ALPHA 184

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.  We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate".      -MLK


Early 2009. Portofino Hotel & Yacht Club. Redondo Beach, CA.  Standing at the desk, reviewing the list of arriving guests, scanning the list of VIP's, one name stood out. I'd gone my whole life without seeing or hearing of anyone with this name, such a common word in our language, but as a surname it struck me as peculiar, unique. Dr. & Mrs. Pepper spent several nights at the hotel, I didn't see them until the day of their departure. Face to face with Dr. William Francis Pepper, bearing no concept of the man or his achievements, yet feeling something, something familiar . .

A week later, I received a customary e-mail from a fellow patriot announcing the upcoming guests on his weekly radio show. Among the names, William Pepper. A year spent since, learning about and speaking of Dr. Peppers work, I wish I had seized the opportunity to shake his hand when I had the chance.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed April 4, 1968. He was considered one of the most influential leaders in American history. By my own account, he was the greatest, and most important man America ever produced. From Baptist minister, to the African-American civil rights movement, to human rights activism leading to a Nobel Peace Prize, no citizen has had a stronger influence on the events of our nation. Incredibly, at the time of his death, his work had only just begun.

Spring 1967. A young journalist named William Pepper had just returned from time in Vietnam. He had thoroughly documented his time and experience through photographs and written articles. The war seen through the lens of Pepper's camera centered on the damages inflicted on the civilian population. Images of children badly burned by napalm and phosphorus, villages ravaged and burned to the ground. It was upon his return that he met, and became friends with Dr. King. For several years King had been in a state of limbo on whether or not he would take a public stance on the war in Vietnam. Upon reviewing Pepper's work, in particular, a piece in Ramparts magazine titled, "The Children of Vietnam", Dr. King was moved to stand against the conflict.

"After reading that article, I said to myself, never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation".

King was planning a march of 500,000 impoverished men and women to the streets of Washington during the summer of 1968. He had spent the previous year building an opposition to US involvement in Vietnam. The inability to satisfy the requested addition of 200,000 troops to the war effort by General Westmoreland signified the calamity that would be created by an influx of half a million men and women into the nation's capital. King's proposed march was deeply threatening to the federal government. What if the people took a page from Thomas Jefferson's playbook, formed a revolution and demanded Washington be held accountable for their actions?  What if they demanded a solution for poverty in America?  What would happen if they demanded we end our involvement in Vietnam?

King was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers strike, he was shot and killed while standing on the balcony outside his room at The Lorraine Motel. After an unexplained trip around world, a man named James Earl Ray confessed to the murder, and was arrested by authorities in London. Ray changed his story 3 days after his confession, and was denied trial 7 times before his death.

In 1977, longtime friend of Dr. King, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, asked Dr. Pepper to interview James Earl Ray. Pepper went in believing Ray was the assassin, only to become his legal representation a decade later. He agreed to represent Ray only when completely convinced he was simply a patsy, and "used by forces well beyond his comprehension to carry our this murder".

In 1993, HBO aired a program titled "The Trial of James Earl Ray". I was in middle school at the time, and remember watching portions of this show, and my surprise with how different it was from everything else I'd ever seen on television. This was a mock trial of course, and the guilty verdict reached a very small crowd, the news traveling a very short distance through the mainstream media. The program was perceived, at the end of the day, as little more than entertainment.

In 1999, Dr. William Pepper was finally granted a real trial.  The King Family filed a wrongful death civil action suit against, "Loyd Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators".

Seventy witnesses took the stand and painted a multi-faceted, cohesive time-line of the crime as it was actually conceived, carried out, and covered-up. Ranking among the accused were J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Richard Helms and the CIA, the US military, Memphis police, and organized crime members from Memphis and New Orleans. Loyd Jowers, a local restaurant owner, stated that Lt. Earl Clark, MPD's best marksman, handed him a smoking rifle through the back door of his restaurant just after the shots were fired. Clark was hired by local organized crime members to carry out the act, but a back-up plan was in place at the assignment the US Army. Strategically placed around the scene of the crime; 20th Special Forces team Alpha 184. During the trial, each member's name, rank, serial number, and place of origin were brought to light. Further detailed; the briefing held at 4:30am the day of the assassination, and individual location points at the time of the shooting. If the first chain; government - intelligence - mafia - Memphis police failed, a crack squad of Army sharp shooters was in place to insure completion of the job.

It took just one hour for a verdict to be reached, at which point The Honorable James E. Swearengen stated to the jury:  "In answer to the question did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Martin Luther King, your answer is yes. Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant? Your answer to that one is also yes."

From my perspective, this was the single most damming verdict in a long history of American conspiracy. Yet, each person I've ever addressed with this information, had no prior knowledge of the case's existence. The deafening silence generated by this monumental achievement is a true testament to the selective information made available to the American people by the mass media.  Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered by the same people who designated a day to commemorate his memory.  It's been proven in a United States court of law.  

So once again, I must inquire . . . Where is your outrage?


"He is depicted on King Day as a civil rights leader. And that's the way you're going to see him probably forever. But he was much more than a civil rights leader and that's what no one in official capacity wants you to know. He had moved well beyond the civil rights movement by 1964-65 and he had become effectively a world-figure in terms of human rights people and particularly the poor of this earth. That's where he was going. That's the area you don't really get into safely when you start talking about wealth, redistributing wealth. Taking, diverting huge sums of money into social welfare programs and health programs and educational programs at the grass roots. When you start going into that you begin to tread on toes in this country, in the United Kingdom, and in most of the western world.
Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis".    -WILLIAM F. PEPPER

"For a quarter of a century, Bill Pepper conducted an independent investigation of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He opened his files to our family, encouraged us to speak with the witnesses, and represented our family in the civil trial against the conspirators. The jury affirmed his findings, providing our family with a long-sought sense of closure and peace, which had been denied by official disinformation and cover-ups".     -CORETTA SCOTT KING

http://www.williampepper.com/audio.html
https://www.thekingcenter.org/KingCenter/Transcript_trial_info.aspx