Dancing in Los Angeles
Ray passed through customs at Tijuana without incident. He drove leisurely, arriving in Los Angeles on Sunday, November 19, in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. That afternoon, he spotted a vacancy sign for AIR-CONDITIONED APARTMENTS at a two-story, deco-style building at 1535 North Serrano Avenue. The manager, Margarita Powers, showed him a bachelor apartment—number 6 on the first floor—and he took it immediately, paying her $127.50 in cash, which covered a month’s rent, a cleaning fee, and a key deposit.1 Southern California would be his home for the next four months, until March 17, eighteen days before Dr. King was murdered in Memphis.
Ray’s initial time in Los Angeles was merely a continuation of the lazy, drifting lifestyle he had enjoyed in Mexico. His new apartment was a few doors south of Hollywood Boulevard, a sleazy area claimed in late 1967 by hippies and transients as their own, marked by flophouses, all-day bars, and inexpensive shops. Western Avenue, just around the corner, was a haven for streetwalkers, including the city’s largest transvestite contingent.
The day after he arrived, Ray wrote to the Chicago film company, from which he was still waiting for his refund. “I will be at the below address for five months,” he told them.*2 “I had a phone installed as I wanded one to inquir about jobs,” Ray later wrote. He had surprisingly decided to look for a straight job. Although he appeared to have money left over from Mexico—he bought a $90 console television soon after arriving in Los Angeles—it seems that he expected to stay in Southern California long enough that he wanted to replenish his cash without resorting to crime.3 Though smuggling might be worthwhile in a country such as Mexico where law enforcement was lackadaisical, it was a much greater risk in the States, where being arrested meant being sent back to finish his twenty-year sentence at Jeff City.
At first the phone company told him there would be a delay, since the main office was swamped with new orders. But he managed to get a fast installation by claiming that he worked in Governor George Wallace’s campaign to get his party—the American Independent Party—placed on the California ballot for the following year’s presidential election. Ray had actually called the local Wallace headquarters to ask how long they would be operating in California, because he thought that since Galt was an Alabama identification, it “would be a good cover.”4 It is a reminder that Ray had stayed abreast of the news while in Mexico and that he was at least following the developments in the Wallace campaign. California was a major testing ground for the incipient Wallace effort, and his supporters had to present the California secretary of state with 66,059 signatures by January 1 to qualify for ballot status. If Wallace and his new party failed there, it would sap the momentum needed to qualify in other states.
Shortly after Ray arrived in Los Angeles, Wallace visited the state and campaigned in large, boisterous rallies from San Francisco to San Diego. The Los Angeles Times, which Ray read, extensively covered the third-party effort. At the same time that Wallace dominated the California political news, there was also steady coverage of King. He had finished serving the five-day jail sentence for his 1963 Birmingham contempt conviction, and the press increasingly focused on his October call for “escalating nonviolence to the level of civil disobedience.”5 King had ratcheted up his rhetoric by blaming the 1967 summer riots on “the greater crimes of white society.”6 A few weeks after Ray moved to Los Angeles, King held a press conference in which he predicted that “waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited” would swarm to Washington, D.C., the following April. Announcing that it was time to “confront the power structure massively,” King acknowledged that his march on Washington was intended to “develop massive dislocation.”7 None of this would have gone unnoticed by the man in Apartment 6 on Serrano Avenue—who was viewed by his neighbors as a quiet loner who shied away from even the casual chitchat that passed as conversation between apartment dwellers in a large city.
Ray’s phone was finally installed on November 27. But instead of calling around to look for work, his first call was to a Dr. Mark O. Freeman, a Beverly Hills clinical psychologist who specialized in self-hypnosis.8 Ray made an appointment that same day for 5:00 P.M.
