In the listening post, investigators from the D.A.’s office took in the conversation over headphones. They heard Robles vomiting and kept listening.
“Make your peace, Ricky. Make your peace with God and man…. If you don’t confess and show remorse, it will destroy your mother.”
Robles started whimpering. “Please. Please call my lawyer. Here’s his card with a telephone number on it.”
The detectives ignored the card. “We don’t want to see you go to the chair, Rick. Confess.”
Now Robles began to cry. For all the tears and dry heaves and whimpering, though, he didn’t say much, just two things: he wanted his lawyer, and he needed a fix.
They went on like this the entire afternoon. At one point, the detectives brought Nathan and Marge Delaney into the room to help convince Robles to confess. Robles started sweating and twitching, as though he were crawling out of his skin, but the detectives were insistent: “Come on, Ricky, this is your only chance. You wanna destroy your mother?”
“I wish I could die.” Three things now: lawyer, fix, die.
“I’m a Catholic, just like you are,” said Cavanaugh. “After you have confessed and made your peace with God, then we’ll let you see a priest.”
Again Robles pleaded for a fix.
“Confess. Confess and you will have your taste.”
“Please. Oh please, please, please. I just want to die.”
As desperate as he was, Robles wouldn’t crack. At 6:11 P.M., the tapes stopped. The detectives took him down to the Twenty-third Precinct station house and placed him in a second-floor interrogation room. His lawyer, Jack Hoffinger, had arrived at the precinct, but he was kept at bay. Another detective—Sean Downes, who knew Robles from his previous burglary arrests and had once even visited him in youth detention—brought coffee and sandwiches into the room. Robles tried to eat, but he spit the sandwich into a wastebasket. “It’s making me sick,” he told Downes. Sugar, that’s what he needed. He loaded up the coffee with four or five packets of sugar and slurped it down.
Weary and sick, seated across from a familiar face, Robles finally unburdened himself. “I went to commit a lousy burglary and wound up killing two girls,” he said.
He told the detective he’d been able to scale the wall outside the Wylie-Hoffert apartment because he was a skilled cat burglar. He climbed in the kitchen window, planning to steal whatever money and valuables he could find and sell them to buy dope. When he got inside, though, he came across Janice Wylie, who’d just come out of the shower, half-naked.
“Then what?” asked Downes.
“Well, she pulled the sheet around her. She said, ‘Please don’t hurt me. Take anything you want.’”
“Okay.”
“Then I decided to hump her.”
“Okay.”
“She had a rag on. She had on a Tampax. She pulled it out of her pussy, or I did. I’m not sure. She said, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’”
“What did you do then, Ricky?”
“I walked her into another room. I got some Noxzema from the medicine cabinet and I put it on her ass and tried to fuck her in the ass. She complained that it hurt.”
“So what did you do?”
“I made her put it in her mouth.”
Then the girl’s roommate came home and walked into the middle of things. Unlike Janice Wylie, who’d been terrified and compliant, Emily Hoffert talked back. Realizing he’d have to tie the two girls up, he grabbed Hoffert and held her at knifepoint while he tore strips from a sheet that he used to bind the girls together. That’s when Emily Hoffert said to Robles, “Leave my glasses on. I want to get a good look at you so I’ll be able to give a description to the police.”
At that, Ricky snapped. He clubbed both girls over the head with a Coke bottle. Then, in a violent frenzy, he hacked them both to death—so forcefully that the knife handle broke off in his hand. “I think I hit a rib,” Ricky told Downes.
That was it: the cops had what they needed. Now that Robles had confessed, he was allowed to meet with his attorney.
Late that night, at the Twenty-third Precinct station house, Ricky Robles was led downstairs by two detectives into a swarm of reporters and bright camera lights, just as George Whitmore had been at the Seven-Three in Brownsville more than a year before. Hey, Ricky, look over here! Ricky, Ricky, one time, this way, Ricky! Hey, Ricky, you don’t have to smile—over here!
