The Savage City (52 page)

Weeks passed. With
The 51st State
segment and
The Marcus-Nelson Murders
generating considerable press attention, there seemed to be a new groundswell of curiosity about what had happened to George Whitmore. After a decade of civil rights marches, riots, Black Power speeches, high-profile trials, Panther frame-ups and assassinations of cops, was Whitmore's case a major miscarriage of justice that had slipped through the cracks?

Late one April afternoon, Beldock got a call from an assistant D.A. in Brooklyn. A date had been set for a hearing in the courtroom of Justice Irwin Brownstein in state supreme court, he said—and D.A. Gold himself would be in attendance. This was significant: the presence of the district attorney suggested a major development.

“Would you like to give me some indication of which way this is going to go?” Beldock asked.

“No,” said the ADA. Then he cleared his throat. “I think it's safe to say that it will be a ruling that you and your client will find favorable.”

Beldock hung up the phone, his heart thumping in his chest. It wasn't clear whether this meant a new trial or a dismissal, but it sounded
promising. One of the first people he called was Selwyn Raab. “Selwyn was pretty certain it was going to be a dismissal,” he recalled. “I wasn't so certain. We decided it would be best to keep George in the dark, so to speak, for his own state of well-being. If it was a ruling in our favor, there would be plenty of time to celebrate after the fact.”

 

ON THE MORNING
of April 9, 1973, George Whitmore was in his cell when he got word that he would be picked up later that day and transferred to New York City for a court appearance the following morning. Although Beldock had mentioned that he had a court date coming up, George didn't know what to make of it.

It was a time of considerable unrest at Green Haven, with riots and other disturbances occurring on a semiregular basis. The previous September, not long after Whitmore arrived, Green Haven had seen a major riot between two rival groups of black inmates, one a Black Muslim sect faithful to Elijah Muhammad and the other described by prison authorities as a group of former Black Panthers. After a major rumble in the prison yard, seven inmates were rushed to a hospital in the nearby town of Poughkeepsie. Superintendent Vincent declared a state of emergency, and the entire inmate population was placed on lockdown. Two months later a prison guard was slashed in the neck with a knife. Once again, full-scale lockdown, with periodic cell searches for weapons.

By March 1973, the atmosphere had quieted down, until one afternoon when maggots were discovered in the food served in the mess hall. This touched off another riot. A group of prison riot police—separate from the guards employed by the Bureau of Prisons—were periodically raiding individual cells and beating prisoners.

With the atmosphere so fraught with violence, Whitmore spent much of his time at Green Haven in a state of terror. One day, when prison authorities made an unscheduled visit to his cell, he was certain they had come to beat him up. Even after they told him he was being transported to New York later that day, he was still skittish, half-convinced he was being set up for a beating.

Around four in the afternoon, Whitmore was retrieved from his cell. “What's this all about?” he asked the guards.

“Sorry, George,” one of the guards replied. “We are under strict orders not to tell you anything.”

Whitmore was startled to find that they were taking him to New York by helicopter. He'd never been in a helicopter before. Yet he still couldn't shake the fear that he was being taken somewhere for a beating. At one point, one of the guards joked, “If you wanna try to escape, George, go ahead, we won't stop you.” George wondered if they were trying to trick him into fleeing so they could shoot him down like a dog.

As the chopper approached the city, George's anxiety settled into an unusual sense of comfort. The flight was so strange—like an amusement park ride, with the city's lights twinkling like diamonds and the skyline like the world's biggest Erector set. Whitmore had seen the New York skyline many times before, but always through the windows of a Greyhound bus coming from New Jersey. Seeing it from above, as he hovered in the sky—this was incredible, and it filled George with the sense that something monumental was about to take place.

They landed at Kennedy Airport. George was escorted by his bodyguards to a car and driven to a nearby motel.

“This is where we stay tonight,” they told George. He was given a room that was connected to one where the guards would stay. Once again, one of them said jokingly, “Now remember, George. If you wanna run away, you go right ahead. We won't stop you.” The others laughed.

George allowed himself a smile, but he still didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

The guards stayed up all night playing cards. Whitmore slept until they woke him up in the morning. He showered, combed his hair—he was now wearing it in a kind of mini-Afro style—and put on his black horn-rimmed glasses. He was given a fresh suit, white dress shirt, and black tie to wear. Standing in front of the mirror dressed in his new clothes, he felt reborn.

