Mugged (6 page)

Davis’s lawyer, William Kunstler, argued that his client had shot uniformed policemen in self-defense and a mostly black jury in the Bronx agreed. This serial murderer/attempted cop killer was acquitted of all charges.

The
Times
had not called for “rigorous prosecution” of Larry Davis, nor was it unhappy with the verdict. Its editorial on his acquittal compared Davis’s shooting six policemen to Bernie Goetz’s self-defense shooting of four muggers a few years earlier.

In an editorial, the
Times
cautioned readers against “dismiss[ing]” the verdict, explaining:

“The jury, predominantly black, was influenced by the police department’s recent history of overreaction and misconduct”—and then cited Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs.
²¹

Although it was the
Times’
s own demagogic reporting that had helped turn those incidents into apparent acts of racism, the
Times
blamed blacks’ negative perception of the police entirely on the police. Americans would have seen the OJ verdict coming if the
Times
’s readership hadn’t been limited all those years to heads-up-their-butts, Upper West Side liberals.

LEMRICK NELSON—1992

After the officers in the Michael Stewart case were acquitted, an inconsolable
New York Times
published a somber editorial titled, “How to Remember Michael Stewart.”
²²
It began by saying that “a New York jury has refused to hold any police officers responsible for the death of Michael Stewart.” Refused? Why not “has found police officers not responsible for the death of Michael Stewart”?

By contrast, several years later, when a predominantly black jury in Brooklyn acquitted Lemrick Nelson of murdering Yankel Rosenbaum—despite Nelson having the bloody knife on him, his being identified by a dying Rosenbaum as the perpetrator, and Nelson’s confession to the police—the
Times
editorial the next day began: “A Brooklyn jury’s acquittal leaves unresolved who killed Yankel Rosenbaum.”
²³

That case began on August 19, 1992, when a car in a Hasidic rabbi’s motorcade hit and killed a nine-year-old black child, Gavin Cato. This instantly incited three nights of black riots, pungent with anti-Semitism. Shortly after the accident, a mob of black teenagers surrounded Rosenbaum, shouting “Kill the Jew!” and stabbed Rosenbaum four times. Hours later, Rosenbaum died.

Cops chased Lemrick Nelson from the scene, caught him nearby and found a bloody knife on him. His jeans were bloodstained. Before the ambulance took Rosenbaum away, he identified Nelson as the man who had knifed him in front of cops, ambulance drivers and civilians. Rosenbaum then asked Nelson, “Why did you do this to me?”
²⁴
Back at the police station, Nelson confessed.
²⁵

Stunningly, Nelson was acquitted of all charges by a majority black Brooklyn jury—or, as the
New York Times
described it, a “jury of seven
women and five men.”
²⁶
Despite the overwhelming evidence against Nelson, the jurors indignantly insisted they based their verdict on “the law and evidence,” as juror Mercidida Hernandez said. Juror Norma Hall said she didn’t believe the police, and the jury foreman, John St. Hill, said there were “a lot of inconsistencies in the facts.” After the verdict, the jurors went to a dinner with Nelson. Several of the jurors hugged him.
²⁷

In his federal civil rights trial more than ten years later, Nelson admitted he had stabbed Rosenbaum.
²⁸

Eight of the nine policemen who testified against Nelson were white, so the New York media blamed the police for the “black community” hating them, suggesting that the
Times
realized the importance of the jury’s racial composition, despite burying that information.

The
New York Times
huffily editorialized about the verdict: “Has the Police Department lost all credibility with many of the neighborhoods it serves?” Instructing New Yorkers “to heed a jury’s sobering message,” the
Times
said the verdict sent a grave message to the police union to stop complaining about Mayor Dinkins’s “supposedly oversympathetic responses when neighborhoods charge police misconduct.” To “help us heal,” the
Times
called for an independent board to review police misconduct.
²⁹

Showing the fierce independence that is the New York media,
Newsday
(New York) also blamed the police: “The verdict should give new urgency to the task of recruiting a police force that reflects the diversity of this city,” it called on the police to “prove to skeptical communities that most cops deserve to be believed.”
³⁰

(Sadly, the
New York Daily News
from that time is not on Nexis.)

Outside the courthouse, blacks cheered the result.
³¹
For many years in New York, every day was the OJ verdict.

