Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

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 167for 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 169through 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 170awake 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," 171he 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 173is 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," 174he 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