He Shot 6 Cops In The Bronx — The Jury Let Him Walk – HT
November 19th, 1986, 6:40 in the evening. The Bronx, 1231 Fulton Avenue, Morasania. A six-story brick building on a block where the street lights buzz and die at random. Ground floor apartment on the left. Regina Lewis is home. Her husband Joe is home. Four children are inside. Two of them are babies.
And her 20-year-old brother is in the back bedroom with the lights off in the hallway. Nine men are stacking up against the wall. Bulletproof vests, shotguns, handguns. Emergency service unit on point. Detectives from the 41st precinct. Fort Apache right behind them. 27 cops total on this detail. Nine coming through the door.
18 more on the perimeter. No arrest warrant. They don’t need one. Not for this kid. Detective Thomas McCarron goes in first. He makes it three steps into the apartment before a 45 caliber round takes him in the mouth. Then it all comes apart at once. Shotgun, handgun, muzzle flash, drywall exploding.
Officer Mary Buckley takes a round to the mouth. Officer John O’Hara takes one to the eye. Sergeant Edward Coulter, hand and thigh. Captain John Ridge, head grazed. Detective Donald O. Sullivan head and hand. In under 30 seconds, six New York City cops are on the floor of a Bronx apartment, bleeding from face, hand, leg, and eye. The shooter is a 20-year-old kid who dropped out of school at 14.
His name is Larry Davis, and in two years, a Bronx jury will look at what he did in this apartment and let him walk. The story starts in Highbridge, Southwest Bronx. a weather-beaten white woodframe rowhouse on Woody Crest Avenue a few blocks from the back wall of Yankee Stadium. The house held Mary Davis, her 15 children, a rotating population of grandchildren, and six pit bulls.
On a block where almost every house had burglar bars, the Davis house had dogs. Mary and Al Davis had driven up from Perry, Georgia in 1952. Al worked as a plumber. Mary was a church-going woman from Rapture Preparation Church on Crotona Avenue. She ran a thrift shop. She took in every runaway and homeless kid the block sent her way. 15 children of her own.
More than 40 grandchildren by the mid80s. The house was never empty. Larry was the youngest. Born May 28th, 1966. His oldest sister, Betty Patron, called him the biggest baby she ever saw, a baby born with muscles. By the time Larry was in elementary school, is his shoulders were wider than kids two years older than him.
When Larry was 10 years old, Al Davis walked out of the house on Woody Crest Avenue. He never came back. Mary raised the rest of it alone. Every one of Larry’s four older brothers would eventually do time. Theft, assault, drugs. The house on Woody Crest stayed full, but the men kept disappearing into the system one by one.
By the time Larry was in junior high, there was a pattern in the Davis family nobody needed to explain. Boys get big, boys get angry, boys go away. School didn’t take. P.S. 73 for elementary, then junior high 145, where a teacher found a weapon in Larry’s desk when he was 12 years old. The principal’s name was Bernard Krano.
Years later, Krano would tell a reporter that Larry didn’t come to school very often. Then when he did, he was usually in trouble. Junior High 147 lasted a couple of days. A special education program in Manhattan came after that. Then at 14, Larry Davis stopped going to school altogether. He was semi-iterate.
He would stay that way his entire life. The man who would eventually lead one of the most complicated court battles in New York City history could barely read a court filing. The first real criminal contact came when he was about 15. The story, his story, the one he told the Village Voice years later went like this.
He was riding a motorcycle without a license on a Bronx street. A cop pulled him over. The cop didn’t give him a ticket. The cop didn’t take him in. The cop gave him cocaine to sell. Take it for what it is. The source is Larry Davis. And no officer was ever named. And but that is the origin story Larry Davis told for the rest of his life.
That’s the story his lawyers built a defense around. That’s the story a Bronx jury would eventually believe enough to let him walk on attempted murder charges. In 1984, he was convicted of robbery, probation, a $6 fine here, a $60 fine there. By 18, he had a wrap sheet resisting arrest, possession of a hypodermic needle, harassment, but he had never spent more than 24 days in a sale.
