The Savage City

by T. J. English

  By the early 1960s, the NAACP had more than fifty branches and close to ten thousand members, but signs of fissure had begun to appear within its ranks. The organization had long excelled at issues of legal advocacy and political lobbying, but in the late 1950s it was outstripped by a more activist movement devoted to the principles of direct action. Throughout the early civil rights era, NAACP leaders at the national and local levels had criticized Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council for engaging in direct conflict with the police. The rift seemed to be generational as much as tactical: as the civil rights movement heated up in the 1960s, the NAACP risked being viewed as old-fashioned and out of touch.

  In New York, the organization often clashed with CORE and other civil rights groups that had a younger membership and seemed to be moving toward a more vocal and rambunctious approach. It would take a few years for the fault lines to be clearly defined, but one thing was apparent: blacks looking to get involved in the civil rights movement would have many more organizations and points of view to choose from than they had only a few years earlier.

  And yet, when it came to calling public attention to an issue—or to providing free legal assistance to victims of injustice—no Negro rights group was more formidable than the NAACP.

  At the local level, the NAACP had been slow to rally around the Whitmore case. In part, the organization had hesitated because of the heinous nature of the Wylie-Hoffert murders: the media attention surrounding the killings, along with Whitmore’s portrayal as a “drifter” and “loner,” had created a broad sense that he was probably guilty of something. Even if his connection to the Wylie-Hoffert murders had been cooked up by detectives—as a discerning observer might have surmised—he’d “confessed” to two other major felonies, including the murder of a black woman.

  Only after Ricky Robles was indicted for the Wylie-Hoffert killings did the NAACP take an active interest in George Whitmore’s case. Ray Williams and Norman Johnson, an attorney with the organization’s Legal Redress Committee, asked to sit in as part of Whitmore’s defense “as observers to determine whether the rights of the defendant were in any way impaired because he is a Negro.”

  Whitmore needed all the help he could get. His upcoming trial for the murder of Minnie Edmonds was deadly serious; if convicted, he’d be headed for a date with Old Sparky.

  For weeks before the trial, the NAACP lawyers and the rest of Whitmore’s defense team had been trying to pressure the Manhattan D.A.’s office to drop the Wylie-Hoffert murder charge. It seemed to defy logic, not to mention the dictates of fairness, for the D.A. to leave these charges hanging over Whitmore’s head after announcing publicly that another suspect had been indicted for the murders—especially when Whitmore had another murder trial pending. If the Borrero jury knew that Whitmore had been charged with the notorious Career Girls Murders, surely the Edmonds jury would too. How could he possibly get a fair trial?

  The behavior of D.A.s Hogan and Koota and the other prosecutors involved in Whitmore’s legal travails was telling. Although the lead prosecutors remained intransigent, a few anonymous sources within the D.A.’s office had begun to voice doubts. Despite an in-house memo from Hogan warning that anyone caught talking to the press about the Whitmore case would be fired, one assistant D.A. told a Times reporter, “I am positive that the police prepared the confession for Whitmore…. I am also sure that the police were the ones who gave Whitmore all the details of the killings that he recited to our office.” Another assistant D.A. said, “Call it what you want—brain-washing, hypnosis, fright. They made him give an untrue confession. The only thing I don’t believe is that Whitmore was beaten.” This unnamed source added, “If this had not been a celebrated case; if this hadn’t got the tremendous publicity; if this is what we so-called professionals call a run-of-the-mill murder, Whitmore might well have been slipped into the electric chair and killed for something he didn’t do.”

  Yet none of these prosecutors would give his name or be quoted on the record, for fear of retribution—a fact that spoke volumes about the dark cloud hanging over the case. A Negro kid had been indicted on trumped-up charges, in a way that implicated not only the cops who elicited the false confession, but also the assistant district attorneys who took down his statement; D.A.s Hogan and Koota; the other government litigators currently presiding over the defendant’s slow torture by prosecution; and the press, who had initially swallowed it all mostly without question. The entire system of criminal justice was implicated in the railroading of George Whitmore.

