In that springtime of nearly 35 years ago, the city was awash in racial tension. The mayor, John V. Lindsay, measured everything against the impact it might have on his presidential aspirations. Race riots had broken out in every major city in America. The Black Liberation Army was assassinating cops, and the streets crackled with danger.

Above: Pat Lynch, at the PBA's November delegates meeting, presents plaques to the men who strove so tirelessly for justice in the Harlem Mosque case: (l-r) former Manhattan Asst. D.A. Thomas Hyland, Randy Jurgensen, and former Manhattan Asst. DAs John Van Lindt and James Harmon.
Below: Jurgensen autographs copies of his book for delegates.

A 10-13 came from the second floor of 102 W. 116th St., Mosque Number 7, headed by Minister Louis Farrakhan. It was a set-up. The mosque doors, normally locked and guarded, were left open for the unsuspecting cops who responded. The investigation would show that the 10-13 was called in using the name of a 28 Pct. detective who had been off duty and out of town that day.

When the officers arrived and tried to gain access to the second floor, they were set upon by a large group of men, members of the Fruit of Islam, the Black Muslims’ security force.

During the melee a cop’s gun was taken and used to mortally wound responding officer Phillip Cardillo. The quick thinking of fellow cops who plugged his wounds with their fingers and raced him in an RMP to the hospital bought Cardillo five more days of life. Several other officers had been severely beaten.

The chief of detectives and a team of investigators had a group of suspects corralled in the building’s basement when all MOS were ordered to withdraw. A deal had been brokered — by a circle of six men — in which the men involved in the attack on the officers would report to the precinct later to be interviewed. They never showed and the killer escaped.

The six responsible for this unholy alliance and miscarriage of justice were Lindsay, Farrakhan, Congressman Charles Rangel, Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, Deputy Commissioner for Community Affairs Benjamin Ward and Chief of Department Michael Codd. (Codd and Ward later become NYPD police commissioners.)

A mob flooded the streets around the mosque, bricks started flying from rooftops. Many police officers were injured, including First-Grade Det. Randy Jurgensen, who would eventually be assigned the task of finding the cop-killer.

The cops were blamed for the whole event. Farrakhan bellowed that it had been a premeditated police attack on a house of worship, and the department did nothing to counter that claim. Apparently, Lindsey was so concerned about how the controversy would affect his political career that he and his police commissioner refused to defend the police officers who had acted appropriately. The good name of New York City’s cops was being sullied by this lie and no one did anything about it.

Thus did Jurgensen, a white detective born and raised in Harlem, get a case that the department didn’t want solved. While you would think that an investigation into an attack on police officers that resulted in one cop’s death would be a priority case for the NYPD, the brass wanted this case to go away.

The only resource the department gave Jurgensen was police officer Vito Navarra, one of the cops injured in the mosque, as a partner. Navarra was not a detective and had no investigatory background. The department flatly refused Jurgensen’s requests for a surveillance vehicle and camera equipment to collect photos of men at the mosque for identification purposes.

After attempting to find the resources covertly in the department, Jurgensen made a last-ditch effort and called the PBA, which gave Jurgensen everything he needed to identify the cop-killer.

This incredible story of betrayal by the department and of the heroic group that restored the reputation of New York City’s police officers is told in a book called “Circle of Six” written by Jurgensen and another retired police officer, Robert Cea (available at a discount through the PBA website, www.nycpba.org.) It is a tale of how a small group of men, including three district attorneys supported by the PBA and its members, fought the city’s political system to correct this injustice. It took years of painstaking work at great professional and personal expense, but Jurgensen ultimately located an eyewitness to the shooting and identified and arrested the killer. Two trials were conducted — the first ended in a hung jury while the second acquitted Louis 13X Dupree despite the testimony of a mosque member who witnessed the shooting.

For his extraordinary work, Randy Jurgensen was brought up on charges for using a forged parking placard (the department had refused his request for a placard several times) during the investigation. The department offered to let him resign and keep his pension or face a departmental trial (it should have awarded him a citation for meritorious duty). Once again, the PBA stepped up and did what the department should have done, 34 years earlier. At the November 2006 PBA delegates’ meeting, the PBA honored Jurgensen and the team that fought to restore the good name of New York’s police officers while attempting to bring a cop-killer to justice.