While an inmate at San Quentin prison, Anthony C. Harris became a devout member of the Nation of Islam.
At that time, the spiritual leader of the Nation was Elijah Muhammad, who preached a gospel of black separatism and superiority. Muhammad taught that whites were literally the incarnation of evil, a race of “blue-eyed devils.”
Elijah Muhammed
To test the worthiness of His Chosen Black People, proclaimed Muhammad, Allah had allowed their 400-year persecution by these “bleached-out, grafted snakes.”
But that great testing period would soon come to its end. Then would follow the literal, heaven-sent destruction of all whites. At the conclusion of this divine slaughter, Allah would create a paradise earth for His Chosen Black People.
It was also in San Quentin that Harris met two other inmates who would radically change his life: Manuel Moore and Jessie Lee Cooks.
Both men asked Harris–a fifth-dan kung-fu expert–to teach them the martial art–so they could kill whites.
Harris agreed to supply the lessons.
The three men had a conversation in the temporary Muslim temple in the prison–about “killing people and cutting their heads off–just white people,” Harris later testified in court.
After Harris was paroled on October 15, 1973, he drifted into San Francisco. There he made a new friend–Larry Craig Green, who helped him into a job at the Black Self-Help, a Muslim-owned, furniture-moving company in the city.
Yet another new friend he made there was J.C. Simon.
Soon he was reunited with Jessie Cooks, who had been paroled in July. The release of Manuel Moore followed in November–as did his own arrival in San Francisco.
In September or October, 1973, Harris and 12 to 13 other Muslims–including Simon, Cooks and Green–met at J.C. Simon’s San Francisco apartment.
“They asked me,” Harris later testified, “was I able to kill anyone? Did I have my mind together? They wanted me to work in the [Muslim] temple” as a kung-fu instructor.
At a second meeting at Simon’s apartment, a large, velvet-lined case was prominently displayed. In it were two machetes, three pistols–a snubnose .38 revolver, a .357 Magnum and an automatic–and a shotgun.
“They asked me, how did I feel about white people? Did I feel they were my enemy? Was my mind together enough to destroy my enemy?
“And I just told them, ‘I don’t know what you mean by destroying my enemy.'” Harris told the other Muslims that he had no enemies.
“They wanted me to go out and kill some people, to show them I could be trusted among them. They told me I would have to make some kind of move sooner or later.”
Once again, Harris found himself under cross-examination: was he ready to take his first step towards joining the elite of Allah, the Death Angels? Was he willing to assist his brethren in destroying the blue-eyed white devils?
To drive the point home, the Muslims showed Harris photographs of his brother, stepbrother, mother, sister and fiancee.
“They told me I knew too much about the organization, and something could happen” to Harris himself and his family unless he joined the group of future killers.
Still, Harris refused to commit himself to the coming plot to slaughter whites.
So his companions decided to enlist him in their cause in one dramatic–and lethal–move.
On the night of October 20, 1973, Americans were glued to their TV sets. President Richard Nixon had just fired Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox and disbanded the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s office.
On that same evening, Harris stood at a bus stop, waiting to be taken home from his job at the Black Self-Help, when a panel truck driven by Larry Green pulled up in the bus zone.
Next to Green, in the passenger’s seat, sat Jessie Lee Cooks. Both men offered Harris a ride home, and he accepted.
The truck drove around for awhile, then parked in the shadows near Powell and Chestnut Streets, in a residential neighborhood.
A few minutes later, the three Muslims spotted a young–and white–married couple, Richard and Quite Hague, strolling nearby.
Hague, 30, worked as a mining engineer for the San Francisco office of Utah International. Quita, 28, was a reporter for the Industrial City Press, in South San Francisco. The previous month they had celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary.
Cooks stopped the Hagues, asking for directions. Then he shoved a pistol into the back of Richard Hague and forced the couple into the rear of the panel truck.
The Hagues were bound, beaten and driven to a remote spot in the San Francisco industrial district. There they were yanked from the van. Larry Green seized a machete and, with one stroke, nearly decapitated Quita Hague.
“He got blood all over him,” Harris would later testify.
“Larry came over with the knife and said something about, ‘You ought to have seen all the blood gush out of her neck.'”
