Urban Unrest

20 November 2006 | Pacifica, Politics | Ernesto Aguilar

An update for listeners. Interviews for the national program coordinator role have concluded. Shortly a decision will be made on this issue. Great candidates, and a great process, have made this a tough decision.

The San Francisco Weekly ran an important piece this week on continued efforts by California police to prosecute now aging members of the Black Panther Party for decades-old crimes. The writing discusses COINTELPRO, the work of the FBI, and the feelings of Panthers today to police use of the Patriot Act and other tools to brand 1960s’ radicals as domestic terrorists. I expect the only place this piece could run is a place like this. Check it out:

From sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly 2006-11-15
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Echoes of the Revolution
The struggle between Bay Area law enforcement and the Black Panthers is still going on after 35 years

By Martin Kuz

Five black men strode into the Ingleside Police Station at 9:40 p.m. on Aug. 29, 1971. Sgt. John Young, who worked at a desk near the station’s visitor window, stepped toward the bulletproof glass to ask if they needed help. One man jammed a 12-gauge shotgun in the window’s speaking hole and fired.

The buckshot caught Young high in the chest, punching him to the floor. A few feet away, office clerk Nina Lipney sat typing while listening to a Dictaphone, her back to the glass. Though her headphones dulled the gun’s roar, she swiveled at the noise. The move likely saved her life. Instead of the gunman’s second shot hitting her square in the back, two pellets ripped into her left arm. She dropped to her knees and crawled to safety behind a wooden filing cabinet.

Officer Jim Nance, the third person in the station and seated at a desk behind Young’s, dove to the floor when he heard the blasts. As seven or eight more shots raked the office, Nance snaked over to the wounded sergeant. His breathing fast and shallow, his chest a bloody void, Young gasped his final words: “Help me.”

Nance dragged him away from the window as the intruders, seeking access to the squad room, pumped 10 shots into the glass and an armored door. When neither gave way, the men fled, running behind the building and squeezing through a hole they had cut in a chain-link fence.

The fence separated the station property from the Ocean Avenue on-ramp leading to northbound Highway 280. A blue Chevelle and a beige sedan sat idling on the ramp’s shoulder. The men climbed in and the drivers punched the gas, streaking the asphalt with tread marks before the cars slipped into traffic.

Officer Ray Shine arrived at the station at 11 p.m. for his regular shift that Sunday night. Unaware of the attack, he saw the parking lot choked with squad cars, their lights aglow. Officers carrying shotguns patrolled the grounds. Reporters milled outside the building’s front doors.

Shine had graduated from the Police Academy a week earlier. Assigned to Ingleside, he braced for the ostracism of veteran officers, who habitually treated rookies as “less than garbage.” The 51-year-old Young, known to most as Jack, proved the exception. A member of the force since 1949, he offered his hand, welcoming Shine to the SFPD.

Lean and bald, with an open, almond-shaped face, Young bore a reputation for decency that preceded his promotion to sergeant a year before his murder. The San Francisco native and Navy veteran worked as an aide to Chief Thomas Cahill for 12 years. As part of his duties, he assisted ex-cons in their search for a steady paycheck or a place to live, easing their re-entry to the outside. Married but childless, he also served as a counselor at a Sonoma center for delinquent boys, steering them away from further trouble.

Possessed of a civility seldom ascribed to cops of any era, much less during the 1960s and ’70s, Young earned the in-house sobriquet “St. Francis of San Francisco.” His murder roused collective anger in the ranks. “Guys were pissed because Jack was a truly good guy,” says Shine, who retired three years ago. “He was the mother hen of the station.”

In death, he represented the latest police casualty in the seething struggle between law enforcement and New Left radicals. An SFPD lieutenant, comparing Young’s murder to similar cop killings in New York and Philadelphia, considered him a victim of “the revolutionary conspiracy.” The details of the assault suggested an intricate plot with as many as a dozen players.

A dark-haired white woman wearing a blond wig and glasses walked into the station an hour before the shooting to report losing her purse. A witness saw her click a flashlight on and off before entering — possibly to signal an unseen accomplice. (Police later learned that the woman provided a bogus name and personal details in her report.)

