The Messenger, page 42
When the relationship soured, Jamal took Gale Benson as his new lover, and the two moved to London, where Jamal sold his memoirs, From the Dead Level, to Andre Deutsch, a small publishing concern. He was also having a passionate affair with his editor, Diana Athill.30 “He was a very intelligent man by nature and good-looking,” Athill remembered. The affair ended after Jamal started referring to himself as Allah and insisted that Benson call him God: “The man was mad and the girl was mad.” The last time Athill saw him, Jamal was dangerously paranoid. Gale and Jamal left London for Trinidad along with Michael Abdul Malik (known as Michael X in London).31
In the first week of January 1972, Jamal and Gale Benson got into a violent argument. No one knows what happened immediately after the argument, except that Jamal left suddenly.32 While he was away from the compound, Benson decided to take a walk in the garden. She saw some of Malik’s “soldiers” digging a ditch. Nervous about being there without her protector, she stopped near the large hole and asked them why they were digging. They were following orders, one of them replied; she had nothing to worry about. When the hole was about six feet deep, Malik sneaked up behind Benson and squeezed her neck, using his left arm as a vise. He released her quickly, so that she fell to the ground next to the hole. Before she could get up, Malik took a machete and stabbed her dozens of times in the throat and chest. As she pleaded for her life, Malik and his men pushed her into the hole and buried her alive.33 Jamal hastily left Trinidad for America, settling in Boston’s Roxbury district, where he was born in 1931.
When Benson’s body was discovered, the scandalous story was on the front page of every tabloid in Great Britain.34 On March 3, Malik was arrested for murdering Benson and for the murder of Joseph Skerritt, a cult member whose body was unearthed on February 24 in another grave in the compound. Both, it transpired, had been murdered because they were suspected of being informants.35 Malik was hanged for the crimes. When investigators tracked down Jamal and questioned him, he denied any knowledge of the murders. By the time stories of Jamal’s relationship with Benson had faded from the American media, the NOI was stirring up trouble for him over statements in his book regarding Malcolm X’s assassination.36 Members of the Mau Mau also were angry with Jamal. They blamed him for neglecting Malcolm’s cousin and accused him of being a traitor for leaving his wife for a white woman. On May 2, eight members of the Mau Mau shot Jamal to death in Boston. Five were accused of his murder and later convicted.37
At the time of Jamal’s murder, the Mau Mau organization had cells of terrorists across the country. Between May 3 and August 4 of 1972, the Chicago cell killed nine white people in the Illinois area. Six of the assassins were arrested on October 15, but the wars of the self-actualized black gods continued.38 Another cult inspired by Fard launched a six-month killing spree in San Francisco in late 1973. Saying that they were sacrificing “blue-eyed devils” to Allah, the Death Angels had attacked twenty-three white people (fourteen of whom died) before seven members of the cult were arrested on May 2, 1974.39 The Death Angels, it turned out, were members of Muhammad’s Mosque No. 26 in San Francisco. The NOI posted bond for them and hired their lawyers. The ultimate irony of the murders was that one victim, Saleem Erakat, was a Muslim whose skin happened to be white.
The case became known as the “Zebra Murders” after the police radio band set aside for tracking the killers. But the description was popularized because all the victims were white and the assailants were black. During the trial, attorney Edward W. Jacko tried explaining to the jury that the defendants had taken too literally the lessons about a Muslim having to kill four white people in order enter heaven. The defendants denied that their cult even existed, but four were ultimately convicted.40
Although the NOI was self-destructing, COINTELPRO actions continued, and some resulted in deadly backfires. On April 14, 1972, two New York City police officers invaded the new Harlem mosque after receiving a bogus distress phone call from a man who identified himself as a detective trapped inside the mosque.41 When the officers rushed into the building, they were attacked by at least ten Muslims. Within minutes of the surprise invasion, one officer was shot with his own gun and the other was beaten with his nightstick.42 When the ordeal was over, Farrakhan said at a press conference that he believed the attack was premeditated. “People saw patrol cars lined out in the streets minutes after the incident. They had submachine guns, automatic weapons, every kind of handgun imaginable and they were wearing bulletproof vests.” The rapidity and scope of the response, Farrakhan said, suggested that the invasion was pretextual.43 The attack dispelled Muhammad’s theory that police would exempt the supposedly unarmed NOI from the types of attacks that had led to the assassination of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and other black revolutionaries. But it also gave him another chance to highlight the importance of unity among black organizations.