“I had read quite a bit about hypnosis in the penitentiary,” Ray later recalled.9 While in Canada four months earlier, he had bought several books on hypnosis, including Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who had developed a commercially popular theory of “self-image” from his experiences in cosmetic surgery. The book’s dust jacket made a pitch that might well have appealed to Ray: “A New Way to Get More Living out of Life.” Personality, according to Maltz, had a “face.” If it “remained scarred, distorted, ‘ugly,’ or inferior, the person himself acted out this role in his behavior.” Maltz talked of changing the type of person whose “image of the world in which he lives is a hostile place.… Frustration, aggression, and loneliness are the price he pays.”10
Ray, neatly dressed, his short dark hair slicked back, arrived promptly for his appointment with Freeman. He told Freeman that he wanted to “overcome his shyness, gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so that he could relax, sleep better, and remember things better.”11 Of course, it is also possible that Ray thought self-hypnosis might help him in planning alibis for crimes, not being anxious about getting captured, or being better able to maintain a cover story as a fugitive when interrogated. If he read Maltz’s book, he may even have thought self-hypnosis would make it possible to adopt a new identity and suppress his old one.
When Freeman asked some introductory questions, Ray astonishingly gave truthful answers, including his real name, and that he came from East St. Louis and was born March 10,1928.12 “I gave him my right nane since I thought he mite get me under hypnosis and find out my right name,” Ray later wrote.13
“You’ve got to keep in mind that I get a lot of angry people around here,” Freeman said later. “I get a lot of rough stuff around here. I mean psychotic, that stuff. But I couldn’t pick up on any of that with Ray. He made a favorable impression on me. He was a good pupil. I’d show him how to go under, and pretty soon he’d be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him lots of positive feelings of competence.”14
Ray saw Freeman six times—$25 for each hourlong session—with several days between visits. During the course of the treatment, Ray assured him that he had no “deep dark secrets.”15 While Freeman did not hear anything startling from Ray, he found him an excellent hypnotic subject, and did discover Ray’s tremendous shyness as well as his dislike for blacks.16 He also found Ray “young and immature for his age,” and that his expectation about hypnosis was unrealistic: “He had the old power idea of hypnotism. That is, that you can go around looking people in the eye and can hypnotize them and make them do what you want them to do” (something that might have appealed to Ray if he wanted to convince women to be in porn films).17
While Ray was seeing Freeman, he finally began looking for work. He answered several classified advertisements in the Times. Among the jobs he applied for were temporary work at the IRS helping taxpayers fill in tax forms, a job as a vacuum cleaner salesman, and even a position as a maintenance man at the Big Bear ski resort. He was frustrated, however, because the positions required a social security card, something he had not yet obtained for Galt.18 “I didn’t want to give the Rayns name,” Ray recalled, fearful that the FBI might have finally traced it from when he had used it during the spring at the Indian Trail restaurant near Chicago.19
Ray then placed two advertisements in the Times, one for restaurant work and the other for general labor, hoping he might “get a job that didn’t require a social security card.”20 He had no luck—all the offers wanted local references. Briefly, Ray’s interest was reignited by a seafaring job. He called the Coast Guard in vain to ask about any shortcuts for getting a job on a ship, and also made a few futile inquiries about seaman’s papers. “It’s not quite as easy in the United States as it is in Canada,” Ray later recounted. “See, Canada don’t require fingerprints or anything, and the United States, in order to get the Seaman’s papers, I found out you have to, they have to take one print. So I was trying to scheme around and find out how I could get someone else’s prints on there rather than mine. But I never did carry it through that far.”21
On December 5, Ray made one of his patently quirky moves—he put down a $100 cash deposit on a $499 dance course at the National Dance Studio in Long Beach. It was a premier school, with twenty-five private hourlong sessions and twenty-five group lessons focusing on recreational dances such as the fox-trot, swing, rumba, and others.22 On his membership application, the dance instructor listed that Ray had previously taken cha-cha and fox-trot lessons while in Birmingham, had owned a restaurant in Mexico, and would be leaving “in a couple of months to work on a ship—wants to travel.”23 The National Dance Studio commanded an extravagant price and was certainly a considerable step up from the lessons he received from Claire Keating in Canada, Irma in Mexico, or the ten-dollar classes in Birmingham. Ray later complained about the price: “The ad in the paper said it would cost $32.00, but they coned the country boy.” Still, he insisted that he wanted to take the course because “I thought I mite stay in Mexico … also, about this time I found out you could go to Columbia S.A. without a passport.”*24
Ray had begun visiting the neighborhood bars when he first moved in, and settled on two as his new haunts. The Sultan Room had erotic decor, sixty-cent drinks, and a pool table in the rear. It was on the ground floor of the five-story, yellow brick St. Francis Hotel-Apartments, only three blocks from his apartment. His other favorite was the Rabbit’s Foot Club, a dark, musty bar around the corner on Hollywood Boulevard. The few who remember him at the bars recall that he claimed to be an Alabama businessman who had just returned from Mexico after several years of operating a bar, which he had sold to his Mexican partner.25 He was looking to open a new tavern. Occasionally he used a couple of Spanish phrases as if to authenticate his story.
