The Savage City (18 page)

Clark had friends in the NYPD, and his connections paid off. To the citizens of Harlem who knew Freddy Clark was a dope dealer who paid off police on a regular basis, it was disgusting, but it was also business as usual. It was precisely the kind of relationship that Adam Clayton Powell had been railing about for years.

Bill Phillips had underworld connections like Freddy Clark. He was also constantly on the lookout for cops he could bring into the fold. Like most hustlers, he seemed to know everyone. He cultivated friends in high and low places.

Sonny Grosso was already something of a star detective in the mid-1960s when he was approached by Phillips. A cop since 1954, Grosso was the youngest first-grade detective in the history of the department at the
time. He was assigned to an undercover narcotics unit in the late 1950s at a time when narcotics investigations were built on improvisation and instinct, since there was no precedent for the kind of dope epidemic then sweeping over the city. Grosso made hundreds—if not thousands—of busts and could have pocketed plenty of money and dope, or both, if he'd been so inclined.

It was perhaps inevitable that Phillips would eventually reach out to Grosso, who was becoming a legend in his own time. Grosso was revered for his role—along with partner Eddie Egan—in breaking the French Connection case, at the time the largest dope bust in the city's history. Street-smart and attuned to the rhythms of East Harlem, where he'd been raised by Italian immigrant parents, Grosso was familiar with swaggering Irish leatherheads like Phillips. His own partner, Egan, was notorious for his hyperaggressive manner, which sometimes rubbed people the wrong way. Phillips was known to Grosso—and just about every other detective in Harlem—as a former detective who'd been flopped back on the street, and as a uniformed cop with an inflated sense of entitlement. “He came to me and said he had a score set up where I could make $50 a month,” recalled Grosso years later. “I told him to take a hike.”

To a highly decorated detective like Grosso, Phillips was a bottom-feeder, a low-level hustler. To others, he was a more complicated figure.

“Phillips was a good cop,” remembered Edwin Torres, another child of El Barrio in East Harlem, who would become the city's first Puerto Rican assistant D.A. in 1959, and later a criminal defense attorney and a legendary state supreme court justice.

Torres was a defense attorney in private practice when he first encountered Phillips in the mid-1960s. “He was tough,” said Torres. “He talked like a cop from another era. He wasn't afraid to mix it up on the street.”

Torres remembered a time when a client of his had been arrested on a drug charge. Phillips was the arresting officer. “He came to me the day of the trial. He told me he felt bad because he had flaked [planted evidence against] my client. He came right out and told me that, which was unusual. He even suggested that if I questioned my client on the stand in a certain way, he would be found not guilty. He gave me information that made it possible for me to establish that my client was innocent, even though he was the guy who arrested him.”

Eddie Torres went on to become a famous figure in the city's crimi
nal justice system—a judge and an author of crime novels that were made into movies—but he always remembered that incident with Phillips. In time, while many of the city's top cops, politicians, journalists, and average citizens would come to see Phillips as a poster child for police corruption, Torres always figured that, somewhere deep inside, he was a dirty cop with a conscience.

Eventually, that question—whether or not Bill Phillips had a conscience—would become a matter of public debate, with results that would rock the NYPD and the city.

 

AT THE ANTIOCH
Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP held a fund-raising breakfast for Whitmore. The headliner was comedian and activist Dick Gregory, author of a newly published memoir entitled
Nigger
. Gregory had arrived in New York fresh from the civil rights marches and protests in the South, where he had been clubbed by police, arrested, and held overnight in jail. Gregory's presence in Brooklyn was a sign that the civil rights movement was shifting its priorities north, from the rural backwaters of the Delta to the concrete jungles of the northern industrial cities.

Flanked by Whitmore's mother; the lawyers Stanley Reiben, Arthur Miller, and Edwin Kaplan; and a phalanx of NAACP dignitaries including Brooklyn chapter president Ray Williams, Gregory addressed an audience of more than two hundred people. “After reading about the Whitmore case,” he said, “I decided there are things going on in this town that they wouldn't do to a dog in Mississippi.”

