Blood in the Water

by Thompson, Heather Ann

  Two girls hold a vigil at the memorial to the Attica staff, on the anniversary of the retaking. (Collection of the author, undated photo)

  Many former hostages and surviving family members of hostages first learned of the prisoner settlement on a radio station, WBTA broadcasting out of Batavia, just twelve miles from Attica where so many prison employees now lived. WBTA radio personality John Carberry announced the news as soon as it broke. On that particular Saturday morning’s show, he had been planning to spend most of his ninety-minute segment covering Martin Luther King Jr. since the King holiday was around the corner. But no sooner had he read the settlement details than his producer, Deb Horton, got a call from a man she strongly suspected to be an Attica hostage survivor. He was upset. He wanted her to know how badly he and his fellow men “were screwed over by the state of New York.”7

  When the caller hung up, Deb Horton thought about it, and then called him back to ask if he would consider discussing this issue on the air.8 Then Horton made a decision that would change history. She would dedicate an entire live radio show to news of the prisoner settlement. She would broadcast it from the Signature Café in downtown Attica in the hope that many of the prison employee survivors and their families would attend to share their reactions and tell their stories.9

  The radio show happened five days after the prisoners’ settlement was announced. Deb was nervous about having enough people there to carry the show. To her surprise, however, almost two hundred crowded into the café and “everyone wanted to talk.”10 The one-hour broadcast that she had planned taped for more than two hours.11 Her husband, local public defender Gary Horton, who had come along that day, was troubled by the stories he heard. Despite what he and the rest of America had assumed, Attica’s hostage widows had been left to survive as best they could, alone, and all of them had suffered mightily as a result. Post-traumatic stress clearly plagued many of the hostages who had survived, and their family members had suffered right along with them all of these decades. As remarkable as it might seem, this was the first time any of these people had shared their stories, even with one another.12 John Carberry was shocked by what was unfolding around him. As he told one fellow writer, “It’s one of those rare opportunities as a journalist where you suddenly find something that needs light…and it takes off on its own.”13

  That day at the Signature Café was life-altering for many there. When Christine Quinn Schrader, the middle daughter of slain CO William Quinn, had heard that the prisoners had been awarded money, she was “so outraged—outraged and betrayed by our judicial system,” that she had decided to come to the café just to vent. Once there, though, Christine was overwhelmed with emotion of a different sort.14 “For the first time in my life I got to meet some of these other families who had also suffered through this horrific event. It was like a support group, only thirty years too late. As the mayor, hostages, troopers, and family members spoke, I could not help but cry.”15 Christine’s mother, Nancy, and her sister Dee Quinn Miller attended too, albeit reluctantly. Miller was also furious that prisoners had gotten money from the state and, frankly, was so mad she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear any more about it. Ultimately she decided to go to the café only because, once there, she might learn more. She “wished someone could make them give the money to us since they took our dads’ lives.”16

  Dee Miller was surprised by how many people had shown up, and her mother was seeing people that she hadn’t laid eyes on in nearly thirty years. It was hard for her even to recognize the survivor families. Nancy Quinn thought she recognized the family of slain CO Edward Cunningham and some of the others, but it was all so overwhelming. For decades now no Attica survivor in her town had discussed anything related to the pain they had endured, and now here they all were in the same room. Suddenly Miller heard people whispering that former Attica hostage Mike Smith, the one who had been shot so badly across the abdomen during the retaking, was also there. She had no idea who Mike Smith was, but some of the others in attendance were clearly apprehensive about him. Miller eventually gleaned that Mike Smith wasn’t that popular with the other hostage survivors because they felt that he had been too friendly with the prisoners back when he worked at the prison and, recently, had also made public statements in support of the fact that they had finally gotten restitution from the state. He was also disliked because rumor had it that at some point in the preceding years he too had tried to sue the state for the gunshot wounds he had suffered. Turning against the state, biting the hand that fed so many residents of this area, was considered bad form. As Miller recalled, summing up the ugly gossip about him that filled the air around her that morning, “He wasn’t a state boy. They hated him for breaking rank. He was outspoken that the state had shot him. [He was stepping outside the bounds of] the good old boys club that was Attica.”17

  Most of the folks assembled at the Signature Café knew precious little about what had really happened in D Yard after the riot and they had uncritically accepted the state’s version of the retaking and rehousing. Dee Miller was one of these. As she later mused, “I knew nothing about Attica.”18 And so, when Mike Smith finally got up to speak—to much eye-rolling and sighing in the group—she found her head spinning. She realized that nothing was as she had thought it to be.19

  Mike Smith told the group that Attica had needed reforms back in 1971, and that the state had cared so little about the prisoners and about its own employees that it had gone in with guns blazing. The state had known that people would die, Smith said, and it had thereafter abandoned the surviving employees as well as the widows and kids of those who had been killed by State Police gunfire. As Dee Quinn Miller listened to Mike Smith recount his nightmare on the day of the retaking, and of all he had endured since due to his gunshot wounds, tears began rolling down her face. She suddenly saw that the prisoners and COs had both been sacrificed by the state and thus that they weren’t each other’s enemies.

  Hostage survivor Mike Smith (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)

  As Mike Smith spoke about not begrudging the prisoners for standing up to the state and, instead, standing with them so that all could get the restitution that they deserved, Dee Quinn Miller found her preexisting views about the Attica uprising and its aftermath crumbling. She also began to see why Mike “was targeted in the yard.”20 As she put it, “Michael was a real humanitarian and [that is why] he was resented.”21 As the show wrapped up Miller knew she had to meet Mike Smith. She walked over to him, introduced herself, and connected with him right away. As she remembered it, “We hugged each other and we cried.”22

  Dee Quinn Miller drove home after the broadcast overwhelmed by all she had learned. She now better inderstood the prisoners’ plight and no longer felt that they should not have received money.23 But now, her anger burned even hotter than it had before on behalf of the other survivors. Dee’s mother, Nancy, had had to take care of her, her little sister, and the new baby who was born soon after she buried her husband, and the state hadn’t compensated her for her trauma. It may have been “just” that the prisoners had been compensated, but to Dee Miller it was unjust that her mother still hadn’t received even a token payment from the state. As she put it, “I still remain without a father, as do the families of the inmates who were killed.”24

  Although not every hostage or hostage family survivor felt as magnanimously as Dee Quinn Miller and Mike Smith did about the prisoners’ right to a settlement, all agreed that the state had treated them abysmally and that it was time for them to come together as a group. A son of slain correction officer Edward Cunningham fumed when he thought about the fact that his mother had been abandoned by state officials despite promises that she would be cared for. “Russell Oswald (then-Commissioner of Correctional Services) came right to our house,” the younger Cunningham told a reporter, and “I remember him putting his arm around my mother and saying, ‘Helen, we’re going to take care of you.’ But they never did.”25

  Several months after th
e show on WBTA, the surviving hostages, widows of hostages, and hostage families decided to come together in an official new organization called the Forgotten Victims of Attica (FVOA)—one that local public defender Gary Horton, radio producer Deb Horton’s husband, would provide legal services for pro bono.26

  The very first meeting, called by former Attica hostage G. B. Smith, took place at the American Legion hall. Notably, Mike Smith wasn’t invited.27 When Gary Horton showed up at this meeting he really wasn’t sure about the best way to proceed. Horton had grown up in Batavia and, although his father had been a state trooper, the family had little connection with the regional prison system. Gary Horton had graduated from Hobart College the year that Attica erupted. When he chose a career as a public defender he did learn a little about Attica, but that was only because he was trying to prevent his clients from being sent there.28 Horton believed to his core that the hostage survivors deserved their day of justice with the state, but it had been hard for him to listen to so much vitriol directed at the prisoners that morning.29 And yet, Horton was heartened to see that, over time, many of the hostage survivors in Batavia and Attica were beginning to grapple with the hostility they felt toward the prisoners. Some like Don Almeter, G. B. Smith, and Dean Wright would never warm to the idea that the prisoners had received money. As Wright put it to a reporter, “Anyone who was a hostage for one day or one hour deserves at least what Frank Smith [Big Black] got.”30 Others, however, like Carl Valone’s widow, Ann, had worked through their anger. As Ann explained it, “First you get real angry at the inmates. Then you find out they acted more humane than the officials….We’ve never been able to heal.”31 As the FVOA grew, to between fifty and seventy members, twenty to forty of whom were meeting every Monday night, the group learned to make decisions by consensus. Dee Quinn Miller explained to one reporter: “These are all survivors…we each have our own beliefs. [Some] people [said]: ‘The [state] troopers were right. They went in. They did their job. They didn’t want to kill anybody.’ And you have people who say, ‘The Troopers sucked. They wanted to kill everybody. They didn’t give a rat’s ass for anybody’s life.’…But, you know, we are respectful of everybody’s opinion.”32 At the end of the day, Quinn Miller said, what the group wanted most was to be “acknowledged for who we are…and for the truth to be told.”33

  The FVOA’s most challenging task was figuring out how the employee survivors were going to get their own restitution from the state. Some members clung to the idea that they must first find a way to stop the prisoners from getting their money. The vast majority of members, however, wanted to devote all energies toward getting their own justice.34 A key step in this direction was to educate the public about what had happened to the hostage survivors after the retaking or, as the daughter of slain hostage Elmer Hardie put it, to let the public “know that everything that should have been done for them wasn’t.”35 To that end the FVOA sponsored “a forum on the riot’s consequences” at the nearby Genesee Community College on September 26, 2000.

  Mounting a successful public relations campaign on their own behalf was the easy part. Figuring out how they could pressure the state to give them damages as well was much more difficult. Debating this question tended to generate serious tensions in the group. The FVOA began discussing this question as Judge Michael Telesca was in his Rochester courtroom hearing prisoners’ searing stories of torture in order to decide how he would divvy up their award. Michael Smith as well as the entire family of slain hostage Carl Valone tried to suggest to the broader FVOA group that Telesca’s prisoner hearings presented a great opportunity for the organization. The FVOA could take a public stand in support of the prisoners and, in the process, levy enormous PR pressure on the state to offer them a settlement as well. Mike Smith had actually testified on behalf of the prisoners in Telesca’s chambers, and Jamie and Mary Ann Valone, the children of Carl Valone, regularly showed up in chambers to show their solidarity with the prisoners. Ellen Yacknin, who had become a senior attorney at the Greater Upstate Law Project in Rochester, was at an event held for the prisoners where she happened to see this trio from the FVOA, and she tried to talk them into joining forces.36

  Because the FVOA had already decided to make all of its decisions by consensus, however, the organization was clearly not going to work closely with prisoners. Although Mike Smith and the Valones would continue to support Attica’s former prisoners, and though Dee Quinn Miller would, in time, come to have a profound relationship with Frank “Big Black” Smith—and even to meet personally with Richard Clark and the other men who had carried her father out of Times Square to safety—the FVOA decided to go it alone. As Gary Horton put it, they decided to “raise money, rent a bus, and walk the halls of Albany to call attention to us….We held small press conferences. We walked office to office.”37 To make the most of its trips to the state capital, Horton asked Jonathan E. Gradess, the head of the New York State Defenders Association, to assist the FVOA. He knew all the players in Albany.38

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  Manipulated and Outmaneuvered

  That Attica’s surviving hostages and hostage families were left, by 2000, with few options for being heard was itself a product of how badly they had been treated by state officials way back in 1971. Right after the retaking they too had hoped to get justice via the legal system and, like the prisoners, they too had filed many individual claims against the state of New York. State officials, however, worked hard—behind the scenes and via the State Insurance Fund—to make sure that their suits would go nowhere.

  As a state employee, any survivor of the Attica retaking, or any widow or dependent of someone killed in the assault, was likely entitled to some sort of state or federal compensation benefit. According to representatives from the state back in 1971, “in the case of an employee who dies in service not as the result of an on-the-job accident, the state provides through the Employees Retirement System a benefit of three times annual salary.”1 There was also the Social Security Death Benefit for the families of the slain hostages as well as various disability benefits, including workman’s compensation, for those who managed to survive the assault.2 Attica’s victims were even able to seek benefits such as overtime pay “for all the hours they were in captivity.”3 But while meager Social Security payments did come through for some of them, most had no clear sense of what was happening vis-à-vis the monies they might be owed by their employer, the state of New York.

  Right after the retaking, as the dead hostages were being buried and the wounded were healing, all any hostage survivor or family member really knew was that Oswald had promised to take care of them. The commissioner had actually visited some of the wounded COs to assure them that they could take up to six months off and would still get their salary. He said much the same to the CO widows—the state would also make sure they were taken care of.4 And, sure enough, within a very short period of time state-issued checks began arriving at the houses of the surviving hostages and hostage widows alike.

  Eugene Smith was one of the surviving hostages who was thrilled to get his first check of ninety-five dollars since he was still an emotional wreck and was hardly ready to go back into the prison to work.5 Dee Quinn Miller’s mom was equally thankful when she began getting checks for $112 every two weeks.6 Another Attica widow with a larger family than the Quinns began receiving $230 a month, and she too breathed a sigh of relief.7 The checks that all of these survivors had been given, ostensibly so that they might buy groceries or pay bills, looked exactly like the checks they had always cashed each month from the prison. However, they were not.8 Although Oswald had implied that the former hostages were on “a period of authorized leave,” and the widows had been told that this money was being given to them simply to ease their burden in a terrible time, all of these survivors were in fact being paid from workman’s compensation funds.9 This would have huge implications for their future.

  Receiving payments from the Workers’ Compensation Board was not, in itself, odd. When
terrible on-the-job events happened, investigators from the bureau were supposed to review the occurrences in question as quickly as possible so that they might “get the facts” necessary to fill out C-62 forms.10 Then hearings would be held to determine compensation, at which injured workers or widows would be present. But none of the standard procedures were followed with these Attica survivors. After some of the survivors had personal assurances from Oswald that they would be taken care of, “Representatives Robert Knight and Leonard Mann of the State Insurance Fund” tried “to do everything possible to expedite payment” to them.11 And so, without formally filing for workman’s compensation, the checks simply showed up soon after the retaking. Unbeknownst to the recipients, the instant that an Attica survivor or widow signed and cashed one of these checks, under New York state law they had “elected a remedy,” which meant that they could no longer sue the state for damages.

  This is exactly what Attica’s survivors had hoped to do. Although they were grateful for the small checks they had been receiving, hostage survivors and surviving family members were barely making it and thus were also interested in filing damage suits against the state in the Court of Claims. Ultimately there were twenty-eight such individual claims and each sought damages on grounds that the state used excessive force in the retaking, which had led to death and injury, and that the state had failed to protect its own employees on the job.12 None of these plaintiffs were much aware of what the others were doing. Each was isolated, just trying to get some help for their particular family. Determined to help these individuals, two attorneys out of Buffalo, William Cunningham and Eugene Tenney, began a decade-long process of trying to get these cases to trial. Cunningham’s cases, collectively, sought “more than $15 million,” and Gene Tenney worked as well to get substantial damages for twenty-two more hostage plaintiffs in his cases.13