You're not an African because you're born
in Africa. You're an African because Africa is born in you. It's in your genes
... your DNA ...your entire biological make up. Whether you like it or not,
that's the way it is. However, if you were to embrace this truth with open
arms....my, my, my ...what a wonderful thing."
Marimba Ani
Ex-radical held in 1971
killing of cop
By STEVE VISSER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
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Greene |
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Hilton |
Nobody was
expected to pay for the killing of Atlanta policeman James Richard Greene.
The 26-year-old engaged
officer had parked his patrol wagon about 1:30 a.m. at a darkened gas station
to eat a ham biscuit. A security guard found him some 20 minutes later still
clutching his napkin.
On Friday, a Fulton County
grand jury deliberated just about one minute before indicting Freddie Hilton
for murder in the 30-year-old case.
It wasn't that the killing
was a mystery. Police had the names of two suspects within a year --
self-styled revolutionaries of the Black Liberation Army reportedly out to
prove their worth by killing a cop. One was killed the next year in a gunbattle
with New York police. The other was the now-49-year-old Hilton, who, The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned, was brought in June from Rikers
Island in New York to the Fulton County Jail.
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"The timing was just
right for this to happen now," said Jim Rose, an Atlanta detective who
crisscrossed the country for 18 months investigating the case. "The police
back then thought they had enough to indict, but I think if you had asked them
if they had enough to prosecute, they would have said no."
If Hilton goes to trial,
he'll be the latest in a string of failed '70s revolutionaries to face a
courtroom for pursuing politics through murder.
The Black Liberation Army
was a disciplined but loose-knit cluster of cells claiming to fight racial
oppression by killing cops. The small but heavily armed group began operating
around 1970, was smashed in shootouts and sputtered out in the early 1980s with
the imprisonment of its top remaining members.
"They left the Black
Panthers because the Panthers weren't violent enough," said Rose, 49, who
had wanted to investigate the Greene murder for years. "But I didn't get
into all that BLA stuff. From the very beginning, the only thing I was
interested in was the murder of Jimmy Greene."
Civil rights and Vietnam
War protests produced major changes in America. Southern blacks won freer
exercise of constitutional rights, and a student movement became a force in
ending a war. But it also was a time when a handful of frustrated radicals took
up guns and bombs to try to overthrow the system or speed reform.
It was also a time when
some police forces were racist, the FBI used illegal covert means to undermine
dissidents and National Guardsmen fired on demonstrators.
"Violence feels like
the common currency," said Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor
and an expert on the radical era. "The arguments against violence
were strong, and most of the people in the movement bought them. But that is
reason, in the head. The glands said, 'Somebody has to hurt for this. Somebody
has to suffer.' "
Hilton's participation in
political violence appears to have ended with that era. After finishing a
prison stint for bank robbery, he had disappeared into a new religion, Islam, a
new name and a new-found legitimacy. As Kamau Sadiki, he worked for the
telephone company in New York for 18 years and stayed out of trouble. A Fulton
indictment for bank robbery lapsed. District Attorney Lewis Slaton said he
didn't have enough evidence to prosecute Hilton for murder.
Hilton's lawyer suspects
that the evidence isn't any better today.
"My client swears he
didn't do it," said Akil Secret, an Atlanta attorney. "Thirty years
to bring an indictment? My guess is the case must have been very weak or it
would have been brought before that. I think the state is guessing."
School for guerrillas|
On Nov. 3, 1971, police
were perplexed by the killing at the intersection of Memorial Drive and
Boulevard. There didn't seem to be any motive.
Then police learned a band
of a dozen or so Black Liberation Army members had fled New York for a
farmhouse on Fayetteville Road in DeKalb County to train in urban guerrilla
tactics. They practiced shooting, map reading and first aid and planned
precision bank robberies, complete with diagrams. The members were suspected in
the killings of several police officers. One of their signatures was to take
the badges as trophies.
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DEATH OF A POLICEMAN: |
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August
1971: Freddie Hilton and a 12-member squad of the Black Liberation Army
set up house on Fayetteville Road in DeKalb County as a safe haven from New
York. Nov.
3, 1971: Atlanta patrolman James Richard Greene is killed. A week later
police, investigating the bank robbery, raid the group's house and arrest
eight people, but not Hilton. Dec.
