New York, 1965. A city on the brink. Malcolm X was assassinated, the FBI was wiretapping Martin Luther King, and militants were plotting to flood the subways with flaming gasoline. The NYPD sent dozens of black undercover officers to infiltrate radical groups. What was life like for the black Donnie Brascos?

When Edward Lee Howlette joined the New York Police Department in the summer of 1965, he didn't know the first thing about how to be a cop. He was twenty-three years old, an Air Force veteran of Cherokee and African-American descent who had moved to Brooklyn from Richmond, Virginia a year earlier. His only previous encounter with the police had come while hitchhiking in his service uniform; a state trooper had given him a hectoring lecture on the danger of taking rides from strangers. Howlette had come to New York knowing no one aside from his aunt, her husband, and a cousin. He worked several jobs, took civil-service tests and attended classes at Columbia University before being recruited by the Bureau of Special Services, the clandestine intelligence branch of the NYPD that was better known by its Orwellian acronym, BOSS.

Given his inexperience with law enforcement, Howlette didn't appreciate how unusual it was that he was allowed to keep his police shield only for the minute it took him to be sworn in. Or that it would be years before he set foot in the police academy. His only education in espionage was a typing course, because his supervisors didn't want to read handwritten reports. This lack of training was no accident: The higher- ups wanted to ensure that Howlette didn't pick up any police slang, telltale words like perp and pinch. They also didn't want him to develop cop eyes, the cynically appraising gaze that was always watching for the worst. The less he knew about being a police officer, they figured, the better he could pretend that he wasn't one.

Courtesy Edward Lee Howlette

Over the next two years, working under the code name "Eric-83," Howlette infiltrated a radical organization known as the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), some of whose associates had once plotted to blow up the Statue of Liberty. He became close to the group's leader, who asked him to help assassinate the heads of two of the country's most prominent civil-rights organizations. When that case went to trial, in the summer of 1968, Howlette discovered his picture along with three others on a "Wanted" poster. He still doesn't know who took the photo, in which his sardonic gaze and rakish mustache make him look like Derek Jeter's evil brother. The poster wasn't circulated by the police, and it didn't accuse Howlette of breaking any laws. He was charged instead with being on the wrong side of history. "Danger, black militants beware!!!!!"the poster warned. Its authors were careful to avoid any actionable incitement to murder, though they would not have mourned his loss. A black cop in uniform was a stooge. A black cop without one was a traitor.

Like Howlette, I was a detective in the NYPD, but I came from a long line of Irish cops. I couldn't have done anything like what he did, even if I'd wanted to try. Though nearly five decades have passed since Howlette came in from the cold, I expected that the past would weigh heavily on him. But when I spoke to him last fall, that didn't seem to be the case. He made clear that he was never the character he portrayed in those volatile times, and that he's not now the same man who played him. He didn't make light of the risks he had taken—far from it—but he recalled his underground days in a manner that was sure and calm, without a hint of unease or defensiveness. Howlette is retired now, and he spends his time as he sees fit. He won't waste any of it on regrets. "I was doing a job," he said.

All intelligence agencies are in the business of betrayal. The best-known deep undercover was "Donnie Brasco," a character played in a movie by Johnny Depp and in life by Joe Pistone, an FBI agent who spent six years with the Bonanno organized-crime family. Pistone had no illusions about the Mafia, a long-standing source of shame to Sicilian families like his own. But his reluctant affection for some of the men he got to know—several of whom were killed when his identity was revealed—gives his story a fraught poignancy. I met Pistone a dozen years ago. He told me that he was still careful about going out in public. His old enemies were dead or in jail, but he always kept an eye out for the young guns who wanted to be a part of history.

Joe Petrosino led the NYPD's Italian Squad, which infiltrated the Mafia.

BOSS is now known as the Intelligence Division. It began in 1905 as the "Italian Squad," when it was led by Joe Petrosino, the first Italian-American detective in the NYPD. Though Petrosino investigated anarchists—his warning to President McKinley about a plot against his life was ignored—most of his efforts were directed against gangsters from his native country. He was murdered by the Mafia in Palermo in 1909. The first volunteer for the squad was its first casualty.

