From Publishers Weekly
Pepper, attorney since 1988 for James Earl Ray, the convicted killer of Martin Luther King Jr., believes that his client was a patsy, not the real assassin. He charges that the civil rights leader slain in 1968 was the victim of a conspiracy that involved Hoover's FBI, the CIA, Army intelligence, the mafia and the Memphis, Tenn., police force, extending to the highest levels of the federal government, which viewed King as a dangerous revolutionary. Pepper has interviewed many new witnesses who remained silent during the last 27 years, and he names names of officials at the local and national levels who, he alleges, participated in the conspiracy. According to Pepper, a team of U.S. Army Special Forces snipers was at the scene, taking aim at King at the same moment as a back-up "civilian" assassin. The Army team, by this account, had orders to kill both King and the Reverend Andrew Young, but the final order to pull the trigger was never given because the "civilian" assassin-tentatively identified here as one Raul Pereira, not Ray-shot King first. Pepper interviewed two former Special Forces members who claim to have been part of the sniper squad. He also cites two failed, government-orchestrated attempts to assassinate King in 1965, as well as a subsequent mafia contract on the civil rights leader's life by New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. Pepper wants a trial for Ray, who, he asserts, was coerced into pleading guilty by his lawyer; the defense, he notes, has never even been allowed to test the rifle or bullets in evidence.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Since 1988, Pepper, who was active in the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s, has been chief counsel for James Earl Ray, convicted--on a guilty plea, without a trial--of the April 4, 1968, assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Through appeals, a civil suit, a TV simulation of the trial Ray never had, and now this book, Pepper has tried to bring to judicial and public attention new evidence, which suggests strongly that Ray was merely the fall guy in a multilevel assassination plot involving the Mafia and government intelligence agencies. Perhaps as disturbing as the paranoia of the FBI, Army Intelligence, and other agencies that viewed Dr. King as a dangerous revolutionary leader are the subsequent actions of local, state, and federal officials who continue, even today, to obscure and obfuscate what happened in 1968. Pepper's story is inevitably complex, because it traces when and how Ray's defenders learned about various leads, as well as how those leads fit into their changing understanding of King's murder. But a list of the "principal players" and a final chapter that sums up the 1968 chronology will help readers put the pieces together. Worth attention from concerned citizens as well as dedicated conspiracy buffs.
Mary Carroll
