Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (55 page)

It was Reynolds, too, who devised an elegant solution to the stalemate: politely ignore Mayor Henry Loeb and negotiate directly with the city council. This allowed the mayor to save face; he could continue to hold on to his intransigent position--
the union is illegal and thus cannot be recognized!
--and then blame any settlement on the council.

Reynolds also helped resolve the other major sticking point--the question of "dues checkoff"--by arranging for an independent, employee-run federal credit union to automatically deduct the sanitation workers' union dues. The final hurdle was a modest pay raise for the garbage workers--a pressing problem, it turned out, as the city had no extra funds in its current budget. This impasse was resolved by a spontaneous act of philanthropy from a Memphis industrialist named Abe Plough,
⁶¹⁶
the founder of a large pharmaceutical concern that made such products as Coppertone suntan lotion, Maybelline cosmetics, and St. Joseph aspirin. Insisting on anonymity at the time, Plough put up sixty thousand dollars of his own money, which was enough to answer the city council's immediate needs.

In the end, the strikers got more or less everything they'd been picketing for these past sixty-five days: union recognition, dues checkoff, a more straightforward grievance procedure, and a wage hike. If the symbolic could be reduced to the strictly monetary, the reparations for King's death, as well as the deaths of the two garbage workers whose crushing accident had ignited the strike, came down to a thin dime: the garbage workers, duly represented by AFSCME Local 1733 of the AFL-CIO, would receive a raise of exactly ten cents per hour.

The negotiators finally shook hands and the memorandum of understanding--no one dared call it a contract--was ratified by the city council. Even Mayor Loeb privately conceded that it was good for the city. "After Dr. King was killed,"
⁶¹⁷
he later said, "we simply had to get this thing behind us." Memphis was reeling from the assassination in every possible way, rethinking itself, questioning its identity. The Cotton Carnival had been completely canceled--and in fact the party would never be quite the same again. Even
Hambone's Meditations
, the regular cartoon in the
Commercial Appeal
, was on its deathbed. That same month, the paper would decide that the beloved Forrest Gump-like Negro had finally outlived his usefulness.

Undersecretary of Labor Reynolds was ecstatic and couldn't wait to report back to President Johnson. "'I am a man'--they meant it,"
⁶¹⁸
Reynolds said. "Even though they picked up garbage and threw it into trucks, they wanted somebody to say, 'You are a man!' It was the real thing."

That night, April 16, the garbage workers gathered inside Clayborn Temple, where the walls were still streaked with tear-gas stains from the March 28 siege, and unanimously voted to approve the agreement. People danced in the aisles, they cried, they flashed V-for-victory signs. The local union leader, T. O. Jones, had tears streaming down his face when he mounted the podium. "We have been aggrieved
⁶¹⁹
many times," he shouted. "But we have got the victory!"

The good cheer in the room was undercut by a painful recognition of the price that had been paid. One garbage worker, visibly excited by the possibility of returning to work the following morning, put it this way: "We won,
⁶²⁰
but we lost a good man along the way."

EARLIER THAT DAY, in Toronto, Eric Galt was undergoing a metamorphosis. He was slowly emerging from the chrysalis of a spent and useless identity and turning into Ramon George Sneyd. In the morning, he found a new apartment for "Sneyd" to live in, this one a few blocks away from the Szpakowski rooming house on Ossington. It was located at 962 Dundas Street West and was run by a Chinese landlady named Sun Fung Loo.
⁶²¹
Then he wrote to the registrar of births
⁶²²
in Ottawa, requesting a birth certificate for Ramon Sneyd. In his application, he asked the authorities to send the certificate to his new Dundas address.

A few hours later, Sneyd walked into the Kennedy Travel Bureau, a respected travel agency on Bloor Street West, to investigate airline tickets. For the first time, he was calling himself Sneyd in public, and wearing the professorial-looking tortoiseshell glasses that graced the photo he planned to use for his passport application. The travel agency's manager, Lillian Spencer,
⁶²³
sat down with Sneyd and gladly helped him with his travel plans. "He just sort of appeared out of nowhere," she recalled. "He was a nebulous person, not the sort of man one notices or remembers. He blended right into the wallpaper."

His unusual name was the only thing that adhered to Spencer's memory: "I thought it was an odd name
⁶²⁴
because Ramon is Spanish and doesn't usually go with George."

Sneyd first inquired about tickets to Johannesburg, South Africa, but recoiled at the price--$820 Canadian round-trip. Instead, he asked Spencer to look into the cheapest available fares to London. She soon found a flight on British Overseas Airways that departed Toronto on May 6. It was a twenty-one-day economy excursion, the cheapest flight available, and came with a fare of only $345 Canadian. Sneyd liked the sound of it and asked her to go ahead and make a reservation.

Do you have your passport with you?
she asked.

He didn't have one yet, he said, but he was working on it. Here Spencer must have sensed his hesitation, his awkward uncertainty over how to proceed. Sneyd was under the mistaken impression that to secure a passport, he would have to provide a "guarantor"--a Canadian citizen in good standing who could vouchsafe that he'd known the applicant for more than two years. Meeting this requirement was the main reason he'd been developing
two
identities and
two
addresses; according to his rather convoluted and risky plan, the bespectacled Sneyd would be the traveler, and Bridgman (wearing an altogether different getup and possibly a toupee) would be the guarantor.

Sneyd wasn't going to explain any of this to her, of course, but Spencer graciously intervened before he had to conjure up a story.
"I
can get you a passport," she said. "Do you have a birth certificate?"

"Well, no," he said.

