The Savage City (40 page)

Black Panthers eliminating other Black Panthers—that was the unspoken goal of COINTELPRO. And by late 1970, the program had begun to bear fruit. In the California desert, Fred Bennett, a Panther known to be sympathetic to the Cleaver faction, was tortured, doused with gasoline, set on fire, and shot to death. His body was then cut up and buried in the desert. It was believed that the murder had been ordered by Newton. In a confidential Airtel memo, Hoover could hardly contain his glee:

Like many prominent New York Panthers, Dhoruba was in the thick of the FBI's disinformation campaign. He was identified in COINTELPRO files as a “field secretary” and also “street leader” of the Panthers. According to one confidential memo “Diruba [
sic
] is angry over leadership decisions” made by party headquarters, and, according to a confidential informant, “has plans to take over the entire New York chapter.”

Dhoruba's dissatisfaction was no secret. At a party central staff meeting held at a community center on Northern Boulevard in Corona, Queens, Dhoruba spoke up on behalf of the Panther Twenty-one. All the party's national leaders were in attendance—Newton, Hilliard, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Bobby Rush from Chicago, and seventeen others. At the meeting, Dhoruba complained that “there has not been proper accounting of funds raised by the Defense Committee.”

Dhoruba was raising a touchy subject. In recent months, COINTELPRO agents had begun leaking information to reporters that Huey Newton was living a lavish lifestyle high in a penthouse apartment in Oakland. The accusations happened to be true: funds raised by the Committee to Defend the Panther Twenty-one in New York were being diverted to the Central Committee, and Newton was using some of the funds to finance his burgeoning cocaine habit.

At the staff meeting in Queens, Newton rose to defend himself.
Instead of addressing the issue directly, he rambled for nearly two hours, talking mostly about political developments in China and Cuba, the need for oppressed people to unite in the struggle against imperialism, the need for greater sales of the party newspaper—everything
except
the Panther Twenty-one case. Clearly, Newton, Hilliard, and others from party headquarters in Oakland would not hesitate to use funds from the Panther Twenty-one Defense Committee to suit their needs, but they weren't interested in discussing a strategy to support the defendants.

Dhoruba was caught in between. Monday through Friday, he arrived in the courtroom in lower Manhattan, often exhausted from traveling on weekends, giving speeches, and organizing activities on behalf of his fellow defendants. Still, some of those who were still in jail resented the fact that Dhoruba was free. As the primary liaison between the defendants and the Panther hierarchy, he received the brunt of their complaints about the party leadership. They also had major philosophical problems with what they saw as Newton's efforts to lead the party away from its militant agenda toward the less radical realm of social and political reform.

Locked away in prison, with no end in sight to their legal travails, the frustrations of the Panther Twenty-one and their defenders had been building for months. In early January 1971, it exploded when eleven of the defendants decided to publish an open letter that criticized the leadership of Huey P. Newton and demanded the expulsion of David Hilliard as chief of staff.

The letter, published in the underground weekly the
East Village Other,
was presented as an open letter to the Weather Underground, a radical organization that had begun a bombing campaign against “symbols of U.S. oppression.” Among other bombings, the Underground had set off an incendiary device in front of Judge Murtagh's home in upper Manhattan, garnering some press coverage but creating no injuries and little property damage.

In their open letter to the mostly white radical group, the Panther Twenty-one stated that as far as they were concerned the Weather Underground—not the Black Panther Party—was now the preeminent revolutionary vanguard organization in the United States.

Dhoruba consulted with the Panther Twenty-one about the letter.

As Dhoruba had predicted, Huey Newton saw the letter as a threat to his leadership. In an interview on a national radio program, Newton referred to the Panther Twenty-one as “traitors and jackanapes.” All eleven Panthers who had signed the letter were immediately expunged from the party by Newton, and it was declared that the party would no longer support the Panther Twenty-one. Dhoruba had not signed the letter, but he was guilty by association: though he was not purged, he was immediately suspended by executive order, along with Cetewayo, Joan Bird, and Afeni Shakur.

Relations with the Central Committee were at an all-time low and getting worse by the day. Later that month, it was announced that Newton and his entourage would be traveling east to speak at a large Panther rally in New Haven, Connecticut, in support of party chairman Bobby Seale, who was about to go on trial for his alleged involvement in the murder of Panther Alex Rackley.

Even before Newton arrived on the East Coast, rumors were swirling. Dhoruba and his people had a well-placed spy in the Newton camp: Cetewayo's wife, Connie Matthews, was Newton's secretary. Newton himself had instructed Cetewayo to marry Connie Matthews, who was a Jamaican national in danger of being deported. But Newton was also sleeping with Matthews, who was elegant and attractive. He hadn't anticipated that Connie would eventually fall in love with her own husband.

Matthews was becoming increasingly concerned about Huey's erratic behavior. He had begun to refer to himself as supreme commander and was having delusions of grandeur. High on cocaine much of the time, Huey walked around in his office and apartment brandishing a gun, and he railed frequently against the New York Panthers, especially Dhoruba, whom he referred to as “a murder mouth.” Connie Matthews wanted out, but she was being held captive by Newton, who rarely let her out of his sight and had her followed by fellow Panthers when he did.

