On a cold Saturday morning in February 1973, I was drinking my coffee while sitting on the bench Dennis had built in the alcove in the kitchen. I picked up the paper. The Chicago Tribune headline read, “Informer Aids FBI in Quiz.” The article stated that a Chicago police sergeant was a suspect in the kidnapping and murder of two drug dealers on Chicago’s South Side. The person named as the witness against the sergeant was William O’Neal.
The article indicated O’Neal had been an FBI informant since 1968. I looked to see if it was the same O’Neal I knew, the former Panther chief of security. A picture on the second page of the article confirmed it. That motherfucker, I thought. I pictured O’Neal, smiling, joking, cynical—always seeking the upper hand, constantly claiming he knew how to get over on the man. The article continued. O’Neal and a former Chicago vice detective, Stanley Robinson, had been detained in the kidnapping of several drug dealers, some of whom had been murdered and dumped in the Chicago River. A confidential FBI report quoted in the article said Robinson had executed Jeff Beard while O’Neal “drove the death car and witnessed the murder.”
Could the guy I knew with the disarming smile and casual attitude be involved in murder for hire? More important, did he drop the dime on Fred? O’Neal’s self-satisfied grin stuck in my mind. His swagger. His flashy clothes and big ride. Did the FBI pay for those? Robinson told the Tribune reporter that he had infiltrated O’Neal’s criminal enterprise and was about to arrest him when he was apprehended. O’Neal countered that he had infiltrated Robinson’s extortion ring, which was involved in shaking down and killing drug dealers. The Tribune reporter was uncertain whether Robinson or O’Neal would be charged.
“I got the techniques down,” O’Neal used to say, bragging about how he got away with burglaries and stickups. His fascination with criminal activity seemed inconsistent with him being an informant. Then I realized maybe not; it made his cover that much better.
Deborah told me O’Neal had driven her to Fred’s apartment the night of the raid, but O’Neal left before they went to sleep. Did he know what was coming? Would the FBI risk disclosing the raid plan to an informant? Would it risk its informant getting shot and possibly turning on it if he was inside and survived? Had he drugged Fred with the barbiturate found in Fred’s blood?
O’Neal didn’t talk politics. He proposed actions, frequently armed ones. This conflicted with my image of an informant as the silent, observant type, following orders from his control to remain inconspicuous. Looking back, he was clearly a provocateur, but I hadn’t realized then that this could be a good cover for an informant.
Like a lover who discovers betrayal, I reconsidered O’Neal’s behavior in light of the new disclosure. It fit uncomfortably well. He always had money; he was constantly offering to chauffeur Fred and Rush and later Deborah in his big car; he never attended political education classes and pushed actions over thought and politics; he advocated the most militaristic line; he often carried a gun; he was constantly suggesting other Panthers engage in criminal activities; he was at Fred’s apartment the night before the raid when everyone ate dinner. Then he left.
The Tribune article reported the FBI had first contacted O’Neal because he had flashed phony FBI identification at a Chicago cop arresting him for driving a stolen car. The Chicago police had turned the matter over to the FBI because impersonating an FBI agent is a federal crime. No one heard anymore about the case. Somebody in the FBI must have recognized his knack for deceit and recruited him.
Dennis was finally getting up. As he came into the kitchen in his bathrobe, I held up the newspaper.
“Check this out,” I said. “O’Neal was working for the FBI.”
Dennis winced. The news hit him like a slap in the face. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his T-shirt as though he needed a clean lens to comprehend what I had said. Even more than me, Dennis had befriended O’Neal, invited him to his house, hung out with him, and trusted him. Dennis reached for the newspaper and read the article. He didn’t say anything for a while, but his brow remained creased. For once he had a puzzled look unlike the usual calm and gleam in his eye that came from having anticipated the situation. This time he clearly had not. He’d been deceived like the rest of us.
After a long pause Dennis said, “I’ve gotta say he was good at his game. He took me in. There was enough there to be suspicious, but I have to admit I wasn’t.”
