The BLA’s most pressing problem, however, was a lack of aboveground support, something Cleaver and Sekou Odinga in far-off Algiers constantly harped on. Other than Right On!, whose next issue wouldn’t appear until August, there was none. Barely a dozen people now manned the Panthers’ Seventh Avenue storefront as their every move was tracked by the NYPD and the FBI. Both searched for links to the underground, but other than the intermittent calls to Algeria, all monitored by the FBI, there were none to be found. The calls, in fact, only revealed the tensions among those few volunteers still supporting Cleaver. At one point, Lumumba Shakur and the Right On! editor, Denise Oliver, got into a bitter argument. “I hit her in the titty!” Shakur crowed to Odinga in Algiers. Cleaver was forced to intervene.
With no donations, the BLA cadres turned to armed robbery. Their targets, as Dhoruba Moore’s experience demonstrated, were black social clubs and drug dealers; almost all these robberies are lost to history. “There were actions all over the five boroughs,” recalls Blood McCreary. “There were people in the drug business who were setting up others for us to move on. We raised a lot of money that way, and we were letting them know that drugs would not be tolerated anymore.”
One of the few surviving accounts of these robberies involves a murderous twenty-year-old BLA recruit whose zeal for gunplay and wide-ranging travels would make him perhaps the single deadliest revolutionary of the decade. His name was Twymon Ford Meyers. A onetime gang member with a long juvenile record of muggings and robberies, Meyers had spent much of his time in the Panthers selling newspapers. His real talent, though, was violence: He used a gun more freely than almost anyone else in the BLA. “Twymon is the baby of three or four kids, and they were all thugs,” recalls McCreary. “Twymon was political, you know, but he was really a gangster. He had done a lot of time [in jail], and there was only one clear thing in his mind. He always told me, ‘I will die before I go back in jail.’”
On the night of August 4, 1971, Meyers and a trio of BLA members burst into Thelma’s Lounge on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 148th Street in Harlem. After robbing the thirty patrons of $6,000, they commandeered a gypsy cab to make their escape. When the cab sagged in heavy traffic three blocks south, police cars arrived. Meyers leaped from the cab, whipped out a .30-caliber automatic rifle, and began firing wildly up and down the street. Police hunched behind their cruisers and fired back; during the exchange the cabdriver was hit and killed. Meyers threw down his gun and ran. The others surrendered and were charged with murder. For the moment, the authorities had no sense that the shooting might be tied to the fledgling BLA.
“Of all the deaths Twymon was involved in, the one with that cabdriver bothered him the most,” recalls McCreary. “Shot right in the head. Twymon always said that really fucked with him. He always said, ‘That motherfucker had nothing to do with anything.’ I remember when he got back to the safe house that night, that cab had just exploded. The women, they picked car glass out of his hair for two or three hours.”
The larger of the two BLA cells, which included the remnants of the Panthers living at 757 Beck Street, was commanded by a burly thirty-eight-year-old army veteran named John Thomas. Another onetime resident of South Jamaica, Thomas was a heavy drinker who surrounded himself with a dozen of the most violent new BLA members, including Twymon Meyers. Realizing that drug rip-offs alone wouldn’t raise enough money to feed and shelter his people, he resolved to begin robbing banks. They hit the first one, in Queens, on July 29, but it was a slapdash job. A more rigorous second robbery, at a Bankers Trust branch on August 23, involved half a dozen BLA members. As four of them trained their guns on the customers, two others leaped over the teller cages, rifled several drawers, and ran with the others to a waiting getaway car with about $7,700.* None of the robbers wore masks. Security cameras easily recorded their every move. Within days both the FBI and the NYPD were searching for them.
It was then that Thomas decided New York was getting too hot for his people. Dhoruba’s arrest also worried him, as did the arrest of several BLA soldiers attempting to set up new operations in Detroit. Thomas announced they were leaving the city. If they were to form a legitimate guerrilla army, he explained, they needed intensive training, and for that Thomas decided to set up a kind of training camp in an area where no one was looking for them, in the South.
