The Savage City (46 page)

The lawmen were excited. NEWKILL had been in effect less than two weeks and they'd already landed a Big Fish. As with most investigations, the best results sometimes came through hard work—but sometimes, when you created the proper environment, they just fell right into your lap. Bin Wahad had screwed up and got himself caught at the Triple-O; that was luck. What came next was more like divine intervention—a lead so unanticipated that it made the agents working OPERATION NEWKILL believe they were on the side of the angels.

On the afternoon of June 12, a call came in on the investigator's hotline, a phone number that had been posted on flyers all over the city. It was the voice of a young woman with a slight Caribbean accent. She told a detective, “The four men you are holding are not the ones who shot the cops. They may know who did it. They did not do it, neither
the Riverside Drive shooting nor the Harlem shooting. They were at my girlfriend's house, 757 Beck Street in the Bronx. Her name is Pauline Joseph. She's the common-law wife of Jamal Joseph. They did nothing until the social club robbery. I don't want to see the innocent accused. I will call again.”

The detectives didn't wait around for the woman to call again. They immediately drove over to 757 Beck Street and discovered that the woman who had made the call was herself Pauline Joseph. A petite black woman of twenty-two, Pauline was a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands. She worked as a receptionist for a doctor and had a baby named Brenda. The baby's father was Jamal Joseph.

Pauline allowed the cops to search the premises. What they discovered was the remnants of an underground guerrilla pad, with an entire room full of medical supplies for treating wounds, revolutionary literature strewn about, bottles for making Molotov cocktails, and the like. The cops asked Pauline if she would be willing to come to the precinct to be questioned. She agreed.

What followed would continue to one degree or another over the next two and a half years. Pauline Joseph talked. Sometimes she didn't even have to be asked a question before she began giving detailed explanations and stories of what had taken place at 757 Beck Street over the last several months. The apartment, it seemed, had become the central location for a highly active cell of the Black Liberation Army. Dhoruba and Jamal had been semiregulars there since they'd first skipped bail in the Panther Twenty-one trial. Sometime around the announcement of the verdict in that trial, they moved in permanently. And there were others who came and went—a veritable who's who of BLA militants, suspects in a spate of bank robberies, shootings, criminal conspiracies, and cop killings around the city. To the detectives, this looked like the mother lode.

Gradually the questioning zeroed in on the Curry and Binetti shooting. Joseph told the investigators that she'd heard Dhoruba and others talking about how they were going to “off a pig.” Dhoruba was the leader; he rarely went anywhere without his .45-caliber submachine gun, which he carried in a duffel bag and affectionately referred to as “the grease.” On the night of May 19, Pauline was in the apartment when Dhoruba and two others, Frank Fields and Michael Dennis Hill, showed up at the apartment in a state of excitement. They turned on the news
and watched, mesmerized, as a news bulletin described the police shooting on Riverside Drive.

“We need to clean out the car,” said Dhoruba. “Pauline, give us a hand.” They all went down to the blue Maverick. While the others removed the license plate from the car, Pauline felt around in the front seat for spent shell casings and noticed Dhoruba's machine gun under the seat. She heard Dhoruba say to Michael D. Hill, “You handled the grease gun real good but not good enough. The two cops lived.”

Later, the men regrouped in the apartment. Jamal was upset. “You know I wanted to go,” he told Dhoruba. “We gonna ice some pigs, I want to be there.” Jamal suggested to the others that they go over to Harlem Hospital and finish the job. “We can't,” said Dhoruba. “There are cops crawling all over the place.”

The NEWKILL investigators felt their pulses quickening. Pauline Joseph was giving them the goods. She told them that Dhoruba and Patricia “Kisha” Green, an activist with the Third World Woman's Alliance who had become his “revolutionary wife,” composed and typed out the BLA letter to the
New York Times
and WLIB Radio using a portable Smith Corona typewriter in the apartment. In a search of 757 Beck Street, detectives found a typewriter and later confirmed it was a perfect match for the letter.

