Mugged (12 page)
No charges were brought against the girl whose lies cost New York taxpayers $643,801
17
—about a million bucks in today’s dollars. Couldn’t we at least deduct the cost of investigating hoax bias crimes from the welfare budget?
Even her Amos and Andy advisors got off scot-free—at least until the OJ verdict.
Amazingly, the Tawana Brawley lunacy didn’t put a dent in the endless accusations of racism. Over and over again in the eighties and nineties, patently false claims had to be aggressively investigated to prove no one was soft on racism.
The living embodiment of the rule that there would never be any consequences for black charlatans is Al Sharpton.
In addition to libeling innocent men in the Tawana Brawley hoax and whipping up mobs in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights where and a rabbinical student was stabbed to death, Sharpton famously incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem, saying, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” A deranged black man who was listening to Sharpton later decided to storm the store and start shooting, wounding several employees and setting a fire that killed seven people.
Surely, after all this, Sharpton became a pariah—oh wait! No, that’s not what happened. Far from being exiled, he became famous, ran for president and Al Gore kissed his ring,
after
these events. Instead of becoming kryptonite, Sharpton became rich, famous, and a Democratic power broker.
Try to imagine Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson getting away with any of that. Or this: In the 1980s, Sharpton was captured on an FBI videotape, biting an unlit cigar and wearing a leather cowboy hat, discussing purchasing a cocaine shipment from an agent posing as a drug dealer.
AL SHARPTON, NATIONAL ACTION NETWORK:
So what kind of time limit are we dealing with, with this?
FBI AGENT:
The coke?
SHARPTON:
Yeah.
FBI AGENT:
Could be—about the same time I have four million coming to us.
SHARPTON:
End of April.
FBI AGENT:
End of April, six weeks from now. Is that a good time, you think?
SHARPTON:
Probably.
FBI AGENT:
Now I can get pure coke, or, you know, 99 percent, for about 35,000 a kilo. But I gotta get, you know, more than one.
SHARPTON:
Right.
FBI AGENT:
You know, if we’re going to do this thing…
SHARPTON:
Now you’re talking about some real…
18
This tape was made in 1983, but the public didn’t see it until 2002, nineteen years later. After the tape played on HBO’s
Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel
in 2002, Sharpton threatened to sue, claiming that there was a second tape that exonerated him, but the second tape never materialized. Instead, government sources said they hadn’t prosecuted Sharpton but instead used the tape to turn him into an FBI informant.
19
On
Meet the Press,
Sharpton denied committing a crime—he said he was just going along with the putative drug deal for fear of violence. He said he had given information to the FBI, and that the FBI had “spent money” on investigations, but denied being “a paid informant of law enforcement.”
20
If the tape had been shown at the time, perhaps the nation could have been spared the Tawana Brawley hoax. That came in 1988, five years after Sharpton was discussing cocaine shipments with an undercover agent.
LAURIE HECHT—1988
There were even Munchausen syndrome bias crimes, with white women claiming to be victims of racism for having spoken up on behalf of blacks. Months after Brawley was discovered in the plastic bag, Laurie Hecht, a white legal secretary in Yonkers, claimed that her speech at a city council meeting in favor of low-income housing being built in white neighborhoods (far, far away from Park Avenue) produced a rash of death threats.
Hecht instantly received twenty-four-hour FBI protection and a police escort wherever she went. The College of New Rochelle awarded her an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters as the “lone voice of reason” promoting civil discourse. Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center offered her a scholarship.
The
New York Times
published touching articles about her grit and spirit, how she helped her neighbors and had lots of plants. She lightheartedly told the
Times
reporter, “I didn’t get any death threats since Friday.”
21
Some might have noticed how she kept obsessively calling newspapers to tell them about her travails.
And then it turned out she was just a neurotic white woman desperate for attention. The FBI captured her on videotape scrawling racist graffiti in her own building moments before she reported the crime to the police. Telephone security equipment showed no calls to her apartment at the times she claimed she was receiving death threats.
22
Still, no one in the media ever said,
Maybe we should reevaluate our policy of always believing any charge of racism by anyone at any time.
Even the sensational Tawana Brawley hoax came and went without hindering the racial-hysteria industry. On the ones they lost—which was all of them—it was considered bad taste for the falsely accused to high-five. Everyone just agreed to never to talk about those examples again.
HOAXES—WHITE TODAY, 1992
Shock seized New York City in January 1992, when it was alleged that a black brother and sister, aged fourteen and twelve, walking to school in the Bronx early one morning, were attacked by white teenagers on a busy intersection. Calling themselves the Albanian Bad Boys, the teenaged assailants were said to have smeared the black children’s faces with white shoe polish, saying, “You’ll turn white today” and stealing $3 from them. The alleged assault was thwarted when the driver of a gypsy cab stopped to help.
After that, both the cab driver and the gang members seemed to disappear into thin air.
The racist paint attack was front-page news across the city and quickly became a national story. Having solved New York City’s crime and budget problems, Mayor Dinkins immediately called the mother and offered the children counseling. He spent the entire next day meeting with government officials, religious leaders, politicians and the police in response to the incident, vowing that he would “leave no stone unturned” in bringing the perpetrators of this “dastardly deed” to justice.
23
He ordered the police and the Commission on Human Rights to investigate so that “those who committed this outrageous attack are brought to the justice they deserve.”
24
Everyone from the Bronx borough president to the police to the human rights commissioner and religious leaders denounced the bias crime and called on witnesses to step forward. The police canvassed the neighborhood and began hauling in suspects the very next day. A twenty-thousand-dollar reward was offered for any information about the attack and a direct appeal was made to the cab driver to come forward. A hotline was set up for anonymous tips.