KIKO GARCIA—1992

About the time police were being blamed for the acquittal of Lemrick Nelson, a far more serious charge of racism would be made—one that would leave a New York City policeman accused of murder. (Guess who’s side Dinkins took?) Little remembered today, the facts are astonishing.

On July 3, 1992, undercover officer Michael O’Keefe and his partners spotted a man with a gun in a high drug-trafficking neighborhood in
Washington Heights. O’Keefe went to apprehend the man, Jose “Kiko” Garcia, while his partners circled around the block to cut off Garcia if he fled.

As soon as O’Keefe told Garcia he was a police officer, Garcia attacked him, launching the two into a four-minute, life-or-death struggle. As O’Keefe struggled to get Garcia’s gun, the fight moved into an apartment foyer. The terrified officer screamed into his radio for backup, but his partners were giving chase to yet another Washington Heights man with a gun who had just run right in front of their car. Back in the apartment foyer, Garcia broke away and pointed his gun at O’Keefe. O’Keefe shot first, hitting Garcia in the stomach and then, as he spun, shot again, hitting Garcia in the side of his back. O’Keefe grabbed Garcia’s loaded gun, and cuffed him.

Garcia, an illegal immigrant, convicted crack dealer, parole violator and cocaine addict was pronounced dead at the hospital. He became an instant martyr to the race agitators and one less vote for the Democrats.

The hardworking immigrant was first honored with three days of violent rioting in his Washington Heights neighborhood, estimated to contain one hundred thousand illegal immigrants. The riots left one person dead, 90 injured, 53 policemen hospitalized, 121 vehicles torched, 11 police cars damaged, and dozens of businesses burned or looted.
³²
Even a police helicopter was struck by gunfire. An industrious Haitian couple stood and watched their livery cab blown up with a Molotov cocktail and burned to rubble. “This car is what we use to pay the rent, feed the kid and take care of our family overseas,” the woman told the
Times
.
³³

Next, Garcia was honored with preposterous lies told by those in “the neighborhood,” recycled in the press and given credibility by Mayor Dinkins.

About an hour after the shooting, neighbors Juana Rodriguez Madera and her sister Anna Rodriguez told detectives that they had seen nothing and heard only a baby crying and a “couple” of shots. But in no time they were blanketing the airwaves with vivid, minute-by-minute eyewitness accounts of the confrontation, in which they claimed—in various versions—that an unarmed Garcia had pleaded for his life as Officer O’Keefe beat and kicked him, then shot him in the back multiple times while he was facedown on the lobby floor.

About six months before this incident, the police had executed a raid on Madera’s apartment in the building where the struggle took place and found cocaine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, a loaded .38 caliber handgun
and forty-two rounds of ammunition. (But, thankfully, no soda, salt, or saturated fats.) The police also found a videotape of Madera’s nephew tossing small drug packets in the air, saying, “It’s legal here; it’s liberated,” with Garcia visible in the background as the nephew’s lookout.

Garcia’s earlier drug conviction and his involvement with Madera in the drug trade was known to Mayor Dinkins before he paid a highly publicized visit to Garcia’s family. The mayor offered the crack dealer’s family his condolences, promising a full investigation and also announcing that the city would pay for Garcia’s funeral expenses in the Dominican Republic. He invited the family to Gracie Mansion the next day.

Dinkins didn’t so much as call Officer O’Keefe, the policeman who came within seconds of losing his life after being attacked by an illegal alien crack dealer, while he was trying to keep a black neighborhood safe.
³⁴

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau convened a grand jury to investigate Officer O’Keefe for murder—
murder
—in the shooting of Garcia, a clean-living hardworking man with a ready smile.

From the beginning, O’Keefe told one consistent story about what had happened.
³⁵
By contrast, the drug-den sisters had a whole bunch of different stories. All the physical and forensic evidence supported O’Keefe’s version—and often directly contradicted the sisters’ testimony. This was according to the city’s forensic experts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—as well as a pathologist and criminologist hired by the Garcia family, who stood to make a lot of money if O’Keefe were found to have acted improperly.

