COLUMN ONE : Informant Mystery Deepens : Ex-roommates raise questions about the man who says Malcolm X’s daughter asked to have Farrakhan killed.

MINNEAPOLIS — Whatever his faults, Michael Kevin Fitzpatrick never failed to entertain.

He regaled his four housemates here with tales of his past, including what he described as a stint as a juvenile bomber for the Jewish Defense League. He displayed his switchblade collection and confided his recent purchase of a 9 mm Glock handgun.

And he told them about his friendship with Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who had been gunned down before her eyes in 1965.

In August, his roommates said, Fitzpatrick also admitted something they had begun to suspect: He was using drugs and was thousands of dollars in debt.

Having made a pact among themsevles to stay sober and clean, the roommates--recovering addicts themselves--kicked Fitzpatrick out. Soon thereafter the insistent calls began.

Some were from bill collectors, but most were from Shabazz, who had recently moved here from New York. “She said he was the one who got her to come out here,” recalled Matthew Forsti, one of the roommates. “She said he had helped her get set up and then he disappeared, had promised her a job that never materialized. She said he owed her money.”

Last week, the federal government told a very different version of the story in a nine-count indictment accusing Shabazz of hiring Fitzpatrick to assassinate the man that her mother had long blamed for her father’s death: Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Fitzpatrick, it turns out, was cooperating with the FBI.

On Wednesday, Shabazz, wearing a blue suit and traditional Muslim head cloth, pleaded not guilty in federal court here. Her defense team, including New York attorney William Kunstler, says Fitzpatrick “lured and enticed” his former high school classmate, manipulating her until she gave in to the urge for revenge.

Even the target agrees. Farrakhan told an emotional crowd at a Chicago mosque Tuesday night that Shabazz was a victim of “wicked machinations” by federal authorities. “The ultimate aim of this government,” he said, “is to destroy Louis Farrakhan by planting the seeds of public contempt and hatred of me.” Again, he denied complicity in the slaying of Shabazz’s father.

What really happened between Qubilah Shabazz and Michael Fitzpatrick is a puzzle that rivals the mystery of who was behind the death of Malcolm X 30 years ago.

Authorities will not comment on the recollection of Fitzpatrick’s roommates that he admitted drug use at the same time he was informing on Shabazz, citing a judge’s admonition to refrain from public statements on the case. The Shabazz defense team contends that the roommates’ recollection underlines their contention that Fitzpatrick is an unreliable witness, a contention they say is bolstered by Fitzpatrick’s two prior arrests on drug charges.

Fitzpatrick, who is part of the federal witness protection program, cannot be reached for comment.

In the 1970s and again a decade later, people who moved through various circles of the militant left said they remember Fitzpatrick’s attraction to violent acts. They would wonder whether he was “equal parts hustler and true believer,” as a friend wrote in the Twin Cities Reader on Wednesday, or whether he was an “agent provocateur,” in the words of Jewish militants whom he fingered in a plot to bomb an Egyptian tourist office in New York in 1978.

As for Shabazz, who if convicted could face 90 years in prison and a $2.25-million fine, a portrait is emerging of a quiet woman whose tumultuous early childhood was followed by years of relative affluence, fine schools, solitude and secrets. She moved frequently, living in Princeton, N.J., Paris, the Los Angeles area and New York. She held jobs that did not match her educational pedigree--working as an au pair, for example, and as a tele-marketer.

Shabazz, 34, met Fitzpatrick, 34, at a prestigious private academy: the United Nations International School in New York City. Fitzpatrick, of Irish and Jewish ancestry, was already acquiring a reputation as a hell-raiser who liked guns. He joined the Jewish Defense League in 1976. The next year, he was convicted on charges of tossing a pipe bomb into a Soviet book store, which brought him into contact with federal prosecutors and led him to become a government informant in subsequent cases.

In interviews, former classmates cannot recall any particular friendship between Shabazz and Fitzpatrick and do not know if she was aware of his extracurricular activities.

Friends and supporters of the two agree that the pair only recently re-established contact. Beyond that, accounts are contradictory.

A journalist friend of Fitzpatrick, Sari Gordon, wrote in the Twin Cities Reader that he told her Shabazz called him out of the blue and asked him to kill Farrakhan, that he rejected her request and that Shabazz was still determined to avenge her father.

Gordon wrote that Fitzpatrick came to believe that she would get a Jew to kill Farrakhan and he feared that antagonism between the Black Muslim and Jewish communities could flare so intensely if she were successful that Jewish lives would be endangered.

By contrast, a friend of Shabazz said that she received a telephone call in the fall. Shabazz wanted to announce her engagement to an old friend from childhood, an Irish Jew. They were moving together to Minnesota. They would marry in November or December.

The federal case rests on videotapes and audio tapes of Shabazz discussing the death of Farrakhan with Fitzpatrick, as well as, sources told The Times, “incriminating admissions” by the defendant under questioning by federal authorities.

Was her motive revenge, confusion or love?

The origins of the case date back 30 years. When Qubilah was born, on Christmas Day, 1960, her father was already a prominent figure. He had helped Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad transform an obscure sect into a thriving movement. Tens of thousands pledged themselves to an ideology that demonized white people and extolled a life of dignity and self-reliance for blacks. The Nation owned farms and small businesses.

Malcolm X was on the road so much that he kept alternate suitcases packed, so that he could just grab one when he needed it. But “Sister Betty,” his wife, would show the children on a map where their father was that night.

In 1964, Malcolm X--who took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz--split bitterly with the Nation over reports that Muhammad had fathered children by his secretaries. Malcolm X formed his own organization and moved closer to orthodox Islam.

