Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI John F. McCormack Interviewed by J. Martial Robichaud On October 31, 2006

Transcription

1 Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI John F. McCormack Interviewed by J. Martial Robichaud On Edited for spelling, repetitions, etc. by Sandra Robinette on January 2, Final corrections from Mr. McCormack by Sandra Robinette on January 22, Martial Robichaud (MR): My name is Martial Robichaud and today is October 31, I am here with John F. McCormack in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and we are conducting an interview of John at his residence. We have both executed the copyright release and background form; both the shorter version and the longer version with John s date of birth, FBI service. With that we will begin the interview. John, I ll let you talk a little bit about where you were born, where you were raised, how you came to come to the Bureau and things like that. John F. McCormack (JM): Good. Well I was born in Brooklyn, New York, of all places. There were four brothers, my mother, and we lived with our grandparents. I went to parochial school in New York and went to St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. What s your degree in, John? Economics. I also got a Master s towards my economics. I haven t written my thesis yet, but I ve got my Masters, towards my Masters. During this time, too, I was looking for gainful employment, of course, when I got out of college. What year did you graduate? In My wife to be had a very good friend who worked in the Chase Bank. It was a very prestigious large bank in New York City, later became Chase Manhattan. During this time they only hired people for Princeton, New York, for their executive program, training program. I was able to get in but they wouldn t let me work with the other executives, future executives of the bank. So I worked in the 44 th and Madison Avenue office. I guess during this time, I had a yearning for the FBI but I never really thought much about it.

2 Page 2 How did that come about? Joe McCarthy, the Senator from The McCarthy Joe Senator. This was somewhat after his problem. But what happened; everybody was afraid of being called a Communist. And the bank had a lot of accounts with soap companies, carpet companies, very prestigious companies. They were afraid, they were afraid of their sponsorship of programs on television. Television was in its infancy. And they were afraid that they were going to be backing some program and somebody was going to say that some person who was on that program was a Communist. So they said, We want to know if there were any Communist leanings in these programs. So they looked at me and said, You go out and find out what you can find out. So through the bank, they had a contact with a company that did little advertising commercials and another man who did some kind of show every week. As I said television didn t really come on until about 6:00 until about 10:00 in the evening. So I went to these people and talked and they gave me a whole list of things; people who did what and from that I went to interview additional people. In fact, the people who did the commercial offered me a job, which I turned down; turned down Screen Gems which later became a giant in the industry. But anyway during this time, I wrote up this big report and I sent it into the bank and they passed it all around. It was several pages long. I thought to myself; if I can do this here, maybe I can do it in the FBI. I went to lunch with my brother one time way down on Wall Street, he was working there and it was such a beautiful spring day. I decided I would walk back. So I walked back and I walked by the FBI office. I walked maybe two blocks past it and I said, It s now or never. So I went back there and I was interviewed. I was lucky because there was a drive on to get agents. During this same period of time, I was having problems, my wife was pregnant and I was wondering about what was I going to do for money. The bank paid me a grand total of $3,000 a year. They gave me a 50 cent increase. So I was making $3, So I figured there s got to be something better than this. So I went back and talked to the FBI agent in the interview room. In New York City. 2

3 Page 3 Yeah, in New York City. And he said come back in a week and take the test and everything. So I went back in a week and took the test. I figured I wouldn t hear much from them. A month later, I knew they were doing an investigation because the agent came by and talked to me about some parts of the interview that he didn t have down on paper, that he wanted some explanation of. People were telling me I was being checked. About a month and a half later, I come home one evening and there is a thing to go into the Bureau. From the day I applied, it was only about a month and a half later that I was Accepted? Accepted. What year was that? That was in August of 54. So you had been working for three years. I had been working for approximately 3 years. So I came in there. What was your pay that they were offering you? Five thousand; which was two thousand dollars better. Minus the 50 cents pay raise, which I didn t get because I left before I got the 50 cents. So anyway I went through training and thoroughly enjoyed it and met some great people. About the last month, when we were waiting for where we were to go, I got my orders to go to Cleveland, my first office. By now it was getting to be winter. So I packed my wife, and we had a small child at the time, less than a year old, and we headed to Cleveland in the snow. We stayed in a motel for a while until we could get residence, find a hotel, or stay a little longer. But we eventually found a nice townhouse to stay in. I stayed in Cleveland and worked mostly, a little security and mostly fugitive work. 3

4 Page 4 When you say security, what did that mean? I did investigation of Chinese. That was my first and did some black bag work too. So this would have been what we refer to now as Foreign Counter Intelligence investigations? Correct. With the Chinese foreign nationals and students and things like that? That s correct. You mentioned black bag jobs. Yes. That was something back in the 50 s that was, my understanding, was fairly common back in those days. It was. Explain that to us a little bit about what your understanding was, your expectations and just the general environment of the FBI during that period of time with respect to searches and seizures. Yes. It ran the gambit of all different types of espionage work. For instance, in one situation if I may, without mentioning names. There was an individual who lived in Cleveland and worked in a steel mill. He just did sweep up work, very low paying job. When the Bureau did a check on him, they found he had a Ph.D. from New York University so they said, This man is interesting so we better see what is going on. They also found out that he was not connected with any Communist organization but had formerly been a member of the Communist Party in New York. So they decided they would do a black bag job on him to find out a little more about him. I was a first office agent and I guess I was the only one on the black bag. The others were all experienced agents. I was sort of the grunt to carry the big cameras in and everything. We broke into the house, picked the lock, while he was under surveillance and photographed everything in the house. 4

5 Page 5 We later determined that he had connections with a foreign country. Basically he was there, we assumed, to do something in case of a national emergency at the steel mill. There were other situations like that that I participated in; in the black bag work. Was he a foreign national or was he a citizen? No, he was not, he was a U.S. citizen. He was working obviously, I assume, almost as an illegal or in undercover capacity, since he was well-educated but working as a janitor or custodian. Were there other instances during that period of time, other cases similar to that; I m trying to get a feel for how many people within the Bureau, totally within the United States, cases similar were being worked? As a first office agent, you probably didn t have a good handle on that. No, I didn t. I did one other bag job in a hotel. There was an organization; there was a labor union that took over the whole hotel. But there were several rooms in that hotel that were purchased by individuals and they were living there permanently. So the Bureau paid for one of these people to take a trip, a vacation, and we took over their room. Two days before the convention started, we, four or five of us, got into the room late at night, two or three in the morning, we would leave the room and go down to the main lobby and go into the area where their records were kept and we photographed those records. I don t know what happened to the case eventually. As a first office agent, and having been one myself at one time, you are at the low end of the food chain and don t understand or appreciate where that information is going, who is using it. All that s done is reported to Headquarters. What was, think back, what was your expectation, what did you think would happen if you got caught? 5

6 Page 6 I thought you would get fired or arrested at the very least. We turned in our credentials. You couldn t carry your credentials or any identification with us, and we knew that perhaps we would be on our own if something happened. I think that all the agents that were involved did it for a sense of accomplishment. They took that risk. It was no less a risk than arresting a fugitive and getting shot. And so we all did it because it was the Bureau. That was the understanding in those days that that was part of the Bureau responsibility and requirement. They never drafted you and said you had to be in this. So you volunteered? You volunteered. Somebody would come up to you and say would you want to work with us today. And you knew who the black bag people were in the office. I readily agreed. The people who did these jobs, where they in every office? Yes. It was every office. So it wasn t just the major larger offices? They had it in the other offices but not to the extent. In other words a black bag squad, they were security agents for the most part, they had cases that were assigned, and this was sort of an after thought; additional work that they did; the same with surveillances. In the smaller offices, for instance, Charlotte, there may not be a squad as such but there would be fellows that they would pick up and say, You, you want to do this. Because it was not the security work in the smaller offices. You probably wouldn t be able to answer this, but from the perspective of the Department of Justice, was there a sense among agents that the department was aware that these things were also being done? I don t think they knew to that extent. I don t know. If you did ultimately try one of these people under espionage violation, the department would have to be involved in that prosecution so it seems to me they would almost have to be 6

7 Page 7 I would image that they would only be involved after a case is made. In other words, I don t think the Bureau would have told the Department that they went out on 16 bag jobs this week. No, I don t think that was the case. But if they were prosecuting say this individual in Cleveland, then we would have to tell them. Right, where that evidence came from. Yes, we wouldn t tell them about each individual thing we did on the case. Right. Well that was an interesting period of time. Very interesting, very interesting. So how long did you spend in Cleveland? My wife was giving birth to a second child so I was held over on my transfer. I should have been transferred after one and half years. But I stayed three years there. Three years. Now let me ask you this, on the target of most of these black bag jobs were alleged or Communist sympathizers or illegals or whatever; where there other groups that were targeted back in the 50 s? Not there. It was just the Communist party that I was involved in. CP-USA. Just anybody that was thought to be part of the Communist party. Okay. Of course, I did interviews there. Had somebody spit on me and slam the door in my face; was my first experience in trying to talk to somebody in the party. It was a neighbor too. Wow. That is interesting. So that was the primary, you did some fugitive work too. Yes. Which everybody did back in those days as a first office agent, I assume. Did you get involved with any other domestic security at that time or primarily? 7

8 Page 8 No. Primarily that and the Victor Riesel case I got involved in. What was that about? Victor Riesel was a reporter in New York; very famous reporter. He wrote a series of articles. And one was the article on the Mafia, which we now know as the Mafia, in New York in the garment industry. This is the same time period that you are in Cleveland? Yes, this is while I was in Cleveland. He was a friend of Hoover s, this Victor Riesel. He wrote a series of articles about; I don t recall the name of it, I think the Dio Brothers or some name like that. And they would go to a manufacturer of dresses for instance, and they would sell these pads that women have in their shoulders. They would check the books and if that company was making 10,000 dresses this series, they would have to buy 20,000 pairs. And it was a big shake down. So Victor Riesel wrote in his newspaper, I think it was the Daily News, a series of articles about this. He was walking out of a restaurant one evening and somebody threw acid on his face. I don t know whether it permanently blinded him or what. While he was lying on the ground there he said, Tell Mr. Hoover. And that got us involved in the case. Now the New York Office developed information. There was a fellow by the name of Telvy, I believe his name was. He hid out one of the fellows, the individual who threw the acid. He was a pimp and he had a stable of two girls. And the only thing New York knew about, and they sent a teletype to Cleveland and said, We think he is in the Cleveland area with the girls. And this is their license number and the car he is driving. So one morning, we have an SAC conference and he gave the information and to be on the lookout. There were agents assigned who were looking for the car. So to be honest with you, I was going home for a cup of coffee and I drove down this side street, bunch of hotels and motels and residences there, and I see the car. We were told not to use the radio. So I backed up into this empty lot and there was a phone booth there and I called it in. They said, Stay right there and don t move. So they sent a squad of agents out. The US Attorney in New York didn t have a warrant for this fellow. So he said, I want him interviewed in detail but don t tell him why you are interviewing him. Kind of hard. 8

9 Page 9 By now it is nine o clock. It was us just sitting around waiting for him to show up. We devised a plan that we would, we didn t have an arrest warrant, we would go in with the sirens blazing when we saw him get into the car because we didn t know what hotel or motel he was in. Mostly there were apartment houses there. We would just ask him to come with us. And that is what we did. He didn t show up until about 3:00, 3:30. They put him in a Bureau car and drove him to the Cleveland Office. Had a senior Agent talk to him but since I was a grunt but I saw the car, they said, All right, you are going to keep the log so go in there for the interview. Which I did. So every 15 or 20 minutes I would go into the SAC s office and tell him what was transpiring so far. I guess it was about midnight, we were still, he said, What are you talking to me about? We just want to know what you have been doing the last couple of weeks, where have you been? We still couldn t tell him. New York wouldn t give us permission. One of the times that I went into the SAC, he was on the phone with somebody and he said, He is right here, let me put him on. I picked up the phone to talk and somebody said on the other end, Good work, son, good work, son. and he hung up. And I said, Who was that? He said, That s Hoover. That was the one time I got to talk to him. I guess it was close to one o clock in the morning, and I believe the agent doing the interview was names Harris but I m not positive. He got the newspaper which came out for the next morning. It came out early and it had headlines about the case. The Director had told the US Attorney in New York that this fellow was going to admit to everything and tell where everything was so he could make a press release. Now this put all kind of pressure on us because at this point he hadn t talked yet. So Harris takes the newspaper and throws it in front of him and says, I thought you might want to read this. And he said, Is this what you are talking about? And we said, Yes. So then he gave us the whole story. He did? Yeah. 9

10 Page 10 So he admitted Admitted to everything about hiding him out. Wow. Why the US Attorney didn t want to tell about that I don t know. But that was my one big case in Cleveland. Well it was high profile obviously. Yes. Then you were transferred to Charlotte, right? Charlotte. Charlotte covered the northern part of South Carolina at the time. There were three resident agencies in the area of South Carolina. No, there were four of them, the Rook Hill Office, Spartanburg Office, Greenburg Office and Greenville Office. They all answered to Charlotte. The rest of the state answered to the Savannah Office which was the headquarters office. When I got here, the SAC gave me a choice of an office in North Carolina, a resident agency, or one in South Carolina. So I said, Let me go outside and come back in. He said, Go ahead. So I went outside and I talked to a couple of the Agents and they said, South Carolina is a better resident agency, it s a better office. So I went back in and told him and that is where I was sent. Spartanburg? Yes. It was only a two-man RA at the time. There was an agent, John Munn, in charge here and I was second in charge, or the grunt again. He had been a southern This is 1957? This is in the early part of 1957, February of He was from Lee County originally and had been in that office since 1947 or thereabouts. He came into the Bureau at the start of World War II. I think his first office was Buffalo and then he got down here to this area. I was the second person here. It was an eye opener to be honest with you. In what aspect? 10

