Legacy of Secrecy (96 page)

lished that he was not a participant.” Ray’s attorney pointed out FBI

files that fingered two criminals unrelated to Ray for the bank robbery,

as well as the fact that Ray’s fingerprints didn’t match those connected

with the robbery.

Ray’s brother, who was implicated in the 1967 robbery by the 1978

HSCA hearings, took the unusual step of going to the Alton bank in 1978

to meet with the bank’s managers, then to the Alton Police Department,

where he offered to stand trial, waive any statute of limitations, and take

a lie-detector test. The Alton police chief told Ray’s brother, and report-

ers, that “he is not, and was not then, a suspect in the holdup.”6 James

Earl Ray would soon be spending and traveling far beyond anything

he could hope to earn legitimately, so if he hadn’t gotten his funds from

the robbery, where did they come from?

According to HSCA files, one of Ray’s brothers revealed to a journalist

the real source of Ray’s funds between the time of his escape from prison,

and his capture after King’s murder—and why Ray went to Montreal in

July 1967. He said that Ray “made money in dope. Told me he had [a]

contact, made it in prison, in Montreal. Some guy who had been in [the

same prison as Ray]. Guy would supply [Ray] with dope—[Ray] had

contact [in] Detroit—ran it back and forth. Detroit–Montreal.” Accord-

ing to this brother, Ray would make approximately $7,000 from running

drugs over the next seven months.7

Ray was no longer dealing with amphetamines, known as speed or

bennies. His brother said there was “no money in speed, bennies . . . it

was heroin—that’s where [the] money is.” Ray would later claim he’d

gone to Canada to escape to a country overseas, perhaps by getting a

job on a merchant ship at Montreal’s busy docks. However, HSCA files

quote Ray’s brother as saying that Ray “did not try to get [a] seaman’s

job,” and that “when [Ray] went [to] Canada it wasn’t to leave [the]

country then—[he] went to work [in the] dope racket. ‘I’m positive of

that.’”8

James Earl Ray himself later admitted to Dan Rather that when he went

to Montreal, “I met with some people. I thought they were possibly nar-

cotics smugglers.”9 Ray’s actions in Canada—and his similar, admitted

smuggling later in Laredo, Texas, and in Mexico—mirror closely the

drug-smuggling activities of the Canadian heroin courier busted in

Laredo in the fall of 1963, detailed in earlier chapters. That courier had

worked for Carlos Marcello’s portion of the French Connection heroin

network.

The heroin from the 1963 Laredo bust was chemically matched

by US authorities to the drugs seized from a Houston ship in 1962. It

was all part of the same heroin network involving Marcello that Rose

Cheramie had told authorities about in 1963 and 1965, and that was

busted at Fort Benning in late 1965. Michel Victor Mertz’s associates

supervised the operations in Canada, while American oversight of

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the Montreal–Toronto portion of the network was under the control of

Carmine Galante, Marcello’s ally and Hoffa’s confidant in his Lewisburg

prison.10

James Earl Ray’s activities are almost a textbook case of a typical

heroin courier for the heroin network allied with Marcello, but that

eluded Congressional investigators, because the only definitive book

on the Canadian heroin trade—
The Canadian Connection
, by Jean-Pierre

Charbonneau—was never published in the US. Just like Ray, the 1963

Laredo heroin courier had originally been recruited in Canada, prior

to his Texas–Mexico smuggling. Also like Ray, the 1963 Laredo courier

had never smuggled heroin before, but was recruited because he knew a

criminal associate of one of the traffickers. Before beginning the Mexican

part of the smuggling, the 1963 Laredo courier had been told he would

“have to change my car because the one I had was too old and I’d need

a newer one.” In the same way, Ray would be told after leaving Canada,

but before heading to Mexico, that he would need to “get rid of the car I

had (it was old)”—parentheses in original—in order to smuggle drugs

between the US and Mexico.11

Ray’s arrival in Montreal coincided with the need for new heroin

smugglers. The traffickers were taking advantage of the decreased scru-

tiny caused by the reassignment of RCMP narcotics squad officers to

provide security for Expo 67, caused in part by the Cuban-exile bomb-

ings and threats. Even before the summer 1967 heroin surge, the net-

work of couriers, traffickers, distributors, and importers had been large:

According to Charbonneau, it had imported “ten tons of heroin with a

street value of $9 billion” in just the “previous five years.”12 But by July

1967, the RCMP’s narcotics squad had been “reduced from 30 men to

eight men, [creating] an unhoped-for opportunity for traffickers. . . .

Montreal during the months of [Expo 67] festivities was a major, if not

the major, port of entry for heroin on the continent.” Eventually, the few

Mounties who remained on “the Narcotics Squad realized that interna-

tional traffickers had been taking advantage of the situation and so had

Montreal dealers, who had started up new trafficking rings.”13

James Earl Ray’s involvement in the Montreal arm of the French Con-

nection heroin network helps to finally explain two lingering mysteries

about him. No investigation has ever come up with a reasonable expla-

nation for how James Earl Ray found the alias Eric Starvo Galt, the main

cover identity he would use for months. The same is true for three other

aliases he used: Galt and those other aliases were all from real Toronto

citizens who lived within a two-mile radius of each other. Three of the

men even fit Ray’s general description, and all four were legitimate

businessmen with no criminal history. The real Eric Galt’s middle name

was St. Vincent, which he abbreviated for a time as “St. V.,” with large

circles for the periods. Thus, the middle name in a handwritten “Eric St.

