Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

by David Horowitz

  This time, in the appellate judge's opinion and in the reportage that followed, Julius Butler was defamed as a "police informer." But, as the 1980 appellate review of the trial shows, it was not until August 10, 1969, about seven months and three weeks after the murder of Caroline Olsen, and more than a month after Butler had been kicked out of the Black Panther Party, that Butler made his first voluntary contact with any law enforcement official. The law enforcement official he met with was a black LAPD officer, Sergeant Duwayne Rice, whom Butler had met when the Black Panther Party made him its official "liason" with the police department. Butler gave Rice a sealed envelope. The envelope was addressed to Rice and had the words "Only to be opened in the event of my death" printed on the outside. Butler did not reveal the contents of the envelope to Rice, who placed it in a locked safe.

  As it happened, Butler was observed by FBI agents giving the envelope to Rice. Three days later, on August 13, the FBI approached Butler and questioned him for the first time. He refused to answer their questions about what was in the envelope and told them nothing about its incriminating contents.

  The FBI then went to Rice and attempted to get him to give up the envelope that Butler had entrusted to him. But Rice also refused. Shortly afterwards, the FBI threatened him with prosecution for obstruction of justice and withholding evidence. But even in the face of these threats, Rice held firm. He would neither open the envelope nor turn it over to the agents. It took the FBI another fourteen months, until October 20, 1970, under circumstances which I will turn to in a moment, to get police to give up the letter so that they could open it themselves and read Butler's testimony that Geronimo Pratt had killed Caroline Olsen.

  When Butler's envelope was finally opened, now twenty-two months after the murder, the letter inside was for the first time read by police. It described a factional struggle in the Black Panther Party and said that the writer was fearful because of threats on his life made by Geronimo Pratt and other Panther leaders, including Roger Lewis, whose nickname was "Blue." The letter offered "the following Reason I feel the Death threat may be carried out," namely that Geronimo and the other Panthers "were Responsible for Acts of murder they carelessly Bragged about": "No. 1: Geronimo for the Killing of a White School Teacher and the wounding of Her Husband on a Tennis Court in the City of Santa Monica some time during the year of 1968.

  "No. 2: Geronimo and Blue being Responsible for the Killing of Capt. Franco [a Panther leader] in January 1969 and constantly stating as a threat to me that I was just like Franco and gave them No Alternative but to 'Wash me Away.'"

  This was and remains the most irrefutable incriminating evidence linking Geronimo Pratt to the tennis court murder. Yet, it is not even addressed, as an issue, in Judge Dickey's decision to accept Johnnie Cochran's newest appeal. (Nor has Cochran raised it as an issue himself.) Roger "Blue" Lewis, in a recorded prison interview with attorneys for the state, has also testified that Geronimo Pratt killed Caroline Olsen and that the murder weapon was his. Eyewitnesses placed Pratt at the murder scene and at an attempted robbery committed moments before. Neither Pratt nor his attorneys have denied that the car driven by the murderer belonged to Pratt. Notwithstanding all these material facts, no other piece of evidence is as incontrovertible and unimpeachable as the letter from Julius Butler contained in the sealed envelope.

  Although Butler was accused by Cochran of being a police and FBI informant, working with law enforcement to frame Pratt, Butler did not give this envelope to the FBI or the police. He had never had a single contact with the FBI up to this point in time. Nor did he give the envelope to the Los Angeles Police Department, "racist" or otherwise. He gave it to a friend, who was a policeman, whom he trusted, and who was black.

  In addition to their accusations that Butler was an informer, the defenders of Geronimo Pratt speculate that the prosecution of Pratt was the result of a "Cointelpro" conspiracy by the FBI to 'neutralize" leaders of the Black Panther Party. Their references, typically vague, are meant to insinuate incriminating possibilities without having to specify concrete evidence. But they are in fact irrelevant. By the time of Pratt's trial for the murder of Caroline Olsen, the FBI's famous "Cointelpro" program had been terminated by J. Edgar Hoover. Moreover, Pratt was no longer a Panther. Three months earlier, in August 1970, he had been expelled from the party by Newton. The official "declaration" of his expulsion, complete with the charge that he had threatened to assassinate Newton, was not made public by the Panthers until Pratt's arrest.

