William O’Neal: FBI Informant, Hampton Raid, and COINTELPRO

William O’Neal was the FBI informant who infiltrated the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, rose to become chief of security in Chicago and Fred Hampton’s personal bodyguard, and supplied the floor plan that enabled the December 4, 1969 police raid in which Hampton and Mark Clark were killed. He was recruited as a teenager after a car theft, paid a monthly stipend plus bonuses, and remained active into the early 1970s. He died by suicide in 1990 at age 40.¹

How the FBI Recruited Him

In 1967, when O’Neal was roughly 18 or 19, he and a friend stole a car and drove it across state lines into Michigan, where they crashed. They had signed into a pool hall beforehand using their real names, which made them easy to trace.²

Several months later, FBI Special Agent Roy Martin Mitchell, known within the bureau for cultivating informants, approached O’Neal. Mitchell told him the FBI could “work it out,” and never used the word “informant.” Instead he said, “You’re working for me.”²³

O’Neal later said he felt proud to be “working undercover for the FBI, doing something good for the finest police organization in America.” He was paid $300 a month plus bonuses.⁴ His uncle Ben Heard put it more plainly: the FBI offered to make pending charges disappear. By that point the charges against O’Neal included car theft, home invasion, kidnapping, and torture.¹

Getting Inside the Black Panther Party

At Mitchell’s direction, O’Neal walked into the Chicago Panther office at Western and Madison and signed up. He was roughly the fifth member of the Illinois chapter.²¹⁵

He said he first assumed the Panthers were “just another gang,” and within days realized how organized they were. Members studied Mao Zedong, Marx, and Lenin, and organized around the Vietnam War and the campaign to free Huey Newton.² By February 1969, he estimated the chapter had 500 members, distributed 25,000 newspapers a week, and took in $1,500 to $2,000 per day in donations.⁶

His reporting to the FBI focused on security matters: weapons, internal conflicts, threats. Attorney Jeffrey Haas, author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton, has said O’Neal did more than observe. He pushed a “militaristic line,” carried a gun, urged the Panthers to commit crimes, and at one point built an electric chair he said would be used on informants.⁴ O’Neal himself said he eventually “forgot the scope of me being there” and started living the life of a Panther.⁶

His Role in the December 4, 1969 Raid

O’Neal’s most consequential act was giving the FBI a detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. The plan showed the layout, furniture placement, and the location of the bed where Hampton slept.⁷ He also supplied a list of the weapons kept there. Agent Mitchell passed the floor plan and weapons information to the Chicago Police Department’s Gang Intelligence Unit and to Richard Jalovec, an assistant to Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan.⁸

The raid was scheduled for 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, moved from an original 8:00 p.m. plan to ensure the occupants would be asleep.⁷⁹ O’Neal left the apartment before the police team arrived. He would later deny the drugging.⁴

A 14-officer team acting under Hanrahan’s authority stormed the apartment. They killed Mark Clark, the 22-year-old Peoria chapter leader on security in the front room, with a shot to the heart.¹⁰ They then fired into the bedroom where Hampton lay unconscious beside his fiancée Deborah Johnson, nine months pregnant with their son. Johnson testified that after she was dragged from the room she heard an officer say, “He’s barely alive, he’ll barely make it,” followed by two shots and the words, “He’s good and dead now.”⁹ Hampton was killed by two bullets fired into his head at point-blank range.¹¹

Investigators later established that police fired roughly 90 to 99 shots into the apartment. Only one outgoing shot was ever identified, fired vertically by the mortally wounded Clark.⁹ Charges against the seven surviving Panthers were dropped after ballistics evidence negated the state’s account.¹¹

Internally, the FBI took credit for the outcome. The bureau awarded O’Neal a bonus and noted his information had been “invaluable to the success of the raid.”⁹

COINTELPRO Context

O’Neal’s infiltration was one piece of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program launched in 1967 to “neutralize” organizations the bureau considered subversive. One directive, now widely quoted, called for preventing “the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the black masses.”⁹

The Senate’s Church Committee, investigating intelligence abuses in 1975 and 1976, found that informants were the FBI’s “most pervasive surveillance technique,” appearing in 83 percent of a random sample of domestic intelligence cases. The committee documented that informants were used against peaceful, law-abiding groups and that keeping “credibility” inside targeted organizations sometimes required participation in violent acts.¹²

The Hampton case and the broader COINTELPRO record shaped the reforms that followed. In April 1976, Attorney General Edward Levi issued guidelines requiring that domestic security investigations be grounded in “specific and articulable facts” suggesting the use of force or violence. Levi’s informant guidelines, issued later that year, imposed restrictions on informant operations.¹³ FBI domestic security investigations dropped from over 21,000 in 1973 to fewer than 5,000 by 1976, and the number of domestic intelligence informants fell from roughly 1,100 in 1975 to about 100 by late 1977.¹⁴

