Houston — QUANELL X stared confidently into the television camera and told a heart-tugging tale about the frail man sitting by his side:
Dennis Garnier was roughed up and disrespected, all because police didn't have their facts straight. A SWAT team burst into his house and hogtied him. It had the wrong address; the drug dealer lived a few doors down.
Garnier has suffered memory loss and has become so scared of guns that he can't work as a security guard anymore. Yet police sent him a letter saying that an internal probe found nothing wrong. Houston Mayor Bill White should apologize. The city should also cut Garnier a check.
"The message this sends to all black people is that at the end of the day, you are still a black man in America!" Quanell X shouted into the camera, his indignation mounting. "When the chips are down, the system will show you."
Another camera crew stepped up, and when it was satisfied, Garnier, 58, muttered his thanks to Quanell X for taking his injustice to thousands of Texans through Fox and CBS newscasts. Houston's most televised activist then told the reporters he'd be in touch. He'd heard about an even bigger outrage, and the story might be ripe soon.
Quanell X was once just Quanell Evans, a Houston street urchin from a shattered home who was slinging crack and staring at a future he knew would put him in prison or a coffin before age 25.
He sought a new start through the Nation of Islam, but his hate-filled diatribes against white America -- which have included anti-Semitic remarks and exhortations to "mug you some good white folks" -- proved too much even for a black Muslim organization used to helping angry hoodlums out of the gutter.
So he left to join a splinter group of gun-toting black separatists, and he advocated racial justice by any means necessary in a misguided fantasy that he was the new Malcolm X -- a self-aggrandizing pose that brought him more ridicule than respect.
Now 36, Quanell X is morphing again, this time into a self-appointed spokesman for the black underclass that he came from, and his services are in high demand.
"They come to me because they know I am not afraid to challenge the powers that be," he said. "I'm not tiptoeing through the tulips and pussyfooting around. I'm saying what other people think but don't have the courage to say."
He has also carved out a reputation as the man to see in Houston if you want to confess to something terrible but don't trust police.
