More Than 20 Years Later p.

By: Debra Gersh

Jack Nelson completes coverage of a story he first wrote
in the late '60s when he was L.A. Times bureau chief in Atlanta sp.

IN 1970, THE Los Angeles Times published a 6,000-word article by Jack Nelson about an FBI ambush of Ku Klux Klan leaders in Mississippi.
But Nelson has only just finished writing the story, more than 20 years later.
Now Washington bureau chief for the Times, Nelson was the paper's Atlanta bureau chief in the late 1960s.
Not surprisingly, a great deal of his work focused on the civil rights movement and retaliatory hate crimes by the Klan.
Although the KKK's actions against blacks and white civil rights workers are well documented, a lesser-known part of the story is that the Klan in Mississippi also targeted the Jewish community.
A number of Nelson's articles in the '60s focused on the Klan bombings of two synagogues and the home of a rabbi, and his longer piece in 1970 looked at the FBI's investigation and eventual ambush that led to the capture of a Klansman known as a "mad-dog killer."
Despite the insight and length of his investigation, Nelson never felt the story was quite finished. He saved all his notes and tape-recorded interviews and recently went back to the material, adding to it new interviews with many of the original players.
The result is Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews, recently published by Simon & Schuster.
"I had never covered a story that so intrigued me from the standpoint of the people who were involved, how the whole thing developed, and even though I wrote a long story about it at the time . . . I still didn't know exactly what happened," Nelson told E&P.
"I didn't know about the Jews and the sort of anguish they were going through, I didn't know who some of the other players were, and I just always wanted to know more about it. So I always had in mind that I might go back and do a book, and that's the reason I saved all the material."
In addition, Nelson used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to FBI documents, including his own file.
The climax of Nelson's book is the setup and ambush of Thomas Albert Tarrants III, then known as a "mad-dog killer," now a born-again Christian and co-pastor of an interracial church.
Tarrants was captured in June 1968, when he and companion Kathy Ainsworth went to Meridian, Miss., on a Ku Klux Klan "Number Four" mission ? a murder.
Tarrants and Ainsworth planned to place a bomb at the home of Meyer Davidson, a community leader who had been outspoken about the synagogue bombings in Mississippi.
Using informers within the Klan, the FBI and local police were able to be at the site when Tarrants planted the bomb. After a bloody shootout, Tarrants was arrested. Ainsworth was killed.
Informers, however, do not come cheap, and thousands of dollars from local and national Jewish organizations had been used to help bait the trap.
After Tarrants was convicted in November 1968, Nelson began to get cryptic calls from Ken Dean, a Baptist minister who headed the Mississippi Council on Human Relations. Dean hinted to Nelson that there was more to the story.
"In the beginning, I didn't know what he was talking about," Nelson said of Dean's initial calls. In fact, even after Nelson realized what Dean was talking about, he didn't believe it.
Then he called A.I. "Bee" Botnick of the Anti-Defamation League in New Orleans, who, confident that Nelson did not have enough facts for a story, confirmed that the two had been set up.
Botnick told Nelson he decided to help after the FBI played for him a tape recording of Klansmen plotting to bomb a synagogue full of people. On the tape, a Klansman can be heard saying, "Little Jew bastards grow up to be big Jew devils. Kill 'em while they're young."
Botnick, however, told Nelson he didn't want anything written about the incident, and Nelson didn't have enough facts yet for a story.
Not long after that, Dean, who still was troubled by the events, was advised to tell the story to a journalist he trusted. So he gave Nelson an 11-page memo detailing everything.
"When I really knew that what Dean had said was pretty accurate was when he gave me that memo, because the memo set down [facts] in great detail, and, not only that, it dovetailed with what Botnick had told me, with what else I had been able to learn," Nelson recalled.
Nelson took that memo to Meridian Police Chief Roy Gunn, who, believing that the police never got proper recognition for their role in the Tarrants capture, set up a meeting for Nelson with Police Detective Luke Scarbrough, who had dealt with the informants.
Nelson had hit the "mother lode." Scarbrough was willing to show Nelson all the police records, including records of meetings with the informants.
There was one catch, though. Scarbrough wanted to be paid.
Nelson wrestled with the idea and then told Scarbrough that he would pay him $1,000 for the documents.
"I drew that distinction there," Nelson explained. "I don't know if everybody would draw that distinction, that I wasn't paying for people to say something. I was paying for documents that spoke for themselves, and I don't think I was just justifying the paying for it.
"The guy wanted the money, I thought the story needed to be told, and the paper could certainly afford to pay for it. So I didn't see anything particularly wrong with it.
"But it is the only time I've ever paid for information of any kind," Nelson said, adding that he disapproves "of paying people to give you a statement or to testify to something that involves an allegation of wrongdoing or something."
"I really disapprove, and I try to make the distinction."
While working on the story, Nelson was extra-careful. Not only did he have Scarbrough initial each page of the documents he copied to verify their legitimacy, when conducting interviews later, the paper's Houston bureau chief flew in to be there as a witness.
Nelson said he took those precautions because he wanted "to make sure that I protected against libel because it was a very sensitive, explosive subject."
Once he had the information, Nelson went back and re-interviewed those involved in the ambush, confronting them with what he had learned. They were not pleased.
In fact, not only did Botnick recant his earlier admissions, but police and FBI sources called the story a disservice to law enforcement and the Jewish community and one that could leave "the blood of innocent people" on Nelson's hands.
This was not the first time people had tried to warn Nelson off a story, but he found it troubling.
As Nelson explains in the book, upon returning to Washington, where he had just been assigned, "I began trying to write a story, but it wasn't easy because it involved a complicated series of events and a large cast of characters.
