by Gini Koch
“I’m pretty sure that one of the Black Panthers in Chicago is an informant, and it’s not for the Chicago police department. I saw the sergeant-at-arms in the Harlem Black Panther office, he was watching us carefully—too carefully—when we went in there. Dr. Watson, there, he noticed something similar in Chicago. He was Hampton’s bodyguard when he was in New York. There was something odd about him, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, but Watson observed. He sits in exactly the wrong place to be a bodyguard. He watches Hampton, not the people Hampton’s with. He’s keeping tabs.
“Now, we have informants across state lines. Infiltrating and observing anti-war protesters and civil rights activists. Mail being opened. Professors being bribed. If you know anything about blackmail, this is how it starts. Once you accept the easy paper, the extra research, then the briber has something over you, and if the carrot doesn’t work, the stick will do. Who does this sound like, with all this power? It could be the President, I suppose. It’s someone at that level. Who’s been in power for over forty years, enough to build a power base? J. Edgar Hoover, that’s who. He not only survived the failure of McCarthyism, but he and his FBI have thrived. What threat is there, really, to the FBI’s power? What do they do? How many agents do they have? When was the last time you heard about them breaking a big case? Why have they been ready with ‘credible sources’ after the Stonewall uprising, after the Spanish Harlem garbage offensive, and the Warhol and Kennedy shootings? They’ve got one villain, and that is subversive groups. I know for a fact that they were wrong about the last one.
“If you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how ridiculous, has to be true.
“If nothing else, the FBI is a bureaucracy. And bureaucrats love paperwork filed in triplicate above all else. That’s their weakness. We’ve seen their footprints across our daily lives, but we need to find out what those footprints mean. Why you, why Hampton? What’s the connection? I’ve spent the last month since we came back from Chicago in the public library, where there’s so much information flowing around it should be impossible to keep track of one person’s research. There are some small, satellite offices—little more than regular business offices. Many of them don’t have alarm systems or even real safes, just locking filing cabinets. It would be very instructive to see a selection of FBI documents. Some of their general orders. Find out what kinds of people they’re watching. I’ve identified four of these satellite offices within two hours of New York that should be easy to break in to. One of them isn’t so far from you, Bill. Look, there, just another suburb of Philadelphia. Media, it’s called.”
“Wouldn’t that be treason?”
“Isn’t burning draft cards treason? What about breaking into Army recruitment offices? I’d call it civil disobedience. Our own tea party. Citizen’s oversight over the FBI. Who are they accountable to? We’d look over everything we found, and anything that could damage an investigation or put an agent in danger we could redact, or just burn the records. We’re only looking for stuff that suggests that people are being followed without probable cause. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The traitor is the one breaking the constitution he’s sworn to uphold.”
Bill looked at us, and then looked back down. “This is crazy talk. Thanks for the investigation, but I think you’re loony. There’s no secret conspiracy, not beyond global capitalism and a military industrial complex. It’s not... it’s not possible. They couldn’t have followed me, done all that stuff. I’m sorry, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson. I’m afraid I’ve wasted your time. Thank you and good day.”
Bill stood up and walked out, looking around him like a paranoid.
Sherlock shook his head. “I rushed him. He believes me, but he doesn’t want to. I hope that nothing happens to him. They’re surely after bigger fish than one mad professor who’s burned a few draft cards. I really would like to know, though.”
thirteen
THE FOURTH OF DECEMBER
CHICAGO IN DECEMBER is dark. The wind coming off Lake Michigan is crippling, cutting through whatever clothes you wear. I’d thought summer in Chicago was brutal, but the winter was worse. There was snow and sleet everywhere, and they said the winter was just starting.
Fred Hampton was dead. Killed overnight in a raid by the police. There were stories about a gun battle, how he and his compatriots shot at the police when they went to serve a warrant on him. Sherlock got us on the first train out.
He was fidgety, didn’t sleep the whole eighteen hours of the journey. I was worried. It was the kind of manic behavior that he’d displayed when he’d found out he was too late to save Bobby Kennedy. That time, it had led to a two-week fit of drugs and depression. There was a cold edge to him now. He was usually aloof, fascinated by mysteries, but not emotionally invested. This was like Solanas. Like when he felt it was his fault.
When we got to the apartment—the same one we’d stayed in—it was locked up, but there were signs of a struggle everywhere. We went to the Black Panther offices and everyone stood around with a vacant look. I saw Janelle, the nurse, and went to speak to her, but Sherlock interrupted.
“Does anyone here have the key to that apartment?”
Janelle looked at him. “Why? What do you want to do?”
“They’ve told a story and I want to see for myself.”
“I don’t think they want us in there.”
“That’s what they told you with their guns, once again. Let me go in, Janelle, before anyone else does. I want to see for myself what happened there. If it was a sealed crime scene, they would have put a guard on it.”
I spoke up. “He’s good at this kind of thing. He might be able to make sense of it. Trust me, Janelle.”
She went to the desk and pulled out a ring of keys. “Let me get my coat.”
