Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (13 page)

Rita introduced Galt to her brother, Charlie Stein, who lived around the corner from the St. Francis Hotel on Franklin Avenue. At Rita's urging, Charlie had volunteered to join Galt on the road trip and help out with the driving.

Charles Stein was a deeply eccentric man
¹⁶⁴
--perhaps even stranger than Galt. A convicted pimp and drug dealer, and a dedicated chess fiend, Stein believed himself to be a psychic healer. He talked to trees and other life-forms, and practiced odd remedies: he swore he had once healed Marie of an arthritis flare-up by removing her panties and then burying them in the backyard. Stein also believed in flying saucers; he liked to drive out to Yucca Valley on weekends and scan the skies for UFOs.

Although Stein and Galt were the same age, they could not have contrasted more starkly in appearance: Stein was a disheveled, balding moose of a man, weighing more than 240 pounds. He had a biblical black beard and wore beads and sandals. He was a hippie, basically--a decidedly far-out version of the breed. His mother, who lived in New Orleans, described him as "crazy but harmless."

Galt was suspicious of Charlie Stein. When Rita first suggested her brother as a traveling companion, Galt thought he smelled a rat and told Rita and Marie, in a blind rage, "I got a gun
¹⁶⁵
--if this is a setup, I'll kill him."

Charlie Stein didn't think much of Galt, either. He thought Galt wore "an excessive amount" of hair cream. From the moment they met, the psychic picked up powerful "anti-vibrations." But Stein wanted to help his sister Rita reunite with his little nieces, and he was looking forward to revisiting the Big Easy, his old hometown, where, among other things, he had once been a bouncer at a French Quarter strip joint.

So it was decided: on December 15, this spectacularly odd couple packed up the Mustang and prepared to embark on a chivalric errand to Louisiana to collect two distressed waifs in time for Christmas. Before leaving, Galt had one stipulation
¹⁶⁶
: he wanted Charlie, Marie, and Rita to accompany him to the American Independent Party headquarters on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood and sign their names on the "Wallace for President" petition. Galt was stone-cold serious about this: he would
not
drive to New Orleans unless the three signed their names. They found it a highly weird eleventh-hour demand--particularly since they had no interest whatsoever in George Wallace--but they gave in and lent their names to the cause. "I figured he was getting paid
¹⁶⁷
for votes," Charlie later said, noting that Galt seemed quite familiar with the Wallace headquarters and "knew his way around the place."

When Charlie Stein signed the petition, the registrar at the counter, a sweet elderly lady named Charlotte Rivett, thanked him and said, "God bless you for registering for Mr. Wallace."

Stein darted his eyes at her and said, "What's God got to do with it?"
¹⁶⁸

Now that Rita, Marie, and Charlie had met their end of the bargain, Galt was keen to go. He dropped off Rita and Marie straightaway, and Charlie threw his stuff in the trunk of the Mustang, next to Galt's blue leatherette suitcase and a Kodak camera box. That afternoon Eric Galt and Charlie Stein headed east through the traffic snarls of Los Angeles.

THEY RODE ALL night
¹⁶⁹
through the desert and into the following day, trading off whenever one driver grew tired. They passed through Yuma, Tucson, Las Cruces, and El Paso and bored deep into the mesquite country of Texas. Sometimes when Galt was sleeping in the passenger seat, he said, "Charlie would nudge me
¹⁷⁰
awake and exclaim that a flying saucer had just passed the car." They made a few pit stops for hamburgers--Galt always ordered his with "everything on 'em." On two different occasions along the way, Galt got out of the car and called someone--he didn't say whom--from pay phones. Stein assumed it was someone he planned to meet in New Orleans.

They didn't talk much during their cross-country marathon, but Galt did mention at one point that he had served in the Army and that he was now living off money he'd gotten from selling a bar he owned somewhere in Mexico. Galt liked to drive with the wheel in one hand and a beer in the other. They got to talking about George Wallace and "coloreds" at one point. Galt told Stein that his Alabama license plates made it dangerous to pass through black neighborhoods in L.A. "Once," he said, "they threw tomatoes at me!" Throughout the drive, Stein kept getting more "anti-vibrations" from his traveling companion. He was sure Galt had "a mental block."

"He was a cat on a mission," Stein later said. "He was acting a part. He never talked much--you couldn't get near him."

"What did you say your last name was?" Stein once asked during the drive.

"It's Galt,"
¹⁷¹
he replied peevishly. "Eric Starvo Galt.
Galt!
" For once, he enunciated, as though he wanted to make absolutely sure Stein heard what he said. Stein thought he protested too much, that something sounded phony about the name and the exaggerated firmness with which he stated it.

After passing through San Antonio and then Houston, they pulled in to New Orleans on December 17. Charlie Stein stayed at his mother's place, but Galt checked in to the Provincial Hotel, on Chartres Street in the French Quarter. He signed the register "Eric S. Galt, of Birmingham." Galt didn't tell Stein what he planned to do--"just some business," is all he'd allow--though he did say at one point that he planned to meet some guy with an Italian-sounding surname. Galt also said he'd be hanging out on Canal Street at Le Bunny Lounge, a local dive.

