Authors: Randy Jurgensen
The precinct I worked at, the 28th Precinct (or 2-8 Precinct), had two distinctions. First, we were the smallest out of seventy-six others; and
second, we led the city in homicides. There were three ways out of Harlem. One: as stated by Honey Combs, the proprietor of The Apollo Theatre, you could, “sing or dance your way out,” like Sammy Davis Jr. who never sang or danced his way back. Two: you could join or wait and be drafted into the army, and sent to Vietnam. Three: be killed. I believe
Time
magazine said that if you were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one years old and black, you stood a better chance in the jungles of Vietnam than on the concrete corner of 116th Street and Eighth Avenue on a Friday night.
Indeed, 1968 was a defining year.
President Nixon was in the White House. It was the apex of the Vietnam War (Tet Offensive). The city's streets were flooded with people of both genders and all colors, creeds, and religions fighting for equal rights. The Women's Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Columbia student riots, and of course, the explosive drug problem all crowded New York's already busy streets.
The word in City Hall was that law and order had to be restored. To that end, after years of its absence, they were going to fire up the electric chair, or
Old Sparky
as those in the know called it. But in order to sit on Old Sparky's throne, you had to have a prior arrest record.
On any given day I would look out the window of the 28th Precinct. I'd see some of Harlem's kids running in and out of the spray of a busted fire hydrant. What I didn't see was a chance in hell that any of those kids would ever be doctors, lawyers, or bankers. But given the right circumstances, which their atmosphere all too willingly provided, I saw plenty of candidates for the chair. Nevertheless hope was still alive in Harlem. But then someone killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Hope was replaced by anger and three days of fires, looting, and shooting...what did you expect?
The following story is true. It took place in this setting and during these trying times. Some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Well, the table is set. Pull up a chair. Take a seat and indulge in some of New York City's most tumultuous history.
–New York City Homicide Detective, Randy Jurgensen
(retired)
Wasn't that hard to make us out—three wired unshaven white guys, sipping cold coffee in a '66 Impala, middle of Harlem, 1972? Shit, we weren't trying to fool anyone. Most of the junkies, hustlers, and street mopes breezing past us that crisp Spring morning worked for me in one way or another anyhow. I was a first grade detective, Harlem's home grown
DT. Kid
, Randy Jurgensen, the omnipresent spoke on a wheel of detectives or DTs. I was part of a high-profile homicide team working out of Manhattan's
Zone-6
, affectionately known back in the day as,
The Murder Factory
.
The Zone-6 murder factory or killing field covered three of the deadliest police precincts in New York City circa 1972—the 2-8, 2-5, and 3-2 precincts. That year alone, 500 people were killed in an area no bigger than 3.4 square miles. An even broader, more staggering statistic: roughly one third of all homicides committed in New York's seventy-five precincts occurred in Zone-6. To say we officers were busy was the understatement of the decade.
My job, among many others that year, was to find those prolific murderers and bring them to justice—a job I'd grown to respect and subsequently love. My job also demanded me to know every one of those street types intimately who were scurrying past us on that severely clear April morning. Occasionally I'd have to turn to them for the info. This was all part of the game, and it would also help catch some killers. These guys, for good or for bad, were what I did for a living; my eyes and ears in a business—catching murderers—that totally relied on credible street intelligence for positive results. More than likely a few of those street mopes would turn up at the beginning or the end of my day, depending on which side of the murder weapon they were lucky or unlucky enough to be on. However, on this particular morning, I was not assigned to Zone-6 homicide. I was on loan to a newly formed furtive unit called the
Major Case Squad
. The unit's sole objective was to hunt down and arrest members of a dangerous and militant anarchist group who were calling themselves The Black Liberation Army,
or BLA. The members of this group were vociferous in their threats and had murdered scores of cops across the United States during crimes such as bank robberies, holdups, armored car heists, and well-organized high-profile assassinations.
