If you read the most thorough and credible works on the subject (see below), you will see that not only did the so-called Zebra murders flow directly from NOI theology, but that they were an NOI operation, directed from Chicago (aka New Mecca), and run out of the San Francisco mosque. The San Francisco death squad had pep rallies run by dignitaries from New Mecca after hours at the NOI-owned moving and storage where most of the killers worked, and all of them worked for NOI-owned businesses.

The apprentice Death Angels had to reach a certain quota from killing either four white children, five white women, or nine white men, in order to become full-fledge Death Angels, and receive free passage to Mecca. The practice of paying free passage to Mecca for killing “white devils” had been  instituted during the early 1930s by NOI founder Wallace Fard.

The NOI even paid for the defense of the three killers who refused to confess (Larry Green, J.C.X. Simon, and Manuel Moore), but refused to pay legal fees for the one killer, Jesse Lee Cooks, who confessed to murder (the Frances Rose killing), and went so far as to disown Cooks. The NOI considers it a mortal sin to confess to any crime in the white man's courts.

To get an indication of how tightly the NOI operation was run, the case was only broken when one of the killers, Anthony Cornelius Harris, came forward, in order to collect the $35,000 reward, get police protection, and new identities for himself and his family. One day, when Harris & Family were in a motel under police guard, and Harris was in the shower, his foolish wife telephoned the wife of her minister, at the San Francisco mosque, and told her where they were holed up. In no time flat, a squad of NOI assassins (Fruit of Islam types, not the raggedy characters in the “Zebra” death squads) showed up at the motel, and Detectives Gus Coreris and John Fotinos just managed to escape with the Harris family seconds ahead of the assassins.

Had the squad managed to kill Harris, the SFPD would never have broken the San Francisco cases (or at least, the 15 official San Francisco cases; there were more killings than that in the city by the bay). As it is, the convictions of Larry Green, J.C.X. Simon, Manuel Moore and Jesse Lee Cooks “cleared” only 15 killings, and the SFPD was convinced that at least three other men were part of the SF squad alone. However, the San Francisco DA, convinced that it had too little evidence to go to trial against the other three, dropped the charges against them.

The NOI is so tightly knit in its devotion to killing whites, whom it variously teaches are “white devils,” “blue-eyed devils,” and “grafted snakes,” that no one else came forward with information.
 
Not only did the NOI organize the death squads (there were many more than the one that went down), but the killings went on up and down the State of California, with different squads working different areas, and according to the FBI, even (though apparently, or rather, hopefully, to a lesser degree) on the East Coast. Dick Walley, the head of the Intelligence Analysis Unit at the California Department of Justice, had a dossier of 71 black-on-white murders committed across the state that he was convinced were NOI killings (Howard). (Walley died of cancer before the trial.) Clark Howard, the author of Zebra, was convinced that the NOI had murdered “just under 270” whites across California, but never named the other 255 victims, or explained his rationale. Since the murders were through and through an NOI operation, and only a small minority of them (even using Walley’s figure, which did not count non-California NOI racial killings) were committed in San Francisco, I suggest that we dispense with calling them the “Zebra Murders,” and simply call them the NOI Murders.

Contrary to those who have claimed that the NOI was seeking with the killings to cause a race war, the NOI was prosecuting a race war. The real story of how that war was stopped is one that I’m afraid we’ll never learn.

Howard, Clark. Zebra: The true account of the 179 days of terror in San Francisco (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979).

 Domestic Terrorism: The Nation of Islam and the Zebra Murders, by Nicholas Stix