On the evening of Saturday, January 27, two nights after the Imperato attack, the group split into two squads and walked out into the chilly night to hunt and kill a cop. Chesimard and Meyers spent several hours canvassing the streets of the Bronx but were unable to find a suitable ambush target. The second group, the same trio who had attacked the Imperatos, took a stolen red GTO and patrolled Queens. Eventually they parked on Baisley Boulevard in the St. Albans section and took their positions around an intersection, waiting for a patrol car to stop. Kearney sagged inside a phone booth. Across the way, Hilton hid a machine pistol beneath his coat. Shakur watched the oncoming traffic, nursing a hidden shotgun.
Finally, a little past midnight, a patrol car containing two officers stopped in their sights. All three men whipped out their guns and began firing. The driver, Officer Roy Pollina, ducked down and hit the gas, smashing into the fender of a car in front of him. A bullet grazed his forehead. As the firing continued, Pollina regained his senses and raced from the scene. His partner suffered a shoulder wound. Police would find twenty-eight shell casings at the intersection.
The next day, confronted by two attacks in fifty-three hours, the mayor threw out any pretense of diplomacy. At a press conference Lindsay announced that an extra six thousand police officers were being hired at a cost of $13 million. Asked if he considered the BLA attacks a “crisis situation,” he replied, “When you have a pattern like these vicious attacks of police officers, I would call it a crisis. No one is going to rest until this group is arrested and brought to justice.”
The newspapers began to change their tone. On January 26, in a story pegged to the police shootings in New Orleans, the Times headline had read, OFFICIALS DOUBT A PLOT BY BLACKS TO KILL WHITE POLICEMEN. Three mornings later, after two new BLA ambushes, the headline read, LIBERATION UNIT RATED AS MURDEROUS.
The furor over the BLA’s sudden legitimization climaxed two weeks later, when New York magazine published an excerpt from a forthcoming book called Target Blue. It was written by none other than Robert Daley, the NYPD’s onetime spokesman—he had resigned—and while it covered many topics, the most explosive parts dealt with the BLA. Using information gleaned while in office, Daley laid bare the story of the 1971 New York and San Francisco attacks and argued they were the work of a single, nationwide militant group. For the first time the debate over the BLA washed into the national press, though many writers and book reviewers remained skeptical. As Gerald M. Astor, who termed Daley “a pistol-packin’ flack with literary ambitions,” noted in a review of Target Blue in Washington Monthly:
Conspiracy claims by the cops have a bad habit of collapsing. . . . A top police investigator of the recent assaults . . . has said of the conspiracy theory: “A few dozen guys in different places happen to know each other and share a certain affinity, so one of them sits down at a typewriter and taps out B.L.A. But in numbers and in administrative structure they don’t make it an army.”
The irony was that Daley was largely correct. While hardly an army, the BLA was real, and it was a multistate conspiracy, if a desperate and sloppy one. But the fact that the man promoting this idea was also promoting a book did little to convince the skeptics. Still, the growing acceptance of the BLA’s existence, at least in New York, had an impact in the streets, where shootings by jittery policemen were becoming almost routine. Every day or two brought a new incident, most having nothing to do with the BLA. When gunfire struck a squad car on Long Island, the papers were filled with stories about the BLA invading the suburbs; it turned out to be a stray bullet from a firing range. A single day, March 6, brought a pair of Bronx shootings. In the first, police tried to stop a gypsy cab they believed had been carjacked. When the car pulled over, three men jumped out and sprayed the cruiser with gunfire; this may well have been Twymon Meyers and two confederates. (POLICE CAR BLASTED BY BRONX GUNMAN, read the Daily News headline.) Twenty minutes earlier, a pair of patrolmen cruising 168th Street thought they recognized Meyers. When they called him by name, he ran. At Franklin Avenue, he tried to flag a cab. When the cab wouldn’t stop, Meyers turned and fired a pistol at the pursuing officers. One, William Hoy, got out and chased Meyers on foot through crowds to Fulton Avenue until, after running for blocks, Meyers vanished. “It was him,” Hoy said later. “I know his picture better than my own kids’.”
