The Savage City (45 page)

George had to borrow thirty-five cents from his lawyer for the subway back to East New York.

As the train emerged from the tunnel onto the elevated tracks in Brooklyn, George peered from the window at the dingy tenement buildings, liquor store signs, and church spires of the borough's skyline. He'd often been told by lawyers, journalists, and civil rights activists that his story was incredible; now a famous Hollywood screenwriter was saying the same. He had suffered a terrible injustice, they said; if people knew the details, the criminal justice system would be reformed forever. He was an important man, they said, and his case was a part of history. Hearing all those kind words made George feel good; it gave him a feeling of relevance, gave his life a sense of purpose. But then they would go back to their lives, and George would go back to his, and nothing had changed. In fact, his financial situation only seemed to get worse as time went on, and his legal situation was like an artifact from another age, mired in sludge, calcifying further with each passing day.

Your day will come, they told George. But his daily routine, his struggle for shelter, work, sustenance, and survival weighed on his shoulders like a bag full of bricks. Out on the streets and in the courts, nothing seemed to change. Some people looked at this reality and became angry—they robbed and they shot at police and engaged in acts of civil disobedience. Whitmore mostly felt despair. No matter how hard he tried, in the collective eyes of the city he remained a nigger with a rap sheet.

THE RAT-A-TAT-TAT OF
machine-gun fire strafed the ceiling at the Triple-O social club. Plaster, dust, and debris rained down on the patrons, huddled together in only their underwear. The group of fifteen men and fifteen women had been ordered to strip by Dhoruba Bin Wahad. After they'd dumped their clothes in a pile in the middle of the floor, he called for everyone to “shut the fuck up!”—and unloaded a round of bullets into the ceiling for emphasis. Everyone shut the fuck up.

“Get the money,” Dhoruba told Jamal, who had already grabbed cash from behind the bar and dumped it into a bag. Another accomplice, Augustus Qualls, fleeced the patrons' clothing for cash and other valuables.

“Stay cool and you won't get hurt,” Dhoruba told the patrons.

The employees, and some of the patrons, knew the routine. Robberies were a common occurrence at the Triple-O, a gambling and narcotics joint located on a desolate stretch of Park Avenue at 171st Street in the South Bronx. The place was an illegal after-hours club, so the owners weren't likely to call the cops to report a robbery. The only way a club like the Triple-O could protect itself was to have plenty of security on the premises, but Dhoruba and his crew—Jamal Joseph, Qualls, and Butch Mason—negated all that by showing up with an arsenal big enough to intimidate a small army. Dhoruba brandished a .45-caliber M3A submachine gun, also known as a “grease gun.” Jamal carried a double-
barreled sawed-off shotgun in one hand and a 9-millimeter Browning automatic in the other. Qualls had a sawed-off shotgun and a .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum. Mason had a Colt .45-caliber revolver. In the glove compartment of their getaway car, they'd brought along a U.S. Army hand grenade, for good measure.

In the four months since Dhoruba had gone underground, he and a small core of supporters had been living off what Carlos Marighella, in his urban guerrilla manual, referred to as “expropriations.” Wrote the Brazilian revolutionary: “It is impossible for the urban guerrilla to exist and survive without fighting to expropriate.” In other words: one must steal to survive. In Marighella's case, expropriation involved “government resources and the wealth belonging to the rich businessmen, the large land owners and the imperialists.” For those in the black urban underground in America, it meant robbing banks, bars, gambling spots, and social clubs. Black Liberation Army members referred to this as their “narcotics eradication program”: they targeted known drug spots—especially those suspected of making regular payoffs to the police—which allowed them to claim they were doing good for the community while expropriating the one thing they needed most: cash money. According to Dhoruba,

Dhoruba's crew had chosen the Triple-O partly because of its desolate location. One thing they hadn't anticipated was that a gypsy cab driver would drive by as they were entering the club, guns in tow. The cabbie alerted two cops in a squad car a few blocks away, and the cops were driving up to the club when they thought they heard machine-gun fire inside the building.

Butch Mason was standing guard outside the club when the green-and-white cop car approached. It was Mason who'd lost his cool during the assault on the BPP newspaper distribution center in Queens six weeks before, killing Sam Napier; Dhoruba had posted him outside to keep him away from the action in the club. With his .45 tucked in his belt, Mason saw the cop car driving up just as he heard the sound
of gunfire inside. Mason turned and ran in to see what was happening.