At that point the story of the BLA, for the police at least, took a surprising turn—in San Francisco. On the evening of Saturday, August 28, a police sergeant named George Kowalski was cruising the rough streets of the Mission District alone when two black men in a dark Oldsmobile stopped in front of him. One opened fire with a submachine gun. Kowalski ducked, found himself unharmed, then gave chase, leading to a wild pursuit through city streets that ended when the driver of the Oldsmobile lost control of the car, sliding into a curb, and was surrounded by police. Both men emerged with hands held high.
The two, Anthony Bottom and Albert Washington, turned out to be Black Panthers, and after detectives began questioning nineteen-year-old Bottom, he gave them quite a story. According to Bottom, he was part of a group of Panthers who had staged a series of minor Bay Area bombings stretching back at least a year; they would later be charged with the murder of a San Francisco policeman as well. But what stunned his questioners was when Bottom volunteered that he and Washington had been among five San Francisco Panthers who had journeyed east that May and murdered two New York policemen, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini. Bottom’s information eventually led to the arrests of the others, including a lithe Panther named Herman Bell, who had fled with several others for New Orleans, where, police learned, they had begun robbing banks. The Bell-Bottom Panthers weren’t officially members of the BLA, but they might as well have been. Dhoruba Moore had been more than willing to take responsibility for their killings in New York.
In Washington, FBI officials watched all these events with mounting alarm. The BLA was fulfilling every warning about black militancy J. Edgar Hoover had made. “During the past several months, the Cleaver Faction of the Black Panther Party has moved on a course of increased violence, lawlessness and terror,” Hoover wrote every FBI office on September 24. “I consider their potential for violence and disruption greater today than ever before. . . . [T]his Bureau must approach its investigation of extremist activity with renewed vigor and imagination.”
For once Hoover was right. Not that it made a bit of difference.
• • •
At just about the moment Anthony Bottom and Albert Washington were arrested in San Francisco, members of John Thomas’s BLA cell began arriving in Atlanta. There were seventeen of them in all, by far the largest single BLA group ever assembled. The No. 2 man, Andrew Jackson, a veteran of 757 Beck Street, was there, as was Joanne Chesimard and Twymon Meyers. Some came in a rented Ryder van piled high with guns and books, others by car, the last few by Greyhound bus.* Several checked into the Bellview Hotel on Auburn Avenue. Within days they found their new headquarters, a large frame home they rented on Fayetteville Road in a semirural area of DeKalb County, on the city’s eastern reaches. This would be the BLA’s first training camp.
“Atlanta was supposed to be a school, a training ground; we were sending everyone there,” recalls Blood McCreary. “Once you got through Atlanta, you were supposed to be ready for anything.”
Once they moved in, Thomas began showing everyone how to clean, strip, and fire pistols and rifles. Classes were held in mapmaking, use of a compass, and robbery techniques. Chesimard led sessions in first aid. Every few days they drove the van into a wooded area, where Thomas had everyone shoot on jerry-rigged firing ranges. Other times they tried to learn wilderness skills, something none of them, city dwellers as they were, knew much about.
After three weeks the money began to run low. Thomas sent everyone into Atlanta to fan out and identify a bank to rob. When the group reassembled that evening, he gave a long talk to the group on how to stage an effic
ient robbery. Everyone was told to take notes, and afterward Thomas reviewed all the members’ notebooks to make sure his message had sunk in. He then scouted the location himself and announced they had found their target: a branch of the Fulton National Bank on Peters Street. To rehearse, they built a sandbox in which they constructed a model of the bank and its surroundings. Thomas moved around the sandbox, drawing arrows with a stick and discussing each member’s role.
In preparation, Meyers and a young recruit named Fred Hilton were sent into downtown Atlanta to steal a car, only to return, crestfallen, without one. Unable to hotwire a car themselves, they ended up robbing a garage attendant who refused to hand over a vehicle. Irked, Thomas sent Meyers and another teenager, Samuel Cooper, to try again. This time they walked into a downtown garage, pointed a pistol at the attendant, and were just about to steal a car when a woman drove up. Meyers shoved the attendant out of sight while Cooper politely accepted the unknowing woman’s keys and handed her a ticket. They then drove off in her car.
They robbed the bank on October 7, covering the customers and quickly leaping the cages. Afterward, flush with cash, Thomas decided to establish a second safe house outside Atlanta. Joanne Chesimard led a scouting team of five members to Greenville, South Carolina, but after a week of searching for a suitable retreat they received word from Thomas to begin looking in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chesimard’s group arrived there on October 14, checking into three rooms at the Rosetta Motel on Thirty-seventh Street. They later moved into a set of apartments. In the following days Thomas sent several members shuttling back and forth between the two cities, redistributing the group’s guns, ammunition, and belongings.
