The Savage City (4 page)

Racial segregation was a fact of life, rigidly enforced. On Labor Day weekend in 1959—not long after the Whitmores first moved to the area—Mr. Entertainer himself, Sammy Davis Jr., interrupted his act at
the Bolero nightclub in Wildwood to tell a thousand visiting firemen that he was leaving town that night, though he'd been contracted to perform through the weekend. Davis explained that he would not work in a town where a Negro performer could not rent a motel room. After he finished the show, the club's owner—suitably embarrassed—was able to find a motel room where Davis could stay. Unfortunately, the other members of his group would have to be lodged in private homes. Davis played out his weekend gig, but his name never again graced the marquee at the Bolero or any other club in Wildwood.

There were plenty of blacks in Wildwood who had moved there to find work during the summer boom season. In keeping with the tenor of the times, most knew the unwritten rules of the segregationist North—which seemed like a refuge compared with the humiliation and terror of places like Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Few were more steadfast in adhering to racial norms than George Whitmore Sr. “I was a man who had one rule: mix with your own kind. That's what I tried to tell my wife and my kids. Mind your own business and white folks'll mind theirs. Just stay in your own back yard.”

By the 1960s, however, protests in the South were stimulating a new consciousness of racial injustice around the country—and the old lines began to blur.

In the spring of 1961, George Jr. was at a school dance when word spread throughout the gym that a Negro boy had insulted a white girl. Afterward, in the parking lot, a modest rumble ensued. Bicycle chains and baseball bats were brandished, racial insults shouted back and forth. The police arrived quickly, and fifteen or twenty boys were rounded up and taken to Wildwood's new fluorescent-lighted police station. Charges were filed against a few of the boys, but all George got was a stern scolding from Lieutenant Parker Johnson.

Lieutenant Johnson was a rarity in Wildwood—and not only because he was one of the few Negroes on the police force. Johnson's family were black pioneers in the area. They had first settled in Wildwood back near the turn of the century, when the town was nothing but a small fishing village. For a long time the Johnsons owned a motel for Negroes, the Glen Oak. Parker Johnson went to Wildwood High School and then to an all-Negro university near Philadelphia, where he majored in psychology and penology. After graduation, Johnson returned to Wildwood and joined the police force. By the early 1960s, he was well known to Negro
families in the area. At the age of forty-nine, he had become something of a role model to black kids like George Whitmore. Sometimes he would stop by school playgrounds and shoot baskets with the kids. Johnson got to know many of the area's Negro youths on a first-name basis—the good kids and the bad. Of Whitmore he would later recall: “Young George was a humble type of individual—meek, never went around with anybody, kept to himself. He was never in any trouble.”

Lieutenant Johnson knew the Whitmore family; their wood shack near the auto cemetery was a far cry from his pleasant two-family house with yard and garage, but the lieutenant wasn't the kind of person to look down on anyone. At the station house that night, he pulled George Whitmore aside. “Now, George, you know better than to be hanging out with those troublemakers. I never want to see you in this station house again. I'm gonna let you go, but you remember what I told you.”

George nodded. “Yes sir, Mister Parker. Thank you, sir.”

He didn't think much about it at the time, but years later, an older and wiser George Whitmore would reflect on the role Lieutenant Parker Johnson played in his life: “I got to thinking all cops were like Mister Parker. They wanted to help you. If you told them the truth and helped them out, they'd treat you right.”

The good lieutenant had inspired in George a willingness—a desire, even—to trust the police without question. Whitmore had no way of knowing it at the time, but it was this inclination—what some of his fellow black citizens might describe as naïveté—that would lead him down a road of unfathomable tribulation.

AT THE TIME
of the Career Girls Murders, Bill Phillips was a detective assigned to the Seventeenth Detective Squad, headquartered on the second floor of the Seventeenth Precinct station house on East Fifty-first Street. The Seventeen was south of the Twenty-third Precinct, where the Wylie-Hoffert killings had taken place. Like dozens of cops working the East Side, Phillips was momentarily roped into the investigation, assigned to canvass the neighborhood. The detective made the rounds, asking store owners, residents, and doormen in the area whether they'd seen anything unusual around the time of the double homicide. Everyone in the area knew about the murders. “Horrifying,” said a deli owner on Madison Avenue. “I'm so disturbed I can't sleep at night,” said the doorman of a building nearby on Fifth Avenue. Everyone expressed shock, some expressed fear, but few had seen anything useful on the day of the slaughter.

