Blood in the Water
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Praise for Heather Ann Thompson’s
BLOOD in the WATER
Winner of the New York State Bar Association’s Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Public Information Award and the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize
“Not all works of history have something to say so directly to the present….But there’s nothing partisan or argumentative about Blood in the Water. The power of this superb work of history comes from its methodical mastery of interviews, transcripts, police reports and other documents, covering thirty-five years, many released only reluctantly by government agencies….It’s Ms. Thompson’s achievement, in this remarkable book, to make us understand why this one group of prisoners [rebelled], and how many others shared the cost.”
—The New York Times
“A gripping account of what happened at Attica, and chilling from start to finish.”
—Bloomberg
“The product of a decade’s deep research, Thompson’s narrative history reveals the root causes, horrific events, and enduring wounds of one of the 1970s’ most violent events.”
—The Boston Globe
“A definitive and groundbreaking account…that names for the first time the troopers and guards who shot unarmed inmates…and describes then New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s secret meetings to make sure all officials repeated an acceptable narrative.”
—Newsweek
“A masterly account….Blood in the Water restores [the prisoners’] struggle to its rightful place in our collective memory.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A master historian discussing her craft and illuminating the crisis of prison reform.”
—Smithsonian
“A long, memorable chronicle….Thompson’s capacity for close observation and her honesty [are] impressive.”
—The New Yorker
“Thompson fully illuminated the facts….Masterful.”
—The Nation
“Anyone needing to be reminded that the problems in America’s prison system date back to long before the War on Drugs may want to pick up Thompson’s history of the infamous 1971 Attica prison uprising. Thompson has drawn on newly unearthed documents and interviews with participants from all sides of the debacle.”
—The Millions
“Thompson’s book is a wonder. Her moral perspective admits both prison guard and prisoner to humane understanding. Her prose is lucid. Her eye for detail…is impeccable.”
—The Washington Spectator
“Remarkable….This is essential reading.”
—Washington Missourian
“Necessary….Riveting….Blood in the Water stands today as the definitive history of the revolt.”
—The Buffalo News
“A great accomplishment….Thompson’s definitive account should be read by students, historians, and others who are interested not only in the riot itself, but in these larger subjects, and one more: the capacity of our legal system, after the fact, to right wrongs, and provide at least a modicum of justice.”
—The National Book Review
“A must-read.”
—San Francisco Book Review
“Writing with cinematic clarity from meticulously sourced material, [Thompson] brilliantly exposes the realities of the Attica prison uprising….Thompson’s superb and thorough study serves as a powerful tale of the search for justice in the face of the abuses of institutional power.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“As powerful a history lesson as you’re likely to encounter. Please read it.”
—Lexington Herald-Leader
“[A] real eye-opener for readers whose interest in Attica and knowledge of what happened ended when the headlines receded….Compelling….Sensitive….Impressively authoritative and thoughtfully composed.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON
BLOOD in the WATER
Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and an award from the New York City Bar Association and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other accolades. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on the subject. She has written on the history of mass incarceration and its current impact for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Newsweek, NBC, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post, as well as for top scholarly publications.
www.heatherannthompson.com
ALSO BY HEATHER ANN THOMPSON
Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City
(as editor)
Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2017
Copyright © 2016 by Heather Ann Thompson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2016.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Name: Thompson, Heather Ann, author.
Title: Blood in the water : the Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy / Heather Ann Thompson.
Description: New York : Pantheon, 2016. Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000477.
Subjects: LCSH: Prison riots—New York (State), Attica Prison.
BISAC: HISTORY/United States/20th Century. LAW/Criminal Law/General. POLITICAL SCIENCE/Political Freedom & Security/Law Enforcement.
Classification: LCC HV9475.N716 T46 2016. DDC 365/.974793—dc23.
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016000477
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781400078240
Ebook ISBN 9781101871324
Cover design by Kelly Blair
Cover image: Prisoners during the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, on September 1, 1971. AP Photo
Author photograph © Graham MacIndoe
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Heather Ann Thompson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: State Secrets
