At the precinct, Dhoruba, Jamal, Qualls, and Mason were all held in separate interrogation rooms. Dhoruba and Jamal kept their mouths shut, but Qualls and maybe Mason—Dhoruba wasn’t sure—started to talk. Before long, word was circulating throughout the precinct and law enforcement circles throughout the city: The cops were holding Dhoruba Bin Wahad, aka Richard Moore. It was almost too good to be true: one of the most wanted of the black radicals terrorizing the city had fallen into their collective lap during a bush-league robbery.
There was plenty of work to be done—evidence to be gathered, witnesses to be sought and massaged. But the police had their first big break in solving one of the most heinous crimes against American law enforcement anyone could remember.
THE FUNERALS FOR Officers Jones and Piagentini were held in late May. The grief felt by the families of the deceased and by the police department in general was without precedent. These cops had not been killed during the commission of a “crime” in the traditional sense, which would have been bad enough. They had been executed, shot down simply because they were police officers. To most white cops, the motive for these murders was beyond comprehension. For black cops, it was cause for alarm, because the BLA had announced that a cop’s race didn’t matter: “Every policeman, lackey or running dog of the ruling class must make his or her choice now. Either side with the people, poor and oppressed, or die for the oppressor.”
The reaction was immediate. Before the funereal bagpipes of the department’s Emerald Pipe Band had even sounded, virtually every division within the force was involved in the investigation. The two incidents—the Curry and Binetti shooting and the Jones and Piagentini killings—were dovetailed into one investigation. Forty-eight detectives and ten supervisors were assigned under the command of an inspector and a lieutenant. A specialized unit of forty detectives and four supervisors worked back-to-back tours, from 10:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., and 6:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. Within a matter of weeks, they had interviewed nearly five hundred witnesses, suspects, and persons of interest. According to a status report written by the inspector overseeing the investigation, “Approximately 1000 DD-5’s [police department activity reports] were submitted, 450 telephone calls were checked out. In addition, approximately 450,000 prints have been scanned from the micro-film file, 85,000 prints in the latent file, 300,000 manually from the main file and all prints from daily arrests have been checked.”
Eventually, the investigation of the police shootings would lead to sixty-two arrests—mostly incidental arrests of people wanted for unrelated crimes—and result in the seizure of thirty-three handguns, twelve rifles, four shotguns, one machine gun, and more than three thousand rounds of ammunition.
The manpower and hours devoted to the investigation would make it one of the most extensive in the history of the NYPD, but the fallout from the police shootings would reach well beyond local police.
On May 26, 1971, less than a week after the killings of Jones and Piagentini, J. Edgar Hoover discussed the recent outbreak of urban violence with Richard Nixon. The president, whose reelection campaign in 1972 would be determined in part by how well he had delivered on his promise of “law and order” in cities like New York, was disturbed by the spate of shootings attributed to black militants. Nixon told Hoover that he should “take the gloves off” when dealing with Black Panthers and the like. Hoover passed the president’s comments on to field agents via a confidential memo, authorizing a new round of counterintelligence and investigative activity.
Together, the FBI and NYPD inaugurated OPERATION NEWKILL, which would be devoted solely to seeking out and taking down anyone even peripherally involved in the police shootings or recent activities of the Black Liberation Army. The NYPD liaison was Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman, a cigar-chomping cop from the old school who undertook his duties with swagger and confidence. Hoover promised Seedman and the NYPD access to the latest fingerprinting and ballistics technologies, as well as use of the FBI’s Black Agitator database. Dozens of agents would be assigned to augment interrogations, interviews, and stakeouts. In return for this unusual level of interdepartmental cooperation, Hoover demanded only one thing: that the FBI’s involvement would never be acknowledged. NEWKILL would be a confidential investigation, known only to the police commissioner, the chief of detectives, and a handful of other high-ranking members of the NYPD.
Almost from the beginning of NEWKILL’s formation, Dhoruba Bin Wahad was designated as a key target. In mid-May, the FBI’s latent print lab had made a startling discovery: fingerprints matching those of Dhoruba and Jamal Joseph had been found on the copy of the New York Post that was used to wrap the license plate delivered along with the BLA’s communiqué claiming credit for the Curry and Binetti shooting. The feds and local police were surprised: their sources had insisted that Dhoruba and Jamal were in Algeria, an impression that seemed to be confirmed by Dhoruba’s article in the New York Times, with its Algiers dateline. The copy of the Post with Dhoruba’s fingerprints was from May 20, putting him in the United States as of that date. A confidential teletype from NEWKILL’s special agent in charge (SAC) to Hoover noted the finding:
Due to the fact that latent impressions obtained…are identical to the fingerprints of richard moore aka dahruba [sic]…it appears moore could be directly involved or possess positive knowledge of the shooting of nycpd officers on five nineteen seventy one and also may be implicated in captioned matter…. intensive and vigorous investigation currently underway by nyc to locate and apprehend moore, and sufficient manpower being utilized to effect same.
Five days after this memo was transmitted, Dhoruba, Jamal, and the others were busted at the Triple-O social club.
At the Forty-eighth Precinct station house in the Bronx, Dhoruba sat in the interrogation room, saying little beyond “I know my rights. I wanna see my lawyer.” The fact that the cops hadn’t killed him, or physically abused him in any way, suggested to him that he was a prize catch. When an FBI agent entered the room and introduced himself, Dhoruba sensed for the first time that the authorities might well try to pin any number of recent BLA crimes on him, including the shootings of the police officers in Manhattan.
Eventually, Dhoruba was transferred to the Bronx House of Detention and placed in solitary confinement. Later that day, he learned from an attorney that the NYPD had issued a press release confirming that the .45-caliber submachine gun seized at the Triple-O club was the same gun that had been used in the shooting of Officers Curry and Binetti.
Now they had him. Locked in his four-by-six-foot cell, Dhoruba could feel the full weight of his situation closing in. If Qualls and even Mason were talking, the cops might soon have enough to name him as an accomplice in the Sam Napier murder. Now they were trying to pin that Riverside Drive cop shooting on him; they might even try to nail him for the other cop shooting too, the one where the two cops were killed. Dhoruba was in what is commonly known on the street as a fucked-up predicament.
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.
The Savage City Page 41
