The Savage City

by T. J. English

  A week later, his lawyer came to Jazz with a new development. “The arresting detectives want money or they’re going to charge you with another crime. They say you fired on cops when you were being pursued. That’s a second count of attempted murder.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Hayden. “They want me to pay them to not frame me when they’re already framing me on the other charge.” Years later, Hayden remembered, “My attitude was, ‘Kiss my ass. I’m gonna pay you not to frame me when you’re already framing me?’ Sure enough, they charged me with another count of attempted murder, said that while I was fleeing arrest I turned and fired on the officers.”

  Hayden was indicted on two counts of attempted murder. By the time his case went to trial, the prosecutors had dropped the original charge against him—but he still went on trial for allegedly shooting at cops while fleeing arrest for the crime they now acknowledged he didn’t commit. He was found guilty and sentenced to eight and a half to twenty-five years. “They shipped me off to prison,” said Hayden. “Ultimately, the conviction was reversed. But during the year and a half I spent in the system, I spent my time at Attica. And during that time, my politicization was completed.”

  Jazz Hayden would remain a hustler, but he never was a Black Panther. In a time of war between the NYPD and the black liberation movement, he was collateral damage.

  The theater of battle was expanding. No one was safe.

  [ fourteen ]

  WHITMORE’S LAST STAND

  LIKE MOST COPS, Bill Phillips followed the war between the NYPD and the black radicals with great interest. The Panthers were an item nearly every day in the newspapers, especially the Daily News, which made a special effort to reflect the police point of view. There were regular reports of new shootings attributed to the Panthers and speculation on where the next ambush might come from. Some cops were disturbed by what the ongoing street war might mean for the city at large; others followed every confrontation between the Panthers and the police as if it were a sporting event.

  Phillips was not a foot soldier in the Panther-police war—at least not directly. The battle was being waged mostly by commanding officers in the city’s various black precincts, by beat cops, riot squads, and the undercover cops working for BOSS. Like many cops, Phillips saw the militancy of the Negro fringe as a direct threat against him and every other policeman in the city. When Phillips read statements of solidarity with the Viet Cong in the Black Panther, his blood boiled. When the Panthers railed against the “pig power structure” and declared that “the only good pig is a dead pig,” it was hard for Phillips, or any cop for that matter, not to take it personally.

  For Phillips, the hustle was still the foremost element of his daily routine.

  By now, Phillips was a true veteran; he’d been in the Two-Five Precinct in Harlem for close to four years, and now he was schooling younger cops on the secrets of scoring, just as he’d been schooled himself. One of the novices he helped educate was a kid named Jerry Lee who seemed ready and willing to learn from a master.

  One of the first scores Phillips set up with Lee was a shakedown at a policy operation inside a men’s club on 117th Street and Second Avenue, in East Harlem. Phillips and his rookie partner spent weeks trying to track down the owner of the club; eventually, they found the guy hiding out in the men’s room of the club.

  So I says, OK you son of a bitch, now I got you. He says, I’ll give you fifty dollars. I say, fifty dollars? Listen, my reputation in the neighborhood would be ruined. I don’t walk around wearing a four-hundred-dollar watch so you can give me fifty bucks…. We drag him outside, get him up to the radio car and he says, all right, what do you want? I says, I want five hundred dollars. He says, oh my God, I ain’t got five hundred. OK, get in the car. He’s haggling and screaming and I’m saying, forget it, you’re under arrest and here comes this friend of his, also a policy guy I scored not long ago. He taps me on the shoulder and says, look, let’s talk. I go in a hallway with him and I says, listen, he’s got two minutes to make up his mind; I get five hundred or he goes in the can.

  Two minutes: that was the amount of time a hustler received to make a life-altering decision on the street. In this case, the policy guy coughed up the money. Two fifty up front, the rest the following day.

  We make a meet for the next day. I get the money and I divide it up with Jerry. Boy, he says, you’re fantastic. And that ain’t all. I put the policy guy on the pad for fifteen bucks a month and later on I sell him to another cop for a hundred bucks. The guy goes in, gets five hundred and gives us a hundred. Beautiful, Jerry says. Beautiful.

