Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr.? (Book Review)

many of you in the audience will have
wondered at some point who really killed martin luther king jr and why probably you didn't want to know what kind of gun they used or precisely how they arranged and positioned the shooters probably uh the details of when and where the meetings took place and how the plan was devised who paid for it probably those details didn't interest you but in a book of this many pages produced over so many years of research you will not be surprised to find that you get the answers to all those questions and more um this is an interesting sort of book review because i'm uh giving a positive assessment of the book and i'm recommending that you read the book while i'm being actually quite harshly critical of its author this is really two books in one appendix one of this book is a transcription of an interview with ron tyler adkins adkins is spelled a d k i n s it's not a famous name i remember hearing an interview several years ago shaw i said many years ago that's uh you can still just barely find the internet as mp3 an interview he gave to a really kind of shallow and silly radio radio talk show one of those radio shows where the host kind of acting like a comedian even when the topic under consideration is in no way amusing and the topic and they were discussing was of course who contrived to kill dr martin luther king jr he gave a very charismatic very memorable performance in that interview however it was also an aimless and ultimately uninformative interview but at that time i knew that this guy atkins he had been a direct enough witness to and participant in the events that he was going to change forever the history the formal written recorded history of what happened and why in the conspiracy to kill dr martin luther king jr and in the actual execution of that plan how he uh happened to die so appendix one of this book gives you the history according to ron atkins that'll regale you with one moment i mean you know having heard that that audio recording of an interview i have some sense of the guy's character or an intonation and voice he he says of himself in the interview that's recorded in this book that he never read a book in his life in between high school and the year 2000 when he started reading the bible so the only book he read since leading eyes leaving high school was the bible and he only started that in the year 2000 and it's believable he's a man of little to no formal education little to no informal education also um but he recalled vividly an anecdote from when he was playing on the front yard swings with his grandmother and grandfather now this grandmother and grandfather they're really part of his family history of being simultaneously organized crime figures in memphis tennessee and yet also deeply involved in and embedded with the government working for both sides if you like so his grandfather was a police officer and i think he'd just come home was maybe still wearing the uniform what have you and his grandmother was playing with him on the swing and he was he was a small boyfriend he said it was eight years old or what and his grandmother said to him apropos nothing uh that his grandfather was out there on the yard too and she said tell me something boy do you know what the difference is between a law man and a police you know he's recounting all this in his own accent and you know preserving the accent and idiom of us of his own grandmother and he was confused by the question he looked at her and said no why like he doesn't even know what she's talking about and she took off her shoe she walked over to him and she held the shoe in front of him as he was sitting there on the swing this is just a children's swing set and the front yard she said to him one step and then for him the most telling part of all that he reflected on years later was that his grandfather the police officer he was there and he started freaking out said no no no don't tell him about that don't explain that you don't need to know about that stuff like his grandfather knew there was something she had in mind there was something the grandmother wanted to teach the grandson you know probably having to do with some kind of business some kind of skullduggery that uh you know maybe his father and grandfather at that stage were already involved with so a large part of appendix one is roy adkins who was 16 years old at the time of the assassination of martin luther king rest in peace roy atkins died this year just a few months ago in 2021 so i very much regret i will never have a chance to meet him i'll never have a chance to interview him i would have very gladly written his biography and i would have been happy not just to interview him but to create a book i'm filled with a certain kind of regret because when i listen to that one radio interview that a recording exists for the interview was so badly conducted it's such a waste of your time i'm not gonna provide a link to it or anything it doesn't aside from uh a few little anecdotes like that giving you a sense of the cultural milieu in memphis at that time memphis in the 1960s you learn nothing from the radio interview and likewise this interview there are so many points so you're like oh you're asking the wrong questions you know you're shutting him down when he's telling you something really interesting and worthwhile and you know oh it's very frustrating to read and i guess we will never get a biography of ron uh taylor adkins there is one other lawyer involved who's in the transcript here who knew him at some greater length i will google around as the years go by and see if he ever writes a follow-up book based on his other interviews with or the extent to which he he knew the guy a little bit of an interesting side story um this other lawyer not the lawyer who wrote the book but a lawyer who's present in that transcript he met ron when they were doing humanitarian work together in response to hurricane katrina and apparently this was a very stressful very emotionally draining time they started talking to each other he says they became as close as brothers or closer than brothers in this weird situation of helping people out i don't know if they were handing out food or clearing debris or what they were doing something uh in the aftermath of hurricane katrina and at some point you know you're working long hours and you're sleep deprived and ron said to the guy look i got to tell you something i was involved with the shooting of dr martin luther king so junior sorry once in a while i leave the junior off of dr martin luther king jr ah please please forgive me so atkins had this on his mind and he recollects in vivid detail and he admits by the way he knows it on this deal because he had been going over the details with this other lawyer he's been talking about for some months or some years he's been kind of working through exactly what happened when and in what order but in large part the value of this book is appendix one and then the value of appendix one is really hearing a significant part of this guy's life story i wish we really got his full autobiography but we don't but in bits and pieces you you get i mean it's completely uncensored you get a lot of really funny curse words i was while i was reading it i was saying some of them out loud to melissa i just got a laugh out of her some really strange sense of humor in terms of phrase then you get a vivid glimpse