The Savage City

by T. J. English

  The mayor’s man was stunned by what he heard. Both the cops had impeccable records as policemen, and they made it known that they were willing to go public with their allegations, at great risk to their careers and even their lives. One of them was Sergeant David Durk. The other, the patrolman, was Frank Serpico.

  For months, Kriegel stonewalled the two cops. Finally, in early 1969, he approached Lindsay with the information. Facing a vituperative reelection campaign in November, Lindsay was reluctant to stir up the wrath of the PBA and the police department. Durk, and especially Serpico, eventually became so frustrated and disillusioned that they nearly gave up hope.

  In November, Lindsay was reelected with 43 percent of the vote.

  How long could the dam hold? When it came to corruption, the police bureaucracy was filled with people who had a vested interest in obscuring the truth. By now New York Times reporter David Burnham was quietly investigating the claims made by Serpico and Durk, and the questions being asked reverberated throughout the NYPD’s command structure. The department’s manner of doing business—payoffs, graft, the pad—had been going on for so long that many cops took it for granted; the idea that it might be exposed was terrifying. Many cops would go to jail, their lives ruined.

  So the NYPD’s decision to take down the Black Panther Party in New York had its self-serving purpose: it engendered sympathy toward the police on the part of white ethnics (the Daily News was their newspaper), and it provided a major smoke screen. The cops and prosecutors who arrested and indicted Dhoruba Bin Wahad and the other black radicals on charges of conspiracy and attempted murder could have done so without ever mentioning the Black Panther Party. It was not illegal to be a member of the party. But the indictment was full of references to the Black Panthers—because the cops and the D.A.’s office saw this case as their opportunity to put the party itself on trial. Many whites in the city considered it downright un-American to question the ethics or motives of the police when they were engaged in a struggle to the death with communist infiltrators, radicals, and black reverse-racists.

  For a time, the tactic seemed to work. Throughout 1969 and into the new year, revelations stemming from the Panther Twenty-one arrests and indictment dominated the press. By now, the conflict between the Panthers and the police had become a nationwide war: from 1967 into 1970, ten Panthers in cities as diverse as Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle were shot and killed by police, in what Charles Garry, a lawyer for the Panthers, called “a pattern of genocide.” In six of those ten killings, an officer or officers were seriously wounded and had reason to believe their own lives were in jeopardy. As the Panther-police war dominated the headlines, the deeper question of police corruption—including systemic racism, brutality, and economic extortion in ghetto communities—remained buried beneath the surface.

  By the spring of 1970, that finally began to change. On April 25, the New York Times began publishing a series of articles by David Burnham describing the culture of graft and payoffs within the NYPD command structure. Serpico and Durk were named as sources in the articles. The cat was out of the bag.

  Though Mayor Lindsay had known about the Serpico-Durk allegations for nearly two years, he reacted as if he were hearing them for the first time. Now safely ensconced in his second term, the mayor announced with fanfare that he was establishing, via executive order, an independent commission to look into the extent and nature of police corruption in the city. To oversee the commission, he selected Whitman Knapp, a respected Wall Street lawyer. The commission was given a small staff, a modest budget, and a vague mandate. The Times covered the announcement on page one, but many other newspapers—including the Daily News and the New York Post—relegated the Knapp Commission story to a few column inches in their back pages, near the obituary section.

  In the upper echelons of the NYPD, sabers were rattled. A few months after the commission was created, Police Commissioner Leary resigned; he was replaced by Patrick V. Murphy, another homegrown Irishman, though one with a solid reputation as a reformer. Murphy was soft-spoken, deliberate, more like an academic than a field general. At his first press conference as commissioner, Murphy announced he was enacting sweeping new policies to root out corruption and punish anyone caught or believed to be violating the high standards of the NYPD.

  Among the officers who should have been concerned was Bill Phillips. Any number of citizens and policemen could have identified Phillips as a bent cop. Rarely had he tried to hide his activities; he took money under the table and spread it around fearlessly. He threatened citizens with summonses, arrest, sometimes even physical violence, all in the name of good old-fashioned extortion. His partners and supervisors knew about it; his payoffs went all the way up the chain of command.