Ricky Robles, the police announced, had confessed to the Career Girls Murders. The NYPD now had two conflicting confessions to the most notorious crime of the decade.
TO STANLEY REIBEN and the legal team now working on behalf of George Whitmore, the arrest of Ricky Robles changed everything. The lawyers immediately called for a meeting with Aaron Koota, the Brooklyn D.A., and demanded that the murder charges against Whitmore in the Minnie Edmonds case be dropped at once. When Koota declined, Reiben decided it was time to call in the NAACP and identify the Whitmore case, once and for all, as a civil rights matter.
At a press conference at the NAACP’s national office in Manhattan, Reiben looked on as Ray H. Williams, chairman of the Brooklyn branch’s legal redress committee, announced he was drafting telegrams to U.S. attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor Wagner, and several other state and city officials calling for an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding Whitmore’s “confession.” The NAACP’s demands were reiterated in the pages of The Crisis, the organization’s in-house magazine, which noted, “In coming to the aid of George Whitmore Jr…. the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP continues a practice and policy of the Association as old as the organization itself.”
Rockefeller was one potential ally. His family had contributed money to civil rights causes in the South, and as governor he had the power to appoint an investigative body. But Nelson Rockefeller was a politician on the move; he had competed vigorously for the Republican presidential nomination the previous year and would likely run again in 1968. The governor responded quickly, via telegram, that Whitmore’s fate was the responsibility of “local authorities” and he would not get involved.
Even without the governor on board, the Robles arrest put the Wylie-Hoffert murders back on the front page. The apparent framing of George Whitmore also got some ink, but mostly in the back pages, a sideshow to the main event.
Whitmore’s defense team, now augmented by representatives from one of the nation’s most prestigious civil rights organizations, was reinvigorated. The case against George was revealed as a race case after all, the framing of a young Negro because he was a Negro. Whitmore’s predicament was elevated from a matter of court dockets and press speculation into the primary narrative of the era: not just a story about some poor kid forced to take the rap, but a story about the rising of the Negroes, their struggle for justice and civil rights.
One afternoon in late January, with the Wylie-Hoffert revelations appearing daily in the news, George met with his lawyers. Since his conviction at the Borrero trial Whitmore had been transferred from county jail to Sing Sing, up the Hudson River in Ossining, New York. Sing Sing was where they housed Old Sparky, the electric chair, and the symbolism wasn’t lost on Whitmore. George asked prison guards and fellow inmates: “Tell me, ’cause I got to know. What’s worse—the chair, gas, or lethal injection?” You don’t want the chair, he was told. And gas, well, apparently that caused the vital organs to expand, which was painful. “I decided to go with the lethal injection,” remembered George. “Figured, if and when the time came, that would be the easiest to take.”
At the visiting room at Sing Sing, Whitmore met with his defense team—Reiben, Miller, and Kaplan, along with Ray Williams from the NAACP. He already knew from the papers that Robles had confessed to the Wylie-Hoffert murders. But there was another wrinkle: now Robles, too, had recanted his confession, claiming he’d been coerced.
The lawyers came bearing gifts. The NAACP had set up a legal defense fund for Whitmore, and one of the
ir first purchases was a small but important one: a pair of glasses for their client. Few of Whitmore’s lawyers knew he had poor eyesight; George never talked about it. After noticing that Whitmore was having trouble reading a legal document, though, they arranged for an eye examination, which confirmed that he was near clinically blind.
In the visiting room, George received the glasses. He removed them from their case and put them on. He looked at the ceiling, the floor, various people in the prison visiting room. The corners of Whitmore’s mouth crinkled into a smile and his eyes lit up: for the first time in a long time, he could see what was going on around him.
