The Savage City (48 page)

The Knapp Commission hearings seemed to capture the historical moment—and ultimately it was the good cop Frank Serpico, not the charismatic rogue Bill Phillips, who came to symbolize the event. A mere two years later, Al Pacino would play Serpico in a major Hollywood film, portraying him as an idealist and “flower child” who was crushed and disillusioned to discover corruption in the NYPD. Some in the mainstream media echoed this innocence-lost story line, claiming to be “shocked, shocked” by the level of corruption in the department.

In the African American community, it was another story. When
it came to policing in the Savage City, black people had lost their innocence a long time ago. Some in the community had been sounding alarm bells for quite a while: Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for instance, had spoken out in public about police payoffs in Harlem. But his accusations had only gotten him ridiculed in the press and labeled a liar in the
New York Times
by the NYPD's deputy of public information, Walter Arm. Powell was hounded by prosecutors and eventually convicted for naming names in public. Though few acknowledged as much in the press at the time, the testimony of Phillips and others in the Knapp Commission hearings was a vindication for Powell.

As illuminating as the hearings were, however, one crucial piece of the puzzle was missing. Underlying the portrait painted by Phillips, Droge, and Logan was the fact that the most rampant corruption in the force took place in the ghetto. The culture of graft was allowed to flourish in Harlem, Bed-Stuy, and other disadvantaged neighborhoods. It was true that marauding hustlers like Phillips would seek scores anywhere they might be found—midtown, uptown, all around the town—but places like Harlem were, as Phillips himself put it, “paradise” for a dirty cop, especially a white cop who felt no great identification with the community or its people. Phillips, in his memoir, expressed his feelings about the ghetto this way:

The truth was, most cops hated the ghetto. And for many it was a short leap from being disgusted by the people and the conditions of that environment to fleecing it shamelessly for personal profit. Was it possible that racism contributed to the practices that Phillips, Droge, Logan, and Serpico had described? Was there a connection between the attitude that made it possible for a group of detectives to frame a young black kid like Whitmore for murder and the belief that the ghetto was a shithole to be plundered?

Such questions were beyond the purview of the Knapp Commission. And the press of the day seemed incapable of placing the subject of police corruption in a racial context. The commission hearings were historic in their detailing of the finer points of a diseased system, but the underlying attitudes that may have contributed to the system's pathology remained safely out of reach—and would continue to fester within the institution for decades to come.

Even with its limitations, the Knapp Commission hearings rocked the lives of many within the police universe—not the least of whom was Phillips's wife, Camille. As was his custom, Phillips even kept her in the dark about the fact that he'd flipped and was cooperating with the government. Until the day it happened, she had no idea he was slated to testify at the hearings; she read about it in the newspaper—in her case the
Daily News
—like everyone else. The news caused a neurological short circuit:

THE KNAPP COMMISSION
hearings dominated the headlines in the fall of 1971, but the war between the NYPD and the BLA hadn't gone away. For weeks, like two sides of the same coin, the two stories vied for space
in the tabloids. Fallout from the hearings, and new revelations about BLA suspects plotting attacks on cops, seemed to suggest a police apparatus that was fighting for its very survival—attacked from both the outside and within. Unnamed sources told reporters repeatedly that morale among the NYPD rank and file was at an all-time low.

That same year, a college professor named Nicholas Alex was granted clearance to interview dozens of NYPD officers as part of a survey of views within the department. The study, eventually published in book form as
New York Cops Talk Back: A Study of a Beleaguered Minority
(1976), gave voice to a cross section of officers at a critical moment in the department's history; they were markedly forthcoming in their comments, in part because they had been promised anonymity.

“I don't think we will ever come back in the eyes of the public the way we were six or seven years ago,” said one cop. “The damage has been done.” Another cop complained that “The Knapp Commission was crying out corruption, corruption, corruption. They publicized it. Even if there was what they say there is, they shouldn't publicize it…because it is demoralizing to honest cops to see other cops taking graft, being arrested, et cetera. It doesn't look good.” Said another cop: “[They] put it right on television just before the kiddie show. When my daughter usually watched
Sesame Street
the Knapp Commission was on TV telling everybody how corrupt we are. What do you say to a kid who hears this stuff? It's like being a saint—the more you protest the crazier you look.”

There was one notable trend within the comments Alex gathered: even when they were being asked specifically about corruption, many of the cops wound up talking about race. Said one patrolman, “Blacks have more rights than they ever had and they want more. They don't want to be equal to whites, they want to be superior to whites! They want reverse position with whites, that's all they want. Blacks are a different breed of people. The way they think. They have no family life…. There is no one supervising them. They want to do things for kicks. And they want more and they don't want to work and it's easier to steal. They love to commit crime. They love it. They love to stick a knife into you. They have a revenge for doing this and they get money for it, too. They are ruthless people.”

