The Savage City (44 page)

It was a stunning defeat for ADA Joe Phillips and Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan. They could have tried the defendants in a series of more manageable cases, on charges of arson, weapons possession, attempted murder, and so on. Instead they had gambled on fear, decrying the mau-mauing of America—and they had lost.

To those in law enforcement, the battle hadn't been a complete loss. As the steady stream of memos in the COINTELPRO and NYPD intelligence files confirmed, the Black Panther Party was in disarray. One memo noted that the party's entire New York chapter had exactly $29.95 in its bank account. Panthers were killing Panthers; the Harlem chapter had been virtually wiped out by the pressures of the trial and by internal disputes. The trial may have ended in acquittal, but its goal was accomplished: the Black Panther Party in New York was beyond recovery.

As with any social conflict, the magnitude of any setback or success depends on where you sit. Within the black liberation movement, the Panther Twenty-one verdict was a cause for joy but also anger. One juror, Edwin Kennebeck, who would later write a book about the case, asked, “How did the grand juries decide to bring those heavy indictments? There is something wrong with the way those august bodies are constituted. They are mainly the fat cats of the community, who, like most of us comfortable folks, have not heeded Martin Duberman's advice to be in touch ‘with the felt experience of others'—the poor, the disaffected, the angry underdogs—to have some concept of their lives, their feelings, their language.” To the most militant within the movement, the fact that even a predominantly white jury saw the Panther Twenty-one prosecutions as a disgrace was like a kick to the solar plexus.

After two years of incarceration and prosecution under the most
severe conditions, the defendants were set free. The Black Panther Party's New York chapter was destroyed, but the underlying causes of the movement had not changed. Authors and sociologists described the mood as one of “black rage,” a feeling of disenfranchisement that led a generation of black youths to throw themselves into the whirlwind. The demands of Black Power activists remained the same, and few in government or the criminal justice system seemed capable of addressing the subject in an enlightened or honest way. All of which begged the question:
If the Black Panther Party is finished, then what comes next?

The answer came hard and fast. On the night of May 19—six days after the Panther Twenty-one defendants were set free—Patrolmen Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti were guarding D.A. Hogan's apartment building at Riverside Drive and 112th Street. A police guard had been posted outside Hogan's place of residence since the firebombing at Judge Murtagh's home the year before. Curry and Binetti were sitting in their vehicle when an aqua-blue Ford Maverick drove past them traveling south in the northbound lane on Riverside Drive. They took off after the car, circling around the block and finally catching up with the car at Riverside Drive and 106th Street. When the police car pulled up alongside the Ford, the cops barely had time to glance into the car when the driver ducked and the passenger, a black male, poked a .45-caliber machine gun out the window and opened fire. Binetti, who was driving the police car, hit the gas pedal, but it was too late. Both cops were riddled with machine-gun fire. The police car lurched forward, running into a parked car. The blue Maverick sped away.

The two cops were badly hurt—Curry disfigured and brain damaged, Binetti paralyzed—but both miraculously survived.

Two days later, a package arrived at the editorial offices of the
New York Times
and another at the studio of WLIB, a black-owned radio station. Inside the package was the license plate of the car sought by police in the shooting, wrapped in pages from the
New York Post
, accompanied by a typed note that read:

Few cops had ever heard of anything called the Black Liberation Army. Those who had found the reference ominous. As some had feared, out of the ashes of the Black Panther Party had arisen something potentially more lethal and militant.

That night, as news of the BLA note made its way through the police grapevine, two cops responded to a domestic disturbance call at the Colonial Park Housing Project at 159th Street and Harlem River Drive, where the Polo Grounds sports stadium had stood until it was torn down in 1960. Patrolmen Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini entered one of the eight massive apartment complexes that composed the Colonial Park projects, only to discover that the call had been a hoax. As the two uniformed policemen—one black, one white—were leaving the grounds of the project, they were ambushed from behind by two assailants later identified as black males. Jones, African American, was shot dead with a bullet in the back of the head. The white cop, Piagentini, was shot and fell to the ground. One of the assailants approached, pulled the officer's gun from its holster, and blasted away at point-blank range using Piagentini's own service revolver. The assailants then fled the scene on foot. Piagentini, shot thirteen times, died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The next day a typed note arrived at the offices of radio station WLIB claiming credit for the killings. The wording was similar to the previous message, and it was signed REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE.

There had never been anything quite like this in the history of the NYPD: cops being executed randomly, regardless of their identity or even skin color. It was open season on the Men in Blue.

“We're in a war,” declared Edward J. Kiernan, president of the PBA,
as he arrived at Harlem Hospital into the middle of television news cameras and a gaggle of reporters. The head of the PBA was traditionally a stalwart and sometimes bellicose defender of his tribe, and Kiernan was no exception. “I refuse to stand by and permit my men to be gunned down while the Lindsay administration does nothing to protect them. Accordingly, I am instructing them to secure their own shotguns and to carry them on patrol at all times.”

“Do you think that will make a difference?” asked a reporter.

