On November 19, 1986, at 8:26 p.m. six police officers—four of whom were detectives—descended upon the entrance of a 19th-century brick apartment building at 1231 Fulton Avenue in the Bronx neighborhood of Morrisania. Six more officers covered the courtyard, fire escapes, and alley, and an additional 15 units lay in wait in case their suspect didn’t go quietly.

The building intercom was broken, but a tenant noticed the officers through the front door’s glass panel, and let them in. They hustled down a wide, L-shaped hall with decaying brown and yellow walls, and stopped at the door of unit 1-A, Regina Lewis’.

The year had already logged in five triple homicides and two quadruple homicides in New York City. According to the police, all seven incidents—23 murders in all—were drug related. The buzz around town inferred they all were fueled by the emergence of crack in the city two years earlier.

Their target was 20-year-old Larry Davis, a squat, muscular Black man with inset eyes, who was known to police as “a little package of Mr. T.” To others, he was “Loco Larry” because of his unbalanced demeanor. 

He was wanted for questioning in a series of murders involving drug dealers, all occurring in 1986: On August 5, Raymond Vizcaino was shot through the door of his apartment in the Bronx; on September 16, Victor Lagombra was gunned down at 521 West 156th Street; and on October 30, Angel Castro, Juan Rodriguez, Jesus Perez, and Hector Figueroa Hernandez were all shot in an apartment at 829 Southern Boulevard.

Davis had been living with his sister Regina Lewis, her husband Joseph, and their three children—3-and 2-year-old sons and a 4-month-old daughter—on Fulton Avenue for at least a month. His sister Helen lived across the hall with her husband and two children. The kids regularly breezed from one place to the other.

A sense of impending doom seemed to consume every fiber of Davis’ being, which he quieted with an assortment of drugs and by sleeping on the couch with a loaded gun. But on this particular night, nothing—not even his newborn daughter, Larrima—could soothe the anxiety of dodging multiple inqueries about gangland-style murders.

In the apartment building hallway, he removed his revolver from his waistband and pressed the barrel against his chiseled cheek bone. When he slumped against the wall and began spitting up, Regina thought her brother was overdosing. After several tense moments, Regina and Joseph were able to coax the gun from him. The mini crisis would prove to be kindling for an impending inferno in just a few hours.

Davis wasn’t always out of control. He loved playing the piano and had even cut a record once. But Davis found that his real talent was in finding the prickly edges of criminality and bypassing any perceived code of the streets.

For Davis, drug dealers made easy marks because they were flush with cash and couldn’t call the police to report a crime.

As a result, Davis staved off retaliation by accumulating a cache of weapons and a sadistic drug habit. His nephew Brian had accompanied him on a few drug spot robberies, but he called it quits when his uncle became too irrational. According to him, he had witnessed Davis torture, kill, and cook a Chihuahua in a skillet. The rusty scent of animal blood and seared flesh was too much for Brian to endure, so he put an end to partnering with his uncle.

After his temporary breakdown in the Fulton Avenue hallway, Davis was now sitting on the couch with his baby and eldest nephew when he heard a knock at the door. The rest of the family and his girlfriend, Melody Fludd, was also in the apartment.

That knock acted as an accelerant to produce “10 minutes of hell.” Davis retreated from the couch, down a 10-foot-long hallway, and into a back bedroom with the children. The other adults remained in the living room. He knew it was the police and believed wholeheartedly that they were there to assassinate him.

The six cops kicked the door in and pushed Lewis to the right of the apartment's entrance.. Armed with a stashed shotgun and an automatic handgun, Davis let off several rounds, forcing the police to huddle behind a cinderblock wall in the foyer to avoid more unexpected barrage. These weren’t warning shots. Davis was shooting to kill. 

Six officers were hit. The most gravely injured was emergency service police officer Mary Ellen Buckley, who was hit in the face. Five upper and five lower teeth ejected out of her mouth like fighter pilots ditching doomed aircraft. Emergency service officer John O’Hara, who was hit in the eye with buckshot, pawed at the white-hot lead pinballing between his cornea and retina. 

The only escape route for the police was backward. Detective Donald O’Sullivan, who had entered upon the initial breach, dodged the onslaught, and headed to a third-floor apartment, where he called for reinforcements. The exchanges over the police radio revealed the ongoing chaos inside apartment 1-A.

8:43: “Use caution, he’s crazy.”

