Days of Rage (32 page)

The full story of the Carter cell has never been told; only three members remain alive, and one, Blood McCreary, tells his version of events here for the first time. Because of the crimes involved, however, his account is incomplete and, in at least one regard, open to doubt. McCreary, for example, states that the Carter group chose to leave New York after the Shakur brothers, Lumumba and Zayd, decided “to make a cell for Assata,” that is, for Joanne Chesimard, the Thomas cell’s most prominent survivor.

As McCreary tells the story, the group had hoped to receive guidance of some sort from Algeria. A meeting was arranged with Cleaver’s emissary, the fiery poet Denise Oliver. “That cell came about from Algeria, or it was supposed to,” McCreary recalls. “Denise had been over there, and she came back with instructions from Eldridge. You know, Algeria, they had some good [ideas], but they didn’t really run us. Anyway, Denise was to meet with us and give us the information from Algeria. [Several of us], we all showed up to meet Denise. That meeting didn’t go down, because Assata wanted to get back to Atlanta, ’cause shit was going down there. But she didn’t go; things were too fucked up. So when she stayed, it was decided to create a new cell for Assata.”

This new cell, led by Carter and Chesimard, soon fled New York for Miami, which McCreary says was the plan all along. A more likely explanation for their sudden departure involves a bizarre episode in Queens on December 20, 1971. At nine thirty that morning, two patrolmen in a squad car spied four people in a green Pontiac—one woman and three men—parked in front of a Bankers Trust branch on Grand Avenue at Forty-ninth Street, acting suspiciously. When the cruiser approached, the Pontiac pulled away from the curb. Following at a safe distance, the officers checked its license plate and discovered that the car had been stolen.

When the cruiser lit its rolling lights, the Pontiac took off, racing to the corner of Flushing Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, where it turned southwest, toward Brooklyn. As the chase continued, someone in the Pontiac rolled down a window and lobbed something toward the cruiser. It was, of all things, a hand grenade—an M-26 fragmentation grenade, to be exact, the kind used by the U.S. Army in Vietnam. To the officers’ amazement, it exploded beside the cruiser, wrecking it. As the officers leaped, unhurt, from the burning car, the Pontiac roared off toward Brooklyn, where a few minutes later its occupants jumped out, rushed toward a man at a Sunoco gas station, and stole his car. Later the man identified Joanne Chesimard as one of his assailants.
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The NYPD immediately issued a thirteen-state alarm calling for her arrest.

As police suspected, the attack was almost certainly the work of Chesimard and the Carter cell. In the BLA’s first-ever phone call to the press, a caller to United Press International (UPI) took credit in the name of the Attica Brigade of the Afro-American Liberation Army—Cleaver’s name for the BLA—saying, “We have more grenades, and we will be back.” The police dragnet would explain why Chesimard, Carter, McCreary, and three other comrades swiftly relocated to the Miami area. There they rented an apartment in the beachfront city of Hollywood and began scouting banks. They probably didn’t know that at that very moment they had become the third BLA group at large in the state of Florida.

They pulled off a quick bank robbery in Miami, running out in less than five minutes. Much as John Thomas had done after his robberies in New York, the cell took its cash and began making plans. Carter and Chesimard, in fact, envisioned sharply expanding the BLA’s reach, creating a string of safe houses across the Midwest. Within days they had left Miami, scattering to rent apartments in Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Carter and McCreary then returned to New York, where they met with Zayd Shakur, who was still in touch with Algeria. They agreed that their immediate focus should be freeing those who had been captured, especially Dhoruba Moore and, at Chesimard’s urging, her boyfriend, who had been arrested in Detroit. “We were going to break them out,” McCreary recalls. “I went with Assata to Detroit and looked things over, but it was clear it would never work. It was obvious we could never get near them.”

Afterward, members of the cell rendezvoused at their new Cleveland safe house, a set of three apartments on East Eighty-fourth Street. Once it became clear that there was no easy way to free the prisoners, two new plans were sketched out. Both involved actions in New York. “Cleveland was our new home,” McCreary remembers, “but New York City was to be our battleground.” All through the first days of 1972, BLA members shuttled back and forth between Cleveland and New York; after the Thomas group’s shootout in North Carolina, they eschewed cars and began traveling by Greyhound bus. The drawback was the Pennsylvania State Police’s penchant for boarding buses to search for drugs. “Every time they came on board, you know, we
were strapped [with guns],” McCreary recalls with a shiver. “Those were some pretty hot moments.”

