Nine Lives of a Black Panther Page 26

  Embedded in Mills’s teachings were lessons on human nature. For instance, there was a fool in the joint who chased anybody he thought was susceptible to being bullied and then tried to turn him into a homosexual. A guy named Monroe, whom I knew from the streets, was being intimated by this lowlife, who would hit him in the chest and the arm. Monroe would retreat, not fighting back. One night after visiting hours a few young brothers were hanging around my bunk going through a deck of cards and doing push-ups. This fool is chasing Monroe around again, and as usual Monroe wouldn’t fight back. So, I’m checking this shit out and decide I couldn’t watch it anymore. I approached him and said, “Listen nigger, we’re not turning out any more brothers. Stop that shit!”

  Mills saw the play go down and said to me, “Young blood, now you need to watch your back. You saved a nigger that didn’t want to be saved. A man will save himself.” I knew that was righteous talk. That’s the kind of education I got from Mills.

  Jail wouldn’t be jail if there weren’t racial conflict and fights. When it happened, it was usually the whites and Mexicans against the black inmates. One day a playoff game was about to start that the black inmates wanted to watch. But some white boys had commandeered the TV early and were watching Hee Haw, a variety show about some white redneck farmers listening to country music. A riot broke out, and we whipped their asses. We didn’t have weapons; we used our fists. We were turning over bunks and beating the white boys and some of the Mexicans who joined them. Those who didn’t want to fight used their mattresses as shields. The guards came in and broke us up. That was the only major fight I had in Wayside.

  Sometimes the guards would harass me or single me out for discipline. “Up against the wall, Blue!” they would say, while surrounding me and pushing me up against the wall. “Hands up. Let me check your pockets.”

  I would follow orders and put up my hands so they could search me. One time I had an orange in my hand. I got so damn mad—I squeezed it so hard that it burst in my hands. Mills was right there watching and supporting me, saying, “Be cool, young blood. Be cool.”

  Mills would work with me to turn down the noise in my head, so I wouldn’t get in more trouble. Mills kept his word and made sure that I walked out of Wayside in one piece.

  20

  THE LIMITS OF FREEDOM

  I walked outside, stopped, and took in a big breath of air. “Ahhhh,” I said, to no one in particular.

  It felt good to be walking out of Wayside Max. It was the springtime, and I was finally done with that place.

  The jail time, legal battles, and especially the uncertainty that went along with both were all behind me. Standing outside the jail, looking up at the cloudless blue sky, I felt that a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I had been looking forward to the future and to reestablishing relationships with my family, and now the time had finally come. I couldn’t wait to get started. The first thing I did was catch the bus to Pam’s place.

  No one was expecting me, and I was practically bursting with happiness at being free to go where I pleased. It will be a great surprise, I thought as I walked up and knocked on Pam’s door.

  “Who is it?” Pam called out from the other side of the door.

  “Wayne,” I said gruffly, trying to hide my excitement.

  The door opened immediately. Pam smiled broadly as I walked through the door, immediately greeting me with the kind of hug that told me I had been missed and needed.

  “Where are the boys?” I asked immediately.

  “In the kitchen. Come on and see them,” she replied happily.

  I walked down the hall and around the corner to the kitchen and was immediately greeted with squeals. I looked at my sons and marveled at how they had grown in just those few months. Their first birthday had been in April, while I was locked up. I hadn’t stressed about it too bad at the time, though, knowing that I would be coming home soon. Seeing them again was amazing. They had teeth, and they were walking and moving about.

  Pam and I agreed to spend a quiet evening together that night; I wasn’t in the mood to party. I was happy to be relaxed and reflective, enjoying the family life I had created.

  The next day, I checked on Sharon and my daughter. Tammy was about to turn two, so she was running the show. She had my mother, Nanny, and Sharon all at her beck and call, demanding that all her needs were taken care of. As usual, whenever I went to see Nanny after being gone for a while, she cooked my favorite foods: red beans and rice, greens, and steak, in that order.

