NOTE:
This was written on February 25 to expose the book about Ray Wood
as a hoax
If the Shabazz Center doesn’t start doing a better job of
vetting its guest speakers, it’s going to become a laughingstock. In the past
few years, the center has called a press conference under the pretense of presenting
new information in the assassination of Malcolm X. These occasions have taken
on added significance due to the presence of one or more of Malcolm’s
daughters, all of whom were under the age of six when he was murdered at the
Audubon Ballroom (home of the center) on February 21, 1965.
Last February, Ark
Media commanded center stage to encourage people to watch its six-part series
on the assassination. The directors, who appeared on stage with DC tour guide Abdur
Rahman Muhammad and the ubiquitous Henry L. Gates, claimed that the series
would prove that Norman Butler and Thomas Johnson were not involved in the brazen
public execution.
The only problem
with that assertion is that it’s untrue. Agreed, that’s a huge problem. The
attempt to win exoneration has stalled, largely because there are photos
showing Butler outside the Audubon moments after the assassination, and because
numerous eyewitnesses selected Butler from a six-person lineup.
Ark Media was able to win the support of the
Innocence Project. When I was contacted by the Innocence Project, the
representative seemed shocked when I mentioned that there was actual film
footage showing Butler at the Audubon. Even though I sent him the link to the
footage and sent still photos, the Innocence Project apparently has too much
pride to admit that it has been bamboozled by a slanted six-part series.
Now comes 2021 and
February and yet another group of characters claiming new evidence in the
assassination. This time the team was led by the equally ubiquitous Benjamin
“Ben” Crump, the Florida attorney who seems to represent the family of nearly every
black victim of a fatal police encounter.
Crump would do well
to take a public speaking course. His delivery is disjointed and distracting.
If he has a speech impediment, as many on the internet have speculated, then I
supposed there’s nothing to be done about it.
Something can and
should be done, however, about his unhealthy habit of posing as a drum major
for justice before he knows all the facts. At the press conference on February
20, he introduces a man named Reginald “Reggie” Wood Jr. while three of Malcolm
X’s daughter look on. Mr. Wood is a distant relative of Raymond “Ray” Wood, a one-time
two-bit agent provocateur who died last November following a bout with colon
cancer.
Reggie Wood
announced that he was there with a monumental revelation. He showed the
audience a typed letter purportedly dictated and signed by Ray Wood. The letter
lists a statement of facts, namely:
1.
Raymond A. Wood was an undercover police officer
for the New York Police Department from April 1964 through May 1971.
2.
Ray had recently (January 2011) learned of the
death of Thomas Johnson (convicted in 1966 as a conspirator in the
assassination), who died in August 2009. Battling cancer, Ray was “deeply
concerned that with my death [Johnson’s] family will not be able to exonerate
him after being wrongly convicted in the killing of Malcolm X.”
3.
Without any formal police training, Ray was hired
as an undercover agent and assigned to entice two alleged key members of
Malcolm X’s security team into a felonious crime so they would not be available
to protect him on February 21, 1965 at the Audubon.
4.
He was at
the Audubon on February 21, 1965 where he was “identified by witnesses while
leaving the scene. Johnson, whom he believes was his doppelganger, “was
wrongfully convicted to protect my cover and the secrets of the FBI and NYPD.”
Then came the
monumental revelation: Reggie had a 99-page book he could sell you so you could
read all about the “confessions of a black NYPD cop in the assassination of
Malcolm X.”
I knew Reggie was
about to pull a fast one the minute he started flashing the book to the
audience comprised mainly of reporters and paparazzi. Crump and a couple of
attorneys stood behind Reggie onstage.
On the back cover,
Crump describes the book as “revealing and riveting,” and the once-famous
activist Susan Brownmiller calls it “a powerful book. I urge you to read it.”
So I read it after
a documentary filmmaker offered me a free copy. I have bought enough of these
crappy little pamphlets masquerading as books to know not to waste my money on
them. Why do I call it a pamphlet?
1.