[ seven ]
HARLEM NOCTURNE
IN LATE JANUARY 1965, Malcolm X was interviewed in a CBS television studio by correspondent Mike Wallace. It was a turbulent time in the fiery Negro leader’s life. Throughout the early 1960s, Malcolm had emerged as a singular force in the budding black liberation movement, which ran alongside and sometimes served as a counterpoint to the more mainstream civil rights movement. Malcolm X presented himself as a militant alternative to the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Malcolm ridiculed nonviolence as a tactic, saying, “It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks…. It doesn’t mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.”
More recently, Malcolm had become caught up in a nasty public feud with his former mentor in the Nation of Islam, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The previous year, Malcolm X learned that Elijah Muhammad had fathered numerous children out of wedlock with young female secretaries in the Nation of Islam. This was a flagrant violation of the tenets of the Muslim faith. The revelation caused a rift that culminated with Malcolm X leaving the Nation of Islam, traveling to Mecca, and finally forming his own organization, which he called the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). The split was vituperative and violent. Throughout 1964 and into 1965 there had been threats against Malcolm’s life. He was detested by the police and the establishment media, who saw him as an agitator; now he was resented by the Nation of Islam, who saw him as a traitor. In Life magazine, he was photographed holding a rifle and peeking out of the window of his house in Forest Hills, Queens, on the lookout for would-be assassins.
In his CBS interview, Malcolm seemed distracted—no surprise given the threats and turmoil swirling around him. But then Wallace asked him a question that brought his attention into focus. “Do you think the case of George Whitmore, the young Negro who may have been forced into signing a false murder confession, is an example of racial injustice?” asked the moderator.
“Yes,” said Malcolm. “For far too long black people in this country have been dealing with racist police. What happened to George Whitmore could have happened to me or any other so-called Negro in America.”
Malcolm X had spoken. In that moment, the case of George Whitmore was elevated from a local story into the annals of civil rights history.
Four weeks later, on the evening of February 21, Malcolm X stood at a podium inside the Audubon Ballroom on West 165th Street, in upper Manhattan. He had just begun to give a speech to a crowd of four hundred onlookers when a disturbance broke out in the audience. “Nigger, get your hand outta my pocket!” someone shouted. Amid the confusion, a man approached the stage, pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and blasted Malcolm X in the chest, sending his body flying backward. Two more men approached with handguns and unloaded on the prone Malcolm, hitting him sixteen times.
Pandemonium followed. Spectators jumped on three of the assailants, some shouting “Kill them!” Cops and medical personnel arrived on the scene. Malcolm X was bleeding profusely, his jaw locked in an odd rictus grin. His limp frame was loaded onto a stretcher and whisked outside, with uniformed cops pushing through shocked and agitated onlookers toward an ambulance. The civil rights leader was dead before he reached the hospital.
News of the assassination reverberated nationwide, but nowhere was it felt more deeply than in the country’s prison system. It was in prison that the slain “prophet” had made his transition from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. To Malcolm, prison had been a reality but also a metaphor, a microcosm of the black experience in America, and his teachings and example held a special resonance with black inmates. The Nation of Islam was well organized within the system, and the split between the Nation and Malcolm on the outside also occurred within prison walls. When news of the assassination broke, Bureau of Prison authorities feared it might touch off a riot.
Dhoruba Bin Wahad was at Comstock when he heard the news. He was stunned. Dhoruba had been reading the speeches and teachings of Malcolm X, and he’d been thinking of becoming a warrior in Malcolm’s army after he got out of prison—though Dhoruba’s admiration didn’t extend to the Nation of Islam. “I never had any interest in joining the Nation,” he recalled, “even though they were the preeminent black organization in prison. I didn’t feel anybody in the Nation was a free thinker. A person should be able to explore and question and validate his core philosophy, but that wasn’t happening in the Nation. It was too dogmatic. But Malcolm was different. He wasn’t a myrmidon; he wasn’t just a bow tie, a talking head. He was funny; he was witty; he was analytical.”
