Blood in the Water

by Thompson, Heather Ann

  Any white inmate who had stood with the black rebels in D Yard also suffered special abuse. Doctors from the National Guard reported hearing troopers and COs punctuate their beating of white inmates—the “nigger lovers”—with bitter refrains of “This is what you get for hanging around with niggers.”58

  So deep was the guards’ and troopers’ hatred of Attica’s surrendered prisoners, and particularly the black men among them, that for days after the retaking they engaged not only in physical abuse but also in the wanton destruction of these men’s most basic and necessary possessions. A trooper forced Jack Florence to pull out his dentures and hand them over, then threw them “on the ground and stepped on it.”59 In addition to smashing the men’s false teeth that they needed to eat, troopers and COs mangled eyeglasses and ground them into the dirt, and tore apart every necklace and smashed every wristwatch they happened to find on a prisoner.

  Correction officers and New York State Police stand over the crowd of prisoners forced to crawl through the mud in D Yard. (Courtesy of the Associated Press)

  What wasn’t savagely destroyed was stolen. On the 14th of September men from the National Guard went into the prison armed with metal detectors and Dan Callahan noticed that one of his “sergeants had stolen a bunch of watches—all up and down his arm, he was proud.”60 Another Guardsman cheerily displayed “his own trophy—a set of false teeth with a bullet hole in it.”61

  From the moment that the shooting died down, officers had begun herding inmates violently up the half dozen steps into D Block, across D Tunnel, and then back down into A Yard. As the men were being rushed, pushed, and kicked from D Yard into A Yard, they had begun falling over one another, bodies on top of bodies. For the men on the bottom of this heap, it was almost impossible to breathe.62 Barely able to get air, these men were then, as Herbert X Blyden remembered the ordeal, stripped naked and forced to “lay in the mud, face down…and crawl.”63

  During this entire process they encountered more and more “officers who beat them and tore their clothes off, took away glasses, watches, false teeth, etc., then herded them naked in a long snaking line that wound slowly through [A] yard,” into A Tunnel, where a gauntlet of armed officers awaited them.64

  Once inside the tunnel, with their feet bleeding profusely from the glass fragments that covered the prison’s ground, the men were forced to run “for some 50 yards…[and] both sides were lined with officers with ax handles, 2 x 4s, baseball bats and rifle butts.” When these naked and often severely wounded men stumbled or fell, they had to “crawl the length of the tunnel, while being struck and jabbed repeatedly.”65 One prisoner described the gauntlet this way: “Well, they stripped me and they told me to go and get in line. They had a line in the form of a snake and you had to get in line and they were moving [us] in one at a time. So this way…the officers [got the] chance to get their sticks ready. On both sides of the hall they had officers, you know, with sticks, correction officers.”66 John Cudmore and some of the other doctors saw with their own eyes what happened inside A Tunnel: “There were people on either side of the door and as men came to the door they’d aim at their legs or vicinity with clubs and, and hit them to knock them down.”67

  Prisoners are ordered to strip and line up in D Yard after the retaking, September 13. (Courtesy of Corbis)

  Any prisoner who troopers or COs considered to be a leader was chalked across the back with a large white “X” and singled out for abuse. When these eighty men managed to make it through that first gauntlet, they were forced to run another when they were taken from A Block over to HBZ.68 At the entrance to HBZ, where the men would all be placed in solitary, “six to eight COs…called to each one: ‘you want your amnesty? Well come and get it.’ ” After they made it through that lineup, guards continued to beat them “severely with clubs.”69

  Big Black Smith was of course chalked as a leader and after enduring many hours of torture on the table in A Yard, he too was forced to run these gauntlets before being thrown, eventually, into an HBZ cell. Guardsman Dan Callahan was just inside A Tunnel when Big Black got to that first entrance. “The last inmate in the yard was Frank Smith. There was a sense of anticipation—this guy is going to get special treatment. The guards approached Smith and told him to get to his feet. He had been in that position [on the table] for 4–5 hours so he fell and they hit him repeatedly between the legs and in the anal area [as he was] pleading for mercy.” Eventually he managed to crawl through A Tunnel and all Callahan could hear then “was the thrumming of night sticks against his body.”