  On December 4, 1970, two months after the letter was opened, Pratt was indicted by a grand jury on one count of murder, one count of assault to commit murder, and two counts of robbery. He was arraigned in April 1971 and was convicted a year later on July 28, 1972. Throughout the trial, Pratt maintained that he was in Oakland at the time of the murder attending a meeting of Panther leaders. For nearly twenty years thereafter, the surviving Panther leaders — Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, and Elaine Brown-denied Pratt's story, and left him to his fate. It was their decision to change their stories that led to the new and successful appeal of which Elaine Brown was one of the organizers. The judge's decision was based on new evidence, obtained by Cochran, that Butler had talked to law enforcement before the trial, but well after the murder. As we have seen, this evidence is irrelevant, since Butler's original accusation that Pratt was guilty of murder had been sealed in an envelope and withheld both from the FBI and the police.

  In the 1980 court opinion denying Pratt's original appeal, the conspiracy theory, which Cochran later refurbished, is succinctly refuted:

  First, it is noted that Julius Butler did not give the letter to the FBI but to a trusted friend (Sergeant Rice) for safekeeping only to be opened in the event of his death. . . . Second, logic dictates that if the FBI with the aid of local law enforcement officers had targeted Pratt and intended to "neutralize" him by "framing" him for the December 18, 1968, murder of Caroline Olsen they would not have waited over fourteen months after the letter was handed to Sergeant Rice to have the contents of the sealed letter disclosed.

  The circumstances under which Butler's letter was finally opened are even more damning for the conspiracy claim. The FBI agents who had observed Butler transferring the sealed envelope, walked over to Sergeant Rice after Butler left and demanded that he turn over the envelope to them. Rice refused. Then, as a precaution, he gave the envelope to yet another black police officer, Captain Edward Henry, who put it in his safe deposit box, still sealed. Rice told no one in order that the va1 would not know its location. What next transpired is best told in Sergeant Rice's own words:

  Soon after this incident [the initial demand for the letter from the FBI], the FBI threatened to indict me for obstruction of justice for refusing to turn over the letter to them. Some time the next year I was involved in a fight with a white Los Angeles police officer. Due to this fight, and other allegations against me, I became the subject of an internal police investigation. During this investigation I was questioned by the Los Angeles Police Department regarding what Julius Butler had given me and ordered to turn it over to the police department. When I refused, I was threatened with being fired for refusing a direct order.

  The FBI was also pressuring Butler about his involvement in the Black Panther Party and a possible firearms violation. (Butler had purchased an illegal submachine gun in October 1968, while still a Panther, and did not want to reveal the name of the person he had given it too-another puzzling posture for a "paid informant.") In fact, the questioning of Butler by the FBI after he was observed delivering the envelope to Sergeant Rice is the principal source of the false impression successfully promoted by the Cochran team that Pratt was on the payroll as an informant for the agency. Yet, in turning down Pratt's 1980 appeal, the court noted that "It would be unnatural for the FBI not to be inquisitive about the contents of the sealed envelope once aware of its existence." In the records of the seven FBI interviews with Butler, the only mention of Pratt is "that Pratt had a mac
hine gun was common knowledge" and that "Pratt also had a caliber .45 pistol." There is no mention of the crucial fact, still hidden in the sealed envelope, that Pratt had boasted of killing a white school teacher and wounding her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court in 1968. In fact, an exhaustive review of the FBI records by a Deputy Attorney General of California states categorically that "Prior to [Pratt's] indictment [for the crime] in December 1970, there are no FBI documents connecting [Pratt] with the tennis court murder." Pratt's indictment was based on the evidence in the envelope sealed by Julius Butler. It was opened at Butler's request in October 1970-twenty-two months after the murder took place — because, as he put it, the FBI was "jamming" him. At the same time, the Internal Affairs investigators were also jamming Rice, who appealed to Butler to release the document.