It’s less than 100 pages of text. The text is
large and there is overly abundant white space on every page. This suggests
that the book was composed in Microsoft Word and then converted to PDF format. The
large type and white space is usually indicative of a book by an untrained
writer with little or nothing to say.
2.
The first 28 pages dwell on minutiae. It begins
with the writer hearing from the down-and-out sellout Ray after many decades. He’s
ill and broke and he wants to know his long-lost relatives. There’s a photo of
Ray at the beach in Florida, a very scant narrative about Ray’s childhood with
the author’s father, followed by oodles and oodles of things having no bearing
on Ray’s years as an “undercover brother” for the Bureau of Special Services
(BOSSI), the scandalously un-American unit of the NYPD.
The next couple of chapters tells us what a
“handsome” man this Ray was, so cool and such a smooth talker that few women
could resist him. But we also learn that Ray is a bum, a perennial slacker who
plans to get through life by hustling. In a flashback, we learn that like
George Washington, Ray chopped down a cherry tree on someone’s property one
time but he did not tell a lie. “I chopped down the cherry tree,” he tells the
white man on whose property said tree was chopped (okay, it might not have been
a cherry tree; maybe it was a small white oak).
2.
The
author probably didn’t intend to portray Ray as a bum, but that’s the
impression one gets. He dropped out of high school in senior year (1951-1952) because
he was so traumatized by the “terrible accident” that ended the life of his
father, Adolphis Wood, who worked as
a merchant marine.
If
you did a double-take when you read “Adolphis,” you are not alone. The
misspelled name of Ray’s father is one of many indicators that Reggie knows
almost nothing about Ray Wood. He refers to his subject as “Raymond A. Wood,”
but apparently he never bothered to ask Ray what the middle initial stood for. In
fact, Ray’s father’s name given name was Adolphus, and Ray’s middle name was Adolphus.
Reggie mentions that Ray spent time in an orphanage, but tells us nothing about
Ray’s parents or Ray’s brother, Roland, who died at Bellevue Hospital two months after birth.
It’s a mystery why
Ray would be traumatized by the death of a father who abandoned him to sail the
high seas. Records on “Adolphus the Sailor Man” show that he spent nearly his
entire adult life in the Merchant Marine.
Had Reggie bothered checking, he would have
known the correct spelling of Adolphus. His research is reprehensible and a key
reason why I suspected the book was a hoax.
After wandering aimlessly, Ray joined the U.S. Air
Force a few years later for a four-year stint. When it was over 1956, Ray moved
from one unskilled job to another in New York City.
2.
In 1959, he met a real pretty girl there who
educated him about the civil rights movement. He was only interested in joining
the Congress of Racial Equality as a means of keeping close to this fair
maiden.
3.
Ray’s
so-called confessions don’t begin until page 42 of the 99-page book, and even
then, there are no revelations. The chapter describes how in November 1964 Ray
entrapped four of his friends in a bone-headed plot to blow up the Statue of
Liberty. Ray’s admission that the entire boondoggle was his idea is nothing
new. In fact, there is absolutely nothing here that can’t be found within six
minutes of an internet search.
Where's The Beef?
4. The next chapter is where the issue of
credibility begins, and it gets us to the main problem with the book. The
author had over a decade to record Ray’s ruminations about his years in law
enforcement, yet Reggie never did so. Rather, he spent the whole time jotting
things down in a single notebook. I kid you not: a decade of confessions from a
certified stool pigeon in one notebook. “I’ve use the same composition notebook
I used that first night throughout the years, using it to write down the
details of Ray’s youth, his beginnings in New York, and his time with the
NYPD,” he tells us in a rambling and repetitive author’s note. That alone tells
you that he didn’t learn much.
5. The author reproduces over two pages a Village Voice article written by
Brownmiller in 1964 about Ray. This is followed by a six-page transcription of
the same article. He also spends several pages talking about recent police
brutality cases, apparently in homage to Crump, or maybe just to add more
pabulum to this unadulterated crap.
