strong-arm operations.”16
But the FBI had dismissed the 1964 White Knights assassination rumor as unreliable—a decision that was to have dire implications for Dr. King. The FBI did so because they could not corroborate another crime mentioned by their Oklahoma informant, implicating Sparks in the murder of a Dixie Mafia drug trafficker. Even though the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation gave credit to that claim, the FBI chose to dismiss both it and the allegation that Sparks had been involved in a White Knights plot against King. The FBI chose to dismiss the primary allegations despite the strong corroboration from Detective Chamblee. Those FBI decisions helped seal Martin Luther King Jr.’s fate three years later. In retrospect it appears clear that the threat that Nissen was relaying was simply a second attempt by the White Knights to use Dixie Mafia members to kill Dr. King. In 1967, the White Knights would rely on outsiders to provide the money they could not raise in 1964.
Independent corroboration for Wing’s account of the Sparks–White Knights bounty came from another Dixie Mafia member, William Kenneth Knight, who, in the late 1960s, became a valued cooperating witness for federal prosecutors in trials of other hoodlums. Knight participated in criminal activity with both Wing and Sparks, including the aforementioned robbery in Fort Payne. According to post-assassination documents from 1968, Knight told FBI agents that Sparks described the 1964 bounty offer to him (Wing was also present, according to Knight) while they were on the run from law enforcement in 1966; the account closely matched what Wing attributed to Sparks and relayed to the FBI in 1965. Since the conversation between Knight and Sparks occurred in 1966, it had to be an independent discussion of the plot. Knight recalled the dollar figure as $10,000 and he did not remember whom Sparks identified as the sponsor, if he identified anyone at all. The FBI report stated:
Knight stated that Sparks is perfectly capable of committing a murder and is a known hater of Negroes. According to Knight, Sparks is not known to make jokes and it was believable to Knight that an actual offer was made to Sparks by someone.
When the FBI followed up on Knight’s reports and interviewed Sparks, they found him in detention in an Alabama prison. He denied involvement in any King plot, then adamantly refused to answer follow-up questions. The FBI correctly noted that Sparks had been in detention for months and could not have been in Memphis, and used that to dismiss him as a suspect. This ignores the well-established modus operandi of the Dixie Mafia, of organizing crimes from behind prison bars (the murder of Judge Vincent Sherry by Kirksey Nix is only the most famous example.) A more thorough investigation of the aborted effort by the White Knights to pay Sparks to kill King in 1964 would have led to just such an operation. It would have led to Leroy McManaman and the bounty offer he made to Donald
