New Orleans Family Associate Salvador “Sal” Liberto is born on September 18 1936. It’s unclear of his exact position within the Family but Sal was implicated, along with brother Frank (a Made member of the New Orleans Family) in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Frank was allegedly overheard on a phone call with the shooter in the assassination telling him to contact his brother in New Orleans to receive payment for the job.

Sal dies in the same month on the 28th in 1999.

Salvador "Sal" Liberto, a shadowy figure operating within the orbit of the New Orleans crime family, was born on September 18, 1936, and would go on to become one of the more intriguing peripheral figures in American organised crime history. While his precise rank within the New Orleans family structure remains a matter of some debate among historians, Sal functioned as an associate of the organisation — a man useful to the family without holding the formal status of a made member. It was a distinction that placed him in a familiar position in the underworld: close enough to the action to be trusted with serious matters, yet removed enough to provide a layer of insulation for those higher up the chain.

The New Orleans crime family, one of the oldest in the American Mafia, had long maintained a powerful presence in the Gulf South, with its tentacles reaching into labour rackets, gambling, and political corruption stretching back to the era of Carlos Marcello, the formidable boss who ran the city's underworld for decades. It was within this environment that the Liberto family found its place, with Sal's brother Frank holding the more elevated distinction of being a made member of the organisation.

It is the shadow of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination in April 1968 that casts the most controversial light over both brothers. Frank Liberto was allegedly overheard during a telephone conversation with the shooter, James Earl Ray, instructing him to contact his brother Sal back in New Orleans in order to receive payment for the killing. The claim, which surfaced through various investigations and witness testimonies over the years, pointed to the possibility that the assassination was not the act of a lone, racially motivated gunman, but rather a contracted murder with mob financing and coordination behind it. The allegation has never been conclusively proven, and it remains one of the most contested and explosive theories in the long history of conspiracy surrounding King's death.

Sal Liberto died on September 28, 1999 — the very month of his birth, sixty-three years later — taking with him whatever secrets he may have held about one of the most consequential crimes of the twentieth century. His death closed a chapter that, for many investigators and historians, was never truly opened wide enough.

The enduring questions surrounding the Liberto brothers serve as a reminder that the reach of organised crime into American political life may have extended far deeper than official accounts have ever acknowledged.