Green handed the machete to Cooks, who slashed Richard Hague about the face and back of the head. Left for dead, Hague would eventually recover–and testify against his wife’s killers.
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ALLAH’S DEATH ANGELS: PART THREE (OF FIVE)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on June 13, 2014 at 12:10 amThe reign of the “Zebra” killers began on October 20, 1973–with the machete decapitation of Quita Hague and the near-murder of her husband, Richard.
Almost immediately after the two Black Muslims finished hacking their victims, flashbulbs began popping. Two other cars, driven by members of the Nation of Islam, had pulled up
Several camera-toting Muslims started taking pictures of the blood-soaked murder scene–as evidence of Larry Green’s and Jessie Lee Cooks’ worthiness as Death Angels.
A series of murders followed.
On October 30–ten days after the abduction of Richard and Quita Hague–Jessie Lee Cooks struck again.
He shot Frances Rose, a physical therapist, four times in the head and neck as she sat in her car at the entrance of the parking lot to the University of California Extension.
Cooks was arrested within a few minutes and only a short distance from the scene, still in possession of the murder weapon, a revolver.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 14, 1974.
He would be tried again and convicted of other murders, along with the other “Zebra” defendants on March 13, 1976.
On November 25, Salem Erakat, a grocer, was found shot in the back of the head in his mom-and-pop market, which lay across the street from the San Francisco Federal Building.
On December 11, a San Francisco resident named Paul Dancik was fatally shot three times as he used a public telephone.
On December 13, Arthur Agnos, a former administrative aide to San Francisco Assemblyman Leo T. McCarthy, was shot and wounded while standing on a street corner, talking to two friends.
He would survive and later serve as Mayor of San Francisco from 1988 to 1992.
On Christmas Eve, Larry Craig Green and J.C. Simon asked Anthony Harris to help them take some packages to a nearby beach.
“When I unloaded the truck, I recall getting a lot of blood on my hands,” Harris later testified as a witness for the prosecution. He asked Simon and Green what was in the packages.
“They said, it was probably a dog or a cat,” said Harris. Later, he learned that the package had held a human body. But he never learned whose.
Harris helped to dispose of similar packages “about 40-some times.”
Harris was taken along by the “Zebra” killers on several shootings. Later, Harris reasoned: “I guess they thought that, sooner or later, I would join their little clique.”
One night, Harris, J.C. Simon and Manuel Moore parked their black Cadillac near an apartment complex. Simon and Moore got out, leaving Harris in the vehicle.
“The next thing I knew,” said Harris, “I heard a gunshot. Manuel started running from the same area that the gunshot came from.”
Moore and Simon jumped into the car. As the vehicle sped off, Harris saw “what appeared to be a body” lying on the sidewalk.
On another occasion, Harris asked his comrades what had happened after he heard shots ring out.
“Just watch television or listen to the radio, and you’ll see what happened,” one of them said.
Harris learned from the news later on that “somebody had been shot and killed.”
Between killings, Harris and his friends attended regular meetings at the Black Self-Help, the Muslim-owned furniture-moving company in San Francisco.
At some of these meetings, as many as 40 to 50 or more Muslims were present.
Members of the Nation of Islam
“They were talking about killing people,” Harris later testified. Films were shown “of the Watts riots [in 1965] and different riots taking place throughout the past, black people being beaten down by the police and shot.”
The meetings’ participants were asked, “Could we allow this to continue? They said the only way to stop it was to act and be vicious…like the police department.
“That you had to…be able to go out and just deliberately take a baby and smash his head against the wall and kill him and, if you have to, even drink the blood to show how vicious you are.
“And they showed us a large number of pictures” on a bulletin board “of a lot of bald-headed men with little white wings on their necks, and identified each guy as being members of the Death Angels.”
Harris was told that “if I wanted to be a member of the Death Angels, that I’d have to go out and kill people to get some wings.”
Not only was the wearing of a pair of white wings a symbol of belonging to the Death Angels, so was a shaved head, stated Harris.
Only certified members of the Death Angels could enter Muslim temples with shaved heads. Anyone else who entered such a temple with a shaved head “can be killed or put out of the temple for coming in like that.”
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