Tim could hear something else. Not in the room but somewhere outside in the night. Distant but chilling.
He could hear gunfire.
AN INVADING ENEMY
The first shots were fired a week earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1972, although some would argue later that this war began centuries before.
A phantom gunman lay in wait in a vacant lot across from New Orleans’s Central Lockup on Perdido Street—where prisoners are booked, fingerprinted, and photographed—just before the jail’s 11 p.m. shift change. When two police recruits came into view, he cut loose with seven shots from a high-powered rifle, killing nineteen-year-old unarmed police cadet Alfred Harrell and wounding a lieutenant.
Police searching the empty lot found a dropped .38 caliber blue-steel Colt revolver, spent .44 Magnum shell casings, footprints, several strings of firecrackers, and other evidence left behind, but the shooter had melted into the night.
But eighteen minutes later, another cop, thirty-year-old K-9 officer Ed Hosli, was mortally wounded while investigating a burglar alarm less than a quarter mile (half a kilometer) from the jail at a warehouse in Gert Town, a poor, black neighborhood where crime and hatred of cops flourished. Spent casings and other evidence at the scene—including a leather bag containing two cans of lighter fluid and some firecrackers—pointed to the same assailant who shot up the city lockup.
The next day, when police flooded Gert Town looking for the assailant, they were treated as an invading enemy. Armed black men shadowed the cops. NOPD switchboards were swamped with callers reporting dozens of fake sniper sightings. After nightfall, some locals shot out streetlights, making the investigation harder and adding an element of menace.
Even before the New Year’s Eve shootings, tensions between New Orleans cops and the city’s poor blacks had been high. In the past year, Police Superintendent Clarence Giarrusso had created the Felony Action Squad, an elite unit assigned to target violence in the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Announcing the squad’s formation in 1972, Giarrusso proudly told reporters that if any of the unit’s twelve undercover agents encountered armed robbers, rapists, or murderers, they could “shoot to kill.”
A series of armed conflicts with Black Panthers and several other black revolutionary organizations in New Orleans’s Desire public housing projects only made matters worse.
Louisiana was smoldering with racial friction. The previous January, two Black Muslim militants had been shot to death by police at a Baton Rouge race riot in which two white deputies also died; among the thirty-one wounded, fourteen were cops. And on November 16, 1972, two black student protesters had been shot and killed at Southern University in Baton Rouge, but their killer (allegedly a police officer) was never identified.
So when the Gert Town sweep wrapped up, the NOPD had precious few clues as to their sniper’s identity or whereabouts. It was clear that the same shooter (or shooters) shot three cops on New Year’s Eve, probably with the same .44 Magnum rifle. They also knew he had wounded himself while trying to break into the warehouse because he left a trail of bloody handprints and spatters.
The investigation wasn’t dead by a long shot. One bit of evidence looked like a promising piece of the puzzle.
A young, slightly built black man had broken into a black Baptist church in Gert Town the night of the shootings. When he was surprised by the pastor the next day, he fled, leaving a satchel of bullets, bloodstains all around the sanctuary, and an apology: “I am sorry for breaking the lock on your church door, but pastor at two o’clock I felt I had to get right with the Lord. You see I was a sinner then, walking past your church …I was drinking …I then broke the door and fell on my knees in prayer. Now I have managed to get it together. I will send you the money for a new lock. God bless you.”
And some potential clues were never fully investigated or simply missed.
Two days after the shootings, a local grocer named Joe Perniciaro told police a young black man with a bloody bandage on his left hand had come into his store just a couple blocks from the warehouse where Hosli was shot. The kid wore a dark jacket and Army fatigues, and Perniciaro feared he might rob the place, but he left without incident after buying a razor.
On Perdido Street, just two blocks from Central Lockup, patrolmen found an abandoned two-door, blue 1963 Chevrolet with Kansas plates and the keys still in the ignition. When they ran the license number, LYE 1367, it came back to a Mark James Robert Essex, age twenty-three, of 902 Cottonwood Street in Emporia, Kansas. With no priors and no warrants, the kid checked out, so police wrote it off as a stalled vehicle and cleared young Essex.