Although he made no close friends, it was at the Sultan Room that he met a cocktail waitress, Marie Tomaso—she had used several names over the years, but finally adopted the professional name Marie Martin when she worked as an exotic dancer.26 Thirty-five, with a plump face and sporting a long, jet black wig, she first saw Ray sitting by himself, nursing a steady supply of straight vodkas.27 She noticed him because the bar, which was usually crowded with elderly retirees, who occupied most of the upstairs hotel, did not get many strangers. Always dressed neatly in a dark suit and light shirt, he seemed very pale, she thought, as though he did not get outside often.28 The thrice-divorced Martin walked near Ray one evening, and suddenly he asked if he could buy her a drink. He spoke so softly that at first she was not sure he was talking to her. She agreed, and it was the start of their friendship.29 “She started telling me something about her family,” Ray recalled. “She said she had a boyfriend doing five years in San Quentin for possession of marijuana.”30 Later that evening, she asked him for a ride home, and on the way she told him that she was originally from New Orleans.31 He talked mainly about the bar he claimed to have owned in Mexico. She reminded him, he told her, of a girl he knew in Guadalajara, where he had lived for six years.32
On Thursday, December 14, Martin’s cousin, Rita Stein, a go-go dancer, dropped by the Sultan Room.33 Dark-eyed and full-figured, the women resembled each other. Martin introduced Ray, and the two women sat with him. Rita noticed that Ray never looked at their eyes, even when he spoke to them.34 Soon, Marie turned to him.
“Rita’s got a problem,” she said. “Her two girls are living with her mother in New Orleans and they’re going to put the kids into a children’s home unless she brings them back here. We’ve been looking for a ride to New Orleans …”
She stopped and stared at Ray. She knew he was ill at ease when he began pulling on his right ear and smiling crookedly as though he was the only one in on a private joke.
“You wouldn’t want to drive me down to pick them up, would you?” She was half joking.35
Ray considered it seriously. “Well, maybe I would. I’m on vacation and not working.”
“You would?!” Martin and Stein were delighted. Stein acted as though Ray had given a firm commitment. “You’ve got to meet my brother, Charlie. He’d go with you and help you drive.”*36
Ray did not object, but he clearly had expected the women were planning to accompany him.
Stein ran the few blocks to her apartment on Franklin Avenue. There, her thirty-eight-year-old brother, Charlie, was baby-sitting her two youngest children. He was a hulking figure, six-two, 240 pounds, bald except for some long, straggling locks of hair that went past his shoulders, and with a thick black beard. Neighbors thought of him as merely a hippie, regularly dressed in his torn jeans, beads, and sandals, often lying on the grass at night searching the sky intently for flying saucers. His own mother thought he was “crazy but harmless.”37 A believer in “Cosmic Philosophy,” he often talked to plants, trees, and animals, convinced that he had the ability to communicate with other life-forms.38 Charlie Stein said he was a songwriter and budding psychic healer—he claimed to have recently cured Marie of arthritis by laying his hands on her and having her bury her panties in a hole he dug in the backyard. But at different times, the sixth-grade dropout had operated a garage, boxed, played competitive chess, worked as both a barker and bouncer at New Orleans strip shows, and even managed a bar for a while in the Big Easy. Stein, who was divorced four times, also had two things in common with Ray, although they did not know it—he had become a union member as a merchant marine, and he had a criminal record.*39
Rita excitedly told him that she had met “a guy in the Sultan Room who’s willing to drive down.”40 A half hour later, Stein made his way to the Sultan. Ray was leery of the “big, swarthy, balding” stranger.41 Charlie said that Ray gave him a limp handshake (the same weak handshake that is a trait of the three Ray brothers), and he felt strong “antivibrations” from him.42 But Charlie was also eager to visit New Orleans to see his mother, as well as a young son from a previous marriage. Could Ray leave tomorrow, Friday, giving them the weekend to drive there? After having said yes so quickly when Marie asked for the ride, it was difficult for Ray suddenly to change his mind. “Since police loved to stop hippies for no cause in those days, Charles was not exactly the type of character an escaped convict would choose to travel with,” said Ray. But he did not want to “welch on my commitment to Marie.”43 So, instead, he made the trip appear to be no big deal by saying he had some business of his own there, and that he would pick up Charlie at 10:00 the next morning.
