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.