Dhoruba, Jamal, and Qualls were gathering up cash and valuables when Mason rushed in. “Hey, what the hell's going on in here? There's cops out there.”

“How many?” asked Dhoruba.

Just one car, Mason said—but they were bound to call for backup after hearing the gunfire.

Dhoruba ran over to the window and peeked from behind a curtain at the street below. He saw four squad cars, with more arriving from all directions. There were half a dozen cops in the street with their guns drawn, motioning others to cover the rear entrance.

Damn,
Dhoruba mumbled to himself.
These motherfuckers got us surrounded
. The words of Marighella rang in his ears: “The urban guerrilla is characterized by his bravery and his decisive nature…. [He] must be a person of great cleverness to compensate for the fact that he is not sufficiently strong in weapons, ammunition and equipment.”

Turning back to the patrons, Dhoruba said, “Okay, folks, put your clothes back on. There's a bunch of pigs outside. Let's all be cool. We're gonna act like nothin's happening, you dig?”

The patrons did as they were told. By the time the cops came through the door, everyone was mostly dressed—shirttails hanging out, one shoe on and one shoe off, but presentable. Stashing their guns under a table, Dhoruba and his crew mixed in with the patrons.

“What's going on here?” asked a police sergeant.

“Nothin',” said one of the patrons.

Something was odd; the patrons were unusually somber.

“We heard shots being fired,” said a patrolman.

The patrons looked around at one another.

“No, there wasn't no shooting here,” one woman said.

“Yeah, some dudes tried to rip us off,” a man said. “But they ran out the back. They gone.”

The cops looked at one another. The patrons looked down at the floor. Then someone spoke up from the back of the group. “No, that's not true. The cats you looking for are right here. That's him, and him and him and him.” He pointed at Dhoruba and the others. The people moved aside, and the cops cuffed Dhoruba and the others without a struggle. A few minutes later, they found the small arsenal of weapons under a table.

The cops didn't know who they had. Dhoruba and Jamal were carrying false identification, Qualls and Mason no ID at all.

One item that immediately caught the attention of the police was the .45-caliber submachine gun, the same type of weapon used in the shooting outside D.A. Hogan's home three weeks earlier. The machine gun was immediately rushed to the ballistics lab.

Meanwhile, the four robbery suspects were loaded into separate vehicles and taken to the Forty-eighth Precinct on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, where they were photographed and fingerprinted. Remembered Dhoruba:

At the precinct, Dhoruba, Jamal, Qualls, and Mason were all held in separate interrogation rooms. Dhoruba and Jamal kept their mouths shut, but Qualls and maybe Mason—Dhoruba wasn't sure—started to talk. Before long, word was circulating throughout the precinct and law enforcement circles throughout the city: The cops were holding Dhoruba Bin Wahad, aka Richard Moore. It was almost too good to be true: one of the most wanted of the black radicals terrorizing the city had fallen into their collective lap during a bush-league robbery.

There was plenty of work to be done—evidence to be gathered, witnesses to be sought and massaged. But the police had their first big break in solving one of the most heinous crimes against American law enforcement anyone could remember.

 

THE FUNERALS FOR
Officers Jones and Piagentini were held in late May. The grief felt by the families of the deceased and by the police department in general was without precedent. These cops had not been killed during the commission of a “crime” in the traditional sense, which would have been bad enough. They had been executed, shot down sim
ply because they were police officers. To most white cops, the motive for these murders was beyond comprehension. For black cops, it was cause for alarm, because the BLA had announced that a cop's race didn't matter: “Every policeman, lackey or running dog of the ruling class must make his or her choice now. Either side with the people, poor and oppressed, or die for the oppressor.”