SHERLOCK ASKED US to wait outside when the door opened, and he stepped in, looking around, carefully, bending and squatting to look at different things, being careful not to step on anything. I watched him in this dance that I would see again and again; gathering evidence, sifting and sorting. He was beautiful. He swung a door back and forth and looked at it.
“I can tell you one thing. There has been no gun battle here. Every shot was done by the people entering. Except that, there. There are shotgun pellets buried in the wall. This is where the guard would have sat, wasn’t it?”
“Mark Clark was there. He got killed, too. He was on the roster to stay up at night.”
“He died right in that chair. This shot, it doesn’t make sense. If he was going to shoot at someone attacking, the pellets would be near the entrance, but they’re all over the wall and the floor. I’d wager that the gun went off when he got shot. That’s it. Everything else is incoming, from the front or the back. Look at that. A trail of bullets across the wall right at bed height. This is where he died, right? Look at this trail of blood. He was dragged off of the bed and left here in the doorway. Here are two bullets in the floor. They shot him on the floor, just to be sure. This wasn’t a gunfight or a raid, this was an assassination.”
Sherlock was the first one to name Hampton’s death an assassination. He spent an hour there that morning, talking Janelle through the evidence, and that’s what gave the people the idea that they could refute the story that came out from the pigs. The investigation into Hampton’s murder kept coming out, and the Chicago pigs got deeper and deeper into shit. They stonewalled, but the court of public opinion swayed against them. The Chicago Tribune ran a big story, swallowing the police story hook, line, and sinker, and somebody leaked information to the media that the FBI thought the Panthers were planning a big shoot-out.
The problem with their narrative was the evidence. The Chicago Panthers, the lawyers, and even members of the public took Sherlock’s evidence and added their own, unpicking and disproving every one of the FBI’s assertions. The Chicago pigs showed pictures of what they called bullet holes that turned out to be nail holes. They tried to say that the defense attorneys went to a lumberyard and got a
fresh door and painted it to confuse the evidence. It was desperate. Eventually, it even came to a grand jury, and the pigs stuck to their story. Point by point, they were refuted. The grand jury agreed with the people and Sherlock in the end. Ninety-nine shots fired by the pigs, including the two that killed Hampton in the end. The pigs were in the wrong, the grand jury found—eventually—but not one of them served a day in jail. They didn’t even get charged.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. It took years for the grinding wheels of justice to exonerate the Chicago Panthers, by which time they’d disbanded and the Chicago PD had consolidated their power.
Sherlock watched this unfold from New York, thinking we’d never know the reasons behind the shooting, who was pulling the strings of the FBI and why. It was a depressing thought.
fourteen
EPILOGUE
SHERLOCK WOKE ME on a cold March morning, over a year after Hampton’s death. Spring hadn’t quite broken through, but the grey snow had started to melt. I was hiding in bed with the blankets over my head when Sherlock poked a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer under the covers, open to page 12 of the local section.
“He’s done it, John.” He gestured to the small article, just a few inches: BREAK-IN AT FBI OFFICE. The article went on to mention how no guns—the presumed target—were stolen, as they were locked in a safe. There weren’t any details as to what was taken. I was groggy.
“Sherlock, it’s too early and too cold for you to be pulling me awake. What’s this about?”
Sherlock slowed down, the urgent edge still raising his voice. “It’s Bill, it has to be. Remember the small FBI offices I tried to get Bill to burgle? Well, he’s done it. Someone has. The Media office just a couple of suburbs over from Haverford. Broken into overnight, during the Fraser-Ali fight, when the whole world was watching men hit each other.
I thought about this for a minute. What information they could have gotten away with. The risks they took. “My god, Sherlock. This is amazing. We should go see him. Find out what they know.”
“No, John. That’s exactly what we shouldn’t do. We need to give them time to uncover whatever they’ve stolen. My curiosity is beyond piqued. I’m hungry for the knowledge of what they’ve found out. We have to wait, though. I’m sure that if it is the FBI following us, they’ll go on high alert. We’ve been watched, and associated with Bill. Any contact now, anything abnormal, could tip their hand. We can only hope that he contacts us once the heat dies down.”
THE WASHINGTON POST published the first of the stolen papers two weeks after the burglary. They came in the mail, anonymously, quoted as the ‘Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI.’ A lot of people in the nation went into an uproar, both for and against the publication. The FBI documents talked about ‘enhancing paranoia’ in political groups and black activist groups, from the violent Black Panthers right down to peaceful movements. One document said the FBI should be giving the impression to political movements ‘that there was an FBI agent behind every mailbox.’
The public didn’t like that, not one bit. It was clear that the FBI was at the very least exceeding its authority, if not downright breaking the law.
WE NEVER KNEW for sure, but I always assumed that the Hampton murder was what set Bill off—assuming it was Bill. He wouldn’t return our calls or answer letters after that. We tried to go meet him in Philadelphia. It must’ve been spring of 1970, but he refused to meet us. He called Campus Security on us when we went to his office in Haverford. Sherlock and I went and passed by that FBI office in Media. The papers said it was perfect—no alarm, and just a normal deadbolt that had been picked by a professional. Every document in the office had been taken.
