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The Black Panther Party was fucking *crawling* with cops…& many of them got themselves *IN CHARGE OF* identifying infiltrators & "disciplining" them…maybe if more party leaders opposed patriarchal violence instead of just carrying it out, things might have turned out different
excerpts on infiltration of the Black Panthers by the fbi (political police)
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"It is impossible to establish with any precision the overall number of police operatives infesting the Party’s forty-three chapters, since the records of local departments have generally proven even less accessible than those of the FBI.
Extrapolating from the fact that a half-dozen BOSS undercover men are known to have infiltrated the BPP in New York alone, however, it may be reasonably assumed that there were at least one hundred.
Taken in combination with their federal counterparts, then, a working estimate might be that about ten percent of the BPP’s total membership consisted of “law enforcement personnel” by the end of 1969.
Bobby Seale and other Panther leaders had become acutely aware of this problem by November 1968, and set out to purge suspected infiltrators.
A significant difficulty with this procedure was that the task of identifying those to be expelled fell mainly upon security units formed within each chapter, a number of which were themselves headed by FBI or police operatives.
Examples include the FBI’s William O’Neal, who not only ran the Panther security team but served as Fred Hampton’s personal bodyguard in Chicago; BOSS detective Ralph White, who, along with a civilian operative called Shaun Dubonnet (William Fletcher),
established “spy hunting” units within the New York chapter; and Melvin “Cotton” Smith, who was in charge of security for the LA chapter.
The result was that a number of legitimate Panthers were bad-jacketed as “snitches and provocateurs,” and summarily ejected, while the infiltrators themselves became even more entrenched.
Worse, as repression of the Party intensified on all fronts over the next year, such operatives were perfectly positioned to advocate, and in some cases to implement, ever more draconian means of combating infiltration.
O’Neal, for instance, is known to have employed a bullwhip in conducting interrogations of “suspected informers,” and built an electric chair with which to intimidate his victims.
To all appearances, only the intervention of Fred Hampton, who had been incarcerated while most of the brutality was going on, prevented O’Neal from setting one or more “deterrent examples” with his device.
Where all this led became obvious in May 1969 when George Sams, a self-styled “Party security expert,” showed up in New Haven, Connecticut, to assist the local BPP chapter in “ridding itself of spies.”
Sams proceeded to interrogate a young recruit named Alex Rackley at great length and under severe torture—the victim was chained to a bed for a week, and repeatedly scalded with boiling water—before killing him and enlisting several chapter members to help dispose of the body.
Then, on August 21, a dozen Panthers, including not only Sams, but Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins (widow of slain LA Panther leader Jon Huggins), western regional Field Marshal Landon Williams & New Haven chapter head Warren Kimbro, were indicted for conspiring in Rackley’s murder.
It turned out that Sams...had been retained by the FBI as early as 1967, first to infiltrate Stokely Carmichael’s faction of SNCC and thence the BPP.
Once apprehended, the killer quickly entered a guilty plea—he was pardoned after serving four years of his resulting life sentence—and became the state’s star witness against Seale, Huggins and Kimbro, a matter which led to the latter’s also being sentenced to a life behind bars.
Seale and Huggins were not convicted, although another New Haven Panther leader, Lonnie McLucas, was tried separately, found guilty of complicity in Rackley’s death, and sentenced to fifteen years.
Charges against Williams and the others of the “New Haven 14” were eventually dropped, but not until May 1971, after they’d spent nearly three years in jail.
Meanwhile, in April 1970, seventeen Baltimore Panthers, along with Arthur Turco, a white lawyer, were accused of murder conspiracy in the death of a suspected police infiltrator named Eugene Anderson.
Among those arrested were virtually the entire Baltimore leadership cadre.
Among those arrested were virtually the entire Baltimore leadership cadre.
Also charged was Don Cox, the Party’s east coast Field Marshall, who evaded arrest by joining exiled Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver’s International Section in Algeria (unlike Cleaver, Cox never returned to the U.S., and now resides in southern France).
Although there were serious questions as to whether the remains upon which the case was based were even Anderson’s, local authorities took the “Baltimore 18” to trial after meeting with Attorney General John Mitchell and his Civil Rights Division head, Jerris Leonard,
as well as FBI officials. The case finally dissolved when it was revealed that the state’s key “participant witnesses”—Mahoney Kebe, Donald Vaughn and Arnold Loney—were not only the likely killers, but FBI operatives inserted into the Baltimore BPP chapter.
Indeed, Kebe, the supposed “star” of the group, was so obviously lying under oath that the trial judge ordered him removed from the witness stand and his testimony stricken from the record.
Charges were then withdrawn, with the District Attorney publicly admitting that there had never been a genuine evidentiary basis for the case and that his own office had indulged in what he called “improper prosecution tactics.”
Nevertheless, those accused, like several of those accused in the Rackley case, had already been held for months in jail without bond while their chapter disintegrated.
And, as in the Rackley case, the FBI’s media manipulators had in the interim availed themselves enthusiastically of yet another Bureau-created opportunity to paint the Panthers as little more than a “gang of vicious thugs.”
There are several other instances, notably those involving the deaths of Fred Bennett and Jimmy Carr in California during the early '70s, in which bona fide Party members may have been killed because they were suspected of being FBI operatives.
Given the otherwise lethal nature of Party factionalism fostered and fueled by COINTELPRO during those years, however, it is difficult to determine whether such suspicions really constituted the motive underlying their murders.
If so, the questions remain open as whether the victims were bad-jacketed by the Bureau for purposes of bringing about their physical elimination and, in Bennett’s case, whether the killer or killers were not themselves federal operatives."
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