A few days before Newton arrived in New York, Connie managed to get a message out to Cetewayo, who immediately met with Dhoruba.

“You know,” Cetewayo told Dhoruba, “Huey and his crew are coming out here to whack our ass. He believes that the Twenty-one, when he comes out here to show his support for Chairman Bobby, we wanna take him out, that he's being threatened, that his leadership is being threatened, and that you are behind all this.”

“How you know this shit?” asked Dhoruba.

“Connie. That's why he's not letting Connie out of his sight. And he won't let me near her no more.”

What Cetewayo and Dhoruba didn't know was that, at the same time, COINTELPRO agents had sent a fraudulent letter from an anonymous “Panther cadre” to Huey Newton's brother, Melvin, alleging that a hit squad led by Dhoruba was preparing to assassinate Huey when he arrived in New York. Melvin Newton showed the letter to Huey and said, “Don't go to New York. They're gonna try to kill you.”

“I have to go,” said Huey. “Chairman Bobby needs us.”

Huey had plans of his own. When he returned from the East Coast, the threat to his leadership among the New York Panthers would be eliminated, one way or another.

Along with Cetewayo, Dhoruba's inner circle included Eddie “Jamal” Joseph, an eighteen-year-old Panther who looked up to Dhoruba like an older brother. At a Panther pad in Harlem, the three talked strategy with Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird. The group was in constant contact with their fellow Panther Twenty-one defendants. Having been purged from the party they'd given their freedom to support, Lumumba Shakur and his codefendants wanted revenge; they wanted the New York Panthers to strike first and kill Huey P. Newton.

Remembered Dhoruba:

Dhoruba and his group resolved to try one last time to reason with Huey, to get him to agree to some sort of monitoring system to prevent further funds from being embezzled from the Panther Twenty-one Defense Committee. They also wanted to address the issue of national representation. As Dhoruba recalled, “Most folks [in New York] wanted Huey and them to understand that we weren't talking about challenging national leadership; we were talking about having national leadership that was truly national, a Central Committee that was represented by leaders from chapters around the country.” If Newton refused to listen, Dhoruba and the others decided to enlist the help of Connie Matthews, an ally. As cosigner of the party's legal entity, Stronghold LTD, Matthews had the authority to sign checks and distribute funds. She also had in her possession ledgers and documents that could prove that the Committee to Defend the Panther Twenty-one was being fleeced by Huey P. Newton.

When Newton arrived in New Haven to speak at the rally, held on the campus of Yale University, he was infuriated to find that his local security team was composed of New York Panthers. His paranoia kicking in, he had his people call Boston and send down a contingent of bodyguards with no connection to the New York chapter.

After he gave his speech and retired to his hotel room, Dhoruba and Cetewayo were allowed through security to speak with Newton. What they witnessed was not encouraging. There were decanters of cognac and lines of cocaine on the coffee table, and marijuana smoke wafted in the air. Newton's entire entourage was high. Two or three young women had been brought from the rally to entertain Newton and his bodyguards. “They were all coked out, zonked out, and they had some freaks up there,” Dhoruba remembered. The supreme commander was in no position to have a coherent conversation, much less make important decisions about party matters. Cetewayo and Dhoruba left the room.

The moment had arrived. Inside the room, Connie Matthews told Huey and his crew that she was going to take a shower. While they were preoccupied, she gathered some Panther financial ledgers, disappeared into the bathroom, and locked the door. She turned on the shower loud
enough to be heard in the other room, then opened the bathroom window and climbed out onto a fire escape. She scurried down the metal stairs to a car where Dhoruba, Cetewayo, and Jamal Joseph were waiting.

The renegade Panthers drove north, and kept driving until they crossed the Canadian border. Cetewayo and Connie hopped a plane into exile in Algeria; they never returned to the United States. Dhoruba and Jamal went underground, first in Canada and then to various locations around the States.

On the morning of Monday, February 8, Dhoruba and Cetewayo failed to show up for court at 100 Centre Street. Judge Murtagh issued a warrant for their arrest, effective immediately. Bail was immediately revoked for Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur, who was four months pregnant at the time, and the Panther Twenty-one trial was temporarily suspended.

In the days that followed, Huey Newton issued a statement, which was mimeographed and distributed to Panther supporters outside the criminal court building and later published in the
Black Panther
. Newton proclaimed Dhoruba and Cetewayo to be “enemies of the people” for “disappearing” from the trial and giving new life to the government's “dying case.” All of the renegade Panthers were purged from the party.

The mood in the Panther universe shifted from dismay to anger and, finally, paranoia. Rumors of hit men heading east and west to exact revenge swirled in the air. James Brown's hit song “The Payback” seemed to capture the mood:

One month after Dhoruba and the others jumped bail, the festering tensions within the party were finally expressed through the barrel of a gun.

On 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem, a Panther named Robert Webb surfaced from underground. After Newton expelled Dhoruba and the others, calling them enemies of the people, most of those closely aligned with the New York Panthers were afraid for their lives. Webb, twenty-two, was close to Dhoruba, often serving as a bodyguard for him
at Panther speaking engagements around the country. As part of what COINTELPRO files routinely referred to as “the Cleaver faction” of the party, Webb had been advised to lie low until the heat blew over.