  Phillips was so popular in the Two-Five that other rookie cops paid five dollars to ride with him on Jerry’s off days to learn how things were done.

  Phillips spent his working days in Harlem, but he didn’t socialize much there. Usually, he hung out in his old stomping grounds in the One-Seven in midtown Manhattan. His favorite spot was P.J. Clarke’s Saloon on Third Avenue at East Fifty-fifth Street.

  Clarke’s was a famous Manhattan watering hole frequented by celebrities: heavyweight contender Rocky Graziano, whom Phillips knew personally; actors like Ben Gazzara; and sportswriters like the legendary Jimmy Cannon, among others. Being a regular at Clarke’s was like being a member of an exclusive club whose membership filled out the Hollywood gossip columns and social register—not so much among the blue bloods (who favored the Stork Club), or the wiseguys (who filled the Copacabana), but the boxers, tough guy actors, newspapermen, cops, and the women who loved them—or at least depended on them for the rent.

  Clarke’s had the look of a Prohibition-era speakeasy, with lush mahogany wainscoting, tiled floors, and a tin ceiling. Phillips had his own regular spot at the bar. He was always dressed impeccably in suit and tie, expensive watch, Gucci shoes, with his police-issue .38 bulging only slightly underneath his coat. He usually nursed a glass of Johnnie Walker Black with water. The phone booth at Clarke’s, which hadn’t changed since the 1920s, was a veritable office and base of operations for Phillips, whose daily routine was similar to that of a bookie. He was constantly on the phone, making plans, setting up deals, checking in with the wife or his latest mistress.

  Outside on the street, somewhere nearby, was Phillips’s pride and joy, a fire engine red Triumph 250 sports car. He parked the car wherever he wanted: in front of a fire hydrant, in a loading zone, it didn’t matter—with his policeman’s ID on the dash, his car was immune to parking tickets.

  One night at Clarke’s, Phillips got the idea to stop by the office of a “friend”—Phillips’s word for someone who had once buckled under to a shakedown. The guy’s name was Jimmy Smith.

  Normally, police officers weren’t supposed to perpetrate scores in precincts other than their own. But Phillips wasn’t worried about that. He was still known in the Seventeenth Precinct from his time in the Detective Bureau there. Plus, Jimmy Smith belonged to him.

  Back in 1965, Phillips and Tony Delafranco, his partner at the time, had put the squeeze on Smith, who was running both a brothel and a bookmaking operation out of an apartment nearby on East Fifty-fifth Street. He and Delafranco had entered Smith’s place of business and demanded five thousand dollars not to close it down. Smith, who wore glasses and spoke with a vaguely southern accent, talked the two detectives down to three thousand, but he didn’t have the cash on him. So Smith and Delafranco headed out to find a loan shark, while Phillips sat in the apartment with two prostitutes, sipping on scotch and water, waiting for the others to return. The women told him how grateful they were that he was taking Smith’s money instead of arresting everybody and shutting the place down. It was a long wait, maybe two and a half hours, before Smith and Delafranco returned—and when they did Smith had only half the money, with a promise to pay the rest the following week. Phillips stopped by a few times in the following days, but Smith always begged off with some slick excuse.

  Now, three years later, Phillips heard from somebody at P.J. Clarke’s t
hat Smith was operating out of an apartment on East Fifty-seventh Street. Phillips headed over on foot and knocked on the door. “He didn’t look too happy to see me,” noted Phillips.

  Smith knew why Phillips was there. He complained about how bad business was, pleaded poverty—and then told Phillips about a good gambling scam he had going. He had a bookie in Las Vegas who was an expert at “past-posting,” a technique that allowed bettors to take advantage of the East Coast–West Coast time difference and register a bet on college football games seconds after the game ended. “I was skeptical,” remembered Phillips, “but I went along with it. I put down fifty to a hundred a game and, over the next few weeks, won every bet.”

