Two rookie cops shot in cold blood on Avenue B

Of course Avenue B was a much rougher stretch of the East Village in the 1970s and 1980s than it is today.

So rough, in fact, that a violent revolutionary group targeted police officers there.

That’s what happened at about 11 p.m. on January 27, 1972, when patrolmen Rocco Laurie (left) and Gregory Foster (right) were walking their usual beat.

Suddenly, at 11th Street and Avenue B, a group of men ambushed the rookies, shooting each in the back several times and leaving them for dead in the snow.

A group calling themselves the Black Liberation Army took responsibility. An offshoot of the Black Panthers, the BLA released a statement claiming that the murders were retaliation for the Attica prison riot.

“The BLA viewed black ghettos as sovereign territory, the police as invaders, and themselves as the armed resistance,” wrote Andrew Roth in Infamous Manhattan. “To this group, Foster (black) and Laurie (white) were but foot soldiers of an enemy army.”

It was the latest in a war the BLA had been waging on the NYPD. In May 1971, two cops were wounded when their car was fired at on the Upper West Side.

Two days after that, officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini were assassinated while patrolling a housing project in Inwood.

Eventually the NYPD tracked down the BLA members responsible for the Avenue B murders and brought them to trial in 1974. According to the New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, all but one of the killers have been brought to justice.

Tags: Avenue B crime, Black Liberation Army, Black Panthers in New York City, East Village 1970s, Foster and Laurie murders, Gregory Foster, New York in the 1970s, NYPD cops shot, Rocco Laurie