The Savage City (24 page)

That night, Jefferys and his rookie partner walked into the middle of a sting set up by the Internal Affairs Division. The two people Jefferys and his partner ripped off had gone straight to IAD and filed a report. Jefferys and his partner were busted. A seal was put on Jefferys's locker at the precinct house; when it was opened the next day, they found the drugs he had confiscated, along with two unregistered pistols and other “unvouchered” material. Both cops could have received prison sentences for the crimes. Instead, they were allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors, were put on probation, and then were dismissed from the force.

Phillips viewed it as a cautionary tale. “You smack a guy around, take his money, take his junk, take his ring, leave him destitute and say, come back tomorrow and bring three hundred dollars, he's going to be absolutely enraged…. My motto is: take the money and run. Don't get anybody too pissed off.”

Phillips liked to think of himself as a thinking man's hustler, a man who understood the back alleys of human nature. He may have been on the take, but he wasn't stupid. He walked the city streets with a bounce in his step, confident that he was above it all—too smart to get caught.

And even if he did misstep, there was always the code.

The code was the bond of absolute loyalty that cops expected from each other—the kind of loyalty that was required of a cop who needed to trust his partner, and his other fellow officers, every day. Every cop asked himself: Will my partner be there for me? Will he back me up,
both figuratively and literally? Can I trust this man with my life? If you expected that kind of loyalty from the cops around you, you had to be willing to extend the same degree of trust yourself.

“The job requires total commitment, as much as any marriage.” These are the words of Randy Jurgensen, who came on the job in 1957, the same year as Phillips. Jurgensen grew up in West Harlem, and by 1967 he'd spent most of his ten-year career at the Twenty-third Precinct station house, not far from where he grew up. Jurgensen knew the terrain—poverty, hopheads, a generation of Harlemites who were hooked on dope and would steal or sell themselves to get a fix. Dope, Jurgensen knew, was a consequence of poverty and hopelessness. When he received his gold detectives shield in 1963, he was assigned to narcotics, partnered with a cop named Sonny Grosso—two white guys from Harlem, one from the West Side and one from the East.

Like most detectives who roamed the precinct, Jurgensen was aware of cops who took meals and small favors from citizens. “It was common,” he remembered years later. “I'm sure I did it myself. Store owners did it as a way to show their gratitude. They gave you coffee; they picked up your check at lunch. No one thought of this as corruption; it's just the way things were done.”

Other cops went farther, and Jurgensen was aware of them also. “Oh yeah, I knew who Phillips was, he became known all around the Harlem precincts. He was up to his tricks; he didn't try to hide it. Everybody knew he was bad news.”

Jurgensen stayed away from Phillips, but he wasn't about to rat on him. Whether you were an untainted cop like Jurgensen, whose career would be long and distinguished, or one who was working the system, like those in Phillips's orbit—it didn't really matter. You'd never blow the whistle on a cop like Phillips because you never knew if one day he'd be called to get your back or that of one of your closest friends on the job. So you did your thing, and he did his. As long as Phillips never stepped on your toes, he'd be allowed to operate, free of judgment, free of interference—even by cops like Jurgensen, who thought he was a “scumbag.”

Phillips was a time-tested member of the club. He was on the right side of the Blue Wall of Silence.

 

FROM HIS FIVE-BY-SEVEN-FOOT
cell, George Whitmore pondered his predicament: the past was ugly, the future a big black hole. After nearly three years, his case seemed to be on a fast track to nowhere, a merry-go-round of court dates, psychiatric tests, conversations with lawyers, and other dead ends. George tried not to think about it too much, which was easier now that his name and predicament were rarely mentioned in the papers. His feelings about the system and his prospects for the future were mixed, perhaps best captured in a maxim Officer Bill Phillips once shared with writer Leonard Shecter: “A poor man goes to jail. A rich man never goes to jail.” It was a principle never taught in law school, but honored by criminals and cops alike; Whitmore had heard it countless times in billiard halls and bars and on street corners in his teens. All he could do was hope that this cruel piece of street logic would spare him.