In those tense late-winter weeks, BLA soldiers emerged as New York’s new boogeymen, spotted at every robbery, blamed for every unexplained shooting. Meyers was one of three BLA soldiers named in the April 10 robbery of a bank on Northern Boulevard in Queens. Another, named Victor Cumberbatch, was so spooked that he pulled a gun on two telephone repairmen, thinking they were police; the Brooklyn district attorney tried to indict him for kidnapping. Other soldiers were blamed for a string of supermarket and bodega robberies. When a new police commissioner, Donald F. Cawley, took office that April, one of his first actions was to summon the chief of detectives, Louis Cottell, into his Centre Street office and make clear his top priority.
“The Black Liberation Army,” Cawley growled. “Get the bastards.” He added: “Louie, think big.”2
Cottell, in turn, brought in a plumpish, sandy-haired deputy chief named Harold Schryver, a twenty-seven-year NYPD veteran. Given wide latitude to apprehend the BLA’s leadership, Schryver consolidated the three detective squads working BLA cases. To analyze the myriad threads of information the squads had gathered, he hit upon the novel idea of entering it all into a Hazeltine 2000 computer he arranged for the department to rent. Two detectives were sent to training courses to figure out how to use it. Detectives were still mastering the computer’s intricacies when, on May 2, the word came from New Jersey. It was Joanne Chesimard.
• • •
Later there would be considerable speculation about where they were headed, the BLA’s last two intellectual leaders, Joanne Chesimard and little Zayd Shakur, the “field mouse,” who was a long way from the moment when Jane Fonda bailed him out of jail three years before. Some said they were heading to hide with family members in Philadelphia or Atlantic City. Others thought they were en route to Washington. Their destination, however, was beside the point. What mattered was their desperate need to escape the police dragnet in New York, and the poor choices they made that night of May 2 in order to do so. In fact, they were breaking every rule of underground survival. They were driving in a car, they were driving at night, and worst of all, they were driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, a highway, then as now, where state troopers had a reputation for stopping and searching cars driven by black men.
A little before midnight they drove out of the city and stopped their battered white Pontiac LeMans for snacks at the Alexander Hamilton rest stop north of Newark. Forty-five minutes later, at twelve forty-five, they were speeding south, passing through the central New Jersey city of New Brunswick, when they saw the trooper behind them, lights rolling. Their driver, a onetime Panther named Clark Squire, pulled to the side of the highway. The trooper, twenty-nine-year-old James M. Harper, called for backup even before approaching the car, which was standard procedure; he later said he stopped the car because it had a faulty taillight. A second trooper, thirty-five-year-old Werner Foerster, pulled up moments later. As it happened, the three cars were now lined up barely two hundred yards south of state police headquarters.
Trooper Harper took Squire’s driver’s license, then asked him to stand behind the car with Trooper Foerster. Harper next leaned into the car to examine the serial number on the driver’s-side door. As he did, he noticed that the woman sitting in the front seat seemed fidgety. The small, light-skinned man in the backseat sat frozen, his eyes glassy.
Suddenly, from behind the car, Foerster said, “Jim, look what I found.” Harper looked back and saw Foerster holding up a clip from an automatic pistol. He quickly turned his attention back to the man and the woman inside the car and told them not to move. He saw Joanne Chesimard reach beneath her right leg. A moment la
ter the gun was in her hand. She fired from barely three feet away. “Her eyes went wide open, her teeth were showing,” Harper testified months later. “She fired a shot. I felt the pain in my shoulder.”
Staggering, Harper managed to draw his revolver and fire several shots into the car, striking both Chesimard and Zayd Shakur. One bullet struck Shakur flush in the chest, mortally wounding him. Behind the car, Clark Squire and Trooper Foerster began grappling. At some point Squire grabbed Foerster’s gun and shot him in the head.
Harper, now outnumbered three to one, ran for the headquarters building. As he did, Squire jumped back in the Le Mans and drove off. When Harper reached the building, he managed to say, “I’ve been shot,” before collapsing. A description of the Le Mans was immediately broadcast. Minutes later a trooper saw it parked on the side of the turnpike, five miles south. As he screeched to a stop he saw a man running away, toward a wooded area. He yelled for him to halt, then fired a wild shot when he didn’t; Squire was found hiding in nearby woods the next day. The trooper found Chesimard lying beside the car, bleeding lightly from a wound in the chest, and Shakur, who was dead. Chesimard was taken to a hospital, where she recovered.