When Stein left, Ray turned to Marie. His face was clenched and drained of the little color it normally had. “If this is a setup, I’ll kill him.” He almost seemed to hiss the words, his teeth clenched in anger. “I have a gun. If he tried to pull anything on me on the trip—”44
“Oh, Eric, it’s not a setup,” Marie interrupted. “If Rita doesn’t get her girls back, they go into a children’s home.”45
Ray, typically, claims that his decision to make a December trip to New Orleans was at Raoul’s direction. He gave two different versions to Huie about how he was called to New Orleans. In the first, Ray said that shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles in November, “I then called Raoul in New Orleans, someone else ansered and ask me if I could come down around xmas, I agreed.”46 In another account, there was no telephone call but “Raoul had written me and told me to meet him at a certain bar in New Orleans at a certain time on December 15” (note, however, that while Ray claims he was supposed to meet Raoul on December 15, he did not even leave Los Angeles until that date).47 Before the Select Committee, he reverted to the phone-call scenario.48
In both of Ray’s stories, the trip had been planned for several weeks. However, his activities in Los Angeles reveal otherwise. Ray had a session with Dr. Freeman on Thursday, December 14, from 10:00 to 11:00 A.M. When he left, he made an appointment to see Freeman the following Monday at 3:00 P.M. However, later on Thursday he met Rita Stein and agreed impetuously to travel to New Orleans. So on Friday morning, Ray called Dr. Freeman to say he was unexpectedly leaving town as his brother had found a job for him in the merchant marine in New Orleans.49 Also on Friday, he telephoned the National Dance Studio and canceled his Monday lesson, saying he would be out of town on a short trip. If he had already had a trip planned to New Orleans for a couple of weeks, he would not have made appointments at Freeman and the dance studio for the time he would be away, and then have had to cancel them hurriedly on the morning of his departure.
Ray, wearing a dark brown suit with a white shirt, picked up Marie Martin at the St. Francis on Friday, December 15, near noon.50 He then drove her to the Steins’, where she explained to Rita and Charlie that Ray had a last-minute condition: that before he would make the trip to New Orleans, he wanted them all to sign petitions to place George Wallace on the California ballot. He even offered to pay all the trip’s expenses if the three agreed.51 “I just want you to register so Wallace will have enough signatures to get his name on the California ticket,” Ray told them.52 The California primary, he explained, was scheduled for next June.53 Ray later denied that it was his idea to have them sign the Wallace petition—he said “they requested it,” although that was unlikely since none of them were registered voters, much less politically active.54 After his arrest, when he learned that the three had no political interest, he came up with an equally dubious reason for their supposed desire to register for Wallace: Marie Martin had a boyfriend in jail and she thought she might help him by making some political connections.55
After Ray had set forth his condition for the New Orleans trip, the three agreed, and Ray drove them to Wallace’s North Hollywood office, where he watched as they signed the petition. Ray walked around the office looking at the campaign literature, and Charlie Stein thought that he seemed to know his way around the headquarters.56 Later, Ray denied having been inside, and Wallace workers claimed they did not recall ever seeing him there.57
