RAUL COELHO (“RAUL”)
The shadows, he plied his trade
Deception a tool, though gray
Here and there always paid,
In his master’s service night and day.
James never backed away from insisting that he was under the control of a man who he came to know as Raul during much of his fugitive times in 1967.
The prosecution continued that this person was a fictional character. The state offered no explanation why James, when desperate to leave the country, having made it to the Montreal docks, all of a sudden turned around and re-entered the United States, going to Birmingham, Alabama, where he mysteriously came up with money to buy a white Mustang.
James, of course, consistently said that Raul gave him the funds to buy the car, which he would use as instructed by Raul, to whom he gave a second set of keys. As part of his consenting to follow Raul’s instructions he was promised that “travel documents” would eventually be provided for him to leave the country for good.
The state offered no credible explanation for where he got the money for the car. As discussed elsewhere the HSCA advanced the theory that after his escape James participated in a bank robbery in Alton, Illinois, and that this gave him the money he needed to go to Canada, and turn around and go to Birmingham where he purchased the car.
The problem with this “theory” is that I called the local sheriff and the bank president in Alton. I was advised that they knew that James had nothing to do with the robbery. The real culprits were known but there was not enough evidence to charge them. When I informed the HSCA of my conversation—during their hearings’ examination of Jerry Ray, who they also tried to implicate (Jerry was at work all day on the day of the robbery)—they quickly moved from the subject.
The Alton bank robbery (“theory”), however, was perpetuated in their final report, and the official story, desperate to deny Raul’s existence, remained unchanged.
Eventually, we gradually learned a good deal about the shadowy Raul. He had emigrated to the United States from Portugal, where he appears to have previously had a military/intelligence history in Angola. He lived in—of all places—my old home city of Yonkers, New York, and took what we came to believe was cover, an assembly-line job at a General Motors factory in North Tarrytown, which was reasonably close to his home.
I put him under photographic surveillance for about two weeks. By then he had retired. Subsequently, my apartment was entered and only that photographic record was taken. We were, however, able to obtain his Immigration Naturalization Service photograph.
One of our Memphis private investigators, John Billings, provided the background information on how that photograph was obtained. Ironically, a Memphis Police Department officer, who had been assigned to the District Attorney General’s task force, had obtained the Immigration and Naturalization Service photograph and turned it over to our investigators in an effort to convince them that he was willing to cooperate and work with them in the search for the truth. Eventually, they learned that nothing could have been further from his true intentions. But, in the short run at least, it gave them the photograph taken in 1961 when Raul emigrated to the United States from Portugal. Billing’s colleague, then our lead investigator Ken Herman, organized a spread of six photographs to exhibit to witnesses. Billings stated that, in his presence, when he placed the spread in front of him, James Earl Ray readily identified the man in the spread as being the person who had controlled his movements and given him money and who he had come to know as Raul. As mentioned elsewhere, James had seen the same photograph in 1978 and, at that time, identified it (with some media coverage), so this was not a surprising revelation.
Our witness, Glenda Grabow, had earlier and consistently identified the man in the photograph as the person she had known in Houston from 1963 onward and who, in or around 1974, in a fit of rage, implicated himself in the assassination of Dr. King just before he raped her.
At the time of the trial, Glenda had injured ribs from an automobile accident and was suffering from internal bleeding, preventing her from testifying. Her husband, Roy, testified instead and confirmed that he had been present when she gave her earlier affidavit statements. Thus, the civil trial jury had access to Glenda’s story, including that James Earl Ray, though innocent, had to be sacrificed and the fact that Foreman knew—or so he said—Raul.
After Roy confirmed its authenticity, I introduced into evidence a telephone bill from their home telephone that showed, on April 20, 1996, a six-minute telephone call to Raul’s home number. Under questioning, Roy stated that Glenda would not have stayed on the phone for six minutes with this person unless he was known to her. It is hard to imagine anyone keeping a conversation going with a complete stranger for that period of time.
Glenda had some time previously provided me with notes of her conversation with Raul, written, however, after the conversation. While I believe them to be an accurate account of the conversation, I did not think that, in Glenda’s absence, we should attempt to enter them into evidence. It is useful, however, to see records of this communication in the context of Raul’s denials about even knowing Glenda. (See Appendix E for proof of the April 20, 1995, conversation.)