Phillips was inclined to believe the tabloids' conclusion about the crime—that one of the girls, Janice Wylie, was a cock teaser, and that some man she brought home from a bar or nightclub had raped and killed her. When her roommate walked in on things, this scenario went, the perpetrator killed her, too; then, in some kind of postcoital rage, he decided to butcher the bodies. Phillips heard the local police gossip surrounding the case, but he didn't know much more than what he read in the papers or saw on TV at night. It was a major event for the New York
Police Department, but not for Bill Phillips, who wasn't one of the lead investigators on the case. He had other priorities.

Phillips, age thirty-three, was a seven-year veteran of the department. He spent most of his day roaming the precinct looking for ways to score—that is, to extort, extract via bribe, or flat out steal money from local residents, guilty or innocent, living or dead.

Scoring was an art Phillips had learned early in his career, while still a patrolman in uniform. One of his first partners was a ten-year veteran named Kenny Keller. It was Keller who taught him how to be a cop. Years later, in a memoir entitled
On the Pad,
Phillips recalled:

By the time of the Wylie-Hoffert murders, Detective Phillips had developed far more sophisticated scams for stealing money off the population he was sworn to serve and protect. One reason was that he had a head start: Phillips was inculcated into the ways of the department by his father, William R. Phillips Sr., who had retired from the force with a full pension in 1959. Bill Sr. was Irish American, part of a fraternal order within the department that filled out its ranks and shaped its destiny. For more than a hundred years the Irish had used the police department as their personal patronage system, to the point where the upper ranks of the NYPD read like a refrain from one of those old Bing Crosby songs, like “McNamara's Band” or “Dear Old Donegal”:

As a teenager, Billy Jr. sat and listened to his father's friends—all of them cops—brag about the legendary scores they had made. His father had been assigned for ten years to the Policy Squad, which was in charge of policing the city's thriving numbers racket; in places like Harlem, even the poor put down a nickel or a dime on the daily number. The Policy Squad was a license to steal, and it was worth $1,000 a month to Bill Phillips Sr.—at a time when a policeman's take-home pay was fifty dollars a week.

From the time Bill Phillips first passed the civil service exam and entered the police academy, the fact that his father had been “on the job” put him in a proud though not necessarily exclusive club. There were many young cadets at the academy with relatives on the job—fathers, uncles, and brothers. The talk among them often had to do with ways to profit above and beyond the lowly police salary. Phillips remembered: “There was a great awareness of this money being made in the street and a lot of the fellows made no bones about it. They just couldn't wait to get out there and start making money.”

Once he was part of the system, Phillips's education was gradual and methodical. His first opportunity for an arrest came before he was even out of the academy. One night, he was on the town with another guy from the academy. They were both in their police “grays,” the uniform worn by recruits not yet sworn in as full-fledged cops. Phillips and his friend had picked up a couple girls in a bar. The friend took his girl up to a hotel room, while Phillips was “stuck down in the car playing a little grab ass.” From the car, Phillips saw a suspicious-looking black guy across the street approach a parked car and jimmy open the window with a screwdriver. The guy broke into the car and started gathering up items from inside.

The would-be flatfoot sprang into action:

Police squad cars pulled up from three different directions. A sergeant approached and asked Phillips, “Hey kid, what've you got?”

Phillips was sure this would be his first official arrest, but it was not to be. After sitting around the precinct for a couple hours, he was told by a detective, “You can go, kid. It's been taken care of.”

Phillips was surprised, but he asked no questions. He figured that some money, or merchandise, must have changed hands and made the matter go away. He vowed that next time, no matter what, he wouldn't be on the outside looking in.

Phillips said years later that he didn't come onto the police force looking for ways to make cash on the side. In fact, the first time he was offered money, he tried to turn it down. One night, when he was a rookie cop in the Nineteenth Precinct on the Upper East Side, he was out patrolling in a radio car with Frankie Olds, a veteran cop in the One-Nine. “Listen, we got a few dollars to pick up,” Officer Olds told him. “Do you mind?”

“Well,” replied Phillips, “no, I don't mind.”

Olds pulled in front of a dance club on Eighty-fifth Street and Lexington Avenue. “I'll only be a minute,” he said. The veteran cop returned a few minutes later with two five-dollar bills, one of which he handed to Phillips.

“No,” said the rookie, “that's okay. You can keep it.”

Olds insisted. “Take it. It's yours.”

“That was the first, and I still remember how I felt when I took it,” recalled Phillips. “I felt, goddamn, do I have to get involved in this? I don't really want to, but if I don't take the money this guy will think I'm some kind of creep. I won't be able to hang out with the group I hang out with now.”

Phillips was startled by the offer from Officer Olds, but he'd known the moment was coming.

For Phillips, the choice was clear. “I took the five dollars. I really didn't know what else to do.” Later, after he'd grown accustomed to taking money in much greater denominations on a regular basis, the process became less mysterious. “You know,” said Phillips, “taking money is like getting laid. You remember the first time with a broad; after that it's a blur.”

Even after Phillips joined the club, he had much to learn about how the system worked. The next stage of his education came when he arrested a kid on East Eighty-fifth Street for creating a disturbance. Patrolman Phillips, who had come upon a group of teenagers knocking over garbage cans and making noise, told the teenagers to straighten up the garbage cans and be on their way. The young punks obeyed, but half an hour later they were back at it. As Phillips put it, “One of the kids, a big kid, Irish, had to be a football player, starts to give me a little lip so I whack him right in the puss in front of all his friends…. He was completely enraged. He puts his hands up to fight. I grab him by the neck and I say, you're under arrest.”

Back at the precinct, Phillips got more guff—not from the kid but from other cops. It was considered a bad arrest. White kid, Irish, got a little drunk, so what? Phillips overheard the desk lieutenant say, “With all the shit out there, why does he have to lock up this kid?” The implica
tion was: we lock up spooks, spics, chinks, and white trash. We don't lock up Irish kids for no good reason.

Phillips felt foolish; it was a rookie mistake. But once you booked somebody you couldn't take it back. The kid stood charged with littering and simple assault. Not to fret: in the NYPD of the day, there was always a way out.

Weeks later, with a trial date for the case now on the docket, a former cop named Pete Meagher contacted a cop named Doc Slaughter, who worked with Phillips in the One-Nine. One day, Doc said to Phillips, “Pete Meagher wants to see you about that kid you locked up. They want to know what they can do. Pete is a one-hundred-percent guy. An ex-cop.”

Phillips, the rookie, was confused. He knew Doc Slaughter was pointing him in a certain direction, but he was too green to figure it out.

“Tell you what,” said Doc. “I'll make an appointment. You'll talk to Pete and we'll see what we can do.”

Phillips and Slaughter met Pete Meagher in a bar on the West Side, in Hell's Kitchen. Slaughter made the introductions. In a thick brogue, Pete said to Phillips, “That's my nephew you locked up. The lad's going to college next fall, and he can't take a conviction. Now, what can we do about it?”

What did Meagher want to do? He wanted to give Phillips two hundred dollars to guarantee that the case came to a favorable conclusion.

Two hundred dollars was a sizable sum to Phillips. His take-home pay was $130 every two weeks. Besides, he'd begun to feel guilty about the arrest: with all the shit out there, why
did
he have to lock up this kid?

Phillips took the money, and everyone was happy. But now the rookie cop had to deliver.

At trial, Phillips took the stand and described the incident.

“Is this the man who did it?” asked the prosecutor, pointing to the Irish kid.

“I can't be sure,” answered Phillips. It was a direct lie—a perjury.

The prosecutor was dumbfounded. “What do you mean you can't be sure?”

“Well, it was dark and there were some other people with him.”

“So why did you lock him up?”

“It looked like him, but I'm not sure.”

“You mean you're not sure now?”

“Well, yes, I can't be positive.”

The kid was set free. The prosecutor looked at Phillips like he was the biggest idiot he'd ever seen.
How can you lock up a guy, you don't even know what he looks like?
Phillips felt stupid, and vowed that he would learn from the experience. “After a while you learn to write up the affidavit in such a loose way that you can't get nailed like that,” he remembered. “You write it up so that if you can't score, boom, you nail the guy, but if you score, you don't look like a boob on the stand.”

In later years, the type of behavior Phillips was engaged in would be referred to as corruption, but at the time few people—inside or outside of the NYPD—used that word. The department had a way of doing things, the way things had been done for generations, and it was rarely challenged by the press, city government, or the citizenry. It was business as usual.

There were some who didn't go along with the program. One of them was a young cop named David Durk, who joined the NYPD in 1963, just months before the Wylie-Hoffert murders. Unlike Bill Phillips, Durk was not Irish, nor was he Italian, German, or Polish—the other ethnicities that composed the bulk of the department. He was Jewish, and a college graduate to boot. Durk was a strange bird by New York police standards, and from the start he was viewed with suspicion.

Durk encountered the same kind of corruption Bill Phillips did, but unlike Phillips he refused to take money himself. This sealed his fate: other cops tagged him as an outsider, a “nut,” a “rat,” a “fag,” and a “psycho.”