The Savage City

by T. J. English

  Eventually, the boys got jobs in Portland with the Salvation Army. They drove around town in a company truck, carrying clipboards and picking up clothing donations. There weren’t many more black people in Portland than in Wyoming, but George found the white folks more hospitable than back east. Even so, he never once thought about skipping bail. He could have stayed out west as an anonymous Negro and never returned to New York, where his freedom hung in the balance. But the thought never crossed his mind. “If I jumped bail, my whole life I would’ve been a convicted rapist, a criminal. I already spent too much time trying to clear my name to give up now. I always knew I would have to go back.”

  Late one night, George found a pay phone and called his lawyer in New York. He’d been told to check in, but it had been more than six weeks since he’d last spoken with Myron Beldock. George was unaware that there was a three-hour time difference between the two coasts. When Beldock answered the phone, he sounded half asleep.

  “George, where are you?”

  “I’m in Portland,” said George.

  “Portland, Maine?” asked the lawyer.

  “No, Portland, Oregon.”

  “George, you need to get back here soon as you can. We have a hearing scheduled in three days.”

  “Damn. Okay, Mister Beldock. Don’t you worry. I’ll be there.”

  George caught the first bus out of Portland and headed due east. He made it as far as eastern Pennsylvania, where he was picked up by his cousins and driven the rest of the way back to the New York area.

  On March 27, 1969, George Whitmore appeared in Brooklyn Supreme Court, wearing his now-familiar suit and tie—the only ones he owned. He was accompanied by his attorneys, Beldock and Arthur Miller. Acting Supreme Court justice Julius Helfand—the same judge who presided over Whitmore’s last conviction—opened the hearing. George looked around the courtroom, suddenly wondering if his entire eight-week journey across the country and into Mexico had happened at all.

  Reality hit home with a familiar force when Elba Borrero took the stand. The purpose of this hearing was to determine whether or not Whitmore deserved a new trial based on the grounds that Borrero’s identification was a violation of police procedure and therefore unconstitutional. All other legal issues had fallen by the wayside. The credibility of Borrero’s ID had become Whitmore’s last stand.

  For the past year, Elba Borrero had been living in Puerto Rico, her country of birth. She had moved away from Brooklyn in part to gain distance from the never-ending hassle of her case. She would have preferred to forget all about that night five years before. With each court appearance Borrero seemed to have put on more weight, until she was now portly. She was feisty, complaining on the stand about having had to testify to the same events six times, and she wasn’t pleased to have had to leave her tropical homeland to return to a drab Brooklyn courtroom and do the same thing all over again.

  This time, however, there was one difference: Myron Beldock was getting his first chance to question Borrero on the witness stand. After looking through all the evidence, Beldock had come up with something astounding that had never even been mentioned in the previous trials. In his very first interview with Borrero, Detective Richard Aidala had scribbled down in his police notebook the following words:

  Sister-in-law saw he grab me from her window (Celeste Viruet).

  This quote was accompanied by the familiar description of the assailant: male negro, tan or beige coat, long coat, cloth, no hat, five foot seven or eight, twenty-six or twenty-seven.

  As he examined the notebook entry, however, Beldock stopped on that parenthesis: (Celeste Viruet). The physical description that followed—had it come from Borrero or her sister-in-law, Celeste Viruet? If it came from Viruet, he believed it represented an independent description that was favorable to the defense, since the description did not fit George in any way beyond the fact that he was a “male Negro.” If it was Borrero’s description, it showed that her initial account—usually considered the most credible—contradicted her later identification of Whitmore as the assailant. Either way, it gave Beldock cause to launch a spirited impeachment of Borrero’s previous testimony.

  “You got a good look at the assailant that night?” Beldock asked the witness.

  “Yes,” answered Borrero.

  “And you’re absolutely certain that it was this man, the man you identified, George Whitmore.”

  “I am certain.”

