The Savage City

by T. J. English

  George had one thing going for him: the skilled and dedicated counsel who had taken up his case. They believed firmly that Whitmore was innocent, but the laborious and costly nature of legal justice in the city was taking its toll. The Whitmore case was becoming a financial sinkhole, which led to resentments and infighting among the lawyers involved.

  Arthur Miller and his partner Ed Kaplan had put in long hours; in many ways, the case had come to dominate their practice. It was they who had brought in Stanley Reiben, the experienced trial lawyer; Reiben, in turn, had brought in the NAACP to try the case in the media, to make it a civil rights case. All of the lawyers involved had a vested interest.

  By the spring of 1966, Miller decided to limit the involvement of the NAACP, which he felt was attempting to hijack the case to suit its own agenda. On the other hand, Reiben became perturbed when he heard that money was being sent by sympathetic citizens to a “Whitmore defense fund” based out of Miller and Kaplan’s Brooklyn office. None of that money was making its way to Reiben. Tensions rose so high that Miller and Reiben could hardly be in the same room without yelling at each other. “I thought they might kill each other,” remembered Whitmore. “I couldn’t get them to agree on nothin’.”

  In March, Whitmore was called back to court yet again—this time to be retried for the attempted rape and assault of Elba Borrero. In the courtroom of Aaron F. Goldstein, down the hall from the location of the previous Borrero trial, the Brooklyn D.A.’s office presented much the same case they had sixteen months before. Elba Borrero took the stand and described the alleged assault on Bristol Street in Brownsville with the same level of detail as before: she was coming out of the el train station in the dead of night when a man came out of the shadows, followed and then jumped her, put a hand over her mouth, held something sharp to her throat, and attempted to drag her into an alley. As she recalled the incident, Borrero cried in all the same places she had cried in the previous trial.

  To the defense, it appeared as though she had been overrehearsed. On cross-examination, Reiben tried to break her down, asking if she had thought to scream when the attacker removed his hand from her mouth.

  “I didn’t dare. Not while he had something pointing at my neck. I didn’t dare.”

  When Reiben sought to bring out a minor discrepancy between her testimony now and at the previous trial, Borrero became combative. “I can’t remember every word I said, but I do know that I will never forget his face.”

  “Is your memory better now than it was on May 6 [the date of her appearance before the grand jury in 1964]?”

  “No, some things I have forgotten, some things.”

  “And some things you have remembered,” Reiben quipped sarcastically.

  Borrero pointed at Whitmore and yelled, “That is the man! I saw his face very clearly.” Then she broke down crying.

  After the prosecutor, Benjamin Schmier, finished presenting the D.A.’s case, it was the defense counsel’s turn. Reiben startled Justice Goldstein and Schmier by mounting no defense at all; he sat mute.

  Earlier, Reiben had argued vociferously that the evidence discrediting Whitmore’s Wylie-Hoffert confession must be allowed as evidence at trial. There was no way you could cite Whitmore’s so-called confession to the Borrero assault, he argued, without dealing with all of his confessions that day, which included Wylie-Hoffert. The judge disagreed and ruled against Reiben, prohibiting any mention of the Wylie-Hoffert case. In protest, Reiben decided to put forth a wall of silence. Neither Whitmore nor anyone else took the stand in his defense. It was a controversial strategy, one that caused further disagreements among Whitmore’s lawyers, but Reiben felt it was impossible to give his client a fair trial without addressing the circumstances of the Wylie-Hoffert confession. They were better off mounting no defense and seeking to overturn a conviction on appeal.

  The results came quickly—a two-day trial, and a guilty verdict for Whitmore.

  Whitmore’s attorneys announced immediately that they would appeal the verdict on the grounds that, by being prevented from entering the fraudulent Wylie-Hoffert confession as evidence, the defendant had been denied a fair trial.

  A few days later, George and his attorneys returned to court for sentencing. Judge Goldstein announced that, before sentencing Whitmore, he wanted him committed to a mental hospital for yet another psychiatric evaluation. Reiben objected: “Your Honor, to submit this defendant to another court-ordered mental evaluation is judicial torture.”

