A city under siege

Marvin Albert, enjoying a rare Sunday off from his warehouse job, was  leaving his house on South White Street when he noticed a man running across a nearby canal footbridge - a man with a rifle.

At the sight of the weapon, some of Albert's neighbors started ducking behind parked cars, but Albert - who had gotten out of Vietnam in 1968, five years before that fateful encounter - wasn't particularly impressed.

"It looked like a kid with a play toy," Albert recalled recently. "I didn't pay him no mind."

What the man with the gun did next would be seared into the mind not just of Marvin Albert but of people throughout New Orleans and, by way of live network television broadcasts, across the nation.

On the 7th January 1973, in a siege of about 10 hours, Mark Essex, 23, holed up in the Howard Johnson hotel on Loyola Avenue and killed seven people, among them three police officers, including the No. 2 man in the New Orleans Police Department.

Horror gripped the city and emptied the streets for blocks around the beleaguered hotel. A Marine helicopter hovered overhead bristling with sharpshooters, and fires set by the sniper gave the scene the feel of a Third World revolution. No one was sure if the sniper, a black man targeting white victims, was part of a broader militant uprising or was acting alone.

"It was a staggeringly difficult event," said state Appeals Judge Moon Landrieu, who was mayor at the time.

Earlier attacks

Police had tangled with Essex a few days before the Howard Johnson's siege.

He had launched a brazen New Year's Eve attack on police headquarters at Tulane Avenue and Gravier Street. Shooting under cover of darkness, he cut down Alfred Harrell Jr., an unarmed police cadet.

Essex escaped, later that same night shooting officer Edwin Hosli Sr., who was investigating a burglary in the 1000 block of South Gayoso Street.

Harrell, 19, died that night; Hosli, 30, survived until March.

Over the next few days, police were jittery as they searched for the cop-killer they sensed was still in their midst.

Their suspicions were confirmed Jan. 7 about 10:15 a.m. when Essex shot grocer Joe Perniciaro at his store on South Gayoso and Erato streets. Essex was fleeing the store when Albert spotted him running across the footbridge off Melpomene Avenue, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Albert got into his car, trying to ignore Essex and hoping he could drive away safely. It didn't work.

"He told me, `Hi, brother. Get out,' " pointed his weapon, a .44-caliber Magnum carbine, and ordered Albert out of the car.

Essex told Albert, who is black, that he didn't want to kill any black people that day, "just honkies," and took off in the Chevelle. By then, police were at the grocery store, and quickly were on the scene of the car theft.

Albert jumped in a police car for what he calls "the ride of my life"

and, with officer Phil Dominick, tracked the Chevelle to the parking garage of the Downtown Howard Johnson Hotel, 330 Loyola Ave., with Detective Bill Trepagnier, an officer in the 6th District at the time, and his partner, Jack Uhle, fast on their heels.

"That's when hell cut loose," said retired officer Gus Krinke, a detective at the time. "That's when the fires started, the shootings."

"We weren't prepared for anything like that," Trepagnier said. "We held out with shotguns and pistols until the detective bureau and the Tac Squad bailed us out."

The first victims

One of the sniper's first targets was firefighter Tim Ursin, shot in the arm as he scaled a ladder, and it fell to Trepagnier and Uhle to try to bring Ursin down before the sniper killed him.

"We drove him back in with the shotgun," Trepagnier said. "We'd take two or three steps down and he'd come back out and shoot again."

Slowly, police manpower built up around the hotel. Officer Dave McCann was on routine patrol with fellow 8th District officer Kenny Solis when they heard a call for traffic control at what they believed was a fire at the Howard Johnson.

"We were only five minutes away, so we went over there," McCann said. He and Solis were walking across Duncan Plaza, the broad, tree-lined area in front of City Hall, when Solis clutched his shoulder and said he'd been shot.

McCann thought his partner was joking. "Yeah, you right," McCann said.

But when he saw the blood, McCann went to work, using skills gained as a Marine Corps medic in Vietnam. First, he carried Solis to shelter behind a tree, used a T-shirt to apply pressure to the bleeding wound, and waited for help to arrive. First District officers Leo Newman and Phil Coleman pulled their car onto the plaza.

"I remember telling Phil when he got out the car, because he opened his door toward the Howard Johnson's - I said, `Keep down, don't get up,' " McCann said. "And as soon as he stood up, he got shot."

Eventually, an emergency unit arrived and took the wounded officers away.

Solis survived; Coleman did not.

Another officer, Paul Persigo of the Motorcycle Division, was killed outside the hotel, his white police helmet providing an easy target for the sniper.

Unknown enemy

Landrieu and some of his top aides were at a planning retreat at St. Joseph's Abbey near Covington when they got word of the crisis Sunday morning and sped back to the city.

Landrieu said he went first to his office to get a situation report, then carefully made his way to the hotel lobby, where Police Chief Clarence Giarrusso had set up a command post.

"I managed to get into the building by kind of hugging the wall and running through the side door on Gravier Street," Landrieu recalled. "We at that time did not know how many people were involved, who was involved or what the reasons were."