The next day Joanne Chesimard’s face—puffy, with full lips and a medium Afro—stared out from the front of every New York newspaper; the Daily News coverage spread across six pages, two just of photos. It was a singular moment in underground history, the first time the press was obliged to introduce and attempt to explain a black revolutionary—and an attractive woman at that—to a mainstream audience. The Daily News termed Chesimard not only “the high priestess of the cop-hating Black Liberation Army” but a “black Joan of Arc.” The Times called her the “soul” of the BLA. Yet even then the news failed to catch the national imagination. As it had from the start, the BLA remained largely a New York story. It would take time for Chesimard’s legend to spread.
Two contrasting funerals ensued. In East Brunswick, New Jersey, the governor led a crowd of 3,500 mourners at Trooper Werner Foerster’s simple twenty-minute service. His body was taken to a cemetery in a procession of five hundred police cars. Meanwhile, in Harlem, Zayd Shakur, his body wrapped in a white shroud, lay in state at the Marcus Jackson Funeral Home. Hundreds of people, almost all of them black, filed past; fliers outside urged readers to “Support the Black Liberation Army.”
“The blood was no super nigger, or super star,” a BLA communiqué announced. “He was just a nigger that was tired of the Racist Pig cops shooting down unarmed brothers and sisters in the streets. . . . The nigger felt the correct method for obtaining liberation here in Babylon was through Revolutionary violence. . . . We will bury our dead, clean our guns and prepare for the next battle.”
• • •
Joanne Chesimard’s capture was a crushing blow for the dozen or so BLA members still hiding in New York. Eldridge Cleaver’s onetime courier, Denise Oliver, now living underground with the BLA’s Andrew Jackson, wrote of their mounting desperation in a diary the NYPD later discovered. “Each day only brings more bad news, more deaths, more captures,” she wrote. “Old friends hit the dust . . . and we are helpless . . . in touch with nothing but the TV. . . . Sexless, but comrades.” The day after Chesimard’s capture, she wrote: “I don’t know if [Jackson] turning himself in is the answer. But to keep running seems futile. In the end, jail or death is the resolution. So why postpone it?”
Both the FBI and the NYPD, now working together, sensed the momentum shifting. “In my view, the BLA (and related groups) are hard pressed to find the type of ‘home base’ support they need to conduct their terrorist tactics at this time,” New York’s police commissioner, Don Cawley, wrote in a memo to his top men on May 30. “In short, they are on the run and appear to be leaderless. . . . The best defense is a good offense. We should quickly move forward and place as much pressure on these revolutionaries as possible.”
Suddenly doors began opening. That spring, either just before or after Chesimard’s capture, three FBI agents who had been working BLA cases since the beginning—Jim Murphy, Bob McCartin, and a youngster named Danny Coulson—secured an informant. “We really believed in pursuing informants; that had been our highest priority for two years,” McCartin recalls. “And finally, you know, we got one.” The informant was a jailed BLA member’s girlfriend; she too faced charges and began cooperating with the FBI to avoid them. Her identity, which has never been revealed, is being withheld here as well; the woman is alive today and in her sixties.
The informant, who remained in contact with several other group members’ companions, furnished tips that allowed the FBI to identify a series of BLA hideouts and rendezvous points. The first involved a meeting between two of the BLA’s most wanted members: Freddie Hilton and Twymon Meyers, the teenagers who had assassinated Officer James Greene in Atlanta in 1971. The pair was planning to meet on the morning of June 7 on New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn; both the FBI and the NYPD were waiting. A vivid glimpse of what happened next was given in Danny Coulson’s 1999 memoir, No Heroes.
The FBI contingent was holed up in an elderly gentleman’s apartment across the street. (“I don’t take to no cop killers,” the man explained, “so you can use the place.”) A group of NYPD detectives dressed as a construction crew sprawled across a stoop down the street; as the FBI men watched, the cops cracked open two six packs of beer and lazily passed them around. Up and down the street, FBI agents and NYPD officers crawled into sniper positions along the rooftops.