A mere thirty-six hours after arriving in New Orleans, however, he was ready to leave. On the morning of December 19, he picked up Charlie and the eight-year-old twins, Kim and Cheryl, along with some clothes and a few toys--including a miniature blackboard. Then they drove straight back to Los Angeles. Aside from gas, food, and bathroom breaks, they stopped only once--for a snowball fight in Texas. Kim and Cheryl, who rode in the backseat, hated the country music Galt played on the radio--and were annoyed by the way he hummed along. To them, he sounded like "a train whistle."
¹⁷²

This highly dysfunctional party of Joads arrived in Los Angeles on December 21, a Thursday. Galt and Stein delivered the girls to their mother just in time for Christmas. Galt spent the next few days holed up in the St. Francis Hotel. There wasn't much else to do--even the Wallace campaign was winding down for the holidays. Wallace himself had returned to Montgomery, where his wife, the real governor, now lay bedridden and dying.

On Christmas Day, Galt kept to his room, reading and basking in the orange light thrown by the neon sign outside his window. "You ought to know that Christmas
¹⁷³
is for family people," he later wrote. "It don't mean anything to a loner like me. It's just another day and another night to go to a bar or sit in your room and look at the paper and drink a beer or two and maybe switch on the TV."

For New Year's, Galt decided to head out to Las Vegas and have a look around--he drove by himself and slept in the Mustang. "I didn't do any gambling,"
¹⁷⁴
he said. "I just drove up there and looked around and watched people poking money into slot machines."

When he returned to Los Angeles, the newspapers were full of good news: the Wallace project in California had been a resounding success. The American Independent Party had met its deadline and announced on January 2, 1968, that it had gathered more than a hundred thousand signatures, nearly twice the required number. Pundits were dumbfounded by the Wallace phenomenon. The triumph of the petition drive was, according to one political scientist, "a nearly impossible feat."
¹⁷⁵

"The experts said it couldn't be done," Wallace proclaimed to roaring crowds in Los Angeles. "This points out again that, really, the experts insofar as politics are concerned are the people themselves. If you can get on the ballot in California, you can get on the ballot of any state in the union!"

Eric Galt could begin the New Year with the satisfaction of knowing that he had done his small part to put George Wallace's name on the official ballot for the California presidential primary in June.

A FEW DAYS later, January 4, 1968, Galt went to see another L.A. hypnotist, the Reverend Xavier von Koss, at his office at 16010 Crenshaw Boulevard. Koss was a practitioner of good reputation in Los Angeles and the president of the International Society of Hypnosis. Galt consulted with Koss for an hour and discussed his desire to undergo treatment. But to Galt's irritation, Koss pressed him with larger questions. "What are your goals in life?" Koss asked him.

Galt tried to answer him as narrowly as possible. "I'm thinking about taking a course in bartending," he said.

"But why are you interested in hypnotism?"

Galt said he thought hypnosis would improve his memory and make him more efficient in carrying out mental tasks. "Somewhere," he said, "I saw where a person under the influence of hypnotism can solve problems in thirty seconds that would take an ordinary person thirty
minutes."

Koss could sense that there was more to Galt's interest in hypnosis than merely mind fortification. Koss thought he was a lost soul, someone searching for some kind of validation--and a way to fit into society. "All persons,
¹⁷⁶
like myself, who work in the profession of mind power can readily discern the main motivational drive of any person," Koss later said. "Galt belongs to the
recognition
type. He desires recognition from his group. He yearns to feel that he is somebody. The desire for recognition for him is superior to sex, superior to money, superior to self-preservation."

Koss advised Galt that in order to reach a better and more meaningful life, he had to see in his mind's eye what he wanted to achieve--a statement that Galt seemed to agree with vigorously. He recommended three books for Galt to read--
Psycho-Cybernetics
, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz;
Self-hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living
, by Leslie LeCron; and
How to Cash In On Your Hidden Memory Power
, by William Hersey. Galt was grateful--he jotted down the titles and would later buy every one of them.

Yet books alone would not accomplish much, Koss cautioned. He began to tell Galt about all the hard work that lay before him if he truly wanted to improve his station in life. Koss said, "You must complete your course
¹⁷⁷
in bartending, you must work hard, you must go to night school, you must construct a settled-down life."

It was all too much for Galt, and he began to retreat from the conversation. "I lost him,"
¹⁷⁸
Koss said. "I could feel a wall rising between us. His mind moved far away from what I was saying to him."

Still, Galt said he was interested in undergoing hypnosis, and the Reverend Xavier von Koss was willing to oblige. He began a series of tests to ascertain whether Galt would be a good candidate. Quickly, however, he detected "a very strong subconscious resistance" to his procedures. "He could not cooperate," Koss said. "This is always the case when a person fears that under hypnosis he may reveal something he wishes to conceal."

11
WALKING BUZZARDS