Skid Row Plot

A Scheme to Kill Carter?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920351,00.html

The man clearly was unstrung. He had a history of mental illness. He also bore an eerily resonant name for a person claiming to be part of a four-man plot to assassinate a President: Raymond Lee Harvey. At first, it all seemed too weird to be taken seriously.

Unemployed and a drifter, the Ohio-born Harvey, 35, claimed to have met three men with Latin names in downtown Los Angeles two weeks ago. On May 4 he was with the three in a third-floor room of the skid row Alan Hotel, near the Los Angeles Civic Center. The three told him they intended to shoot President Carter, who was scheduled to talk to a crowd in the center on the following day, a Saturday. They asked him to help. Under the plan, Harvey was to work his way toward the front of the crowd, then fire a starter pistol. That was to create a diversion during which two of the others would fire at the President with rifles from an undisclosed location.

Harvey was given a starter pistol. He and one of the men, whom he called Julio, went to the roof on Friday night and fired seven blanks from the pistol to see how much noise it would make. He spent the night at the hotel in a room with Julio. The other two men occupied another room on the same floor.

Just a wild tale by a wino? Perhaps, but just before Carter was to speak on Saturday, Harvey was in the crowd—and he looked so nervous that he drew the attention of a Secret Service agent. As the agent approached him, Harvey began walking rapidly away, and was seized. He was carrying a starter pistol. As he told his story, Secret Service and FBI agents tried to check it out. They found the man Harvey knew as Julio, but he gave his name as Osvaldo Espinoza-Ortiz, 21. He admitted being an illegal alien from Mexico.

At first Espinoza denied knowing Harvey, but under questioning he said he had known him for more than a year and knew the other two Latins as well. They, he said, had showed him two loaded rifles. He knew one of the men as Umberto Camacho. Agents found a shotgun case and three rounds of live ammunition in refuse from the room rented by Camacho, who had checked out of the hotel on Saturday. When agents seized Harvey, Espinoza said, he had been standing in the crowd only ten feet away.

Was it nevertheless just skid row chatter among transients who had no intention of carrying out the killing? And why would they have wanted to kill the President? Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles were not certain. But they charged Harvey with conspiring to kill the President and jailed him on a $50,000 bond.

Espinoza was held as a material witness under $100,000 bail. The other two men were being sought. The U.S. Attorney was to decide this week whether to seek grand jury indictments. Declared FBI Spokesman Tom Sheil: "Any time there's a threat against a President or a possible plot against a President, we're going to take it seriously."

And from NEWSWEEK

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Was there a plot to kill Carter?

At first it seemed just a bum's boozy fantasy. When a grubby transient named
Raymond Lee Harvey was arrested 50 feet away from Jimmy Carter at a Los Angeles
rally two weekends ago, he claimed to be part of a four-man conspiracy to
assassinate Carter. Harvey carried only a blank-firing starter's pistol, and
the Secret Service said at the time that he had "all the characteristics of a
derelict." But investigators found new evidence last week that supported
Harvey's story - including a shotgun case and ammunition in a nearby hotel room
- and once again raised the specter of a Presidential assassination plot.

The case is as bizarre and confusing as it is potentially serious. One curious
twist is the names of the principals; Raymond Lee Harvey, who was held on
$50,000 bail last week on a charge of conspiring to kill the President, and
Osvaldo Espinoza Ortiz, who was held on $100,000 bail as a material witness.
References to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy were
unavoidable. Officials have also indicated that Harvey has a history of mental
illness. Both Harvey and Espinoza now claim that Harvey was supposed to create
a diversion by firing the starter's pistol while two other men attempted to
shoot Carter. But investigators say they have no clues to the whereabouts of
the alleged accomplices and are not even certain of their identities.
Accordingly, the authorities have been careful to stress their doubts about the
case.

The mystery began when Harvey, 35, was arrested at the downtown Los Angeles
Civic Center Mall just ten minutes before Carter was to speak at a Cinco de Mayo
Mexican festival. Secret Service agents said they spotted him in the crowd
"looking nervous," searched him and found the .22-caliber, eight-shot revolver
and 70 unspent blank cartridges. Espinoza, 21, who had been standing nearby,
was taken into custody shortly afterward. According to government affidavits,
Espinoza initially denied knowing Harvey but later corroborated his story that
the two of them had gone to the roof of the shabby Alan Hotel near the Civic
Center and test-fired the starter's pistol on the night before Carter's
appearance. The plot, they said, was hatched along with two other men, both
Mexican, who had rifles and were living in the hotel. Checking out the story,
police found an empty shotgun case and three rounds of live ammunition in a room
that had been rented by a man named Umberto Camacho - who had checked out on the
day of Carter's visit.

Taking it seriously: Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Etra was expected to make a
decision on the case this week. "Unless it's clear that the defendant has
committed the crime with which he is charged, we're not going to present the
case to a grand jury," he said. The FBI, meanwhile, continued its investigation
- trying to find Camacho and the unnamed fourth alleged conspirator. "Any time
there's a threat against a President or a possible plot against the President,
we're going to take it seriously," vowed FBI spokesman Tom Sheil. But it was
still far from clear whether the authorities had a real conspiracy or a
wild-goose chase on their hands.
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[Taken from Newsweek, May 21st, 1979, page 34]

Two of the three "conspirators" have rather interesting names - and if someone
was sending Carter a message, they could hardly have done better with those
names, and the three rounds of live ammo found at the hotel. (it would be most
interesting indeed if they happened to have been 6.5mm - but that detail wasn't
given.)