My target that April morning was as legitimate a cop killer as anyone I'd ever known, one with whom I was quite familiar—Twyman Meyers, the self-professed leader of The Black Liberation Army. Just the week before, we'd been sitting on Joanne Chesimard, “the soul of the BLA,” and had missed her by six hours. Twyman was wanted in connection with the cold-blooded ambush assassination of four New York City patrolmen and the attempted murder of two other New York City cops by wantonly spraying their RMP (Radio Motor Patrol) with automatic machine-gun fire. Numerous witnesses recorded the license plates of Meyers's getaway car. He wasn't trying to hide anything. Two days after the plates of Twyman's stolen car were revealed in the news, the actual plates were mailed to
The New York Times
with this hand-written message:
May 19th, 1971
All the power to the people.
Here are the license plates sort [sic] after by the fascist state pig police. We send them in order to exhibit the potential power of opposed peoples to acquire Revolutionary justice.
The armed goons of this racist government will again meet the guns of oppressed Third World Peoples as long as they occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of American law and order; just as the fascist Marines and Army occupy Vietnam in the name of democracy and murder Vietnamese people in the name of American Imperialism are confronted with the guns of the Vietnamese Liberation Army, the domestic armed forces of racism and oppression will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army, who will mete out in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries real justice. [sic]
We are revolutionary justice. All power to the people.
My partner, Sonny Grosso (of
French Connection
fame), and I'd crossed paths with Meyers eleven months prior. I'd locked him up. We'd received information that Meyers was setting us up for assassination, and through some street CIs (confidential informants) we were able to get the jump on
him and two accomplices before they could carry out their deadly mission—
killing us
. However, during the struggle Sonny and Twyman both fell over a banister, crashing onto a flight of stairs one-half story down. Sonny sustained injuries that would ultimately end his career. One week after our violent encounter, Twyman was bailed out of the Manhattan Detention Center,
the Tombs
, with money the BLA acquired from a St. Louis bank robbery. He was free to roam and murder again. Directly after this
jumble-fuck-of-a-release
from the Tombs, it was determined that Meyers had been party to the 1971 murders of New York City cops Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones. Witnesses said that Twyman Meyers danced over the fallen bodies of the two patrolmen. It was incriminating evidence, but it had come too late. The killer was long gone and had disappeared into the wind. But the scumbag wouldn't let me forget him for long. He was a son of a bitch who liked to brag. In those eleven months since we'd collared him, he'd made repeated calls to Les Matthews, a writer for
The Amsterdam News
, stating that I was at the top of his
to-be-killed
list, and that members of my family would be executed as well. Needless to say, the NYPD took those threats seriously, especially after Meyers showed up at my mother's home. After that incident, my parents received twenty-four hour, solid-gold protection and were eventually relocated to Florida and taken into protective custody. Twyman Meyers had made it personal, but so did I. I countered by calling Matthews with a message, in hopes of smoking the killer out of hiding. It was detailed, as in-depth as Meyers's rant to
The Times
, but subtly worded to get the reaction I wanted. It's a shame that the newspaper printed this watered-down version:
Harlem-born and reared detective, Randy Jurgensen, is looking for the young leader of the Black Liberation Army, Twyman Meyers, and his daring accomplice Robert Vickers, who are both out to allegedly assassinate the cop according to underworld sources.
Young leader of the BLA and his daring accomplice? They weren't movie stars; they were cop killers looking to make a name for themselves. And
The Amsterdam News
had become their go-between. This only tempered my resolve to catch my would-be assassin.
In 1972 we (the NYPD) were at war with the likes of Twyman Meyers, a hostile media, and a public who, for the most part, did not trust or like what they saw as the manifestation of “the establishment.” This was a brew
for a hellacious and bloody year. The climate in New York was this: We cops were targeted for death. The us-versus-them mentality was a yoke on every cop's shoulder, worn like a heavy weight, carried daily with rounds and rounds of extra ammo to guard against everyone and anyone. In those mean 1972 streets, the only thing we could count on was one another—our brother cops and the superior officers we called boss. If only that held true on that particular April morning. What I and the rest of the country were about to witness would place an indelible black mark on the face of the NYPD, its uppermost echelon, the Nation of Islam, Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, and Mayor John Lindsay—a dark hurtful blemish that remains to this day, one that I myself could never and will never forget. We, the rank and file, were sandbagged by our own—the hierarchy of the NYPD. One of our brother cops, Phil Cardillo, was murdered and subsequently bastardized, then hurried into the ground in a cloak of mystery and dishonor, all in an effort to cover up a purposeful negligence of duty so blatant it defies belief. In short, we were betrayed by our fathers, the police commissioner, and his deputies. It was the collusion of our own, Mayor John Lindsay, Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Ward, Chief of the Department Michael Codd, and Congressman Charles Rangel, with Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam—six in total—the
Circle of Six
.
To understand the backstabbing fully, we have to go back in time, back to one of the most brutal periods in New York history. Back to a time when ten cops a year were systematically executed in cold and calculated hits, back to one of the most traumatic eras in the storied New York City Police Department's past.
The place
: Harlem, New York.
The time
: April 14, 1972.
We were set up just west of Amsterdam Avenue on 125th Street. I settled my binoculars on a clear and unobstructed view of the set. According to my information, Twyman Meyers was coming in from the north, so we felt fairly confident that our surveillance OPs (observation posts) were invulnerable to burn. I was assigned five plain-clothes cops, or anticrime cops as they were called, from the 2-8 (28th) Precinct. Two were with me in the car, while the other three were on the other side of Amsterdam Avenue. It was an unseasonably warm day, and the fact that I was wearing my army field jacket to hold ammo and conceal my shotgun made the shit-box Impala feel like a blast furnace. I was jittery and for good reason. Meyers had succeeded in doing what no other perp had done before: He'd gotten deep inside, made this a personal war. But I was a professional and didn't want emotions getting in the way of a good bust. As far as I was concerned, Twyman Meyers was about to lose his position as the head of the BLA. He had a destiny with one of two conclusions: an electric chair or a pine box. End of story.
I swept the binos over the dingy terrain and couldn't help thinking how the streets had changed. I knew the area intimately, was born and bred on 123rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, just two blocks south of where I was sitting that very moment, trying to catch this criminal. But that was a different time and a different way of life.
My parents were the superintendents of the building, two of the few who truly cared about their residents and strived to make the conditions as nice as possible. Like most of the hard-working parents in New York City during the forties, they also took care of the neighborhood and all of its children. Now, thirty years later, I was trying to do the same, look out for
the neighborhood. Though this time, so much more was at stake. The core values and very foundation that molded me into the man I was, that same foundation that once held those families, their extensions, and those tightly knit streets together, was now being dismantled by an ideology steeped in blazing hatred. In hindsight I may have been overly naive, but I truly felt that when I caught Twyman Meyers, the hatred and all the diseased thoughts that he espoused to so many young children would somehow recede, and we would all come together like so many years before. In my heart I felt that Twyman Meyers, Joanne Chesimard, and the soldiers of the BLA were the symbols of hatred that I had to do away with. Was I obsessed with my mission? You bet. My mission was to try to turn back the hands of time. I'd soon realize how ridiculous that presumption was. That day was just the beginning of five years of hell.
We were on the Zone-6 radio frequency, which seemed to erupt in a continuous cacophony of chatter between the cops of the ultra-busy Harlem precincts and Central Dispatch. It was a machine-gun ratta-tat-tat of coded numbers, legalese, and raw New York slang.
2-8 Nora, got a 52 corner of 1-2-8 and Amsterdam
Ten-four central, Nora responding, K
2-5 Adam 52 with a gun, corner of Saint Nick at 1-2-2, units to respond