Hmm, ""Not only is Bingham a murdering communist, he is also a hypocrite..."
I met Steve Bingham back in '88. The most soft-spoken lawyer I've ever talked to. Son of Old Left radical Alfred Bingham, who edited a thities lefty magazine, "Common Sense." See the Greenwood Press reprint series, "Radical Periodicals in the U.S." Michael Pugliese
http://www.examiner.com/ http://www.examiner.com/news/default.jsp?story=n.sanquentin.0806w
San Quentin slayings haunt the Bay Area By Nick Driver Of the Examiner Staff
"Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard. Some of us are prisoners, the rest of us are guards." -- lyric from 1971 song, "George Jackson," by Bob Dylan
On Aug. 21, 1971, San Quentin correctional officers shot Black Panther George Jackson dead as he sprinted across the prison yard. Minutes before, 26 inmates had rioted, slashing the throats of three guards and two trusty inmates.
Thirty years later, the Bay Area is still nursing festering emotional and social wounds. The 1971 deaths still rank as one of the area's most jarring events of the 1970s.
It is little wonder that government conspiracy theorists and black activists are still sparring with colleagues and families of the slain guards? New theories and "evidence" are surfacing -- even at this late date -- on one of the great unsolved mysteries in the black power movement and government attempts to quash it.
Civil rights, or lawlessness?
Many of those who had a stake in the incident have theories on what actually went down that summer day at the Big House. Former San Quentin guards, as well as some of the families of the slain guards, are still promoting books, pamphlets and theories on how legal activist Stephen Bingham must have smuggled the gun in for Jackson, who they allege was planning to break out.
Bingham, a Tiffany fortune heir, was acquitted of any involvement 15 years ago, after returning from more than a decade of self-imposed exile.
He and a whole generation of civil rights activists believe just as fervently that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the gun planted on Jackson, or at least had an FBI prison informant deliver him the gun.
After all, Jackson was the author of a set of prison letters, "Soledad Brother," that could have made him as big a thorn in the FBI's side as Malcolm X.
"The power of George Jackson's personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system," writes historian Howard Zinn.
FBI's covert war
There is also evidence that the FBI was waging a covert war against the Black Panthers through the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. In a 1997 case, fellow Black Panther and San Quentin inmate Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt proved the FBI had withheld evidence -- that a key witness against Pratt was a paid informant -- in order to convict him of murder.
Johnnie Cochran won Pratt's release from San Quentin after 27 years. Cochran and Pratt subsequently won a $1.75 million judgment against the FBI, one of the few times the FBI has paid out money on a case.
Hoover, a notorious paranoid, kept a list of the people and organizations he feared most, and Pratt and Jackson were near the top, along with other Black Panthers. Jack Olsen, author of "Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt," writes that Hoover issued an order to "neutralize" Pratt, and made Jackson -- an eloquent writer and forceful civil rights leader -- a marked man.
"George Jackson was a key target for FBI counterintelligence and we had one document" that proved FBI involvement in his case, said Bingham, who 15 years later still vehemently denies giving the gun to Jackson.
The smoking gun
Acquitted in 1986, Bingham returned to practicing law in the Fell Street offices of what is now known as Bay Area Legal Aid, a federally funded nonprofit group that helps minorities and the poor with medical and housing issues. Bingham said he has always worked with housing and tenancy issues, and never was the "leading prison legal activist" press reports described him at the time.
Bingham said that even without FBI cooperation and 15 years of elapsed time, his defense team came up with three more plausible theories, including the tidbit that Jackson's gun had once been in police possession in Connecticut. It was impossible for his defense lawyers to pursue other explanations, however, since "guards washed down the crime site right after the crime."
But Jackson's jailers scoff at Bingham's alternate theories, and swear that lax San Quentin security, Bingham's "communist leanings" and Jackson's violent streak -- he was about to go on trial for the slaying of a prison guard while in Soledad Prison -- were the direct causes of the tragedy.
Dan Scarborough, a 78-year-old retired San Quentin correctional officer, is the latest witness to the killings who says he has a new answer to the riddle of how Jackson got his gun into San Quentin. Scarborough says he knows how the prosecution bungled their case: Bingham smuggled the gun in his legal briefcase, not the tape recorder that prosecutors built their case around at his trial.
Bingham visited Jackson the day of the killing, and was the last person from outside the prison to visit him. Scarborough, an ex-Marine now living in a remote Idaho town, was in charge of the visiting room the day of the shooting. He is determined to set the record straight on what he terms a "total miscarriage of justice" -- Bingham's 1986 acquittal.
"Not only is Bingham a murdering communist, he is also a hypocrite," said Scarborough, adding that if Bingham really believed his rhetoric about changing the system, he would have stayed and fought the charges against him instead of fleeing from justice for 13 years.
Theories and vitriol
The prosecution alleged that Jackson led the killings of three guards and two white inmates before he was killed by guards. Jackson's defenders say he was murdered after the gun was planted on him. The lack of neutral eyewitnesses or real evidence either way has shrouded both sides in doubt.
The real truth, hypothesized Ed George, another retired San Quentin guard, may lie somewhere in between. Bingham may have unwittingly smuggled the gun inside the case, for instance.
Bingham downplayed that possibility as well, pointing to action taken by some of the slain guards' family members. When news of the FBI's COINTELPRO monitoring of Jackson came out, the family members were doubtful enough about the official version that they sued -- unsuccessfully -- to obtain information on the state and FBI monitoring of Jackson.
But despite a lack of any new evidence, Scarborough has persisted in his theory, meticulously describing the day in question, and how Bingham must have smuggled the gun into the prison -- inside the overstuffed accordion-style case, not the tape recorder. He said the jury might have convicted Bingham if the prosecution had focused on that method.
Guards never passed the case through the metal detector, as they were focused so intently on the tape recorder, said Scarborough, surmising that their cursory check through the briefcase did not detect the gun hidden below a stack of papers.
Bingham's visit was concluded about an hour later. As per San Quentin regulations, he remained in the visitors' room and Jackson was led back to his cell. In the foyer, the officer walking Jackson back to his cell said he spotted something shiny in Jackson's hair.
Guards at the trial said Jackson, aware that his plan was foiled, then pulled the two-pound, 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol from under a smuggled Afro wig. As one clip of bullets fell on the floor, Jackson thrust another clip into the gun and pointed it at the guards, so the story goes.
Fatal run
As 26 prisoners rioted inside the walls of the cavernous prison, the so-called San Quentin Six -- Jackson and five other prisoners -- slaughtered three guards and two white inmates, then stacked most of the bodies in Jackson's cell. Jackson heard the prison alarm and began running across the chapel plaza, where guards say he was gunned down by a guard armed with a high-powered rifle.
The bullet hit Jackson in the lower spine, then traveled straight up his spinal cord to his brain, killing him instantly and ending the bloodiest event in the prison's checkered 150-year history.
The official version at the time was largely discounted by suspicious civil rights activists, who quickly made Jackson a martyr and black outlaw folk hero, spawning pop songs and raising African-American civil rights consciousness across the nation.
During his funeral in Oakland on Aug. 28, 1971, 1,500 mourners thronged the streets, wept and sang songs. Many raised their fists in the Black Panther salute.
Thirty years later, J. Edgar Hoover is dead and gone. The Black Panther Party salutes are gone, their members dispersed, paunchier and grayer.
But passions continue to simmer. Blocked by FBI silence and the deaths of key figures in the case, the picture of the San Quentin Massacre will likely remain fuzzy and incomplete, the stuff of local legend.
E-mail Nick Driver at ndriver at sfexaminer.com