The kid who was about to shoot six cops in a Bronx apartment had never really been to prison. He had never sat in a cell block long enough to be broken. He had never learned the thing prison teaches that the next move has consequences. By the time he understood that lesson, it was 1991 and he was looking at life. By 1986, Larry Davis was not a kingpin.
That’s the first thing to understand. He wasn’t Nikki Barnes. He wasn’t Rael Edmund. He wasn’t moving kilos in 10 cities. He was a 20-year-old stickup kid with a pistol and a crew of three. And the crew was smaller than most high school cafeteria tables. Ricardo Bergos. Rick was the right hand, short, scrappy, squinty eyed.
He had known Larry since elementary school. Rick had been arrested that August for shooting a man at the White Castle on Webster Avenue. By fall of 86, Rick was on Riker’s Island doing two to six. That’s the crew Larry Davis was running. A right-hand sitting in city jail. James Patran JJ was the nephew. Larry’s oldest sister’s son.
Young, loyal, along for whatever Larry was doing. Guy’s the kind of family hire that happens in every Bronx crew. Blood before skill. Charlie Conway Senior was the old-timer, a former merchant marine who had taught Larry how to bore out a 45 caliber barrel. Charlie was a friend. Charlie was the man Larry bragged to. Charlie was drinking at Larry’s kitchen table.
Larry showed Charlie weapons the way a younger man shows an older one what he’s been up to. Charlie was going to be the one who put him in a courtroom. The crack era was on. 1986 was the year that changed New York. The year Lynn Bias died. The year Congress passed a 100 to1 sentencing law that would eventually fill federal prisons with a generation of black men.
The year the city started treating every black man in a project hallway like a defendant. The Bronx was on fire. Whole blocks in Morrisania. Longwood and Hunts Point had been burned out in the 70s and never rebuilt. The apartments that were still standing had been taken over. Dealers moving weight out of kitchens, out of bathtubs, out of closets.
The 41st precinct was called Fort Apache because officers said it felt like a military outpost in hostile territory. Cops called the South Bronx the jungle. residents called the cops the same thing back. Fort Apache was not a metaphor. The 41st was the precinct Hollywood had made a movie about a station house on Simpson Street where officers worked a beat that had the highest murder rate in the city year after year.
The cops in that house had seen everything. They had also, according to Larry Davis and according to the Mullen Commission years later, done some of it. This was the environment. Dealers who couldn’t trust the cops. Cops who couldn’t trust the dealers. Residents who couldn’t trust either. And in the middle of it, a 20-year-old with a 45 caliber pistol and a reputation for taking other people’s money.
Larry Davis wasn’t running weight in that environment. Larry Davis was taking it from the people who were. That was his hustle. The robbery of drug dealers, not street mugging. Targeted home invasions of men who kept cash and products where they lived. Dealers can’t call the cops. That’s the math. You hit a bodega, the owner files a report.
You hit a kilo dealer, the kilo dealer digs a grave or comes back for you himself. But a stickup kid in the Bronx crack era had a short ceiling and a shorter life. Every man Larry Davis robbed was a man with a gun, a crew, and a memory. And every apartment he kicked in was an apartment someone else would kick in later looking for him.
That’s the math of that hustle. You make enemies faster than you make money. You sleep with 45 under the pillow. You stop going to the places people know you go. Larry Davis was 20 years old and he had already stopped going to his mother’s house for dinner. On October 26th, 1986, Davis allegedly robbed a man named Roy Gray for $2 in Washington Heights. $2.
That’s the kind of detail that tells you where Davis’s head was that fall. a 20-year-old robbing a crack house steer for pocket change three weeks before he would shoot six police officers. The story doesn’t run on logic. It runs on pressure. Um, but Larry Davis’s story had one wrinkle that separates it from every other Bronx Stickup kid of the era.
