Shortly before two o’clock in the morning, Giarrusso was deluged with reports that a sniper had crawled out on a “ledge” on the roof of the hotel and was firing across Loyola Avenue. Five men on top of the Bank of New Orleans said they could see someone in a white T-shirt, “lying on the corner of the roof ” not far from the Perdido stairwell. There were multiple sightings, and police in both stairwells reported hearing the clatter of an automatic carbine. Giarrusso asked for an exact position. A unit identified as Car 114 said the sniper was at the edge of a neon sign that ran from the first floor to the roof and on which the words “The Howard Johnson’s” were spelled out vertically in big block letters.
“He’s not on the roof itself,” the cop said. “He’s on a ledge. Right by the illuminated ‘T.’”
“He’s kneeling down now,” Car 406 radioed from the top of the Federal Building. Officer Delmado made his sighting with binoculars. And because he had the clearest line of fire, Giarrusso decided to let him shoot, but first he ordered Jack Schnapp’s squad in the Perdido stairwell to drop down a floor to get safely out of range. This done, he said, “Car Two to all units. Four-oh-six will be doing some shooting.” There was a long silence, then he said, “Go ahead, 406.”
The shots came rapidly, booming in the distance. The bullets seemed to be right on target. “You have him moving around,” a spotter reported.
“You were a little high the last time,” said the patrolman in Car 114. He was standing in the parking lot which the Marines were using as a landing site. “You’re high and right. Drop low and left.”
More shots rang out.
“We are beginning to fire for effect.”
“He’s shooting at you, 406! We can see the flashes. He’s still on the ledge.”
“You’re about two feet low. The wind is throwing you off.”
“We’ll try Kentucky windage,” 406 radioed. By this, Delmado meant he was aiming one to two feet high, hoping the extra elevation would compensate for the wind and the dropping trajectory of their bullets. He and his partner, Ruiz, were over six hundred yards from the hotel, using scoped rifles.
“That subject is still lying on the ledge. You’re hitting all around him.”
“There he goes! He just fired again!”
“Now he’s standing straight up. Kill him, 406! Kill him!”
Delmado was firing as fast as he could pull the trigger while Ruiz loaded clips. Unable to follow the shots, Ruiz wished they had tracers. He and his partner were relying solely on the sightings of Car 114 to determine their aim.
“That one was right above his head. Drop down a foot. You’ll shoot his head off.”
“Can you still see him?” Giarrusso asked.
“We’re reloading,” 406 answered.
There was a lull as Delmado inserted a fresh clip into his rifle.
Antoine Saacks, who was standing near Car 114, (he and the other policemen assigned to the helicopter sat in the car between flights) rubbed his tired eyes and strained once again to see the sniper. Ever since the shooting started he had been staring intently at the edge of the roof but could just made out a motionless “shadow.” Using binoculars, he saw nothing at all. Thomas Holden, a Marine officer who also had binoculars, couldn’t see anyone either. It’s the tension, he told himself. They’re seeing things.
The shooting resumed. The firing was faster and more concentrated.
“You’re just a hair to the right.”
There was another flurry of shots.
“That’s good. Very good. Keep it up.”
The bullets tore chunks of concrete from the edge of the roof and a shower of powdered fragments fell to the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Then an extremely heavy barrage broke out and ricochets flashed brightly on the walls of the Perdido stairwell.
“Hey, someone else is shooting,” 114 reported. “They’re coming from another direction.”
It was quickly determined that two state troopers who didn’t have a radio were firing large-caliber rifles. They were ordered to stop at once.
Giarrusso was furious. “What do they want to do?” he shouted, his words garbling over the air. “Do they want to kill a cop? Don’t they know there are policemen up there?”
Bullets continued to hiss down from the Federal Building.
“They’re hitting all around the subject,” 114 said.
Three more shots were fired. Then Jake Schnapp said, “Uh, that last one came into the sixteenth floor.”
“You’re shooting into the eighteenth floor,” someone else said almost simultaneously.
More bullets hit the building dangerously low, breaking windows and sending cops rolling for cover. Walls were shot through and lamps shattered, and men were screaming, cursing. One officer began to cry uncontrollably.
“Cease firing,” Giarrusso ordered. “All units, cease fire at once.”
“I just scanned the roof,” Car 114 reported. “I don’t see him.”
“Someone just fired again,” Lieutenant Schnapp said.
Officer Louis Dabdoub, on the sixteenth floor, had dived behind a bed when the bullets started crashing into rooms, and now he listened to the radio in disbelief as someone said, “We have him in our sights. He’s on one of the upper balconies. He’s wearing a pink poncho.” Beside himself, Dabdoub fumbled with the radio dial. “Don’t shoot,” he yelled frantically. “That’s my partner out there. That’s my partner.”
