https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201 ... -stingray/Lawyer: Cops “deliberately misled” judge who seemingly signed off on stingray
“Any system that is not transparent is inherently corrupt.”
- 5/6/2017, 9:00 AM
FBI’s stingray quickly found suspect after local cops’ device couldn’t
OAKLAND, Calif.—Defense attorney Martha Boersch has strong words for federal law enforcement's warrantless use of cell-site simulators, better known as stingrays.
Her client, Purvis Ellis, charged with attempted murder and racketeering, was tracked down to an East Oakland apartment in January 2013 with the help of not just one stingray, but two. Prosecutors initially insisted that only one stingray was used, but as was revealed last summer, that turned out to not be the case. The Oakland Police Department's own stingray was seemingly insufficient, so officers then called in the FBI, both times without a warrant.
"When they then take that technology and use it in a run-of-the-mill criminal case and use it secretly and clearly without providing defendants with notice or any of the Constitutional protections that a defendant is supposed to have, that's a real problem," Boersch, who herself served as a federal prosecutor for 12 years, told Ars during a recent in-person interview at her downtown office.
"Why courts are letting the government get away with it, I don't quite understand."
The stingray question is proving to be a constant thorn in the prosecution's side—the defense has seized on it as an avenue to challenge the government's case. Earlier this week, Boersch filed three new motions that an Oakland federal judge will hear next month. Her client may finally get a judicial ruling as to whether the Oakland Police Department and the FBI's stingray use here was appropriate and what effect that should have, if any, on his case.
Boersch noted that she didn’t have a problem with law enforcement using stingrays per se, but she wanted agents to be "up front about it."
"To me, the biggest issue is transparency," she continued. "Any system that is not transparent is inherently corrupt, and that's what happens when law enforcement is able to use something like the stingray secretly."
Wheels of justice
FURTHER READING
“PING SUSP PHONE”—An Oakland shooting reveals how cops snoop on cell phones
As Ars has reported for years, stingrays determine a phone’s location by spoofing a cell tower. In some cases, they can also intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity.
In recent years, the use of stingrays has come under increased public scrutiny. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, said that they would have new policies regarding a warrant.
On January 21, 2013, Ellis was arrested not long after he was located via stingray in Apartment #112, one of many in a complex of units at 1759 Seminary Avenue in East Oakland. Several hours earlier, during the evening before, an undercover Oakland police officer was shot inside the gated parking area in front of the building. (That officer, Eric Karsseboom, accused one of Ellis’ co-defendants, Damien McDaniel, of being the one who pulled the trigger. McDaniel recently pleaded guilty—three defendants remain, including Ellis.)
In the Ellis case, prosecutors have said that no warrant was needed under the exigent circumstances exception. The defense has challenged that assertion, but the judge has not made a ruling.
Of Boersch's May 1 motions, the first was a new motion to suppress all the evidence that was found as a result of the stingray, and it applies to all three remaining defendants. In addition, she filed a second motion to suppress the evidence found in the four apartments that were searched, including #112, where Ellis was located, on account of an allegedly defective warrant.
Finally, she filed a third motion to sever Ellis' case from the other two co-defendants. She notes that her client can no longer wait for the case to unfold at the glacial pace that it has. Under the US Constitution, Ellis has a right to a speedy trial, and he has been kept in "administrative segregation," also known as solitary confinement, inside Oakland’s Glenn Dyer jail for more than two years. Until now, Ellis has waived his right to a speedy trial, but he has seemingly grown frustrated with the pace of his case.
“The application does not inform the judge... ”
FURTHER READING
Oakland may become rare American city with strict rules for spy gear use
The new stingray motion makes a forceful argument that deployment of a cell-site simulator requires a warrant and that warrantless searches are presumed to be unreasonable. The Oakland Police Department did file a pen register order with Metro PCS, the mobile phone carrier. That legal order, however, makes no mention of any stingray use.
In ideal circumstances, detectives typically go to a local judge before they deploy a stingray. Instead of a warrant, most law enforcement officers file an application for a "pen register and trap and trace order." Unlike the threshold for a warrant—probable cause of an actual crime—the pen register and trap and trace order only requires authorities to show "relevancy to a criminal investigation."
As Boersch writes:
The order did not allow the FBI or OPD to bypass the carriers and independently use a roaming cell-site simulator, which, as discussed above, performs very different and more intrusive functions than these. In fact, the affidavit in support of the order did not mention cell-site simulators at all or seek authorization to conduct any of the sort of electronic surveillance that the Stingrays were apparently performing.