  Beldock was not surprised. “Lawyers who do eyewitness identification cases,” he remembered years later, “expect people to say, ‘I’ll never forget that face. I am certain that is the one.’ Then the witness gets emotional and backs it up—and, indeed, not to be lying necessarily, but because they believe it, they have come to believe it’s true even when they are completely wrong. People are trained somewhat to do this by their handlers—the assistant district attorneys and the cops tell them, ‘This is what you should say. Say it this way, say it that way.’ So, of course, [Borrero] said, ‘I’ll never forget that face.’”

  Beldock kept bringing up inconsistencies in Borrero’s testimony, one by one. But finally the witness broke into tears and shouted, “All I know is, George Whitmore attacked me that night! Stop bothering me. I know it, he knows it, God knows it.”

  When Beldock objected to this, Borrero jumped up from the witness chair and said, “You weren’t raped that night, sir.” Then, turning to Justice Helfand, she continued, “Judge, do you know what it is to go through this for five years?”

  To which Beldock interjected, “Do you know what it is to spend three years in jail?”

  Beldock thought he’d done a reasonable job of poking holes in Borrero’s testimony, but the judge disagreed. Two weeks after the hearing, he reaffirmed Elba Borrero’s identification of Whitmore, noting that her testimony “had the unmistakable ring of truth. It was direct; it was positive; it was clear and convincing.”

  “George,” Beldock told Whitmore, “we will keep fighting. We will seek a favorable ruling in the Appellate Division, and if we don’t get that we’ll appeal to the state supreme court and, if we have to, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Until then, Whitmore would remain free on bail.

  If anyone needed a reminder of the disparity between the daily reality of Whitmore’s legal travails and the larger framework under which he was being prosecuted, it came a few weeks after Judge Helfand’s decision. The New York Times revealed for the first time that, in early 1965, Governor Nelson Rockefeller had ordered an investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Whitmore “confession.” A separate in-house NYPD report had sought to clear policemen Isola, Aidala, Di Prima, and Bulger of any wrongdoing, but the governor’s report spelled out at least nineteen separate discrepancies between the facts of the Wylie-Hoffert murders and what Whitmore supposedly told the detectives. The report made clear what some in the black community had alleged: Whitmore had been willfully framed by detectives. The frame-up was accepted and furthered by prosecutors in Brooklyn.

  After Governor Rockefeller’s ninety-two-page report was completed in June 1965 and delivered to the State House, the frame-up became a cover-up. Not one person within government or civil service—not Rockefeller, Mayor Wagner, the district attorney, or anyone connected with the NYPD—was willing to release the findings of the report to the public, though many knew of its existence. The Rockefeller report was buried for four years before it was finally leaked to the Times “by a source outside the Police Department.”

  An innocent black youth had been framed on charges of murder—a frame job that was sanctioned, facilitated, and covered up by police authorities, judges, prosecutors, and other high government officials. But not a single public official accepted responsibility or was punished or even reprimanded. A few of them even received promotions.

  Meanwhile, George Whitmore remained entangled in the system, and life in the city continued.

  FOR THE BLACK Panther Party in New York, the year 1969 would be a point of no retur
n. This was due in part to the election of Richard M. Nixon, who was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States on January 9. Nixon had been voted into office on a hard-line law-and-order ticket. Like most public officials, he lumped the Panthers together with the antiwar movement, the counterculture, women’s liberation, and anything else that represented a threat to the established order.

  It was no accident that, two weeks after Nixon was elected, the Panthers’ leading national spokesperson, Eldridge Cleaver, had his parole revoked, and a federal warrant was issued for his arrest. Rather than return to prison, Cleaver jumped his $50,000 bail and fled into exile, first to Cuba and eventually to Algiers. From Algiers, Cleaver announced that he was establishing an international chapter of the Black Panther Party. In the coming months he would meet with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the African National Congress (ANC), and other liberation movements from around the globe.

  Stateside, with Cleaver in exile and Newton in prison, the Black Panther Party was without clear national leadership. Individual regional chapters began to undertake initiatives of their own. In New York, there was much unfinished business between the Panthers and the police stemming from the beat-down at the Brooklyn courthouse the previous summer. A series of tit-for-tat incidents occurred throughout the winter, including a November 1968 dynamite explosion at the Twenty-fifth Precinct station house that shattered two windows. Bomb squad detectives traced explosive material to an apartment in Brooklyn rented by a woman whom a spokesperson for the NYPD described as “a lieutenant in the Black Panther Party.” The woman and a Panther spokesperson denied that she had anything to do with the party.

  The bombing incident, and the police response to it, were part of an emerging pattern. When an act of aggression was perpetrated against a police officer, or a bombing occurred at a station house—or bombing material was found planted at a station house—an NYPD source was quoted in the press linking the incident to the Black Panther Party. In some cases, there was actual evidence to suggest such a link; in other cases there was not. Either way, the police were using the media to reinforce the idea that the Panthers were purely a militant underground group dedicated to killing cops, not in any way a community-based social service organization. In the war between police and the Panthers, this propaganda campaign would become a self-fulfilling prophecy for both sides.

  On the night of January 17, an incident occurred that brought matters into focus. In upper Manhattan, alongside a stretch of the Harlem River Drive, two motorcycle patrolmen had pulled over to do some paperwork after issuing a speeding ticket to a motorist. They noticed a red Dodge Dart parked in a dark, grassy area near the Harlem River. The two cops—one white, one black—thought the car was disabled. As they dismounted from their motorcycles and approached the car, they noticed two men, one standing at the rear of the car with the trunk open, one standing alongside the car, and a female seated behind the wheel. All three were African American.

  “What’s the trouble?” one of the cops asked.

  The man standing by the trunk was Kuwasi Balagoon. The other man was Sekou Adinga. Behind the wheel was nineteen-year-old Joan Bird. All three were members of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party.

  They all glanced at one another. “No big deal, Officer,” Balagoon told the cop. “Just engine trouble.” Then he and Adinga pulled out guns and started firing at the cops. The cops returned fire, hitting the Dodge Dart and shattering the windshield. One of the cops was hit in the hip, but the bullet was stopped by a thick pouch on his belt. The cop retreated back to his bike and called for backup.

  The two shooters ran off, disappearing into a wooded area.

  Screaming sirens and flashing cherry-tops converged on the scene, nearly a dozen police cars in all. A swarm of officers spilled out and slowly approached the vehicle, guns drawn. Inside, scrunched down on the floor, was Joan Bird. “Don’t shoot. I’m not armed,” she said.

  The cop who’d been hit in the pouch grabbed Bird by the feet and pulled her from the car. The cops cuffed Bird, then searched the car. In the trunk they found a .308-caliber Winchester rifle.

  Later that night, Mrs. Charles Bird, Joan Bird’s mother, was called to the Thirty-fourth Precinct station house. When Mrs. Bird, a Jamaican national, arrived, detectives recounted a version of what had taken place. As they were talking, she could hear her daughter screaming somewhere in the station house. When she was eventually led to a back room to see her daughter, she was shocked. Joan Bird had a black eye, her lip was swollen, her face bruised.

  “Dear God in Heaven, who did you like this?” asked Mrs. Bird.

  The daughter, crying and trembling, nodded toward the arresting officer, the one who’d been hit by a bullet and then pulled her from the car.

  Bird was sent downtown to central booking, processed on charges of attempted homicide and assault, and released the following night.

  The incident was the latest ball of confusion: a photo of Joan Bird’s face with black eye, bloodied lip, and multiple bruises was printed in the Black Panther. The Panthers claimed Bird had been tortured; the police countered with a statement claiming that Bird had told them she’d injured herself during the shoot-out, banging her head on the steering wheel as she ducked to the floor when the shooting began.

  By now, BOSS had penetrated most local Panther branches. Through their network of informants, they were told that Bird, a former VISTA volunteer, had volunteered to drive that night to prove herself and earn her stripes as a Panther. They had parked the Dodge Dart by the side of the road to set up a sniper post. The Panthers had supposedly rigged a bomb to go off later at the Forty-fourth Precinct station house, across the Harlem River in the Bronx; the idea was that, after the bombing, Balagoon and Adinga would open fire on the cops from across the river as they came flooding out of the station house.

