When the darkness lifted, the gray sky promised snow. The temperature had fallen steadily during the night and was now in the low thirties with a sharp wind gusting out of the north. The palm trees along Loyola Avenue looked hopelessly transplanted. The police officers who encircled the Howard Johnson’s took shelter from the cold wherever they could find it, sometimes building fires in trash cans and feeding in wadded newspapers to warm themselves. While they shivered, the rush hour passed safely. The cordon had worked. Hardly anyone at all ventured downtown; New Orleans had become a city under siege, her empty and strangely quiet streets abandoned to a few slow-moving squad cars.
Since the helicopters last sortie over the rooftop, there had been no indication of movement inside the cubicles. The gunmen, as had happened so often before, had seemingly vanished. By ten o’clock, however, this calm was shattered. Dispatchers received incoherent reports that snipers were firing from rooftops in other parts of the city; a woman was said to have been wounded in the head; blacks with rifles were allegedly seen darting down alleys, firing as they ran; and a black couple driving an expensive car had reportedly just purchased a large quantity of ammunition. One sighting seemed to trigger three more, and as each call was checked out and proven erroneous, others poured into the command post. Even Colonel Pitman was caught up in the excitement when the squad car carrying him to the hotel veered off to answer a sniper alarm two blocks from the Federal Building. The gunman turned out to be a seventy-year-old man with an umbrella who was startled to see three cops drawn down on him with shotguns. In another instance, five plainclothes detectives guarding the top floor of a hospital parking garage were almost attacked by officers who mistook them for snipers. Pedestrians, one of them an engineer carrying a blueprint case, were thrown up against walls and roughly frisked. As the panic spread, shots were exchanged during car chases, and there were bomb scares at the International Trade Mart, the Warwick Hotel, and City Hall. Many blacks were arrested only to be eleased afterward.
Giarrusso had difficulty following what was happening, for the radio frequencies were hopelessly jammed with disjointed, excited voices.
“Any unit near those Marine helicopters, come in,” a dispatcher said urgently. “We got a report of two Negro males, one with a green jacket, walking behind City Hall. They were walking in the direction of the helicopters.”
“Better check them out,” said an unidentified cop. “They were acting pretty suspicious and hid when a police car passed by.”
“From our vantage point, we can see what looks like two juveniles sitting on a bench by Juvenile Court. Wait a minute, there’s a young man that just ran across over there. He’s in blue jeans and a fatigue jacket. Now he’s hiding in some weeds.”
“This is Car 3170. We’re on Claiborne, down the street by Charity. There’s supposed to be a Negro male with a red jacket and a rifle around here. A motorist just stopped me and gave me this information.”
“I can see people running on the streets down below,” said a cop from the roof of Charity Hospital. “They’re running and jumping all over the place down there.”
“All right,” interrupted Giarrusso. “Use caution. It might be a setup.”
“We’ve checked all the way down Claiborne,” said Car 1900.
“We can’t see anyone. What’s going on? How about another description of that guy with the rifle.”
“It’s supposed to be Negro male with a red jacket and brown pants,” said a dispatcher.
“OK, we just saw a Negro with a red jacket ride down Loyola on a motorbike. We’re pursuing.”
“There’s a man with a rifle on the corner,” a cop said excitedly. “I can see — “
“You’re hollering into your mike, man. Slow down. We can’t hear you.”
“One of the subjects was seen running across that parking lot towards O’Keefe with a rifle. We got about six officers chasing him.”
“All units,” Giarrusso said. “Use caution. Repeat, use caution. Don’t get drawn into anything.”
“The guy with the rifle was running riverbound on either Union or Perdido.”
“All units, come in. We got firing over by Charity. It’s coming from around the nurses’ dormitory building.”
“There are state police rushing over there. We better try to coordinate this.”
“That shooting was coming from the roof of the nurses’ building. There’s definitely shots being fired from the roof of the nurses’ home on Claiborne and Gravier.”
“We can see the dorm,” said a cop at the hospital. “From our side we can’t see anybody on the top of the building.”
“Unit 610 is close to the nurses’ home. Do you have any idea where they are coming from up there? The shots.”
“All right, we have observers on top of Charity and they are looking at the nurses’ home,” Giarrusso said. “They don’t see anything.”
“They got what appears to be windows knocked out up there.”
