Days of Rage (37 page)

“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 article, 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.”

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.