He then announced that it was time to begin their long-planned war. To all of them that meant one thing: killing policemen. Thomas selected the two youngest members, Twymon Meyers and Freddie Hilton, for the honor of the first kill. The two teens had borne the brunt of his anger more than once, for mishandling stolen cars and for crashing the Ryder van into a tree and having to abandon it. Now, Thomas announced, they must prove they were worthy of the BLA. They would go into the streets of Atlanta, alone, and kill.
• • •
A few minutes after midnight on the morning of November 3, 1971, a twenty-seven-year-old Atlanta police officer named James Greene walked out of Grandma’s Biscuits with a late-night snack: a cup of coffee and a ham biscuit. He climbed into his patrol wagon and drove to a darkened service station on Memorial Drive across from a cemetery. He had just finished the sandwich when Twymon Meyers and Freddie Hilton materialized from the shadows on both sides of the wagon, raised their .38-caliber pistols, and opened fire with no warning. Greene never had a chance. Struck by three bullets, he would be dead by morning.
Meyers and Hilton opened the car door, tore off Greene’s badge with such force that they ripped his shirt, and took his pistol. When they returned to the house on Fayetteville Road, one BLA member would recall months later, they were triumphant, brandishing the police revolver and the badge, announcing, “We did it! We did it!”
John Thomas was pleased; he dispatched the two to the Chattanooga apartments to hide out. At the same time he summoned two other members, Cooper and Ronald Anderson, to return from Tennessee. When they arrived, Thomas led them into a bedroom where Jackson was waiting. “You know what happened?” Thomas asked.
They knew. “Your two brothers did it,” he continued. Motioning toward Jackson, he said, “You all have the next one.” The next morning Cooper woke to find Jackson caressing Officer Greene’s stolen revolver. “The pigs got nice guns,” he remarked.
On November 7, four days after the murder of Officer Greene, Andrew Jackson led his two young charges into Atlanta to kill a second policeman. Instead, after a passing patrolman noticed their guns, they ended up getting arrested outside a convenience store. When the news reached John Thomas, he ordered an immediate evacuation. The group piled everything into two cars and drove to the apartments in Chattanooga, where they pored over the newspapers for any sign of what was happening back in Atlanta. After four days, once it became clear that Jackson and the others would not be released anytime soon, Thomas announced that everyone was returning to New York. On the morning of November 11, the remaining nine members of the cell drove east out of Chattanooga in two cars, crossing the Smoky Mountains into North Carolina.
Everything went smoothly until one of the cars was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy named Ted Elmore in Catawba County, North Carolina. A gunfight broke out. Elmore was shot and left paralyzed; four of the group’s members were arrested. The others rendezvoused in Norfolk, Virginia, and decided they couldn’t afford to return to New York, where too many people knew them. Instead, Thomas led four of them to Florida, where they were later accused of robbing a bank in Miami and robbing a gun store in Tampa. On December 30 they checked into a hotel in the small town of Odessa, north of Tampa; when a hotel employee became suspicious, police were called. FBI agents arrived on the scene the next day. Thomas and his girlfriend went quietly. Another BLA member, Frank Fields—probably one of the three men who attacked Officers Curry and Binetti—ran, and an FBI agent opened fire; a bullet struck Fields in the eye, killing him.
• • •
The implosion of John Thomas’s cell scattered nearly twenty BLA militants all across the Southeast. As a new year, 1972, dawned, Thomas sat in a Tampa jail awaiting bank-robbery charges; four others were behind bars in North Carolina. Andrew Jackson and two others, arrested in Atlanta, had managed to escape from a county jail and made their way into Florida as well, where they spent two months picking tomatoes alongside migrant workers in an effort to raise money for the bus fare back north. The others trickled back to New York in ones and twos. Marooned outside Tampa, Twymon Meyers and the teenaged Mark Holder stuffed dozens of guns into three suitcases, stole a car, and drove back. Holder was arrested with most of the guns in Philadelphia three weeks later.
