The Savage City (53 page)

Phillips's account of the events of that night was nearly incomprehensible; when asked about details, he floundered, confusing one of the two dead victims with the survivor. He sounded like a man determined to convince the board he was guilty—and remorseful—for a crime he didn't commit. Ultimately, his act was successful: on November 10, 2007, after serving thirty-three years in prison, Bill Phillips was released on parole. He was seventy-eight years old.

Upon release, Phillips went into hiding. After living for a time in a U.S. veterans halfway house, he was taken in by the Mormon group he'd become associated with in prison. As of 2010, he was working with two filmmakers who planned to produce a documentary about his life.

DHORUBA BIN WAHAD

In the late 1970s, while incarcerated at Green Haven, Dhoruba started reading about a covert FBI counterintelligence program that had been
revealed during Senate hearings in Washington, D.C. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Senate had vowed to usher in a new era of transparency in government. A committee was formed to investigate the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies. The Church Committee hearings, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, focused in part on the activities of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover (who had died of natural causes on May 2, 1972). For the first time, the American public learned of the FBI's efforts to infiltrate and destabilize the black liberation movement via COINTELPRO.

Dhoruba became convinced that he might have been a target of the FBI's counterintelligence efforts; if that was true, he might have grounds to claim that his civil rights had been violated. COINTELPRO had engaged in the use of illegal wiretaps, paid informants, and the spreading of false information that, in some cases, led directly to the deaths of people in the movement. If Dhoruba had been a target of the program, it also bolstered his argument that police authorities had targeted him, because of his politics, to take the rap for the shooting of police officers Curry and Binetti.

The problem for Dhoruba was that he was locked away in prison on a life sentence. No lawyer was likely even to listen to his claims, much less devote time and effort to helping him prove his theories. Then, in 1975, he got lucky. A group of college students visited Green Haven prison. Among the group was Robert Boyle, a twenty-year-old student majoring in sociology. Boyle met Dhoruba and became convinced that, if what the imprisoned black militant was saying was true, it might open a window onto a pattern of FBI wrongdoing that had affected an entire generation of civil rights activists.

Thus began a legal saga that would last the next fifteen years. Boyle decided to become a lawyer. He attended Brooklyn Law School and was admitted to the New York State bar in 1981. At the same time, he brought Dhoruba's case to Elizabeth Fink, a civil rights attorney whose career had been inspired by William Kunstler. Together, Fink and Boyle began a long process of filing legal injunctions against the FBI and the NYPD in an effort to get their hands on any and all files relating to Dhoruba Bin Wahad.

At every turn, government lawyers stonewalled. At first, they claimed there were no secret files. Then they claimed there
had
been files, but that they were destroyed or lost. Finally, in 1989, the govern
ment not only revealed that FBI and NYPD intelligence files did exist, but they also launched a counterstrategy: they released a mountain of files, more than three hundred thousand pages in all, hoping to overwhelm Dhoruba and his attorneys.

Over the next ten months, the lawyers pored over the files—and were astounded by what they found. Not only was the name of Richard Moore aka Dhoruba all over the FBI files, they uncovered extensive documentation of the covert program known as NEWKILL—the first time that program was revealed to anyone outside of law enforcement. The implications were explosive: the files proved conclusively that the Manhattan D.A.'s office had been lying when it insisted that there were no relevant files or notes concerning Dhoruba's case. In particular, the NEWKILL files revealed that—despite the prosecution's repeated denials during Dhoruba's trial—star witness Pauline Joseph, whose testimony helped convict Dhoruba and others at numerous BLA-related trials, had been briefed and interrogated dozens of times over a period of two years, and much of what she told detectives and prosecutors contradicted what she had testified to on the witness stand.

Fink and Boyle believed they had hit the jackpot. They filed a motion to have Dhoruba's conviction overturned, citing (among other factors) the fact that the government had failed to turn over essential Rosario material at trial.

At first the motion was denied; then the denial was overturned. Finally, in March 1990, Dhoruba's case came before Justice Peter J. McQuillan. After examining the motion filed by Dhoruba's lawyers and all the relevant material from the NEWKILL files, McQuillan rendered his verdict. “I acknowledge that [my] decision is not free from doubt,” said the judge. “The Rosario materials do not contain clearly exculpatory statements, nor any statements that would undermine a witness's entire testimony. But they do include statements by Pauline Joseph which depart significantly from some of her most crucial testimony, and that testimony was essential to the People's theory of the case. It follows, then, that there is a reasonable possibility of a different verdict if the defendant had been afforded the opportunity to cross-examine her with these statements. To vacate a conviction some twenty years after the jury's verdict on the basis of a possibility, however reasonable that possibility may be, is not a pleasant duty…. A conviction that can no longer be called a just conviction…must be remedied no matter how
much time has passed. Accordingly, the motion to vacate the defendant's conviction is granted.”

After nineteen years of imprisonment, Dhoruba walked out of court a free man.

