The Savage City (37 page)

At central booking in downtown Manhattan, Dhoruba was held in an isolation cell. It wasn't until he was brought into arraignment court the next day that he was hit with the full magnitude of what was taking place. The arrested Panthers, male and female, were marched into a courtroom packed with reporters, cops, and officials from the Manhattan D.A.'s office. Dhoruba and the other Panthers were being charged with more than two hundred counts of conspiracy. In one fell swoop, the Forces of the Law had tried to take out the entire upper echelon of the Black Panther Party in New York City.

IN JUNE 1970,
George Whitmore finally succumbed to the pressures of a criminal justice system that seemed determined to define him as a lawbreaker. It happened in New Jersey, where Whitmore had moved after separating from Aida. He was out drinking with Nate, his friend from the cross-country hitchhiking adventure. At some point that evening, Nate said, “Hey, I know a guy who stole something from me, and I'm gonna go get it. Will you help me out?”

George had no idea what Nate was talking about, but he felt indebted to his traveling partner, so he agreed.

At the time, George was working three days a week driving a truck for the Colson Lumber Company. Sometimes, like tonight, he got to keep the truck during off hours. He and Nate climbed into the truck and drove to the nearby township of Rio Grande, not far from Wildwood. George began to suspect something was wrong when Nate insisted they stop at a place called Krown's Record Store, and Nate got out of the truck with a crowbar.

“Wait a minute,” said George.

“I know what the hell I'm doing,” replied Nate.

Too drunk to argue, George stood by as Nate started jimmying the door of Krown's Record Store.

Neither of them even noticed the police car as it turned off its headlights and pulled up slowly behind George's truck. Patrolman Ronald
Brown got out of the car, his gun drawn, and approached the two men.

“Stop right there,” he said. “You're both under arrest.”

George was so inebriated he hardly remembered what happened. He woke up the next morning in the county jail and was told he'd been charged with attempted breaking and entering and possession of burglary equipment (the crowbar).

It was all pro forma: a county defense lawyer informed George that if he pleaded guilty to attempted breaking and entering, the other charge would be dropped. He would be fined $150, placed on two years' probation, and allowed to walk.

It was a good deal; George took it. The only problem was that Colson Lumber wasn't happy to hear he'd used the company truck in an attempted burglary. He was fired from his job.

George was broke. His remaining NAACP Legal Defense Fund money had long since dried up. He was able to get by for a time on public assistance, but by October he was without money to pay his bills or help Aida out with the kids. At the end of his rope, George did something he'd never done before: he willingly set out to commit a crime.

Again, it was late and he was drunk. Using the same crowbar he and Nate had used, George broke into Allen's Delicatessen, a corner store on Route 9 in the town of Cape May Court House. It was 3:00
A.M.
Police caught him coming out of the store with $132.32 in stolen cash in his pocket.

George was charged with “B and E,” larceny, and possession of burglary tools.

From his cell at the county jail, the biggest emotion George felt was shame. He wondered if he had messed up his case in New York by getting arrested. He wondered if his lawyers Miller and Beldock would now abandon him.

To defend him, Whitmore used a local attorney. A few weeks after his arrest, as they talked in the county jail's visiting room, the attorney suggested that they might be able to plea-bargain. By now, George had lost his glasses; he could hardly see.

“Listen, son,” the lawyer said, “you're gonna have to do some time.”

“How much?” said George.

“Well, I'll get them to drop the possession charge. You cop to the B and E.”

George sank back into his chair. Before he could take the deal, he needed to talk with his New York attorneys. He was afraid that if he were convicted of a crime, even a relatively minor first-time offense, Beldock and Miller would give up on him.

Beldock was reassuring. Pleading guilty to a burglary charge, he said, should have little or no adverse effect on any ruling in the Borrero attempted rape conviction. “Take the plea,” he told George over the phone. “Do the time. We'll deal with legal matters here in New York when you are released. And George?”

“What, Mister Beldock.”

“Stay out of trouble.”

“Yes, Mister Beldock.”

Whitmore pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine months.

