Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (6 page)

Like the doomed iguana in the story, Galt appeared to be a creature who'd come to the end of his rope. Manuela found him strange. He complained of headaches,
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stomach problems, and other maladies. He was introverted, distracted, perpetually tired. He rarely tipped
⁵⁰
and never laughed. He was paranoid of the cops, always looking over his shoulder. Under the seat of his car, he carried a loaded Liberty Chief .38 snub-nosed revolver, which he called his "equalizer."
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He claimed to have served twenty years in the U.S. Army. He made trips into the hills
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from time to time, apparently to buy marijuana.

For someone who hung out in grimy whorehouses, he was a surprisingly meticulous dresser and a person of tidy habits. He took lunch nearly every day at 3:00 p.m. at the same place, the Discotheque Cafe, where he always ordered the same thing--a hamburger and a Pepsi. Galt was keen on learning Spanish and toted an English-Spanish phrase book nearly everywhere he went. He was equally keen on learning the steps of local Mexican dances;
⁵³
though Manuela tried to teach him what she knew, his clumsy feet never got the hang of it.

Yet for all his oddities, Galt was nice to her, Manuela had to admit. They walked the Malecon together, soaking up the colorful street life--the Day of the Dead curios, the vendors selling mangoes on a stick, the weird beaded figurines of the peyote-loving Huichol Indians who lived back in the Sierra Madre. Several times, when he'd been drinking, he asked Manuela to marry him (she politely refused). He even went out and looked at a piece of property to buy--a local man proposed to barter his land for Galt's Mustang. "I seriously considered the trade,"
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Galt later said. "Mexico's an earthy place. I got to like Puerto Vallarta so much, I was thinking I could throw up a lean-to and retire."

ONE EVENING AT the Casa Susana, Manuela Medrano glimpsed another side of Eric Galt that gave her pause. He entered the cantina around nine that night--a Monday--and took a seat next to her at a table, as was their usual routine. They sat and drank and tried to listen to the jukebox, but a few tables over, six American revelers were making a racket--apparently, they'd just come in off a yacht. Two of them were white, and four were black.

One of the African-Americans, who was drunk, stumbled as he brushed by Galt's table, perhaps en route to the bathroom, and he reflexively reached out and touched Manuela's arm to break his fall. Galt suddenly tensed and leaned into Manuela, blurting out something about "niggers." She had never known him to blow his stack like this. "He said many insulting things
⁵⁵
--son of a bitch and other names," she recalled, although the language barrier made it difficult for her to understand most of what he was saying. He suddenly rose, stormed over to the table, and yelled an insult to the offending black man. There was a standoff, with hot stares and macho posturing, but then Galt came back and sat down.

Yet that was not the end of it. As the jukebox played on, Galt continued to sulk. In a few minutes, the black man wandered over and tried to make peace, but Galt muttered yet another insult. Then he rose again from the table and this time went outside to the parking lot. A few minutes later he returned.

"Where did you go?" Manuela asked.

"Feel my pocket," he replied, with a furtive look.

She ran her hand over his pocket and realized he had a gun, the same revolver he carried under the seat of his Mustang.

Apparently unaware of this latest development, the party of Americans soon got up and left the cantina: they were prudently calling it a night. Then Galt started for the door in pursuit. "I'm going to kill them,"
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Manuela thought he said.

She managed to intervene, somehow communicating to him that the police would be dropping by soon for their usual ten o'clock visit. It would be foolish for him to cause trouble with these men now--foolish for him, and foolish for the whole operation at Casa Susana. Her argument carried weight--Galt had always seemed deeply fearful of any sort of run-in with the police--and he finally began to simmer down. It was unclear, in the end, whether Galt's fierce reaction to the black patron at Casa Susana grew from racial prejudice or simply from the fact that a strange man had touched what passed for his woman. But Manuela had never seen Galt like this before. The whole fracas made her extremely uncomfortable--and leery of his mercurial moods.

Yet in his sloppier moments of drunkenness, he kept proposing to Manuela, and she kept on refusing. Among other things, she knew that he was sleeping with other women--or, rather, seeing other whores. One night when she rebuffed his proposal a final time, Galt pulled his .38 revolver on her and threatened to kill her.

GALT DID NOT linger long in Puerto Vallarta. Predictably, his relationship with Manuela fizzled, and for a week or so in early November he took up with another young local woman, named Elisa, who worked as a cigarette girl and photographer's aide at the Posada Vallarta. They went out to nightclubs and slept together at the Hotel Las Glorias.

