American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [34]
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,