  Phillips wasn’t the least bit worried. Sure, he’d heard there was some half-assed commission appointed by that dick-wad mayor who hated cops—but Phillips knew the cops hated Lindsay just as badly. He was sure no self-respecting cop would talk to any commission. That was one of the reasons Phillips had always been so diligent about spreading the wealth within the department—he felt it inoculated him. The more cops who were on the pad, the less likely it was that anyone would ever flip. It was almost inconceivable to Phillips that the department’s way of doing business would ever change. Like most cops, he believed the Blue Wall of Silence was impregnable. The mayor and his investigators were so far removed from the daily realities of life in the precincts and on the street, they might as well have been operating from Uranus.

  PRETRIAL HEARINGS IN the case against the Panther Twenty-one dragged on for months. The defendants were being held on bail of $100,000 each, an astounding sum, and were confined at separate correctional facilities, making it difficult for them to coordinate their legal defense. Each morning, Dhoruba and the other defendants (whittled down from twenty-one to thirteen after various trial separations) were retrieved from holding pens in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan and transported to the Criminal Court building at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Along with Dhoruba, on trial were Lumumba Shakur, Afeni Shakur, Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor, William “Kinshasa” King, Curtis Powell, Robert Collier, Ali Bey Hassan, Alex McKeiver, Clark Squires, Baba Odinga, Lee Roper, and Joan Bird.

  In a courtroom on the sixth floor, the proceedings were boisterous and sometimes chaotic. Taking a page from the New Left playbook of the 1960s, the defendants turned the trial into a burlesque of justice. They openly defied, insulted, and berated Justice John M. Murtagh, a rigid, old-school judge who was the embodiment of much of what the Panthers were fighting against. The son of a fire battalion chief, an Irish Catholic who was closely aligned with the NYPD, Murtagh had served as commissioner of investigation during the Harry Gross gambling scandal. He’d actually been arrested and charged with “willful and unlawful…neglect of duty” for failure to report evidence of police corruption during that episode, but the charge was later dismissed on a technicality and had no adverse effect on his career.

  Early on, Judge Murtagh declared, “This is not a political trial; it is a criminal matter.” And yet much of the prosecution’s evidence revolved around political literature: they would enter as evidence copies of Mao’s Little Red Book, the Black Panther, and books on guerrilla warfare seized in the defendants’ apartments, along with the movie The Battle of Algiers and even posters of Malcolm X and of John Carlos Williams and Tommy Smith giving the Black Power salute at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. They used these items to support their case that the defendants were bent on committing acts of terrorism and advocating the overthrow of the government.

  The defense of the Panther Twenty-one was handled by a collective of like-minded lawyers, many of them protégés of the radical defense attorney William Kunstler. They proved to be skilled legal advocates, but it was clear early on that many of the Panthers would not hesitate to speak for themselves. The most vocal was Dhoruba, who announced to the court, “We are going to tell people we’re not going down like all tho
se other niggers.” Years later, Dhoruba remembered, “I was referring to George Whitmore and all the others who had been mistreated and framed by a corrupt criminal justice system ever since black people were brought to this country.”

  “Now, if this court does not give us justice,” Dhoruba told the judge, “we’re going to tear this raggedy, filthy, injustice pigpen inside out every single day…. All we ask for is justice. That’s all we ask for. Four hundred and fifty motherfuckin’ years, we ask for justice. And you get this punk [the prosecutor] calls us terrorists and you get the Gestapo in our community murdering us; because of punks like that we got guns.”

  Murtagh responded by citing Dhoruba for contempt. At one point he suspended the proceedings entirely until Dhoruba and the other defendants agreed to promise—in writing or via recorded statement—not to disrupt the trial or use profane language in the courtroom. The defendants responded by composing a long, detailed political treatise on racial repression in the United States, from Plymouth Rock through Frederick Douglass, from the horrors of the KKK and Jim Crow through police violence in the modern era. The “Panther Twenty-one Manifesto” was recorded in its entirety by Cetewayo, who had a booming theatrical voice in the manner of Paul Robeson. Then they announced that they had prepared what they called an “apology” and requested that it be played in open court.

