The Savage City (41 page)

What caused Webb to surface was that he heard the
Black Panther
was being sold in Harlem. The newspaper had become a symbolic flashpoint in the split between the Newton and Cleaver factions of the party; the New York Panthers had even begun publishing a paper of their own, called
Right On!
The original Oakland paper, the
Black Panther,
had slowly disappeared from New York streets.

On the afternoon of March 8, Webb confronted a group of Panthers, loyal to Newton, who were selling the
Black Panther
on New York Panther turf. In retrospect, the operation may have been a trap to lure the New York Panthers, who were in hiding, into the light of day. Webb was ambushed, shot multiple times. He died in the gutter on 125th Street, not far from the Apollo Theater, where the masses had gathered eight years earlier and boarded buses to the nation's capital to hear Martin Luther King speak.

According to Dhoruba, “That crew who killed Webb were some boys from Boston and a Panther from the Midwest by the name of Redwine. That's the same crew who was supposed to kill me and Cetewayo. When Robert resurfaced, he became a target of opportunity. They took him out.”

The war over black liberation had become a war of Panthers killing Panthers.

THE NYPD KEPT
its collective eye on the Black Panther Party. Though the New York chapter had been torn asunder by the debilitating and long-running Panther Twenty-one trial and the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative, the agents of BOSS continued filing their daily reports of the coming apocalypse. This on October 29, 1970, from the commanding officer of Special Services to the chief inspector:

The BOSS memos were starting to read like something out of a blaxploitation movie—
Shaft
meets
Superfly
by way of
Black Caesar
. Never mind that the organizational structure of the Panthers in the city was in disarray. A wounded panther was dangerous and unpredictable, capable of lashing out in an irrational manner.

Of all the party initiatives that troubled the NYPD, one that received copious attention in the BOSS files was the call for community oversight and decentralization of the police—an approach known as “community policing.” In a petition circulated to protesters at rallies outside the Criminal Court building during the Panther Twenty-one trial, the party called for a police control amendment to be added to the city charter:

The notion of community control of the police seemed democratic on the face of it, but the Panthers knew full well that what they were calling for flew in the face of historical precedent in New York and virtually every other major city in the United States. In general, urban police departments had been formed by the property-owning class to protect their assets. A police officer could shoot a looter during a riot situation and know he would be exonerated because many municipalities had determined—unofficially, and in selected situations—that property was more valuable than human life. By the late 1940s and into the 1950s, with the great migration of southern blacks to the northern cities, this dynamic took on a racial cast.

Some Black Panther Party leaders—Huey Newton in particular—
had tried to make the argument that the police were mere tools of the ruling class. In New York City, after all, real estate concerns were a primary force behind racial segregation. Real estate money was invariably behind the election of politicians, and the development of property determined where city resources were focused. The fact that the city was so densely populated, with a rich neighborhood like the Upper East Side just blocks away from a poor neighborhood like East Harlem, required the police to man the barricades with due diligence; they were the first and the last line of defense.

The argument that the police were being used by larger capitalist forces may have had some merit, but it was also a Marxist analysis that fell on deaf ears. Cops weren't interested in being portrayed as “instruments of the white power structure.” And for black citizens living in impoverished communities, the theoretical reasons behind police brutality were less interesting than the reality of a nightstick across the skull.

Community policing was an attempt to alter the priorities of law enforcement, to remove them from the influences and pressures of the city's larger economic structure and put it in the hands of the people. To dismiss this as utopian or Marxist was beside the point. The vanguard of the BPP was calling for revolution, not social reform.

To the cops, community policing reminded them of the mock trials that the Panthers had instituted to call attention to police actions they felt were beyond the pale. One such “tribunal” took place at the Marcy Housing Projects in Brooklyn, where a “legal proceeding” was held to determine the guilt or innocence of Patrolman Thomas Johnson, shield number 2420, who had shot and killed a local teenager on Flushing Avenue during an arrest gone bad.

As noted in a BOSS confidential memo, “The trial procedure included a judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense attorney. The members of the jury were made up of persons of the community and members of the BPP, who in addition, formed a security detail to physically search all persons wishing to gain access to the proceedings…. Information gained from another source reveals that Ptl. Johnson was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by the Black Panther Party. No mention was made of any planned action to enforce this judgment.”

Access to BOSS files was restricted, but information leaked out, creating a rumor mill through which legitimate threats, hypothetical pos
sibilities, and police paranoia were disseminated into the community. When it came to the subject of community policing, most cops were worried less about mock trials than about the very real possibility that the department's deeply engrained corruption might soon be dragged into the light of day.

Bill Phillips was aware of the possibilities. By early 1971, he had moved most of his hustling activities out of the ghetto, where operations like the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) were skimming narcotics profits in places like Harlem on a scale beyond anything Phillips had ever attempted. SIU was a virtual rogue unit within the department, relatively unmonitored by the NYPD command structure or anyone else.

Sensing, perhaps, that the level of graft in the narcotics age had skyrocketed, Phillips narrowed his own reach, focusing on the tried-and-true scams he knew best. He confined himself mostly to midtown Manhattan on the East Side, home of the Seventeenth Precinct. Payoffs from bars, nightclubs, construction sites, and gambling operations were still the best moneymakers, but like any veteran hustler, Phillips was always on the lookout for new scores.

One night in early April, he was having a drink at P.J. Clarke's, where everyone still thought he was a detective, when another cop—this one an actual detective—pulled him aside and excitedly told him of a potential score. Just a few blocks away, on East Fifty-fifth Street near Madison Avenue, a high-class madam was running a prostitution operation. Having been busted a week earlier, she was now looking for a cop who could put her on the pad in exchange for protection.

