Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised. Mr Larson, Yes, Sir William Pepper, I'm calling you from good morning to you. Good morning. How are you? You're about twenty minutes We're going to Corrida again? Sorry I am, yes, sir. I got a couple of hearings over there this morning. Uh. I have a client who has imparted some information to me and he assures me that he can back up everything. He has told me that quite frankly, could prove that James are already did not shoot Dr King, and I think could probably prove who actually did it. Yeah. I called the Union Hall. I said it's a matter of life and death. I said, I think these people are planning to kill Dr King. The authorities were parade. Oh, we found a gun that James ol Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr King. James Lvey was upon for the official story from My Heart Radio intended for TV. The plan was to get King to the city because they wanted it handled in memphisfore Dead and in cat Hamon. And I've lived with it so long, my sion, and they scared for me. The Lord told me to not the word. I've been wanting to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Claiburg, and this is d MLK Tapes. I'm sitting with Bill Pepper in his cluttered study, listening to a phone conversation that Bill had recorded in I found the unlabeled cassette in a box with others that Bill had stashed at the King Center in Atlanta, a hundred tapes, ninety minutes each. I was doing triage. I was about to set this tape aside because it was just ordinary phone calls. But then some lawyer comes on and tells Bill that he is a client who, thirty years after the fact, can prove that James Earl Ray did not shoot Martin Luther King, the very thing that Pepper had been trying to prove for twenty years. That, of course, it's very exciting. Uh, it's not in the best of hell. And he had quite frankly believed that the King family deserves to know what actually happened. Right. Ah, he has known that great for many years. Apparently they at one time we're imprisoned together in Southeast Missouri when they were both young. Uh. And I'll be quite honest with you, and you could care less about James all right. You know he thanks the Kings deserved to know what happened, and that's why he has come forward. If you're Bill Pepper, you get phone calls like this every once in a while. People who know things reach out often as they approached the end of their lives. I was fascinated by what I heard on this tape, and Bill had agreed to sit and listen to it with me. So that's what we're doing in a study. And at times you can hear the Harlem Street noise from below. So Bill, you're living in England and you get a call from this guy, attorney Larson, and you call him back and he spins you this tale. Um, what do you think about that? What was your initial reaction? Well, my initial reaction was of interest. I had an open mind with respect to witnesses potential with as is coming forward, and here was a guy who was represented and represented himself as to be a lawyer. Seemed to be a lawyer. So I was interested in, uh opening that door and having a conversation. Why would Bill Pepper say that this man on the phone represented himself to be a lawyer. It's an odd way to put it. The answer is because over the years Pepper has been approached by a few people who are not who they said they were, or otherwise offered false information. Bill did agree that this Mr. Larson seemed on the up and up, but there was still the matter of the client. Was he for real? Mr? Larson said he was. He worked for the federal government for many years. He did considerable undercover work, a lot of it through my understanding the U. S. Attorney's office in County Ryan. And have you known this client, Mr Larson for quite a period of time. I have known him for probably seven or eight years. He has several business operations in Tennessee and I have done work for them. And quite honestly, it was stunned when he called and said I need a visit with you. I had no idea that he had the involvement that he did. I see and have you found it to be a reliable person. If he were to tell me that it was going to snow on the fourth day, I would probably laugh that I'd get a cop just in case. I'm Lustralian, for instance. Now, because he said that he has ever met me at any time, Telser, he did testify several years ago an executive session of the Subcommittee on as the Congressional Committee. Yes, yesterday he testified in executive session. Apparently he and Mr Stokes did not hit it off immediately. And I'm sure that will come as no great shot you. Attorney Larson has just dropped a bomb. He said his client had been called to testify before the House Up Committee on Assassinations a full twenty years earlier. Not just anybody gets called before the h s c A. An executive session was reserved for people who had things to say that would be kept secret for fifty years. So who was this guy? Bill Pepper didn't know at this point. He didn't know the guy's name. Back to the phone call. He's a he's a white with the Southerner, Yes, sir, he is from southeast Missouri. Now live isn't another state that I am in contact? With him. How do you suggest we've received as Larson. I mean, I certainly would like in your presence to um to meet with your client. Does he have any any concern about his own situation in terms of prosecution or anything of that sort, But not not a whole bun, because basically his knowledge came after the fact. I mean, he is not extraordinarily concerned about it, although he is well aware that it's possible because of all the other things that had transpired in this case. Uh, what he had suggested to me, and I'll throw this out in you, he had suggested, perhaps if there were some injuries in talking with him, everyone meeting in Atlanta, perhaps at the Key Museum, and he could then basically explained to the sign is what Dexter gets. Okay, that's that's a that's the good starting point suggestion. I think the center is probably too my profile, and I think but I think the idea of having Dexter there is a very good one. I'd very much like to have you president, if that's if that's if you don't object to it, and if that's uh, you know, I think I think my client would prefer that also, is it is we we meet internally outside of Tennessee. I mean, would would Nashville be a possibility for UM? I think Nashville would be a possibility. Yeah. Would he mind on recording this session? I don't believe. So I'll clarify that with him that I certainly would expect you to do that. Quite frankly, we would like to do that. We'll give you a company his information as arson such that it could be um it could be produced in court if he were willing to do that, or is it a portion of it would be admissible? There would be some that I think would be perhaps hearsay, you know. But the circumstances I found to be somewhat chilling. Ye, And what what troubled me, especially as I grew up down in Memphis, right and I was in high school where the murder occurred. Right now, I remember the cast of characters and all of a sudden names were coming back, right. So I based on that, I think that there's there's something there. Listen. I do thank you very much, UM, and please tell your client I'm I'm very grateful to him at his late point in his life. We're coming forward because he wish that his name not be known to me or Dexter prior to any meeting that we uh, yes, or he would prefer not to have that done just yet. That's one that's fairly fine. And how your telephone lines secure? Yes, sir, far as I know I have, well, I have your number. You don't even need to lose that. You could just say it's Rusty calling, okay, And but I will come back to you fairly quickly, and I look forward to meeting you and your client, and I'm sure Dexter will as well. All right, sir, I thank you very much, my pleasure, very forward to meeting you, and thank you, yes, sir. When we were listening to this tape, neither Bill Pepper nor I knew if the lawyer or his client were still alive. And when Bill hung up the phone on the original call, he didn't even know the name of the guy, the one with this new information. But we know it now. His name was Green, Jim Green. According to his story, Green had led a life of crime when he was young and spent time in prison more than once. Then he served some years with law enforcement, after which he opened a couple of topless bars. But he was just twenty one when He says he was picked or more or less told to kill James L. Ray. According to Green, whose voice we will hear right now, he didn't know that doctor King was to be murdered the people and took the money. That may have been difficult to hear, as the recording of this phone conversation between Jim Green and Bill Pepper is of poor quality. Jim Green said, I've been told that he, referring to James Earl Ray, double cross some people and took their money. Now here's the rest of that statement from the Coalst transcript as read by a voice actor. They knew that Ray was going to perform a robbery in Memphis. We were going to kill him after the robbery. We don't even know King is in town as far as we're concerned. We're told that when he turns the corner that if the policeman don't get him, I get him. I was the backup shooter and the cop was late, and then Ray turned and walked the other way where I couldn't get him. Jim