Undercover work is not equal-opportunity employment. By the mid-sixties, when Howlette joined BOSS, the bureau had broadened its primary focus from communists to black revolutionaries. A case index from 1973 listed twenty-six "operators," as undercovers were known, nine of whom were working on criminal cases. Fifteen of the eighteen political investigations were directed at leftist and black-nationalist groups, some of which—the Black Panthers—are still remembered, while others, such as the Republic of New Africa, are forgotten. When it came to white militants, two operators each covered multiple groups, which suggests that the National Renaissance Party and something called "Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property" were considered to be less than existential threats. An old family friend named Bill Courtney, who worked at BOSS at the time, once told me that the white cadres were hapless if not exactly harmless. "You know how you infiltrated those guys? You showed up with a six-pack."

"You know how you infiltrated those guys? You showed up with a six-pack."

As tensions between black activists and the police in places like Baltimore and Chicago dominated the news in recent years, I began to wonder about black undercovers such as Ed Howlette. What was life like for the black Donnie Brascos? The sociologist Nicholas Alex has noted that racial identity doesn't disappear beneath a uniform. Often, he says, a black policeman "is drawn into an enclave of black cops and becomes a member of a minority group within a minority group.'' Black cops at BOSS who worked political cases against black radicals were a minority within a minority within a minority: isolation squared, then cubed.

The full history of domestic police espionage will likely never be written, as the ablest practitioners of the trade knew how to keep a secret. Most of the black undercovers I tried to contact never responded, and one who did implored me not to mention his name. Still, there were a few who felt a need to tell their stories, if only to set the record straight.

BOSS leaned toward recruits with high test scores and low profiles. According to E. W. Count, whose vivid oral history of NYPD detectives, Cop Talk, included a chapter on Howlette and other deep undercovers, the bureau "zeroed in time after time on a certain political innocence, a blank slate." Howlette fit the mold. He'd joined the military at seventeen, when lunch counters and just about everything else were segregated, and left it when the March on Washington was last year's news. He told me that by the time he moved to New York, in the summer of 1964, he'd "pretty much missed the civil-rights movement."

Courtesy Edward Lee Howlette

Howlette had never been to Harlem before he was sent to report on rallies there. Many of the protests he attended were halfhearted, haphazard affairs. It was his job to note when talk moved to action, when politics shifted to crime, as when one firebrand speaker urged those in attendance to "kiss the cops with razor blades." Unserious people such as the firebrand, who once appeared dressed as a sort of reverse Klansman, in a black hood and robe, might nonetheless be capable of causing serious harm.

The racism that enraged the crowd was real, as Howlette knew well. A straight-A student in high school, he told me that he left Richmond for the Air Force because he wouldn't have been able to get a job "delivering groceries on a bicycle" if he'd stayed. Racial tensions had been rising all over the country. Howlette joined BOSS the same year as the riots in Watts, which saw thirty-four people killed, more than three thousand arrested, and several square miles of Los Angeles ravaged by arson.

"They didn't want civil rights. They wanted revolution!"

As a regular at the rallies, Howlette didn't have to wait long before a man approached him to ask, "Do you want to come to a secret meeting?" From then on, he spent a great deal of time with Herman Ferguson, the assistant principal of a public school and a leader of RAM. The group saw Moscow as the weak sister to Beijing. When Khrushchev "blinked" during the Cuban missile crisis, most of the world viewed the escape from Armageddon with terrified relief. For RAM, it was a wasted opportunity.

The notion that there might be some remedy for racism that fell short of nuclear war allowed Howlette to maintain a philosophical distance from his associates. And he was appalled by Ferguson's plan to transform street gangs into shock troops. One of the few times Howlette betrayed any emotion was when I asked him if he had mixed feelings, then or now: "No! What they were doing to the youth was the worst. They didn't want civil rights. They wanted revolution!"

Betty Shabazz Michael Ochs Archives Getty Images

The same qualities that made Howlette attractive to BOSS appealed to the radical underground: Both looked with favor on his intelligence, his ambition, his familiarity with weapons, and his lack of local ties. He helped set up the Jamaica Rifle and Pistol Club, which grew to some fifteen members who practiced at ranges around the city every week. Eventually, they obtained recognition from the NRA, which supplied them with a carbine and free ammunition. Howlette joined Ferguson in meetings with other groups, and he once rode with Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow, to one of RAM's drills.