11 Page 11 Well I had been to a few trials in Cleveland, and it was a completely different situation here. One thing I noticed right away in the trials that I went to here, the jury was all white, all male. No female, no black. The first week that I was here, an agent from another agency pulled me aside and said, Now when you are in court, we don t refer to a black defendant (he didn t say black, he said a colored defendant) because the word black wasn t used at this time. It was Negro. Yes, it was Negro. But you can t refer to them as sir. You can t refer to them as sir. Yes. What agency, I don t want a name, but what agency was that? Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I don t know whether somebody told him to tell me that or what. There was a rather rough judge here. Was there a sitting Federal judge here? Yes, it was a Federal Judge, C.C. Whyce. He was in Spartanburg for years; very tough but very fair. The interesting thing that I noticed too; there were very few trials at the time, everybody plead guilty because with the all-white jury there wasn t any chance of getting away with anything. Did you have mostly black defendants? No, most of the black defendants were in illegal liquor; liquor stills. There was a big illegal liquor business. Moon shining? Moon shining was very large in this area; it was in an area called Dark s Corner. Or Little Chicago, they called it Where was that? 11

12 Page 12 Up in the mountains above Spartanburg in the mountains, Greenville and Spartanburg County. In fact, there was probably at any given time 30 to 40 stills being operated; some of them by white people with blacks or black employees and some by all blacks. I learned early on that the genteel in the area referred to the (which we now call black), they were referred to them as colored. There was no other word. We didn t use negro; they didn t want to use the word negro. The genteel referred to them as negra. That was some way of not referring to the word negro but being the other way. But in reality, the blacks that went to trial before they went to sentencing before Judge Whyce got off better than the whites. For the reason being that the Judge had a very good friend, the chauffeur, Joe Black, and he was Judge Whyce s chauffeur. The Judge would have the defendant in front of him and he would turn to Joe and he would say, What about him, Joe? And Joe would tell him and he would say, Joe said you are pretty good, I am going to give you probation. He would actually ask his driver? Yes, he would ask his driver. In open court? Well, he would lean over to him but his voice was so loud you could hear it all over the place. He was a very interesting character the Judge. He would question the defendants about who was our senator, who was our member of the house and, if they didn t know, he would get a little peeved and he would say, How come you don t know who your senator is? He would play with them a little bit. But he was very fair in what he gave. There was probably only one or two attorneys who represented criminal offenders. One was Tommy Whiteside, a wonderful man, a very good friend of mine and the other Agent here in town. We trusted Tommy so much that when I had a case, I just let him look over the file, the whole rough file. He was very good at getting his defendant probation as opposed to a sentence and moved the cases along real fast. He and Judge Whyce were very close. During that period of time, John, was the illegal bootlegging the primary focus of that RA, as far as illegal, was there property crime violation? 12

13 Page 13 Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did those. There was an office down the hall. We had a one-room office. There was adjoined space in between and then down, the next office down after that was Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms with three individuals all from this area. They did illegal, they would go out and locate these stills and a lot of times they would be out on the road at night stopping these cars loaded with liquor in them. All the NASCAR drivers. Yes, all the former NASCAR drivers. The interesting thing about that, when they arrested someone, when they stopped somebody or when they broke in on a still and caught three or four guys there; they were the same guys that were arrested before. They would take down their names and say, All right. We ll meet you at the magistrate s office. So the commissioner, which is now the commissioner, was called the magistrate back then; the Federal magistrate. We will meet you at the Federal magistrate s office at 9:00. They never brought them to jail and booked them. They just showed up at the magistrate s office. It was sort of an unwritten law down here that when we in the FBI were doing our investigation and we came across an individual who was in the illegal liquor business; we would not convey that to ATF. They knew that. Because in that way we were able to get informants; use informants in the illegal liquor business. There was a bank robbery case we had, where an informant was invaluable to me. About that time there was a bank burglary at Donaldson Air Force Base and back then $40,000 was a lot of money. They got $40,000. They burglarized the safe and they got $40,000. During this same period of time, sugar had gotten so expensive that a lot of the people in the illegal liquor business took up other jobs, other illegal jobs. This one group, the Babb burglaries, we knew who did it. How did you know? It was rumored all over. It was not that hard to find out but to prove was another thing. Right. 13

14 Page 14 So I went to the ATF agent and I said, Look this bank was burglarized. Yeah, we read about that John. Do you know anybody I could talk to? So he said, Yeah, we ve got a fellow up there, Fred Campbell. He ll talk to you, Campbell. I said, Why would he talk? He said, Well they were having a poker game years ago, the Babbs and the Campbell s and some other people, and one of the Babbs shot and killed a Campbell. And Mr. Campbell has been waiting to get even. And Fred lives in the base of the mountains so you can talk to him and nobody would He doesn t travel much. But again he knows what is going on. And he will help you. So I drove up to Dark Corner and from there I drove on a two and a half mile dirt road to this old farm house. You were by yourself? All by myself. Nothing around it for miles. I just talked to Fred Campbell up there. Fred had a lot of people up there all the time. They d gamble and I d leave everything at home or under the car seat. I went up there as his insurance man collecting a debit. I had a debit book. One day I went up there and they were drunk and gambling and I walked in and some man sitting in a corner chair said, Come on, how about playing with us. You insurance guys can play poker. I need some fresh meat in here. I said, No, I ve got to go inside. Fred took me to the back room and told me what he had found out. This guy comes in and says, Come on you have to play. I said, No, I can t play. Well he pulled out this switch blade knife about that long and he says, You are going to play or I m going to cut you. 14