Green died about ten years ago, but as you just heard, we have a tape of him talking to Bill Pepper, and we will play that tape in a bit. But Green's lawyer, Rusty Larson, the man you heard on the phone with Bill, is very much alive and still practicing law in Jackson, Tennessee. We contacted Larson and asked if he would tell us what he knew of Jim Green and the plan to murder Ray. We'll hear from Larson after the break. Attorney Larson, Yes, sir, Bill Claibor here, Yes, sir. How are you Bill? Good? Good? How you doing? I'm doing good? Did did our engineer arrive? He has gotten here and he has more equipment than you say, Grace over. I'm at home in upstate New York. An attorney Russell Larson, better known as Rusty Larson, is sitting in his law office in Jackson, Tennessee, where he has practiced law for forty years. Larson grew up in South Memphis in an area called fittingly white Haven, and he was a junior in high school when King was shot. I asked him if he was aware of the desperate, deepening divide in his city. Of course, I was aware of the sanitation strike because that had gone on for quite a while. My dad, being in the restaurant business, was adversely affected by that. But you know, it was just business as usual basically in my world. But business as usual was about to change in Memphis when Dr King was shot. The National Guard troops came in and downtown Memphis got shut down, and he got a little scary at that point, the first time I had ever been around or have much exposure to armed military people with real life guns. Kind of a coming of age time. Larson went to college and got his law degree at Memphis State. Upon graduation, he landed a job with an appellate judge in Jackson, just an hour and a half of the road from Memphis. A few years later, he went out on his own as a criminal defense attorney, which is the work he has done it for since. I asked Larson how this led to Jim Green. Mr Green opened a adult entertainment establishment here called the Doll House, and needless to say, when the topless bar came to town with scantily clad women dancing, it upset a lot of folks and the police department tried to shut them down. I was hired by Jim Green two represent them, and we danced off to Federal Court and all of a sudden we had a federal judge who understood that dancing was really speech and it was protected by the Constitution. And so that's how I got involved with Jim and some of his operations. He often would come to town and would dropped in the office and we would talk for hours of a time, because Jim had plenty of stories to tell, what kind of stories, scary ones about his life of crime and then his life in law enforcement, things that Green had seen or done, and enough that Green himself began to write them down for a book he hoped to publish. The unfinished manuscript was titled Blood and Dishonor, and it was his account of his life on both sides of the law and his role in the murder of Martin Luther King. The book had been kept in a safe by Attorney Larson, who was kind enough to copy its pages and send them to me with an associate reading for us. The book begins this way. I was raised in Carruthersville, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi. The town had bars, whorehouses, drugs, gambling, and about one killing a week. If you wanted anything, all you had to do was ask. But even in a town like that. People live normal lives. I played baseball and football. You might ask, how could I be that normal and end up doing all the things I did. It was easy look at what was around me. As he tells it, Jim Green was fourteen the first time he was put in jail. He had driven someone's truck from Tennessee to Florida to see a girl. When the cops pulled him over, they found a kid without a license. While they were still in high school, Jim and his friend Butch started running moonshine from Missouri into Tennessee and Alabama. They made good money. They also got busted a bunch of times. According to Attorney Larson, Jim was very young when when all this was taking place. I know that his career started when he was was pretty young, maybe even as a juvenile, and then he graduated to adult facilities. He had spent some time behind bars, and he knew the routines, and his personality was such that he had a great way of asking questions and getting people to talk to him. Inside the walls, you had punks, snitches, the ones who ran the drugs, the money, and finally the guards that thought they were cons This is where my education really began, or should I say where I found out what the world was really made of. Prison is a world with rules of its own. You either abide by the con rules or die. That's how simple it is. One of the people Green met in prison was a fellow named James Earle Ray. Green remembers him as a quiet guy who worked in the kitchen. That was about it. They weren't friends or anything, but Green thinks that is Knowing Ray, however, casually, was a reason he was picked for the job of killing him, because Green knew what Ray looked like. I asked Lawson how we found out about Green's involvement in the killing of King. I got the impression that Jim just needed to talk to somebody who didn't know a lot of the people that Jim knew. You know, sometimes you just need to talk to somebody and and if it's somebody that has a confidentiality situation, that your semi safe and talking and getting things off your chest. And I got the impression that there were a lot of ghosts that Jim was dealing with. When you reached out to Larson, Green was out of place in his life where he no longer wanted to carry his and everybody else's secrets about the murder of Dr. King, and both he and Attorney Larson thought that Bill Pepper was the person to talk to, so they each talked to Pepper on the phone and then made plans to meet with him and Dexter King in Memphis. Can you remember anything of what was said when Jim met Dexter King. Nothing as far as great substance. Mainly it was Dexter King trying to ascertain who was involved, what was it all about. Although Larson was representing Green and had grown up in Memphis, he really wasn't up on the complexities of the murder of Martin Luther King. So Larson was hearing a lot of stuff he hadn't heard before. It really kind of opened my eyes that there was more of a conspiracy than I thought there was. I think my idea probably developed fairly late in the game. The more I was involved in criminal defense work and got to know some of the cast of characters in Memphis and the Memphis Police Department, I got the feeling that there were some what we call them suits, the investigators who were involved in either the timing, the surveillance, maybe the planning. I had prepped for my interview with Rusty Larson by reading Jim Green's manuscript Blood and Dishonor, And since Green was no longer alive, I thought Larson and I might enter his story by way of the book and talk about the intrigue or the characters like Buster or j Bird, for whom crime was simply a way of life. I had some paragraphs that I intended to read to Larsen as springboards into Jim Green's story. There was one character in particular who had a powerful position in the Missouri crime mosaic. Yet to Jim Green, he seemed different from the others. His name was Paul, and one evening, Jim and Paul were alone together at the back of the pool hall. This is how Green describes the situation in his book. Paul reached inside his jacket and pulled out what looked like a wallet. He flipped it open, and all I could see were the letters FBI. Paul smiled at me and said, don't worry. I'm your friend, not your enemy. He said. Everybody had to make a little money, even cops. I knew we had worked with the local cops before, but I had never known of the FEDS being crooked. When I left, I drove straight back to Carruthersville. I told j Bird what had happened, and he started laughing and said, I bet you shape your pants. I asked him what he would do if he saw that kind of badge. Jay Bird said not to worry, because he needed us and we needed him, and that I was never to say anything about his badge where we would all end up being dead. I was eager to talk to Attorney Larson about this guy Paul and Paul's boss, who he called Rochi. I thought the book would be our springboard, but I would be disappointed because although Larson had read the manuscript, it had been over twenty years ago and little of it was still in his head. But there remains something important that I wanted from Larson, because if Jim Green's story is true, it points straight back to those who planned the murder of Dr. King. And in our phone conversation, I had found Rusty Larson to be smart, funny, and perceptive, and I wanted to apply those qualities to the question at hand. What did he think of Jim Green? Was Green the sort of man who would have gone to enormous trouble to invent an elaborate, self incriminating story. Why would he want to for attention? Larson didn't think so. He was not the type that needed the attention. He made a good bit of money in his various topless operations and kind of enjoyed that type of life. So I never had the impression that he would have to make up some story just too elevate himself and appear to be something that he wasn't. If anything, Jim just really didn't give a flip. He was who he was and if you like him, great, and if you don't like him, go