J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, ordered information to be withheld in the death of an Omaha policeman in 1970 resulting in the conviction of two Black Panthers for the crime. The book explores the racial divide of the time and events leading to murder, the details of the FBI intrusion into a local prosecution, and the unsuccessful efforts of the two convicted men to obtain a new trial untainted by FBI and police misdeeds.
The book uses prison interviews, police reports, FBI memorandums, news accounts, and legal documents to tell the hidden story of justice undone in the heart of America. A policeman's killers got away with murder so that the two Black Panthers, Ed Poindexter and David Rice, could be blamed and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The book is a painful account of how justice was twisted in Omaha, Nebraska, and then ignored. Hoover's role in the travesty is documented from previously secret COINTELPRO documents.
Statements of the prisoners who became known as the Omaha Two, woven throughout the book, add a personal and sometimes uplifting element to a unique and compelling story of a corrupted national police force.