But before the New Year’s Eve sniper investigation could unfold fully, before New Orleans could rest easier, even before the coming week was finished …a bloody, one-man race war would erupt in the worst carnage the city had seen since the War of 1812.
And police would hear the name Mark Essex again.
MARK ESSEX’S FAMILY AND FRIENDS BELIEVE THE MILD-MANNERED, SMALL-TOWN KANSAS KID ENCOUNTERED UNEXPECTED RACISM IN THE U.S. NAVY. ANGERED BY IT, HE FELL UNDER THE SWAY OF RADICAL BLACK MILITANTS.
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FROM CHOIRBOY TO REVOLUTIONARY
Mark James Essex’s private war began in the peaceful prairie town of Emporia, Kansas, an American Gothic village once described as “grassland, stoplights, grassland again.”
Emporia was a meatpacking town of fewer than thirty thousand citizens, but fewer than five hundred of them were black in the 1960s. Jimmy—as his friends and family called him—was the second of five children born to Nellie and Mark Henry Essex, a foreman at one of the local meat plants. The seven of them lived in a modest white frame house on the eastern edge of town, near the Santa Fe Railway tracks, an area where most of the town’s minorities also lived.
Jimmy grew up happy but soft-spoken, congenial but unremarkable. He was the kid nobody noticed and few remembered. He loved to fish and hunt, and he was a crack shot. He attended church faithfully enough that he talked about becoming a minister someday. He mowed neighbors’ lawns for pocket money. Jimmy Essex was, both literally and metaphorically, a Boy Scout and a choirboy, not a loner or rebel.
In school, Jimmy was a C student who probably had Bs in him, but he never pushed himself that hard. Short and skinny, he didn’t play sports, although he played saxophone in the Emporia High School band for three years. When it appeared he was better with his hands than with his mind, Jimmy spent his last two years at a vocational-technical school, where he focused on auto mechanics.
In January 1969, after one listless semester at college and worries about being drafted to fight in Vietnam, Jimmy Essex enlisted for four years in the U.S. Navy. After graduating from boot camp with outstanding ratings, he went to dental technician school, where he graduated with the highest honors before being assigned to the clinic at the naval air station in Imperial Beach, California.
Jimmy wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Back home, he’d never seen racism as virulent as he saw in the Navy, where he came to believe black men were still treated as second-class citizens. He suffered racial slurs, ridiculous and meticulous searches of his car when he came and went from the base, harassment in the barracks, extra guard duty, trifling orders from white superiors intended only to exasperate—all irritations that most black sailors encountered but shrugged off.
But not Jimmy Essex.
Although only 5-foot-4 (1.6 meters) and less than 140 pounds (64 kilograms), Jimmy fought back physically. Sometimes he complained bitterly to officers about the racist behavior he experienced. In letters home, he wrote that “blacks have trouble getting along here.” His constant skirmishing often landed him in hot water and marked him as a troublemaker.
Eventually, Jimmy befriended a black sailor named Rodney Frank, a convicted rapist and armed robber from New Orleans who hid behind his own militant bombast. Frank introduced Jimmy to radical Black Panther literature, to the revolutionary writings of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, and to Black Mu
slim fanatics off-base.
In a matter of months, everything changed. Jimmy Essex, the quiet choirboy from Kansas, was dead. Mark Essex, the angry revolutionary, stood defiantly in his place.
On October 19, 1970, Essex went AWOL. He packed a duffel bag and boarded a bus back home to Emporia. When his parents picked him up at the bus depot, he told them he had come home “to think about what a black man has to do to survive.”
He was angry, bitter, and isolated, obsessed with the wrongs he had suffered and adamant about not returning to the Navy. His worried mother asked the Reverend W. A. Chambers, the Baptist minister who’d baptized Jimmy at age twelve, to speak to her son. Essex wanted to hear none of it. He was not only disillusioned with the world, but with God, too.
“Christianity is a white man’s religion,” he told his former minister, “and the white man’s been running things too long.”
