Days of Rage (29 page)

Amid the chaos of those early March days, the only constant was the rumor of imminent warfare between the East and West Coast Panthers. Zayd Shakur repeatedly told reporters that Newton had dispatched as many as seventy-five “robots” to wipe out the New York leadership. Overnight, the Panther offices in Harlem and the Bronx were transformed into fortresses. Guns were stockpiled. Windows were boarded. At any minute, Shakur warned, Newton’s assassins would strike.

Then, on the afternoon of Monday, March 8, came the spark. Robert Webb was a charismatic twenty-two-year-old Panther field marshal from the Bay Area who had come to Harlem the previous spring with two other Panthers in an effort to reassert Oakland’s control. Webb, however, warmed to the New Yorkers; when his companions were unceremoniously sent back to California, he stayed behind, emerging as a popular leader known as Coffee Man. “Coffee Man saw how we worked, and he hooked up with us,” a onetime Panther named Cyril Innis recalls. “He became one of us, and that made the powers that be very, very nervous.”

That Monday afternoon, in front of a Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant at the
corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, Webb confronted a rival Panther selling newspapers. Exactly what happened has never been explained, but Webb, who was carrying his customary .357 Magnum, ended up dead on the sidewalk, a single bullet hole in the back of his head. The Harlem Panthers would later claim he had been killed by a Newtonite assassin, but no arrest was ever made. In an FBI memo written to J. Edgar Hoover a month later, an agent in New York credited COINTELPRO “activities” with causing Webb’s murder. Webb’s death electrified the New York Panthers, who were convinced that the long-awaited war had begun.

“Right then, that’s when the BLA started,” Cyril Innis recalls. “Certain people were told to go underground. Who made the decisions? I wish I knew. To this day, I don’t really know.”

 • • • 

The full story of the Black Liberation Army’s origins will probably never be told. Too many people have died, then and since; too many who lived still worry about being prosecuted for the killings that began that chaotic spring. One man who will talk, however, was perhaps the BLA’s most important organizer. His name in 1971 was Richard “Dhoruba” Moore. Forty years later, after a legal odyssey as strange as any in U.S. history, he is known as Dhoruba bin-Wahad.

Dhoruba Moore, as he will be called, was twenty-six that spring. He was an unlikely underground commander, a rangy, motormouthed peacock and curbside intellectual whose rambling soliloquies on every conceivable topic tended to draw snickers from Panthers and reporters alike. Like Sekou Odinga and other Panthers, he was a onetime gang member who had been radicalized in prison. A talented recruiter, Dhoruba had been arrested and become one of the more notorious of the Panther 21, thanks to his penchant for outrageous courtroom outbursts.

That March, as tensions escalated between West and East Coast Panthers, Dhoruba and another 21 defendant, Michael “Cetawayo” Tabor, made bail and were released from custody. When the party split and open warfare appeared imminent, both men decided to join Cleaver in Algiers. With two others, they jumped bail and made their way to Montreal, where flights had been arranged. At the last moment, however, Dhoruba was informed that his papers weren’t ready; he couldn’t go. When Tabor boarded a plane to Algiers, Dhoruba was left behind. At that point, he had to make a choice. If he returned to New York, where he imagined Newton’s assassins were combing the streets in search of him, he was going back to fight—fight the West Coast Panthers and the New York police and anyone else who threatened them. “What else would we do? Join the Salvation Army?” Dhoruba recalls. “This was war.”

War meant one thing: mobilizing the underground, the nascent Black Liberation Army. “It was our plan when we came back to build an underground, to use the infrastructure we had in place, that would attack the police who had killed our people,” Dhoruba recalls. “We would strike back, and that’s what we did, or what we tried to do.”

Returning to New York, Dhoruba began gathering his people, many of whom had been put on alert that winter. By and large, those first BLA recruits were men, and a few women, with arms or medical training, whom Dhoruba felt he could trust. They came mostly from three neighborhoods, including the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where Dhoruba had worked as a Panther recruiter, and South Jamaica, the home of many of the “heaviest” Panthers, including the Shakur brothers and Sekou Odinga. A third source of recruits was the Washington Heights chapter of the National Committee to Combat Fascism, a Panther-affiliated group many would-be Panthers had joined when the party’s ranks were closed to new members in 1969. “Jamaica, Brownsville, and Washington Heights—that’s where almost all the initial BLA cadres came from,” Dhoruba recalls. “Andrew Jackson, Frank Fields, Assata Shakur—they all came from the Washington Heights chapter. I’d had Washington Heights on the down low for months. They were half expecting this.”

