A President Who Rocked

 One of the major pieces I published in Rolling Stone near the end of my time there was also one of my first in-depth efforts to document the global trade in banned drugs and chemicals.

Not exactly what you’d expect from a Rock ‘n Roll magazine, eh?

It was called “For Export Only” and it was summarized like this: “What do the multimillion-dollar U.S. pesticide and drug industries do when government agencies ban the use of their products? They find new markets in underdeveloped countries.”

The article appeared in the magazine’s February 10, 1977 issue, which had Peter Frampton featured on the cover as “The Rock Star of the Year” in a profile written by 19-year-old Cameron Crowe.

In those years, long before email, laptops or cellphones, the way we got feedback on our articles was through the mail. And usually there was a lot — we got hundreds of letters, for example, in response to our Patty Hearst stories.

By contrast, I only got one letter in response to “For Export Only.’ Yet it had an intriguing return address — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.

It was from a staff member to President Jimmy Carter indicating that my article had been included in his weekly briefing on new policy issues.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time (maybe it was just standard PR stuff?), until I learned that Carter had also decided to form an interagency task force to study the banned exports problem that I had exposed. Eventually he issued an executive order that for the first time in U.s. history restricted the trade in banned and restricted goods overseas.

This was a major policy victory on what until then had been an obscure issue few kew or cared about. Soon after the article appeared, I left Rolling Stone and co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting, where one of our big early projects was the book I co-authored with Mark Schapiro on the same topic, “Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World.”

That book helped launch a global movement to stem the tide of restricted hazards flowing around the globe — a movement that continues in many forms and many places to this day.

But Jimmy Carter was the only political leader who early on recognized the importance of this issue, which involves the immorality of rich countries dumping dangerous goods in poor countries where regulatory structures are weak, causing heavy damage to human health and the environment.

I never got to thank Carter for his role in taking what at the time was a bold new regulatory attempt to try and rein in what was basically unadorned corporate greed, but I did meet him briefly years later at an event honoring environmental leaders hosted by Ted Turner.

Jimmy Carter was many things — a peanut farmer, ambitious politician, humanitarian, policy wonk, avid reader, big-time rock fan, but I’ll always remember him as the only person who reached out to me and recognized the ground-breaking potential of that seminal piece I published in Rolling Stone.

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HEADLINES:

• Trump endorses Johnson in speaker’s race ahead of critical vote (CNN)

• Jimmy Carter's state funeral to be held Jan. 9 at Washington National Cathedral (ABC)

• America Needs More Jimmy Carters (NYT)

• Work after White House made Carter a standout (WP)

• Remembering a Visit to Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia (New Yorker)

• Jimmy Carter spent decades working to eliminate an ancient parasite plaguing the world’s poorest people (AP)

• Why Jimmy Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980 (WP)

• Appeals court upholds $5 million E. Jean Carroll verdict against Trump (NBC)

• Bleak outlook for US farmers – and Trump tariffs could make it worse (Guardian)

• Taking back Panama Canal would require war: Former ambassador (The Hill)

• Sobbing and prayers echo through South Korean airport as families mourn air crash victims (CNN)

• Now Syria’s long-ruling Baath party is collapsing, too (AP)

• Negative time, discovered for the first time in history: It goes from the future to the past (Ecoticious)

• AI does not mean the robots are coming (Financial Times)

• Robots learned how to perform surgical tasks by watching videos. For decades, robots have helped doctors perform surgeries. Now, some can be trained to imitate actions on videos, according to a new study. (WP)

• Gym Installs Confusing New Equipment To Mess With Anyone Joining In January (The Onion)

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Next Comes the Song

One occupational hazard of a career in journalism is the illusion that what you do has any lasting impact in the larger scheme of things. That rarely happens, but on certain occasions you do get the chance to make a difference in one person’s life.

Thirty years ago, I was in my office at Mother Jones early one morning when the front desk buzzed me to say there was someone who would like to talk to an editor. It was the week following the Rodney King beating by police in L.A. and there had been destructive riots with looting in San Francisco’s downtown areas.

My visitor was a soft-spoken young man carrying a large package. He asked me if we could speak privately.

Back in my office, he explained the purpose of his visit. He’d been caught up in the anger of the moment, he said, and had been angry and frustrated by yet another act of police violence against his community — he’d grown up in South Central L.A. -- when he had joined the rioters and broken into a Radio Shack and stolen a computer monitor.

“I knew it was wrong almost the minute I did it, and now I feel bad,” he told me. “I’d like to ask if you’d return it for me.”

I looked closely at my young visitor. He was black, perhaps 21 years old or so, with the kind of honest face you can’t fake. I really wanted to know more of his story.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I will return it for you if you’ll tell me why you stole it in the first place and what you wanted it for.”

He accepted these terms and we further agreed that I would protect his identity in any article that I published based on our conversation. 

His story proved to be exceptionally timely. He described growing up in poverty, surrounded by violence and family tragedy but told me how he had avoided getting into major trouble himself, partly due to his love of music. His dream was to to make music of his own and he had grabbed the monitor in the mistaken belief it was a computer that could help him do that.

Later on I arranged for the monitor to be returned to Radio Shack, which eventually led to a call from the D.A.’s office asking me to identify my young informant so he could be charged for a crime.

I flatly refused and asked, “How many of the hundreds of rioters that looted have turned the stuff they stole back in?”

“He’s the only one.”

I then suggested it might send a mixed message at a time of heightened racial tensions to prosecute the one guy out of hundreds willing to try and make amends. Besides, I doubted any jury would convict him of anything anyway.

That was the last I heard from the D.A., but a friendly editor over at the San Francisco Examiner spotted my piece in Mother Jones and asked to reprint it.

That set off a completely unanticipated seres of events, including a flood of donations from the public to help my young friend buy a real computer, which in turn helped him make his dreams of becoming a musician come true.

So that’s the ending to this particular story. But you know that where one ends, often another begins.

That’s what happened in this case, but that story is not mine to tell.

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HEADLINES:

• Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100 (WP)

• As Birth Rates Plummet, Women's Autonomy Will Be Even More at Risk (Wired)

• ‘A Complete Unknown’ Director James Mangold on Consulting With Bob Dylan, Adoring Pete Seeger and Why Newport ’65 Was Like ‘Thanksgiving Dinner Gone Amuck’ (Variety)

• To evade Assad’s secret police, Syrians developed a code language (WP)

• Musk causes uproar for backing Germany’s far-right party ahead of key elections (AP)

• Think DEI Is Dead? Enter The H-1B Visa And Elon Musk’s ‘War’ (Forbes)

• Trump says H-1B visa program is 'great' amid MAGA feud over tech workers (NBC)

• Elon Musk Is a National Security Risk (NYT)

• China Has Limited Firepower to Counter U.S. Tariffs (WSJ)

• Peyote sacred to Native Americans threatened by psychedelic renaissance and development (AP)

• Our Reporter Returned to Afghanistan, Seeking Lessons and Secrets (NYT)

• Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. (WP)

• Travis Kelce Excitedly Hands Taylor Swift Wrapped Football-Shaped Gift (The Onion)

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Today’s Lyrics

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or over-step the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by, all good people are praying
It's the last temptation
The last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be another day
Guess it's too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away —Bob Dylan

Warnings From Abroad

Donald Trump makes a lot of threats, so many that it can be difficult to figure out which ones to take seriously, but among those we must are his repeated threats against journalists.

Whether or not he ever follows through on his vows to jail reporters, punish media companies he perceives as hostile, and sue press outlets he doesn’t like, the damage he’s already done by inciting his followers against the media is substantial.

And it’s worth remembering that he’s not even in office yet.

Trump’s oft-voiced dream of establishing himself as an autocratic will depend on somehow curtailing the free press, including prominent alternative voices who have the courage to stand up to him.

His apologists in the right-wing media often say he is only joking about instituting some form of state censorship but I’m not laughing.

Of course, the U.S. is not the only country going through a populist revolt that erodes democratic norms, including attacks on the media. In that context, I pulled up Ann Marie Lipinski’s recent piece in Nieman Reports on what advice foreign journalists have for those of us concerned about this issue in the U.S.

Here is an excerpt:

• International journalists are hearing echoes. From countries around the world that have witnessed the rise of autocratic and populist leaders, they are watching the U.S. and warning of a characteristic of wounded democracies everywhere: an endangered free press.

• When Donald Trump sued CBS News for $10 billion over its editing of a Kamala Harris interview, some viewed it as just another tantrum. When he threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for critical coverage, we were told it was beyond a president’s power. And when the president-elect’s insults escalated from cries of “fake news” to violent provocations, his defenders said not to take him literally.

• But each of these developments and others are warning signs to those journalists who saw the improbable become reality in their countries as democratic norms were trampled.

• “American colleagues, prepare for the worst,” writes Glenda Gloria, editor of Rappler, a news site in the Philippines whose staff endured years of personal attack and legal torment from the Rodrigo Duterte administration. “If it doesn’t happen, you’ll be happy to be proven wrong. If it happens, it could happen fast.”

• “Dear American colleagues, do not have any illusions,” writes Bartosz Wieliński, deputy editor of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza. “If an autocrat or dictator announces something, sooner or later they will act on it.”

Think about that — “If it happens, it could happen fast,” and “sooner or later they will act on it.” Our major media institutions are at weak point after decades of newspaper closings, corporate takeovers, and the disruptive impacts of technology.

The journalism profession has reached a low point in public esteem, established reporters at mainstream outlets fear for their jobs, and the CEOs of Facebook (Meta), Amazon, et.al. seem ready to bow at the feet of the would-be despot.

So at this juncture things look bad. But maybe this is just paranoia on my part. Maybe it will never come to pass. Maybe.

***

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HEADLINES:

• 179 dead in South Korea’s worst plane crash in years (CNN)

• The End of News — Legacy media has a trust problem, but it’s not too late to solve it. (Atlantic)

• At CNN, lower TV ratings and heightened anxieties about what’s ahead (WP)

• Dear America — Advice from areas of the world where press freedom is under attack (Nieman Reports)

• How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking? (New Yorker)

• Trump team says Canada, Greenland, Panama comments are part of a broader plan (WP)

• Elon Musk pledges "war" over H-1B visa program, calls opponents racists (Axios)

• US may hit new debt limit as early as Jan 14, Yellen says (Reuters)

• Yellen Warns ‘Extraordinary Measures’ Will Be Needed to Avoid Default (NYT)

• US government will not buy Bitcoin in 2025 — Galaxy Research (Cointelegraph)

• Elderly student loan borrowers owe $121 billion. They ask Biden for relief. (WP)

• How to fight ageism in the world around you — and in yourself (NPR)

• Migrants and End of Covid Restrictions Fuel Jump in Homelessness (NYT)

• Free-speech advocates tell Supreme Court US TikTok law reminiscent of dictatorships (Reuters)

• It's a full-on leak war between the SF Giants and Scott Boras now (SFGate)

• Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was Google’s first female engineer—only because she tried to delete a recruiter email and accidentally opened it instead (Fortune)

• Good news! 2025 will be full of AI! (WP)

• Grandma Who Survived Great Depression Casually Drops That She Once Killed Man For Mayonnaise (The Onion)

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Letters to a Young Journalist

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

In the 1960s, like many of the other young men around me, the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam and fight in a war I didn’t believe in terrified me. And that prospect made some of us very angry as well.

When I was a freshman in college, a small but insistent minority of students protested against the war and organized to convince more of us to join their ranks. At the same time, other students were joining in civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King and others and wanted to do something about racism in our society.

Our the four years I was in school, the ranks of students willing to join the antiwar and civil rights demonstrations grew considerably until it felt like we were in the majority, though mathematically that was never the case. We were, however, in the words of the writer Jack Newfield, “A Prophetic Minority.”

Other movements emerged, led by feminist, LBGTQ and environmental activists. Since we were young, we underestimated how difficult it would be to achieve the fundamental changes we sought. We met plenty of resistance, which only made us angrier and more determined to fight for change.

In those years, I read everything I could find about all of these issues and participated in protests for a while, though as I was finding my way as a journalist, increasingly I began covering the demonstrations rather than take part in them.

Our generation didn’t necessarily see a conflict between activism and journalism at first, although as we grew older and more experienced our attitudes evolved. By twenty years after my graduation, many media executives were actively prohibiting student journalists and young reporters from even attending demonstrations —to avoid any appearance of bias or conflict on contentious issues.

Those with my type of history were not happy about this but we gradually adapted and recommended that our interns and students and new hires make a difficult ethical choice. We told them if they wanted to be successful journalists they had to guard their credibility by not openly demonstrating. Otherwise they would be seen as partisans, which might end up limiting their career options.

Fast forward to today when the partisan divide is much deeper and more fractious than it was in the past. In addition, the incoming President has made it clear that he considers journalists who do not support him as “enemies of the people.” This would not appear to be an ideal time for young journalists to be entering the field.

So what is to be done under these circumstances?

Trying to remain open-minded, unbiased, even neutral about something as critical as witnessing our democracy slip into an autocracy is beyond any challenge to journalistic ethics my generation ever faced. If it comes to that, we’ll have to know where we stand before the point comes when there will be no place left to hide. It will be critical to build close connections with other journalists, young and old, as we work our way through the difficult period ahead.

But our role as journalists is clear.

To tell the truth no matter who might try to silence us.

HEADLINES:

• Azerbaijan Airlines says plane crashed after ‘external interference’ as questions mount over possible Russian involvement (CNN)

• Putin apologizes for 'tragic incident' but stops short of saying Azerbaijani plane was shot down (AP)

• South Korea Impeaches Acting President (WSJ)

• Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians (NYT)

• Window closing for Gaza hostage-ceasefire deal before Trump takes office (Axios)

• China’s Xi orders a stop to a spree of mass killings known as ‘revenge on society crimes’ (AP)

• Panama's president calls Trump's Chinese canal claim 'nonsense' (BBC)

• As Mystery Drones Fill Skies, Police and Businesses Want Authority to Take Them Down (WSJ)

• Dollar Eyes Best Year in Almost a Decade (Bloomberg)

• US homelessness up 18% as affordable housing remains out of reach for many people (AP)

• A MAGA ‘Civil War’ on X between Musk and the far right over H-1B visas (WP)

• MAGA civil war breaks out over American "mediocrity" culture (Axios)

• A race is on to save the Everglades and protect a key source of drinking water in Florida (AP)

• Beyond excessive force: How police abuse women, the poor, the homeless (WP)

• OpenAI defends for-profit shift as critical to sustain humanitarian mission (ArsTechnica)

• How A.I. Could Reshape the Economic Geography of America (NYT)

• Horrified Taylor Swift Realizes Football Happens Every Year (The Onion)

 

Holiday Times

I’m on a short break, but will return soon. I wish everyone a safe, healthy and peaceful holiday period.

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Trouble Returns

One of those bits of common wisdom that bears repetition is that history repeats itself, for better and for worse. Trump’s choice for FBI director is a case in point. Kash Patel has vowed to go after his boss’s perceived enemies, including members of the press. Doesn’t this ring a bell?

Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI conducted its notorious Cointelpro operations against activists and others Hoover deemed enemies of the state. Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post, advises us: As you consider Kash Patel, remember J. Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro.

“Under Cointelpro, the FBI:

• Sent anonymous fictitious materials to targeted groups, designed to “create dissension and cause disruption.”

• Leaked informant-based or investigative materials to friendly media sources for the purpose of exposing the nature, aims and membership of those groups.

• Deployed informants to disrupt such groups’ activities by sowing dissension and exploiting disputes.

• Informed employers, prospective employers, credit bureaus and creditors of targeted people’s “illegal, immoral, radical and Communist Party activities,” aiming to damage their financial or employment status.

• Told people that the FBI was “aware” of their activity, with the goal of developing them as informants.”

• Attempted to persuade religious and civic leaders to exert pressure on state and local governments, employers and landlords to the “detriment” of the targeted groups.

• Sent anonymous letters, including one to a political candidate alerting him that a targeted group’s members were active in his campaign and warning him not to be a “tool,” and another to a school board official, “purporting to be from a concerned parent,” pointing out that some candidates for the school board were members of a certain group.

• Furnished background on a candidate for public office, including arrests and questionable marital status, to news media contacts; furnished information concerning arrests of an individual to a court that had earlier given him a suspended sentence and furnished this same information to his employer, which later fired him.

• Made “an anonymous telephone call to a defense attorney, after a federal prosecution had resulted in a mistrial, advising him (apparently falsely) that one of the defendants and another well-known group individual were FBI informants.”

• Put out disinformation over “citizens band” radio, using the same frequency as demonstrators.

• Obtained tax returns of suspect group members, reproduced a group leader’s signature stamp and investigated a group leader’s love life.

This ugly history is why we should pay attention to Patel’s vow to “go after” people. It’s been done before and recovering from those violations of our civil rights took decades. Among the many troubling aspects of the incoming Trump administration, turning back this particular clock is near the top of the list.

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HEADLINES:

• Trump threatens to take back Panama Canal over ‘ridiculous’ fees (Guardian)

• Trump suggests U.S. should take ownership of Greenland (Axios)

• What Trump’s decision to wade into spending fight tells us about the next 4 years (AP)

• He’s anti-democracy and pro-Trump: the obscure ‘dark enlightenment’ blogger influencing the next US administration (Guardian)

• ‘They were prison camps’: At least 3,100 Native American students died at U.S.-run boarding schools (WP)

• Deception and Betrayal: Inside the Final Days of the Assad Regime (NYT)

• The Enigma of Bob Dylan (NYT)

• Groundbreaking 21-Million Cell Study Revises Our Understanding of Aging (SciTechDaily)

• The Race to Translate Animal Sounds Into Human Language (Wired)

• AI predicts Earth's peak warming (Stanford)

• Data-Driven Predictions of Peak Warming Under Rapid Decarbonization (AGU)

• OpenAI trained o1 and o3 to ‘think’ about its safety policy (TechCrunch)

• New Trump Ad Shows Montage Of People He’ll Kill If Elected (The Onion)

Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 10)

One piece of evidence that lay unexamined in the Betty Van Patter case for decades until I asked about it was Betty’s strange note to herself on or about November 1st, 1974: “[415] 644-6743 Police.” 

When I spoke to Tamara about it, she noted the way her mother had circled and made a mark next to the notation. She pointed to other examples of this and said it was the way her mother doodled when listening to someone on the phone.

So we concluded that she must have either made or received a call from that particular number.

Tamara then located on the Internet a copy of an old police directory that connected that extension to a Berkeley Police Department Officer named Dave Frederick. She pulled out her own notes from December 19th, 1974, when she first contacted the police, and sure enough, Frederick’s name and extension showed up on that list as well.

In fact, Frederick signed all the early “supplemental reports” during the extensive police hunt for Betty as a missing person. He noted that the department had one contact with Betty in the past, during an arrest of a former boyfriend, when she was charged with disturbing the peace. But he did not mention the phone call from a few weeks before she went missing, or any other recent contact with Betty. 

One of Tamara’s brothers, Greg Baltar, searched and found that Frederick had retired after 29 years at the BPD in 2002 and had died suddenly in 2004, at age 54. 

It was also clear from the files in 1974 that the Berkeley Police were in touch with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which was looking into the Panthers’ financial irregularities. (Back in 1969, the IRS had begun targeting the Panthers for intelligence purposes and for uncovering evidence of violations of any tax regulations.)

On December 26, 1974, two weeks after Betty had gone missing, an entry in the police file noted that at least two agents from the IRS were investigating the relevant financial issues — a “Ronald C. Williams S/A (IRS) 273-7255 ‘has the case on the Lamp Post.’ And on March 3rd, 1975: “Fred Walter, IRS, said he was investigating the Lamp Post's books and Jimmie Ward told him the 4th quarter payroll records were missing because they were in the possession of Betty Van Patter.” (The police noted this could not be true because Betty had disappeared before the fourth quarter books could have been closed.) 

So that brings us back to Betty’s mysterious notation. Is it possible that Dave Frederick had called Betty to see whether she knew anything about the Panthers’ financial irregularities and/or whether she might be willing to cooperate with the IRS in its investigation? 

Or could she have called him? Those who knew Betty well maintain that she would never have cooperated with any law enforcement agency against the Panthers so it seems inconceivable that she called them. But it seems quite credible that the police would have called her, hoping to get help in probing the Panther finances. So does that explain her note?

We know from multiple sources that Betty was increasingly upset in the weeks leading up to her disappearance and that she was seeking someone she could talk over her “situation” with. We know she tried to find Tom Silk and that she did talk with Fred Hiestand, who were at the time two of the party’s attorneys. 

We also know that Fred Hiestand told Elaine Brown just two days before Betty disappeared of her concerns about what she’d seen at the Lamp Post, with money taken out of the till and not accounted for.

Then there is the matter of Brown allegedly firing Betty. That Brown lied about the date – claiming it was a week earlier – is obvious – but did she possibly also lie about firing her in the first place? According to Brown herself, Betty had left her a phone message threatening to quit.

It seems more than plausible that while she was sitting at the Berkeley Square on the night of December 13th, Betty thought she could still salvage her job and was waiting to meet someone connected with the Panthers in that effort. It could well have been Brown, or perhaps Jimmie Ward, the owner of the Lamp Post, whom she hoped to meet up with.

The identity of the man who came to the bar and spoke with her has never been established, although the police ran down several leads about who he might have been. Whoever he was, and whatever message he imparted, we know that Betty got up and left with him. Her next known location, from all the known evidence, was the Lamp Post, but that’s where the trail grows cold.

Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, and I met with Alameda County D.A. Tom Orloff on October 22, 1991 to discuss his view of what happened. Orloff said he believed that Betty had gone from the Berkeley Square to the Lamp Post, where she was killed either as “a spontaneous event or it was planned from there.”

But Orloff said he did not have enough evidence to bring charges.

While considering the various scenarios, it occurred to me to be an odd circumstance that the Panthers had changed the lock on the door to the office where Betty had been working in the days after she went missing. Why would they do this if they already had her in their custody? Also, it is noted in the police file that the Panthers knew that Betty had her office keys with her when she disappeared.

Yet the locks were changed anyway. 

So what if “they” (the Panthers) were not acting in concert? Consider another scenario, one that would explain this and some of the other inconsistencies. 

What if, as of the 17th, when Horowitz first contacted her, Elaine Brown did not yet know what had happened to Betty? Elaine Brown is very smart; smart enough to avoid incriminating herself on a phone call that might be (and in fact was) being taped. So her bitter comments about Betty, from one perspective so self-incriminating, might actually have indicated that she was out of the loop in this matter.

At the Lamp Post on the 13th, Betty would have been under the province of Jimmie Ward, a man well-known and feared by those who knew him. Especially women. There is evidence that among Ward’s businesses was a prostitution ring, no doubt generating much of the cash that to Betty’s dismay kept mysteriously finding its way into and out of the bar’s cash register.

Ward had plenty to hide, and Betty represented a potential loose cannon, given her expressed concerns about what she'd witnessed at the bar. What if he, and not Brown, had been the one to summon her that Friday night, possibly without Brown even being aware?

If that is what occurred, then it makes more sense that Brown would have had the locks to Betty’s office changed the following week. 

As she elaborated in her book, Brown believed that Betty knew too much and that she was raising her concerns with Hiestand and others. If she now was missing, she had with her the keys to the office where the party’s sensitive information was kept.

As for the forensic and anecdotal (via David Horowitz’s sources) evidence that Betty was held, and possibly tortured for as long as two weeks before being killed, this would rule out any personal motive and further tie the Panthers to her death. Only the Panthers had a known motive for holding and torturing her. A crime of passion (by her ex-boyfriend Ken Baptiste or someone like him) would not have been carried out in such a fashion.

As to who was calling the shots about her fate, Horowitz and reporters Ken Kelley and Kate Coleman, among others, came to the conclusion that it was Huey Newton, from his base in Havana. Evaluating all of the evidence, I agree with them.

The chain of command could have been Newton to Ward, every bit as easily as it could have been Brown to a member of the 'Squad,' as the Panther security members were often referred to. That was what was suggested by the private investigator David Fechheimer to his mentor, Hal Lipset, and later to the family. In her book, Brown describes taking a phone call from Newton at the Lamp Post, just like the calls -- as she admitted to Coleman -- she received from him frequently at her home number.

Other sources have corroborated that Newton called the Lamp Post whenever he wanted to, dispensing orders for “bad things” to be done. Ward was his cousin, the party funded the bar, Newton killed one of Ward’s brothers in a dispute, and everyone feared the wrath of Huey P. Newton. Including Jimmie Ward, Flores Forbes and Elaine Brown.

But to this day, these various scenarios are just that — scenarios. The case has never been solved. And unless someone who knows the truth comes forward, it will remain that way.

The statute of limitations never runs out on murder.

Afterward

When Betty Van Patter disappeared in 1974, her daughter, Tamara Baltar, was in her early 20s. They’d been very close — losing her mother created a giant hole in Tamara’s life. Even though Betty’s body was eventually recovered, identified and buried, in Tamara’s mind, her mother was still simply missing. There was no closure, no resolution. Just the ongoing anguish of not knowing what exactly had happened or why.

The families of murder victims often feel this way, and it is one of the terrible consequences of unsolved cold cases. And it is why, even after all of these years, if one of those who knows what happened to Betty would come forward, some good could still be done in this tragic matter.

As the decades have passed, Tamara has systematically collected and catalogued every document, report and mention of her mother’s case and organized them into a series of binders. She has generously shared that evidence with me, which has made this 10-part series possible. 

Included in those binders is the autopsy report on her mother’s body. Tamara had never wanted to look at it but a few years ago she finally summoned the courage to do so. What she encountered was a confusing jumble of pages, possibly out of order, filled with technical jargon and containing grainy photographs of what seemed like some sort of design element on the coroner’s forms, possibly Indian artwork — dark, twisted images, vaguely humanoid, from various angles and perspectives.

One image in particular caught her attention and as she stared at it, she very slowly realized that it was a human skull. As the realization washed over her as to what —and who —she was gazing at, she smiled and said softly, “There you are! I’ve finally found you.”

The End

______________________

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

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Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 9)

Fourteen years after Elaine Brown’s book came Flores Forbes’ revealing memoir, “Will You Die With Me?” in 2006. While in prison serving time for second-degree murder for the Richmond incident, Forbes had started his college education, which eventually led him onto urban planning and a job with the city of New York. Today he is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at Colombia University.

Though he has done well in New York, Flores Forbes has not always been able to contain himself as he attempted to deal with his feelings about some of his past actions. Sometime around the 25th anniversary of Betty’s disappearance, in 1999, a New York-based freelance writer, Scott Sherman, overheard Forbes bragging at a party about his past life as a Panther gunman.

That fed into Sherman’s work on an article for The Nation in 2000 about the Panthers’ role in David Horowitz’s conversion from a reliable friend of the left into an outspoken enemy.

In “Will You Die With Me?” Forbes provided an elaborate description of how he staged and executed the botched Richmond incident. That is the only criminal action he admitted to, although he stated there were others. In the book he indicated that he had come to genuinely regret the things he did as a security officer in the Black Panther Party.

“Shit, if there was a witness who had the courage to testify against us, we would bribe them. Or, as we’d tried to do in Richmond, take stern steps to ensure they didn’t show or testify.”

“There was still the shadow that my past casts over my life.”

“Upon close reflection, I realized that the passing of Huey P. Newton…meant that one less person was alive who actually knew what my past deeds were, and with each passing, that number would get smaller.”

These sound like the words of a man hoping to avoid paying any further price for his crimes beyond the time he had already served in California prisons.

Could the murder of Betty Van Patter have been one of those deeds? After all, he was the party’s head of security at that time, and therefore in charge of doing any dirty work required. Furthermore, legal investigator David Fechheimerindicated to his mentor, Hal Lipset, that Forbes was the Panther responsible for Betty’s death.

As he toured the country promoting his book, Forbes visited Oakland, where he was politely received at a reading in a bookstore at Jack London Square.

During the question and answer period after his talk, Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, raised her hand:

“Mr. Forbes, "You talked about the Lamp Post extensively in your book. My mother, Betty Van Patter, was the Panther bookkeeper who was last seen at the Lamp Post on December 13th, 1974, and then found murdered. Given your position in the Party, would you please comment on this?"

Forbes, clearly taken aback, could only mumble a denial/non-denial answer:

“I did not know who Betty Van Patter was."

After the reading, as he was walking with his family nearby and saw Tamara approaching from another direction, Forbes steered his party aside to avoid encountering her a second time.

***

Over the half-century since Betty Van Patter was killed, her murder has been mentioned in news articles and books, as well as in academic writings that mainly focus on the historical significance of Black Panther Party.

Driving much of the coverage during all those years has been the tortured figure of David Horowitz, who used Betty’s case to argue that the Panthers were not a source of progressive change at all but essentially a gang of thugs. As more and more evidence has surfaced about the street brutality promoted by Huey Newton, Horowitz’s perspective gained a measure of credibility.

Even Elaine Brown, in her memoir, acknowledged the dark side of the Panthers: “Huey and his entourage of restless gunmen were prowling the after-hours clubs with no purpose other than to intimidate.”

Of course, Brown and others (particularly academics) who continue to defend the party’s legacy, argue that they were “armed revolutionaries” fighting repressive institutions, including police agencies that were targeting black people all over the country.

To a great extent, the Betty Van Patter case has been politicized by all sides, and rarely assessed simply as an unsolved murder, which is finally what the family asked me to do. It’s impossible to shed all personal bias, of course, but I’ve spent every bit as much energy looking for evidence of a counter-theory as for corroboration that the Panthers were at fault.

The family has pretty much given up hope there will ever be charges or a trial in the case, particularly since, as Forbes noted in his book, fewer and fewer people are still alive who know the actual details of this or any of the Panther-related crimes.

That the Panthers killed Betty is the only scenario that fits the known facts, but without definitive proof, it remains possible that someone else could have been involved.

An obvious suspect would have been an ex-boyfriend, like Ken Baptiste, the married man who was still emotionally entwined with Betty when she disappeared. The anguished entries to her private journal indicate that he was the source of some of what seemed to be troubling her in her final days. But he also appears to have cooperated with the police extensively, and to have made serious efforts to locate her when she was missing.

The police appear to have never really considered any theory other than that the Panthers were at fault. But they could not build a plausible case based on solid evidence – -everything was circumstantial. Elaine Brown’s statements over the years have done little to exonerate her and the Panthers from suspicion, however.

If anything, Brown has dug herself into a rhetorical hole around the case by strongly suggesting a motive – that Betty raised suspicions by asking too many questions at a time when the IRS was already actively probing the group’s finances.

In this context, it is not known whether Betty herself even was aware of law enforcement interest in the Panthers’ financial practices. The types of questions she was raising were simply the obvious ones any accountant or bookkeeper has to ask. Where was the money coming from and where was it going? Bookkeeping is all about keeping track – money in and money out.

Part of the confusion inside the organization may have been that Brown and others apparently knew very little about financial accounting themselves, so the straight-forward questions any scrupulous bookkeeper would have asked probably struck them as much more suspicious than they actually were.

Another factor here is the substantial and unrelenting pressure generated by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies on the Panthers. Could this have been a factor — directly or indirectly — in her murder?

I’ll examine that angle at length tomorrow.

(Part Ten, which concludes the series, will appear tomorrow.)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

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Who Killed Betty Van Patter? (part 8)

By 1977, when Huey P. Newton returned from his exile in Cuba, the Black Panther Party was in tatters. Newton was frequently sighted drunk and/or high on cocaine and 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 conversations ranging from poetry to philosophy to politics and beyond. Newton was the party’s main theoretician, extremely well versed in Marxism, even though he claimed that he had been illiterate until his junior year in high school. 

I found that particular claim hard to believe, probably part of the myth he and others had constructed about his rise to fame. But up until to this point I had only experienced Huey’s charming and brilliant side when meeting him in person. Then came the occasion when I witnessed what the angry Newton could be like.

It was soon after the “Richmond incident.” On October 23, 1977, the Panthers head of security, Flores Forbes, led a contingent of Panthers in the dead of night to a house where they thought a woman lived who was scheduled to testify against Newton in the murder of a prostitute, Kathleen Smith.

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.”

But 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 also been hit. 

The police also found more abandoned weapons and ammunition. It didn’t take them long to figure out that the intended victim was a prostitute who rented an apartment behind the middle-aged woman’s house and who had seen Huey Newton shoot her friend, Kathleen Smith.

The dead man was a Panther squad member, and team leader Flores Forbes was the other wounded man. 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 a house in the Oakland hills as he sipped a glass of cognac. Newton’s lawyer, Sheldon Otis, was also present.

Newton denied any involvement in the Richmond incident and tried to convince us that Forbes and the other assailants had been only loosely associated with the Panthers, which was patently absurd. He then claimed that they all had quit the party some weeks earlier. As he kept drinking during our interview, his speech was becoming somewhat slurred and erratic.

As part of the interview, I carefully repeated step-by-step the chain of events and the trail of evidence leading back to the Panthers for a second time. At this point Newton completely lost his temper. He jumped up and stalked out of the room.

His lawyer, Otis, murmured an apology and then followed him into an adjoining room. For an extended period of time, Avery and I could hear Newton shouting in the other room, “I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill him!” 

Avery and I debated whether it might be wise to make our 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, and he seemed emotionally flat and remote.

Many years later, when Forbes published his memoir, he took personal responsibility for the botched assassination attempt in Richmond, saying that he did it without Newton’s involvement or knowledge. That prompted me to wonder whether in fact Newton’s anger at my questions that day had been because he was indeed 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 and killed 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. 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 Van Patter, her daughter Tamara Baltar, David Horowitz, Huey 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 Van Patter, 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 entry, 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 odd and gratuitous decision by Brown to include the false charge in the first place.

Brown claimed in her book that, after Betty’s body was found, 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.”

(Part Nine will appear tomorrow.)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

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