15 Page 15 Now I had no gun, had nothing else. I stood up and I got the pillow and I figured I would use that in some way. I was just about ready to fight him when Fred hit him over the head with a frying pan. At the time I thought maybe he killed him. But anyway that was one of the things. Fred use to go down to town and get prostitutes, young girls, and bring them up there. He would make them get undressed and walk around that house nude all day long. Is that right? How old was Fred? Fred was sixty-five. Had no nose, had been knocked off in an automobile accident years before. He would have them up there. They came up there because Fred gave them all kinds of money. He bought them all kinds of food. They would tell him about dresses they saw down in town, and he would send somebody to buy dresses for them. One time I went up there and they were walking around and Fred gave me the information he was suppose to give me. And as I was leaving, there was a whole clothesline. They would stay up there about three days, wash their clothes, dry them and iron them and leave. I said, Fred, the girls will be leaving soon, their clothes are almost dry. No watch, John. And he took the hose and he wet down the clothes. I ll keep them another day. But that is the kind of characters there were here. It was a different experience completely for me; a New York boy into this kind of an atmosphere. It was an era of characters, Damon Runyon characters. I thoroughly enjoyed it. John Munn, the other agent, was called by a bootlegger. He lived up in Bird Mountain up in Spartanburg County. We went up to see him. He said, I have to show you one of my helpers. We walked down this dirt road and the guy was sitting down dead. And we said, What happened? And he said, He had a heart attack. He said, Why didn t you call the police? He said, No, no, you got to call them. That s the kind of people who were here. But my first case in the civil rights, in the field of civil rights so to speak, came up when I first got here in

16 Page 16 Right. I was maybe here three or four days or maybe a week or so. At that time, I didn t mean to interrupt you, but at that time on the books; the Civil Rights Act had not been passed. No, there was nothing like that is what we are talking about. But prior to that, the Federal laws prohibited what now? Well, the only thing that they took care of was the civil rights on the part of a police officer or law enforcement officer. Under Color of Law. Under Color of Law. But there was no civil rights. But there were cases where we got called in because the Director said we were going to work that. I see. Or the President said we are going to work that. One of these cases was a particular case. There was all this talk about integration at the schools. There was not integration at the time down here. There was a college over in Gaffney, Limestone College; a very good school; mostly female, but a few male students. There was a Dean s wife who wrote a chapter for a book about integration. It was a book that favored, not favored integration, but talked about it in a positive sense, of what it might bring to the community. And hers was the first chapter in the book. And she made a suggestion in her section that rather than have integration right away everything happen, let s start it in the first grade this year. The second grade next year and bring it on slowly like that. I got a call from somebody over in Gaffney and they had this SLED, which was the State Law Enforcement Division. This was an organization of law enforcement officers, usually one investigator in each county, and it was run by Pete Strom; a wonderful man, honest, honorable, former National Academy man. He had this investigator in Gaffney, Earl Collins, and Earl called me up and said, Do you want to come over and look at some stuff? 16

17 Page 17 They found a large case of or barrel rather loaded with dynamite right under the window of this residence where this woman lived with her husband, the dean. For some reason, it didn t go off. It was set to go off? It was set to go off but it didn t go off. What happened we never found out; what the device was that would start it up, because there was nobody in the field of dynamite or explosives. The only thing we could do when something like this happened, the locals would call up Fort Jackson and they would send somebody up that knowledgeable with explosives. And that is what they did. That s what they did. I was only there for gathering intelligence information. It was shortly thereafter that they narrowed in, SLED narrowed in, on five individuals. They were not members of any Klan group, they just got together and decided to blow this woman up for what she did. One of the individuals, I think his name was Martin, he turned State s evidence. He gave them a signed statement about the four other guys that were involved in it. Now this started a headache for me because I then had to do background checks on these five persons. The case never went to trial because the individual who was to testify about the others, he was working under his car doing some repair work and it fell off the jack and killed him, while the other four were there. But there was no prosecution of the other four. But the Bureau said from now on do a back ground check on these individuals. From time to time when there was a bombing some place in the United States, I would get a teletype read to me from the Charlotte Office that said to verify the whereabouts of these four individuals, of your four for such and such a time. Most of the time it seemed that these calls came in at two o clock in the morning. I would have to drive over to Cherokee County, Gaffney, and check to make sure they were all on station. One of them worked in North Carolina, usually have to drive up to North Carolina and find if he was there. Luckily I was able to verify where they were. This went on for several years. I was in the middle of the night or early in the morning have to go and check on them. They finally called that off because they were never really involved in anything. I guess it was a long time thereafter that I got involved in the next case involving civil rights. 17

