The Man Who Armed the Panthers

The person who armed the BPP was Richard Aoki. He was involved in a lot of political movements, such as the Asian American Political Alliance, and was an informant for the FBI. His background made him a perfect informer as they, and everybody thought that there was no way that Aoki would and could be an informant. This became evident when one of his friend said that this was a big surprise to him. He headed the Berkeley chapter of the Blank Panthers and later became a field marshal and had given the BPP guns. As a young child/adult, he was involved in gang activity and a lot of petty crimes. He became a co-valedictorian in high school and became a firearms expert once he went to the military. After high school, Threadgill reported that Aoki began informing the FBI about socialist groups around the time he graduated high school. On FBI records, while all information was blacked out Aoki was not and was referred to informant T2. In 2009, Aoki committed suicide, two uniforms that were found at his house were the BPP and army uniforms. The FBI ended up releasing 1900 pages on organizations that Aoki had been involved in but claimed they had no files on Aoki. Rosenfeld sued the FBI since he believed that they were withholding information and the court ordered the FBI to release all files they had on Aoki, which they did not do. While watching this I was a bit surprised by Aoki’s response to Rosenfeld when asked if he knew Threadgill, his response at the end was, “Oh, that’s interesting”. A question that popped up during this video was as an informant how much does the FBI really know about what you tell them? The reason that this question popped up was because Rosenfeld brought up whether the FBI knew that Aoki had given guns to the Panthers and how much the FBI knew.