FOLLOW THE LEADER

By Richard Lacayo

That the world of FBI informers is full of squirrelly characters is no surprise. You can't expect Boy Scouts to tell you much about the seedier corners that law enforcement needs to poke into. Even so, there may not be many government informants more rough-edged than Michael Fitzpatrick. Convicted bomber, alleged coke user, he is also the man whose accusations led to the arrest of Qubilah Shabazz, a daughter of Malcolm X, two weeks ago. In an increasingly controversial case, Fitzpatrick's credibility has become central to the government's charge that she tried to hire a hit man to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Prosecutors say Fitzpatrick, 34, tipped off an FBI agent and agreed to inform on Shabazz last July after she let him in on her desire to kill Farrakhan, a man suspected by many--including Malcolm's widow Betty--of having something to do with her father's 1965 assassination. Friends of Shabazz's say Fitzpatrick, who was arrested for cocaine possession in late 1993, lured her into planning a crime so he could offer her up to prosecutors in return for leniency on the drug charge.

In an exclusive interview with Time, FBI director Louis Freeh insisted that his bureau took pains to ensure that Fitzpatrick did not push Shabazz into a crime. Throughout the seven-month investigation, he says, Fitzpatrick's FBI handlers were overseen by bureau supervisors and the U.S. Attorney's office, whose reports were sent East for further review. Freeh said he was ``aware'' of the investigation though he ``did not review all the details.'' Nevertheless, ``I'm satisfied that we were well within the law.''

But in a case that has left many African Americans skeptical, that may not be enough--especially given the bureau's targeting of civil-rights leaders in the 1960s and the more recent harassment and discrimination lawsuits brought by minority agents. Farrakhan, for one, told a crowd of cheering supporters in Chicago last week that Shabazz was a victim of ``wicked machinations'' and that the FBI was trying to turn prominent African Americans against one another.

The chief evidence against Shabazz, who has pleaded not guilty, is a statement she signed for FBI agents and a stack of 20 audiotapes of conversations between her and Fitzpatrick. There is also a 50- min. videotape that Fitzpatrick made at a Minneapolis-area motel room where he had set up a hidden camera. But the Minneapolis Star Tribune, quoting an unnamed federal official close to the case, says that on the videotape Fitzpatrick does most of the talking, encouraging Shabazz to go ahead with the plot while she objects that innocent people might be killed or that Farrakhan supporters might retaliate against Jews.

Whether he's a valuable informer or an agent provocateur, Fitzpatrick has a way of popping up wherever a fuse is burning. As a teenager at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, where Shabazz was also a student, Fitzpatrick, the son of an Irish union organizer and a Jewish businesswoman, joined the radical Jewish Defense League. He was convicted in the 1977 bombing of a Soviet bookstore in Manhattan. Soon after, Fitzpatrick turned government informer. According to court documents he was paid about $10,000 by the FBI to inform on two members of a j.d.l. splinter group who were eventually convicted of the 1978 attempt to bomb an Egyptian tourist office in New York City.

Fitzpatrick then disappeared into the federal witness-protection program, which moved him to a Minneapolis suburb under the name Michael Summers. In the 1980s he drifted back and forth between New York and Minneapolis before settling there again four years ago. Chris Gunderson was a member of a local anarchist collective when Fitzpatrick became a regular at the group's bookstore. ``He was a pretty muscular guy with a physically intimidating presence,'' says Gunderson, who remembers Fitzpatrick trying to draw members into drug dealing and militant actions involving ``Molotov cocktails or guns or bombs.'' Fitzpatrick sold a shotgun to Rob Shapiro, another collective member. ``He said it was important that we be armed,'' says Shapiro. At a bar one night, Fitzpatrick plied the group with beer while urging them to make an armed attack on a polling place during the 1986 election. ``By the end of the evening we were sufficiently intoxicated to be talked into a plan to carry out an attack using bags of human feces,'' says Gunderson. In the morning, they changed their minds.

Some friends of Shabazz's--a onetime Princeton student and a single mother who has worked as a waitress and a telemarketer--say that last year, after getting back in touch with Fitzpatrick, she moved to Minneapolis in September expecting to marry him. Depending on how her case goes--the trial is set for March--she could be living soon in a prison cell. Depending on how his drug case goes, so could he. Then again, if she goes to jail, perhaps he won't. --Reported by Massimo Calabresi/ New York, Wendy Cole/Minneapolis and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/ NEW YORK, WENDY COLE/MINNEAPOLIS AND ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON