Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
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face of these threats, Rice held firm. He would neither open the envelope nor turn it over to the agents. It took the FBI another fourteen months, until October 20, 1970, under circumstances to which I will turn in a moment, to get Rice to give up the letter so that they could open it themselves and read Butler’s testimony that Geronimo Pratt had killed Caroline Olsen.
In addition to their accusations that Butler was an informer, Pratt’s defenders speculate that the prosecution of Pratt was the result of a “Cointelpro” conspiracy by the FBI to “neutralize” leaders of the Black Panther Party. Their references, typically vague, are meant to insinuate foul play. But they are irrelevant. By the time of the Pratt trial, the FBI’s “Cointelpro” program had been terminated. Moreover, Pratt was no longer even a Panther. He had been expelled three months earlier, in August 1970. (The official “declaration” of his expulsion, complete with the charge that he had threatened to assassinate Newton, was not made public until his arrest.)
On December 4, 1970, two months after the letter was opened, Pratt was indicted by a grand jury on one count of murder, one count of assault to commit murder and two counts of robbery. He was arraigned in April 1971 and was convicted a year later, on July 28, 1972. Throughout the trial, Pratt maintained that he was in Oakland at the time of the murder for a meeting with Panther leaders. During the trial, and for nearly twenty years thereafter, the Panther leaders—Bobby Seale, David Hilliard and Elaine Brown—denied Pratt’s story and left him to his fate. It was their decision to change their story that led to the new and successful appeal.
In the 1980 court opinion denying Pratt’s original appeal, the conspiracy theory is succinctly refuted: “First, it is noted that Julius Butler did not give the letter to the FBI but to a trusted friend (Sergeant Rice) for safekeeping only to be opened in the event of his death. . . . Second, logic dictates that if the FBI with the aid of local law enforcement officers had targeted Pratt and intended to ‘neutralize’ him by ‘framing’ him for the December 18, 1968, murder of Caroline Olsen, they would not have waited over 14 months after the letter was handed to Sergeant Rice to have the contents of the sealed letter disclosed.”
The circumstances under which Butler’s letter was finally opened are actually even more troublesome for the conspiracy argument. The FBI agents who had observed Butler transferring the sealed envelope walked over to Sergeant Rice after Butler had left and demanded that he turn over the envelope to them. Rice refused. Then, as a precaution, he gave the envelope to yet another black police officer, Captain Edward Henry, who put it in his safe deposit box, still sealed. Rice told no one of this move, in order that the FBI would not know its location. What next transpired is best told in Sergeant Rice’s own words:
Soon after this incident [the initial demand for the letter from the FBI], the FBI threatened to indict me for obstruction of justice for refusing to turn over the letter to them. Some time during the next year I was involved in a fight with a white Los Angeles police officer. Due to this fight, and other allegations against me, I became the subject of an internal police investigation. During this investigation I was questioned by the Los Angeles Police Department regarding what Julius Butler had given me and ordered to turn it over to the police department. When I refused, I was threatened with being fired for refusing a direct order.33
Ibid.
It was this investigation of Rice by the LAPD’s Department of Internal Affairs that led to the opening of the letter. Internal Affairs had actually become suspicious that Rice was subversive and sympathetic to the Panthers because of his relationship with Butler. The FBI was also pressuring Butler about his involvement in the Black Panther Party and a possible firearms violation. (Butler had purchased an illegal submachine gun in October 1968, while still a Panther, and did not want to reveal the name of the person he had given it to—another puzzling attitude for someone who was no more than a “paid informant.”)
The questioning of Butler by the FBI, after he was observed delivering the envelope to Sergeant Rice, is the principal source of the false impression successfully promoted by the Cochran team that Butler was on the payroll as an informant for the agency. In the records of the seven FBI interviews with Butler, however, the only mention of Pratt is “that Pratt had a machine gun was common knowledge” and that “Pratt also had a caliber .45 pistol.” There is no mention of the crucial fact, still hidden in the sealed envelope, that Pratt had boasted of killing a white schoolteacher and wounding her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court in 1968.
In fact, an exhaustive review of the FBI records by a deputy attorney general of California states categorically: “Prior to [Pratt’s] indictment [for the crime] in December 1970, there are no FBI documents connecting [Pratt] with the tennis court murder.” Pratt’s indictment was based on the evidence in the sealed envelope Julius Butler gave to Rice. It was opened at Butler’s request in October 1970–22 months after the murder took place—because, as he put it, the FBI was “jamming” him. In turning down Pratt’s 1980 appeal, the court noted that “It would be unnatural for the FBI not to be inquisitive about the contents of the sealed envelope once aware of its existence.”
The appeal that secured Pratt’s release in May 1997 adds only minor details to the original rejected 1980 appeal. It basically cites recent information, voluntarily turned over by prosecutors, which seems to amplify the claim that Butler had some kind of involvement with law enforcement after the sealed envelope was delivered to Sergeant Rice. The principal new claim was the existence of an “informant” card that the district attorney’s office voluntarily turned over to Cochran’s team. When I asked one of the original prosecutors about this, he maintained that the informant card was insignificant. “When you take someone to lunch you have to provide a chit for the lunch,” he explained. “‘Informant’ is a convenient category, and that’s all there is to it.” There is a record of Butler’s contacts with the FBI following its agents’ observation of the encounter with Sergeant Rice. Butler’s response to agents’ questions was always that he was no longer with the Party and wasn’t able to give them an informed opinion.
But no matter how one parses the language of these reports or interprets “informant card,” none of the evidence brought forward by Cochran in any way alters the picture of Julius Butler’s relations to law enforcement as outlined above. Butler did not take his charges against Pratt to the police but strenuously withheld them for nearly two years, until forced by the Internal Affairs investigation of Rice to give them up.
Johnnie Cochran has called Julius Butler a “conniving snake” and “liar” and “police informant.” As in the Simpson case, he has had great success with this line of attack before a credulous and ill-informed public and press. Los Angeles Urban League President John Mack was only one of many who swallowed the Cochran line whole. At the time of Pratt’s release, Mack told the Los Angeles Times: “The Geronimo Pratt case is one of the most compelling and painful examples of a political assassination on an African-American activist.”
Cochran’s brief for Pratt follows the pattern of the Simpson defense: an attack on law enforcement as a racist conspiracy out to “get” his client. A principal problem for Cochran has been the fact that Butler is black, and that until Cochran’s charges he was a responsible and respected member of the community, a lawyer and a church elder. As part of Cochran’s assault on Butler’s character, he has alleged that Butler carried a grudge which was the result of thwarted ambition. Specifically, Cochran claims that when Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, the leader of the Los Angeles Panthers, was killed by a rival gang headed by Ron (Maulana) Karenga in a shoot-out at UCLA a month after the Olsen murder, Pratt rather than Butler was made head of the Party and Butler didn’t forgive him.
Once again, however, the facts do not substantiate the Cochran thesis. If jealousy was the motive, why not go to the police immediately? Why hand over a sealed letter and wait 22 months until long after you have become so disillusioned with the Panthers that your jealousy, if not cooled, has become an irrelevance?
In fact, Butler did not even deposit his insurance letter into the safekeeping of Sergeant Rice immediately after the murder. He did so only after being relieved of his Panther duties in July 1969, and then physically threatened by Pratt and his lieutenants, who were conducting a purge in the Party’s ranks in the wake of