Category Archives: migration

by | 10 June 2026 · 12:38 am

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

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Filed under Bulgaria, education, labor, language, migration, Moldova, Romania, Russia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 8 June 2026 · 8:58 am

Our Quick Visit to Moldova

The Far Outliers have just returned from a short visit to Moldova, flying from Warsaw to Chișinău for Poland’s Corpus Christi school holidays. We had multiple reasons for the visit.

We had earlier considered doing another year abroad under the English Language Fellow program after our year in Poland. In fact, we had originally hoped to go to Romania, but there were no current openings. Moldova has an opening for next year, but my scary health problems during our deep winter in Poland made me fear I might not make it through a Moldovan winter, despite my advantage of arriving in Moldova still fairly fluent in Romanian. Public signage all over Chișinău was indeed almost fully in Romanian (not in Moldovan Cyrillic or Russian), and I enjoyed being able to converse much more readily in Romanian than I have been able to in Polish. (My ability to navigate written Polish is far ahead of my conversational ability.)

Our other reason for visiting Moldova was to make a pilgrimage to the village where Ms. Outlier’s Bessarabian German grandfather was born, and from which his family emigrated via Odessa to Canada and the Dakotas in the 1890s. Their rural village was named Neudorf, like dozens of German villages around the world. (There is a Neudorf village in Saskatchewan, and a poorly documented Neudorf cemetery in Eureka, South Dakota, originally settled by Germans from Russia). All the remaining Germans were expelled from Bessarabia in the 1940s, and Neudorf was renamed Carmanova (in Russian, Карманово).

Carmanova now lies in Transnistria, so near to the Ukrainian border that T-Mobile sent us “Welcome to Ukraine!” text messages when our phones came within range of their Ukraine cell towers. To get us there (and back), Moldova Tours was able to arrange for a private driver fluent in Russian, Romanian, and English, who had prior experience driving groups into the Transnistrian capital, Tiraspol, on their Soviet-era culture tours. But he had never been to very rural Carmanova and was curious about it. We ended up getting turned back twice at Russian Army checkpoints that could not handle international passports, and we had to wait in a long, slow line at the Grigoriopol checkpoint that could process our passports. They gave us a temporary insert but did not stamp our passports.

The rolling green hills of the Transnistrian countryside are quite lovely in June, with vast acres of foot-high sunflower sprouts. Several forks in the road had signposts directing us to the German settlements, and the road into the village featured a roughly made tall welcome sign with the year 1809 (when Neudorf was founded), its name in Cyrillic, Нойдорф, the year 1944, and its new name Карманово (from Карман ‘pocket’?). There was also a rock monument in the village inscribed to mark the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1809.

The village itself was very small and quiet. We were given a tour of the House of Culture by its cordial manager. It contained a curtained stage and auditorium, a disco hall, a barre-lined ballet studio, and several rooms for workshops of various kinds. We also visited the cemetery for Soviet soldiers who died there, billboards with the names and faces of local citizens who died between 1941 and 1945. We saw no sign of a former church. The little country store where we bought a bottle of Ukrainian water took only Transnistrian rubles, so our driver/translator handled the payment.

I’ve added a Moldova album to my Flickr site, Joel Abroad.

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Filed under family, Germany, language, migration, Moldova, Romania, Russia, U.S., Ukraine

by | 3 June 2026 · 3:16 am

Student Evaluation Day in Moldova

From Lenin’s Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 53-54:

Lyudmila Petrovna asked if I could say a few words.

I’d prepared a stern lecture about the importance of homework and intellectual discipline. Pupils shouldn’t cheat. I wanted to explain why students needed books every day and couldn’t share pencils while taking notes. And though I didn’t wish to lecture anyone on proper parenting skills, I thought I might touch on the need to curb the smoking, drinking, and sexual assault in the school zone.

But I abandoned this prepared lecture. I feared anything negative I shared would lead to beatings.

So instead, using my best Russian, I painted a less dire picture. “Moldova is different than America,” I began. “My pupils are struggling, but that is to be expected. I don’t teach like a Russian. I expect different things and it will take the pupils time to understand these things. They play with each other too much, true, but they understand me more each day and I think soon they will speak English.”

All the faces in the audience smiled at me and I felt pleased with myself. The parents would be patient with their young learners. They would communicate that students should be patient with me, do everything I say, and stop sexually assaulting their classmates. I honestly thought we’d all come to this amicable conclusion.

Lyudmila Petrovna looked at the floor while she considered what to say next. On several occasions she’d rescued me when my classes got out of control. Her room was just down the hall and when she heard more than five kids screaming at once she’d rush into the room and threaten to kill anyone who didn’t shut up and respect me. The little ones feared her. And now she wanted the little ones to fear their parents.

“Any behavior problems?” asked Lyudmila Petrovna.

“Oh, certainly,” I said.

“We demand names!” shouted the parents in unison. And when I failed to list the offenders they shouted family names for me to inform on.

“Crimiac? Does he listen?”

“Osipov? Did he start that fire?”

I placed my palms in the air. I surrendered.

“Okay,” shouted Lyudmila Petrovna. “One at a time.”

We spent the next ten minutes going down the class roster. I named names. Little Sasha didn’t do his homework. Maxim didn’t stay in his seat. Anya habitually cheated. And so on.

The parents promised immediate improvement. I feared for these children.

But I no longer feared repercussions from their parents. These weren’t parents. As Lyudmila Petrovna called on each raised hand, she introduced the woman and her role in the student’s life. Before me were a handful of grandmothers, aunts, distant cousins, neighbors—but few actual parents. Things became clearer for me: many of those who acted up in my class had parents elsewhere in the world, working jobs in Russia or still farther away. Grandmothers looked after grandchildren. Neighbors stepped in. Older siblings took larger roles. I had assumed Andrei was sitting in the audience with his mother, but in fact he was there to represent his younger brother, Maxim. When their mother next called home he would give his report of little Maxim’s poor behavior and she would scold him over the phone from Italy.

Everyone thanked me before I left. One of the grand-mothers asked when I would marry. Seeing this as an opening for questions, others shouted out the suspicions they wished confirmed. How much could I be making per month in America? How well did I speak German? What type of spying had I accomplished in the past? Was the Peace Corps a consequence associated with the American penal system, and if so what had I done?

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Filed under education, family, language, migration, Moldova, Russia, U.S.

by | 28 May 2026 · 12:42 am

Entering the Lena River Delta, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 316-318:

THE LENA RIVER originates nearly three thousand miles to the south of the Arctic Ocean, in a mountain range near Lake Baikal in the deep interior of Russia, not far from the border with Mongolia. As the river flows through the forested solitudes of Yakutia, it picks up tributary after tributary—the Kirenga, the Vitim, the Olekma, the Aldan, the Vilyui. The Lena is the world’s eleventh-longest river, draining the world’s ninth-largest watershed, a boggy, mosquitoey swath of tundra and taiga that measures more than 960,000 square miles. The amount of sediment carried by the Lena is extraordinary—and the river’s enormous power discharges a plume of silt and debris more than fifty miles out into the Arctic Ocean.

The Lena, like only a few of the world’s largest river systems, flows northward, toward a mostly frozen sea. In the fall, it begins to freeze first at its mouth, not at its source, which means that it develops a natural barrier against the force of its own massive current. As winter approaches in the Arctic, the river continues to flow with unchecked power, until it meets the ever-thickening plug of ice at its lower reaches.

The water’s only response is to spread out, frantically seeking other paths to the sea. In other words, the ice distorts and magnifies the tendency all rivers have of fanning out at their mouths. The pressures that build behind the Lena’s ice dam become so tremendous that the river splays over more than eleven thousand square miles. This riot of swollen currents creates one of the largest and most complicated deltas in the world.

From the air, the Lena delta looks rather like the cross section of an enormous tumor that bulges far out into the Laptev Sea from the Siberian mainland. Inside this protruding mass, 125 miles in width, is a confusing mesh of branched streams twisting and threading across sandy flats pocked by thousands of ponds and lakes and oxbow swamps. The delta has more than fifteen hundred islands—though that number changes all the time. The river, as it pushes through this morass of alluvium, divides into seven main branches, which, in turn, subdivide into scores and scores of lesser ones, an array of channels that redirect themselves from season to season as they course like capillaries toward the Arctic Ocean. The river’s assiduous probing continues until early winter, when the weather finally turns so cold that this titanic natural plumbing project backs up entirely—freezing solid all three thousand miles upstream, creating a superhighway of ice.

