Hellhound on His Trail

by Hampton Sides

  He wanted to make it clear that he wasn't a racist--and didn't raise his kids to think that way. "I don't hate niggers,"674 he said, noting that around Ewing there weren't any black folks anyway. On the other hand, he pointed out, "They aren't the same as us. They just lay around and fuck all the time."

  As he thought about his son's present troubles, he was convinced that where Jimmy went wrong was in failing to heed his childhood lesson, the one Speedy ingrained in him over and over again--that the little guy can't win, that the cards are stacked against him, that the best course is to keep your identity murky and aim low. "People try to get too much out of life,"675 he told the journalist George McMillan. "Sometimes I think Jimmy outsmarted himself. I can't figure out why he tried to compete with all them bigshots. Life don't amount to a shit anyway. Jimmy had too much nerve for his own good. He tried to go too far too fast."

  WHILE THE FBI dug ever deeper into the disturbing muck of James Earl Ray's past, Ramon Sneyd was hiding five thousand miles across the ocean, in Portugal.

  Balmy Lisbon, the salt-bleached capital of Moorish palaces and Romanesque castles perched on the westernmost edge of Europe, afforded Sneyd a refreshing change from gray Toronto. His hotel was not far from the waterfront and the swirling chaos of Rossio Square, where the acres of marble reverberated night and day with the fat thunk of soccer balls and the longing strains of fado music. The city was crawling with sailors, fishermen, and merchant mariners; huge freighters could often be seen clanking in from the ocean, taking refuge in the estuary of the Tagus River, which formed one of the world's greatest ports.

  It was the port, in fact, that had attracted Ramon Sneyd to Lisbon. Knowing that the Portuguese capital was an international recruitment center for mercenaries, he'd come straight from London hoping to catch a cheap ship to Africa. Sneyd had simply exchanged the return portion of his excursion fare for a ticket to Lisbon and then hopped on a flight the same day, May 7. For a week now he'd been prowling the wharves, just as he had in Montreal a few weeks earlier. He found a promising ship bound for Angola,676 the war-torn Portuguese colony in Africa. The passage would only cost him 3,777 escudos, or about $130. But again Sneyd was stymied by paperwork; entry into Angola, he discovered, required a visa, which would take over a week to obtain. The ship was leaving in three days.

  Sneyd thought Lisbon would be a safe place to hide out and cool off for a while, until he could find passage to Africa or figure out something else to do. He was aware that Portugal's extradition laws were strict--always favoring the fugitive--and that Portugal, which had abolished capital punishment back in 1867, would not extradite him to the United States if prosecutors there vowed to seek the death penalty.

  Sneyd was staying on the second floor of the Hotel Portugal,677 a sternly appointed establishment in a bustling precinct that smelled of smoked fish and spitted chickens. His rent was 50 escudos--about $1.80 a night. Gentil Soares,678 the main desk clerk at the hotel, thought Sneyd was an "unfriendly tourist." The day clerk, Joao, said he was a "bashful fellow, always walked around with his face down." He never tipped, never ordered room service, never talked with anyone. Soares noticed that Sneyd wore eyeglasses in his Canadian passport photo, and also when he was checking in, but that he never wore the glasses again. Once Sneyd tried to bring a prostitute up to his room, but the hotel management refused; the couple left and evidently stayed the night together somewhere else, as Sneyd was not seen again at the hotel until the following afternoon.

  Sneyd spent his daytimes at the docks, or at places like the South African embassy, where he pointedly inquired about immigration procedures. He told someone at the embassy's front office that he was hoping to travel to southern Africa to search for his long-lost brother; Sneyd said he had reason to believe that his brother, last seen in the Belgian Congo, was now a mercenary fighting in Angola. Did the embassy have any information on how he might sign up to become a soldier of fortune down there? (On this question, the understandably suspicious embassy officials proved to be of no help, but Sneyd did eventually learn about several mercenary groups operating in Angola--he jotted down contact information on a piece of paper that he then folded and wedged into the power compartment of his new transistor radio, to ensure a tight battery connection.) Sneyd also visited, to no avail, the Rhodesian mission and the unofficial legation for Biafra, then stopped by the offices of South African Airways and gathered information on flights to Salisbury and Johannesburg.