The cell that coalesced around Dhoruba Moore was only one of several that formed that spring in the chaos after Robert Webb’s death—an estimated fifty to eighty Panthers were in some stage of going underground—but it was the first to act. Several safe-house apartments were already in place, an archipelago of dingy flats scattered through Harlem and the Bronx. What amounted to the group’s headquarters was a shambling three-story
townhouse at 757 Beck Street in the Bronx, where Dhoruba stored the group’s weapons, including several hand grenades and a machine gun. Bunking off and on there were a dozen or so Panthers, all in their twenties, several of whom were destined for prominence within the BLA; these included Frank “Heavy” Fields, a chunky New York University dropout; Andrew Jackson, a suave, smooth-skinned Queens Panther; and sixteen-year-old Mark Holder, who had been at Robert Webb’s side when he was murdered. The townhouse doubled as their hospital. Friends at a radical-run clinic in the Bronx had stolen a closetful of medical supplies for them. The group’s medical expert—she knew first aid, at least—was Joanne Chesimard, later known as Assata Shakur, a smart, attractive City College student who would eventually become the BLA’s most infamous member.

The Beck Street cell’s first priority was money for food and rent. To get it, Dhoruba says, they began robbing heroin dealers, which brought the additional benefit of fighting the drug trade, a longtime Panther priority. “I knew all these major drug dudes, Nicky Barnes, Tito Johnson, Albie Simmons, from the Bronx and from prison,” Dhoruba recalls. “It was the natural place to get money. So when we first went underground, we started taking down heroin dealers. We were really rolling these motherfuckers. And they gave us information. When we rolled Tito, he says, ‘There’s a lot of pressure, we can’t work, the cops are all over us wanting information on you.’ That’s how we found the police were trying to use the dealers against us. We bashed down a lot of doors, man. We were like black cops.”

After several weeks, when neither the police nor a Panther assassination squad had found them, the talk at 757 Beck turned to revenge for Robert Webb’s murder. Their target was obvious: the East Coast office of the Newton-controlled Black Panther newspaper, on Northern Boulevard in Queens. The office was run by a popular thirty-two-year-old Panther named Sam Napier. They watched it for days. As police later pieced together events, seven members of the Beck Street underground, led more or less by Dhoruba, piled into a U-Haul truck and drove to Queens on the afternoon of April 17. Shooing away a number of women and children in the office, the group bound Napier with a venetian blind cord, tortured him, shot him four times, then set his body on fire.

To those white radicals who had rallied to the Panther 21’s defense, the sudden outbreak of violence was deeply unsettling. One of those caught in the political cross-currents was a twenty-three-year-old volunteer on the 21’s defense committee named Silvia Baraldini. She was an expatriate Italian businessman’s daughter who had grown up in Washington, D.C., and radicalized at the University of Wisconsin; in the next dozen years Baraldini would go on to one of the more colorful careers of any underground figure. “Suddenly, you know, all these Panthers we knew were killing each other,” she remembers. “None of us, the whites I mean, had any clue what was really going on.”

One might expect Napier’s gruesome murder to have intensified West Coast−East Coast violence. Instead, it ended it. The BLA never again targeted a Panther for death. Instead, barely a month later, its members would ambush four police officers, killing two. Contemporary accounts portrayed the May shootings of Officers Curry and Binetti and the murders of Officers Jones and Piagentini as attacks that erupted out of nowhere, with no warning. In fact, the BLA’s abrupt change in focus arose from a little-noticed incident in Harlem a full month earlier, on April 19, just two days after Sam Napier’s death.

That afternoon two patrolmen, Arthur Plate and Howard Steward, were cruising on West 121st Street when a pedestrian flagged them down and, motioning toward a trio of black men, said he had overheard them discussing plans for a robbery. The officers emerged from the car, approached the three men and ordered them into the foyer at 215 West 121st to be searched. Two complied. The third drew a pistol and opened fire. A wild gunfight ensued inside the vestibule. Officer Plate was struck in the face and fell to the floor, critically wounded. Officer Steward, struck in the thigh, ducked, drew his gun, and fired all six shots in his service revolver. His bullets killed one of the men, twenty-year-old Harold Russell, and injured a twenty-three-year-old named Anthony “Kimu” White. A third man, wounded in the shoulder, charged out the door and made his escape. Police identified him as Robert Vickers.