  Prosecutor Schmier spoke up. He already had his conviction, but he apparently wanted more. “Your Honor, both Detectives Aidala and Di Prima time and time again in preparation of this case…have told the district attorney—and I state this for the first time publicly—that throughout the questioning of George Whitmore, he literally begged Di Prima and Aidala to help him. As close as I can, these are Di Prima’s words: ‘George Whitmore said, help me, I do these things, and I don’t want to do them, and if they let me out on the street I am liable to do them again. Help, please help me.’”

  Said Reiben sharply, “This is a tirade of utter garbage. This comes completely out of left field…. After all the other actions in this case, for the first time, this garbage comes out.”

  Judge Goldstein overlooked the contempt in Reiben’s response and declared, “I certainly think a psychiatrist should know all about the past so the court could evaluate [Whitmore]. The court is entitled to know whether this defendant can be rehabilitated.” So off Whitmore went again to Kings County Hospital for a mental examination, which he passed, as he had twice before.

  On May 27, two months after the trial, Whitmore was back in Justice Goldstein’s courtroom. He stood before the judge hoping that his clean mental evaluation might prove to be a mitigating circumstance, but the judge showed no mercy. He gave George the maximum sentence under the law: five to ten years on the attempted rape indictment, and two and a half years on the charge of assault with attempt to rape.

  The Brooklyn D.A.’s office felt vindicated. Whitmore may not have committed the Wiley-Hoffert murders, but he’d been found guilty of something. There was such a thing as justice in Brooklyn after all.

  D.A. Aaron Koota had shown unusual fervor in his pursuit of the charges against Whitmore. Now, in victory, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to gloat. “It is high time to give serious consideration as to whether the pendulum of justice has not swung too much in favor of the criminal,” he told a New York Times reporter. “There is a saying, ‘It is far better that a thousand guilty men go free than a single innocent man be convicted.’ This is a fetish in our society. The chances of an innocent man being convicted are extremely remote.”

  For Whitmore, it was a new low point. He trusted Miller and Reiben, but the infighting among his lawyers depressed him, and he couldn’t fathom this strategy of losing a case in hopes of having it reversed down the road. He felt increasingly doomed.

  The one good thing about being down so low was that any small ray of light, any lessening of cloud cover, was a reason for hope.

  On June 13, one month after Whitmore was sentenced, the Supreme Court of the United States dropped a bombshell of a judicial ruling that affected Whitmore’s case.

  The Miranda decision, as it became known, grew out of a criminal case in Arizona, in which a suspect was tricked into giving a confession to a murder. By the time the case made it to the Supreme Court, defense attorneys cited a number of other cases that, they argued, buttressed their contention that a suspect could not receive a fair trial if he hadn’t first been informed of his constitutional right to legal counsel and told that anything he said in a police precinct could be used against him. One of the primary cases cited was that of George Whitmore.

  In delivering the landmark decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren noted: “This atmosphere—the back room of a police precinct—carries its own badge of intimidation…. The current practice of incommunicado interrogation is at odds with one of our Nation’s most cherished principles—that
the individual may not be impelled to incriminate himself…. The warning of the right to remain silent must be accompanied by the explanation that anything said can and will be used against the individual in court. This warning is needed in order to make him aware not only of the privilege, but also the consequences of forgoing it. It is only through an awareness of these consequences that there can be any assurance of real understanding and intelligent exercise of the privilege. Moreover, this warning may serve to make the individual more acutely aware that he is faced with a phase of the adversary system—that he is not in the presence of persons acting solely in his interest.”

  The Miranda decision touched off a vigorous debate within criminal justice circles, with law enforcement officials throughout the land predicting that the ruling would lead to a free-for-all for criminals. An article in the New York Times noted that the Whitmore case had played a “crucial role” in the court’s decision, raising the specter that a Negro could find justice in the highest court in the land, but couldn’t catch a break in Brooklyn.

  Two days after the article appeared, D.A. Koota announced that his office would not retry Whitmore for the Minnie Edmonds murder. The charges were being thrown out.