The words of his father rang in Phillips's ears: prostitution, like dope, was usually more trouble than it was worth. But Pop was dead now. Money was money. Who was Bill Phillips to say no to a potential score?

Phillips and the other cop left Clarke's and walked over to the whorehouse in an apartment building at 155 East Fifty-fifth Street. It was an immaculate building with a doorman, and the madam running the place was a class act. Her name was Xaviera Hollander. She was a Dutch immigrant, blond, blue-eyed, a professional hooker and serious businesswoman at the age of thirty-five.

Phillips introduced himself. At first, Hollander doubted he really was a cop; she'd been ripped off before by fake cops. Phillips gave her his badge and department ID number. “So,” he said, “I heard you've been having problems and are looking for someone who can make them go away.”

Hollander told him the story of the recent bust at her place. She and her girls had been taken downtown and thrown in the Tombs like common criminals. She described to Phillips how they were leered at by predatory Negro junkie streetwalkers. Years later, in a published memoir, Hollander put it like this: “Almost from the moment we were herded into the crowded cattle pen of a prison cell…the jail-toughened black hookers gave us nothing but misery. ‘Hey, bigshit madambitch, bet you ain't got no black cunt turnin' tricks in your high-class fuckin' house!'…In the hooker hierarchy, we were the aristocrats, they were the serfs, and jail, by God, was the great leveler. I stood with my girls huddled together against the cell bars, putting as much distance as possible between us and the black streetwalkers.”

Phillips listened sympathetically to this European lady's tale of woe amid the black rabble of the city. “Who was the arresting officer?” he asked. Hollander gave him a name, and that was that. Then they went over to P.J. Clarke's for a drink. Hollander was impressed with Phillips, especially when he mentioned that he had his pilot's license and ran a flying school. “You seem to be able to get around pretty well,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Phillips. “I move pretty good.”

Over the next few weeks, Phillips went to work. Through his contacts at the local precinct, he was introduced to a patrolman named O'Keefe, whose beat included East Fifty-fifth Street. Phillips told O'Keefe: “I got a good operation up there. She's making a good buck and wants to go on the pad. What's it going to cost me?”

O'Keefe thought about it; he didn't really know. Sometimes, coming up with an equitable number was not easy. The money had to be spread around. How about $500 a month? The price included all the protection that O'Keefe could provide, plus an early-warning system. If the cop heard of any raids being planned for the madam's premises, he would call and tell her Mister White was coming to town, and at what time.

“That's a fair price,” said Phillips. “Let me run it by Xaviera.”

At a meeting with Hollander, Phillips made his pitch. Also present in Hollander's small office on East Fifty-fifth Street was a guy named Teddy Ratnoff, who had been introduced to Phillips as Hollander's “boyfriend.” The term, Phillips gathered, was being used loosely. Hollander likely had many boyfriends, some of whom she dated because they knew how to fuck, some because they paid money for the privilege,
and some who offered services in return. Teddy Ratnoff was a guy who had worked in various city agencies, knew people in government, and advertised himself as a kind of Mister Fix It. Ratnoff presented himself as Hollander's “financial adviser,” but to Phillips he seemed more like “a towel boy in a whore house.” At the age of thirty-three, prematurely bald, paunchy, with oversized glasses and perennially sweaty, Teddy seemed harmless—which is why Phillips was unconcerned when he sat in on their business discussion.

“Good news,” Phillips told the madam. “I got a cop at the One-Seven who will be your rabbi. All it's gonna cost you is two hundred for the precinct, five hundred for the division, three hundred for the borough, and a lousy one hundred for me.”

Hollander winced. “That's eleven hundred a month.”

“Hey,” said Phillips, who was hoping to pocket six hundred a month on the deal, “you ask me, it's a bargain.” To impress her, Phillips gave them names of real cops and commanders in the precinct he was supposedly paying off.

Ratnoff was perspiring, Phillips noticed…but then Ratnoff was a sweaty guy.

He was also wearing a wire. Teddy Ratnoff was recording the entire conversation as a part-time operative for the Knapp Commission.

 

IN THE NEARLY
six months since its inception, the Knapp Commission had toiled mostly in obscurity. From the beginning, it struggled with mandate issues and budgetary constraints. The commission had been created by executive order, which gave it the power to hold public hearings and the right to get subpoena power. Its initial funding came from a federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grant, but that was hardly sufficient or sustainable. Even some members of the commission felt the initiative had been set up to fade out and disappear as soon as possible.

As chief counsel for the commission, Knapp selected Michael Armstrong, a square-jawed, thirty-one-year-old attorney with a boyish shock of brown hair and an impeccable reputation. From the beginning, Armstrong took the assignment seriously. If the Knapp Commission was supposed to be a paper tiger, nobody told Mike Armstrong. He immediately set up meetings with various leaders in law enforcement,
the district attorney's office, and in the community, to let it be known that the Knapp Commission meant business.

In Harlem, Armstrong met with the editor of an African American newspaper. When he asked the man if he knew of any cops on the take in the black community, the editor was incredulous. “You gotta be kiddin', right?”

“Well,” Armstrong persisted. “In your opinion, who are they? Which cops are on the pad in Harlem?”

The editor answered, “The dudes that are taking the money are the dudes that are breaking hands.” It took a few days for the meaning of this remark to dawn on Armstrong: the NYPD's habit of physical abuse went hand in hand with its pattern of financial corruption. The department's use of excessive force instilled fear everywhere in the community; it was the nonverbal facilitator behind many police corruption rackets.

In his role as the commission's chief liaison with the criminal justice community, Armstrong also met with assistant D.A. Joseph Phillips. Along with serving as prosecutor in the still ongoing Panther Twenty-one trial, Joe Phillips helmed the bureau that dealt with police corruption cases in the NYPD's plainclothes division. He struck Armstrong as highly defensive, in deep denial on the subject.