Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  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.

  Unfortunately there were more than a hundred such listings in every issue, far too many to canvass. Then, on November 7, came the break. One of Meyers’s bank-robbing partners, Joe Lee Jones, surrendered to the FBI on an old charge of deserting from the army. NYPD detectives interrogated him the next day. Jones, who was deathly afraid of Meyers, said Meyers moved apartments every few weeks. He had no idea where he was. But he mentioned a remark by Meyers’s girlfriend in which she spoke of moving into a freshly painted flat. Detectives checked the Amsterdam News: Only eleven places were advertised as newly painted. It took six days to rule out ten of them. On November 14 they discreetly interviewed neighbors around the eleventh, a third-floor set of rooms in a tenement at 625 Tinton Avenue in the Bronx. From their descriptions the occupants had to be Meyers and his girlfriend.

  Both the NYPD and the FBI sent every man they had. By early afternoon, when the girlfriend left the building and was positively identified, there were nearly 150 policemen and federal agents in the area, about a dozen undercover men on Tinton Avenue itself. Armed with flak jackets, shotguns, and automatic weapons, they were ready for war.

  The day stretched by with no sign of Meyers. Finally, around 7:15 p.m., a man wearing a ski cap emerged from the building. He looked like Meyers.

  It was, in fact, Meyers. Unaware of the small army around him, he strolled around the corner onto 152nd Street, then disappeared into a bodega. When he came out, a detective named Kernal Holland was closest to him. Holland knew that Meyers usually carried an automatic pistol beneath his coat. When Meyers turned down the street, Holland stepped forward, grabbed his arm, and barked, “Freeze! Police!”

  Meyers wheeled. His eyes met Holland’s and widened. He took two steps back, pulled a 9mm submachine gun, and opened fire. Holland rolled to the pavement and shot back. The quiet Bronx neighborhood exploded as FBI men and plainclothesmen up and down the street drew their guns and fired. Wounded, Meyers wildly fired his 9mm, then frantically drew a second submachine gun from beneath his coat. It was no use. No one could have survived the blizzard of bullets directed his way. Twymon Meyers, out for a stroll on a cold New York night, was cut to pieces.

  His funeral in Harlem made a deep impression on any number of white radicals who attended. The young Italian émigré Silvia Baraldini, who would later rob banks alongside black militants, gave a friend a religious icon to place inside the coffin. “You had to run this gauntlet of police sharpshooters to go into the funeral,” she remembers. “Seeing all these sharpshooters, on practically every rooftop in Harlem, you realized there really was a war going on. I think that was the day I decided to join them.”

  It was over—the shooting, at least. A few stragglers would pull a bank job or two in coming months, but the BLA’s days as a legitimate urban guerrilla force were at an end. The trials of its members would stretch on for years, with one or two serving as rallying points for what remained of the radical underground. The memory of the BLA itself blurred and then dimmed and then, in the minds of an American public that took little notice of it anyway, winked out altogether.

  Even in custody BLA fighters refused to surrender. Henry “Sha Sha” Brown, captured in St. Louis, managed to escape but was recaptured a week later. Melvin Kearney, held on the eighth floor of the Brooklyn House of Detention, tied together bedsheets and shimmied out a window, only to fall to his death when they unraveled.

  Forty-two years later six onetime BLA fighters remain alive in U.S. prisons. The murders of Greg Foster and Rocco Laurie of the NYPD remain officially unsolved. Of the dozens of onetime Panthers who served in the BLA, only a handful would soldier on, and only one would make his mark doing so. In 1973, still a fugitive, still the only veteran of Eldridge Cleaver’s Algerian adventure vowing to continue the struggle, the man known as Sekou Odinga melted into the shadows of New York City and, with a handful of recruits, began robbing banks.

  Part Three

  THE SECOND WAVE

  12

  THE DRAGON UNLEASHED

  The Rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army, November 1973 to February 1974

  Believe me, my friend, with the time and the incentive that these brothers have to read, study and think, you will find no class or category more aware, more embittered, desperate or dedicated to the ultimate remedy—revolution. The most dedicated, the best of our kind—you will find them in the Folsoms, San Quentins, and Soledads. They live like there was no tomorrow.

  —George Jackson, Soledad Brother

  When the prison
gates fly open, the real dragons will emerge.

