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The Assassination of Malcolm X: Ex-Undercover Officer Admits Role in FBI & Police Conspiracy
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
February 26, 2021

The FBI and New York Police Department are facing renewed calls to open their records into the assassination of Malcolm X, after the release of a deathbed confession of a former undercover NYPD officer who admitted to being part of a conspiracy targeting Malcolm. In the confession, Raymond Wood, who died last year, admitted he entrapped two members of Malcolm’s security team in another crime — a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty — just days before the assassination. This left the Black civil rights leader vulnerable at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where he was fatally shot on February 21, 1965. Raymond Wood’s cousin Reggie Wood, who released the confession last week at a press conference, tells Democracy Now! his cousin’s involvement in the plot haunted him for much of his life. “Ray was told by his handlers not to repeat anything that he had seen or heard, or he would join Malcolm,” says Reggie Wood. “He trusted me enough to reveal this information and asked me not to say anything until he passed away, but at the same time not to allow him to take it to his grave.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The FBI and New York Police Department are facing new calls to finally open their records related to the assassination of Malcolm X, shot dead 56 years ago at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, February 21st, 1965. This comes after the release of a deathbed confession of a former undercover New York police officer who admitted to being part of a broad New York police and FBI conspiracy targeting Malcolm. In the confession, the former officer, Raymond Wood, who died last year, admitted he entrapped two members of Malcolm’s security team in another crime, a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, just days before the assassination. On Saturday, Ray Wood’s cousin, Reggie Wood, read the letter at a news conference at the Shabazz Center in Harlem.

REGGIE WOOD: “It was my assignment to draw the two men into a felonious federal crime, so that they could be arrested by the FBI and kept away from managing Malcolm X’s Audubon Ballroom door security on February 21st, 1965.”

AMY GOODMAN: In his letter, Raymond Wood also revealed he was inside the Audubon Ballroom at the time of Malcolm’s assassination. At least one other undercover New York police officer, Gene Roberts, was also inside, after infiltrating the security team of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the group Malcolm founded after leaving the Nation of Islam. Both officers, Wood and Roberts, were part of the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, or BOSSI, a secretive political intelligence unit of the NYPD nicknamed The Red Squad.

Following Malcolm’s assassination, police arrested three members of the Nation of Islam for his murder, but questions about the guilt of the men have lingered for decades. In his letter, Raymond Wood openly says one of the men, Thomas Johnson, was innocent and was arrested to, quote, “protect my cover and the secrets of the FBI and the NYPD,” unquote. Ray Wood’s letter echoes claims in recent books by Manning Marable and Les Payne that some of Malcolm’s actual assassins were never charged.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by Raymond Wood’s cousin Reggie Wood, who released his deathbed confession. But first I want to turn to the words of Malcolm X himself, speaking after his home in Queens was firebombed just a week before his assassination, February 14th, 1965.

MALCOLM X: My house was bombed. It was bombed by the Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad. Now, they had come around to — they had planned to do it from the front and the back so that I couldn’t get out. They covered the front completely, the front door. Then they had came to the back. But instead of getting directly in back of the house and throwing it this way, they stood at a 45-degree angle and tossed it at the window, so it glanced and went onto the ground. And the fire hit the window, and it woke up my second-oldest baby. But the fire burned on the outside of the house. But had that fire, had that one gone through that window, it would have fallen on a 6-year-old girl, a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old girl. And I’m going to tell you, if it had done it, I’d taken my rifle and gone after anybody in sight. I would not wait. And I say that because of this: The police know the criminal operation of the Black Muslim movement because they have thoroughly infiltrated it.

AMY GOODMAN: “Because they have thoroughly infiltrated it.” Those are the words of Malcolm X right before his assassination, right after his home was firebombed in February of 1965. Just days later, he was shot seconds after he took the stage at the Audubon Ballroom.

We’re joined now by Reggie Wood, the cousin of Raymond Wood, author of the new book, The Ray Wood Story: Confessions of a Black NYPD Cop in the Assassination of Malcolm X. Still with us, civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who attended that news conference with Reggie Wood at the Audubon Ballroom, now the Shabazz Center, where Malcolm X was assassinated 56 years ago.

Reggie, thank you so much for joining us. You read parts of the letter this weekend. Talk about your cousin, Ray Wood, and what you understand happened, the conspiracy he alleges that he was a part of by the FBI and the New York Police Department to assassinate Malcolm X.

REGGIE WOOD: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

Ray was a complicated man. I think, based on his past experiences, he lived with a lot of fear and caution on a daily basis, which he instilled in me over the past 10 years. But Ray was a person that lived as a — he lived as a very quiet and reserved person because of what he had experienced. He witnessed some horrible things firsthand and also realized that he was a part of it after the fact. And so, therefore, Ray was told by his handlers not to repeat anything that he had seen or heard, or he would join Malcolm. Therefore, for 46 years, Ray separated himself from the family, in fear that he would put us in danger.