According to Davis, the cocaine he was moving on the other side of those robberies was coming from the police. According to Davis, a circle of corrupt officers was running product through the Bronx and using him, a teenage dropout with a 45 and no impulse control as a distributor.
And in early November 1986, Larry Davis and Rick Bergos allegedly handled a 40 kilo deal with a Colombian buyer. A suitcase came back with a million dollars inside and Larry Davis kept the suitcase. The number that would later become famous was $40,000. That’s the figure in a Fison’s book. The figure that circulated through Harlem and the Bronx for years.
The $40,000 that Larry Davis allegedly withheld from the cops who were supposed to get their cut. Whatever the number, here’s the point. The cops wanted their money. Larry Davis wasn’t giving it back. There is a version of this story where Larry Davis gives the money back and lives, pays the tax, keeps his head down, waiting out the winter, becomes another Bronx 20-year-old nobody ever heard of.
That version existed. Larry Davis didn’t take it. His older brothers had already taken the other version. four of them in and out of state prisons. Theft, assault, drugs. Every one of them had bent when the system bent them. Every one of them had come back broken or hadn’t come back at all. Larry had watched it happen since he was a child on Woody Crest Avenue.
He had decided somewhere along the line that he was not going to be the fifth one. He was not going to be the brother who went away quiet. He was going to be the brother who went away out loud or didn’t go away at all. Everything that happened next, every body on the floor, every shell casing, every aqu quiddle, started with a kid who decided he’d rather keep the bag than live.
The evidence for any of this is thin. No officer was ever charged. No corrupt cop was ever named in court. Internal Affairs opened a file that went nowhere because Davis’s own lawyer wouldn’t let him cooperate without immunity. What you have is Larry Davis’s word, a trial record, and a few years later, the Maul Commission confirming that yes, in those precincts in that era, cops were running drugs, never naming the ones who ran with him, just confirming the world he described was real.
Um, that’s the ground everything else gets built on. Uncertain ground. That’s also the ground counselor and Stewart would eventually stand on in front of a Bronx jury. Not a defense of what Larry Davis did. A defense of why a 20-year-old kid who had been used, then marked for death, then hunted by the same precinct that had created him. That was the story.
The prosecution had fingerprints and ballistics and witness testimony. The defense had a story, but uncertain ground is enough when a jury wants to believe you. October 30th, 1986, approximately 4:00 in the morning, 8:29 Southern Boulevard, the Longwood section of the South Bronx, a six-story brick building where dealers kept a stash apartment. Four men were inside.
Angel Castro, 35, Hector Hernandez, 34. Juan Rodriguez, you know, 37 Jesus Perez, 38 mid-level Dominican traffickers. They had weight, they had cash, they were the kind of crew that kept a handgun in a drawer and a shotgun in a closet and figured that was enough. What happened next comes from a confession Larry Davis allegedly made to Charlie Conway the next morning and from physical evidence the NYPD recovered afterward.
Four men kicked in the door. Larry Davis, Rick Bergos, JJ Patran, a fourth man never publicly named. The dealers were stripped. Stripped to their socks. They were tied. They were put in a bathtub filled with water. Then they were killed one at a time. Executed with handguns, including a 45 caliber pistol. Four bodies, one bathtub.
No witnesses left to call anyone. The morning after, Larry Davis and JJ Patran walked into Charlie Conway’s apartment while Conway later testified under oath that Larry announced himself at the door by saying his nickname, Rambo Rambo, and that Larry then told him the quote that went into the Bronx DA’s file.
We had to pap these four guys. Larry said they going to rob some men. Some static happened and he’d finished it because he didn’t need no witnesses. JJ allegedly told Conway that one of the dealers had jumped on Larry’s back and that Larry had taken care of the rest. The crew got away with cash and product. Later that same day, the same day, Larry Davis, Rick Bergos, and JJ Patron got spotted by officers on Jerome Avenue.
