The Savage City (35 page)

One day George was drinking with a friend named Nate at a bar in Wildwood. After they downed a few pitchers of beer, Nate said, “Hey, we should go to Mexico. I hear the sun always shines there and they got pretty girls.”

“Damn,” said George. “You right. Let's go.”

“I mean it,” said Nate. “We could hitchhike and be there in a few days. What's stopping us?”

“Okay. Let's go now.”

“Yeah, let's go.”

What followed could be described as George and Nate's Excellent Adventure. Years later, Whitmore recalled it only in bits and pieces, like a movie with the reels shown out of sequence. “I was drunk when we
started hitchhiking. When I woke up, we were in Ohio.” They were carrying one suitcase with both their clothes and one hundred dollars cash each. Tijuana was the only Mexican town either of them had heard of, so that's where they headed. The western sun beckoned, but it was damn cold in the East and Midwest. George and Nate stuck out their thumbs; drivers picked them up, drove in the direction they were headed, then dropped the boys off. At one point they hopped a freight train. George had never before seen the wide open spaces of the central plains, land as far as the eye could see with no buildings in sight. He felt as though he were traveling on another planet.

Somewhere in Wyoming, George and Nate discovered an abandoned car and slept in it, until they were awakened by a police sheriff wearing a cowboy hat shining a flashlight in their faces. “You boys have identification?” asked the sheriff.

George and Nate showed their IDs and explained that they were on their way to Tijuana. They were a little worried—as far as they could tell, there wasn't a single black person in all of Wyoming—but the sheriff was friendly. “I'm gonna do you fellas a favor,” he told them. “I'm gonna hold you overnight in the county jail, which means you'll have a warm place to sleep and a good breakfast, courtesy of the state of Wyoming.”

The sheriff was true to his word: the jail was warmer and more comfortable than the abandoned car. The next day, after a meal of eggs, grits, and coffee, Whitmore and his pal were back out on the road.

It took them six days to travel all the way to Tijuana. Years later, all Whitmore could remember about the place was an “old, raggedy-ass pool hall” where he and Nate hung out. There they met two Mexican girls who agreed to travel with them up the West Coast. They took a Greyhound bus to Portland, Oregon, and by the time they got there they were flat broke. The two Mexican girls turned out to be “a couple of bull dykes. Lesbians.” George and Nate cut them loose. They discovered a bar in Portland where a farmer came in at 8:00
A.M.
and offered day work chopping beans to anyone who'd come. It paid enough to buy a bowl of soup and a slice of bread. They lived at a boardinghouse until they ran out of money, then crashed at a local movie theater, hiding in the balcony and sleeping there overnight. Sometimes, they raided the hot dog machine and ate cold dogs with mustard for breakfast.

Eventually, the boys got jobs in Portland with the Salvation Army. They drove around town in a company truck, carrying clipboards and
picking up clothing donations. There weren't many more black people in Portland than in Wyoming, but George found the white folks more hospitable than back east. Even so, he never once thought about skipping bail. He could have stayed out west as an anonymous Negro and never returned to New York, where his freedom hung in the balance. But the thought never crossed his mind. “If I jumped bail, my whole life I would've been a convicted rapist, a criminal. I already spent too much time trying to clear my name to give up now. I always knew I would have to go back.”

Late one night, George found a pay phone and called his lawyer in New York. He'd been told to check in, but it had been more than six weeks since he'd last spoken with Myron Beldock. George was unaware that there was a three-hour time difference between the two coasts. When Beldock answered the phone, he sounded half asleep.

“George, where are you?”

“I'm in Portland,” said George.

“Portland, Maine?” asked the lawyer.

“No, Portland, Oregon.”

“George, you need to get back here soon as you can. We have a hearing scheduled in three days.”

“Damn. Okay, Mister Beldock. Don't you worry. I'll be there.”

George caught the first bus out of Portland and headed due east. He made it as far as eastern Pennsylvania, where he was picked up by his cousins and driven the rest of the way back to the New York area.