There were lots of possibilities. New Orleans police already had endured  two stand-offs with members of the Black Panther Party in the Desire public housing complex. And other left-wing groups were still around from the heyday of radical protests in the 1960s, including many committed to violence as an avenue to social change.

Essex's turn to radical action stemmed from his time in the Navy, where he faced white racism more virulent than anything he had seen in the quiet Kansas town of Emporia where he grew up.

His friends remembered Essex as a quiet, happy person, who had talked in his youth of entering the ministry. But the Navy had changed him from a dependable worker to a disenchanted sailor who went AWOL once and eventually got an involuntary special discharge.

During his Navy stint he had become involved with some black radical groups in San Diego and, once out of the military, had connected for a time with a wing of the Black Panthers in New York.

After the Howard Johnson incident, black militant leader Stokely Carmichael praised Essex for "carrying our struggle to the next quantitative level, the level of science."

Bravery and survival

If Essex acted alone in the hotel - there are some who still maintain he had accomplices - then he did so with a studied, if not scientific, precision. Moving quickly through the building, he started fires by lighting phone books and placing them under the drapes. Then he'd move to other floors to do the same thing.

Meanwhile, he was taking shots with his booming .44-caliber Magnum carbine from various spots in the hotel and tossing around firecrackers he had brought as a diversion, creating the impression that snipers and arsonists lurked on several floors.

Four hotel guests were killed, including a couple from Virginia married just seven months. Robert Steagall Jr., 28, was shot first. His wife, Elizabeth, 25, was shot in the head as she cradled her husband in her arms.

The hotel's general manager, W. Sherwood Collins, 46, and assistant manager, Frank Schneider, 62, also were killed.

The most devastating loss for the Police Department was Deputy Superintendent Louis Sirgo.

"As far as I'm concerned he was a heroic figure," Landrieu said of the man he had picked as the department's second in command.

Sirgo, 48, led a heavily armed team of men up one of the hotel's two exterior stairwells. "As they were going up the stairs, he looked down and - boom! - shot Sirgo," Krinke said.

The ordeal at the hotel served up enough stories of bravery and survival to fill a feature-length disaster movie:

Like the story of the two New Orleans policemen trapped in a hotel elevator, who decided to rappel down the shaft with the greasy elevator cables rather than risk death by smoke inhalation.

Or hotel guest Robert Beamish, who played dead in the hotel pool for hours after he was shot, fearing a sniper's bullet if he moved.

Or the sorties by a Marine helicopter loaded with police snipers shooting at a rooftop cubicle in which Essex had holed up.

It was there that Essex met his end.

A sniper's death

Officers on the stairwells below him could hear Essex moving about, shouting epithets at the police deployed on nearby buildings. Intermittently, he would run out from the bunker, fire off a round, and run back inside, somehow shielding himself from return fire, even that from the helicopter.

Essex apparently stood on a fire standpipe inside the rooftop cubicle as the helicopter passed by.

"He was up above, where you couldn't see him, wedged in there," Krinke said. So when the helicopter snipers shot at him, they were shooting downward - and missing.

Eventually, the gunfire broke the pipe - pressurized from a link to a fire truck on the ground - and spewed water everywhere, dousing the officers waiting below Essex on the stairwell.

"It damn near washed them out from all the pressure," Krinke said.

Finally, under a burst of intense fire, with ricochets and flying concrete chips forcing him from his bunker, Essex ran across the roof as the helicopter passed, raised his fist and was cut down.

Police kept shooting into Essex's body, wanting to be certain their tormentor was dead. They shot his rifle apart so that accomplices, if there were any, wouldn't be able to use it against them.

Though Essex was killed shortly after 9 p.m., the ordeal didn't end then. Throughout the night, police reported sightings of other snipers and gunflashes in the hotel. Many have attributed those sightings to the frayed nerves of men who had been working in the cold and dark.

"It's typical of rumors, of people panicking," Krinke said. He compared it to the reported sightings of Japanese saboteurs on the West Coast after the United States entered World War II.

On Monday afternoon, a police team stormed a large maintenance building on the roof, thinking an accomplice was inside. Several officers were injured by the ricochet of police bullets off the metal door.

Though Krinke thinks the reported sightings of other snipers were erroneous, he doesn't buy the one-sniper theory.

"I believe there was more than one, and that one of them got out in the chaos of removing the guests from the building," Krinke said. "He slipped in with that and made his way out."

Trepagnier agrees: "My gut feeling is, I shot at two different people."

The official investigation said otherwise.

"They proved that all of the metal casings came out of the same gun," McCann said. "They didn't find casings that matched any other gun than the one the sniper had."

The weeks after the incident were days full of "shock, dismay, sadness, and, I think, a great deal of suspicion," Landrieu said. "It took a long time to unravel. There was much criticism from various sources at the time: Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?"

But Landrieu has nothing but praise for the city employees who put their lives on the line that day.

"I thought it was an outstanding performance," he said. "But if you ask me `Was it pretty?' It was not pretty. I didn't know any way to make it pretty, nor did they. We didn't know what we were dealing with."