  Whitmore’s attorneys were caught off guard by Koota’s sudden announcement. They quickly put together legal papers to argue in court that—now that all three murder charges against Whitmore had been dismissed—the defendant should be allowed to go free on bail pending appeal of his conviction in the Borrero matter.

  In appeals court, Whitmore’s attorneys made their argument. The presiding judge, Hyman Barshay, ordered yet another psychiatric evaluation for Whitmore, saying he wanted to know beyond a reasonable doubt that Whitmore was no danger to society before making any decision on bail. This time he was examined by an independent psychiatrist outside the system, a psychiatric professor at the State University of New York. The doctor declared that, although “somewhat preoccupied with his experiences” with the courts, Whitmore was “well adapted, without any evidence of mental disease.” The professor added that if there was anything strange about Whitmore, it was his total lack of any rancor for his ordeal.

  When Whitmore was brought from the Queens House of Detention to Justice Barshay’s courtroom in Brooklyn Criminal Court for the bail hearing, he was uncertain what all the excitement was about. He knew his attorneys were working on something, but he didn’t know the details. A representative of the NAACP appeared before the judge and vouched for the fact that a job awaited Whitmore in his hometown of Wildwood. Parker Johnson, who was now the first Negro police captain on the Wildwood police force, submitted a letter in which he promised to keep George under “close supervision.” The cost of the bail—five thousand dollars—was guaranteed by R. Peter Straus, the progressive-minded president of radio station WMCA, who had a history of supporting and donating money to civil rights causes. He put up the collateral, the NAACP paid the bail bond premium, and on July 13—two years, two months, two weeks, and five days after he walked into the Seventy-third Precinct station house in Brownsville—George Whitmore was released on his own recognizance.

  Wearing a wool suit provided by his mother and carrying his possessions in a paper bag, Whitmore squinted in the afternoon sun. Newspaper and TV reporters were on the scene.

  “Did you ever think this day would come?” George was asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said.

  “Any bitterness?”

  George thought about that. “I am hurt, yes. It would be abnormal for any person to come out and say he is not hurt when he is.”

  Whitmore’s mother and attorney Arthur Miller led him toward a car.

  “Would you like to see the police officers brought to justice?” shouted yet another reporter.

  “It’s not my place to say,” said George.

  With one hundred dollars in his pocket—the last of the money raised for him by the NAACP in Brooklyn—Whitmore got into the car and was driven away. He was taken to the same junkyard shack in Wildwood where he’d been living with his father before his troubles began. Once again, this would be his home.

  As the car pulled up, Whitmore’s father came out of the shack and peered in the backseat.

  “Hi, Pops,” said George. “It’s me.”

  His father replied, “It’s you. It’s you. Thank God, it’s you…. Boy, I am so glad to see you I don’t know what to say.”

  The exuberance of freedom lasted for a while. But then Whitmore realized he was right back where it all began: the junkyard. Each morning, he looked around at his surroundings—the same rusted husks of old cars, piles of scrap metal and garbage, junkyard dogs rummaging for food. Then there was Pops, still bellicose and drunk most of the time, telling George what he should and shouldn’t do. This was the same set of circumstances that had compelled George to flee to Brooklyn in the first place. Nothing had changed. He was still George Whitmore, Negro suspect.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1966, was Election Day. Finally, the citizens of New York would decide the fate of the CCRB, Mayor Lindsay’s campaign proposal. It had been a long and vituperative referendum debate. In some ways, the fight over the board was a metaphor for race relations in the city: there were loud voices on all sides, and the tone set by civic and community leaders was seized upon by race hustlers and professional agitators.

