BY TOM HAYS, The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) -- More than three decades have passed, but Diane Piagentini can still see the red lights that flashed on her living room windows when the patrol car pulled up.
A chaplain appeared at her door and told her that militants had killed her police officer husband, Joseph Piagentini, 28, and his partner, Waverly Jones, in an ambush in Harlem.
“That night never goes away,” she says.
Now, two men convicted in the 1971 killings, Herman Bell and Anthony Bottom, are up for parole hearings, and their case is reviving passions from an era when radical groups declared war on the establishment.
The powerful Patrolman’s Benevolent Association has started a petition drive to head off a repeat of the state Parole Board’s surprise decision last year to free another former radical, Kathy Boudin. She had served 22 years for an armored car heist in which two police officers and a security guard were killed in upstate Rockland County.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, an NYPD sergeant at the time of the slayings, also has lobbied against parole for Bell and Bottom.
“The murders of these two officers were different,” he wrote in a letter to parole officials.
“They were drawn into a trap for the purpose of killing them and fomenting civil unrest.”
Bell and Bottom, both former members of the Black Liberation Army, are serving 25-years-to-life terms. Bell will go before the state Parole Board for the first time next month, Bottom in July for the second time.
Bottom, 52, declined a request for an interview; Bell, 55, didn’t respond. But supporters describe them as model inmates worthy of release.
Both earned college degrees in prison. A warden has credited Bottom with helping prevent riots. Bell, a former scholarship athlete, coaches inmate football teams.
The convicts count City Councilman Charles Barron, himself a self-described revolutionary, and various leftist groups among their supporters.
“To deny them parole would be a denial of their civil rights,” said Monifa Bandeli, executive director of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Brooklyn.
Still calling themselves the “New York 3" -- an accomplice died in prison in 2000 -- the men insist they were framed by the FBI. Information that a local drug dealer was behind the killings was purposely ignored, they say.
“We are political prisoners because ... the FBI initiated a secret war on the black liberation movement,” Bell wrote on one Web site.
Bottom, at a parole hearing in 2002, admitted being a soldier in the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers. But he emphatically denied killing the officers.
The Black Liberation Army had sanctioned symbolic killings of police officers. Declassified documents show FBI director J. Edgar Hoover responded with a covert campaign to infiltrate and disrupt the BLA and other violent radical movements.
Piagentini, 28, was a white cop with two young daughters. His wife worried about him patrolling tough neighborhoods during the turbulent period. But she convinced herself his partner, who was black, could protect him.
On the night of May 21, 1971, the partners were sent to investigate a report of a domestic dispute at a housing project. Authorities say it was actually a trap set by Bell and Bottom.
The two officers were cornered outside the project. Piagentini died from 12 gunshot wounds. Four bullets hit Jones in the back of the head. The assailants stole their victims’ service revolvers.
According to witnesses, Bottom and Bell talked openly about the killings.
Three weeks later, San Francisco police arrested Bottom and recovered Jones’ revolver and another gun linked to the ambush. Bell was caught in New Orleans in 1973.
Diane Piagentini, who raised her daughters without remarrying, prayed that the pain would subside, but it hasn’t.
“I have a visual in my mind that will just not go away: him on the ground, bleeding, saying ‘Please don’t kill me. I have a wife and children,”’ she said.
Bell and Bottom “want mercy?” she asked. “They showed no mercy.”