Third, if the government intended this order to cover its use of the two Stingrays, it deliberately misled the state court judge by failing to inform him of the technology being used, the materials to be collected, or the nature of the surveillance it was conducting. The affidavit in support of the order fails to mention that the FBI or OPD would be using a Stingray, cell-site simulator, or any other similar device. The application does not inform the judge that law enforcement will be using devices wholly independent of the carriers to whom the order was directed. And the affidavit fails to inform the judge that the FBI and OPD would be monitoring everyone's phone within range. If the government contends that the order authorized the use of the Stingray, then the agent's statements were necessarily deliberately misleading.
The new filings come at a time when the city of Oakland itself is thinking in entirely new ways about how best to balance the needs of law enforcement with the citizenry's right to privacy, which is enshrined in the state constitution.
On Tuesday, May 9, the Public Safety Committee is expected to formally recommend that the City Council adopt a new proposed law—believed to be one of the most stringent local surveillance oversight laws in the nation. Brian Hofer, the chair of the city's Privacy Advisory Commission, made the case for the new law in a recent op-ed in a local newspaper, the East Bay Express.
In it, he writes:
The ordinance will also shift the balance of power. By requiring Council approval for acquisition or use of surveillance technology, law enforcement will no longer be able to make secret, unilateral decisions, such as OPD's move to acquire and use a Stingray cell-phone tracking device in 2007. Our City Council found
http://www.startribune.com/former-nsa-e ... 421535213/Former NSA executive urges public vigilance against government ...
Minneapolis Star Tribune-
In 2007, FBI agents raided his home in Maryland. Drake was left in limbo for two years, wondering whether the new Obama administration would continue the ...
MAY 6, 2017 — 3:22PM
Thomas Drake still thinks about waking up a free man, instead of the lifelong prison term he was promised by the government he used to work for.
Drake woke up Wednesday in a guesthouse on the campus of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn. The former senior executive of the National Security Agency spoke at the college's annual MAYDAY! Peace Conference last week as part of his second career: the whistleblower warning the nation about the rise of mass surveillance.
After a career in the U.S. Air Force and stints as a CIA analyst and an intelligence agency contractor, Drake took a job at the NSA, perhaps the country's most secretive federal agency, which exists to protect the nation by intercepting and analyzing telephone and digital communications. His first day of work was Sept. 11, 2001.
Within months, he said, he was disturbed by what he saw. To stop future attacks, the NSA was collecting huge volumes of communications of Americans, flouting the Constitution's protection against warrantless searches, he said.
He said he raised his concerns internally at first, to no effect. In 2006, he contacted a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, which then published a series of stories about Trailblazer, an NSA program it described as violating privacy at huge cost and dubious benefit.
Drake said he chose defending the law over loyalty to the agency. "If that meant going to prison, then I would go to prison. I knew that in blowing the whistle, shortly after 9/11, I would expose myself to that possibility, and not just lose my job, but lose everything."
In 2007, FBI agents raided his home in Maryland. Drake was left in limbo for two years, wondering whether the new Obama administration would continue the case. He got his answer in April 2010 when he was charged with 10 felony counts. Five of them invoked the Espionage Act, a law that's intended for saboteurs, not whistleblowers.
Four days before his trial was to begin in 2011, the government dropped the espionage charges and allowed Drake to plead guilty to a misdemeanor of misusing a government computer. He was sentenced to community service, probation and a $25 court fee.
The judge lashed out at the prosecution for putting Drake through "four years of hell."
By then, Drake could no longer afford private attorneys and had found a job at an Apple Store, where he still works today. Yet he had the unique distinction of having beaten the rap in the Obama administration's unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to punish leakers.
Now he's a celebrity in the small society of federal whistleblowers, a subject of documentary films and profiles, with his own book on the way and plans to teach.
http://postcourier.com.pg/fbi-director- ... on-abedin/FBI Director Comey struggles to answer Cruz on pass given to ...
POST-COURIER-
And let me ask you, how would you handle an FBI Agent who forwarded thousands of classified emails to his or her spouse on a non-government computer?”.
http://www.thebaynet.com/articles/0517/ ... laint.htmlMadison County Sheriff’s Deputy Arrested on Pedophile Complaint
05/06/2017
The U.S. Department of Justice
Charlottesville, VIRGINIA – A Madison County Sheriff’s Office detective, assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force [ICAC], was arrested this morning and charged via federal criminal complaint with four counts relating to the sexual exploitation of minors, Acting United States Attorney Rick A. Mountcastle, Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Virginia State Police Colonel Steve W. Flaherty and Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Richmond Division John J. Lenkart, announced today.
