Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Questions about wiretaps and black bag jobs lingered all that summer in the chaos that pervaded FBI headquarters after Hoover’s death. A new director, L. Patrick Gray, was named, but for months no one seemed to have a clear sense of how aggressively he wanted to pursue the Weather Underground, which had detonated exactly one bomb in the previous nine months. Finally, at a meeting of supervisors on August 29, Ed Miller pointedly asked Gray whether black bag jobs would still be allowed. According to Miller, Gray said they would. At the subsequent meeting, Miller recalled, “Gray stood up and he did tell them. He said he had decided to approve surreptitious entries, ‘but I want you to make damn sure that none of these are done without prior bureau authorization.’” Afterward Miller telephoned one of his aides, Robert Shackleford, to say break-ins would be resumed. “That’s good,” Shackleford said, “because they’re going on anyway.”1

  Later that fall, reacting to the terrorist attacks at the Olympic Games in Munich, President Nixon issued a secret presidential directive calling for an all-out counterterrorism campaign. In Gray’s mind, at least, this included actions against the Weather Underground. He told his No. 2 man, Mark Felt, that he wanted the Weathermen “hunted to exhaustion.” Newly emboldened, Squad 47 renewed its illegal activities with a vengeance, initiating black bag jobs against the friends and families of twenty-six Weather fugitives. It was all very secret and all, very clearly now, illegal. That October, in fact, the Justice Department unceremoniously dropped its case against the leadership in Detroit rather than disclose what the FBI was doing. To the Bureau’s lasting regret, their activities would not remain secret for long.

  11

  BLOOD IN THE STREETS OF BABYLON

  The Black Liberation Army, 1973

  I understand I am

  Slightly out of fashion.

  The in-crowd wants no part of me.

  Someone said that I am too sixties

  Black.

  Someone else told me I had failed to mellow.

  —Poem by Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur

  The year 1973 was pivotal in postwar U.S. history, the year the Vietnam War was effectively lost, the Watergate scandal unraveled, the ’60s era finally ended, and “the wave of student uprisings and radicalism,” one author notes, “ran its course.” The Movement was dead. Abbie Hoffman, arrested on drug charges, went underground, writing a “travel” column for Crawdaddy magazine about his clandestine life. H. Rap Brown was in prison. Huey Newton fled to Cuba. Timothy Leary was arrested in Afghanistan and returned to give grand jury testimony against the Weather Underground. The previous autumn the government of Algeria had finally thrown the Panthers out of their beloved embassy. Washing up in Paris, Eldridge Cleaver glumly told reporters the revolution was over; he had lost.

  A new conservative mood was afoot, a reaction to ’60s excesses, especially the wave of drugs whose abuses and attendant violence had turned swaths of cities from San Francisco to New York into what the press liked to call war zones. Crime soared. The harsh Rockefeller drug laws passed in New York. The White House called for the death penalty. Nothing worked. It was, the author Andreas Killen notes, “a genuine low point in American history.”

  Nowhere was the clash between revolutionary diehards and a public newly incensed at drugs and violence more vividly on display than in the bloody final months of the Black Liberation Army. The BLA’s last chapter began in the darkness before dawn on October 23, 1972. Lower Manhattan was quiet that morning, but deep inside the Manhattan House of Detention, the granite fortress known as the Tombs, seven men were busy at work—with hacksaw blades. One was Anthony “Kimu” White, a twenty-four-year-old BLA recruit. White had been in jail since taking part in the Harlem shootout that helped give birth to the BLA, the Plate-Steward incident in April 1971.

  After a headcount at 6:15 a.m., the seven men began sawing through four steel bars in their fourth-floor cell area. Once finished, they crawled across a thirty-foot gangplank spanning an unused area of the jail that had been damaged in a 1970 rebellion. At the end of the gangplank, the men crawled up a sixteen-foot wall to a tiny window, where they sawed through another set of steel bars. Squeezing through, they dropped a bedsheet ladder to a parking lot forty feet below. A guard spotted them at 6:25 a.m., just as the last inmate leaped to the pavement and dashed into the gathering dawn. It was the first escape from the Tombs since it opened in 1941.* And though no one knew it, it would reinvigorate what remained of the Black Liberation Army in New York.