The guards put George in the car and drove into Brooklyn, to the state supreme court building on Court Street. George was loaded onto a freight elevator and then taken to a small room “no bigger than a bathroom.” There was a small desk in the room. George was given a breakfast of cereal, some fruit, and a cup of coffee.

“Stay put until we come to get you,” they said. “Do not open the door unless you hear this knock.” One of guards tapped out a code,
tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap
. George nodded. The guards departed.

George sat alone in the tiny office. He tried to eat the food, but he
was so filled with excitement and apprehension that he couldn't stomach the meal.

Twenty minutes later he heard the coded knock on the door. He opened the door.

“Okay, Mister Whitmore. Time to go.”

George followed the guards into the elevator, up a few flights, then down a hallway and into a courtroom.

Whitmore was unprepared for what he found there: a roomful of people, reporters with notepads and pens, uniformed guards lining the room, lights so bright that for a few seconds he was blinded. Eventually, he noticed familiar faces—his attorneys Beldock and Miller, his mother, his brother Gerald, maybe some others he knew. He was led over to a table where Beldock and Miller stood smiling.

Within a few minutes of his arrival, Judge Irwin Brownstein entered the courtroom. “Mister Gold, I believe you have a statement you would like to read to the court.”

A man George didn't recognize stood at the prosecutor's table to speak.

“Who's that?” George asked Beldock under his breath.

“Eugene Gold, Kings County D.A.,” the attorney told his client.

Gold announced that “fresh new evidence” uncovered by his office had shown that Elba Borrero's identification of George Whitmore as her assailant was “hopelessly suspect.” Borrero's relatives, Gold stated, now declared that she had told them a number of things that “either contradict or undermine the testimony she has given against Mister Whitmore.” Among other things, Gold noted, his office had learned from Celeste Viruet that, before Elba Borrero identified Whitmore at the Seventy-second Precinct station house in Brownsville, she had first been shown a collection of mug shot photographs by the police—and identified one among them as her assailant. It was not George Whitmore. This fact—that Borrero had identified someone else as her assailant before she ever identified Whitmore—had never been revealed by cops, prosecutors, or Borrero herself in all the criminal proceedings Whitmore had been subjected to over the years.

Gold stopped short of affirming Whitmore's innocence. But the new evidence, he declared, “renders the case so weak that any possibility of conviction is negated.” Gold asked the judge to vacate Whitmore's con
viction, to dismiss the indictment, and to have the defendant discharged immediately.

Cheers broke out in the courtroom. Whitmore felt his knees go weak. He was afraid he might fall to the floor.

Gold had one final comment: “Your Honor, if in fact George Whitmore is guilty of these charges, surely his debt has been paid by his incarceration. If in fact he is innocent, I pray that my action today will in some measure repay society's debt to him.”

The attorneys Beldock and Miller were allowed to add their own pleas for dismissal. Then the judge spoke.

“Gentlemen, I won't waste any more of your time. It is indeed disgraceful that this defendant has been subjected to nine years of prosecution and appeals. I hereby declare that he be released from custody immediately and that all charges against him be dismissed.”

Again, the courtroom erupted in spontaneous applause.

Then the judge turned to George. “Mister Whitmore, I would like to say to you on behalf of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, I am sorry for what you have had to go through.”

Now George felt tears coming to his eyes. In all his years struggling to break free from the chains of false prosecution, he had never dreamed that one day a judge would look him in the face and apologize for what happened. Whitmore felt a lump in his throat; he was speechless.

The people spilled out of the courtroom. George was led by his attorneys out onto the steps in front of the courthouse. It was a bright spring day. Whitmore squinted in the sunlight. A reporter shouted a question: “George, what do you have to say?”

After nearly giving up hope for so many years, Whitmore tried to summon his feelings. The rush of emotion was almost too much.

“I feel it's just beyond expressing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “They dropped my case. I'm overwhelmed.”

Years later Whitmore recalled:

George was taken by his attorneys to a waiting car. Someone asked him something about getting revenge against the prosecutors. “I'm not bitter,” George told a reporter. “I appreciate greatly what the D.A. did.”

From the backseat, he waved shyly to the crowd. Then the car drove away.