screw yourself. Yeah, it was real simple with him. How simple. We'll let Jim Green tell you himself. I would run we come. This is Jim Green talking on the phone in late to Bill Pepper in London. Again, because of the tape's quality, this statement will be read by a voice actor. I was running moonshine and stolen cars with the mob out of St. Louis. I was working for Buster Workman Jim Michaels and then boys out of Gaslight. We ran money from the vending machine companies back and forth. Because my cousin was an owner of one of the companies, and I got tied in through them, and that's how I met the agent. I was told to go to this place in St. Louis with Butch and meet this guy. He told me we work hand in hand. They help us, we help them. Back in the sixties, that was the way of life. The agent Jim Green speaks about is a guy named Paul, who had FBI identification. But we're closely with organized crime in the southern US. They help us, we help them, is what he was told. From this point forward, we're going to forego the voice actor and play the original tape. We highly recommend wearing headphones. While some of it may be difficult to hear, we feel it's important that you hear Jim Green make the statements himself. According to Green, Paul was the one who recruited him for the upcoming job in Memphis. Our crowd they robbery as members. We were looking. He had to the robbery. This is what we're doing. That's what you were trying. And I'm told that the mender of polices go back and up. We only no key and then right as far as we're concerned, right, we're told that when Ray turned this corner, then it's the police, and don't get him when he turns upoint when he draw his driving. So when he's walking, I was a bag of pater in case and the cop was k and then Ray turned and walked the other way where I couldn't get what I would have done it or night, I don't know. I say the end. As a kid, I would have been to see. There's one other thing my lower my son told me. I was like, right, he didn't he didn't mention that that. I don't know when Ray will remember me, because I was a very young kid in his army. I was turned his army and I wasn't order taken and Ray had a free to run in the bread and you know it adventicated stuff. And then when they had burned me back through them, I made him again. It made me. We're making before okay now when they and that's one thing, and I think God would pick ncud when they held me in figure and then you remember him. I didn't remember me. And then when they told me he ran with the club board. Then I've been all in because that love and found these very cosys from ringing beginning. Attorney Rusty Larson had said in his call to Pepper that Green had testified before the House Select Committee. So Pepper asked Green about that. I can divide under exective in that, but my catrimonial nobody would allowed that room when I did everybody, but I only came home, you know, I don't they can play to him. And I was already gray, and I knew the Ray didn't do the killing because I was looking at him with the D and uh so my dad's funny was never known and never will be known until two thousand and twenty nine. Okay, so, but did still your name appear anywhere in the well? I was repeating, You're spinning till your name appear anywhere in any of the volumes the report. I don't know they'd let me to warri it, you know, because they had a man and a woman inventityator come to me and men. Right. I was working on an undercover time at the time, right, and uh, they asked me would not come out to night. Ain't no way I'll do. I don't be fay no way, I thought the Brontu right, and uh, he said, well, we've got a way to put me in. What they called me because they could have said head that way and only uh, the propagator and the committee will be the only people. They again, and and then I drink. Then I got a visit from the federal ward before I win, and they told me that I think you can talk about They didn't they want round God. I think it was more warning than anything. The way we worked. Well, I've been involved several other cases that I didn't think was right when you worked for the government. You're John, you do you forget about? It? Was Walter Fauntroy President at your testimony. The only one I remember Walter is who will yes, well Stokes is we think Stokes was pretty much involved. He would invoud a, y don't me? And I looked at anotherment though not only had to me, you know. Pepper then questioned Green about the day the king was killed. Where the one that meant when the eight and out on Lamar that night before and took the dry runs down and we're related with me. We left them up down to enter send up together about three o'clock. Were you and Jim's grilled all that day? Me and Budge was at one time? Yeah, did you did you? We introduced to Lloyd Jowers at any point and back then the first time, I hadn't been down or in that area. No, I didn't know. I didn't know he would be in the group. I was there anyway. But your specific role in this whole operation was pe gave little Rudel, Right, that's what your role was, trying my own him from three thirty three fifteen, you know, you know, holding up where I was there, I could see everything. I couldn't see all right, but I could see in the bar, I could see you drink down the drink. Okay, you can remember when you can describe where you were in your location. Oh yeah. Green said he would do that when they met. But we'll do it here by reading from Blood and Dishonor Green's unpublished account of his life and his role in the murder of Martin Luther King. We arrived in Memphis at two pm on the third of April and got a room. Then we went out and visited a massage parlor. South Haven was full of parlors, and we knew a few of the owners, most of them women. Butch and I got up the next morning and left the motel around noon. Then we went downtown and stopped in a bar by the old King Cotton Hotel while we sat there, but punched me and said, look at this. There was James Earl Ray coming in the door. I asked what if we should do him now? And he said no. We were told he couldn't die until after six pm. And James Earl Ray's account of his coming into Memphis, given to Attorney Louis Garrison, he speaks of entering a bar a few blocks south of Jim's Grill, ordering a beer and asking for directions. But he noticed this two guys who keep looking at him. This is what he said. I got a south Main strate and I went in the bar on the right side, and I think about this an rest and he said those rooms she was standing mark, and she said that it was narrow street and left the block. Or so well. I was in indes in are. I thought maybe it were one apparently watched mate. Now, returning to Green's written account of that afternoon, at about three, Boots dropped me off and I climbed the ladder to the roof and posted myself with a clear view of four to two Mate. I had been told to climb the Loomis building, but I changed that to a building about four doors down because the loomis was right in front of the fire station and I thought it was too wide open. At about three thirty, Ray came out and walked up made in half a block. I lost sight of him. This would carst on would Ray's verified trip to the sporting goods store to buy as he was told to do, a pair of binoculars. From his perch on the roof, Green saw Ray come and go a couple of times as six o'clock approached. Then at five, I saw Ray emerge from the rooming house and get into the Mustang. Ray started his car and pulled away, and I waited for him to turn his car south, but he didn't. I thought he would circle the block and park and walk. This is what I was told, so I waited. Then some minutes later I hear a sound like a backfire. Then I heard hollering and sirens starting to go off. As this was going on, I saw a butch come from the side of the building, and then Paul emerged from the rooming house and I saw Paul lay down what looked like a coat on the sidewalk. Then they got into the car, made a U turn and came toward me. I hurried down, and as soon as I reached the car, pushed asked if I got Ray. I said no. His eyes lit up and he said, damn, we're in trouble. As Green explains in his book, the trouble they were in had to do with the fact that Ray was not intending to rob anybody, as they were told, but he was there to take the blame for the murder of King, and that's why he needed to be dead. The whole idea they had they had to rent room and he would prof sent it me or that police officer head guilty, No, wefriend me you got again and Black that the old man the police and they Bill Pepper ended his conversation with Jim Green by asking him why he had decided to come forward. Maybe I want to clear my card. I didn't have nothing to do with you. Again, I didn't know even but I was on the under side and I put it together. Then when I started real line and everybody, you know, I would not getting body here and not get my mond went on with my life. H So that was it. And sometime after this phone call, Bill Pepper arranged for a meeting in a room at the Memphis Airport with Jim Green, Rusty Larson, and Dexter King. But I could not find a tape of that meeting, either in Bill Pepper's collections or down at the King Center. So as far as the voice of Jim Green telling a story, we only have this short phone conversation with Pepper in London. I felt proud of myself for finding