  Kimu White wasted little time reuniting with his comrades in the New York BLA cell, one of only two cells still at large; the other was a group of West Coast exiles robbing banks in the New Orleans area. The New York cell was down to fifteen or so desperate members, hunted, scattered, constantly on the move among squalid apartments in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The wild-eyed Twymon Meyers was one, along with his pals Avon White and Fred Hilton, who had rejoined the BLA after serving brief terms in North Carolina jails after the November 1971 shooting of a sheriff’s deputy. To the extent that these last survivors had any true leadership, it had fallen to the unlikeliest field marshal in the annals of black revolutionaries: twenty-five-year-old Joanne Chesimard, who was poised to become the most wanted female in New York history.

  Chesimard went by many names. Her family knew her as Joey. In underground circles, where she would become an icon, she would be known as Assata Shakur. She had grown up in Queens with a troubled mother, but she was smart and pretty. Small and quiet, she had been a student at City College before she began running with the Panthers. She attended her share of protests, but otherwise little is known of her Panther career until an incident in March 1971—during the violence of the Panther split—when she was shot in the stomach during some kind of robbery at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, probably an early BLA drug rip-off. She had been with Dhoruba Moore at 757 Beck Street, where she distinguished herself as a medic, and later with the BLA contingent in Atlanta. She was little known to the public during her years underground, but her notoriety skyrocketed once her career came to an end. It was then that the New York Daily News dubbed her “Sister Love.” It was then that the NYPD began referring to her as the “heart and soul” of the BLA.

  Whatever you called her, no one could deny she became a defining symbol of the underground era. Where Bernardine Dohrn’s name sometimes drew snickers from the most hard-core radicals, Chesimard would be viewed in the underground as perhaps the purest expression of revolutionary ardor, a ferocious, machine-gun-toting, grenade-tossing, spitting-mad Bonnie Parker for the 1970s, an archetype for a series of badass heroines heralded in Foxy Brown, Get Christie Love!, and other blaxploitation films of the day. It was a powerful image: In time, Chesimard’s visage would hang alongside those of Che Guevara and Malcolm X on the walls of scores of revolutionary venues. But while she was an angry young woman who almost certainly robbed banks and conspired in attacks on policemen, Chesimard left many more questions than answers in her wake. Forty years ago the NYPD cast her as the BLA’s last and greatest leader, blaming her for scores of crimes. There proved precious little evidence to back up these assertions, however, and today the handful of detectives still investigating the old BLA cases question almost all of these claims.

  “Chesimard,” rasps one New York investigator, “is no fucking saint, but was she the heart and soul of the BLA? Hell, no. The guys back then demonized her because, unlike the others, she was educated. She was young and pretty. I can point to at least two other women in the BLA who were more important than Joanne Chesimard ever was. We created that myth. The cops did.” Adds a longtime BLA attorney, Robert Boyle, “Assata was never this massively important figure the police portrayed her as. She was important, but the police made up this mythic image of a super black woman, with the afro and the machine gun. She was never that.”

  Divining the truth about Chesimard is not easy. During the 1970s few journalists took the trouble to learn her
story; what little they wrote came from police, whose theories proved unsupportable. Since then she has been the subject of two books, an autobiography and a memoir written by her aunt, who was also her attorney; both are notable for dwelling solely on her early and later life, leaving a gaping hole where one expects to find details of her career with the BLA. What is known is that in 1972, in the months after the Foster-Laurie murders, Chesimard and the other BLA survivors limped back from St. Louis and Cleveland and Miami to the only city they knew, New York, and attempted to regroup. No coherent story of their lives that year has ever emerged, only allegations of various outer-borough armed robberies that eventually led to trials and, typically, not-guilty verdicts. When it was finally over, the FBI and the NYPD would take some bare-bones statements from captured BLA members, but the few documents that survive give little sense of the desperate lives they must have led.