“I’m on Claiborne in front of the nurses’ dorm,” reported Car 810. “I just heard a report of gunfire on Gravier and Claiborne.”
“You heard it yourself?” Giarrusso asked.
“Ten-four.”
“Chief, we heard it, too. Three gunshots.”
“This is Unit 25. An unmarked car just passed a subject with a red jacket and brown pants. He’s giving some kind of signal toward the hotel. He’s got a medium bush.”
“All right, use caution. This subject was signaling.”
“Hey, that’s a cop! It turns out that subject is a cop!”
“There’s a white male with a black overcoat and he’s carrying a long black case, similar to a long violin case or a rifle case,” said an observer at the Rault Center. “He’s walking toward the domed stadium. He should be to the right of the Juvenile Courts Building.”
“That looks like a middle-aged man. Better use caution. He might just be a businessman.”
“Right, we got him checked. He’s a worker from City Hall. He’s just leaving the area.”
Now Unit 610 broke in, “Would you tell these people to get off the panic button, Chief? Let’s get back to the business of the day.”
“What did you say, 610?” Giarrusso asked.
“I said, let’s pass out the nerve pills. These people are getting too damn nervous.”
“This is Charity again. We just received word that a subject with a white leather jacket and a cap was seen on the roof of the nurses’ home.”
“Wait, now the state police are up there. They are on the roof. We can see them.”
“Now we got it. It was two nurses up there. Two nurses on the roof.”
It was almost two hours before a fragile order was restored. Giarrusso said later that he was appalled by the “circus” but was unable to stop it. “All those reports of snipers running around. They made me furious,” he said. “I suspected those calls, every one of them, were bullshit, nothing but hysteria or tired cops seeing things that weren’t there.” The chaos, he said, ultimately triggered a “spontaneous” though inconclusive discussion about whether or not to impose a curfew. The participants included Governor Edwin Edwards.
Edwards had arrived by helicopter at Charity Hospital earlier that morning, and after chatting with several wounded police officers, he met with reporters. Because of the shootings, the governor said he would consider state laws to reinstate capital punishment for certain “heinous crimes.” He also said that he had “no information whatsoever on a nationwide conspirThe National
acy to kill policemen.” Such a view had been expressed Sunday night by Louisiana Attorney General William Guste, who told newsmen, “I am now convinced that there is an underground, national, suicide group bent on creating terror in America. Their purpose is to cause the people to be dissatisfied, to bring race against race, black against white, young against old, to cause internal national chaos.” Guste had said almost the same thing in a telephone conversation with U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst who assured him that “the full force of the Department of Justice would be behind a national investigation” to determine whether a conspiracy existed.
The comments of Guste and Edwards were aired live on the New Orleans television networks, as were those of Catholic Archbishop Philip Hannan, who reminded viewers that Monday was the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. The bishop urged that the community “stand as brothers united” as it had done 158 years earlier in the face of British invasion.
In the hotel, meanwhile, police had decided to enter the machinery room on the roof after spending an uneventful night guarding the ladder that led up to it. No sound had come from inside, not even the faintest scrape of a footstep. Walter Reed, one of the men who made the ascent, later narrated his experiences. “We had tried to get a dog up there, but the ladder was just too steep. Finally that morning, some fat, bald sheriff came up and said, ‘Hell, I’ll go up there if no one else won’t.’ I thought the guy was crazy, but I gave him my carbine, and he started up. He got to the trap door and pushed it open and climbed on inside. After a while he hollered, ‘Shit, there isn’t anyone up here.’ That’s when I and a couple of other guys followed him. Sure enough, the room was empty. A wall separated it from the boiler room next door. An old quilt was jammed in a small window, and there was a fan of some sort in one of the walls. The quilt seemed suspicious, so we called downstairs and the engineer told us it was supposed to be there. I beat the fan out with my gun butt and looked out, and I could see part of the way into one of the cubicles on the Gravier Street side. We also could see that body. But there was still a lot of blind space, so I went downstairs and broke a mirror and stuck a piece of it out the opening to try to see better. They showed all of that on television, and I found out later some reporter said, ‘Oh, look. A hand. It must be the sniper.’ The mirror worked but we still couldn’t see all of what we had to. There was a skylight in the ceiling, or rather a trap door of some sort. I went down and talked to the superintendent and told him that I could get out that opening and work my way along the roof and look into both cubicles. After a long talk, he finally agreed to let me do it. But first he passed the word on the radio that a cop was going out and for everybody to hold their fire. I climbed back up and opened the skylight a crack. I had an old police helmet and I put it on a rifle and stuck it out. Nothing happened so I opened it a little more, and I could see the guys in the Building. I waved to them and they waved back. I leaned up some more and could look at the Rault, and they told me to come on out, that they wouldn’t shoot. That’s when I opened the hatch all the way and climbed out slowly. I took a few steps when some shots rang out and slammed into the concrete near my feet. I dived back through the hatch and knocked two guys off the ladder.” It had happened again; a man without a radio had fired, mistaking Reed for a sniper.