He did his time at the Cape May Court House county jail, just down the street from the deli he'd tried to rob. For the next nine months, he didn't have to worry about rent or any other bills. He was George Whitmore, forgotten man.

George wasn't able to make rotgut hooch while doing county time; they didn't have the facilities. That was one thing he noticed: in prison, the days passed more slowly when you couldn't get drunk.

 

THE VENERABLE DISTRICT
attorney stood at a microphone before flashing lights and television cameras—a rarity for the white-haired eminence of 100 Centre Street. By assuming the task of delivering news of a criminal indictment directly to reporters, Frank Hogan was signaling its importance in the larger scheme of criminal justice in the Big Town. The personification of Irish Catholic rectitude, Hogan stood stiff and motionless—
underplaying,
Stanislavsky would have called it, seizing command through a Zen-like force of will rather than histrionics.

In a simple monotone, Hogan let his plain words drive home the message: “The grand jury has returned an indictment containing twelve [major] counts, all felonies, charging members of the Black Panther Party with conspiracy to bomb New York City department stores, Macy's, Alexander's, Korvette's, Bloomingdale's, Abercrombie & Fitch, during the Easter shopping season. These bombings were to be coordinated with similar bombing attacks on the Forty-second Police Precinct station at Third Avenue at One hundred and sixtieth Street in the Bronx
and six locations along the New Haven Railroad right of way…. And the target date was April third, tomorrow.”

The Black Panther Party had also planned to bomb the Bronx Botanical Gardens and the city subway system, Hogan added. In total, the indictment included 156 separate criminal counts.

If headlines could scream, the following day's papers would have contracted laryngitis. “Smash Plot to Bomb Stores,” read the
Daily News
, with a subhead: “Indict 21 Panthers in Store Bomb Plot
.”
The
New York Times
declared, “Bomb Plot Is Laid to 21 Panthers; Black Extremists Accused of Planning Explosions at Macy's and Elsewhere.” The
Post
updated the arrest tally in their afternoon edition: “Nab One More in Panther Bomb Plot.”

Filled with quotes from “sources close to the investigation,” the articles explained that the police had conducted more than a dozen raids around the city, confiscating “African clubs, spears, cane swords and a long-barreled gun that shoots fire, like a flame thrower,” along with guns, knives, and other weapons. To many, the haul seemed to confirm Buckley's prediction that the Mau Mau were on the rise in America. But the exotic assortment of spears and clubs could hardly have sufficed to pull off the kind of plot described in the indictment. A spokesman for the prosecutor tried to explain the discrepancy, telling the
Times,
“We believe they have other material packed away. We have not recovered everything.” A police spokesman reported that detectives had contacted the department stores named in the indictment and that “precautions had been taken.” The stores themselves were taking “special security measures.” The
Daily News
noted that “additional police [were] being assigned to the area around St. Patrick's Cathedral, focal point of [the] Easter Parade.”

In all of the newspapers accounts, the Panthers were characterized almost exclusively by police and prosecutorial sources. The
Daily News
described the party in New York as consisting of one hundred “hardcore” members and three thousand “fringe” members, a portrait that was “pieced together from information supplied by police who infiltrated the outfit, foiling the alleged plot only a day before its scheduled execution, and from others close to the three-year investigation.” Party members strictly followed “the hard-line Mao philosophy, using the so-called Red Book of the Chinese Communist boss as their text.” “The gang” was “run on military lines,” and party members, according to the
police, “have infiltrated the school system, with some Panthers working as teachers.”

The Panthers were also linked to Cuba. “High police sources” claimed that the New York Panthers were being financed through Cuban officials at the United Nations, though there was nothing in the indictment to back this up and the charges were never substantiated.

And, as if all this weren't enough, there was this: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation is quietly probing the possibility that Panthers represent a ‘national conspiracy against the white power structure'—a possibility supported by the fact that individual Panthers range the nation on Party business.”

