Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [290]
The police were well aware that New Jersey Muslims might have been involved in the murder. MMI guards had mentioned the presence of Linwood Cathcart in the Grand Ballroom, and he was interviewed by the NYPD on March 25, 1965; Robert 16X Gray, a member of the Newark mosque, had already been interviewed three days earlier. However, the police did not systematically investigate Hayer’s ties to the Newark mosque, or endeavor to explain how he might have hooked up with Butler and Johnson, two Harlem-based NOI officers more senior than himself. They apparently did not consider that NOI protocol would never have allowed enforcers from the Harlem mosque to murder Malcolm in broad daylight, because such men almost certainly would have been recognized by many in the crowd. The NYPD file for Joseph Gravitt is empty, indicating perhaps that any evidence obtained from the Mosque No. 7 captain had been destroyed years ago.
Within Malcolm’s organizations, suspicion quickly rose over the truth of the NYPD’s assertion, and murmurs could be heard about the possibility of an inside job. Since the day of the murder, some inside the MMI had started to revise their estimation of Reuben X Francis as the day’s hero, for shooting Talmadge Hayer. If the NYPD had been asked to relocate their detail outside the Audubon to a location several blocks away, there were only two individuals, other than Malcolm, who had the authority to negotiate a pullback: James 67X and Reuben. In addition, many began to wonder why Charles X Blackwell and Robert 35X Smith had been assigned to guard Malcolm that day when neither man had much experience in a forward defensive position, and when a usual rostrum guard, William 64X George, was present but assigned to guard the door. Reuben’s position as Malcolm’s head of security, responsible for both communicating with the police and arranging Malcolm’s guard detail, had some brothers believing that he might have been involved in the killing.
Gerry Fulcher was convinced that Reuben Francis “was the guy. He organized it. And he wanted to get out of Dodge when he knew things were going to get hot. It would come back to him.” The key question for Fulcher was whether Francis was an informant for either the FBI or the NYPD. If Francis had been involved, Fulcher believes, “he had to have contacts within the agency [FBI], or with our office.” But Francis’s role remains uncertain; even the police records are unclear because BOSS and the FBI rarely shared important information about undercover operatives. “The last thing the FBI would ever tell BOSS,” Fulcher said, “is that Francis was an informant.”
Francis began telling others that things were too hot to stay in New York. Released for bail of $10,000, he began expressing fears that New York district attorneys intended to prosecute him for the Hayer shooting, so he decided to flee the country. Anas Luqman, who had also been dragged in by police and then released, thought this made sense, and the two men hatched a plot to drive to the Mexican border and hide out in the desert. Francis recruited three other men with NOI connections who, for different reasons, also wanted to leave the United States. Luqman insisted that one of them, a seventeen-year-old boy, be left behind. “So we started driving,” Luqman recalled more than forty years later, and after several days on the road the group crossed the border.
Whether or not Malcolm’s own men played a role in his death, nearly all Malcolmites were convinced that law enforcement and the U.S. government were extensively involved in the murder. Peter Bailey, for example, charged in a 1968 interview that the NYPD and the FBI “knew that brother Malcolm’s destiny was assigned for assassination.” Bailey believed that both Thomas Johnson and Norman Butler were innocent. Although he himself did not witness the shooting—he was waiting downstairs for the arrival of Reverend Galamison—he developed a strong theory on how the assassination had occurred.