Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  All three men, it turned out, were Cleaverite Panthers; the two survivors, in fact, would become active members of the BLA. For the police, it was just another nasty shooting; the NYPD had no idea the men were Panthers and no clue that anything called the Black Liberation Army yet existed. For Dhoruba Moore’s new BLA, however, the gunfight was a call to arms. The wounded Robert Vickers made his way to 757 Beck Street, where Joanne Chesimard nursed him back to health.

  “He comes back to Beck Street,” Dhoruba recalls, “and we decide that of course retaliation is appropriate. And it could be on Malcolm X’s birthday. So we decided to announce the debut of the BLA, the first black underground, on Malcolm’s birthday. May 19.”

  The full story of those first two BLA attacks, on May 19 and 21, 1971, probably will never be told. After three trials and years of litigation, Dhoruba, whose fingerprints were found on one of the communiqués, would be convicted of his involvement. Forty years later, he will not discuss what happened. But all available evidence indicates that the two shootings were actually carried out by two unrelated groups of Panthers who knew nothing of each other’s plans. The May 19 shootings of Officers Binetti and Curry were the work of Panthers from 757 Beck Street, including Frank Fields, who was killed later that year. The May 21 murders of Officers Jones and Piagentini, as will be seen, were carried out by a group of out-of-state Panthers who happened to be visiting New York and, it appears, were inspired by the May 19 attacks. Dhoruba Moore, one surmises, wrote the communiqués for both incidents, even though he had no idea who was behind the second incident; presumably this was done to make the attacks appear related and the BLA more dangerous.

  All Dhoruba will say today is that he regrets targeting patrolmen.

  “The tactical mistake we made was killing the cops in uniform,” he says, “when we should’ve killed the higher-ups. That would’ve been more effective.”

  • • •

  In spearheading the BLA’s formation, Dhoruba expected it would take guidance, if not direct orders, from Eldridge Cleaver and his military adviser, Donald Cox, in far-off Algiers. In the wake of the split, Cleaver certainly appeared ready to launch his long-predicted guerrilla war in the United States. He seemingly had command of every gun and gadget a modern guerrilla leader might need, all of it tucked away in his beloved Panther embassy. He seldom left the grounds, spending much of his time smoking hashish and talking on the telephone. But even as his personal world shrank, Cleaver’s introduction to the other Third World revolutionaries broadened his worldview: In his mind, he was now not only the leader of black revolutionary America but a leader of the global revolutionary movement. What money he raised, much of it from a Panther support group in Paris, went into a Marxist library—he kept an account at a London bookseller—and newfangled electronic equipment, including cameras and machines to make how-to and revolutionary videotapes he intended to distribute around the world. His pride and joy was a giant map of the world that filled one entire wall of his communications room. When a British reporter visited, Cleaver demonstrated how the map worked:

  Cleaver begins flicking switches on a consul, and slowly, all over the world, lights come up. There is one color for the Panther headquarters in America, another color for liberation groups engaged in armed struggle in Africa, Brazil, Vietnam. There is another color for “solidarity” groups. “We have a solidarity group in China,” Cleaver says with a laugh. “Its chairman is Chairman Mao.” Finally one last light goes on, much bigger than all the rest, and bright red. It is in Algiers. “That is the Witchdoctor,” Cleaver says with a grin. He gesticulates in the direction of the map. “We will make videotapes of the struggles going on all over the world. . . . [But] we don’t call it videotape. We call it voodoo. Because it has, like, magical properties. You know how electricity moves? It’s kind of mysterious. . . . It’s invisible.”