Though skinned and bruised from his fall, Reed agreed to go out again after talking with Giarrusso. This time the precautions were more extensive. In addition to putting alerts over the radio, police with bullhorns went outside the hotel and directed that absolutely no shots were to be fired. Also, Reed moved faster. Throwing back the hatch, he pulled himself onto the roof and sprinted first to one end, then to the other. He dropped back inside the machinery room within seconds, having seen no one.
Now what to do? If the sniper wasn’t hiding in the cubicles, where was he? The only conceivable place left was inside the boiler room which had two louvered metal doors that opened onto the roof. These doors showed clearly in photographs taken from the Marine helicopter earlier that morning. Giarrusso had been studying them carefully for the better part of an hour, trying to settle on an acceptable strategy. After talking again with Reed, he decided to fire tear gas inside the boiler room. Major Thomas Drake agreed to do the shooting and Colonel Pitman readied the helicopter.
Since sunrise the sky had partially cleared and the landing zone had become crowded; another Marine CH-46 had arrived from Belle Chasse, and the Army had sent two heavily armed Hueys, which were parked near Pitman’s helicopter. These small, fast Vietnam-era gunships with their stubby brownand-green fuselages were on stand by. Pitman flew directly over them when he took off.
On the first flight, Drake fired at the doors only to watch the canisters bounce off the metal slats. The helicopter climbed sharply, halted, then dropped down on the opposite side of the hotel. The rear wall of the boiler room was almost flush with the edge of the roof. The words, “The Downtown Howard Johnson’s” were painted across it in red, and there was a small air vent visible above the letter “H.” Drake fired at the vent, but the heavy shells wouldn’t penetrate the metal grillwork and fell to the patio where they burst open. Some of them landed in the swimming pool.
Giarrusso ordered the vent shot away. The marksmen in the Rault Center had the best angle of fire, and using .44-magnums they blew it open in short order, leaving a hole about a foot square.
“Chief, it looks like there is return fire coming from that hole,” someone said. This was vigorously disputed by other observers.
Giarrusso now asked Drake to fire some tear gas through the vent. And the television cameras had some spectacular footage as Pitman eased the helicopter ever lower until the rotors were three feet over the rooftop, so low and close that the men on board could reach out and touch the blue curtains that flapped from the shattered windows on the eighteenth floor. Despite the lurching vibrations and the prop wash, Drake shot five bull’s eyes. Gas poured out the hole as the room filled with it, the excess seeping into the machinery room next door, where the men tried in vain to protect their eyes with handkerchiefs. Pitman maneuvered the helicopter back in front of the boiler room so that the police could shoot at the metal louvered doors. The bullets ripped a hundred holes in them, but they wouldn’t open and then the ammunition ran out and Pitman had to land.
It was now twelve o’clock. Giarrusso began to make the final preparations for what he had resolutely avoided for over a day — an assault on the roof. He worked out the plan with Lieutenant Hunter who had gathered sixteen volunteers for the attack, which was to be launched from the Gravier stairwell. Hunter, who was to lead it, said afterward, “We held a meeting on the sixteenth floor, and I told them that sooner or later we had to go up on that roof. When I asked if anyone wanted to go with me, everyone’s hand went up. We made the decision in seconds. Later on, when it got to be time, Sal Scalia drew a diagram on the wall of the layout on the roof. The plan was to isolate that building in the center, the one with the boiler room. I wanted two men with shotguns to lean out the hole at the top of the stairwell and fire into the cubicle to make sure no one bushwacked us. Then the rest of us were to come out, check the Perdido cubicles, and surround that center building.”
Scalia recalled that they were convinced the sniper would have a clear shot at them when they rushed out. “We thought it was going to be suicide,” he said. “We were quite sure that guy was up there somewhere with a carbine and I remember we had a pretty frank discussion of fear. It was almost like going to confession. One of the men was scheduled to retire in a week or two, and he asked whether we’d feel bad if he didn’t go. We told him, hell no, that he’d be a fool if he went along, but it turned out he was one of the first on the roof.”
An hour passed, then another, and a little before two o’clock, the men lined up single file inside the stairwell. They carried automatic carbines and shotguns; a few wore gas masks and held pistols. It was a scene from the trenches of World War One. There was little talking; a few men smoked very quietly in the darkness. Then it was time.
“All right, move it, let’s go,” Hunter shouted, and two men at the top of the stairs leaned out the hole and blasted into cubicle with their shotguns, one aiming high, the other low. Then they were out on the roof, and the others followed, jumping over the body, not looking at it as they ran for the boiler room. The Gravier cubicles were checked first. They were empty. Then there were gunshots. Someone was shooting at them from City Hall. “Don’t shoot,” they screamed, waving their rifles. “We’re cops! We’re cops!”
Three men gingerly sidestepped along a narrow ledge that ran behind the boiler room. They could feel the wind tugging at their legs, and when they passed the vent, the heavy odor of tear gas made them dizzy and they had to kneel down to steady themselves. One of them carried a shotgun. It had jammed and when he tried to clear it, the weapon discharged unexpectedly so that he almost fell from the ledge. Then they reached the corner, and leaning around it, they fired into the Perdido cubicles. These, too, were empty.
All of Hunter’s men were now on the roof. Their backs were flattened against the walls of the boiler room. They were flanking the doors.
“Who’s got the keys?” someone shouted.
They had forgotten them.
“Let’s get an ax.”
“Fuck the ax; let’s shoot it open.”
Now Lieutenant Schnapp and ten men rushed from the Perdido stairwell. Originally, there were to be only two assault teams, those led by Hunter and Schnapp. But they had failed to secure the stairwells behind them, an oversight that permitted over thirty officers to push and shove their way onto the rooftop. Everything had broken to pieces. Cops stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a semicircle in front of the boiler room, their rifles leveled at the doors.
“Jesus, they’re not going to do what I think they are,” said a cop, watching from the Rault Center.
But then they did. There was a gunshot, and someone shouted, “He’s shooting,” and all of them opened up at once, the bullets splattering into the doors. Ricochets careened loudly.
“Cease firing!” Hunter shouted desperately. “Cease fire!” Men fell around him. They went down like tenpins, some of them clutching their legs, others their sides and backs. Hunter knew what had happened and he could feel himself getting sick. Then something stung his hand. The hand was suddenly very hot. A finger had been grazed.
Nine men were shot. They crawled or had to be carried out of the line of fire. Three were seriously injured: L.J. Delsa, Dan Dunn, and Guy LeBlanc, all members of Hunter’s squad. “I was hit in the left forearm with a .30-caliber bullet,” Delsa said later. “It cut right through the muscle like a knife through warm butter. I was standing there waiting for the keys when those idiots opened up on the doors. The bullets glanced off and hit me. Guy LeBlanc and Dan Dunn, all of us were standing together. We couldn’t believe it at first. I fell and got up. The blasting was terrible, deafening, and I decided to get the hell out of there. Then Guy fell, and I dragged him, then Danny Dunn went to help us and he got hit in the leg. LeBlanc got it in the thigh. He thought he was shot in the stomach. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and he felt the bullet hit him in the gut, but it glanced off and went into his thigh. Dan and I pulled Guy out of the way. He could hardly move.”
Giarrusso watched all this on television. Moments before the assault, a small portable TV had been set up in the comA mand post. (Until then, he had been unaware that for hours television cameras had provided clear, detailed pictures of the rooftop while he was relying on poorly focused photographs and word of mouth. He would later admit that one of his mistakes was simply not turning on a television.)
“How were those men shot?” he asked.
When it was explained, Giarrusso flinched in his seat but kept under control. “Let’s get some order up there,” he said. “Get the men to the sides of that building and let’s get decided on our next move.”
The decision was made quickly. While a heavy-set cop belabored the metal doors with an ax, four men crawled out on the roof of the machinery room. Carrying shotguns and hunched over, they moved cautiously to the boiler-room hatch. But as soon as they began to open it, they were called back, and there was a brief delay until it was determined that the boilers and electrical circuits inside would not explode. Then, as national television networks interrupted their midday soap operas to provide live coverage, the metal doors were smashed open and the hatch lifted. Men ran inside. The room was empty.
“The roof is clear,” Hunter reported. “We got into the boiler room. There’s nothing there.”
The words landed like hammer blows in the command post.
“He must have made it down last night,” a cop said bitterly. “I’ll bet he had ropes. With that fog he could have slid down the side of the building and we’d never have seen him.”
A detective said, “Shit, all he needed was a police uniform. He probably walked out of the place.”
“Can you get a Crime Lab photographer and some coroner’s people up here for this Negro male,” Lieutenant Ed O’Donnell radioed from the roof.
“Eddie, they are standing by, but I’m not satisfied yet,” Giarrusso said. “I would like to talk this over.”
“We’d like to talk to somebody from Car 406, the guys who were firing at that dude last night.” It was Lieutenant Raymond Comstock who had been in the Perdido stairwell. “I’m on the corner here facing you, 406. I’m waving a rifle. Can you see me?”
“Ten-four,” 406 said.
“According to my left or right, where were you firing at that guy?”
“Ray, come on down and we’ll talk about that,” Giarrusso said. “We’re being monitored and I would rather discuss that privately.”
When the roof was secured, men walked over to examine the body. It was not easy to look at. The left leg was almost severed. Much of the torso was a colorless pulp, and a wide black stain had seeped into the pea-gravel. The face was shot away, the bullets having twisted the lips into a contorted, hideous smile. The right hand was clenched in a fist.
A cop knelt down and reached into the dead man’s pockets. He withdrew two bullets and a firecracker.
Walter Reed stared at the shattered body. It seemed so small, and the rifle, broken in four pieces, looked almost toylike. How did they do it? he asked himself. How did the others escape? Where did they go?
“We blew it,” said a cop standing next to him. “We had them, and then we blew it.” He was crying softly.
At two-thirty in the afternoon, Car 406 reported that the side paneling had fallen from a large air-conditioning unit at the rear of the hotel. Then a spotter on another building said that he could see a “Negro male wearing a white T-shirt,” hiding inside the air conditioner.
“Just hold your positions,” Giarrusso said. “Keep him under observation.”
“He appears to be armed.”
“We got a clear shot from the BNO.”
“No, no. Hold your fire,” Giarrusso said. “No one is to fire. Just keep this unit under observation.”
“I have an open field of fire,” said Car 406.
“We got armor-piercing slugs,” a cop radioed from the parking garage at the Bank of New Orleans. “I’m on the fiteenth floor. I’ve got a beautiful shot.”
“Chief, we saw the subject move his arm,” 406 said excitedly. “We saw it move.”
“You better do some more checking,” someone cut in. “That looks like it might be a piece of hose or insulation.”
“We’re not going to shoot at anybody until we can see him, and right now no one sees him,” Giarrusso said.
“I tell you we’re looking at him eyeball to eyeball,” 406 said.
There was only one sure way to settle it. Lieutenant Roger Bacon prepared to go out and check the air conditioners. But first the War Wagon, using loudspeakers, clattered down the streets, warning everyone to hold their fire. As the tank swung around in front of City Hall its brakes went out and it rolled up on the lawn, cutting zigzagged furrows in the soft grass before finally coasting to a stop two feet from the front door. Then there was another delay when an old man, evidently out for his morning walk, shuffled slowly up Perdido Street. While everyone watched dumbfounded, he stepped over fire hoses with stiff-legged difficulty and made his way around the police cars and fire trucks that were pulled up on the sidewalk, pausing from time to time to spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the gutter. A cop ran out and dragged him off the street.
At last, Bacon and two other men were given the go-ahead. Climbing down from a balcony, they dropped onto a narrow roof that jutted from the ninth floor at the rear of the hotel. Bacon wore a white shirt and tie and held a stub-nosed pistol. There were three air conditioners on the roof, each the size of a small car, and he unscrewed the side panels of the first two before he moved to the third, which reportedly concealed the black male. He checked one side, then the other while two men covered him with their shotguns.
“It’s all clear,” he reported.
“What was it? Insulation?” Giarrusso asked.
“Ten-four.”