Soon after she departed, the station received calls about a bomb detonating at a bank in Stonestown. Investigators described the explosion as a ploy to empty the station; the response of officers to the scene left Young, Lipney, and Nance alone in the building. The five men showed up 20 minutes later, and the abruptness of their attack gave Lipney and Nance only a glimpse of them. A lack of physical evidence, save for ejected shotgun shells, further bedeviled detectives.

The Ingleside shooting occurred eight days after San Quentin prison guards gunned down “Soledad Brother” George Jackson during a botched breakout attempt. Before trying to escape, Jackson, field marshal for the Black Panther Party, incited a bloody cell-block riot that killed three guards and two inmates. His death provoked vows of revenge from the Panthers and a splinter faction, the Black Liberation Army.

Authorities suspected the BLA in a series of police ambushes from Los Angeles to New York, despite a membership of fewer than 100. In the wake of Young’s murder, the Chronicle and Examiner received identical letters signed by the BLA. The group boasted about the siege of the “Ingleside Pig Sty” and called it “one political consequence for the recent intolerable assassination of Comrade George L. Jackson.”

Yet 35 years later, with the black power revolution long since dissipated, it is former Panthers and BLA members who remain shadowed by the events of Aug. 29, 1971. This summer, state and federal authorities delving into Young’s murder served DNA warrants on some two dozen people, among them five men identified as potential suspects by police in 1973. The collecting of mouth swabs marked the most recent turn in what has evolved into an investigation without end. In 2005, state prosecutors convened a pair of grand juries in San Francisco to examine the case, two years after federal prosecutors impaneled one of their own. None of those gambits yielded clues that led to arrests.

In fact, since reopening the Young case in 2002, authorities have succeeded primarily in boosting the ex-Panthers’ profile. After spending several weeks in county lockup last year for refusing to testify before either grand jury, the five men emerged as a minor cause celèbre in activist circles. They count actor Danny Glover and Harvard professor Charles Ogletree as advocates, and travel across the country to speak out against the investigation.

To its targets and their supporters, the ongoing probe evokes the specter of COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous FBI campaign to dismantle dissident groups by any means necessary. Under that program, the five men allege, San Francisco homicide detectives were complicit in torturing two of them in 1973 to extract false confessions in the Young investigation. Now, the graying ex-Panthers contend, authorities are exploiting the Patriot Act to pursue the case, recasting the radicals of the past as domestic terrorists.

In early 2003, three men appeared on the doorstep of John Bowman’s house in Oklahoma City. Two of them he had never seen before. The third he had hoped to never see again.

“Do you remember me?” Frank McCoy asked.

Bowman stared in disbelief. He recognized McCoy as one of two SFPD detectives who grilled him all those years ago about Sgt. John Young’s murder. There could be no forgetting.

McCoy wanted to discuss the Ingleside shooting and Bowman’s days with the Black Panthers. Recovering from his initial shock, Bowman declined to answer questions and invited the trio to leave.

A social program developer and father of two, Bowman, 58, speaks in a slow baritone deepened by his barrel-chested build. The sight of McCoy reminded him that his past devotion to the Panthers shades the present. “Because of that commitment that I made in 1967, I’m still being persecuted and punished,” Bowman said in a radio interview last year.

Within a few weeks of McCoy accosting him, he received a summons to appear at a federal grand jury hearing in San Francisco. Authorities delivered subpoenas to more than 20 people in all, including at least four of Bowman’s ex-Panther cohorts: Richard Brown, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones, and Harold Taylor. Each endured drop-ins from McCoy or his old police partner, Ed Erdelatz, the detectives who originally probed Young’s killing.

Their sleuthing efforts stalled in 1976, after a Superior Court judge nixed murder charges against Bowman, Taylor, and Ruben Scott, another former Panther. The file gathered dust for the next quarter century, until the FBI’s San Francisco office, working with federal prosecutors, revived the investigation sometime in 2002. The decision coincided with the Department of Justice’s expanding prosecution of political crimes, both recent and vintage, in the name of homeland security.