Spotters continued to sweep the fog-shrouded roof with binoculars and rifle scopes. Their reports conflicted; some said they saw “movement,” and others insisted the sniper had disappeared.”
“Chief, I have my weapon sighted in right around three hundred yards,” radioed 406. “If you can spot the subject, I believe I can hit him.”
“Negative, 406. Stand by until we have a definite sighting.”
Now the firing was clearly heard even in the command post — the whine of high-velocity bullets mingling with the louder explosions of much bigger calibers. Then another weapon went to work; its sound was unmistakable. “Good God,” a cop said. “Someone’s using a Thompson.”
The shooting came from the upper floors of the State Building, the brilliant flashes of the machine gun blurring orange and red in the dark. Again the bullets struck near policemen. And in desperation, some men on the sixteenth floor shouted through a broken window, “You motherfuckers! Next time we’re going to shoot back.”
Giarrusso’s anger made him sick, almost to the point of nausea. His intestines and stomach seemed on fire and he felt feverish. He wanted to run across the street to the State Building, screaming his rage. Instead, he sent two cops with orders to co-ordinate communications; no one was to shoot without his expressed permission. He had almost resolved to clear the premises. “Tell those — men that if they keep firing blindly like that they’re going to kill some policemen,” he said.
Now it was Landrieu’s turn to lose his temper. Realizing that he had left the police radio outside, he went to look for it. On his way through the lobby, he saw a cluster of reporters sitting on a bench, and there, on the floor in plain view, was his portable.
“Is that mine?” he asked. A reporter picked up the radio and examined it; on the back a green label bore the mayor’s name. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I believe it is.”
“Well that’s pretty low,” Landrieu said, snatching the radio. “There are men all over the place who are in desperate need of these and you have to steal mine.” He then stormed off to the command post. (Throughout the night, television and radio stations monitored the police frequencies, often reporting the conversations verbatim over the air. Giarrusso complained later that “every move we made was broadcast. Anyone with a radio, even the snipers, would have known what we were up to.”)
It was almost two-thirty. Because spotters continued to report that gunfire was coming from the Gravier Street cubicle, Giarrusso decided to shoot a hole into the outer wall, hoping a ricochet would kill anyone hiding inside. The wall, already badly pockmarked, faced Rampart and was made of twelve-inch-thick concrete reinforced with steel rods. To punch through it they would have to use the biggest rifles available, something Giarrusso had steadfastly hoped to avoid for fear of endangering men in nearby buildings. But this time there was no choice; the helicopter had developed minor hydraulic problems and was temporarily grounded.
Six men were chosen for the assignment. One of them was Clinton “Deats” Lauman of the Vice Squad. Lauman, considered by many to be the best shot in the department, arrived at the hotel after traveling over two hundred miles from northern Louisiana, where he had been on a deer hunt. “It had been a good trip,” Lauman recalled. “The night before, I had taken a six pointer. We heard on the radio about the snipings and came straight in. I got to the hotel around four in the after noon, and then early in the morning. I was ordered to go on the top floor of the Bank of New Orleans, the parking garage. The instructions were to cut a hole in that cubicle. I had a very heavy rifle, a .375-caliber Holland and Holland Winchester. It shoots a six-inch bullet almost a half-inch in diameter. Actually it’s an elephant gun with a range of a thirty-ought-six, about three miles, although that’s not its effective range. I bought it from a preacher who had taken it to Africa. It was too powerful for him, and when he came back he sold it to me. I think there were eight men in all who did the shooting. I fired the first round and it went right on through the wall, then everyone else started firing and it wasn’t long before we had blown out a lot of concrete. When the bullets hit those steel rods, there were tremendous sparks. And that rifle makes a hell of a noise. I live across the river in Algiers and my wife said that when I started shooting, she could hear it, every shot.” Lauman estimates he fired thirty rounds; the recoil broke his nose and cheek and severely bruised his shoulder.
Every time one of Lauman’s cordite, “Nitro-express” shells slammed into the wall, the impact shook the entire building, and men in the command post looked at one another anxiously. There was very little talking. Outside, what sounded like an avalanche of concrete fell onto Gravier Street.