Some white cops expressed dismay about how black residents viewed them, but it never seemed to cross their minds that it might be because of
the way blacks were treated by cops. “A call came over one night on the radio car that they wanted an ambulance. A lady's son was very sick and she would not let policemen into her house because they were white and she was black. They wanted a black policeman, plus a black ambulance attendant to come. Now this brings up two things: the public doesn't want you, and in this case, the person doesn't want you because you are white. We are helping her and yet she still rejects us.”

One white officer assigned to Harlem reported that “Nobody likes you in Harlem. And I'm not the only cop who feels that way. They rag-mouth you. They will say anything. They know they can get away with it…. Out in Brooklyn, forget it. Black kids have never respected us anyway. They call you a pig and a motherfucker. This is not something new. They see you in a car and call you a motherfucker and spit at the car. If I get out of the car it would be an incident, so I stay in the car. Sometimes I might say, ‘Do you know me to call me that?'”

Most cops had resigned themselves to hostility from blacks, but the Knapp Commission hearings left them convinced that the entire system was against them. “To me it's understandable why a great many of the men have the idea that the least I do the better off I am. I don't have to worry about civilian complaints. I don't have to worry about going out and having to answer for my actions to some review board because I haven't done anything. I pick up my paycheck every two weeks. I don't give a damn what happens.”

 

ON A FREEZING
night in late January 1972—not long after the Knapp Commission hearings wrapped up—a cascade of bullets once again pierced the vital organs of two policemen. This double shooting was, if anything, even more disturbing than those that came before.

On Avenue B and East Eleventh Street in the East Village, Officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie—rookies who had both served as combat marines in Vietnam—were ambushed from behind by multiple gunmen and executed in the middle of the intersection. A total of fourteen bullets were unloaded on the two officers, many while the two men lay on the ground. Patrolman Foster had his eyes shot out, his brain matter reduced to liquid on the pavement. Witnesses described one gunman—a black male—standing over Patrolman Laurie. “Shoot him in the balls,” said an accomplice. The gunman shot Laurie in the groin at
point-blank range; then, according to a witness, he danced in the street and fired shots in the air in celebration.

The East Village was a hub of narcotics activity, and at first there was speculation—even among some in the police department—that one or both of the cops might have gotten mixed up in the dope trade. It was a nasty issue to raise, an insult to the memory of the two cops, but a logical question at a time when police corruption was the number one topic of the day.

The day after the shootings, a letter concerning the shootings arrived at the offices of United Press International. It read in part:

The letter, which was immediately forwarded to Chief Seedman at police headquarters, was signed by the “George Jackson Squad,” a reference to a prominent Black Panther who'd been killed while attempting to escape from California's San Quentin prison. The reference to Attica concerned a notorious riot at the Attica prison in upstate New York three months earlier, which was still under investigation. After the riots began, Black Panther Bobby Seale had flown in to facilitate negotiations between rioting inmates and prison authorities, but his efforts were in vain: the four-day riot had ended only after a National Guard unit called in by Governor Rockefeller had massacred the rioters. Thirty-nine people were killed, including twenty-nine inmates, all of them black and Hispanic.

The Foster-Laurie killings were a chilling codicil to both the Attica riots and the Knapp Commission hearings, and they touched off a new round of hysteria in the press. Commissioner Murphy, normally circumspect in his public statements about the Black Liberation Army, went on the offensive, describing the BLA as a highly mobile group of approximately one hundred members spread throughout the United States. “Too many policemen have been killed,” said Murphy. “Too many policemen have been wounded. And obviously there has been a pattern. I think the hunt for these men should be one of the highest priority problems in the country.”

By now, a number of corruption cases stemming from the Knapp Commission hearings were starting to get under way, and some suggested that Murphy's daily press bulletins about the BLA were an attempt to divert public attention from the department's internal scandals. In the Eastern District of New York, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Scopetta was building a series of criminal cases against cops, using former narcotics detective Robert Leuci as the star witness, that promised to make the Knapp revelations look tame in comparison. The NYPD's public relations nightmare was far from over.

Commissioner Murphy's possible motivations in leading the charge against black militancy were not lost on Dhoruba Bin Wahad's attorney, Robert Bloom. As a veteran of the Panther Twenty-one case, where he represented Curtis Powell, Bloom was a seasoned combatant. His strategy was to always land the first blow. In February, Bloom filed an injunction in court to prohibit the police commissioner from making further public statements about the BLA. Bloom contended that Murphy was polluting the jury pool for upcoming trials, trying to win sympathy for the department at a time when their standing in the community had reached a new low. Federal court judge Charles H. Tenney disagreed; he ruled against the plaintiff and stated that Commissioner Murphy's statements about the BLA—whatever his motives—interfered with no one's right to a fair trial.

The battle lines were drawn: the police on one side, the black army on the other.

 

AS MUCH AS
he may have wanted to, George Whitmore could not escape the times in which he lived. As a black man fighting for his freedom, he had seen the quaint days of “I have a dream” give way to a culture in which cops were lethally ambushed on city streets, peaceful civil disobedience had given way to organized radical violence, and prison riots filled TV screens with images of death and destruction. In 1971, soul singer Marvin Gaye released a hit song asking “What's Goin' On?” There were no easy answers.