“Me either,” I admitted. We all had heard, even repeated, the common refrain that the party was infiltrated, but I was still alarmed to discover it was someone we knew. It made me feel more vulnerable.
I also felt critical of myself, not because I had ever confided anything so damaging to O’Neal but because I had congratulated myself on being able to maintain a friendship with a black person with street savvy.
That day I realized Dennis was not invincible. I had seldom challenged his perceptions or even his prophesies. He had been the first to recognize the need for an independent law office to represent the Panthers, and the first to conceptualize and implement it. He had proposed People’s Law Office as the name we carry to this day. Dennis had advocated going on the offense with our evidence and accusations after Fred’s death, which had caused Hanrahan to respond and lose his credibility, and Dennis immediately saw the need for our office to get involved in Attica following the assault and killings by the New York State Police. But on this day, I realized that Dennis, like me, was capable of being deceived. I can’t attribute all of our being taken in to our pride. O’Neal had fooled the Panthers themselves and was good, very good, at his game.
Later that morning Dennis and I got over venting our anger and frustration at being so effectively hoodwinked and tried to figure out how O’Neal really worked.
“He used his car, his supposed street smarts, and his mechanical skills to get near the leadership,” Dennis commented. “None of these required any political understanding.”
“And because he was always the first one to build some military device or advocate some military action, people didn’t suspect him. We should know better,” I said. “And frankly, I thought it was cool to hear this streetwise guy supposedly telling it like it is.”
“Do you think he provided the information for the raid?” I continued, thinking out loud.
It had come out at the federal grand jury that Jalovec’s tip came from the FBI, but Sergeant Groth swore he had his own source. A valid search warrant had to be based on information that the informant had personally provided the officer who was signing the affidavit. If Groth didn’t have an informant, then the warrant would be invalid and the search and raid illegal.
“I think O’Neal told them there were guns in Fred’s apartment.” Dennis said. “And if he was working for the FBI, I doubt he would be working for Groth as well.” If we could prove Groth had no informant, the raid per se would be unconstitutional; that is, without probable cause. We could win the civil case on legal grounds and at least get sanctions against Groth. The jury would only have to decide the amount of damages. However, proving Groth’s informant did not exist would be difficult. Thus far neither the federal grand jury nor Judge Perry had demanded Groth name his informant or offer proof that he even existed.
“Kind of interesting, in six months of investigation, that the grand jury overlooked O’Neal,” I said, “and never interviewed his FBI control agent.”
All of us had been suspicious that the federal grand jury was mostly about blunting public outrage, giving the appearance of a fair investigation without doing anything. I now began to see its function as hiding the FBI role.
“The FBI might be behind this whole thing. It’s outrageous, they pretend to be the impartial fact-finders for the raid, and really they’re covering their own ass. I think we should take O’Neal’s deposition,” Dennis said, once again thinking ahead.
“At the moment we don’t have a lawsuit in which to depose anyone,” I reminded him. “Unless the court of appeals reverses Perry, we may never learn what the FBI did.”
When the article exposed O’Neal, documents had already surfaced that demonstrated Hoover and the FBI had targeted the entire black movement, from Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Muslims. The FBI had blackmailed Dr. King by threatening to release tapes showing his infidelity if he didn’t kill himself. “There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is,” the cryptic FBI note attached to the tapes read.
Although Hoover consistently sought to defame and discredit Dr. King and other black leaders and organizations, it was the Panthers whom Hoover labeled “the biggest threat to the security of the United States.” We had copies of the FBI memos in which Hoover ordered FBI agents to attack the Panthers with “hard-hitting programs to destroy, disrupt, and neutralize” them. These directives, including using local police to achieve their aims, were contained in the FBI documents released by the antiwar protesters who carried out the burglary of the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania. In 1971, when they were first circulated, we didn’t know how to connect them to our case. O’Neal might well be the link.