Prosecution, Civil Suit, and Settlement

In August 1971, a special grand jury indicted Hanrahan and 13 co-defendants for conspiring to obstruct justice. In October 1972, Judge Philip Romiti acquitted all of them in a nonjury trial, calling the prosecution’s case “inference pyramiding on inference.”¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷ No government official ever served prison time for the killings.⁹

Survivors of the raid and the families of Hampton and Clark filed a $47.7 million civil rights suit in 1970. The case ran 13 years. In 1979 the Seventh Circuit reversed directed verdicts and reinstated the case against 24 defendants, finding that the federal government had “obstructed the judicial process by withholding important information,” including some 25,000 pages of suppressed documents that revealed the FBI’s direct role in planning the raid. Among the suppressed records was a request for a $300 bonus for O’Neal tied to the raid.¹⁸⁷ In February 1983 the federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago settled for $1.85 million, split equally among the three and divided among nine plaintiffs.¹⁰ Plaintiffs’ attorney G. Flint Taylor called the settlement “an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the F.B.I. and Hanrahan’s men to murder Fred Hampton.” Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Gruenberg said it was “not an admission of any guilt or responsibility.”

Life After Being Exposed

O’Neal continued informing into the early 1970s. By 1971 he was managing a gas station in Maywood, Illinois. In 1973 the Chicago Tribune publicly identified him as the FBI’s mole inside the Black Panther Party. He entered the federal witness protection program under the alias “William Hart” and relocated to California. He secretly returned to Chicago around 1984 to 1986 and eventually worked for a downtown attorney.⁴

In 1989 or early 1990, he sat for an interview with the PBS series Eyes on the Prize II, using his alias and keeping his sunglasses on for the first 45 minutes of taping. In that interview he alternated between using “we” for the FBI and “we” for the Panthers.¹⁹ He denied any sense of betrayal: “Do I feel like I betrayed someone? Absolutely not. I had no allegiance to the Panthers.” He said the FBI work had made him a “better person” and called agent Mitchell a role model. He also called Hampton “pretty idealistic” and “dedicated to the Black struggle,” and said that on learning of Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths he felt “bad,” “angry,” and “betrayed”: “I felt like I was expendable.”⁴

His Death

On January 15, 1990, Martin Luther King Day, O’Neal spent the evening at his uncle Ben Heard’s apartment in Maywood. Heard said that after other guests left, O’Neal began acting “strange,” made repeated trips to the bathroom, and emerged in a rage. He tried to jump from a second-story window; Heard grabbed him by the ankles, but O’Neal broke free and ran outside.¹

At about 2:30 a.m. he ran into the westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway. A driver told police O’Neal jumped in front of the vehicle while waving his arms; the driver swerved but could not avoid the impact. He was 40 years old. His death was ruled a suicide. He had survived a nearly identical incident the previous September.¹¹⁹

Heard described his nephew as a man “forever tortured by the guilt” of his role in the assassination, someone who had cooperated with the FBI to avoid jail and then found himself “in way over his head.”¹ Fred Hampton’s brother Bill Hampton offered a different judgment: “The act he committed was unjust and ignorant… It’s something he tried to live with and couldn’t.”⁴

Judas and the Black Messiah

In February 2021, the film Judas and the Black Messiah, directed and co-written by Shaka King and co-produced by Ryan Coogler, brought O’Neal’s story to a wide audience. LaKeith Stanfield played O’Neal, Daniel Kaluuya played Hampton, and Martin Sheen played J. Edgar Hoover. King described the project as a psychological thriller set “inside the world of COINTELPRO.” The film premiered at Sundance and was released in theaters and on HBO Max on February 12, 2021.²⁰ Freedom of Information Act requests tied to the production yielded documents supporting long-standing claims that Hoover was directly involved in planning Hampton’s killing.²¹

1
Chicago Reader. The Last Hours of William O’Neal
2
American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Eyes on the Prize II Interview With William O’Neal
3
Jacobin. Fred Hampton Murder FBI Informant
4
Esquire. William O’Neal Judas and the Black Messiah True Story
5
Digital Chicago History. The Assassination
6
American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Eyes on the Prize II Interview With William O’Neal, Part 2
7
People’s Law Office. Hampton v. Hanrahan Legal History
8
Westlaw. Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F.2d 600
9
Democracy Now. Watch the Assassination of Fred Hampton
10
Activist Mark Clark. About Mark Clark
11
National Archives. Fred Hampton
12
Senate Select Committee (Church Committee). Church Committee Final Report
13
Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General. Chapter 2, FBI Guidelines
14
Government Accountability Office. FBI Domestic Intelligence Operations Report
15
New York Times. Judge Acquits Hanrahan of Plot in ’69 Chicago Raid on Panthers
16
New York Times. Defeat of Hanrahan for Prosecutor Is a Stunning Blow to Daley’s
17
Chicago Tribune. Edward V. Hanrahan, 1921-2009
18
New York Times. Plaintiffs in Panther Suit Knew We Were Right
19
Vanity Fair. Judas and the Black Messiah William O’Neal
20
Democracy Now. Judas and the Black Messiah Interview
21
Smithsonian Magazine. True History Behind Judas and the Black Messiah