water for seventeen days. She was 42 years old.
By this time, everything I knew about Betty’s disappearance led 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. But even as I sank into a long period of depression and remorse, 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.” No black reporter did. 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 Cline, 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 10,000 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, and ended Betty’s. 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.33 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.
Many years after the publication of “Black Murder Inc.,” a member of the Squad, whom the police believed to be Betty’s probable killer, Flores Forbes, described its criminal activities, in particular its shakedowns of the afterhours clubs, while omitting the murders it committed in the course of the shakedowns, in a memoir called Will You Die With Me?, July, 2006
I learned about the personalities in the Squad, and about their involvement in Betty’s murder. One of them, Robert Heard, was known as “Big Bob” because he was 6'8" and weighed 400 pounds.44 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.
After the Party disintegrated in the mid-Seventies, Heard continued his criminal career and was eventually convicted of a non-Panther related homicide.
Betty’s children commissioned Hal Lipset, a private eye 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 without success.
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 Democratic Assemblyman Tom Bates, husband of Berkeley’s radical mayor, Loni Hancock.
Not everyone was ready to turn a blind eye to the Panther reality. The minute Huey stepped off the plane, Alameda Country prosecutors began preparing to try him for the murder of Kathleen Smith, the 17-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, Squad member Flores Forbes and another Panther gunmen tried to break into a house in the nearby city of Richmond, where they expected to find the prosecution’s eye-witness, Crystal Gray, and assassinate her.55 But it was the wrong door, since Gray lived in an apartment in the back. The owner of the front apartment, a black bookkeeper, picked up her .38 and fired at the intruders. A gun battle ensued in which Forbes inadvertently killed his partner. Forbes was also wounded.
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
