this kind of a trap. Though more speculative than the White attempt, evidence suggests that Bowers wanted to draw King to Mississippi for the Sparks-McManaman plot. Under this scenario, Bowers had multiple motivations when he ordered a “code four” on James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in the Mississippi Burning murders. Undoubtedly, the most widely accepted interpretation of the crime—that Bowers wanted to use the murders to scare the hundreds of incoming student activists on their way to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964—is true. But the disappearance of two white men alongside a black man in Neshoba County also generated nationwide attention, and revulsion when federal agents discovered the bodies weeks later. Bowers seemed to anticipate the reaction—one of the largest federal investigations in American history—in a speech given only weeks before in a closely guarded meeting of Klan members.
“The enemy will seek their final push for victory here in Mississippi,” he said, referring to the well-publicized Freedom Summer. But he added that open violence between whites and blacks would lead to a “decree from the communist authorities in charge of the national government . . . declaring martial law.”15 The federal intervention in Mississippi did not quite reach the level of martial law, but polls showed that, during the height of the search for the bodies in Mississippi, when Bowers provoked law enforcement by arranging for additional attacks, a large number of Americans favored something like a declaration of martial law if the violence got worse. Such turbulence surely would invite a visit and protests, as it often did, from Dr. King. And this raises questions about something else Bowers told his audience in the speech before the murders. Speaking of guerrilla strike teams who would resist the federal government and respond to outside agitators, Bowers said:
Any personal attacks on the enemy should be carefully planned to include only the leaders and prime white collaborators of the enemy forces. These attacks against these selected individual targets should, of course, be as severe as circumstances and conditions will permit. The leaders . . . should be our prime targets.16
As will become clear in the following chapter, Bowers calibrated major acts of violence for maximum, public effect. It was part of an even larger plan to incite violence across the country, not only in Mississippi—one that he kept even from his closest followers; one that he pursued with a religious devotion.
His failures to kill King from 1964 to 1966 did not deter Bowers. Instead, he appears to have learned from his mistakes and changed his tactics. When he could not pay Dixie Mafia killers, he turned “in house” to fellow Klansmen. When King could no longer be counted on to follow his announced itinerary in 1965, Bowers attempted to dictate the time and place of the murder through a trap (White’s killing) in 1966. Bowers was not alone in plotting King’s assassination; King escaped numerous times through luck. The minister benefitted from advance warning only once, in 1965, because the informant Delmar Dennis had become aware of the plot and because President Johnson took a unique role in protecting King’s life. So, to ultimately succeed in killing King, Bowers relied on a plot that could account for, and even closely track, King’s movements; one that would be flexible, in place to be activated regardless of time or geography, when the opportunity presented itself. He turned to a Dixie Mafia hitman who could follow King, even outside of the domain of Mississippi, and assassinate him using killers for hire.
But in 1967 and 1968, Bowers faced a major obstacle: the non-stop surveillance and scrutiny of federal law enforcement. Agents in the Jackson, Mississippi, field office engaged in what amounted to a virtual war with the Mississippi KKK. Bowers always took extraordinary measures to avoid surveillance. When he gave the aforementioned 1964 speech about the “enemy’s . . . final push for victory” before the MIBURN killings, Bowers did so in a remote building so that Piper airplanes could provide aerial warning of any potential law enforcement observers or raids.17 The audience had been body-searched upon entry. At one point, he proposed firing the entire leadership of the White Knights out of concern that some might be informants. In 1967, with his one-time close aide Delmar Dennis prepared to testify against Bowers and others at trial, Bowers was more cautious than ever. The FBI’s efforts denied him freedom of movement and access to his lieutenants and foot soldiers.
Bowers responded to this in a familiar way: he turned to outsiders to advance his plans to kill King and engage in white supremacist violence. As described in detail in Chapter 1, the White Knights floated a high-money bounty offer to the Dixie Mafia to kill King. In researching Donald Nissen’s claims, something became clear: unbeknownst to Nissen, Leroy McManaman, the hoodlum who offered him the bounty at Leavenworth, very likely participated in the 1964 Sparks-McManaman plot on King. McManaman belonged to the same cadre of Dixie Mafia gangsters as Don Sparks, a group headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. McManaman knew Sparks personally according to Robert “Rubie” Charles Jenkins, a fellow member of the Tulsa gang and Sparks’s closest friend. McMamanan, in turn, partnered with Jenkins in an interstate car-theft ring that landed both men in federal prison in 1964.18 But McManaman, who somehow secured a commutation from the Kansas governor against the wishes of a state prosecutor in 1952,19 also managed to win a rare federal appeals bond in 1964. This allowed McManaman to temporarily leave Leavenworth while he challenged his 1963 conviction in the Tenth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The court’s jurisdiction included Kansas, where McManaman and Jenkins were originally convicted, and five other states.20 But McManaman not only imperiled his appeal, he risked adding years to his prison sentence: he spent weeks outside of Kansas, staying with a married real estate broker, Sybil Eure, in Jackson, Mississippi, in the spring of 1964. Thus McManaman, whose criminal activity rarely included Mississippi, found his way to the Magnolia State at the same time that his friend, hitman Donald Sparks, took refuge at a Jackson motel, waiting for the money to kill King. There’s little doubt he was there to assist Sparks in King’s assassination, but the bounty money never arrived, McManaman’s appeal failed, and he had to return, before Freedom Summer began, to Leavenworth to serve out his sentence.
It is critical to note that Eure is the woman whose name McManaman provided to Donald Nissen as a go-between if Nissen wanted to join the 1967 King murder conspiracy. She was the first person the FBI interviewed to follow up on Nissen’s revelations about the plot in the Sherman, Texas, jail. Eure denied any connection to a King bounty; her explanations for how she knew McManaman defied credulity, including the claim that an unidentified friend recommended McManaman to her as an expert on real estate.21 Putting aside the dubious notion that a middle-class woman in Jackson would share a mutual connection to a hardened career criminal—and that her friend would encourage Eure to shelter that criminal for weeks—McManaman’s only background in real estate was running an illegal gambling operation out of an inn he ran in Colorado. McManaman’s prison records reveal a much deeper relationship than Eure admitted: he hoped to marry her when he got out of Leavenworth, and she was his most frequent visitor while he stayed behind bars.22
The FBI neglected another important revelation by Eure. Asked if she knew anything about the other two go-betweens that McManaman spoke of to Donald Nissen, Eure provided some interesting answers. She told the agents she knew a Floyd—her own brother, Floyd Gardner. This Floyd, however, was not the Floyd referenced by McManaman, as will become clear in Chapter 5, but the FBI did little to investigate. Eure also identified two men she knew who were connected to the federal marshals office in Mississippi: Charlie Sutherland, a cousin, and Robert C. Thomas, an associate. Neither of them, she asserted, would have anything to do with the Klan or a plot on King’s life.
Interviews conducted by the authors with people familiar with Sutherland and with Sutherland himself confirm Eure’s assertions about her cousin. But Robert C. Thomas, as federal authorities would learn soon after the King assassination, did associate with the Ku Klux Klan. Before he began work as a clerk with the southern district court in Mississippi, Thomas was appointed as the chief investigator for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state government agency that spied on civil rights groups in Mississippi as part of the state’s wider effort to resist federally imposed integration. But as a clerk for the federal courts, Thomas illegally rigged juries on behalf of Sam Bowers. Nissen did tell the authors that McManaman specifically noted that the go-between had recently been appointed as a deputy marshal in Mississippi.