  The Cochran appeal that eventually secured Pratt's release in May 1997 added only minor details to the original 1980 appeal that was rejected. Its new element was information voluntarily turned over by prosecutors that seemed to amplify the claim that Butler had some kind of involvement with law enforcement after the sealed envelope was delivered to Rice. The key new claim, for example, was the existence of an "informant" card that the District Attorney's office voluntarily turned over to Cochran's team. When I asked one of the original prosecutors about this, he maintained that the "informant card" was insignificant. "When you take someone to lunch you have to provide a chit for the lunch," he explained. "'Informant' is a convenient category, and that's all there is to it." The record indicates nothing else. In the notes of the interviews that were submitted to the Court, Butler's consistent response to agents' questions is that he is no longer with the party and is not able to give them an informed opinion on the issue.

  But no matter how one parses the language of these reports, or interprets "informant cards," none of the evidence brought forward by Cochran in any way alters the picture of Julius Butler's relations to law enforcement outlined above. Butler did not take his charges against Pratt to the police, but strenuously withheld them for nearly two years, until forced by the Internal Affairs investigation of Rice to give them up.

  In conducting his appeal, Johnnie Cochran called Julius Butler a "conniving snake" and "liar" and "police informant." As in the Simpson case, he had great success with this line of attack before the credulous public and willing press. Los Angeles Urban League president John Mack was only one of many who swallowed the slander whole. At the time of Pratt's release, Mack told the Los Angeles Times: "The Geronimo Pratt case is one of the most compelling and painful examples of a political assassination on an African-American activist."

  Cochran's brief for Pratt religiously followed the pattern of the Simpson defense. It was an attack on law enforcement as a racist conspiracy to "get" his client. A principal problem for Cochran's theory is the fact that Butler is black and that, until Cochran's charges, he was a responsible member of the community, a lawyer, a law-abiding citizen, and a church elder. As part of Cochran's assault on Butler's character he alleged that Butler carried a grudge, which was the result of thwarted ambition. Cochran claimed that when "Bunchy" Carter, the leader of the Los Angeles Panthers was killed in January 1969 by a rival gang headed by Ron ("Malauna") Karenga in a shoot-out at UCLA, Butler became jealous of the fact Pratt rather than he was made head of the party.

  Once the story of the sealed envelope is understood, however, the Cochran hypothesis falls apart. If jealousy was Butler's motive, why didn't he go to the police immediately? Why did he hand over a sealed letter to a friend and wait nearly two years to deliver it to authorities who would indict Pratt, and then did so only under duress?

  In fact, Butler did not even deposit his "insurance" letter into the safekeeping of Sergeant Rice immediately after the murder, when he was passed over for Pratt. He did so only after he was relieved of his Panther duties and only after he had been physically threatened by Pratt and his lieutenants, who were conducting a purge in the party's ranks seeking the "agents" who might have set up Bunchy Carter's murder. (One prosecutor I interviewed suggested that it was Pratt who had set up Carter. Pratt was in charge of Panther security, yet was absent when the shooting took place.) The cause of Butler's conflict with Pratt was not envy, but a growing concern about the party's direction. In his letter, Butler wrote:

  During the year of 1969 I began to notice the party changing its direction from that set forth by Huey P. Newton, and dissented with some theorys [sic] and practices of the So. Calif. Leadership. During the months of June and July 1969 I more strongly critisized[sic] these Leaders, because I felt they were carelessly, and foolishly doing things that didn't have a direction benificial [sic] for the people. I also critisized [sic] the Physical Actions or threats to party members who were attempting to sincerly [sic] impliment [sic] programs that oppressed people could Respond to.

  The incident that most depressed Butler was the pistol-whipping of a seventeen-year-old Panther named Ollie Taylor, who was suspected of working for Karenga's gang. The incident led to false imprisonment and assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charges against Butler, Geronimo Pratt, and Roger Lewis. Butler's feelings about this incident were so regretful that he pled guilty to the charges in the case. Pratt was also tried but the juries were hung 10-2 and 11-1 for conviction.