George had one thing going for him: the skilled and dedicated counsel who had taken up his case. They believed firmly that Whitmore was innocent, but the laborious and costly nature of legal justice in the city was taking its toll. The Whitmore case was becoming a financial sinkhole, which led to resentments and infighting among the lawyers involved.

Arthur Miller and his partner Ed Kaplan had put in long hours; in many ways, the case had come to dominate their practice. It was they who had brought in Stanley Reiben, the experienced trial lawyer; Reiben, in turn, had brought in the NAACP to try the case in the media, to make it a civil rights case. All of the lawyers involved had a vested interest.

By the spring of 1966, Miller decided to limit the involvement of the NAACP, which he felt was attempting to hijack the case to suit its own agenda. On the other hand, Reiben became perturbed when he heard that money was being sent by sympathetic citizens to a “Whitmore defense fund” based out of Miller and Kaplan's Brooklyn office. None of that money was making its way to Reiben. Tensions rose so high that Miller and Reiben could hardly be in the same room without yelling at each other. “I thought they might kill each other,” remembered Whitmore. “I couldn't get them to agree on nothin'.”

In March, Whitmore was called back to court yet again—this time to be retried for the attempted rape and assault of Elba Borrero. In the courtroom of Aaron F. Goldstein, down the hall from the location of the previous Borrero trial, the Brooklyn D.A.'s office presented much the same case they had sixteen months before. Elba Borrero took the
stand and described the alleged assault on Bristol Street in Brownsville with the same level of detail as before: she was coming out of the el train station in the dead of night when a man came out of the shadows, followed and then jumped her, put a hand over her mouth, held something sharp to her throat, and attempted to drag her into an alley. As she recalled the incident, Borrero cried in all the same places she had cried in the previous trial.

To the defense, it appeared as though she had been overrehearsed. On cross-examination, Reiben tried to break her down, asking if she had thought to scream when the attacker removed his hand from her mouth.

“I didn't dare. Not while he had something pointing at my neck. I didn't dare.”

When Reiben sought to bring out a minor discrepancy between her testimony now and at the previous trial, Borrero became combative. “I can't remember every word I said, but I do know that I will never forget his face.”

“Is your memory better now than it was on May 6 [the date of her appearance before the grand jury in 1964]?”

“No, some things I have forgotten, some things.”

“And some things you have remembered,” Reiben quipped sarcastically.

Borrero pointed at Whitmore and yelled, “That is the man! I saw his face very clearly.” Then she broke down crying.

After the prosecutor, Benjamin Schmier, finished presenting the D.A.'s case, it was the defense counsel's turn. Reiben startled Justice Goldstein and Schmier by mounting no defense at all; he sat mute.

Earlier, Reiben had argued vociferously that the evidence discrediting Whitmore's Wylie-Hoffert confession must be allowed as evidence at trial. There was no way you could cite Whitmore's so-called confession to the Borrero assault, he argued, without dealing with all of his confessions that day, which included Wylie-Hoffert. The judge disagreed and ruled against Reiben, prohibiting any mention of the Wylie-Hoffert case. In protest, Reiben decided to put forth a wall of silence. Neither Whitmore nor anyone else took the stand in his defense. It was a controversial strategy, one that caused further disagreements among Whitmore's lawyers, but Reiben felt it was impossible to give his client a fair trial without addressing the circumstances of the Wylie-Hoffert
confession. They were better off mounting no defense and seeking to overturn a conviction on appeal.

The results came quickly—a two-day trial, and a guilty verdict for Whitmore.

Whitmore's attorneys announced immediately that they would appeal the verdict on the grounds that, by being prevented from entering the fraudulent Wylie-Hoffert confession as evidence, the defendant had been denied a fair trial.

A few days later, George and his attorneys returned to court for sentencing. Judge Goldstein announced that, before sentencing Whitmore, he wanted him committed to a mental hospital for yet another psychiatric evaluation. Reiben objected: “Your Honor, to submit this defendant to another court-ordered mental evaluation is judicial torture.”