Though the club members shared a political outlook, Ferguson was careful to restrict dangerous conversations to smaller, more trusted coteries. It was widely known that the NYPD and the FBI had spies everywhere. Still, in the circles within circles, they talked explicitly about attacking cops with hatchets. They cross-indexed the locations of gas stations and subway stops on maps, with a view toward flooding the tunnels with fuel and setting them on fire. Though politics was shifting to crime, talk hadn't shifted into action, aside from the accumulation of weapons.

Talk was dangerous enough for Howlette, who was instructed to record as much of it as possible. But he had to do a James Bond job with Austin Powers gadgets, as he found when he discovered a surprising feature of the boxy tape recorder that barely fit under his arm: A blinking red light signaled when the tape ran out. His handler noticed it when they met on a subway platform, and a review of the tape suggested that it had been flashing for some time. Fortunately, Howlette had been wearing a sweater, and his friends had been too preoccupied with devising mayhem to see the Christmas ornament in his armpit.

BOSS told Howlette not to tell anyone about his job, but the urgency of secrecy was undercut by the fact that they hadn't given him an alias: Ferguson knew him by his real name. Once, Howlette was walking down the street with a coconspirator named Arthur Harris when he passed a favorite five-year-old nephew. "Hey, Uncle Ed!" the boy shouted. His father knew enough to tug his hand and tell him to be quiet.

By that point Ferguson had chosen Howlette and Harris to help him assassinate Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, the heads of the NAACP and the Urban League. The two civil-rights leaders had drawn Ferguson's ire for criticizing the nascent Black Power movement, which had rejected nonviolence. The three-man RAM cell immediately set to work hashing out the details—it was decided that they'd gun the men down, even if they were with their wives—but weeks into their plan, Ferguson made a grim announcement: RAM had been infiltrated by an undercover cop.

Howlette's stunned expression likely served him well, and every potential error that he or BOSS could have made flashed through his mind. Ferguson went on to say that the authorities were in possession of RAM's closely held "Community Self-Defense" literature, which included diagrams for building Molotov-cocktail launchers. He promised that he would get to the bottom of things, and that the consequences for treachery would be severe. It had to be the FBI or the CIA, Ferguson reckoned; local cops weren't sophisticated enough to get so close to him.

How could you trust anyone who betrayed his own people?

Howlette was relieved, but months would pass before he learned how Ferguson knew about the spy: A fellow undercover had volunteered to be a double agent. Howlette was constitutionally immune to an identity crisis, but one of his unknown partners had apparently come down with a very bad case of one. Though BOSS had a strict protocol to ensure that its undercovers never knew one another—for safety's sake, and to provide multiple sources of reporting—someone had left out paperwork referring to the infiltration. Howlette was at a National Guard armory in Brooklyn one day with Ferguson and a few others when the double agent tried to join them on the shooting range. Ferguson threw him out. How could you trust anyone who betrayed his own people?

Herman Ferguson, of the Revolutionary Action Movement;

In June 1967, the RAM case was taken down. Ferguson had ten rifles and a machine gun in his house, and the fifteen others charged brought the evidentiary haul to thirty weapons, more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, pipe bombs, and 275 bags of heroin. A year later, Ferguson and Harris went on trial together. They were the only defendants convicted among the sixteen, thanks largely to the testimony of Howlette, who was praised for his "calm demeanor" by The New York Times. The Queens DA called him "the perfect undercover."

It was around this time that the Wanted poster circulated, showing Howlette, another undercover, and an unidentified woman. The fourth person on the poster was the failed double agent. He resigned from the police department, but the radicals still branded him an enemy of the people.

A mock Wanted poster featuring Ed Howlette undercover

This past summer, I went down to my union, the Detectives' Endowment Association, to ask around about other black undercovers. My old friend Sam Katz told me about Cleave Bethea, a detective who was seriously wounded in a shootout with members of the Black Liberation Army in the early seventies. Though Bethea wasn't an undercover, Katz sent me an article she had written about him for the union magazine. As I flipped through the pages, I came across a letter from Thomas Coghlan, an NYPD detective who had written a dissertation in clinical psychology about the subjective inner experiences of long-term undercovers.

