by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Café Helios shines as a cozy, bright waterfront establishment, with polished tables, immaculate coffee dispensers and microbrew on tap. Just a few steps from where the first Europeans settled on our island and not a bad spot to watch the tankers float by or chat with owner Jim Aravantinos about how his family bought the place in 1984 and transformed it from a leather shop. It’s not a bad place to be. Strange that such a pleasant place could be at the heart of conjecture over the American government’s secret murderous ways.

In the still of the night, devils whisper and conspiracy theorists have long howled about the mysterious encounter that’s said to have taken place there 251/2 years ago.

Back in July 1967, Montreal’s Old Port was abuzz with foghorns and busy with ships and sailors who’d come ashore and stroll Common Street (as de la Commune was known to many). Many would head into the Helios, then known as the Neptune Tavern, a woody, rough-hewn bar full of dodgy characters. Elbows were planted on Formica tables. Lamps were attached to the ships’ wheels hanging from the ceiling. Hardened waiters would yank levers to fill pitchers of beer that would sell for 50 cents.

While the rest of the city was celebrating Expo ’67, a small-time hood named James Earl Ray, on the lam from a Missouri jail, wandered around the port, desperately seeking allies to help him get a Canadian passport. When Ray ran out of cash he beat and robbed a pimp and invested part of the loot on new threads. The gussied-up Ray managed to seduce a visitor from Ottawa, but his attempts to get her to help him get a passport sputtered.

One afternoon, the loser fugitive walked into the Neptune and thus began a spiral of events that would eventually launch Senate Committee hearings, countless documentaries, books and dark speculation. That day Ray met Raoul, who was 5’8”, 140 pounds, in his mid 30s, and had “slightly wavy red hair,” as Ray would later write. The mysterious Raoul was—many believe—the key agent of one or more of the highest-level political assassinations in American history.

About a half-dozen more times that summer, Ray came from his home at the Har-K apartments on Notre Dame E. to the Neptune to hook up with Raoul. Ray ran small smuggling deals for Raoul in return for the promise of a Canadian passport.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot outside a Memphis parking lot. Two months later, Ray was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London. Ray confessed but later blamed the whole thing on Raoul, a story he stuck to until his death in prison in 1998.

In recent years, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s son Dexter and Ray’s former lawyer, a New York attorney named William Pepper, both spoke endlessly about Raoul. So did many others, including a woman named Brenda Grabow, who said that her acquaintance Dago was also Raoul, and that he’d confessed to both the killings of John F. Kennedy and King.

Many believe that Ray simply invented Raoul, as his descriptions varied considerably. But the less skeptical have, over the years, identified 25 individuals as Raoul. None of them panned out, but the quest continues for the human Holy Grail of smoking gun conspiracy evidence. Indeed such a grand enterprise needs no further justification. It might be rather intriguing if an aging Raoul would come forth to explain the assassinations that he set up at the beer-drenched dive on our waterfront.

Few have speculated why Raoul would have come here to recruit his dupe for the political assassination and fewer still have imagined that Raoul might still be here. The manhunt for this mastermind seems never to have touched these parts. Maybe Raoul, at this very moment, has his feet up in the best room at the Ritz, strolling out occasionally to Holt’s or Ogilvy’s, planning his next big political plot. Or not. Either way, keep your eyes peeled. :

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