The investigation and arrests were presented as a rousing victory for the NYPD. A lead editorial in the
Daily News
noted that the indictments were the results of “superior police work.” It seemed to promise an end to the NYPD-Panthers conflict that had raged for more than a year. The indictment in Manhattan of what would come to be known as “the Panther Twenty-one” showed not only that the Black Panthers were hostile toward cops, but that they were determined to kill innocent people—black and white—on a prominent Christian holiday. They were communists, terrorists, and “black extremists” all rolled into one.

They were also a terrific diversion.

There's no doubt that most police officers genuinely felt the Panthers were a threat to their lives; lethal shoot-outs between police and Panthers had been occurring around the country for some time. But in New York City, the war with the Panthers served an additional purpose: it gave the NYPD a convenient way to frame their ongoing battle in heroic terms—good versus evil, law and order versus anti-Americanism and disrespect for the law. This took the focus off a growing problem within the department: a degree of moral rot among its members that, if exposed, would make the Harry Gross corruption scandal of the late 1940s look like a minor infraction.

Deep within the bureaucracy—in the Lindsay administration and, by extension, among sources “in the know” within the police department—there were disturbing signs on the horizon.

Nearly two years earlier, in 1967, a Lindsay administration official named Jay Kriegel had been approached with explosive information about the systematic corruption in the NYPD. Through an intermediary, two plainclothes cops—one a patrolman, the other a sergeant—
described to Kriegel exactly how the pervasive system of illegal payoffs within the department worked. Money from illegal narcotics, gambling, extortion, and other criminal rackets—some of it skimmed from criminal operations outside the department, some of it generated by dirty cops within—had become the norm in virtually every division in the city. And not only did the higher-ups in the department know about it, they were benefiting from it, collecting payoffs via bagmen and other designated emissaries.

The mayor's man was stunned by what he heard. Both the cops had impeccable records as policemen, and they made it known that they were willing to go public with their allegations, at great risk to their careers and even their lives. One of them was Sergeant David Durk. The other, the patrolman, was Frank Serpico.

For months, Kriegel stonewalled the two cops. Finally, in early 1969, he approached Lindsay with the information. Facing a vituperative reelection campaign in November, Lindsay was reluctant to stir up the wrath of the PBA and the police department. Durk, and especially Serpico, eventually became so frustrated and disillusioned that they nearly gave up hope.

In November, Lindsay was reelected with 43 percent of the vote.

How long could the dam hold? When it came to corruption, the police bureaucracy was filled with people who had a vested interest in obscuring the truth. By now
New York Times
reporter David Burnham was quietly investigating the claims made by Serpico and Durk, and the questions being asked reverberated throughout the NYPD's command structure. The department's manner of doing business—payoffs, graft, the pad—had been going on for so long that many cops took it for granted; the idea that it might be exposed was terrifying. Many cops would go to jail, their lives ruined.

So the NYPD's decision to take down the Black Panther Party in New York had its self-serving purpose: it engendered sympathy toward the police on the part of white ethnics (the
Daily News
was their newspaper), and it provided a major smoke screen. The cops and prosecutors who arrested and indicted Dhoruba Bin Wahad and the other black radicals on charges of conspiracy and attempted murder could have done so without ever mentioning the Black Panther Party. It was not illegal to be a member of the party. But the indictment was full of references to the Black Panthers—because the cops and the D.A.'s office saw this case as
their opportunity to put the party itself on trial. Many whites in the city considered it downright un-American to question the ethics or motives of the police when they were engaged in a struggle to the death with communist infiltrators, radicals, and black reverse-racists.

For a time, the tactic seemed to work. Throughout 1969 and into the new year, revelations stemming from the Panther Twenty-one arrests and indictment dominated the press. By now, the conflict between the Panthers and the police had become a nationwide war: from 1967 into 1970, ten Panthers in cities as diverse as Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle were shot and killed by police, in what Charles Garry, a lawyer for the Panthers, called “a pattern of genocide.” In six of those ten killings, an officer or officers were seriously wounded and had reason to believe their own lives were in jeopardy. As the Panther-police war dominated the headlines, the deeper question of police corruption—including systemic racism, brutality, and economic extortion in ghetto communities—remained buried beneath the surface.