  Typical was the statement given by BLA member Ronald Anderson, a veteran of the Atlanta training camp. Anderson was one of the three BLA men who escaped from an Atlanta jail in November 1971 and spent the following weeks picking tomatoes in Florida. According to his statement, the trio finally raised enough cash for the long bus trip back to New York in January 1972. They hid in a relative’s home in the Bronx for a month, living on money from one of their mothers. After that they split up. Lumumba Shakur found an apartment for Anderson and John Thomas’s onetime No. 2, Andrew Jackson, on Dean Street in Brooklyn, where they lived with two Panther women who supported them by working as prostitutes in a Manhattan massage parlor. That spring, Anderson said, they finally met with Joanne Chesimard in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. She said she was leading a bank-robbery gang with Twymon Meyers and two other BLA soldiers and offered them a place in it; Anderson insists that he declined.

  • • •

  By the beginning of 1973, both the FBI and NYPD investigations of the BLA were languishing. In the ten months since the shoot-out in St. Louis, precisely two BLA members had been captured. When an NYPD lieutenant named James Motherway arrived at his new assignment in the Major Case Squad’s Thirteenth Division, he found morale among the detectives low. No fewer than eight groups were hunting the BLA at that point—including detective squads in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, plus district attorneys in Brooklyn and Queens—apparently without talking with one another, much less the FBI. The NYPD was further hamstrung by two bugaboos of mid-1970s policing: the department’s newfound sensitivities about race, and a lengthy corruption inquiry.

  A snapshot of the situation is offered in Motherway’s unpublished memoir. “So what’s the problem?” he recalls asking the assembled BLA investigators one morning in early 1973. No one responded. At first no one wanted to be seen criticizing the department—“the kiss of death,” in Motherway’s words. “Maybe these pussies are afraid to talk, but I’m not,” a bellicose detective named Joe Tidmarsh finally piped up. “You wanna know what’s wrong? I’ll tell ya. The bosses won’t turn us loose. We have a dozen leads they won’t let us follow. Did you know we aren’t allowed to go into Harlem after dark?”

  “No,” Motherway said, skeptical. “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” Tidmarsh went on, “the Deputy Chief [of detectives] is afraid we’ll cause a riot or shoot someone. It might ruin his chance for promotion.” Another detective chimed in, “Did you know we have a tap on Twymon Meyers’s mother’s phone? Last week we hear her telling her niece that she was going to meet ‘baby.’ That’s Twymon. Here she’s going to meet the guy we know has killed a half-dozen cops and we couldn’t tail her because it was nighttime in Harlem.”

  Motherway left the meeting shaken. By coincidence, a few days later the new chief of detectives, Louis Cottell, sent an inspector to find out why the BLA cases were stalled. Motherway was the last of the squad’s lieutenants to be interviewed. Certain he was risking his career, he decided to relay the detectives’ complaints. Three days later the deputy chief was replaced. The squad now reported directly to Cottell. Morale rose. Detectives were allowed into Harlem at night. Suddenly they began aggressively pursuing a host of new leads.

  One involved two BLA members, Woody Green and Kimu White, the Tombs escapee. One detective learned that Green’s wedding anniversary was January 23. Certain Green would see his wife, he asked for surveillance. Motherway approved it. That evening detectives followed Green’s wife to the Big T Lounge in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Sipping coffee in unmarked cars outside, they spotted Green walking into the bar at midnight. Two detectives, Cleave Bethea and Philip Hogan, were sent in to confirm the identification. As they entered, they made eye contact with Green, who was standing at the bar alongside White and a dozen patrons. Suddenly both Green and White drew pistols and opened fire.