FBI officials tapped Erdelatz and McCoy to resume digging into the Young case. Since neither still held a police badge, the agency in effect deputized them for the job. At the time, Erdelatz worked as an investigator for the District Attorney’s Office in Alameda County, a job he quit last year. McCoy apparently had settled into retirement. (Erdelatz did not respond to SF Weekly’s interview requests; McCoy could not be reached for comment.) Their surprise visits exhumed dark memories for Bowman and his one-time Panther brethren.

Bowman, born and raised in the Fillmore, joined the party in 1967, a year after Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale unveiled their Ten Point Program, black berets, and bandoliers. Inspired by the group’s message of self-reliance, Bowman worked as a program organizer, setting up free medical clinics and advocating tenants’ rights. As he gained experience, he traveled to the party’s chapters in Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C., assisting with similar projects.

Like Bowman, Brown grew up in the Fillmore and worked as a Panther organizer, running a jobs program for low-income residents. In 1968, the two men also briefly landed in jail together, in connection with a police shooting near the Hall of Justice.

The incident occurred after officers stopped one of the group’s newspaper delivery trucks, following a report that three of the eight men in the vehicle robbed a gas station. When the truck pulled over, a man inside opened fire, wounding three cops. Police soon released Bowman, Brown, and three others, clearing them of all charges.

The Panthers’ militant rhetoric and trappings — gun-toting members once barged into the California Assembly to protest a proposed ban on carrying firearms in public — inevitably drew the SFPD’s scrutiny. In particular, the party clashed with the tactical squad, a unit that gained national notoriety in 1968 during a student strike at San Francisco State, clubbing demonstrators who sought creation of a black studies program.

Panthers accused the tac squad of subjecting them to perpetual coercion: illegal raids on homes and party offices, false arrests, jailhouse beatings. Tired of the bullying, Bowman left San Francisco for Los Angeles in 1971. But the change of ocean views aside, he again wound up in handcuffs, along with fellow Panther organizers Boudreaux and Taylor.

In September 1971, only days after the Ingleside shooting, Los Angeles police stopped a car carrying the threesome. The precise motive for pulling them over remains unclear. Regardless, moments later, officers pumped dozens of rounds into the vehicle, injuring the men.

For returning fire, the men faced charges of assault with intent to kill. But the case against them appeared as full of holes as the bullet-riddled car: A judge tossed the charges against Bowman and Boudreaux, while a jury acquitted Taylor.

Three years passed between their arrests and respective legal victories, a delay that resulted, in part, from the men skipping bail, police records indicate. Georgia authorities caught up with Boudreaux outside Atlanta in 1973, arresting him and Hank Jones, a one-time Panther coordinator in the Bay Area, on a bank robbery rap.

The same year in New Orleans, Bowman and Taylor were among 15 purported members of the Black Liberation Army collared on a panoply of murder, robbery, and drug charges. In directing the sting, the FBI alerted homicide detectives in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, cities with recent cop killings allegedly carried out by the BLA. Erdelatz and McCoy hopped a flight to the Big Easy.

New Orleans police shuttled Bowman and Taylor to jail and placed them in separate holding cells. Taylor recognized one of the men in his cage as Ruben Scott, a BLA member and former Panther. He lay trembling in the fetal position, his clothes soaked and reeking.

“They’d urinated on him and they’d beaten him,” Taylor said during a public forum earlier this year.* (See footnote.) Officers soon fetched Taylor from the cell and walked him toward an interview room. “They told me if I didn’t cooperate with them, I was going to get what Ruben got.”

Taylor asserts that officers forced him to strip, then cuffed his hands and ankles to a chair. Using their fists and blunt objects — a lead pipe wrapped in leather, a massive police ledger — they began hitting him in the neck, shoulders, stomach, and legs. They spared his face to avoid inflicting bruises or cuts that could arouse suspicion of abuse in court.

Taylor lost sense of time. When the cops finally relented, they told him to dress and left the room. Erdelatz and McCoy entered.