A few minutes before eleven Freddie Hilton appeared, as promised. He walked halfway up the block and peered down toward the construction crew, which made a little show of guzzling their beers. In the apartment above, Danny Coulson took out a .308-caliber Remington sniper rifle and trained it on Hilton’s chest. Through the scope, he could make out the slight bulge on Hilton’s hip.
“Murph,” he radioed Jim Murphy, “put it out that he has a pistol in his waistband, left side, butt forward.”
Suddenly the distant cry of a police siren could be heard. As the FBI men exchanged glances, it drew nearer. On the sidewalk, Hilton glanced up and down the street, then studied the surrounding buildings. Coulson eased back into the darkened apartment. As each moment passed, the siren grew nearer until, to Coulson’s dismay, a patrol car appeared at the head of the street. “Shit, there it is, down to our left,” an FBI man whispered. Once again Coulson trained his rifle on Hilton’s chest, ready to fire if he made a move toward the approaching car.
As the others watched, the patrol car slid down the street. As it approached Hilton, he edged into the shadow of a doorway. The car passed him and came to a stop sixty feet beyond, in front of the building at 440 New Lots. Hilton stepped out of the doorway and watched as two uniformed officers got out, trotted up the steps, and disappeared inside. With Coulson’s rifle still trained on his chest, Hilton, evidently curious, sauntered down toward the patrol car. As he did, shots rang out from the rooftop. Hilton jumped in surprise, then craned his neck skyward. He never saw the two NYPD detectives who barreled into him from behind, tackling him to the pavement.
It took several minutes for everyone to understand what had happened. As it turned out, a woman living at 440 New Lots had seen plainclothes officers on her roof and, mistaking them for burglars, called the Liberty Avenue station, which dispatched the patrol car. The responding officers crept up a stairwell to the roof entry, where, through the crack of a door, they glimpsed what appeared to be a man pointing a shotgun at them. One officer fired three shots through the door, hitting forty-four-year-old Williams Jakes of the Major Case Squad in the stomach. “We’re police officers!” the men on the roof shouted. The officer in the stairwell tossed his police hat through the door. A badge came whistling down the stairs in response. It was friendly fire.
Fred Hilton was handcuffed, bundled into a police car, and taken for fingerprinting, after which he was shoved into a car full of FBI men for the short drive to a federal ma
gistrate. “So who are you guys?” Hilton asked at one point. Coulson, Murphy, and the others introduced themselves. “Oh, I heard of you guys,” Hilton said, daring a smile. “We know who’s chasing us, you know.”
“Fred,” Coulson said, “if you know our names, why didn’t you just call us and surrender? Our number’s in the book, you know.”
“You guys just don’t get it, do you?” Hilton snapped. “We’re at war. The people are at war with this fascist government. I’m a soldier on my side, and you guys are soldiers on your side, and we won’t ever surrender.” Coulson twisted to face him. “No, Freddie, we’re not at war,” he said. “If we were at war, you’d have a great big hole in your chest from my rifle.” Fred Hilton said no more.3
Once again Twymon Meyers had gotten away, but later that day Jim Murphy got a follow-up tip from their informant, this one on the BLA’s dashing Andrew Jackson. According to the informant, Jackson was holed up with Denise Oliver in a flat at 158th and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. FBI agents surrounded the building the next morning. Jim Murphy and another agent swung a battering ram, knocking the apartment’s door off its hinges. An agent named Errol Meyers barged inside, then into the bedroom, where Jackson was in bed with Oliver. Slowly he put up his hands. “Don’t shoot, man,” he said. “Don’t shoot.”
• • •
After three high-profile arrests orchestrated by the FBI, it was time for the NYPD’s retooled, computerized BLA squad to make its mark. The good news, as far as Chief Harold Schryver was concerned, was that there were only a handful of hardened BLA soldiers still at large; the bad news was that they were the most desperate and dangerous of all. In mid-September, days after the onetime Panther Herman Bell and several others were arrested for a string of bank robberies in New Orleans, the New York Transit Police received a tip that a BLA soldier named Robert “Seth” Hayes, wanted for shooting a transit cop that June, was holed up in a tenement apartment at 1801 Bryant Avenue in the Bronx. Surveillance suggested that a number of people appeared to be living with him, including three women and at least one infant.
Days of Rage Page 29