Informant Shenanigans
The three funniest parts of this video:
1) Nerdy white FBI guys assigned to deal with the Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army etc., getting way too into the role and becoming obsessed with 1960s black culture, to the point of going to black bars and engaging black radicals in excruciatingly long and boring discussions about its obscure points, while their informant suffers in silence. I can only assume that this is how the backpack rap scene was born.
You can see the same thing with, for instance, military linguist nerds.
Note to anyone working a job like this: a pinch goes a long way. Cracking a Saadi al Hilli joke at Iraqis goes a much longer way than trying to build rapport by discussing the finer points of some obscure Iraqi poet whom nobody cares about.
2) The inability of the brothers to pick out informants by the incongruity of their lifestyle with their job (or lack thereof,) because of the ubiquity of “hustling,” i.e., making a living through petty crime and the gray market, in their community. “How do you afford all these nice things?” “Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that.” “Oh, right, okay.”
Thankfully, it’s easier if you live in a generally law-abiding community.
3) Three Black Panther Party guys are riding along in a car through the California mountains, along with their white friend. The white guy and at least one of the Panthers are FBI informants. The senior Panther, James Carr, says that there’s an FBI informant in the car. He then picks out the other Panther, takes him out of the car and shoots him, at which point the other two informants help him dispose of the body. They go home and report to their handlers about the murder. Nothing happens to Carr.
In other words, presumably Carr was on the payroll, too (the dead guy, Bennett, may or may not have been). So you’ve got a “revolutionary” organization, a significant portion of whose members are collecting an informant paycheck while committing crimes. In other words, the law enforcement apparatus is a silent criminal business partner.