  THE MINNIE EDMONDS trial was similarly problematic. Edmonds, a forty-six-year-old Negro washerwoman, was last seen alive around 2:00 A.M. on April 14, 1964, when she left a tavern near her home in Brownsville. Her body was found stabbed and beaten, her clothes torn and disheveled, in a pool of blood just after dawn that morning in a tenement yard on Chester Street, just a block from where Elba Borrero was attacked ten days later. The cause of death was multiple stab wounds in the face, chest, and heart. At the time the body was discovered, the murder of Minnie Edmonds merited not one column inch in the city’s seven daily newspapers.

  The case against Whitmore for the murder was weak, almost nonexistent. The Brooklyn D.A.’s office contended that Whitmore had accosted Edmonds on her way home from the tavern, chasing her into an alleyway much like the one where Elba Borrero was assaulted. There Whitmore allegedly tried to rape the woman and brutally murdered her when she resisted. There were no witnesses, no circumstantial evidence linking Whitmore to the crime. All the prosecutors had was Whitmore’s confession.

  Realizing that the validity of Whitmore’s signed statement would come under scrutiny, D.A. Koota made a public show of launching an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the confession. His four-man team of investigators consisted of Assistant D.A. Lichtman, a Negro investigator from the D.A.’s office, and the two detectives who elicited the confession in the first place, Aidala and Di Prima. When asked by a reporter why the D.A.’s office would choose as investigators two detectives with a vested interest in upholding the confession, Lichtman said, “These two fellows were the lead investigators on the case. They were familiar with the leads and the area, particularly Dick Aidala…. I didn’t even think of taking anybody else.”

  Lichtman’s boss, Aaron Koota, concurred, adding in a separate interview: “Suppose [we] brought in other police officers and they found evidence to attack Di Prima and Aidala. Do you think they would have told us?”

  It was an astounding statement: the most powerful criminal justice official in the borough was justifying the use of the two least objective detectives he could find because they were the only ones he could trust.

  The Edmonds murder trial kicked off in Brooklyn Supreme Court, in a room down the hall from where the Borrero trial had taken place six months earlier. This trial began with a monthlong hearing—known as a Hundley hearing—in which Whitmore’s defense team sought once more to have the so-called confession declared inadmissible. One by one, the detectives took the stand and laid it all out, this time for Justice Dominic Rinaldi.

  At the witness table, flanked by his attorneys, Whitmore listened as the policemen came forward and told lie after lie. He had heard it all before, but with each court proceeding and each telling of the tale Whitmore developed a more pronounced sense of vertigo, a deeper feeling of descending into the rabbit hole. He remained without rancor, believing that some horrible mistake was being made, that he would one day wake up and it would all be over. But each day the earth gave way beneath his feet, and he felt his life slipping away.

  Midway through the hearing, on a Thursday afternoon, a sudden groaning sound came from the spectators’ gallery in the courtroom. George turned from his seat at the defendant’s table to see his father collapse into his mother’s arms. George Whitmore Sr. was taken from the courtroom, given air from an oxygen tank, and rushed to the hospital. The trial was postponed until the following Monday.

  Their di
fficult relationship didn’t mitigate Whitmore’s concern for his father, who had suffered a heart attack. George asked himself: What curse has befallen me that I stand falsely accused, publicly tarred and feathered, and now those nearest to me are struck down by a sudden affliction, as if by the Hand of God?

  It was another lost weekend for George, who languished in his cell at the Brooklyn House of Detention waiting to hear whether his travails had contributed to his father’s death.

  Whitmore Sr. recovered and was out of the hospital by Monday, but he never returned to the courtroom.

  The Hundley hearing ended badly. Supreme Court Justice Dominic Rinaldi declared that Whitmore had “confessed of his own accord, without coercion by the police.” His confession would stand.

  “Judge,” protested Stanley Reiben, “my client is doomed by this decision.”

  In the trial that followed, Whitmore himself took the stand. This time, he was more presentable; his new horn-rimmed glasses gave him an almost scholarly appearance. After twelve months of interrogations, depositions, incarceration, trials, hearings, and an endless recital of names, dates, times, and other details, however, Whitmore was like a punch-drunk fighter. He wanted to do well, to please his lawyers, but the process had worn him down.

  “Mister Whitmore, do you recognize the man standing in front of you?” Assistant D.A. Lichtman had become Whitmore’s Grand Inquisitor, a voice almost as familiar as that of his own attorney.

  George looked at the man standing nearby: a detective, probably. White man. No friend of mine. But George couldn’t be sure. “No,” he said.

  “Did you see him in the station house?” the judge interjected.

  George looked at the man again. “Not that I recollect.”

  “Did he ask you any questions about Wylie-Hoffert?”

  “No, sir…. He may have come into the room, because there were people coming in and out of the room all the time.”

  Even Whitmore’s attorneys were startled. The man standing in front of George was Detective Eddie Bulger, the very person who had so carefully tied him to the Wylie-Hoffert murders. The jury already knew that Bulger had been among the detectives who interrogated Whitmore; they knew he had been in the squad room. Detective Di Prima testified that Bulger helped Whitmore draw a diagram of the murder scene. To George, however, Bulger was just another face among the swirl of faces that had come in and out of the squad room. His inability to identify Bulger did not help his credibility as a witness.

  In questioning his client on redirect, Reiben sought to salvage Whitmore’s testimony by keeping it simple. “George, did you kill Mrs. Minnie Edmonds?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever killed anybody, George?”

  “No, sir.”

  In his final summation, Prosecutor Lichtman stood before the all-male Blue Ribbon jury of eleven whites and one Negro. The concept of the Blue Ribbon jury—one chosen on the basis of superior education and community standing—was a holdover from earlier in the century. Knowing that the jury members came from backgrounds far removed from the world of George Whitmore, Lichtman zeroed in on differences between the friends and relatives who had testified on Whitmore’s behalf and the “upstanding” collection of public servants who took the stand on behalf of the prosecution.

  “Now, gentlemen,” offered Lichtman, “you observed Detective Joseph Di Prima as he testified…. Can you conceive of a more sincere and a more forthright and a more genuinely direct witness than Joe Di Prima on that stand? I ask you, didn’t he fairly exude character? Didn’t he fairly exude, yes, even a fatherly-type sensitivity, somewhat of a compassion, almost a sense of regret as he sat there…telling you the truth?…What under the name of heaven could possibly impel father, grandfather, and husband Joseph Di Prima to lie this defendant into a Murder One conviction? The only evidence you might even consider would be the testimony of this admitted would-be rapist killer who sat on the stand…. I ask you to match your observations of the detective [and] of this defendant. Match your observations of George Whitmore, sitting on the stand…with your observations, your mental picture of Detective Di Prima.”

  Lichtman harped on these perceived class distinctions shamelessly. Of Beverly Payne, he said, “George Whitmore’s girlfriend, who is pregnant with another man, has a baby with another man. She lied.” After a young woman named Mary Goodwin, Whitmore’s cousin, testified that Detective Aidala cursed her for lack of cooperation—and that another detective, a Negro detective working for the D.A.’s office, called her “a goddamned nigger”—Lichtman dismissed her, even getting her name wrong: “Oh, Betty Goodman [sic], what can I say about Betty Goodman? With a different child out of a different stallion almost every year…. You size her up.”

  If race could not be used openly to hang Whitmore, class prejudice could.

  “You are not going to succumb to any thought…that this is a civil rights struggle in this courtroom,” said the prosecutor. “This is a struggle for justice in the American way.”

  To Lichtman, it was a simple case of good versus evil, public service versus the ghetto, but he could not hide the fact that his entire case was riding on one thing: the confession.