Coghlan interviewed four "deeps," as he called them. (None were identified in any recognizable detail, in keeping with academic practice, but they weren't NYPD.) All were transformed by the work, often brutally so. Those who went in with the firm conviction that the difference between good guys and bad was as clearly defined as the squares on a chessboard experienced the most cognitive dissonance. Few cops would have any qualms about locking up a heroin trafficker; few wouldn't if they'd spent time with the trafficker's six-year-old kid. All four came to realize that there were "good bad guys" and "bad bad guys," and that there was a difference between the criminal and the crime. Three out of four reported mistreatment by their agencies. One deep told of having her car break down and calling the office for help. Her colleagues in law enforcement couldn't be bothered, so she called her new criminal friends, who happily obliged her with a lift. When she was sick at home, she knew who would bring soup. It wasn't the cops.

A Black Panther Demonstration

Though Coghlan's subjects were exposed to constant physical threat, their internal battles were just as punishing. It's hard to go from being a warlord in a biker gang on Friday to coaching Little League on Saturday. It's harder still to tell your kid that you can't coach for the next couple of months or years. But what might be the hardest part is realizing how much fun it is to be a biker warlord. There can be a playground joy to these inventions, method actor-ish or therapeutic, with a punch-the-pillow kind of release.

Several of the deeps were disturbed by how easily they learned to lie, by how naturally they took to deception. When I called Coghlan recently, he told me that newer cops tended to suffer more in these assignments because they hadn't formed an identity that might withstand the personal, moral, and social challenges that arose. For BOSS, the lack of training was an essential part of the program, which amounted to a high-risk improv class.

BOSS didn't pick dummies: One of the white undercovers, Bill Clark, went into television, eventually becoming an executive producer of N.Y.P.D. Blue

In Count's Cop Talk, all of the undercovers spoke glowingly of how they were handled: No one was told to do anything more than report what they saw; no one was pushed to take risks beyond what would make them comfortable or keep them safe. Those who chose to leave faced no recriminations from the department. Several spoke with great affection of one handler, Tony Ulasewicz, who was revered for his savvy, his sympathy, and his strategic gifts. "Tony U" went on to become one of Nixon's bagmen during Watergate. He beat the rap.

BOSS didn't pick dummies: One of the white undercovers, Bill Clark, went into television, eventually becoming an executive producer of N.Y.P.D. Blue. (The character of Sipowicz, a Vietnam vet and former deep undercover, is based in part on him.) A black undercover named Cornelius Blackshear became a federal judge.

Others didn't fare as well. Gene Roberts, a black undercover interviewed by Count, told her that his behavior alarmed his parents, who "thought I had flipped over and really had become what I was portraying." When his parents asked him if he'd changed, he replied, "No, I'm still me, but I'm just trying to stay alive." He went on, "I used to tell 'em, 'I got a little girl that likes to see her daddy come home.' And that was my attitude. Tried to keep my game face on."

Roberts was a young Navy vet when he was recruited by BOSS in April 1964, and he spent almost six years undercover before he was publicly and painfully identified as a cop. Soon after joining BOSS, he was sent to report on Malcolm X. Malcolm had just broken from the Nation of Islam, discarding the ugly racial dogma that had alarmed white liberals as well as the crackpot religious rigmarole that had embarrassed leftists of every color. He had less than a year to live.

"Malcolm and the NYPD had already reached a practical détente"

Roberts spent a great deal of time in Malcolm's close company, as part of his security detail. He was recognized for his quiet competence and the sincerity of his allegiance, which was unfeigned—he came to admire Malcolm with fervor. Manning Marable has written that "Malcolm and the NYPD had already reached a practical détente" by then, at least in terms of coordinating security for public events. Although that hardly amounted to an invitation to surveillance, for Roberts there was a blissful absence of conflict between his missions. He didn't see himself as being behind enemy lines. Malcolm wasn't plotting to flood the subways with gasoline. Roberts could gladly relay what he heard to Tony U, secure in the belief that it did no one any harm. And as the death threats by the Nation of Islam became more vicious and vocal, he could uphold his oath to serve and protect, keeping faith with those who knew him as Brother Gene and with those who knew him as Officer Roberts.

One of Malcolm X's followers kneels at his side after Gene Roberts tried to save his life.

