In the Name of the Father

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

WHEN A LITTLE GIRL IS FOUR, HER father is God. He is the leader of her private nation. Should he also happen to be a real-life leader, invited to stand before microphones and talk to great cheering crowds, that too would seem appropriate, consistent with his place in her young universe. But what if one day, while she is watching, he is blown from the dais by five thugs -- a grotesque reversal of the nature of things, a wiping out of the sun? Can her spirit survive it? Can she avoid being twisted by it? Can it be overcome?

Last week a federal prosecutor in Minnesota suggested that it could not -- that, in the words of one little girl's father, chickens will come home to + roost, that violence must beget violence, that the world is a tragedy in a continuous loop. Minneapolis U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug charged on Thursday that Qubilah Shabazz, 34, had for seven months negotiated with a hit man for a murder and had in fact moved to Minnesota to make a down payment on the crime. Her alleged target: Louis Farrakhan, the bitter rival of her father Malcolm X, who was murdered in 1965.

It was a seductive premise: the violence Malcolm saw as a tool of liberation had degenerated into the internecine violence that killed him, and now into a senseless blood feud. But by the weekend the case's lessons, and its prospects, looked less clear. The man expected to be the prosecution's key witness seemed to be more impeachable, at least on character, than anything yet seen at the O.J. Simpson trial. And the state's allegations had achieved what the passage of years had failed to do -- drawn the Shabazz family and Farrakhan into apparent agreement on at least one belief: that the Federal Government so dislikes black activists that it will pursue them recklessly unto the second generation.

The prosecution's case, should it ever reach trial, will inevitably conjure up the carnage that took place at New York City's Audubon Ballroom 30 years ago next month, as Malcolm X, former con man and thief who had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) while in prison and become the foremost spokesman of its fiercely proud and racist party line, played out his final political incarnation. After revealing that his mentor, Elijah Muhammad, had fathered several illegitimate children, Malcolm had split with the Nation. He had founded a splinter group, traveled to Mecca, adopted a more tolerant political philosophy (along with the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and begun to believe he was marked for death -- correctly so. One conspirator distracted his bodyguards' attention; another pulled a shotgun trigger, creating, in the words of writer Marshall Frady, "a perfectly circular seven-inch pattern of holes over his heart." For insurance, the killers shot him again with the shotgun and pistols.

All this within yards of his pregnant wife and four young daughters.

"They never actually saw what happened," Betty Shabazz told reporters of her children. At the first shot, she threw them under a chair and herself on top of them. But her oldest daughter Attallah contradicted that in interviews of her own: "She's yelling, 'That's my husband they're killing!' And a kid wants to look and see. Her husband means it's my father. So I keep looking. I see the men. I see it." Qubilah, the second eldest, presumably saw it too.

Nor was she likely to forget it. Betty Shabazz has said, "My children were reared on a picture of Daddy. A lot of people have Daddy at home. When they prayed that God bless them and everybody, Daddy was part of everything." The mother hid her copies of the posthumously published Autobiography of Malcolm X because they showed his corpse, but Attallah says she and Qubilah found them. Fareed Nu'man, a researcher with the American Muslim Council in Washington, says Qubilah "had the roughest time" of all the Shabazz daughters coping with their father's loss. Mary Ryan, a Shabazz neighbor, agrees, adding "She was kind of a lonesome child, but friendly."

She attended the U.N. International School in Manhattan, an academically rigorous haven for the children of diplomats, wealthy Manhattanites and scholarship students. There she met a white boy named Michael Fitzpatrick, whom a contemporary recalls as "a wild, wild kid" and who would pop up in her life later. Although some of her sisters attained a measure of celebrity, Qubilah lived out of the public eye. She had a child, now a teenager, whom she named Malcolm. She lived several years in France, reportedly working as a journalist.

And then, last October, she moved to an inner-city neighborhood in Minneapolis. The name next to her buzzer gave no hint of her paternity -- it read simply Qubilah. ("Really a fabulous person," says her building's owner, Mansoor Alyeshmerni. "Quiet and intelligent, very respectful.") But according to U.S. Attorney Lillehaug, she came to Minnesota with a purpose. FBI audio- and videotapes, he claims, indicate that she made eight phone calls in July and August to a Minnesota resident contracting the murder of Farrakhan and, upon arrival, she made a down payment on the job. If convicted, she could receive 90 years in jail and a $2.5 million fine.