into what life was like in the 1960s in memphis for someone who was raised as a member of an organized crime family now as they organized crime uh they were connected to the italian mafia they were connected to one very significant portuguese mafia figure but yes primarily their connections were to what you would call redneck organized crime some of whom were of course members of the klu klux klan they were over racist uh some of them were black though some of them were african-americans i always like to say you know for a lot of racists of that generation it's difficult for people today to relate to how unconventionally racist they were you know they were racist but they weren't racist in a way that you and i today can easily understand um the problem with this book is that it's not written by ron taylor adkins that part appendix one is completely invaluable unfortunately the rest of the book is written by this guy dr pepper for some reason he refers to refer to himself as dr william f pepper esquire i don't know why he wouldn't just use the name dr pepper i mean you could get that on a t-shirt that's a great name the story of dr pepper is much less interesting to me and you can hear it everywhere he's been telling the same story on lecture tours for 50 years 40 years it's been a lot of years that he's been on tour how much you all want to tell sorry i feel like i just want to completely skip over dr pepper's story a huge percentage of this book is devoted to it but i mean all right um spoilers the problem with having an author who has been obsessed with this topic emotionally and intellectually obsessed for 40 years or 50 years is precisely that he doesn't have the level of detachment necessary to recognize that when he's given this interview by ron taylor adkins by this new witness to our administration oh okay so um all the stuff i've been researching for 40 years is completely wrong that's that's the way investigations go right like you commit a lot of time and energy into looking into this into looking into that and then you meet one witness in this case it's not just a witness to the crime but a participant in the crime who tells you oh no this is what really happened and you have to have the detachment to admit to yourself that you had been barking up the wrong tree you were burning up several wrong trees over a great many years so this is not william pepper's first book on this and again if you even just search within youtube or you search podcasts he's been giving lectures at universities and different kinds of humanitarian agencies um you know for decades and decades william pepper's story is that he was very close friends with martin luther king but for a short time perhaps the last one year of his life in round numbers he published a pictorial most of which you get here in an obscure christian magazine called rampart magazine and it was a series of photographs showing how miserable small children were who had been injured by the vietnam war effort didn't really reveal very much that's useful or interesting but this pictorial resulted in a very upset martin luther king jr getting on the phone with william pepper and hollering at him and weeping over the phone and talking about how upset he was it brought about a turning point in martin luther king jr's life where he switched from being primarily engaged with uh african-american rights to vote et cetera civil rights of black people to being overweenily interested in the vietnam war the ethics of the vietnam war and ending the vietnam war so on and so forth to what extent this change in tactic or this change in focus led to his death is certainly worth asking as not going to be covered in this book the other shift that took place by the way in the last couple years of martin luther king jr's life someone can look up exactly when he made the shift was that he shifted from a black civil rights focus to starting what he called the poor people's movement sounds a lot like communism because it was guess what supporting the communist vietnamese side in the vietnam war also sounds a lot like communism because it was i think it is fair to say based on what i know that the increasing hostility of the american federal authorities to martin luther king jr leading up to his assassination had a great deal to do with martin luther king junior's own change in politics um don't believe me who is lbj all right that was the president united states at the time right there has never been any president of the united states before since who was more committed to helping black people than lbj all right so if you're making the assertion that it was lbj the president united states who ordered the execution of martin luther king jr you need to have a good explanation because politically so far as black people's rights are concerned lbj and martin luther king were on the same side uh you guys sorry this is now forgotten if you don't really do political science lbj uh sent his wife who was nicknamed uh ladybird johnson so the first lady she went on a lecture tour of the southern united states explaining why black people and white people should have equal civil rights and she did that to crowds that were jeering and booing her i mean she was it was tough you know i don't know any president united states before or since you know has really done that it's really taking on hostile crowds that way most people as soon as they're elected you know they switch from electioneering mode to really kind of permanent vacation it's kind of amazing i'm just saying it's amazing how kind of lazy and self-indulgent uh presidents the united states are well lbj wasn't like that now i could tell you a lot of bad things about obj i'm i'm not up here saying i do not think lbj was a moral person i do not think he was a highly intellectual person i tell you a lot of bad things about lbj however on the specific issue of the legal and political status of african americans lbj was on the side of the angels and he passed all of the landmark legislation that earlier presidents united states just just didn't show any interest in um [Music] you know a figure like eisenhower is still remembered positively well if you compare eisenhower to lbj eisenhower was pure evil right now lbj maybe he was a mix of good and evil but there was some good there was some good there especially on exactly this issue right like in another world lbj and martin luther king jr they could have been standing on the same stage together you know making the same lectures that you know really supporting one another in this period let's just say the one year leading up to martin luther king jr's death the decisions that made martin luther king jr an enemy of the white establishment and of the president united states and what the federal government was doing they had a lot to do with the man who wrote this book with his friendship with william pepper and his decision to branch off from black rights to the poor people's movement and to branch off from civil rights political rights et cetera within domestic policy united states america into vietnam war uh international communism etc so that was that was one step he took one step that would change his life and would uh would end his life and it's also worthwhile to say that's not what he's remembered for positively today by african-americans or or otherwise okay so my fundamental criticism of the author of william pepper is that a very large part of this book is his story i don't want to hear it i mean