A report that would come out in 1882 would note, “No chart had been laid down of this desolate region, and indeed it would seem impossible to make any which would not be falsified by the changes which every fresh season brought.” Petermann’s map was the only one that had been published with any level of detail, but it was largely hypothetical and riddled with major errors. His map showed eight mouths to the delta, when in fact there were more than two hundred—and the few place-names, landmarks, and villages specified on his map were either grossly misplaced or didn’t exist at all.

This was the utterly bewildering landscape that De Long and his men approached on the afternoon of September 16, 1881. They were three miles out from the delta, yet they were already stuck, grounded on the river’s massive deposits of silt.

When De Long stood up to assess the problem, only one solution came to mind. He had everyone crawl out of the boat to lighten her load, so that she would ride a few inches higher in the water. The men, wading in the riffling currents, gathered around the cutter and began to guide her, sometimes shove her, toward land. Only Snoozer [the last dog] and a few disabled men remained in the boat.

Through the clear, shallow water, the wading men could see that the congealed beds of silt on which they oozed along had been brushed into ornate patterns by the play of the currents. Small fish darted this way and that. The water varied between one and a half and four feet in depth but generally became shallower the closer they drew toward land. The mud sucked at their boots, sometimes pulling them clear off their feet. In frustration, some of the men hurled their mukluks into the cutter and waded barefoot.

Often the boat ran aground, forcing the crew to heel her over and angle the bow toward a more promising channel. It was backbreaking labor, made more unpleasant by the cold of the river, which soon turned their feet and legs numb. While most of the men grunted and strained around the gunwales of the boat, others waded ahead, wielding oars to smash the young ice and scouting the best path toward land.

Throughout the day, they made only halting progress, advancing perhaps a mile. They could move only when the tide was in—at low tide the boat sat stuck in the slough. By late afternoon, said Nindemann, “everyone was pretty well played out.” They crawled back into the boat with Snoozer and shared a drab dinner of beef tongue. Afterward, Ambler asked everyone to take off their boots so he could examine their feet. What the doctor saw greatly alarmed him. A day of wading in the frigid water had come at a tremendous cost. The men’s feet were badly swollen and had developed a sickening bluish pallor. Ambler feared that frostbite was rampant among the crew. Boyd, Erichsen, Collins, Ah Sam, and Captain De Long were in the worst shape, but everyone’s extremities had suffered.

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by | 27 May 2026 · 2:34 am

Trekking Over Arctic Ice, 1881

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 245-247:

In high spirits, De Long and his men began their long march across the frozen ocean, inching toward the familiar world, or at least a place where other human beings might conceivably be found. Stretched out for miles across the ice, they resembled, said Melville, a straggle of “vagabond insects.” It was numbing, staggering work, and yet they were strangely happy—happy to be free of the confines of the ship, relieved to be moving again, eager to accept the bonds of their common struggle. They aimed for the middle of Russia and the Siberian Arctic coast, but in their minds they were heading home, to wives and mothers and girlfriends, to plump chickens and fresh garden vegetables, to soft beds and warm fires, to gossip and invention, and if not to glory, exactly, then to the cheers of an appreciative homeland.

De Long and Dunbar, equipped with field glasses and pocket prismatic compasses, clambered ahead of everyone else in the foggy distances to mark the way with black flags stuck in the ice. They called their path a “road,” but the route they staked was little more than a suggestion of lesser treachery, a devious course across ever-shifting mazes of fissures, hummocks, pressure ridges, and pools of shimmering meltwater. Which is to say, the captain and his ice pilot—whose earlier problem with snow blindness had cleared up—were merely going on their best hunches.

Keep to the road! they cried. Stay on the road! The men could only laugh at the absurdity of the word. As Danenhower put it, there was only “knee-deep snow” and “lumps of ice that would have taken a whole corps of engineers to level.” Yet they trudged on, sunburned and chapped-lipped, dressed in sour-smelling pelts, wearing slitted ice goggles, singing galley songs as they slogged over the impossible expanses of crust and rubble and sludge.