  In the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, a group of angry white teenagers calling themselves SPONGE—the “Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything”—banded together to protest the idea. Some (especially black folks) suspected that SPONGE was a kind of youth division of the PBA, partly financed by the police advocacy group. Mostly, the organization became an excuse for impoverished white youths to loiter outside the entrance to the subway and harass black people. “Go back to Africa, niggers!” they shouted at people coming home from school or work. “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate” was another chant. SPONGE had fewer than a hundred members, but they represented a certain segment of the population: aggrieved white people who felt besieged. East New York was a stark example of the city’s wrenching demographic trends: as the state census showed, in the course of merely five years, the neighborhood had gone from being 80 percent white (mostly Jewish, Italian, and Irish) to 80 percent black and Puerto Rican. This massive shift created layers of resentment, and it raised the prospect of violence.

  SPONGE served as a peanut gallery to a summer of hate that spread throughout the city but was especially heated in Brooklyn. There were organized protests, racial skirmishes, shootings, and ambushes on a near-nightly basis. The hostilities cut both ways. In July, when a group of white student government interns arrived in Bedford-Stuyvesant to study ghetto conditions, they were met by Sonny Carson, the head of Brooklyn CORE, who told them:

  Get the hell out of Bedford-Stuyvesant. We don’t want any white people in the community. It is our turf; whites are evil, all whites. All whites are racists; all whites including everybody in this room have killed our grandfathers. You’re all racists. The CIA killed Malcolm X; you are all responsible; every white person is responsible for Malcolm X’s murder and the CIA’s actions. Slavery in the South was all backed by your grandfathers. You all backed black slavery, and you get the hell out of the community. Whites are no good. Get out, we don’t need you, we don’t want you. The community is going to be burned down, and you’re going to be burned with it if you don’t get the hell out.

  Even Mayor Lindsay was not immune to the onslaught of racial invective. When he walked the streets in a mostly Italian American section of East New York in an effort to lessen tensions, he was told, “Go back to Africa, Lindsay, and take your niggers with you!” The Jewish owner of a butcher shop that had been looted during one of the summer’s mini-uprisings said of the mayor, “I got him in hell—and I never cursed anyone before.”

  Then it happened: on the night of July 21, 1966, at the corner of Dumont Avenue and Ashford Street, a ten-year-old Negro boy named Eric Dean was shot dead.
As usual, accounts of what happened varied; the shooting took place during a street disturbance, with cops and agitators present. Amid the chaos and uncertainty, police arrested Ernest Gallashaw, a seventeen-year-old Negro. The Brooklyn D.A.’s office alleged not only that Gallashaw had shot Dean with a zip gun, but that he’d actually been attempting to shoot a police officer. The D.A. claimed to have three eyewitnesses. Another witness, however, claimed he saw a white youth identified only as “Little Joe” shoot the black kid.

  Ernest Gallashaw had no criminal record; he lived with his mother and extended family in a city housing project. Now, he was a teenager indicted for homicide.

  The three witnesses who gave their story to the grand jury were hidden away by the D.A.’s office, but journalist Sidney Zion tracked them down and interviewed them for the New York Times. The witnesses, boys eleven, twelve, and fourteen years of age, all had histories of mental instability. To Zion, they recanted much of what they had told the grand jury. Yet the case proceeded anyway, with denials and counterdenials and explosive revelations in the press.

  The Gallashaw case was a good example of how treacherous the city’s racial dynamic had become. An innocent young boy had been killed during a riot. A black kid had been arrested, though some witnesses said they’d seen a white perpetrator. Dubious eyewitnesses were assembled. The witnesses told one story, then recanted, then re-recanted. It became impossible to know whom to trust, or how to get a clear picture of what had happened. The criminal justice system—the police and the D.A.’s office—was so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of minority communities that it seemed the truth could never be known.

  Outside a Brooklyn courthouse during a pretrial hearing in the Gallashaw case, a group of thirty demonstrators carried picket signs and marched in a circle. “No more Whitmores,” they chanted. A hand-bill distributed by workers from CORE cited the Whitmore case as the kind of travesty they hoped to avoid. Under the headline “One More Whitmore,” the flyer read: The eyewitnesses who saw the white racist kill Eric Dean are being harassed and intimidated by the police. Radio station WBAI played a tape-recorded interview with people in East New York who said they saw the fatal shot fired from a passing car with four white men. The D.A. said this information was irrelevant because of the nature of the speakers. They were black.