Legacy of Secrecy (122 page)

Canada to Alabama to Mexico to Los Angeles, to New Orleans, back to

L.A., to New Orleans again, then to Memphis. A month after arriving in

Toronto, Ray would leave for London, England. From there, he would

go to Lisbon, Portugal, stay two days, then return to London, where he

would prepare for a trip to Belgium—all while he was the subject of

a worldwide manhunt. The much vaunted reputation of the FBI and

its Most Wanted list, which J. Edgar Hoover had carefully crafted for

decades, would be made to look ridiculous by a two-bit escaped con

from Missouri.

Chapter Fifty-three

On April 9, 1968, the eyes of the world were on Martin Luther King’s

funeral procession in Atlanta. Gathered behind a simple wagon, pulled

by two mules, walked the four leaders vying to become the next presi-

dent: Bobby Kennedy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Eugene

McCarthy, and Richard Nixon. Joining the King family, associates, and

assorted dignitaries were fifty thousand people from all walks of life.

Most were black, but some whites walked beside them as well. Just

three years earlier, such a huge integrated gathering in a Deep South

city like Atlanta would have been unprecedented and, to some, unthink-

able. Now, thanks to the professional baseball and football teams the

city’s moderate image had attracted, racially mixed gatherings of such

size were no longer rare. Sadly, such a large, peaceful integrated march

wouldn’t have been possible in many large American cities at that time,

that were still smoldering from the riots following Dr. King’s slaying.1

Unknown to the thousands of somber marchers beginning the four-

mile trek, their route took them within a few blocks of James Earl Ray’s

abandoned Mustang. It would take two more days for police to be called

about the white car that had been sitting in the parking lot of Capitol

Homes since the morning of April 5. Registered to “Eric S. Galt” in

Alabama, the car was one more crucial piece of evidence in the FBI’s

massive search for the man who had shot Dr. King.

As two Congressional committees documented a decade later, the

FBI’s manhunt was both incredibly thorough and severely compro-

mised. Many of the field agents did an amazingly well-documented

job of investigative work, methodically piecing together the clues to

Ray’s identity and travels. But key officials in Washington, including

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, made glaring lapses in the investigation

that left important questions unanswered.

By April 5, the day after Dr. King’s murder, the FBI had only two

aliases for Ray: “Willard” (used at the Memphis rooming house) and

“Lowmyer” (used for the rifle purchase). But each had been used only

once, so neither led anywhere. Not until April 11, when the car was

found and one of Ray’s t-shirts was traced by a laundry mark to a Los

Angeles cleaners, did the FBI learn his main alias, “Eric Starvo Galt.”

That led agents to “Galt’s” former residence in Los Angeles, then to his

dancing lessons and the bartending school. Though authorities talked

to narcotics trafficker Charles Stein, he told them only generally about

his trip to New Orleans with the man he claimed to know only as “Eric

Galt.” The bartending school graduation photo allowed the Birmingham

gun clerks to ID “Galt” as the man who’d bought the rifle, and a money

order traced from the Locksmithing Institute led to “Galt’s” Atlanta

rooming house in Midtown.2

Agents watched the rooming house covertly for a time, but on April

16, they made a surreptitious entry, obtaining food, clothes, and maps,

including the marked Atlanta map with a clear fingerprint. By cross-

checking that print, and one from the rifle, with those of fugitives fitting

the general description from Memphis, the FBI announced on April 19,

1968—fifteen days after King’s murder—that “Eric Starvo Galt” was an

alias, and that James Earl Ray was wanted for King’s murder.

In a Toronto bar on April 21, Ray claimed to have watched the dra-

matic announcement at the end of that week’s episode of the popular

TV drama
The FBI
, when he was officially added to the FBI’s “Ten Most

Wanted” list. Ray, now pretending to be George Ramon Sneyd, left for

Montreal the next day, having already applied for a Canadian pass-

port using his new alias. Ray stayed in Montreal for a week, claiming

later that he didn’t “associate with anybody” while he was there. Ray

returned to Toronto to find that he finally had a Canadian passport, but

on it, his “Sneyd” alias was misspelled as “Senya.” Not wanting to wait

the extra time needed to fix the error, Ray paid for a ticket to London

and flew to England on May 6, 1968.3

The FBI’s identification of Ray was a result of the diligent work of

hundreds of field agents in the days immediately following Dr. King’s

murder. J. Edgar Hoover made some efforts in the right direction, like

eventually asking the attorney general to approve wiretaps and surveil-

lance on Ray’s family, including one of his brothers. The brothers weren’t

tied to the conspiracy with Milteer and Marcello, but one of them had

associates who might have led investigators to Milteer. However, when

Attorney General Ramsey Clark didn’t act on Hoover’s request for a

month, the FBI Director withdrew it.4,5

Hoover was often far off the mark in his other investigative efforts,

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and a week after the assassination he theorized to President Johnson

that black leaders H. Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael might have been

behind Dr. King’s murder. Hoover even had the FBI float a false story

to Jack Anderson that someone connected to an alleged mistress of Dr.

King in Los Angeles might have been behind the assassination.6

However, the longer James Earl Ray remained at large, the more pres-

sure Hoover faced from LBJ, the press, and the public to find the real

culprit, especially once Ray’s real name and photograph were released.

The fact that Ray had been an escaped fugitive at the time of Dr. King’s

murder, and had been traveling across the country for almost a year,

made the Bureau look less than stellar.