The public file on the Young case, thinned by records gone missing over the years, offers scant clues about why the detectives considered Taylor — or anyone else — a suspect in the murder before the BLA roundup in New Orleans. But he contends that, as they grilled him about the details of the Ingleside attack and the identities of those involved, he refused to talk. After 15 minutes of questions and no answers, Erdelatz and McCoy walked out, giving way to the New Orleans officers — and another beating, Taylor claims.

The brutality intensified over the next three days, according to Taylor and Bowman, who also faced questions about Young’s murder. Both accuse police of a litany of sadistic acts: kicking them unconscious, draping thick blankets drenched in boiling water over their heads, shocking their genitals with cattle prods.

Taylor and Bowman, along with Scott, whom authorities suspected of taking part in the Ingleside attack and a double police slaying in New York earlier in the year, claim they heard each other’s screams. Between the episodes of violence, Erdelatz and McCoy persisted with their interrogations.

The two detectives were renowned within the SFPD for an ability to crack tough cases. In 1972, their work on a Chinatown slaying netted a murder conviction against a 19-year-old man, a verdict that police officials called crucial in quelling the district’s gang wars.

(Four years later, however, the Examiner ran a three-part series on the case that suggested the investigators fabricated evidence and threatened a key witness to secure his testimony. Erdelatz and McCoy sued the paper for libel and won a $4.56 million award; the California Supreme Court later voided the judgment.)

Deprived of water, food, and sleep for 72 hours, Taylor alleged, he finally succumbed, his willpower collapsing. “Whatever you want me to say,” he recalled telling Erdelatz and McCoy, “I will say it.” Likewise, Bowman and Scott acquiesced, and the trio’s statements supplied the detectives with their story line of the Ingleside attack.

In a memo sent to the FBI, the investigators, relying on “admissions obtained from Scott, Taylor, and Bowman,” fingered BLA member Herman Bell as the man who gunned down Young. Bell was a fugitive at the time, wanted in connection with the slayings of two New York cops in May 1971, three months before Young’s murder. (Captured in 1973 and convicted in the New York killings, Bell received a term of 25 years to life.)

The report states that Bowman acted as a lookout during the siege while Scott, Richard Brown, Hank Jones, and a fourth man entered the station with Bell. Taylor cut the chain-link fence that allowed the men access to the station property, according to the document, and Ray Boudreaux and another man drove the getaway cars. The memo also names two women who could be the blond-wigged brunette who visited the station an hour before the attack, and identifies a suspect in the “diversionary” bank bombing that emptied the squad room a short time later.

The document is dated Aug. 29, 1973 — the second anniversary of Young’s death. The same day, in a modest ceremony attended by his widow, Geraldine Young, city officials renamed the short street that leads to the Ingleside Police Station in honor of the fallen sergeant. She dedicated Sgt. John V. Young Lane “to law enforcement officers everywhere who risk their lives protecting the public.”

Yet if Erdelatz and McCoy believed they stitched together a strong case, it already had begun to unravel. Two days earlier, Bowman, Taylor, and Scott appeared before Magistrate Judge Robert Collins in New Orleans for their arraignment on a variety of charges. At the hearing, their public defender voiced concern that the detectives interrogated the men without first providing access to an attorney.

A concerned Collins reminded prosecutors that, with the defendants now arraigned, due process required authorities to notify the trio’s lawyer before questioning them. Absent from the hearing, Erdelatz and McCoy failed to heed that protocol. The next day, Aug. 28, they returned to the jail to interview the three men, court records show, eliciting their alleged admissions about the Ingleside assault — and violating their right to counsel.

Two years later, the gaffe would prompt a Superior Court judge in San Francisco to flush a murder indictment against Bowman, Taylor, and Scott. Judge Edward Cragen faulted prosecutors for failing to disclose to grand jurors the unlawful method by which the detectives wrung statements from Scott, the lead defendant.

A few months later, in February 1976, Cragen wrote a ruling that banned the use of Scott’s confession in California courts. The spiking of the statement, coupled with the scarcity of physical evidence, persuaded county prosecutors to shelve the Ingleside file.

