Alberto Zanini - A PANTHER'S STORY [Hardback Book]

TESLA GROOVE

£29.70

Format: Hardback Book
Catalogue No.: PANTHER1
Release Date: 16 Sep 2022

TALES FROM THE TIME CAPSULE

Finally done. Following up on Funk Investigators, although no longer with an autobiographical slant but as a real journalistic novel, was not easy task. I hope you will enjoy reading it at least as much as I enjoyed writing it, although I would have preferred to do it in a less complicated period of my life. I am also happy to announce that, in the coming months, both books Funk Investigators and A Panther's Story will also be published in Spain by Colectivo Bruxista, the most eclectic and underground publishing house in the Country. Thanks to Carlo Babando (of Blackness fame) for the superb preface. "A Panther's Story" is dedicated to my father, my children and my brothers and sisters (you know who you are). It is also dedicated to liars. There ain't no hole deep enough.

A Panther on the run. Hunted down by J. Edgar Hoover's Special Agents over one of the most turbulent years in recent American history. Dirty cops, mobsters, civil rights activists, street gangsters, investigative journalists and secret services from Nations afar intertwine in a time capsule on which the Funk Investigators are called to shed a light once again.

Excerpt from the incipit
Chapter I
Jalon Perry & The DeVonne Brothers
Harlem, April 1969

Jalon Perry was sad to leave New York in a hurry in spring, the most beautiful season for that city, but there was nothing he could do about it. He would have to do without the light green of the first leaves on Mount Morris' oaks and the darker one of the new ivy at St. Nicholas Park. No more spliffs while watching kids shooting basketball at the Rucker Playground. Worst thing was, due to the pace with which events chased each other, he could not even stop by one last time to say adiós, to those places. To promise them he'd be back.
The day before the police stormed the Party’s headquarters, a tip came from a copper who the DeVonne Brothers used to bribe. They imported to the hood some special heroin from Southeast Asia and had run the city's largest clandestine betting ring for decades, the so-called Numbers, so they were always craving for information and protection.
That tip was bad news. Jalon could not allow himself to waver while waiting for them to be confirmed by facts. Not that he was guilty of anything, not anything he had done or anything the cops thought he was going to do, but in those tense times there was no need to actually be guilty. If you were a member of the Black Panthers the cops wanted to arrest, they would have set you up and make it to prove your guilt by all means available. To make certain and demonstrable facts that never happened. So it was better to disappear, and quickly.
The copper's mind wasn't bright about what was going on in those days. He said that strange people were over at 28th Precinct, up in Manhattan North. Folks you’d never seen before, going back and forth from Captain’s office in cheap gray suits instead of standard issue blue uniforms, plotting diagrams on large urban maps of the hood, wide open on the meeting room’s table. Maps of Harlem with notes and symbols scribbled on 7th Avenue and 141st Street, exactly where the Black Panther’s chapter of New York had office.
Established just a year earlier, it was among the younger sections of the Party and its ranks had rapidly grown to make it one of the most important branches in the entire nation. The members had increased exponentially just when the hostilities with security forces had turned in what Jalon Perry and his crew called a real guerrilla. The murders of Malcolm X in '65 right there in Harlem, of Martin Luther King in April of '68 down in Memphis and, two days later, that of Bobby Hutton of the Oakland Panthers had done nothing but increase the fear and the level of self-awareness in all black communities of America. The Black Panthers were taking...
© 2022 - Alberto Zanini - All Rights