Days of Rage (38 page)

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 later 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 magistrate. “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.

Early in the evening of September 17, police quietly surrounded the building. The apartment, a double-sized unit with doors labeled “B” and “C,” was on the first floor. Just before eight o’clock a group of nine NYPD detectives carrying battering rams hustled inside the building and rushed the two doors. Door B, a metal door, refused to budge; after two strikes from a battering ram, neither would Door C. At that point someone inside the apartment opened fire with a shotgun. One final heave of the battering ram and Door C flew open. Six detectives rushed into the dim apartment, whose sole adornment appeared to be a poster of George Jackson on one wall. Hayes emerged from a bedroom, holding a shotgun at his waist. He fired, striking a detective named Melvin Betty in the hand. Betty staggered back into the corridor.

The apartment erupted in gunfire as Hayes disappeared back into the bedroom, the detectives firing wildly in his direction. Inside, a woman began screaming, “My baby! My baby is in here!” It was bedlam. Two detectives tried to duck into the living room, only to be driven back by fire from an unseen gunman. Hayes poked his shotgun out from the bedroom door and fired another blast. A pair of detectives grabbed the smoking barrel, pushed Hayes back inside the room, and tackled him on a bed as a woman and her seventeen-day-old daughter screamed in a corner.

For a moment the apartment went silent. Detectives furiously reloaded their weapons, at one point sliding pistols across the floor to beef up their arsenal. Suddenly a detective named Maximo Jimenez, struck by a glancing bullet in the buttocks, saw something rolling out of the living room toward him. It was a smoke bomb. Thinking fast, Jimenez reached out his foot and kicked it back into the living room, which began to fill with smoke. “We were shouting things like, ‘You’re surrounded, throw out your guns and come out with your hands up,’” one detective later told the
Daily News
. “What they were shouting back wasn’t printable.” After several more staccato exchanges of gunfire, someone from within the living room shouted, “We give up!”

Coughing and hacking, two BLA soldiers, Melvin Kearney—wanted in
connection with the police shootings early that year—and Avon White, walked out, hands in the air. The trio’s three girlfriends eventually scurried out through the smoke as well. Three detectives were wounded. In a press conference afterward Police Commissioner Cawley—overjoyed—called the raid “a monumental event.”

It was almost over. With most of the BLA now off the streets, the head of the Major Case Squad, Harold Schryver, decided to make an all-out effort to bring in the last and deadliest of its gunmen, Twymon Meyers. The morning after the Bronx gunfight, the FBI named him to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Leads came in slowly, most on buildings in the South Bronx where Meyers had been seen. They found apartments on 117th and 118th Streets that he had used months before. Finally, in October, they unearthed a hideout on 116th Street that hadn’t been reoccupied in the weeks since Meyers had left. The apartment was filthy, strewn with trash, and infested with rats. In the garbage detectives found a receipt for a money order issued by a store in the Bronx. At the store a clerk handed over the original order, made out to a real estate company. A visit to the real estate company revealed that the money had been used to rent an apartment at 263 West 118th Street, which also had not been reoccupied since Meyers had last used it. Inside detectives found a copy of the
Amsterdam News
with the page carrying apartment listings torn out. They concluded that Meyers was using it to rent his hideouts.