V. Galt” might have been misinterpreted to have “Starvo” as a middle

name. However, neither the HSCA nor the FBI nor Canadian authorities

could figure out how Ray obtained Galt’s name, since Ray passed only

briefly through Toronto on his way to Montreal, where he first used the

alias. Galt was not in any newspaper or TV stories around that time, and

the same was true for the three other Toronto men whose identities Ray

would steal and use in the coming months.14

However, aliases are important for effective smuggling, and the Mon-

treal heroin ring also ran an immigration and illegal-identity racket for

“supplying false papers”—what would be called identity theft today.

In addition to smuggling, the ring was also used for new Mafia recruits,

immigrants fresh from Italy and Sicily who needed cover identities to

avoid the well-publicized troubles of illegal immigrant Mafiosi like

Marcello. This illegal-identity part of the heroin ring was run by three

Mafiosi, including two longtime associates of Michel Victor Mertz, Mar-

cello’s heroin partner.1 James Earl Ray’s aliases and cover identities,

stolen from the Toronto men, probably came from this identity-theft

ring, which also ran heroin through Toronto.15

Shortly before Ray arrived in Montreal, the third Mafioso working

in the identity division of the heroin ring had plastic surgery to make

himself less distinctive and harder to recognize. Perhaps Ray heard

about that, because several months later—just four weeks before Mar-

tin Luther King’s murder—Ray would undergo plastic surgery in Los

Angeles to make his nose less distinctive. That was something Ray, his

family, or other associates had never done before.16

Ray’s access to false identities would help not only in the short run,

with his drug smuggling, but also in his eventually getting a fake iden-

tity that would be good enough to allow the fugitive to settle safely in

the US or assume residence in a foreign country. In the short term, Ray’s

first and main false identity, Eric Starvo Galt, would help him in his drug

smuggling. Either just before or just after Ray arrived in Montreal, he

obtained a fairly sizable amount of money to tide him over until his first

cross-border smuggling run the following month.

Ray later offered various accounts of how he obtained his first funds

1. One of the Canadian identity theft kingpins used an “Amusements” company as a cover;

Marcello and Trafficante used similar amusement companies as covers, and so did a Marcello

operative tied to Dr. King’s murder as well as another man who would first find Ray’s rifle

after Dr. King was shot.

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LEGACY OF SECRECY

in Montreal, saying he robbed a Montreal brothel or a grocery store, but

Canadian authorities identified no grocery store robberies within that

time frame. Many of Ray’s claims over the years have proven false, so

we treat all of Ray’s statements with caution unless we find corroborat-

ing evidence or testimony. As a career criminal, Ray often changed his

story to avoid subjects and crimes he didn’t want to discuss, such as the

Mafia, heroin trafficking, and federal agents involved in Cuban exile

operations. Ray’s stories also evolved over time to fit emerging evidence

or the claims of others.1

Ray mentioned various amounts when describing the haul from his

alleged Montreal robbery, ranging from $800 to $1,700 (in today’s dol-

lars, $4,800 to $10,200). Given Ray’s shifting stories about it over the

years, he likely obtained the money in another fashion, perhaps from

an initial smuggling run in Montreal that he didn’t want to confess to.

Realizing the questions it would raise and the mobsters it would anger,

Ray always tried to avoid clearly admitting that he smuggled heroin,

usually limiting himself to describing even obvious examples as only

something that might have been drugs.17

James Earl Ray arrived in Montreal on July 17, 1967, and, as his brother

noted earlier, Ray sought out a contact he’d made in prison, who was

then in Montreal. The brother says Ray “must have made [a] drug con-

tact in Canada,” and was adamant that Ray “was running dope” there.18

Ray initially registered at a Montreal hotel and began hanging around

the seedier part of the waterfront area, known as a major importation

center for the French Connection drug ring. Ray frequented the Nep-

tune Tavern, and later claimed he made it known that he was looking

for false identity papers to help him leave the country and that he was

soon approached by a man, known to him only as “Raoul,” who would

supposedly guide Ray’s actions over the next nine months.

Ray’s physical descriptions of this “Raoul” varied over the years,

though his supposed actions that Ray described remained relatively

consistent. We believe, after reading all of the available material, that

while Ray might have had a drug- and arms-smuggling contact who

1. The same also applies to the statements of Ray’s brothers. In general, we look for one

or more of the following in evaluating and accepting the statements of veteran criminals:

1. Independent corroborating evidence or testimony; 2. If it is an admission against interest

(i.e., harmful to the criminal’s own case), especially when the statements form a coherent

and consistent pattern, even when they are made at different times; examples of the latter are

Ray’s drug smuggling and his cont acts in New Orleans; 3. The conditions under which the

statements were made (i.e., is there a reason the criminal might have let their guard down

or been comfortable in actually telling the truth).

used the name Raoul, the individual he describes is more likely a com-

posite of two or more criminal figures Ray dealt with. Ray’s first two

attorneys, Arthur Hanes Sr. and Percy Foreman, came to the same con-

clusion: Foreman told noted author William Bradford Huie, “‘Raul’ . . .

is the name Ray uses for any and all of his contacts and accomplices in

crime between July 1967 and April 1968.”19

A career criminal like Ray would most likely tell authorities about a

named figure like Raoul only if:

1. He had been told to do so by a crime boss, in case he was ever

caught, or

2. He thought doing so would keep him alive in prison; in other

words, by letting the criminals he was working for know that if he or

a family member was killed, then the true identities of the criminals

he collectively called “Raoul” would be revealed by his attorney or a

surviving family member.

Ray’s extensive travels and activities from July 1967 until his cap-

ture two months after Martin Luther King’s murder, in London in June

1968, demonstrate clearly that Ray had criminal associates during that

time. As political science professor Phillip Melanson wrote, “The best

evidence suggests that Ray was an unexceptional criminal who had