  Eventually, Phillips lost contact with Jimmy Smith. He was one of literally hundreds of fellow hustlers with whom Phillips would form a fly-by-night partnership over the years—only, in this case, the relationship with Smith would lay like a dormant cancer cell, seemingly benign, until it surfaced to eat the flesh off a cop who had always believed he was immune to getting caught.

  FOR THE MOST part, Phillips kept his police life completely separate from his home life. Not only did he never talk with his wife about his hustling pursuits, he rarely told her anything about the job at all. When Camille read in the Daily News about his shooting the burglar in Harlem, she said, “I never knew you were back in uniform.” It had been three years since Phillips was flopped out of the Detective Bureau.

  This wasn’t unusual among police marriages. In Phillips’s case, he was bringing home the bacon—bringing home piles of cash, in fact, above and beyond his police salary. Camille didn’t ask questions, and Phillips never offered details. It was all part of the schizophrenic reality of life as a New York cop.

  Occasionally, events had a way of intruding on Phillips’s neat little arrangement. In early 1969, for instance, his father seemed to be nearing the end of the road, and it would have profound consequences not only for Phillips but for the entire city.

  Bill Jr.’s relationship with his father was complex. When Phillips was a preteen, his father had physically abused him, boxing him around in the kitchen, punching him in the face till he drew blood. It was all just to toughen the kid up, he said. Bill Jr.’s resentment toward his old man was one reason he had initially resisted joining the NYPD. He spent a few years in the air force in Arizona, where he met his wife, before returning to New York and finally joining the force after struggling to find other stable work. Only after becoming a cop did he begin the process of reconciliation with his father, an effort that continued for the next decade.

  The old man liked to drink. In the early 1960s, when Phillips was still in the Detective Bureau, his father nearly drank himself to death. Once a big man who weighed close to two hundred pounds, he dropped down to ninety-eight. Remembered the son, “He got to be a pain in the ass with his drinking…. He went from being a big strapping guy down to a little skeleton…. I said, listen, if you want to keep on drinking we’re going to put you in a box and carry you out of here. So he got the shit scared out of him and he stopped…. Drank [only] ginger ale, even at parties. I really admired him.” Phillips Sr. stayed clean for eight years, then began to feel ill again. X-rays showed a spot on his lung. He smoked two packs a day, so his chances weren’t good. His son was with him when they brought him in for exploratory surgery.

  “I don’t want the surgery,” said the father at the eleventh hour.

  Said Phillips, “Go in and get the fucking thing over with, will you? They got to check it out and see what the hell it is and then you’re finished.”

  After the operation, Phillips was shocked by his father’s condition. His father had a cancerous lung removed and was in desperate shape. He needed round-the-clock attention, which was costly. One afternoon, Phillips showed up unexpectedly at the hospital and was angered at what he discovered:

  We’re paying thirty dollars a shift, a hundred and something dollars a day and he’s fucking all by himself. He’s got tubes in him, whacked out, alone. I raise fucking holy hell. Where’s that administrator? I says, you son of a bitch, where’s the nurse who’s supposed to take care of him? He’s getting treated like a dog up there. If you don’t take care of him, I’m going to break balls like you never saw.

  The hospital administrators promised Phillips it would never happen again.

  On the job, Phillips kept working his scores, hustling like never before; pushing the envelope at work seemed to take his mind off the fact that his father was dying. Sometimes, between scams, he’d come by the hospital while still in uniform. Phillips was there as often as three or four times a day, the dutiful son. One night when he arrived, his father had been whisked into intensive care.

  This is the worst sight I’ve ever seen. He’s propped up in bed, all kinds of bandages, tubes and shit all over him. He’s got all kinds of beep-beep-beep things going all over the fucking room…and he’s gasping for air. He’s dead. Absolutely dead. They’re just keeping him alive. There’s no way he can survive. I looked at him, holy shit, I almost died…. [The next night] I got to the hospital about ten-thirty…and I stayed until about four in the morning. I went home and he died shortly after I left. He was sixty-four years old.