All three men, it turned out, were Cleaverite Panthers; the two survivors, in fact, would become active members of the BLA. For the police, it was just another nasty shooting; the NYPD had no idea the men were Panthers and
no clue that anything called the Black Liberation Army yet existed. For Dhoruba Moore’s new BLA, however, the gunfight was a call to arms. The wounded Robert Vickers made his way to 757 Beck Street, where Joanne Chesimard nursed him back to health.

“He comes back to Beck Street,” Dhoruba recalls, “and we decide that of course retaliation is appropriate. And it could be on Malcolm X’s birthday. So we decided to announce the debut of the BLA, the first black underground, on Malcolm’s birthday. May 19.”

The full story of those first two BLA attacks, on May 19 and 21, 1971, probably will never be told. After three trials and years of litigation, Dhoruba, whose fingerprints were found on one of the communiqués, would be convicted of his involvement. Forty years later, he will not discuss what happened. But all available evidence indicates that the two shootings were actually carried out by two unrelated groups of Panthers who knew nothing of each other’s plans. The May 19 shootings of Officers Binetti and Curry were the work of Panthers from 757 Beck Street, including Frank Fields, who was killed later that year. The May 21 murders of Officers Jones and Piagentini, as will be seen, were carried out by a group of out-of-state Panthers who happened to be visiting New York and, it appears, were inspired by the May 19 attacks. Dhoruba Moore, one surmises, wrote the communiqués for both incidents, even though he had no idea who was behind the second incident; presumably this was done to make the attacks appear related and the BLA more dangerous.

All Dhoruba will say today is that he regrets targeting patrolmen.

“The tactical mistake we made was killing the cops in uniform,” he says, “when we should’ve killed the higher-ups. That would’ve been more effective.”

 • • • 

In spearheading the BLA’s formation, Dhoruba expected it would take guidance, if not direct orders, from Eldridge Cleaver and his military adviser, Donald Cox, in far-off Algiers. In the wake of the split, Cleaver certainly appeared ready to launch his long-predicted guerrilla war in the United States. He seemingly had command of every gun and gadget a modern guerrilla leader might need, all of it tucked away in his beloved Panther embassy. He seldom left the grounds, spending much of his time smoking hashish and talking on the telephone. But even as his personal world shrank, Cleaver’s introduction to the other Third World revolutionaries broadened his worldview: In his mind, he was now not only the leader of black revolutionary America but a leader of the global revolutionary movement. What money he raised, much of it from a Panther support group in Paris, went into a Marxist library—he kept an account at a London bookseller—and newfangled electronic equipment, including cameras and machines to make how-to and revolutionary videotapes he intended to distribute around the world. His pride and joy was a giant map of the world that filled one entire wall of his communications room. When a British reporter visited, Cleaver demonstrated how the map worked:

Cleaver begins flicking switches on a consul, and slowly, all over the world, lights come up. There is one color for the Panther headquarters in America, another color for liberation groups engaged in armed struggle in Africa, Brazil, Vietnam. There is another color for “solidarity” groups. “We have a solidarity group in China,” Cleaver says with a laugh. “Its chairman is Chairman Mao.” Finally one last light goes on, much bigger than all the rest, and bright red. It is in Algiers. “That is the Witchdoctor,” Cleaver says with a grin. He gesticulates in the direction of the map. “We will make videotapes of the struggles going on all over the world. . . . [But] we don’t call it videotape. We call it voodoo. Because it has, like, magical properties. You know how electricity moves? It’s kind of mysterious. . . . It’s invisible.”

With the Panther split in February 1971, Cleaver’s dreams seemed to be coming true. After years of calling for guerrilla warfare in the United States, militant Panthers began flocking to New York to take arms. Policemen were murdered. Communiqués were issued. Given his role as a beacon of revolutionary violence, one might have expected Cleaver to anoint himself chairman of the BLA. He didn’t. In fact, Cleaver ordained that the BLA would have no leader. Not him. Not anyone. Under guidelines set by Cleaver and
Don Cox, the BLA’s structure would be the exact opposite of the Weather Underground’s. Where Weather cadres did nothing without direction from leadership, Cleaver and Cox wanted BLA units to operate independently, with no central coordination whatsoever. A system of autonomous cells, Cox reasoned, would be much harder for the government to subdue; a single leader could be defeated with a single arrest. This sounded fine in theory; in practice it led to anarchy. “I never understood the concept of an organization without leadership,” recalls Brooklyn BLA member Blood McCreary. “I always thought that was going to be difficult, and it was. When we got into the field, we were supposed to be autonomous, and you’d be two or three cells trying to do their own thing. I remember once two cells showed up to rob the same bank. It happened outside the Bronx Zoo, at a Manufacturers Hanover. So not having leadership, that was a problem.”