  Nighttimes Sneyd kept to a fairly regular circuit of sailors' bars--the Bolero, the Galo, the Bohemia, the Fontoria, Maxine's Nightclub. Usually he sat off by himself, drinking beer in the shadows, but some nights he tried to make conversation with women. One evening at the Texas Bar, he met a hooker named Maria Irene Dos Santos and managed to negotiate a bargain rate of three hundred escudos--about eleven dollars--for her favors. At Maxine's, he grew particularly friendly with a prostitute named Gloria Sausa Ribeiro679 and spent several nights with her. She was a tall, willowy woman with blond hair clipped in a stylish poodle cut. She noticed that Sneyd was obsessed with the news and bought every American and British paper he could get his hands on. For her services, Sneyd insisted on paying not in cash but in gifts--a dress and a pair of stockings. "He did not know any Portuguese,"680 Gloria later told Portuguese police detectives, "and I spoke no English, so we conversed only in the international language of love."

  While Sneyd was freely sampling the Iberian nightlife, he knew his time in Lisbon was short. He was desperate over his finances--which, after eight days, had dwindled to about five hundred dollars. He'd had no luck finding a ship, and feared that his complete unfamiliarity with both the Portuguese tongue and the Portuguese currency made it impractical for him to consider pulling a heist or robbing a store. Lisbon was too strange and exotic. He couldn't see a way to fall back into his usual pattern of melting into the crowd.

  He decided he had to rethink his options in an English-speaking city. He dropped by the Canadian consulate and had a new passport issued, this time with the surname spelled correctly. On Friday, May 17, Sneyd took a taxi to Lisbon's Portela Airport and boarded a flight on Transportes Aereos, bound for London.

  43 A RETIREMENT PLAN

  IN WASHINGTON, DeLoach's men were slowly piecing together field reports that hinted at the answer to perhaps the most salient question about James Earl Ray: his motive for killing King.

  It was becoming more apparent to the FBI, and to investigative reporters burrowing into the case, that although Ray had not exactly lived at the forefront of racial politics, he had long been a virulent racist. When he was sixteen, he carried a picture of Hitler in his wallet, and while serving an Army stint in Germany just after World War II, he'd continued his adolescent fascination with Nazis. "What appealed to Jimmy about Hitler,"681 his brother Jerry Ray told the journalist George McMillan, "was that he would make the U.S. an all-white country, no Jews or Negroes. He would be a strong leader who would just do what was right and that was it. Not try to please everybody like Roosevelt. Jimmy thought Hitler was going to succeed, and still thinks he would have succeeded if the Japs hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor."

  A number of Ray's acquaintances told FBI agents that Ray couldn't stand black people. Walter Rife, an old drinking buddy who pulled off a postal service money order heist with Ray in the 1950s, said that Ray "was unreasonable in his hatred682 for niggers. He hated to see them breathe. If you pressed it, he'd get violent in a conversation about it. He hated them! I never did know why." When Ray was in Leavenworth for the money order heist, he turned down a chance to work on the coveted honor farm because the dorms were integrated.

  While serving his armed robbery sentence at Jefferson City, Ray allegedly told a number of inmates that he planned to kill King. Investigators had to take such stories with a grain of salt, of course--prisoners were notorious for telling authorities just about anything--but agents found a consistency to the story that was hard to ignore. One Jeff City inmate, a not always reliable man named Raymo
nd Curtis, said Ray would become incensed whenever King appeared on the cell-block TV. "Somebody's got to get him," Ray would say. Curtis said an inmate from Arkansas claimed he knew a "bunch of Mississippi businessmen" who were willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who killed King. This got Ray thinking. According to Curtis, Ray liked to analyze the mistakes Oswald had made in killing Kennedy, and talked about what he would have done differently. Ray once said that "Martin Luther Coon" was his "retirement plan683--if I ever get to the streets, I'm going to kill him."

  THE FBI, MEANWHILE, had already begun to look for avenues by which Ray might have been paid to kill King--or at least avenues by which Ray might reasonably have hoped to get paid. The bureau was well aware of the existence of bounties on King's head. The talk was out there. Throughout 1967 and early 1968, FBI informers across the country got wind of new threats nearly every week. It was loose talk, mostly, whispered among liquored-up hotheads in bars and pool halls. The bureau understood that death threats, though they provided a certain barometer of the culture, weren't the real concern; the people who didn't threaten were usually the ones to worry about.