this tape, but when we had finished listening to it, I was surprised to learn that after his meeting with Jim Green and Extra King in Memphis, Bill Pepper concluded that Jim Green's story was fabricated, that Green had been sent forward with a phony story for some reason. I believe Green was largely a disinformation agent, and I think we saw him that way, and I thought it didn't make sense of the total picture that eventually I've covered. The only thing that gave Mr Larson any credible ability was the fact that he had a client he was willing to put before us, who was going to tell us a story about how his job was a designation that killed James or Ray, and that seemed to be par for the course. I mean, Patsy's are routinely disposed of because they may inadvertently or or or actually learn facts that could be embarrassing to the people involved with the conspiracy. But that was about the only thing that Pepper found in Green's favor. This guy is creating a scenario that is supposed to give credibility to a story that he has, but he falls short in so many areas. And he, for example, could not have been watching Ray. He says at one point that he he saw Ray at the time of the shooting. It impossible. He couldn't have couldn't have done that. Uh Ray was up at the gas station with the time the shooting took place, not anywhere else. Pepper also questioned whether Green had met Ray in prison and whether he had really testified before the House collect Committee in both of those stories had run true to me. I then asked what kind of damage you could have done if Green had been let in the door? Pepper rolled his eyes. Do you remember what time we're talking about here? Do you you know what here we're talking about? We're talking about him surfacing at the time when the trial was about to take place, the civil trial. They didn't want that civil trial. The government didn't want it at all because of all the evidence that was laid out. So this was all a hated time when it would be very important to undercutt undermine, or distract us from where we were going and what we were learning. So Jim Green appeared out of the mist when Bill Pepper was beginning to put together the civil trial that would feature all the evidence that had surfaced in the thirty years following King's murder. This was the very thing that the authorities that fought so hard against, a trial with witness testimony preserved in court records, but putting on the trial was no small thing. Seventy witnesses flying in and out of Memphis and put up in hotels, all to be scheduled, arranged, and somehow paid for. It was a tremendous undertaking. And because he had been fed disinformation in the past, Pepper was on the lookout for someone who might try to push their way onto the witness stand and then make a mockery of the whole proceeding and to build Pepper, Jim Green looked like that guy that said, I believe that Jim Green's story is true, at least most of it. In arriving at this conclusion. I had the advantage of twenty additional years to watch the story play out. I had talked to Rusty Larson, who was not only Jim Green's lawyer but also his friend, and I had the extraordinary benefit fit of reading Jim Green's unpublished, an unvarnished manuscript. So Bill Pepper and I, widely separated in time, came to different conclusions about Jim Green. We've talked about it, and I think it speaks to the health of our relationship that we can see pieces of this thing differently. Bill has spent over forty years of his life successfully investigating this murder. I would not be here today except for the work he has done. As to my take, was Jim Green looking at Ray at the moment of the shooting as he said to Bill Pepper, No, I think he was giving the abbreviated form of the story. He intended to sit down with Pepper and Dexter King and lay it all out, as he did in his book where he explains how James ol Ray emerged from the roomy house before six pm, got into his car and drove away just as Ray said he did, and the same said by witnesses Hendricks and read in their sworn statements to the FBI. Was Green telling the truth when he said he didn't know that King was to be killed? Maybe not, but it's a very understandable, almost forgivable lie to tell. If it was a lie, Green got sucked into the plot, but none of it was his idea. He was just twenty one. But the biggest reason to believe that Green was not an agent of disinformation is that his story points an accusing finger back to the very same people that Bill Pepper was pointing to, including the FBI. But it's not a simple thumbs up or thumbs down with Jim Green, because if you accept Green's story, you bring on stage a cast of characters that doesn't exactly fit with the ones already there. For example, Ray says that it was a man named Raoul who was up in the rooming house with him, sending him on errands and presumably placing the rifle with raised finger prints out on the sidewalk, a rifle covered by a bedspread. But according to Jim Green, Paul was the one who appeared out of the rooming house and placed something on the street, something that from his instance, looked like a Coat. Is it possible that Paul was Raoul, or if they were separate people at different times in his year long journey to Memphis. Did Ray to protect himself roll him into one, perhaps along with others to finish this puzzle. It would have helped if Ray had been more forthcoming with his story. But Ray was not the only one whose secrets make it difficult to construct a clean mosaic of this crime. M Jim Green says he was called to testify before the House Select Committee in He believes that came about because, in a foolish moment, he told Memphis reporter Kay Black that he knew that Ray had not killed King. Green said that two agents accompanied him to Washington, and before he testified, he was visited by the agent he knew as Paul and Paul's boss, who he knew was Rocchi, a visit he interpreted as a warning. What did Green tell the committee? We don't know, because, like with a lot of other stuff that might shed light on this crime, it was kept secret, not to be revealed until sixty years after the death of Martin Luther King. If King were murdered by James Earl Ray acting alone, what was the need for secrecy. If the purpose of the committee was to use their power to investigate this murder and reveal to the public their findings, why are their secret files and secret testimony. I believe that Jim Green's story is based in truth, and because of the official secrecy surrounding this murder and the secrecy surrounding his testimony, I feel obligated to present his story, even if it does not precisely fit with other stories that I also believe are based in truth. So that is what I have done. I'll close with a brief paragraph from Jim Green's unpublished account of his participation in this horrific crime. So why did I wait so long to tell what I know? Watch TV and see how they try to discredit the people who do come forward. Then I would ask myself, what about my family? What if they charged me even though I didn't know King was to be killed? Why ruined my life over something no one will believe or jeopardize what I now have for a murder that took place over thirty years ago. And then I think that I am older now and want to clear the air before death. The first time I tried, the subcommittee didn't want the truth. But this time I will do it my way, and if people don't believe me, at least I know that I told the truth and the rest will be up to history next time. On the email K tapes is how we live. As you didn't have a rap, how would you feel about undergoing hypnosis for the purpose of taking you back and putting you face to face with this man to see if you could remember his name. He tells you that he was the one who did the shooting straight up, Yeah, he told me, pop. I mean it was three guys out there were Lionel Clark, my brother, and had no old man and no man didn't have guts to do it is to shake in ship. If it was the brother that did it, and the brother convinced the younger brother that he was the one who did it, it would give him that type of insulation, that type of protection. There was a man that was a sign to get the king before anybody could run up from anywhere to get the king and make sure he was dead. It was already arranged that he was to go to Saint Joseph's Hospital down the straight. He never was gonna make it out of that emergency room. Alive. Thanks for listening to The m l K Tapes, a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This podcast is not specifically endorsed by the King Family or the King of State. The Email k Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Claiper. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio with producers Trevor Young and Ben Keebrick. Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stepman. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by Mr Soul two six with photography by Artemis Jenkins. Special thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at u t A, The Nord Group, back Median Marketing, Envisioned Business Management, and Station sixteen. If you have questions, you can visit our website, the Email k Tapes dot com. We posted photos and videos related to the podcast on our social media accounts. You can check them out at the Email K Tapes. From our podcasts from I Heart Radio and ten Your Foot TV, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to the MLK Tapes, a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised. Mr Larson, Yes, Sir William Pepper, I'm calling you from good morning to you. Good morning. How are you? You're about twenty minutes We're going to Corrida again? Sorry I am, yes, sir. I got a couple of hearings over there this morning. Uh. I have a client who has imparted some information to me and he assures me that he can back up everything. He has told me that quite frankly, could prove that James are already did not shoot Dr King, and I think could probably prove who actually did it. Yeah. I called the Union Hall. I said it's a matter of life and death. I said, I think these people are planning to kill Dr King. The authorities were parade. Oh, we found a gun that James ol Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Dr King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr King. James Lvey was upon for the official story from My Heart Radio intended for TV. The plan was to get King to the city because they wanted it handled in memphisfore Dead and in cat Hamon. And I've lived with it so long, my sion, and they scared for me. The Lord told me to not the word. I've been wanting to tell it all my life. I'm Bill Claiburg, and this is d MLK Tapes. I'm sitting with Bill Pepper in his cluttered study, listening to a phone conversation that Bill had recorded in I found the unlabeled cassette in a box with others that Bill had stashed at the King Center in Atlanta, a hundred tapes, ninety minutes each. I was doing triage. I was about to set this tape aside because it was just ordinary phone calls. But then some lawyer comes on and tells Bill that he is a client who, thirty years after the fact, can prove that James Earl Ray did not shoot Martin Luther King, the very thing that Pepper had been trying to prove for twenty years. That, of course, it's very exciting. Uh, it's not in the best of hell. And he had quite frankly believed that the King family deserves to know what actually happened. Right. Ah, he has known that great for many years. Apparently they at one time we're imprisoned together in Southeast Missouri when they were both young. Uh. And I'll be quite honest with you, and you could care less about James all right. You know he thanks the Kings deserved to know what happened, and that's why he has come forward. If you're Bill Pepper, you get phone calls like this every once in a while. People who know things reach out often as they approached the end of their lives. I was fascinated by what I heard on this tape, and Bill had agreed to sit and listen to it with me. So that's what we're doing in a study. And at times you can hear the Harlem Street noise from below. So Bill, you're living in England and you get a call from this guy, attorney Larson, and you call him back and he spins you this tale. Um, what do you think about that? What was your initial reaction? Well, my initial reaction was of interest. I had an open mind with respect to witnesses potential with as is coming forward, and here was a guy who was represented and represented himself as to be a lawyer. Seemed to be a lawyer. So I was interested in, uh opening that door and having a conversation. Why would Bill Pepper say that this man on the phone represented himself to be a lawyer. It's an odd way to put it. The answer is because over the years Pepper has been approached by a few people who are not who they said they were, or otherwise offered false information. Bill did agree that this Mr. Larson seemed on the up and up, but there was still the matter of the client. Was he for real? Mr? Larson said he was. He worked for the federal government for many years. He did considerable undercover work, a lot of it through my understanding the U. S. Attorney's office in County Ryan. And have you known this client, Mr Larson for quite a period of time. I have known him for probably seven or eight years. He has several business operations in Tennessee and I have done work for them. And quite honestly, it was stunned when he called and said I need a visit with you. I had no idea that he had the involvement that he did. I see and have you found it to be a reliable person. If he were to tell me that it was going to snow on the fourth day, I would probably laugh that I'd get a cop just in case. I'm Lustralian, for instance. Now, because he said that he has ever met me at any time, Telser, he did testify several years ago an executive session of the Subcommittee on as the Congressional Committee. Yes, yesterday he testified in executive session. Apparently he and Mr Stokes did not hit it off immediately. And I'm sure that will come as no great shot you. Attorney Larson has just dropped a bomb. He said his client had been called to testify before the House Up Committee on Assassinations a full twenty years earlier. Not just anybody gets called before the h s c A. An executive session was reserved for people who had things to say that would be kept secret for fifty years. So who was this guy? Bill Pepper didn't know at this point. He didn't know the guy's name. Back to the phone call. He's a he's a white with the Southerner, Yes, sir, he is from southeast Missouri. Now live isn't another state that I am in contact? With him. How do you suggest we've received as Larson. I mean, I certainly would like in your presence to um to meet with your client. Does he have any any concern about his own situation in terms of prosecution or anything of that sort, But not not a whole bun, because basically his knowledge came after the fact. I mean, he is not extraordinarily concerned about it, although he is well aware that it's possible because of all the other things that had transpired in this case. Uh, what he had suggested to me, and I'll throw this out in you, he had suggested, perhaps if there were some injuries in talking with him, everyone meeting in Atlanta, perhaps at the Key Museum, and he could then basically explained to the sign is what Dexter gets. Okay, that's that's a that's the good starting point suggestion. I think the center is probably too my profile, and I think but I think the idea of having Dexter there is a very good one. I'd very much like to have you president, if that's if that's if you don't object to it, and if that's uh, you know, I think I think my client would prefer that also, is it is we we meet internally outside of Tennessee. I mean, would would Nashville be a possibility for UM? I think Nashville would be a possibility. Yeah. Would he mind on recording this session? I don't believe. So I'll clarify that with him that I certainly would expect you to do that. Quite frankly, we would like to do that. We'll give you a company his information as arson such that it could be um it could be produced in court if he were willing to do that, or is it a portion of it would be admissible? There would be some that I think would be perhaps hearsay, you know. But the circumstances I found to be somewhat chilling. Ye, And what what troubled me, especially as I grew up down in Memphis, right and I was in high school where the murder occurred. Right now, I remember the cast of characters and all of a sudden names were coming back, right. So I based on that, I think that there's there's something there. Listen. I do thank you very much, UM, and please tell your client I'm I'm very grateful to him at his late point in his life. We're coming forward because he wish that his name not be known to me or Dexter prior to any meeting that we uh, yes, or he would prefer not to have that done just yet. That's one that's fairly fine. And how your telephone lines secure? Yes, sir, far as I know I have, well, I have your number. You don't even need to lose that. You could just say it's Rusty calling, okay, And but I will come back to you fairly quickly, and I look forward to meeting you and your client, and I'm sure Dexter will as well. All right, sir, I thank you very much, my pleasure, very forward to meeting you, and thank you, yes, sir. When we were listening to this tape, neither Bill Pepper nor I knew if the lawyer or his client were still alive. And when Bill hung up the phone on the original call, he didn't even know the name of the guy, the one with this new information. But we know it now. His name was Green, Jim Green. According to his story, Green had led a life of crime when he was young and spent time in prison more than once. Then he served some years with law enforcement, after which he opened a couple of topless bars. But he was just twenty one when He says he was picked or more or less told to kill James L. Ray. According to Green, whose voice we will hear right now, he didn't know that doctor King was to be murdered the people and took the money. That may have been difficult to hear, as the recording of this phone conversation between Jim Green and Bill Pepper is of poor quality. Jim Green said, I've been told that he, referring to James Earl Ray, double cross some people and took their money. Now here's the rest of that statement from the Coalst transcript as read by a voice actor. They knew that Ray was going to perform a robbery in Memphis. We were going to kill him after the robbery. We don't even know King is in town as far as we're concerned. We're told that when he turns the corner that if the policeman don't get him, I get him. I