THE FBI WAR ON TUPAC SHAKUR AND BLACK LEADERS - JOHN POTASH

I tore through this thing in a day. I’ve heard John Potash on some conspiracy-minded podcasts and he typically speaks well (he has a sort of gen. X hipster vibe and vocabulary) and tows the line between boring and over the top so I decided to take a look at one of his books. The title is somewhat misleading, I would say that Tupac makes up only a part of what he’s talking about. Potash takes a much broader view of state repression of leftist leaders and hops around a lot. There’s chapters about the Panthers, including lots of great information about who was an informant, the death of Huey Newton (always has seemed suspicious to me, Potash makes a reasonably strong case for government involvement), the LA and New York Panthers in particular and the tactics the state used to break them up. There’s stuff about the MLK assassination, stuff about the A.I.M, stuff about Judi Bari. He covers the RFK assassination and the CIA’s work with domestic police forces. He gives us run-downs of the MOVE bombing and Mumia. He covers Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, who I did not know did benefits for the Panthers, and who Potash believes was murdered by his manager, a former MI6 man. Marley has obviously been quite on my mind since I finished “Brief History” a few days ago. He basically confirms (up to and including names, I thought James had changed all the names but, apparently, he used the real (street) name of at least one of the would-be assassins) one of the most dramatic scenes in the book, where Marley himself oversees a sort of ghetto court where his shooters confess, and confess to CIA involvement, before being executed. The Tupac stuff is quite good and very interesting, especially the role his mother played in the Panther 21 trail in New York and the degree to which Tupac was monitored and fucked with, even before he became amazingly famous. The tactics around undermining gang peace efforts and igniting an East/West feud, and how these were old tactics (going back to, at least, the British efforts against the Mau Mau) could be a whole book. The ways that various Black activists tried to politicize street gangs and were killed and their efforts undermined could be a book. A book I’d love to read and I hope someone writes someday. I think I part from Potash about the literal causes of Tupac’s death. He seems to think Orlando Anderson was paid to get beat-up so some government forces could kill ‘Pac. This strikes me as unlikely, or at least less likely than the alternative. Especially since Keefy D, who is now dying, has admitted to being in the car and that Anderson, his nephew, fired the fatal shots. He also, in a single sentance, seems to suggest that Bill Cosby had been targeted with fake rape accusations due to his activism, a stance that hasn’t aged well. Overall, this book is a good intro to a lot of these topics. He hops around so much that he never goes super deep on any one subject, each of which either has a good book about it or should have one. I’m pretty pill’d on most of these happenings but it was nice to see the connections, how the FBI agent who helped fuck with Newton also fucked with Pac and helped bomb Judi Bari for instance. I think this guy has also written a book about how the government killed Kurt Cobain so perhaps your mileage might very. Either way, it reads really fast and, if you’re not familiar with some of this stuff, it could be a good place to wet your feet. 1996 government assassinations.