In July, the Messenger thought he had discovered a powerful new preacher. Joe Tex, an internationally recognized black entertainer at the zenith of his career, called a press conference to reveal his membership in the NOI. “You can call me Joseph X now,” Tex said smiling.44 A high school dropout in 1955, Joe Tex was earning as much as $500,000 by 1970 with a string of hits, among them “Skinny Legs,” “Chicken Crazy,” and “Hold On to What You Got,” which sold more than a million copies. Tex announced in early 1972 that he was forsaking his music career to follow his heart. “I had wanted to get out a long time before this,” he said during a national tour for the Messenger that brought him to Howard University that July. He confessed that he had joined the NOI in Miami in 1967 after attending meetings with his road manager, who was a Muslim. The only thing that had kept him from quitting the entertainment industry sooner, he said, was that he wasn’t sure of what he would do after he revealed his allegiance to the Messenger.45 “I did not want an ordinary job under the white man. I had that as a young man, picking cotton where it was ‘nigger’ this and ‘nigger’ that.”
After discussing his dilemma with the Messenger, Tex said, he was advised that he could become a minister. “Being a minister is the highest you can go,” he said euphorically. “I am very happy that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is giving me a chance to get out of the song and dance business.” One of the most successful crossover artists in history, he stunned white and black fans alike with his announcement. It was eerie to think that a man so frequently seen on television entertaining predominantly white audiences could suddenly start screaming “devil” and “savage” at them. Joe Tex’s revelation had a tremendous impact on black teenagers, but like Muhammad Ali, he had a credibility problem. Most people simply refused to believe that he was serious. Whatever his intentions, the singer’s stint as a minister was short-lived; he returned to the recording studio in 1974 and churned out at least five more albums.46
Although Muhammad Ali was not attracting the hordes of converts that Malcolm would have, he offered the Messenger access to foreign heads of state who literally worshipped the first Muslim athlete to become an international icon. When Ali was a young boxer, he won the admiration of a Muslim student who had participated in human rights demonstrations as a youth (including a protests against the French government’s alleged involvement in Patrice Lumumba’s assassination) and who worshipped Ali after meeting him once after a boxing match.47 The student, who was the same age as Ali, shook his hand and tried to explain what a hero Ali was to him and to young Muslims throughout the world. When the student, Muammar Gadhafi, became premier of Libya, he offered the Messenger a $3,000,000 loan, negotiated by Muhammad Ali, to build a mosque in Chicago.48 The U.S. State Department was furious, but the loan was not in violation of any laws so there was nothing the government could do. When the State Department contacted Abdalla Suwes, the Libyan ambassador in Washington, to complain about Gadhafi’s “interference in domestic affairs,” Suwes replied that Libya had no intention of doing so. “We are merely helping to build a church, and this is something American missionaries have done in many countries.”49
African Americans beamed with pride that a foreign ruler had trusted one of their own enough to lend that much money, and had refused to back down in the face of an implied threat from the big, bad United States. Muhammad used the money to purchase the Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church on Chicago’s South Side.50 When Muhammad had wanted to buy the church in 1970, representatives of the government of Saudi Arabia had offered to pay nearly half the cost. Despite his desire to acquire the building for an Islamic Center, Muhammad was reluctant at that time to accept loans from the Saudis for fear of becoming “beholden” to the lenders. The original asking price was $3,000,000. But when the Messenger was the highest bidder, the seller hiked the price to $4,000,000.51 It was an odd business move since no one else had offered anything near $3,000,000 for the building in a neighborhood that had gone from being all-white to 70 percent African American.