  Stories like this, which were passed along from Panther informants to police supervisors and then spread through the rank and file like wildfire, fueled a kind of police hysteria about the Panthers. Never mind that no bomb was ever found planted at the Bronx precinct. Never mind that, from the location of the supposed “sniper post,” there was no clear shot at the door of the station house or anywhere else where cops might come running out of the building. The story defied logic, but that didn’t seem to matter. It fed into an anger and fear among the NYPD about what the Black Panthers represented: a Communist-inspired black vigilante group looking to exact revenge on local symbols of law and order by blowing up station houses and sniping at policemen from riverbanks and rooftops.

  As one of the leaders of the Panthers’ Harlem chapter, Dhoruba immediately recognized the value of the Joan Bird incident as a propaganda tool. He had copies made of the photo of Bird’s bruised and battered face and had them posted all over the city. Frustrated by the California-based Black Panther’s inattention to events in New York, Dhoruba created his own grassroots pamphlet called It’s Time: Cadre News. Written and mimeographed at the Harlem office, it was distributed through the Harlem-Bronx ministry of information. In the very first issue (vol. 1, no. 1, January 1969), under the heading “OUR JOB,” Dhoruba wrote, “It is the duty of those that profess to be revolutionaries to grasp revolutionary principles and apply them in the form of revolutionary action. The duty to the people’s struggle impels us now to raise the conscious level of Black people within the confines of Gomorrah, this whore of the west. We must educate the people through propaganda. With this goal of political education, the people can best deal with this Pig Power structure. The method of education that the Black Community responds to best is—action.”

  By now, Dhoruba had become one of the Black Panther Party’s most vocal and visible leaders in New York. He gave speeches throughout the city, at colleges, political rallies, fund-raisers, and symposiums. He had adopted the Panther look—black leather jacket, turtleneck, and neatly trimmed goatee—and adopted the Panther rhetorical style, a torrent of in-your-face language, libe
rally peppered with quotes from Marcus Garvey, Karl Marx, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and other revolutionary thinkers. As field secretary, Dhoruba traveled to Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; and New Jersey to oversee the setting up of chapters and settle disputes. For the first time his life had focus and purpose.

  Dhoruba’s high profile inevitably brought him to the attention of NYPD undercover officers and FBI field agents, who were tripping over one another in their efforts to monitor the Panthers’ daily activities. An FBI COINTELPRO report from January 1969 noted:

  On January two nineteen sixty nine [a confidential informant] advised that at a meeting of the Black Panther Party political education class in Harlem, New York, it was stated that all Panthers are to obtain “a piece” (meaning a gun) by the middle of January…. Some Panthers are to leave for Texas (no place specified) in order to secure several pieces, one of those believed traveling to Texas is Diruba (ph)…Subject, also known as Richard Moore, was heard making inquiries as to where he could obtain grenades and other explosives. He is quoted as having expressed a desire to kill a law enforcement officer. In a speech, he called for revolution by the black race…he was observed carrying two pistols. IN VIEW OF SUBJECT’S EXPRESSED DESIRE TO KILL A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, AND HIS POSSESSION OF FIREARMS HE SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

  In later years, Dhoruba and other Panthers would contend that much of the overheated and incendiary rhetoric at political education meetings was deliberate; they knew it would go directly into the files of law enforcement. In a propaganda war, the idea was to keep the other side in a state of paranoia. If the cops believed that the Panthers were out to kill them, they could be kept off balance. But it was a dangerous game for both sides. Confidential police and FBI reports from early 1969 show that law enforcement not only felt threatened by the Panthers but also felt the movement was predicated on murder and revenge. Every black nationalist rally, black cultural gathering, or statement of black liberation by the Panthers was recorded and seen as part of a conspiracy to kill police officers.