  With the Panther split in February 1971, Cleaver’s dreams seemed to be coming true. After years of calling for guerrilla warfare in the United States, militant Panthers began flocking to New York to take arms. Policemen were murdered. Communiqués were issued. Given his role as a beacon of revolutionary violence, one might have expected Cleaver to anoint himself chairman of the BLA. He didn’t. In fact, Cleaver ordained that the BLA would have no leader. Not him. Not anyone. Under guidelines set by Cleaver and Don Cox, the BLA’s structure would be the exact opposite of the Weather Underground’s. Where Weather cadres did nothing without direction from leadership, Cleaver and Cox wanted BLA units to operate independently, with no central coordination whatsoever. A system of autonomous cells, Cox reasoned, would be much harder for the government to subdue; a single leader could be defeated with a single arrest. This sounded fine in theory; in practice it led to anarchy. “I never understood the concept of an organization without leadership,” recalls Brooklyn BLA member Blood McCreary. “I always thought that was going to be difficult, and it was. When we got into the field, we were supposed to be autonomous, and you’d be two or three cells trying to do their own thing. I remember once two cells showed up to rob the same bank. It happened outside the Bronx Zoo, at a Manufacturers Hanover. So not having leadership, that was a problem.”

  A decentralized structure, however, had the added virtue of distancing Cleaver from BLA violence. The Algerian government, while happy to host revolutionary groups, made clear to all of them it would not condone acts of violence initiated on its own soil; worse, from Cleaver’s point of view, were hints that the government might be warming to a U.S. government more than a little interested in Algerian energy reserves. In practice this meant that while Cleaver spent day and night proselytizing bloody revolution, he seldom if ever mentioned the Black Liberation Army by name, much less publicly condoned its acts. His position in Algiers was too insecure. Rather than speak over an international phone line he suspected—correctly—that the FBI had tapped, Cleaver laid out his initial plans for the BLA in a set of “voodoo” tapes, which his favorite courier—a striking young Puerto Rican radical named Denise Oliver—brought to New York.

  Cleaver’s subsequent relationship with the BLA was as complex as the man himself. He was a writer at heart and sensed he was best suited to be an inspirational rather than operational leader. “He was not a military man; he only thought he was,” Sekou Odinga recalls. “It was D.C. [Donald Cox] who had the military mind; he was a brilliant strategist. It may have looked like Cleaver was leading the BLA, but he wasn’t. He just talked the talk. But the decisions—the decisions—were made by D.C. and me and Cetawayo [Michael Tabor]. Cleaver didn’t even know most of these guys. But they were our comrades.”

  Communication between BLA leaders in New York and the Algerian Panthers was problematic at best. Zayd Shakur and, after his release from jail, his brother Lumumba spoke to Algiers on a regular basis, but the calls were expensive, and when money ran low, volunteers at the Seventh Avenue headquarters resorted to using stolen credit cards. When they managed to get through, surviving transcripts of FBI wiretaps indicate, Cleaver rarely came to the telephone. The calls were usually taken instead by Donald Cox or Odinga, who, keenly aware of FBI wiretaps, were obliged to speak in circumscribed terms. “Not only was Cleaver not leading the BLA, remember, he didn’t know most of them, he wasn’t even from New York,” Odinga remembers. “Zayd, Denise, they called and talked to me. Lumumba made sure I got all the info. I talked to them every day. I was in contact with dozens of people underground. Believe me, everything that was going on, I knew about.”

  The problem, Odinga says, was that knowledge of events did not translate into influence. Cleaver, for instance, wanted to call their new underground the Afro-American Liberation Army. Dhoruba Moore says the New York Panthers simply ignored this. “Outside of an advisory role, we had no role,” Odinga goes on. “I made suggestions, sure, but they were not listening to what I said. They made their own decisions. I was not leading anything. As far as I know, no one person was leading anything. I kept telling them, �
��Go slow, organize, get yourselves together.’ But once [Robert] Webb got killed, things got outta control. Lumumba and Zayd, they’re trying to control things, but they can’t. I said, ‘Slow down, I’m gonna come help,’ and they said, ‘Nah, it’s too late for that.’ Things just got too crazy.”