18 Page 18 Let me ask you this one before we go to that one. No other information ever came out of that case? The first witness that was killed under his car, his family never said anything about, you know, the other four being involved or anything like that? Nobody pursued it. Nobody pursued it. Of course, we didn t have any jurisdiction. That s right, the Bureau didn t have jurisdiction. I was sure that they killed him. You know. I don t think, in retrospect, I don t think that the sheriff s office which was involved in the case had enough to prosecute them even for the killing. They said they were just there talking to him and the jack fell out. There were four witnesses. Okay, go ahead. In 1961, we moved into this house in In 1961, I was out cleaning up the backyard and planting trees and everything. I was digging a hole out in the front to plant, (I ll never forget this), to plant a flowering crab apple tree. The dirt was real hard. It was clay. I got the hole about dug. I had a big tree there with a big root bowl on it. My wife came out and said, John Ramey is on the phone. Now John was with the ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I got on the phone and said, What s up John? He said, We have been called to Montgomery, Alabama, all of us, the three of us, they are going to deputize us as U.S. Marshals, bus burnings and riots in the bus terminals there. And we are going to be deputized. He said, What I would like for you to do is pick up our checks and deposit them in the mail. I said, Sure John, sure. And I went back out and I dug a little deeper in the hole END OF SIDE A TAPE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE B Tape 1 I was just about to move the tree in and my wife came out the front door and said, Another phone call. I went in and it was the Charlotte Office of the FBI. They said, Get in your car, head to Greenwood, South Carolina, and pick up Agent Ed Groves and head to Montgomery, Alabama. You are to arrive there by the morning. 18

19 Page 19 I said, For how long? They said, I don t know, a couple of weeks. May be a month, I don t know. So that is what I did. So that is how it started? That s how it started. We were doing investigations of the bombing of the bus burnings. And ATF and Border Patrol and a few other government agencies were all deputized as Marshals and they were doing law enforcement work because the local police were nil. I mean as far as doing any work or stopping the riots at the bus terminals. We were to go to the bus terminals and record what happened there. Newspapers were all around. News media was there. What exactly was the issue? The issue was; the President wanted the rioting to stop. This was JFK. Yes, JFK. In fact he had sent Byron (aka Wizzer) White, who later became the Supreme Court Justice. Wizzer headed up the Marshals, the newly deputized Marshals. So Byron White was in charge? Byron White was in charge of that. In fact I was liaison for a while and had to go over to him and get some information and give some information. On one occasion, we had to get information from the postal inspectors about a letter that was mailed. The postal inspector refused to make that information available. They did? So I went over and talked to Wizzer White, who called Bobby Kennedy and the postal inspector called me back and said, You will get that information right away. That s how politics works. Right. 19

20 Page 20 I stayed there for about two or two and half weeks. I came back to Spartanburg and thought my days in the civil rights field were over, until 1963 came along. In the early part of September of 63, I received a phone call. Now you have got to realize that during this time I had 60 or 70 criminal cases assigned to me. Any time I was away doing anything, when I came back I had to work those cases. So I didn t like to go on these specials. But anyway, I received this phone call and he said, You are to drive up here, Joe Zimmerman, another agent, and you are to take a flight out to Birmingham, Alabama, to work cases there. I said, How long? Famous question. Two weeks at the most, John. Two weeks turned out to be three and half months. We got to Birmingham and the first thing that happened was, they said, You are going to go to supper with George Wallace. There s a supper, and we want you, since you are not known in this area, you and Joe, to see if you can pick up little tidbits of what s going on. This was a local office in Birmingham asking us to do this. We did, nothing came of it. Something did happen funny, though. They told us not to bring a Bureau car, take a cab there and everything. Joe Zimmerman, he was single, he picked up one these floral arrangements from the middle of the table and I said, What are you doing with that Joe? He said, I m single and there are some pretty girls in that Birmingham Office and I m bringing them some flowers. The bus boy said, Take them, they are going to throw them out anyway. So Joe took them and he is walking down the street with me and we are trying to figure out, we were lost, how to get back to the field office. And these guys are following us and now we had no guns, no identification or anything. We walked up this street and it was a dead end street and these guys kept coming; two or three of them. I said, What are we going to do, Joe? Joe said, Don t hurt the flowers. We are going to have to fight them. Well, they were gay and they just thought we were because of the flowers. So anyway, the next day Now let me ask you this before you, you were asked to go to George Wallace s function. Now George Wallace was a separatist governor of Alabama at the time. That s correct. 20