was the backup shooter and the cop was late, and then Ray turned and walked the other way where I couldn't get him. Jim Green died about ten years ago, but as you just heard, we have a tape of him talking to Bill Pepper, and we will play that tape in a bit. But Green's lawyer, Rusty Larson, the man you heard on the phone with Bill, is very much alive and still practicing law in Jackson, Tennessee. We contacted Larson and asked if he would tell us what he knew of Jim Green and the plan to murder Ray. We'll hear from Larson after the break. Attorney Larson, Yes, sir, Bill Claibor here, Yes, sir. How are you Bill? Good? Good? How you doing? I'm doing good? Did did our engineer arrive? He has gotten here and he has more equipment than you say, Grace over. I'm at home in upstate New York. An attorney Russell Larson, better known as Rusty Larson, is sitting in his law office in Jackson, Tennessee, where he has practiced law for forty years. Larson grew up in South Memphis in an area called fittingly white Haven, and he was a junior in high school when King was shot. I asked him if he was aware of the desperate, deepening divide in his city. Of course, I was aware of the sanitation strike because that had gone on for quite a while. My dad, being in the restaurant business, was adversely affected by that. But you know, it was just business as usual basically in my world. But business as usual was about to change in Memphis when Dr King was shot. The National Guard troops came in and downtown Memphis got shut down, and he got a little scary at that point, the first time I had ever been around or have much exposure to armed military people with real life guns. Kind of a coming of age time. Larson went to college and got his law degree at Memphis State. Upon graduation, he landed a job with an appellate judge in Jackson, just an hour and a half of the road from Memphis. A few years later, he went out on his own as a criminal defense attorney, which is the work he has done it for since. I asked Larson how this led to Jim Green. Mr Green opened a adult entertainment establishment here called the Doll House, and needless to say, when the topless bar came to town with scantily clad women dancing, it upset a lot of folks and the police department tried to shut them down. I was hired by Jim Green two represent them, and we danced off to Federal Court and all of a sudden we had a federal judge who understood that dancing was really speech and it was protected by the Constitution. And so that's how I got involved with Jim and some of his operations. He often would come to town and would dropped in the office and we would talk for hours of a time, because Jim had plenty of stories to tell, what kind of stories, scary ones about his life of crime and then his life in law enforcement, things that Green had seen or done, and enough that Green himself began to write them down for a book he hoped to publish. The unfinished manuscript was titled Blood and Dishonor, and it was his account of his life on both sides of the law and his role in the murder of Martin Luther King. The book had been kept in a safe by Attorney Larson, who was kind enough to copy its pages and send them to me with an associate reading for us. The book begins this way. I was raised in Carruthersville, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi. The town had bars, whorehouses, drugs, gambling, and about one killing a week. If you wanted anything, all you had to do was ask. But even in a town like that. People live normal lives. I played baseball and football. You might ask, how could I be that normal and end up doing all the things I did. It was easy look at what was around me. As he tells it, Jim Green was fourteen the first time he was put in jail. He had driven someone's truck from Tennessee to Florida to see a girl. When the cops pulled him over, they found a kid without a license. While they were still in high school, Jim and his friend Butch started running moonshine from Missouri into Tennessee and Alabama. They made good money. They also got busted a bunch of times. According to Attorney Larson, Jim was very young when when all this was taking place. I know that his career started when he was was pretty young, maybe even as a juvenile, and then he graduated to adult facilities. He had spent some time behind bars, and he knew the routines, and his personality was such that he had a great way of asking questions and getting people to talk to him. Inside the walls, you had punks, snitches, the ones who ran the drugs, the money, and finally the guards that thought they were cons This is where my education really began, or should I say where I found out what the world was really made of. Prison is a world with rules of its own. You either abide by the con rules or die. That's how simple it is. One of the people Green met in prison was a fellow named James Earle Ray. Green remembers him as a quiet guy who worked in the kitchen. That was about it. They weren't friends or anything, but Green thinks that is Knowing Ray, however, casually, was a reason he was picked for the job of killing him, because Green knew what Ray looked like. I asked Lawson how we found out about Green's involvement in the killing of King. I got the impression that Jim just needed to talk to somebody who didn't know a lot of the people that Jim knew. You know, sometimes you just need to talk to somebody and and if it's somebody that has a confidentiality situation, that your semi safe and talking and getting things off your chest. And I got the impression that there were a lot of ghosts that Jim was dealing with. When you reached out to Larson, Green was out of place in his life where he no longer wanted to carry his and everybody else's secrets about the murder of Dr. King, and both he and Attorney Larson thought that Bill Pepper was the person to talk to, so they each talked to Pepper on the phone and then made plans to meet with him and Dexter King in Memphis. Can you remember anything of what was said when Jim met Dexter King. Nothing as far as great substance. Mainly it was Dexter King trying to ascertain who was involved, what was it all about. Although Larson was representing Green and had grown up in Memphis, he really wasn't up on the complexities of the murder of Martin Luther King. So Larson was hearing a lot of stuff he hadn't heard before. It really kind of opened my eyes that there was more of a conspiracy than I thought there was. I think my idea probably developed fairly late in the game. The more I was involved in criminal defense work and got to know some of the cast of characters in Memphis and the Memphis Police Department, I got the feeling that there were some what we call them suits, the investigators who were involved in either the timing, the surveillance, maybe the planning. I had prepped for my interview with Rusty Larson by reading Jim Green's manuscript Blood and Dishonor, And since Green was no longer alive, I thought Larson and I might enter his story by way of the book and talk about the intrigue or the characters like Buster or j Bird, for whom crime was simply a way of life. I had some paragraphs that I intended to read to Larsen as springboards into Jim Green's story. There was one character in particular who had a powerful position in the Missouri crime mosaic. Yet to Jim Green, he seemed different from the others. His name was Paul, and one evening, Jim and Paul were alone together at the back of the pool hall. This is how Green describes the situation in his book. Paul reached inside his jacket and pulled out what looked like a wallet. He flipped it open, and all I could see were the letters FBI. Paul smiled at me and said, don't worry. I'm your friend, not your enemy. He said. Everybody had to make a little money, even cops. I knew we had worked with the local cops before, but I had never known of the FEDS being crooked. When I left, I drove straight back to Carruthersville. I told j Bird what had happened, and he started laughing and said, I bet you shape your pants. I asked him what he would do if he saw that kind of badge. Jay Bird said not to worry, because he needed us and we needed him, and that I was never to say anything about his badge where we would all end up being dead. I was eager to talk to Attorney Larson about this guy Paul and Paul's boss, who he called Rochi. I thought the book would be our springboard, but I would be disappointed because although Larson had read the manuscript, it had been over twenty years ago and little of it was still in his head. But there remains something important that I wanted from Larson, because if Jim Green's story is true, it points straight back to those who planned the murder of Dr. King. And in our phone conversation, I had found Rusty Larson to be smart, funny, and perceptive, and I wanted to apply those qualities to the question at hand. What did he think of Jim Green? Was Green the sort of man who would have gone to enormous trouble to invent an elaborate, self incriminating story. Why would he want to for attention? Larson didn't think so. He was not the type that needed the attention. He made a good bit of money in his various topless operations and kind of enjoyed that type of life. So I never had the impression that he would have to make up some story just too elevate himself and appear to be something that he wasn't. If anything, Jim just really didn't give a flip. He was who he was and if you like him, great, and if you don't like him, go screw yourself. Yeah, it was real simple with him. How simple. We'll let Jim Green tell you himself. I would run we come. This is Jim Green talking on the phone in late to Bill Pepper in London. Again, because of the tape's quality, this statement will be read by a voice actor. I was running moonshine and stolen cars with the mob out of St. Louis. I was working for Buster Workman Jim Michaels and then boys out of Gaslight. We ran money from the vending machine companies back and forth. Because my cousin was an owner of one of the companies, and I got tied in through them, and that's how I met the agent. I was told to go to this place in St. Louis with Butch and meet this guy. He told me we work hand in hand. They help us, we help them. Back in the sixties, that was the way of life. The agent Jim Green speaks about is a guy named Paul, who had FBI identification. But we're closely with organized crime in the southern US. They help us, we help them, is what he was told. From this point forward, we're going to forego the voice actor and play the original tape. We highly recommend wearing headphones. While some of it may be difficult to hear, we feel it's important that you hear Jim Green make the statements himself. According to Green, Paul was the one who recruited him for the upcoming job in Memphis. Our crowd they robbery as members. We were looking. He had to the robbery. This is what we're doing. That's what you were trying. And I'm told that the mender of polices go back and up. We only no key and then right as far as we're concerned, right, we're told that when Ray turned this corner, then it's the police, and don't get him when he turns upoint when he draw his driving. So when he's walking, I was a bag of pater in case and the cop was k and then Ray turned and walked the other way where I couldn't get what I would have done it or night, I don't know. I say the end. As a kid, I would have been to see. There's one other thing my lower my son told me. I was like, right, he didn't he didn't mention that that. I don't know when Ray will remember me, because I was a very young kid in his army. I was turned his army and I wasn't order taken and Ray had a free to run in the bread and you know it adventicated stuff. And then when they had burned me back through them, I made him again. It made me. We're making before okay now when they and that's one thing, and I think God would pick ncud when they held me in figure and then you remember him. I didn't remember me. And then when they told me he ran with the club board. Then I've been all in because that love and found these very cosys from ringing beginning. Attorney Rusty Larson had said in his call to Pepper that Green had testified before the House Select Committee. So Pepper asked Green about that. I can divide under exective in that, but my catrimonial nobody would allowed that room when I did everybody, but I only came home, you know, I don't they can play to him. And I was already gray, and I knew the Ray didn't do the killing because I was looking at him with the D and uh so my dad's funny was never known and never will be known until two thousand and twenty nine. Okay, so, but did still your name appear anywhere in the well? I was repeating, You're spinning till your name appear anywhere in any of the volumes the report. I don't know they'd let me to warri it, you know, because they had a man and a woman inventityator come to me and men. Right. I was working on an undercover time at the time, right, and uh, they asked me would not come out to night. Ain't no way I'll do. I don't be fay no way, I thought the Brontu right, and uh, he said, well, we've got a way to put me in. What they called me because they could have said head that way and only uh, the propagator and the committee will be the only people. They again, and and then I drink. Then I got a visit from the federal ward before I win, and they told me that I think you can talk about They didn't they want round God. I think it was more warning than anything. The way we worked. Well, I've been involved several other cases that I didn't think was right when you worked for the government. You're John, you do you forget about? It? Was Walter Fauntroy President at your testimony. The only one I remember Walter is who will yes, well Stokes is we think Stokes was pretty much involved. He would invoud a, y don't me? And I looked at anotherment though not only had to me, you know. Pepper then questioned Green about the day the king was killed. Where the one that meant when the eight and out on Lamar that night before and took the dry runs down and we're related with me. We left them up down to enter send up together about three o'clock. Were you and Jim's grilled all that day? Me and Budge was at one time? Yeah, did you did you? We introduced to Lloyd Jowers at any point and back then the first time, I hadn't been down or in that area. No, I didn't know. I didn't know he would be in the group. I was there anyway. But your specific role in this whole operation was pe gave little Rudel, Right, that's what your role was, trying my own him from three thirty three fifteen, you know, you know, holding up where I was there, I could see everything. I couldn't see all right, but I could see in the bar, I could see you drink down the drink. Okay, you can remember when you can describe where you were in your location. Oh yeah. Green said he would do that when they met. But we'll do it here by reading from Blood and Dishonor Green's unpublished account of his life and his role in the murder of Martin Luther King. We arrived in Memphis at two pm on the third of April and got a room. Then we went out and visited a massage parlor. South Haven was full of parlors, and we knew a few of the owners, most of them women. Butch and I got up the next morning and left the motel around noon. Then we went downtown and stopped in a bar by the old King Cotton Hotel while we sat there, but punched me and said, look at this. There was James Earl Ray coming in the door. I asked what if we should do him now? And he said no. We were told he couldn't die until after six pm. And James Earl Ray's account of his coming into Memphis, given to Attorney Louis Garrison, he speaks of entering a bar a few blocks south of Jim's Grill, ordering a beer and asking for directions. But he noticed this two guys who keep looking at him. This is what he said. I got a south Main strate and I went in the bar on the right side, and I think about this an rest and he said those rooms she was standing mark, and she said that it was narrow street and left the block. Or so well. I was in indes in are. I thought maybe it were one apparently watched mate. Now, returning to Green's written account of that afternoon, at about three, Boots dropped me off and I climbed the ladder to the roof and posted myself with a clear view of four to two Mate. I had been told to climb the Loomis building, but I changed that to a building about four doors down because the loomis was right in front of the fire station and I thought it was too wide open. At about three thirty, Ray came out and walked up made in half a block. I lost sight of him. This would carst on would Ray's verified trip to the sporting goods store to buy as he was told to do, a pair of binoculars. From his perch on the roof, Green saw Ray come and go a couple of times as six o'clock approached. Then at five, I saw Ray emerge from the rooming house and get into the Mustang. Ray started his car and pulled away, and I waited for him to turn his car south, but he didn't. I thought he would circle the block and park and walk. This is what I was told, so I waited. Then some minutes later I hear a sound like a backfire. Then I heard hollering and sirens starting to go off. As this was going on, I saw a butch come from the side of the building, and then Paul emerged from the rooming house and I saw Paul lay down what looked like a coat on the sidewalk. Then they got into the car, made a U turn and came toward me. I hurried down, and as soon as I reached the car, pushed asked if I got Ray. I said no. His eyes lit up and he said, damn, we're in trouble. As Green explains in his book, the trouble they were in had to do with the fact that Ray was not intending to rob anybody, as they were told, but he was there to take the blame for the murder of King, and that's why he needed to be dead. The whole idea they had they had to rent room and he would prof sent it me or that police officer head guilty, No, wefriend me you got again and Black that the old man the police and they Bill Pepper ended his conversation with Jim Green by asking him why he had decided to come forward. Maybe I want to clear my card. I didn't have nothing to do with you. Again, I didn't know even but I was on the under side and I put it together. Then when I started real line and everybody, you know, I would not getting body here and not get my mond went on with my life. H So that was it. And sometime after this phone call, Bill Pepper arranged for a meeting in a room at the Memphis Airport with Jim Green, Rusty Larson, and Dexter King. But I could not find a tape of that meeting, either in Bill Pepper's collections or down at the King Center. So as far as the voice of Jim Green