Blood Brothers (44 page)

That morning, Talmadge X and the brothers from New Jersey left Paterson in a blue Cadillac. Driving across the George Washington Bridge, they reviewed their assignments. After parking a few blocks away from the Audubon, the men scouted the building's perimeter. They confidently strode past Malcolm's security, concealing their weapons under long overcoats. They knew that no one would frisk them since Malcolm had called off body searches at previous meetings. What they could not have known was that Malcolm had also directed his security to arrive unarmed, though at least one man disobeyed him: his bodyguard, Reuben Francis.
⁴⁰

The New Jersey group drifted into the second-floor ballroom unmolested. Arriving earlier than most guests, the five men made sure that they found seats near the stage. With a .45 tucked into his pants, Talmadge sat in the front row next to Leon, who carried a Luger beneath his coat. Behind them sat William, hiding a shotgun, and Ben,
the Newark secretary. Wilbur, the getaway driver, sat somewhere in the middle of the hall's four hundred folding chairs.
⁴¹

At one o'clock, around the same time the armed men headed for the Audubon, Malcolm drove his blue Oldsmobile uptown to Harlem, parking it at the southeast corner of Broadway and West 146th Street, twenty blocks away from the ballroom. He walked alone for a few blocks, perhaps, an aide suggested later, so that if his assassins tried to kill him no one else would be harmed. Standing at a corner near a movie theater, he waited for a bus when a white Cadillac with New Jersey plates slowly pulled up beside him. Malcolm did not recognize the driver waving at him. Cautiously, he peered into the backseat and noticed one of his security guards, Charles X. Grinning with relief, Malcolm entered the backseat next to Charles, who then introduced him to his friends sitting up front.
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Around two o'clock, Malcolm arrived at the Audubon. As he approached the entrance, he passed a single police officer, patrolman Thomas Hoy. Typically, four or five officers guarded the entrance, but someone from Malcolm's camp, supposedly acting on the minister's authority, asked the duty officer to reduce the police presence. Two uniformed officers took positions inside the Rose Ballroom, adjacent to the main hall. Curiously, the police had discreetly assigned another twenty officers across the street at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. When Malcolm's aide, Charles Kenyatta, arrived at the Audubon, he could not understand why people were not being searched. Reuben Francis insisted that he was just following Malcolm's orders. “That's bullshit!” Charles exclaimed. “You know he don't know what he sayin' or doin'. Y'all know better.”
⁴³

Malcolm slowly climbed the stairs up to the main ballroom, taking long, heavy steps. By the time he reached the second floor, he looked exhausted, “harried,” an OAAU member recalled, “not fearful . . . but just [like] somebody who had a lot on their mind.” Backstage, Malcolm sank into a metal folding chair and rested his elbow on a counter in front of an old vanity mirror. From the anteroom, he could hear the noisy crowd filling the ballroom. When he learned that the guest speakers had not arrived and that no one had printed his official program, he snapped at his assistants, “Get out! Everybody! Get out!”
⁴⁴

Restless, he bounded from the chair and began pacing, occasionally peeking out at the audience. “He was more tense than I'd ever seen him,” Benjamin 2X remembered. Without an official platform or a guest speaker, he sent Benjamin to give the introduction. “Make it plain,” Malcolm instructed. A few moments later, he apologized to the aides who had returned to the green room. Anxious, he admitted, “I don't feel right about this meeting. I feel that I should not be here. Something is wrong, brothers.”
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After improvising for more than twenty minutes, around three o'clock, Benjamin brought Malcolm on stage. Wearing a dark brown suit and a solemn expression, Malcolm stood behind the plywood lectern, a few feet away from an old white grand piano, a drum set, and a row of folding chairs. For more than a minute the audience gave him a standing ovation. Right before he began, Gene Roberts retreated from his position near the stage and headed toward the back of the ballroom, leaving only two bodyguards standing in front of the rostrum. As the crowd continued clapping, Malcolm cracked a crooked smile. When the audience quieted down, he greeted them. “
As-Salaam-Alaikum
,” he announced. “
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam
,” the crowd rejoined.
⁴⁶

Taking a long deep breath, like a boxer moving out of his corner before the first round, Malcolm began, “Brothers and sisters . . .” Then it happened.

A man in a black overcoat jumped from his seat, tossed a homemade smoke bomb, and shouted, “Get your hand out of my pocket!” Suddenly, two men in the middle of the audience were on their feet, entangled in a shoving match. Startled and confused, the spectators began yelling. Immediately, the two rostrum guards dashed toward the commotion, leaving Malcolm unprotected. Gene Roberts and several other security guards standing in the rear left their posts too.
⁴⁷

“Now, now, brothers,” Malcolm urged, “break it up. Be cool, be calm.”

At that moment a large black man stepped into the aisle and raised a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. “Hold it!” Malcolm pleaded, extending his arm in the air. “Hold it!”

Boom!
The gunman pulled the trigger, blasting shotgun pellets through the plywood lectern, cutting a crater of holes in the center of Malcolm's chest.

Malcolm staggered, rocking back on his heels. His body swayed backward, crashing into two empty chairs. His head slammed onto the hardwood, making a loud thud.