6. A three-page Acknowledgments reads like a
letter an actor composed for an awards show. He sends a shout-out to his
daughter, Breonna. “My baby girl, my protégé, I can’t say enough about how
proud of you I am.” Then one to dear old dad. “Where do I start? When I was a
very young boy, I sat on the parade field and watched you lead a group of young
soldiers in drill.” Yada yada yada. Just mind-numbing drivel having nothing to
do with the so-called confessions of a remorseful turncoat.
The crux of the
book is a claim that left my head spinning like the little girl in “The
Exorcist.” According to Ray, the whole reason for the addle-brained plot to
blow up the Statue of Liberty was to make sure that two of his alleged cohorts,
Walter Augustus Bowe and Khaleel Sayyed, would be in jail on February 21, 1965,
the day chosen by the FBI and NYPD to orchestrate the assassination of Malcolm
X. According to Ray, Sayyed was the chief person in charge of Malcolm’s
security.
On February 16,
Bowe and Sayyed were arrested and incarcerated, and Ray was lauded by his
“handler” at BOSSI and even by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who took much of
the credit for the bust. The subsequent trial proved what accused activists
suspected, namely that Ray had provoked the entire episode, committing most of
the crime’s elements later blamed on them. They were all convicted and Ray got
a pat on the face and a shiny detective badge.
But
the “undercover brother” wasn’t done.
Now that he had left Malcolm X without Sayyed, his head of
security, Ray was ordered to attend the meeting at the Audubon on February 21.
He was puzzled by the assignment, the author tells us ad nauseum, because he was afraid that someone might recognize him
from the Statue of Liberty incident.
By the way, Sayyed was never, ever in charge
of Malcolm X’s security detail. Rueben Frances and Charles Kenyatta played the
role sometimes, but because people had regular jobs and couldn’t afford to do
security full-time, the guards and those in charge of security were always in
flux. I suspect Reggie pulled that one out of his as . . . I was saying . . .
Ray wasn’t very good as an agent, which is why
his days as an operative were numbered. His
cover was blown during the 1964 incident in which he and Herbert Callender, a leader
of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in New York City were arrested for trying
to perform a citizen’s arrest of Mayor Robert F. Wagner Junior. Ray was
promptly released, of course, while Callender was carted off to the psychiatric
ward at Bellevue Hospital, wondering why he agreed to such a hair-brained idea.
“You Can Call Me Ray,
or You Can Call Me Jay, but you don’t have to call me Johnson.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCqh5ROtQRg
Ray’s reticence disappeared as soon as he was reminded by an
unnamed presumed FBI handler (remember the unnamed CIA handler in “The X Files”?)
that no one in Malcolm’s organization would recognize him because newspapers
and TV reporters had never shown his face. “A photo of Ray had even made it
into the news,” he writes on page 58, “though it only revealed a partial view
of his face.”
Two pages later,
the sinister stranger tells Ray that he should have no fear of being recognized
at the Audubon because “all of you Blacks look alike. . . Besides, only the
side of your face was shown in that news photo” (page 60-61). On the very next
page, Reggie reminds us that Ray’s identity as a Secret Agent Man was secure because
his “whole face had not been shared yet with the public, only a side shot” (page
62).
This is the first
major red flag. The writer is clearly oblivious to the fact that very clear
photos of Ray’s mug appeared in newspapers and on television following his
entrapment of Herb Callender. Ray would certainly have known about this and so
would his bosses at BOSSI. And the Unnamed Handler. His photo appeared on page
12 of the New York Times edition of July
16, 1964 and other newspapers.
But let’s get back to Reggie’s story – I mean Ray’s story.
Confident that no
one would recognize him, Ray “chose a seat in the front of the [ball]room.”
Here it should be noted that Ray was over six
feet tall, so sitting in the front row was the last thing an intelligent
undercover agent would have done. Ray attributes mistakes he made to the NYPD’s
failure to provide him with any training before sending him on undercover
assignments. Apparently they also failed to give him common sense.
Within minutes of
taking a seat on the front row, Ray saw several men stand up and begin shooting
Malcolm X. He ran from the building but was apprehended by several members of
the crowd who thought he was the light-skinned man shooting Malcolm.
