It was war, and a spy had infiltrated the Panthers’ ranks. William O’Neal, a petty thief from the West Side, had driven a stolen car across state lines, a federal offense, and was offered a deal: Become an FBI informant and the case would go away. “I was beginning to feel clean again, just by helping the FBI,” he afterward told the Tribune. Ordered to infiltrate the Panthers, he quickly rose from handyman to security chief, and in November, he was given an assignment by his FBI handler: a sketch of Hampton’s apartment. “He wanted to know the locations of weapons caches, he wanted to know if we had explosives … who spent the night where,” O’Neal said in a videotaped interview at Washington University.