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Henican: For Davis, life was about armed struggle

Ellis Henican

February 22, 2008

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To this day, criminal defense lawyers in New York have an expression for a client who appears especially hard-nosed and violence-prone.

The street thug or drug lord or stone-cold killer, they'll say, has "Larry Davis eyes."

"I'm surprised he lasted as long he did," lawyer Stanley Cohen was saying yesterday. "He had real enemies, inside and outside of prison. If there was an easy way and a hard way to do something, Larry always opted for the latter. He was ready to fight anyone - and often physically."

As crazed as Cohen's first big client could surely be, he never kidded himself about his own mortality. "He knew this was the only way he was coming out of prison - in a body bag," the lawyer said. "It didn't matter how many cases he won. It didn't matter how many juries found him not guilty. Larry told me, 'You don't shoot as many cops as I did, beat them at trial and ever go home a free man.'"

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Back in 1986, Cohen was a young Legal Aid lawyer in the Bronx. He was a bearded, shaggy-haired defender who was quick with expressions like "killer cops" and "the oppressive state."

Eventually, brand-name civil rights attorneys William Kunstler and Lynne Stewart muscled their way into the celebrated Davis case. But Cohen was the one who was called by the family when young Larry, wanted for killing four drug dealers, shot his way out of his sister's Bronx apartment one night, leaving six wounded cops behind. And it was Cohen who first launched young Larry's maddeningly effective claim of self-defense - that a band of rogue cops, fearful that Davis was going to testify against them, had come to murder him first.

"You have to remember the context here," Cohen said. "This was THE case at the crossroads of what the Bronx was and what it had become. A young black kid shoots his way out of an apartment surrounded by an army of cops, and he becomes a folk hero before anyone knew what it was all about."

Crime back then was soaring. Crack was suddenly king. Police brutality was all over the papers. The South Bronx especially felt completely out of control.

And when 20-year-old Larry Davis, after one of the largest manhunts in NYPD history and 17 days on the run, walked out of the Twin Parks West housing project in handcuffs, people on the street cheered for him.

"Larry, Larry, Larry," they chanted from open apartment windows.

The folk-hero aura stretched all the way to the courthouse.

First, Davis was acquitted of killing the drug dealers. Then, when he went on trial for the attempted murder of nine cops, the Supreme Court jury in the Bronx acquitted him again, returning a guilty verdict only on a lesser weapons charge.

There was no real evidence to back up his rogue-cop defense. But don't these acquittals say something depressing and powerful about the place and time?

"Race relations were at their worst in city," Cohen said. "Political corruption was at its apex. People looked at the police like an occupying army, people of color especially."

It was only later, in 1991, that Davis was convicted of murdering yet another drug dealer, the case that kept him in prison for 25 years to life.

"I had other clients who would come across Larry upstate," his lawyer said. "They'd say he rules the roost up there. Larry was a tough guy wherever he was."

He died the way he lived, violently. At the blade of another inmate in the yard at Shawangunk prison, stabbed repeatedly in the chest, arms, back and head with a 9-inch shank.

But through it all - the violent beginning, the crazy middle and the violent end - Larry Davis always had a basic understanding of who he was.

"I remember one time he told me, 'I ain't Martin Luther King,'" Cohen was saying yesterday. "Larry believed in armed struggle long before he even understood what the term meant. He was armed struggle, from beginning to end."