Neither of his employers seemed committed to saving Malcolm's life. At public events, Roberts scanned the crowd, and he warned BOSS about a gathering threat. Malcolm directed all but one of his security detail to stop carrying guns, and he ordered them not to search members of the audience, as had been their practice. He requested that the NYPD curtail the number of uniformed officers at his rallies. The department heeded his entreaty despite the urgent pleadings of its own inside man. After another defector from the Nation was shot in the Bronx, where Roberts lived with his wife and infant daughter, he sent the baby to stay with relatives. Some measure of how torn Roberts's family was by the case and the cause is suggested by the fact that his wife, Joan, joined him at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965.

Roberts was offstage, on a break, when a diversionary scuffle in the ballroom broke out—"Get your hand out of my pocket!"—that allowed three men to rush the stage. They opened fire. Roberts threw a chair at one of them, Talmadge Hayer, and knocked him down. When Hayer shot at him, Roberts jumped, and the bullet passed through his jacket as it swung open. After the crowd grabbed Hayer and began to beat him, Roberts ran back to Malcolm, who lay dying onstage. Desperate, Roberts attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When he realized he had failed, he turned to Betty Shabazz and told her that her husband was dead.

A picture of Malcolm and Roberts in that futile embrace ran in Life magazine. Marable writes, "Joan Roberts was deeply traumatized by Malcolm's assassination and her husband's near death. She wept uncontrollably in the taxi as she went home with her husband. Forty years later, Gene Roberts observed that 'the horror of that incident stayed with her for years.' " It is difficult to believe that Gene wasn't speaking of himself as well.

Roberts was promoted to detective, and he drifted along undercover for the next three years, dismissing the self-proclaimed rebels he met as loudmouths and wannabes. He'd known the real thing, and both the radicals and the department respected his opinion. He was like a talent scout on the hunt for the next great voice, but no one he met could carry a tune.

When he became a founding member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, in July 1968, he saw little to alter his opinion. Over the next year, his reports to BOSS were pithy and derisive: "Nothing significant; usual black power rhetoric." He must have been almost as surprised as the Panthers when twenty-one of them were charged with conspiring to blow up several police precincts, part of a railroad, the Bronx Botanical Garden, and five Manhattan department stores. After the DA announced the arrests, the city believed it had escaped an imminent and devastating series of coordinated attacks. But Roberts had taken the lead in the department-store operation, and no one he knew had done anything more than window-shop.

At the time, the "Panther 21" trial was the longest and most expensive criminal prosecution in the history of New York. Two years passed from the first arrests to the verdict; the jury voted not guilty on all counts after two hours of deliberation. In terms of theatrics, People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur, et al. made People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson seem no more thrilling than a Tuesday at traffic court. No one firebombed the judge's house during the O. J. trial, and neither O. J. nor his counsel was in the habit of shouting that Lance Ito was a racist, a fascist, a faggot, or a "dried-up cracker in female robes."

Panther 21 saw bail jumping, a jail riot, an escape to Algeria, and a murderous feud between Panther factions. A police informant whose sworn testimony provided the basis for wiretaps was revealed to be an escaped mental patient. Jane Fonda paid one defendant's bail; other celebrity supporters of the Panthers inspired Tom Wolfe to coin the term "radical chic" in a stinging essay.

Despite the overheated rhetoric and slapstick missteps, there was a substantive case to be made against the Panthers, or at least half a case. Roberts was only one of several police infiltrators, and an undercover colleague had managed to steal some dynamite that Lumumba Shakur had stashed, switching the real sticks for duds before bombs were planted at police stations. A Panther sniper team was assigned to pick off cops as they fled from one precinct—the Forty-fourth, my old home—after the planned explosion, but a pair of highway police happened upon them where they'd parked and guessed that they had car trouble. A gunfight ensued, though no one was hit, and the snipers escaped.

The prosecutors' solid case was compromised by the shadiness and strangeness that had marked the investigation from the beginning. One of the cops in the shootout claimed that his memo book had been perforated by a bullet, though it was undamaged. What's more, the dynamite supplied to Shakur had come from an erstwhile FBI informant who had neglected to mention the deal to his handlers.

"Isn't it a fact that you helped murder Malcolm X?"

Gene Roberts had never testified in open court before he was kept on the stand for six weeks. The group portrait of the accused that emerged from his wry and wary testimony was one of rebels without a clue, and if he was unhelpful to the prosecution as a witness, he was mortifying for the defense. Ordinarily, the experience of being cross-examined is like giving a speech to an audience of a single heckler; Roberts had six of them, mostly white radical lawyers who denounced men like him as "the trusted slave who would whip the other slaves when required," and "secret agents . . . forced to sell their souls and forfeit their manhood." He had certainly endured sermons from high-minded whites on what black men should believe and how they should behave, but for the conscientious labors of his life to be contrasted unfavorably with those of windy poseurs and brutal ex-cons must have been painfully new.