The sudden loss of a dozen men did little to dissuade the BLA members still in New York; if anything, it motivated them to strike back, to show authorities that they remained viable and strong. At the time there were still at least two active New York subcells, both devoted to armed robbery, mostly of drug dealers and social clubs. Even before the loss of Thomas and so many of his men, one of these cells had also talked about heading south. In December this group, led by a twenty-eight-year-old ex-marine named Ronald Carter, embarked on a multistate odyssey whose bloody climax would shake the city of New York to its core and trigger a national debate about the BLA that would, in a small way, reverberate in the 1972 presidential primaries.
The full story of the Carter cell has never been told; only three members remain alive, and one, Blood McCreary, tells his version of events here for the first time. Because of the crimes involved, however, his account is incomplete and, in at least one regard, open to doubt. McCreary, for example, states that the Carter group chose to leave New York after the Shakur brothers, Lumumba and Zayd, decided “to make a cell for Assata,” that is, for Joanne Chesimard, the Thomas cell’s most prominent survivor.
As McCreary tells the story, the group had hoped to receive guidance of some sort from Algeria. A meeting was arranged with Cleaver’s emissary, the fiery poet Denise Oliver. “That cell came about from Algeria, or it was supposed to,” McCreary recalls. “Denise had been over there, and she came back with instructions from Eldridge. You know, Algeria, they had some good [ideas], but they didn’t really run us. Anyway, Denise was to meet with us and give us the information from Algeria. [Several of us], we all showed up to meet Denise. That meeting didn’t go down, because Assata wanted to get back to Atlanta, ’cause shit was going down there. But she didn’t go; things were too fucked up. So when she stayed, it was decided to create a new cell for Assata.”
This new cell, led by Carter and Chesimard, soon fled New York for Miami, which McCreary says was the plan all along. A more likely explanation for their sudden departure invol
ves a bizarre episode in Queens on December 20, 1971. At nine thirty that morning, two patrolmen in a squad car spied four people in a green Pontiac—one woman and three men—parked in front of a Bankers Trust branch on Grand Avenue at Forty-ninth Street, acting suspiciously. When the cruiser approached, the Pontiac pulled away from the curb. Following at a safe distance, the officers checked its license plate and discovered that the car had been stolen.
When the cruiser lit its rolling lights, the Pontiac took off, racing to the corner of Flushing Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, where it turned southwest, toward Brooklyn. As the chase continued, someone in the Pontiac rolled down a window and lobbed something toward the cruiser. It was, of all things, a hand grenade—an M-26 fragmentation grenade, to be exact, the kind used by the U.S. Army in Vietnam. To the officers’ amazement, it exploded beside the cruiser, wrecking it. As the officers leaped, unhurt, from the burning car, the Pontiac roared off toward Brooklyn, where a few minutes later its occupants jumped out, rushed toward a man at a Sunoco gas station, and stole his car. Later the man identified Joanne Chesimard as one of his assailants.* The NYPD immediately issued a thirteen-state alarm calling for her arrest.
As police suspected, the attack was almost certainly the work of Chesimard and the Carter cell. In the BLA’s first-ever phone call to the press, a caller to United Press International (UPI) took credit in the name of the Attica Brigade of the Afro-American Liberation Army—Cleaver’s name for the BLA—saying, “We have more grenades, and we will be back.” The police dragnet would explain why Chesimard, Carter, McCreary, and three other comrades swiftly relocated to the Miami area. There they rented an apartment in the beachfront city of Hollywood and began scouting banks. They probably didn’t know that at that very moment they had become the third BLA group at large in the state of Florida.
They pulled off a quick bank robbery in Miami, running out in less than five minutes. Much as John Thomas had done after his robberies in New York, the cell took its cash and began making plans. Carter and Chesimard, in fact, envisioned sharply expanding the BLA’s reach, creating a string of safe houses across the Midwest. Within days they had left Miami, scattering to rent apartments in Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Carter and McCreary then returned to New York, where they met with Zayd Shakur, who was still in touch with Algeria. They agreed that their immediate focus should be freeing those who had been captured, especially Dhoruba Moore and, at Chesimard’s urging, her boyfriend, who had been arrested in Detroit. “We were going to break them out,” McCreary recalls. “I went with Assata to Detroit and looked things over, but it was clear it would never work. It was obvious we could never get near them.”
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