  As the defendants languished in lockup, the voice of Cetewayo intoned the Panthers’ Trojan horse diatribe before an audience of spectators and the press. As he listened to the defendants rail against “four hundred years of oppression,” Murtagh grew apoplectic, suspending the proceedings again. The trial would drag on in this way for months to come—twenty-four months in all, making it the longest criminal proceeding to date in New York State history.

  Handling the prosecution was Joseph A. Phillips (no relation to Bill Phillips), a veteran assistant district attorney. Like Murtagh, Phillips was a classic product of the system. He presided over a bureau within the Manhattan D.A.’s office responsible for prosecuting corrupt cops, but not a single major police corruption case had been mounted during his tenure. Phillips’s fealty to the bureaucracy led one defense attorney to note that “the Panthers are on trial for conspiracy before a white Irish Catholic judge selected by a white Irish Catholic assistant D.A. to hear the testimony of white police officers from a police department historically controlled and disproportionately populated by white Irish Catholics.”

  When the city’s law enforcement authorities made their calculated decision to eradicate the Panthers, one thing they failed to anticipate was that their prosecution of a smattering of loosely connected defendants would become a lightning rod for the entire era. Like the trial of the Chicago Eight, which was unfolding in the Windy City at the same time, the Panther Twenty-one trial became a proscenium on which a particular brand of radical theater was staged.

  On the sidewalk in front of the courthouse, hundreds of Black Panthers, Panther supporters, and sympathizers gathered daily on Centre Street. The Panthers marched and called out in cadence as protesters carried hand-painted protest signs and chanted. Hundreds of uniformed officers, on foot and on horseback, were called in to surround the protesters, who gathered on the sidewalk and spilled out into the street. The rallies became a gathering point for much of the dissent and civil disobedience building throughout the city and country. Up until then, the civil rights movement, with its roots in the Deep South and its moral compass located in the ghetto, had vied for national attention alongside the antiwar movement and the rising of the counterculture. The trial of the Panther Twenty-one proved a magnet for the various protest movements, with many of the “stars” of the counterculture making an appearance on the sidewalk outside Manhattan Criminal Court. One of the most visible was Abbie Hoffman, who used part of a publisher’s advance and movie option for a book called Revolution for the Hell of It to post bond on behalf of Dhoruba Bin Wahad.

  For Dhoruba, the trial was a showcase for his most rebellious tendencies; it also came perilously close to sounding the death knell for an organization that had come to inhabit the center of his universe. Dhoruba’s identity was wrapped up in being a Panther. As the party grew in stature and notoriety around the city, Dhoruba became more invested in its salvation. His personal biography, as a former gangbanger turned Panther field secretary, was central to the narrative of the Panthers in New York, who had risen organically from various Afrocentric community organizations around the city and provided fuel for a national trend. The Black Power movement was coming into its own, and Dhoruba was one of its rising stars.

  Being a recognized leader in the movement had its complications. In Dhoruba’s case, he was called to answer for the infiltration of the Panthers by undercover police officers and paid informants, which composed the backbone of the government’s case against the Panther Twenty-one.

  While the case was still tied up in seemingly endless pretrial machinations, Dhoruba was met in a jailhouse visiting room by David Hilliard, chief of staff and acting boss of the Panthers while Huey P. Newton was still in prison. Hilliard had flown out from national headquarters in Oakland, where party leadership was in a rage over the New York indictments. Huey Newton, Hilliard, and others were afraid that the New York Panthers might take the entire national organization down with them.

  “We’re gonna close down the New York chapter,” Hilliard told Dhoruba.

  Dhoruba was shocked. “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” said Hilliard.

  “Why not!? Because this is New York, that’s why not. Harlem is here, brother. This is the center of black culture in the United States. You can’t close the Black Panther Party in Harlem. This is where Marcus Garvey spoke on street corners. This is where Malcolm X launched his career.”