  “To follow Algeria, that was the initial plan,” Dhoruba recalls. “When the split went down, we were following the instructions from Eldridge and D.C. in Algiers. Denise Oliver brought back these audiotapes from them, with guidelines, so we could read them out to people, our people, but also people Geronimo [Pratt] had organized in California and the South. But then everything changed. The reality on the ground was, people were scrambling and running for their lives. After [the police shootings on] May 19, it became a real war between the police and us. It got harder to talk to Algeria.”

  What most interested Cleaver, and the subject he returned to again and again in his transatlantic phone calls, was the need to establish an aboveground network to support the BLA. Guerrilla units could not survive long, he knew, without donations, without volunteers to serve as couriers and press agents, without community support. A Panther named Bernice Jones was keeping the old Seventh Avenue headquarters open in Harlem, but as police pressure skyrocketed after the May attacks, many volunteers simply melted away. Those who remained came under relentless surveillance and harassment from the FBI and NYPD. By the summer there would be fewer than a dozen people working with Jones. “Everyone is just too scared,” Lumumba Shakur complained in one call to Algeria. “They all running and hiding in fear.”

  While subordinates fielded harried calls from Harlem, Cleaver resorted to doing what he did best: writing. He started a newspaper to compete with the official Panther organ, The Black Panther. Cleaver’s paper, Right On!, was aimed squarely at the recruitment and education of black urban guerrillas; its language was even more violent than that found in The Black Panther. Its first issue, which hit the streets two weeks after Webb’s death, explained the split, called for New York Panthers to rally behind Cleaver, and featured a back-page cartoon showing a black man with a pistol aimed at a policeman. IN THE SPIRIT OF ROBERT WEBB, the caption read, WE HAVE NO HANG UPS ABOUT REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE.

  A second issue, “The New Urban Guerrilla,” published May 17, just hours before the first police shootings, went even further. In an article detailing the death of one Panther, the author wrote, “His spirit will live in all revolutionaries who pick up the gun to off their oppressors.” There was a photo of Richard Nixon with a noose around his neck, and a cartoon drawing of a child holding a pistol to a policeman’s head. THE 9MM & HOW TO USE IT, the caption read.

  • • •

  The assassination of two New York police officers and the critical wounding of two more was so jarring that its reverberations were felt all the way to the White House, where on May 26, five days after the shootings, President Nixon summoned J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell to the Oval Office. Was this the beginning, Nixon wondered, of the violent black uprising they had always feared? Or just street thugs run amok? Hoover hadn’t a clue, but Nixon told him to use every means necessary to stamp out this Black Liberation Army, or whatever it was. Hoover ordered every available New York agent into the case, which he code-named NEWKILL. At the FBI’s Sixty-ninth Street offices, a new squad, numbered 43A, was formed.

  From the beginning, however, this was the NYPD’s case, which presented Mayor John Lindsay with a set of delicate problems. Presidential primaries began in a scant ten months, and many believed Lindsay wanted to run again, as he eventually did. Lindsay’s image as a candidate, however, was built on a reputation for having kept New York’s bubbling racial stew from boiling over. Talk of a black conspiracy to kill policemen struck directly at his prospects, not that it mattered to police-union officials. “We’re in a war,” Edward J. Kiernan, the head of the union, growled to a group of reporters. “It’s open season on cops in this city. I refuse to stand by and permit my men to be gunned down while the Lindsay administration does nothing to protect them. Accordingly, I am instructing them to secure their own shotguns and carry them on patrol at all times.”

  “You think that’ll make a difference?” a reporter asked.

  “I dunno,” Kiernan said. “But we’ll do whatever is necessary. If we have to patrol this city in tanks, that’s what we’ll do. This is war.”

  Black leaders, fearing police reprisals, denounced these and similar “emotional calls for shotgun justice,” in the words of Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton. City Hall did everything possible to tamp down racial tensions. Asked if there really was a Black Liberation Army targeting cops, Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy told reporters there was “no proof.” When Murphy subsequently announced that police cruisers in high-crime areas would be followed by unmarked backup cars, he denied that it was to protect the police. Rather, he said, it would “counteract possible overreacting by policemen.”