Galt's main interest in Elisa was her knowledge of photography. He wanted to soak up everything she'd learned from her day job. Much as he had done with Manuela, he took Elisa out to secluded beaches, and they'd kill the afternoons taking Polaroids. On one occasion, using the remote cable he had purchased, he straddled Elisa
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and photographed the two of them in a pornographic pose. Other times, he would take mug shots of himself. He seemed obsessed with the contours of his own face. He had a mirror,
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and he would stare at himself for minutes at a time, grimacing at certain features he didn't like--his prominent and slightly bulbous nose, his jug ears. He said he wanted to have "a face that no one can describe."

Galt told Elisa he was heading to purchase marijuana in Yelapa, a nearby fishing village without electricity or roads that was accessible only by boat. A few American expats had set up there, living the simple life with the locals in open thatch
palapas
, and hippies went in search of the strong weed that was said to grow in the jungles hanging over the town. Before Galt took off on his errand, he gave Elisa forty-eight dollars to rent a little love-nest apartment for them, but instead she took the money and bolted for Guadalajara. She left him a note with the bartender of the Posada Vallarta--a Dear John letter, basically--in which she pleaded with him to forgive her.

Galt had been resoundingly jilted, and it was enough to sour him on Puerto Vallarta for good. "I couldn't accomplish anything
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further in Mexico in the way of securing permanent residency," he rationalized. "I don't believe you can live in Mexico.
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They don't have no middle class, see, you are either on top or on the bottom, and I think it would be difficult to accustom yourself to living on the bottom because there is all types of ailments and things."

A week later, probably on November 16, Eric Galt carefully stuffed the inner tube of his spare tire with some of Jalisco's finest cannabis. He packed up his Mustang and headed out of town. Soon he was on Highway 15, aiming north, in the direction of Tijuana.
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4
ANATHEMA TO EVIL MEN

DURING THE LATE fall and early winter of 1967, Martin Luther King pressed forward with his ambitious plans to lead his Poor People's Army to Washington the following summer. One person who was most assuredly keeping a close eye on King's proposed demonstration was J. Edgar Hoover, the seventy-two-year-old director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover was born and raised in the District of Columbia and had spent his entire professional life there, serving under nine presidents. A devout Presbyterian who once dreamed of being a minister, Hoover had long ago appointed himself a guardian of the capital's morals. The director saw the prospect of an army of indigent subversives encamped on the Mall not only as a threat to the Republic but also as a Vandal attack on his native city.

Sitting at his desk in his inner sanctum on the third floor of the gray granite Justice Department building, with his mother's black Bible always parked at his elbow, America's number-one G-man had read the FBI reports about the new SCLC project with increasing alarm. What was King really up to? he worried. Was this the start of a full-scale black revolution? Were the Soviets behind the scheme? Most important, how could the burrhead be stopped?

Burrhead--that was one of his many names
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for King, the man on whom he had fixed a nearly pathological hatred ever since the civil rights leader first emerged on the national scene in 1955. Hoover's FBI had been waging a protracted yet so far unsuccessful campaign designed (as various FBI memos colorfully put it) to "see this scoundrel exposed," to "take him off his pedestal," and to "neutralize him" as a force in American life. In a private communication earlier in 1967, Hoover told President Johnson: "Based on King's recent activities
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and public utterances, it is clear that he is an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our nation."

Although J. Edgar Hoover was still utterly in control of the FBI, he was in his waning years, a liver-spotted and somewhat fusty caricature of himself. He had developed a paunch, his eyes were baggy, and his chin had become an odd-looking knob of ruddy flesh. He suffered from hypertension and other ailments. He still dressed as dandily as ever, in sharp pin-striped suits with color-coordinated handkerchiefs and ties, but he had lost some of his boldness of step. He had developed weird phobias
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about germs, about flies, about the slightest breach in the yolk of his morning poached egg. His speech seemed curiously dated now; he peppered his tirades with Depression-era phrases that gave some of his younger agents pause, phrases like "criminal scum" and "moral rats" and "alien filth." He was fond of saying that his enemies were afflicted with "mental halitosis."
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By the late 1960s, Hoover was a living anachronism, dwelling in a rigid world of his own making. Art Buchwald joked that he was "a mythical person
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first thought up by the
Reader's Digest."
As always, Hoover wielded his blue pen with grumpy exactitude. As always, he composed his Rabble-Rouser Index and other lists of dangerous radicals, real or imagined. He still took his regular "non-vacations" (the press was told that even when he was away from Washington, the director never stopped working) to shuffleboard palaces in Miami Beach or to hotels of faded glory near the horse tracks at Del Mar or Saratoga Springs, where he always booked adjoining suites with his lifelong friend and second-in-command, Clyde Tolson. Hoover's confirmed bachelorhood, combined with his curiously matrimonial relationship with Tolson, had led to widespread speculation. And to endless jokes, like this one from Truman Capote: "Are you familiar
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with the term 'killer fruit'? It's a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream. Like Hadrian, or J. Edgar Hoover."