It was a gray and drizzling day. When Dhoruba went out to the yard, he saw a man huddled under an awning to stay out of the rain. The man was his father.
Dhoruba had never had any real relationship with the man who had brought him into the world—though back when he was still little Richard Moore that had never seemed like a major issue. Collins Moore, known to his friends and associates as Cokey, was a bona fide street character, a neighborhood fixture Dhoruba referred to as a “slickster.” Out on the street, his hair was conked, and he wore the zoot suits of his youth. He was a talented dancer, popular with the ladies. But he was also a heroin addict whose habit diminished his status in the underworld, making him more of a street hustler than a full-fledged player.
Pops Moore was only in his midforties when Dhoruba found him in the prison yard, but he seemed withered. The father looked at the son and blinked; it took him a moment to recognize his own blood. Dhoruba remembered:
The meeting was kind of routine. That’s the odd part about these abnormal encounters; they can sometime seem mundane. We just started talking about simple stuff, like what did you get busted for, when are you getting out, et cetera. I believe he was in there for boosting, probably to support his habit. Eventually the conversation swung over to family matters, my grandfather, cousins, and all that.
In childhood, Dhoruba’s view of his father had been colored by the constant negative comments made about him by his mother’s family. “That man is no good,” his aunts and grandparents would say whenever the name of Collins Moore was mentioned. As a boy, Dhoruba sometimes saw his father working the streets or coming out of a bar, a shadowy figure with a bebop strut. Young Dhoruba wanted to approach the man and ask, “Pops, why they talk so bad about you?” But he was just a kid, without the courage to approach this unfamiliar street hustler they said was his father.
Dhoruba didn’t bring it up now, either. It was Cokey Moore who broached the subject with his son. “You a young man now,” he told Dhoruba. “So let me explain why I wasn’t around much when you was little.”
Over the course of three days in the prison yard at Green Haven, Old Man Moore told Dhoruba how he met his mother in Harlem. The mother’s family were hardworking immigrants, “old-school West Indians, very clannish and family oriented.” Moore was from Georgia, the southern slave tradition, with its legacy of bullwhips, lynching, and familial decimation. To the mother’s family, Moore was a lazy malcontent with the heart of a hustler. “They never could accept me,” he told Dhoruba.
The breaking point came in 1944, right around the time Dhoruba was born, when Collins Moore decided to join the army. He was motivated in part by a desire to show his wife’s family that he could be somebody. The wife’s family came from a military tradition: her father had been a merchant marine and her brother—Dhoruba’s uncle—had been a war hero who died in combat during a rescue mission. The uncle’s death had been a touchstone event in the family history; a plaque commemorating his service and death during the Second World War was on a wall in the house. It was one of the reasons Dhoruba had joined the service.
In 1945, however, Collins Moore went AWOL. To his wife’s family this was a disgrace to the memory of Dhoruba’s heroic uncle, and it was one of the factors that led to his separation from Dhoruba’s mother. From that point on, they acted as if Collins Moore had never existed—except when they wanted to curse his name.
Hearing this side of the story for the first time, Dhoruba felt an unexpected emotional connection with his father. The surroundings only added to the sense of intimacy: it took a prison encounter for Dhoruba to learn his family’s secrets, the undercurrents that had shaped his African American family and set him off on his own rebellious course.
“I’m glad you told me,” Dhoruba said to his father. “I never knew the whole story.”
“Well, now you know,” said Pops.
Their time together was brief. Three days after Dhoruba first met Collins Moore in the yard at Green Haven, he got into an altercation in the mess hall. It wasn’t a serious incident—there weren’t even any punches thrown—but Dhoruba’s disciplinary record was so bad that any small event was enough to get him hauled off to the Box. He would spend the remainder of his sentence there in isolation, with no library, limited rec time, and only one hour a day outside the unit. He was a twenty-year-old male entering into manhood, a manchild serving out his time as ward of the state. He would spend the remainder of his sentence fixating on one thing: his release date.
GEORGE WHITMORE WAS also in prison. Since his last legal proceeding he’d been housed at the Brooklyn House of Detention, with easy access to the courts. That was the cycle that defined his weekly routine: prison to court, court to prison. Like Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Whitmore found himself surrounded by mostly African American inmates and white guards, escorted from one institution to another by court officers and armed marshals, handcuffed, searched, told to “sit right there” or “stand right there” until further notice. Unlike Dhoruba, though, George had no release date to look forward to. Not even his lawyers knew for sure how his future would play out. He was told not to lose hope, which was, of course, the battle cry of the era. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders implored their followers to “keep hope alive.” Hope had become the placebo of an entire generation.
In the public arena, Whitmore’s case had become a potent symbol of injustice. In May 1965, as the New York State Senate legislators prepared to vote on whether to abolish the death penalty, one legislator declared: “This is the year of Whitmore.”