  “Confessions have been used as a weapon, a threat, as torture, and as punishment from the first day of man,” said Stanley Reiben during his summation. Like most attorneys, Reiben had strengths and weaknesses. He was thought to be average on research and attention to detail but excellent at courtroom oratory. He was particularly good at casting reasonable doubt on criminal charges by framing them in an expansive and sometimes breathtaking way.

  “[Confessions] have been used by the Romans against the early Christians. They have been used in the Spanish Inquisition; they have been used in the Salem witch trials; they have been used in Nazi Germany; they have been used in Russia, in Communist China; and they are still to this day the greatest weapon to get a man to turn…and not all of them were voluntary. That is the only thing that the people, Mister Lichtman, the prosecutor, is presenting to you, nothing else, not a shred, not a speck, not an iota of corroboration…. We must beware of the law being used as a weapon by those whose sworn duty it is to enforce the laws fairly and impartially, without fear or favor, rich or poor, black or white…. I would like to remind you that you promised me, and that’s all I ask, that you would treat this defendant as you would want to be treated. Someone else said it much better, much more simply, and much more lovingly, and I am going to ask that you please do unto George Whitmore as you would have others do unto you.”

  The jury began their deliberations. As the foreman later explained it, “The arguments were very bitter. The jurors never knew that the Wylie-Hoffert case was discredited. We knew that somebody else had been indicted for the murders. We assumed this guy was a partner of Whitmore. An accomplice. We thought Robles and Whitmore were in it together.”

  The jury deliberated for two days, but they were hopelessly deadlocked, with a vote of ten to two in favor of acquittal. The result was a hung jury, and no resolution for George Whitmore.

  Three days after the trial was over, Manhattan D.A. Hogan finally dismissed the Wylie-Hoffert charges against Whitmore. The New York Civil Liberties Union issued a statement criticizing Hogan for not dismissing the indictment before the Edmonds murder trial: “It is apparent that the only plausible reason for Mister Hogan’s inaction was to aid a fellow prosecutor—Brooklyn D.A. Aaron Koota—to convict Whitmore in the Edmonds case. We expect more of our public servants.”

  Whitmore first heard that the Career Girls charges against him were being dropped while he was washing dishes at the Brooklyn House of Detention. Given the circumstances, the news was anticlimactic. The Brooklyn D.A. had not yet announced whether or not they were going to retry George for the Edmonds murder. His ongoing nightmare was far from over.

  PRISON CAN BE a state of mind. The walls close in, the day is regimented by forc
e of arms, dreams wither and die. A convict can be crushed by the institutionalized monotony, whether the sentence is one year or twenty. And then there are the bars. As Malcolm X expressed it in his autobiography, “Any person who claims to have deep feelings for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons. But there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.”

  Dhoruba Bin Wahad had been behind bars for four years, and in that time he had received exactly one visitor—his mother, who came to see him at Coxsackie. The Bureau of Prisons made it so difficult and costly for a person of limited means to navigate the prison bureaucracy and get to the facility that visits were rare to nonexistent. While Dhoruba was behind bars, his past and future disappeared; there was only the present, a world of cement walls, cold floors, Caucasian authority, and chain-link fences topped with barbed wire.

  It was not part of Dhoruba’s makeup to see himself as a victim. Therefore, his time in prison was sometimes contentious. He fought with guards, stood up to the authorities, and showed little contrition when called before the parole board. Though his extensive reading in prison had raised his consciousness, the gang mentality was just as present in prison as it was on the streets of the Southeast Bronx. At Comstock, Dhoruba took part in a yard-gang rumble that got him thrown in the Box for an extended period. In late 1965, the prison administration decided to transfer him to a maximum-security facility. Dhoruba was inching closer to completing his five-year bit, but he was also sinking deeper and deeper into the system.

  Green Haven Correctional Facility is located near the town of Poughkeepsie, eighty miles north of New York City, not far from the New York–Connecticut border. Dhoruba was initially housed in the orientation compound, a kind of quarantine for new inmates. After a month, he was released into general population. He had been circulating among the other convicts for less than a week when a guard told him, “Hey, there’s somebody in the yard who wants to see you.”