Twenty-eight days later, Essex returned to his base to face a court-martial.
Although he had already pleaded guilty to being absent without leave, Essex’s defense was that the Navy’s entrenched racism was to blame. Hate made him do it. “I had to talk to some black people because I had begun to hate all white people. I was tired of going to white people and telling them my problems and not getting anything done about it.”
The court actually gave credence to Essex’s claims of discrimination and handed out a relatively insignificant sentence, but within weeks, Essex was given a special discharge for unspecified “character and behavior disorders” after a Navy psychiatrist had concluded that Essex had an “immature personality.” In his report, the psychiatrist noted that Essex exhibited no suicidal tendencies, but “he alludes to the fact he ‘might do something’ if he doesn’t get what he wants.”
In the end, the Navy washed its hands of Seaman Mark James Robert Essex, who served for little more than half his enlistment.
Starting in February 1971, Essex spent a few months in New York City, where he voraciously consumed Black Panther Party propaganda and fueled the flames that were beginning to flicker deep inside. He studied the Panthers’ urban guerrilla warfare tactics and started calling cops “pigs.” He also learned that one of the Panthers’ weapons of choice was the .44 Magnum semiautomatic carbine, a light and powerful hunting rifle that was devastating at close range.
EVERY INCH OF THE WALLS IN MARK ESSEX’S UPTOWN APARTMENT WERE COVERED WITH BLACK MILITANT AND RACIST GRAFFITI THAT CALLED FOR A BLOODY REVOLUTION AGAINST WHITE “DEVILS”—ESPECIALLY COPS.
© Bettmann/CORBIS
Back in Emporia, Essex couldn’t adjust. His few childhood friends had all moved away, and he yearned to live in a black man’s city. He worked a series of odd jobs for a year or so, but never with any enthusiasm. His hatred, however, continued to simmer.
Then one day, he walked into the local Montgomery Ward store and bought himself a .44 Magnum Ruger Deerslayer rifle, which he practiced firing in the countryside until the gun had become an extension of him.
Whether Emporia had become too claustrophobic or Essex had decided to launch a new front in his private race war, nobody knows. But in the summer of 1972, he picked up the phone, called his old friend Rodney Frank—also recently drummed out of the Navy as an incorrigible—and decided to move to New Orleans.
To the outside world, Mark Essex appeared to be just another young black man who didn’t know exactly where he was going or why. He entered a training program for vending-machine repairmen and rented a cheap apartment in the back of a shabby house.
But inwardly, he was reaching an ugly kind of critical mass. His defiant, revolutionary outlook grew darker. He began calling himself Mata, the Swahili word for a hunter’s bow. He was devouring militant newspapers and books. And he was filling every inch of the pale brown walls in his little two-room apartment with a hateful scrawl of angry anti-white slogans like “My destiny lies in the bloody death of racist pigs,” “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun,” “Hate white people beast of the earth,” “Kill pig Nixon and all his running dogs.”
All references to whites, and that was most of them, were daubed in red paint. The rest were black. He even wrote on the ceiling, taunting the police he knew would eventually visit his frowsy sanctuary: “Only a pig would read shit on the ceiling.”
In November 1972, when Essex heard the news that two black students had been gunned down at Southern University while protesting the white man’s oppression, he declared his own personal war on whites and cops.
After Christmas, he handwrote a note to a local TV station announcing his bloody intentions:
Africa greets you.
On Dec. 31, 1972, aprx. 11 pm, the downtown New Orleans Police Department will be attacked. Reason—many, but the death of two innocent brothers will be avenged. And many others.
P.S. Tell pig Giarrusso the felony action squad ain’t shit.
MATA
The attack happened as Essex had promised, although the letter was not opened at the TV station until days later. It was revealed too late to prevent the murders of Alfred Harrell and Ed Hosli. Nevertheless, it would not only link Mark Essex undeniably to those New Year’s Eve shootings—in which his first victim, ironically, was a black man—but also foretold a bigger, bloodier butchery to come.
