The Savage City

by T. J. English

  “What?” cried the judge.

  “My appeal will be over the barrel of a gun,” the clerk glumly repeated.

  Later, while he was biding his time at Rikers Island Correctional Facility before being moved upstate, Dhoruba was more sanguine. “They cannot break my spirit,” he told his attorney. “I will fight this. I will fight until the day I die.”

  IN DECEMBER 1972, the Knapp Commission issued its final report. In the history of the NYPD there had never been a more thorough and embarrassing exposure of corruption within the ranks. This was not a report on wrongdoing within a certain division or a scandal in one of the city’s boroughs—it was a highly detailed dissection of the entire rotten organism.

  Among other things, the Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption identified two primary classes of bent cop. One group—the “grass eaters”—were those who “accepted gratuities and solicit five, ten, twenty dollar payments from contractors, tow truck operators, gamblers, and the like but do not pursue corruption payments.” Grass eating was passed from officer to officer; it was a way for officers to prove their loyalty within the brotherhood, and it was widespread and widely tolerated throughout the department.

  The other group—the “meat eaters”—were police officers who “spent a good deal of time aggressively looking for situations they can exploit for financial gain.” Some cops justified activities like shaking down pimps and drug dealers for money by pointing out that the victims were criminals anyway and deserved it. But meat eaters didn’t always stop there; they were willing to extort money from civilians, too. They spread the illicit proceeds from scores throughout the command structure, confident that widening the net would inoculate them from possible trouble.

  The designation of dirty cops as grass eaters and meat eaters would be the Knapp Commission’s most lasting legacy. The rest of the report was overshadowed by a development no one had expected: the commission’s own star meat eater, Bill Phillips, was accused of being a homicidal maniac—a charge that came as a shock even to those who knew Phillips’s dirty side.

  During the live broadcasts of the Knapp Commission hearings, a veteran detective named John Justy saw Phillips on TV and thought, That face looks familiar. Three years earlier, on the night of Christmas Eve 1968, a brutal double murder had taken place in an upscale whore-house in an apartment building at 157 East Fifty-seventh Street, which was within Justy’s precinct. Jimmy Smith, the brothel’s proprietor, and a nineteen-year-old prostitute named Sharon Stango were executed with bullets to the head at close range. A customer named Charles Gonzales was also shot, but survived.

  Detective Justy caught the case of the whorehouse murders, but the killings went unsolved. A composite sketch of the killer was made from details provided by Gonzales and a handyman who saw the killer leaving the building. After seeing Phillips on TV, Justy dug up the sketch and reopened the case. He tracked down various former employees of Smith’s prostitution business and showed them photos of Bill Phillips. A number of them said they’d seen Phillips on more than one occasion at the whorehouse. One prostitute claimed that on the night before the Christmas Eve double murder, she was present at Smith’s eleventh-floor apartment when Phillips told Smith, “If you don’t have my one thousand dollars I’m going to come back here tomorrow night and blow your fucking head off.”

  The next evening, Justy concluded, Phillips returned to apartment 11-F. Smith was in the front room with Stango and her john, Gonzales, when Phillips told Smith, “You owe me a thousand dollars.”

  “I can pay you at the end of the week,” Smith replied.

  “I’m not going to wait until the end of the week,” said Phillips, “I want my fucking money now.” Then he pulled out a .38-caliber gun, put it to Smith’s head, and pulled the trigger. Blood spurted everywhere, and down went Smith.

  Stango screamed.

  “Shut up, bitch,” said the assailant, turning the gun on Stango and pressing the muzzle against her head. “Please, please,” she cried hysterically. Then he pulled the trigger twice. Blood poured down the front of her shirt, and she fell to the floor.

  The killer now turned to Gonzales, a short, pudgy man of forty. “I have four children,” pleaded Gonzales.

  The shooter fired on Gonzales, but the john raised his arm, deflecting the bullet so that it hit him in the abdomen. The man went down. Thinking he was dead, the shooter stepped over him and left the apartment.