Bruce A. Harvey, 40, of Reva, Va., has been charged with two counts of transporting minors across state lines with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and two counts of interstate travel with minors with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct. The alleged criminal activity involved two minor female victims who had contact with Harvey while he worked
http://triblive.com/lifestyles/morelife ... raffickingRed Sand Project will not raise awareness of cops trafficking
Children
County Commission Chairwoman Gina Cerilli says an FBI agent will address the topic at an upcoming women's caucus of county commissioners. “Unfortunately ...
http://mtpr.org/post/marchers-decry-epi ... tive-womenMarchers Decry Epidemic Of Violence Against Native Women
MTPR-
BR: I also spoke to FBI Special Agent Travis Burrows to find this out. He's the supervisory resident agent, which means he supervises the Eastern Montana ...
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/dec/2 ... nslaughte/Jury finds FBI special agent guilty of manslaughter in hammer death
Judge sets sentencing for February for 63-year-old former law enforcement officer
Edward Preciado-Nuno is shown during a break in his murder trial at the Regional Justice Center Thursday, December 16, 2010. Preciado-Nuno, a retired FBI special agent, is accused of killing his son’s girlfriend Kimberly Long. Preciado-Nuno says he was attacked by the girlfriend and killed her in self-defense.
Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010 | 4:54 p.m.
Edward Preciado-Nuno
A jury found retired San Diego FBI special agent Edward Preciado-Nuno guilty of voluntary manslaughter with use of a deadly weapon Tuesday afternoon in Clark County District Court.
Preciado-Nuno, 63, who was out on bail, was taken into custody and will be sentenced on Feb. 23. The jury deliberated from 9 a.m. until about 2:30 p.m., Chief Deputy District Attorney Giancarlo Pesci said.
“We’re grateful he’s in custody,” Pesci said.
Preciado-Nuno was arrested in November 2008 on a charge of murder with a deadly weapon. Police found Preciado-Nuno’s son’s girlfriend Kimberly Long dead in his son’s garage with several blunt force trauma wounds.
The trial began Nov. 14 of this year and the main issue contested was whether the attack was self-defense or murder.
In his opening statements, Pesci said the evidence would show that Long was trying to defend herself. He showed the jury an autopsy photo of Long's head. It showed 13 places where Preciado-Nuno had hit her with a claw hammer.
Pesci also showed the jurors photos of cuts and bruises from the hammer marks on her arm, plus an X-ray that showed her arm had been broken. There were 34 areas of injury on her body, he said.
http://www.41nbc.com/2017/05/06/utahns- ... -congress/UTAHNS PUZZLED BY CHAFFETZ DECISION TO QUIT CONGRESS
05/06/2017 - 7:36am
Raised Jewish, Chaffetz father’s first wife was Kitty Dukakis — who later married failed Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis — and his grandfather was an FBI agent.
Chaffetz became a Mormon while a student at Brigham Young University. Before he got into politics, he was a spokesman for the Utah-based Nu Skin Enterprises, a personal care and dietary supplement company that had been accused in the past of being a pyramid scheme — and which now operates abroad in countries like
Russia and China.
While Chaffetz
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/press ... le/2622312Pressure builds on FBI to explain Garland terrorist attack
May 6, 2017, 12:01 AM
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Authorities continue to investigate shooting in Garland Texas
The FBI is under mounting pressure from the Senate to explain the circumstances behind a terrorist attack in Garland, Texas in 2015, although it's still far from clear whether the FBI intends to explain why an FBI agent was at the scene and did nothing.
In open testimony before the committee on Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey told Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that he would be willing to explain media reports that suggest the FBI may have had advance knowledge of the attack. But he only said he would do that in a classified briefing, and no briefing has been set.
The
Cruz's request was just the latest attempt to get to the bottom of the attack. Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has been trying to get information from the FBI and the Justice Department for over a year and a half, and has had little to show for his efforts.
Requests for comment from Cruz and Johnson were not returned about when a briefing might occur.
In May 2015, two radicalized Islamic extremists, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, went to a "Draw Muhammed" event in a car loaded with firearms and ammunition. They opened fire at a security checkpoint at the perimeter of the parking lot, and were quickly shot and killed by a traffic officer on the scene before they could reach the building in which the event was being held. Bruce Joiner, a security guard on the scene, was shot in the leg and survived.
A report by 60 Minutes, however, showed a remarkable level of involvement by the FBI on that day. An undercover agent was in the car immediately behind the two attackers, and was taking pictures of the scene just seconds before Simpson and Soofi opened fire. The undercover FBI agent had been in touch with Simpson for weeks prior to the shooting, and even texted him the message "Tear up Texas" weeks before the attack. And just after the pair began their attack, the undercover agent tried to flee the scene.