Cragen’s decision resembled one made in 1974 by a Los Angeles judge, and together, the rulings seemed to virtually inoculate from prosecution those named as suspects in Erdelatz and McCoy’s memo. The earlier ruling occurred during a hearing related to the alleged shootout with L.A. police involving him, Boudreaux, and Jones in 1971. The judge found that authorities in New Orleans tortured Taylor to extract a false confession about what had induced officers to plug the trio’s car with bullets.

Unable to use the statement in court, prosecutors struggled to mount a case, and jurors found Taylor not guilty. Boudreaux and Jones saw their charges dropped.

But winning release from jail proved easier than finding freedom from the past. Following the dismissal of the Ingleside case in 1976, Taylor went home to Los Angeles to rebuild his life. Soon after he landed a job, he asserted, an FBI agent talked to his employer. The boss gave Taylor the heave.

The cycle repeated so many times that he switched coasts, settling in Florida. He earned for his family by working as a utility lineman, content to recede into middle-class obscurity.

Yet Taylor, 58, admitted the trauma of New Orleans lingers, afflicting body and psyche alike. He blames the jailhouse beatings for the chronic neck and back pain that forced him to retire early, and his ears still ring from the head blows he absorbed. A sense of peace eludes him. Early last year, he received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in San Francisco. Erdelatz and McCoy delivered it.

“In the back of my mind, I always thought, ‘This is never going to end. Sooner or later, I’ll see them again.’”

The same feeling of fatalism seized Ray Boudreaux on Sept. 11, 2001. Watching the Twin Towers atomize on TV, he realized that the relative tranquility of his post-Panther years would turn to ash. “Deep down in my heart,” he said, “I knew that someone was going to come visit me as soon as they could get it organized.”

A lanky Louisiana native whose nasal, tinny drawl betrays his roots, Boudreaux served two hitches in Vietnam as an Air Force policeman. He returned to the States for good in 1965 and drifted toward the Bay Area three years later, lured by the ideals and promise of the Panthers.

While working as a longshoreman, Boudreaux helped run one of the party’s breakfast programs in Oakland that delivered food to low-income families. He struck up a friendship and ideological kinship with Hank Jones, who acted as a liaison between the party and the Nation of Islam.

The two men survived their brushes with the law, including the purported shootout with Los Angeles police and their 1973 convictions for robbing a bank in a small town near Atlanta. The same resolve that steadied them during their Panther years carried them through last year’s back-to-back state grand juries. Both men, along with Brown, Bowman, and Taylor, refused to testify and wound up behind bars for contempt of court.

“I spent six weeks in San Francisco County Jail, and I’d spend six years if necessary,” said Jones, 71, a real estate appraiser who lives near Pasadena and about a mile from Boudreaux, an electrician with Los Angeles County. Last year, following their release, the five men founded the Committee for Defense of Human Rights. The advocacy group seeks to expose abuses committed through the grand jury process, in which witnesses must appear in court without an attorney.

“It’s the same secret procedures, the same violations of our human and constitutional rights” as during their Panther years, Jones said.

Amid the fallout from 9/11, the Patriot Act loosened the definition of terrorism as the Department of Homeland Security sought to tighten the nation’s safety measures. John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, herded the resources of federal law enforcement agencies to fight the war on terror. He stayed quieter about seeking to corral San Francisco’s terrorists of yore, the radical activists of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era.

In 2002, while reheating the Ingleside probe, federal and state authorities pulled another file out of deep freeze. In February 1970, 18 months before Sgt. Young’s murder, a bomb exploded at the Park Police Station, killing one officer and injuring nine. Then as now, authorities suspected the Weather Underground of carrying out the plot, and in 2003, federal prosecutors convened a grand jury.

Both the Ingleside and Park station cases raised questions from legal observers about what, if any, new evidence authorities unearthed to justify impaneling a grand jury. Few answers have surfaced in either probe. Part of the problem derives from the unwillingness of authorities to grant full immunity to witnesses in exchange for testimony. In the case of the ex-Panthers called before the grand jury, prosecutors sought to reserve the right to indict them in particular circumstances.

“That isn’t immunity,” says defense attorney Richard Mazer, who represents Brown. “That’s a ploy.”