The conversation went as follows:
| Glenda: | Raul? |
| Raul: | Yes. |
| Glenda: | This is Glenda Grabow. |
| Raul: | Olinda. |
| Glenda: | Yes. I was just calling to tell you I was supposed to come to New York. |
| Raul: | Where you at? |
| Glenda: | Houston. |
| Raul: | Houston? |
| Glenda: | When I come to New York, I will call you. |
| Raul: | When? |
| Glenda: | I still don’t know yet when. You sell wine now? |
| Raul: | Ya. |
| Glenda: | Do you still deal in guns? |
| Raul: | Ya, I still deal in lots of guns. |
| Glenda: | You do? |
| Raul: | Ya. |
| Glenda: | Have you heard from Jack V—lately? |
| Raul: | No, not for long time. Why you want to know? Why you call me? |
| Glenda: | I will try and talk to you when I get there. |
| Raul: | OK. Oh ya. |
| Glenda: | I heard your daughter was getting married? |
| Raul: | Ya, she gets married. How many you have now? |
| Glenda: | I just have the two girls and they are grown now. Time flies. Well, I will call back later. When is the best time to call? |
| Raul: | My wife gets here, or (leaves here) at 6:00. |
| Glenda: | OK, I will call you when I get there. |
| Raul: | OK. |
| Glenda: | Bye. |
Glenda’s brother, Royce Wilburn, an electrical contractor from Nashville, Tennessee, who had not discussed the case or his testimony with his sister, testified that the man he knew as “Dago,” and whose photograph he picked out of the spread, did indeed hang out, off and on, at a gas station near their home in Houston. He confirmed that his sister and he used to see and talk with the man because the gas station, where he hung out, was between their home and school.
British merchant seaman Sid Carthew, in a telephone deposition, described how he had met Raul—whom he had under oath previously identified from the spread of photographs—late in the summer of 1967, in the Neptune Bar on West Commissioners Street in the Montreal docks area. At that time, he said Raul appeared to be with another person who may well have been James. Carthew said at one point Raul came over and introduced himself (as Raul). Sid, who was identified with the British Naturalist Party, said that the Neptune was a regular haunt of his and his mates when they came ashore following days at sea on the voyage from Liverpool. Someone in the bar must have told Raul about his politics because eventually the conversation came around to the question of whether Sid might want to buy some guns. Sid said he expressed interest, and they began to negotiate. Raul said that their guns were new army (US) issue, and the price reflected the money that had to be paid to a sergeant who was organizing the supply. (To my mind, this matched Warren’s earlier account of guns being taken from Camp Shelby or other military installations, trucked to New Orleans, and delivered to Carlos Marcello, who organized the sales.)
Former UK Thames Television producer Jack Saltman, who had produced the 1993 Thames/HBO television trial of James Earl Ray, took the stand to testify that after the trial, when convinced that an egregious injustice had been down, he continued some investigating efforts on his own. He particularly focused on Raul. At one point, he took the spread of photographs to Raul’s front door. The jury heard the tape-recorded exchange between Saltman and Raul’s daughter, who was on the other side of the door. They heard her admit that the photograph was indeed that of her father. Her words were effectively that “Anyone could get that picture of my father.” It was a startling admission. For now, Raul’s own daughter had joined the ranks of the others who had confirmed that the critical photographic evidence was indeed her father.
Both Dexter King and Ambassador Young testified that the civil trial defendant Loyd Jowers had unhesitatingly identified the photograph as being that of the man who appeared in his Grill to pick up the Liberto cash and leave the murder weapon, a “package,” for the actual assassin.
Barbara Reis was very uncomfortable on the stand. Reporters do not like to have to testify in court. She was the primary US correspondent of Publico, the largest newspaper in Portugal, and because Raul was Portuguese, her paper was interested in the story. She was covering the trial and in attendance in court almost every day for the first two weeks. Sometime earlier, however, she had gone to Raul’s home and spoken with a member of his family (whom we agreed not to identify) and that was why we believed that we had no choice but to issue a subpoena for her testimony. She was outraged, but I believed that the evidence was too valuable not to be put in front of the jury. So, under oath, she reluctantly recounted what she had been told during the course of that interview.
She said that she was informed that though these allegations had greatly disrupted their lives and were terrible, nevertheless the family took great comfort from the fact that they were being protected and advised by US government agentsn who had visited their home on three occasions and who were monitoring their telephones. The government was helping them through those difficult days.
The fact that the government was helping a retired automobile worker in such a fashion was not lost on the members of the jury. Ordinary private citizens are obviously not afforded these services. It is our contention that Raul was and will continue to be protected for services rendered and perceived to be in the national security interests of the state or the special interests which determine what is to be designated as national security interests.