The reaction was immediate. Before the funereal bagpipes of the department's Emerald Pipe Band had even sounded, virtually every division within the force was involved in the investigation. The two incidents—the Curry and Binetti shooting and the Jones and Piagentini killings—were dovetailed into one investigation. Forty-eight detectives and ten supervisors were assigned under the command of an inspector and a lieutenant. A specialized unit of forty detectives and four supervisors worked back-to-back tours, from 10:00
A.M.
to 6:00
P.M.
, and 6:00
P.M.
to 2:00
A.M.
Within a matter of weeks, they had interviewed nearly five hundred witnesses, suspects, and persons of interest. According to a status report written by the inspector overseeing the investigation, “Approximately 1000 DD-5's [police department activity reports] were submitted, 450 telephone calls were checked out. In addition, approximately 450,000 prints have been scanned from the micro-film file, 85,000 prints in the latent file, 300,000 manually from the main file and all prints from daily arrests have been checked.”

Eventually, the investigation of the police shootings would lead to sixty-two arrests—mostly incidental arrests of people wanted for unrelated crimes—and result in the seizure of thirty-three handguns, twelve rifles, four shotguns, one machine gun, and more than three thousand rounds of ammunition.

The manpower and hours devoted to the investigation would make it one of the most extensive in the history of the NYPD, but the fallout from the police shootings would reach well beyond local police.

On May 26, 1971, less than a week after the killings of Jones and Piagentini, J. Edgar Hoover discussed the recent outbreak of urban violence with Richard Nixon. The president, whose reelection campaign in 1972 would be determined in part by how well he had delivered on his promise of “law and order” in cities like New York, was disturbed by the spate of shootings attributed to black militants. Nixon told Hoover that he should “take the gloves off” when dealing with Black Panthers and
the like. Hoover passed the president's comments on to field agents via a confidential memo, authorizing a new round of counterintelligence and investigative activity.

Together, the FBI and NYPD inaugurated OPERATION NEWKILL, which would be devoted solely to seeking out and taking down anyone even peripherally involved in the police shootings or recent activities of the Black Liberation Army. The NYPD liaison was Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman, a cigar-chomping cop from the old school who undertook his duties with swagger and confidence. Hoover promised Seedman and the NYPD access to the latest fingerprinting and ballistics technologies, as well as use of the FBI's Black Agitator database. Dozens of agents would be assigned to augment interrogations, interviews, and stakeouts. In return for this unusual level of interdepartmental cooperation, Hoover demanded only one thing: that the FBI's involvement would never be acknowledged. NEWKILL would be a confidential investigation, known only to the police commissioner, the chief of detectives, and a handful of other high-ranking members of the NYPD.

Almost from the beginning of NEWKILL's formation, Dhoruba Bin Wahad was designated as a key target. In mid-May, the FBI's latent print lab had made a startling discovery: fingerprints matching those of Dhoruba and Jamal Joseph had been found on the copy of the
New York Post
that was used to wrap the license plate delivered along with the BLA's communiqué claiming credit for the Curry and Binetti shooting. The feds and local police were surprised: their sources had insisted that Dhoruba and Jamal were in Algeria, an impression that seemed to be confirmed by Dhoruba's article in the
New York Times,
with its Algiers dateline. The copy of the
Post
with Dhoruba's fingerprints was from May 20, putting him in the United States as of that date. A confidential teletype from NEWKILL's special agent in charge (SAC) to Hoover noted the finding:

Five days after this memo was transmitted, Dhoruba, Jamal, and the others were busted at the Triple-O social club.

At the Forty-eighth Precinct station house in the Bronx, Dhoruba sat in the interrogation room, saying little beyond “I know my rights. I wanna see my lawyer.” The fact that the cops hadn't killed him, or physically abused him in any way, suggested to him that he was a prize catch. When an FBI agent entered the room and introduced himself, Dhoruba sensed for the first time that the authorities might well try to pin any number of recent BLA crimes on him, including the shootings of the police officers in Manhattan.

Eventually, Dhoruba was transferred to the Bronx House of Detention and placed in solitary confinement. Later that day, he learned from an attorney that the NYPD had issued a press release confirming that the .45-caliber submachine gun seized at the Triple-O club was the same gun that had been used in the shooting of Officers Curry and Binetti.

Now they had him. Locked in his four-by-six-foot cell, Dhoruba could feel the full weight of his situation closing in. If Qualls and even Mason were talking, the cops might soon have enough to name him as an accomplice in the Sam Napier murder. Now they were trying to pin that Riverside Drive cop shooting on him; they might even try to nail him for the other cop shooting too, the one where the two cops were killed. Dhoruba was in what is commonly known on the street as a fucked-up predicament.