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

Speedy Raynes was a muddle of superstitions and rants--tenaciously held ideas that he pummeled into Jimmy's adolescent head while they drove around Ewing together, shooting pool in taverns, hauling junk up and down the Fabius River valley. Speedy wouldn't eat Chinese food, he said, because "those people will poison you." 672He believed all baseball games were fixed, that doctors were determined to kill you, that pretty much everything in life was a racket. "All politicians are thieves 673and gangsters," he said. "Well, maybe not Wallace. But when the government gets after anybody, they don't have a chance."

He wanted to make it clear that he wasn't a racist--and didn't raise his kids to think that way. "I don't hate niggers," 674he said, noting that around Ewing there weren't any black folks anyway. On the other hand, he pointed out, "They aren't the same as us. They just lay around and fuck all the time."

As he thought about his son's present troubles, he was convinced that where Jimmy went wrong was in failing to heed his childhood lesson, the one Speedy ingrained in him over and over again--that the little guy can't win, that the cards are stacked against him, that the best course is to keep your identity murky and aim low. "People try to get too much out of life," 675he told the journalist George McMillan. "Sometimes I think Jimmy outsmarted himself. I can't figure out why he tried to compete with all them bigshots. Life don't amount to a shit anyway. Jimmy had too much nerve for his own good. He tried to go too far too fast."

WHILE THE FBI dug ever deeper into the disturbing muck of James Earl Ray's past, Ramon Sneyd was hiding five thousand miles across the ocean, in Portugal.

Balmy Lisbon, the salt-bleached capital of Moorish palaces and Romanesque castles perched on the westernmost edge of Europe, afforded Sneyd a refreshing change from gray Toronto. His hotel was not far from the waterfront and the swirling chaos of Rossio Square, where the acres of marble reverberated night and day with the fat thunk of soccer balls and the longing strains of fado music. The city was crawling with sailors, fishermen, and merchant mariners; huge freighters could often be seen clanking in from the ocean, taking refuge in the estuary of the Tagus River, which formed one of the world's greatest ports.

It was the port, in fact, that had attracted Ramon Sneyd to Lisbon. Knowing that the Portuguese capital was an international recruitment center for mercenaries, he'd come straight from London hoping to catch a cheap ship to Africa. Sneyd had simply exchanged the return portion of his excursion fare for a ticket to Lisbon and then hopped on a flight the same day, May 7. For a week now he'd been prowling the wharves, just as he had in Montreal a few weeks earlier. He found a promising ship bound for Angola, 676the war-torn Portuguese colony in Africa. The passage would only cost him 3,777 escudos, or about $130. But again Sneyd was stymied by paperwork; entry into Angola, he discovered, required a visa, which would take over a week to obtain. The ship was leaving in 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, 677a 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, 678the 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 Ribeiro 679and 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," 680Gloria 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," 681his 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."