  Dhoruba was dumbfounded. Hilliard had risen to his position within the party largely because he was a boyhood friend of Huey Newton, but Dhoruba knew he wasn’t respected among the party’s rank and file. During the shoot-out between Panthers and Oakland police in June 1968, in which Bobby Hutton was killed and Eldridge Cleaver was shot in the leg, Hilliard had hid in an empty bathtub in a Panther safe house. As far as Dhoruba was concerned, David Hilliard was a punk.

  Dhoruba also saw Hilliard as a conciliator, like many of the “country boys” from Oakland. “I was and still am a black nationalist,” remembered Dhoruba years later. “I was raised in the ferment of Harlem, where Garvey and Malcolm talked about forging a black identity, a unique black culture. We were not just interested in civil rights, or integration, even though that was part of it. We were talking about the right to assert our individual identity as the descendants of African slaves in America.”

  Hilliard was insistent. “The problem,” he told Dhoruba, “is that the Party here in New York is infiltrated with agents and jackanapes. Nobody can be trusted.” He cited the case of Alex Rackley, a New York Panther who’d been tortured and summarily executed with two bullets to the back of the head in a swamp in rural Connecticut the month before. Local Panthers had killed Rackley on the suspicion that he was an informant. One of the people involved in the murder, George Sams, was himself an informant. A former mental patient who’d been recruited by the FBI to serve as a snitch, Sams had insinuated himself into various East Coast chapters of the party. Sams claimed that the Rackley murder had been authorized by national chairman Bobby Seale, who was now under arrest in New Haven for his role in the murder.

  “Okay,” said Dhoruba. “We got informants. That’s a legitimate security issue. But you can’t say nobody can be trusted. There are dozens—hundreds—of young brothers and sisters out there picking up the slack. How you gonna let these white crackers run the Panthers out of New York? Besides, this trial here is gonna be a fund-raising bonanza for the Party.”

  The mention of fund-raising stopped Hilliard’s complaining and started him listening. A support group of radical lawyers, celebrities, and others had formed the Committee to Defend the Panther Twenty-one, soliciting funds
from an office they opened on Union Square in Manhattan. Donations were pouring in.

  “Well,” said Hilliard, “maybe you’re right. I’m gonna discuss this further with the chairman. But in the meantime we have to take some measure to show that discipline will be enforced. As of today, the entire New York chapter is under suspension, except for the brothers and sisters in jail. I’m headed up to New Haven to meet with the chairman. We gonna get to the bottom of this.” Dhoruba returned to his cell feeling he’d averted a disaster.

  Later, in sessions with their lawyers—when the defendants were able to meet with one another in a holding pen adjacent to Manhattan criminal court—Dhoruba discussed the situation with Lumumba Shakur, Cetewayo, and others. Some of the New York Panthers were livid when they heard that the national leadership had been ready to sell them down the river. Lumumba suggested that they break away from the Black Panther Party and form a splinter group.

  Dhoruba argued for patience. “Look,” he said, “if we could just get through to Minister Huey P. Newton, and explain our vision for a national party based in New York City, I know he would agree. The problem is Hilliard. He controls access to Huey while he’s in the joint. If we could just get to Huey, he’d realize that now is not the time to bail out on the party in New York. On the contrary, this trial could be the basis for a whole new initiative—national, even international.”

  The others were impressed. Dhoruba was taking leadership; he was stepping into the breach.

  In a matter of months, Dhoruba Bin Wahad would get his wish, meeting face-to-face with Huey P. Newton. But the man Dhoruba met wasn’t the same man who had spawned the Black Panther Party for Self Defense a few years earlier, before he went off to prison for the killing of an Oakland police officer. And the BPP that Newton envisioned back in 1966—small, localized, and politically parochial—had grown unmanageable while he was away. Growing pains, internal conflicts, and the persistent counterintelligence efforts of the FBI had begun to eat away at the foundation of the black liberation movement in New York City.