if you do that part of the book is him talking about how after he knew martin luther king jr he tried to become friends with the surviving members of the family he tried to get support for a televised trial for one legal challenge after another how he pursued one theory after another that all of which i basically consider discredited and okay it's not it's not well written it's not that part of the book we're willing pepper is thomas's story this is supposed to be the definitive final version of story but there are actually some big significant gaps that you'd have to find some other book to cover so for those of you who are new to the assassination of dr martin luther king jr you may or may not know that there were teams of snipers and observers sent by the us government basically military snipers and photographers who were placed on several rooftops surrounding the shooting but they didn't shoot they did not do the shooting but they were there right as if just to prove that this was a conspiracy that involved the government which was an incredibly stupid thing for them to do um the photographers were on the roof of the fire department how did they get up on the roof they didn't climb up there like spider-man they didn't throw up a rope like batman they went and they talked to the fire chief and they went upstairs like oh hey we got to go up and hey we got to go do some surveillance job where these special photographers in the government let us go up to the roof so there were witnesses there are plenty of witnesses that this happened and the book talks about but in a confusing and incoherent and incomplete way the extent to which those rooftop figures some of them actually were traced they were still alive and well and living in mexico some of them gave some interviews so their existence wasn't just confirmed by witnesses at the time but presumably in their old age in their retirement in mexico there were other traces now i so that is a story worth telling that could be a chapter in itself but in this version of events that's it's incomplete it's incoherent and incomplete what what the evidence is exactly what finally we do and don't know about those guys some of them so allegedly some of them died under mysterious circumstances but i don't know i don't feel after reading this book i i can pin down what we know and how we know it about those guys we're talking maybe six people maybe eight people i don't know exactly who were on those rooftops as sniper spotter sniper spotter and then the photograph crew who were up on top of the um the fire department right phew um now again for those of you who are new some of you might be this might be the first time you've heard of that well okay sorry um you have no may have noticed that i'm not presenting it as a matter for debate as to whether or not the american government was involved in the assassination of martin luther king jr as with uh the assassination of jfk if you want irrefutable evidence of government involvement you need not look at the details of the shooting itself you can just look at what happened at the hospital immediately after the shooting as there were there were things that happened at the hospital in either case jfk or martin luther king jr there were circumstances that were rigged there was evidence that was tampered with and so on so on that the mafia could not possibly have done like it could not possibly be that italian organized crime was there at the hospital with military men in uniform doing these things the only people who could have sent those guys in the military are the military like either it's the military itself either it's a conspiracy within the military or it goes above the military to you know basically the executive office of the president states so you know either unless you believe it's really a military coup d'etat that it's the military without leadership from the white house you're talking about the military with leadership okay with all that having been said i do not believe the us military shot and killed martin luther king jr i believe the version of events that is here in appendix one the adkins version of events if you like so i keep referring to this the problem with this book is it's written by a guy who was personal friends with martin luther king had this emotional connection martin luther king jr and who went on to fight one court case after another and go on one lecture tour after another and publish one book after another advancing his version of events about who killed dr martin luther king jr and why and he's wrong i mean his version of events prior to appendix one began this book in several important respects it's wrong and when he wrote this book he couldn't let go of some of the theories he put together so a lot of these things they don't matter regarding isolation so to give you an example um there was a man who climbed up over a wall and landed on the ground and then ran down an alleyway immediately after the shooting there were several witnesses to this at the time he left footprints i think because he fell with such force after jumping over the wall and he left footprints and the police took a cast of it so i don't know if there's a plaster cast or what you know to get the precise size of the shoes he left a size 13 shoe when he went out went over the wall now i'm again this is not the most important aspect but it does relate to figuring out who was where exactly uh in the shootings well you know so he interviews someone a guy named frank strausser and during the interview to frank strosser he mentions that in passing so i'll tell you a little bit more about frank starks in a moment he says well you know there was this guy who went over the wall and people saw him and you know the you know the the footprints were a size 13 shoe and frank strosser says back to him i wear a size 13 shoe and pepper just bungles it he just drops the ball no no take take the hint i think this guy is being as honest with you as he can be he doesn't want to put himself in prison you know what i mean he can't he can't just directly tell you exactly what his role was this is a recorded interview you know with a lawyer a lawyer who has investigated the martin luther king death for a year you know he's trying to tell you what his involvement was and you won't hear it so instead even during that interview with stressor and then in writing this book i don't know how much i know it was months later or years later but whenever he was writing this up in the book he's instead insisting on a theory that this guy frank strosser wasn't the man who jumped over the wall that instead he was actually the man who pulled the trigger that he actually had the gun and if you read the book you can get a sense of why psychologically pepper wanted to believe that there's absolutely no reason to believe that none uh there's no reason to overturn what adkins tells you adkins the man in appendix one he gives you a complete a detailed account of exactly what happened because he was there and he was involved as i'll tell you just a moment there is no reason to overturn that and say oh no no this other guy frank strouser would have been the would have been the shooter no okay so it's two books in one ironically one book kind of proves the other wrong the portion of the book that is written by pepper dr pepper um it's not worthless but it's written it's a kind of serialized fiction narrative of the troubles he had with reporters from nbc and abc and then he did