When Johnson first queried the Justice Department for information that could help him understand what happened that day, he said the response "contained little specificity and ignored several important questions."
After the 60 Minutes report in March, Johnson again requested documentation from the FBI, but his deadline came and went, and the FBI sent him nothing.
The FBI press office told the Washington Examiner it is "in contact" with Johnson's office about the questions he's raised about the FBI's involvement in the incident, but had nothing else to say about it.
Still, that acknowledgment is a big leap forward in the bureau's willingness to make any public admission about the attack, which was the first on American soil for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
Toward the end of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, forced Comey to confirm for a second time that he would not only brief Cruz, but also committee staff.
"Assuming they have the clearances for it. I don't think that's a problem at all, I'll do that," Comey replied.
The attorney for the wounded security guard, Trenton Roberts, previously told the Washington Examiner that he was concerned the FBI may have been more invested in moving an undercover agent up the ranks in a U.S.-based cell of the Islamic State than they were interested in stopping an imminent attack.
"It seems like it had to have been one or the other," Roberts told the Examiner. "Just a complete botched operation where they [the FBI] don't want the attack to actually take place, or, it's something where they need the attack to take place in order for this guy [the agent] to advance in the world of ISIS."
Joiner and Roberts have about six months to decide if they'll sue the FBI, whi
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/05/06/f ... son-effectOrganization that assassinated Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
Coin new SYFY word “ferguson effect”
'Ferguson Effect': FBI Says Biased Media Narratives Lead to ...
Fox News
A recent FBI study showed that one-sided media reporting and social media posts about officer-involved shooting incidents lead to further episodes of violence ...
https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2 ... -hospital/MARTIN LUTHER KING SURVIVED SHOOTING, WAS MURDERED IN HOSPITAL: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM PEPPER
For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. – William Pepper (page 15, The Plot to Kill King)
By Craig McKee
The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable.
Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee. These and many more incredible details of the King assassination are contained in a trilogy of volumes by Pepper culminating with his latest and final book on the subject, The Plot to Kill King. He previously wrote Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003).
With virtually no help from the mainstream media and very little from the justice system, Pepper was able to piece together what really happened on April 4, 1968 in Memphis right down to who gave the order and supplied the money, how the patsy was chosen, and who actually pulled the trigger.
Without this information, the truth about King’s assassination would have been buried and lost to history. Witnesses would have died off, taking their secrets with them, and the official lie that King was the victim of a racist lone gunman named James Earl Ray would have remained “fact.”
Instead, we know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to make contact with Colonel John Downie (he had to work through a third party), the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer. We also learn that as part of the operation, photographs were actually taken of the shooting and that Pepper came very close to getting his hands on those photographs.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media has ignored all of these revelations and continues to label Ray as King’s lone assassin. In fact, Pepper chronicles in detail how a disinformation campaign has featured the collaboration of many mainstream journalists over almost half a century. He says he suspects that those orchestrating the cover-up, which continues to this day, are no longer concerned with what he writes about the subject.
“I’m really basically harmless, I think, to the power structure,” Pepper said in an interview.
“I don’t think I threaten them, really. The control of the media is so consolidated now they can keep someone like me under wraps, under cover, forever. This book will probably never be reviewed seriously by mainstream, the story will not be aired in mainstream – they control the media. It was bad in the ’60s but nowhere near as bad as now.”
And the most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King – which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.
“That is probably the most shocking aspect of the book, that final revelation of how this great man was taken from us,” Pepper says. (By the way, when I quote Pepper as having “said” something I mean in our interview. If I’m quoting from the book, I’ll indicate that.)
The hospital story was told to Pepper by a man named Johnton Shelby, whose mother, Lula Mae Shelby, had been a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s that night. Shelby told Pepper the story of how his mother came home the morning after the shooting (she hadn’t been allowed to go home the night before) and gathered the family together. He remembers her saying to them, “I can’t believe they took his life.”
She described chief of surgery Dr. Breen Bland entering the emergency room with two men in suits. Seeing doctors working on King, Bland commanded, “Stop working on the nigger and let him die! Now, all of you get out of here, right now. Everybody get out.”
Johnton Shelby says his mother described hearing the sound of the three men sucking up saliva into their mouths and then spitting. Lula Mae described to her family that she looked over her shoulder as she was leaving the room and saw that the breathing tube had been removed from King and that Bland was holding a pillow over his head. (The book contains the entire deposition given by Johnton Shelby to Pepper, so readers can judge for themselves whether they think Shelby is credible – as Pepper believes he is.)
