The Savage City (33 page)

BOSS was able to place six different undercover agents in the New York Panthers, as well as dozens more paid informants through what they called the Ghetto Informant Program. Among the policemen posing as Panthers were:

 

Carlos Ashwood:
Born in Panama, a former member of the U.S. Air Force, Ashwood was recruited by the NYPD for the express purpose of penetrating the Black Panther Party. He joined the police department in early 1968 and became a Black Panther a short time later.

 

Ralph White:
After joining the NYPD in early 1968, White was recruited by BOSS. He became a Panther in June after first infiltrating an activist organization in the Bronx known as the Elsmere Tenants Association. White drank and smoked pot with the Panthers, slept with many Panther sisters, and became known as someone who liked to “talk big” by advocating the bombings of public facilities and assassination of police officers.

 

Eugene Richards:
Although he would eventually go down in history as one of the most notorious undercover agents BOSS ever produced, few people—including other cops and district attorneys—knew that Richards was a member of the NYPD. He had joined the force in 1964 and quickly penetrated three different black organizations, including that of Malcolm X. In fact, Richards was Malcolm's bodyguard on the night he was murdered; he had tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Malcolm as he lay dying on the floor of the Audubon Ballroom. After the assassination, Richards maintained his cover; his presence at Malcolm's side on that fateful evening made him something of a legend in black activist circles. He joined the Black Panther Party in the summer of 1968.

 

BOSS's efforts to gather intelligence on the Panthers were ongoing in the summer and early fall of 1968. Few inside or outside the NYPD knew the details. The goal of the operation was not just to monitor but ultimately to bring about the demise of the black liberation movement.

These efforts were given a huge boost on September 8, when FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared, in a front-page article in the
New York Times,
that the Black Panther Party was “the greatest [single] threat to the internal security of the country.” Hoover was finally confirming in public what had been a priority of the bureau's COINTELPRO program for years. A few weeks later, the chief of the COINTELPRO program circulated a confidential memo to local FBI offices urging that the counterintelligence program against the Panthers be accelerated:

DHORUBA KNEW THAT
the community was riddled with snitches. As he said years later, “If you accept the definition of a Negro as someone who has acquiesced and accepted the power of the status quo and was therefore a potential informant and collaborator with the status quo, then the majority of the population were Negroes.” Surrounded by Negroes, the Panthers formed a security section, of which Dhoruba would become a key player. The security section was designed to insulate the leadership from the community organizations, which were vulnerable to penetration by informants. It was the job of the security section to stockpile weapons, to carry out “self-defense operations” against the police, and act as security at rallies and when members of the national leadership came into town. With his gang and prison background, Dhoruba was a natural to take charge of the security section. His official title was field secretary.

In September 1968, he and Iris moved to Harlem. It was a manifestation of his journey back to his roots, back to Africa, in the sense that Harlem was a symbol of Africa in America. Dhoruba and Iris took an apartment on West 137th Street, across from Harlem Hospital. Dhoruba gave up his weed-peddling party life among the hippies in the East Village to become, as he saw it, a warrior in the fight for liberation and justice.

The fall of '68 was full of promise but also dread. Barry McGuire's “Eve of Destruction,” released in 1966, was still riding the charts almost two years later; with its vision of coming apocalypse, it was a song that spoke across racial lines. The diverse strains of dissent at play in the country were beginning to cohere.

And that fall Eldridge Cleaver finally made his New York City debut, after which the Black Panther Party in New York would never be quite the same.

After the shoot-out in Oakland the previous May, Cleaver had been incarcerated for a month and then paroled, pending criminal charges. In the meantime, he announced that he was a candidate for president of the United States on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Having the Black Panther Party's minister of information running for president was a stimulating national sideshow, especially among the country's burgeoning radical left. In New York State, Cleaver's age—thirty-three, two years shy of the age of eligibility—got him banned from the ballot. It didn't matter. As Cleaver said, he didn't “dream at night about living in the White House.” He was running not to win, but to use the national platform his candidacy provided.

In New York, Dhoruba Bin Wahad was put in charge of Cleaver's security detail. He was finally coming face-to-face with the man whose writings in
Ramparts
had attracted him to the Black Panther Party in the first place. “Certain people,” remembered Dhoruba, “had an aura about them. Eldridge was like that.
Soul on Ice
was on the best-seller list. His reputation was large, and he carried himself like a star. He was probably the most potent recruiting tool the party had at the time; he had credibility with the lumpen and the ex-cons, and he was attractive to white radicals, the New Left—even the media thought Eldridge was cool.”