Gadhafi’s loan was by far the most generous, but soon other Muslim heads of state joined in the philanthropy, the logic being that anyone who opposed Zionism can’t be all bad. In late October 1972 Prince Abdalla Aziz Khalifa Althani of Qatar gave the Messenger a check for $100,000 during a visit to his Chicago mansion.52 That was followed by a $125,000 loan from the government of Abu Dahbi “to aide the cause of Islam” in America.53 Less than a year after the $3,000,000 Gadhafi loan, the Messenger asked for another one. This time, Gadhafi hesitated. Arab students had complained that the Muslims were an apostate group who denied the brotherhood of man.54 The Messenger had hoped to get approval of the loan before Saviour’s Day 1973, but was not successful. On the other hand, Gadhafi received such favorable publicity in black newspapers that he announced his intention to donate the money of the first loan instead of lending it.55
Not to be outdone, FBI official Moore wrote in a report for the Bureau’s file on the NOI that the “Tax Division of the [Justice] Department currently has a tax claim suit pending against Elijah Muhammad [over the loans from Libya].”56 The Bureau agreed to cooperate, but would not reveal the entirety of its file on the Messenger, which was well over a million pages. There were nearly 100,000 pages from the 1942 draft-evasion investigation alone.57 Besides the tax investigation, the intelligence community was called upon during the OPEC crisis to investigate reports that Kuwait and Libya were considering “giving the NOI oil tankers to transport oil to the United States and a possible visit by Colonel Gadhafi, premier of Libya, to the United Nations in the near future and, at that time, possibly meeting with Elijah Muhammad in New York City.”58
Two weeks after Moore wrote the memorandum, President Nixon told Congress that while the United States had “only six percent of the world’s population, we consume one-third of the world’s energy output.” The energy crisis that had been choking American motorists since January was showing no signs of abatement, and a little black man in Chicago suddenly seemed like a potential ally instead of a threat. The results of the investigation remain classified, but it’s a safe assumption that the idea of talks between Kuwait and Libya and the NOI never advanced beyond the theoretical stage.
During the same week in 1972 that the Libyan loan was granted, Clara Muhammad returned to her physician, complaining of a painful burning sensation in her stomach. She was hospitalized and given a battery of tests. The diagnosis was advanced cancerous growths in her abdomen, and the prognosis was grim: she probably had less than three months to live.59 On July 14, the Messenger wrote in Muhammad Speaks that Clara was progressing from her recent illness. From the tone of the article, he seemed confident that his wife would make a miraculous recovery. Whether he was hiding the truth about Clara’s condition to reassure the women in the NOI for whom she was a heroine, or merely blinding himself to it, is unknown. In all probability, it was a little of both. On August 12, 1972, Clara’s battle with stomach cancer ended. There was no autopsy, but her death certificate showed that she had cerebral thrombosis, generalized arteriosclerosis, and carcinoma of the stomach with general metastasis. She was buried at Mount Glenwood Cemetery in Thornton, Illinois.60
Clara’s painful death after two decades of painful life seems to have awakened Muhammad’s dulled sense of justice and mortality. It was one thing to pretend to be a divine man who could live to be a thousand with the proper diet and lifestyle; it was quite another for him to see the stilled body of a friend who had been beside him for nearly all of his life, who bore his children and raised them well, and who loved him when others saw nothing worth loving. Clara was the one who picked him out of the gutter when he was an alcoholic. She opened his mind to Islam, then led Master Fard to him. She wrote to him constantly while he was in prison, and held the NOI together while trying to do the same for her own family. And through it all, she had been faithful. She put up with his philandering and his verbal abuse. She left their home when he ordered her to leave, then returned whenever he begged her to come back. While rumors started going around after Clara died that Elijah was planning to marry Velora Najieb, one of his personal secretaries,61 or Tynetta Nelson, they were unfounded. As his health declined, Elijah seemed to have come to the realization that a hundred concubines couldn’t give him what he and Clara had had together. Faced with his own mortality, the Messenger began saying things he really believed instead of things to perpetuate a faded façade. The first indications of this came during an interview while Clara was ill.