On March 27, 1969, George Whitmore appeared in Brooklyn Supreme Court, wearing his now-familiar suit and tie—the only ones he owned. He was accompanied by his attorneys, Beldock and Arthur Miller. Acting Supreme Court justice Julius Helfand—the same judge who presided over Whitmore's last conviction—opened the hearing. George looked around the courtroom, suddenly wondering if his entire eight-week journey across the country and into Mexico had happened at all.

Reality hit home with a familiar force when Elba Borrero took the stand. The purpose of this hearing was to determine whether or not Whitmore deserved a new trial based on the grounds that Borrero's identification was a violation of police procedure and therefore unconstitutional. All other legal issues had fallen by the wayside. The credibility of Borrero's ID had become Whitmore's last stand.

For the past year, Elba Borrero had been living in Puerto Rico, her country of birth. She had moved away from Brooklyn in part to gain distance from the never-ending hassle of her case. She would have preferred to forget all about that night five years before. With each court appearance Borrero seemed to have put on more weight, until she was now portly. She was feisty, complaining on the stand about having had to testify to the same events six times, and she wasn't pleased to have had to leave her tropical homeland to return to a drab Brooklyn courtroom and do the same thing all over again.

This time, however, there was one difference: Myron Beldock was getting his first chance to question Borrero on the witness stand. After looking through all the evidence, Beldock had come up with something astounding that had never even been mentioned in the previous trials. In his very first interview with Borrero, Detective Richard Aidala had scribbled down in his police notebook the following words:

This quote was accompanied by the familiar description of the assailant:
male negro, tan or beige coat, long coat, cloth, no hat, five foot seven or eight, twenty-six or twenty-seven.

As he examined the notebook entry, however, Beldock stopped on that parenthesis: (
Celeste Viruet
). The physical description that followed—had it come from Borrero or her sister-in-law, Celeste Viruet? If it came from Viruet, he believed it represented an independent description that was favorable to the defense, since the description did not fit George in any way beyond the fact that he was a “male Negro.” If it was Borrero's description, it showed that her initial account—usually considered the most credible—contradicted her later identification of Whitmore as the assailant. Either way, it gave Beldock cause to launch a spirited impeachment of Borrero's previous testimony.

“You got a good look at the assailant that night?” Beldock asked the witness.

“Yes,” answered Borrero.

“And you're absolutely certain that it was this man, the man you identified, George Whitmore.”

“I am certain.”

Beldock was not surprised. “Lawyers who do eyewitness identification cases,” he remembered years later, “expect people to say, ‘I'll never forget that face. I am certain that is the one.' Then the witness gets emotional and backs it up—and, indeed, not to be lying necessarily, but because they believe it, they have come to believe it's true even when they are completely wrong. People are trained somewhat to do this by their handlers—the assistant district attorneys and the cops tell them, ‘This is what you should say. Say it this way, say it that way.' So, of course, [Borrero] said, ‘I'll never forget that face.'”

Beldock kept bringing up inconsistencies in Borrero's testimony, one by one. But finally the witness broke into tears and shouted, “All I know is, George Whitmore attacked me that night! Stop bothering me. I know it, he knows it, God knows it.”

When Beldock objected to this, Borrero jumped up from the witness chair and said, “You weren't raped that night, sir.” Then, turning to Justice Helfand, she continued, “Judge, do you know what it is to go through this for five years?”

To which Beldock interjected, “Do you know what it is to spend three years in jail?”

Beldock thought he'd done a reasonable job of poking holes in Borrero's testimony, but the judge disagreed. Two weeks after the hearing, he reaffirmed Elba Borrero's identification of Whitmore, noting that her testimony “had the unmistakable ring of truth. It was direct; it was positive; it was clear and convincing.”

“George,” Beldock told Whitmore, “we will keep fighting. We will seek a favorable ruling in the Appellate Division, and if we don't get that we'll appeal to the state supreme court and, if we have to, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Until then, Whitmore would remain free on bail.