  As five officers took turns hitting him, one of them managed to break his wrist while another, as Big Black recalled, “opened my head up and knocked me just about out.” Big Black felt each blow. After this, he explained, “They took me to a room next to the hospital, laid me on the floor, spread-eagled me, and played shotgun roulette with me. Then they took me and dumped me on the floor in the [prison] hospital.”70

  As night descended upon Attica, “a skeleton force of troop A personnel assisting correction officers at the facility had managed to rehouse 1,240 of the prisoners who had been in D Yard into 540 cells—most in A Block.71 The rehousing had been a brutal affair from start to finish. According to guardsman Dan Callahan, when some of his men went into a cell block “to help guards get an unruly inmate in the cell,” he heard a commotion and then watched in disbelief as an officer dragged the man out of his cell and threw him down, whereupon “his head opened like a melon all over [the] concrete.”72 He also reported watching as naked, wounded, and terrified men were locked at times three to a cell in A Block. In the best-case scenario, there were “two men sleeping head to foot on a narrow bed, and the third one on the floor, with a blanket and no mattress,” but usually all the men lay naked on the cold concrete floor of the cell with no covering or bed.73

  Some men viewed being locked up even in these conditions with relief—after all, perhaps this meant that the cruelty of the day was over. Perry Ford was one of these. As the sound of gunfire continued to punctuate the night air, Ford now cowered in a cell with two white prisoners hoping that they would now be left alone.74 But the correction officers who had tossed him into this cell were still seething with anger, having decided that Perry had been involved in the death of Officer Billy Quinn. Within fifteen minutes of locking him up, the officers came back and dragged him out of the cell, shouting, “We going to kill you because you killed Quinn,” all the while calling Ford “a black slimy nigger.”75 As he was dragged down the stairs back into the yard he almost slipped and fell on a large puddle of blood with broken teeth in it. One of the officers told him that this was from the last “nigger” they had dealt with.76 Now trembling from sheer terror, Ford was thrust out into the yard and placed against a wall, where he faced a trooper with a shotgun in hand. The trooper took all but one of the bullets out of his gun, cocked the gun at Ford, and said, “There’s a bullet in here and you’ll find out when you’re hit” and then began pulling the trigger again and again. Each time, Ford “anticipated death.”77

  Russian roulette was a frequent practice of the night guards and troopers; so was telling thirsty, exhausted men cowering on the floor—like Carlos Roche—to “drink the urine of correction officers.”78 Officers spent the entire night of the 13th scraping the bars loudly with the butts of their guns, taunting, physically assaulting, and threatening to kill the men they had just rehoused. And during the following several nights as well, groups of COs visited the cell area and threatened inmates with death, pointing guns and clubs into the cells.79 Some of the former hostages were taken aback by how relentless the attacks on prisoners were. Once hostage Donny Almeter heard about what had been happening at the prison, he said, shaking his head, “I understood the initial beatings but I never understood going back in a cell three days later and dragging a guy out of his cell to beat him.’ ’80

  Superintendent Mancusi had ordered all the doctors from outside to leave the prison by 11:00 p.m., and the re
maining prison doctor announced he was going to bed, so the men in cells were not only terrorized by officers, many of them were still also in serious medical trauma. Perry Ford described two of the men he saw that night: “One was shot 12 times or close to 12 times and he was in the cell. He had a bullet in his neck. There was another inmate with a bullet on his spine. And they were asking for medication, you know, could they get out to the doctor,” to no avail.81 Prisoner Jack Florence, whose dentures had been smashed, experienced this callous lack of treatment firsthand. “I keep begging for a nurse, don’t get one,” he remembered, shuddering. “Tuesday night, everybody come by, asked them for a nurse or a doctor. Don’t get one. Wednesday came, I asked for a nurse, don’t get one.” Finally Florence saw that a member of the “brass” was coming by his cell so he then begged him to get a doctor up there. This official too “didn’t say a word, kept on walking.”82 Even the postoperative patients got no follow-up care—a fact reportedly shrugged off by a physician leaving the prison on the 13th who said, “Well, they’re young and strong; I guess they’ll be all right.”83

  But there were many medical professionals who were deeply worried about these men, and who would have stayed to treat them or would gladly have entered the prison to treat them if only they were allowed. Waiting outside the prison doors that night was a medical team consisting of “nine doctors and three nurses from New York City, mostly from Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, [who had] arrived at the prison saying they were answering the call for doctors, “but none were let in.”84 This team represented the National Medical Association, a group of about eight thousand doctors and nurses of color. They had gotten there earlier that day and, desperate to be allowed to render their services, had tried to enlist the aid of all medical personnel they saw at the entrance to the prison.85 “They came running up to us,” one doctor recalled, and asked that he tell Mancusi they were there and ready to help.86 This physician promised to pass on the message but wasn’t optimistic that the superintendent would want them there.87 And Mancusi didn’t. The reason they were barred, according to Dr. Michael Brandriss, was that Lincoln Hospital “was a well-known hotbed of activism, social activism and everything else.”88 One of the group from Lincoln Hospital, Dr. Howard Levy, had “gained fame in 1967 as the military doctor who was court-martialed for refusing to instruct Green Beret troops,” but the clear need to have more doctors on hand to help should have made this a minor concern. Even when another group of doctors, residents, and nurses from Buffalo with no political associations showed up at Attica, hoping to be allowed to assist the medical personnel already there from Meyer Memorial Hospital and University of Buffalo Medical School, they too were denied entry.89 The truth was that prison officials didn’t really trust any doctors to see what was happening inside of Attica—particularly after two staff physicians from Meyer Memorial were now telling “the press of guards’ brutality.”90

  For Mancusi, this was only the beginning of a years-long effort to prevent word from getting out about the abuses occurring behind Attica’s walls throughout the day and into the night of September 13, and for weeks thereafter. But he was surely aware that these terrible violations of human rights were taking place—as were his deputies, Leon Vincent and Karl Pfeil, his boss, Russell Oswald, and various high-ranking State Police officials such George Infante, John Monahan, and Henry Williams. All were at the prison from the morning of the 13th onward, and all could not have helped but see the rampant abuse of prisoners reported by doctors, legislators, and even National Guardsmen.91

  And yet, to a one, they all claimed that procedures were being adhered to. Indeed, the Department of Corrections described its officers as “dog tired and deeply concerned, dedicated correction officers and staff” who were working tirelessly to issue “clothing, bedding and the essentials of living to the population and housed them three to a cell under as comfortable living conditions as possible.”92 The troopers themselves were less politic about how they felt about the men they were now supposed to rehouse. Directly below a chalked inscription made by the D Yard rebels commemorating the beginning of the uprising on the 9th of September, members of law enforcement made their own inscription: “Retaken 9-13-71. 31 Dead Niggers.”93

  Outside the prison many people were working around the clock to ensure that law enforcement wouldn’t be allowed to continue to hurt the men who had just been assaulted in the retaking of Attica. Besides their families and the medical personnel who volunteered, scores of prisoner rights lawyers set out for the prison to insist on proper medical care and immediate legal counsel. As Herman Schwartz put it, “Lawyers started to pour into upstate New York that night.”94 They didn’t know much about what was going on yet, but they knew enough to know that Attica’s prisoners were now at the mercy of troopers and correction officers who had been hoping to get at them for four long days; they also knew, from the death toll of the hostages and the stories told about how they died, that things were very likely to be ugly inside for anyone with a number.

  William Hellerstein, a full-bearded, thirty-five-year-old attorney in charge of the criminal appeals board of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, set out for Buffalo the morning of the 13th with a group of other young attorneys, two of whom he had just hired. As he recalled it, “we didn’t know exactly what we could do,” but eventually they ended up at Herman Schwartz’s house for a planning meeting and then headed to the University of Buffalo to discuss how they would get into Attica to check on the prisoners.95

  Making that plan was fairly fraught. As Hellerstein remembered, it was a “big get-together….Lots of yelling and screaming,” between the lawyers such as himself and Schwartz and the younger, more radical attorneys and law students. At issue was how best to levy pressure on the state in order to protect the men inside.96 All suspected that abuses were taking place but they didn’t have concrete evidence. So what could they really do? Eventually it was decided that their best shot at helping the prisoners would be to get a federal order allowing them to enter the prison on the grounds of ensuring that the prisoners’ Miranda rights were being observed.97 Schwartz, who had long known U.S. district judge John Curtin and had just met with him days earlier to get the ill-fated injunction he had brought into D Yard, called the judge at his home that night. Curtin invited Schwartz, Hellerstein, and Stan Bass from the NAACP over to his house so that he could hear their arguments in person. Listening gravely, he finally decided that he would grant a temporary order granting them “the right to enjoin interrogation, granting us the right to see our clients, and allowing medical care.”98 Curtin personally phoned Mancusi to inform him of the order and to tell him that, if he had any questions, there would be a hearing to review the order in his chambers at 10:30 the following morning, September 14.

  Relieved, a large group of the lawyers set out for Attica in the pouring rain. Hellerstein and his team, who were traveling in a rented station wagon and several other cars, found themselves caravanning with the band of doctors from Lincoln Hospital who were just then making their way to the prison by van from New York City. Right before reaching the prison these vehicles filled with lawyers and doctors stopped to gas up, when suddenly they were “surrounded by troopers with shotguns drawn” who demanded to search the doctors’ van.99 Hellerstein knew that it was a crime to interfere with the process of serving a federal court order, so, brandishing the Curtin order, he not only forced the troopers to cease harassing the vanful of “hippie” doctors, but actually convinced the troopers to escort the caravan of lawyers and doctors to the prison.100

  At approximately midnight the group arrived at Attica, showed the court order, and expected at that point to be let in to check on the prisoners. Warden Mancusi and Assistant Deputy Superintendent Pfeil, however, refused them entry. The minute that he learned of the court order, Pfeil had conferred with his superiors in the Department of Corrections and he felt confident that the Attica staff would be supported if they refused to follow Curtin’s order.101

 
Schwartz and Hellerstein were incredulous. Even though they had with them “some twenty lawyers and twenty doctors, we were told that they would not obey the order, and at 3:30 in the morning that was confirmed.”102 Hellerstein set out to find a phone so that he could call Curtin to tell him that his order was being disregarded. Curtin was, he could tell, “very shaken up” that prison officials were so blatantly refusing to follow a federal court order. But Curtin didn’t see that there was anything he could do until the next morning at the hearing he had scheduled.103 Tired and dispirited, the lawyers marshaled their energies to try to prepare their arguments for later that morning.104

  PART V

  Reckonings and Reactions

  ROBERT DOUGLASS

  Robert Douglass had spent a long week trying to help Governor Rockefeller resolve the situation at Attica and somehow, even though the uprising was over, the crisis was not. Douglass had worked for the governor as an attorney since 1965. He had an impressive pedigree. Born in Binghamton, New York, he had graduated with distinction from Dartmouth and earned an LL.B. from Cornell Law School. He then took a position with a prestigious law firm before coming on board with the Rockefeller administration. Douglass loved New York and knew its laws inside and out. It was an honor to serve as the governor’s eyes and ears at Attica. He felt that Rockefeller’s team on the ground had done a good job of trying to broker a peaceful settlement, and, when that had proved impossible, retaking the prison with as little loss of life as possible.