The following week, a twelve-year-old Hispanic boy, Bryan Figueroa, claimed that the exact same thing happened to him! He said he was attacked at a school bus stop during morning rush hour. When the police
showed up to interview him, he asked if he would get to meet the mayor, too.
25
Dinkins called the purported second attack “shameful and heinous.”
26
A month later, despite blanket news coverage and a police dragnet, the police didn’t have a single witness or suspect. They quietly admitted they believed both attacks were hoaxes. The
New York Times
broke the news gently, deep within the newspaper—Section B; page 3; column 5: “Police Puzzled by Lack of Leads in Bias Attacks on Black Youths.” The police were “considering a variety of theories” the paper reported, but the only “theory” mentioned was that “the children may have fabricated their descriptions of the incident.”
27
It seemed that the mother of the first two children had been desperately trying to get them transferred to a different school—a request that had been denied but was immediately granted after the paint incident. Even before reporting it to the police, she had told school officials about the assault in order to again ask for a transfer. School officials were quick to assure the
Times
that the transfer request “had no bearing on the veracity of the reported attack.”
28
But, according to the
New York Post
’s Peter Moses, others at the school said they didn’t believe it occurred because, in addition to reporting it to the school, before the police, the boy had a history of blaming his problems on racism whenever he got in trouble.
29
Asked about the possibility that the sensational crime had been a hoax, Mayor Dinkins said he wouldn’t comment until the police “say that it didn’t happen.”
30
Which would happen never. Instead, close observers of the case had to wait another three months for a small announcement on
page 42
of the
Times
admitting that the police still had no leads, despite—at that point—hundreds of interviews.
31
The only definitive proof that the paint attacks were hoaxes was that the police, the mayor and the
New York Times
suddenly dropped the subject, never mentioning the white-paint attacks again. Needless to say, there would be no investigation into whether the alleged victims had wasted police resources by falsely reporting a crime.
The shoe-polish hate crime had made the front page of the
New York Times
and the cover of
New York Newsday
in massive in-depth interviews with the “victims.” The
Times
’s story, titled “Victim of Bias Attack, 14, Wrestles with His Anger,” was 1,228 words long.
32
Newsday
’s account, written by the most easily fooled journalist in America, Jim Dwyer, clocked
in at 1,016 words and was titled “Race Victim’s Mom: I Wanted a Better Life for My Kids.”
33
The racist attack was talked about in France, Toronto, Seattle, Chicago, on the
MacNeil Lehrer NewsHour
, in endless stories on National Public Radio and still today, in Anna Quindlen’s living room.
News coverage for the paint attacks turning out to be hoaxes was very, very, very, very, very, very, very much more subdued. The
New York Times
ran two obscure items on the police findings and
Newsday
inconspicuously revealed the hoax theory in a short item about various New York politicians deriding the idea that the attacks had been faked.
A year after the
New York Times
had quietly stopped mentioning the white-paint hate crime in the Bronx, the pea-brained Anna Quindlen included her
Times
column denouncing the attack in her book,
Thinking Out Loud
. She was either unaware that the attack had turned out to be a hoax or lacked the decency to cut it. Explaining that opposition to affirmative action is what led to the paint attack on black children (which, again, never happened), Quindlen preached:
[Y]ou have to remember that kids learn their lessons from adults. That’s what the mother of two black children who were sprayed with white paint in the Bronx said last week about the assailants, teenagers who called her son and daughter “nigger” and vowed they would turn them white. “Can you imagine what they are learning at home?” she asked.
On and on she went, blubbering about blacks who are “taught at age twelve and fourteen through the utter humiliation of having their faces cleaned with paint thinner that there are those who think that even becoming white from a bottle is better than not being white at all.”
34
This would be like writing a book on the treachery of the Jews with the Dreyfus affair as your case in chief.
The
New York Post
had reported that the police and teachers from the children’s school believed it was a hoax by February 1992. Even Quindlen’s own paper hinted that the attack was a hoax in its still-no-leads article in May.
And yet Quindlen also included her anguished ruminations about a hoax hate crime in the paperback edition of her book, released in March 1994.
I’m not going to rewrite that column. That was my favorite column of the whole year!
Liberals were so desperate for proof of white racism, they would believe anything.
CLINTON’S NONEXISTENT CHURCH BURNINGS AND SPECIAL FORCES RACISTS—1996
One of the more prominent hoax hate crimes was invented by Bill Clinton when he was president. In a 1996 radio address, Clinton said, “I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child.” No one else in Arkansas remembered a single church burning in Arkansas, ever. Definitely not when Clinton was a child.
The
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
(Little Rock) checked with the state historian, current and past presidents of the Arkansas NAACP, the former president of the Regular Arkansas Baptist Convention, the chairman of the Arkansas Black History Advisory Committee—and all confirmed that there had been no church burnings in Clinton’s own state.
35
There was no apology from the White House, much less from Clinton himself, for this despicable slander on the state of Arkansas. The
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Washington Post
didn’t mention Clinton’s tall tale—though all newspapers ran stories on the fraudulent claim that there had been an upsurge in arson at black churches.
In fact, the burnings of churches, black and white, had been declining in recent years. The hysteria about a new epidemic of black church burnings was completely counterfactual nonsense being put out by a liberal group in order to accuse right-wing rhetoric of inciting neo-Klanners.
36
Again, the lie part got a lot of coverage; the facts exposing the claim as a lie did not.