One of his proteges, a former calypso singer named Louis X who was minister of the Nation’s Boston mosque, was outraged. He wrote in a Nation publication that Malcolm X was “worthy of death.”

On Feb. 21, 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, three men then pumped 21 bullets into the heart of Malcolm X in front of his wife and four daughters, including Qubilah. Three men were later convicted of the crime, but many were not satisfied that justice had been done, Betty Shabazz among them.

Rumors began circulating that the orders for the assassination came from Muhammad, or Farrakhan, or the FBI, or a combination of all three. Nearly a year ago, Betty Shabazz said she blamed Farrakhan.

Malcolm X left no life insurance, but his posthumously-issued autobiography--a best-seller--yielded enough in royalties to allow Betty Shabazz to buy a substantial brick house in suburban Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

In the aftermath of the slaying, as would be expected, there was grief and depression in the house. Still, Betty Shabazz said after Wednesday’s arraignment, “my daughter...was reared with no steady diet of disliking anyone. All the big emphasis on my children was placed on themselves and doing well in school.”

The other kids in the area were warned by their parents not to bring up the subject of Malcolm X’s death in front of the Shabazz girls, remembered Lawrence Otis Graham, a corporate attorney and author who grew up in their social set.

“Even at five years old, Qubilah was very serious,” Graham said, “very, very poised.”

That never changed. As a member of the Westchester County chapter of Jack and Jill--a social and service club composed predominantly of upper-middle-class black teens--Qubilah Shabazz visited nursing homes and foster homes, but never appeared at parties, Graham said.

She never talked about politics. She never talked about her father. She never, he added, talked about Fitzpatrick.

After she left Princeton, she lived in Paris during the early 1980s. During that period, she had a son. The father, said a woman who befriended her there, was not an American. Qubilah named her child Malcolm.

Meanwhile, Michael Fitzpatrick--the son of an Irish union organizer and a Jewish businesswoman--was on probation for the bombing of the Soviet bookstore, the Four Continents, in New York.

It was then, according to Fitzpatrick’s friend Gordon, that FBI agent Dan Scott contacted Fitzpatrick and asked him to help the government track two radicals who had left the Jewish Defense League and formed a more radical offshoot.

Fitzpatrick met them near the Port Authority Terminal and discussed bombing the Egyptian government tourist office in Manhattan. He told them he could get two sticks of dynamite and that he could get his brother to rent a car.

“I’ve bought a couple of shotguns, a pistol, and a high-powered rifle over a year, like over two, two and a half, three years,” Fitzpatrick said during a monitored conversation. He was 18 years old.

The two men were arrested on the way to the tourist office and convicted largely on the basis of Fitzpatrick’s testimony.

One of the radicals, Chaim Ben-Pesach, said Fitzpatrick led them into their illegal plot. “He picked the target,” Ben-Pesach said. “I was stupid, I admit it.”

Fitzpatrick entered the federal witness protection program and moved to the Twin Cities, enrolling briefly at the University of Minnesota. Sometimes he went by the name Michael Summers; sometimes, he used his own name.

In January of 1986, he was arrested by Minneapolis police for possession of cocaine. Charges were dropped.

In October of that year, a political collective that ran Back Room Anarchist Books and an organizing center held a march through downtown. Christopher Gunderson, a member of the group, noticed a stocky, tattooed man in an old Army jacket scuffling with police. The man started hanging out at the shop. It was Fitzpatrick, Gunderson said.

Within a month, Gunderson said, Fitzpatrick was urging the Back Room group to abandon its street-theater tactics for more militant action. To mark Election Day, Fitzpatrick suggested “some sort of attack on a polling place with guns or Molotov cocktails,” Gunderson said.

“I remember him because we were suspicious of everyone, but he’s the only one we actually kicked out,” Gunderson said.

By this time, Fitzpatrick had sought help for drug abuse at the Hazelton clinic and other treatment centers. He was arrested in 1986 for possession of cocaine; charges were dismissed. Gordon, his friend, wrote that he often disappeared to Jamaica, New York or the suburbs and returned to offer “terse acknowledgment that he had, once again, taken a U-turn back into cocaine use.”

He was arrested again in November of 1993, in the apartment of his employer at a gold-coin dealer. According to the police report, Fitzpatrick--who gave his name as Summers--ran to the bathroom with a plate of cocaine and dumped the drug into the toilet. He still faces charges.

But one year ago, when he moved with four other men into a rented wood-frame house in the bohemian Uptown neighborhood, the roommates made a pact: They’d all stay clean.

He was working for another gold-coin brokerage. Employers say he was an effective salesman, weaving into his pitch recent changes in the world economy, stock market rumblings, Bundesbank moves. “He could be a very convincing man,” said Maz Khan, president of Premier Investments in suburban Apple Valley.

Last summer, Fitzpatrick called Dan Scott, an FBI agent in Atlanta who had worked with him on the Jewish terrorist case years before, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The newspaper reported that Fitzpatrick told Scott that Qubilah Shabazz had tracked him down by calling his mother in New York, and that his old classmate wanted him to kill Farrakhan.

During this period, the indictment of Shabazz alleges, Shabazz placed eight phone calls regarding Farrakhan’s murder.

In August, the roommates asked Fitzpatrick to leave.

By September, Qubilah Shabazz was a Minneapolis resident. Fitzpatrick’s former roommates knew all too well that she’d arrived. “Kubie called,” they’d write, guessing at the spelling of her nickname. “She really wanted to find him and no matter how much we explained he wasn’t in our lives anymore, she just wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Forsti said. “A few days later, she’d call again.”

By November, the U.S. Attorney had alerted Justice Department officials in Washington about the sensitive case. Nation of Islam attorney Ava Muhammad said the group was informed that “Muslim extremists” were planning to kill Farrakhan.