By Kenneth R. Strange Jr.

Joanne Chesimard aka Asset Shakur, a convicted revolutionary and American fugitive in Cuba for more than forty years, has died at the age of seventy-eight. 

It was 1973.  I was a Senior in high school when political activist and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Joanne Chesimard chose to shoot it out on the New Jersey Turnpike with a pair of State troopers resulting in the wounding of Trooper James Harper and the execution-style slaying of Trooper Werner Foester. Little did I know sixteen years later, I would become involved in a FBI Terrorism Task Force case searching for the associates of fugitive Joanne Chesimard.

A Cop’s Son

As a cop’s son, I evinced an early interest in law enforcement and learned about this young and pretty, black revolutionary with the Afro hairdo.  With the purpose of achieving black liberation, the BLA was waging a guerrilla war against the U.S. government—setting off bombs, robbing banks and murdering both drug dealers and police.  Chesimard, a prominent BLA cell leader, garnered public attention not only for a violent hand grenade attack on a police car but for a series of bank robberies and murders.  Several NYPD police officers had also been assassinated in cold blood. 

Just like that, it had become personal. Our family hoped and prayed our father, assigned to the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica, Queens, would not cross paths with Chesimard. 

Larger than Life

To the media and on college campuses, Chesimard was a fascinating, romantic folk hero.  After a disappointing stint with the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA, she joined the BLA, whose members found inspiration in freedom fighter causes throughout the world. In 1971, dismissing her Christian name as a ‘slave name,’ she chose an African name, Assata Shakur, as her ‘nom de guerre.’  

Chesimard was described by Robert Daley, author and Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police, as “the final wanted fugitive, the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”

In 1977, Chesimard was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner. But her incarceration would last only two years. BLA members broke her out of a Woman’s Correctional Facility in Clinton, NJ where she would go into hiding, eventually surfacing in Cuba in 1984. The Castro regime gleefully poked the US government in the eye and granted fugitive Chesimard political asylum.  Chesimard was now only ninety miles away from Key West, Florida but she would spend the rest of her life lambasting her former country from Castro’s island nation.

FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force

In 1989, I was a part of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) an elite group of Special Agents and New Jersey State troopers in Newark, New Jersey. For the state troopers, the murder of Foester, one of their own, was a particularly painful and sensitive topic which made it personal for all of us. 

During the time Chesimard was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List we were investigating those individuals associated with the escaped black militant. One of these associates led us on a high-speed surveillance which ended unsuccessfully in a black neighborhood in the Bronx in the dark of night. 

During my retirement from federal law enforcement, I began contemplating a trip to Cuba.  As a Spanish speaker, I’d always been enamored of Cuban history and literature.  Shortly after graduate school, I would join the FBI by way of the Spanish language program. In one amusing Cuban intelligence story, I discovered the President of Cuba and his brother had bizarrely greeted me by name on a VHS tape which had made its way to our FBI office in Newark.

Bucket List Visit to Cuba

Would it be possible to fulfill a ‘bucket list’ visit to Cuba?  Could I “let bygones be bygones” and meet with the remaining Castro sibling, Raul, now getting on in years?   And while in Havana, would it be possible to meet with Assatu Shakur?  Yes, there was a $ 2 million dollar reward for her capture but that would not be my goal—just a “one to one” conversation with her about a life in exile—to find out if there were any regrets in knowing she would never see her country again, any remorse for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foester? 

U.S. State Department contacts informed me there was nothing to stop me from visiting Cuba but feelers to the current regime about a meet with Shakur would not play well politically for either side.  It might also complicate my ‘bucket list’ visit to the island. In short, there was nothing to gain.  

Death of Joanne Chesimard

Had Joanne Chesimard gone out in a blaze of glory like bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or been hunted down by soldiers in the bad lands of Bolivia like Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, the myth might have endured. Instead, Chesimard’s death after forty plus leaden years in Cuban exile, closes out a violent and almost forgotten chapter in U.S. history.  Did Joanne Chesimard contribute to the welfare and well-being of humanity while she was alive? You might want to ask the widows and orphans she left in her wake.

Kenneth R. Strange Jr. is a former FBI Special Agent, Special Agent in Charge of the DOJ, and the author of “A Cop’s Son: One G-Man’s Fight Against Jihad, Global Fraud and the Cartels.”

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