9:00: “He fired on us. I dove for my ass…”

9:52: “There’s a Scorpio unit on the roof. They advise they had seen a man wearing Army fatigues and light pants in the parking lot of 15-story building between 168 and 169.”

Slipping out, Davis entered the vacated building hallway, saw that the next-door apartment’s lock had been shot off during the exchange of gunfire, entered, and headed for a window, where he exited, dropping 10 feet into the rear courtyard. He then vaulted a brick wall into an alley and escaped unnoticed. 

Adrenaline coursing through his veins as he dodged the Klieg-like police lights shining down from a helicopter, Davis still had enough ammunition to kill a dozen more police officers if his aim was steady and true.

Two injured officers were taken across the street to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, another walked there, leaving a trail of blood, a fourth was taken to Lincoln Hospital, and two others were transferred to Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan. 

“I can’t say off the top of my head, but I believe this may be the worst shooting in the police department’s history,” said department chief Robert J. Johnston.

The police dragnet for Davis was all-encompassing. Every police cruiser in upstate Albany had his picture taped to their visors, his description was broadcast to every Illinois state trooper at the beginning of each shift, and Baltimore patrol received three daily updates. In New York City, there was a $25,000 reward offered. Yet, no one had seen or heard from Larry Davis in the aftermath. But more assuredly, everyone knew Davis’ reputation.  

Larry Davis was born in Newberry, South Carolina, on May 28, 1966, to Mary and Larry Davis Sr . The youngest of 13 (sometimes reported as 19) children, their first home in the Bronx was on Woodycrest Avenue—two blocks from Yankee stadium. When he turned 10, his father walked out on the family, leaving him to learn lessons from neighborhood toughs who made their own destiny through force and guile.

Before the shootout, Davis knew that he had an infamous reputation in the Bronx. His criminal audacity seemed to have no guardrails: He was known for jacking motorists stopped at red lights, bursting intohomes on Long Island, and ripping off drug dealers. The latter was supposedly driven by a desire to get retribution for getting one of his sisters hooked on drugs. 

His first arrest took place in 1980. Davis was 14 years old when he was apprehended in Suffolk County for suspicion of grand larceny. Two months later, he was taken into custody in the Bronx for resisting arrest and possession of stolen property. In 1984 he incurred three more arrests. Six months later he was charged in Manhattan with robbery. The judge granted him youthful offender status and sentenced him to five years’ probation. In 1986, he was arrested for use of a deadly weapon, assault, and possession of shotgun. Released on $2,500 bail, he skipped out and never returned to court. Surprisingly, during that six-year stretch, Davis hadn’t spent a single day in prison. 

 Little did Davis know that now, in the Bronx, he was achieving cult hero status. Reggie Jackson had hit three home runs on three swings in the 1977 World Series; Davis had hit six cops with at least 16 rounds from a .45 caliber automatic, a shotgun, and a .32 caliber automatic .

Five days after the police-involved shooting, on November 24, a caller identifying himself as Larry Davis phoned WABC-TV at least three times and asked for reporter John Johnson of Eyewitness News. The last call was recorded. Davis’ girlfriend, Melody Fludd—with whom he shared a daughter— confirmed that it was his voice.

“And it’s not going to be alive. They’ll have to take me out through the morgue. Right now, I’m unstable. I don’t know what I want to do right now. Everybody’s looking for me. The first sight they see of me, they’re going to kill me. They’ll never find me. I’m hiding out.”

The police tip line on Davis averaged close to 1,000 calls per day, with daylight hours often bringing in 100 an hour. Six strategic police raids—each bigger and more expansive than the last—took place in the six days after the Fulton Avenue shootout. Each time, Davis either escaped, or was nowhere to be found—a shadow on an intermittently cloudy day. 

“He’s like a cockroach,” remarked one top police official. “Every time you put your foot down he sneaks away someplace else.”

At a church gathering in Harlem, Mayor Ed Koch urged Davis to turn himself in, either to a priest or minister who would facilitate a safe surrender.

“I expect every police officer, no matter how angry, to act in a professional way and not engage in vigilante justice,” he told the Daily News.

The last major police manhunt in New York City occurred three months’ prior. The August 18 capture of Errol Campbell a.k.a. Robert Roulston, who was charged with the shooting death of police officer Scott Gadell on June 28. Roulston managed to avoid capture for 51 days until he was nabbed by the police while attempting to flee a Brooklyn apartment by climbing down a fire escape.

Unlike Campbell, who had jumped parole for a robbery conviction by fleeing to Jamaica, Davis wasn’t a worldly man. All he knew were the arteries of the Bronx and Manhattan, and all of his family lived in proximity to one another.

