Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
ass out of Memphis." 238
    King was sunk in profound doubt about his role and his identity. On the phone, he told one adviser that people would now declare that "'Martin Luther King is dead. 239 He's finished. His nonviolence is nothing, no one is listening to it.' Let's face it, we do have a great public relations setback where my image and my leadership are concerned."
    Ralph Abernathy tried to lift King's spirits but failed. They went out on the balcony and looked over the Mississippi River. Abernathy had never seen his friend this dejected before. "I couldn't get him to sleep that night," Abernathy recalled. "He was worried, worried. Deeply disturbed. He didn't know what to do, and he didn't know what the press was going to say."
    The more Abernathy tried to console him, the deeper King descended into his funk. "Ralph," he said, "we live in a sick nation. 240 Maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course. Maybe people will listen to the voice of violence. They certainly won't listen to us."

16 THE GAMEMASTER
    THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Friday, March 29, Eric Galt walked into the Long-Lewis hardware store in Bessemer, Alabama, a blue-collar suburb of Birmingham, about 160 miles west of Atlanta. He made his way over to a salesman 241 named Mike Kopp, who stood beneath an enormous moose head mounted on the wall--a trophy that advertised the hardware store's sideline business in big-game hunting equipment.
    Galt inquired about the store's selection of high-powered rifles.
    "We've got a few 30.30s," Kopp said.
    Galt cut him off. "I need something more powerful than that," he said.
    He then peppered Kopp with questions about various kinds of ammunition. How many inches would a certain kind of bullet drop in fifty yards? Or one hundred yards? What was the knockdown power? What about the recoil?
    The questions were too detailed for Kopp to answer with authority. Galt started to leave, but then eyed the large bearded ungulate scowling from the wall and mused, "I once tried to bring down a moose, but I missed."
    Kopp studied the pale, fidgety man and concluded to his own satisfaction that Galt had never hunted moose--or any species of big game.

    J. EDGAR HOOVER had been monitoring the events in Memphis, and that morning, March 29, he came to work with a feeling of vindication. To him, the mayhem on Beale Street was a fulfillment of all his earlier warnings: King might talk nonviolence, but it was an act. The Memphis debacle only foreshadowed what would happen if King was allowed to march on Washington. Hoover's ties to the Memphis authorities were unusually close--fire and police director Frank Holloman had been an FBI agent earlier in his career, and had even served as Hoover's "office manager" in Washington. Hoover made sure his COINTELPRO agents were on the case, working with the Memphis police to gather all the information necessary to heap maximum blame on King--and make every accusation stick.
    Early on the morning of March 29, the FBI field office in Memphis was in high dudgeon. The assistant director William Sullivan called from Washington and spoke with the second-in-command in the Memphis office, Special Agent C. O. Halter. Sullivan wanted Halter's men to find out if King had been sleeping around, drinking too much, or engaging in any other "improper conduct" or "activities both official and personal" while in Memphis. "Mr. Sullivan requested 242 that we get everything possible on King and that we stay on him until he leaves," Halter later recalled. Among other things, agents tried to learn the identity of the woman whose Pontiac Lee and Abernathy had flagged down the previous day--presumably on the suspicion that she and King might have had a tryst.
    Sullivan wanted the Memphis agents to prove that King was personally responsible for much of the Beale Street fracas. Agents were instructed to answer such questions as: "Did Martin Luther King do anything 243 to trigger the violence? Did he make any statements
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