The Savage City

by T. J. English

  At first, George was able to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Blondell Dantzler, his aunt and uncle, in their cramped apartment on Hopkinson Avenue. But the Dantzlers often had other guests, and on those nights George had to look elsewhere. Sometimes he was able to sleep on a sofa at one of his brothers’ apartments, though they too often relied on the kindness of family and friends for a place to stay. Occasionally, George was able to sleep at the apartment of Beverly Payne, his sometime girlfriend. A seventeen-year-old high school student, Beverly lived on Hopkinson Avenue with her mother in a three-room railroad flat.

  On the night of April 23, 1964, Whitmore had been hoping to stay at Beverly’s, but her mother wasn’t having it. The mother did not approve of her daughter’s relationship with an unemployed grade-school dropout from New Jersey who sometimes enticed Beverly to skip school for the day and hang out with him. After George spent a few nights on a sofa in the front room, she laid down the law: no more overnight stays for him.

  George spent most of that day with Beverly, but by nightfall he’d gone looking for a place to stay. Reluctant to trouble his aunt and uncle, he headed for an apartment building at 191 Amboy Street where his brother Gerald was staying with a cousin. George himself had stayed there before, but he didn’t have a key, and his cousins didn’t have a phone, so when George arrived at the apartment he had no way of knowing whether anyone would be home. This time no one was home, so George did what he had done before under the circumstances: he walked across the street to an almost identical tenement at 178 Amboy, where the front door lock was usually broken. Entering the building, he walked to the rear of a musty ground-floor hallway, wrapped his coat around himself, and burrowed into a small space underneath a stairwell. This would be his home for the night.

  He awoke around 7:00 A.M., stiff and groggy from a night of little sleep. He stumbled out into the daylight, all nineteen years of him, gangly, pimple-faced, a veil of grime on his clothes and face. It took him a while to remember that he’d promised to meet his brother Gerald in front of a Laundromat on Sutter Avenue that morning. He quickly shuffled on over to Sutter, one block away, where he immediately spotted the familiar face of a cop by the name of Isola.

  Early the previous morning, George had been standing at the same spot in front of the same Laundromat when he was approached by the same cop, Patrolman Frank Isola. The cop asked him why he was there. George willingly gave his name and told the officer he was waiting for his brother to take him to a day job at a salt-packing plant. He watched the cop jot down the information in a notepad. George didn’t mind; he was eager to help.

  “I know why you’re asking me these questions,” said George.

  “Oh?” said the cop. “Why?”

  George explained that the night before he’d been walking home from a pool hall when he heard shots and saw a guy running along Bristol Street with a cop in pursuit. “What was the shooting all about?” asked George.

  Officer Isola explained that a woman coming home from work had been assaulted in the street.

  “How low can some people get?” said George.

  The cop asked George a few questions about what he’d seen. George explained that the guy being chased had disappeared into a building on Amboy Street. George even volunteered to show Officer Isola the building, which he did. Isola didn’t bother to write down the building’s address, but he did find it noteworthy that George had witnessed the assailant running away. From a street call box the patrolman called his sergeant, who minutes later pulled up in a squad car. Isola gave the sergeant a report. Without even getting out of the car, the sergeant stuck his head out of the window and said to Whitmore, “Between you and me, it’s against the law not to tell us where a guy went to when we’re looking for him.”

  George was startled; that’s exactly what he had done. “I did tell you,” he said.

  The sergeant shrugged and then said to Isola, “You got this kid’s name and place of employment?” Isola nodded; the sergeant drove off. Not long after that George’s brother showed up and they headed off for a day of employment at the Schoenberg Salt Company.

  Now, here it was the following morning and Officer Isola was back. This time he was accompanied by another guy. The guy was built like a football player, with a barrel chest and biceps that stretched the fabric of his suit jacket. They both approached Whitmore. “Mornin’, Officer,” said George.

  The big guy spoke first: “Why did you lie to us?”

  George stuttered.

  Isola explained that the man with him was Detective Richard Aidala. “Your name is George Whitman, correct?”

  “No,” said George. “Not Whitman. Whitmore. George Whitmore Junior.”

  The cops looked at each other, then at George. They told him that yesterday they had gone to his place of business, the Schoenberg Salt Company. The manager told them there was no George Whitman working there. “Were you there yesterday?”

  George explained that he’d gone with his brother to the factory, but when he got there he realized he’d neglected to bring along his social security number, and without that number the company was unable to employ him for the day, so they’d sent George packing.

  Whitmore had answers for Isola and Aidala’s questions, but the two policemen didn’t seem satisfied. Aidala asked, “Would you be willing to come with us to the station house and answer a few questions?”

  “Why, sure,” said George. He wasn’t the least bit hesitant; indeed, Whitmore had seen enough TV cop shows that he was actually excited by the prospect of helping with the investigation.

  The Seventy-third Precinct station house was located near the intersection of East New York Avenue and Rockaway Avenue. It had the look of a Second World War bunker, an imposing redbrick and slate building constructed at the turn of the century in a style known as French Fortress. Like most public buildings in this part of Brooklyn, it had seen better days; there was chicken wire over the windows, a crumbling facade, and weeds sprouting from cracks in the front steps and surrounding sidewalk.