this trial for the tv station hbo and it's it to me it is fundamentally a story i don't need to read but i mean i guess you could say it's the story of his struggle to make the assassination of martin luther king matter in the mainstream press and it's the story of the really weird compromises he made where he like interviewed people and then agreed to like uh never never disclose their secrets until after you know after they died and this kind of thing and how oh well okay at that time we did this tv special but i'd already interviewed this person but i couldn't admit it for this reason and it is he does not have the detachment or rigorous self-honesty to tell you but a lot of it is him barking up the wrong tree which by the way is part of it's part of investigative journalism it's part of detective work you know you can do have a murder mystery where you investigate every single person who was in the house at the time of the murder and you got to be wrong nine times out of ten to be right uh just once so guys as you can see i have a lot to say about the book uh this is hashtag booktube if you guys wanna ask me any questions if you wanna say something salient in the comment section i'm happy to read them i have to reply i also we don't have a big crowd here not that many people too interested in finding out about who shot jf pardon me who shot mlk that's good okay uh but you know if you guys want to take a second hit the thumbs up button it'll help a few more people join uh while the live stream is is still rolling i understand too a lot of you will not have questions because all of this is just kind of mind-blowing and bizarre to you oh you know oh well as as you kind of you've got the impression i already knew quite a lot about the assassination before reading this book and you know one could say that the pages the many many many pages add to this by william pepper they maybe they maybe provide they provide corroborating details that i guess might be reassuring to someone who's stepping in knowing absolutely nothing prior to prior picking this book so you know it's not not a complete waste of paper all right so despite the uniquely valuable testimony of adkins um [Music] pepper tries to sell us on the myth that the shooter was frank strouser now i'm not going to get too much into the critique of pepper on this but fundamentally it would make no difference to history whatsoever if the actual person who pulled the trigger was frank strausser or not it makes no difference doesn't matter at all and again frank strosser was instead indicating that no he was the guy who jumped over the wall so i and if somebody else jumped over the wall that also doesn't really like on that level of detail it's not really what matters in the investigation of the assassination of uh dr martin luther king jr okay um there are some big bombshells here about who was involved in what capacity and uh one of the crucial conspirators was the reverend jesse jackson okay so i'm gonna put in a link to wikipedia some people don't know who he is how could you not know well not all my viewers are american okay so this is this is kind of a digression rather than the main story um but the revelations about jesse jackson um [Music] they are especially shocking if you are someone who has grown up seeing jesse jackson on cnn news and on mainstream television appearing year after year on the anniversary of the assassination of martin luther king or on some black memorial day and giving one sanctimonious speech after another now again if you if you if you actually do political science very few people do but if you're someone like me who really does political science you will not be surprised at this revelation because exactly what jesse jackson was doing in kind of the minutes and hours leading up the assassination is incredibly suspect jesse jackson um inexplicably arranged to relocate uh martin luther king jr from what would have been his regular room a room he'd stayed in before that was in in some kind of quad wrangle in a lower floor in a kind of uh hidden uh part of this hotel part of the hill that wasn't open to a sniper in this way now apart from the possibility of assassination you can imagine someone as famous as martin luther king jr was at that time i'm sure that was probably the room they used for any celebrity it was probably the part of the hotel they used for celebrities even celebrities who weren't afraid of being shot but you didn't want people taking photographs of them in their bathrobe or something you know what i mean they didn't want to have a window exposed to the parking lot in that way they wanted to be deeper inside the hotel so jesse jackson forced martin luther king jr to relocate to this room that's perfectly located if you just look at where it is on the hotel it's the best possible location for a sniper to shoot him and then also at the last minute there was another group of black activists activists well you know we don't have to specify too much the type of activists who would be uh collaborating with and cooperating with martin luther king jr they had the room right next to him suddenly and inexplicably jesse jackson forced him out of that room forced him to leave the hotel like get your stuff and get out we can't have you here why like the only advantage of this location was that these people are in a hotel together and they can organize what they're doing that day there were a number of other things that are suspicious and look staged such as the fact that jesse jackson left went out the door exactly at six o'clock like this looked timed it looked set up and actually where jesse jackson was standing and how he was behaving everything about it it looked like he was part of the plot okay so here we get from inside sources direct and i feel verifiable claim that yes indeed jesse jackson was part of the conspiracy to kill uh martin luther king jr and he wasn't the only one there were some other black activists who were part of this part of this group okay i'm just gonna take a moment and look at your comments guys so again how today this is 2021. i think jesse jackson i think he's almost a forgotten figure he used to be a towering figure in american politics even in the 1990s or something so you have the potentially significant revelation here that at that time as now jesse jackson was a pro-establishment figure who played ball with the fbi he was an fbi informant and collaborated with the authorities right down to it including the assassination of martin luther king jr and i suppose we will probably never know what his motivations were he might have felt himself that mlk uh had to go okay um so joshua lay asked an interesting question here uh quote how do you personally go about differentiating the tinfoil hat style conspiracy theory and the conspiracy theory that sounds as if it uh could be you know a ridiculous could be ridiculous let's say but turns out to be true [Music] oh you see you know josh um i think what people really need to understand is that how strange something is only has to do with how familiar or unfamiliar it is to you so i was talking to my mom about politics a couple days ago and a couple days before that i met up for lunch with a beautiful instagram model and we talked about some of the same things two different things but this instagram model purely platonic relationship uh uh she um you know she was shocked by some things i was saying about politics i think i mean it wouldn't be fair to say my mother was shocked but she was just surprised that she had lived all her life without knowing some of these things so with my mom i was talking about the reality of american support for the khmer rouge for the some of the most violent communists who've existed in the history of planet earth some of those notorious oh well for these reasons the united states of america wasn't fighting against them they're actually fighting with them and for them you know okay well you know politics makes strange bedfellows that's not a tin foil hat conspiracy theory it's a completely verifiable historical fact um but also you know it's not strange to me right i've studied american politics i've studied cambodian politicians studying chinese politics i'm familiar with the historical figures involved and familiar with why they're making these decisions and compromises so to me it makes a lot of sense right for someone who's a complete outsider i remember talking to white people about this in cambodia i was like hey you know like this was american equipment that was used by the commercial you notice that like what do you think about that you know um there are palpable signs here of the alliance that went on and on between the united states and the khmer rouge in cambodia um so you know i'm just i'm just being honest with you if you were i mean if you were ignorant of something entirely then what are the distinctions you can make about what's what's a conspiracy or what's what's strange and what's not strange so you know right now the consensus view in political science is that pakistan during the last 20 years simultaneously supported the taliban and the united states of america just within the last two weeks i have been told by the news so if i'm wrong about this i'm being told this by mainstream news journalism i have been told that the pakistani air force was providing drones supporting the taliban that they were working with the taliban now nobody believes that started yesterday one way or the people either believe that uh people either believe that pakistan was working against the united states covertly and supporting the taliban the whole time or that they were simultaneously supporting both the taliban united states in case you don't know um there used to be a war that was called the gulf war now we've had so many wars in the gulf that it's confusing but there was a war between iraq and iran does it sound like a crazy conspiracy theory to you if i told you that the united states was arming and supporting both sides simultaneously they were supporting both iran and iraq when they were war with each other makes no sense that's ridiculous you know how could it be that the cia got involved in um uh you know cocaine trafficking well you know stick around it starts to make sense the more you know about history and politics these things aren't surprising you and also by the way you know i've said many many times from many different angles you know um sympathy is an analytical tool i can totally sympathize with the decisions made by people in positions of authority here i mean even you know the the assassination of jfk jfk was no angel i mean if if i had been alive at that time if i had been a person in the military at an elite level or something and i was being asked look do you want to get rid of jfk or not i could totally see a solid line of reasoning for why jfk had to die and why people in elite positions would have made that decision rather than another rather than saying okay let's just let it go for eight years you know there were there were really important reasons to assassinate jfk which you will never get out of that movie made by what's his name oliver stone oliver stone is not going to tell you hey look guys here's the dark side of jfk here's what people were really worried about and felt that they couldn't couldn't let him live any longer couldn't let him be in power um it was not there were not for silly reasons that jfk was was assassinated and again sympathy is an analytical tool i'm not telling you to sympathize with them because sympathy for the devil is a virtue in itself sympathize because it leads to a deeper understanding and and appreciation so william mcgehen says quote here's an interesting observation jfk mlk rfk yes well you are not the first person to observe this here is a handwritten letter uh from the number two man in the fbi of this time so the number two man of the fbi is now notorious for being the gay lover of the number one man so this says at the top it's quite an interesting historical document it says my personal prayer list jfk rfk mlk and this guy the number two in the fbi he was basically um i'm blanking on the head of the fbi's name not hoover what's his name uh jagger hoover thank you uh this guy was personally the emissary between j edgar hoover and the atkins family in memphis visiting them three times a year or four times a year so he brought this note this letter that's on a historical piece of paper apparently taken from the library of congress or something like it's peace people from the 1830s that has stamped on it my personal prayer list jfk rfk mlk and it's saying to the adkins crime family i hope you can help me with my prayer list it seems to be indicating pretty directly that they either want to kill jfk rfk and mlk all three that this is part of a plan to kill all three of them or you could interpret it as being they just want to destroy their reputations like the most charitable interpretation would be just they want to ruin their political careers and that they're interested in conspiring yes um cat c-a-t that's both the three initials of that guy i'm sorry i'm forgetting his name well it's like something like charles andrew taylor you know it's it's his three initials but it was also his kind of nickname and code name was cat uh so sir i can get his name for you but i don't really want to write for oh there you go clyde tolson and yeah so here are photographs of clyde tolson visiting the atkins family and that's him with uh the at the kids of the atkins family so in terms of how regular visitors so uh clyde tolson his middle initial starts the letter a he uh he sorry so cly clyde anderson tolson melissa did the fact check there his initial cat he uh he was traveling back and forth between j edgar hoover and the atkins family in memphis now this also gives you a sense of how at that time the adkins family was an unbelievably important crime family in memphis or at least they were regarded as such and treated as such by j edgar hoover it's very strange so why would j edgar hoover and his sorry his boyfriend as far as we know it's his boyfriend or husband whatever i'm saying but the man who was notoriously as gay lover and also was formally the second um second in command uh for the fbi why would they come and visit and give this give this piece of paper this uh this prayer list so a very interesting and uh incriminating uh piece of evidence nacho says quote you and melissa would look adorable with tinfoil hands all right so um the account from this guy atkins which is covered in appendix 1. adkins was 16 years old at the time martin luther king jr was assassinated and he had been deeply involved in his father's business his father's organized crime ring at least since age 11 but he had already been paying attention on learning things since age eight and he describes all this in tremendous detail i wish we really had a biography or autobiography of the guy but he talks about you know