“Some Muslims, or former Muslims, wonder why you employ so many white people?” The question, posed to the Messenger during a press conference in 1972, was one that had troubled members of the NOI for a long time.62 The Messenger’s first significant contract was with the Lerners, a Jewish family whose company printed Muhammad Speaks.63 By 1970, Muhammad worked daily with Caucasians he was forced to hire to handle the NOI’s growing wealth. The question, and the conspicuous integration of his staff, had Muslims wondering whether Muhammad had changed his racial views. “Because I can get along with both,” Muhammad answered defensively, “and the white people know their country, know their government, know their buildings, their material. And if my people would build those houses over there [referring to his new mansions], they would have to buy the material from the white people.”64
The reporter had raised the issue because he was struck by the obvious contradiction of labeling Caucasians as inferior to black people and then hiring them to manage the NOI. The Messenger’s wish to have it both ways became the focus of a report released by the American Jewish Committee, which accused the NOI of being a major source of “anti-Semitic infection in the black community.” It had been prepared by Milton Ellerin, who had given a similar report on the Muslims to BOSSI agents in 1959. “Muhammad Speaks,” Ellerin wrote, “frequently indulges in overt anti-Semitism … [and] stereotypes reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda diet crop up from time to time.” The report stated further that the paper habitually referred to “international bankers” and the “international economic conspiracy” supervised by Jews. The report noted that the group’s views were troubling because it was the most influential black separatist group in the nation, and that Muhammad Speaks had a verified paid circulation of over half a million.65
Muhammad’s vision of a significant influx of members from the new black middle class—created largely through affirmative action and other integration efforts promoted by civil rights groups—never materialized. In early October, 500 black professionals chartered six planes to Chicago for a “unity meeting” requested by Muhammad. In the invitation they received from Farrakhan, they were told that they would not be required to join the NOI in order to handle the group’s growing bankroll. “We have reached our level of expertise in handling it and we now need the help of black professionals to maintain it and carry it forward,” a spokesman for the Messenger said.66 Among those who attended the meeting were Leonard Jeffries, head of the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York; educational consultant Preston Wilcox, and Carlos Russell, dean of the School of Contemporary Studies at Brooklyn College. The meeting was a complete disaster. Instead of pleading for their cooperation, the Messenger denounced them for two hours. Most were so outraged that by the end of the meeting, fewer than fifty were ready to cooperate with the NOI.67
With their departure, Muhammad reluctantly recognized that he would have to hire even more Caucasians to help manage his burgeoning antiwhite NOI. A further sign of deteriorating conditions in the organization was the decision in late October to expel every Muslim in New York who was a policeman. “You can’t be a Muslim and a policeman at the same time,” Leonard 12X Weir was told when he arrived at the Harlem mosque for a religious service. The irony of the expulsion for Weir was that he had personally presented the Messenger with an award from black policemen three years earlier. The blanket expulsion order was issued after Gene X Roberts revealed during the trial of the so-called Black Panther 21 that he had infiltrated Malcolm X’s organization and the Black Panther Party.68
The most serious threat to the NOI wasn’t misfeasance by the FBI or the growth of black nationalist organizations, but came rather from the Philadelphia mosque headed by the Messenger’s lifelong friend, Jeremiah X Pugh. Emboldened by the Dubrow robbery and the Messenger’s acquiescence in hiding Mims from the law, members of the Muslim Mafia decided to take over certain drug markets in Philadelphia’s ghetto. On June 9, 1973, Major Benjamin Coxson was found shot to death in his home in Cherry Hill, a New Jersey suburb fifteen miles outside Philadelphia.69 Coxson, who grew up in Philadelphia, was a pivotal player in the East Coast Black Mafia. Although he had no visible means of support, he lived in a mansion a few houses down the road from Muhammad Ali.70 He was so well-respected that when he ran for mayor of Camden, Ali campaigned for him.