Bertram L. Podell, the Brooklyn assemblyman and attorney who spearheaded the initiative to outlaw capital punishment, used the Whitmore case as Exhibit A. In introducing the bill, he told his fellow senators: “A sixty-one page, completely detailed confession was manufactured and force-fed to Whitmore. On the basis of this confession, this defendant not only could have been, but probably would have been executed. I don’t have to highlight the terrible effect Whitmore’s execution would have had if the falsity of his confession and the tactics used in securing it had come out after the switch had been pulled, instead of before.”
It was a watershed in the history of capital punishment in New York. State legislators had introduced legislation to do away with the death penalty ever since it was introduced in 1948, but every year the bills had failed. With the story of George Whitmore in the ether, though, the State Senate dramatically reversed its position, voting 47–9 to eradicate capital punishment in New York. In June, the bill was signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
In another bill, legislators challenged the state’s practice of employing well-heeled Blue Ribbon juries, which tended to find against impoverished defendants. Using the Minnie Edmonds murder trial as an example, proponents of the bill argued that Blue Ribbon juries “perpetuate a systematic exclusion of women, Puerto Ricans and Negroes…thereby making it a near-mathematical certainty that a defendant would be tried by a lily-white, all male jury.” The bill was approved later that year, and Blue Ribbon juries became a thing of the past.
The Whitmore case was like a virus that had entered the system through the usual channels but could not be easily expunged. Whitmore now had advocates who were altering the way he was perceived by the general public. The young man scorned as a “nineteen-year-old pimple-faced hoodlum” a year and a half before was now “the most celebrated wrong man in the history of the city,” according to the Herald Tribune. For groups like the NAACP, CORE, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and others, Whitmore was a cause célèbre, routinely cited in the press as a symbol of injustice. The newspapers, some of which had helped to frame Whitmore in the eyes of the public, took up his case on the editorial pages. When the NYPD announced it was launching an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Whitmore confession, the New York Times asked, “Can the police be relied on to investigate alleged misconduct by their own department?” It was a fair and logical question, but also a revolutionary o
ne: at the time it was unheard of for a newspaper to challenge the authority of the police.
BY THE FALL of 1965, the prosecution of Ricky Robles for the Career Girls Murders returned George Whitmore to the front pages. Among other things, the trial promised to be a referendum on police practices in New York City. The city’s bad cops had elicited a wrongful confession from the wrong man; its good cops had stepped in to correct their work and nail the true killer. The Wylie-Hoffert murder trial had been years in the making; it captured national attention and riveted New Yorkers with all the drama of a public tribunal.
The man on trial in that fall of 1965 was Ricky Robles, but the figure at the center of the storm was George Whitmore. For the Manhattan D.A.’s office to prove that Robles was the man who had murdered Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, they would also have to show that the Whitmore confession was erroneous. This meant that Whitmore himself would be called to the witness stand in yet another trial—this time for the prosecution. This was a complete reversal for George: in this case the Manhattan D.A. was his friend, the man who would show that his Brooklyn confession, at least with regard to the Wylie-Hoffert murders, was not to be believed. The defense attorney, on the other hand, had a vested interest in giving the impression that the Whitmore confession was accurate, that Whitmore and not his client, Ricky Robles, had committed the killings.
In anticipation of the trial, George was moved from the Brooklyn House of Detention to the Queens House of Detention in Kew Gardens, a newer and more hospitable facility. Assistant D.A. John F. Keenan, chief of the Manhattan D.A.’s Homicide Bureau, was handling the Wylie-Hoffert murder case. Keenan was a Hogan protégé, a fellow Irish Catholic, with the steely will and colorless personality of a devout public servant. He met with Whitmore once before the trial—in the presence of attorney Stanley Reiben—to discuss George’s testimony. Whitmore was startled by Keenan’s solicitous manner; it was the first time any representative of the D.A.’s office had treated him like a human being.
The trial had been under way for almost a month by the time Whitmore was called to testify, on the morning of November 12, 1965. George was twenty-one years old now. He had added some weight, his complexion clear, and he wore the black-rimmed glasses that were now a permanent fixture. He seemed more confident, perhaps because he was becoming familiar with the trappings of courtroom jargon and etiquette, or perhaps because this time he himself wasn’t on trial. He had nothing to lose.
Whitmore was anxious to convey exactly how he’d been tricked into signing away his life and freedom. He was feistier on the witness stand than he had been, more willing to impute nefarious motives to his police interrogators. During cross-examination, Robles’s cocounsel Jack Hoffinger read large sections of Whitmore’s “Q and A transcript” from the night he was arrested. “Were you asked these questions, and did you make these answers?”
“No, sir,” said George. “The question was asked, but I didn’t know, so they told me.”
“Who told you?”
“One of the detectives—I was asked what I saw. I said I was never in the house, that I was not in the building, so he insisted that when I went into the building and pushed the door open, the first thing I was supposed to have saw was soda bottles. Everything was suggested to me in this way.”
“Didn’t there come a time when [Assistant D.A.] Peter Koste came into a room, brought you in and Mister Koste himself asked you questions? Didn’t that happen?”
