Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His A

What did he look like? the agents asked him. How did he dress?

'He wore a brown suit and a watch. I'll tell you this, the guy put on an excessive amount of hair cream.'

Agents Ross and Slicks found that Stein's cousin Marie Tomaso had sharp recollections⁶¹² of her own. As a cocktail waitress at the Sultan Room and as a fellow tenant in the St. Francis Hotel, Tomaso had seen Galt on more than thirty occasions, she guessed. 'He usually drank vodka, or beer,' she remembered. 'He liked to eat beef jerky. His hands were clean, no calluses. He always had a solemn expression. He was real pale, as if he stayed indoors all the time.'

Once Tomaso and Galt shot some billiards together. 'He wasn't very good, but you could tell he'd played some pool.' Although he was mostly quiet and shy, he had a temper. She recalled the time when Galt turned on her and Rita, furious at their suggestion that Charlie, not Rita, would accompany him to New Orleans. 'I got a gun,' he'd said. 'If this is a setup, I'll kill him.'

Sometime around late February, she and Galt arranged to swap televisions. He wanted to exchange his clunky Montgomery Ward console TV, which he'd purchased a few months earlier through a classified ad, for her little Zenith. The trade didn't make much sense to her, because her Zenith really wasn't as good a set, but he explained: 'I need a portable--I'm doing some traveling the next few months.'

She was happy to take delivery of the big console and went up to Galt's room to help him carry it down. On the back of the television set was a handwritten sign⁶¹³ that said: MARTIN LUTHER COON.

WHEN SPECIAL AGENTS John Ogden and Roger Kaas⁶¹⁴ knocked on Jimmie Garner's door that Easter Sunday, April 14, the Atlanta landlord was deeply confused--and quite possibly a little drunk. His office records were in shambles, and at first he mixed up Galt with another tenant, a worker from North Carolina who had checked in only a few days earlier. But at the agents' steady prompting, memories of Eric Galt slowly came flooding back to his befogged mind.

Galt had moved in on March 24--'he wore a suit and looked for all the world like a preacher,' Garner said. He paid ten bucks a week in rent and stayed in room 2. On March 31, Galt paid a second week's rent, and that was the last time Garner had seen him. On the afternoon of April 5, Garner entered Galt's room to change the linen and found on the bed a scrap of cardboard on which Galt had scrawled in ballpoint pen: 'Had to go to Birmingham--left TV. Will return to pick up soon.' But Galt hadn't returned, and Garner had all but given up on his tenant--in fact, he was beginning to covet that abandoned Zenith for himself.

That night FBI agents kept an eye on the rooming house in case Galt did try to circle back for his things. The next morning, Monday, April 15, Agents Kaas and Ogden showed up again for another round of questioning. Can we see Galt's room? they wanted to know.

'Sure,' Garner said. Hoisting a big ring of jangling keys, the landlord opened up room 2 and gladly showed them the space. Garner apparently had no idea that FBI agents had already snuck in and cased the joint, but he was beginning to guess what the investigation was all about. 'How you guys coming along on the King case?' he asked at one point.

While Garner looked on, the agents donned gloves and collected all of Galt's belongings. (To Garner's chagrin, they took away the TV set, too.) The evidence was soon boxed up at the FBI field office and then entrusted to Agent John Sullivan, who drove straightaway to the Atlanta airport, hopped a Delta flight for Washington, and personally transported the latest trove to the FBI Crime Lab.

Jimmie Garner, meanwhile, was whisked away to the FBI Atlanta office for more questioning. An agent laid out six photographs of six different white males and asked Garner, 'Was your roomer any one of these guys?'

Garner didn't hesitate in picking a photograph of Eric Galt--the portrait that had been taken with Tomas Lau at the bartending school. 'If this isn't the guy,' Garner said, 'it's his twin brother.'

THE NEXT MORNING, in Memphis, the sanitation strike that had lured King to his death was finally drawing to a close. Nearly every day since the assassination, while garbage continued to pile up on the streets and citizens began to suspect King's killer would never be found, negotiators had exhausted long hours at the Hotel Claridge downtown, desperately trying to hammer out an agreement. Several times the discussions had devolved into shouting matches, finger wagging, fist shaking--'we were numb,⁶¹⁵ played out emotionally,' said one of the mediators--and the parties representing the city and the union nearly walked away.

It was President Johnson's personal emissary, Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds, who kept things on track. 'Whether you realize it or not,' he told the negotiators, 'the eyes of the world are on this table.'

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 aggrieved⁶¹⁹ 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 births⁶²² 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