Ever since it was revealed that the NYPD had indicted a new perpetrator for the Wylie-Hoffert killings, the NAACP had been calling attention to the Whitmore case and a series of other recent prosecutions of young Negro men, all involving spurious “confessions” elicited by Detective Edward Bulger. Among the men were David Coleman, who was on death row, and a defendant named Charles Everett, who had been tricked into signing a confession after detectives told him that a man he'd allegedly beaten was in an adjoining squad room. If Everett confessed, said the detectives, they would intercede with the victim to work out a light sentence. Only after Everett confessed did he learn that the victim was dead. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Everett's murder conviction on the grounds that the confession had
been obtained by fraud—and yet he had since been reindicted by the Brooklyn D.A.

In his Antioch Baptist speech, Gregory used wit to soften what was actually a stern challenge to his audience. He attacked what he saw as northern Negroes' “indifference” toward the civil rights struggle. “Wake up!” he commanded repeatedly. “Don't blame the white folks. Blame yourselves.” Using the previous summer's Harlem and Brooklyn riots as a point of reference, he added, “If you don't know your own power, it was demonstrated last summer…. Last summer proved that if you want yours, you better go out and get it.”

After the breakfast, the NAACP issued a statement to the press. “The police have apparently for over a number of years, in order to get at the guilty or persons that they suspect of being guilty, been allowed by society to use apparent inhumane means…such as implanting in the mind of the suspect facts and circumstances of the crime. This seems a crime and ought to be penally dealt with.” Among other things, the NAACP demanded that the circumstances of the Whitmore “confession” be investigated by a criminal justice panel appointed by the governor, and that the charges against Whitmore be immediately dismissed.

Though the NAACP's efforts garnered some coverage in the press, Whitmore's predicament did not change. Even the indictment of another perpetrator seemed insufficient to persuade Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan to drop the charges against Whitmore anytime soon. To George's attorney, Stanley Reiben, Hogan's indifference was unconscionable. Reiben insisted to reporters that Hogan was leaving the Wylie-Hoffert charges hanging over Whitmore's head for one reason—so that his alleged role in the Career Girls Murders would influence Whitmore's prosecution on the other criminal charges he faced.

Meanwhile, Whitmore languished in prison. From inside his cell at Sing Sing, he was barely aware of the efforts being waged on his behalf. He had stopped reading newspaper accounts of his case, tired of seeing himself referred to as a “simpleton,” a “loner,” a predatory Negro with an IQ of ninety-one that supposedly categorized him as borderline retarded. He was sick of speculation that he would be fried in the electric chair, or gassed to death by the state, or sentenced to eternal incarceration.

As he waited for updates on his case from the lawyers, Whitmore's main source of refuge was his talent for drawing. When he was sixteen, an instructor at Wildwood High School had arranged for him to
take a correspondence course in cartoon illustration at a branch of the Walt Disney School in Philadelphia. He had passed the exam with flying colors. The Disney School sent a shipment of free art supplies—an easel, brushes, paints, and crayons—to his junkyard home in Wildwood. When the supplies arrived, though, George's father wouldn't let the delivery men unload the truck. “Forget this nonsense,” he said. “How you ever gonna make a livin' from this nonsense?” He fired a gun in the air to frighten the men away, then set the dogs on them.

After the truck drove away, George cried for days. “I guess my daddy didn't want me to have the success he never did,” he remembered years later. “I never could forgive him for that.”

Though his dreams of becoming an artist had been dashed, George still found pleasure in the act; sometimes he even profited from his abilities. In the weeks after the assassination of Malcolm X, Whitmore made money painting portraits of the black leader—based on a photo in the
New York Post
—and selling them for $20 apiece to Muslim inmates. Later, Whitmore made money doing portraits of inmates. He used some of the proceeds to buy art supplies, mailed to him at Sing Sing by inmates' friends and family members, and sent some of the money to his mother.

