22

Mexican Holiday

Ray said he left Birmingham on the morning of October 6, 1967.1 Before he reached Nuevo Laredo he drove partway to Dallas to visit a former inmate from Leavenworth. He claimed that since he thought he might be carrying drugs for Raoul, he wanted advice from the ex-con, who had himself been a drug smuggler. But he turned around halfway since it “might not be a good idea because he may be under surveillance himself.”² He then stopped in Baton Rouge, checked into a hotel, and, he said, spent considerable time searching a phone book to find the number that Raoul had recently given him.³

The following afternoon, October 7, Ray was issued a tourist card in the name Eric S. Galt and crossed the Mexican border at Nuevo Laredo.*⁴ It was there, he said, that he had his only Mexican contact with Raoul. They met at a hotel on the Mexican side of the border, and the two then crossed back into the United States.* From a second car parked near the border, they picked up a spare tire, and crossed again into Mexico.⁵ Ray assumed the tire contained rare coins, jewelry, or even counterfeit money. “I don’t believe you smuggle narcotics into Mexico,” he said, “it would probably be something manufactured. Manufacturing products have a high resale value.”⁶

They returned to the hotel in Nuevo Laredo where Ray had earlier checked in. “We talked a short while,” Ray later wrote, “and he told me what he wanted me to do which was to haul the tyre and its contents through the customs check in the interior, I guess that would be about 50 klms. from the border (he also told me to keep the photographic equipment for the time being).”⁷

The next day, Ray and Raoul drove through the interior customs checkpoint in separate cars. In the car with Raoul was another man, whom Ray described as a Mexican with Indian features. When they were out of sight of the guards, they transferred the tire back to Raoul’s car. Ray has claimed that Raoul then gave him $2,000 (though he told Huie it was $3,000) and that Raoul told him he “couldn’t get the travel documents,” but that he would have them the next time they met, and that he would also give Ray $10,000 to $12,000 for the next job, which “involved taking guns and accessories into Mexico.”⁸

Although Ray said he was “mad as hell” that there was no passport, he agreed to let Raoul contact him again. He told Raoul he would probably stay in Mexico for a month and then head for Los Angeles. “Raoul said okay,” recalled Ray, “but for me to let him know where I was by calling the New Orleans telephone number from time to time, and that he’d write me general delivery in Los Angeles.”⁹ (Before the Select Committee, Ray changed his story to say that Raoul had given him a new telephone number in New Orleans with which to stay in touch.)¹⁰

Ray may be partially telling the truth, at least about smuggling goods into Mexico. He had been to Mexico in 1959 when he was “cooling off” after pulling a $1,300 heist from a Madison, Illinois, gambling club. Then he had smuggled small appliances that had a high tariff in Mexico into the port town of Campeche.¹¹ He knew that fencing such items as jewelry and coins was profitable. It is hard to imagine that Ray, a habitual criminal, had suddenly turned straight since he had fled from Jeff City six months earlier; instead, he was likely still plying his trade. When the Select Committee asked Ray if he was smuggling goods while in Mexico, he gave a weak denial: “Uh, no, not particularly. I was thinking about it one time.”¹²

Ray’s description of the smuggling sounds authentic. What does not sound truthful is what Raoul supposedly paid him—$2,000 to $3,000. In Canada, Ray claimed he was paid $750 for two runs across the border with a much higher-risk cargo, probably heroin. Yet in Mexico, where the aduaneros—Mexican customs officials—were notoriously lax about what came into their country, why would Ray be paid up to four times as much for only a single run, with a lower-risk cargo of jewelry or coins? If Ray made several thousand dollars, it is probably because he had stolen the goods himself while in Birmingham and then reaped all the profits when he fenced them in Mexico.

Additional evidence that Ray was involved in some type of border smuggling was uncovered when author William Bradford Huie visited the San Francisco hotel in Acapulco after the assassination. That is where Ray initially drove after crossing the border. It was the same hotel he had stayed in when he visited in 1959. The local police chief later accompanied Huie to the hotel, and they asked to examine the registration card of Eric S. Galt, which would indicate his arrival around October 10. However, when the hotel manager retrieved the registration book, he discovered that the space where Galt had signed his name had been carefully cut out. In compliance with police regulations, toward the bottom of the page was a handwritten explanation for the excision. According to the note, on October 14, only a week after Ray crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo, his registration had been examined and taken by a federal police officer from Mexico City named Ramon del Rio.13 If Ray was under investigation in Mexico six months before King’s assassination, it was almost certainly related to his border crossing.*