After dropping the women off at their apartments, Stein and Ray set off for New Orleans that afternoon. They were a strange pair, with almost nothing in common, and said little to each other. “The trip was uneventful,” recalled Ray, “except that once in a while as he was driving and I was sleeping Charlie would nudge me awake and exclaim that a flying saucer had just passed the car.”58
They drove overnight, sharing the driving. Early Saturday, during a snowstorm, Ray was at the wheel when the car skidded several hundred yards off the freeway, coming to rest against a wire fence. That prompted him to stop in El Paso, where he bought a used tire for four dollars to replace a threadbare one.59 At rest stops, Ray ordered hamburgers with everything on them, together with a beer, which he usually drank in the car, one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding the bottle.60
Stein remembered that he once thanked Ray for making the trip, but Ray said, “I’m not doing any favor—I’ve got business in New Orleans.”61 Ray mentioned a name—something that sounded Italian—but Stein could not remember it. A couple of times, Ray stopped at gas stations to make telephone calls, which each lasted five or ten minutes.62 Ray, in fact, later admitted to making two calls when traveling to New Orleans, both to his brother Jerry.63 “I just called him,” recalled Ray, “I just wanted to tell him I was all right and, of course, I didn’t want to call him from California.” (He feared that if the FBI was watching Jerry they might trace the call to his current hideout.) Ray said, “There was no significance in the calls. They weren’t of no importance.”*64
Although there was little conversation during the ride to New Orleans, at one point Ray told Stein that he had done a lot of traveling in the Mustang, and that he had had trouble in black areas because of his Alabama plates. He had also told Marie Martin about his problems with blacks.65 If blacks wanted to be free, Ray said, they should live in the North or West, but if blacks wanted to remain as slaves, then they should stay in the South.66
At one point, Stein, having forgotten Ray’s last name, asked him what it was. “It’s Galt—Eric Starvo Galt. Galt!” Ray shot back. It was as though Ray wanted him to remember the name.67 Stein did not think Ray looked like an Eric: With his greased-backed hair and affinity for cowboy tunes, he seemed more like a country boy. From their brief conversations, Stein had the impression that Ray, who was knowledgeable about the details of Wallace’s presidential campaign, was somehow involved with it.68
The two drove nonstop, and while Stein said Ray was not a user of hard drugs, it was possible he was a “pillhead” and took some during their trip.69 The unlikely duo arrived in New Orleans on Sunday, December 17. Ray decided at the last moment not to stay at Stein’s mother’s house, and instead checked into a motel on Stein’s recommendation, the Provincial, in the heart of the French Quarter.70 He signed in as Eric S. Galt, gave the Birmingham rooming house as his permanent address, and was assigned a small, twelve-dollar-a-night room.71 After registering, Ray dropped Stein off at his family’s home.* The next evening, Ray was anxious to return to Los Angeles. He drove to the home of Stein’s married sister, Marie Lee. When Ray arrived, he parked the car and walked up a path to the front porch, where Stein and his sister were sitting. “Eric, say hi to Marie,” said Stein. “Glad to know you,” said Marie. Ray did not acknowledge the introduction. Instead, he leaned against a porch post and stared at the ground.72 After a few uncomfortable moments, Marie went inside the house. “You ready to go back?” asked Ray. Stein, who had expected that they would be there at least a few days, pleaded to stay another day. Ray finally agreed.