  —Ho Chi Minh

  The death of Twymon Meyers in 1973 should have signaled an end to what remained of the underground movement. The BLA had now been defeated. Only the Weather Underground soldiered on, a shadow of its former self, its isolated leadership groping for some kind of return to relevance. The ’60s were over. America was moving on. With the war all but complete, underground violence seemed a relic of a fast-receding era, vanishing as quickly as peace signs.

  In fact, the American underground was poised for an explosive rebirth, one that would spawn headlines unlike any seen before, along with a series of “second generation” protest bombers. This new eruption of armed cells would be peopled by a motley collection of wannabes and never-weres, those who had missed the Weather and BLA trains or who saw in those organizations’ exploits a path toward the greater meaning so many radicals sought once the seismic energies of the 1960s faded. They emerged in far-flung corners of the country: in the Bay Area, in the Pacific Northwest, in New England, in New York. Most modeled themselves on Weather or the BLA, reading, rereading, and underlining their Mao and Debray and Marighella, even rediscovering the rigors of criticism/self-criticism. But what made the new cells distinct from their forerunners was that they no longer drew their inspiration from the war or the civil rights movement. Their intellectual fuel emanated instead from a new source of shimmering radical energy: U.S. prisons, especially those in California.

  That jailed criminals would link up with the underground movement had long been foreseen. The rhetoric of violent revolution had found hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eager adherents inside U.S. prisons from its first utterances in the mid-1960s. Nowhere did prisoners pore over Debray and Che and Marighella more avidly than in California, where their interest attracted the notice of those who wanted a revolution just as badly: white radicals in San Francisco, Oakland, and especially the college city of Berkeley. This unlikely alliance, between charismatic black inmates and adoring white radicals, provided the underground with the long-sought messiah it ardently sought, thereby prolonging the life of a movement that had been on its last legs.

  Ironically, the figure who paved the way for all this was a white man, Caryl Chessman, a convicted rapist who, during the 1950s, launched a tireless legal and literary assault on the California prison system from his cell at San Quentin. What began as a stream of writs and lawsuits evolved into a series of best-selling memoirs in which Chessman put the prison system’s brutality on trial. By the time he was finally executed, in 1960, he had drawn clemency appeals from such liberal icons as Eleanor Roosevelt and Norman Mailer. During the 1960s hundreds of California inmates mimicked Chessman’s tactics, churning out thousands of clemency petitions and memoirs of their own—so many that as late as 1967 inmates on San Quentin’s Death Row were punished if discovered attempting to write their life stories.

  Few snatched up Chessman’s gauntlet more skillfully than the first important group of postwar prison radicals, the Black Muslims, whose leader, Elijah Muhammad, himself a onetime convict, had begun recruiting convicts during the 1950s. Malcolm X preached that prisoners held a special place in the Black Muslim world, symbolizing “white society’s crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.”

  By the early 1960s there were mosques at several California prisons, including San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad. The wardens tried to outlaw their meetings, leading to an escalating series of confrontations that climaxed with shootings that killed Muslim inmates in 1961 and again in 1963. By 1967, after a bloody riot at San Quentin, California prison facilities had embarked on a cycle of violence and retaliatory crackdowns that would endure for years. It brought racial polarization, along with an avalanche of legal challenges and, among black inmates at least, racial unity and a taste for open confrontation with guards and wardens. The first inmate to emerge as a public figure from this turmoil, Eldridge Cleaver, as we have seen, almost single-handedly rallied white radicals to the prison-reform movement and, in so doing, built the foundation of the black inmate/white radical alliance that ensued. By 1970 the protests of Bay Area radicals were all but permanent fixtures outside the walls at San Quentin.

  For apocalyptic revolutionaries, who had long sought a constituency to rise up and fight alongside them, black inmates seemed to represent the Holy Grail. Weatherman, after all, had invested thousands of hours attempting to rally working-class youth, high school students, and black liberals and had earned little in return but snickers and shrugs. Finally, in California’s toughest prisons, radicals found what appeared to be a loyal following. By 1968 black inmates were reported to be forming clandestine chapters of the Black Panthers and a hard-core Marxist group called the Black Guerrilla Family, both of which operated extensive, secret Marxist political-education groups, including courses on revolutionary theory and bomb making. In 1971 a House subcommittee identified the most popular books requested by black inmates as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die, and Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.