Ray did not like Acapulco the second time around. He stayed only four days. “The reason I left Acapulco was everything was money,” he later wrote, “you couldn’t even park or go to the beach without someone wanting pesos.”¹⁴ Several years earlier, while in Jeff City, Ray had read an article in True magazine about an up-and-coming resort, Puerto Vallarta.¹⁵ He decided to go there. The three-hundred-mile drive north was difficult because of poor road conditions caused by the rainy season, so he stopped for three days in Gaudalajara, staying at the Pancho Villa motel.¹⁶ While there, a local dentist treated him for an abscessed molar.¹⁷

Ray finally reached Puerto Vallarta on Thursday, October 19, and registered as Eric S. Galt at the Hotel Rio. On his registration form he listed Alabama as his native state, Cherpes’s rooming house as his permanent address, and as his profession listed “Employed by Publisher.”18 He settled into a $4.80-a-day, second-floor room that overlooked a small stream where fishermen stretched their nets and locals fried fish along the banks at night. Although only a few hundred miles from Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta was primitive and cheap in comparison, largely undiscovered by the combination of jet-setters and package tours that would later convert it into another slick and pricey tourist haven. It did not take Ray long to conclude “this was about the best town in Mexico I had been in.” After the assassination he told Huie, “When I get out of jail again I’m going back there permanently.”¹⁹

Ray spent the first three weeks at the Hotel Rio, and the last week at the more expensive Tropicana, directly on the beach.* For Ray, his month in Puerto Vallarta may have been the single season in his life when he felt as though he was somebody. In a town where many of the streets were unpaved, donkeys still transported goods, and jalopies were owned by only a small number of residents, Ray’s Mustang conferred a special status. Since he now announced he was a writer, and had a portable typewriter, notebook, and cameras to prove it, he won even more attention, especially at the local whorehouses that became his haunts.

While he was at the Hotel Rio, another visitor from Alabama heard about the popular Southern American writer who had just come to town and knocked on Ray’s door. The tourist wanted to reminisce about their home state. Ray knew he could easily be unmasked as a liar and simply listened, occasionally grunting or nodding in agreement to whatever his visitor said. “I guess he thought I was crazy as I didn’t say mush as I didn’t know mush about the state.”²⁰

“I spent most of my time on the beach,” he recalled. “Their was one brothel which I was in about 4 times plus two times during the day on business.”²¹ The business he referred to was that a bartender wanted to trade a plot of land for Ray’s Mustang.22 Ray was tempted. He even thought about returning to the States to steal a Mustang and bring it back for the land swap, but eventually decided against it.²³

While Casa Susana, the town’s largest whorehouse, was his favorite hangout, he also visited other brothels. One that he boasted about to Huie was a place where a dozen horizontal cubicles, each a little larger than a telephone booth, were stacked on top of one another. The ends of the cordwood cubicles were open, and a blanket in each covered the floor. There, climbing wooden ladders to get inside, men paid twenty pesos ($1.60) to spend an hour with a local girl. Ray liked it because the cacophony of sex sounds that came from the adjacent cubicles heightened his excitement.²⁴

In visiting the brothels, Ray struck up a relationship with at least two women. The first was Manuela Aguirre Medrano, a slightly plump prostitute at Casa Susana.²⁵ She went by the professional name Irma La Douce, after the popular musical of a decade earlier.²⁶ Although only twenty-three, she had the prematurely haggard appearance that was the trademark of many of the girls who eked out a harsh living for a few dollars a day.²⁷ There, in a rundown building, women from teenagers to grandmothers sat in metal chairs that ringed the ground-floor room, which also served as a primitive bar, a single jukebox blaring dated American show tunes. Local men used the whorehouse as a gathering spot, drinking at the bar and sometimes picking one of the women for a dance and a short visit to one of the grimy upstairs rooms. Children whose mothers were occasionally among those sitting along the walls ran in or through the room. It was there that Ray usually settled in after having a daily hamburger and Pepsi from the nearby Discotheque Café.²⁸ He spent the afternoons drinking beer, and switched to a wide assortment of liquor—gin, screwdrivers, Bacardi rum, and even tequila with Squirt soda—at night.²⁹ After a few drinks, he usually had enough courage to dance with the women.

