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

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 Raymond 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