  Gonzales struggled to his feet, staggered out into the hallway, and fell to his knees. He looked down the hall at the shooter, who was waiting for the elevator. “Merry Christmas,” the shooter said, then disappeared into the elevator. Gonzales slumped to the floor and passed out.

  The slaughter on East Fifty-seventh Street hadn’t made a lot of headlines at the time. In the Savage City of 1968, lurid crimes of violence had become commonplace—even those involving white victims shot in Upper East Side apartments. Now, three years later, with the perpetrator of the crime being named as the very same cop who had torn his department down in front of the Knapp Commission just months before, the story shocked even the most jaded New Yorkers.

  No one was more shocked than Bill Phillips. Ever since the end of the commission hearings, Phillips had been helping prosecutors prepare cases stemming from his testimony. Then, one afternoon in March 1972, Detective John Justy and ADA John Keenan intercepted Phillips at the D.A.’s office, leading him to a private conference room to inform him that he was being investigated for the whorehouse shooting. Phillips recalled: “It was around three in the afternoon…. I was in such a state, mentally and physically, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t sit down, I couldn’t drink anything; I couldn’t eat. I went home that night in a terrible state of mental torture.” Right away, Phillips’s gut told him he was being framed by the NYPD as payback for his Knapp testimony. What else could it be? He knew John Justy. Years earlier he’d offered to help Justy fix a case the detective was working on. Justy was amenable, but the case never advanced, and nothing ever came of it. Phillips also knew that one of the cops he’d fingered during the Knapp hearings had been a friend of Justy’s; humiliated by the public exposure, he had committed suicide soon afterward. Phillips heard that Justy was distraught and angry about his friend’s death.

  Even so, Phillips was dumbfounded. He himself had named Jimmy Smith to Knapp investigators as someone he had once scored. He hadn’t visited Smith’s place since 1968, when he’d briefly taken part in a past-posting sports betting scam. Why on earth would he willingly link himself to Smith if he was the one who’d killed him? There could be only one answer. They want to bury me, Phillips thought. That way they can destroy all the Knapp-related cases, the state cases, the federal cases, all the police corruption cases. Everybody walks.

  On March 20, Phillips was indicted on two counts of murder in the first degree and one count of attempted murder.

  A few weeks later, an incident occurred that seemed to symbolize the moral chaos that had consumed the city. In Harlem, a handful of cops responded to calls of a “10-13”—officer down. The location of the reported disturbance was at Lenox Avenue and 116th Street, an address the cops didn’t immediately recognize as the Nation of Islam’s Mosque Number Seven. Inside the mosque, a rumble broke out between the cops and a group of Muslims. One cop, Patrolman Phillip Cardillo, was shot and killed in the melee. Additional cops flooded to the scene, but they were surrounded by a huge throng of Harlemites that had gathered on the street and sidewalk in front of the mosque. Before long, the crowd was attacking the cops with bricks, rocks, and even gunfire raining down from rooftops nearby.

  One of the cops responding was Detective Randy Jurgensen, who had been undercover in a gypsy cab, staking out the apartment of a BLA member’s girlfriend, when the call came over the radio. Jurgensen drove to the scene, but the mob of pedestrians was too thick to get close, so he left the car and ran toward the mosque on foot. Behind him, angry rioters turned over his gypsy cab and set it on fire. Jurgensen was hit i
n the head with something heavy—a rock, a brick, maybe a baseball bat.

  “I thought I was shot,” he remembered. “I was coughing up blood, gasping for breath.” Jurgensen collapsed, unconscious. When he came to he was in the arms of a fellow officer, being dragged away from the mob as another officer fired his gun in the air to keep the rioters at bay.

  “Die, you pigs!” shouted someone in the crowd. “Kill the pigs!” shouted another.

  The riot raged until enough police arrived to quell the crowd. From the stoop in front of the mosque, Minister Louis Farrakhan attempted to control and disperse the angry residents. It had been a sudden and frightening explosion of violence, with numerous injuries. The shooting of Patrolman Cardillo inside the mosque was revealed only later; no one was arrested for the crime. In fact, city and police authorities weren’t even willing to say a murder had taken place, though officers on the scene claimed that Cardillo had been beaten and gunned down in cold blood by a member of the Nation of Islam inside the mosque.

  The politically explosive nature of the incident seemed to enshroud it in mystery. The 10-13 call that initially drew cops to the mosque, it turned out, was a false alarm. Had police been deliberately suckered into a confrontation? Did the police have the right to storm unannounced into a religious place of worship? And who shot Officer Cardillo? Muslims claimed he’d been killed by friendly fire during the mayhem, and that cops, humiliated and disgraced, were trying to blame it on them. Outside, on the street, a throng of local residents had almost lynched a group of cops who’d been called to back up fellow officers in distress. It was an afternoon of utter mayhem.

  No one representing city government—or anyone else—was able to give a clear accounting of what happened that day, but that was hardly surprising. The city could no longer be broken down into simple categories of good guys and bad guys. Black was white, white was black. The old ways had been turned inside out.

  As if to further illustrate the moral ambiguity, in the summer of 1972—eight weeks after the mosque riot—Bill Phillips was brought into Manhattan criminal court to be tried on charges of murder and attempted murder.

  The judge presiding was John Murtagh. It was his first major trial since the debacle of the Panther Twenty-one prosecution, after which a number of jurors had signed an affidavit calling his conduct prejudicial and unfair. Murtagh had been berated by the Panther defendants and their political allies for two years; his home had been targeted for bombing by the Weather Underground. The defendant in this new case, Bill Phillips, wasn’t likely to jump up and call Murtagh a “crypto-fascist,” but there were other issues.

  For one thing, Phillips’s attorney, the celebrated Boston attorney F. Lee Bailey, was famous for trying to influence the outcome of his trials both inside and outside the courtroom. In the weeks leading up to the trial, Bailey stoked the flames of controversy by promoting Phillips’s claim that the charges were simply payback for his Knapp testimony. In pretrial hearings, Justice Murtagh made it clear to Bailey that any such allegations of a police department conspiracy, made without evidence, would be ruled out of order.

  As for the prosecution, Keenan decided he would try the case himself—a rare move for a bureau chief. Fresh from supervising the successful conviction of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Keenan was a veteran in the city’s race and corruption wars; he’d even prosecuted Ricky Robles in the Wiley-Hoffert case. Keenan was upright to the point of drabness, a pillar of propriety who never pronounced curse words outright in court; in his mouth the word fuck became “the f-word,” and shit became “a reference to certain human bodily functions.” His very presence was a rebuke to the salty demeanor of swaggering Bill Phillips.

  Once the trial commenced, the prosecution presented a startling array of eyewitnesses. Four different prostitutes who had worked for Jimmy Smith testified that they’d seen Phillips on the premises numerous times, including the night before the murder, when he threatened Smith. The handyman at the apartment building, who did not know Phillips by name but had seen him at the building “five or six times,” testified that the defendant had arrived just before the murders took place, gone to the eleventh floor, and then left the building after the slaughter. Even more damaging was the testimony of Charles Gonzales, who showed the jurors his gruesome scar from the shooting; when asked to identify the assailant, he stepped down from the witness stand, walked over to Phillips, and said, “That’s the man who shot me.”

  An eyewitness account from the survivor of a brutal criminal act was powerful testimony, but the single most effective evidence against Phillips may have been his own words. When Phillips took the stand to testify in his own defense, Keenan played him a recording made by Teddy Ratnoff not long after the two men first met. Phillips did not know Ratnoff was wired. At one point on the tape, Ratnoff asked Phillips about some commendation medals on the front of his police uniform:

  Ratnoff: What’s that??

  Phillips: Oh yeah, I killed three fucks up there.

  Ratnoff: You killed three—yeah?

  Phillips: Yeah. Oh yeah. I blow ’em away like they’re fucking nothing.

  Phillips had killed one man in the line of duty; the prosecution contended that the other two victims he was referring to were the pimp and the prostitute. Phillips would dismiss his words as idle bravado, the inflated rhetoric of a professional hustler with a couple drinks under his belt.

