will become clear in later chapters, McManaman not only knew Sparks well, he almost definitely worked with Sparks in the unrealized project to kill King in Mississippi in 1964. The second iteration of the White Knights plot, the one revealed by McManaman to Nissen, was a continuation of the effort that had failed to assassinate King in 1964. Only this time, the bounty plot would succeed on April 4, 1968.
The White Knights, and the network of racist zealots who supported them, never wavered in their aim to kill King—engaging in multiple plots until they found their mark, literally and figuratively, in 1968. But in the highly compartmentalized FBI, reports deemed “unreliable” had no currency, so Sparks’s account to the informant never reached the agents tasked with investigating Nissen’s report of a bounty three years later. It was only revisited in the investigation that followed King’s murder.
Nissen himself knew nothing about any connection to the 1964 bounty. The authors developed the connection between the two events by collating and corroborating often minor details in newspaper accounts, interviews, and never-before-released government records. McManaman only relayed the details of the most up-to-date 1967 bounty offer to Nissen. There was no mention of Sparks or “Two Jumps” and a high-powered rifle at the Tarrymore Motel. Nissen wanted no part of it. He was a career burglar and con man, not a murderer. He had used guns in his crimes, but he had never shot anyone. But saying no to someone like McManaman, while both remained at Leavenworth, was dangerous. Knowing too much already, Nissen could have been killed before his release, before he went to Atlanta and the sales job he had waiting for him. Nissen told his cellmate John May about the offer, but not with any intent to recruit May. Nissen was thinking out loud, debating how to thread the needle between avoiding involvement in a potential capital offense and avoiding being the victim of one at the hands of McManaman. Ultimately, he decided to keep to himself and bide his time until he was released.17
This tactic—never saying “yes” or “no” to McManaman—seemed smart at the time, but it would cause Nissen more trouble than he ever expected. On that Friday, June 2, 1967, sitting across from two special agents from the FBI, Nissen thought he had his opportunity to safely extricate himself from future association with the plot against King. Hundreds of miles away from Leavenworth and McManaman, he had no intention of going back to prison on a life sentence, and he gave information to the Dallas FBI as much to protect himself as to save King from being killed.
It now appears likely that Donald Nissen’s June 1967 story to federal agents might have preempted King’s tragic murder on April 4, 1968—if only the FBI had investigated it more fully. Instead they conducted a superficial investigation in the summer of 1967 that did nothing but expose Nissen to danger.
The FBI did not revisit Nissen’s story until April 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Nissen, they discovered, had jumped parole and disappeared.18 Despite his desire to disentangle himself from the plot against King, Nissen’s unwilling involvement had only just begun on that summer day in June 1967.
2
the sponsors
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi formed in the state’s cauldron of anti-integrationist resistance in the early 1960s. No white supremacist group committed more acts of violence in the nation. As one of the few states with a majority nonwhite population, Mississippi’s white establishment vigorously opposed efforts to give equal rights to minorities. Yet some white Mississippians did not feel that the reactionary moves made by the wealthy White Citizens Councils and the government-backed Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission went far enough. To some, even the existing Klan regime in Mississippi was too passive, and they abandoned their county-based subgroups (known as Klaverns) in large numbers, coalescing to form the White Knights, led by the devilishly brilliant Samuel Holloway Bowers and eventually becoming the most successfully violent KKK subgroup in the nation.
Law enforcement estimates connected the group to at least “10 murders; to the burnings of an estimated 75 black churches, to at least 300 assaults and beatings and bombings.”1 The violence included the famous Mississippi Burning (abbreviated as MIBURN by the FBI), murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County. Klansmen firebombed the home of voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer, in Forrest County, Mississippi, nearly killing his wife and children, who luckily survived.2 Dahmer died from burns suffered in the attack. Although the group had not officially formed when Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in June 1963—shot in the back by sniper fire, just yards away from his home and his wife and children—many suspect that a budding version of the White Knights had some role in the attack. The man eventually convicted of the Evers murder, Byron de la Beckwith, became a leading member of the White Knights. Like de la Beckwith, who liked to taunt law enforcement with quasi-confessions of the sniper attack, the White Knights were the boldest of any Klan group in the country, certain that a Mississippi jury would never convict them of a crime. They even put local law enforcement and FBI agents on hit lists.3
But developments in 1967 brought a new wave of hope for law enforcement. Using federal civil rights laws rather than local murder statutes, the Justice Department finally brought nine Klansmen to account for their roles in the murder of civil rights martyrs Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney in Neshoba County in 1964. The FBI had devoted a tremendous amount of resources over some three years to establish the facts of the case and, in fact, had developed most of the story by the end of 1964. The sheriff of Neshoba County, Lawrence Rainey, a closet member of the White Knights, arrested the three activists under false pretenses, with the help of his deputy, Cecil Price. While Rainey held the men incommunicado, a posse of Klansmen assembled and traveled to Neshoba, when Rainey obligingly released his prey the evening of June 20. The Klansmen, with Price’s help, followed the activists down a dark highway, forced them off the road and out of their vehicle, and killed them in the nearby woods. White Knights Grand Wizard Sam Bowers had set the outlines of the plan in motion more than a month before, and it worked to perfection.
The disappearance of two white men, Schwerner and Goodman, galvanized the nation in ways that most other racial crimes, directed solely at blacks (like Chaney), did not. At the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, a dogged FBI investigation uncovered the victims’ bodies buried under an earthen dam, but a Southern judge dismissed the murder case against Rainey and Price in 1964. In 1967, the FBI developed a high-level informant, Delmar Dennis, inside the White Knights, and the Department of Justice used civil rights statutes to retry the perpetrators. Prized targets among the accused included the infamous brothers Raymond and Alton Wayne Roberts; the latter, according to accounts from those involved in the ambush, shot at least one of the victims. Most importantly, the DOJ set its sights on finally sending the kingpin, Samuel Bowers, to prison.4
Born in 1924 to a wealthy New Orleans family, Bowers grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. He enlisted in the navy in World War II and briefly spent time in California before returning to southern Mississippi. He owned a vending machine company, Sambo Amusement Company, but focused his energy on directing the activities of the White Knights. But Bowers was not a typical “redneck,” as he called his followers. He had studied engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and then at Tulane University in New Orleans. If other Klan leaders played checkers, Bowers played chess, plotting crimes months in advance, using spy-like tradecraft to avoid law enforcement surveillance and always remaining careful—almost paranoid—not to leave his “fingerprints” on his crimes.5 He would plot crimes in new locations to divert FBI resources away from major investigations and even considered framing rival Klan groups for his own offenses.
Bowers alone had the ability to issue a “code four”—White Knights parlance for a bombing or killing. He did so for both the MIBURN killings and the Dahmer firebombing.6 But nothing occupied the attention or energy of Bowers like the prospect of killing Martin Luther King Jr. From 1964 on, Bowers attempted to assassinate Dr. King at least four times.
The first attempt, referenced in Chapter 1, involved