21 Page 21 What was the purpose of that; what did they think? They were wondering, the black leadership in Birmingham had gotten together at the churches and they said, We want to report any and all violations by the police departments and sheriff s offices, Bull Connor especially, who was the head of the police department in Birmingham. And any violations you see under the Color of Law, you give them to us and we are going to turn them all over to the FBI and they are going to investigate them. Now these cases started coming in; 20, 30, 50, and Birmingham couldn t cover it. That s why they sent Joe and I; ten people in total five squads You were investigating all these cases of alleged Color of Law violations. Color of Law violations. And they wanted to know what Wallace and all of his friends might say about this or what was the situation. Of course, nothing was discussed along that line. Right. So we got back to the office and we started working these cases. Worked them for about a week. Many times we were working on Saturdays, so Sunday came along and it was September 15, Joe said to me, John, do you have any money left? We were running out of money. Per diem wasn t that great. We were staying at the Tutweiller hotel, the ten of us. So I said, I don t have any money. He said, Well we have to do our laundry. So Joe said, I know what we will do. We cut up soap and we put it in the tub and we put our clothes; our shirts, underwear and socks and everything and we swished them around and we let them soak. We go out and eat breakfast, go to church, then when we come back here, we will hang them all up and they will be dry by the morning. So we were, I guess, we were all dressed and ready to go. We getting ready to walk out the door and all of a sudden something shakes, real loud. I said, What was that, Joe? He said, I don t know. Sounds like an earthquake. It was about a minute or half a minute later, the phone rings. He said, We are trying to get a hold of the other guys and we can only get you. The police radio scanner (this was the Birmingham Office) said there is an explosion at the 16 th Street Baptist Church. Head right there and see what is going on. 21

22 Page 22 These bombings were going on all over the city. Although we were just there to do the under Color of Law we didn t know whether Was ATF doing the bombings? Pardon me? Was ATF doing the bombings? No. Were they investigating? No. The city was investigating. The city was investigating. So we headed over there. I guess we were right behind the fire truck. We were about the first, maybe first or second law enforcement officers there, because it was only three or four blocks from the hotel. We got right in the car, Joe got there right, Joe always drove. I walked into the hole in the side of the church and it was a mess. I looked around, there was a body part in there but I didn t know what, because right at this time, fire department said, Everybody out. We are not sure this place will hold up. So I got outside. I made a few observations which later turned out to be correct. I noticed that although, the street was some debris, there wasn t a lot of debris. It was all in the hole. There was something else and I ll explain that later that happened while I was there. I guess it was two or three, maybe an hour later, we got in the car and started to leave. By this time a large crowd of blacks had assembled around the area. As we drove through, and I can t blame them, they tried to rock the car and turn it over. Birmingham turned into an armed city at this time. We tried to find out who did it but we were working at a disadvantage. We had no contact. The police, there was no real cooperation between the police. There was one person in the Birmingham Office that was a liaison with the police department and everything went through him, if you needed some records of something over there. 22

23 Page 23 This was Sunday night and I guess it was close to midnight or 1:00 in the morning when we got back into the hotel and found that all of our clothes were still in the tub. Still in the tub soaking. We rinsed them all out which took about an hour or an hour and half. We hung them over lamps and everything else and turned on the lamps and went to sleep. The next morning, we were still dirty and dirt and the suit I had on was full of dust. We dusted off as best we could and went over to the Birmingham Office to see what was going on. The SAC at the time told us that a special was being put together; over and above the special that I was on. Roy K. Moore was going to be in charge of it. Now Roy Moore was a real go-getter SAC, and he was on, I believe, the Inspection Staff at the time; wonderful guy. I had worked for him at the Charlotte Office when he was SAC there. I figured well maybe it is time to go home; although I was interested in working the case. But the SAC said, No. You and Joe are going to stay. He said he wants you two there. I don t know if that was a blessing or not. Roy got there, Roy was able to pick out who he wanted there. He arrived late Monday. Now Monday morning, or Monday afternoon, there was a meeting of the Klan that we had heard about, called the East View Klavern and they meet down at the park down in a gulley. We tried to put them under surveillance but we didn t have the right equipment, we didn t have anything there at the time. Roy hadn t arrived. Roy got there and he got the two of us together and there were a few others that came at that time and he said, Now I m assembling this crew and the Assistant Director gave me permission to pick the people I wanted here. People I know around the Bureau. The people I want to get things done. And maybe not follow the regulations exactly. So they started arriving there. Roy bawled out Joe and I out for not doing a better surveillance and find out what they talked about down at the gulley. But that was rarely. We had a crime scene the next day and did a crime scene search of the area. Now it had been roped off all night. 23