“I don't know,” said the PBA president. “But we'll do whatever is necessary. If we have to patrol this city in tanks, that's what we'll do. This is a war. I want all my men to understand that in any situation in which they have to draw their weapons, they are to shoot to kill. This is a battle to the death, and I want everyone to know that we won't be the only ones taking casualties.”

Three blocks away, in a detective squad room on the second floor of the Thirty-second Precinct station house, Mayor Lindsay and Commissioner Murphy hosted a somewhat more sedate gathering of the Fourth Estate. Describing the shootings as “an organized attempt…deliberate, unprovoked, and maniacal,” the commissioner released to the press a copy of the note from the BLA in response to the Curry and Binetti shooting. When a reporter told Murphy that the PBA president had “ordered” his men to carry their own shotguns, the commissioner blanched. “Police officers will carry regulation firearms,” he said, refusing to comment further.

Moments later, the commissioner and the mayor left the station house, a four-story brick fortress, and came face-to-face with a gathering of twenty-five to thirty off-duty cops. The men stood between the officials and their waiting limousine.

“Jonesy and Joe are dead,” someone shouted. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“What are you gonna do about
us
?” another cop demanded, with a chorus of voices sounding their approval.

“I don't know about you guys,” said another cop, “but the next time I go out there I got my shotgun with me.”

In a soft voice, Commissioner Murphy said, “That's not the answer. Those two patrolmen were ambushed from the back. Shotguns wouldn't have done them any good.”

“That's them. I gotta be able to protect me.”

“That's not the answer,” Murphy repeated.

Mayor Lindsay said nothing. He was out of his element, surrounded by hostile officers who viewed him as the enemy. As he and Murphy moved toward their waiting car, a young patrolman stepped forward and spoke directly to the mayor. “We're targets. Every day we go out there, we're targets. They don't fear us or respect us. Maybe if we carried shotguns, maybe if we got tough with them…” The cop's voice trailed off.

The mayor nodded and climbed into the limo with the police commissioner. Their car drove off, leaving behind a handful of cops muttering to themselves, feeling angry and wounded.

 

IN LATE MAY,
George Whitmore was released from jail in New Jersey after serving nine months for attempted robbery. He moved in with cousins at a tenement apartment in Brooklyn. As with most of his periodic stints behind bars, Whitmore returned to a society that seemed to be worse off than when he went into prison—fewer jobs, more crime, more overt hostility. This time, Whitmore rejoined the civilian population at a time when New York City seemed to be in the midst of a war. News about police shootings, or attempted shootings, were in the tabloid headlines nearly every day. In the black community there was a heated debate about the morality of the shootings. Although the BLA had its defenders, most people were disturbed by the random killing of police officers, either black or white. An editorial in the
Amsterdam News
captured the mood:

Whitmore skimmed the articles, read the headlines, and scratched his head. He did not support the black radicals. He was against random killing on moral grounds. Most of all, he couldn't see how shooting cops was anything but counterproductive. George came from a generation who believed that if you challenged the police, they would only use it as an excuse to bring the hammer of repression down on you even harder. George also had personal reasons for being concerned about the social agitation of the black militants: it was bad for his case. Somehow, he feared, the actions of the black revolutionaries could be exploited to deny him his freedom.

That freedom was hanging by a thread. Whitmore was out of jail, but still firmly in the clutches of the system. He and his lawyers were waiting for a final ruling from the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court on whether Elba Borrero's identification of him as her assailant back in 1964 would stand. The judge could call for a new trial, or, better yet, dismiss Borrero's identification altogether, throwing the ball back into the court of the Brooklyn D.A. Of course, there was also a third possibility: the judge could uphold Borrero's identification and Whitmore's conviction—in which case George would immediately be taken back into custody and serve out the remainder of his five-to-ten-year term for assault and attempted rape. There was no way of knowing which way it would go.

Meanwhile, George, as usual, was broke and without a job. With each new round of legal complications, his rap sheet grew and the likelihood of his ever finding meaningful employment faded further.

In the midst of his now familiar cycle of legal limbo and poverty, George got a surprising call from Myron Beldock, asking George to come to his office. There was someone who wanted to meet him—a famous Hollywood screenwriter.

Abby Mann was a Hollywood player at the top of his game. Having won an Academy Award in 1961 for his screenplay
Judgment at Nuremberg,
which had started out as a teleplay for the prestigious CBS drama series
Playhouse 90,
he was considered a go-to writer for subjects of serious social import. Now he wanted to adapt George Whitmore's story for film. Universal Studios had purchased the rights to Selwyn Raab's book
Justice in the Back Room
and hired Mann to work it up into a script—but in the interest of authenticity, Mann wanted to meet directly with the man at the center of it all.

George took the long subway ride into Manhattan to Beldock's midtown office, where he met the screenwriter. In his midforties, with jet-black hair and a perennial suntan, Mann had the look of an authentic Hollywood character. He told George he wanted to create a movie that was “faithful to the true story of George Whitmore.” It was his intention, and the producers', to use real names and real locations for the picture, which was slated as a feature film for theatrical release.

George was intrigued, but he kept waiting to hear the words “and you will be paid this amount for your participation.” Mann suggested that he might be hired as a technical adviser, but no promises were made.