She told him that was okay, he didn't need a birth certificate.

What about the guarantor? he asked. "I don't know anyone who could serve as my guarantor."

"Not necessary, either," Spencer replied. There was a loophole in the passport rules, she said. From her files, she fished out a government form called "Statutory Declaration in Lieu of Guarantor." Sneyd was simply required to sign the form in the presence of a notary. "As it happens," she said sunnily, "we have a notary right here in the office."

Sneyd couldn't believe his good fortune. He'd had no idea how easy it was in wholesome, trusting Canada to acquire travel papers and inhabit another person's identity: no birth certificate required, no proof of residence, no character witnesses. He'd wasted his time fabricating a web of interlocking aliases, disguises, and residences, when all he had to do was swear before a notary that he was who he said he was.
Welcome to Canada
, the expression went,
we believe you
.

Sneyd made quick work of the application forms. Listing his occupation as "car salesman," he provided the real Ramon Sneyd's birth date with his new address at Mrs. Loo's place on Dundas Street West. The application asked, "Person to Notify in Canada in Case of Emergency," to which, predictably, he furnished the name of his doppelganger, "Paul Bridgman, 102 Ossington Avenue, Toronto." It was all terrifically easy, but in his haste he made one critical mistake--he scribbled the last name "Sneyd" in a way that was barely legible.

From his jacket, he retrieved an envelope containing the passport photos he'd sat for at the Arcade Studio a few days before. Sneyd paid Lillian Spencer five dollars for the application and another three dollars for her processing fee. She said the passport would be ready within two weeks--and should arrive in her office about the same time the British Overseas Airways ticket came in. She bade him farewell, and as he ambled out the door, she affixed to his application a note whose frantic truth she could not have guessed. "Please expedite," she wrote, "as our client wishes to leave the country as soon as possible."

39
ARMED AND DANGEROUS

AT THE FBI headquarters in Washington, the MURKIN investigation had been steadily building throughout the week, steadily swelling toward an evidentiary crescendo. Individually, the thousands of isolated puzzle pieces that agents had thus far accumulated meant little and proved nothing; taken as a whole, however, they were starting to paint a single portrait and point toward a single man. The mounting evidence kept landing on the same individual, over and over and over again--the same shadowy figure, nervous, fidgety, wearing a suit, living in flophouses, and driving a white Mustang.

In quite a literal sense, the puzzle pieces
were
coming together: they were now arrayed on a single large table in a harshly lit FBI examination room. Since April 4, the FBI had compiled a staggering amount of stuff--hundreds and hundreds of miscellaneous objects that seemed to bear no relation to one another, like the scattered debris at an airplane crash. A Schlitz beer can. A package of lima beans. A bullet housing. A strand of hair. A scrap of paper. A pocket radio. A receipt with handwriting on it. A shutter-release cable for a camera. A coffee cup immersion heater. A marked-up map. A pair of undershorts. A twenty-dollar bill. A portable television. A set of binoculars. A bottle of French salad dressing. A toothbrush. A rifle.

Cartha DeLoach had the bureau's best minds poring over this mass of evidence--not just fingerprint people, but handwriting people, fiber-analysis people, photographic specialists, ultraviolet light technicians, ballistics experts. The connections these professionals began to discern were dizzying, the links intriguing, the microscopic matches too numerous to count. What they saw was a thousand little arrows, each one seemingly pointing to some other arrow.

Fibers found in the trunk of the impounded Mustang matched fibers taken from the bundle's herringbone bedspread. Eric Galt's signature on the registration card at the New Rebel Motel in Memphis matched handwriting samples obtained all along the investigatory trail. Hairs in Galt's comb matched hairs found in the Mustang sweepings. The physical, the circumstantial, and the purely anecdotal seemed increasingly interwoven: The "Turista" stickers affixed to the car jibed with Stein's recollections that Galt said he'd once owned a bar in Mexico. When buying the gun in Birmingham, Lowmeyer had mentioned going hunting "with my brother," while people at both the bartending and the dancing schools also recalled that Galt mentioned a forthcoming trip to visit a brother. The story about Galt pressuring Charlie and Rita Stein, and their cousin Marie Tomaso, to lend their signatures to the George Wallace campaign seemed somehow connected to Galt's Alabama license plates, his former Alabama residence, and other emerging ties to George Wallace's home state.

Every imaginable detail--the Thermo-Seal laundry tags, the auto service sticker, the change-of-address form, the maps, the fingerprint-laden Afta aftershave lotion, the money orders, Marie Tomaso's Zenith television found abandoned two thousand miles away in Atlanta--seemed to link Galt's movements together. The car was connected to the bundle, was connected to the gun, was connected to the binoculars. Atlanta was connected to Memphis, was connected to Mexico, was connected to Los Angeles and Birmingham and back to Atlanta again. It was all a single web.

Two pieces of late-breaking evidence clinched the FBI's confidence that they were onto the right man. The first came on April 16, when agents in Atlanta found the laundry service
⁶²⁵
Eric Galt had used on Peachtree Street. Annie Estelle Peters, the desk clerk at Piedmont Laundry, checked her records and noted that Galt had picked up his clothes on the morning of April 5, the day after the assassination--the same day he'd parked the Mustang at Capitol Homes and vacated his rooming house, leaving a note on his bed. Galt's inculpatory movements seemed now almost perfectly clear: staying in Memphis at the New Rebel Motel on the night of April 3, he had raced back to Atlanta after the assassination, whereupon he'd abandoned his car, picked up his laundry, cleared out of his room--and apparently left town for good.