Part I: The Tinderbox
Frank “Big Black” Smith
1 Not So Greener Pastures
2 Responding to Resistance
3 Voices from Auburn
4 Knowledge Is Power
5 Playing by the Rules
6 Back and Forth
7 End of the Line
Part II: Power and Politics Unleashed
Michael Smith
8 Talking Back
9 Burning Down the House
10 Reeling and Reacting
11 Order Out of Chaos
12 What’s Going On
13 Into the Night
Part III: The Sound Before the Fury
Tom Wicker
15 Getting Down to Business
16 Dreams and Nightmares
17 On the Precipice
18 Deciding Disaster
Part IV: Retribution and Reprisals Unimagined
Tony Strollo
19 Chomping at the Bit
20 Standing Firm
21 No Mercy
22 Spinning Disaster
23 And the Beat Goes On
Part V: Reckonings and Reactions
Robert Douglass
24 Speaking Up
25 Stepping Back
26 Funerals and Fallout
27 Prodding and Probing
28 Which Side Are You On?
29 Ducks in a Row
Part VI: Inquiries and Diversions
Anthony Simonetti
30 Digging More Deeply
31 Foxes in the Hen House
32 Stick and Carrot
33 Seeking Help
34 Indictments All Around
Part VII: Justice on Trial
Ernest Goodman
35 Mobilizing and Maneuvering
36 A House Divided
37 Laying the Groundwork
38 Testing the Waters
39 Going for Broke
40 Evening the Score
41 A Long Journey Ahead
Part VIII: Blowing the Whistle
Malcolm Bell
42 Joining the Team
43 Protecting the Police
44 Smoking Guns
45 Going Public
46 Investigating the Investigation
47 Closing the Book
Part IX: David and Goliath
Elizabeth Fink
48 It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
49 Shining the Light on Evil
50 Delay Tactics
51 The Price of Blood
52 Deal with the Devil
Part X: A Final Fight
Deanne Quinn Miller
53 Family Fury
54 Manipulated and Outmaneuvered
55 Biting the Hand
56 Getting Heard
57 Waiting Game
58 A Hollow Victory
Epilogue: Prisons and Power
Acknowledgments
Notes
For all who were killed at the Attica Correctional Facility more than four decades ago
William Allen
Elliot Barkley
John Barnes
Edward T. Cunningham
John D’Arcangelo
Bernard Davis
Allen Durham
William Fuller
Melvin Gray
Elmer Hardie
Robert Henigan
Kenneth Hess
Thomas Hicks
Emanuel Johnson
Herbert Jones
Richard Lewis
Charles Lundy
Kenneth Malloy
Gidell Martin
William McKinney
Lorenzo McNeil
Samuel Melville
Edward Menefee
Jose Mentijo
Milton Menyweather
John Monteleone
Richard Moore
Carlos Prescott
Michael Privitera
William Quinn
Raymond (Ramon) Rivera
James Robinson
Santiago Santos
Barry Schwartz
Harold Thomas
Carl Valone
Rafael Vasquez
Melvin Ware
Elon Werner
Ronald Werner
Willie West
Harrison Whalen
Alfred Williams
And for all who were wounded, maimed, tortured, and scarred on September 13, 1971. A list too long to recount here.
Detail left
Detail right
You have read in the paper all these years of the My Lai Massacre. That was only 170-odd men. We are going to end up with 1,500 men here, if things don’t go right, at least 1,500.
—ATTICA CORRECTION OFFICER EDWARD CUNNINGHAM
The officer pulled out a Phillips screwdriver and told the naked inmate to get on his feet or he’d stab the screwdriver into his rectum….Then he just started stabbing him.
—NATIONAL GUARDSMAN JAMES O’DAY
You just wake up in the night sweating. It was just so overpowering, to see that much trauma.
—NEW YORK STATE TROOPER THOMAS CONSTANTINE
I could see all this blood just running out of the mud and water. That’s all I could see.
—ATTICA PRISONER JAMES LEE ASBURY
Introduction
State Secrets
One might well wonder why it has taken forty-five years for a comprehensive history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 to be written. The answer is simple: the most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.
Some of these materials, such as scores of boxes related to the McKay Commission inquiry into Attica, were deemed off limits four decades ago—in this case at the request of the commission members who feared that state prosecutors would try to use the information to make cases against prisoners in a court of law. Other materials related to the Attica uprising, such as the last two volumes of the Meyer Report of 1976, were also sealed back in the 1970s. Members of law enforcement fought hard to prevent disclosure of this report in particular. Although a judge has recently ruled that these volumes can now be released to the public, the redaction process that they first will undergo means that crucial parts of Attica’s history will almost certainly remain hidden.1
The vast majority of Attica’s records, however, are not sealed, and yet they might as well be. Federal agencies such as the FBI and the Justice Department have important Attica files, for example, but when one requests them via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), they have been rendered nearly unreadable from all of the redactions. And then there are the records held by the state of New York itself—countless boxes housed in various upstate warehouses that came from numerous sources: the state’s official investigation into whether criminal acts had been committed at Attica during the rebellion, its five years of prosecuting such alleged crimes, and its nearly three decades of defending itself against civil actions filed by prisoners and hostages. In 2006 I was able to get an index of these files, which made clear that this is a treasure trove of Attica documentation: autopsies, ballistics reports, trooper statements, depositions, and more. It constitutes ground zero of the Attica story.2
Everything that the state holds in these warehouses can also be requested via FOIA, but here as well it is difficult to get documents released. As this book goes to press, and after waiting since 2013 for some explanation of whether my latest FOIA request would net me important documents, I just received word that state officials will not be giving me those materials. I know the items that I requested are there, according to the state’s own inventory, and I also know that I did not ask for any grand jury materials that would be protected, and yet my request is still being denied.
But thanks to so many who lived and litigated the Attica uprising, as well as so many others who took the time to chronicle or to collect parts of this history in newspapers, in memoirs, and in archives outside the control of the state of New York, I was still able to rescue and recount the story of Attica.
And, because of two extraordinarily lucky breaks I had while I was trying to write this book, the history you are about to read is one that state officials very much hoped would not be told.
First, in 2006 I stumbled upon a cache of Attica documents at the Erie County courthouse in Buffalo, New York, that changed everything. I had, for two years, been calling and writing every county courthouse and coroner’s office and munici
pal building in upstate New York in order to find any Attica-related records that had not been placed under lock and key by the Office of the Attorney General or sealed by a judge. I had little to go on in these early years—I didn’t have case numbers to search, I knew few names to inquire about. But one day I hit pay dirt. I was on the phone with a woman from the Erie County courthouse who thought that a bunch of Attica papers had recently been placed in the back room there. They had been somewhere else, but had been moved to the Office of the Clerk, perhaps after suffering some water damage. I headed to Buffalo.
When I walked into that dim file room at the courthouse I was taken aback. In front of me, in complete disarray on floor-to-ceiling metal shelves, were literally thousands of pages of Attica documents. In this mess was everything from grand jury testimony, to depositions and indictments, to memos and personal letters. Most stunningly, though, I found in this mountain of moldy papers vital information from the very heart of the state’s own investigation into whether crimes had been committed during the rebellion or the retaking of the prison. In short, I had found a great deal of what the state knew, and when it knew it—not the least of which was what evidence it thought it had against members of law enforcement who were never indicted. I took as many notes as I could take, and Xeroxed as many pages as they would let me, and, finally, had much of what I needed to write a history of Attica that no one yet knew.