Joseph also told them about the Sam Napier murder: on April 17, the day of the killing, she bought adhesive tape at Sherman's Drug Store for a crew that included Dhoruba, Jamal, Michael D. Hill, Butch Mason, Mark Holder, Andrew Jackson, and Frank Fields. The crew left the house with the tape, several rifles and guns, cord from a venetian blind, and Molotov cocktails that Pauline, Patricia Green, and two other revolutionary wives had prepared. Hours later, the crew returned to the house and listened to a radio news bulletin about the fire and how an unidentified body had been discovered in the basement. Joseph claimed to have heard Butch Mason say, “I shot him in the head, pow, pow, pow.” When detectives went back to 757 Beck Street to follow up on the leads, they found a venetian blind cord that matched the one used to tie up Sam Napier, as well as the roll of adhesive tape and leftover Molotov cocktails.

One disappointment stemming from the questioning of Pauline Joseph concerned the Jones-Piagentini murders. On the night of the shooting, Joseph said she'd been at the apartment eating pepper steak and drinking Boone's Farm Apple Wine. Dhoruba, Jamal, Kisha Green,
and a few others had just returned from dropping off the BLA letters at the offices of the
Times
and WLIB. They had the radio on, half-expecting news of the letters to come over the airwaves, when Butch Mason burst into the apartment.

“Hey, did you hear? Two brothers just offed two pigs in Harlem.”

Within a few minutes, a report about the shooting came on the radio. Later, the crew gathered around to watch a more detailed report on the eleven o'clock TV news, which carried footage of the crime scene, a somber press conference with Mayor Lindsay and Commissioner Murphy, and comments from people at the Colonial Park Housing Project, where the shooting took place.

“Damn, Butch, find out who iced those two pigs,” Jamal told Mason.

“I'll try,” said Mason.

The detectives listened to Joseph, but they weren't sure. Just to be sure, they rounded up Dhoruba, Jamal, Mason, and Augustus Qualls—all four of the men arrested at the Triple-O—and paraded them in a lineup before witnesses of the Jones and Piagentini murder. None of the witnesses identified Dhoruba or any of the others as the shooters.

In police parlance, Pauline Joseph was a “prize informant.” She was not herself a political militant, but she had sat ringside as perhaps the city's most active BLA cell plotted and carried out crimes. Still, as a potential trial witness, she was far from perfect: though much of what she told the detectives checked out, her stories had a way of changing. And her memory was open to suggestion, which was both good and bad.

An assistant D.A. was assigned to the case—John Keenan, head of the Manhattan D.A.'s Homicide Bureau, the same man who had prosecuted Ricky Robles for the Wylie-Hoffert murders back in 1965. You couldn't get much higher in the D.A.'s office than Keenan, who was rumored to be in line for the top job if and when D.A. Hogan decided to step down.

At Keenan's insistence, Pauline Joseph became a virtual ward of the state. She was set up in a room at the Commodore Hotel in midtown Manhattan and kept under armed guard twenty-four hours a day, with a female detective assigned as her full-time guardian. Detectives and FBI agents from OPERATION NEWKILL interviewed her almost daily.

Joseph was a troubled woman. She had twice done stints in a psychiatric hospital and been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She
had depended from time to time on both street prostitution and welfare for a living. Her motive for cooperating with the authorities was hard to discern: she told the investigators that her greatest dream was to be accepted into the U.S. Army, and they promised her that, if she proved helpful in her testimony, they would help make that happen.

It would be a while before investigators decided whether Joseph would hold up as a credible witness at trial, but in the meantime she offered them a treasure trove of useful information, presenting her account of events before various grand juries unfettered by cross-examination. The investigators parsed the information as it was released to the press, hoping to put maximum pressure on the accused. An unusual number of D.A.s and prosecutors were involved. Dhoruba and his crew had been arrested in the Bronx, but they were suspected of major crimes that would be prosecuted in Queens (the Napier murder) and Manhattan (the Curry and Binetti shooting).

That summer the indictments were rolled out one by one, like a series of explosions designed to shatter Dhoruba Bin Wahad's resolve. In the Bronx, D.A. Burton Roberts announced a seventy-five-count indictment against Dhoruba, Jamal, Qualls, and Mason on charges that included robbery, grand larceny, possession of a weapon as a felony, burglary, assault, and reckless endangerment. The following month, at a news conference in Queens, D.A. Thomas J. Mackell, accompanied by Chief Seedman, announced that seven men were being arraigned on charges of murder and first-degree arson in the death of Sam Napier. Dhoruba, Jamal, and Mason were among those charged; the other four were still at large.