just his role kind of serving drinks and being in the room when all these negotiations went on with all these different crime organizations including as mentioned the italian mafia interestingly so um they were not members of the italian mafia but they did very much actively cooperate with very senior influential uh italian crime families so he grew up in this context and he then sets the stage for and explains exactly how it was that martin luther king jr was attracted to memphis at that time and how the hit was set up where it was when it was at that time and that they were directed to do this and provided with stacks of cash from the fbi from uh j edgar hoover himself and that these bundles of cash were directly delivered to his father basically i mean i don't say to his family to his father in at least one case i think it was to his mother but whatever same thing to this crime family they that huge stacks of cash were delivered to them by clyde tulsa so clyde tolson would fly in an aircraft from fbi headquarters to memphis he didn't have he didn't have another reason to be in memphis memphis is not that important a city united states america wasn't there brother business and he would meet with uh you know the reigning uh head of the atkins crime family it would stan hand them stacks of cash to take care of some problem or another now in the years leading up to the assassination of martin luther king adkins had informants inside martin luther king's circle so he had people to my knowledge these were all black people they were black people who worked with the atkins crime family whom he was paying some of these stacks of cash from uh the fbi so that they would report back and quite my new details about where uh martin luther king was going next obviously also probably some political information about what his organization was doing so in effect adkins was both operating a crime family and a ring of fbi informants whether they were aware or not that um they were working for the fbi they knew that they were working for atkins and atkins was the guy who handed them this money now to characterize the atkins crime family i laughed out loud many times and i remarked to uh melissa about this many times how is it possible that when you have a crime family that's committed to this level of crime to carrying out assassinations that they are nevertheless willing and able to carry out engaging in really petty really trivial crimes it's just amazing to me like you might think someone in this position would have the attitude look they're they're the people who killed martin luther king jr they're not going to do some petty uh purse snatching or something but we have related to us this kind of hilarious scam they had this family controlled the city dump now i will just say speculatively that could be how they got into assassination and murder because uh his father literally had the keys to the incinerator as a professional city dump incinerator if you want to destroy evidence if you want to destroy a corpse it's a very powerful position to be in just to be able to incinerate a corpse without a trace i mean today we have dna at that time there was no dna anyway so his father controls the uh the city dump at that time many department stores gave out coupons in the form of stamps so these were stamps similar to a postage stamp in that they had glue on the back you were supposed to collect the stamps when you made purchases and then stick them into an album into a book where you filled in a certain number of spaces with a stamp and then you'd get a free piece of merchandise to reward you so he gives the example of a baby crib they'd give you a baby crib once you'd saved up 300 stamps or whatever it was there were stamps was so when these stamps were collected by the shop they would be stamped again they would have ink put over them to mark them as void and then they'd be sent to the city dump they'd be put in the garbage like what are you gonna what are you gonna do with them afterwards well guess who controls the city dump this totally corrupt criminal and he took these stamps and he would so this is organized crime he had a whole bunch of people working together so you go to the dump you'd gather the stamps out of the garbage he would put them in a washing machine washing them like laundry to get the voiding ink out he would then take them and dry them in the sunlight the apparatus that was used is describing instead of quite a complex apparatus to dry them in the sunlight then lay them flat and apply new glue to them he would re-glue the back and then put them back into the albums and then take them to this department store and get hundreds of free baby cribs and uh collectible you know so this is the sort of uh committed career criminal that old man atkins was the head of this this crime family now i've already mentioned some members of the family were police officers um old man adkins himself was involved in city government and is also involved in in elections in election hearing uh when election time we get we get descriptions of his uh his political vote in that in that sense but there's another important figure here who is ron tyler atkins older brother and his older brother was approximately 20 years older than himself he admits he doesn't know exactly how many years old his brother was so that's a big gap he had an older brother who was more or less old enough to be his father and it's a half brother it's a brother from a different marriage okay so you have some sense of who his father was grandfather the involvement this family is simultaneously involved with the police involved with the city government to some extent involved the state government they're involved with the federal government through their their personal friendship with the leader of the fbi with j edgar hoover and his boyfriend clyde um okay so they have a lot of various powerful connections they also have powerful connections to uh italian organized crime and those are covered the italian the one italian and one portuguese figure their their stories are also told in this book though you know whatever as i say if you want to save time you can just read appendix one and then get on with your life and not read the hundreds of other pages this book to get all those details but it is true each of those details corroborates the others right like you get to see how different pieces of evidence from one source confirm pieces of evidence from another source where each couldn't have possibly known what the other knew uh this sort of thing you know um the older brother so ron atkins has an older brother he was us marine corps intelligence and he knew how to shoot a rifle so if you want to get into the details of exactly who was where when during the shooting ron age 16 was given a motorcycle he literally delivered the murder weapon to his brother he has his brother with two other guys sitting together in what's de facto the sniper's nest so there are three guys together and the sniper's nest he believes completely reasonably it was his own older brother who pulled the trigger and his older brother told himself his old brother said so if it wasn't his older brother who pulled the trigger it was the guy sitting right next to him who's also named here but there's no reason to think it was one of the other two guys sitting with him he was the guy who was trained by the us marine corps he knew how to shoot a rifle etc etc it's complete he himself said that he was the