“THE REVOLUTION IS HERE”
On the rain-shrouded morning of Sunday, January 7, 1973, Mark Essex girded for battle.
Almost a thousand miles away, Nellie Essex prepared for church, where she would cry and pray for her son’s wayward soul.
Tim Ursin kissed his children good-bye before going to work.
And a whole city awoke to a misty, gray day that would be unlike any before it.
Shortly after 10 a.m., Mark Essex walked back into Joe Perniciaro’s market and stood in the doorway holding his .44 Magnum hunting rifle in his right hand. With his wounded left hand, he pointed at Perniciaro.
SNIPER MARK ESSEX’S BULLET-MANGLED CORPSE LAY UNTOUCHED FOR HALF A DAY ON THE HOWARD JOHNSON’S ROOF UNTIL POLICE WERE CONVINCED NO OTHER SHOOTERS REMAINED IN THE DOWNTOWN NEW ORLEANS HOTEL.
Associated Press
“You. You’re the one I want,” Essex shouted. “Come here.”
Perniciaro recognized him as the bandaged young man who bought the razor five days before. He started to run toward the back of the store. Essex, believing Perniciaro had fingered him to the cops, had come for revenge.
Essex fired one booming shot, blasting a gaping hole in the grocer’s right shoulder and knocking him to the floor, before he turned and ran down the street.
Four blocks away, a fleeing Essex ran up to a black man sitting in front of his house in a beige and black 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle.
“Hi, brother, get out,” Essex told him.
“You crazy, man?”
Essex leveled his rifle at the stunned man’s head.
“I don’t want to kill you, brother. Just honkies,” he said calmly. “But I will kill you, too.”
As the man leaped out, Essex jumped into the car and peeled out in the stolen Chevelle, sideswiping another vehicle before disappearing into traffic.
Police radios crackled with nearly simultaneous reports of a shooting and an armed carjacking in the Gert Town district. Cruisers scrambled to respond, but the stolen Chevelle eluded them. All they had was a description of a slim, young black male, up to 5-foot-4 (1.6 meters), weighing about 140 pounds (64 kilograms), wearing a green camouflage jacket and olive-drab fatigue pants. He was carrying a hunting rifle onto which he’d tied a red, green, and black handkerchief—later identified as the Black Liberation Flag.
While police searched for the stolen Chevelle, Mark Essex careened into the parking garage of the Howard Johnson Hotel on Loyola Street and left the car on the fourth level. He ran up the stairwell to a locked fire door on the eighth floor, where he pounded until two black maids came to the door. He told one he wanted to visit a friend who was staying on the eighteenth floor.
She hesitated. She could
lose her job if she let a stranger through the fire door.
“Are you a soul sister?” he asked one of them.
She said she was.
“Sister, the revolution is here,” he said. “It’s one for all and two for one.”
But the maid still wouldn’t let him enter, so Essex climbed another flight of stairs to the ninth floor, where he again pounded on the fire door and was again turned away by a maid.
On the eighteenth floor, he found a fire door propped open and went into the hallway, where he encountered two frightened maids and a houseman, all three of whom were black.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you black people,” he reassured them as he hurried past. “I want the whites.”
But before Essex could get to an elevator, a white guest, twenty-seven-year-old Dr. Robert Steagall, saw him with the gun and tried to tackle him. They wrestled desperately for a few seconds before Essex shot the doctor in the chest. When Betty Steagall ran to her husband’s aid, Essex coolly put the muzzle of his carbine against the base of her skull and pulled the trigger. She died embracing her dead husband.
Essex untied the Black Liberation Flag from his gun and threw it near their corpses.
Inside the Steagalls’ room, Essex set the drapes on fire and ran to the nearest stairwell.
Moving quickly through the hotel, he started several fires on various floors by soaking phone books with lighter fluid, then igniting them beneath the draperies. The whole time, he would shoot at any white folks he saw and would set off firecrackers in smoky halls and stairwells to create the illusion that many snipers and arsonists were prowling the hotel’s eighteen floors and killing at random.
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