The very next day—July 31—over in Manhattan the gray eminence himself, District Attorney Frank Hogan, made the announcement that everyone in law enforcement had been waiting for: Richard Moore, aka Dhoruba Bin Wahad, was being charged with attempted murder in the shooting of Officers Curry and Binetti outside Hogan's own home.

At his arraignment, Dhoruba refused to enter a plea to the charges against him, protesting that there weren't enough black folks on the grand jury to make it a genuine panel of his peers. Supreme Court Justice Xavier Riccobono entered a plea of not guilty on Dhoruba's behalf and ordered that he be held without bail.

 

FOR THE NYPD,
it should have been a time of great public sympathy. Cops were under assault from what some in the press referred to as a “black army.” Where the Black Panther Party had enjoyed some support in the media and among white liberals, almost no whites and not many blacks were willing to get behind the Black Liberation Army. The BLA made no pretense of promoting breakfast programs for children or the kinds of social services Huey Newton described as “survival programs.” The BLA's agenda was armed revolution, the sooner the better.

If the detectives and agents of NEWKILL thought taking down Dhoruba and his crew would defuse the BLA, they were wrong. Starting in the spring and into the fall, a number of BLA-affiliated militants whom Pauline Joseph had named as regulars at the 757 Beck Street safe house were involved in head-to-head combat with the police. In April, two cops were injured in a shoot-out in Harlem with BLA members. One of the black militants was shot and killed, another was captured, and a third—Robert Vickers—was shot and wounded but escaped.

In August, a crew of five heavily armed bank robbers stormed a Bankers Trust branch in Jackson Heights, Queens. The crew included Twymon Myers, a twenty-one-year-old known for his sweet disposition, and JoAnne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur, an attractive woman with a majestic Afro whom police had identified as “the soul of the black militants.” Assata, her boyfriend, Andrew Jackson, and their crew were believed to be responsible for securing false IDs for the BLA and facilitating an “underground railroad” for members on the run, usually through Detroit or upstate New York into Canada and often on to Algeria. At the Bankers Trust in Queens, Myers, Assata, and the others made off with $7,697. Assata and her distinctive Afro were caught on a surveillance camera.

A few months later, in another part of Queens, two policemen were chasing three men and a woman in a stolen car when the fleeing suspects tossed a grenade at the police car. Amazingly, the two cops escaped serious injury, but their patrol car was demolished. Working from FBI photos, a witness identified Assata and Andrew Jackson as the car's occupants.

It was a bitter harvest of BLA shootings, bombings, and threats against the police—yet public outrage over the incidents was noticeably lacking. By the fall of 1971, the exposure of rampant criminal behavior within the NYPD itself would make it hard for many to view the ongo
ing war between law enforcement and black radicals as a battle of good guys versus bad guys. And the man responsible for that shift was Bill Phillips.

 

FOR FIVE MONTHS,
from June through October 1971, Phillips circulated as an undercover operative for the Knapp Commission. To facilitate his work, he was restored to the Detective Bureau as a third-grade detective. Out of uniform and back in suit and tie, Phillips made the rounds much as he always had, except now he was wearing a recording device specially created by the man who had entrapped him—Teddy Ratnoff.

Phillips applied the same enthusiasm and initiative to his undercover work as he had to his life as a bent cop. He put major construction projects on the pad, then acted as bagman, making cash payments up the chain of command. He took payoffs from organized crime figures in East Harlem, protecting all manner of bookmaking, numbers, and narcotics operations, and made sure the local precinct received its “nut.” He spread the money around—though some on the Knapp Commission worried that Phillips was pocketing some of the cash himself. Brian Bruh, one of the investigators, considered Phillips “a crook.” “I didn't trust him,” he recalled. “So what I made him do was, he was under instructions to call me every single night…. If he was not working with me during the day, he had to call me during the day. I had to know where he was all the time.”