To which he responded: “Yes, I told it to the guy with the antique store down on Maryland Avenue. He was a federal informant.”
I was taken aback. “When did you tell him that?”
He responded, “Right after I come from Kauffman with the offer. I come in the door, and he says, ‘I wanted to see you. I want you to kill a guy in Chicago for me.’ I says, ‘I don’t kill people,’ I says. ‘I just got the offer to kill King.’ He says, ‘Martin Luther?’ I says, ‘Yeah.’ ”
I pressed him further. “Do you think he told other people?”
Byers said, “He was a federal informant. That’s what he was. It’s the FBI’s fault that they did not act on this offer. Do you understand me?”
Not really believing what I was hearing—both because it diverged so much from the testimony he had given to the committee and because of his age—I assumed he was simply confused about the timing of it all, so I pushed him again.
“But didn’t you mention it to him a long time after the offer was made? Like, maybe in ’73?”
Byers was insistent. “It was five minutes after the offer was made. I went straight to the store because we were dealing in stolen lamps and stuff. And he told the FBI immediately. They should have acted upon it. He would still be alive.”
I pressed him once more: “According to the FBI, you didn’t mention it to an informant until five years later.”
Byers was clear: “No, it was five minutes later. The FBI was on my back. I left Kauffman, and I went to the informant. If they had acted on it, he would be alive.”
Sitting on the couch in my home office, I was stunned. I ignored, for a moment, the FBI’s failure to investigate any potential conspiracy once it had arrested Ray because of its own misdeeds in the ever-growing COINTELPRO domestic-spying scandal. I put to the back of my mind the revelations about Hoover’s known assaults on the civil rights leader while he was alive. I stripped away all of the complexity and merely pondered the possibility that Byers was telling the truth now and that he had lied before the HSCA; he had confided about the bounty to someone who both was an FBI informant and was highly active in the St. Louis criminal underground, a network deeply aligned with far-right-wing politics. The agency’s failure to investigate a conspiracy to kill King could have been one of the most fateful errors of inaction in the history of our nation.