Larry fired three shots from a moving car. The crew ran. No arrest warrant was issued. That’s the part that matters. Four bodies in a bathtub in the South Bronx. A crew fleeing police with guns drawn on a Bronx Avenue and no warrant. No indictment, no charge, but the NYPD had his fingerprints on a cash box at the scene.
They had shell casings that would later match his weapon. They had a witness, Conway, and somewhere in a precinct house in the Bronx, a cop was looking at the file and putting it together with a different file, a file about $40,000 that never came back. Three weeks later, a raid team was going to show up at Regina Lewis’s door.
But here’s where the story turns. Because what happened on November 19th was not a cop standing over a shooter’s body. What happened on November 19th was the opposite. Well, and everything that made Larry Davis famous. Everything that made his name something people still say in the Bronx 40 years later starts with the fact that the raid didn’t go the way the raid was supposed to go.
6:40 in the evening, 1231 Fulton Avenue. The detectives stack up. Nine go in. 18 hold the perimeter. Larry Davis is in the back bedroom. Lights off. Shotgun in one hand, 45 in the other. According to the defense, he was watching Rambo on a VCR when he heard the door. According to the prosecution, he was waiting. McCarron comes through the doorway first.
The 45 barks once and Marron’s face opens up. What follows lasts under a minute. Davis fires from the dark bedroom into the living room. The nine cops return fireb blind into a three- room apartment with civilians in it. The four of them children, two of them infants. Drywall shreds. A shotgun slug from a police weapon grazes the top of Davis’s head.
It’s the only wound he takes the entire night. The slug ends up buried in a bedroom dresser where the defense will later find it and put it in front of a jury like a trophy. The six wounded cops fall in a cluster. Mary Buckley mouth. She will need more than 135 hours of dental work. O’Hara I cter hand and thigh ridge head.
Later that night, a news day reporter will claim Ridge had alcohol on his breath at the hospital. A detail Ridge will deny for the rest of his career. O Sullivan head in hand. McCarron mouth. The detective who went in first will never work as a cop again. Six down. The cops retreat. That’s the part nobody likes to say out loud.
Nine armed officers in vests with shotguns against one 20-year-old dropout. And the cops pull back into the hallway because they are losing. Davis moves. He crosses the living room past his sister, past his brother-in-law, past the four kids, two of them infants who are somehow impossibly not hit. He gets to the door that connects Regina’s apartment to his other sister, Helen Mendoza’s apartment next door.
He shoots the lock off. He goes through. He crosses Helen’s apartment. He opens her back window. He climbs out. By the time the perimeter officers figure out what happened, Larry Davis is gone. Six cops on the floor of a Bronx apartment. The shooter in the wind. What followed was the largest manhunt the NYPD had run in modern memory.
17 days, hundreds of officers, bridges, tunnels, terminals watched. Now, nationwide alerts, raids in Chicago, raids in Albany, raids in Newark, every place Davis had a cousin or a friend. A man claiming to be Davis called ABC News said he wouldn’t be taken alive. The tabloids ran the quote across their front pages, “They won’t take me alive.
” over a mug shot of a babyfaced kid with wide eyes. For 17 days, every news stand in New York led with the same face. 4 days in, police surrounded Mary Davis’s home. They questioned her in a laundromat across the street. A 65year-old woman who had been going to church for 40 years. She had a heart attack in that laundromat. She survived.
Three days later, recovering in a hospital bed, she went to the NAACP and asked them to arrange her son’s surrender. On the evening of December 5th, police got a tip. 365 East 183rd Street, Twin Parks West, a 14story project building. Larry’s sister, Margaret, had an apartment there. The cops surrounded the building. They closed off local streets.
They put snipers on the roofs. And then, and this is the part that tells you everything about how the NYPD felt about Larry Davis. They started a doortodoor search of every one of the building’s 312 apartments. Officers knocked on every single unit in a 14story project building.