  Whitmore was brought into the station house by Isola and Aidala. It was his first experience inside a New York police station. The harsh overhead fluorescent lighting seemed designed to make a person sweat. There was a sickly yellowish hue to the lighting: it had been years since the light fixtures had been cleaned or the walls painted, decades since the floor tiles had been replaced. The building’s few windows allowed little natural light to intrude on the institutional surroundings. George had the same feeling many civilians did when they entered this and other precincts in black Brooklyn: that it was the kind of place a person could enter and never be heard from again.

  Right away George got the sense that, despite what he’d been told, he hadn’t been brought to the station house for “routine questioning.” The cops inside looked at him like he was a criminal. Whitmore was taken upstairs and placed in “the cage,” a makeshift holding cell in the detective squad room. The two cops disappeared.

  Damn, thought George, why they treatin’ me like this? What’d I do?

  The two cops returned. Detective Aidala took George into another room and told him to stand. Unbeknownst to Whitmore, in an adjacent squad commander’s office, Patrolman Isola and a woman named Elba Borrero were awaiting his arrival. It was Elba Borrero, a twenty-five-year-old Puerto Rican woman, who had been assaulted on Bristol Street two nights before.

  Isola instructed Borrero to look through a peephole in the wall at a person she’d been told was a suspect. Borrero was a small woman, barely five feet tall; she couldn’t reach the peephole until the cops stacked some phone books for her to stand on. She peeked through the hole and said, “That’s the man.” Then she thought about it for a moment and said, “I want to be sure. Can I hear his voice?”

  Whitmore was instructed to say, “Lady, I’m going to rape you; lady, I’m going to kill you.”

  When George said the words, Borrero began to tremble. It took the cops twenty minutes to calm her down. “He’s the one,” she s
aid.

  George was brought into the squad commander’s office to face Elba Borrero. He’d heard her through the door claiming he was the person who assaulted her. “Ma’am,” he said, “you makin’ a mistake. I never seen you before in my life.”

  The woman recoiled in horror; she was immediately led out of the room.

  Whitmore stood dumbstruck. The odd confluence of circumstances that had brought him to this moment had fallen like dominoes: if Whitmore hadn’t chatted amiably with Officer Isola the previous morning, volunteering information about what he’d seen on Sutter Avenue, he probably wouldn’t be standing in the precinct house at this moment. If the officer had copied down his name correctly as Whitmore, not Whitman, Isola and Aidala wouldn’t have concluded that George was a liar and therefore worthy of suspicion. If George hadn’t been a meek and pliable person—a blank slate—he might not have intrigued Isola and Aidala as the ideal suspect, a wayward Negro boy you could pin crimes on and no one would ever know or care.

  There is an expression cops use when they have a suspect who fits the profile of a perpetrator they’re looking for: “I like him for that assault,” they’ll say. “I like him for this murder.” Officers Isola and Aidala liked George Whitmore. They liked him a lot. In fact, they thought he fit nicely into another case that was being investigated in the Seventy-third Precinct—the murder of a woman in a Brownsville alley two weeks earlier.

  The cops immediately called the lead investigator on that case and summoned him to the precinct. In the meantime, George needed to be softened up. The three of them—Isola, Aidala, and Whitmore—were in the squad commander’s office with the door closed. As Whitmore recalled:

  The detective kept on saying that I was suppose’ to have raped this lady, and then he started punchin’ on me…and I kept telling him that “I don’t know anything about this,” and at the same time the officer came in and he was rollin’ up his sleeves…and he came over and started punchin’ on me, too. He had a big ring on his finger, and that ring kept hitting me in the chest, in the same spot, over and over. Then they stood me in front of a chair, and every time I said, “I never seen this lady before,” I got knocked into the chair until I thought the chair was gonna break underneath me. I told them, “If I told you that I did do what you said I did, I’d be lyin’.” They called me a liar and kept beatin’ on me. So I just broke down and said, yes.

  After thirty minutes, Detective Joseph Di Prima, the man from the homicide squad, arrived in the squad room.

  Di Prima knew what to do: it was called “the Mutt and Jeff routine,” or “good cop bad cop,” part of a detective’s official training as laid out in Fundamentals of Police Investigation, a manual by Charles E. O’Hara, a former NYPD detective. O’Hara described the tactic: “One interrogator, Mutt, is relentless and menacing, but the other, Jeff, is a kindhearted man…. He disapproves of Mutt and his tactics and will arrange to get him off the case if the suspect will cooperate.”

  Di Prima stepped into the role of Jeff. “Are you hungry, George?” he asked. “Can we get you something to eat?”

  Whitmore nodded; he hadn’t put anything in his stomach in a long time.

  The detective sent Patrolman Isola out for Italian rolls and containers of coffee for the four of them. While they waited, Di Prima made small talk with George, taking care to stay away from criminal matters. He asked George about his upbringing in Wildwood and about his life in Brownsville. He asked George about his father and his mother and about whether he’d been able to find much work in Brooklyn. Whitmore was relieved to talk about something besides the crime of which he’d suddenly been accused.