The gunman fired again into his jerking body. Two more shooters, Talmadge and Leon, streaked toward the stage and sprayed him with bullets.
⁴⁸

Within seconds, it was over. Fleeing, the man with the shotgun fired above the crowd. “Get out of the goddamn way!” one of them yelled. Screaming and cursing, people ran for the exits, colliding into each other. Others helplessly dove onto the floor, tossing chairs aside. Covering her girls, Betty tried to shield them from the horror. “They're killing my husband!” she cried.
⁴⁹

Hurdling chairs, Talmadge ran right at Gene Roberts, firing a shot at the undercover agent, grazing his coat. Roberts flung a chair at his legs, knocking Talmadge down. Rising from the floor, he sprinted toward the exit. Just as he reached the top of the stairwell, Reuben Francis fired three shots, clipping him in the left thigh. “Oh!” Talmadge screamed. Writhing in pain, he tumbled down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, a mob seized him. “Kill him! Kill him!” the horde shouted.

Rushing toward the crowd, patrolman Hoy grabbed on to the suspect's arm, yanking it “like the rope in tug-o'-war.” “They were trying to pull him apart the way you pull a drumstick off a turkey,” one witness recalled.
⁵⁰

Moments later, two more patrolmen emerged from a squad car. When one of the officers realized that the crowd was winning the tug-of-war, he fired his revolver into the air, ordering them to disperse. Quickly, the patrolmen shoved Talmadge into the back of the cruiser. The suspect, identified in the press as “Thomas Hagan,” was the only assassin caught at the scene.
⁵¹

Inside the ballroom, Malcolm lay on the stage, his heartbeat still pulsing. The screaming had subsided, but people were still crying and moaning. “The whole room was a wailing woman,” one writer recalled. A half dozen people bent over him while Malcolm's men paced furiously, regretting that they had not done enough to protect their brother. One fumed, “There ain't no goddam hope for our people in this lousy country. You got to fight them lousy whites and fight the stupid niggahs too. There ain't no goddam hope!”
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Frantic, Betty kneeled beside her husband, his white shirt ripped open and soaked with blood. Gene Roberts had tried to revive him, but by then it was too late. Betty attempted to resuscitate him too, frantically pumping his chest. Suddenly, she began digging through his pockets, searching for a paper that included the names of five men Malcolm believed would be responsible for his murder, a list that Betty never revealed. Clinging to the bloodstained paper, friends pulled her away while a stretcher rolled into the dance hall. “Oh, Muriel,” she sobbed to a friend, “he's gone! And I'm
pregnant
!”
⁵³

Police investigators knew very little except that Malcolm was dead and that a wounded suspect was already being interrogated. Beyond those facts, they had more questions than answers. Why hadn't Malcolm's guards been armed? Why weren't the spectators searched? Why wasn't there tighter security near the stage? Was this an inside job? “He was definitely set up for it,” an investigator later told
Newsweek
writer Peter Goldman. “To us, it was all so—
perfect
. Nobody would have walked in there to shoot him unless you know nobody has a gun and unless you know you've got one key man in your pocket.”

Malcolm's men had questions of their own. The police knew that his life was in danger, and yet on the day of the murder, they deployed only two officers inside the Audubon and one outside the entrance. Why did the police hide twenty officers inside the hospital across the street? Did the police look the other way? Was the FBI involved? Malcolm had told his most trusted assistants that the FBI had agents working inside the Nation—agents who deliberately exacerbated the feud between him and Elijah, knowing that it would lead to a bloody war. Malcolm's men did not doubt that Talmadge X and his accomplices belonged to the Nation of Islam. The real question, the one that has lingered for decades, was much simpler: who sent them?

M
ALCOLM
'
S MURDER ENRAGED
his followers, setting in motion a vendetta against Elijah Muhammad and the Nation's most prominent members. After the FBI warned the Chicago police that Malcolm's avengers were headed to their city, the department placed heavy details at bus stations, train stations, and airports. Police cruisers and unmarked cars parked outside Muhammad's mansion, Mosque No. 2, and the offices of
Muhammad Speaks
. Under police protection, Elijah seemed safe, but around ten p.m., a call went out over police scanners: a fire had broken out at a South Side apartment on Cregier Avenue. While the fire burned for more than an hour, the police interviewed a resident who lived on the second floor. At first they suspected arson because Muhammad Ali had an apartment on the third floor. Perhaps, the police surmised, Malcolm's men had planned to immolate the boxer while he slept. But after interviewing Ali's drunk neighbor, the man admitted that he had started the fire when he fell asleep on a sofa with a cigarette in his hand.
⁵⁴

There was little hope that Malcolm would survive the massive gunshot wounds that ripped open his chest. Emergency room doctors tried to revive him at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, but it was too late. Shortly before three thirty p.m., a surgeon delivered the tragic news to the fallen minister's friends and loved ones: “The gentleman you knew as Malcolm X is dead.”
Associated Press

Fortunately for Ali, when the fire occurred, he and Sonji were out dining after attending religious services. Earlier that evening at the mosque, one of the ministers announced that Malcolm had been murdered. Immediately, Sonji feared that her husband might be next. No one knew that they were eating dinner at the Arabian Sands Motel, but somehow John Ali, who had already returned from New York, called
to tell the champ that his apartment had caught fire. Arriving at his apartment with the national secretary, the boxer told writers that he was “shocked and surprised” that someone had killed Malcolm. The Nation, he insisted, had nothing to do with the murder. It was just a coincidence that the fire occurred on the same day that Malcolm was killed, he said. Privately, though, Ali told Sonji that “somebody started it on purpose.”
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