-Caveat Lector- Published Sunday, October 22, 2000 http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/alameda/oakland/stories/sjpratt_20001022. htm Inside an FBI frame-up: story of a Black Panther 'Geronimo ji Jaga' Pratt served 27 years for a Santa Monica murder committed while he was in Oakland By Dan Reed SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- MORGAN CITY, La. -- Amid the worn shanties and shops in this humid, buggy bayou town lives a revolutionary and future multimillionaire -- a man once accused of such vile crimes as the Charles Manson-led "Helter Skelter" massacre, of the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, of conspiring to hijack a school bus and behead the children on board, and of the cold-blooded killing of a woman on a Santa Monica tennis court. His name is Elmer Pratt, now Geronimo ji Jaga. The highly decorated Vietnam veteran spent 27 years -- just over half his life -- in a penitentiary, where he withstood years of abuse. He was a Black Panther, a group labeled "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," in a memo by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI when Pratt was arrested. And, he was framed. The story of how Pratt became the victim of a secret government "counterintelligence" campaign is told in a just-published biography, "Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt," by the noted writer Jack Olsen. In July, the Los Angeles City Council approved its share of a $4.5 million settlement for his wrongful incarceration in the tennis court case. The rest came from the FBI, which hid evidence as it waged a now-well-documented campaign against players in the civil rights, anti-war and other movements considered politically radical in the late '60s and early '70s. Pratt has yet to see the money, although it will come. Now, three years after winning his release, the former officer in the Oakland-based Black Panther Party is back home in swampy Morgan City, caring for his frail 97-year-old mother, who had prayed daily for his release, and trying to build a social center from the town's old "colored" high school and denouncing injustice as he sees it. These days, he often longs to slip away into the bayous for a calming day of bass fishing, trying to make bad memories fade. But always, he's under pressure as a spokesman, as a symbol of the fight against government injustice. "He went into prison a revolutionary and came out a revolutionary," said Olsen, who spent long hours with Pratt while researching his book. Johnnie Cochran, the attorney for O.J. Simpson who represented Pratt for years, said recently it was his most important case ever. If the U.S. Supreme Court had not temporarily suspended capital punishment as unconstitutional in the early 1970s -- the era in which Pratt, originally accused of a death penalty offense for the tennis court killing, was tried -- the government likely would have executed an innocent man, said several observers. On this day in Morgan City, Pratt is particularly agitated, fuming into his cell phone about an apparently racially motivated fire bombing in Selma, Ala., the site of the "Bloody Sunday" voting rights march. "It's the same old racism, the same thing as in 1965," he said. Soon, he and his coterie -- like-minded friends in the civil rights movement -- would be on a flight there, talking to locals, trying to buoy their spirits. A few days later, he would be off to Washington, D.C., testifying before the Congressional Black Caucus about the FBI's dirty tricks campaign called Cointelpro -- counterintelligence programs -- to determine whether others are wrongly still behind bars because of it. In Pratt's case, the FBI tried to undermine the Black Panthers by planting letters that convinced the group's already-paranoid leaders -- namely the Huey Newton faction -- that Pratt was against them. So, they refused to testify he was in Oakland -- he was there for a leadership meeting -- the night of the tennis court murder. The FBI wiretapped Panther meetings, documents later released under the federal Freedom of Information Act show, but the logs for that one night are mysteriously missing. Yet Wes Swearington, a former FBI agent interviewed by Olsen, remembers seeing the transcripts, and says they proved Pratt was in Oakland -- not Santa Monica -- the night of the killing. Though Olson refers to him as a "peaceful" revolutionary, Pratt was never much a supporter of the aggressive non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, he took to the teachings of Malcolm X, believing armed struggle may be necessary to rebuff racial oppressors. He has killed, firing in heavy combat in his two tours in Vietnam. He is only now talking about how he put his military training to use back home -- secretly traveling to cities, teaching black groups how to use weapons in case they came under attack. Now, given the perspective of years, the man with skin the color of buffed oak -- African, Indian and white blood -- is nearly at peace. His face is marked by two distinguishing chicken pox scars. At 53, his body is compact and powerfully built. Each morning he jogs five miles. Today, he's wearing a T-shirt and baggy shorts. He fumbles with Wal-mart reading glasses; on the top of one lens is a strip of tape that says, "office." "Everyone keeps borrowing them," said Pratt, chuckling at the explanation. He laughs easily at himself and is astonishingly philosophical about his time in prison, which included eight years in "the hole," a concrete box, as he describes it, about four feet by seven feet. No bunk, no window, no sunshine, no sink. A hole for a toilet. Now, a free man, he stands as a martyr for the wrongly accused and spends many days attempting to make up for time lost. "I've been trying to be there for my mother, who I wasn't there for for 27 years ... to give her birthday presents, to take her out to dinner," he said as he sat in the office dedicated to his new cause, the Kuji Foundation. It was created to turn the old Morgan City Colored High School, his alma mater and now a jail, into a social center. "I've asked the (civil rights) movement to please give me a minute with my mother, and everybody says, 'Sure, that's beautiful,' and then they turn around and call me the next day. 