Irma recalled him as someone who never laughed, and while he was not overly generous with her, he initially treated her kindly.³⁰ Ray always carried his English-Spanish phrase book, since Irma knew only a few English words. She tried to teach him some Mexican dance steps, something he wanted to learn but at which he was not very good. In return, he took her over the twelve-mile bumpy, gravel road to Mismaloya Beach, where Night of the Iguana was shot. Rodimir Biscara, a short, skinny bartender at the whorehouse who spoke a fair amount of English, sometimes accompanied them. An open-air cantina that served refreshments was at the beach and the owner remembered the three of them—the plumpish Irma, the fully dressed and solemn Ray, and Biscara, always flashing a big grin that showed a mouthful of rotting teeth—usually sitting under some remote palm tree.31 Once, Biscara told the cantina owner that Ray was spending “a great deal of money” on Irma.³² When Ray was still considering swapping his Mustang for some property, the three of them looked at land parcels together.³³ On those excursions, Ray sometimes took along his Polaroid, and on their way back to Puerto Vallarta he took pictures of Irma, one with her skirt lifted up to her waist, but he tore them up because he was dissatisfied with the way they came out.³⁴ Another time at the whorehouse, Irma prevailed over his objections and had a photographer snap a photo of them.³⁵

One evening, when Ray was in Casa Susana having a drink with Irma, four black sailors from a private boat were at a nearby table. The group was quite drunk and rowdy, especially one short, heavyset man. Irma, in a statement she gave to the Mexican police a few months after the assassination, said she noticed that Ray seemed disturbed. She had trouble understanding him because of the language barrier, but believed he was insulting the black men, “goading” them. He even walked to their table and angrily said something before stepping outside. In a moment he came back, again strode to their table, and said something else in an agitated state. When he returned to Irma, he asked her to feel his pocket, and she reached over and ran her hand over what appeared to be a pistol. When one of the four blacks walked up to Ray in a conciliatory manner, Ray rebuffed him. Then one of the black men took the shorter one by the arm, and they left the whorehouse. Although Ray wanted to pursue them, she warned him that the police would soon be coming around for their nightly rounds, and he abandoned the idea.³⁶

Almost ten years after she told her story to the police, the House Select Committee on Assassinations interviewed Irma. In her later version, she downplayed the confrontation’s racial overtones. She told the committee she remembered only two blacks, and that one of them was so drunk that he grabbed her to steady himself as he walked past their table. He then apologized. But Ray got angry and “stood up, he had something, I imagine a weapon, to take care of him.”³⁷ Ray began calling him names: “Son-of-a-bitch, chicken, and many such things.”³⁸ The other black sailor took his friend by the arm and they left the whorehouse. However, Irma said she believed that Ray became so agitated “because he [the sailor] touched her,” not because he was black. She said that because of the language difficulties between them, she did not remember him ever talking badly about blacks.

Irma, who was seldom treated with anything but contempt by locals, interpreted Ray’s trips to the beach and the money he spent on her as true affection. On three or four occasions, he got so drunk that he even asked her to marry him.³⁹ She said no because he still slept with other women, and the final time she said no, he pulled a pistol on her. “He scared me,” Irma recalled about the incident that prompted her to stop seeing him.⁴⁰ Although Irma might like to have thought that Ray was being chivalrous in his argument at Casa Susana, given his demeaning view of blacks it is instead likely that the sailor’s race incited him, more so than someone accidentally touching his eight-dollar-a-day prostitute. His regard for Irma was actually so low that when he was angry with her about other matters, he simply used one of the other whores—one named Arcelia Gonzalez and another Margarita Montes Meza, who used the professional name “La Chilindrina” (the Little Trifle)—while Irma stood by helplessly.41 He asked both of the new girls to go to a nearby recreation area at the coast, possibly so he could take photos of them, but both declined.⁴²

When Irma finally shied away from him, Ray found another woman, nineteen-year-old Elisa Arellano Torres, a cigarette girl and photographer’s assistant at the town’s most expensive hotel, the Posada Vallarta.⁴³ She was younger and prettier than Irma, and Ray took her for a week to a cheap motel at Playa del Gloria, located on the road from Puerto Vallarta to the airport.⁴⁴ The owners remembered that the couple, who checked into a corner room, was “strange.” Ray sometimes left at dawn, returned later, and then locked the door to his room, where he spent the rest of the day with Elisa.⁴⁵ Author George McMillan believes that it was with Elisa that Ray took his first sexual pictures.*⁴⁶

Elisa found Ray an introvert who did not like noisy crowds or loud sounds. He often complained that he was tired, and she later said that while she wondered if he was “maybe a mental case,” he was generous to her so she stayed.⁴⁷

