some business in Mexico City and apparently did well financially." Garrison reported that Greene's son, Lorenzo Thomas Greene, said his father also told him of the encounter; the older man always hoped Gaines would return. But because of his experience with the FBI while active in the civil-rights movement during those years, Greene did not report his telephone contact with Gaines. "There wasn't a lot of trust there," said the son. "Even if my father went to them with that information, I really don't think they would have cared." Some of Gaines's relatives were willing to accept that he lived out his life in Mexico, as opposed to the alternative scenarios. "It's better than being buried in a basement somewhere—Jimmy Hoffa style," said Paulette Mosby-Smith, one of Gaines's great-nieces. Others believe that would have been against his nature. "It's hard for me to believe that he went to Mexico and accepted a big payoff," George Gaines told Garrison. "That's not the same man who presented himself during the trial. I don't believe he would compromise his integrity like that." Another great-niece, Tracy Berry, who graduated from law school and became a federal prosecutor, agrees: She has since told The New York Times that she believes her great-uncle was murdered. Legacy and honors Although the family never had Lloyd Gaines declared legally dead, they erected a monument to him in 1999 in a Missouri cemetery. "His legacy didn't so much make me want to go to law school," says Tracy Berry. "But I think he did instill the legacy of education in our family. It's expected that you go to college. He started the fight that made it all possible." In a December 1939 editorial, the Louisville Defender, that city's African-American newspaper, wrote: "[W]hether Gaines has been bribed, intimidated or worse, should certainly have little permanent effect on the struggle for equal rights and social justice in connection with Negro education in the South ... [where] Negroes are already hammering upon the doors of graduate schools hitherto closed to them, with increasing persistence." Thurgood Marshall later said, "I remember the Gaines case as one of our greatest legal victories." He had argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and was later that body's first African-American justice. He went on, "But I have never lost the pain of having so many people spend so much time and money on