Why Farrakhan? Two months before Malcolm's assassination, Farrakhan, now NOI's head and the most influential extremist voice in black politics, wrote in the Nation's newspaper that "the die is set and Malcolm shall not escape. Such a man is worthy of death." (Three men were jailed after the murder, but no coherent explanation of their culpability ever emerged, and most scholars now think two of them were innocent.) Farrakhan has always maintained his + innocence of the deed and in fact has been apologetic for creating what he calls an atmosphere of hatred. Still, he has been recorded condoning it: the documentary Brother Minister captures a 1993 speech in which, referring to Malcolm, he roars: "And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?"

Betty Shabazz thought it was her business. A family friend explains that she has always believed the Nation killed Malcolm, while the FBI declined to interfere. Asked on a WNBC television program whether Farrakhan was involved, she answered, "Yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it." In June, Farrakhan and Shabazz appeared on the same stage at a leadership summit in Baltimore; but they did not exchange words, and Shabazz's remarks were noticeably cold. Asked recently whether she stood by her WNBC statement, she replied that she had not changed her position ((on it)) in 30 years.

Those, the prosecution may well suggest, would be 30 years of indoctrination, during which a shy, impressionable four-year-old might plausibly turn into a 34-year-old fanatic. But "might" is a key word, and the skeptics are many.

Their doubts quickly settled on the government's informant. According to lawyers close to the defense, he is none other than Qubilah's school friend Michael Fitzpatrick, whose life since those days has followed a singular course. In 1977 the 17-year-old was arrested in the bombing of a Soviet bookstore. Subsequently, according to court documents, he turned government informer and betrayed co-conspirators in a second attempted bombing: the Associated Press quoted a former acquaintance as calling him "a setup artist." The government sent him to Minneapolis as part of the witness- protection program and assigned him a new name, under which he was arrested in a cocaine bust. His hearing, as it happens, was scheduled, then postponed, the day before Shabazz's murder-conspiracy arraignment. Shabazz's lawyer, Scott Tilsen, has hinted that Fitzpatrick entrapped her in order to re- establish credit with his understandably disenchanted federal patrons. "She was an easy target," says Tilsen. "If your mother and father had been murdered, and somebody came to you and enticed -- cajoled -- you into discussing what happened, you'd listen, and it could be made to appear that you were in a conspiracy."

Betty Shabazz, who was in Atlanta last weekend to help celebrate Martin ! Luther King Day, said, "It is unfortunate that anyone would do that to a young woman, and it says how quick they are and how they will do anything to get their political ends." James Turner, a Shabazz family friend and national chairman of the Malcolm X Commemoration Commission, confides that Shabazz is "outraged" at the charges against her daughter. Another friend adds that she is concerned about possible retaliation by Farrakhan. But Farrakhan seems otherwise inclined. A spokesperson for the Minister said on Thursday that "his heart goes out to the Shabazz family"; another added that "it would be easy for conspirators to entrap this troubled young woman."

Both parties' comments reflect dire suspicions based in sad history. For decades black radicals -- and especially the Nation -- have appeared prone to paranoia; but events have recurrently proved their fears founded. The FBI's claims about Qubilah Shabazz prompt Turner to recall the '60s and '70s, when "there was a well-orchestrated, high-priority program operating from the FBI to destabilize black organizations that were involved in the civil-rights movement and African-American liberation struggle. This was to be done by planting agent provocateurs, providing false documents and sending bogus letters to the heads of various organizations that would sow the seeds of conflict . . . in order to effectively destabilize them."

Still, it is hard to imagine what good reason the government might have to frame a young woman with no national reputation as an activist, and whether or not she was entrapped into it, no public figure has yet suggested that she did not undertake to commit a horrible crime. In jail or free, her wounds, reopened, will be slow to heal.

With reporting by Tresa Chambers and Sharon E. Epperson/New York, Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta, Elaine Shannon and Jack E. White/Washington and David Skarjune/Minneapolis