Ray’s thirty-six hours in New Orleans have sparked tremendous speculation about what he did, whom he met, and whether the groundwork for killing King was laid there some fourteen weeks prior to the assassination. By the time the FBI had traced him to the Provincial Motel after the assassination, it was possible to determine from the motel’s records that he had not made any long-distance phone calls while there, but the records that would have shown if he made local calls, and to whom, had already been destroyed.73 New Orleans was, of course, where Lee Oswald had spent his summer only four years earlier, just before he killed Kennedy. With its anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing paramilitary groups, a dominant mafia family headed by Carlos Marcello, and a corrupt police and judiciary, it is easy to believe in conspiracies brewing in the Big Easy. When Ray was there, conspiracy and assassinations were topic one, as District Attorney Jim Garrison had forced through an indictment against prominent businessman Clay Shaw just that March. The trial had not yet begun, but the international press had swarmed into the city to discover whether Garrison had uncovered a plot behind the president’s murder.*
It was in New Orleans that Ray claims to have had his first meeting with Raoul since the supposed rendezvous at the Mexican border.† Again, Ray has given many different versions. In the original, he met Raoul at Le Bunny Lounge, a bar at 611 Canal Street, and said, “Raoul was interested in a job he wanted us to do in about two or three months.”74 In a subsequent rendition, instead of giving the general time span of two to three months, Raoul was precise, promising he would contact Ray in April, the very month in which King was killed.75 Before the Select Committee, nine years later, Ray reverted to claiming that “there was no date set at that time.”76
Raoul still had no travel documents for Ray, but promised them the next time, together with the long-awaited $12,000 payoff. Another time, instead of travel documents, Ray asserted that Raoul promised to relocate him to Cuba, and that from there he could go anywhere in the world.77 When Ray asked what the next job entailed, Raoul “said not to worry about it and not to ask questions.”78 In a second version to Huie, instead of telling Ray not to ask questions, Raoul told him it involved gunrunning. Before the Select Committee, nine years later, it had changed to “some type of military equipment.”79
Originally, Ray said Raoul gave him $500 in twenties to prevent him from asking questions. Ray’s next story had him receiving the money merely because he was short of cash, and it had nothing to do with silencing him. Then, suddenly, Ray claimed that instead of a mere $500, Raoul had actually given him $2,500.80 Before the Select Committee, he dropped it back to $500.81
While there may have been no Raoul, it is possible that Ray met with someone in New Orleans connected to his Mexican smuggling or even an old jail mate. However, if he met with anyone, it was more likely one of his brothers. When James had canceled his appointment with Dr. Freeman in Los Angeles, on the day he left for New Orleans, he said his brother had found a job for him in New Orleans. On his way to the Big Easy, Ray admitted, the only person he called was Jerry. James later told his Los Angeles dance instructor, Sharon Rhodes, that when he visited Louisiana in December, it was to see his brother.82 And most important, in a private conversation with a Select Committee witness (who asked for anonymity), Jerry admitted that he was in New Orleans with James in December 1967.83
Jerry publicly denies being there, saying instead that he was visiting St. Louis for the Christmas holidays. But St. Louis is only 675 miles from New Orleans, making it possible for Jerry to have quickly made the trip there after James called him from the road.84 Of course, the visitor in New Orleans could also have been John Ray, who had recently begun preparing for the opening of his own tavern in St. Louis and had no time clock or work schedule that could curtail his movements.
The timing of a December meeting between the brothers is important because that is the time when John and Jerry may have independently learned about the standing $50,000 bounty that the St. Louis lawyer and segregationist John Sutherland was offering for King’s murder. That was the same offer Ray himself might have found out about before he escaped from Jeff City.
Ten weeks before Ray left for New Orleans, on October 1, 1967, Carol Ray (then using her married name, Pepper) took out a lease on commercial space on Arsenal Street in St. Louis. She had decided to go into a joint venture for a bar—the Grapevine Tavern—with her brother John, but because of his criminal record she did not want to jeopardize the liquor license by putting his name on the lease.85 For the next two months, John Ray was a regular in that St. Louis neighborhood, preparing the bar for its grand opening. A couple of weeks before James’s visit to New Orleans, the Grapevine finally had its gas and electricity turned on, and although it did not technically receive its liquor license until January, it was unofficially open for business for neighborhood locals.86 John had made friends in the area during the bar’s construction, and it was immediately popular, according to him, with a “rough blue collar” crowd.87 It was also, according to St. Louis police intelligence files, a place where ex-convicts gathered, often to plan burglaries and robberies, and it had a reputation among criminals as a place where “jobs” could be found.88