“About this time,” Ray wrote, “I thought of having plastic sugery.”⁴⁸ He said that the idea first came to him when he was discharged from Leavenworth in 1958. The discharge officer did not think Ray’s prison photo looked like him, so he was forced to wait until they matched his fingerprints. While most said Ray was nondescript, he nevertheless fretted that he had “pronounced features”—a pointy nose and jutting right ear—and it might be easy to identify him, and he thought surgery could “change my facial features so it would be harder to identify me throught pictures circulated by law officials.”⁴⁹ That photos taken of him at the Mexican beaches made him look considerably younger also encouraged him to consider plastic surgery.^†50

But evidently not even the relaxation afforded by his indolent lifestyle in Puerto Vallarta could keep Ray away from the rackets that were second nature to him. In one of his letters to Huie, Ray said, “Their is another bartender who works at one of the hotel’s [Luis Garcia at the Hotel Oceano] who mite give you some information on my somewhat illegal activities, but I think you should talk to him first, then I will verify what he says.”51 Luis Garcia was the only visitor Ray ever had while he was at the Hotel Rio for three weeks. One day, when Ray was not there, Garcia had arrived and seemed agitated about something he had left in Ray’s car.⁵² William Bradford Huie interviewed Garcia and concluded he was Ray’s source for the marijuana he sold. Garcia denied it.⁵³

Soon after the assassination, the FBI picked up information that Ray might have sold marijuana while in Mexico. But Ray had a ready, albeit unlikely, explanation. “I think that one reason for this charge was that on the way to the beach I picked up a hippie who was hitchhiking, he probably remembered my car from newspaper reports. Anyway several of them was living on the beach and I was talking to one of the girls about the effect the drug [marijuana] had on you, and I think out of this conversation and by them knowing me on sight they mite have informed on me to the FBI. Also, I would think that the hippies would be sympthic to people like King. And if they thought I was involved they would inform.”⁵⁴ His version is more telling than he intended. Ray detested informers, yet he used that word to describe what the hippies did to him. If they had concocted a story about him, he would have said that they made one up to hurt him, but rather his use of “they would inform” implies that they told the authorities about whatever he was doing with marijuana.

Others who knew Ray in Puerto Vallarta reported that when he was offered a cigarette, his answer invariably was “I don’t smoke anything but marijuana.”⁵⁵ Ray took several American hippie girls to the same isolated stretch of beach that he visited with Irma.⁵⁶ Elisa, his last girlfriend, said Ray bragged to her that he had made several trips to Yelapa (nearby at the coast) to buy marijuana.⁵⁷ He was obviously familiar with Yelapa, as he had told Irma that he had been there for business, and had asked another prostitute, Arcelia Gonzalez, to accompany him there.⁵⁸ Also, early in his stay in Mexico, when Ray had to replace a damaged tire, he bought a slightly larger tire than the car needed and fitted it with an inner tube.⁵⁹ An inner tube is a handy means of hiding several pounds of contraband pressed against the wall of an oversize tire.

During his “working” vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Ray also did some further research on finding a country to which he might want to permanently move. While reading a copy of U.S. News & World Report, he saw an advertisement for immigrants wanted in Rhodesia. The ad listed an address to write to for more information, and Ray sent a letter saying that he was interested in immigrating to an English-speaking country. He did not get an answer before he left Mexico.*⁶⁰

By mid-November, Ray was ready to move on, later claiming, “It became clear that I couldn’t accomplish anything further in Mexico in the way of securing permanent residency.”⁶¹ Mexico was not a country to which he seriously considered relocating. He later gave several reasons. “I don’t believe you can live in Mexico. There’s a language problem.… 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 living on the bottom because there is all types of ailments and things.… [p]eople that lives down there for years and years they immune to that, whereas probably if somebody like me that hadn’t been use to that water, they’d probably wind up poisoned or something.”⁶²

Ray failed to mention another key reason: Elisa jilted him. He had grown fond of her, and had given her the most money he had ever given a woman, 600 pesos [$48], with a promise that he would soon have more. He told her to take the money and rent an apartment where they could stay together. But she took the cash and skipped town with her two children. When Ray showed up at the lush bar at the Posada Vallarta looking for Elisa, the bartender gave him a “Dear John” note from her.⁶³ Elisa later claimed that the real reason she left him was his insistence that she buy marijuana for him.⁶⁴

