The rhetoric espoused by Chicago officials contaminated the entire Nation. Muhammad Ali was convinced by their claims that Malcolm fabricated vicious lies about Elijah’s infidelities. And no man, Ali declared, could slander the Messenger and get away with it: “Malcolm X and anybody else who attacks or talks about attacking Elijah Muhammad will die.”3
CAPTAIN CLARENCE COULD smell a rat. He was not certain, but he suspected that Leon Ameer, Ali’s press secretary, had been talking to Malcolm, divulging the Nation’s secrets and maybe even Clarence’s plot to kill the despised minister. Ameer knew that any Muslim who talked to Malcolm risked his life. He had heard the Messenger say so himself. According to Ameer, in September, Muhammad called a secret meeting, ordering about two hundred men from the Fruit to report to Chicago. For hours, Muhammad berated the sect’s defectors. Anyone who left the Nation should be treated as a hypocrite, he announced. And all hypocrites should be “taken care of, either by beatings or killings, but it [must] be done carefully when there were no witnesses.” As for Malcolm, “the greatest hypocrite,” Muhammad demanded that the Fruit stop him “at all costs.”4
Ameer was convinced that the Fruit would go to any length to fulfill the Messenger’s order. Shaken, he left the meeting certain that Malcolm was as good as dead. Since late July, when Clarence approached him about locating a silencer, he’d begun thinking about how he might leave the Nation. He would need protection, but not even Malcolm could offer that. Malcolm could hardly protect himself.
In October, while Ali trained in Boston, the heavyweight champion complained to Ameer that the Muslims required “numerous donations.” Usually, members paid monthly dues to their local mosque. In his case, he would have donated to the Miami mosque, but the Nation’s officials demanded that he send all contributions directly to Chicago. No one knows exactly how much money Ali funneled to the Nation’s headquarters, but it was enough for him to grumble about it to Ameer.
Listening to Ali’s complaints, Ameer thought that he might be able to persuade him to quit the Nation. The boxer “was foolish” for letting the Black Muslims exploit him, he said, and someday the Muslims would jettison him when he was no longer valuable to Muhammad. Yet Ameer’s arguments failed to convince Ali. Malcolm had already told him the same thing, after all. “He’s just a boy,” Malcolm later said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s being used.”5
Ameer should have kept quiet. Around one p.m. on Christmas Day, he received a phone call in his room at the Sherry Biltmore Hotel in Boston. He was told that four newsmen wanted to talk to him about Ali’s recovery. When one of the reporters asked if they could come up to his room, Ameer became suspicious and said that he would meet them in the lobby. Stepping out of the elevator, he immediately recognized Clarence X. Puzzled, he asked the Boston captain if he had seen a group of reporters, but before Clarence could answer, a man struck him from behind. Clarence and his three henchmen kicked Leon until an off-duty detective came to his rescue.6
Later that night, after he received stitches above his left eye and returned to his hotel room, a group of men posing as investigators knocked on his door. When he opened it, they rushed him, swinging fists and clubs. Leon covered his face while they pummeled and kicked him, shattering his eardrum, breaking his ribs, and fracturing his skull. The following morning, a chambermaid screamed when she found him lying nearly lifeless in a tub splattered with blood.7
Ameer survived. Recovering from a coma, he spent fifteen days in the hospital. On January 9, 1965, at a press conference in Harlem, he told reporters that he feared assassins would come after him again and that Ali’s life was in jeopardy too. Ali would not admit it, but he had expressed “grave doubts about the integrity of certain powerful Muslims.” He knew all too well what could happen to him if he so much as thought about leaving the Nation.8