  My mom and a few relatives stopped by Nanny’s to see me and partake of the meal. I expected my mother to start pestering me about changing my life. I didn’t have to wait long; she jumped right in. We hadn’t even finished eating. “Wayne, I think this is a good time for you to think about going back to school.”

  I replied with as much sincerity as I could muster. “Yeah, Mom, I have been thinking a lot about that.”

  Nanny joined in, “If you decide that you don’t want to go right back to school, you can always get a job. You’re smart, Wayne; you can do anything you want.”

  I nodded. “I understand, Nanny. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  Of course, my mom couldn’t help herself. “Son, I sure hope that you are not thinking about getting involved with that Black Panther Party again. Being with the group hasn’t helped you. And it’s worrying the hell out of us.”

  I bit my tongue, because I was getting aggravated. “Things have changed so much with the Party that there is not much to go back to.”

  My family didn’t really need to worry about the Black Panther Party. It was now a shell of its former self. Huey Newton had gone to China in September 1971. After his return, he ordered the Black Panther Party chapters across the country closed and relocated the leadership of various chapters to Oakland. Huey also formally announced that it was time for the Party to “put away the gun” to “serve the people.” After the Watts office burned down, no other office was opened in the area. All other offices in Southern California were closed while I was in jail.

  In the meantime, G’s trial for the Olsen murder was coming up. He was being set up, because we all knew that he had been attending a Black Panther meeting in Oakland when Caroline Olsen was killed and her husband shot. His defense team tried to get Hilliard and Seale to go on record and declare that G was there, but they refused to help. I thought that shit was unforgivable. But I also knew that they wanted to see G locked up because they were afraid of him, even more so after Red was killed. Still, they should’ve talked things through and worked something out, rather than allow him to remain in jail.

  Despite the Central Committee’s refusal to affirm G’s location during the murders, we believed he could beat the case. He had a winning legal team: Charles Hollopeter, a successful local attorney, was his court-appointed lawyer, and Johnnie Cochran served as cocounsel. Tyrone Hutchinson had already told the police that a couple of drug addicts from the neighborhood had committed the murder, so that information could be used to meet the criteria for reasonable doubt. Julio was a proven lying dog and an agent who had been snitching on the Panthers for years. And finally, Kathleen Cleaver flew to Los Angeles from Algeria to testify that she and G were in Oakland at the time of the murder.

  The trial started on June 14, 1972. Less than two months later, on July 28, 1972, G was convicted of first-degree murder and given a life sentence. It was possible that he would spend the rest of his life in jail.

  After the sentence came down, I stopped by Richard’s place on Central and Eighty-Fourth. Richard had been recruited by Bunchy but worked out of West Adams with Julio, who was his section leader. “The way that shit came down on G is a crying shame,” Richard said to me.

  “I talked with Johnnie, and he said they are going to appeal,” I replied.

  “C’mon man, do you think G really has a chance?”

  “I’m not sure. After G chased that damn judge off the bench, all the judges in California probably want to see
him locked up. Considering all the reasons why he should have gotten off, it seems to me that to help G we might have to make some money and work it another way.”

  “I hear that. I still think that Bunchy should have gotten rid of Julio’s crazy ass a long time ago. We knew he was sucker and a lowlife.”

  “Yeah, I know. But Bunchy could work with fools like that and get them to do the right thing.”

  Richard smiled, remembering times with Bunchy. “He put Julio in a box and watched him work.”

  I chuckled. “I love G, but he didn’t have Bunchy’s people skills and couldn’t control his temper. Bunchy would instill a little fear in people, but they respected him nonetheless. With G, everybody is just plain scared. Julio was terrified of G.”

  Richard remarked, “G knew that Julio was a little off. Maybe he thought he needed to watch him, that’s why he didn’t just expel him. I’m glad I never had anything to do with Julio.”

