The Van Patter Files
The Final Days of the Black Panther Party
After he returned from Cuba, Huey Newton was frequently sighted in public drunk and/or high on cocaine. He seemingly could turn violent in a flash, reacting to minor perceived insults. He had always bragged to his Panther security contingent that he was the baddest of the bad-asses on Oakland’s tough streets, even as he presented himself to others (including me) as a soft-spoken, charming intellectual.
My earlier experiences with him were memorable for the brilliant conversations ranging from poetry to philosophy to politics and beyond. I liked him — a lot. Newton was the party’s main theoretician, extremely well versed in Marxism, even though he said he had been illiterate until his junior year in high school.
I found that last claim hard to believe. But up until to this point I had only experienced Huey’s charming and brilliant side. Then came the occasion when I witnessed what the angry Newton could be like.
It was soon after the “Richmond incident” (October 23, 1977), where the Panthers head of security, Flores Forbes, by his own admission led a contingent of Panthers in the dead of night to a house where they thought a witness scheduled to testify against Newton in the murder of a prostitute, Kathleen Smith, was living.
In his 2006 memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes wrote: “I was not bothered by the fact I was on my way to assassinating someone.“ He continued, “In the final analysis, what I really believed was that Huey P. Newton was my ‘prince.’ I would kill or die for him at the drop of a hat.”
In Richmond, Forbes and his team got the address wrong and as they were attempting to break into the house, they awoke a middle-aged woman who heard her screen door being ripped off its hinges and then a shot outside. Thinking whoever was out there was trying to shoot off her lock, she grabbed her .38 revolver and fired.
When a hail of return fire came slamming back through her door she ran to another room and hid. When police arrived, they found a pool of blood and a shotgun. Following that trail of blood they found a dead man, but the trail continued, indicating a second assailant had been hit.
The police also found more abandoned weapons and ammunition. It didn’t take them long to find out who the intended victim was – a prostitute who rented an apartment behind the middle-aged woman’s house and who had witnessed Huey Newton gun down her friend, Kathleen Smith.
The dead man was a Panther squad member, and team leader Flores Forbes was the other wounded assailant. He’d been shot in the hand and, with a third Panther, had fled to Las Vegas. Forbes was eventually convicted in the case and sent to prison.
Not long after this bloody event, Paul Avery and I interviewed Newton in the Oakland hills as he sipped a glass of cognac. Newton’s lawyer, Sheldon Otis, was also present.
Newton tried to persuade us that Forbes and the other assailants had been only loosely associated with the Panthers, which was patently not true. He then claimed that they all had quit the party some weeks earlier. His speech was somewhat erratic.
As I carefully repeated the chain of events and the trail of evidence leading back to the party for a second time during our interview, Newton lost his temper. He jumped up and stalked out of the room.
Otis followed him and for an extended period of time, Avery and I could hear him shouting in the other room, “I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him!”
Avery and I debated whether it might be wise for me make a hasty exit but we calculated that Otis would probably be able to calm Newton down. Eventually he did and Huey returned to finish the interview, still denying any knowledge of what the assassination squad had been up to that night in Richmond. He was subdued and no longer drinking the cognac, but he seemed emotionally remote.
Many years later, when Forbes published his memoir, he took personal responsibility for the botched assassination attempt, saying that he did it without Newton’s involvement or knowledge. That prompted me to wonder whether in fact part of Newton’s anger at my questioning that day had been because he was out of the loop on the assault after all.
***
In the early morning hours of August 22nd, 1989, a coked-out Huey Newton was shot to death by a low-level crack dealer, Tyrone Robinson, on the streets of Oakland. By then, the Black Panther Party had long since ceased to exist, as virtually every leader, from Bobby Seale to Elaine Brown to David Hilliard had fled from Newton’s side during his reign of terror.
Journalist Ken Kelley, who at one point or another was friends with virtually everyone involved in this case -– Betty, Tamara, Horowitz, Newton and also me -- published the first of two articles about his relationship with Newton, including having acted as his de facto PR man for a while in the late ‘70s.
The first piece appeared in the East Bay Express soon after Newton’s death. The second came sometime later in California magazine, where I was working as Northern California bureau chief. I edited that second article.
In both pieces, Kelley claimed that Newton confirmed that the Panthers had killed Betty, and had told him: “They never should have found her body.”
Other memoirs from significant players would soon follow. First up in 1992 was Elaine Brown’s “A Taste of Power.” Brown opened her book by reprinting the speech she gave in August 1974, when she assumed control of the Black Panther Party in the wake of Newton’s escape to Cuba to avoid facing murder charges.
“I have control over all of the guns and all of the money of this party. There will be no external or internal opposition I will not resist and put down. I will deal resolutely with anyone or anything that stands in the way.”
Throughout the book, Brown recounted numerous violent acts she witnessed, including some that she ordered. "It is a sensuous thing to know that at one's will an enemy can be struck down," she writes at one point after describing how she threatened to blow a woman’s office “off the map.”
“We Black Panthers disregarded the law. We were, indeed, as newspaper headlines frequently suggested, outlaws.”
Brown said she “endorsed” the “kicked-in doors or shot-up facilities” of those business owners in Oakland who resisted the shakedown demands the Panthers made in order to get the funds needed to run the party’s programs.
When it came to Betty Van Patter’s case, Brown offered the following version of events. “The body of Betty Van Patter had just been found in San Francisco Bay. She had been reported missing for some time, during which, through Charles Garry’s office, I had to answer police questions about her disappearance. I had no idea where she was.”
Brown indicated that she also was concerned at the time of “intensified Internal Revenue Service surveillance of our bank accounts.”
“Betty (asked) Norma (Norma Armour, who also worked on the Panthers’ books), and every other Panther with whom she had contact, about the source of our cash, or the exact nature of this or that expenditure. Her job was to order and balance our books and records, not to investigate them. I ordered her to cease her interrogations. She continued. I knew I had made a mistake in hiring her.”
Brown stated, “There was no question that many of our money transactions could be ruled illegal.”
“Our accountants and tax lawyers could hold off the IRS,” Brown continued. “It was for the party to keep our affairs in order. Betty Van Patter was showing herself useless in that endeavor, her nose in our business more than our books.”
Then, in a curious and wholly inaccurate addition, Brown wrote this:
“Moreover, I had learned after hiring her that Betty’s arrest record was a prison record – on charges related to drug trafficking. Her prison record would weaken our position in any appearance we might have to make before a government body inquiring into our finances. Given her actions and her record, she was not, to say the least, an asset. I fired Betty without notice.”
This was an entirely false allegation – Betty had no such arrest record and was never involved in any drug trafficking activity. Her only arrest ever was a minor “disturbing the peace” citation many years earlier.
So after receiving a letter from the Baltar family’s attorney to that effect, Brown’s publisher removed Brown’s statement that Betty had a prison record for drug trafficking from subsequent printings of the book.
Still, it was an oddly gratuitous move to include it in the first place.
After Betty’s body was found, Brown claimed in her book, many white supporters of the Panthers started to fear for their own lives and told her they’d heard she was under investigation for involvement in Betty’s murder. “All I could do was say, over and over, that while it was true that I had come to dislike Betty Van Patter, I had fired her, not killed her.”
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I had lost track of many of these details, David. It's important history especially for those of us who came on the Left.