Ray lived alone many years, and he finally — in his final years, when he realized that his cancer was reoccurring, he wanted to reconnect with family because he didn’t want to die alone. So, I volunteered to move him to Florida so that my wife and I could take care of him and get him back and forth to his cancer treatments and things of that nature. And therefore, he trusted me enough to reveal this information and asked me not to say anything until he passed away, but at the same time not to allow him to take it to his grave.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in your book, Reggie Wood, “He had spent years living in relative obscurity, wanting to ensure the cops wouldn’t preemptively act to silence him. He also feared retribution from society, especially the Black community. Ray was ashamed of what he’d been a part of and felt he had betrayed his own people. Due to his lugubrious feelings about his actions and fear for what might be done to him in retaliation, this 2015 article deeply impacted Ray.” And he’s talking about this news coverage from February — he was talking about the article by Garrett Felber in The Guardian that really laid out your cousin’s seminal involvement here and the FBI-police involvement in the assassination.

REGGIE WOOD: Yes. That book really details everything that happened. I felt that after consulting with Mr. Crump, I was looking for the best way to put this information out there. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to turn it over to authorities. Therefore, I just wrote everything that Ray told me into this memoir and made it available to the world, so that everyone would see it and hear it at the same time. And I think that’s the best way to do it. It’s a load off of my back, because I’m no longer in fear of the government trying to quiet me, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to news coverage from February 1965 about the police-orchestrated plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. This was just days before Malcolm X’s assassination. This might be news to a lot of people, even old-time activists. In the video, Raymond Wood is seen being promoted for his role in that plot.

NEWSREEL: The happy ending to the plot was written by a rookie policeman who had been on the force only eight months when he infiltrated the extremist group. His work led police to a quiet New York residential area where the dynamite had been hidden. … Another arrested was Khaleel Sayyed, who, police say, went to the Statue of Liberty to buy a model and further the plot with the fourth conspirator, Walter Bowe. The hero cop, his face hidden for future undercover work, is promoted on the spot to the rank of detective, a happy climax to a bizarre story.

AMY GOODMAN: The arrests were carried out on February 16th, just days before Malcolm X was assassinated. And this is very significant, Reggie Wood, as you know, this so-called —

REGGIE WOOD: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — Statue of Liberty plot, because these men who were arrested were the security team of Malcolm X, meaning he wouldn’t have them there February 21st, a few days later, when he was assassinated.

REGGIE WOOD: That’s correct. That’s correct. As we were doing our research, my research assistant, Lizzette Salado, really helped me put the pieces together. We whiteboarded everything that Ray said and attempted to connect it to facts that the FBI had released and that historians had pulled out. And we worked closely with some historians to try to corroborate the information that was there. And once we were able to do that, we were able to present that information to Mr. Crump and show that this was a legitimate situation that needed to be brought to light.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, in the 2015 article in The Guardian, historian Garrett Felber reveals notes written by the late Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama. At a meeting held in 1965, she identified Ray Wood to be at the scene of Malcolm X’s assassination. She wrote, quote, “Ray Woods [sic]” — she wrote, with an “s” — “Ray Woods [sic] is said to have been seen also running out of Audubon; was one of two picked up by police. Was the second person running out,” Yuri wrote. This appears to substantiate some of the accounts of a second man taken into police custody after the assassination. I spent many hours with Yuri Kochiyama talking to her at an assisted-living facility at the end of her life in Oakland before she died. Can you talk about what happened at the assassination — because Yuri is right here; she was very close to Malcolm X, up on the stage with him, as well, at the end, after he was shot — that your cousin ran out and was taken away by police?

REGGIE WOOD: Yes. What Ray basically explained to me was that once he saw what was going down and he realized what had actually happened, after spending time with Mr. Sayyed and Mr. Bowe, he was there, and he reminisced or thought about the situation with him coming into the Audubon without being checked. He thought about the fact that those guys were in prison as we spoke. And he decided he needed to get out of there.

And as he was leaving, some individuals that knew him from his other undercover work — and he had been exposed somewhat from the bombing case — saw him, and they attempted to grab him. As they were grabbing him, trying to restrain him, a police officer intervened and grabbed Ray and took him into the police car. And from there, they took him to the precinct and put him into a cell, where he sat there for three to four hours not knowing what was going on. The only information that he had was listening to the chatter on the radio while they were transporting him to the police station.

And later that afternoon, the same two gentlemen that told him to go to the Audubon came and removed him from his cell and drove him back home and told him, quote, “Do not speak of this again, or you will face similar consequences.”

AMY GOODMAN: Did he know Gene Roberts, the other undercover officer, or at least one other, that we know of, who was there?

