Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (16 page)

The best review of Elaine's book and the best epitaph for her party are provided ironically by Elaine herself. In the wake of the brutal and senseless whipping of Bobby Seale by a leader insane with drugs and political adulation, and a coterie too drugged with power themselves to resist, she reflects: "Faith was all there was. If I did not believe in the ultimate rightness of our goals and our party, then what we did, what Huey was doing, what he was, what I was, was horrible."

*In a lengthy investigative article for the
New Yorker
, which appeared in 1970, Edward Jay Epstein systematically punctured this myth and provided evidence for all to see that it was a hoax. But nobody paid any attention.

I
FIRST HEARD THE NAME GERONIMO PRATT in the early 1970s, I during a late night conversation with Huey Newton, the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, now deceased. Pratt was the leader of the Los Angeles branch of the party and had been recently convicted of a robbery-murder in Santa Monica. The victim was a young elementary school teacher named Caroline Olsen, who was accosted with her husband by two gunmen on a Santa Monica tennis court on December 18, 1968. Caroline and Kenneth Olsen were ordered to lie down and give up their cash and jewelry, which they did. As the two predators left the scene, however, one of the gunmen emptied his .45-caliber weapon into their prone bodies, wounding Kenneth and killing his wife. Nearly two years later, Geronimo Pratt was charged with the murder and eventually convicted, despite the efforts of Johnnie Cochran, then a young, unknown attorney on the make, to present him as the victim of a police conspiracy.

It was not just the murder conviction that made Pratt a figure of interest to me at the time. Other Panthers had had run-ins with the law. But Pratt was a special case because Newton and the party, and their followers in the New Left, had hung him out to dry. Even though Pratt was a Deputy Minister of Defense and ran the Los Angeles party, there were no "Free Geronimo" rallies organized in his behalf, as there had been for Newton himself. Even more damningly, Newton and the other Panther leaders — Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, and Elaine Brown — flatly denied the alibi with which Pratt sought to save himself. He had claimed he was at a Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of the murder. The refusal of those who attended the meeting to confirm this story, as much as any other fact, sealed Pratt's fate.

There were "political" factors behind this decision to abandon Pratt to his legal fate. He had, in fact, been expelled from the Black Panther Party shortly after the murder of Caroline Olsen for his support of an anti-Newton Black Panther faction led by Eldridge Cleaver, the more violent wing of the party that had accused Newton of "selling out" the "armed struggle." To show their authenticity, Cleaver's followers had formed a Black Liberation Army, which had already launched a guerilla war in earnest in America's cities. Pratt was the party's "military expert" and had fortified the party's headquarters for a shoot-out with police, deploying machine guns and other automatic weapons in a firefight in which three officers and three Panther soldiers were wounded. At the beginning of August 1970, when Pratt was kicked out of the party, another member of the violent "Cleaver" faction, Jonathan Jackson, marched into a Marin County Courthouse with loaded shotguns to take hostages in an episode that cost the lives of a federal judge, Jackson himself, and two of his cohorts. Pratt had supported Jackson and his plan to use the hostages to liberate his brother George from San Quentin, where he was awaiting trial for murder.

The evening Huey and I talked about Geronimo, he explained to me that Pratt, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was psychotic, a "crazy man" who had not only committed the Santa Monica murder, but actually enjoyed violence for its own sake. Huey attributed Pratt's aberrant behavior to his war experience, although in fact he had not met Pratt prior to his military discharge.

And that was the way it remained for me for twenty-five years, during which time I discovered that Newton himself was a coldblooded killer and the Panthers a political gang that had committed many robberies, arsons, and murders. By the time Johnnie Cochran brought the case of Geronimo Pratt before a national public, I was almost ready myself to give Newton's enemy the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps some other Panther had killed Caroline Olsen and used Pratt's car in committing the crime, as his supporters maintained. Perhaps the murder weapon, a distinctive .45 caliber model used in the military and identified by several witnesses as belonging to Pratt had actually belonged to someone else, as he claimed.