11-12, 1971: The Black Liberation Army members escape from the DeKalb
County Jail on a weekend. May
1972: Greene's service revolver and holster are found in a lake in
southwest Atlanta. The serial number had been filed off the gun. September
1972: Samuel Cooper is recaptured in Miami. He identifies two men, one of
them Hilton, as the gunmen who killed Greene. Oct.
2, 1972: District Attorney Lewis Slaton says he doesn't have sufficient
evidence to indict in the slaying of Greene. Dec.
12, 1974: Hilton is convicted of robbing a savings and loan in Queens and
sentenced to five years. Feb.
2, 2001: New York detectives, investigating an unrelated case, discover
Hilton is the key suspect in the killing of Greene. Atlanta Police Detective
Jim Rose starts investigating the case. July
12, 2002: A Fulton County grand jury indicts Hilton for murder. |
Greene's badge and gun were
missing. A week later DeKalb police raided the house and arrested eight people.
The next month, all eight
escaped from the DeKalb jail by jimmying the doors and sliding out on a rope of
sheets. Within 10 months, police had recaptured one -- Samuel Cooper. He told
them Hilton and Twyman Meyers, 22, had killed the officer to prove themselves
after their leader berated them for doing "stupid things."
After the shooting, Cooper
told police, Hilton and Meyers came back to the house and tossed Greene's badge
and revolver on a table, shouting, "We did it, we did it." Another
housemate played with the pistol, saying, "The pigs in Atlanta sure have
nice guns."
In September 1972, Atlanta
police Lt. Louis Graham announced that Hilton and Meyers would be indicted for
Greene's murder. But within a week, Fulton DA Slaton said Cooper's statement
wouldn't suffice for the murder indictment.
"I knew we had a good
case, but the DA wouldn't go for it," said Graham, who retired as Fulton
County police chief and is now chief deputy for the DeKalb County Sheriff's
Department. "That always bothered me.
Meyers died in a gunbattle
in the Bronx with police the next year.
District Attorney Paul
Howard, who sought the new indictment, says the case against Hilton is more
solid now. Rose and M.C. Cox, a retired Atlanta policeman who works as an
investigator for Howard and has a reputation for finding hard-to-find people,
have rounded up at least seven people who are willing to testify.
Rose said some are former
Black Liberation Army members who heard Hilton brag about the shooting.
"Some of them are truly remorseful about it," he said. "But I
don't think they would have been as willing to testify back then."
He said some have become
mainstream professionals. "It's a lot harder to find somebody on the run,
and I think that was a problem the police had back then," the detective
said. "I was able to find everybody but one person. Virtually all of them
had tried to straighten their lives out and were no longer in hiding."
There are other witnesses
who saw Hilton pull the trigger and reach in and grab Greene's badge, Rose
said. A woman who was headed to a bootlegger's shot house said she spoke to the
gunmen. She saw Hilton walk up to Greene, ostensibly to ask directions, and
then open fire, with Meyers shooting from the passenger side. A couple driving
to work at Krispy Kreme were stopped at the intersection and saw the shooting.
They told police Hilton and Meyers strode across the street and up Boulevard
along the wall of historic Oakland Cemetery.
The witnesses had all
scattered over the next three decades. "Jim Rose finds an eyewitness in
Florida and he does a photo array and the witness picks out Freddie
Hilton," said Chris Karolkowski, a New York police detective who helped in
the case. "It was amazing. All the pieces fell into place."
FBI assists probe
Both New York and federal
law officers spent the early 1970s trying to nail Hilton for attacks on police
and bank robberies with limited success. In 1973, he was acquitted of a Bronx
heist. In 1974, he was acquitted of attempted murder in the wounding of two
patrolmen. He was convicted of robbing a savings and loan in Queens in New York
and sentenced to five years.
During those days he
achieved notoriety for fathering the daughter of JoAnne Chesimard -- called the
force behind the Black Liberation Army -- in a jail cell where they were
sequestered for disrupting their Bronx bank robbery trial. After her acquittal,
Chesimard was later convicted of murdering a New Jersey trooper. She escaped
from prison and lives in Cuba. She changed her name to Assata Shakur and is one
of the nation's most wanted fugitives.
After Hilton's arrest in
1972, Graham suspected the FBI had blocked his indictment in Greene's murder
because it wanted to try Hilton for federal crimes in New York. But Rose said
the federal agents cooperated fully this time, opening agency files to him and
even helping him land a helicopter so he could skip around New York, New Jersey
and Pennsylvania.
Any FBI involvement --
coupled with the 30-year delay in bringing the case -- makes former radicals
suspicious there are hidden motives behind Hilton's prosecution.
"The best we can tell
is that this is a way of pressuring Assata," said Kathleen Cleaver, a
former Black Panther who now is a visiting professor at Emory Law School.
"The FBI told [Hilton] they were going to have him arrested and he was
going to die in jail."
It was a complaint by a
12-year-old girl that sparked Hilton's arrest. Karolkowski and fellow New York
police detective James Moss arrested Hilton on a charge of molestation. That
charge was later dropped, but not before detectives learned Hilton once had
soldiered for the Black Liberation Army.
That was enough for them to
dig into his past. The Black Liberation Army was blamed for killing a number of
NYPD officers in the 1970s, and the cops wanted his help in solving a 1970s
slaying of two patrolmen. Hilton was little help on that case, but the detectives
learned from a FBI file that he was the chief suspect in an Atlanta police
killing.
"There is a legacy of
violence that attaches to an individual like Mr. Hilton," said Tom Niery,
a New York police detective in the major cases squad whose voice wells with
anger when he talks about the Black Liberation Army cases he worked in the
1970s. "There are a lot of people who ambushed police officers still
walking round today. We're looking for justice, wherever justice can be
had."
Karolkowski called Atlanta
police in January 2001 and was referred to Rose, who has a reputation for
solving cold cases. Rose was already eyeing the Greene case when he learned
Hilton was in jail.
"All of these guys
were influenced by the times," said Karolkowski, 31, who had to spend
three days in the library to get up to speed on the now obscure group. "As
they got older, some continued in a life of crime and other realized that
wasn't the way to go and lived decent lives. Unfortunately a lot of them, like
Hilton, have crimes hanging over their heads."
Unlike the Black Panthers,
another group that picked up the gun, the Black Liberation Army didn't set up
breakfast programs or health clinics, although many of its members were
ex-Panthers. It tapped into a growing view among some African-Americans that
violence was needed to ensure equal rights even if tilted toward anarchy.
"By 1971, you have the
growth of violent black nationalism," said Gitlin, the NYU professor.
"And you have the virtual collapse of the Black Panthers, who had been a
channel for would-be revolutionaries. But the Panthers were still a political
organization which had a political program. I don't think the Black Liberation
Army had anything other than a gun."
'Going back in history'
The members saw themselves
as freedom fighters "expropriating" funds from capitalist banks to
overthrow a racist system, said Akinyele Umoja, a professor at Georgia State
University who has interviewed Black Liberation Army members.
Police portray them as
maniac back-shooters.
"They were assassins,
and there was no rhyme or reason," said Niery, who noted some of the
group's police killings involved black officers. "Nobody ever articulated
a motive like this cop beat someone."
Niery said he's still
trying to solve the murder of New York Officer Robert Bolden, a 45-year-old
black Navy vet. In 1971, he was killed during a pub robbery in a Brooklyn
neighborhood where Niery said the Black Liberation Army operated.
Black Liberation Army
cadres would have viewed black officers as traitors because they had joined the
enemy they saw as an occupying army, said Umoja. He did not condone the killing
but said he believed the group's violence was the natural outgrowth of racial
repression, including the FBI's campaign to destroy the Black Panthers and black
nationalist groups.
"Many attacks on
police were considered retaliation for attacks on Black Panthers, police
shootings in the community and other forms of police brutality," he said.
"It was a more hostile situation in America at that time."
Rose remembers that time.
He was 18 and living in rural New York state when Greene was killed in Atlanta,
and he remembers the attacks on police in his home state.
"Investigating this
case was like going back in history," Rose said. "One thing that
impressed me was that nothing in this country got solved by violence. Killing
cops didn't change anything. All the progress that was made was through
nonviolence."