Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (14 page)

By this time, everything I knew about Betty's disappearance had led me to the conclusion that the Panthers had killed her. Everything I knew about the party and the way it worked led me to believe that Elaine Brown had given the order to have her killed.

Betty's murder shattered my life and changed it forever. While I sank into a long period of depression and remorse, however, Elaine's star began to rise in Oakland's political firmament. A white woman who worked for the Black Panther Party had been murdered, but-despite our rhetoric about police conspiracies and racist oppression-there seemed to be no consequences for Elaine or her party.

The press made nothing of it. When Peter Collier approached Marilyn Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Channel 5 with the story, she said she "wouldn't touch it unless a black reporter did it first." Betty's friends in the Bay Area progressive community, who generally were alert to every injustice, even in lands so remote they could not locate them on a map, kept their silence about this one in their own backyard. Peter also went to the police who told him: "You guys have been cutting our balls off for the last ten years. You destroy the police and then you expect them to solve the murders of your friends."

While the investigation of Betty's death continued, Elaine ran for the Oakland City Council and garnered 44 percent of the vote. The following year, under her leadership, the party provided the political machine that elected Oakland's first black mayor, Lionel Wilson. Elaine herself secured the endorsement of Governor Jerry Brown and was a Jerry Brown delegate to the Democratic Convention in 1976. (Before making his run, Brown phoned Elaine to find out what kind of support the party could provide him.) Tony Kline, a Panther lawyer and confidante of Elaine, was also a college roommate of the Governor and became a member of his cabinet. Using her leverage in Sacramento, Elaine was able to get approval for an extension of the Grove-Shafter Freeway, which had been blocked by environmentalists. On the basis of this achievement, she began negotiations with the head of Oakland's Council for Economic Development to control ten thousand new city jobs that the freeway would create.

In all these successes, the Learning Center was her showpiece. Capitalizing on liberal concerns for Oakland's inner city poor, she obtained contributions and grants for the school, and bought herself a red Mercedes. The party's political influence climbed to its zenith. It was an all-American nightmare.

While Elaine's power grew to alarming proportions, I intensified my private investigations into the Panther reality that had previously eluded me. I had to confront my blindness and understand the events that had led to such an irreversible crossroads in my life. I interrogated everyone I could trust who had been around the Panthers about the dark side of their operations, seeking answers to the questions of Betty's death.

I discovered the existence of the Panther "Squad" — an enforcer group that Huey had organized inside the party to maintain discipline and carry out criminal activities in the East Oakland community. I learned of beatings, arson, extortion and murders. The Learning Center itself had been used as the pretext for a shakedown operation of "after hours" clubs which were required to "donate" weekly sums and whose owners were gunned down when they refused.

I learned about the personalities in the Squad, and about their involvement in the killing. One of them, Robert Heard, was known as "Big Bob" in the party because he was six feet, eight inches tall and weighed four hundred pounds. Big Bob told friends, whom I talked to, that the Squad had killed Betty and more than a dozen other people, in the brief period between 1972 and 1976. The other victims were all black, and included the Vice President of the Black Student Union at Grove Street College, whose misfortune was to have inadvertently insulted a member of the Squad.

Betty's children commissioned Hal Lipset, a private investigator with connections to the Left (and to the Panthers themselves, who had employed him during Huey's trials) to investigate the case. Lipset confirmed the police conclusion that the Panthers had killed Betty. They also tried to get the case against the Panthers reopened, but with no success.

Then, in the summer of 1977, unable to stomach exile any longer, Huey suddenly returned from Cuba. He was given a welcome by the local left, culminating in a ceremony and "citizenship award" presented by Assemblyman Tom Bates, husband of Berkeley's radical mayor, Loni Hancock.

But not everyone would turn a blind eye to the Panther reality. The minute Huey stepped off the plane, Alameda County prosecutors began preparing to try him for the murder of Kathleen Smith, the eighteen-year-old prostitute he had killed three years earlier.

Huey made preparations too. One day before the preliminary trial hearings were to begin in Oakland, three Panther gunmen tried to break into a house in the nearby city of Richmond, where they expected to find the prosecution's chief eye-witness, Crystal Gray.

It was the wrong house. (Gray lived in an apartment in the back.) The owner, a black bookkeeper, picked up her .38 and fired at the intruders. A gun battle ensued in which one Panther was killed and another, named Flores Forbes, was wounded.

Forbes fled the scene to seek the assistance of another Panther, Nelson Malloy, who was not a Squad member and had only just joined the party. Fearing that the innocent Malloy might link him to the assassination attempt, Huey ordered a hit team to follow Malloy and Forbes to Las Vegas, where they had fled. The assassins found them and shot Malloy in the head and buried him in a shallow roadside grave in the Nevada desert. Miraculously he was discovered by tourists who heard his moans and rescued him, although he remained paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Shortly after the Richmond incident, Elaine herself was gone. The Squad had never really accommodated itself to being ruled by a woman. When Huey returned, tensions between Elaine and the Squad reached a head, and Huey came down on the side of his gunmen. Elaine left for Los Angeles, never to return.

The botched assassination attempt on the prosecution witness, together with the headlines about Malloy's burial in the desert, destroyed the alliances that Elaine had so carefully built. Mayor Lionel Wilson, the head of Clorox, and the other Oakland dignitaries resigned from the Learning Center board. With its power diminished and its sinister reality in part revealed, the Panther Party had been de-clawed. I began to breathe more easily.

But I was still unable to write or make public what I had come to know about the party and its role in Betty's murder. I had given some of the information to reporter Kate Coleman who wrote a courageous story for the magazine
New Times
. It was called "The Party's Over" and helped speed the Panther decline. But I could not be a witness myself. I was no longer worried about being denounced as a racist or government agent by my friends on the Left if I accused the Panthers of murdering Betty. (Such a possibility would seem far more plausible after the Richmond events.) Nor would I have cared so much now about attacks from the Left. During the five years since Betty's death, my own politics had begun to change. But I retained a residue of physical fear.

Huey was alive in Oakland, armed and obviously crazy, and dangerous. I now realized how powerless the "law" in fact was.

Huey seemed untouchable. He had managed to beat his murder rap with the help of testimony by friends ready to perjure themselves for the cause. The pistol-whipping case had been dropped as well. After being threatened and bribed, the tailor Preston Callins retracted his charges. For me, caution seemed to be the prudent course.

Then, in 1980, an event took place that provided me with an occasion to relieve myself of a portion of my burden. It provided a story that was parallel in many respects to what I had been through. It would afford me the opportunity to speak about things that had been unspeakable until now.

In May 1980, Fay Stender, an attorney who had defended Black Panther George Jackson, took her own life in Hong Kong. She had withdrawn to this remote city away from family and friends in order to kill herself after a member of Jackson's prison gang had shot and paralyzed her the year before. She had stayed alive just long enough to act as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of her assailant.

In writing "Requiem for A Radical," which recounted the details of her life and death, Peter Collier and I were able to lift a part of the veil that had obscured the criminal underside of the Black Panther Party. We described the army of thugs that had been trained in the Santa Cruz Mountains to free Jackson from his San Quentin cell. We described the "killing fields" in those same mountains where the Panthers had buried the corpses of Fred Bennett and others who had violated their party codes. We were also able to write honestly about Jackson himself, whom the Left had made into a romantic legend and who, like Huey, was a criminal psychopath. Obscured by the love letters Jackson had written in Soledad Brother, which Fay Stender had edited, was the murderer who had boasted of killing a dozen men in prison and whose revolutionary plan was to poison the water system of Chicago where he had grown up.

When our story appeared in
New West Magazine
, I learned through mutual friends that Bert Schneider, Huey's Hollywood patron, was unhappy with the account Peter and I had written. Although I sensed that Bert was aware of the party's criminal activities, including Betty's murder, I was not as afraid of him as I was of Huey, and I decided to go and see him. I did so on a principle I had learned from the Godfather movies, that you should get near to your enemies and find out what they have in mind for you. The Fay Stender story was not a direct hit on Huey or Bert and their reactions might tell me something I needed to know. Perhaps the past was not as alive for them as I imagined. Perhaps I did not have so much to fear.

Bert had an estate in the hills above Benedict Canyon. I called my name through the security gate and was admitted into the main house. Bert appeared, wearing a bathrobe, and in a quiet rage. He was angrier than I had ever seen him. "You endangered my life" he hissed at me.

I did not have the slightest idea what he was talking about. He directed me to a passage in our text about Jackson's attempted escape from San Quentin prison (an episode in which the Panther and his comrades slit the throats of three prison guards they had tied up, before Jackson himself was killed): "The abortive escape left a thicket of unanswered questions behind. . . . Had Jackson been set up? If so, was it by the Cleaver faction of the Black Panther Party? Or by Newton, fearful of Jackson's charismatic competition?"

A book about Jackson had described Bert as being in close contact with Huey during the escape attempt. But even with that in mind, I still could not understand why Bert was so agitated. I was already focusing, however, on something else Bert had said that had far greater significance for me. In defending his reaction to the article he had admitted "Huey isn't as angry as I am." It was the opening I was looking for. I told him I would like to see Huey, and a lunch was arranged.

When I arrived at Norman's, the North Berkeley restaurant that Huey had chosen, he was already there, sunk into one of the vinyl divans, his eyes liverish and his skin pallid, drunker than I had ever seen him. He was so drunk, in fact, that when the lunch was over he asked me to drive him back to the two-story house that Bert had bought for him in the Oakland Hills. When he invited me in, I was a little nervous but decided to go anyway. The decor-piled carpets, leather couches and glass-topped end tables-was familiar. Only the African decorative masks that had been mounted on the beige walls seemed a new touch.

As we sat down in Huey's living room, our lunch conversation continued. Huey told me about a project he had dreamed up to produce Porgy and Bess as a musical set in contemporary Harlem, starring Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger. It was a bizarre idea but not out of character for Huey, whose final fight with Bobby Seale had begun with a quarrel over who should play the lead role in a film Huey wanted to make. Huey even showed me the treatment he had prepared in braille for Stevie Wonder, while complaining that the people around the singer had badmouthed him and killed the deal. When he said this his face contorted in a grimace that was truly demonic.

Then, just as suddenly, he relaxed and fell into a distant silence. After a minute, he looked directly at me and said: "Elaine killed Betty." And then, just as abruptly, he added a caveat whose cynical bravado was also typical, as though he was teaching me, once again, how the world really worked: "But if you write that, I'll deny it."

Until that moment I had thought Elaine was solely responsible for the order to kill Betty. But now I realized that Huey had collaborated with her and probably given the order himself. He might have said, "David, I'm sorry about Betty. It should never have happened, but I was in Cuba and couldn't stop it." But he did not. He chose instead to point a finger at Elaine, as the one alone responsible. It had a false ring. It was uncharacteristically disloyal. Why point the finger at anyone in particular, unless he could indeed have prevented it and did not?

I went home and began contacting several ex-Panthers, who were living on the East Coast. I asked them how Elaine, as a woman, had been able to run the party and control the Squad. The answer was the same in each case: Elaine had not really run the party while Huey was in Cuba. Huey had run it. He was in daily contact with Elaine by phone. The Squad stayed loyal to Elaine out of fear of Huey.

Having gotten this far, I turned to the actual decision to kill Betty. The same sources told me that Betty's fate had been debated for a week. Elaine had provided Huey with the reasons for killing Betty; Huey had made the final decision.

In 1989, fourteen years after Betty Van Patter disappeared, Huey was gunned down by a drug dealer he had burned. It was a few blocks away from where Huey had killed Kathleen Smith. It was not justice. He should have died sooner; he should have suffered more. But if I had learned anything through all this, it was not to expect justice in this world, and to be grateful for that which did occur, however belated and insufficient.