Later the Grapevine became a center of pro-George Wallace activity.89 John Ray’s sudden engrossment in politics was out of character, as he had never shown any interest before 1968, and as an ex-felon he was barred from voting. However, that year he converted the Grapevine into a distribution center for Wallace literature, and actually drove prospective voters to the Wallace registration office.*90 Sutherland and John Kauffmann, the man he had used as a go-between to pass along his offer of money for King’s death, were major Wallace supporters. Sutherland even paid the salary of the American Independent Party’s Missouri state chairman.91 Many of the party’s rallying meetings were held near the bar, even when it was under construction in late 1967. One of the party’s most active organizers lived only a hundred yards from the Grapevine.92
The Grapevine was a place where a bounty on King could have been comfortably discussed.93 “I ran a tavern in a racist neighborhood,” John later said.94 When pushed by the Select Committee on how King was discussed at the Grapevine, John acknowledged that King was “a controversy figure,” to whom John was personally “opposed,” but that he could not remember any “serious discussion to do bodily injuries or conspiracies” about King (emphasis added).95
Moreover, starting in January, John Ray employed Naomi Regazzi as a bartender. Her husband was friendly with at least one person who knew of the bounty (Russell Byers) and a convict at Jeff City (John Paul Spica) who might have been aware of it.96
If John learned of the bounty, he and Jerry would almost certainly have talked about it—$50,000 was too tempting to summarily dismiss. But, as the Ray brothers always operated, a decision that big, especially one that involved a step up to murder, could not be made without the untitled leader of the clan, James.97
Not surprisingly, the Rays and Naomi Regazzi all disavow any complicity in the plot. John denied ever learning of Sutherland’s offer through his Wallace work or passing it to James, much less visiting New Orleans in December 1967. Jerry Ray made the same denials. Regazzi said she was separated from her husband, did not meet John Ray until late December, and anyway claimed she never knew of any offer to kill King.98
Whatever Ray was up to in New Orleans, he certainly gave no indication to Charlie Stein. They left New Orleans on Tuesday. Stein and Ray shared the driving, and Rita Stein’s twin eight-year-old girls sat in the Mustang’s backseat. They drove the 1,850 miles almost nonstop, stopping once for a snowball fight in Texas and then after that only for food and gasoline.99 The girls recalled that Ray never spoke much, but that he used to hum loudly, accompanying radio music that to them sounded like a train whistle.100 They arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday, December 21, two days after leaving New Orleans. Ray visited the National Dance Studio that same day, and even though he had an agreement to pay the balance of his enrollment fee in installments, he paid $364 cash.101 Such a large expenditure, hours after his return from New Orleans, again raised the specter that somehow he had come into money while there.
Four days later, Ray had his first Christmas outside prison in eight years. Rita Stein invited him over for dinner with some of her friends and family, but Ray declined.102 Huie later assumed that it must have been a “memorable” day for Ray, and asked what he did that Christmas. “I don’t remember anything about that Christmas,” Ray said. “You ought to know that Christmas is for family people. It don’t mean anything to a loner like me. It’s just another day and another night to go to a bar or sit in your room and look at the paper and drink a beer or two and maybe switch on the TV. No, I don’t remember anything about Christmas.”103
* Ray actually would leave his North Serrano apartment in January, but he would move only three blocks. The fact that on his second day in Los Angeles he predicted how long he would be there has prompted speculation that his moves were preplanned, possibly coordinated by someone else, leading ultimately to the King assassination. But that overlooks the importance that Ray attached to staying on the move as a fugitive. He had convinced himself that law enforcement would trace him if he stayed too long in any single city. In Birmingham, he originally told the rooming house manager that he would be there only four months (he left in six weeks) and in Mexico claimed he would be there a few months (again, less than two). The only difference in Los Angeles is that his estimate was closer to being right, only a month off.
* The unusual part of Ray’s actions, especially if he is to be believed about desperately wanting a passport, is that he spent his money on nonessential items instead of obtaining his travel papers. For instance, he admitted before the Select Committee that as an ex-convict he knew it was possible to buy a forged passport for about $1,000. Yet, while he never did that, he spent nearly $800 in Los Angeles alone on the dance lessons, his psychological sessions, and later a bartending course.