Davis’ brother Marvin, the second-oldest boy in the family, had watched his brother, whom he nicknamed “Baby Huey” after the hulking soul singer James Ramsey, fought for respect from his older brothers. Davis wasn’t a skilled boxer like Marvin, but just a few seconds in his bear hug felt like your lungs were being squeezed by an overzealous grizzly.  

One by one, Davis exerted his dominance over his older brothers like a game of king of the hill. But when he got to Marvin, he wound up in the hospital with a reminder that a bull’s brute force always ran the risk of meeting the cunning matador’s blade. 

Marvin observed how his little brother’s time as a juvenile offender on Rikers Island had hardened him even more. Guards had beaten him, and he was, “scared as hell to ever go back to prison.” 

Marvin himself had served six years in prison for serious crimes like murder. Despite his past, he was now a Brooklyn construction worker and published poet. The only crooked thing about him was his unruly handlebar mustache. 

His apartment at 2116 Vyse Avenue in the Bronx had been already raided by 100 police officers in search of his brother after they noticed a light and television set on when they knew Marvin wasn’t home. They forced his infant niece and nephew to stand out in the cold until 1:50 a.m., and he later accused the police of stealing $1,500 from his residence. But Larry had never been there. 

Marvin’s place wasn’t the most obvious choice for his brother to lie low. The brothers had remained distant from each other as they took divergent paths. But when Marvin received a strange phone call from an unidentified male instructing him to go to the corner of Findlay Avenue and 167th Street, something compelled him to believe that his misguided brother was attempting to make contact.

After waiting for 20 minutes, a husky Black man wearing a gray overcoat and brown ski mask handed him a letter.

The two-page, single-spaced letter was a surprising form of communication given that Davis was illiterate. It indicated that he was ready to turn himself in and blamed the whole shootout on the police. It went on to say that he was worried about a police detective called “Crazy Joe,” who was going to “shoot him down like a dog.” Marvin recognized the letter’s tone as that of his brother, whom he called “a bully, punk, coward, and braggart.”

Seventeen days had passed since the shootout. In the early afternoon on December 6, Davis entered Twin Parks West, a block-long housing project at 365 E. 183rd Street. The structure had opened in the early ’70s with enthusiasm about the subsidized affordable housing constructed atop a rock escarpment. Instead of one large unit, the black-and-tan brick buildings—which emulated the two‐tone hues of many nicer, older apartment buildings in the Bronx—were spread among 12 locations in the hope of fostering a sense of community.

Davis’ sister Margaret Jenkins and her four children lived on the second floor. Soon after, tips began rolling in to police indicating that he was somewhere inside. When reporters were also tipped off, they rushed to the scene and listened in on a cryptic police radio transmission.

For the past two weeks, his legend had only grown. Street gangs like the Wild Bunch in the West Farms section lauded him as an example of evading the law and winning.

“Larry be the dude that elude, man,” said a gang member who identified himself as Vyse (like the avenue). 

Another Bronx resident came up with an analogy for the situation: “This is one time the animal strikes back and the neighborhood thinks, ‘Who says the zookeeper’s always right?’ ”

While a search of Jenkins’ apartment turned up empty, a wiretapped phone conversation between two of Davis’ relatives led them to believe he was still somewhere in the building. 

The same feeling of impending doom that had compelled him to place a gun to his head seventeen days earlier, returned. Davis knew that his sister’s place would soon be crawling with revenge-minded police officers.

With nowhere to run, just after 3:15 p.m., Davis confronted Theresa Ali and her 2-year-old son in the hallway. He was rambling, and she did her best to stay calm amidst his transformation from on the lam to the wolf. He wanted a place to hide. Ali’s fight or flight instincts told her that she’d have a better chance of staying safe if she and her son weren’t alone.

Step by step, the climbed the 14-story, 312-unit building together, and stopped in front of apartment 14 E-B. He knocked. 

Inside, Sophia Sewers was bathing her 8-month-old daughter. Her older daughter was also in the apartment. When she opened the door, her life changed.

Davis pulled up his bomber jacket to expose his .45 semiautomatic pistol with seven in the clip and another 14 rounds to spare in case things got tricky. Theresa’s terrified look confirmed that she and Sophia were in mortal danger. 

Then it all clicked. Sophia remembered seeing his mug shot on the news and saying to herself, “My God, he is so young.” Now, here he was in the flesh—albeit more disheveled—with a look she later described as a combination of “fear and exhaustion.”