  Bailey was able to put forth a strong alibi defense for his client. The crime had taken place on Christmas Eve, which made it easy for Phillips to reconstruct his whereabouts that night. After attending a dinner party with his wife and relatives, Phillips had driven around to the homes of other relatives to offer Christmas greetings. At his aunt and uncle’s house, they all stopped to watch news reports of the first U.S. astronauts to circle the earth. It was a memorable evening, and Bailey paraded a host of Phillips’s relatives before the jury to confirm Phillips’s account of his whereabouts.

  The trial lasted six weeks. For four days the jury deliberated. Then they returned to the courtroom to inform Justice Murtagh that they were deadlocked, 10–2 in favor of acquittal. There would be no verdict. Hung jury.

  Within days, Hogan and Keenan announced that Phillips would be retried on the same charges. Phillips didn’t seem overly concerned; he was out on bail, living with the ever-faithful Camille, who had apparently reconciled herself to the fact that her husband was a hoodlum. He had even arranged to publish a memoir, On the Pad, written with Leonard Shecter. Phillips had always been a man of great confidence; he had little doubt he would beat the charges at the next trial.

  As he waited, the revelations of the Knapp Commission were debated by journalists, politicians, and policymakers. It was a true sign of the times that the man who had made the revelations possible—the man who breached the Blue Wall as no one ever had before—was facing an indictment that, if true, made him the dirtiest cop of them all.

  What was the public supposed to make of that?

  AT GREEN HAVEN prison in upstate New York, Whitmore received a rare visit from the warden. For a lowly inmate, it was like an audience with the pope. Whitmore knew it meant something out of the ordinary.

  “George,” said Superintendent Leon Vincent. “How you feeling?”

  “Okay,” said Whitmore.

  Vincent was known as tough but fair. “Well, son,” he said to George, “I got a proposition for you.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Tonight on television they’re showing that movie based on your case. I was thinking of sending you to the sick ward so you can watch it in privacy. This way, nobody’s gonna bother you in the TV room. What do you think?”

  “I appreciate that, Warden.”

  For three days, George had a bed in the prison hospital ward—the only place in the prison where inmates got private TV privileges. On the night of March 8, 1973, he had the unusual experience of watching a major motion picture that purported to be based on his life.

  George had mixed feel
ings about the project. Selwyn Raab and Myron Beldock had finally shamed and cajoled Universal Studios and CBS into making Whitmore a modest payment of three thousand dollars. But their promises to hire him as a technical consultant never panned out—and, worse yet, the movie itself had taken a sharp turn away from the docudrama they had originally pitched. What had begun as a feature film to be called The Wiley-Hoffert Murders, using the real names and details of George Whitmore’s case, had been transformed into a fictionalized TV movie called The Marcus-Nelson Murders, with a screenplay “suggested by” Raab’s book Justice in the Back Room.

  Even so, it was a heady experience for Whitmore sitting alone in the sick ward at Green Haven watching a three-hour movie so clearly based on his story. The actor playing the Whitmore character—Gene Woodbury, a young African American in his first major role—had written George a number of letters in researching the part, and much of the filming was done at locations in Brownsville and elsewhere in Brooklyn where the actual events had taken place

  At times, for George the movie was almost too painful to watch. The sequence in which the Whitmore character is broken down by detectives until he signs a false confession was taken directly from Raab’s book, which relied heavily on the actual transcript of George’s interrogation. The scene had him in tears—consumed with shame that he hadn’t stood up to the detectives.

  By the end of the movie, though, George’s shame was eclipsed by annoyance. Ultimately, the star of The Marcus-Nelson Murders was a crusading detective who senses immediately that the Whitmore character has been framed—and then becomes a tireless advocate for justice, securing a top trial lawyer for the black kid and spearheading the investigation that eventually exonerates him of the murder of two white girls.

  The detective character was a composite of several detectives who worked the real Wiley-Hoffert investigation, most notably Lieutenant Thomas Cavanaugh, the cop who tracked, wiretapped, and interrogated Ricky Robles. In the movie, the detective was named Lieutenant Theo Kojak and played by the charismatic, bald-headed actor Telly Savalas. The character was such a hit that he was later spun off into his own series, entitled Kojak, which would become one of the most iconic TV cop shows in American TV history.