* In Ray’s version, he first mentioned to the women that he was going to New Orleans for business, and then they asked if he would pick up the children. However, both Martin and Stein gave contemporaneous statements to the FBI that indicated they initiated the idea of the New Orleans trip. Ray obviously realized later that if it was their suggestion, he could not very well claim that he had planned the trip in conjunction with Raoul as part of a plot that led to King’s death.
* Beyond running illicit prostitution and gambling, Stein had a 1961 arrest in New Orleans for possession of narcotics, but no conviction on that. Several police officers in New Orleans told the House Select Committee that they believed, however, that Stein dealt in narcotics while there. After his meeting with Ray, Stein did have a 1969 conviction for growing marijuana in California, and a 1974 conviction for dealing in heroin. Stein’s brother-in-law had had a narcotics record and died of a morphine overdose in 1966. This background, coupled with Ray’s connection at different times to illegal drugs, raised the possibility that the meeting was not as coincidental as they have recounted it. The FBI seriously considered the possibility that Stein and Ray made the New Orleans trip to score narcotics, but could not prove it. The House Select Committee conducted an extensive investigation of Stein, his background, associates, and activities, concluding finally that he and Ray met “fortuitously … had separate and independent reasons for making the trip” and that “no evil purpose” existed between them.
* After the assassination, journalist Louis Lomax rented a white Mustang and with Charlie Stein tried to re-create the drive from Los Angeles to New Orleans, especially to find one particular pay phone along the route that Ray used. Stein wanted $4,000 to make the trip but settled for agreeing to split the assassination’s $100,000 reward with Lomax. They never collected it. Their collaboration resulted in a syndicated series of articles with wildly imaginative assertions, including, among others, that Ray had really called an industrialist in New Orleans who financed the King murder; that he secretly made another trip to New Orleans around Valentine’s Day; that there was a girl, Jeri, in the plot, who worked at the Sultan Room (there was no such person); that after the murder, instead of fleeing to Toronto, Ray really hid in Milwaukee with the phantom Jeri; and that the FBI helped Ray. Even Ray felt compelled to comment on Lomax’s articles in his prison letters to Huie. He found them “silly” and assumed they were “just something he [Lomax] made up.”
* Anthony Charles DeCarvelho, a cab driver in New Orleans and a friend of Stein’s, told the Select Committee that he had met Ray at Stein’s mother’s house on the night they arrived. Ray then requested a cab ride to the Provincial Motel because he had to meet someone. DeCarvelho made the trip and waited for Ray, who took about ten minutes and then returned to the car satisfied that his meeting had gone well. However, when DeCarvelho was interviewed in 1968 by the FBI, only three weeks after the assassination, he told no such story. He said then he had only met Ray when he and Stein were leaving New Orleans, and did not speak to him. Moreover, his story was at variance with the descriptions supplied by both Stein and Ray, and it made no sense for Ray not to use his own car if he had such a rendezvous, rather than create a witness to a clandestine meeting. The Select Committee concluded that DeCarvelho’s information about Ray was “unreliable.”
* Stein, Ray’s travel mate, was coincidentally a close friend of Garrison’s, and both belonged to and played chess at the New Orleans chess club. When Stein was arrested in 1962 on a vice charge, Garrison commented, “He is a good boy but keeps bad company.” Garrison eventually dismissed the charge (MURKIN 2635–2673, section 27, p. 83).
† Charles Stein surprised the Select Committee in one of his interviews with its investigators when he announced that Ray had mentioned the name Raoul on their drive to New Orleans. If true, it would be the only independent, contemporaneous corroboration that Raoul existed. However, when asked by the FBI in February 1969 if Ray had ever mentioned Raoul, Stein said he had never heard the name. Finally, when placed under oath by the committee, Stein backed off his new story. “I don’t know,” he said when asked if Ray mentioned Raoul. Moreover, Stein was working with some people on a film about the King assassination at the time of his changed testimony, and the film was offered to the committee for a substantial amount of money. The Select Committee concluded that Stein’s change of testimony about Raoul was prompted “not by a specific factual occurrence, but rather by the passing chance of financial gain.”
* John later told a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he and James were “both strong supporters of George C. Wallace,” and that when John visited James at Jeff City in 1967, “maybe we talked about him a little.”