  As the police dragnet spread, Dhoruba Moore and his comrades began efforts to raise money, robbing a series of heroin dealers and social clubs. In the predawn hours of June 5, he and three men barged into an after-hours club in the Bronx called the Triple O. Waving a .45-caliber submachine gun, Dhoruba ordered the two dozen patrons to strip; when one man was a bit slow, Dhoruba fired a burst of bullets into a wall over the man’s head. Once everyone’s clothes were piled on the floor, Dhoruba’s companions began searching them for cash and jewelry.

  The gunfire was loud enough that officers in a passing police cruiser heard it. Sensing a robbery in progress, they radioed for backup. Within minutes police from five patrol cars were outside, guns drawn. They called for everyone to come out. No one came. After several minutes ticked by, one officer opened the door and crept up the staircase to the second-floor club. He found thirty or so people still putting on their clothes. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “Beats me,” one man replied. “We just minding our own business.”

  “We heard shooting.”

  “Some dudes tried to rip us off,” another said. “But they gone now.”

  Then the man who had drawn Dhoruba’s fire piped up. “No way, that’s him!” he said, pointing out Dhoruba, who was attempting to blend in with the patrons. “And him. And him. And him.”

  Dhoruba and his men were led away in handcuffs, a matter of hours, as it happened, after the FBI had identified his fingerprints on the BLA communiqués. The newspapers all trumpeted the arrests, suggesting that the men behind the May attacks had all been caught, or soon would be. Fears of police reprisals and race riots began to ebb. Investigations of the Beck Street Panthers, who quickly scattered, would drag on for months, but as far as police were concerned, the mystery of the May attacks was more or less solved. All that remained was to track down the remaining suspects. This Black Liberation Army, the thinking went, was just another silly name dreamed up by the radical element to lend credence to its crimes. Few in law enforcement, or anywhere else for that matter, appear to have given serious thought to the idea that the BLA was very real, and just getting started.

  09

  THE RISE OF THE BLA

  The Black Liberation Army, June 1971 to February 1972

  faceless brothers of the night

  who swim through the city

  like fish in the sea

  never resting in your search

  and destroy mission

  against the system

  i know how lonely you are

  and my heart reaches out to you . . .

  as repression grows

  it becomes more difficult for us

  to continue our struggle here

  but we persist

  until the final day

  when we shall join you

  in the sea of blood

  that will flow in the streets

  of babylon.

  —A poem appe
aring in Eldridge Cleaver’s Right On! Black Community News Service, Fall 1971

  There were three versions of the story of the Black Liberation Army playing out in New York as that hot summer of 1971 wore on: what the public knew, what the police suspected, and what was actually happening. To the public, the attacks in May had swiftly become old news after the arrests of Dhoruba Moore and his three comrades; the NYPD, it was assumed, would make more arrests, as they usually did; as for the BLA itself, few believed it was anything more than a name typed on a letter. The police, however, were starting to suspect that something was afoot. All through June and July detectives chased reports of onetime Panthers robbing drug dealers and social clubs across Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Something was going on.

  What was happening, it is now clear, was that after the chaos that spring, the BLA was beginning to consolidate. By July the Panthers who had gone underground—perhaps fifty or sixty total—had coalesced into two main cells: one based in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, each divided into “subcells,” and each, as Eldridge Cleaver had ordained, operating independently. All were beginning to realize that it was far easier to talk about guerrilla warfare than to engage in it.

  “We had no idea—no idea—what we were up against,” remembers Blood McCreary, who was busy robbing drug dealers in Brooklyn. “We had really hoped that established revolutionary organizations, that they could point to us and say that unless certain things are dealt with in society, this is what you’re going to be dealing with. But we were so young, we didn’t know what we were doing. The cops, the government, man, they were killing us. Everywhere we looked, there were cops.”