Meanwhile, the vast scope of the grand jury questions posed to the former Panthers resemble the net-casting approach of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with witnesses asked if they’ve ever known any of dozens of people. According to court records, other queries were so broad as to be round: “Between 1969 and 1973, had you heard of a group or organization or entity known as the Black Liberation Army?”

“At this point,” says defense lawyer John Philipsborn, who represents Jones, “it appears [authorities] are on a fishing expedition.”

The serving of DNA warrants on more than 20 people this summer may or may not portend a new lead in the case — authorities aren’t talking. The FBI agent handling the Young murder probe, Joseph Engler, declined to comment, while a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman, citing agency policy, refused to deny or confirm the existence of an investigation. David Druliner, a state deputy attorney general who oversaw the two grand juries convened last year, also declined to comment.

But three law enforcement sources who spoke on condition of anonymity offer one possible reason for the case staying afloat. Speculation has persisted since the time of Young’s death that the FBI had surveillance on those involved in the Ingleside attack and failed to avert the tragedy. Thirty-five years later, the story goes, the agency wants to atone for that lapse.

The theory’s veracity aside, ex-Panthers argue that the FBI stood as the leading terrorism organization of its day. Under J. Edgar Hoover, who once declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to internal security of the country,” the agency launched COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program aimed at infiltrating and imploding radical groups.

A 1976 Senate investigation into COINTELPRO uncovered a spy agency gone wild. Some two to three dozen assassinations of Black Panther members, including the slaying of Chicago chapter leader Fred Hampton, traced back to covert FBI activities. Wrongful convictions piled up like cordwood: Geronimo Pratt, Ernest Graham, Robert Wilkerson. (Last week, a Louisiana state court official announced that a 1972 murder conviction of a former Panther should be set aside, owing to tainted testimony from several witnesses.)

The grand jury investigations in the Ingleside case smack of COINTELPRO revisited, says former Panther Kathleen Cleaver, a visiting lecturer at Emory University in Atlanta. “This is not law enforcement,” says Cleaver, whose late ex-husband, Eldridge, served as the party’s minister of information. “It’s an attempt to harass those who had the audacity to join the revolution.”

Those in law enforcement counter that trying to nail Young’s killer and accomplices resembles efforts to convict Byron de la Beckwith 30 years after he killed civil rights worker Medgar Evers in Mississippi. (Beckwith, sentenced to life in prison in 1994, died seven years later.) “This has nothing to do with reliving or destroying the revolution,” one source says. “This has to do with a cop being killed and trying to figure out who did it.”

In the same respect, after so many years, old grievances harden, and skeptics of the Young probe doubt authorities will persuade anyone to share details about a murder in 1971. “It’s a 35-year-old case,” says another law enforcement source, “and these are not the kind of people who are going to find religion and confess. If you think otherwise, you’re living a pipe dream.”

Birney Jarvis covered Young’s murder for the Examiner. The retired reporter considered the soft-spoken sergeant a friend, and when the two occasionally got together for drinks, Young voiced concerns about the antics of radicals and cops alike. “He had a sense that there wasn’t enough understanding on either side,” Jarvis says. “He didn’t think stockpiling guns or cracking skulls would solve a whole lot of problems.”

Geraldine Young, John’s widow, moved to Sonoma after her husband died, leaving behind the city where she lost him. Those who know her say she dislikes visits she receives from prosecutors and investigators to discuss the case. Now in her 80s and residing in an assisted-living facility, she quietly turned down SF Weekly’s request to talk about her late husband.

“No,” she says. “No more about that.”

The ex-Panthers would like to hear authorities say as much, even as their reverence for the party’s legacy precludes compromise. If they stop short of offering details or denials about the Panthers’ own sins, and if there’s a tendency toward self-absolution and revisionism among former members, there also remains the defiant loyalty to the cause: to give power to the people. Just ask Taylor. “I’ll always be a Black Panther.”

*Note: Former Black Panthers John Bowman, Richard Brown, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones, and Harold Taylor declined to comment to SF Weekly, citing legal concerns about the ongoing probe into Sgt. John Young’s murder. Unless otherwise noted, quotes attributed to them in this story were culled from their statements at public forums held during the past year.

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