Jon Lewis - The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

But Young, who discussed the matter with other computer consultants, isn’t so sure it’s just a coincidence.

The “Wingdings” font contains no letters—just 255 symbols.

Young calculated the odds of three letters of the alphabet being combined with 255 symbols, and said he found that the odds of obtaining the message were less than one in a trillion.

“It’s mind-blowing,” said Young. “Somebody’s responsible for this. This is very offensive.”

“I found it hard to believe some of the stories about the resurgence of Nazi sympathizers—but this puts things back into perspective.”

The Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, 3.05 p.m., 21 February 1965: someone in the crowd of 400 shouts out, “Get your hand outta my pocket! Don’t be messin’ with my pockets!” A smoke bomb goes off at the back of the auditorium. Chaos ensues. Out of the agitated mass of people a black man moves to the stage with a sawn-off shotgun and fires point blank at the speaker. Behind him two other men charge forward with handguns, and they likewise fire at the figure on the stage.

Hit by what the autopsy report later called “multiple wounds in the chest, heart and aorta”, the speaker died almost instantaneously, despite the efforts of his bodyguard Gene Roberts to resuscitate him.

The speaker was Malcolm X, the leading black politician of post-war America aside from the also-assassinated Martin Luther King.

As Malcolm X lay with his life racing away, his assassins tried to escape, but one of the shooters, Talmadge Hayer, was caught by the crowd. Almost a year later Hayer and two other men, Norman “3x” Butler and Thomas “15x” Johnson, were convicted of the first-degree murder of Malcolm X. The case was closed, tied up with ribbon and put away in the vault. Hayer had admitted the crime and the motive was plain: internecine war between black radicals. Hayer, Butler and Johnson belonged to the Nation of Islam, from which Malcolm X had been expelled after accusing founder Elijah Muhammad of the distinctly non-Koranic behaviour of fathering illegitimate children. Malcolm X had afterwards founded his own Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). A running war between the two outfits ensued. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam was reported as saying only weeks before the killing that Malcolm X was “worthy of death”. Malcolm X’s daughter Qubilah certainly considered Farrakhan the architect of her father’s death; she contracted a (failed) hit on Farrakhan in 1994.

The assassination of Malcolm X, however, presented some discrepancies which suggested that it was not an “inside job” by black radicals:

Hayer might have been guilty, but there was plenty of evidence to suggest that “3x” Butler and “15x” Johnson were not even in the Audubon Ballroom on the fateful day.

Malcolm X’s meetings were usually overflowing with police, yet almost none were present on 21 February 1965.

One of the few NYPD cops who was on duty that day (Gene Roberts) turned out to be working undercover—as Malcolm X’s bodyguard.

Four days after Malcolm X’s assassination, one of the principal officers at OAAU, Leon “4x” Ameer, announced that he had important information on the case but feared his life was in danger. Just under three weeks later he was dead, apparently from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Talmadge Hayer stated that, although he pulled the trigger, he was not a member of the Nation of Islam. Moreover, the man who hired him was “not a Muslim”.

The scuttlebutt, which grew louder and louder, was that Malcolm X’s assassination had been ordered by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Malcolm X had attributes which failed to endear him to the FBI director: just for a start, he wanted the overthrow of the racially tainted American capitalist system “by any means necessary”. He kept bad company, too; he met with the likes of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Hoover did not balk at assassinating those he deemed Public Enemies, as the gundown of John Dillinger outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago at the outset of Hoover’s career attested. Malcolm X would certainly have qualified in Hoover’s head as a Public Enemy, although calling for revolution was not actually a crime in the “land of the free”. Some strong circumstantial evidence of FBI involvement in Malcolm X’s assassination came with the uncovering of an FBI Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) memo which takes credit for the shooting. The same memo also states that Gene Roberts worked for the Bureau as well as the NYPD.

COINTELPRO was Hoover’s personal covert agency, its stock-in-trade being the infiltration of radical groups with the intention of fomenting discord, or setting up members of radical groups for assassination. In 1968 Black Panther Fred Hampton was shot dead as he slept by Chicago police (who fired a generous 89 bullets around his apartment) after an FBI tipoff.

Could FBI agents provocateurs have manoeuvred the Nation of Islam into killing Malcolm X? Yes.

Michael Friedly, Malcolm X: The Assassination, 1992