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Ten days later, according to Orloff, the dapper Newton was being visited in his penthouse by his tailor, Preston Callins. They began arguing about the price of suits. When Newton complained that he was being ripped off, Callins said, "Oh, baby, don't feel that way." Once again, apparently, the faintly belittling word infuriated Newton. "Nobody calls me no damn baby!" he cried. He seized a revolver, according to Orloff, and pistol whipped Callins, fracturing his skull.
Police charged Newton with assault, but he contacted the FBI and claimed that he was a target of the underworld. He said the Mafia had put a $10,000 price on his head because he was resisting Mafia drug pushing (the FBI expresses polite skepticism about this). Then Newton disappeared, in part to avoid the charges against him. He surfaced a year later in Cuba, and there he lived for the next two years, working in a cement factory.
During his absence, the Panthers came under the leadership of Newton's friend Elaine Brown, who urged the Panthers to put more emphasis on traditional politics. Brown ran for the Oakland city council in 1973 and 1975, finishing second both times. She also served as a Jerry Brown delegate to the 1976 Democratic Convention.
During her regime, the Panthers pursued a number of social enterprises that had been started under Newton. They founded and still operate the Oakland Community School, which provides high-level education to 150 ghetto kids. There was and is a program that helps old people to go out shopping and another that provides school lunches. One Panther program offers dances for teen-agers and training in martial arts. Says Oakland County Supervisor John George: "Huey could take street-gang types and give them a social consciousness."
For such community activities, the Panthers won $500,000 in government grants (and the attention of government auditors, who found a number of instances of sloppiness and mismanagement). Even in the midst of these good works, however, there were some violent incidents that seemed to lead back to the Panthers. The ugliest was the murder of Betty Van Patten, 45, the Panthers' earnest white bookkeeper, who in 1975 was found floating in San Francisco Bay with her head bashed in. There were rumors that she might have made enemies by questioning irregularities in party ledgers, but the case has never been solved.
In the summer of 1977, Newton figured that the political climate had mellowed enough for him to risk coming home. Three months later, the Panther Party was back in the police news. One night in October, three heavily armed men, dressed in dark blue jumpsuits and wearing black ski masks and gloves, started shooting through the door of a home in Richmond, Calif. The occupant, a black woman named Mary Matthews, 56, fired back with the .38-cal. revolver she kept by her bed. One man fell, killed by a burst of machine-gun fire—from behind. The two others fled. The dead man turned out to be a Panther.
The incident was inexplicable until Crystal Gray, who lived in the house in back of Matthews', went to the police and said she apparently was the intended victim. She was one of the witnesses in the murder of Prostitute Kathleen Smith. The assassins had attacked the wrong house.