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

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, 615played 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, 616the 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," 617he 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," 618Reynolds 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 aggrieved 619many 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, 620but 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. 621Then he wrote to the registrar of births 622in 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 professorial-looking tortoiseshell glasses that graced the photo he planned to use for his passport application. The travel agency's manager, Lillian Spencer, 623sat down with Sneyd and gladly helped him with his travel plans. "He just sort of appeared out of nowhere," she recalled. "He was a nebulous person, not the sort of man one notices or remembers. He blended right into the wallpaper."

His unusual name was the only thing that adhered to Spencer's memory: "I thought it was an odd name 624because Ramon is Spanish and doesn't usually go with George."

Sneyd first inquired about tickets to Johannesburg, South Africa, but recoiled at the price--$820 Canadian round-trip. Instead, he asked Spencer to look into the cheapest available fares to London. She soon found a flight on British Overseas Airways that departed Toronto on May 6. It was a twenty-one-day economy excursion, the cheapest flight available, and came with a fare of only $345 Canadian. Sneyd liked the sound of it and asked her to go ahead and make a reservation.

Do you have your passport with you? she asked.

He didn't have one yet, he said, but he was working on it. Here Spencer must have sensed his hesitation, his awkward uncertainty over how to proceed. Sneyd was under the mistaken impression that to secure a passport, he would have to provide a "guarantor"--a Canadian citizen in good standing who could vouchsafe that he'd known the applicant for more than two years. Meeting this requirement was the main reason he'd been developing two identities and two addresses; according to his rather convoluted and risky plan, the bespectacled Sneyd would be the traveler, and Bridgman (wearing an altogether different getup and possibly a toupee) would be the guarantor.