The city had decided no door was going to stay closed. Davis forced his way into apartment 14EB. Elroy and Sophia Sewer lived there with their two daughters. A neighbor, Teresa Ali, had just walked in with her 2-year-old son. Davis let Teresa and the baby go. He held the sewers and then he negotiated. Uh, for 6 hours, Larry Davis, 20 years old, semi- literate, wanted for shooting six cops, sat in a stranger’s apartment on the phone with NYPD negotiators.
He asked about lawyers. He talked about stereo equipment. He threatened the hostages with what he claimed was a hand grenade. He demanded to see press credentials of reporters staged in a nearby apartment. He asked to speak to his girlfriend. The negotiator kept repeating the same line. There is no use running. You have nowhere to hide now.
At approximately 7 in the morning on December 6th, Larry Davis laid down his 45 caliber pistol and walked out. Chief of department Robert Johnston. The NYPD called him Patton. Watched from the street in a pith helmet in the December cold. Mayor Ed Ko was there, police commissioner Benjamin Ward was there, and they patted each other on the back.
And then the other thing happened, the thing the NYPD didn’t put in the press release. As Larry Davis was walking down the wheelchair ramp of 365 East 183rd Street in a bulletproof vest and handcuffs, the residents of the 14-story project leaned out of their windows. They clapped. They chanted his name, “Larry, Larry, Larry.
” A 20- yearear-old kid who had just shot six New York City police officers walked out of a building to applause, to cheer to an entire Bronx housing project, screaming his name like he just won a title fight. Larry Davis looked up at the cameras and he said on tape on every news broadcast in the tri-state area, “It’s a good thing to sell drugs.
The cops gave me the guns. Mayor Ko stopped patting the commissioner’s back. So Larry Davis went on trial three times in three years, and a Bronx jury acquitted him every time on the charges that mattered. The first trial was for the four dealers at 829 Southern Boulevard, December 1987 into March 1988. Judge Fried on the bench.
Prosecutors William Flack and Brian Wilson for the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. William Consler and Lynn Stewart for the defense. Counselor was already a legend. Chicago 7 Attica Wounded Knee. He built Davis’s defense around a single idea that Larry Davis was a pawn who had been run by corrupt NYPD officers and that every piece of evidence against him had been fabricated, planted, or coerced.
The fingerprints on the cash box, the ballistics, Charlie Conway’s confession, all of it. The jury, seven black, three Latino, deliberated for nine days. At the time, it was the longest single defendant deliberation in Bronx County history. A quiddle all counts. The second trial started in the fall of 1988. Nine counts of attempted murder of a police officer.
Six counts of aggravated assault weapons charges. This one was supposed to be unwinable for the defense. Six officers on the stand. Ballistics. The raid team’s testimony. The bullet holes are still visible in the apartment walls. An entire precinct waiting for a verdict. Counselor told the jury this was not a case about a shootout.
This was a case about a corrupt precinct sending a hit squad to kill a kid who knew too much. He put Mary Davis on the stand. Shi testified that an officer named Joseph Nelon had grabbed her the day before the raid and told her they were going to put a bullet in her son’s head. That testimony is in the trial transcript. a 65year-old grandmother on a witness stand saying a New York City police officer threatened to execute her son November 20th, 1988.
The jury, 10 black, two Hispanic, came back after 38 hours over 5 days. Not guilty on every count of attempted murder. Not guilty on every count of assault. Guilty only on the weapons charges. 5 to 15 years. That’s what Larry Davis got for shooting six New York City police officers. McCarron, the detective who had taken a round to the mouth, stood on the courthouse steps and called it a racist verdict.
Now, about a thousand NYPD officers protested outside one police plaza the next morning. The jury for woman told reporters Larry Davis was a young and innocent kid who had been recruited by corrupt police. That’s the phrase that went in the papers, a young and innocent kid. Lynn Stewart gave the quote, “The city never forgot.
” She said at the courthouse on camera that the black community was no longer going to have black sambos. It was going to have black Ramos. The third trial came in December 1989. The Victor Lagomera murder. Harlem drug dealer, 46 years old, killed in a robbery in September of 86. Ballistics tied Davis’s 32 caliber revolver to the body.
Defense attorney Michael Warren produced two witnesses who swore Davis was in Florida, cutting a rap album on the day of the killing. In three-day deliberation, a quiddle, three trials, three acquitt on the murder counts. and Larry Davis went from a Bronx stickup kid to a name they were painting on subway cars.
They finally caught him on the fourth one, Raymond Visano. A Bronx dealer, Davis, had allegedly shot through an apartment door on Webster Avenue in August of 86. Davis’s older brother, Eddie, had already been convicted of the same killing in June of ‘ 89. But the new Bronx DA, Robert Johnson, the state’s first black district attorney, came for Larry on top of his brother.
March 14th, 1991, convicted. April 26th, 1991, 25 years to life on top of the 5 to 15 for the weapons. At sentencing, Larry Davis gave an hour-ong speech. He told the judge he wasn’t afraid of him, and the judge had him removed from the courtroom. By 1989, while he was still on remand, Larry Davis had already legally changed his name. He had converted to Islam.
From that point forward, his legal name was Adam Abdul Hakeim. He said the name meant lifeblood, servant of the wise. He would never be a free man again. Adekica Shaangunk. 75 disciplinary incidents on his record by the time it was over. He kept filing. keep alleging, kept naming corrupt cops in letters and interviews.
Nobody listened except the people who had always listened. On the outside, the name became something else. Hip hop picked it up and wouldn’t let it go. Ghost Face Killer put it on wax. Jay-Z put it next to Papy Mason. Immortal Technique used it as a verb. A whole generation of rappers, Cool G Rap, Gang Star, Lloyd Banks, Young Buck, and Jeru the Demaga, funloving criminals put Larry Davis’s name in their verses on a tribe called Quest Scenario remix from 1992.
A rapper named MC Hood opened his verse with the line, “Lay down your wages. I’m wild like Larry Davis.” That’s what Larry Davis became. Not a person, a verb, a comparison, a line, and a rap that meant you were willing to shoot it out with the cops and live. In 1992, the Mullen Commission opened an investigation into NYPD corruption.
By 1994, they had documented exactly the pattern Davis had described. Cops dealing drugs, cops robbing dealers, cops protecting dealers. They never named the specific officers Davis had accused, but they confirmed the world he claimed to have come from was real. For a lot of people in the Bronx, that was enough.
February 20th in 2008, Shawangunk Correctional Facility, BB Block Recreation Yard, about 7 in the evening. 22 inmates in the yard, three correctional officers watching. A 42year-old inmate named Luis Rosado walked up behind Larry Davis with a homemade shank somewhere between 9 and 12 in long, a half inch wide. He put it into Larry’s back, his chest, his arms, his head, his thigh.
A correctional officer found Larry Davis trying to fight Rosado off with the walking cane he used. Larry was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital in Newberg at 7:46 that night, 41 years old. The day before the killing, a BET documentary crew had been scheduled to film an interview with him. Ed Ko by then out of office for almost 20 years gave the quote that ran in every paper like he said the prison system had done what the criminal justice system could not.
His sister said they had been trying to kill him since before he was ever arrested. Rosado pleaded guilty to firstdegree manslaughter 10 years on top of what he was already serving. He was parrolled in 2021. That’s the record. Four bodies in a bathtub, six cops on a hallway floor, 17 days on the run, three acquitt, one conviction, a shank in a prison yard, and a question the Bronx never stopped asking whether Larry Davis was a killer who got away with it because a jury hated cops or a killer who got away with it because the cops really were exactly
what he said they were. The evidence for the first answer is the bodies. The evidence for the second answer is the Mullen commission. Both can be true. Both probably are. They Larry Davis shot six police officers. Six police officers deserve to come home that night. Four men died in a bathtub for nothing.
And somewhere in a precinct file in the Bronx, there is still a sealed report about $40,000 that nobody ever claimed. The jury believed him. The prison system buried him. The Bronx remembers him. And the name the Bronx remembers is the name he gave himself.