24 Page 24 The church? The church. The police had done some checking but not much. The only thing we found on the street there, right on the street where it had happened was a lot of little plastic pieces; but we didn t know what they were from and a fishing bobber with a leader on it which probably meant nothing. Probably thrown out of a car or dropped. That was about all. Somebody came down from the Bureau and said it was probably ten sticks of dynamite that did this. Or thirty, I don t even remember what he said it was. Roy got there and got all his people together and started handing out jobs. One of the things he said to Joe and I was, I want to know where dynamite comes from. I want to know about dynamite. So I have arranged for you and Joe, because we had no specialized people in dynamite or bombings, you and Joe I have arranged to go to a Dupont plant where they make dynamite and you are going to learn about dynamite. So we drove; I can t remember where it was in Alabama, and the manager there of the plant told us all about dynamite and I said, told him about what the theory was about how many sticks of dynamite. He said, What percentage dynamite? I said, What do you mean, what percentage? Dynamite comes in different percentages; 33%, you know, most people in this area use dynamite in the mines. There was a big coal mine district in Birmingham. Thirty-three percent is a pushing type dynamite. That is what you are probably looking at. It would be a lot more, like 30 or 40 sticks that you are looking at for the bombing. He gave us a lot of other information. We came back and one of the things Roy said was Now I want you to find out who has dynamite in this area. Who distributes it, who do they distribute it to. Well that turned into a real Pandora s Box because most of the dynamite was purchased for the coal mines. I learned a new situation that I didn t know before, that there is such a thing as somebody robbing a mine. What that is is that after a mine gets worked completely by some big company or some individual, what s left in the mine is the coal that may be above where they shored up the ceiling or where a post is holding it up. Let s stop here John. Got the main one running and then the camera. Okay. We are on. Do you remember where you were, John? Yes, we were talking about the dynamite. 24

25 Page 25 Right. And what happens after a mine is worked completely. The mine owner usually sells the right to rob that mine to an individual. He goes into the very end of the mine where they ended and he starts removing the overhead ceilings and the posts on the side and taking that little bit of coal that is left there. Of course he uses dynamite. It is a very dangerous job because it could collapse on him. I don t know where the name came up of robbing the mine but that is what one or two of the individuals told me it was called. We would have to go to them and say, Well did you order, we see that you purchased dynamite from this store? Well I don t know how much of it I used. There were no records kept any place. So the dynamite was sort of a dead end street for us. We tried everything. The Bureau was collecting intelligence information but that wasn t helping us much. The only thing that helped us was intelligence information that the Birmingham Office had on the Klan. We settled on a Klavern The East View Klavern. There was all kinds of rumors that these fellows were the ones who were planting bombs. Especially an individual by the name of Robert Chambliss who was the Exalted Cyclops of that Klavern. There were several others that were mentioned as possible individuals involved; one was a Herman Cash, Tommy Blanton, Bobby Cherry, and John Hall. They were the individuals that we concentrated on. Now the way Roy set it up. There were a whole bunch of other people too but the way Roy set it up; each of us were broken of the 30 (there was probably maybe 12 crews special crews with 2 agents in each crew). So you had a total of how many agents working this special? About 30. Okay. There were other agents later on doing other work. So there were about 24 there. We were all assigned a primary suspect, a couple of secondary suspects and then a couple of fringe suspects. You had to eliminate them or put them in, in the case. 25

26 Page 26 Joe and I got John Hall as a suspect, a prime suspect. We would go out every morning. We would start at 8:00 with a conference in the office, Birmingham. We would go into the office and we would all tell what we were going to do that day, tell Roy Moore. We would leave and interview either a prime suspect or a secondary suspect. Now most of these people were working so a lot of our work had to be done at night. We spent our mornings looking for dynamite, where it went to and things like that. What happened then, we would work until about 2:00 a.m. in the morning. Roy didn t want you to quit before that time. 2:00 a.m. So eight o clock in the morning until 2:00 a.m. The rest of the time was for us to sleep. But nobody complained about it. Now one of the things he wanted to do; we didn t have any idea how they set that bomb off. Because in our investigation, a week after the bombing, we went to, we had road blocks set up and stopped cars that came by and say, Did you come by this place a week ago? Yes or no. Did you see anything? Joe and I had a black motel that we went to that Martin Luther King was staying there. And we interviewed people there; did they know any, now they were black but did they know anything or did they see anything. Nothing came of that. One of the main things we came across during this investigation that the bomb had to be set out there earlier than 9:00 or 9:30 whenever it went off. So what was the trigger mechanism? We found no clock or parts for clock and everything. But nothing that would indicate what set that bomb off. So one of the things Roy wanted us to do while we were out working was to, if a bomb went off any place like a church or anything, go there and do a crime scene. You agents do the crime scene. Let s see if we can find out what set this bomb off. No bomb went off for a while. But one thing did happen. When we d leave the office, somehow we would be followed. When we went to interview a Klansman, we were at this place and some times we were followed. Sometimes a car would pull up next to us; a guy with a shotgun in it, you know show us. 26