REGGIE WOOD: No. No, he did not. He did not know him. He did not know he was an undercover. He assumed he was part of Malcolm X’s team.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Ben Crump, you ended the last segment where we want to talk at the end of this segment, and that is the issue of what evidence is out there that the police or the FBI is hiding, and what you are calling for. It’s interesting that last week a judge ruled — a court ruled that the disciplinary records of New York police, going back for years, must be released. De Blasio said they’re releasing them, the mayor of New York. Not clear if they’re being released at this moment. That’s disciplinary records. And the police unions have been fighting this tooth and nail. What are you calling for in this case?

BENJAMIN CRUMP: Well, Amy, thank you for covering this important matter, as well, and to Reggie Wood, who has put forth this dying declaration letter from his cousin, Ray Wood, and documented all the corroborating evidence, and the memoir that he and Lizzette researched to show that everything in that letter is true. It is legitimate. And that’s very important to help exonerate all those Black people who were wrongfully convicted by Ray Wood’s work, all those people who have been conspired against by the NYPD and the FBI, whether that be Walter Bowe, Khaleel Sayyed, whether it be Thomas Johnson, who was picked up, who wasn’t even at the Audubon Ballroom but, to ensure that Ray’s cover would not be blown, was arrested and served almost three decades in prison for a crime of killing Malcolm X that they all knew he did not do.

And also Tupac Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur, part of the Panther 21, who Ray Wood testified against, saying that they tried to blow up New York monuments, and therefore, quite literally, she was imprisoned when she had her prince, Tupac Shakur, because of NYPD and the FBI were conspiring to wrongfully convict them.

And as Ray Wood said in his letter, their job was to discredit civil rights organizations and Black leaders. And that’s why we are calling for a Malcolm X commission to be convened by the United States Congress, so his daughters, but also the people who was affected by these felonious actions of NYPD and the FBI to target Black people can be exposed, because, Amy, the past is prologue. As Reggie Wood and I have often taught, the same way they targeted Malcolm X for saying that Black people deserve equality by any means necessary, they are targeting young Black Lives Matter activists today, labeling them as Black identity extremists. And so, we need to have our federal government be held to account for trying to stop Black people from exercising their First Amendment rights, but, more importantly, for being able to declare that Black lives matter, over and over again.

AMY GOODMAN: Benjamin Crump, we want to thank you for being with us, civil rights attorney, speaking to us from New Orleans. And thank you to Reggie Wood, author of the new book, The Ray Wood Story: Confessions of a Black NYPD Cop in the Assassination of Malcolm X. Reggie Wood, speaking to us from Tampa, Florida.

When we come back, we’ll get reaction from Ilyasah Shabazz, one of the six daughters of Malcolm X, who herself has just written a young adult novel based on her father’s time in jail. Stay with us.

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“We Want the Truth Uncovered”: Malcolm X’s Daughter Ilyasah Shabazz Backs New Probe into Assassination
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
February 26, 2021

The family of Malcolm X is demanding a new investigation into his 1965 assassination in light of the deathbed confession of a former New York police officer who said police and the FBI conspired to kill the Black leader. Ilyasah Shabazz, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and one of Malcolm’s six children, says the latest revelation is further evidence of how the authorities worked to infiltrate and undermine Black organizations during the civil rights movement. “All he wanted was for America to live up to her promise of liberty and justice for all,” she says of her father. “I’m happy that the truth can finally be uncovered.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

To talk more about the assassination of Malcolm X, we’re joined by his daughter, Ilyasah Shabazz. She joined Reggie Wood on Saturday when he released the deathbed confession of his cousin, the late undercover police officer Raymond Wood, who described being part of a police and FBI conspiracy that targeted Malcolm X, was there at his assassination.

Ilyasah Shabazz is professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, a community organizer, motivational speaker, activist and award-winning author. Ilyasah Shabazz and Tiffany Jackson have just co-written a new book for young adults titled The Awakening of Malcolm X.

Before we go back in time to the book and Malcolm X’s history, Ilyasah, can you respond to this bombshell deathbed revelation that Reggie just shared with us?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Wow! You know, I think it’s deplorable. But I think that it’s good that he came forward with this letter, because many people just did not understand how intricately involved people in powerful positions were to infiltrate organizations that set out to improve society.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, true that Reggie Wood — Raymond Wood not only infiltrated Malcolm X’s organization, but CORE, the Panther 21, all these different groupings. Now, you have dealt with this slow drip of revelations over the decades. I mean, you are Malcolm X’s daughter. Can you talk about the effect on your family and what you’re calling for now? Do you join Ben Crump in calling for a reopening of the investigation of your father’s assassination?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Absolutely. We want the truth uncovered. And if it’s the Manhattan district attorney, the United States Congress, we would like them to do a thorough investigation on the assassination of our father, Malcolm X. You know, it was quite challenging, you can imagine, for my mother, who was a young woman, pregnant with my youngest sisters, the twins, had four babies, to walk into the Audubon excited to see her husband because their home had been firebombed just a week prior on the evening of Valentine’s Day, and for her to be able to go and see her husband with her family, she must have walked into that Audubon Sunday afternoon really excited, and left, shattered.