I’m beginning to
really smell a dead rat now. I have studied the assassination long enough to
know that none of the three shooters was described as a light-skinned black
man. Here are their photos:
Norman Butler in custody
Luckily, says Reggie, police fought off the men holding Ray
and placed him the back of a squad car. He was held for several hours at a
local police precinct. When he saw a
photo of Thomas 15 Johnson in the newspaper a week later, it suddenly occurred
to him why his handlers wanted him at the Audubon that day. Eureka! It was so
people would mistake him for Johnson, whom he describes as a dead ringer for
himself.
People, you can’t
make this stuff up. I mean that literally. You can’t make up stuff so important
to African American history and its leaders and think that no one is going to
question you. This concocted alleged confession is as asinine as the Statue of
Liberty plot. No wonder Bowe and others laughed in his face when Ray first
broached the idea. It appears from the book that Ray’s IQ and Reggie’s IQ are
lower than the writer’s age (between 47-57).
The story is a
complete fabrication. Police obtained a list of everyone who was inside the
ballroom that fateful day and subsequently interviewed them. Scholars, using
evidence from interviews and police records, noted the names of most of the
people seated on the front rows. Neither Ray’s name nor his aliases appear. Moreover,
the people on the front rows were identified days after the assassination.
Second, it is well
known now that Thomas Johnson was not the man who fired the shotgun at Malcolm
X. He was been positively identified as William Bradley, a longtime Nation of
Islam member who spent 20 years in prison for armed bank robberies. So if no
one saw a light-skinned man firing at Malcolm X, what possible reason would BOSSI
need Ray to be there.
In fact, former BOSSI
detective Tony Bouza told author Garrett Felber in 2015 that Ray had nothing to
do with the case. None of the documents from the trial of the assassins, from
police interviews, or from witness statements mention Ray Wood or Ray Woodall
or any of his other aliases.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/21/malcolm-x-assassination-records-nypd-investigation
Third, no one in
their right mind would mistake Ray for Thomas Johnson. Johnson was about 5’10”
tall, while Ray was at least 6’2” tall. Ray was much slimmer than Johnson.
Johnson’s face had a round shape while Ray’s face was more oval.
What Reggie has done is take a snippet from a journal which
mentions Ray. To wit, Malcolm X aide Yuri Kochiyama recorded gossip that “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.”
Reggie cites the Felber
article, yet he tries to argue that Ray was the man some witnesses claimed
to have seen running out of the Audubon. There is video of the scene outside
the Audubon immediately after the assassination. The man being held by the
crowd is Thomas Hagan, the assassin captured at the scene. No one else was
involved in a scuffle except Bradley, who's trying to free Hagan.
As for the olive-skinned
man witnesses saw being placed in a police car, the most logical explanation to
date is that it was William Harris, the audience member who was struck in the
abdomen by a stray bullet.
Neither Reggie nor
Ray explain why BOSSI would want to frame Johnson. Finally, as for Johnson
being an innocent victim, people forget that Johnson and Butler were out on
bail at the time of the assassination following their failed attempt to kill
dissident Black Muslim Benjamin Brown. Johnson told me in no uncertain terms
that he intended to kill Brown when he stuck the muzzle of the rifle against
his chest but the weapon jammed. He fired again and wounded Brown.
Consequently, Butler and Johnson were going to prison
anyway, and for a very long time. And this ridiculous book is going into the paper recycling bin with all
the other useless paper.
On February 26, Kelly G. Wood, the daughter of Raymond Wood, notified a news outlet in New York that the letter displayed by Reggie Wood at the news conference was fake, and that her father did not sign it. The odd thing about the typed letter is that it's not notarized, and there were no witnesses to the signing.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/26/letter-implicating-nypd-in-malcolm-xs-death-is-fake-cops-daughter/
Reggie Wood has not been available for comment. He and Crump did appear on "Democracy Now!" this weekend to hype the book. I hope you get a refund if you bought this.