Don Wilson’s resolve hardened, and he refused to testify at the trial. Early on, Don had told Dexter King about the events and given him copies of two of the pieces of paper he took away from James’s abandoned Mustang. Dexter was, therefore, in a position to identify the materials, the originals which had been with the Justice Department going through a process of authentication for several months. In the course of his testimony, Dexter recounted how Don Wilson originally explained how when he opened the slightly ajar passenger door of James’s car, abandoned in an Atlanta housing project parking lot, an envelope fell on the ground, and he instinctively put it in his pocket. The young agent was initially afraid that he had screwed up material criminal evidence by allowing it to become separated from an automobile possibly connected with a crime. Later, when he had an opportunity to consider the materials, he decided to hold on to them, in part because he was in a difficult, if not impossible, position for not having turned them in straight away and also because he genuinely came to believe that the notes would be buried if he turned them over to his superiors at the Atlanta field office. So he retained them—for nearly thirty years—until he decided to come forward in an effort to support the King family and James Earl Ray.
The material did, in fact, contain the name Raul as well as what appeared to be a list of payments to be made. When shown a copy of the torn page from a Dallas telephone directory with handwriting at the top, in his testimony Dexter King identified the name Raul, as he did for a second time on the payoff list.
Glenda Grabow’s story about the connection between Raul and Jack Ruby had, in my view, been corroborated, but I eventually decided against introducing into evidence this connection and the link to the Kennedy assassination. I did not want to run the risk of taking the jury down that road. It was, after all, surplus to our main case, and there was always the possibility that the jury would refuse to accept the connection with the Kennedy assassination.
I had Madeleine, Beverly, and Chari lined up to travel to Memphis, but then did not call them. It was a temptation, which had to be resisted. It was not easy because I believed these courageous women, Madeleine Brown for example, were very credible. Some aspects of Madeleine’s recollections of her life and genuine love for Johnson were compelling. In fact, as I have mentioned previously, she gave birth to his only son. I obtained a copy of Johnson’s commitment (through his local lawyer Jerome Ragsdale) to provide support for Steven, which continued even after the president’s death. That she was able to provide such detail about their relationship was impressive. Of particular note (though a digression) was her recollection of the Kennedy assassination. She said she attended a social gathering at Clint Murchison’s home. Ostensibly, it was an event to honor J. Edgar Hoover, who was a close friend of Murchison, H. L. Hunt, and the other Texas oil giants. The guest list included John McCloy, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank; Richard Nixon; George Brown, of the Brown and Root Construction Company; R. L. Thornton, president of the Mercantile Bank; and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, brother of General Charles Cabell, former Deputy Director of the CIA, who was fired by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs.
Madeleine told me that near the end of the party, Johnson made an appearance and the group quickly went into Murchison’s study behind closed doors. After about twenty minutes the meeting broke up. Johnson, anxious and red-faced, came up behind her and embraced her with a quiet grating sound and whispered in her ear a message she would never forget, “After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again—that’s no threat, that’s a promise.” She was stunned, but the next day she realized what he meant. While it is true that her story has been attacked, it was corroborated by employees of Murchison’s household including the man who picked up Hoover at the airport.
I decided not to take our case in this direction. It was a tactical decision, but if I am asked whether I believe that Raul and Ruby knew each other, were associates, and that the same forces were involved with both assassinations, I could only truthfully answer in the affirmative.
As for Raul’s existence and role in the assassination of Dr. King, the following facts, in my view, are irrefutable.
• A photograph of this Raul was instantly picked from a spread by Glenda Grabow, her brother, Loyd Jowers (having seen him in the Grill), James Earl Ray (who had previously refused to identify anyone from the hundreds of photographs shown to him, but who had identified—covered by a newspaper report, this same photo in 1978—but refused to use the name on the back, which he thought might be a set up), and Sid Carthew, the UK merchant seaman who had met him at the Neptune Bar in Montreal, around the time that Ray was there.
• This same photograph was identified by Raul’s own daughter at their front door when she said on tape (heard on tape and part of the record of the Civil Trial in 1999), “anyone could get that picture of my father.”
• Glenda had a telephone conversation with him that lasted—as the phone bill shows—for several minutes.
• The conversation was obviously not between strangers. When she told him who she was he called her by the name he used for her, “Olinda.” Thus she had no doubt as to who he was.
• Included with some papers that FBI Agent Donald Wilson obtained from James’s Mustang that was found in Atlanta was a slip of paper with the name “Raul” on it. Another piece of paper had the phone number of one of Jack Ruby’s places in Dallas.
• Portuguese newspaper reporter Barbara Reis’s interview with Raul’s wife confirmed that this difficult situation had been made better by the assistance of the US government who had sent agents and technicians to see them to monitor their phones and advise them how to respond to queries.
Imagine that extensive concern being taken by US federal agents over the problems caused by an alleged mistaken identity to a retired automobile plant worker. In fairness to Posner, this incongruous revelation emerged in testimony at the 1999 civil trial after his relatively short research period was over and his book was published. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge, he has not commented on this strange, extensive concern and involvement in the troubles of a working-class family.