  Hit by bullets in the left arm and leg, Bethea fell to the floor and passed out. Hogan, struck in the shoulder, rolled through the lounge’s door onto the sidewalk. Nine detectives leaped from their cars, unsheathed pistols, and laid shotguns across the hoods of parked cars. Inside, the bar went quiet. The patrons flattened themselves on the floor. Within minutes more than a dozen patrol cars began squealing to stops all around. When two detectives attempted to peer through the lounge’s window, gunfire erupted from within, sending them scurrying for cover. Up and down the street, cops returned fire. Their bullets blasted the Big T Lounge to shreds, smashing windows and riddling the walls behind the bar. When everything finally went quiet, a detective crawled through the front door. He found White and Green dead on the floor. Miraculously, none of the other patrons were injured.

  To the press, it was just another BLA shoot-out; the Daily News carried the story on page 8, while the Times chose page 48. To Joanne Chesimard and the remaining members of the BLA, however, it was as if the NYPD had violated a months-long ceasefire. Months later, a rare glimpse of the group’s inner workings at the time would be provided by a captured BLA soldier, Avon White. According to White, Chesimard convened a strategy meeting the night after the shootout in a ratty safe-house apartment in the Bronx. She argued for immediate retaliation. The others—a soldier named Melvin Kearney, Zayd Shakur, Freddie Hilton—agreed. That same night they stole a car in Brooklyn. Guns, they had.

  The next evening, Thursday, January 25, a frigid north wind was blowing as two brothers, Officers Carlo and Vincent Imperato, climbed into their radio car at the East New York Avenue station in Brooklyn. It was a routine patrol, at least until seven forty-five, when Carlo, who was driving, stopped at a red light on Newport Street.

  Glancing to his left, Carlo was startled to see a black man in a raincoat step out of a parked car and aim an automatic rifle directly at him. It was a BLA man, Melvin Kearney.

  “Duck!” Carlo yelled.

  Bullets shattered the driver’s-side window; one struck Carlo in the left shoulder, and flying glass gashed his brother’s arm. Vincent drew his revolver and squeezed off two shots as Carlo mashed the accelerator and the patrol car surged forward, barreling through the intersection. Behind them Kearney kept firing; police would find twenty-three bullet casings scattered on the pavement. The brothers drove themselves to Brookdale Hospital, where they were treated and released.*

  COP BROTHERS SHOT IN B’KLYN AMBUSH, screamed the Daily News headline the next day. The police commissioner, Patrick Murphy, chose his words carefully: “We are very disturbed at this time because this was a deliberate attack without provocation. I’m very troubled, upset and angry about this trend of violence shown against the police. This violence must cease. We ask the public to condemn this behavior.”

  Everyone assumed it was the BLA. After a year in the shadows, the shooting thrust the group back onto the front pages. As it happened, the Imperato shootings came just days after a series of attacks in New Orleans in which a black radical named Mark Essex shot nineteen people, killing nine, including five police officers; some believed that Essex was a member of the BLA. Suddenly the dormant debate about the BLA’s existence reignited. In a lengthy articl
e, the New York Times asked the central question: “Are there really organized cells of blacks dedicated to the ambush of urban patrolmen? Or if nothing that extensive, are there a handful of ‘guerrilla’ assassins moving from city to city and getting help from friends along the way? . . . Talk of conspiracy has become virtually a reflex response to such incidents in the last few years, and yet in no single case has it ever been substantiated.”1 The Times polled police officials across the country. Some believed that the BLA was a nationwide conspiracy. Most scoffed at the idea.

  Whatever was happening, the NYPD was taking no chances. The morning after the Imperato shootings, Mayor Lindsay approved the police commissioner’s plan to flood the northern sections of Brooklyn with officers allotted a thousand hours of overtime. Meanwhile, safely back in the Bronx, Chesimard, Zayd Shakur, and the others were incensed that the Imperato brothers had survived. They plotted a follow-up attack, this time determined to take a life—“the reasoning being,” Avon White told the NYPD months later, “that the pigs did not die in Brooklyn.”