One lawyer challenged him, "Isn't it a fact that you helped murder Malcolm X?"

Afeni Shakur, one of the defendants, shouted, "Yes!" Shakur was heavily pregnant during the trial. She had been free on bail when her son, Tupac, the future rap superstar, was conceived. Her husband, Lumumba, had not.

Afeni Shakur

Roberts responded to the question at greater length than either side might have preferred. He spoke with as much anger and pain as his nature and the circumstances allowed, telling of how the NYPD had failed to heed his warnings about the threat to Malcolm, and how he had risked his life to do whatever small good was possible. Whether his testimony was sufficiently impressive, or the lesson of his life was too difficult to reduce, most of the defense lawyers chose to focus on the other undercovers in their summations.

Several former cops said that Gene Roberts struggled during his remaining years on the job. Patrick Harnett, who retired as a chief, told me, "I was a young cop when I met him. This guy had some pair of balls to do what he did, but he was a nice, unassuming guy. Everybody liked him. But he was basically new to the world of policing. And what makes you a great undercover doesn't make you a great detective." After the trial, Roberts was assigned to ordinary detective duties in the Bronx. He developed a drinking problem, which eventually cost him his marriage.

In Harnett's view, the department failed Roberts. He was given medals but never promoted; he was still living in his apartment and taking the subway to court during the Panther trial, despite the danger. Instead of addressing his alcoholism, the department parked him in a quiet precinct. He died alone in Virginia in 2008. I found his obituary online and contacted the pastor who was listed as having performed the service. His representatives got back to me to say that he did not remember the funeral

Roberts gave several interviews later in life, including one for a 1994 documentary called Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, which follows him as he walks through what appears to be the remains of the Audubon Ballroom. His gait is stiffer than it should be for a man in his early fifties. His beard is gray, his eyes are wide, and the high arch of his eyebrows gives him an expression of permanent surprise. He's missing a few teeth. He speaks with a weary melancholy, halting often and trailing off: "There are a lot of people in the black community that consider me a traitor to my race and the community. . . . I felt then and I feel now . . . I would get some negative feedback. And I would get some positive feedback. I felt that it was a job. A job I felt was the right thing to do."

In the documentary, Roberts recalls reporting to BOSS that he tried to give Malcolm X mouth-to-mouth. One of his handlers asked, "What did you do that for?" Roberts sounds as puzzled as he is wounded when he cites his reply: "Cops try to save people."

Roberts talked to Count around the same time. He told her that he "wouldn't want to see another guy go through what I did. I really wouldn't. Maybe because I feel they might not have my tolerance, so to speak." He went on: "You do this, and you're gonna have nightmares."

You can win at trial and still lose the larger argument. For the Panther 21, being found not guilty seems to have brought a more damning verdict of triviality, of impotence. Days after the acquittal, two cops were machine-gunned outside the Manhattan district attorney's house, crippling them for life. A group called the Black Liberation Army, which was organized by one of the Panther 21 defendants, Richard "Dhoruba" Moore, claimed responsibility for the shootings.

The BLA waged a campaign of bank robberies, bombings, and police assassinations across the country, killing at least fourteen cops. The group was also allied with Eldridge Cleaver in his war with Huey Newton and the West Coast Black Panthers. Moore was eventually arrested during the robbery of an after-hours club, by Pat Harnett and his partner. Despite maintaining his innocence, he was convicted of attempted murder for his role in the police shootings. While in prison, he pled guilty to attempted manslaughter after the charred remains of a Newton ally were found in a building that housed the official Panther newspaper.

And then there were the revelations about COINTELPRO, the FBI domestic-espionage program. Not only did J. Edgar Hoover target wholly aboveboard organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but his tactics were casually criminal and astonishingly vicious. A man like Gene Roberts might have picked up a newspaper and read about how the BLA planted a bomb in a church in San Francisco, to be set off during a police officer's funeral, and felt reassured that he'd chosen the right side. It's hard to fathom his reaction to learning that the FBI had secretly recorded Martin Luther King having sex with another woman and sent the tapes to his wife, or that Hoover's Bureau had sent King a note urging him to commit suicide. Was what Gene did a part of that?

