American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  We’ve come a long way since those days in terms of race relations, but in the 1960s integration was still only beginning—the Voting Rights Act hadn’t even become law when Malcolm X was alive. Those were the years of the Freedom Riders getting the crap beat out of them when they rode buses into the South, and “Bull” Connor fire-hosing African-Americans down in Birmingham, and James Meredith having to walk a National Guard gauntlet just to enroll at the University of Mississippi. It was a tempestuous period in our history, and Malcolm X was right at the forefront.

  The FBI had been watching Malcolm as far back as 1950, when he was still in prison for grand larceny and first discovered the Nation of Islam [NOI].3 When he was paroled after serving six years, he soon became a leading spokesman for Elijah Muhammad. In 1957, when the police beat a Black Muslim badly in Harlem and reluctantly agreed to hospitalize him thanks to Malcolm X’s insistence, with a simple wave of his hand Malcolm had stopped what might have been a bloody riot of some 2,600 people. “No man should have that much power,” a police inspector said.4 Not surprisingly, the FBI’s COINTELPRO agents were soon all over him. After Hoover learned that Malcolm would be Elijah Muhammad’s likely successor, one COINTELPRO file said bluntly: “The secret to disabling the [NOI] movement, therefore, lay in neutralizing Malcolm X.”5

  In 1958, a fellow named John Ali was an adviser, friend, and housemate to Malcolm X. Five years later, he became National Secretary of the Black Muslims. When Elijah Muhammad left Chicago and moved to Phoenix because of his failing health, John Ali took over handling the group’s finances and administration. At the same time, unbeknownst to the Muslims, he was working closely with the FBI. The main man he was keeping an eye on was Malcolm X.6

  Isn’t it interesting that for many of our public figures who’ve been killed—I’m thinking of John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Dr. King—they all seem to be under surveillance first and then assassinated later. Viewing it from a military standpoint, that would be the Standard Operating Procedure you’d expect: heavy surveillance to learn how you live, what way would be best to do it, how do we set up the patsy and get away with it? Look at it this way—if they’re following these people around, wouldn’t it turn up that somebody else was doing the same thing? But turning up the killers never seems to happen, does it?

  By 1963, Malcolm was being pushed out of the Muslim hierarchy. The FBI, using informants and wiretaps to keep up with the rift, started spreading tales about Elijah Muhammad having affairs with young women—The FBI pretending it was Malcolm X doing the rumormongering. After Malcolm made comments about “chickens coming home to roost” following Kennedy’s assassination, Elijah Muhammad seized the opportunity to suspend him for 90 days. At that point, FBI agents came around with a bribe offer that Malcolm refused. Not long after that, he was warned about a plot to wire his car to blow up as soon as he started the engine.

  On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X announced he was leaving the NOI and founding a new mosque in New York. A few weeks later, he and Martin Luther King met for the one and only time in Washington, where they were both attending a Senate hearing on civil rights legislation. They spent time together on the Capitol steps, finding common ground. King said soon after that, unless Congress moved quickly, they could expect that “our nation is in for a dark night of social disruption.”7 Malcolm X was saying: “We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights.”

  Then he went off to Mecca. While he was gone, the NYPD’s unit known as BOSSI (Bureau of Special Service and Investigation) was busy infiltrating Malcolm X’s new mosque and passing along information to the FBI and CIA. The fellow in charge of the operation was Anthony Ulasewicz, who later became President Nixon’s private detective for purposes of undercover ops and gained infamy during Watergate.8 He brought onboard a 25-year-old black detective named Gene Roberts, a martial arts expert who joined up with Malcolm X as a bodyguard. “When he came back from Mecca and Africa, I went wherever he went, as long as it was in the city,” Roberts said later.9

  Toward the end of May 1964, the five men who’d be directly involved in assassinating Malcolm X met for the first time. They were part of a paramilitary training unit, known as the Fruit of Islam, based out of Newark, New Jersey.10 That summer, when Malcolm left on an extended trip to Africa, John Ali said on a Chicago call-in radio station: “I predict that anyone who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad puts their life in jeopardy.”11