In an October 11 press conference at the Algonquin Hotel in midtown Manhattan to kick off a four-day speaking tour, Cleaver announced that “the purpose of my campaign is to organize people, to break some ground for a revolutionary movement, to lay the base for a revolutionary movement that will unite black radicals and white radicals.” Dressed in the unofficial Panther uniform of black leather jacket and blue turtleneck sweater, he parried with the New York press like a skilled middle-weight contender. When asked if his New York–based running mate, Judith Mage, had received funds from a city antipoverty program, he said, “I hope she can take all of it, take every penny she can get not only
from the poverty program, but I wish that we could rip off Fort Knox. And all these hocus-pocus questions about where our money comes from—I hope that Mao Tse-tung sends me a boxcar full of money today 'cause I need it. Ho Chi Minh, send me some money. Fidel Castro, send me some money. Your momma, tell your momma send me some money 'cause we need it.” He added that if Mage was getting antipoverty funds she “would be functioning in the spirit of Robin Hood.”

With Dhoruba and his four-man security crew at his side, Cleaver also spoke at New York University's Washington Square campus before an audience of two thousand students. He spoke to a smaller group of Panther cadre at the auditorium of P.S. 201, many of whom were electrified. “He was spitting fire,” said one Panther. His speeches were profane, sometimes angry, and often witty; people came away feeling they had witnessed an authentic cultural phenomenon.

Eldridge Cleaver giving speeches was one thing, but the Panthers were also a reality that played out in the streets on a daily basis. Both the New York police and members of the party used the word
war
to describe what was happening. As with most wars, it would sweep up many bystanders—people who weren't necessarily combatants but who were close enough to the action to become casualties.

One of these was Joseph “Jazz” Hayden. Born and raised in Harlem, Hayden became entangled in the era of the Panthers, though he was not a member of the Black Panther Party. He was known to the police as a local criminal—and he was a black male, which itself made him a suspicious character in the eyes of the law.

The incident that proved his undoing occurred in late September. Earlier that month, in California, Huey P. Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of the Oakland police officer the previous year. The conviction sent shock waves through the national Panther network. On September 27, Defense Minister Newton was sentenced to a term of two to fifteen years in prison. In New York, some among the armed wing of the Panthers felt it was necessary to retaliate by seeking payback against the system. It was part of a new strategy among some of the more militant element of the party—though never officially sanctioned by its hierarchy—to strike back after perceived acts of injustice on the part of “the power structure.” In this case, the decision was made to respond to the sentencing of Newton in California by shooting some “pigs” in Harlem.

On the night of September 28, two uniformed police officers were sitting in a squad car at a taxi stand at 114th Street and Lenox Avenue. A black male wearing what was later described as an orange-lined black cape approached with a .30-caliber rifle and opened fire from fifteen feet away. Both officers were hit; one of them was able to return fire, emptying his revolver at the rifleman and a getaway driver. The attackers sped away in a black Cadillac. The cops believed they might have hit the fleeing gunman. The assailants were described by a police spokesperson as Negroes with mustaches, both of them tall and thin, with the driver dressed in “African garb.”

The officers were wounded but in fair condition. A citywide alarm went out for the assailants. According to police, it was the fourth such attack on officers in the previous two months.

Jazz Hayden had nothing to do with the shooting. In fact, he had deliberately steered clear of the Panthers. He was a small-time hustler looking to score off the underground economy—the numbers racket, marijuana trade, dice, craps, and card games. He admired what the Panthers were doing, but it wasn't for him. “For one thing,” he recalled years later, “what the Panthers was doing wasn't gonna help me pay no bills.”

Hayden had been working the streets in Harlem since childhood. His father was a merchant marine who separated from his mother, leaving Jazz to fend for himself. As a kid, he'd collected pennies by selling peanuts and scrounging for empty bottles outside the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played ball. He ran errands for a local barbershop, dusted off coats, and shined shoes for loose change.

By the time he was a teenager, he was a different kind of hustler. Hayden described a typical day:

The corner crap game was the lifeblood of Harlem's underground economy:

Jazz advanced thanks in part to his uncle, who was an established numbers man.

In the late 1950s, Hayden got busted with eleven bags of heroin in his pocket. The bags sold for two dollars each. He was both a seller and a part-time user, but this was his first offense. There was no such thing as narcotics rehab back then; he was sentenced to Comstock prison for three years. He was sixteen years old. “The first night they locked me in
a cell, I was rehabilitated. I'd never been away from home, never been in this kind of situation, this cement and steel. I cried.”