But there was a detail from that conversation with Newton that I could never forget and yet never quite believe either. Pratt was so crazy, Newton told me, that "he couldn't get an erection unless he was holding a knife in his hand." This detail would come up again in the aftermath of Pratt's release in the late spring of 1997, when an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Everett Dickey, agreed with Cochran, who was still on the case, that the prosecution had wrongfully concealed from the original jury the information that their key witness, a former Panther named Julius Butler, was a police and FBI "informant. It was Butler who had identified the .45 as Pratt's weapon and-even more damning — claimed that Pratt boasted to him that he had killed Caroline Olsen. It was Butler — and the adroit use Cochran made of him — that led to Pratt's being granted a new trial. Johnnie Cochran and a compliant press named him a "hero" and "victim of injustice."

In the tapestry of Johnnie Cochran's political career, the case of Geronimo Pratt has been a central thread. A young Johnnie Cochran, just setting out on his career in the law, was Pratt's counsel in the original trial. By his own account, it was the Pratt case that "radicalized" him, persuading him that America's criminal justice system was unfair to black men. It showed him, too, that his failure to play the "race card" had led to the conviction of his client. He resolved never to make this mistake again. When Cochran later took on the legal battle that made him famous, he told his client, O. J. Simpson, under indictment for the brutal murder of his wife and an innocent bystander, 'I'm not going to let happen to you what happened to Geronimo Pratt." After getting Simpson acquitted, Cochran visited the imprisoned Pratt and reiterated the promise he had made that he would never rest "until you are free."

Johnnie Cochran's defense strategy made the two cases into the legal equivalent of Siamese twins. Cochran had rescued Simpson from almost certain conviction by focusing on officer Mark Fuhrman and alleging a racist police conspiracy to plant evidence that would frame a popular black hero. In the Pratt case, Cochran focused on chief prosecution witness Julius Butler and alleged an FBI-sponsored "Cointelpro" conspiracy to frame a political hero who was black. As in the Simpson case, Cochran's indictment of the law as conspiratorial and racist was the heart of the appeal that freed Pratt. Indeed, the Simpson case was itself a factor in the Pratt appeal. The climate of public opinion had been so turned against law enforcement by Cochran and other racial demagogues that all the defense had to show was that Julius Butler, the prosecution's chief witness, had had contacts with the law prior to the trial (but well after the murder). That proved sufficient to taint the verdict. In playing the race card for Simpson, Cochran also put it on the table for Geronimo Pratt.

It was this use of the race card, along with that odd comment Huey had made to me over twenty years earlier, that led me to inquire into the decision to give Geronimo Pratt a "new trial" and inevitably-since the only eyewitness to the murder, Kenneth Olsen, was also now dead-to free him.

To understand the flimsy construction of the argument that prompted this decision and eventually freed Pratt, one has to look at the court's original rejection of an almost identical appeal Pratt made in 1980 which reviewed in detail every significant point of the case. At that time, Pratt was supported in his petition by a blue ribbon list including Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congressman Pete McCloskey, current San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, the ACLU, the president of the California Democratic Council, and the chair of the Coalition to Free Geronimo Pratt. The central claim made by Pratt's defenders then has not changed in nearly twenty years: "A totally innocent man has languished in [prison] since mid-1972. . . . He was sent there as the result of a case which was deliberately contrived by agents of our state and federal governments. . . . [His] conviction was the result of a joint effort by state and federal governments to neutralize and discredit him because of his membership in the militant Black Panther Party."

This time the nation's press bought the argument whole. But the facts, summarized in the earlier opinion from the court record, reveal the argument to be a political fiction. Though the information that follows was easily available to reporters, none of it made its way into the reams of newsprint that described and celebrated Pratt's release.

This time, in the appellate judge's opinion and in the reportage that followed, Julius Butler was defamed as a "police informer." But, as the 1980 appellate review of the trial shows, it was not until August 10, 1969, about seven months and three weeks
after
the murder of Caroline Olsen, and more than a month after Butler had been kicked out of the Black Panther Party, that Butler made his first voluntary contact with any law enforcement official. The law enforcement official he met with was a black LAPD officer, Sergeant Duwayne Rice, whom Butler had met when the Black Panther Party made him its official "liason" with the police department. Butler gave Rice a sealed envelope. The envelope was addressed to Rice and had the words "Only to be opened in the event of my death" printed on the outside. Butler did not reveal the contents of the envelope to Rice, who placed it in a locked safe.