For George, the next three days were one long parade of press conferences, interviews, and TV appearances. The news reports tried to sum up the Whitmore case in sixty-second spots—but there was more to the story than any report could contain. It had been ten years since the horrific murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, nine and a half since Whitmore was plucked from the streets of Brooklyn and thrust into a drama that would destroy his life and call into question the basic fairness of the city's justice system. From the time of the Career Girls Murders, the city had descended into a kind of urban madness; a tidal wave of injustice and insurrection, ambushes and assassinations, led some to believe that the city could not be saved. White people continued their exodus from the city, and black people stepped forward to claim what they felt was rightfully theirs. Others—black and white—tried to cauterize the trauma with words of caution, with nonviolent protests and peaceful marches, but the historical moment seemed to hold forth its own bloody agenda.

Ten years earlier, the voice of a prophet had echoed throughout the city's concrete canyons: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of unspeakable acts of police brutality.” In a speech that heralded the beginning of a new era in the struggle for human dignity, King called on a nation to “live up to the meaning of its creed.” The nation had been trying to do so, but the process was not pretty. The costs were nearly incalculable. The framing of a semiliterate Negro youth for one of the most heinous double murders in a generation had been one of many sparks for the racial conflagration that followed, troubling the collective conscience of those who cared about social justice.

In the year 1973 most would have agreed that the struggle was far from over. But a weary people will take their moments of triumph wher
ever they can be found. The story of George Whitmore symbolized the injustice that had long pervaded the system. Now, it seemed, the wheels of time were moving forward. Police corruption, prosecutorial malfeasance, civil unrest, and institutional racism still existed, but at least one grave injustice had been undone, one crooked place had been made straight.

George Whitmore was a free man.

ONE PERSON'S HARDSHIP
is another's opportunity. The Savage City was like a kaleidoscope, its moods and shadings shifting with the angle of the instrument and the perspective of the participant. The cliché was that the city could make or break a person. The harder truth was that life in the big town could set an individual off on a blind path, one that could change a person in ways that were difficult to assess. You could attain high levels of accomplishment and still become lost in a world of self-righteous illusion. And, yes, on any given day you could be crushed by the wheels of progress.

To Mayor John Lindsay, the era of civic disorder and rising crime over which he presided was a sign that the American city was struggling to redefine itself. It was also in great danger of being abandoned by the federal government. In November 1971—against a backdrop of police executions, spectacular criminal prosecutions, and a level of racial conflict that had become the norm—Lindsay reasserted his mission as self-appointed guardian of the urban ideal and used it to announce that he was running for president of the United States.

There was no great clamoring for Lindsay to run. His poll ratings in New York City were low, though he was in good standing among black voters. Lindsay took this as a sign that his day had arrived. He switched his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat and traveled south to Florida to take part in the presidential primary. His pitch to voters was based largely on the argument that the country's future depended on the health of its major metropolitan areas. But Florida was a state
filled with New Yorkers who had fled the city during Lindsay's years as mayor. As far as they were concerned, he was prescribing a medicine they did not want to take. Lindsay finished a distant fifth in a field of six candidates, with 7 percent of the vote. The winner of the Florida Democratic primary, with 42 percent of the vote, was George Wallace, an avowed segregationist.

After a couple more disastrous primaries in other states, Lindsay returned to the city a beaten man. He finished his term as mayor in 1973, but his political career never recovered. In the end, he was one more casualty from an era that claimed many victims.

There were still some scores yet to be settled. The war between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army continued down a dark alley. The battlefield spread nationwide; there were BLA–law enforcement shoot-outs in St. Louis, San Francisco, Florida, and elsewhere. All of these confrontations ended with BLA members succumbing to overwhelming police fire-power. Between 1971 and 1974, the BLA killed ten police officers around the United States; dozens of militants were captured or killed.

The last to go out in a blaze of glory was Twymon Myers, who was believed by police to have been involved in the murder of Officers Foster and Laurie in Manhattan and also another shooting of a policeman in Brooklyn.

On November 14, 1973, at 152nd Street and Tinton Avenue in the Bronx, members of a joint FBI-NYPD task force surrounded Myers outside the apartment building where he had been hiding out. According to the police version, “Myers turned, pulled a 9-mm automatic pistol from under his coat and opened fire.” The lawmen then returned fire, hitting Myers “multiple times.” Eyewitnesses in the neighborhood offered a different account: Myers did have a weapon, they said, but the police fired first. Four officers were hit by bullets; one witness suggested that it was another case of friendly fire, as more than a dozen cops and agents unloaded their weapons in a shooting frenzy. Riddled with bullets, Myers died in the street. He was twenty-three years old.