Whitmore paused; the lingering confusion and despair that had dogged him for the last two years returned, and he started to sweat. So many names, dates, events. No, he answered, Koste had only asked “my name and address.”
“Didn’t Mister Koste ask you these questions I have been reading from?” George was asked.
“No, sir,” he replied.
It was a curious moment: it had already been established at the trial that Peter Koste was the assistant D.A. who took down Whitmore’s statement. George had nothing to gain by lying about this detail. And yet he seemed so certain in his misremembrance. Later in his testimony, he denied that he had initialed the sketch drawing of the murder scene and various pages of Koste’s stenographic transcript, though the penmanship on these pages was clearly his.
Whitmore’s denial of such basic facts had little bearing on the case against Robles, but it did show how thoroughly George had been worn down. It appeared that he was no longer able to reconstruct what happened to him on that long night at the precinct in Brooklyn.
The trial’s big moment came when Assistant D.A. Keenan called Eddie Bulger to the stand. Bulger had conveniently retired from the police force a few weeks before the trial began—and then disappeared. The D.A.’s office had tried to track him down, but he had apparently gone into hiding. His daughter said he was on an “extended tour of the southern states.” A judge threatened to call Bulger’s son, a detective in the Seventy-eighth Precinct in Brooklyn, into court to reveal his father’s whereabouts. Two days later, Eddie Bulger responded to his subpoena.
Bulger strutted into court, tanned and cocky. If he felt he’d been forced to retire under a cloud, you couldn’t tell by looking at him. Eddie Bulger apologized to no one.
“Mister Bulger, have you ever seen me before?” asked Keenan.
“No, sir,” answered the former detective.
Keenan led Bulger through an outline of his police career, including the many commendations and promotions he’d received before his retirement, with full pension, after twenty-seven years of service. Bulger may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the time Keenan asked a seemingly innocuous question: “You have shaved with a razor, right?”
“I have an electric,” said Bulger.
Keenan then led the detective headlong into his “discovery” of an empty razor packet found in the bathroom of the Wylie-Hoffert apartment. “Do you know, Detective Bulger, that blades that come from dispensers have arrows on them, did you know that?”
Bulger was confused. “Arrows?”
He admitted that he’d never seen the actual blade found in the murder room—the blade used to slice sheets for tying up Wylie and Hoffert.
Keenan showed Bulger the evidence—a blade sealed in a glassine bag—and pointed out the telltale arrows. This proved that the blade came from a dispenser, not from a wrapped razor packet, as Whitmore had supposedly “confessed” to leaving behind in the bathroom.
Asked Keenan: “Did you know there was a razor blade dispenser in the bureau drawer in the room the girls were found in?”
At one time, Bulger had believed he knew everything there was to know about the Wylie-Hoffert case. “No, sir,” he answered, in a subdued voice.
“Now, when you question a suspect, Detective Bulger, are you always polite to them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You ask them what happened, you don’t feed them information?”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t tell them they did something, you ask them did they do something, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you speak in the tone of voice you speak to us here…polite, calm, when you question a suspect?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you remember questioning a certain window washer by the name of Eddie White?”
Hoffinger, the defense attorney, interjected: “I am going to object to this, Your Honor.”
The judge: “Objection overruled.”
Bulger answered, “I don’t recall.”
Keenan: “Do you remember questioning a young Negro man about twenty-four years of age, you and a Detective Branker of the Bronx Homicide Squad doing the questioning, in December, shortly after December sixteen of nineteen sixty-three?”
“Oh, we questioned a lot of people.” Bulger’s response was a tad too jovial; he would have known that he’d been working the Wylie-Hoffert case in that time frame.
Keenan showed Bulger a report on the incident that Bulger had made out and signed. “Does that re
fresh your recollection?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall questioning a Mister Eddie White?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember saying to Mister White, leaning across the desk in the presence of Sergeant Brent of the Twenty-third Squad, and hitting your hand on the desk, ‘You’re the guy who did this…. You saw the door and walked in, you saw the bottles on the floor and picked them up, and you saw Janice nude.’ Do you recall saying that?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you recall saying to Mister White then, ‘Alright, get out of here. But I’m not through with you yet.’ Do you recall saying any such thing?”
“No, sir.”
“You deny that happened?”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t deny that happened?”
“I do deny it.”
Keenan moved in for the kill. He held up the photograph of a blond girl that Bulger had taken from Whitmore’s wallet. The prosecutor asked the detective about his reaction when Whitmore told him he found the photo at a garbage dump in Wildwood. Bulger acknowledged that he told Whitmore he didn’t believe him.
Asked Keenan: “When you told him you didn’t believe him when he said that he got it from a dump in Wildwood, were you looking at his stomach? Did you notice his stomach moving in and out?”
Bewilderment rippled through the jury box and spectators’ gallery.
“I’m sorry,” said Bulger. “What do you mean?”
“Whitmore was a young Negro boy. Didn’t you tell Mister Koste and Mister Glass on July thirty, in this very building, that you can always tell when a Negro boy is lying by watching his stomach, because it moves in and out when he lies?”
The Savage City Page 19