We understood that Fred, with his charismatic appeal, bringing hundreds of young blacks into the movement, was a threat. Why wouldn’t Hoover perceive that as well? Of course he did. The question was what did he do to “neutralize” Fred?
By the middle of 1973, the Watergate scandal was exploding, and it became clearer that the break-in was connected directly to the White House. Public interest in uncovering government wrongdoing increased dramatically. Disclosure was at the top of the national agenda as well as our own. We already knew the outlines of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program. We wanted to find out what steps were taken by the local FBI office in Chicago to implement the program, and ultimately to learn if the December 4 raid was a COINTELPRO operation.
Subsequently, we began to receive FBI COINTELPRO documents released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, known as the Church Committee. It was holding open hearings investigating the break-ins at the Democratic headquarters at Watergate and at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. After Ellsberg had released the secret documents nicknamed the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post, the White House was so infuriated that not only did they order Ellsberg be prosecuted for espionage, but Nixon’s top advisor, H. R. Haldeman, ordered a break-in to Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to try to find data they could use against him at his criminal trial.
The Church Committee’s mandate went beyond investigating Nixon’s “Plumbers” and included uncovering all illegal government spying and dirty tricks. They began asking questions and started the subpoena process for obtaining documents on the FBI’s formerly secret Counterintelligence Program.
Interest in government malfeasance is cyclical. Gaining the momentum to get to the bottom—or actually the people at the top—of the illegalities depends upon many factors. Watergate was now two years old, but only after the disclosure of the Plumbers breaking into Ellsberg’s office did it gain momentum. Years later, in the 1980s, our office exposed that Chicago police commander Jon Burge had tortured black suspects to get confessions from them, but it took over fifteen years before Mayor Richard M. Daley, who at the time was the prosecutor who used the tainted confessions to get convictions, was confronted. In 1973 we were finally getting a real national investigation of COINTELPRO, after many of its victims were dead or in prison and its existence had been public knowledge for two years.
Soon after O’Neal’s exposure, Flint pointed out to me that the Church Committee had uncovered that Jerris Leonard—the head of Nixon’s Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and coincidentally the person who led the federal grand jury investigation of the December 4 raid—also headed a secret intelligence unit charged with gathering information on black militants and passing it on to law enforcement. He was supposed to be looking into civil rights violations against the Panthers, yet he had the responsibility to help the FBI and other law enforcement agencies monitor and destroy them. “Talk about the fox watching the chickens,” Flint said. “Jerris Leonard had no intention in 1970 of exposing the then secret COINTELPRO, no matter how large a role it had in the raid.”
The pieces were beginning to fit. “Now we know why the federal grand jury he led never uncovered O’Neal, and never examined the details of Fred’s death to see if it was murder. Probably because they were behind it,” I said, getting hotter as I realized they had successfully kept the FBI role in the raid hidden for four years.
“And worst of all, that sanctimonious bastard Leonard blamed the Panthers for both causing the raid and preventing the grand jury from learning the truth. I gotta admit he was clever,” Flint responded.
Things changed as the public and media came to understand the danger represented by clandestine government spying and dirty tricks. We benefited from that national momentum. We needed the help. We were working to uncover an outrage even bigger than the Plumbers;
a deliberate political killing, set in motion from FBI headquarters in Washington.
In May, three months after we learned about O’Neal, the NAACP Commission of Inquiry released their book-length report on the December 4 raid. It was aptly titled Search and Destroy, the name given to military missions in Vietnam to ferret out and kill Vietcong. The commission was cochaired by former attorney general Ramsey Clark and NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins. Law professor Herb Reid from Howard University wrote the report. The commission examined every bit of physical evidence and scrutinized all the prior testimony as well as the existing expert opinions. Where the facts were in dispute (for example, who fired the first shot, how Fred was killed, and whether or not he was drugged), they not only analyzed the existing expert opinions, but when they felt those were deficient, they retained experts of their own.
The commission ridiculed the federal grand jury report because it had been more critical of the Panthers for their violent rhetoric and for their refusal to trust the federal prosecutors leading the grand jury than it was of the police actions.