William Pepper with his friend Martin Luther King.
In fact, a second invaluable source was Ron Adkins, whose father, Russell Adkins Sr., was a local Dixie Mafia gangster and conspirator in the planning of the assassination even though he died a year before it took place. Ron told Pepper he had overheard Bland, who was his family’s doctor, tell his father that if King did survive the shooting he had to be taken to St. Joseph’s and nowhere else. As Pepper describes it:
“He remembers Breen Bland saying to his father, ‘If he’s not killed by the shot, just make sure he gets to St. Joseph Hospital, and we’ll make sure that he doesn’t leave.’”
Ron, who was just 16 when the shooting took place, was apparently taken everywhere by his father in those days, and he was able to recount many details of what happened as the assassination was planned and carried out.
“I definitely found him credible,” Pepper says. “I found him troubled, I found him disturbed in a lot of ways by things that went on earlier in his life.”
His deposition is also contained in the book, which Pepper explains was important so that readers could judge the statements for themselves.
“What I wanted to do was to make sure that the entire deposition of these critical moments and this critical information was there, so that one could go and read the depositions and see that I was being accurate,” Pepper says.
Besides describing what he heard Bland tell his father, Ron Adkins described the many visits made to Russell Sr. by Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man. Known to Ron as “Uncle Clyde,” the high-level FBI official often delivered cash to the elder Adkins for jobs he and his associates would carry out on behalf of Hoover. Among those the younger Adkins said were paid to supply information about the activities of Martin Luther King were the reverends Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Jesse Jackson.
The basics of the official story
If you seek out any information from a mainstream source about James Earl Ray, you’ll find him described as the killer of Martin Luther King, just as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are labelled “assassins” in the murders of John and Robert Kennedy.
But once you read any or all of Pepper’s three books on the King slaying, you see very clearly that Ray is not a killer at all. Instead, he was a petty criminal who was a perfect “follower.” Like Oswald and Sirhan, Ray was set up to take the fall for an assassination that originated within the American deep state. In fact, Pepper says he’s convinced that knowledge of the plot went all the way to the top.
“The whole thing would have been part of Lyndon Johnson’s playbook,” Pepper says. “I think Johnson knew about this.”
As the official story of the shooting goes, at 5:50 p.m. on April 4, Kyles knocked on the door of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel to let King and the rest of his party know that they were running late for a planned dinner at Kyles’s home. Kyles then walked about 60 feet down the balcony where he remained even after King came out of the room at about 6 p.m. (Although Kyles has maintained ever since that he spent the last half hour in the room, Pepper has proven otherwise.)
Andrew Young (left) and others on balcony of the Lorraine pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)
Members of a militant black organizing group the Invaders, who were also staying in the motel because of King’s visit, were told shortly before the shooting by a member of the motel staff that their rooms would no longer being paid for by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and that they had to leave immediately. When they asked who had given this order, they were told it was Jesse Jackson. At the time of the shooting, Jackson was waiting down by the swimming pool. Ron Adkins also identified Jackson as the person who called the owners of the Lorraine Motel and demanded that King be moved from a more secure inner courtyard room to an exposed room on the second floor facing the street.
The Memphis Police Department usually formed a detail of black officers to protect King when he was in town, but did not this time. Emergency TACT support units were pulled back from the Lorraine to the fire station, which overlooked the motel. Pepper also learned that the only two black members of the Memphis Fire Department had been told the day before the shooting not to report for work the next day at the fire station. And black detective Ed Redditt was physically removed from his surveillance post in the fire station taken to MPD headquarters, where he described seeing many Army officers. He was then driven home where he heard news about the assassination in his car just after arriving.
Just about a minute after King exited his room, a single shot was fired and the bullet ripped through King’s jaw and spinal cord, dropping him immediately. The shot appeared to come from across Mulberry Street. King was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead just after 7 p.m.
According to the official story, the shot was fired by Ray from the bathroom of a rooming house above a bar called Jim’s Grill, which backed on to Mulberry and faced onto South Main Street. But, as Pepper’s investigation proves, the shot actually came from the bushes located in between the rooming house and the street. In fact, the only “witness” who placed Ray at the scene was a falling-down-drunk named Charles Stephens, who later did not recognize Ray in a photograph and who cab driver James McCraw had refused to transport a short time before because he was too intoxicated.
The bushes that concealed the shooter were conveniently trimmed the day after the shooting, giving a false impression that a shooter could not have been concealed there. Several witnesses, including journalist Earl Caldwell and King’s Memphis driver, Solomon Jones, described seeing the shot come from the bushes and not from the bathroom of the rooming house as the official story states.