Not a single bullet mark, for example, was found in the floor, despite the sisters’ claim that Garcia had been lying on the ground unconscious while O’Keefe repeatedly shot him in the back. However, a bullet mark was found in a lobby pillar right where it would have passed through Garcia’s stomach if he had been standing where O’Keefe said he was.

The bullet wounds on Garcia’s body were consistent with his being shot once in the stomach, spinning from the impact, and then being shot in the side of his back—just as O’Keefe had said. The bullet wounds were inconsistent with the sisters’ claim that Garcia was flat on his stomach, unconscious, as O’Keefe shot him three times in the back.

Apart from the handcuff marks, medical experts found only two bruises on Garcia’s body—on his nose and head, exactly where O’Keefe said he had hit Garcia in the struggle. The absence of any other bruising strongly contradicted the sisters’ claim that O’Keefe savagely beat Garcia all over his body, including his knees, shoulders and hands.

The bullets recovered from the foyer, a ballistics report on O’Keefe’s gun, and Garcia’s wounds all showed that only two shots were fired—as O’Keefe said. Not three—as the sisters testified.

As for why Garcia might have reacted violently to a policeman, the pathologists concluded that Kiko was a chronic cocaine user and that there was cocaine in his system at the time of death. The fact that he was an illegal immigrant, a convicted felon and a parole violator might also have influenced his decision to try to kill the cop.

But reporters were earnestly broadcasting every outlandish claim to come out of “the neighborhood”—a neighborhood that held the record for the most murders of any police precinct in New York.
³⁶
CBS News called Garcia “a Dominican immigrant.” (How about, “Heinrich Himmler, a Munich native”?) As the camera panned over his sorry living quarters, reporter Giselle Fernandez posed a question from his aunt: Does “this look like the lavish style of a drug dealer, as police allege?”
³⁷

Viewers might have been able to better answer that question if CBS had also mentioned that Garcia was a prodigious cocaine user, a convicted drug dealer and had appeared as a lookout on a home video seized during a drug bust months earlier.

A
New York Times
article cited “[p]eople on the street” contending that “the officer pushed Mr. Garcia into the building and then shot him.” One man, Genefonsio Yiquiya, described a whole posse of police beating Garcia: “Undercover police hit him on the knee. After they break his legs, they pulled him in and shot him three times.” He claimed he “heard Mr. Garcia screaming, ‘Mama, Mama, they are killing me,’ in Spanish.” The
Times
also quoted, without correction, the Garcia family lawyer’s claim that “this kid never was arrested; he wasn’t a drug dealer.”
³⁸

Soon the
Times
was referring to the illegal alien/coke addict/convicted drug dealer as “Mr. Garcia, a twenty-three-year-old father of two.” (“Himmler, a forty-five-year-old father of two…”) Mixed in were slanderous allegations from “the neighborhood” about O’Keefe being part of a criminal gang of cops, who stole money and cocaine from drug dealers.
³⁹
Liberals have unadorned affection for any Third World dictatorship, but our police arrest a black man and it’s always a fascist police state—in a negative way.

The
Times
was a model of journalistic skepticism compared to
New York Newsday
, which ran a banner headline on its cover: “Cop Shooting Victim: He Was Shot in the Back.” Another
Newsday
article said it was “not clear what happened” because, although the police claimed Garcia was a convicted crack dealer, on the other hand, “the community”—i.e.,
drug dealers—said he was “a clean-living immigrant.”
⁴⁰
Who could possibly sort out these conflicting perspectives?

Newsday
’s Jim Dwyer dedicated an entire column to repeating the allegations of drug-den proprietress Madera. Describing Madera as a “mother of four,” Dwyer said she “runs a small cafeteria in the kitchen of Apartment 110 at 505 W. 162nd St.” The “cafeteria” noted by Dwyer was in the same apartment where she also stored drugs and guns, based on the recent police raid.

Dwyer also unskeptically reported that Madera saw O’Keefe beating Garcia from the second-floor landing, adding—as if the gritty street reporter had performed an inspection of the building himself—that the “lobby is visible from there only by kneeling.”
⁴¹
In fact, it was not visible by kneeling, or even by lying prone—as was later established by city investigators as well as the Garcia family lawyer. Dwyer was so breathtakingly easy to fool, in no time he was hired by the
New York Times
, where he now holds the Anna Quindlen chair in Extreme Gullibility of Belief In Anything.