Said Donald F. Cawley, the newly appointed police commissioner: “Tonight we've culminated a very long journey that involved the final capture of Twymon Myers, who we consider the last of the known leaders of the Black Liberation Army. We believe we have now broken the back of the BLA.”

But the BLA's bloody rise and fall wasn't quite played out. There was
one last saga; this one involved Assata Shakur, aka JoAnne Chesimard, occasional bank-robbing partner of Twymon Myers.

Since she'd gone underground in late 1971 Assata had been linked to a staggering array of bank robberies, attempted murders, kidnappings, and other crimes on the East Coast. Her face appeared on FBI wanted posters in New York and elsewhere around the country. In his 1973 book
Target Blue,
Robert Daley described her as “the final wanted fugitive, the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”

Assata was captured in May 1973 after a ferocious shoot-out on the New Jersey Turnpike between state troopers and three BLA members—Assata Shakur, Zyad Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli. Zyad Shakur was killed in the shoot-out, as was one of the state troopers. The other trooper and Assata were injured. Acoli and Assata tried to escape, driving five miles along the turnpike until their car was surrounded by state troopers. Bleeding from gunshot wounds in both arms and a shoulder, Assata surrendered to troopers at the scene.

From 1973 to 1977, Shakur was indicted ten times in New York and New Jersey, resulting in seven different trials. She was charged with two bank robberies, the kidnapping of a Brooklyn heroin dealer, the attempted murder of two Queens police officers, and eight other felonies related to the turnpike shoot-out. All the charges for which she was originally hunted by the FBI were either dismissed or ended in acquittal at trial. She was, however, found guilty at trial on all eight felony counts relating to the shoot-out on the turnpike. Her role in the murder of the state trooper brought with it a mandatory life sentence.

During her incarceration, Assata had a child by one of her codefendants, James Hinton. Her imprisonment, which included long stretches of solitary confinement—and instances of physical abuse, claimed Shakur—was condemned by a panel of jurists representing the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, who stated that her treatment “was totally unbefitting any prisoner.” Her cause as a political prisoner was championed by the dwindling faithful in the black liberation movement.

No doubt there were those who cheered when, on November 2, 1979, Assata was sprung from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in a daring escape engineered by, among others, former Black Panther Sekou Adinga and Mutulu Shakur. Using false IDs, the team of BLA members penetrated prison security, then seized
two guards as hostages and used a prison van to escape. Assata was able to evade an intensive FBI manhunt and live underground in the United States for nearly five years. In 1984, she fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum and still lives in exile.

Assata Shakur was one of many whose lives were scattered to the winds by events of the 1960s and early 1970s in New York City. For the three main players in this narrative—Phillips, Bin Wahad, and Whitmore—the years that followed were no less dramatic:

BILL PHILLIPS

After the hung jury in his first trial for the double murder of a pimp and a prostitute, Phillips began his retrial in November 1974 expecting to be found not guilty. In terms of the evidence, the second trial was a replay of the first, but this time Phillips was without the services of star attorney F. Lee Bailey, with whom he parted ways after a dispute over the lawyer's fee. At trial, Phillips's new attorney, Harold Rothblatt, was unable to undermine the eyewitness testimony of the surviving victim, Charles Gonzales, who, when asked if Phillips was the man who shot him, said, “Yes sir. I'll never forget his face as long as I live.” After an eight-week trial, the jury deliberated eleven hours over two days before finding Phillips guilty on two counts of homicide and one count of attempted homicide. “The 44-year-old defendant blanched and sank into his chair at the defense table after the foreman replied ‘guilty' when asked for the verdict on each of the three counts in the indictment,” the
New York Times
reported. Phillips was sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.

For the high-flying corrupt cop who became a media star during the televised Knapp Commission hearings, it was a fall of mythic proportions. Phillips did not fear many things, but he did fear prison. As he put it in his memoir, “I could never, never spend the rest of my life in fucking jail. I would kill myself first. The thought of suicide is the only escape. To be locked up like an animal in some fuckin' jail, I couldn't do it. I couldn't survive. I'd have to find some way to end it.”

