Larry Davis: A Modern Day Anti-Hero

There is not one big Black nigger alive who has confronted law enforcement and lived to talk about it. Wait a minute now. There once lived an unlikely folk hero named Larry Davis from the boogie down Bronx who not only confronted but shot six White cops on a frigid Nov. 19, 1986 evening. Davis was out of control, and also out of his mind. But to us, he was a bona fide “revolutionary”-in-training.
We do not often get to pick our heroes most of whom are deeply flawed, complex and, often, conflicted characters that nonetheless manage by a quirk of fate to become an agent of change, catalyst for revolution, at an exact moment in time. Like El Hajj Malik El Shabazz better known as Malcolm X, Davis who changed his name to Adam Abdul-Hakeem in 1989, was a gun toting, drug dealing, high school dropout. By all objective accounts, Davis’ drug trade was supplied by crooked cops who stole, beat, shot and set up other dealers. There is no honor among thieves, though.

Davis promptly cheated these rogue cops out of their share of the drug money. They came after him with murderous intent. In an unusual turn of events, Davis successfully fended off what was most certainly going to become another “justifiable homicide” of a small time, Black hoodlum. Using a cache of small arms he had secreted in a sister’s apartment, Davis shot it out OK corral style with nine crooked cops in a blaze of over 150 shots between them making his escape through an adjoining apartment window near the shootout at 1231 Fulton Avenue and 168th Street, in Morrisania. New Yorkers sat riveted, rapturously watching events unfold like a prequel to “Empire” as Davis eluded capture - a massive manhunt  - for the next 17 days spearheaded by NYC's "finest." 
Virtually all majority owned print and television outlets conspicuously downplayed the police corruption angle from the very start shifting the onus for the gun battle entirely to Davis contending he was a violent thug. There is not a single person living in Morrisania who does not know at least one brutal, crooked cop. Here you can reasonably substitute that section of the Bronx for any other Ghetto in the United States. 
Fed up with over policing in which insensitive, prejudiced cops occupy minority communities employing terroristic tactics in clearly questionable police involved killings of Black and brown people invariably deemed “justifiable,” Black people cheered Davis on much to the chagrin of shocked Whites. The White dominated, establishment media responded predictably en mass writing dozens of frenzied, scathing reports demonizing Davis as a dangerous menace that needed to be put down like a rabid dog, who all along claimed he was being set up by crooked cops, showing how institutional racism works: white folk walk in lockstep, speaking in one cacophonous voice, to protect both their privilege as well as their interest. 
It also demonstrated another truism: whites are in denial about how white supremacy plays out in the Black community. An American investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News named Gary Stephen Webb (August 31, 1955 – December 10, 2004) wrote an explosive, provocative exposé that came to be known infamously as the "Dark Alliance" series. The exposé appeared in the Mercury News in 1996, and explored the origins of the crack-cocaine trade in Los Angeles claiming that members of the anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the drug trade, using cocaine profits to finance their struggle. 
Webb’s “Dark Alliance” exposé strongly suggested that the Contra rebels acted in complicity with secret agents from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “According to Webb, in the 1980s when the CIA exerted a certain amount of control over Contra groups such as the FDN, the agency granted amnesty to and put on the agency’s bankroll important leaders known to be cocaine smugglers. Later, at the behest of Oliver North, the Reagan Administration began to use Contra drug money to support the Nicaraguan rebel’s efforts against the Sandinista government. The Sandinistas were disliked by the administration for their support of “Marxist” revolutions happening throughout Central and South America. 
Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cocaine smuggler who founded an FDN chapter in Los Angeles, was a major supplier for Freeway Ricky Ross. With access to cheap, pure cocaine and the idea to cook the cocaine into crack, Ross established a major drug network and recklessly drove the popularity of crack practically by his lonesome, which devastated entire communities and the families that comprised them. At his peak, Ross was selling $3 million worth of product a day. All the while, Webb alleges, the CIA was supporting the Contras supplying him with the cocaine.” The exposé instigated fury in Los Angeles generally and in the African-American community particularly. 
The damning charges in Webb’s exposé led to four major investigations of the exposé’s charges. The controversy came to a head when the Los Angeles Times and other major papers published articles - par for the course - implying Webb’s charges were fantastic. The resulting claims and counterclaims resulted in push back from vocal Black leaders like Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Cal) accusing the Los Angeles Times and other papers of focusing on editorial issues with the exposé instead of demanding that policymakers and stakeholders hold hearings looking into the questions the exposé raised. Many of Webb's supporters this writer included, while acknowledging errors in the exposé, also believe that the findings of the investigations substantiated Webb's basic thesis. Webb allegedly committed suicide on December 10, 2004 under highly questionable circumstances. 
There have always been deep, nagging suspicions in the progressive, conscious Black community of government sponsored pacification programs fueled by drugs to tamp down dissent in the wake of unrest prompted by assassinations of charismatic, influential Black leaders. These concerns have been dismissed out-of-hand by the majority media as unprovable conspiracy theories.
Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the King assassination in April of 1968, drugs flooded virtually every urban area of this country launching a heroin epidemic that lasted almost twenty years causing wholesale destruction of families, which destroyed famous Black communities such as Harlem in New York City's Manhattan. Harlem had started to rebound just before the latest drug fueled [crack cocaine] epidemic mysteriously hit these same beleaguered communities twenty years later in the 1980s corresponding precisely to Abdul-Hakeem’s rise to infamy.
So the smoking gun - as evidence of this conspiracy - was quite literally in Abdul-Hakeem’s hands dramatized by an improbable shootout with rogue cops who were peddling death and destruction in our community instead of protecting and serving in bed with the intelligence community to quell resistance to economic inequality, criminal injustice, and racism that relentlessly plagues these Ghettos. Abdul-Hakeem was killed on Thursday, February 21, 2008 in a knife fight with another inmate at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in New York where he was serving a life sentence for murder the authorities were finally able to make stick. It does not close a sordid chapter of another failed revolution or revolutionary, but remains a compelling story in our quest for self-determination, economic equity and justice.