The police had the building surrounded. The blades of the helicopters above rattled the apartment fixtures. As nightfall approached, Davis moved everyone into a bedroom and insisted that the lights remain off. He knew every apartment was being searched, and hoped that darkness would indicate 14 E-B’s emptiness. Davis ultimately fell asleep in a chair that he used to block the bedroom door.

Sophia expected her husband, Elroy, home by 8 p.m, and he usually called first. When the phone rang in the living room, Sophia convinced Davis to let her answer so Elroy didn't have any reason to suspect that something was wrong. It was indeed him, instructing Sophia to lock the door and fasten the chain. He had heard who was allegedly in the building, and wanted to make sure his family was well-protected. 

Despite officers surrounding the building and a conducting a meticulous floor-to-floor search, Elroy was allowed to enter the building with police officers, who rode the elevator up with him.

The inside of the apartment was pitch black except for a sliver of light creeping in from the streetlights below. When he saw Davis’ shadow behind his wife, his first instinct was to yell for help. But the way Sophia looked hinted that he should cultivate a sense of calm in an otherwise life or death situation.

Davis, Sophia, and Elroy returned to the bedroom. Elroy held out hope that his children weren’t involved, but there they were — joined by a neighbor and her son — with whom they regularly socialized with.

Davis wasn’t a spiritual man, but he was a man of conviction. When Elroy began praying for the safety of everyone in the bedroom, this gesture of goodwill seemed to put Davis at ease. 

After several hours, he asked Elroy to go outside of the building and make two phone calls; one to his girlfriend, Melody, and one to his mother. He wrote both numbers down on a paper bag and asked Elroy to tell them both, “I love you, and I am okay.”

Elroy knew that their living room phone was in proper working order. Inside, he could keep close watch on his family. But outside, he had the chance to tell police exactly who was in his apartment.

Speaking for the first time since the ordeal began, Theresa asked to be released with her son. She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone about anything. Davis agreed, allowing Theresa and her son to leave, and dispatching Elroy to make the calls and pick up Chinese food. Sophia and her two young daughters were now left alone with the most wanted man in New York City.

For some reason, Davis regarded Sophia as someone he could trust. He began telling his story, explaining how he was recruited by police officers to sell drugs. When he decided to quit, he became a liability. When police visited his sister’s house on that fateful day, they hurled racial slurs at him and insisted that the police officers—all of whom were white—shot first, while his his niece was in his arms.

Elroy actually bought the Chinese food, and then went directly to the Webster Avenue command post and told them that Davis was holed up in his apartment with his wife and daughters. The police radios erupted with chatter.

“We’re going to try and contact.”

“Anyone who’s got the tools to pull these lights? We’ll be silhouetted on the roof.”

“He claims that’s the clicking sound. That’s the grenade.”

All the while, Davis was enlisting Sophia as a would-be accomplice. First, she was ordered to tie bed sheets together so he could climb down the outside walls and escape. Then, she was instructed to remove a window guard, but the screws were too rusted to twist. Finally, she encouraged her captor to tell his side of the story into a tape recorder in the event that he was killed during the process of being apprehended. He initially liked the idea, but balked when he realized was making too much noise during his tell-all. If he wanted to tell his truth, he’d have to make it out alive.

Davis’ anxiety grew as the hours passed, and Elroy still hadn’t returned. When he went to check the peephole, he found that it had been covered. He could now hear the sound of police officers’ tactical boots on the roof. They had zeroed in on his position, and the next move was his, and his only, to make.

 At 1:30 a.m. on the anniversary of his 27th year as a police officer, Detective Frank Gallagher positioned himself in a neighboring 14th-floor apartment and used the occupants’ beige Princess phone to dial the Sewers’ number. The 55-year-old Irishman, with a steely glare and a penchant for newsboy hats, had been with the hostage negotiation unit since its inception 14 years earlier. Davis answered. 

“Larry, this is Frank Gallagher. I’m with the police department.”

“Yeah,” Davis replied. “I was expecting you.”

He and his partner, Detective Sergeant Peter Martin, an 18-year veteran, kept Davis on the phone for nearly six hours. Their conversations sounded like a maniac’s grocery list: Davis said he had two hand grenades and two guns. He demanded a helicopter to fly him to Washington, D.C. He told negotiators he was going out the 14th-floor window by tying bedsheets together. Later he leaned out the window and yelled to Melody, who was standing on the street below.

To borrow a boxing analogy, the standoff was like a boxing match before the Queensberry rules were established. Fatigue set in on both sides, and the police were able to offset their own weariness by having the team of Gallagher and Martin manning the Princess phone.

Gallagher specifically used pertinent details—like Davis’ love of music and desire to create his own record label—to create a rapport. Martin even asked for recommendations about the type of piano to buy his son.

When Davis grew agitated, he would hang up the phone. The negotiators knew to give him a little breathing room before calling back to resume their attempts to de-escalate the situation.

It had been 17 hours since the ordeal began, when a semblance of progress was finally made. Davis wanted assurance that the shotgun-toting NYPD officers—now overseen by FBI agents—wouldn’t fire out of anger over their injured colleagues. Gallagher assured him that he would be taken in alive as long as he followed his instructions precisely: hand over the gun to Sophia and come out with his hands up. To earn his trust, negotiators allowed Melody to speak to him directly.

At 6:50 a.m., at Davis’ request, three reporters were escorted to the 13th floor. They turned over their press passes to police officers— and that of two FBI agents that Davis knew were on scene—who then slid the identification under the Sewers’ door. Davis wanted witnesses who had no NYPD affiliation.

Everything and everyone was in place. At 7:20 a.m., Davis put his .45 cal automatic pistol in Sophia’s hand. With her other hand, she spoke to Gallagher on the phone and told him Davis was ready to give up.

For a moment, there was dead silence. Sophia stopped talking. Apparently, she had put down the phone to tend to her crying baby, whose needs trumped that of the police.

Five minutes later, the tense surrender resumed, and Davis was taken into custody without incident. Gallagher took to the police radio frequency to reiterate that this was a peaceful surrender. 

Outside, a shirtless and bleary-eyed Davis was met by chants of “Larry, Larry,” from residents hanging out of the building’s windows. 

“It’s a good thing to sell drugs,” he yelled back. “The cops gave me the guns.”

At 11 p.m., he arrived at Rikers Island, where he was processed and evaluated by doctors. Despite more than two weeks as a fugitive—having spent a night underneath a Dumpster during a torrential downpour—he was said to be in good health. Still, he was given a cell in the prison infirmary with a single bed, shelf, and toilet because it was a maximum-security area. 

Davis was charged with nine counts of attempted murder of a police officer (even though he actually hit six). If guilty, he could face a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years to life on each count. 

In addition, he now faced charges of unlawful imprisonment and burglary concerning the standoff inside the Sewers’ apartment.

Adding to his growing rap sheet, Police still wanted to speak to him about his alleged role in six gangland-style murders, too.

Attorney William Kunstler chose to represent Larry Davis. He was no stranger to taking unpopular cases. He defended the Freedom Riders, the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville Nine, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown and won a landmark Supreme Court case defending the right to burn the American flag. Kunstler had also worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King in the case of Thomas Wansely, a Black teenager who was sentenced to death in 1962 after being convicted by a white jury of raping a 59-year-old white woman in Lynchburg, Virginia. After a series of appeals and two more trials, the charges were dismissed. 

Kunstler wasn’t the portrait of a successful litigator. With long gray hair and unduly lengthy sideburns to match, he would position his glasses above his forehead like a fighter pilot’s aviation goggles. But anyone who regarded his quirky appearance as a reflection of his skill, would be mistaken. According to colleagues, Kunstler could sift through a foot-high stack of documents over breakfast, then use them a few hours later to cross-examine a witness without missing a beat.

In his basement office, Kunstler began forming the basis of Davis’ defense: he had acted in self-defense. Specifically, a ring of drug-dealing police officers had recruited Davis to work for them and then wanted to silence him when their business transactions turned sour.

“They were there to kill him,” Kunstler contended. “Twenty-four police , all white, going there to talk to him? It had all the makings, to me, of a classic case of attempted assassination of a Black kid they turned into a dope dealer. It just seemed like a perfect case, even though on the surface it didn’t seem like a Martin Luther King, a Stokely Carmichael.”

When Davis was taken into custody, he had the business cards and telephone numbers of a dozen officers and detectives. According to Kunstler, this backed up Davis’ claim that he had an established relationship with police—whether officially or unofficially—and these interactions led to drug trafficking. 

He colloquially referred to this strategy as “the 77th Precinct Defense,” because 13 officers in the Brooklyn “seven-seven” precinct had been charged with illegal activities the previous fall, including drug dealing. One of the officers, Brian F. O’Regan, had said that what went on in the 77th Precinct was common through the city’s 75 precincts—before he committed suicide while wearing a 77th precinct T-shirt.