And when I discovered this letter, when I discovered Reggie Wood with this information, you know, I thought of my mother. I thought of my father, just a young man. All he wanted was for America to live up to her promise of liberty and justice for all. And he worked quite diligently for 12 years looking for solutions to this ongoing problem. And he provided the biggest critique of America. And I’m happy that the truth can finally be uncovered. And so, whatever it takes, I and my five sisters are supportive of that effort.

AMY GOODMAN: You were there 56 years ago, horrifyingly. How old were you? Two years old, in the Audubon Ballroom, where you returned this past weekend. I mean, of course, you’ve been there many times. It’s now the Shabazz Center. Fifty-six years ago, when he was gunned down, you were there with your sisters and mom.

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: That’s right. That’s right. And again, I always go back to my mother — it had to have been just so difficult for her — and how she safeguarded her husband’s legacy, because, look, what most people are discovering now is that all of what they learned about Malcolm X, it was absolutely inaccurate. This past summer, while young people were politicized because of this global pandemic, because of being forced to watch this horrific death of George Floyd, going out into the streets, protesting, 50 states in this country, 18 countries abroad, and we discovered that my father was quoted 53.7 thousand times per hour in social media. And this is the clearest indication that people wanted to know the truth about Malcolm X. They knew that Malcolm spoke truth and that he provided strategies and tactics that they could employ to meet these socioeconomic challenges head on. And so I take my hat off to these young people for being diligent, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to an excerpt of a speech your dad gave at the Audubon Ballroom in '64, about half a year before he was assassinated there. It's called “By Any Means Necessary.”

MALCOLM X: One of the first things that the independent African nations did was to form an organization called the Organization of African Unity. The purpose of our Organization of Afro-American Unity, which has the same aim and objective, to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere, and first, here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Malcolm X, months before he was assassinated. Ilyasah Shabazz, you have now written a book for young adults called The Awakening of Malcolm X, and it really focuses on his time in jail. Talk about why you chose this period. And what do you think is so critical for young people to take from it?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Well, I wanted to first make sure that I showed that Malcolm didn’t go to jail and miraculously become Malcolm X, that his parents instilled specific values. And it speaks to all the smart, forward-thinking adults that, you know, we have to provide guidance for our children. They need an education curriculum that teaches the truth. We can’t sit back and expect someone else to do these things for us.

If our young people understood that, say, in world history classes, as I teach my students, that Africa is the cradle of the most advanced, thriving civilization ever to exist in mankind, and if they also learned about the impressive kingdoms of Benin, Fouta Djallon, Mali, Egypt, to the same degree that we teach them of ancient Greece and Rome, then we might better appreciate the beauty and magnificence of nonwhite civilizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And we would have the opportunity to teach our children love, respect, instead of instilling these values of hate and discrimination. Rather, love and respect for ourselves and then for humanity. You know, I think all of these things are extremely important.

AMY GOODMAN: You write the book in the first person. What was it like to inhabit your father’s perspective in this way?

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: Well, talking about the values that were instilled in him by his parents, and Malcolm running from himself, running from his identity, running from the fact that his father was lynched. His father was the president of the chapter — the chapter president of an organization that was commanded by millions of followers in the 1920s, that he purchased land that was then reserved for whites only, and, you know, the KKK lynched him. They targeted his family. His mother, who was the recording secretary, instilling values of compassion, human compassion, literary. All of these things that we see in Malcolm later in his life was put into an institution. The family was separated. The land was taken.

And so, when Malcolm finds himself in jail, we find that Malcolm is still smart. He ends up being a star debater on the debate team. The prison debated against Ivy League schools, Harvard, MIT, Boston University. And Malcolm debated about capital punishment. And so, we see his compassion. We see his wit. We see his ability to inform and engage others. And so, what we find is that Malcolm studied the dictionary not so that he could learn how to read and write, but he studied the dictionary so he could learn the etymology, the root words, so he could be his best.

And when we look at today the criminal justice system, we know that there are over 3 million people behind bars, that the U.S. spent in 2012 —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

ILYASAH SHABAZZ: — $80 billion taxpayer dollars on correction facilities, not education, not after-school programs. And so, the incarcerated population has increased by 700%, and we wanted to focus on the humanity of these people behind bars.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, you dedicate the book to the incarcerated. Ilyasah Shabazz, I want to thank you so much for being with us. The book is called The Awakening of Malcolm X. I’m Amy Goodman. Wear a mask. Stay safe.