ok so I couldn't sleep tonight and ended up going down a rabbit hole listening to one of those long history podcasts about Malcomx's assassination. one of the stories was about this letter that came out in 2021 from an old NYPD undercover officer, named Raymond Wood and I genuinely had to sit up because I had never heard about this before. how is this not bigger.
Malcolm X gets shot at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965. three Nation of Islam guys get convicted. one of them, Mujahid Abdul Halim (also went by Talmadge Hayer), admitted he did it from the very beginning but kept saying the other two, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, weren't even there. nobody listened to him. Aziz did 20 years, Islam did 22 and died in 2009 still officially labeled an assassin, never got to hear anyone say he was innocent.
The letter: then in 2021, six days before the 50-somethingth anniversary of the killing, Malcolm X's daughters and attorney Ben Crump hold a press conference and read out this letter. it was written by Raymond Wood, who was a Black undercover NYPD officer in the 60s working for a unit called BOSSI (Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, they literally called it the Red Squad). Wood died in November 2020 at age 87. his cousin Reggie Wood says Ray confessed all this to him back in 2011 when he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, asked him to wait until he died to release it. cancer actually went into remission btw and he lived another 9 years which is wild on its own.
The letter says his job was to infiltrate civil rights groups and basically entrap members into committing federal crimes so they could be arrested. in the days before the assassination, he was specifically tasked with setting up two of Malcolm's main security guys, Walter Bowe and Khaleel Sayyed, by drawing them into a plot to bomb the Statue of Liberty they got arrested by the FBI right before Feb 21. So when Malcolm walked out at the Audubon, his usual door security was just gone. that's the whole reason no one was checking people coming in.
He also says one of the guys convicted, Thomas Johnson (Khalil Islam's earlier name), was completely innocent and was set up to protect Wood's cover and the FBI/NYPD's secrets. Wood says he was inside the ballroom that day. another undercover officer named Gene Roberts was ALSO inside, he had infiltrated Malcolm's own organization and was literally on his security detail. there's a famous photo of Roberts giving Malcolm mouth to mouth right after he was shot. I keep thinking about this for some reason.
Now here's where it gets murky
I want to be honest about it because this sub doesn't mess around. Wood's own daughter Kelly Wood went on NY1 a few days after the press conference and said the letter is fake. said it's not his signature, the envelope is fake, and she thinks her cousin Reggie made the whole thing up to sell a book (there is in fact a book, Reggie co-wrote it). some historians have also pushed back hard, the Washington Post ran a piece basically saying the scholarly consensus is the letter is not credible as written. Snopes looked at it too and couldn't independently verify the corroborating research the cousin claimed to have done.
But here's the thing that makes the bigger story not contested at all.
Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance had already started a 22 month reinvestigation in 2020, before the Wood letter even dropped, because of that Netflix doc Who Killed Malcolm X (which is great if anyone hasn't seen it, the historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad spent literal decades on this). That investigation found that the FBI and NYPD had withheld documents from the original trial that would have pointed away from Aziz and Islam. straight up Brady violations. evidence of innocence, suppressed.
So in November 2021, both men were exonerated. judge called it a fundamental failure. Vance personally apologized on behalf of the NYPD and FBI for what he called "serious, unacceptable violations of the law and public trust." then in October 2022, NYC paid $26 million and the state of New York added another $10 million for a total $36 million settlement. Split between Aziz and Islam's estate. Islam's family got the money 13 years after he was already in the ground.
So even if you throw out the Wood letter entirely, the underlying story is that the FBI and NYPD had stuff that proved two innocent men weren't the killers and they sat on it for 56 years and let those men rot. and the actual gunman literally told them in 1965 and named the real shooters in a 1977 affidavit and nobody acted on it for over 40 more years.
What I can't stop thinking about is how Halim, the one guy who actually did it and admitted it, was telling the truth from day one and the system just decided his truth wasn't useful. Aziz is 84 now. he's been out longer than he was in but he spent essentially his entire adult life branded as the man who killed Malcolm X.