  But some of the rumors about bounties seemed to have a basis in fact. The White Knights of the KKK, it was said, had offered a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who killed the Nobel laureate. Other groups, such as the Minutemen and various neo-Nazi cells, had also floated assassination proposals that involved a considerable financial reward.

  Perhaps the most serious bounty of all, and the one that, years later, the FBI would deem the most credible, originated in Ray's hometown of St. Louis, where a wealthy patent attorney named John Sutherland684 had offered a bounty of fifty thousand dollars. Sutherland had a portfolio of stocks and other securities worth nearly a half-million dollars--investments that included sizable holdings in Rhodesia. One of St. Louis's most ardent segregationists, he was founder of the St. Louis White Citizens Council and an active member of the John Birch Society (he was a personal friend of its founder, Robert Welch). In recent years, he had become immersed in a right-wing business organization called the Southern States Industrial Council.

  For years Sutherland had been venting his peculiar strain of racial rage. "Like Khrushchev, the collectivists will settle for nothing less than total integration of every residential area, every social gathering, and every privately owned business enterprise," he once wrote, on letterhead stationery that featured entwined Confederate and American flags emblazoned with the motto STATES RIGHTS--RACIAL INTEGRITY. "The white majority must act before state coercion prevents us from doing so!" Sutherland lamented that "we are deep in the throes of minority rule" and insisted that "we forgotten men got that way by failing to heed the admonition of the great seal of Missouri--'United We Stand, Divided We Fall.'"

  Throughout 1968, Sutherland spent much of his time organizing for George Wallace. He sometimes could be found down at the Wallace headquarters in South St. Louis, where organizers frequently met at John Ray's tavern, the Grapevine.

  Earlier in the year, Sutherland tried to persuade at least one man--Russell Byers, a forty-six-year-old auto parts dealer and sometime car thief--to accept his bounty offer and assassinate King. Byers claimed he met Sutherland in the den of his house, which was conspicuously Confederate themed: swords, bugles, flags. Sutherland wore the hat of a Confederate cavalry colonel, with crossed sabers on the front.

  As Byers recalled the encounter to the FBI, Sutherland told him he'd like to pay fifty grand to contract for the killing of a well-known figure.

  And who would that be? Byers asked.

  "King," Sutherland answered. "Kill Martin Luther King. Or arrange to have him killed."

  Byers had long dwelled in a criminal netherworld and was used to having exotic business ventures floated his way, but the whole situation struck him as strange. "Where's the money coming from?" he asked.

  Sutherland replied that he belonged to "a secret Southern organization" that could easily raise the bounty.

  Byers declined the offer. Though he was a small-time crook, a thief, and a con man, he was no murderer. But Byers could tell that this shadowy wheeler-dealer, this colonel manque in the Confederate cap, was serious about his project. If he was a wacko, he was a well-connected one, someone who could leverage the underworld of St. Louis and get things done.

  The bureau never found definitive proof that Ray was ever paid a cent by Sutherland, or even that Ray knew about the bounty. But Sutherland's connections to the Wallace campaign, and to John Ray's Grapevine Tavern, would intrigue investigators for years. Russell Byers did not immediately come forward to the FBI, and it would not be until 1977 that agents were able to piece together the story. Investigators with the House Select Committee on Assassinations found Byers's story "credible" and singled out the Sutherland bounty as one scenario that likely could have motivated James Earl Ray to kill King. But by that point, John Sutherland was beyond the reach of prosecution. He died in 1970.

  44 PLAGUES

  ALONG THE MALL in Washington, the caravans of the Poor People's Army had all arrived, and on May 13, Resurrection City was declared open for business.685 Much as Martin Luther King had hoped for, more than two thousand people of all colors and backgrounds were now encamped in a sprawling tabernacle city set among the cherry trees of West Potomac Park. Abernathy was sworn in as "mayor," and Jesse Jackson, having more or less patched up his relationship with King's successor, was named the shantytown's "city manager."

  The SCLC began this epic demonstration with high energy and fervent hope and even good humor. Abernathy envisioned a "City on a Hill," a great experiment in protest politics that would last at least a month. It would be a kind of American Soweto perched on the back doorstep of Capitol Hill, a deliberate eyesore meant to force the government to pay attention to the problem of systemic poverty. Protesters vowed to disrupt if not paralyze the business of government, and they planned to go to jail en masse. Abernathy threatened to sic "plague after plague686 upon the pharaohs of Congress until we get our demands"--which included an economic bill of rights guaranteeing a minimum yearly income, a campaign to end hunger in America, and a multi-point plan to rebuild the nation's worst inner-city ghettos. The price tag on all of Abernathy's antipoverty measures came to nearly thirty billion dollars.

