This is The Face of Another of Malcolm X’s Assassins, William Bradley, But He Never Got a Day in Prison. Why?

I saw this at Jack and Jill Politics. Hat tip to Jill Tubman.

The elderly William Bradley, aka Mustafa Shabazz, first to fire a bullet into El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X, in 1965; Bradley lives quietly in New Jersey, but he may have been a government operative (Courtesy: NewarkSpeaks)

I’m sure some of you have heard that Thomas Hagan, known in the Sixties as Talmadge X. Hayer, the only confessed killer of Malcolm X, was released on parole yesterday after 45 years in jail. Now nearly 70, and known as Mujahid Halim, Hagan is no longer a Black Muslim, and he has repeatedly and profoundly expressed sorrow and regret for his part in Malcolm’s assassination.

But he wasn’t the only trigger man. Hagan wasn’t the lead shooter. And he has repeatedly maintained that the two other men who were convicted were wrongly imprisoned. He knows who the real perpetrators were. He even gave the names to authorities as well as to his lawyer, the late William Kunstler, in an affidavit. So does Spike Lee, who made sure that he got the film depictions of the assassins as close as possible to the identities of the real perpetrators, and named their names at the close of the film, Malcolm X.

From Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a D.C.-based historian and independent scholar who runs the blog, A Singular Voice:

The five assassins came out of the Nation of Islam Mosque Number 25 in Newark (now Masjid Ali Muslim) located at 257 S. Orange Ave, and are Benjamin Thomas, Leon Davis, Wilber McKinley, Talmadge Hayer, and William Bradley. It was Bradley who was especially chosen by Thomas, the ring’s leader, to handle the sawed-off owing to his infamous reputation on the streets of Newark, N.J. as a ”stick up man” and bank robber, the city where he still lives today “hidden in plain sight”. He can be found on almost any given day, a large grandfatherly type figure, at the First Class Championship Development Center, a gym located at 936 Bergen Street which is owned and operated by his wife, long time activist Carolyne Kelley-Shabazz. She has her own interesting story. A one-time supporter and intimate acquaintance of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, she emerged later to become one of the most well-connected cronies of former Mayor and convicted felon, Sharpe James. In addition to the gym she owns quite a bit of real estate, providing for herself and her husband – the killer of Malcolm X – a very comfortable standard of living. Are you outraged yet?

In fact, Bradley even appears in a campaign ad for Cory Booker; that’s how middle-of-the-road, if you can call it that, he has become.

How has Bradley and the three other assassins managed to get away with it for so long?

Muhammad thinks that although Bradley had a rap sheet a mile long, his “get out of jail” card was to murder Malcolm at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, the domestic intelligence apparatus. As proof, he provides a piece of film in which Bradley, a burly man who looks like he has a rolled up newspaper in his coat pocket, was filmed at the Audubon Ballroom. He ostensibly looks like he wants to attack Hagan, who is in police custody, but he desists and is eventually shown calmly walking away from the scene of the assassination, looking as if he is fading into the scenery.

[…O]ur research has convinced us that someone is protecting Bradley. Although he is a very dangerous multiple felon, no mug shot at all exists in his criminal record (which we have). Also, when you plug his name into the New Jersey State Convicted Felon Registry, nothing comes back for William Bradley or a Mustafa Shabazz of his age. We also learned that in 1968, just three years after he cut down brother Malcolm, he committed a bank heist in Jersey with two other men, yet they went to prison AND BRADLEY DID NOT! What’s more, there is no explanation for why he was allowed to go free either. Was this his “get out of jail free card” for assassinating Malcolm X? We need answers to these questions. When we questioned our sources about these strange things their answer was very blunt, “Bradley has been working for the ‘Feds’.”

Time has a way of exposing who was responsible for murders and misdeeds during the civil rights era and the Black Power Movement, whether it was neo-Confederate or Klan members and symps; or in this case, government operatives and informants or agents provocateurs.

For example, John Ali, national secretary for the Nation of Islam, who was part of the campaign to smear Malcolm, was later revealed in the Seventies to have been an FBI agent. Bodyguard Gene Roberts, who was Malcolm’s “chief of security,” was also exposed as an intelligence agent for the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services or BOSS. BOSS was notoriously super-secret and was nicknamed “The Red Squad.” Muhammad suggests that Malcolm’s murder could have been the result of strategies used by what became known as Hoover’s Counter Intelligence Program, or Cointelpro, which operated under the FBI umbrella between 1956-1971. Some think, though, that Cointelpro still exists and operates today.

And you will know them by how they live and where they live, too. And what they live on and who they hang with. And for all intents and purposes, they’ll look harmless and respectable.

Check it out. Come to your own conclusions.

~ by blksista on April 29, 2010.