He visited Irma La Douce one last time, said he was leaving, and promised to return when he finished some unspecified business.⁶⁵ His new destination was Los Angeles, and on November 13 he checked out of the Tropicana and headed for the West Coast, stopping in the border town of Tijuana. There he checked into a motel and thoroughly searched his car to ensure there was nothing that might alert a customs check to his fugitive status.^† Almost ten years after the assassination, Ray told a story publicly for the first time to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: that his search of the car produced a business card, slipped into a pack of cigarettes, lodged between the right front bucket seat and the gearshift. That card, according to Ray, contained some unusual information—information that has produced one of the case’s enduring controversies. On the front of the card, Ray said, several things were written or printed, including a name that had been inked out, a city (a “two-part name, like New Orleans”), and the initials LEAA. On the rear of the card was a handwritten name—“Randy Rosen-something”—and an address, “1180 Northwest River Drive, Miami, Fla.”66 Ray was unsure of the significance, if any, of this information. “I could only speculate whether the cigarette pack had been accidentally dropped or intentionally planted,” he wrote.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, he copied the information to a separate sheet of paper (listing all the numbers backward), and then threw that paper out when he was later on the run after the King assassination (he has changed his story about when he threw it out, but is adamant that he no longer has a copy).⁶⁸

In his 1977 interview with Canadian Broadcasting, Ray intimated that the person listed on the card—whom Jerry Ray supposedly tracked down—was Randolph Erwin Rosenson, and that Rosenson might have information about Raoul. Ray speculated that this was possible since Raoul had supposedly been in the car five weeks earlier and may have dropped the cigarettes and card there (of course, if the card story is true, it could also have been dropped there by any of the local Mexicans or American hippies that Ray gave rides to during his stay in Puerto Vallarta, or even the previous owners of the Mustang in Birmingham).

The House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted an exhaustive investigation into Rosenson’s background, associates, and movements in the 1960s. It uncovered evidence that Rosenson and Ray had had several opportunities to meet prior to the King assassination. For instance, Rosenson, who had a drug-related felony conviction, used a carnival operation as the cover for his smuggling. Rosenson traveled extensively in his work, and had been in Mexico in late 1965 and early 1966.⁶⁹ The committee could not show that he was there in 1967 when Ray visited. However, he was frequently in New Orleans, a city Ray visited briefly in December 1967. Rosenson traveled in many of the same New Orleans circles as the person with whom Ray visited New Orleans, Charles Stein. Both Rosenson and Stein were known to the New Orleans Police Department for similar crimes, had mutual acquaintances, frequented the same bars, and had even retained the same lawyer.⁷⁰ Moreover, Rosenson was also in Los Angeles and Birmingham at the same time as Ray during 1967 and early 1968, and in Birmingham during March 1968 when Ray purchased the murder weapon.⁷¹ Ray and Rosenson even used the same Birmingham bank.⁷²

The Select Committee interviewed Rosenson on six occasions, and once he appeared in executive session. He adamantly denied knowing Ray or any Ray family members or known associates, including a Raoul or Charles Stein. Further, he emphatically denied any role in the King assassination and could not offer any reason as to why Ray implicated him.73

The Select Committee concluded, “Despite the opportunities for Ray and Rosenson to have met, an extensive field investigation, including interviews of Rosenson’s relatives, friends, business associates, criminal contacts, and numerous law enforcement officials, failed to establish a definite link between Ray and Rosenson. The committee concluded that Rosenson was not involved with Ray in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.”*⁷⁴

Rosenson’s lawyer before the Select Committee, Gene Stanley, told the author, “Originally Rosenson lied to the committee investigators about Ray and he gave them all this bull, he was trying to bait them by lying through his teeth. I spoke to them and to him. He finally leveled with them and really did not know anything about Ray. But as he said, ‘I met a lot of people I’ve never known, and if I was on drugs, I might have met him and not known it.’”⁷⁵ According to Stanley, the HSCA investigators thought “there might be a person who was involved in drug smuggling who may have had contact with Ray and Rosenson. That person wasn’t Raoul, but it may have been somebody who was operating in Mexico. The problem was with Rosenson’s mind, since it was so fried on drugs he could not even remember what he did a couple of years ago.”⁷⁶

It is possible that Ray and Rosenson met and somehow formed a smuggling link, and that Rosenson was truthful when he said he had nothing to do with the King assassination. Also, it is possible that Ray, after he was in jail for the King murder, read about Rosenson in the papers, and then placed him into the story just in time for the Select Committee to waste precious time and resources tracking down a tale that proved to be a dead end. Was it one of Ray’s ploys to prevent the committee from investigating other leads that might have brought it closer to the truth about his role, and the scope of any real conspiracy in the King assassination?