The June sun, whenever it burned through the fog, had a strange quality of penetrating intensity, as though it were training X-rays on the snow. The light revealed a dirty ice pack at times strewn with signs of life—crab claws, bear scat, mussel shells, bleached bones, goose quills, plant seeds, driftwood, ocean sponges. The gyre of the ocean and the churn of the ice had mixed everything up, old and new, animal and vegetable, into a kind of Arctic gumbo.

Dr. Ambler cared for the sick; Alexey and Aneguin tended to the dogs. But the others spent their days as draft animals, straining against their hemp ropes and canvas harnesses. They pulled more than eight tons of provisions and gear, on improvised sleds whose crosspieces had been fashioned from whiskey barrel staves and whose heavy oak runners were shod with smooth whalebone. In addition to the three battered boats, they hauled, among other things, medicine chests, ammunition, stew pots, cooking stoves, tent poles, oars, rifles, ship logs and diaries, canvas for sails, scientific instruments, the wooden dinghy, and two hundred gallons of stove alcohol.

As for food, they had inventoried, at the outset, 3,960 pounds of pemmican, 1,500 pounds of hardtack, thirty-two pounds of beef tongue, 150 pounds of Liebig’s beef extract, twelve and a half pounds of pigs’ feet, and substantial quantities of veal, ham, whiskey, brandy, chocolate, and tobacco. Every pound, every ounce, had been carefully weighed at the start, then just as carefully apportioned to the different sleds and crews so that everyone, aside from the sick, would pull an equal amount of weight.

There was far too much to haul in one trip, so they had to double back—and sometimes triple back—to bring up everything from the rear. This meant that for many of the haulers, each mile of forward progress actually represented a distance of five miles traversed. A full day of this Sisyphean business could mean twenty-five miles or more of ceaseless struggle. It would have constituted slave labor even on hard, dry ground, but this slob ice, with all its gaping holes and intervening sea-lanes, was the most trying terrain imaginable—as a landscape, said De Long, it was “terribly confused.”

The men often had to launch the boats, cross a narrow lead of water, and then hop right back out again to re-stow the boats on the sleds. Other times, they would use a large cake of floating ice as a ferry, employing grappling hooks and networks of ropes to tow it, and all their belongings, across the water to the icy shore beyond. The “road-building crew” would wield pickaxes to clear a smooth groove through encrusted ice, shave off the top of a high hummock, or fashion what De Long called a “causeway” or a “flying bridge” across emerald pools of meltwater.

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by | 13 May 2026 · 8:07 am

Arctic Rivalry in the 1800s

From In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

To be sure, nationalism also drove the obsession. Americans, slowly emerging from the devastation of the Civil War, yearned to prove themselves on the international stage. Polar exploration, some suggested, could help unify the divided country—it was an endeavor that everyone, North and South, could agree on. An ambitious expedition of discovery provided a way for the still-mending republic to flex her power in a quasi-military, but ultimately peaceful, way.

It was a British naval officer, William [Edward] Parry, who in 1827 led what is widely regarded as the first serious expedition specifically aiming to reach the North Pole. Ever since then, the British Admiralty had led most of the cutting-edge polar explorations. This was largely due to the nearly evangelical zeal of Second Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow for all things Arctic, and to the fact that after the defeat of Napoleon, the Royal Navy had had few major wars to fight throughout much of the 1800s. The great ships of the world’s mightiest navy were rotting away largely unused, and many officers had been relegated to half wages with little to do, yet with ambitions still burning in their breasts. The British primarily focused their efforts on finding a navigable sea route across the top of Canada—and on searching for previous English expeditions that had disappeared while looking for this elusive Northwest Passage.

But now, in the 1870s, attention was shifting away from finding the Northwest Passage and more toward the goal of reaching the North Pole itself, as an object of pure, abstract exploration. Not only England but France, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had mounted, or were now proposing, expeditions to reach the pole first. The United States considered herself a viable contender in this grand chase, and many Americans fervently wished to see the Stars and Stripes planted at the top of the world.

America’s desire to push north could be considered, in some ways, an extension of Manifest Destiny, the country’s pioneering surge toward the west. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the western frontier was closing—or at least its conquest was reaching a different phase, one that consisted less of adventurous exploration and more of the messy backfill work of occupation and settlement. But in 1867, the United States had purchased Alaska from the czar for the paltry sum of $7.2 million, and this enormous new frontier lay untapped and largely unknown. Thus the national movement west, having reached California, had taken a right turn and become a movement north.

In 1873, the country was still digesting this acquisition, was still trying to learn about the immensity of what America owned in her Far North and why she owned it. The money spent on Russian America remained controversial—Alaska was still widely referred to as “Seward’s Icebox” and “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Polar Bear Garden,” in derision of former secretary of state William Seward, who had championed and then negotiated the purchase. Yet the American people also wanted to know what might lie beyond the country’s new northern borders—and they were hungry for a hero to personify the country’s northern tilt.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, migration, military, nationalism, U.S.

by | 9 May 2026 · 12:10 am

Nabbed at Heathrow, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 365-366:

“Passport please,” a young immigration officer named Kenneth Human said when Sneyd approached the window.

Sneyd fished his wallet out of a coat pocket. From an inside fold, he retrieved a dark blue Canadian passport, which the officer opened and studied. Officer Human glanced at Sneyd, and then back at the passport photo. Nothing seemed untoward: the same man, the same glasses, everything matched.

Then Human saw another passport, peeking from Sneyd’s billfold. “May I see that other one?” he asked.

Sneyd handed the officer the second passport, which was clearly stamped “Canceled.”

“Why are the names different?” Human asked, noting that one said “Sneyd” and the other said “Sneya.”

Sneyd explained that his original passport, issued in Ottawa, had contained the misspelling—simply a clerical error—but that he’d had it corrected as soon as possible while in Portugal.

Officer Human appeared to be buying Sneyd’s explanation. But at this point, a Scotland Yard detective materialized—a slender, fastidious man with blue eyes and a trim mustache named Philip Birch. While Sneyd and the customs officer continued talking about the passport, Birch studied the Canadian’s face and movements. He had an “absent-minded professorial air” about him, Birch thought, but something about the traveler looked familiar. He seemed to recall seeing the man’s photograph in the pages of the Police Gazette.

Birch ran his finger down a list of names typed on an official Scotland Yard document that was labeled “Watch For and Detain.” Under the heading “All Ports Warning,” the Canadian’s name jumped off the page: Ramon George Sneyd.

Detective Birch tapped Sneyd on the shoulder. “I say, old fellow,” he later recalled telling the subject. “Would you mind stepping over here for a moment? I’d like to have a word with you.”

Seemingly more annoyed than alarmed, Sneyd glanced at his watch. “But my plane’s leaving soon.”

“Oh, this will only take a moment,” Birch assured him in a chipper tone. “May I see those passports, please?”

Two policemen joined Birch, and the three men escorted Sneyd across the busy terminal toward a police administrative office. Sneyd believed this was all just a routine passport mix-up, and so he remained grudgingly cooperative. Should things turn dicey, there was always the loaded revolver in his pocket. As far as he could see, this friendly trio of officers did not carry weapons.

When they arrived at the office, Birch turned and faced Sneyd. “Would you mind if I searched you?” he asked. Sneyd raised his arms and offered no protest.

Carefully patting him down, Birch quickly discovered the revolver: a Japanese-made .38-caliber Liberty Chief—its checkered walnut stock wrapped with black electrical tape. Birch spun the revolver and found five rounds of ammunition.

“Why are you carrying this gun?” Birch asked in an even tone.

“Well,” Sneyd replied. “I’m going to Africa. I thought I might need it. You know how things are there.” For the first time, a note of alarm had edged into his voice.

Birch handed the revolver to one of the other policemen and continued frisking the suspect. In Sneyd’s pockets, Birch found a little booklet on rifle silencers and a blank key, of the sort that a locksmith might carry. Sneyd had a small amount of money—less than sixty pounds—on his person.

“I have reason to believe you have committed an arrestable offense,” Birch said, and told Sneyd he was being detained. Now he would be missing his flight. Sneyd slumped in his chair.

The officer got on the phone and tried to have Sneyd’s bag pulled from the plane—but it was too late, the jet was already easing back from the gate. Then Birch called Scotland Yard headquarters and informed his superiors that just two days after being placed on the “All Ports Warning,” Ramon George Sneyd was now in police custody.