In short order the Cleveland cell grew in size to nine, as McCreary tracked down three soldiers who had lost their way, including Twymon Meyers, whom he stumbled across one night in the East Village, and a new recruit, Henry “Sha Sha” Brown. In Cleveland they quickly went to work on an audacious plan that had originated with Cleaver and Don Cox in Algeria. Black guerrillas had launched a civil war in the South African country of Zimbabwe, and the white-led government had responded with a string of indiscriminate killings. Cleaver suggested that the Cleveland cell attempt to storm the Zimbabwean Consulate in New York.

“We wanted to make a signature statement in New York, something that would get us noticed internationally,” says McCreary. “So we scouted out [the consulate]; it was off Park Avenue in the Fifties. We went in. We could see it was gonna be too much trouble. Too much traffic, it just didn’t work out. So we found out [the diplomats] all lived in homes on Long Island, like in a compound. The place was guarded by these huge dogs, Rhodesian ridgebacks. So we go out there to poison these dogs, and needless to say, it didn’t work. And so we went to the alternate plan. And I don’t want to talk about that.”

And with good reason. The Carter cell’s “alternate plan” almost certainly led to one of the most gruesome murders in the history of New York.

 • • • 

The night of January 27, 1972, was freezing; frigid winter winds whistled down the garbage-strewn streets of New York’s East Village. Snow was on the way. Down on Avenue B two young patrolmen were walking their beat. Greg Foster, who was twenty-two, was black. Rocco Laurie, a year older, was white. The two had served together as marines in Vietnam and, as close friends, had received permission to be partners, patrolling one of New York’s most dangerous and drug-ridden neighborhoods.

The two were walking south along Avenue B around ten thirty when they noticed a car parked in front of a hydrant. They ducked into a luncheonette
across the street, the Shrimp Boat, and asked the owner if he knew the car. He stepped outside and shook his head no. Satisfied, Foster and Laurie turned and began to walk back north. As they did, three black men passed, parting to allow the officers to walk between them. One of the men wore a long black coat, another a green fatigue jacket and a black Australian-style bush hat.

A moment after the officers passed, the three men suddenly turned and drew pistols, a .38 automatic and two 9mm automatics. Foster and Laurie were a few strides away when the men began firing directly into their backs. Foster was hit eight times and fell in a heap onto the icy pavement. Six bullets hit Laurie. All but one struck his arms and legs, but the last pierced his neck, and he staggered forward, clutching at his throat before dropping to his knees and falling, slowly, onto his side. As the two men lay dying, their assassins marched calmly toward them. A witness later claimed one of the shooters hollered, “Shoot ’em in the balls,” and all three again opened fire.

Three bullets were fired directly into Foster’s eyes; two were shot into Laurie’s groin. When both men lay still, two of the assassins reached down and wrenched loose their pistols. They ran toward a waiting Chrysler, while the third man, apparently intoxicated by the moment, reportedly danced a jig over the dead men’s bodies, firing his pistol into the air Wild West−style. Startled to be left behind, he ran off alone, disappearing into the night.

The whine of police sirens echoed within minutes, and the first several officers to respond, all answering a disturbance call two blocks away, were quickly on the scene. What they found was stomach turning. Greg Foster’s head had been destroyed; a sludge of blood and brain matter formed a three-foot puddle around his corpse. Rocco Laurie had been shot to pieces, bullet wounds up and down his body. An ambulance took Laurie to Bellevue Hospital, where he died. Almost everyone who responded had the same thought: These were planned assassinations, no doubt by the same people who had murdered Officers Piagentini and Jones eight months before, this so-called Black Liberation Army. It took only a few hours to confirm it. Fingerprints found in the getaway car suggested that the assassins were Ronald Carter, Twymon Meyers, and at least one other member of the Cleveland cell.

