The Informer

Appearing on a recent national TV program, U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was asked if the FBI had infiltrated the K.K.K. Replied he: "Yes. At times I think we know more about what the Klan is doing than we know about what some divisions of the Justice Department are doing."

One of the probable reasons for the Attorney General's sweeping statement is Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., an Alabamian who has lived his 34 years in Birmingham. Rowe is a stocky, reddish-haired man remembered by acquaintances as a job-to-job drifter, working at various times in a dairy, in a novelty store, behind a bar, as an ambulance driver, and in a meat-packing plant, where he froze several toes. To Birmingham cops, he was a sometime squealer in bootleg cases. And to his fellow Ku Klux Klansmen, he was a colleague who liked to talk--without ever getting very specific--about all the Negroes he had beaten up.

Last March 26, Rowe was one of four men arrested in connection with the senseless highway slaying of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, 39, a Detroit white woman who had gone to Alabama for the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

Looking for Excitement. Last week a county grand jury in Alabama returned murder indictments against three of those four men. But not against Gary Rowe, who, as it turned out, was now the prosecution's star witness--having been a part-time paid informer for the FBI against the K.K.K. for at least six years.

The specifics of what Rowe told the grand jury were not made public. But in general he told how after the march from Selma to Montgomery was over, three Klansmen left Birmingham looking for excitement. Considering Rowe one of their own, they let him go along. Before they left, according to Rowe, he called his FBI contact.

The four cruised around Selma, Rowe said, and finding no outlet for Klansmanship, headed out on Highway 80. On the highway, the Klansmen spotted Mrs. Liuzzo driving a car in which the only passenger was a Negro youth, Leroy Moton, 19.

Struggle with a Pistol. The Klan car trailed Mrs. Liuzzo's for about 20 miles. Finally, as it sped past, the man sitting next to Rowe fired the shots that killed the woman.

All this time, according to Rowe, he was under the impression that his companions intended only to frighten their victims or, at worst, to beat them up. When the killer began firing at Mrs. Liuzzo, Rowe struggled with his own pistol, but could not get it out of its holster in time, he told the jury. When the three tried-and-true Klansmen who were riding with him finally come to trial, Rowe will be the only eyewitness against them. The Negro youth in the car with Mrs. Liuzzo has said that he would have difficulty identifying the occupants of the murder car.

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