J. Edgar Hoover’s directive to withhold a FBI laboratory report on the identity of an anonymous caller that lured Omaha policeman Larry Minard, Sr. to his death in 1970 has been featured in Crime Magazine. Hoover wanted to eliminate Black Panther leaders Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) and withheld evidence to make a case against the two leaders under the infamous Operation COINTELPRO.
Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are both still serving life sentences in the maximum-security Nebraska State Penitentiary for the murder while one of the confessed killers, 15 year-old Duane Peak, walked free on his 18th birthday. The anonymous caller who made a bogus 911 call luring Minard and seven other officers to a bomb ambush was never identified and remains at large. Raleigh House, the named supplier of the dynamite that was used in the bomb, was never prosecuted for his role in the crime raising suspicion that he was an FBI informant.
Crime Magazine publisher Pat O’Connor says the Minard killing is “a painful story” and commissioned a definitive report on the murder after reading an Examiner article on the case.
The Crime Magazine article is the most detailed account of the COINTELPRO operation ever published and uses exclusive interviews, secret COINTELPRO documents, police reports, court records and news stories to piece together Hoover’s scheme.
The Omaha Two, as Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are known, were Hoover’s last victims as COINTELPRO was terminated ten days after the trial ended following the release of secret FBI documents after the March 8, 1971 break-in of the Media, Pennsylvania FBI office.
COINTELPRO was an illegal operation of massive proportion from 1956 until 1971 targeting thousands of individuals and groups including Martin Luther King, Jr. and a host of political activists. However, the most lethal counterintelligence operations of COINTELPRO were directed at the Black Panthers.
In the Omaha Two case, Hoover personally directed the fixing of the murder trial by withholding a FBI laboratory report on the identity of Minard’s killer who had made the 911 phone call. Although Hoover only gave oral orders to fix the case his directive was noted in a handwritten notation on a COINTERLPRO memo by FBI lab director Ivan Willard Conrad.
The jury that convicted the Omaha Two never heard the recorded voice of the deadly 911 caller nor were informed that Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa were targets of COINTELPRO. Both men continue to deny any role in the crime.
To read the Crime Magazine article click HERE
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