"What am I? A gang of one?" Stevenson said Conway asked. It was then that Conway learned that his Panther affiliation made him a member of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang. (You poor, benighted, miseducated-in-Baltimore-public-schools refugees who've been spray-painting "Black GORILLA Family" on walls around the city, please note the correct spelling of the word in the previous sentence.)
This flies in the face of what I know about the BGF/Panther relationship. Conway's being a Panther is just as likely to make him a target of, as well as a member of, the BGF. Remember Huey Newton, the founder of the Panthers? A BGF grunt fatally shot Newton in a drug deal gone bad in 1989. (One day some reader will e-mail or snail-mail me a letter about what constitutes a drug deal gone good.) According to Hugh Pearson's Shadow of the Panther, the guy who smoked Newton could be heard shouting, "I'll move up in rank!" right after the shooting.
Newton made several bad choices in his life; running afoul of the BGF was at the very top of the list.
There is no room here to go into the history of Newton, the BGF and prison activist and BPP member George Jackson, the reputed founder of the notorious prison gang. There is only room left for a response from corrections officials, so here it is.
According to Rick Binetti, a corrections spokesman, "MCTC does not prohibit any inmates identified as gang members from participating in programming, as long as they are in the general population. Being in the general population is a prerequisite for participating in programming at MCTC and is applied to all inmates."
That answers the charges Stevenson said inmates made about "tagging." But what specifically about Conway and the BGF? Judging from Binetti's answer, I can only conclude that comes under the heading of "classified information."
"For security reasons," Binetti wrote in an e-mail, "DPSCS does not discuss publicly specific policies and procedures related to intelligence-gathering efforts of any kind."
The Eddie Conway/BGF connection will have to, for now, remain a mystery.
greg.kane@baltsun.com