  The CIA was aware that Malcolm was putting together information for African leaders at the second conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Cairo. One informant report claimed he was out “to embarrass the United States” by telling Africa about our “ill treatment of the Negro.” Malcolm knew he was being shadowed by government agents, telling a friend that “our Muslims don’t have the resources to finance a worldwide spy network.”12 While he was eating at the Nile Hilton, he recognized the waiter as a man he’d seen before in New York. Malcolm was rushed to a hospital just in time to have his stomach pumped. The doctor said there’d been something toxic in the food. By then, of course, the waiter had disappeared. Malcolm recovered, and urged the OAU leaders to consider African-American problems like their own and talk about this at the U.N.

  The State Department then alerted President Johnson of an informant’s report that Malcolm X and related “extremist groups” were receiving money from certain African states to ignite race riots. Johnson asked Hoover to look into this, and the State Department sent a memo to Richard Helms, the man in charge of clandestine operations at the CIA. The FBI told the CIA that the charges were trumped up. But Helms went ahead and authorized increasing surveillance on Malcolm X.13 Over at the FBI, Director Hoover wrote in a memo: “There are clear and unmistakeable signs that we are in the midst of a social revolution with the racial movement at its core. The Bureau, in meeting its responsibilities in this area, is an integral part of this revolution.”14

  John Lewis, the future congressman, was part of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) at the time, when he happened to run into Malcolm X in Nairobi. Lewis remembers Malcolm telling him “in a calm, measured way he was convinced that somebody wanted him killed.”15 He kept extending his stay abroad, before finally flying back to the U.S. Louis X, known today as Louis Farrakhan, released a public statement: “Such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death.” Years later, Farrakhan admitted to filmmaker Spike Lee that he’d “helped contribute to the atmosphere that led to the assassination of Malcolm X.”16

  As Malcolm’s influence grew, the CIA and FBI were only too happy to take advantage of the worsening divide between him and the followers of Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm seemed resigned to this. “Those talks [overseas] broadened my outlook and made it crystal clear to me that I had to look at the struggle in America’s ghettos against the background of a worldwide struggle of oppressed peoples,” he told a friend. “That’s why, after every one of my trips abroad, America’s rulers see me as being more and more dangerous. That’s why I feel in my bones the plots to kill me have already been hatched in high places. The triggermen will only be doing what they were paid to do.”

  Alex Haley said that “Malcolm X complained repeatedly that the police would not take his requests for protection seriously.” One headquarters officer put it like this: “The guy had a bad [rap] sheet. You don’t offer somebody like that protection.”17 As 1965 began, he was being shadowed at every stop by potential assassins. John Ali was there waiting for his arrival in L.A., along with a group from the NOI. In Chicago, fifteen NOI members hung around outside his hotel. When Malcolm X flew to Paris to give a talk, the French authorities wouldn’t let him enter the country. Later, a journalist named Eric Norden found out from a diplomat “that the CIA planned Malcolm’s murder, and France feared he might be liquidated on its soil.”18

  On February 4, 1965, Hoover sent a “confidential” memo that outlined Malcolm’s travel plans to Helms at the CIA and intel experts with all three branches
of the military. At the same time, Elijah Muhammad was writing: “Malcolm—the Chief Hypocrite—was beyond the point of no return.” On February 14, Malcolm’s house was firebombed. He managed to get his pregnant wife, Betty, out along with their four daughters, into the 20-degree temperature outside. The NOI started a rumor that he’d burned his own house to get publicity. When a fireman left a bottle of gasoline on the dresser to make it look like that, Malcolm knew the plot against him went beyond the NOI.19 The truth was, the main man spreading the rumor (Captain Joseph X) had been part of the firebombing team.