George had few visitors—Sing Sing was a long way from Wildwood or Brooklyn—but he was rarely in a mood to see people anyway. Conversations always focused on his case, which only depressed him. He usually used his daily phone call to call his attorney, hoping for good news.

In early March 1965, Whitmore was loaded onto a Bureau of Prisons bus and transferred back to the Brooklyn House of Detention. The following day he was dressed in nice clothes, delivered to the jail by his mother, and brought to the same courtroom where he'd been tried and found guilty for the attempted rape and assault of Elba Borrero. He was there for what his lawyers called a “hearing.” George wasn't sure how a hearing differed from an actual trial, but the lawyers said it was important. George was apprehensive until he heard that he wouldn't have to testify, or do much of anything but listen.

The hearing had been requested by Judge David Malbin after Whitmore's attorneys sent him a memo claiming that various improprieties, if not illegalities, had occurred during the trial. The memo included an affidavit signed by Gerald Corbin, juror number seven at the Borrero trial, which confirmed claims of racial discrimination among
the jury. The charges were disturbing enough that Malbin granted a public hearing.

Over two days, Stanley Reiben presented affidavits and signed statements supporting his claims of irregularity in Whitmore's prosecution. He also revealed, for the first time in a public forum, that the prosecution had failed to reveal an FBI lab report concluding that threads from the button presented as evidence by Assistant D.A. Sidney Lichtman did not match the threads on Whitmore's coat.

A series of jurors who had voted to find Whitmore guilty were questioned by the judge. One juror was asked by Malbin, “Did I understand you to say that you did make the statement about ‘this is nothing compared to what he will get in New York'?”

“I said, ‘He is a lucky boy in my opinion.'”

“Why was he a lucky boy?”

“Just my opinion.”

“This was after he was found guilty?”

“That's right.”

“He would have been unlucky if he were acquitted?”

“I don't know. At that time there were two murder raps going after him.”

“Did you know about the Wylie-Hoffert murders in New York, sir, at the time he was tried?”

“Yes. Sir.”

“Did you know about the Edmonds murder charge in Brooklyn?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you knew that he had confessed to the Wylie-Hoffert murders?”

“That's right.”

Malbin asked another juror when he had made the remark “This is nothing compared to what he'll be getting in New York.”

“That was during the deliberations,” said the juror.

Gerald Corbin was called to the stand. When, he was asked, had he heard another juror say, “You know how these people are. They have to have their sex, so they screw like jackrabbits.”

“During the trial,” Corbin said.

After considering the testimony, Judge Malbin delivered a statement: “Sufficient cause has been shown to raise grave doubt whether the accused received a fair and impartial trial…. Prejudice and racial bias,
in any of its ugly forms, has no place in an American court of justice. Deprivation of the absolute right of the accused to a fair and impartial trial reduces the process of a law to a mere sham. It destroys the hope of fundamental fairness and undermines the constitutional provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Malbin then moved on to the issue of the button. Assistant D.A. Lichtman was called to the stand and asked, “Mister Lichtman, did you receive this report from the FBI in writing prior to the trial of George Whitmore?”

“I did.”

“Did you submit the report in evidence during the trial?”

“I did not.”

“Why, Mister Lichtman?”

“My understanding of the rules of evidence indicates that a report is not evidence…. Secondly…the report contains the expert conclusion that ‘It was not possible to determine whether the button had been attached to the coat.' In view of that conclusion, it was my judgment that this report was probative of nothing.” In other words, the prosecutor seemed to be saying, the report was only relevant as evidence if it confirmed his theory that the button was a match. The colloquy continued:

 

Judge:
Although the report itself might not have been the best evidence, you could have brought from Washington, from the laboratory, whoever made the analysis, couldn't you, to testify?

Lichtman:
His testimony as such would have been probative of nothing.

Judge:
You say in your judgment you felt it was not worthwhile to introduce either the report or the analyst himself into evidence?