As it happened, Butler was observed by FBI agents giving the envelope to Rice. Three days later, on August 13, the FBI approached Butler and questioned him for the first time. He refused to answer their questions about what was in the envelope and told them nothing about its incriminating contents.

The FBI then went to Rice and attempted to get him to give up the envelope that Butler had entrusted to him. But Rice also refused. Shortly afterwards, the FBI threatened him with prosecution for obstruction of justice and withholding evidence. But even in the face of these threats, Rice held firm. He would neither open the envelope nor turn it over to the agents. It took the FBI another fourteen months, until October 20, 1970, under circumstances which I will turn to in a moment, to get police to give up the letter so that they could open it themselves and read Butler's testimony that Geronimo Pratt had killed Caroline Olsen.

When Butler's envelope was finally opened, now twenty-two months after the murder, the letter inside was for the first time read by police. It described a factional struggle in the Black Panther Party and said that the writer was fearful because of threats on his life made by Geronimo Pratt and other Panther leaders, including Roger Lewis, whose nickname was "Blue." The letter offered "the following Reason I feel the Death threat may be carried out," namely that Geronimo and the other Panthers "were Responsible for Acts of murder they carelessly Bragged about": "No. 1: Geronimo for the Killing of a White School Teacher and the wounding of Her Husband on a Tennis Court in the City of Santa Monica some time during the year of 1968.

"No. 2: Geronimo and Blue being Responsible for the Killing of Capt. Franco [a Panther leader] in January 1969 and constantly stating as a threat to me that I was just like Franco and gave them No Alternative but to 'Wash me Away.'"

This was and remains the most irrefutable incriminating evidence linking Geronimo Pratt to the tennis court murder. Yet, it is not even addressed, as an issue, in Judge Dickey's decision to accept Johnnie Cochran's newest appeal. (Nor has Cochran raised it as an issue himself.) Roger "Blue" Lewis, in a recorded prison interview with attorneys for the state, has also testified that Geronimo Pratt killed Caroline Olsen and that the murder weapon was his. Eyewitnesses placed Pratt at the murder scene and at an attempted robbery committed moments before. Neither Pratt nor his attorneys have denied that the car driven by the murderer belonged to Pratt. Notwithstanding all these material facts, no other piece of evidence is as incontrovertible and unimpeachable as the letter from Julius Butler contained in the sealed envelope.

Although Butler was accused by Cochran of being a police and FBI informant, working with law enforcement to frame Pratt, Butler did not give this envelope to the FBI or the police. He had never had a single contact with the FBI up to this point in time. Nor did he give the envelope to the Los Angeles Police Department, "racist" or otherwise. He gave it to a friend, who was a policeman, whom he trusted, and who was black.

In addition to their accusations that Butler was an informer, the defenders of Geronimo Pratt speculate that the prosecution of Pratt was the result of a "Cointelpro" conspiracy by the FBI to 'neutralize" leaders of the Black Panther Party. Their references, typically vague, are meant to insinuate incriminating possibilities without having to specify concrete evidence. But they are in fact irrelevant. By the time of Pratt's trial for the murder of Caroline Olsen, the FBI's famous "Cointelpro" program had been terminated by J. Edgar Hoover. Moreover, Pratt was no longer a Panther. Three months earlier, in August 1970, he had been expelled from the party by Newton. The official "declaration" of his expulsion, complete with the charge that he had threatened to assassinate Newton, was not made public by the Panthers until Pratt's arrest.

On December 4, 1970, two months after the letter was opened, Pratt was indicted by a grand jury on one count of murder, one count of assault to commit murder, and two counts of robbery. He was arraigned in April 1971 and was convicted a year later on July 28, 1972. Throughout the trial, Pratt maintained that he was in Oakland at the time of the murder attending a meeting of Panther leaders. For nearly twenty years thereafter, the surviving Panther leaders — Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, and Elaine Brown-denied Pratt's story, and left him to his fate. It was their decision to change their stories that led to the new and successful appeal of which Elaine Brown was one of the organizers. The judge's decision was based on new evidence, obtained by Cochran, that Butler had talked to law enforcement before the trial, but well after the murder. As we have seen, this evidence is irrelevant, since Butler's original accusation that Pratt was guilty of murder had been sealed in an envelope and withheld both from the FBI and the police.