That same year, officer Mike Dowd—who worked in the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn—realized that he could make more than his $600 weekly salary if he partnered with Adam Diaz, a cocaine trafficker, who took in $1 million per week. Diaz paid Dowd a $24,000 upfront fee and a salary of $8,000 a week. In exchange, Dowd would warn Diaz of impending threats and help rob competing dealers. After a while, Dowd didn’t even bother trying to appear low-key: He drove to work in a bright red Corvette and would forget to pick up his NYPD paycheck.

Kunstler went about constructing a timeline of events that would strengthen his self-defense theory. Davis’ mother Mary had filed a civilian complaint stating that three detectives from the 44th Squad in the Bronx visited her at home on the morning of October 31. They showed no badges and forced their way in.

According to her, one detective warned, “You tell your son that he is going to get a [expletive] bullet right in front of his [expletive] forehead.” The point was punctuated when he raised his finger and pointed at her head as if it were a makeshift barrel on a gun.

The detectives were later identified by her as Sergeant Joseph “Crazy Joe” Blanck, Larry Coyle, and Joseph Nealon. The former had been a part of the Robbery Identification Program and had since transferred to the 42nd Precinct, and the latter two were still members of the 44th Squad.

Blanck had a short history of misconduct after spending 11 of his 12 years in the 44th. In October 1984, he was suspended from full police duties because of a brutality charge made by a Black hospital worker, who accused him of hitting him with a police radio. “Crazy Joe”—as he was called by residents of the Claremont neighborhood in the Bronx—was known to pop out of garbage cans and abandoned cars to get a rise out of both users and dealers. However, the infraction was offset by 46 commendations and citations for meritorious police work.

Ballistic tests linked Davis’ .45-caliber automatic weapon to the murder of the four drug dealers on October 30. According to Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola, who had successfully prosecuted David Berkowitz for the Son of Sam killings in 1978, Davis, Ricardo Burgos, and two others went to an apartment at 892 Southern Boulevard at 4 a.m., demanded drugs, ordered three of the drug dealers to strip, and then fatally shot all four in the head at close range. Both Davis and Burgos faced up to 100 years in prison.

Upon receiving the news about the ballistics test, the reality of Davis’ predicament set in quickly. He ripped out the sink from his cell wall, causing the main corridor of the 13-cell infirmary to flood. Then he set his mattress on fire. He was subsequently moved to a punitive segregation cell, where he was remanded for 30 days. His only respite from the darkness was either one hour of recreation a day, tr his attorney visits that took place in between glass panes in a small booth.

The seriousness of Davis’ other actions on the streets also intensified. He, along with his older brother Eddie, were indicted in the August 5 killing of Raymond Vizcaino. As the news broke, Davis was being treated at Elmhurst General Hospital after telling guards he had swallowed 100 pills. Doctors found no evidence that he had done so.

On February 1, 1987, he gave his first exclusive interview with the Daily News since the ordeal began. He bemoaned the conditions at Rikers and said that he found glass and razor blades in his hamburger. For this incident, again, he was rushed to the hospital, but X-rays revealed nothing.

Each day brought with it more newspaper reporting: he stabbed a guard with a ballpoint pen in the forehead, he converted to Islam (adopting the new name Adam Abdul-Hakeem), he supposedly dealt with an inmate who had defecated on his face (a claim he later denied), and thought about killing a lookalike during his time on the lam to throw police off his scent. 

To combat his claims of abuse, guards began trailing him with a video camera. He became such a hassle that guards didn’t even make him wear a prison uniform. He preferred navy Fila sweats, black Avia sneakers, a gold bracelet, and a blue beaded necklace with a white cross that he got from a Roman Catholic priest.

Quadruple murder

Nothing was easy or normal in the State’s pursuit of justice. Just days after postponing the quadruple murder trial, Judge Jerome Reinstein suffered a heart attack at the Bronx County Courthouse and later died inside the Lincoln Hospital emergency room.

Justice Bernard J. Fried was named as Reinstein’s replacement. After more than two months of defense motions, protracted jury selection, and discussions about whether Davis should remain at Rikers Island during trial, his quadruple murder trial began on December 21.

Another tragedy would befall the justice system before Davis got his day in court. District Attorney Merola died of a cerebral hemorrhage after being found by his wife on the dining room floor of his home. 