The publicity of the Panther 21 trial eventually led to a landmark consent decree that limited the scope of police investigations into political activity. And for many cops, the consequences of the exposure of COINTELPRO were as appalling as the program itself. Dhoruba Moore had served nineteen years in prison when his attempted-murder conviction was overturned. A judge ruled that the prosecution had improperly withheld from Moore's lawyers information that the FBI had collected. Two wrongs didn't make Moore right, but they did make him rich: He was awarded nearly $1 million in damages by New York City and the federal government.

In later life, Gene Roberts might have offered Moore as an example of why the Panther case wasn't wholly a matter of reactionary paranoia, but people only asked him about Malcolm, and that story got sadder every time he told it. (Roberts would perhaps have found a receptive audience with the New Black Panther Party, whose members broke Dhoruba's jaw in three places, in Atlanta in 2015, when he accused them of being government spies.) Though Roberts was a good man and Moore was not, both had the same desperate, doubting tone when they insisted that their lives had been justified.

Chief Thomas Galati, the current commanding officer of the Intelligence Division—and my old boss—told me, "I really, really try to take care of my people. Some are bitter. It's tough. I can see how some of them are conflicted. But we try to take care of them, however we can, even if it's a long time after they left."

When Galati was a young cop, in the mid-eighties, he and his partner saw a middle- aged black man driving a Renault convertible in Queens. It was a cold night, but the man had the top down, and he was driving around five miles an hour. After he collided with a pole, the officers approached him, and he suddenly grabbed Galati's partner, bashing her head against the side of the car. At the precinct, they found his retired NYPD ID, which was stamped no firearm. His arrest history showed he had assaulted a highway cop before, apparently under similar circumstances. The man kept going crazy until the sergeant at the desk, who was black, seemed to recognize him. He went in the cell to talk. After a few minutes of quiet conversation, the man seemed to wake up from a dream, apologizing—Is everybody okay? The prisoner and the sergeant had both been undercovers of the same type, from the same time. A boss from downtown arrived at the precinct, and things were settled. The case went away, as far as Galati knew. What had driven the man to such despair might never be known, but it appeared to warrant him a large measure of forgiveness.

He didn't know black cops when he was a kid, let alone black lawyers.

Whose are the representative stories of those battles, those of the survivors or the casualties? In his memoir, Eric-83: Patriot or Traitor?, Howlette answers the question to his satisfaction, making his case with the modesty of the squared-away airman he once was and the precision of the attorney he became. During the Panther trial, he was assigned to protect the judge, John Murtagh, after his house was firebombed. When Murtagh learned that Howlette was interested in law school, he helped him win a full scholarship to Fordham. Howlette sees his career as a struggle for betterment, and not only his own. He didn't know black cops when he was a kid, let alone black lawyers. One of his sons is graduating from medical school this spring; another is an assistant U. S. attorney.

Howlette is candid about his failings—he writes about having to surrender his law license for a time, after commingling client funds with his business accounts. No restitution was owed to any client, but he takes full responsibility for his actions. The mea culpa contrasts strikingly with his recollections of his early police career, for which he offers no apology. He tends not to let things get to him.

Courtesy Edward Lee Howlette

When Howlette ran for the New York State assembly in the early nineties, as a Republican in the suburbs, he found it necessary to rebut attacks against his undercover work. Though he was vice-president of his local chapter of the NAACP, and he'd stopped a plot to kill Roy Wilkins, he says that his fellow NAACP members were behind the smear campaign.

The men Howlette sent to prison, Arthur Harris and Herman Ferguson, both jumped bail and fled the country before sentencing. Harris has never been found, but Ferguson returned from exile in Guyana in 1989, in the hope that FBI files would lead to his conviction being overturned. Instead, he served a prison term of a little more than four years.

When I told Howlette that the failed double agent who betrayed him—the man whose face also appears on the Wanted poster—went on to become a police chief in the Caribbean, he was unruffled. "I heard he'd gone back to the islands."

I asked, "If you saw him today, what would you tell him?"

Howlette knew what it was like to have been in the crucible of history, and he was in no rush to pass judgment. He thought for a moment and said, "I probably wouldn't recognize him."