 • • • 

The Foster-Laurie murders presented Mayor John Lindsay’s administration with much the same dilemma it had confronted after the first attacks the previous May. Within hours, in fact, a series of debates erupted within the police department and the mayor’s office: Were these planned assassinations or something else? If they were the work of the same group behind the attacks in May, as was widely assumed, did this mean there actually was a genuine Black Liberation Army? Was there really a nationwide black conspiracy to murder policemen? And if so, should the public be told?

What police knew was this: Ten officers had now been attacked and seven killed in a nine-month span in New York, San Francisco, North Carolina, and Atlanta, seemingly all by onetime Panthers claiming to be a Black Liberation Army. Some of these attacks were linked; some were not. Many in the NYPD believed that this constituted a legitimate national conspiracy. But others, including several aides in Mayor Lindsay’s office, felt that the killings were unrelated. There was no black army, they argued; this was the work of a few disgruntled Panthers borrowing a discarded Panther term to make it appear as if there was.

The pivotal figure in these debates was a newcomer to the NYPD, a deputy police commissioner named Robert Daley. Daley had been a
New York Times
reporter who had attracted the attention of Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy while writing a profile of him; when Murphy offered him the department’s top public-relations job, Daley accepted. He was a divisive figure, a publicity hound who, as the
Times
itself noted later, “was always mugging for the cameras.” What Daley loved most was a good detective yarn, and the story of the BLA was one of the best he had seen. Gunsmoke had barely cleared over Foster and Laurie’s bodies when he began arguing that the NYPD had an obligation to go public with its suspicions that the murders constituted a planned assassination by a national conspiracy of black militants.

This kind of talk startled aides to Mayor Lindsay, who had announced his campaign for the presidency a month earlier. Talk of black terrorists loose in the streets would undercut his candidacy, inflame race relations, and have
every cop in the city looking askance at young black men. Lindsay’s combative press secretary, Tom Morgan, made clear to everyone that he didn’t want to see a single word about black conspiracies in the press.

Swarmed by reporters the morning after the murders, the chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, went along, pooh-poohing the conspiracy angle. But the next day, a Saturday, the UPI office received a handwritten communiqué, signed by the “George Jackson Squad of the Black Liberation Army.”
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Mailed the previous day, it referenced “the pigs wiped out in lower Manhattan last night” and promised: “This is the start of our spring offensive. There is more to come.”

This was too much for Daley. That same afternoon—even as citizens in far-off Arizona were voting in the caucuses, in which Lindsay placed second to Edmund Muskie—Daley strode into an East Village precinct house and, standing before a bank of microphones, raised Rocco Laurie’s blood-drenched shirt for all to see. He called the murders assassinations, carried out by a conspiracy of urban guerrillas—black urban guerrillas. “Always in the past the police have been quiet about this conspiracy because of fear of accusations of racism,” he said. “But it isn’t the black community that is doing this, it is a few dozen black criminal thugs. . . . It’s terribly serious, much more serious than people seem to think. The police are the last barrier before chaos.”

Suddenly the rhetorical cat was out of the bag. The mayor’s people were apoplectic. But the New York newspapers, sensing a story too hot to handle, downplayed Daley’s dramatic press conference; the
Times
buried the story on page 35. Talk of a black conspiracy ebbed for several days as reporters focused on the officers’ funerals, which were massive affairs, with hundreds of uniformed officers lining Fifth Avenue in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But Daley would not let up. In off-the-record chats all that week, he told reporters that there was a true national conspiracy, that the NYPD’s intelligence, gathered over the previous seven months, confirmed the existence of a Black Liberation Army, with hundreds of would-be assassins divided into revolutionary cells. For the most part, no one believed him; no
one, at least, printed more of his theories. It was all too inflammatory, too far-fetched.

Finally, a week after the murders, a
Times
reporter cornered a reluctant Commissioner Murphy. All available evidence, Murphy admitted, suggested that the Foster-Laurie murders were in fact the work not of a national conspiracy to kill police but of roving bands of militants—“crazies,” Murphy termed them—who moved from city to city, murdering policemen. Daley, however, went much further. He told the
Times
there was a BLA that was “nationwide in scope,” adding, “We have here a very, very dangerous and criminal conspiracy. The public really doesn’t seem to be aware of it. The time is over when the Police Department should keep its mouth shut on this kind of thing.”