The Savage City (50 page)

The press flooded the thirteenth-floor courtroom: Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan was rumored to be nearing retirement, and he had a lot riding on this prosecution—even beyond the fact that the case involved the shooting of two cops who'd been guarding his own apartment building. Hogan had come under fire for publicly criticizing the jury in the Panther Twenty-one case for having been influenced by “the political climate,” when Hogan's own critics were accusing him of the very same thing. Dhoruba's prosecution was a crucial step in the D.A.'s efforts to show that they were not toothless in the ongoing war between black radicals and the police.

Curry and Binetti both testified. Neither had much recollection of the assault, and neither was able to positively identify Bin Wahad as the shooter. But their appearance on the stand—two white police officers, one permanently paralyzed, the other partially disfigured—made an impression. One of the jurors, a twenty-five-year-old white male from the Bronx named Frank Treu, later said: “Here [were] two damaged white people. And they're police officers, whom we're supposed to trust. What gripe did they have that caused them to be shot?…[A]s far as any value as witnesses, there really was none. But it set the tone. And the tone it set was: somebody has to pay.”

The primary witness was Pauline Joseph. Her testimony was well rehearsed—perhaps too much so. Throughout the trial, defense attorney
Bloom reminded the court repeatedly that the prosecution was required to turn over all notes from interviews of Joseph by investigators—documentation commonly known as Rosario material. ADA Terrence O'Reilly claimed that the only such document was a one-paragraph statement by Joseph that had already been admitted into evidence.

Dhoruba and his attorney believed this to be a lie, and their suspicions seemed to be supported by an article in
New York
magazine by Robert Daley, the NYPD's recently retired press information officer. In the article, Daley described how Joseph was cultivated as a witness—with a level of detail that suggested there was more to the written record than the prosecution was presenting in court. Had Daley made it all up? Or was his account based on police reports and incriminating FBI interview notes not entered into evidence? The obvious solution would have been to call Robert Daley to the witness stand, but the judge, Joseph A. Martinis, refused to authorize a subpoena, taking the D.A.'s office at its word.

On the stand, Joseph was caught in lies relating to her psychiatric history, her time as a street prostitute, and the fact that she'd been on welfare. “She [testified] for three days,” said juror Treu. “And by the end of the third day, in my mind, there was enough inconsistency that it was hard to tell ‘Was she telling the truth here or was she telling the truth there?'”

The prosecution's case was riddled with doubt, but they did have one key piece of evidence: the gun. Although no witness was able to give an account of who actually pulled the trigger on the night of the shooting, the prosecution tried to link the gun to Dhoruba through a jailhouse conversation that ADA O'Reilly characterized as a “confession” on Dhoruba's part. His crew member Augustus Qualls, an admitted heroin addict and recidivist criminal, while the two were sharing a cell after their arrest for the Triple-O robbery, asked Dhoruba, “Why didn't you tell me the gun you used was the one that was used in the shooting of those two pigs?”

“If I had told you that, would you have come with us?” Dhoruba allegedly replied.

During his closing statement, ADA O'Reilly handed the machine gun to a juror and asked that it be passed around among the jury. It was a powerful bookend to the prosecution's opening presentation: having begun with the spectacle of two damaged cops, their lives altered irrevocably,
the prosecution was closing with the weapon that had injured them. And there, ladies and gentlemen, at the defendant's table, was the man behind it all—the man who, according to Pauline Joseph, loved that gun so much he gave it a nickname.

“That man,” said O'Reilly, “Richard Moore, known to some as Dhoruba, he shot those two police officers.”

Treu recalled that emotions ran high during deliberations: “One of the other jurors says, ‘What's the difference if he did it or not? You want a guy like this running around on your streets?…My feeling now is that I want to take this guy and shake him and say, ‘This is America, you idiot. We don't do it this way.'”

He wouldn't get that satisfaction. After deliberating for two and a half days, the jury of eleven men and one woman announced to the judge that they were deadlocked. Justice Martinis had no choice but to declare a hung jury.

D.A. Hogan wasted little time getting Bin Wahad back into court on the same charges, but by January 1973 that effort ended in another mistrial, after the judge became ill during jury selection.

Finally, in June, the D.A.'s office got the conviction they sought. After a four-week trial that was virtually identical to the first proceeding, a jury took just forty-five minutes to declare Dhoruba Bin Wahad guilty.

After the verdict was announced, Justice Martinis individually polled each of the jurors. From the defendant's table, Dhoruba jumped to his feet and pointed at the judge. “You did everything in your power to deny me a fair trial. I did not want those twelve men, but you forced me to accept them. Now they have convicted me of a crime I didn't commit.” Then he turned to the jury and told them: “Anything that happens from now on, it is on your shoulders, not mine.”

“It's on yours,” said the judge.

“No, it's not. It's on theirs,” countered Dhoruba.

After Dhoruba was taken away, the D.A.'s office allowed itself a moment of self-congratulation. ADA O'Reilly, who the
Times
described as “jubilant with his victory,” noted at a press conference that Bin Wahad was the first black militant in New York to be convicted of attempting to kill policemen. D.A. Hogan called the verdict “a major triumph.”

At his sentencing hearing a month later, Dhoruba remained angry and unrepentant. He told the judge he would leave the courtroom and
stay in the nearby detention pen unless all detectives and prosecutors were removed from the courtroom. When the justice refused to comply, Dhoruba stalked out, leaving it to his attorney to explain, “Many people here in the courtroom—police officers and others—have conspired to convict Mister Moore on perjured and unlawful testimony. In their own specific way they've seen to it he could not receive a fair and impartial trial.”

The judge stood firm. Holding her new baby, Kisha Green cried, “Please, Judge, as a matter of human dignity…”

“I order that woman removed from this court,” Justice Martinis yelled.

“But, Your Honor, that is Richard Moore's wife,” Bloom pleaded as guards escorted Green and child from the courtroom.

“I don't care who she is,” said the justice. “I'll have order in this courtroom.”

Martinis then announced that he was sentencing Dhoruba to life in prison.

A court clerk was sent to the holding pen to inform Dhoruba of his right to appeal. The clerk returned with a message from Dhoruba: “My appeal will be over the barrel of a gun.”

“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.