A week after his sudden death, he overwhelmingly won reelection, apparently the first time a deceased person has been elected to city office.

When court finally convened in December 1987, to try Davis for the quadruple murders the new chief prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney William B. Flack, told the jury that he would present irrefutable evidence—including fingerprints, ballistics findings, and telephone recordings—in which Davis admitted to executing four men with a pistol before dawn on October 30 of the previous year.

The State called more than 50 witnesses, including Davis’ brother-in-law, who confirmed that Davis robbed and killed the drug dealers. Later, he stated that he had perjured himself under pressure from law enforcement. It was a small reminder that the crux of Kunstler’s defense was that Davis was a drug runner for rogue cops, which began when he was 15 years old, and he was later accused of a fabricated quadruple murder as a means of justifiably killing him.

He leaned on testimony from Davis’ sister, Regina, who testified that police abused her in the hours after the shootout at the 48th Precinct, and suggested she tell the grand jury that her brother fired first, even though she didn’t know that as a fact .

When he questioned Sergeant Coulter, one of the six wounded officers, he admitted that the raid was, “tactically wrong.”

Kunstler turned over closing arguments to attorney Lynne Stewart, a sturdy woman, with cropped gray hair. She chose to focus primarily on the police shootout three weeks after Davis’ alleged role in the quadruple murders.

“The events of that night are what makes this case unique,” she said during her three-hour summation.

During her summation, she admitted that she and Kunstler hadn’t produced any proof of police corruption or of Davis’ involvement with corrupt police. 

The jury deliberated for nine days. It was a record for the borough in a case involving a single defendant. At one point, they told the judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked. Finally, they rendered their verdict on March 3 at 7:30 p.m.: not guilty.

Gasps and a smattering of applause followed. Davis dropped his head into his hands and then hugged his defense team. His mother sobbed and had to be helped out of the courtroom.

“We’re delirious,” Kunstler said. “We’re shocked. We’re ecstatic.”

According to an anonymous juror, some of his colleagues were skeptical of the ballistics evidence; others gave credence to Kunstler’s claim that Davis was involved with a gang of corrupt, drug-dealing cops.

Police shooting

The prosecution interpreted the acquittal as neither a good nor bad sign for their forthcoming attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon case against Davis, while the defense believed it was a crucial affirmation of police misconduct. 

Kunstler, brimming with enthusiasm, alluded to witnesses who had seen police officers give Davis drugs and guns, and pointed to what he believed was rampant corruption in the 32nd, 34th, 41st, and 44th precincts. According to Kunstler and Stewart, when Davis made off with a $1 million of their money, they vowed to take revenge.

Jury selection for the November 19 shootout began on April 18 of the following year. When all the legal maneuvering and peremptory challenges were exhausted, the jury was made up of 11 Black jurors and one white. The latter, John Tegtmeier, was later removed when he told Judge Fried that his wife feared that in the event of an acquittal, the police would harass the couple. The judge then declared a mistrial and called for a completely new jury pool.

The testimony from the stricken officers was compelling. The detectives described being pinned down by a barrage of bullets and watching colleagues being knocked off their feet from the force of the gunfire. When they returned fire, they purposefully aimed high to avoid a child who Davis allegedly was using as a makeshift shield. 

Bronx Detective Thomas McCarren , who entered the apartment first, described how he put his hands up against his head and neck to stop the blood from his wounds. After he was taken to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, he recalled receiving last rites.

Kunstler attempted to impeach his credibility by portraying him as a shotgun-toting assassin who had rushed ahead of his colleagues to kill Davis before he could reveal facts about a rogue-cop narcotics ring.

In one of the most dramatic moments, Kunstler said to McCarren: “You fired a double-barrel shotgun with a slug at Larry Davis, intending to kill him from six feet away and you missed. Isn’t that the real truth of this case?”

McCarren turned slightly in his chair to look directly at the jurors, answering, “It definitely is not.” He insisted he never fired his service revolver because two small children in diapers were “frozen” in his line of fire.

The defense’s chief expert, Professor Peter DeForest testified that a slug retrieved from a bedroom dresser indicated that police had fired from a much closer distance than from the entrance to the apartment to the 10-foot-long back hallway that led to the bedroom Davis was hiding in. According to Stewart, “If they lied about the first shot, they lied about everything in this case.” 

On Friday August 19, Judge Fried adjourned the afternoon session so Davis could pay his last respects to his stepfather, Albert, who died of cancer. The Bronx funeral home was surrounded by a dozen marked and unmarked police cars and a series of corrections department vans. Davis, clad in a tan suit, and using a crutch, spent 40 minutes inside. Some chanted his name as he was transported by van back to the Manhattan Correctional Center.

William Kunstler knew that he didn’t have the best poker hand. But an acquittal didn’t rely on turning Davis into a saint, either. He chipped away at each police officer’s heroism, and painted them as bloodthirsty. Davis mother, Mary, testified that there had been many “non official” visits at her home on Woodycrest Avenue years before the shootout — alluding to his involvement in an ongoing drug conspiracy.

The jury deliberated for five days, before reached a unanimous decision on the aggravated assault charge: not guilty. However, Davis, was found guilty on six of 10 counts of criminal possession of a weapon. While he did avoid the most serious charges, he was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison.

Forewoman Cecilia Thompson summarized the defense’s case: “[Police] came in to wipe him out. They wanted him dead so he couldn’t squeal on them. There was no way out for this guy. They would have killed him.”

When Davis returned to his cell, he says he was greeted by hugs and such thunderous applause that the entire facility was shaking. In a manner of speaking, Kunstler had put the entire NYPD on trial. The department’s reputation was stained from that point on.

LaGombra & Vizcaino murders

Davis would beat yet another murder rap involving a drug dealer after a month long trial and three days of deliberations. According to a witness, Davis and two accomplices fatally shot Victor LaGombra in the head and neck on September 16, 1986. Davis's attorney, Michael Warren, produced two witnesses who testified that he was in Florida on the day of the shooting recording a rap album. William Kunstler, still quarely in Davis' corner, said the constant accusations against Davis constituted a conspiracy.

''They are out to get him,'' he said. ''Mr. Davis is a man who used to help the police sell drugs. When he decided to stop, they decided to kill him.''

His violent past would eventually catch up to him. He was convicted of the August 5, 1986, murder of drug dealer Raymond Vizcaino. An additional 25 years was tacked onto his sentence.. The jury of 10 women and two men believed the prosecution’s witnesses, despite having perceived credibility issues.

Davis was 24 years old.

New York City police corruption occurred in 20-year cycles—resulting in The Lexow Committee of 1894, the Curran Committee of 1913, the Seabury Committee of 1930, the Harry Gross investigation of 1950, and the Knapp Commission of 1971.

In July, 1992, almost exactly 20 years after the Knapp Commission published its final report, Mayor David N. Dinkins established by executive order a temporary mayoral commission to investigate issues of police corruption. 

The Mollen Commission reviewed thousands of NYPD policy documents, personnel files, and corruption case files and conducted hundreds of private hearings and interviews with private citizens and former and current police officers, including officers who had previously been convicted of corruption charges. 

The commission found that a large majority of New York City police officers were honest. However, the commission also found that a serious and alarming form of police wrongdoing existed. Specifically, police officers were profiting from the drug trade and the distinction between the criminal and the corrupt cop had become hazy.

At the height of Davis’ infamy in 1987, The New York Times explored his rising popularity among marginalized groups in the city. Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, an autobiographical account of his upbringing in Harlem, wasn’t surprised.

“It should’ve been expected that the things Larry Davis did would make him a folk hero,” said Brown. “The white police department has been intimidating the black community—think of Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart—and all of a sudden here comes Larry Davis, the avenging angel. It’s like, we finally won one.”

Larry Davis was stabbed to death while serving out his sentence at Shawangunk Correctional Facility. He was 41 years old and had spent more time in jail than as a free man.

Many people usually ask, “How did Larry Davis get away with so much?”

The introduction of crack into local communities fueled an anti-drug and anti-alcohol sentiment that had been gathering momentum since the early 1980s. In the first six months of 1986, robbery and aggravated assault were up 12 percent and homicide was up 23.5 percent, particularly in areas of New York City where crack use was most pronounced.

The New York Times printed its first front-page story on crack on November 29, another on April 1, and yet another on May 16. Newsweek published a cover story on cocaine and crack on March 17 . Finally, on May 18, all three of New York City’s newspapers, The New York Times, The Daily News, and Newsday, printed substantial articles on the growing crack trend.

Larry Davis had specifically targeted drug dealers. Perhaps jurors didn't believe that justice was warranted in their deaths. In the police shooting, the NYPD's show of force continued a narrative that officers were more mercenary, than peace keeper. But Larry Davis was no saint. He robbed, beat, and had murdered at least one person. He was vengeance, and ultimately, vengeance found him.