one who did the shooting it said you know so okay that seems to solve that problem um so ron himself rode up on his motorbike and then he was kind of doing scout duty he rode around the neighborhood repeatedly to make sure everything was fine and nobody was out of place and because he was reconnoitering with the other conspirators and noticing what cars he was seeing oh is that a funny car in a funny place is that going to be a problem for us he knew the escape route where they would drive to exactly he has a lot of corroborating evidence of who went where right after the shot was fired and this this kind of thing so uh yeah i mean what am i going to tell you that's the whole story you can read it in detail with a lot of kind of vivid and charming recollections of what it was like for adkins to grow up in that family during that period of time uh you can read about exactly what the connection was with the reverend jesse jackson with the black activists you know within martin luther king's own camp who sold him out and cooperated uh and you get the precise mechanics of how the killing was was uh carried out so plant-based powered you're incorrect this is an interesting comment plant-based power says quote well he was a lousy shot if he was aiming for the head he hit the chin instead that's covered in the book the hit it was specifically requested to shoot him in the mouth and if you haven't read about stuff there are several different witnesses to that because some of the people uh involved were screaming over the phone about that were heard screaming over the phone that they specifically wanted martin luther king jr shot in the mouth which is where he got shot so no he was a he was a dead shot uh but you also get uh you know you also get you get a sense of what the assassination meant to people who were alive at that time which i think is invaluable and if you're interested in william pepper's perspective you get a sense of the public apathy and the indifference of journalists and the uh i don't know the public in general in the decades that followed because he carried on this crusade for something like 40 years or 50 years when uh simply put nobody wanted to hear it okay so guys are going to read through your comments and then we can wrap it up it's been a 51 minute stream hashtag booktube it's a it's a it's a book review but if any of you uh want to read more you know exactly where to do it so i don't have to really answer any more questions there's anything you guys want to say um uh so there's a funny joke okay so jfk rfk mlk nacho says if this is a pattern frk is next melissa got it without melissa guy right fully raw christina um so yeah there's a question here from william again william again says lee harvey oswald james earway and sir han soran i mean that's the least interesting part of the story right i mean i'm sorry like like the title of this video is who shot martin luther king jr not who didn't shoot the king jr you know yeah that but um uh this same guy dr pepper he knew uh he knew personally uh james earl ray and was involved with his legal defense team for years and spoke on his behalf and spoke with him and so and so forth so i mean if you want to know more details about exactly what james earl ray did those are also in this book okay i haven't talked about it it's a whole different story um james earl ray this book argues and i think it can be proven to a reasonable extent he did not escape from prison he was let out of prison what he actually did after prison he must have had the help of the federal government to do he was given a fake id sorry i shouldn't even say a fake id he was given a real passport and real id documents for another person that allowed him to pass into canada and then he lived in canada for quite some time the whole time he was being kept by a certain um shall we say fbi asset or you know a government asset whose whole story is also covered in this uh government in this document he's the guy named rahul who is uh portuguese or code named rahul whatever i'm fred his real name is in there also his real identity is uncovered and you get to hear a lot of disturbing things about his life um anyway you know exactly where he went and where his money came from and i mean sorry just to just to focus on that one point even if you believe that he could have escaped from prison single-handedly uh due to his own brilliance or something everything james earl ray does after escaping from prison uh requires support of government agents or you'd have to believe he was part of some kind of crime family that provided him with these documents but even then when you get into the details of what the documents were and who the real person was um there is basically no explanation for what james earl ray does in between leaving prison and his his being in the right place the right time to be uh falsely accused of shooting martin luther king jr he was moved from location to location to precisely the places where they had been planning to assassinate martin luther king jr but it didn't work out and then he suddenly relocated to memphis um where he's left holding the bag in this case so yeah and again james earl ray if you don't know the details of the trial they're in this book but they're easy to find he did not plead guilty he did protest his innocence he did talk about what really happened um so his side of the story has always been pretty easy to know so i mean james rory is not the nicest guy in the world or something but he did not kill uh martin luther king jr he was put he was set up to take the blame a remarkably long time in advance which does indicate that this was something that at least some people in the federal government have been planning on in advance most obviously jagger hoover and the other top brass at the fbi so again you can get into i mean the next question is to what extent was this directly ordered by the president united states of america i would assume it was um the more you know but how the fbi operates on those things um you know and by the way also there are many aspects of the hit of the actual assassination of the shooting that are quite amateurish right and this deserves a question well why use gangsters why use local gangsters why not use a professional you know army sniper now it turns out this same family of gangsters actually had a u.s marine corps trained uh you know shooter to do the shooting so no you know it wasn't that different from having a having an army sniper do it or something you know well of course the reason is that from the government's perspective if some of them get caught or if some of them get exposed or if some of them talk the idea is that the public and journalists will blame organized crime or will blame the klu klux land they won't cast aspersions onto the government so that was you know that's obviously the modus operandi here for why involve amateurs at all now with that having been said if you read the whole book you see the tremendous stupidity of that because almost all these people went on to talk so there are several very vivid energies this the guy who's who's nicknamed rahul the portuguese guy you hear about a gruesome situation in which he does brag about having killed uh martin luther king jr obviously he was just one part of the conspiracy he didn't do it alone he didn't pull the trigger but he was one of the conspirators and then you know the antics that ensue because there were witnesses to him bragging on this instance the