HOOVER’S REACTION WAS predictable: close ranks and rally his troops, both agents and the public. Every week there was a new Public Enemy Number One. There was a woman who’d visited the FBI office—long brown hair and glasses, like pretty much every third woman in Philadelphia at that time. He talked about how disclosure of these documents ‘endangered lives’ and ‘encouraged criminality.’ They tried to get a court order to stop the publication of the documents, but the Post kept publishing, and the rest of the papers soon followed.
What the FBI was apparently doing was beyond the most out-there conspiracy theories. They spied on everyone, from presidents to Black Panthers. They’d spied on Martin Luther King, and other clergy members. The vast majority of the spying was on left-leaning groups. The only right-wing groups were real reactionaries like the KKK. In some places, it seemed like FBI agents were spying on everyone. After a while, someone went through the papers and found that in one all-black college, every single student and staff member was either an FBI informant or under surveillance; sometimes both. Postal workers. University professors. Activists, and regular students, too.
Eventually, the term COINTELPRO turned up, and any chance the FBI had of holding the moral high ground started to fall apart. Hoover lost his ability to act with impunity. Then Watergate came out and no one trusted anyone in government for a while, elected or not. This might have been the biggest story of the twentieth century—the illegal and incompetent mass surveillance of Americans for no reason other than their birth or beliefs. There was a Senate investigation, and it seemed like it could almost have brought down the government.
No one served a day, though. Hoover’s name was dragged through the mud, and he died with a cloud over his head, if not behind bars. Watergate and the Church Committee restricted the powers of the FBI until we all forgot about it, with the oil crisis and the economy and inflation. By the time Reagan came along, everyone’d pretty much moved on.
That’s the thing that really gets to me. If you ask the man in the street today about COINTELPRO, people don’t remember. From that time they remember these things: the Summer of Love was amazing, the Black Panthers were bad, Martin Luther King was good, and Kent State a tragedy. No one remembers that this was the time when the government engaged in the illegal mass surveillance of anyone it didn’t like. I think it only fell apart because they were limited to paper and carbon copies, and the amount someone could hold in their heads. The FBI thought they had an army of Sherlocks, but they didn’t. They really didn’t.
But we ignored their treason in the end.
I did find a note from Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, though, in a book on a shelf years later. It was yellowed with age and clipped to that first article from the Post.
Sherlock—
I actually don’t know how you did it, but this has to have been you. Good job avoiding getting caught yourself. You know nothing can touch me.
—Mycroft
about the authors
Although she’s best known for science fiction, paranormal, horror, and fantasy, Gini Koch’s (ginikoch.com) first literary love is mystery and suspense, and her first literary crush, at the tender age of 7, was on Sherlock Holmes. Gini writes the fast, fresh and funny Alien/Katherine “Kitty” Katt series for DAW Books, the Necropolis Enforcement Files series, and the Martian Alliance Chronicles series for Musa Publishing, and as G. J. Koch she writes the Alexander Outland series. Gini’s made the most of multiple personality disorder by writing under a variety of other pen names as well, including Anita Ensal, Jemma Chase, A. E. Stanton, and J. C. Koch. Her dark secret is that pretty much everything she writes has a mystery in it—because mysteries are the spice of literary life.
Glen Mehn (glen.mehn.net) was born and raised in New Orleans, and has since lived in San Francisco, North Carolina, Oxford, Uganda, Zambia, and now lives in London. He’s previously been published by Random House Struik and Jurassic London, and is currently working on his first hopefully publishable novel. When not writing, Glen designs innovation programmes that use technology for social good for the Social Innovation Camp and is head of programme at Bethnal Green Ventures. Glen holds a BA in English Literature and Sociology from the University of New Orleans and an MBA from the University of Oxford.
Glen has been a bookseller, lin
e cook, lighting and set designer, house painter, IT director, carbon finance consultant, soldier, dishwasher, and innovation programme designer. One day, he might be a writer. He lives in Brixton, which is where you live if you move from New Orleans to London. He moved country five times in two years once, and happy to stick around for a while.
After a misspent adulthood pursuing a Music Education degree, Jamie Wyman (www.jamiewyman.com) fostered several interests before discovering that being an author means never having to get out of pajamas. She has an unhealthy addiction to chai, a passion for circus history, and a questionable hobby that involves putting a flaming torch into her mouth. When she’s not traipsing about with her imaginary friends, she lives in Phoenix with two hobbits and two cats. Jamie is proud to say she has a deeply disturbed following at her blog.
Jamie’s novels Wild Card and Unveiled (Entangled Edge) are available wherever ebooks are sold. You can also find her short story ‘The Clever One’ in the anthology When The Hero Comes Home 2 (Dragon Moon Press).
THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS DETECTIVE, AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE!