May 2018
Post 13 Trivia John Young, Patrolman
Andrew’s Betrayal!
Andrew Cuomo became the 56th Governor of New York, on January 1, 2011. During his first term, New York legalized same-sex marriage and enacted gun control legislation whereby police officers, armed with semi-automatic pistols, were even in violation. Re-elected in 2014, to a second term, he has changed the make-up of the State Parole Board.
Each member of the State Parole Board is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate for a six-year term. Three members have been appointed by previous Governors (Patterson, Spitzer and Pataki) and reappointed by Cuomo. Retired NYPD detective Sally Thompson’s term ends in May 2019. All others have backgrounds in law, social work and probation.
An article in the New York Post (3/15/18) described Herman Bell as an assassin who was excoriated by the Parole Board’s decision of letting a cop-killer out of prison to walk among us to kill again. By a vote of two (Otis Cruse & Carol Sharpio) to one (Caryne Demosthenes), the three member panel heard Bell’s appeal for parole. It was only in 2012 that Bell finally admitted his complicity in the murders of Patrolmen Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini. Two board members fell for his impressive institutional record and list of accomplishments over the course of his 35 years of imprisonment.
Bell’s major accomplishment was joining the Black Panther Party. Through its survival program, he became part of the Black Liberation Army. Unlike the Zulu warriors who defeated the British Army at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (1879), Bell and two cohorts (Anthony Bottom & Albert Washington) waited for the cops to pass them, before shooting them in the back. Jones was shot in the back of the head from six inches away, while they emptied Piagentini’s service revolver into him, as he pleaded for his life.
On August 29, 1971, Bottom and Washington were arrested in the shotgun killing of Sergeant John V. Young SFPD at the Ingleside Police Station in San Francisco. At the time of their arrest, they found Officer Jones’s service revolver and a .45 automatic that was identified as the murder weapon. Did I mention, the station house was empty except for Sergeant Young and a civilian. Everyone else was at the scene of a bombing!
Following a lead, detectives went to New Orleans, where Bell was arrested in September 1973. According to his bio on www.freethesf8.org, Bell alleged he was tortured by New Orleans police, and then illegally extradited to New York. There was no eyewitness to the shooting and he was never put in a line-up. However, he failed to mention that his fingerprints were found on a parked car on the street outside the project. An informant (Ruben Scott) would later tell detectives that Bell buried Piagentini’s gun on a farm in Mississippi.
The first trial against Bell, Bottom, Washington and the Torres Brothers concluded in a hung jury. In January 1975, The New York Three were each convicted on two counts of murder. Judge Edward Greenfield sentenced all three assassins to a 25 year-to-life prison term as the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the death penalty in July 1972.
Luckily Albert Washington died in prison in April 2000, before he became eligible for parole. Bell and Bottom have had eight parole hearings each, since 2002, with Bottom having a second hearing in 2014. Bottom took the Muslim name of Jilil Abdul Muntaqim. You can visit www.freejalil.com and read about Jalil: Political Prisoner, Prisoner of War. He wrote 52 blogs including a history, his history, of how the Nixon Administration and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI conspired to destroy the Civil Rights Movement and militant black organizations.
Bottom speaks of being arrested after a shoot-out with San Francisco Police, but does not describe how he and his cohorts attacked the Ingleside Police Station in August 1971. There were only two persons in the empty station house, as they fired six rounds from a shotgun, killing Sergeant John V. Young and wounding a civilian employee. All the other cops had responded to the scene of a bombing.
In the first trial of the San Francisco Eight, charges were dismissed because the police had used torture to extract confessions from some of the defendants that were arrested in New Orleans. The same eight were arrested in 2007, and charged with the murder of Sgt. Young. In 2009, a California Court took a plea of Voluntary Manslaughter by Bell, while Bottom pleaded “no contest” to Conspiracy to commit Voluntary Manslaughter. Both received probation. All charges against the other six Black Panthers were dismissed.
If you want an education, you have to read some of the writings (blogs) on Jalil’s website. Even better, visit some of his links (i.e. The San Francisco Eight, The National Jericho Movement, The Freedom Archives.
In addition, I found the following: The New York Three gives the history and case background surrounding a trial that sent three innocent black men to prison. Bottom mentions three books that tell the story: Robert Daly’s Target Blue, Al Seedman’s Chief and Robert Tannenbaum’s Badge of the Assassins. However, they don’t tell the truth. Tannenbaum prosecuted the Piagentini and Jones murders. New York prisons must have some great libraries!
Jilil echoed Chicago’s Reverend Wright in one of his writings, “America reaps what it sows!” The 911 attack was part of an overall blow-back to U.S. Imperialist policy in the support of Zionist Israel, and opposition to fundamental Islam.
Blog #18 (The Parole Board and the PBA: One and the Same?) attacks the organizations position that “cop killers” should never get parole. He complains that the PBA has a website (www.nycpba.org) with a “Keep Cop-killers in Jail” page that sent over 330,000 letters in 2014. In fact, Attica resident Anthony Bottom, Prisoner #77A-4283, is coming before the Parole Board in June 2018. Visit the page, all you have to give is your e-mail address and zip code. You may want to leave a comment. Be nice!
Remember the Governor’s 2016 Christmas present to Judith Clark, granting her clemency by reducing her 75 year-to-life sentence to 35 years-to-life sentence? She was denied parole in April 2017. Remember my sticker, “Cuomo Loves Cop Killers!”