The Savage City (43 page)

Dhoruba was on that hit list, but he had gone underground. The rumor in the street—and in the files of the NYPD and the FBI—was that he was in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver. In truth, Dhoruba and
Jamal Joseph had snuck back into the United States from Canada; they were hiding out in the Bronx, moving from Panther pad to Panther pad—and redoubling their studies of the philosophy and lifestyle of the urban underground.

Much of what they knew came from reading Carlos Marighella's
Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla
. As a leader of National Liberation Action (ALN), a Brazilian guerrilla organization fighting the military dictatorship in Brazil, Marighella offered practical advice on how to live as an urban revolutionary:

Dhoruba and his crew felt they were under the gun on two fronts: in the war between law enforcement and the black liberation movement, and in the war between the East and West Coast Panthers.

Revenge was the talk of the day. The New York Panthers wanted revenge for the murder of Robert Webb, but that wasn't the only issue that had gotten under their skin. Adding insult to injury, the Huey Newton faction of the party had set up shop in New York. They'd moved the
Black Panther
publication offices to an office in Corona, Queens, and soon the paper was selling four times as many issues in New York as in any other city in the United States, including the Bay Area. And yet none of the proceeds went to the New York operation. Ever since Newton had purged the New York chapter, the city had become nothing more than a source of plunder for the Central Committee—a flagrant act of financial buggery that wasn't going down easy with the brothers from the block.

On the evening of April 17—five weeks after Webb's shooting—Dhoruba, Jamal Joseph, and a handful of others met at a secret location in the Bronx. They had already decided to retaliate by burning down the
Black Panther
's office and distribution center on Northern Boulevard in Queens. After staking out the location, they decided to strike at night. After renting a U-Haul truck and loading it with handguns, rifles, a machine gun, and cans of gasoline, Dhoruba and five others piled into the truck around 10:00
P.M.
and drove across the Whitestone Bridge and into Queens.

Among the Panther faithful, the split between the Newton and Cleaver factions of the party had created a mood of foreboding. The Panther Twenty-one trial had been going on for nearly two years, and efforts to rally support for the prisoners had been scuttled by dissension within the party. The Central Committee in Oakland had abandoned and excoriated the defendants, who had been locked up without bail and driven virtually insane by an interminable legal process. Newton had forbidden any mention of the group in the pages of the party's own newspaper. They had been demonized.

As the split began to take shape, many Panthers were caught in the middle. One was a young Panther named William “B.J.” Johnson, who had joined the Jamaica, Queens, branch and then transferred to Corona, Queens, to work on distributing the
Black Panther
. B.J. was a former heroin dealer from Brooklyn who became involved in the Panthers' Drug Relief Program, which involved recruiting members who were in rehab and offering them a path to getting clean by working for the party.

At the Corona branch, Johnson became close to Sam Napier, the
Panther
's national distribution manager. Napier had come to Corona from Oakland, where he'd known Newton and Hilliard since the party's early days in the Bay Area. Napier was well liked by those who knew him, but his strong connections to the California Panthers made him a visible symbol of the Newton faction in New York—not a comfortable position as tensions mounted.

Johnson was a rank-and-file member of the party; he did not see himself as being affiliated with any faction, Newton or Cleaver. But as feelings became more heated, and Panthers started killing other Panthers, neutrality was not an option. Remembered B.J.:

On the night of April 17, Johnson and a fellow Panther named Omar were in Manhattan distributing copies of the paper. From a pay phone, Johnson called Sam Napier, who told them, “Get your ass back to the office.” There had been threats against the office all week, and Napier was concerned that there were no security guards on the premises.

Johnson and Omar were driving back to the distribution center when they heard fire trucks behind them. They pulled their van over to the side of the street and let the trucks pass. As they approached the distribution center, there was smoke billowing from what they thought was a storefront next to the office. Then they got closer and saw what was happening. “Oh, shit!” B.J. cried. “It's the office. We been hit!” They pulled over and jumped out.

As Johnson knew, Napier was in the office—along with a woman who was babysitting the child of a Panther secretary. He ran into an apartment building next to the Panther office, headed down to the basement, and crossed over to the distribution center building. In a closet on the ground floor he found the woman tied up with tape over her mouth. When Johnson pulled off the tape, the woman exclaimed, “The baby! Get the baby. It's in the backyard!” He ran into the yard, and sure enough there was a baby crawling around in the dirt. He
grabbed the child, handed it to the woman, and the three of them hurried out of the burning building. B.J. remembered:

When Johnson, the woman, and the baby arrived back on the street in front of the building, the situation was chaotic. There were at least four fire trucks, all of them spraying water. A dozen police cars had arrived on the scene from different directions, lights flashing and sirens blaring. At one point, Johnson broke away to call Oakland and tell them what had happened. “I need to talk to someone in charge,” he said to whoever answered the phone.

“That's me,” said the person. “I'm the officer of the day.”

“Well,” responded B.J., “I need someone higher than you. The shit done hit the fan out here. East Coast distribution is on fire. I need to talk with somebody else.”

“Hold on, brother.” The person handed the phone to someone who sounded like David Hilliard. Johnson explained the situation. “I told them I got the sister and I got the baby out. I said, ‘The place is on fire, it's burning up.' I told them if Sam was in there he's a goner and we're gettin' ready to get out of here.” That's when Hilliard told Johnson he needed to let the fire marshal know that Sam was in the basement. “He might be trapped down there,” said Hilliard.

Johnson's instinct was to flee the scene before the police locked him up as a material witness, but he was a good soldier. He approached the firemen and told them to check the basement. They did—and, sure enough, Sam Napier's bullet-riddled body was found smoldering in the embers.

B.J. Johnson was arrested and held in custody for nearly a week, interrogated by Chief of Detectives Albert J. Seedman. He stalled the police as long as he could before relenting and telling them about the Panther split. Eventually the cops came across other leads and let Johnson go.

The details of the Napier murder spread like a malodorous breeze through the Panther universe; the callousness of the killing was a por
tent of things to come. Napier had been tied up, then shot in the back of the head and set on fire. One former Panther noted that his body “was found charred beyond recognition.” The supervisory fire marshal investigating the blaze told the
Daily News
that “Mister Napier's eyes had been bound shut with tape and his body appeared to have been set afire with flammable liquid.” He said the dead Panther had been shot four times.

To Dhoruba, the Napier killing was part of a chain reaction, the tragic consequence of a dirty war that made his death seem almost inevitable. In a sense, Napier had died for the sins of Huey P. Newton. Dhoruba and six New York Panthers had stormed the office, guns drawn. Napier was bound and gagged, but it was never the plan for him to be executed. That occurred when Irving “Butch” Mason, one of the group, decided to shoot Napier in the back of the head after he was taken to the basement. Dhoruba remembered:

After the Napier killing, Dhoruba and Jamal Joseph went deeper underground. They stockpiled weapons, stayed indoors for days on end, and relied on a sprawling cadre of supporters in the urban underground.

Followers of the Panthers knew that the Napier killing was fallout from what was routinely referred to as “the split,” but if they knew who the perpetrators were, they kept their mouths shut. Most people, including law enforcement, still believed that Dhoruba was in Algeria, a ruse that was unknowingly aided and abetted by the
New York Times
.

Since Dhoruba, Jamal, and Cetewayo had been demonized by Newton for skipping bail in the Panther Twenty-one trial, Dhoruba felt the need to explain the reasoning behind his actions. He penned a letter to the
Times,
which he submitted for publication a few days after he and Cetewayo first went underground, arranging to have it postmarked by way of Algeria. The paper sat on the letter for three months before finally printing it on the editorial page on May 12, three and a half weeks after the Napier killing. Printed under the headline “A Black Panther Speaks,” the article was accompanied by an explanatory note that claimed the author “wrote this from Algeria.”

Along with denouncing the trial and prosecution as fraudulent, Dhoruba explained how fundamental differences between the New York Panthers and “the revisionist clique of west coast pimps headed by Huey P. Newton” had threatened to derail the revolution. He criticized the policies of the Central Committee, which seemed more devoted to “survival programs” than revolution, and personally called out Newton for living in a plush penthouse apartment all at the expense of “the people's struggle.”

There were those in the movement who felt that Dhoruba had gone off the reservation and become a danger to society. But one thing he couldn't be accused of was abandoning his vision. While Huey P. Newton spent his time socializing with starlets and appearing on radio and TV,
Dhoruba was underground, living off the land, stockpiling weapons, and plotting revolution.

 

ON MAY 12,
1971, a verdict was finally delivered in the Panther Twenty-one conspiracy trial. After two years and two million dollars—the most expensive trial in the history of New York State—the jury deliberated a mere ninety minutes before finding the defendants not guilty on all charges. Reading the verdict aloud required the foreman to repeat the phrase “not guilty” one hundred and fifty-six times. Dhoruba and Cetewayo were found not guilty in absentia.