Badge of the Assassin dramatized the real 1971 killings of New York City police officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini in Harlem. According to the account on which the 1985 CBS telefilm was based, Black Liberation Army members Anthony Bottom, Albert “Nuh” Washington, and Herman Bell ambushed and shot the officers in an unprovoked attack before evading immediate justice. The case became a long, nationwide investigation rather than a swift conviction: Assistant District Attorney Robert K. Tanenbaum pursued the suspects through leads stretching from New York to San Francisco, New Orleans, and Mississippi, working with detective Cliff Fenton. The first trial ended with a hung jury, forcing prosecutors to try the case again; the second trial resulted in murder convictions in 1975, four years after the killings. Tanenbaum later co-wrote the 1979 true-crime book Badge of the Assassin with Philip Rosenberg and served as a co-executive producer of the television adaptation, in which James Woods portrayed him, with Yaphet Kotto and Alex Rocco playing detectives. The film’s restrained treatment deliberately avoided turning the racial anger of the period into a simplistic subplot, a choice noted by contemporary reviewers who also observed that the passage of nearly fifteen years had transformed a traumatic police-murder case into Saturday-night television entertainment.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The 1971 Harlem Ambush That Became Badge of the Assassin
Badge of the Assassin / 1970s
Badge of the Assassin dramatized the real 1971 killings of New York City police officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini in Harlem. According to the account on which the 1985 CBS telefilm was based, Black Liberation Army members Anthony Bottom, Albert “Nuh” Washington, and Herman Bell ambushed and shot the officers in an unprovoked attack before evading immediate justice. The case became a long, nationwide investigation rather than a swift conviction: Assistant District Attorney Robert K. Tanenbaum pursued the suspects through leads stretching from New York to San Francisco, New Orleans, and Mississippi, working with detective Cliff Fenton. The first trial ended with a hung jury, forcing prosecutors to try the case again; the second trial resulted in murder convictions in 1975, four years after the killings. Tanenbaum later co-wrote the 1979 true-crime book Badge of the Assassin with Philip Rosenberg and served as a co-executive producer of the television adaptation, in which James Woods portrayed him, with Yaphet Kotto and Alex Rocco playing detectives. The film’s restrained treatment deliberately avoided turning the racial anger of the period into a simplistic subplot, a choice noted by contemporary reviewers who also observed that the passage of nearly fifteen years had transformed a traumatic police-murder case into Saturday-night television entertainment.
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