  It was Cleaver, starting in 1968, who loudly and repeatedly began predicting that black inmates would soon rise up and form the leading edge of the revolution. This kind of talk produced something approaching rapture in a certain brand of white revolutionary, to the point that, in a phenomenon the author Eric Cummins terms “convict cultism,” by the early 1970s “convicts who were released from California prisons frequently enjoyed instant hero status in radical organizations.” As a Movement radical named Betsy Carr put it, “I was completely fascinated with [black inmates]—the glamour, the bizarreness. It was my Hollywood. I’d never discussed anything with any of them, just watched in total awe.”

  By 1971 scores of Bay Area radicals were volunteering and protesting at California prisons. More than a few of the black inmates they befriended, however, turned out to be opportunists who parroted Marxist philosophy in hopes of luring their new white friends into helping them make parole or, in extreme cases, escape. The classic case came in October 1972, when several members of Venceremos, a leading Bay Area activist group, ambushed a car transporting a black prisoner named Ronald Beaty outside Chino’s California Institute for Men. A guard was killed in the ensuing gunfight. Their plan, authorities learned later, was to form guerrilla training camps in the California mountains, from which they would launch the long-awaited revolution in American cities. These hopes were dashed, however, when Beaty was recaptured. He not only implicated much of the Venceremos leadership; he also said he had only pretended to be a revolutionary to gain his freedom.

  For a brief window of time, between 1968 and 1972 or so, many in the Movement’s most radical corners ardently believed that black inmates held the key not only to the underground’s future but to the specter of revolution itself. All that remained was the emergence of someone to lead them. Ever since Cleaver fled to Algeria, white revolutionaries, especially in the Bay Area, had been seeking that new messiah, a strong man who could unite white radicals and black inmates in the revolution. In 1970 they found him, the fifth great voice of the era’s black militants. His name was George Jackson.

  • • •

  On paper George Jackson resembled Eldridge Cleaver. Like Cleaver’s, Jackson’s family immigrated to Southern California during the 1950s; there, like Cleaver, he became a teenaged thug who stole cars, robbed liquor stores, and wanted, deep in his soul, to someday become a writer. But whereas Cleaver could grin and charm and talk for hours, Jackson was a thug with a fountain pen, far angrier and prone to violent language than Cleaver had ever been.

  Jackson was born in Chicago in 1941. His family moved to Watts in Los Angeles when he was fourteen. A gangbanger with a long criminal record, by his own admission he staged his first mugging at the age of twelve. After a burglary at fifteen he was sentenced to a California Youth Authority Camp. He escaped and fled to Chicago, then got himself arrested a
fter knifing a man and was dragged back to Los Angeles in shackles. He escaped again. He was recaptured again. Paroled, he was arrested in 1961 for a $70 gas-station stickup in Bakersfield. When he pled guilty, the judge gave him a sentence of one year to life. On his prison admission form, Jackson stated that his ambition was “to become a successful writer.” He was nineteen.

  George Jackson would spend his entire adult life behind the walls of California prisons, initially in a juvenile facility, then San Quentin, and later Soledad, a hulking fortress outside the farm town of Salinas, an hour south of San Francisco. He was an extraordinarily violent prisoner, earning forty-seven disciplinary actions in just under ten years, an average of one every ten weeks. At his first stop he and his friend James Carr—best known for burning down his elementary school at the age of nine—worked as muscle for Mexican gangs, then branched out into loan-sharking and homosexual pimping. Jackson was investigated for a murder, as he would be several times, but nothing came of it. Transferred to San Quentin, Jackson, by then a chiseled six-footer—it was said that he performed a thousand fingertip push-ups every morning—joined the black Capone Gang, where he established himself as a feared debt collector, so adept at threatening other inmates that he took to buying debts from other prisoners to collect himself. He was angry, sullen, irascible, and legendarily mean-spirited.

  “He was the meanest mother I ever saw, inside or out,” a white prisoner once recalled. “And you want to know why he was what dumbass people call a prison leader? ’Cause everyone was shit-scared of him. . . . I mean, he was into everything when I was inside. Dope, booze, peddling ass—you name it. Strong-arm. Hit man.” John Irwin, a board member of the United Prisoners Union, recalled, “We hated his guts. . . . He was a mean, rotten son of a bitch. He was a bully . . . an unscrupulous bully.”1