Saturday, December 17, 2022

Master of History!


Dylan (L) popping corks with Aidan tonight after receiving the call that he has been awarded his Master's Degree in History (with Distinction) from SF State. The portrait in the center is of his maternal great-grandmother.

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Betty and the Panthers

In the summer of 1974, 44-year-old Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper and divorced mother of three, was excited about starting a new job.

David Horowitz, one of the editors at Ramparts, the magazine where she’d been working, had recommended Betty for a similar position at the Educational Opportunities Corporation (EOC), which was operated by the Black Panther Party.

Horowitz was one of many white progressives in the Bay Area and beyond who supported the Panthers, their revolutionary political philosophy, and their community programs, which included a free school, a free breakfast program, and a jobs initiative. 

Almost alone among black power groups of the era, the Panther leaders voiced support for women’s rights, Latino rights and gay rights, and formed alliances with white radicals. They also welcomed whites into their inner circle, an openness that quickly elevated the party to a kind of a rock-star-like status on the left. 

From San Francisco and New York to Hollywood, wealthy people in the legal, publishing, and entertainment circles threw parties and made donations that helped fund Panther programs and defend them during the numerous trials stemming from violent clashes with police and rival black groups.

After a period of growth and global prominence, and under the relentless pressure of attacks by police agencies and the FBI, the Panthers had peaked as an international revolutionary organization by the early 70s. They needed to retrench so they ordered all their offices and branches to close down and the most important regional leaders to come back and work out of headquarters in Oakland.

Meanwhile, Horowitz recommended Betty to Elaine Brown, who, in the absence of the party’s charismatic co-founder Huey Newton, was now the head of the party. (Newton had fled to Cuba to avoid murder charges.)

A number of others choose to leave the party as well. In a phone call in September, Betty explained to her daughter, Tamara Baltar, that among those leaving were Audrea Jones and William Roberts.

The departure of Jones and Roberts had created a vacuum around the administrative and bookkeeping functions for the EOC and the party, which led to an immediate increase in Betty’s responsibilities. On August 31st, 1974, Betty wrote her mother, Venus Floyd, describing her new work opportunity: 

“They want and need to get things in order on a straight basis, and I can do that. The big thing I have going for me is that I know how to do it and have very few hang-ups about black people. I think they recognize that. 

Later in the letter, Betty addresses what she knew to be one of her mother’s major fears:

“Please don’t feel frightened for my physical safety. I am not in the least worried about that part of it. What I need to look out for is legal problems, not physical problems. If anything, I am super protected physically. There is no one in the whole organization who would lift a finger against me physically. 

Later that fall, Betty wrote her mother again:

“As of last Tuesday, I have been asked to take on the structuring of the books and supervision of the whole of the Black Panther Party operation.  After meeting Elaine Brown (the very lovely and articulate young woman who is now the acting head of the party) and hearing her proposal to me – and after talking to four attorneys and several other people, I met again with her Friday. 

“I told her I would like to help and she said she was so relieved she could cry. She has a mountain of responsibility on her shoulders right now. She is a dynamic, educated, intelligent, forceful person and she has given me her complete trust.”

Later in the letter she continued, “As I proceed with this whole thing I am becoming more and more aware that there is no need for fear.”

On October 22nd, Betty wrote to her mother again, indicating that she was becoming much more familiar with the inner workings of the Black Panther Party.

“All of their money has gone to help people in various ways. Medical, dental, food, clothing, car repair, rent, education, childcare – you name it. Very few people know of all the good they have done. Eventually, the Black Panther Party as such will not be called that but something else. 

Then she described the various party projects she was working on. “Aside from the party per se, I am taking care of the EOC and teaching and supervising things on the accounting end. There’s also the Lamp Post, which is taking more time as well.”

The Lamp Post was a bar run by Newton’s cousin, Jimmie Ward.

Then thIngs for Betty deteriorated rapidly. In a letter on October 31st, Betty for the first time expressed some reservations about her co-workers. “My biggest problem and frustration is in getting the people I'm working with to do what they're supposed to be getting done on time.  It takes a lot of patience. They are never rushed about anything -- maybe I should take a lesson!"

Although she did not share it with her mother, Betty Van Patter was developing a deep concern about what she was witnessing as bookkeeper for the EOC and the Lamp Post.

By mid-November, Tamara, saw that Betty had become quite agitated, telling her that cash was being taken out of register at the Lamp Post and not accounted for. “They don’t understand that the register tape shows cash coming in and so when they just take cash out of the drawer, it shows up as not accounted for,” she says.

In her journal, Betty wrote: “Something very heavy is happening in my life right now…There will be a crisis point – I know it. It’s rapidly approaching – I can feel it. There is an imminent danger.”

Tragically, she was right. Within a few weeks, she would be dead.

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Friday, December 16, 2022

The FBI's War on the Black Panthers


In the mid-1970s, when we were reporters at Rolling Stone, Lowell Bergman, and I decided to look in depth into the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to disrupt activist organizations. We focused on the Black Panther Party.

In a 1967 memorandum that we quoted in our article, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had stated that the program’s intent was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalists.” 

By September 1968, the Panthers had emerged as the leaders of the black power movement in the U.S. A key FBI memo solicited suggestions from its field agents for new ways to “create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the (Panthers), as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each other’s sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement.”

In another memo, in July 1969, Hoover declared that the Panthers were “without question the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Starting late in 1968, there were numerous police raids on Panther offices around the country; sometimes including federal law enforcement officials. Several Panther leaders were killed or wounded, many others were sent to prison, or fled into exile.

In the course of gathering documents under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewing Panthers and ex-Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver and Elaine Brown, Bergman and I were able to document hundreds of actions taken by FBI agents in pursuit of Hoover’s stated goals. 

Many of these involved “disinformation,” sending letters purportedly from Cleaver to Huey Newton, for example, or vice versa, promoting the growing paranoia and distrust that already was driving the two leaders toward an eventual split.

I interviewed Elaine Brown during this period. She was the head of the party, as Newton was still in Cuba. She was smart, articulate and projected a powerful presence. 

“The government didn’t succeed in destroying us,” she told me. “We survived…These motherfuckers intended to kill every one of us. But it’s too late now. Our ideas are out there – they cannot be erased from the minds of the people.”

After months of work, Bergman and I produced a story that presented an exhaustive catalogue of the federal government’s war against the Panthers. We also noted that the FBI’s relentless attempts to disrupt the organization “encouraged local police departments to harass the group” as well.

But the process of reviewing a huge number of law enforcement files had also exposed to us evidence suggesting there was a sinister side to the Panthers, including internecine violence that had nothing to do with government provocation but more closely resembled ruthless gang activity.

In 1977, once we had founded the Center for Investigative Reporting, we received numerous complaints from people in the community that the Panthers were “out of control;” and that Newton in particular, who by then was back in town, was wreaking havoc inside the inner-city neighborhoods where he was allegedly committing random violent assaults, often fueled by consuming alcohol and cocaine at the same time.

We decided that CIR should look into these allegations, and the result in 1978 was a long investigative article called “The Party’s Over,” by a courageous Berkeley journalist, Kate Coleman, and a veteran police reporter, Paul Avery, published in New Times magazine. 

(Avery was later portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 Hollywood movie “Zodiac” for his work on the unsolved case of a notorious serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

“The Party’s Over” documented dozens of violent incidents caused by Newton and his “security squad” against members of the party who had provoked Newton’s wrath, as well as non-party members, including a prostitute he killed, a tailor he pistol-whipped to the verge of death, and other victims of his rage.

CIR was heavily criticized by the left for doing this story, but I’d long since grown used to such reactions from the PC crowd.  We were journalists, not political partisans, so naturally both political extremes hated us for exposing their dirty secrets. It came with the territory.

As they were pursuing their investigation, Coleman and Avery had come upon the unsolved murder of Betty Van Patter, and thanks to Avery’s connections, gained access to the Berkeley Police Department files on the case. 

Quoting it here:

“11:30 a.m. January 17th, 1975: Sgt. R. Scofield, piloting San Mateo County Sheriff’s Helicopter 2-H-10, was on patrol above San Francisco Bay when he spotted a body floating about a mile south of the San Mateo Hayward Bridge, between markers 670 and 680.

“He immediately put out distress calls to the U.S. Coast Guard, the Foster City Police Department, and the San Mateo Coroner’s Office. Within 15 minutes, the Coast Guard was on the scene, recovered the body, and took it to Old Warder Pier, on the corner of East Hillsdale Avenue and Teal Street, where representatives of the police department and coroner’s office quickly gathered.

“The medical examiner observed that the body was that of an adult female in a state of “moderate to severe post-mortem decomposition.”

“The remains were transported to Chope Hospital for an examination and identification. The body was placed in container #7 and sealed at 2:05 p.m. An autopsy was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following morning.”

It took three days for the coroner to determine an identity through the use of dental charts, but there was little doubt about the cause of death. The victim had been murdered -- killed by a massive blow to the head -- a “fractured calvarium” is noted in the autopsy report.

There was no water in the woman’s lungs, which means she was dead before her body got into the bay. The coroner estimated she was in the water for around three weeks, drifting on the currents, back and forth along the tide lines. 

She was identified as Betty Van Patter.

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Thursday, December 15, 2022

Cold Case Opening

I never met Betty Van Patter in person but I did speak with her on the phone at least once. Her daughter, Tamara Baltar, was helping us set up the administrative systems for SunDance magazine in 1972, and she asked Betty to talk with us.

At the time, Betty was working at Ramparts, and we needed her advice.

Alas, SunDance didn’t last very long, but a few years later, Tamara was again helping me set up administrative systems, this time for a new non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) in Oakland.

In the interim, something unspeakable had happened. Betty had taken a job as bookkeeper for the Black Panther Party, discovered a number of irregularities, which she reported to her boss, Elaine Brown. But rather than fix the problems, Brown fired Betty on Friday, December 13, 1974.

Later that night, Betty went missing. Her body was found floating in San Francisco Bay five weeks later. He skull had been bashed in.

***

Betty had been recommended for the job with the Panthers by David Horowitz, a former editor at Ramparts. A few days after Betty went missing, Tamara called Horowitz, who in turn called Elaine Brown.

Horowitz recorded the call:

DH: “I got a call from Betty’s daughter who says she hasn’t been home since Friday.”

EB: “Well, listen, let me tell you something about Betty. Betty wanted to know too much of everything…And she was getting into the Lamp Post…I was scared of her getting into my campaign books and all the other stuff. She started asking about where money was going.”

After some back and forth, Brown told Horowitz that she had fired Betty.

Horowitz then called Tamara back and told her that she should go to the police. But Tamara didn’t want to involve the police since they might be biased against the Panthers so she called the most famous private eye in the Bay Area, Hal Lipset, instead.

When Lipset advised her to go the police as well, she finally contacted the Berkeley Police six days after Betty disappeared. In response, the police conducted a thorough investigation, which included an interview with Elaine Brown.

Brown claimed that she had fired Betty a week before she disappeared, on December 6th. (The police investigators noted in their files that this was contradicted by all the known evidence.) Brown then added a curious detail — that she had seen Betty at the Lamp Post and spoke “briefly” with her “one weekend evening” after December 6th.

Brown’s attorney terminated the interview before the police could ask any more questions.

***

In 1983, almost nine years to the day after her mother gone missing, Tamara decided to meet again with legendary private eye Hal Lipset in his San Francisco office to discuss the case. She asked me to accompany her to this meeting.

Until recently, Tamara had remained, in her words, in “complete denial” that the Panthers could have been responsible for killing her mother. But questions raised by CIR reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery, as well as by David Horowitz, slowly convinced her to consider that possibility.

On January 12th, 1984, Tamara officially hired Lipset in investigate Betty’s murder. One of Lipset’s protégés was David Fechheimer, by then a prominent P.I. in his own right.

Fechheimer had been working for the Panthers’ defense attorneys in 1974 and knew a great deal about Betty’s case. He told his old mentor what he knew. Afterwards, Lipset met with Tamara and told her she should have “no doubt” that the Panthers had killed her mother.

During that meeting, Tamara saw Lipset’s notes from his conversation with Fechheimer. They indicated who had ordered the killing and who had carried it out.

***

These are just a few of the salient details of this unsolved case. I’ll publish more in the future, because there is a lot more to this story and it needs to be told. Justice needs to be served. 

The statute of limitations never lapses on murder.


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Wednesday, December 14, 2022

To Solve a Murder...

Yesterday, as I do every December 13th, I wrote about the disappearance and death of Betty Van Patter back in 1974. 

The 45-year-old Black Panther Party bookkeeper was an idealistic Berkeley mother of three who admired the party and its programs to fight racism and help the poor.

But somebody killed her — perhaps for her ideals or her naiveté, or both — and the mystery of her murder has remained unsolved for 48 years.

Meanwhile, over the course of my half century in journalism, I worked on a lot of big stories. We got some, we didn’t get others. I have some regrets.

The Betty Van Patter case is one of them. The Alameda District Attorney, the Berkeley Police Department, several private investigators, and a number of journalists are among those who have looked into the case and come up empty.

Some of the best work on the case has been done by investigative reporter Kate Coleman, who published one plausible scenario for Betty’s murder in the now defunct magazine Heterodoxy in 1994. Coleman revealed that the well-known private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, told his mentor, the legendary private eye Hal Lipset, who it was inside the Panthers who ordered Betty’s murder and who carried it out.

Lipset was working for Van Patter’s family at the time and he confirmed Coleman’s report to me. Both Lipset and Fechheimer have since passed away.

Nobody has ever been charged in the case. 

By now, interest by law enforcement and the media has waned. The problem with the story is obvious. Historians, academics, young activists and old activists alike want to be able to celebrate the positive legacy of the Black Panthers, which includes exposing systematic racism, the harassment and arrest of countless black people, as well as the poverty and oppressive living conditions endured by millions to this day.

But to honestly tell the story of what happened to Betty Van Patter may seem to run counter to that narrative, because it brings up the Panthers’ internal corruption, violence, sexism, prostitution, drugs, shakedowns, weaponry and justification of gratuitous violence.

Any honest appraisal of the group’s place in history would be capable of holding both sides of the truth in one hand, both the good and the bad, unflinchingly.

For that, Betty’s case must be solved.

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Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Who Did It and Why?

 Forty-eight years ago today, on December 13, 1974, bookkeeper Betty Van Patter was nursing a drink and crying softly after work at a bar on University Avenue called the Berkeley Square.

She had been fired from her job at the Black Panther Party by Elaine Brown, who headed up the party while co-founder Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba. Van Patter, an idealistic supporter of the party, had witnessed irregularities and misuse of cash by party members and had warned Brown that they were illegal and needed to be stopped to avoid bringing unwanted attention from law enforcement authorities.

While she was at the bar, a man walked in and handed Van Patter a note. She got up and followed him out of the door.

Later that night, she was spotted at Jimmy's Lamp Post, another bar on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The Lamp Post, owned by a cousin of Newton's named Jimmy Ward, was the site of most of the illegal cash transactions Van Patter was worried about.

Meanwhile, back at the Berkeley Square, one of Betty's friends arrived to join her, only to find her missing. He then placed a telephone call to the Lamp Post and asked if she was there.

"That party has left," he was told.

That was the last any of her friends or family heard from Betty Van Patter. Her badly beaten body was found floating in San Francisco Bay over a month later, on January 17, 1975.

***

The Black Panther Party was an extraordinary, historically significant attempt by a group of young black people to aggressively fight back against entrenched racism in U.S. society. Its leaders established a number of remarkable programs, including a free school, a free breakfast program for poor children, and an armed effort to monitor arrests of black people by the police.

The party, unlike other black power organizations, welcomed white support and forged alliances with Latino groups and gay organizations. It also developed a strong cadre of women leaders, like Elaine Brown, who helped the party gain international prominence.

At the same time, some of the party's leaders acted like street thugs, shaking down local merchants for protection money, and running drug and prostitution runs out of various locations, including the Lamp Post. 

The visionary programs and the criminality co-existed side by side. It wasn’t one or the other; it was both at the same time. The party’s complicated legacy cannot be understood without acknowledging that.

The party was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time racist head of the FBI, as a severe national security threat; he and other elements of the federal government waged an illegal campaign known as COINTELPRO to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Panthers. 

Certain state and local law enforcement forces cooperated with the FBI in this effort, which at one point resulted in the brutal murder by police of Panther leader Fred Hampton and a colleague in Chicago.

The Panthers also waged a terror campaign of their own, murdering party members suspected of being agents or informers, as well as innocent members of the community whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Co-founder Huey Newton was at the center of all that was good and all that was horrible about the Black Panther Party.

One of Huey's major white supporters was David Horowitz, a Berkeley radical, who got Betty Van Patter her job with the organization. He knew her from Ramparts magazine, the left-wing voice of the movement to upend racism and imperialism during the 1960s, where he was an editor.

In the aftermath of Betty's murder, Horowitz underwent a loud, long and very public political migration from the left to the right, where he emerged as one of the fiercest critics of progressives in this country. He wrote books and articles and delivered lectures that shredded the idealistic vision of those seeking progressive social change by comparing them to Stalin's murderous regime in the Soviet Union and Mao's reign of terror in China.

As Horowitz used his considerable intellectual ability and historical knowledge to carry on his anti-left crusade, he repeatedly cited his guilt over Betty's death as the catalyst that propelled him on his journey. Many progressives believe he was simply exploiting Betty’s murder to justify his crusade.

In 1976, Lowell Bergman and I co-authored a major piece in Rolling Stone magazine about the FBI's Cointelpro initiative to destroy the Panthers. In the process of doing that and related articles, we interviewed Newton, Brown, Eldridge Cleaver and many other Panthers and their most prominent supporters, including Hollywood celebrities, left-wing lawyers and Berkeley intellectuals.

While we were doing the Rolling Stone article, Bergman and I became aware of the dirty underbelly of the Panther organization, and later at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we coordinated and I edited the breakthrough investigative article by reporters Kate Coleman and Paul Avery called "The Party's Over," in New Times magazine in 1978.

That article, more than any other, pierced the facade of the Panthers and documented some of the awful crimes carried out by Newton and his followers, including the murder of Van Patter.

A few years after she died, Betty's warning of what would happen to the Panthers if they didn’t stop their financial abuse came to pass. Law enforcement authorities closed in and effectively shut the party down for the illegal misuse of government funds. The Party really was over now.

Meanwhile, during the four-plus decades since Betty's murder, the Berkeley Police, the Alameda District Attorney, and a number of private investigators and journalists have tried to solve her murder case. 

I’m one of them.

The known evidence strongly suggests that the Panthers were responsible for her death. She was allegedly held in a secret chamber attached to the Lamp Post, where she was reportedly tortured before she was killed by a massive blow to the head. Her body was then dumped into the Bay.

In the years since this happened, some evidence has been produced as to who killed her, who ordered it and why.  Probably the most informative and provocative piece is Kate Coleman’s "Death in Berkeley" in Heterodoxy in 1994. In it, Coleman revealed that private investigator David Fechheimer, who was working for the Panthers at the time of Betty’s murder, later told his mentor, private eye Hal Lipset, who by then was retained by Van Patter’s family, who in the party had ordered Betty’s murder and who carried it out.

But no charges were ever been brought. Those responsible remain free. 

Betty Van Patter’s murder constitutes a deep stain on the legacy of the Panthers and their many positive accomplishments. 

The statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

If you or someone you know has any evidence that could help solve this case, please contact me.

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