  The sense of melancholy I felt was real. I hoped that the attorneys could really help G on appeal. But I was also feeling low because I had lost contact with some of my other homeboys. Baba and Wendell had gone to Canada, trying to escape a stint in jail for the attempted murder charge of Michael Lansky, a local communist leader. Then there was Billy Dean Smith, another brother we called “Duck,” whom I had recruited into the Party. Duck was from Watts, and we were the same age. He had a green GTO, which he allowed the Party to use. I rode with Duck to Oakland for the United Front Against Fascism conference in July 1969. We had a great time, partying at night, attending workshops during the day, and hanging out with progressive young people of all races and colors. Duck had gotten drafted into the army and was sent to Vietnam. He didn’t want to go, but he had no real options for refusal. He trained at Fort Ord and then was sent to Vietnam in October 1970. I heard through the grapevine that the officers were sending Duck to the frontlines every day, putting him on point, which meant that he could be the first to die. Duck fiercely protested his treatment, which led to several confrontations with his superiors in the army. Then a grenade exploded in the officers’ barracks killing two officers and wounding another. After a grenade pin was found in one of Duck’s pockets, he was arrested and charged with murder. Duck had been sent back to the United States and put in solitary confinement, where he remained. Luke McKissack, one of our attorneys on the SWAT case, was now defending Duck, which I was glad about because Duck would surely face the army’s firing squad if convicted.

  I was also mourning the end of my work in the Party. It had been my life for two years, and I was committed to our activism. I could still recite the Ten Point Platform from memory. But now there were no more political education classes and no more selling newspapers and no more organizing rallies. I couldn’t deny it; I was still a Panther in my heart.

  As sentimental as I was about the slow demise of the Party, I had to get my priorities in order, and making money was at the top of the list. Before I went to Wayside, I asked Pam to set aside some money for me. She kept her word, so I had a little cash in my pocket. I hit the streets to make sure I invested that cash into an opportunity to make more.

  I turned my attention to the drug trade, full blast. Things had changed, and the black community was flooded with drugs. Weed and pills seemed primitive compared with the new drugs of choice: heroin, cocaine, mescaline, speed, and LSD. It seemed like everybody was using or selling drugs. Unbelievable to me, after participating in the black struggle, was that the pressure exerted on the drug dealers seemed nonexistent.

  The abundance of illegal drugs in the black community signaled a change in Los Angeles, but there was also a new set of gangs. Crips, Bloods, Pirus, and others were taking over the streets. They were much more vicious than we were. When I was coming up, gangs boxed, wrestled, and sometimes used knives in fights. Periodically, a gang member would get killed. But the new crews were different; they wanted to see blood at the outset. It was nothing for them to pull a gun on somebody. In this new environment, I had to play just as hard.

  At Wayside, Mills told me that robbery was a short-term game and that I needed to always remember that a wrong move during a robbery could be my last. Using that information, I looked for Freddie to hook me up with some action in a different arena. Freddie took me under his wing, and I started hustling with him all over the city. We sold weed, worked accidents, and played the horses at the racetrack. Because I didn’t like the odds on winning at the track, I found a niche in loaning other hustlers money. Betting on the ninth race was a big deal, because it was the last race of the day. People would “baseball the bet,” meaning that the numbers they bet equaled nine. But if a guy had been there all day, then he was usually broke. That’s when I would step in, ready to help a brother out.

  In return for my contribution, I didn’t ask for money; I wanted to be paid back with the action—drugs I could sell. I would drop them off to one of my partners, like Slow Drag. I met him in the projects, and he was the person who introduced me to tooting cocaine. I had tried it before but really wasn’t into it. But Slow Drag showed me how to take the rocks out of the cut, so that it was real pure and didn’t ball up. One time Slow Drag made so much money he paid me twice in one day. Slow Drag was from Chicago, and the whole time he was in Los Angeles he wore coats, because he said “it didn’t get cold enough.”