The commission understood the police were viewed skeptically in the black community and the issue of police abuse of citizens was much more important to blacks than to whites. They documented the reasons for, rather than criticized, the Panthers’ lack of trust of law enforcement. As a result, they gained the cooperation of the Panthers, and the survivors willingly testified before the commission. However, as the NAACP report explained, if federal prosecutors had really been interested in determining if criminal conduct, including murder, took place, they could have relied on the transcripts of the survivors’ testimony at the people’s inquest.
Search and Destroy noted, “The federal grand jury’s Report scarcely deals with the precise manner of Hampton’s death except to assume that Fred was killed by one of the bullets coming through the wall.” To the befuddlement of the NAACP commission, the feds were inexplicably not interested in learning how Fred died or who killed him.
In contrast, Search and Destroy began, “Those of us who want to love our country are not anxious to ask whether our police are capable of murder. So we do not ask. We do not dare concede the possibility.” Unlike the federal grand jury, the NAACP report delves directly into how Fred was killed.
Search and Destroy reached four conclusions about the raid. The first one was that the police fired all but one shot. This was largely conceded by the federal grand jury and supported by the findings of Robert Zimmers, the FBI’s firearms identification expert.
The second conclusion was that Officer Jones most likely fired the first shot in the hallway next to the front door. This was based on the shotgun impact hole and shotgun wads found outside and to the left of the living room door, which matched Jones’s shotgun and was where the raiders forced their way in. The commission concluded that Jones’s shot led to a second shot, by Sergeant Groth, through the front door and a third shot from Mark Clark, quite possibly after he had been mortally wounded. This sequence, they found, best fit the angles of Groth’s and Clark’s shots through the front door, because Groth’s shot was fired as the door was opening and Clark’s after it was opened further.
The commission’s third and most dramatic conclusion was:
The shots in Hampton’s head, their closeness to each other, and their proximity to the shoulder wound indicate they were fired by persons who could see their target. If Hampton could be seen and was then shot it was likely that Johnson and Truelock, if on the same bed, could also be seen and shot. It is therefore probable either that Fred Hampton was shot after the occupants were removed from the room by an officer or officers who could see his prostrate body on the bed, or that Hampton was deliberately selected as the sole target…. The death of Fred Hampton appears to the Commission to have been isolated from the killing of Mark Clark and the wounding of Brenda Harris on the one hand, and from the wounding of Ronald Satchel, Verlina Brewer, and Blair Anderson on the other. The Commission has concluded that there is probable cause to believe that Fred Hampton was murdered—that he was shot by an officer or officers who could see his prostrate body lying on the bed.
The fourth finding was, “The Commission has been unable to determine whether Hampton was drugged at the time of his murder, but considers it more probable than not that he was.” After an exhaustive analysis of all the pathologists’ reports and testimony, the commission found the most reliable report was done by Eleanor Berman, the former Cook County Deputy Coroner retained by PLO. They also acknowledged that discrepancies in the handling of the blood and the first autopsy made it more difficult to reach a definitive conclusion.
Search and Destroy concludes, “Summary execution is not acceptable and summary punishment cannot be condoned.”
Finally, they named it. Not murder or assassination (killing for a political purpose) but summary execution, an alternative but accurate description of what happened. “They laid it out,” I said to Flint after I finished the report. “It took them more than two years, but they got it.”
“I’d like to wave this in Perry’s face,” Flint answered. “He won’t even let us suggest Fred’s death was deliberate. I hope the Seventh Circuit reads this before it decides our appeal. Better yet, I’d like to get the report into evidence after they’ve ordered Perry off our case.
Search and Destroy was widely quoted in the Chicago papers. Its condemnation of Hanrahan and the raid, as well as its finding of summary execution reignited the public’s, and in particular the black community’s, skepticism about the police version. Roy Wilkins, Ramsey Clark, and Jesse Jackson, as well as some white leaders, called for reopening a federal criminal investigation.