"Worse, my stomach was tied in knots and I had trouble sleeping. I would go to bed each night thinking about what [FBI agent Roy] Moore had said about the blood of innocent people being on my hands and yanking the rug out from under law enforcement."
That was when Nelson received the uncashed check back from Scarbrough, who warned that "You are writing about vicious, bloodthirsty Klansmen who are waiting for certain names to be made public and there will be retaliation by them. This blood will be on your hands and your conscience."
Despite the admonitions, Nelson wrote, "There was never any real question in my mind about whether I would write the story."
Nelson finished the article two weeks later. The Times ran the story on Page One with a jump inside and distributed it through the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.
While there was considerable backlash from Meridian, the quake in Washington began at the top. J. Edgar Hoover immediately issued instructions that the FBI have nothing further to do with Nelson. Not only was Nelson cut off, but the paper was denied access to Bureau matters, and Hoover reportedly began to spread rumors around Washington that Nelson was a drunk.
This was not the first time Nelson had irked the FBI with his coverage, but the "smear campaign" against him was much worse, and the Times eventually told Nelson to back off on other FBI stories.
Nelson, who had been investigating another FBI matter, said that was the only time he ever got pulled off a story.
He knew, however, that if the FBI was that angry with him for his stories, "there's something dead wrong there, because I knew I hadn't done anything wrong in any of it. All I had done was I had literally reported what had happened."
At the time, events in the nation precluded the Meridian ambush from garnering much national attention, but it continued to haunt Nelson for 20 years.
The opportunity to write about Meridian again came out of an offer to write a book about President Reagan or President Bush.
Nelson, who has written several books, said he had no interest in that and instead pitched this book.
"I was always fascinated by it, and I always wondered how justified they were in setting up the ambush," Nelson said. "I think probably, having gone back and done the book, I've changed my mind about it."
Looking at the situation, Nelson said he tried "to look at it as if I were a Jew living in Mississippi, and I had heard played for me by the FBI a tape recording of Klansmen saying they were going to blow up a synagogue with women and children inside. What would my reaction have been?"
In his 1970 article, Nelson said he "was more focused on the police practices and what happened there."
"It was only after really going back in the book that I really thought that much about it, focused on it.
"I look back on it, and I wish I had known as much then as I know now about it and had been able to report it in more detail. I see more now of the justification for what took place than I did at the time."
The book includes "a lot more detail about the way it was set up, the way the money was raised, the way the Jews had their meetings and the talk about hiring Mafia hitmen to come over and break arms and legs. It had a lot of really rich detail in it," Nelson explained.
"But also, one of the things I was really interested in looking into was the whole plight of the Jewish community and what their record was in dealing with the racial situation in Mississippi, especially since the school desegregation decision in 1954."
In addition, Nelson said he does not "think anybody ever had gone back and really looked into and written about how Jews in the South managed to walk that fine line of knowing that they were . . . a small Jewish community living in this very predominantly, fundamentalist almost, Christian community."
When the white civil rights workers from the North ? many with Jewish-sounding surnames ? began appearing in the South, they called attention to the Jewish community, which had done its best to assimilate.
"They felt they were under siege in a way, and in a sense you could sort of understand it, particularly since the Klan had decided to declare war on them," Nelson pointed out.
There are lessons to be learned from the book, he said, "about a society that lets something go on like this without speaking up when violence takes place."
The story also raises the question of how much police power is justified.
"I do think, and I've always thought, that [since] the police powers are so potent and can be misused in such a way that citizens can lose their lives, that when questions are raised about police conduct that there ought to be a public airing of the facts.
"There never were any hearings or investigations into this, although they were called for at the time," he said.
"I think that probably my book takes the place of that sort of a hearing because I think I have fairly thoroughly aired it now. I don't know that it takes the real place of a hearing because if you had subpoena power, you maybe could have learned more than I did, but I learned a lot."
The case "raises the real question of 'Do the ends justify the means? Can you use illegal means to enforce the law? And if you can use it against the Klan, can you use it against Black Panthers? And if you can use it against them, can you use it against whoever, you and me?'
"Anyway," Nelson continued, "to me it was always an intriguing story, and one of the things I didn't realize was how rich some of the characters were."
Nelson was able to talk to many of those rich characters when he returned to research the book.
"The fact that I had sort of exposed the ambush in the first place made it possible for me to talk to some of these Klan members . . . because they looked at me two ways: on one side, I was with the hated press, but also I wrote something that showed the FBI had sort of set them up. So I was able, because of that, to talk to them," he explained.
"Now, some of the people were not real eager to talk to me, but I worked on it awhile and brought them around," Nelson said, adding that some of the people involved in the story helped him locate others and set up interviews.
So now, after more than 20 years, has Nelson finished the story?
"Well, I don't know. I look at it and I don't know whether I've done it all, but I'm not going to do any more," he said. "I think I gave it a pretty thorough going-over. I don't expect anything else to come of it particularly except that a lot of people will discuss it and discuss the kind of lessons that might be taken from it."