  Next, I needed to move my sons out of the projects. The county workers had recently come to make sure Pam was still qualified to receive welfare benefits, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps. When one of the workers asked me how much I made, I replied with $3,000 a month.

  After they left, Pam went ballistic, yelling and screaming. “Wayne, why in the hell would you tell those people that you was making that much money? Now they are going to kick me off the county.”

  I yelled back at her, “I don’t give a damn about the county! I was brought up hustling for mine and not playing the welfare game.” I had no plans to be dependent on anybody’s welfare. “Fuck that shit.”

  I moved us into an apartment on the Westside, on Ninety-Second off Normandie. It was the same neighborhood that caused me so much consternation when I was in middle school. It was a couple of miles from Henry Clay, the school where I had experienced racism. I can’t explain why I went back there, except that I didn’t want my boys growing up in the projects.

  It was around this time that I got my wholesaler’s license to sell clothes, which I sold out of the trunk of my car. Coats and hot pants made good money, but my staples were panty hose—off-black, coffee, and a little navy blue. Sometimes Pam would dress up in one of those nice hot-pants suits to generate interest, and then they would really sell.

  While I was working my other hustles, Freddie came up with a good connection for Mexican Mud, which is brown heroin. Dealers liked selling it because they could sell one ounce for five hits. I sold to other dealers, rarely to individuals. The action from the Mud with Freddie not only helped me pay the bills and keep the lights on, but also contributed to my ability to pay for a few extras, like better TVs and electronics.

  Then one day I took my boys to Rudy’s Barbershop on Ninety-Eighth and Normandie for haircuts. I sat around jive talking with Rudy for a few hours with some of his other customers. Of the men Rudy introduced me to that day, Joe Armistead stood out from the rest. He was a tall, thin, light-skinned cat about ten years older than me. While we were shooting the breeze, I was checking out Joe’s diamond rings and wondering what he was into. It was starting to get late, so I picked up my boys to go home.

  As I was walking down the street carrying one son in each arm, Joe pulled up in a long, black 1970 Coupe de Ville and offered us a ride home. “Sure,” I said, and Joe took us home. I invited him in. “Hey, Joe, I have a little blow in the house.”

  Getting out of his car while still talking, Joe said enthusiastically, “Sounds good to me.”

  Joe and I tooted some and then he split.

  After Joe left, Pam came to me, livid. �
�You and this fool snorted up all the coke, and we need the money!” Blah, blah, blah.

  I quickly forgot Pam’s meltdown. I had a feeling earlier that day that I might get lucky, and I was right. A couple of hours later, Joe came back to my apartment with his girlfriend, Donna. Small world: Donna and I went to high school together at Washington. “Hello, Donna. It’s good to see you. What have you been doing with your life?”

  “Hanging with Joe.”

  Joe asked, “How do you two know each other?”

  We both said, “Washington High” at the same time and laughed.

  Donna said some good things about the work I did organizing the BSU at Washington.

  Joe said, “Hey, brother, that was nice what you did this afternoon, inviting me to share your stash.” While making conversation, Joe put an ounce of coke on an album cover and we consumed it. Joe and I started talking business while Pam and Donna got to know each other. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. I knew meeting Joe was a stroke of luck for me, and the fact that I knew Donna gave Joe and me a closer connection. He told me about his Mexican connection and said he would hook me up.

  Joe introduced me to Homer, who would go to Mexico and get pure cocaine from the producers. Joe would come by weekly and drop a stash for me to move. Then Joe took me to Mexico with him to meet some of the players. I was ballin’. Freddie had given me the game, but Joe gave me my PhD in hustling. Now I was moving on the fast track. I put together a crew, and we began to sell to hustlers at the Gardena Casino. I had so much money, I bought about five cars in one year. But I didn’t go Superfly. I made sure I gave Sharon some money, and Nanny. I bought a Mustang, a convertible El Dorado, and a Coupe de Ville. I would run the cars up and down La Cienega Boulevard, a long strip of highway on the Westside.