If anyone needed a reminder of the disparity between the daily reality of Whitmore's legal travails and the larger framework under which he was being prosecuted, it came a few weeks after Judge Helfand's decision. The
New York Times
revealed for the first time that, in early 1965, Governor Nelson Rockefeller had ordered an investigation of the circumstances surrounding the Whitmore “confession.” A separate in-house NYPD report had sought to clear policemen Isola, Aidala, Di Prima, and Bulger of any wrongdoing, but the governor's report spelled out at least nineteen separate discrepancies between the facts of the
Wylie-Hoffert murders and what Whitmore supposedly told the detectives. The report made clear what some in the black community had alleged: Whitmore had been willfully framed by detectives. The frame-up was accepted and furthered by prosecutors in Brooklyn.

After Governor Rockefeller's ninety-two-page report was completed in June 1965 and delivered to the State House, the frame-up became a cover-up. Not one person within government or civil service—not Rockefeller, Mayor Wagner, the district attorney, or anyone connected with the NYPD—was willing to release the findings of the report to the public, though many knew of its existence. The Rockefeller report was buried for four years before it was finally leaked to the
Times
“by a source outside the Police Department.”

An innocent black youth had been framed on charges of murder—a frame job that was sanctioned, facilitated, and covered up by police authorities, judges, prosecutors, and other high government officials. But not a single public official accepted responsibility or was punished or even reprimanded. A few of them even received promotions.

Meanwhile, George Whitmore remained entangled in the system, and life in the city continued.

 

FOR THE BLACK
Panther Party in New York, the year 1969 would be a point of no return. This was due in part to the election of Richard M. Nixon, who was sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States on January 9. Nixon had been voted into office on a hard-line law-and-order ticket. Like most public officials, he lumped the Panthers together with the antiwar movement, the counterculture, women's liberation, and anything else that represented a threat to the established order.

It was no accident that, two weeks after Nixon was elected, the Panthers' leading national spokesperson, Eldridge Cleaver, had his parole revoked, and a federal warrant was issued for his arrest. Rather than return to prison, Cleaver jumped his $50,000 bail and fled into exile, first to Cuba and eventually to Algiers. From Algiers, Cleaver announced that he was establishing an international chapter of the Black Panther Party. In the coming months he would meet with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the African National Congress (ANC), and other liberation movements from around the globe.

Stateside, with Cleaver in exile and Newton in prison, the Black Panther Party was without clear national leadership. Individual regional chapters began to undertake initiatives of their own. In New York, there was much unfinished business between the Panthers and the police stemming from the beat-down at the Brooklyn courthouse the previous summer. A series of tit-for-tat incidents occurred throughout the winter, including a November 1968 dynamite explosion at the Twenty-fifth Precinct station house that shattered two windows. Bomb squad detectives traced explosive material to an apartment in Brooklyn rented by a woman whom a spokesperson for the NYPD described as “a lieutenant in the Black Panther Party.” The woman and a Panther spokesperson denied that she had anything to do with the party.

The bombing incident, and the police response to it, were part of an emerging pattern. When an act of aggression was perpetrated against a police officer, or a bombing occurred at a station house—or bombing material was found planted at a station house—an NYPD source was quoted in the press linking the incident to the Black Panther Party. In some cases, there was actual evidence to suggest such a link; in other cases there was not. Either way, the police were using the media to reinforce the idea that the Panthers were purely a militant underground group dedicated to killing cops, not in any way a community-based social service organization. In the war between police and the Panthers, this propaganda campaign would become a self-fulfilling prophecy for both sides.

On the night of January 17, an incident occurred that brought matters into focus. In upper Manhattan, alongside a stretch of the Harlem River Drive, two motorcycle patrolmen had pulled over to do some paperwork after issuing a speeding ticket to a motorist. They noticed a red Dodge Dart parked in a dark, grassy area near the Harlem River. The two cops—one white, one black—thought the car was disabled. As they dismounted from their motorcycles and approached the car, they noticed two men, one standing at the rear of the car with the trunk open, one standing alongside the car, and a female seated behind the wheel. All three were African American.