Given Phillips's trepidation about being an ex-cop locked up with criminals, the next thirty years of his life were a time of considerable accomplishment. He was first sent to Attica, a correctional facility seething with racial hostilities in the wake of the infamous riot that had taken place three and a half years earlier. In general population, Phillips
was “terrorized” every minute of every day, as he would later put it.

Around 1978 Phillips began spending nearly all of his free time in the prison library studying the law. At first it was just a hobby, but eventually he began helping out fellow inmates with their cases. He took full advantage of educational programs that were instituted in the state prison system as a result of reforms brought about by the Attica riot. Eventually, he earned a bachelor's degree from Empire State College and a master's degree from Buffalo State University with a 4.0 grade point average. He earned a state certification in legal research and taught a course on the subject at Attica. He helped dozens of inmates with their cases, and in the late 1980s he was profiled on the CBS newsmagazine
Street Stories
. The program's producers interviewed inmates whom Phillips had helped get released from prison through his legal work. “I've been championing the cause of the underdog in here,” Phillips would say on the program.

Phillips would eventually be transferred to various other state penal facilities. He used his incarceration time well, doing charity work through an upstate Quaker group, rewriting a prison substance and alcohol abuse treatment program, and receiving counseling from a Mormon prison organization. By the time of his first parole hearing in 1999, he had become known as a “model inmate” who was respectful to prison authorities and helpful to other inmates.

As the hearing approached that September, Phillips had reason to believe he might have a favorable reception. He had letters of recommendation from Whitman Knapp and Mike Armstrong, the Knapp Commission's chief counsel, who wrote that Phillips had been “resourceful, courageous, tireless, and extremely effective” in his work for the Knapp Commission. “It is fair to say that, without the undercover work and testimony of William Phillips, our committee would not have been able to hold its public hearings.”

Yet the pleas on Phillips's behalf were to no avail. He was turned down for parole; the board called him “a criminal of the worst kind whose danger to public safety is to the highest degree.” Of the parole board members, Phillips said only, “Most of these guys were in diapers when I was testifying. They don't know what it's about. They have no idea about my story.”

From 1999 on, Phillips went before the parole board every two years, and was turned down every two years, until he was one of the
oldest inmates in the state prison system. Over the years, he had three cancer surgeries, including one that claimed his left eye. He suffered a minor stroke and developed diabetes. Despite his infirmities, Phillips kept himself in shape in the prison gym and never lost hope that he would eventually see the light of day.

The problem was, Phillips was not only unwilling to express remorse for the double homicide for which he'd been convicted, he wouldn't even admit to the killings. To Phillips, the reason was clear: he didn't do it. At his first hearing in 1999, he was asked,

 

Parole board officer:
So it is your position on these convictions that you're innocent of these crimes?

Phillips:
Well, I was convicted by a jury so I'm stuck with that.

Parole board
: Do you suppose the witness could be wrong about who shot him?

Phillips:
I believe so.

Phillips was asked if he had any ideas about who might have done the actual murder.

 

Phillips:
Yes, I have a theory. It was a loan shark. Every report that was put in this case was put in by the detective that it was a loan shark. This individual [Jimmy Smith] had 33 or 35 arrests. He owed everybody money. He had been beat up on several occasions for nonpayment of his loan shark bills, and my theory of the case is that, yes, it was a loan shark.

Parole board:
You are saying that another person was responsible?

Phillips:
My theory, yes.

After three or four parole hearings over an eight-year period, it became clear to Phillips that he would never be released unless he copped to the killings. In 2007, a new regime took over control of the state parole board. Phillips was informed by his attorney that there was a good chance he could get a favorable ruling, but he would have to say the magic words:
I did it.
This was easier said than done. The parole board
was likely to ask Phillips specific questions about the night of the shootings. He would have to come up with a scenario that matched the actual details of the crime.

On September 19, Phillips came before the board in what would likely be his last shot at receiving parole. When he was asked “How are you feeling today?” he answered, “A little nervous. It's my fifth time before the parole board.” He was told, “Take a few minutes to calm down. Take your time, sir. Take a deep breath. It's a fresh, new panel.”

Phillips decided, at last, to tell the board what it wanted to hear—that he had shot the three victims in that whorehouse in 1968. He proceeded to take the board members through a rambling description of the crime, seeming at times incredulous at his own words: