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the supreme court that “the FBI knew all along that there were four [other] men involved in the killing and that two of the men convicted were innocent.” The FBI refused to release its findings about Malcolm’s assassination to the court. Kunstler also noted rumors, never confirmed, that Reuben Francis had recently resurfaced “around his old haunts spending large sums of money he allegedly received from the FBI.” Another affidavit was also submitted by Benjamin Goodman (then Ben Karim), who affirmed that “at no time did I see the faces of Butler or Johnson whom I knew well, and would have been sure to notice.”

On November 1, 1978, Justice Harold J. Rothwax of the state supreme court denied the motion to set aside the 1966 convictions of Butler and Johnson. The information in the affidavit might have exonerated those two men while identifying four others who, Hayer said, were guilty. However, the judge deemed the document insufficient to grant a new trial. Throughout 1978 and 1979 civil rights groups took up the Butler-Johnson case, first petitioning the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, requesting an investigation into Malcolm X’s death. The petition charged, “The ‘official version’ has it that Malcolm X was the victim of a Muslim vendetta. Many unanswered questions and unexplained events that predate the assassination . . . do not support the official version’ at all.” Signatories of the petition included Ossie Davis, African Methodist Episcopal bishop H. H. Brookins, California state assemblywoman Maxine Waters, and Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party. Despite the campaign’s efforts, no congressional hearings were held.

Norman Butler was paroled in 1985 and Thomas Johnson received parole in 1987. For decades both men agitated to clear their names. Johnson, who had changed his name to Khalil Islam, died on August 4, 2009. Butler changed his name to Muhammad Abdul Aziz, and in the early 1990s was employed as a supportive services counselor at a Harlem drug rehabilitation clinic. In 1998, Aziz briefly served as security chief for Harlem Mosque No. 7. Beginning in 1990, Hayer was incarcerated part-time at the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Manhattan, where he was confined for a total of twelve hours per week on weekends. After seventeen unsuccessful attempts, Hayer was finally granted full parole in April 2010. Hayer told the parole board, “I’ve had a lot of time . . . to think about [Malcolm X’s murder] . . . I understand a lot better the dynamics of movements . . . and conflicts that can come up, but I have deep regrets about my participation in that.” It was an oddly impersonal mea culpa, an apology without actually articulating the crime he had committed. Hayer’s parole provoked a negative response from the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, which announced at a press conference that Hayer’s crimes were too serious to permit his release.

Other than Talmadge Hayer, the alleged assassins of Malcolm X, according to Hayer’s affidavit, continued their lives in the Nation of Islam as before. The senior member of the crew, Newark mosque administrator Benjamin Thomas, was killed in 1986, at age forty-eight. Leon Davis lived on in Paterson, New Jersey, employed at an electronics factory there; he continued his affiliation with the Nation and the FOI for decades. Businessman Wilbur McKinley also continued to be associated with the Newark mosque.

Alleged murderer Willie Bradley went into a life of crime. On April 11, 1968, the Livingston National Bank of Livingston, New Jersey, was robbed by three masked men brandishing three handguns and one sawed-off shotgun. They escaped with over $12,500. The following year Bradley and a second man, James Moore, were charged with the bank robbery and were brought to trial. Bradley, however, received privileged treatment, and he retained his own attorney separate from Moore. The charges against him were ultimately dismissed; meanwhile, after a first trial ending in a hung jury, Moore was convicted in a second trial.

Bradley’s special treatment by the criminal justice system