Another casualty of the King murder was cab driver Buddy Butler who reported that he saw a man running from the scene right after the shot, going south on Mulberry St., and jumping into a police car (this would turn out to be MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark). Butler reported this to his dispatcher and later to fellow cab driver Louie Ward. Butler was interviewed at the Yellow Cab Company later that evening by police. Ward was told the next day that Butler had either fallen, or was pushed, to his death from a speeding car on the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.
The owner of Jim’ Grill, Loyd Jowers, would later admit to being part of the conspiracy to kill King, and he would be found responsible – along with various government agencies – for the killing in a 1999 civil lawsuit by the King family, which was represented by Pepper.
“The King family got enormous comfort out of the results of that trial and the evidence that came forward from that,” Pepper says.
Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill and girlfriend of Jowers, says she saw him rush into the back of the Grill through the back door seconds after the shot, white as a ghost and holding a rifle, which he then wrapped in a tablecloth and hid on a shelf under the counter. He turned to her and said, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She responded, “Of course not, Loyd.” Spates, who didn’t come forward until the 1990s, also recounted that Jowers had been delivered a large sum of money right before the assassination.
James McCraw stated that Jowers had shown him a rifle the day after the shooting and told him it was the one used to kill King.
“We confronted Loyd,” Peppers explains. “We told him he was likely to be indicted if he didn’t help us, if he didn’t give more information. Jowers didn’t know there was no way the grand jury was going to indict him. All he knew was what he did, what he participated in, how much money he got for it – he got quite a large sum of money, built a taxi cab company with it, had his gambling debt with [local Mafia figure Frank] Liberto forgiven.”
Liberto, an associate of Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello, turned out to be involved in the assassination also. He owned a produce warehouse and one of his regular customers, John McFerren, was making his weekly shopping trip there when he overheard Liberto shout into the phone an hour before the shooting: “Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony.” Nathan Whitlock and his mother, LaVada Addison Whitlock, who owned a restaurant frequented by Liberto, stated that Liberto had told them he was responsible for the King murder.
Setting up the patsy
One thing that many don’t know is that Ray was in prison in 1967, the year before the assassination, serving a 20-year sentence for a grocery store robbery in 1959. After a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts, Ray succeeded in breaking out of prison on April 23, 1967. Unknown to Ray was the fact that the escape had been orchestrated, because he had already been chosen as the patsy in the planned assassination of King, which was still a year away.
The warden of Missouri State Penitentiary was paid $25,000 by Russell Adkins Sr. to allow the escape (as confirmed by Ron Adkins). The money was delivered to Adkins by Tolson, and it was this same connection that would later be used to finance the assassination of King.
After his escape from prison, Ray went to Chicago for a few weeks where he got a job. But, worried about getting caught, he went to Canada, specifically Montreal, and took the name Eric S. Galt. His intention was to get a passport under a false name and to travel to a country from which he could not be extradited.
James Earl Ray spent the last 30 years of his life in prison for a murder he did not commit.
At the Neptune Bar in the Montreal dock area in August 1967, Ray met a mysterious figure who identified himself as “Raul.” Raul asked Ray to help him with a smuggling scheme, and Ray agreed. In the months ahead, Ray would do a number of jobs, including gun running, for Raul for which he was paid and given a car. Always, Ray had to wait to be contacted by Raul, who Ray said co-ordinated his activities right up until the day of the assassination.
At one point Ray was instructed to purchase a deer rifle with a scope (although Raul was not satisfied with the one he bought and made him exchange it for another). Ray was instructed to go to Memphis (he arrived April 3, 1968) and upon meeting with Raul in his motel was given the name of Jim’s Grill, where the two were to meet at 3 p.m. the next day. He also handed the rifle over to Raul and always maintained that he never saw it again.
Ray rented a room at the rooming house above Jim’s Grill (the two met the day of the assassination as planned). About an hour before the shooting, he was given money to go to the movies, but first he tried to have a tire repaired because Raul had said he wanted to use the car. But when Ray heard the sirens that followed the shooting, he got scared and left the area.
Fearing he had been set up, Ray left the country and ended up in England where he was captured on June 8, 1968 at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was trying to leave the UK. Once charged with the crime, Ray was pressured by his second lawyer, Percy Foreman, to plead guilty on the grounds that the evidence was too strong against him and Foreman was not in good health and couldn’t offer a strong defence.
“Foreman was sent in with the purpose of replacing the original lawyers,” Pepper says.
Foreman offered Ray $500 to get another lawyer if he pleaded guilty and even put this in writing. Ray would regret accepting this offer for the rest of his life. He tried unsuccessfully to rescind the guilty plea and get a trial for the next 30 years, finally dying in prison of cancer in 1998.
Pepper becomes convinced of Ray’s innocence
It was 10 years after the assassination before Pepper would even consider meeting with Ray. He had taken for granted at first that Ray was the assassin, but he was encouraged to meet him by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as President of the SCLC. Abernathy had remained unsatisfied with the official account of the shooting.
In the book, Pepper describes his first meeting with Ray in 1978 and how he quickly came to believe that Ray had not been the shooter and that the case was essentially still unsolved. It wasn’t until 1988 before Pepper became certain that Ray had not played any knowing part in the conspiracy, and at that point he agreed to represent him, which he did until his death.
Purveyors of the official story of the assassination have always claimed that Raul was an invention of Ray’s, and mainstream media accounts refer to this question as still unanswered even though Pepper not only found witnesses who described their connections to Raul, he actually found Raul himself with the help of witness Glenda Grabow (Pepper learned that his last name was Coelho). She identified Raul as someone she had known in Houston in 1963 and who around 1974, in a fit of rage, had implicated himself in the King assassination right before raping her. Grabow also identified Jack Ruby as someone who she had seen with Raul in 1963. This fascinating story is recounted both in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King.
One of the most intriguing things to come out of both of these books is the account of a young FBI agent named Don Wilson who after the assassination was sent to check out a white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray drove a white Mustang) that had been abandoned and that was thought to be connected to the assassination. Wilson opened the car door and some papers fell out. He examined them later and found a torn-out piece of a 1963 Dallas, Texas telephone directory. Written on the page was the name “Raul” and the initial “J” and a phone number, which turned out to be that of a Las Vegas night club run by Jack Ruby, the man who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. A second piece of paper had a list of names with amounts of money beside each. Wilson decided to hold on to this evidence, fearing it would disappear forever if he turned it in. He held on to it for 29 years before making it available to Pepper and the King family.
The shooter revealed
Another incredible revelation in The Plot to Kill King is the identity of the man who appears to have fired the fatal shot. Pepper learned his identity from Lenny B. Curtis, who was a custodian at the Memphis Police Department rifle range. Curtis told Pepper this in 2003, and Pepper recorded a deposition with him but kept it confidential out of fear for Curtis’s life. Only after his death in 2013 did Pepper reveal what Curtis had said – that the shooter was Memphis police officer Frank Strausser.
“We had to be very careful about [Curtis’s safety],” Pepper says.
Curtis said to Pepper in his deposition that he heard Strausser say about King four or five months before the assassination that somebody was going to “. . . blow his motherfucking brains out.” He also described that Strausser had practised in the rifle range with a particular rifle that had been brought in four or five days earlier by a member of the fire department. That fireman had shown the rifle to Curtis and asked, “How would you like that scoundrel, that baby there?” When Curtis said it look like any other rifle, he replied, “No, this is a special one; that baby is special.” Lenny remembered that on the day of the assassination, Strausser spent the whole day practicing with it. (Strausser has given several conflicting accounts of where he was and what he was doing that day.)
After the assassination, Curtis says he was followed and intimidated by Strausser. Pepper writes:
“Lenny said that he subsequently became aware that strange things were happening around him. His gas was strangely turned on once when he was about to enter his house. He had lit a cigarette, but as he opened the door he smelled gas and quickly put out the cigarette. A strange Lincoln was occasionally parked across the street from his apartment house. He was frightened. One morning when the car was there, he got into his own car and quickly drove off, and the strange car pulled out and followed him. He managed to see the driver. It was Strausser.”
In the book, Pepper describes how he came to meet with Strausser, who he describes as a committed and devoted racist.
“He had no respect for black people at all,” Pepper says. “He wasn’t explicit about his racism. But he was not at all sympathetic to what Martin King was all about.”
In the hope of prompting an admission, Pepper lied and told him that he had been implicated in the killing by Loyd Jowers – but Strausser didn’t take the bait. Pepper also told Strausser that the footprints found in the bushes after the shooting were from size 13 shoes (which they were). Then he asked him about the size of his feet:
“He had a bit of a grin on his face, and he said ‘13 large,’” Pepper says.
Pepper also arranged to have cab driver Nathan Whitlock, who Strausser knew, tell him that there was a good possibility that he (Strausser) would be indicted for the shooting. He responded: “What are they going to indict me for, something I did 30 years ago?” Then he caught himself and added, “Or something I knew about 30 years ago?”