'I need you here, I need you there.'" He and his mother, Eunice, share a stately antebellum house in Morgan City, painted yellow with white trim. Columns support a front-and-side deck. It's not so far from where he grew up, a shotgun house in a neighborhood near the Atchafalaya River called Across The Tracks, then the Negro section of town. Even though the Ku Klux Klan had outposts in the region, his upbringing was generally idyllic. Pratt's father was a junkman, who enlisted his boys -- Elmer was the baby in a family of seven -- to haul his findings to New Orleans, 99 miles from home. He remembers one frightening encounter with the Klan. On a Halloween night, he, his brother Timothy and a friend, at the time about 10 or 11 years old, were trick-or-treating -- Geronimo, dressed as the pirate Jean Lafitte. Unknown to them, some black kids had jumped some white kids and taken their candy. A Klan family went riding, looking for revenge on the first blacks they could find. "We got to running, and they caught my brother Tim," beating him badly, Pratt recalled. He said Tim still suffers epileptic seizures brought on by injuries to his brain. As a boy, Geronimo was a crack shot, and that helped scratch up extra cash. "When I was young," he said, "I'd come back with 75 rabbits, 20 or 30 coons. Man, that's good money. I'd sell them to the markets, and they would take them to New Orleans. Or sell them to people in the community -- two dollars clean, dollar-fifty unclean." A star quarterback in high school, he dreamed of going to Grambling State University. But the community's elders -- senior, respected men who looked out for the black population -- had other ideas for their young men. It was the mid-1960s; the country was in ferment. The elders felt they needed a new generation trained in the ways of war, in case the already bloody civil rights movement took a turn for the worse. "They said it wasn't time to go to college right now," Pratt recalls. "There was a lot of things happening." He didn't expect Vietnam, but he fought there valiantly, earning 18 medals, two of them Purple Hearts. "Those are the ones that hurt," he says, lifting his arm to show where a piece of grenade shrapnel still pushes its way from under his skin. After two tours, Pratt believed he'd get a cushy military job. But the elders said no. "When they killed Martin Luther King, the elders said to get out. Not only to me, but all across the nation, black people were getting out of the army, coming to their communities, arming themselves." On a trip to Los Angeles, he hooked up with fellow Louisianan Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, founder of the Black Panthers' local chapter. The pair quickly became friends. It was Bunchy who gave him the nickname Geronimo. Pratt adopted the name ji Jaga while he was in prison. After Carter was fatally shot in a fight with a competing group -- documents suggest the fissure might have been fostered by the FBI's Cointelpro -- Panther leaders found a tape Carter left. It instructed them to turn over to Pratt his role as deputy minister of defense, making Pratt one of the key people in the chapter. It was 1968, King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, riots erupted at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and Hoover stepped up his campaign against so-called subversive groups. In one agency memo, dated Nov. 25 of that year, Hoover ordered his agents to submit "imaginative and hardhitting measures aimed at crippling the BPP," according to Hoover biographer Curt Gentry. Such dirty tricks included anonymous mailings, paid informants, burglaries, surveillances, taps, bugs and mail openings, Gentry wrote. And as soon as Los Angeles authorities realized Pratt's flashy, red-over-white GTO belonged to a Panther, Pratt said, the harassment started. He was one of about two dozen members arrested in a predawn police raid on a Panther home that sparked a long shootout. When Charles Manson's "family" slaughtered seven people, Pratt was picked up for the grisly killings, he said. "They locked me in a cell and told me I was being investigated for a series of murders," he said. "They did this a lot to get me out of commission -- until the lawyers showed up." He figured his arrest in the 1968 tennis court slaying, a woman shot during a robbery, was another setup that would quickly go away. It didn't. It went to trial. And the deck was stacked. Cochran was the young Los Angeles lawyer appointed to defend Pratt in 1971. This year, he finally finished the job, settling Pratt's civil suit against the government. He proved that authorities withheld information from the defense, including that the key prosecution witness was a government informant. Pratt insisted a conspiracy existed to convict him, but Cochran didn't believe, then, the government would stoop to such dirty play. "He was right, I was wrong," Cochran says now. "There's no question about it. I had no idea they were following him, wiretapping phones." The harassment continued even after he was imprisoned, he says -- beatings, the hole. At one point, word was passed that he'd orchestrated from the hole a plan to hijack a bus carrying the children of prison guards -- beheading one a day until demands were met. No such hijacking ever occurred. Even though prison authorities later admitted Pratt had no role in the plan, the accusation stayed in his prison folder for years, making him a target of guards' wrath. Another time, as Cochran stood by, FBI agents offered him $500,000 and free passage to Algiers, where Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver was living in self-exile, if Pratt would tell them where his people had stashed kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. "What about the lady I supposedly killed on the tennis courts?" Pratt asked, according to Olsen's book. "Oh, everybody knows you're clean," one of the agents replied. A radical young law student named Stuart Hanlon -- unencumbered by Cochran's faith in the system -- then took up the case, sticking with it and working with Cochran off and on all these years. A breakthrough came from the 1976 Church Committee Senate hearings in Washington, which revealed the FBI's Cointelpro program of dirty tricks. "I believed the FBI was framing people before Cointelpro ever happened," said Hanlon, a Bay Area lawyer. "The Church Committee report came out and it all started to make sense." Still, even as evidence pointing toward a frame-up mounted, the government fought hard at every court hearing. To Hanlon and the army of volunteers behind the swelling "Free Geronimo Pratt" campaign, it was clear: Pratt was a political prisoner. "He was prosecuted and framed because he was a Panther," Hanlon says. Given the radical politics, it was perhaps ironic that it finally took a conservative judge from Orange County to order his conviction "reversed and remanded for further proceedings." Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti, much to the disgust of Pratt and his attorneys, dithered for months before deciding to not pursue the case further. Garcetti did not answer a phone message for comment. Neither did the FBI's San Francisco office. Freedom? "It was like surreal, whooooooooo! It was like, this is not real, I'm going to be back in in a minute," Pratt recently remembered, laughing hard. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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