While Hoover told LBJ and the attorney general early on that the

killer had most likely acted alone, both the Director and other FBI offi-

cials remained somewhat open to the possibility of a conspiracy. A May

FBI memo from Hoover said, “The possibility exists that subject was a

hired assassin.” To detect signs of a payoff to the hit man, Hoover even

asked for agents in Atlanta, New Orleans, Birmingham, Los Angeles,

and Memphis to talk to all banks in those cities in order to learn the

identities of anyone withdrawing more than $10,000 in cash during the

month of April.7

Just two days after Dr. King’s murder, an assistant FBI director had

said that “Los Angeles should keep in mind that King may have been

killed by a hired assassin. In this connection [two lines mostly censored]

should be kept in mind.” It’s not known whether the censored name was

some Mafioso in Los Angeles, the type of mobster who routinely hired

hit men, a King-hating fanatic like Milteer’s friend Dr. Wesley Smith—or

another type of suspect entirely. Even though Hoover and his top aides

considered a conspiracy at least possible for a time, Hoover apparently

didn’t want to pursue leads that might lead to Johnny Rosselli, Carlos

Marcello, or Joseph Milteer. Perhaps that’s because all three had been

problems for the FBI back in 1963 and again in 1967.8

On April 16, 1968, before the FBI had confirmed that “Galt” was in fact

James Earl Ray, agents had found the marked Los Angeles map in Ray’s

Atlanta room. Given the methodical way FBI agents across the country

followed even the smallest leads, it’s very unusual that the marks on

Ray’s Los Angeles map were not run down and checked out, especially

since the FBI knew by then that “Galt” had lived in Los Angeles for

a time. If the locations marked were visited or cross-checked, agents

would have noticed that one address was familiar to the FBI.9

Numerous FBI files prove that the Los Angeles FBI office and FBI

headquarters were well aware that Rosselli lived in the Beverly Towers

apartments on Beverly Glen, located at one of Ray’s map marks. Since

Rosselli had been living there since 1964 (and would continue to reside

there until he finally went to prison in 1971), the fact that either a Los

Angeles agent or a higher-level official in Washington didn’t notice the

familiar location is almost inconceivable. Some experts point out that the

FBI was pursuing so many leads that perhaps it was simply overlooked,

and that despite all the good work many agents did, some leads were

bound to fall between the cracks. Still, it’s hard to imagine a Los Angeles

FBI agent either overlooking or deciding on his own not to call attention

to the coincidence of addresses, especially given Hoover’s fearsome

reputation. The FBI had been getting information regularly on Rosselli’s

movements from a variety of mostly noncriminal informants, like his

building’s switchboard operators, for almost four years at that point.10

It’s possible the Rosselli-Ray lead wasn’t pursued because it could

have complicated the FBI’s role in Johnny Rosselli’s upcoming trial on

immigration charges, set for April 23, 1968, and his Friars Club trial

slated for later in the year.11 The evidence was overwhelming in each

case, and the odds were high that Rosselli would be convicted in both.

Any hint or indication that Rosselli was being investigated for the assas-

sination of Martin Luther King could play into the hands of Rosselli’s

defense attorney. In Jimmy Hoffa’s spring 1964 trial, he had tried with-

out success to elicit testimony from a government witness about his 1962

threat to assassinate Bobby Kennedy. While it may seem counterintuitive

that Jimmy Hoffa would try to bring that out in court, Hoffa’s attorneys

wanted to demonstrate that the government and Bobby Kennedy had a

vendetta against him by planting such a wild story. Rosselli could have

tried the same approach: claiming that the FBI couldn’t find Dr. King’s

real killer, so they were now trying to scapegoat him for that crime, along

with the other violations he was charged with.

Rosselli had also been a problem for the FBI in 1967, when Richard

Helms and the CIA intervened with the FBI on Rosselli’s behalf after the

Jack Anderson articles appeared. Rosselli had also presented difficulties

in the fall of 1963 after JFK’s assassination, since the FBI had apparently

noted the two Miami meetings between Rosselli and Jack Ruby, while

Rosselli was working on the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Castro. In early 1968,

officials in Washington (certainly the CIA) were pressuring the FBI about

Rosselli, and recently retired CIA officer William Harvey had met with

Rosselli in March 1968, just weeks before Ray’s Los Angeles map was

found.12

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If the FBI did make the Rosselli connection based on Ray’s marked

map, it could have been not pursued, or buried, at the request of some-

one in the CIA, ostensibly on national security grounds relating to Cuba.

Rosselli’s old friend David Morales was still quite active in the CIA

and made at least one visit to Los Angeles in 1968. At the time, Morales

was between overseas CIA assignments, and apparently working on a

personal project involving Rosselli. It’s also possible that Hoover sim-

ply had any memos about the fact that Rosselli’s building had been

marked on Ray’s map sent to Hoover’s secret “official and confidential”

files, many of which were destroyed after Hoover’s death. That way,

the information would never have to be provided to Rosselli’s defense

attorneys, and it couldn’t embarrass the FBI.

John McFerren’s statements regarding Memphis produce dealer Frank

C. Liberto could also have been problematic for J. Edgar Hoover because

they should have led to Carlos Marcello. On April 8, 1968, McFerren

was persuaded to talk to Frank Holloman, an interview that resulted

in the FBI’s questioning McFerren. It’s interesting to contrast the FBI’s

initial interview of McFerren with those by journalist William Sartor, and

to see how the McFerren’s story evolved and was slanted to a degree

by the FBI. When the FBI first interviewed McFerren, their only visual

representation of Dr. King’s shooter was an FBI sketch, which diverged

somewhat from a better-known drawing, by a Mexico City police art-

ist, that appeared in many American newspapers. McFerren said the

sketch resembled someone who had worked briefly at Liberto’s produce

market in the fall of 1968. However, McFerren was always clear that this

person had a “jaundiced complexion, a rash or pockmarks on his neck,”

which Ray lacked. After photos of Ray were available, McFerren said

one in a photo line-up “resembled” the man who’d worked at Liberto’s