In the days after the assassination, a fight broke out in the cafeteria at Comstock between followers of the Nation and followers of Malcolm. After an inmate was shanked, the prison was put on lockdown; other New York State facilities followed suit.
At the time, Dhoruba and most other black inmates believed that Malcolm had likely been killed by some combination of his enemies in the Nation, acting in consort with the NYPD and/or the FBI.
Prison offers few opportunities for inmates to pursue an idea, to take a belief or emotion and put it into action. For a young man like Dhoruba—full of restless energy, looking to define himself—the mind becomes the receptacle for all rebellious impulses. It occurred to Dhoruba that the best way to honor the legacy of Malcolm X was to think like Malcolm X, to take his message and apply it to his daily reality. And so began the next phase of Dhoruba’s education. Under the auspices of Mjuba and other Muslim prisoners in the Box, he converted to Islam. He began classes in Swahili. And he changed his name from Richard Earl Moore, his birth name, to Dhoruba al-Mujahid Bin Wahad. In Swahili, dhoruba means “he who is born in the storm.”
During his stints in general population, Dhoruba spent much of his time in the library. The library was a window into an alternate reality. Dhoruba read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon; the historical novel Exodus by Leon Uris; novels on Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan; and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Much of Dhoruba’s reading was political in nature. Prison became a think tank for Dhoruba, as it did for a generation of like-minded Negro inmates.
Being in general population could be numbingly dull. The daily routine might involve sweeping the gym floor, peeling potatoes in the kitchen, washing dishes, making license plates in metal shop. Inmates not assigned a job were put on “idle time,” which meant being in a cell twenty-three hours a day, with one hour of release in the morning for “yard time.”
Dhoruba was not a “model inmate.” He talked back to guards and fought with other inmates when he felt it was necessary. Much as he had rebelled against institutional authority in the military, he clashed with prison authorities and refused to play the “good Negro.”
I definitely had a bad attitude. I was a litigator. I would litigate any way I could. I wouldn’t let them get away with anything. If they locked me up for talking in line, I’d go through all the institutional procedures, administrative, segregation procedures. I would drag shit out for a month, for something I would have did seventy-two hours keep-lock time. I would contest it. Of course, I always lost. No, come to think of it, that’s not true; I won a couple, to the amazement of everyb
ody. But by then winning was usually a Pyrrhic victory, because while you’re fighting this disciplinary charge, you’re on lockdown. So when we finished after fighting for a month, they already got their pound of flesh out of your ass.
Around the time of Malcolm X’s assassination, Dhoruba was called before the New York State Parole Board. Parole hearings were a big moment for any inmate. If all went well, the board could cut time off a sentence or even release a prisoner outright. Some inmates dreamed about the moment of their parole review, practicing responses they’d crafted to convince the Man that they truly were repentant and rehabilitated, even if they were not.
Dhoruba had mixed feelings about his parole board appearance. Yes, he would have liked to have had his sentence reduced, but the process of submission involved was contrary to Dhoruba’s nature.
Still, he went through the motions. Donning a clean white shirt supplied by the Bureau of Prisons, he was taken to the prison’s administrative building, where he sat down in front of a panel of parole officers, five white men dressed in the bureaucratic uniform of the day: gray suit, white shirt, thin black tie.
“Mister Richard Moore,” said one of the men, “you come before us with a mixed disciplinary record. Are we to believe that you are remorseful for your behavior and ready to handle the pressures of civilian life?”
“First of all,” said Dhoruba, “I don’t go by Richard Moore no more. That’s a slave name. You can call me Dhoruba al-Mujahid Bin Wahad.”
The five parole officers looked at one another. “In any event,” the lead suit continued, “you had an incident at the Elmira youth facility, a physical confrontation with another inmate. Would you like to tell us about that?”
Dhoruba recounted a fight he had in the Elmira cafeteria, just months after his arrival there. “It was a matter of self-defense,” he explained.
The Savage City Page 15