Prosecutor Schmier spoke up. He already had his conviction, but he apparently wanted more. “Your Honor, both Detectives Aidala and Di Prima time and time again in preparation of this case…have told the district attorney—and I state this for the first time publicly—that throughout the questioning of George Whitmore, he literally begged Di Prima and Aidala to help him. As close as I can, these are Di Prima's words: ‘George Whitmore said, help me, I do these things, and I don't want to do them, and if they let me out on the street I am liable to do them again. Help, please help me.'”

Said Reiben sharply, “This is a tirade of utter garbage. This comes completely out of left field…. After all the other actions in this case, for the first time, this garbage comes out.”

Judge Goldstein overlooked the contempt in Reiben's response and declared, “I certainly think a psychiatrist should know all about the past so the court could evaluate [Whitmore]. The court is entitled to know whether this defendant can be rehabilitated.” So off Whitmore went again to Kings County Hospital for a mental examination, which he passed, as he had twice before.

On May 27, two months after the trial, Whitmore was back in Justice Goldstein's courtroom. He stood before the judge hoping that his clean mental evaluation might prove to be a mitigating circumstance, but the judge showed no mercy. He gave George the maximum sentence under the law: five to ten years on the attempted rape indictment, and two and a half years on the charge of assault with attempt to rape.

The Brooklyn D.A.'s office felt vindicated. Whitmore may not have
committed the Wiley-Hoffert murders, but he'd been found guilty of something. There was such a thing as justice in Brooklyn after all.

D.A. Aaron Koota had shown unusual fervor in his pursuit of the charges against Whitmore. Now, in victory, he couldn't resist the opportunity to gloat. “It is high time to give serious consideration as to whether the pendulum of justice has not swung too much in favor of the criminal,” he told a
New York Times
reporter. “There is a saying, ‘It is far better that a thousand guilty men go free than a single innocent man be convicted.' This is a fetish in our society. The chances of an innocent man being convicted are extremely remote.”

For Whitmore, it was a new low point. He trusted Miller and Reiben, but the infighting among his lawyers depressed him, and he couldn't fathom this strategy of losing a case in hopes of having it reversed down the road. He felt increasingly doomed.

The one good thing about being down so low was that any small ray of light, any lessening of cloud cover, was a reason for hope.

On June 13, one month after Whitmore was sentenced, the Supreme Court of the United States dropped a bombshell of a judicial ruling that affected Whitmore's case.

The
Miranda
decision, as it became known, grew out of a criminal case in Arizona, in which a suspect was tricked into giving a confession to a murder. By the time the case made it to the Supreme Court, defense attorneys cited a number of other cases that, they argued, buttressed their contention that a suspect could not receive a fair trial if he hadn't first been informed of his constitutional right to legal counsel and told that anything he said in a police precinct could be used against him. One of the primary cases cited was that of George Whitmore.

In delivering the landmark decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren noted: “This atmosphere—the back room of a police precinct—carries its own badge of intimidation…. The current practice of incommunicado interrogation is at odds with one of our Nation's most cherished principles—that the individual may not be impelled to incriminate himself…. The warning of the right to remain silent must be accompanied by the explanation that anything said can and will be used against the individual in court. This warning is needed in order to make him aware not only of the privilege, but also the consequences of forgoing it. It is only through an awareness of these consequences that there can be any assurance of real understanding and intelligent exercise of the privilege.
Moreover, this warning may serve to make the individual more acutely aware that he is faced with a phase of the adversary system—that he is not in the presence of persons acting solely in his interest.”

The
Miranda
decision touched off a vigorous debate within criminal justice circles, with law enforcement officials throughout the land predicting that the ruling would lead to a free-for-all for criminals. An article in the
New York Times
noted that the Whitmore case had played a “crucial role” in the court's decision, raising the specter that a Negro could find justice in the highest court in the land, but couldn't catch a break in Brooklyn.