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by | 8 May 2026 · 7:33 am

Robbing a Bank in London, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 356-357:

SNEYD HAD MOVED from the Heathfield House to the New Earls Court Hotel only a few days before. Though the little hotel was just around the corner, on Penywern Road, the weekly rent was cheaper and the accommodations a little nicer. Besides, Sneyd thought it prudent not to linger too long in any one place—especially after his aborted jewelry store stickup in Paddington.

The hotel was a four-story walk-up, with Doric columns and a blue awning covering a cramped vestibule; it was near the Earls Court tube stop and Earls Court Stadium, where Billy Graham had recently conducted a series of wildly successful crusades. For another week, Sneyd remained faithful to his usual nocturnal schedule, keeping to his brown-wallpapered room all day, receiving no calls, and taking no visitors. “He was nervous, pathetically shy, and unsure of himself,” the young hotel receptionist, Janet Nassau, later said. Feeling sorry for him, Nassau tried to make conversation and help him out with a few currency questions. “But he was so incoherent,” she said, “that nobody seemed able to help him. I thought he was a bit thick. I tried to talk to him, but then I stopped myself, I was afraid he might think I was too forward—trying to chat him up.”

For Sneyd, a far bigger worry than the peculiarities of British money was the fact that he scarcely had any money at all; his funds had dwindled to about ten pounds. But on June 4, the same day he called the Daily Telegraph journalist Ian Colvin, Sneyd worked up his courage and resolved to finally dig himself out of his financial straits.

That afternoon he put on a blue suit and pair of sunglasses. Then, at 2:13 p.m., he walked into the Trustee Savings Bank in Fulham and stood in the queue until, a few minutes later, he approached the till of a clerk named Edward Viney. Through the slot, Sneyd slid a paper bag toward the teller. At first, Viney didn’t know what to do with the rumpled pink bag. Then, on closer inspection, he saw writing scrawled across it.

“Put all £5 notes in this bag,” the message demanded. Viney caught a faint glimpse of the man’s eyes through his shades and realized he was serious. Glancing down, he saw the glinting nose of a revolver, pointed at him.

Viney quickly emptied his till of all small denominations—in total, only ninety-five pounds. Sneyd was displeased with his slim pickings, and he leaned over the counter and craned his neck toward the adjacent till. “Give me all your small notes!” he yelled, shoving his pistol toward the teller, Llewellyn Heath. In panic, Heath backpedaled and kicked a large tin box, which produced a concussive sound similar to a gunshot. The noise startled everyone, including Sneyd, who leaped away from the counter and sprinted down the street. Two tellers took off after him, but he lost them, ducking into a tailor’s shop, where for five minutes he feigned interest in buying a pair of slacks.

At Trustee Savings Bank, Edward Viney surveyed the premises and realized that the robber had left his note behind, scrawled on the pink paper bag. When the bobbies arrived, Viney handed them the bag—upon which, it was soon discovered in the crime lab of New Scotland Yard, the robber had left a high-quality latent thumbprint.

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Filed under biography, Britain, economics, migration, science, U.S.

by | 5 May 2026 · 1:11 am

Finding Eric Galt’s Real Name

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 319-323:

THE FBI REMAINED confident that the warrant they’d issued the previous day was correct, that Eric S. Galt was indeed their man. What they weren’t sure about was whether Eric Galt was really Eric Galt. The suspect clearly had a penchant for using multiple aliases, and Galt could very well be just another one. As Cartha DeLoach well knew, isolating a suspect was one thing; positively identifying him was something else again.

To that end, the fingerprint expert George Bonebrake and his men at the crime lab had been methodically poring over the fingerprints found on various objects in the bundle, in the Mustang, and in the Atlanta rooming house and comparing them with select batches of prints on file at FBI headquarters. Bonebrake had considerably narrowed the search by concentrating on men under fifty and over twenty-one, but that still left some three million sets of prints to examine—an aneurysm-inducing chore that could take many months and still turn up nothing.

