1-25-07, 7:40 a.m.

The wheels of justice, so says the old adage, turn slowly. No one can better attest to the truth of that statement than Thomas Moore, 63, who has been in determined pursuit of justice for the kidnapping and murder of his brother Charles Eddie Moore back in 1964.

The bodies of Charles Moore and friend Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19 years old at the time, were discovered heavily weighted in a Mississippi river in July of 1964. Their bodies were discovered almost by accident during the intensive investigation into the disappearance of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were shot to death on the evening of June 21, 1964 and their bodies were subsequently discovered.

The disappearances of Moore and Dee, two young African-American men, were largely overshadowed and ignored in the wake of the publicity given to the search for the three civil rights workers. The FBI had become involved and called their investigation 'MIBURN,' bureaucratic shorthand for 'Mississippi Burning.' A movie of this same name was made in 1988 and starred Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe and Frances McDormand.

But Thomas Moore didn't forget. How could he? He kept the memory of what happened to his brother alive, and he never stopped fighting for justice. And now, there has finally been an arrest.

An Associated Press report by Emily Wagster Pettus and Lara Jakes Jordan states that a former deputy sheriff named James Ford Seale, 71, has been arrested for the kidnapping of Moore and Dee. Seale, who the Associated Press reports is a 'reputed Ku Klux Klansman' is expected to be arraigned today in Jackson, Mississippi.

A second man long suspected to have had a role in the disappearance of Moore and Dee, Charles Marcus Edwards, 72, was not charged. The Associated Press quoted anonymous sources close to the investigation as saying Edwards was cooperating with the investigation.

Seale was long reported by his family to have died. However, Thomas Moore and David Ridgen, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, found Seale in 2005 living just a few miles from where the kidnappings had occurred.

The cold case of Moore and Dee was reopened by the Justice Department in 2000. US Attorney for Mississippi Dunn Lampton, told the Associated Press he credited the efforts of Thomas Moore in this latest arrest. 'If they hadn't brought it to my attention, I wouldn't have known to do anything,' Lumpton said.

Seale and Edwards were arrested by the FBI in 1964, but the Associated Press reports that the Bureau, 'consumed' by the investigation into the disappearances of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, turned the case over to local authorities. A local Justice of the Peace promptly dismissed the charges, the AP reported.

As a result of numerous disclosures, including documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, however, we know that the well-oiled-always-get-their-man picture of the FBI as portrayed by James Stewart and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., was largely a product of J. Edgar Hoover's very well-oiled-and-finely-tuned propaganda machine.

Contrary to FBI mythology, Hoover's agents were compelled to conduct the MIBURN investigation. Hoover's attitudes toward non-whites are now a matter of established record. The FBI had for many years one African-American special agent; his job was to drive Hoover's car. And even in an area where the FBI has enjoyed tremendous success, investigating organized crime, we know that Hoover dragged his feet on that topic -- consistently denying the existence of organized crime until the revelations of former crime figure Joseph Valachi in 1963.

Since that time, a break-in into the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office disclosed the now infamous COINTELPRO operation against the left-- investigations that included illegal 'black bag' jobs and other forms of harassment; revelations that acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray destroyed evidence in the FBI's investigation of Watergate; investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) that the Center for Constitutional Rights characterized as 'sweeping and intrusive'; and the failure of the FBI to act on information which might have foiled the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Most recently, the Justice Department's Inspector General released a highly critical report suggesting the FBI, in effect, botched the investigation into the activities of former Florida Congressman Mark Foley.

Thomas Moore was not deterred. In his comments to the Associated Press, he said, ''I walked around with an amount of shame. I didn't know why, why it happened to us, that I wasn't there to do something - to do SOMETHING.'

'It took all those years but [my brother and Henry Dee] finally got justice,' he said.

-Lawrence Albright is a contributing writer on politics and culture for Political Affairs.