  The bread and coffee arrived. When George had finished his, Di Prima got down to business. The detective was there to ask George about a different crime—a murder—but he started with the Borrero incident, with the idea of working inexorably toward the other case. According to Di Prima:

  I asked him whether or not he was the person who attacked Mrs. Borrero. I asked him if what she said was true. He said, in the beginning, he said, he did not attack Mrs. Borrero, he didn’t know anything about it. I said inasmuch as Mrs. Borrero had identified him as her assailant there was no other thing for the police to do but to arrest him. If he wanted to tell me anything about it, it was his privilege, he didn’t have to speak to me if he didn’t want to. He thought it over a little while and then asked me, if a fellow was convicted for this type of crime, how much time would he do. I said I honestly didn’t know, the punishment for the crime would be limited to the courts and the judge. He then turned around and says, “Well,” he says, “I’ll tell you the truth. I want to tell you that I’m the one that Mrs. Borrero identified as—I’m the person that she identified as assaulting her.” I again reminded him that he didn’t have to speak to me about this if he didn’t want to, but if he wanted to tell me the truth, I would listen to him and I would relay that same truth to the court. He continued talking to me…. He told me later on, during the conversation, when I reminded him that there was nobody there that would hurt him, and I kept talking to him in a nice level. I asked him was he afraid of me, he said, “No, you’re speaking to me better than anyone else has spoken to me in my life,” he said. “My father never spoke to me like that….”

  With George now on his side, Di Prima moved on to the murder case. It involved a forty-two-year-old Negro woman named Minnie Edmonds who had been sexually assaulted and brutally stabbed to death in an alley near Chester Street. As the detective would later tell it:

  When we were through with the Borrero case, I said to George Whitmore, “You mentioned Chester Street in your conversation with me, have you anything in your mind about Chester Street?” At first he said, “Well, the boys fight on Chester Street, you know there is a lot of jitterbugging going on.” I said, “This is nothing new to the police. We know about the jitterbugging. What is on your mind or have you anything on your mind on Chester Street other than the jitterbugging.” He said, “You mean about the woman that was hurt on Chester Street?” He said, “I hurt the woman who was hurt on Chester Street.” I said, “Do you care to talk to me about it?” He said he would….

  Whitmore, of course, had a different version of his conversation with Detective Di Prima. George would contend that he knew nothing of these crimes other than the information given to him by the policemen. He did admit that, after the physical abuse he’d taken from Isola and Aidala, he’d begun to fear for his well-being. From that point on his goal—if he had a goal—was to tell the cops whatever they wanted to hear so he could get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

  Occasionally Isola and Aidala came into the squad commander’s office to listen in on Detective Di Prima’s interrogation. Everything was going well. Di Prima fed Whitmore the details: You approached the woman from behind, you put a knife to her throat and said, “I want to touch your pussy, I want to rape you. Be quiet or I’ll fucking kill you, bitch.” You tore her panties off and tried to rape her, but she began screaming. So you cut her with the knife.

  Di Prima was careful not to say that George had murdered the woman: that was part of the strategy, to get Whitmore to admit to the facts before he had any idea that he was admitting to murder.

  George went along with everything. He was so pliable that the policemen could hardly believe their good fortune. He was a blank slate, an empty vessel to be filled with all the crimes they could make stick.

  There was one problem: Whitmore was saying “yes” and “okay” to virtually every detail of the Edmonds murder fed to him by Di Prima—but what about the weapon, the knife he’d used in the attack?

  George wanted to help; he wanted to satisfy the cops so that maybe they’d let him go. But he didn’t know what to say about the knife.

  At this point, Patrolman Isola entered the room and listened to Di Prima questioning George about the knife. Isola left the room, went to his locker, and returned with a knife. It was metallic, with a black handle and the image of a greyhound on both sides
of the handle. “Was it anything like this?” Isola asked Whitmore.

  George nodded.

  The cops were excited. George had identified a knife, but not the knife. They wanted to know what he did with it. As George remembered it:

  They kept on insistin’ that I had a knife, which I kept telling them that I had no such knife, and they made a statement that this knife would be the only thing that would help me, and they need it, they wanted to find it. So I told them that I had lost a knife, and I didn’t know where it is, and they just insisted, so I told them that I hid it….

  “Where?” asked Detective Di Prima. “Show us.”

  George began to sweat. His first thought was that he didn’t want his family or relatives to know where he was and what was happening; he was embarrassed. He could think of only one place to direct the cops where he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew: his “home” under that stairwell in the tenement building on Amboy Street.

  Together with Detectives Di Prima and Aidala and another officer acting as driver, Whitmore was loaded into the back of a squad car. They drove through the streets of Brownsville to the building at 178 Amboy Street. There, George led the detectives inside and showed them the spot under the stairs where he’d slept the night before. Detective Aidala got down on his hands and knees and swept his hands around in the dark space. He found some debris, but nothing else. “You look,” the detective said to George.