American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [35]
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,