The assassination attempt is described in Flores Forbes’ book, Will You Die With Me? In the book Forbes claims, implausibly, that this plot was his own initiative, unauthorized by Newton.
Forbes fled the scene to seek the assistance of another Panther, named 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 members had never really accommodated themselves 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. Lionel Wilson, and the head of Clorox along with 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 radical journalist Kate Coleman who wrote a courageous story for the magazine New Times. It was called “The Party’s Over” and it 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. During the five years since Betty’s death, my politics had begun to change. But there remained a residue of physical fear. Huey was alive in Oakland, and 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, too. 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.
Peter Collier and I wrote her story, calling it “Requiem for A Radical.”66 In it, we recounted the details of her life and death, and 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 the book 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.
A chapter in Destructive Generation, 1989
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 taken 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 on a hill above Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. 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 didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. He directed me to a passage in our Fay Stender article 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?”
Joe Durden Smith’s book Who Killed George Jackson? had described Bert as being in close contact with Huey during the escape attempt. Perhaps he was referring to that. Even so, 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, and left his own car outside the restaurant. When we arrived, he invited me in. I was a little nervous about accepting 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 settled ourselves in Huey’s living room, the conversation we had begun at lunch 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. It was the accusation against Elaine that provided the clue. 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 didn’t. 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, unless he wanted to deflect attention from himself? I went home and contacted 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