* If Ray drove partway to Dallas and then to Baton Rouge before arriving in Nuevo Laredo, it was an arduous feat, since he had some 1,400 miles to cover. He made the trip, by his account, in about thirty hours. The driving alone could easily take twenty-five hours, and then he needed time for his phone book investigation, food, and gas. He did not sleep for two days, providing the first evidence he may again have found a temporary source of amphetamines, the same drug that used to keep him up in multiday spurts at Jeff City.

* The FBI checked all the hotels and motels in Nuevo Laredo for the month of October under the names Raoul, John L. Rayns, and Eric S. Galt, and could not find that any of them were ever registered.

* The Mexican government, pursuant to the author’s repeated written requests for information about the original investigation, as well as access to Ray’s file, finally said that they did not have any files or information about Ray. It is possible that what Huie interpreted as a federal police interest in Ray in 1967 was mistaken. Hotel proprietors are required by Mexican law to forward daily reports of foreign guests to the Federal Office of Tourism. After the assassination, a federal police officer may have come to the San Francisco hotel to excise the signature, and the October 14 reference on the bottom of the register refers merely to the date Ray checked out (he checked in on October 10).

* While Ray was at the Hotel Rio for nineteen days, he did not make a single telephone call from his room. William Bradford Huie inadvertently created one of the mysteries in the case when he interviewed the manager of the Hotel Tropicana and reported in his book that the day before he checked out Ray charged a single call to Corpus Christi, Texas. However, according to Huie, the Mexican police had taken the charge record after the assassination and never released it. Ray, meanwhile, denied making any calls while in Puerto Vallarta. On this, Ray told the truth. Huie relied on the word of the manager that the records did not exist, but in fact they did. Mexican authorities and the FBI reviewed the records, made available by the hotel’s accountant, Carlos Manzo, and they reveal that Ray made no calls from that room. In addition, 12,000 toll calls made through the central exchange in Puerto Vallarta from October 15 to November 20, 1967, were checked, and none were placed in the name Galt (MURKIN 5101, section 69, pp. 150–51).

* There were rumors that he had actually made nude photos of both Elisa and Irma, and maybe even a short blue film with Elisa, but they have never been substantiated. None of the pictures Ray took of the women have been found, although copies of a simple photo of Ray and Irma, taken by another photographer at Casa Susana, was turned over to the FBI. That photo was released in mid-1968 when the hunt for Ray was in high gear.

† Typically, Ray changed his testimony several times before the Select Committee about whether he had taken pictures of himself in Mexico. He once denied taking any photos, then admitted to one, and then admitted to a couple, at other times saying perhaps he took some more.

* Of course, Ray’s interest in Rhodesia has raised much speculation about his racism and the eventual role it might have played in the assassination. He read too many news magazines and newspapers not to know that Rhodesia was one of the last bastions of a segregated, white-dominated society and government. It was also a staging ground for white mercenaries who fought in some of the local civil wars that ravaged its black neighbors. Certainly the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., might well have been considered a hero, or at least a respected character of high notoriety, in a place like Rhodesia.

^† Ray’s careful cleaning of the car prior to passing customs is another good indicator that he was involved in some type of contraband dealing while in Mexico. Although he contends he was worried about revealing anything that would unmask his fugitive status, he knew there was nothing like that over which to fret. However, some remnant of stolen property or marijuana would have concerned him.

* One of the issues that conspiracy buffs use to keep the Rosenson issue alive are the initials—LEAA—that Ray said were on the front of the card. “The L.E.A.A. stood for the Law Enforcement Administration,” alleges William Pepper, Ray’s latest lawyer, “which at the time was sponsoring a number of pilot projects in selected cities.” However, the problem is that the LEAA was not created until August 1968, almost a year after Ray crossed into Mexico. Ray has since tried to cover the mistake by claiming there were two early LEAA pilot projects in New Orleans, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the author checked and the name—Office of Law Enforcement Assistance—was never even mentioned before the August 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act was passed. As for the pilot projects, there was nothing remotely related to the agency’s eventual name, or the use of initials such as LEAA. Moreover, as opposed to the implication of some conspiracists, the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance was not a law enforcement operation. It was instead a block-grant program, coordinated as a research and statistics agency. By coincidence, the LEAA was actually formed by Lyndon Johnson because, in the wake of the riots that ravaged some cities after the King assassination, he wanted to provide additional funding to those particularly hard hit.