In April 1969, New York indicted twenty-one members of the city's Black Panther chapter — effectively its entire leadership — on charges of conspiring to bomb police stations, department stores, and the Bronx Botanical Garden. Bail was set at $100,000 each, imprisoning the chapter for two years before trial; the case was built by undercover officers of the NYPD's BOSS unit who had helped found the chapter. The defendants' collective autobiography, "Look for Me in the Whirlwind," and Afeni Shakur's pro se defense from the Women's House of Detention made the case an international cause.
On May 13, 1971, after the longest political trial in New York history, the jury acquitted all defendants on all 156 counts in less than an hour of deliberation — a repudiation so complete it embarrassed the prosecution into silence. But the operation had succeeded as disruption: the chapter was bankrupted and split, the two years of pretrial detention were never compensated, and several of the Twenty-One were pursued into new cases for years afterward.