one italian gangster but with those those i'm just not talking about it but those details will give you nightmares i mean terrible things happen to terrible people and terrible things happen to nice people too as a consequence of that situation um you know there's an italian gangster uh who when he's a very old man um boasts about killing uh martin luther king jr in front of just one woman and then her teenage son confronts him about it and it's a it's an interesting little anecdote and he's obviously thinking about killing this kid i forget if he's 16 or something at the time because he's been exposed to this kid and then he dies suddenly could have been old age because he was you know elderly and could be you know uh it could be that he was himself assassinated for having spilled the beans you don't know you don't have that so there are funny stories linked to uh each of the various people um [Music] you know who who were involved with this as amateurs and who conducted themselves like amateurs the killing itself was carried out in a kind of messy way with a lot of witnesses and a lot of questions being asked i mean you know again why even involve someone like the reverend jesse jackson that's amateurish don't you know i'm not going to get into giving you advice here on how to carry out this kind of operation but there are a lot of things that went wrong however if you just if you just read appendix one if you just read the account given to you by adkins you get a very good sense of how this particular operation was really thrown together at the last minute because they didn't know he so martin luther king came to memphis then he left memphis because there was some particular protest that went wrong it was an embarrassment and then he unexpectedly he came back to memphis and they thought he was going to be staying in a different hotel they thought he was going to be in a i believe was a holiday inn on the on the outskirts of town and then he wasn't at the holiday inn so it was really something they threw together at the last minute as plan b or plan c they probably weren't totally unprepared for it but they it wasn't a situation where they knew long in advance where it was going to be they had their informants on the inside making phone calls back and forth and all the time oh okay he's going to be there and then you can understand how they'd have to put pressure on jesse jackson okay okay he's going to you've got to make sure he's in this room not that room you got to do this oh no get those other guys out of the room next door we can't have them there you know were all of these within within a day and a half or something everything had to be thrown together quite messily so the the amateurish elements of the operation itself are well explained in detail in this book and then as they say you get to see the disadvantages of the government working with amateurs because many of these people they cracked afterwards it left uh it left a paper trail it left a trail of witnesses and braggarts and boasting and you know it's hard to keep a secret when it involves more than 20 people and again this book for me does not fully well sorry sorry another area where you know you have too many people keeping too many secrets is the hospital this is a very detailed account from one of the nurses of what happened at the hospital okay well so what do you do you're going to kill all the nurses that are like what are you going to do if you want to keep this a secret you know so too many cracks too many witnesses too many too many problems and again i even feel what happened to the hospital with the doctors is well covered just in appendix one because you get the relationship between one of the doctors there and the adkins crime family covered so it all kind of comes together um yeah but you know the role of james earl ray is kind of the easiest part of the story to pin down in a sense the value of this book is telling you everything else and the title is video is who did shoot martin luther king jr not who didn't so we get a question from plant-based quote why did they want to shoot him in the mouth you 14 or something if you have to explain human malice to you sorry where do you want me to begin well you know let's start with adam and eve uh why do you think why do you think they wanted to shoot a civil rights leader a demagogue why do you think they wanted the shot to pay them out why do you think 14 years old man i'm sorry no i'm not saying this makes sense but i mean this is you know yeah so uh look so this video was just meant to cover martin luther king obviously so we have a question from william again about lee harvey oswald um i know a lot about lee harvey oswald i know a lot about the jfk killing also however lee harvey oswald was not a sniper in the army that is not correct um i could send you some links to articles talking about what he actually did in the marine corps uh in japan and anyway his his sad tale is a story for another day okay guys so it's been an hour it doesn't look like there are any more questions coming in i'll just wrap it up there this is the year 2021 ron tyler adkins is now dead i do not know if uh appendix one is going to be the last trace of the story he had to share with the world if so that's kind of sad um you know ron tyler adkins is someone who really had something to teach us um you know he was a violent brutal corrupt ignorant man who did terrible unspeakable things to enormous numbers of people he was born into a racist crime family i feel he was he was really trained to be a killer by his father and older brother and from little bits and pieces that are recorded here i mean we get little glimpses of what he did with the rest of his life after martin luther king jr died he you know lived a life of crime and like his own father he worked on both sides of the law he worked for the federal government while also being a career criminal uh we get tantalizing confusing glimpses of this he gives us a detailed story apropos of nothing it's just a digression in his testimony where he describes how he set up a stand by the side of the road uh selling watermelons and some watermelons cost seven dollars and some watermelons cost two hundred dollars the watermelons that cost 200 had a bag of cocaine hidden inside so he was a coke dealer who was disguising his cocaine dealing operation uh in broad daylight by putting a bag inside and uh his family had been so close with law and order there the judges were corrupt there in memphis and the police were corrupt that he basic according to him in this story he got away with it but how many times uh you know how many times he went in a jail you know in total i don't know so you know sometimes the most ignorant people uh have the most to teach you but he's a fragment of a society that you know no longer exists he is a fragment of the society that was left behind by the losing side of the american civil war he never referred to his organized crime group as the memphis mafia he said that they instead called themselves the invisible confederacy that they were the confederacy i.e the southern side that continued to exist they continued to organize despite the federal government after losing the war um [Laughter] and uh you know it it just so happened that of all his hundreds of crimes he committed in life at age 16 he was in the right place at the right time to record for the history of the world exactly who how and why had assassinated dr martin luther king jr [Music]