The Savage City (19 page)

Lichtman:
I said I felt in view of the conclusion…the conclusion indicates that the expert could not say one way or the other whether the button did or did not come from the coat.

Judge:
Don't you think that the reporter or the analyst, this evidence contained in the report, should have been submitted to a jury so that they could determine?

Lichtman:
I do not.

Judge:
You did receive an expert opinion, didn't you, sir, as to whether the threads matched?

Lichtman:
Yes, I received expert opinions that said that the threads on the button did not match the threads on the coat.

 

The hearing received minimal press coverage. Two weeks after it was over, on March 19, Judge Malbin delivered his ruling: “The hearing revealed that prejudice and racial bias invaded the jury room. Bigotry in any of its sinister forms is reprehensible; it must be crushed, never to rise again. It has no place in an American court of justice.” As for the FBI lab report, the judge noted that although he found no “deliberate and willful suppression of any material evidence…the nondisclosure of this evidence to the defendant was a violation of an obligation on the part of the prosecutor, and the failure to reveal information that may be usable by an accused may be a denial of that fairness that is required under the due process clause of the constitution…. Therefore, the court concludes that the conviction cannot stand.”

The Borrero conviction was thrown out. But Whitmore's defense team had little time to celebrate. For one thing, the very next day Brooklyn D.A. Aaron Koota announced that his office would retry Whitmore for the same charge. Even more pressing, the Minnie Edmonds murder trial was scheduled to take place in exactly one week—in the same courthouse, and with the same prosecutor, Sid Lichtman.

In that case, Whitmore was facing the death penalty.

THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
for the Advancement of Colored People was a proud organization. When it was founded in 1909, by W. E. B. Du Bois among others, segregation was the law of the land. In the southern states, racist Jim Crow statutes were brutally enforced by the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine organization that counted many law enforcement officials and civic government representatives among its members. There was no Klan or Jim Crow laws in the North, but there was still segregation, most notably in areas of housing, education, and employment. Northern whites could hang with blacks at jazz clubs and the ballpark, and segregated restrooms and water fountains were technically illegal (though they did exist), but the white population had little interest in issues of racial equality and fairness in most aspects of city life. The NAACP set about trying to change social mores by addressing the institutional nature of racism throughout the United States.

The NAACP's first official gathering took place in New York, at the Henry Street Settlement House in lower Manhattan. At the meeting, attended by forty people—some of them white—the group ratified a charter that delineated its mission:

As the organization grew in size and stature, it developed a specific focus on legal issues as they played out in the courts. The NAACP was always something of a bourgeois organization; it had wealthy donors, undeniable social stature, and the power to influence public opinion—as in 1914, when it organized a nationwide protest against D. W. Griffith's racist epic
The Birth of a Nation
. The organization's ability to provide pro bono legal assistance was a lifeline for generations of Negroes caught in the country's institutionalized racial caste system. The NAACP was especially active in decrying the lynching of blacks throughout the United States by working for legislation, lobbying in Congress, and educating the masses.

By the early 1960s, the NAACP had more than fifty branches and close to ten thousand members, but signs of fissure had begun to appear within its ranks. The organization had long excelled at issues of legal advocacy and political lobbying, but in the late 1950s it was outstripped by a more activist movement devoted to the principles of direct action. Throughout the early civil rights era, NAACP leaders at the national and local levels had criticized Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council for engaging in direct conflict with the police. The rift seemed to be generational as much as tactical: as the civil rights movement heated up in the 1960s, the NAACP risked being viewed as old-fashioned and out of touch.

In New York, the organization often clashed with CORE and other civil rights groups that had a younger membership and seemed to be moving toward a more vocal and rambunctious approach. It would take a few years for the fault lines to be clearly defined, but one thing was apparent: blacks looking to get involved in the civil rights movement would have many more organizations and points of view to choose from than they had only a few years earlier.

And yet, when it came to calling public attention to an issue—or to providing free legal assistance to victims of injustice—no Negro rights group was more formidable than the NAACP.

At the local level, the NAACP had been slow to rally around the Whitmore case. In part, the organization had hesitated because of the
heinous nature of the Wylie-Hoffert murders: the media attention surrounding the killings, along with Whitmore's portrayal as a “drifter” and “loner,” had created a broad sense that he was probably guilty of something. Even if his connection to the Wylie-Hoffert murders had been cooked up by detectives—as a discerning observer might have surmised—he'd “confessed” to two other major felonies, including the murder of a black woman.

Only after Ricky Robles was indicted for the Wylie-Hoffert killings did the NAACP take an active interest in George Whitmore's case. Ray Williams and Norman Johnson, an attorney with the organization's Legal Redress Committee, asked to sit in as part of Whitmore's defense “as observers to determine whether the rights of the defendant were in any way impaired because he is a Negro.”

Whitmore needed all the help he could get. His upcoming trial for the murder of Minnie Edmonds was deadly serious; if convicted, he'd be headed for a date with Old Sparky.

For weeks before the trial, the NAACP lawyers and the rest of Whitmore's defense team had been trying to pressure the Manhattan D.A.'s office to drop the Wylie-Hoffert murder charge. It seemed to defy logic, not to mention the dictates of fairness, for the D.A. to leave these charges hanging over Whitmore's head after announcing publicly that another suspect had been indicted for the murders—especially when Whitmore had another murder trial pending. If the Borrero jury knew that Whitmore had been charged with the notorious Career Girls Murders, surely the Edmonds jury would too. How could he possibly get a fair trial?

The behavior of D.A.s Hogan and Koota and the other prosecutors involved in Whitmore's legal travails was telling. Although the lead prosecutors remained intransigent, a few anonymous sources within the D.A.'s office had begun to voice doubts. Despite an in-house memo from Hogan warning that anyone caught talking to the press about the Whitmore case would be fired, one assistant D.A. told a
Times
reporter, “I am positive that the police prepared the confession for Whitmore…. I am also sure that the police were the ones who gave Whitmore all the details of the killings that he recited to our office.” Another assistant D.A. said, “Call it what you want—brain-washing, hypnosis, fright. They made him give an untrue confession. The only thing I don't believe is that Whitmore was beaten.” This unnamed source added, “If this had
not been a celebrated case; if this hadn't got the tremendous publicity; if this is what we so-called professionals call a run-of-the-mill murder, Whitmore might well have been slipped into the electric chair and killed for something he didn't do.”

Yet none of these prosecutors would give his name or be quoted on the record, for fear of retribution—a fact that spoke volumes about the dark cloud hanging over the case. A Negro kid had been indicted on trumped-up charges, in a way that implicated not only the cops who elicited the false confession, but also the assistant district attorneys who took down his statement; D.A.s Hogan and Koota; the other government litigators currently presiding over the defendant's slow torture by prosecution; and the press, who had initially swallowed it all mostly without question. The entire system of criminal justice was implicated in the railroading of George Whitmore.

 

THE MINNIE EDMONDS
trial was similarly problematic. Edmonds, a forty-six-year-old Negro washerwoman, was last seen alive around 2:00
A.M.
on April 14, 1964, when she left a tavern near her home in Brownsville. Her body was found stabbed and beaten, her clothes torn and disheveled, in a pool of blood just after dawn that morning in a tenement yard on Chester Street, just a block from where Elba Borrero was attacked ten days later. The cause of death was multiple stab wounds in the face, chest, and heart. At the time the body was discovered, the murder of Minnie Edmonds merited not one column inch in the city's seven daily newspapers.

The case against Whitmore for the murder was weak, almost nonexistent. The Brooklyn D.A.'s office contended that Whitmore had accosted Edmonds on her way home from the tavern, chasing her into an alleyway much like the one where Elba Borrero was assaulted. There Whitmore allegedly tried to rape the woman and brutally murdered her when she resisted. There were no witnesses, no circumstantial evidence linking Whitmore to the crime. All the prosecutors had was Whitmore's confession.

Realizing that the validity of Whitmore's signed statement would come under scrutiny, D.A. Koota made a public show of launching an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the confession. His four-man team of investigators consisted of Assistant D.A. Lichtman,
a Negro investigator from the D.A.'s office, and the two detectives who elicited the confession in the first place, Aidala and Di Prima. When asked by a reporter why the D.A.'s office would choose as investigators two detectives with a vested interest in upholding the confession, Lichtman said, “These two fellows were the lead investigators on the case. They were familiar with the leads and the area, particularly Dick Aidala…. I didn't even think of taking anybody else.”

Lichtman's boss, Aaron Koota, concurred, adding in a separate interview: “Suppose [we] brought in other police officers and they found evidence to attack Di Prima and Aidala. Do you think they would have told us?”

It was an astounding statement: the most powerful criminal justice official in the borough was justifying the use of the two least objective detectives he could find because they were the only ones he could trust.

The Edmonds murder trial kicked off in Brooklyn Supreme Court, in a room down the hall from where the Borrero trial had taken place six months earlier. This trial began with a monthlong hearing—known as a Hundley hearing—in which Whitmore's defense team sought once more to have the so-called confession declared inadmissible. One by one, the detectives took the stand and laid it all out, this time for Justice Dominic Rinaldi.

At the witness table, flanked by his attorneys, Whitmore listened as the policemen came forward and told lie after lie. He had heard it all before, but with each court proceeding and each telling of the tale Whitmore developed a more pronounced sense of vertigo, a deeper feeling of descending into the rabbit hole. He remained without rancor, believing that some horrible mistake was being made, that he would one day wake up and it would all be over. But each day the earth gave way beneath his feet, and he felt his life slipping away.

Midway through the hearing, on a Thursday afternoon, a sudden groaning sound came from the spectators' gallery in the courtroom. George turned from his seat at the defendant's table to see his father collapse into his mother's arms. George Whitmore Sr. was taken from the courtroom, given air from an oxygen tank, and rushed to the hospital. The trial was postponed until the following Monday.

Their difficult relationship didn't mitigate Whitmore's concern for his father, who had suffered a heart attack. George asked himself:
What curse has befallen me that I stand falsely accused, publicly tarred and feathered,
and now those nearest to me are struck down by a sudden affliction, as if by the Hand of God?

It was another lost weekend for George, who languished in his cell at the Brooklyn House of Detention waiting to hear whether his travails had contributed to his father's death.

Whitmore Sr. recovered and was out of the hospital by Monday, but he never returned to the courtroom.

The Hundley hearing ended badly. Supreme Court Justice Dominic Rinaldi declared that Whitmore had “confessed of his own accord, without coercion by the police.” His confession would stand.

“Judge,” protested Stanley Reiben, “my client is doomed by this decision.”

In the trial that followed, Whitmore himself took the stand. This time, he was more presentable; his new horn-rimmed glasses gave him an almost scholarly appearance. After twelve months of interrogations, depositions, incarceration, trials, hearings, and an endless recital of names, dates, times, and other details, however, Whitmore was like a punch-drunk fighter. He wanted to do well, to please his lawyers, but the process had worn him down.

“Mister Whitmore, do you recognize the man standing in front of you?” Assistant D.A. Lichtman had become Whitmore's Grand Inquisitor, a voice almost as familiar as that of his own attorney.

George looked at the man standing nearby:
a detective, probably. White man. No friend of mine.
But George couldn't be sure. “No,” he said.

“Did you see him in the station house?” the judge interjected.

George looked at the man again. “Not that I recollect.”

“Did he ask you any questions about Wylie-Hoffert?”

“No, sir…. He may have come into the room, because there were people coming in and out of the room all the time.”

Even Whitmore's attorneys were startled. The man standing in front of George was Detective Eddie Bulger, the very person who had so carefully tied him to the Wylie-Hoffert murders. The jury already knew that Bulger had been among the detectives who interrogated Whitmore; they knew he had been in the squad room. Detective Di Prima testified that Bulger helped Whitmore draw a diagram of the murder scene. To George, however, Bulger was just another face among the swirl of faces that had come in and out of the squad room. His inability to identify Bulger did not help his credibility as a witness.

In questioning his client on redirect, Reiben sought to salvage Whitmore's testimony by keeping it simple. “George, did you kill Mrs. Minnie Edmonds?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever killed anybody, George?”

“No, sir.”

In his final summation, Prosecutor Lichtman stood before the all-male Blue Ribbon jury of eleven whites and one Negro. The concept of the Blue Ribbon jury—one chosen on the basis of superior education and community standing—was a holdover from earlier in the century. Knowing that the jury members came from backgrounds far removed from the world of George Whitmore, Lichtman zeroed in on differences between the friends and relatives who had testified on Whitmore's behalf and the “upstanding” collection of public servants who took the stand on behalf of the prosecution.