Hoover and DeLoach realized they had to figure out some other way to narrow the search. DeLoach hunkered down with other high-ranking officials and sifted through all the evidence gathered thus far. As they did, a clear pattern began to emerge: Galt, even before the assassination, seemed to be acting like a man on the run. “All the signs were there,” DeLoach said. “The aliases, the movement from one place to another, the reluctance to make friends, the caution, the restraint. Galt was behaving like an escaped convict trying to avoid detection.”

Thus an idea was born. DeLoach picked up the phone and called Bonebrake’s boss, Les Trotter, director of the FBI’s Identification Division for fingerprints. DeLoach later recalled the conversation in his memoirs. “Les, we have pretty good evidence that Galt is an escapee,” DeLoach said. “How many ‘Wanted’ notices do we currently have in our files?”

“About 53,000,” Trotter said.

DeLoach grimaced. “Well,” he said, “at least that’s better than three million.”

The task before them was clear: DeLoach wanted Bonebrake’s men to compare the “Galt” prints with the prints of all fifty-three thousand wanted fugitives. “You’ve got to put all your people on this,” DeLoach said.

“When do you want us to begin?” Trotter asked.

“How about today?”

The examiners began working in the late afternoon of April 18, exactly two weeks after the assassination. Additional experts from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Richmond hastened to Washington to assist in the round-the-clock effort. DeLoach said he didn’t need to remind them that “we’re under tremendous pressure, and that our cities are powder kegs.”

Bonebrake zeroed in on Galt’s left thumbprint found on both the rifle and the binoculars. It was their highest-quality print, the one that manifested a clear loop pattern with twelve ridge counts. To his pleasant surprise, Bonebrake learned that the FBI files of known fugitives held only nineteen hundred thumbprints with loops of between ten and fourteen ridge counts. This was encouraging: suddenly the monumentality of Bonebrake’s project had shrunk by several orders of magnitude. The teams of experts ranged around a table, facing a blowup poster of Galt’s thumbprint. They got out their magnifying glasses and went to work.

At 9:15 the next morning, April 19, Les Trotter called DeLoach. “We’re getting there,” Trotter said, noting that Bonebrake and his team hadn’t slept a wink and that they’d already plowed through more than five hundred sets of cards. “Give us just a little more time.”

“OK,” DeLoach said, and then ducked into a weekly meeting of FBI muckety-mucks led by Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man. DeLoach was reluctant to tell Tolson the truth—that although countless specialists were hard at work and making progress, the investigation seemed to be momentarily stymied.

Several hours later, as the meeting was adjourning and DeLoach was gathering up his papers, the phone rang. It was Les Trotter on the line. “Deke,” he said, and already DeLoach thought he could detect a “note of triumph” in Trotter’s voice. There was a long pause, and then Trotter gloatingly said: “Tell the Director. We’ve got your man!”

“Are you sure?”

“No doubt about it. Bonebrake’s experts found an exact match just a few minutes ago, on the 702nd card.”

“I take it he’s not really Eric Galt. Or Lowmeyer. Or Willard.”

“Nope,” Trotter said. “His card number is 405,942G. The guy’s a habitual offender. Escaped last year from the state pen at Jeff City, Missouri. His name is James Earl Ray.”

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by | 4 May 2026 · 4:38 am

Getting a Canadian Passport, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 281-282, 293-294, 308-309:

Then Galt did something truly brazen, something that illustrated the extent of his desperation: he called Bridgman and Sneyd on the telephone, probably from the same phone booth Mrs. Szpakowski saw him talking on. One night, Paul Bridgman, who worked as the director of the Toronto Board of Education’s Language Study Centre, picked up his home telephone, shortly after finishing his supper.

“Yes, hello,” Bridgman later recalled hearing the caller say. “I’m a registrar with the Passport Office in Ottawa. We’re checking on some irregularities in our files here and we need to know if you’ve recently applied for a passport.”

Bridgman was naturally a little suspicious. He didn’t understand why some bureaucrat in Ottawa would call on official business during the evening. “Are you sure you have the right person?”

“Bridgman,” Galt assured him, spelling out the surname. “Paul Edward Bridgman. Born 10 November, 1932. Mother’s maiden name—Evelyn Godden.”

