The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge by T. J. English

Author:T. J. English [English, T. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, United States, History, True Crime
ISBN: 9780061824555
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE BUREAU OF Special Services (BOSS) was a clandestine branch of the police department’s Intelligence Division. It had originally been set up in the halcyon days of the cold war to monitor the activities of the Communist Party in New York, which earned it the nickname “the Red Squad.” By the early 1960s—especially after the Harlem and Brooklyn riots of July 1964—BOSS switched its focus from communists to what it referred to as “black hate groups.” One of its early efforts had been to supply information through backdoor channels to the CBS television network, which produced a documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced. The documentary, produced and narrated by Mike Wallace, was an alarmist portrait of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam.

BOSS covertly gathered information on anyone who advocated for civil rights on behalf of black people. Its most ambitious effort involved planting undercover agents within black activist organizations. They infiltrated the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s Organization of African American Unity almost from their beginnings in New York. The organizations SNCC and CORE were rife with police informants, and undercover detectives infiltrating RAM played a major role in that group’s demise.

BOSS also infiltrated the Black Panther Party. The Panther organization was growing fast, making it difficult to conduct thorough background checks on all prospective members. The leadership tried to instill quality control by enforcing a rigid initiation process. But the undercover cops were good enough at this kind of work to penetrate whatever security the Panthers could muster—and ultimately this fact created an atmosphere of paranoia within the group that was easily manipulated by law enforcement.

BOSS was able to place six different undercover agents in the New York Panthers, as well as dozens more paid informants through what they called the Ghetto Informant Program. Among the policemen posing as Panthers were:

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