telling a story, we only have this short phone conversation with Pepper in London. I felt proud of myself for finding this tape, but when we had finished listening to it, I was surprised to learn that after his meeting with Jim Green and Extra King in Memphis, Bill Pepper concluded that Jim Green's story was fabricated, that Green had been sent forward with a phony story for some reason. I believe Green was largely a disinformation agent, and I think we saw him that way, and I thought it didn't make sense of the total picture that eventually I've covered. The only thing that gave Mr Larson any credible ability was the fact that he had a client he was willing to put before us, who was going to tell us a story about how his job was a designation that killed James or Ray, and that seemed to be par for the course. I mean, Patsy's are routinely disposed of because they may inadvertently or or or actually learn facts that could be embarrassing to the people involved with the conspiracy. But that was about the only thing that Pepper found in Green's favor. This guy is creating a scenario that is supposed to give credibility to a story that he has, but he falls short in so many areas. And he, for example, could not have been watching Ray. He says at one point that he he saw Ray at the time of the shooting. It impossible. He couldn't have couldn't have done that. Uh Ray was up at the gas station with the time the shooting took place, not anywhere else. Pepper also questioned whether Green had met Ray in prison and whether he had really testified before the House collect Committee in both of those stories had run true to me. I then asked what kind of damage you could have done if Green had been let in the door? Pepper rolled his eyes. Do you remember what time we're talking about here? Do you you know what here we're talking about? We're talking about him surfacing at the time when the trial was about to take place, the civil trial. They didn't want that civil trial. The government didn't want it at all because of all the evidence that was laid out. So this was all a hated time when it would be very important to undercutt undermine, or distract us from where we were going and what we were learning. So Jim Green appeared out of the mist when Bill Pepper was beginning to put together the civil trial that would feature all the evidence that had surfaced in the thirty years following King's murder. This was the very thing that the authorities that fought so hard against, a trial with witness testimony preserved in court records, but putting on the trial was no small thing. Seventy witnesses flying in and out of Memphis and put up in hotels, all to be scheduled, arranged, and somehow paid for. It was a tremendous undertaking. And because he had been fed disinformation in the past, Pepper was on the lookout for someone who might try to push their way onto the witness stand and then make a mockery of the whole proceeding and to build Pepper, Jim Green looked like that guy that said, I believe that Jim Green's story is true, at least most of it. In arriving at this conclusion. I had the advantage of twenty additional years to watch the story play out. I had talked to Rusty Larson, who was not only Jim Green's lawyer but also his friend, and I had the extraordinary benefit fit of reading Jim Green's unpublished, an unvarnished manuscript. So Bill Pepper and I, widely separated in time, came to different conclusions about Jim Green. We've talked about it, and I think it speaks to the health of our relationship that we can see pieces of this thing differently. Bill has spent over forty years of his life successfully investigating this murder. I would not be here today except for the work he has done. As to my take, was Jim Green looking at Ray at the moment of the shooting as he said to Bill Pepper, No, I think he was giving the abbreviated form of the story. He intended to sit down with Pepper and Dexter King and lay it all out, as he did in his book where he explains how James ol Ray emerged from the roomy house before six pm, got into his car and drove away just as Ray said he did, and the same said by witnesses Hendricks and read in their sworn statements to the FBI. Was Green telling the truth when he said he didn't know that King was to be killed? Maybe not, but it's a very understandable, almost forgivable lie to tell. If it was a lie, Green got sucked into the plot, but none of it was his idea. He was just twenty one. But the biggest reason to believe that Green was not an agent of disinformation is that his story points an accusing finger back to the very same people that Bill Pepper was pointing to, including the FBI. But it's not a simple thumbs up or thumbs down with Jim Green, because if you accept Green's story, you bring on stage a cast of characters that doesn't exactly fit with the ones already there. For example, Ray says that it was a man named Raoul who was up in the rooming house with him, sending him on errands and presumably placing the rifle with raised finger prints out on the sidewalk, a rifle covered by a bedspread. But according to Jim Green, Paul was the one who appeared out of the rooming house and placed something on the street, something that from his instance, looked like a Coat. Is it possible that Paul was Raoul, or if they were separate people at different times in his year long journey to Memphis. Did Ray to protect himself roll him into one, perhaps along with others to finish this puzzle. It would have helped if Ray had been more forthcoming with his story. But Ray was not the only one whose secrets make it difficult to construct a clean mosaic of this crime. M Jim Green says he was called to testify before the House Select Committee in He believes that came about because, in a foolish moment, he told Memphis reporter Kay Black that he knew that Ray had not killed King. Green said that two agents accompanied him to Washington, and before he testified, he was visited by the agent he knew as Paul and Paul's boss, who he knew was Rocchi, a visit he interpreted as a warning. What did Green tell the committee? We don't know, because, like with a lot of other stuff that might shed light on this crime, it was kept secret, not to be revealed until sixty years after the death of Martin Luther King. If King were murdered by James Earl Ray acting alone, what was the need for secrecy. If the purpose of the committee was to use their power to investigate this murder and reveal to the public their findings, why are their secret files and secret testimony. I believe that Jim Green's story is based in truth, and because of the official secrecy surrounding this murder and the secrecy surrounding his testimony, I feel obligated to present his story, even if it does not precisely fit with other stories that I also believe are based in truth. So that is what I have done. I'll close with a brief paragraph from Jim Green's unpublished account of his participation in this horrific crime. So why did I wait so long to tell what I know? Watch TV and see how they try to discredit the people who do come forward. Then I would ask myself, what about my family? What if they charged me even though I didn't know King was to be killed? Why ruined my life over something no one will believe or jeopardize what I now have for a murder that took place over thirty years ago. And then I think that I am older now and want to clear the air before death. The first time I tried, the subcommittee didn't want the truth. But this time I will do it my way, and if people don't believe me, at least I know that I told the truth and the rest will be up to history next time. On the email K tapes is how we live. As you didn't have a rap, how would you feel about undergoing hypnosis for the purpose of taking you back and putting you face to face with this man to see if you could remember his name. He tells you that he was the one who did the shooting straight up, Yeah, he told me, pop. I mean it was three guys out there were Lionel Clark, my brother, and had no old man and no man didn't have guts to do it is to shake in ship. If it was the brother that did it, and the brother convinced the younger brother that he was the one who did it, it would give him that type of insulation, that type of protection. There was a man that was a sign to get the king before anybody could run up from anywhere to get the king and make sure he was dead. It was already arranged that he was to go to Saint Joseph's Hospital down the straight. He never was gonna make it out of that emergency room. Alive. Thanks for listening to The m l K Tapes, a production of I Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This podcast is not specifically endorsed by the King Family or the King of State. The Email k Tapes is written and hosted by Bill Claiper. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio with producers Trevor Young and Ben Keebrick. Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stepman. Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set. Cover art by Mr Soul two six with photography by Artemis Jenkins. Special thanks to Owen Rosenbaum and Grace Royer at u t A, The Nord Group, back Median Marketing, Envisioned Business Management, and Station sixteen. If you have questions, you can visit our website, the Email k Tapes dot com. 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