Immediately, the former Panther and underground guerrilla became a symbol to a generation of activists who had been beaten, shot at, hunted down, and incarcerated during the years of conflict between police and the black liberation movement. Dhoruba became a popular speaker at political rallies and, occasionally, on television. After a 1992 appearance on
The Phil Donahue Show
alongside rapper Sister Souljah and Prince ton University professor Cornel West, Dhoruba was derided by a
New York Times
reviewer for his “soapbox radicalism.” In speeches and essays in leftist journals, Dhoruba's rhetoric remained fiery and unrepentant, though in many ways the movement he helped forge had since moved on.

The inevitable civil litigation followed. Dhoruba sued the FBI and the NYPD. In a 1995 settlement with the federal government he was awarded $400,000. Five years later, in a settlement with the City of New York, he collected a further $490,000. Some of this money went to pay legal fees, some to taxes. The rest Dhoruba used to finance a project he had dreamed about while he was in prison. In the late 1990s he moved to Ghana, Africa, and, in partnership with the local government, constructed a school for children. Dhoruba became something of a player in African politics, jetting back and forth between the continent and the United States. In 1999, he introduced Nelson Mandela at a rally in Harlem. A documentary about his life called
Passin' It On
was produced and shown on PBS. But by the early years of the new century, Dhoruba's ventures in Ghana had fizzled out. His school was forced to close after financial improprieties by his business partners, and the political party he had supported was voted out of office.

Dhoruba moved his African wife and child back to the United States, where he settled in New Jersey. For a time, he resumed his role as a speaker at political forums and rallies. But increasingly Dhoruba's politics and uncompromising point of view seemed to reflect battles from another era. He routinely attacked ostensibly progressive activists and political figures whom he considered insufficiently radical. Dhoruba was still a revolutionary, but the revolution he advocated had been put to rest long ago.

In November 2008, at the age of sixty-three, Dhoruba became a
father for the fourth time. His new child caused him to reflect back on the years of his youth, when he and others of his generation had thrown themselves into the whirlwind.

Bin Wahad, the former gangbanger from the South Bronx, had over the years embraced a Pan-Africanist perspective. The more he became immersed in the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the more acutely aware he became that he and his fellow revolutionaries were merely displaced Africans living out the legacy of slavery. His forays in Africa sometimes took him to his sharpest levels of reflection.

Dhoruba's opinions were far from flippant; they were hard-earned. You could disagree with his views and actions, but it was hard to question his bona fides. His philosophy was tempered in the streets and during twenty-four years behind bars, nineteen of those for a crime he maintains he did not commit.

By early 2010, the former Panther had put together the pieces of a new business venture that involved ibogaine, a highly touted though controversial drug used as a treatment for narcotics addiction. Ibogaine is derived from iboga, a hallucinogenic plant of West African origin. Together with partners in Ghana, Dhoruba was looking to build a narcotics rehabilitation clinic somewhere in Saudi Arabia. Often, after negotiating some detail of the plan from his cell phone driving around New York and New Jersey, he would hang up the phone and say to himself, “I gotta get back to Africa.”

George Whitmore

Life wasn't easy for Whitmore, a man whose existence was changed forever by a chance encounter with a policeman on a Brooklyn street. Upon his release in 1973, George moved back to the same area of New Jersey where he had lived most of his life. He tried to live an anonymous life, but his story as a wronged man was still fresh, and people asked him about it constantly. Remembered George, “I got tired of everybody saying, ‘Hey, aren't you Whitmore?' and reciting all these things I was trying to forget. I was polite and nice about it and everything, but I said, Well, it's time for me to move. I lived in Whitesboro, Wildwood, Denisville, Woodbine. Everywhere I went, people knew my case.”

Through his attorney, Whitmore filed a lawsuit against the City of New York for improper arrest and malicious prosecution. It took five years to get a ruling. In 1979, a judge dismissed Whitmore's suit, saying that parts of it had been filed too late. The judge also declared that there was “no proof of actual malice” by the Brooklyn D.A.'s office in trying Whitmore three times on the same false accusation.

In a rare display of discord, George was quoted in the
Times
saying, “They wrecked my life and they still won't admit they did anything wrong. If justice prevails, let it prevail for me.” And, eventually, it did: the judge's decision was overturned on appeal, and in 1982 Whitmore received $560,000 in a settlement with the city.

As often happens with people from humble beginnings who come into a large sum of money, the influx of cash was a mixed blessing for Whitmore. Relatives, friends, acquaintances, and would-be business partners came out of the woodwork. George gave some of the money away to family members in need. He invested half of the money in a cattle business, but his partner, a former schoolmate, fleeced Whitmore of nearly $100,000. The crooked business partner went to jail, but Whitmore was unable to recoup his losses.

In Denisville, a pleasant, mostly white suburb on the other side of the tracks from Wildwood, Whitmore bought a beautiful, spacious home (“a mansion,” he called it) on a tree-lined street. He got a good deal: the asking price was $100,000, but since the previous occupant had killed his wife and himself in the house, George was able to buy the house for $75,000.

George moved in with a lady friend and three kids—two of his and one of hers. He knew about the killings that had taken place in the house, but what he didn't know was that the place was haunted. “One morning I woke up and all the silverware had been pulled out of the drawers and thrown on the floor. That was only the beginning; there were ghosts in that house.” George bought sheets of plywood and boarded up part of the house to keep the ghosts away.