He wanted to meet me.” The two arranged a rendezvous in West Memphis, Ark., on the evening of April 3, 1968, at what Ray calls a “back-alley” bar.
The last call he received from his brother before the assassination came on March 29, 1968: “He was concerned about what was going down on some type of job. “I told him, if you’re looking for guns, I can get any gun you want from Ft. “He called me one time, asking about a gun,” John Larry Ray says. James Earl Ray subsequently fled north of the border, but there is no indication that he participated in such a caper.Īfter returning to the United States, he occasionally talked to his brother by phone. Ray says his brother gave him approximately half the money and requested that he hold $10,000 of it in case he was arrested and needed to post bond. He suspects that the payoff was passed through Wortman’s organization by the Chicago mob in advance of a Canadian jewel robbery in which his brother was slated to take part. He claims that his brother was then fronted an estimated $50,000. Louis area and met with O’Brien again, John Larry Ray says. Later that year, James Earl Ray returned to the St. Before the details of that caper could be hashed out, however, the Ray brothers got jittery and split for Chicago.īut John Larry Ray believes that his brother maintained contact with O’Brien after their hasty departure. Meanwhile, O’Brien was supposed to check with Wortman about a proposed diamond heist.
O’Brien arranged for the Ray brothers to spend the night at a nearby apartment above an illegal gambling den also operated by Wortman. O’Brien knew the owner of the Paddock - Frank “Buster” Wortman - the East Side mob boss. “We drove across the river to the Paddock Lounge in Illinois and I introduced him to Jimmie O’Brien,” Ray says. The next day, he says, they met with Joe Burnett, another criminal, at a Manchester Avenue bar: “The reason we went there was to try and put some money into James’ pocket.” Burnett referred them to safecracker and burglar James “Obie” O’Brien. Louis, says Ray, referring to Jack “Catman” Gawron, a criminal associate of the Ray brothers. “We stayed all night at the Catman’s in South St. After the breakout, John Larry Ray says, he picked James Earl Ray up and drove him back to St. Much of the author’s personal knowledge of his brother’s exploits is limited to involvement in James Earl Ray’s escape from the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City in April 1967, a year before King’s murder. On the basis of this anecdote, co-author Barsten speculates that James Earl Ray was subjected to the CIA’s behavior-modification program known as MK-Ultra. James Earl Ray also supposedly told his brother that the CIA had tapped him to be an intelligence asset. The revelation was allegedly made in October 1974, when the two brothers shared a cell at the Shelby County (Tenn.) Jail in advance of an evidentiary hearing to determine whether James Earl Ray should be granted a trial. In the book, John Larry Ray asserts that his brother revealed to him that he had been ordered to shoot and kill a black soldier in postwar Germany while serving in the Army. “You can’t stop one place and jump to another place.” “It’s like the Mississippi River,” says John Larry Ray. Truth at Last is his intriguing but meandering account, a navigation of the uncharted waters of the two siblings’ lives. John Larry Ray, a convicted bank robber, spent more than a quarter-century behind bars himself. He died of kidney failure and complications of liver disease at Nashville Memorial Hospital on April 23, 1998.
The convicted assassin spent the rest of his life in the Tennessee prison system. Ray’s late brother James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder in 1969 but quickly recanted his confession. Ray, a 75-year-old resident of Quincy, is giving media interviews in New York to promote the release of his memoir, Truth at Last, co-authored by Lyndon Barsten. Martin Luther King Jr., who died in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968. When he visits the Big Apple this week, he will be discussing the assassination of another black leader, the Rev. While there, he remembers, Malcolm X was murdered. He was between jobs, collecting unemployment benefits.
The last time John Larry Ray visited New York City was in 1965. A version of this story appeared in Illinois Times, April 2, 2008.
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