A threat to the powers that be
As Pepper explains, King was not only hated by the establishment as he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he was feared. Not only did he have the ability to move large numbers of people with his message of peace and tolerance, but he had designs on a political career. According to Pepper, King was planning to run for president on a third-party ticket with fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was also causing panic in powerful circles because he intended to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to an encampment in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 to bring attention to the plight of the poor.
“They were terrified that the anger level when [the demonstrators] were not going to get what they wanted was going to rise to such a point where Martin was going to lose control of that group and the more radical among them would take it over and they’d have a revolution,” Pepper explains. “And they didn’t have the troops to put it down. That was a real fear that the Army had. And I think it was a justifiable fear.”
King would also have posed an increasing threat to the political establishment because he intended to become much more vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War. He had been influenced by an article and photos by Pepper called, “The Children of Vietnam,” which was published in Ramparts Magazine in January 1967 and was going to be reprinted in Look magazine until the man who made that decision, Bill Atwood, had a heart attack and left the magazine. (Atwood told Pepper he received a visit from former New York governor and ambassador to the Soviet Union Averill Harriman who passed on a message from President Johnson that he would appreciate it if Atwood never published anything by Pepper.)
Beyond King’s importance as a powerful force for justice, peace, and equality, he was also Pepper’s friend. And the lawyer/journalist had to deal with that loss as he sought the truth about who really killed King and fought for justice for the man falsely accused of his murder. He writes:
“For me, this is a story rife with sadness, replete with massive accounts of personal and public deception and betrayal. Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen. In addition, there is an element of personal despair that has resulted from this long effort, which has made me even question the wisdom of undertaking this task.” (page xiv, The Plot to Kill King)
http://www.philasun.com/stateside/flori ... injustice/Florida Senate apologizes for 68-year-old racial injustice
May 5, 2017
ABOVE PHOTO: Pictured are three of the Groveland Four. Ernest Thomas was killed in a hail of bullets by law inforcement after being found sleeping under a tress.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. –The Florida Senate formally apologized on Thursday to the families of four Black men accused of raping a white teenager nearly seven decades ago in a case now seen as a racial injustice.
The Senate also is asking Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet to posthumously pardon the men known as the Groveland Four. The Florida House issued the same apology last week. Both votes were unanimous.
“We cannot go back to this terrible event and undo it, but we can acknowledge our wrongs and we can bring peace and healing and closure to the families who have suffered for so long,’’ said Democratic Sen. Gary Farmer, who sponsored the resolution.
Their ordeal began in Lake County in 1949, when a 17-year-old said she had been raped. Three of the men were arrested and severely beaten; a fourth, Ernest Thomas, fled.
A posse of about 1,000 men was formed to hunt down Thomas. He was shot 400 times when they found him sleeping under a tree. White residents also formed a mob and went to a black neighborhood, burning houses and firing guns into homes in a disturbance that took days to quell.
Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd were convicted despite dubious evidence. Other evidence that could have exonerated them — such as a doctor’s conclusion that the teen probably wasn’t raped — was withheld at their trial. Greenlee was sentenced to life, and Irvin and Shepherd to death.
Thurgood Marshall, later the first African-American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, took up Irvin and Shepherd’s appeals for the NAACP, and in 1951 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered new trials.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/us/p ... .html?_r=0Fight Brews Over Push to Shield Americans in Warrantless ...
James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, testifying on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. He calls Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act an “essential tool.” Credit ...
http://pppfocus.com/2017/05/06/abc-hamm ... -election/ABC HAMMERS FBI DIRECTOR COMEY, PUSH THAT HE SWAYED ELECTION
May 6, 2017
http://upnorthlive.com/news/local/north ... al-academyFBI OCTOPUS
Northern Michigan DNR captain completes FBI National Academy
UpNorthLive.com-
(WPBN/WGTU)-- A northern Michigan-based Department of Natural Resources conservation officer recently graduated from the prestigious FBI National ...
http://americanfreepress.net/mistrial-p ... nd-guilty/[ May 6, 2017 ] Mistrial: Protesters Get Off But FBI Informant Found ...
American Free Press
Shockingly, one of the two men convicted had been an FBI informant for years. His cover was ... During testimony, FBI agents said Burleson was an informant.
Last week, the jury in the first of three trials of supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy ended in a hung jury for four of the six defendants. Perhaps most shocking in the case was one of the two found guilty of multiple charges had been a paid FBI informant.
LINK DU JOUR
https://www.lawfareblog.com/week-was-al ... e-post-198