“Well yes, that’s correct,” Bridgman replied, deciding the caller must be on the level after all. Soon Bridgman freely told Galt the information he needed to know: Yes, he once had a passport, about ten years ago, but it had expired, and he had not bothered renewing it. “Thank you very much,” Galt said, and hung up.

Galt was concerned that Bridgman might pose a problem—his old passport might still be on file in Ottawa and might set off alarm bells if Galt applied for a new one. So he got back on the phone and reached Ramon Sneyd. Going through the same routine, Galt was relieved to learn from Sneyd that the man had never applied for a passport in his life.

That settled it in Galt’s mind: while he might develop the Bridgman alias for sideline purposes, he would become Ramon George Sneyd.

…

IN TORONTO THAT same morning, Eric Galt was walking down Yonge Street, intent on an errand of disguise. He turned in to Brown’s Theatrical Supply Company and bought a makeup kit. Playing with the cosmetics later that day, he applied a little foundation and powder and eyebrow liner. He parted his hair in a different way and was a bit more conservative with his hair cream. Then he donned a dark suit, a narrow tie with a discreet waffle weave, and his best white dress shirt. As a final touch, he put on a recently purchased pair of dark horn-rimmed glasses, which, sitting on his surgery-sharpened nose, gave him a vaguely professorial cast.

Looking in a mirror, Galt was happy with the transformation: Ramon Sneyd was now ready for his close-up.

Sometime in the afternoon of April 11, he walked into the Arcade Photo Studio, also on Yonge Street, and met the manager, Mrs. Mabel Agnew. He told her he needed some passport photos.

Mrs. Agnew was happy to oblige. She led him to the rear of the studio, which was decorated with a vanity mirror and travel poster of Holland, and sat him on a revolving piano stool before a gray-white screen. Galt doubtless hated the whole ritual, as always, but this time he peered just off camera and kept his eyes wide open, throwing everything he had into playacting his new role. Mrs. Agnew couldn’t get her subject to smile, but she finally managed to snap off a decent shot. He left while the pictures developed and returned a few hours later. For two dollars, he retrieved three passport-sized prints.

The image turned out well. His countenance bore a discerning quality, a certain cosmopolitan panache. He could pass for a lawyer, or an engineer, or an international businessman. He almost looked handsome.

…

Sneyd first inquired about tickets to Johannesburg, South Africa, but recoiled at the price—$820 Canadian round-trip. Instead, he asked Spencer to look into the cheapest available fares to London. She soon found a flight on British Overseas Airways that departed Toronto on May 6. It was a twenty-one-day economy excursion, the cheapest flight available, and came with a fare of only $345 Canadian. Sneyd liked the sound of it and asked her to go ahead and make a reservation.

Do you have your passport with you? she asked.

He didn’t have one yet, he said, but he was working on it. Here Spencer must have sensed his hesitation, his awkward uncertainty over how to proceed. Sneyd was under the mistaken impression that to secure a passport, he would have to provide a “guarantor”—a Canadian citizen in good standing who could vouchsafe that he’d known the applicant for more than two years. Meeting this requirement was the main reason he’d been developing two identities and two addresses; according to his rather convoluted and risky plan, the bespectacled Sneyd would be the traveler, and Bridgman (wearing an altogether different getup and possibly a toupee) would be the guarantor.

Sneyd wasn’t going to explain any of this to her, of course, but Spencer graciously intervened before he had to conjure up a story. “I can get you a passport,” she said. “Do you have a birth certificate?”

“Well, no,” he said. She told him that was okay, he didn’t need a birth certificate.

What about the guarantor? he asked. “I don’t know anyone who could serve as my guarantor.”

“Not necessary, either,” Spencer replied. There was a loophole in the passport rules, she said. From her files, she fished out a government form called “Statutory Declaration in Lieu of Guarantor.” Sneyd was simply required to sign the form in the presence of a notary. “As it happens,” she said sunnily, “we have a notary right here in the office.”

Sneyd couldn’t believe his good fortune. He’d had no idea how easy it was in wholesome, trusting Canada to acquire travel papers and inhabit another person’s identity: no birth certificate required, no proof of residence, no character witnesses. He’d wasted his time fabricating a web of interlocking aliases, disguises, and residences, when all he had to do was swear before a notary that he was who he said he was. Welcome to Canada, the expression went, we believe you.

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