  According to Butler, Pratt masterminded the torture-interrogation of Taylor, holding a cocked weapon at Butler's head while ordering him to beat the suspect. Under oath at his own trial, Pratt not only denied leading the interrogation but claimed that the beating had taken place before he arrived and that he had reprimanded Butler, telling him this was not the Panther way to deal with suspects. (We know, however, from other cases, like Alex Rackley's torture in New Haven, that it was.) Pratt then said he had relieved Butler of his position in the party's security force, and placed him under "house arrest." At Pratt's trial, the victim of the beating, Ollie Taylor, confirmed Butler's version of the events and flatly contradicted Pratt's story.

  Reading Butler's testimony about the Ollie Taylor incident, I had a jolt of recognition that resolved any remaining doubt I may have had as to the integrity of Butler's account, not only of these matters, but of those regarding Pratt's guilt. For it was in examining Butler's testimony that Newton's story about the eroticism of violence in Pratt's psyche resurfaced in my mind with riveting force:

  Q Was Ollie Taylor in the room at this time?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Okay?

  A. Ollie Taylor was sitting in the middle of the room, and I was sitting next to Ollie Taylor, and I was trying to talk to Ollie Taylor on the basis of "Give as much information about yourself to clear yourself," and Geronimo stated to me that the shit he was talking was a bunch of bullshit... I looked over and he cocked the hammer on the pistol.

  Q Where was the pistol pointed, if at all?

  A. It was actually right between me and Ollie Taylor, because I was sitting side-by-side with Ollie Taylor.

  Then I noticed that Geronimo had an erection, and he stated, "If you don't move, I'll blow your head off," and he said 'Furthermore, I think maybe you're siding with him,' so he told me to slap Ollie Taylor.

  He say, "You interrogate," so I did it in the pretense of trying to-at that time I was frightened of Geronimo's behavior, very seriously frightened. I had never seen a man with an erection.

  Before Butler could complete the sentence, his attorney interrupted with an objection that the course of inquiry was irrelevant.

  But as far as I was concerned, the sentence did not need to be finished. Here were two different figures, both intimate with Pratt, but otherwise separated by distance, status, and motivation, who remarked on the erotic charge violence gave him.

  Despite the persuasive evidence of Pratt's guilt and the persuasive testimony contained in the handling of the letter that Butler was not part of a police or FBI conspiracy to frame Pratt, Johnnie Cochran prevailed in court. In granting Pratt a new trial, Dickey concluded that "this was not a strong case for the prosecutio
n without the testimony of [Julius] Butler," and that it was reasonably probable that Pratt could have obtained a different result "in the entire absence of Butler's testimony," or had the prosecution revealed Butler's contacts with law enforcement. His opinion did not go into any detail by way of explaining how these contacts would or should have affected the verdict, given the testimony of the sealed envelope.

  Reading Dickey's opinion is a depressing experience for anyone concerned about American justice. The salient reason cited by Judge Dickey for overturning the original verdict is that the prosecution concealed the "fact" that "[Butler] had been, for at least three years before the trial, providing information about the Black Panther Party and individuals associated with it to law enforcement agencies on a confidential basis."

  The statement, as we have seen and as court records show, is false and misleading. Julius Butler had no contact with the FBI or law enforcement prior to his delivery of the sealed letter to Sergeant Rice, seven months after the murder and less than two years before the trial. The letter's identification of Geronimo Pratt as the killer of Caroline Olsen was available to the jury and was a centerpiece of the court proceeding, a fact which is not even addressed in Dickey's opinion — nor is the whole history of Butler's withholding of the incriminating document despite efforts by the FBI and the police to pry it from him. These would seem to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that Julius Butler was not an informant and was not cooperating with the FBI, the police, or the prosecutors of Geronimo Pratt, prior to Pratt's arraignment for the murder. Moreover, Butler's testimony at the trial was entirely consistent with the information contained in the incriminating letter and with his behavior throughout the case.

  Why hasn't justice prevailed in this matter? Why is a clearly guilty individual free? The answer lies in the climate of the times, in which the testimonies of officers of the law have become more readily impeachable than the testimony of criminals. As in the O. J. Simpson trial, the appeals process in the Pratt case has been turned by Johnnie Cochran into a class action libel against the Psi, the police, the prosecution, and its chief witness. And as in the Simpson case, Johnnie Cochran's fictional melodrama has defeated the politically incorrect truth.*