Lieutenant Lawrence Vigurie, also an excellent marksman, directed the shooting. “There were at least nine windows that we had to break out first,” he reminisced long afterward. “It was very thick tinted glass, and we had to use a pipe to bust through it. Besides Deats Lauman, I had some other pretty good shots with me. Much of our ammunition came from the New Orleans Arms Company, a small gunshop located in the French Quarter. They brought us everything we needed. The manager of the place had come to the scene with some other guys earlier in the night. They had some really big weapons, but the superintendent nixed using them. Finally when he decided he wanted that hole, I called them back. And when they came down this time, they brought a .50-caliber antitank gun along with them. Thank God we never fired it. After half an hour or so, we must have had forty people in that room, not counting the men who were doing most of the shooting. Everyone wanted to get into the act. We had cops there from Mississippi, Texas, Jefferson Parish, St. Bernard Parish, and a lot of other places. Once I had to ask a sheriff ’s deputy to get out. It was two hundred yards on the nose to the target. And this guy started firing and he didn’t have a scope and was missing the hole by a mile. Spectators and newsman trying to push their way in also caused problems. Then to make things really messy, people somehow got a hold of our telephone number. We got calls from guys who offered us ammunition, rifles, food, anything, even dynamite. And God, there was a racket in there when all those guns went off. It was deafening. By the time we stopped shooting, there was enough brass on the floor to fill a five-gallon can.”
When Giarrusso called a cease-fire, the hole was almost two feet wide. At first the tomblike silence on the roof made it appear that the tactic may have worked. But then, as had happened so often before, reports of gunfire broke out anew. Men in the stairwells heard shouted obscenities, and from the tops of buildings, spotters with binoculars saw shadowed movement.
“What about using dogs up there?” someone suggested. “We sure don’t have anything to lose.”
Giarrusso decided to give the idea a try and called in two members of the K-9 corps. The officers led their German shepherds through the hotel lobby to the Perdido stairwell. (As the two dogs disappeared up the stairs, one reporter wisecracked, “Five minutes from now, they’ll be saying the sniper bit eight cops.”) The dogs started the long climb eagerly, in fine form, but when they reached the upper landings, one of them, apparently sickened by the heavy odor of tear gas, lay down and curled up on its side. Soon it had to be carried downstairs in a blanket.
The other dog was unaffected by the gas and lapped water from a steel helmet as its trainer awaited instructions. They were one flight below the stairwell door, which was held ajar by the shotgun Larry Arthur had dropped when he was wounded. The plan was to have the dog squeeze though the foot-wide crack and attack anyone on the roof. After carefully surveying the landing and door, the trainer declined.
“That amazed us,” officer Walter Reed remembered. “The guy said he wouldn’t let his dog go up alone, that he had to go up with it. Needless to say, that was out of the question, so it turned into an impasse. He kept saying, ‘They’ll kill my dog,’ and we kept telling him. ‘Better a goddamn dog than a man.’? We just couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t even let the dog go up with a thirty-foot leash.” Another K-9 officer was sent upstairs. His German shepherd was small and wiry and snapped out viciously if anyone came too close. This time there were no arguments. Tied to a long cord, the dog slowly climbed to the door and sniffed the edges of the crack. It would not go any farther.
“Go on, boy,” the trainer shouted. “Go on.” The dog still refused to advance and after a few minutes it was called back.
“The dog made it all the way to the door,” Lieutenant Schnapp told the command post. “We’re pretty well convinced now that no one’s hiding in those cubicles or on the landing.” The landing was just out of sight, hidden around a final turn in the stairwell.
“We’re trying to ascertain if they are moving around on our end,” Lieutenant Hunter said from the Gravier stairwell. “It seems as if we can hear the door. As if someone’s fooling with the door.”
“Chief, this dog is kinda hard to handle in these close quarters,” Schnapp said. Nervously excited, the dog was lunging with bared fangs if anyone stepped in its direction, and the trainer had to pull back hard on the choke-chain to make it lie down. Exhaustion was partially to blame. The dog had spent ten hours locked in the back seat of a squad car before it entered the hotel.
Yet another dog was sent up. It went to work on the eighteenth floor, where police had found a steel ladder inside a laundry closet near the elevator lobby. The ladder led to a trap door which opened into the boiler room on the roof. Rather than climb up to investigate, police prudently decided to use the dog.
“Is it up there yet?” Giarrusso asked. The ladder’s discovery had greatly worried him; he feared it might have been used as an escape route from the roof.
“He can’t make it up the ladder, Chief. It’s too steep, like a ship’s ladder.”
“Can you push him up or maybe lift him?”
“Stand by, we’ll try.”
“Someone’s firing again,” reported Car 114. “The shots are coming from somewhere along Loyola.”
“No one is authorized to fire,” Giarrusso snapped, his anger breaking into the open. “This is Car Two. Absolutely no one is to shoot.”
“The dog couldn’t make it up the stairs.”
“We’ve got to get him up there,” Giarrusso said. “The dog has got to do it. Can you stack some boxes? Maybe he can jump from box to box.”
The difficulties, however, persisted. “The K-9 man advises me that the dog will not go up without him.”
“Can he carry the dog up there?” Giarrusso asked.
“Negative, sir.”
“You got a long leash, don’t you?”
“He says that’s not the problem.”
“Right, well forget it then.”
Giarrusso now abandoned the plan. He had been informed the helicopter was repaired; in a matter of minutes he decided on another reconnaissance flight, and at five o’clock, after a long strategy conference in the command post, Colonel Pitman took off once again from the parking lot.
The helicopter’s approach over the darkened hotel was described for television audiences up at that hour by a reporter in the Warwick Hotel, where a bulky studio-sized camera had been positioned in a room facing the Howard Johnson’s. (Several television stations provided live coverage throughout the night.) “We should be seeing him any moment,” said WWLA TV reporter Phil Johnson, spacing his words for dramatic effect. “We can hear the rotor blades now. That gunman is still up there, still holding police at bay.” His voice was brittle with fatigue, for he had been talking steadily since Sunday noon. “There it is. It’s that big helicopter. The Jolly Green Giant. It’s coming in slowly, hovering over the roof. It’s playing its spotlight on the roof, shining it on those cubicles on the Perdido end of the building. They are obviously trying to draw his fire, but apparently this sniper is playing it cagey. The helicopter is right over the building now. It’s very low, right in front of those cubicles. You can see the light playing on the walls. Wait! They’re firing! Apparently they saw him. They’re really pouring it in.”
Sergeant Robert Buras was one of four men who were in the Perdido stairwell when the shooting began. With him were Sergeant Fred “Silky” O’Sullivan, head of the Intelligence Division, and tactical officers Wayne Galjour and Richard Siegal. They were sitting with their backs against the wall a half landing from the top of the stairwell. Their weapons were pointed toward the door. Not long before, Buras had sent five men downstairs; they had fallen asleep. “From our position, we could see the doorway leading onto the roof and we could see the slight rim of light around the door,” Buras said later. “This was because the door was propped open with a shotgun. From this location we could hear gunshots striking the building on our side. It was very difficult to distinguish where the rounds were coming from, that is, we couldn’t determine if it was the sniper or police officers firing at our position. During the night, on two occasions, the door to the roof had blown open from the wind caused by the helicopter. No one from our position ever fired a shot. We were in complete darkness when the door opened. And we could see that no one was silhouetted against the sky light. Near 5 AM, on the third pass of the helicopter, and while I was temporarily blinded by its lights, I saw what appeared to be the muzzle blast of an automatic weapon. It looked like it was coming through the crack of the door. We immediately returned fire. This lasted for only seconds, and the magazine of my weapon went empty or jammed, I don’t know which. During the exchange, I felt a strong blow to the shoulder and thought that I had got a hit in my bulletproof vest. After the firing ended, I put another clip into my carbine and that’s when I could feel pain in my left shoulder and blood beginning to run down my arm. Then someone asked who was hit, and all four of us yelled out.”
Bullet fragments had hit Buras in the chest, shoulder, and forearm. O’Sullivan, who had fired two bursts from an Israelimade UZI submachine gun as they retreated, was shot through the ear. Galjour and Siegel were also grazed.
After his wound was stitched shut at Charity Hospital, O’Sullivan told a newsman, “He popped at us and we popped back. We don’t know what we did to him.”
Buras, had he been asked, would have made a similar comment. Like O’Sullivan, he was convinced that a sniper had shot all of them. When he learned that there was another explanation for this three wounds, he was furious, “sick to the stomach.”
The explanation was later offered by Colonel Pitman who said, “Just before the flight, we had picked up one new guy, a lieutenant. Now the patrolmen on board apparently didn’t tell the lieutenant what the score was. It was just like the military. You don’t tell the general how to do things. We had already gone up for several flights around one or two in the morning, and we were still reportedly taking fire from the bunkers. People were still hearing voices and reporting movement on the roof, so we went up again. As we came around on our first pass, the rotor wash from the helicopter made the stairwell door vibrate and, of course, this caused the gun propped in there to move. [The shotgun dropped by Larry Arthur when he was wounded.] Now someone had just reported the sniper was on that end of the building inside the bunker. So when the gun moved, the lieu tenant fired a round or two. In the meantime, the cops in the stairwell were looking up and saw this big light come on, and they saw the door and the gun move and they opened up. It turned out we got four of them and they got two of us. A cop and one of my Marines were nicked by a bit of shrapnel. It just shows you what a lack of co-ordination can do.”