Foster and Laurie

At a quarter to 11:00 on the night of January 27, 1972, two rookie patrolmen, Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, were on their beat, poised on this corner of 11th Street and Avenue B. As they stood, perhaps talking, perhaps only pausing silently for a moment, three, or maybe four, men came toward them across the intersection, parted to pass, then suddenly spun around and unleashed a thundering volley of shots into the backs of the two cops. As the pair went down, the men stood over them and fired again and again - Laurie took six slugs, Foster eight. One of the gunmen fled North up Avenue B; the others jumped into a getaway car and sped away. Hours later the car was found idling by the L subway station at 14th Street and First Avenue. Empty shells were found in the station itself, indicating that the killers had fled, courtesy of the MTA, into Brooklyn. Foster died instantly, Laurie on the operating table early the next day. Two cops mercilessly assassinated was shocking enough, but Foster and Laurie were only the latest victims of a nearly yearlong vendetta against the NYPD. On May 19, 1971, patrolman Nicholas Binetti and Thomas Curry flagged down a car at Riverside Drive and 106th Street for a minor traffic violation. Suddenly, their patrol car was riddled by a burst of machine gunfire from the car. Though gravely wounded, neither died. Two days later patrolmen Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini, walking out of a project called the Colonial Park Houses at 159-20 Harlem River Drive in Inwood, were ambushed. This pair was not so lucky - the attack was fatal for both. The UPI received a communiqué after the Foster and Laurie shooting: This is from the George Jackson Squad of the Black Liberation Army about the pigs wiped out in lower Manhattan last night. No longer will black people tolerate Attica and oppression and exploitation and rape of our black community. This is the start of our spring offensive. There is more to come. We remember Attica. The George Jackson Squad of the BLA The Black Liberation Army had arisen in 1969 from the ashes of a Black Panther Party decimated by arrests and schisms. Unlike the Panthers, who were given to grand public gestures and self-promotion, the BLA was an underground and extremely secretive group of revolutionary black nationalists. They considered the Panthers too moderate, even sell-outs. The BLA viewed black ghettoes as sovereign territory, the police as invaders, and themselves as the armed resistance. To this group, Foster (black) and Laurie (white) were but foot soldiers of an enemy army. From the investigation of the Binetti-Curry and Jones-Piagentini murders the police had a sheaf full of suspected BLA members, and eyewitnesses in the vicinity of 11th and B picked out several mugshots. Within a week the police knew who they were looking for. They found them, by accident, in St. Louis. A shootout after a routine stop for a traffic violation lead to the arrest of Henry Brown and death of Ronald Ca

Forget the epic novels of today. Forget all the great fiction that has been written in the course of history, for it has absolutely nothing on the story of New York City Patrolmen Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie. This is the story of their lives and their tragic deaths, murdered by back-shooting cop-killers on the 27th of January, 1972. This is, without a doubt, the most true-to-life, compelling, and it is probably the saddest book you will ever read. Period.