  Phillips’s attitude about life and work changed after that. It would be tempting to say that he lost his moral bearings—except that, with Phillips, morality had always been relative. But he seemed to stop caring as much about the job after his father died. Having the old man around had instilled in him a strong sense of fealty, not to the people of New York but to the job, to the tribe. Bill Phillips was a cop’s cop; he took care of his partners and would never have dreamed of violating the department’s unwritten code of silence.

  Yet that sense of commitment to the force seemed to erode with the passing of the old man—an irascible Irishman, a keeper of the code, a New York policeman to the bone. Now the very embodiment of the Blue Wall of Silence was dead, and his son couldn’t shake the feeling that the code had died with him.

  ONE DAY, GEORGE Whitmore came home and found a baby in the crib that wasn’t his. A few months earlier Aida had told him she was pregnant again, but now they had the baby and it didn’t even look like George. Someone else was the daddy. George and Aida started arguing, and George started asking around, and eventually he found out she had a boyfriend on the side. That made him feel like running away. He moved out of their apartment and returned alone to Wildwood, where his brother and some cousins lived.

  One person George didn’t have around anymore was his father, who passed away in early 1969. A couple weeks after that, the house at the auto junkyard where George grew up caught fire and burned to the ground. By the time George returned to Wildwood, all that remained was the charred frame of the place where he and his pops used to live. It was a bittersweet memory—his father drunk and violent with his mother, George fishing out his back window with a homemade fishing pole, hoping to catch something from the inlet that sometimes lapped up against the house. It was all gone now.

  One day George was drinking with a friend named Nate at a bar in Wildwood. After they downed a few pitchers of beer, Nate said, “Hey, we should go to Mexico. I hear the sun always shines there and they got pretty girls.”

  “Damn,” said George. “You right. Let’s go.”

  “I mean it,” said Nate. “We could hitchhike and be there in a few days. What’s stopping us?”

  “Okay. Let’s go now.”

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  What followed could be described as George and Nate’s Excellent Adventure. Years later, Whitmore recalled it only in bits and pieces, like a movie with the reels shown out of sequence. “I was drunk when we started hitchhiking. When I woke up, we were in Ohio.” They were carrying one suitcase with both their clothes and one hundred dollars cash each. Tijuana was the only Mexican town either of them had heard of, so that’s where they headed. The western sun beckoned, but it was damn cold in the East and Midwest. George and Nate stuck out their thumbs; drive
rs picked them up, drove in the direction they were headed, then dropped the boys off. At one point they hopped a freight train. George had never before seen the wide open spaces of the central plains, land as far as the eye could see with no buildings in sight. He felt as though he were traveling on another planet.

  Somewhere in Wyoming, George and Nate discovered an abandoned car and slept in it, until they were awakened by a police sheriff wearing a cowboy hat shining a flashlight in their faces. “You boys have identification?” asked the sheriff.

  George and Nate showed their IDs and explained that they were on their way to Tijuana. They were a little worried—as far as they could tell, there wasn’t a single black person in all of Wyoming—but the sheriff was friendly. “I’m gonna do you fellas a favor,” he told them. “I’m gonna hold you overnight in the county jail, which means you’ll have a warm place to sleep and a good breakfast, courtesy of the state of Wyoming.”

  The sheriff was true to his word: the jail was warmer and more comfortable than the abandoned car. The next day, after a meal of eggs, grits, and coffee, Whitmore and his pal were back out on the road.

  It took them six days to travel all the way to Tijuana. Years later, all Whitmore could remember about the place was an “old, raggedy-ass pool hall” where he and Nate hung out. There they met two Mexican girls who agreed to travel with them up the West Coast. They took a Greyhound bus to Portland, Oregon, and by the time they got there they were flat broke. The two Mexican girls turned out to be “a couple of bull dykes. Lesbians.” George and Nate cut them loose. They discovered a bar in Portland where a farmer came in at 8:00 A.M. and offered day work chopping beans to anyone who’d come. It paid enough to buy a bowl of soup and a slice of bread. They lived at a boardinghouse until they ran out of money, then crashed at a local movie theater, hiding in the balcony and sleeping there overnight. Sometimes, they raided the hot dog machine and ate cold dogs with mustard for breakfast.