  By now, Gene Roberts, the security guard sent in as an infiltrator by the NYPD, had become a friend and admirer of Malcolm X. “I learned to love the man; respect him. I think he was a good person.” So when he observed a false disruption scene in the audience at one of Malcolm’s talks, Roberts called his supervisors and said: “Listen, I just saw the dry run on Malcolm’s life,” adding that he thought it might happen at the Audubon Ballroom the next Sunday.20 “And they said, okay, we’ll pass it on,” Roberts remembered. “What they did with it I don’t know ... I don’t think they really cared.” The same day of Roberts’s alert, Malcolm X said to a friend: “I have been marked for death in the next five days. I have the names of five Black Muslims who have been asked to kill me. I will announce them at the [Sunday] meeting.”21

  Malcolm X didn’t carry a gun. He even ruled against anybody getting searched before being allowed in to his last speech. That Sunday morning, he was awakened by a phone call to his room at the New York Hilton: “Wake up, brother,” the voice said. Malcolm called his sister, Ella, in Boston, and told her: “I feel they may have doomed me for this day.”22

  Five men from Newark Mosque 25 had checked out the Audubon Ballroom’s floor plan at a dance there on Saturday night. The next afternoon, the men entered the ballroom with their weapons concealed under their coats. Talmadge Hayer sat in the front row left, carrying a .45 automatic; next to him was Leon Davis, with a Luger. A few rows behind them sat William X with a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun. The organizer of the killing squad, Benjamin Thomas, was next to him. Toward the back of the ballroom, Wilbur X waited to start the disturbance that would divert everyone’s attention.

  Before he came onstage, Malcolm X told his aides that what was happening to him lately went far beyond what the NOI alone could do. He walked out to a standing ovation. When he soon heard what seemed like a fight, he left the podium and went to the front of the stage. “Now, now, brothers break it up. Hold it, hold it,” he said. Those were his last words. Bodyguard Gene Roberts, seated toward the back, recognized the tactic he’d seen before and headed down the aisle. In the rear, Wilbur X threw a smokebomb. The audience started screaming. William X, from fifteen feet away, made a circle in Malcolm X’s chest with a dozen shotgun pellets. Hayer and Davis then riddled his body with shots from their pistols. As Hayer ran for the exit, Roberts grabbed a chair. Hayer fired again, hitting his suit jacket but not penetrating Roberts’ body, who then knocked Hayer down with the chair. When he rose limping, another security guard shot him in the left thigh. Outside, the gunman found himself surrounded by an angry crowd that started beating him. The one policeman stationed in the vicinity then pulled Hayer away and shoved him into a cop car. Onstage, Roberts found a hint of a pulse and tried to resuscitate Malcolm X, but couldn’t do it.

  All the assailants except Hayer escaped. Two New York enforcers for the NOI were hauled into custody a week after the assassination. The three of them went on trial a year later. Some questionable witnesses, contradicting testimony they’d given to a grand jury, claimed they’d seen them all shooting. On the stand, Hayer confessed to his own role and truthfully said that the other two were not involved. But he wouldn’t name the actual coconspirators, so his testimony was dismissed. All three were convicted and received life prison sentences. The FBI had kept close tabs on the trial, their main concern being to protect from exposure the informants and undercover agents they’d planted in Malcolm’s organization.23

  It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Hayer named the others involved, hoping to get the House Committee on Assassinations to conduct a new investigation. That didn’t happen, and the other killers have never been brought to justice. As of 1989, Leon Davis was still living in the vicinity of Paterson, New Jersey. William X (Bradley) was doing time in Bergen County for another crime, but refused to talk to an author who tried.24

  There is also a confidential FBI report to Hoover about a witness who said: “John Ali met with Hayer the night before Malcolm X was killed.”25 It’s a known fact that John Ali “had come in from Chicago on February 19th, checked into the Americana Hotel in midtown Manhattan and checked out on the evening of February 21”—meaning he’d arrived just in time for the final rehearsal of the murder.

  When Leon Ameer, a 32-year-old aide to Malcolm X, went to the FBI about ten days after the assassination to talk about a conspiracy that included elements of the government, he was found dead a few days later in his Boston apartment. First it was ruled a suicide, then a drug overdose, and finally “natural causes.”26

  The official history is that Malcolm X’s was a “revenge killing” by men connected to Elijah Muhammad. But notice how nearly all of them were never caught, only the one guy that got injured. All signs point to a conspiracy that went way beyond the Nation of Islam. We didn’t know at the time about the CIA’s “Executive Action”program to get rid of certain foreign leaders. For years, the agency had been plotting to assassinate Castro. In 1960 they’d come up with a plan to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba by infecting his toothbrush with a fatal disease. At least eight foreign heads of state were targeted during those Cold War years, and five of them died violent deaths. Given this fact, how can we not believe they’d also go after an “undesirable” like Malcolm X?

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  Let’s focus on rethinking the meaning of surveillance. Certainly in the case of Malcolm X, as well as Dr. King, being shadowed by government agencies seemed to lead inevitably to their deaths. There is too much secrecy in our government, and surveillance today is even more widespread than it was then, at a considerable waste of taxpayer dollars. Let’s also teach our young people that a willingness to change your attitude, as Malcolm X was willing to do, is a mark not of weakness but sometimes of greatness.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE MURDER OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  THE INCIDENT: Martin Luther King was shot and killed standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, on April 4, 1968.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: James Earl Ray, a racist and escaped convict, shot King from the window of a rooming house across the street, fled the scene, and was arrested two months later in London, after which he pled guilty to the murder.

  MY TAKE: Ray was another “patsy,” like Oswald, who had evidence planted to incriminate him while the real killer fired from behind some shrubs. The links to King’s assassination trace to people in the Mob, the military, and the right wing.

  “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

  —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  In 1968 I was living a sheltered life in south Minneapolis, enjoying being a kid with my GTO and playing defensive end on my undefeated high school football team. There were never any racial tensions at my school. My best black friend in a predominantly white school was elected Winter Sports King. To me, Dr. King was a TV personality, whom you always saw walking arm-in-arm in front of a group of people and they had a cause. At the time, protests were peaking against the Vietnam War. But I was the flag-waving young American, being naïve and believing what I was taught in school, the domino effect of Communism and all that. After I graduated, I joined the navy.

  So, while I remember being shocked by Dr. King’s assassination, Minneapolis didn’t see much if any rioting as happened in other cities. Two months later,
when James Earl Ray was picked up in London and charged with the killing, I accepted what the authorities said and figured justice would be served. It was many years later when I began to question the official line. This happened in 1997, when King’s son, Dexter, met face-to-face with Ray in a Tennessee prison. Ray was dying of liver disease. I read about Dexter King asking him point-blank, “Did you kill my father?” Ray answered him, “No, I didn’t.” And Dexter King said, “I believe you, and my family believes you.”1 I thought, wow, if that’s the case, then there’s a lot more to Dr. King’s killing than meets the eye.

  Then, in 1999, the King family brought a wrongful death lawsuit in a Tennessee Circuit Court. A nearly month-long trial ensued. Seventy witnesses were called. It took the jury only two and a half hours to come back with a verdict that Dr. King was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.2

  In the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial where TV had gavel-to-gavel coverage, you’d think the media would have been all over this. Trial of the century, maybe? Not so. I read where only one Memphis TV reporter, and one freelance journalist, covered the whole proceeding. I consider this another indictment of our media. Because O.J.’s trial, regardless of what a major personality he was and how entertaining it was to everyone, didn’t affect anyone really. Not to the level of Martin Luther King’s killing, which affected masses of people and had a far-reaching impact on society as a whole. Has the United States been so “dumbed down” that people are more concerned about the titillating news of a celebrity sports star and his murdered white girlfriend, than about the killing of a great leader like King? (If you want to find out what happened at the trial, the entire 4,000-word transcript is at www.thekingcenter.com.)