  During its first week, Resurrection City made front-page news and enjoyed a sort of honeymoon period in the media. Reporters feasted on the spectacle of this latter-day Hooverville erected in the shadow of the Mall's cold marble monuments. Congressional delegations walked the grounds--among the visitors was a U.S. representative from Texas named George Herbert Walker Bush. There were marches, parades, press conferences, and sit-ins; there was live music, dancing, even an Indian powwow. Peter, Paul, and Mary came, as did Pete Seeger and a host of black entertainers. Abernathy proudly baptized the first child born in the camp. Resurrection City had the feel and pulse of a freewheeling countercultural festival, a full year before Woodstock.

  But by the second week, things had started to unravel. It became apparent that the Poor People's Campaign was short on ideas--and even shorter on organizational strategy. The SCLC knew how to run a march, but it had no experience running a functioning city. Ralph Abernathy was no Martin Luther King--he had neither the shrewdness nor the charisma nor the rhetorical discipline to bring off such an ambitious campaign. Even Abernathy recognized it. "Resurrection City was flawed687 from the beginning," he later conceded. "I realized more every day the loss I had suffered and the burden I had inherited."

  Veterans and friends of the movement began to impugn Abernathy's leadership. Stanley Levison, King's old confidant, saw signs of "megalomania688--Abernathy is thrill-happy and running around everywhere." As far as Levison was concerned, the campaign was fast becoming "a fiasco." Bayard Rustin, meeting with reporters, shared a similar disdain for Abernathy's abilities. Resurrection City was "just another fish-fry,"689 he said. Instead of engaging government officials and building allies, Rustin argued, the SCLC le
ader was alienating nearly everyone who could aid the cause, leaving Congress feeling "trapped by Abernathy's nameless demands for an instant millennium."

  As Andy Young saw it, Abernathy simply didn't have what it took to hold the already-disintegrating movement together, and he couldn't keep his headstrong young staff under control. Bickering between James Bevel, Hosea Williams, and Jesse Jackson nearly descended to the level of fistfights. "Ralph was frustrated690 with his inability to be Martin Luther King," Young later wrote. "The team of wild horses was now really running wild."

  Most of the SCLC higher-ups didn't even stay in Resurrection City--they decamped to a Howard Johnson across from the Watergate. In the absence of strong and present leadership, Resurrection City fell apart. Teenage gang members, who served as "marshals" along the encampment's tattered thoroughfares, harassed and even beat up reporters. Thugs worked the long rows of tents, shaking down residents for protection money. The camp was treated to a steady drumbeat of weird and troubling anecdotes: An obese man wielding an ax stormed about the camp, hacking down several A-frame structures. Two psychiatric patients, recently released from St. Elizabeths mental hospital, set a phone booth on fire. A band of rowdies threw bottles at cars along Independence Avenue and fell into a protracted tear-gas war with the police at the east end of the Reflecting Pool. Camp officials began to receive threats on Abernathy's life. Then a rumor went out that vandals from Chicago were planning to scale the Lincoln Memorial and spray-paint it black.

  Just when it seemed as though the news reports emanating from Resurrection City couldn't get any worse, they did. On May 23, the rains came, and the deluge didn't stop for two weeks. As Abernathy put it, "The gray skies poured water,691 huge sheets that swept across the Mall like the monsoons of India," leaving people "ankle deep in cold, brown slush." It rained so much that people suspected the government had seeded the clouds. Resurrection City became, literally, a quagmire. Hosea Williams, who replaced Jesse Jackson as "city manager" after the internecine feuding became intolerable, called the campsite "that mudhole." Pathways had to be covered in sheets of plywood. Tents collapsed. Hygiene deteriorated. Worried health department officials warned that outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid were imminent. The National Park Service would soon be presenting the SCLC with a bill of seventy-two thousand dollars for damages to the grounds of the Mall. Meanwhile, some twenty-two broken-down mules abandoned after the long trek to Washington were given over to the care of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or placed in perpetuity on a Virginia farm.