After high school, they both took off drifting. Fitzpatrick stumbled through a life in political fringe groups, drug rehab, gold-coin peddling and the federal witness-protection program. Shabazz wandered in and out of bad relationships and dead-end jobs. Armed with what she says is a degree from the Sorbonne in Paris, she found hersself waitressing at Denny’s, when she wasn’t pitching telemarketing products. Some friends say she was haunted by her father’s legacv. She was confused, reclusive, looking for love.
What drew these two fractured lives together again after 16 years is still an unfolding mystery. Federal agents say the mismatched loners became tangled in an amateurish plot, apparently to avenge the 1965 murder of Malcolm X. Shabazz allegedly reached out to Fitzpatrick last summer, hiring him to kill Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrrakhan, her father’s protege, turned rival. Federal sources say that in September Shabazz took her 10-year-old son, Malcolm, and moved to Minneapolis hoping to close the deal with Fitzpatrick. Authorities reportedly have at least 20 taped conversations between Shabazz and her former classmate, allegedly hatching the plot. A few days after she arrived in the Twin Cities, though, Fitzpatrick disappeared again – some think back into the federal witness-protection program. And last week a fearful Shabtzz stood up in a St. Paul courtroom to murmur “not guilty” to nine counts of scheming to kill Farrakhan. It wasn’t her only difficult moment since moving to Minnesota. On Sunday, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported that police removed Qubilah’s son last Novemember on suspicion of neglect. Days later, evidence of alleged sexual and physical abuse surfaced, according to a police report.
The criminal-conspiracy charges have already prompted a truce among famous enemies. Farrakhan, who once wrote that Malcolm X was “worthy of death,” spoke tenderly of Qubilah last week. “I held her as a baby in my arms,” he said softly, flanked by grim bodyguards. Shabazz’s mother, Betty, who in the past has made no secret of her disdain for Farrakhan, expressed “surprise at the extent of his humanity.” And civil-rights attorney William Kuntsler plans to argue Farrakhan’s own theory: the FBI framed Qubilah in order to discredit the Nation of Islam. The charges, Kuntsler suggested, would stir up old and teacherous rifts that could only damage Farrakhan.
The six-member defense team may argue that Shabazz was romanced by a man who planned to betray her all along; that Fitzpatrick baited the vulnerable Qubilah, so he could beat an outstanding cocaine possession charge. It’s true that police agencies rely on informants and snitches eager for leniency (following story). But the drug charge is so minor that Fitzpatrick faced only probation. U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug refused to discuss the case. But NEWSWEEK sources who have seen the evidence say the prosecution’s key videotape is stronger than previously reported. It apparently shows Qubliah as more than a reticent partner. To add grist to the case against Shabazz, sources said last week that Oubilah signed an incriminating statement for the FBI in December.
By all accounts Qubilah is prone to makiing statements. Over the years, friends say, she has spun all sorts of tales – some fanciful, some not – of strange episodes involving crimes, pals or work. So it was not utterly out of character last Summer when she, told a neighbor in Harlem that she was headed for Minnesota. She was going to marry a white man, get a job, and finally pull her life together. Ingram Fox, a retired pianist who sometimes hired her to do his typing, was aghast. “I told QB “He’s not going to marry you’,” says Fox. “I asked her, “Are you out of your mind?'”
Whatever her interest in Fitzpatrick, she hadn’t chosen well. His entanglement with the FBI began at the young age of 17, when he was convicted for firebombing a Russian-language bookstore in New York. When he was 18, the young militant entered the federal witness-protection program after informing the FBI of a plot of Jewish militants to bomb an Egyptian tourist office in Manhattan. (Though his father was Irish, his mother is Jewish.) Michael moved to Minnesota, took the name Summers and began his volatile life anew. These days, his only real attachment, according to coworkers, is to his golden retreiver, Barney. the 34-year-old prefers the jazzy street look, gold jewelry, leather coats and expensive cars. And he can apparently afford them. According to sources at his last job, he earned $12,000 a month.
Still, it’s not hard to find people who hate him. Christopher Gunderson says Fitzpatrick began hanging out with members of Minneapolis’s tiny anarchist movement in 1986. Late one night in a bar, Fitzpatrick tried to persuade the reluctant group to firebomb a polling place. The group balked. “He was more interested in the bombing than the target,” Gunderson told Newsweek. Months later they heard stories of Fitzpatrick’s informant days and banned him from their bookstore. “He was the only person we ever threw out aw an agent provocateur,” Gunderson says.
Did Fitzpatrick honestly face down a moral dilema? Did he run out of kicks? Whatever the case, Newsweek learned, co-workers at Premier Rarities, the precious-coin business where he worked, found it strange last August when he boasted that the “daughter of Malcolm X” was coming to see him. He was ordinarily so remote. But soon after she arrived, he vanished, leaving little trace. Then, in another strange twist to the ever twisting story, months later Qubilah Shabbaz turned up at the same company to interview for a job. Two days later, she vanished, too – into the national spotlight. The sad reality is, Qubilah could have used the job. “She was always broke,” says Fox, her New York neighbor who regularly gave her loans. “I asked myself, “Why can’t her mother or sisters help her?’ She was like the black sheep.”
Of all of Malcolm X’s six daughters, family friends say, his second eldest has always been the most unstable, least able to cope with her father’s death and the confusion of his legacy. She was just 4 years old when she watched her father die in a hail of bullets in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Malcolm X had split with the Nation of Islam by then. He was considered a “traitor,” a marked man. Though three gunmen were convicted for the murder, the family believes Louis Farrakhan played a role.
The poised and polite young woman who enjoys jazz and Terry McMillan novels began drifting after high school. She entered Princeton in 1978, but didn’t stay long enough to declare a major. In Paris, she worked as a translator and became in volved with an African man, the father of her son, Malcolm Latiff Shabazz. When that relationship went sour she fled Paris telling friends that the child’s father “would not leave her alone.” But when she ran by chance into David Steinhardt. a high-school classmate, she spun a far wilder tale of murder and mayhem.
Did Qubilah just want her disapproving family to see her “finally do something to make them proud?” wonders a family friend. Or was she, as she says, hoping for a father for her son? Either way she made a profound mistake. While the court decides her fate, friends worry most for Qubilah’s son, the real victim in the tableau. They fear young Malcolm acquired not only his grandfather’s name but his notoriously painful childhood as well. Says one: “The grief is just being passed on one more, time.”
