The Savage City (20 page)

“Now, gentlemen,” offered Lichtman, “you observed Detective Joseph Di Prima as he testified…. Can you conceive of a more sincere and a more forthright and a more genuinely direct witness than Joe Di Prima on that stand? I ask you, didn't he fairly exude character? Didn't he fairly exude, yes, even a fatherly-type sensitivity, somewhat of a compassion, almost a sense of regret as he sat there…telling you the truth?…What under the name of heaven could possibly impel father, grandfather, and husband Joseph Di Prima to lie this defendant into a Murder One conviction? The only evidence you might even consider would be the testimony of this admitted would-be rapist killer who sat on the stand…. I ask you to match your observations of the detective [and] of this defendant. Match your observations of George Whitmore, sitting on the stand…with your observations, your mental picture of Detective Di Prima.”

Lichtman harped on these perceived class distinctions shamelessly. Of Beverly Payne, he said, “George Whitmore's girlfriend, who is pregnant with another man, has a baby with another man. She lied.” After a young woman named Mary Goodwin, Whitmore's cousin, testified that Detective Aidala cursed her for lack of cooperation—and that another detective, a Negro detective working for the D.A.'s office, called her “a goddamned nigger”—Lichtman dismissed her, even getting her name
wrong: “Oh, Betty Goodman [
sic
], what can I say about Betty Goodman? With a different child out of a different stallion almost every year…. You size her up.”

If race could not be used openly to hang Whitmore, class prejudice could.

“You are not going to succumb to any thought…that this is a civil rights struggle in this courtroom,” said the prosecutor. “This is a struggle for justice in the American way.”

To Lichtman, it was a simple case of good versus evil, public service versus the ghetto, but he could not hide the fact that his entire case was riding on one thing: the confession.

“Confessions have been used as a weapon, a threat, as torture, and as punishment from the first day of man,” said Stanley Reiben during his summation. Like most attorneys, Reiben had strengths and weaknesses. He was thought to be average on research and attention to detail but excellent at courtroom oratory. He was particularly good at casting reasonable doubt on criminal charges by framing them in an expansive and sometimes breathtaking way.

“[Confessions] have been used by the Romans against the early Christians. They have been used in the Spanish Inquisition; they have been used in the Salem witch trials; they have been used in Nazi Germany; they have been used in Russia, in Communist China; and they are still to this day the greatest weapon to get a man to turn…and not all of them were voluntary. That is the only thing that the people, Mister Lichtman, the prosecutor, is presenting to you, nothing else, not a shred, not a speck, not an iota of corroboration…. We must beware of the law being used as a weapon by those whose sworn duty it is to enforce the laws fairly and impartially, without fear or favor, rich or poor, black or white…. I would like to remind you that you promised me, and that's all I ask, that you would treat this defendant as you would want to be treated. Someone else said it much better, much more simply, and much more lovingly, and I am going to ask that you please do unto George Whitmore as you would have others do unto you.”

The jury began their deliberations. As the foreman later explained it, “The arguments were very bitter. The jurors never knew that the Wylie-Hoffert case was discredited. We knew that somebody else had been indicted for the murders. We assumed this guy was a partner of
Whitmore. An accomplice. We thought Robles and Whitmore were in it together.”

The jury deliberated for two days, but they were hopelessly deadlocked, with a vote of ten to two in favor of acquittal. The result was a hung jury, and no resolution for George Whitmore.

Three days after the trial was over, Manhattan D.A. Hogan finally dismissed the Wylie-Hoffert charges against Whitmore. The New York Civil Liberties Union issued a statement criticizing Hogan for not dismissing the indictment before the Edmonds murder trial: “It is apparent that the only plausible reason for Mister Hogan's inaction was to aid a fellow prosecutor—Brooklyn D.A. Aaron Koota—to convict Whitmore in the Edmonds case. We expect more of our public servants.”

Whitmore first heard that the Career Girls charges against him were being dropped while he was washing dishes at the Brooklyn House of Detention. Given the circumstances, the news was anticlimactic. The Brooklyn D.A. had not yet announced whether or not they were going to retry George for the Edmonds murder. His ongoing nightmare was far from over.

 

PRISON CAN BE
a state of mind. The walls close in, the day is regimented by force of arms, dreams wither and die. A convict can be crushed by the institutionalized monotony, whether the sentence is one year or twenty. And then there are the bars. As Malcolm X expressed it in his autobiography, “Any person who claims to have deep feelings for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons. But there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.”

Dhoruba Bin Wahad had been behind bars for four years, and in that time he had received exactly one visitor—his mother, who came to see him at Coxsackie. The Bureau of Prisons made it so difficult and costly for a person of limited means to navigate the prison bureaucracy and get to the facility that visits were rare to nonexistent. While Dhoruba was behind bars, his past and future disappeared; there was only the present, a world of cement walls, cold floors, Caucasian authority, and chain-link fences topped with barbed wire.

It was not part of Dhoruba's makeup to see himself as a victim. Therefore, his time in prison was sometimes contentious. He fought with guards, stood up to the authorities, and showed little contrition when called before the parole board. Though his extensive reading in prison had raised his consciousness, the gang mentality was just as present in prison as it was on the streets of the Southeast Bronx. At Comstock, Dhoruba took part in a yard-gang rumble that got him thrown in the Box for an extended period. In late 1965, the prison administration decided to transfer him to a maximum-security facility. Dhoruba was inching closer to completing his five-year bit, but he was also sinking deeper and deeper into the system.

Green Haven Correctional Facility is located near the town of Poughkeepsie, eighty miles north of New York City, not far from the New York–Connecticut border. Dhoruba was initially housed in the orientation compound, a kind of quarantine for new inmates. After a month, he was released into general population. He had been circulating among the other convicts for less than a week when a guard told him, “Hey, there's somebody in the yard who wants to see you.”

It was a gray and drizzling day. When Dhoruba went out to the yard, he saw a man huddled under an awning to stay out of the rain. The man was his father.

Dhoruba had never had any real relationship with the man who had brought him into the world—though back when he was still little Richard Moore that had never seemed like a major issue. Collins Moore, known to his friends and associates as Cokey, was a bona fide street character, a neighborhood fixture Dhoruba referred to as a “slickster.” Out on the street, his hair was conked, and he wore the zoot suits of his youth. He was a talented dancer, popular with the ladies. But he was also a heroin addict whose habit diminished his status in the underworld, making him more of a street hustler than a full-fledged player.

Pops Moore was only in his midforties when Dhoruba found him in the prison yard, but he seemed withered. The father looked at the son and blinked; it took him a moment to recognize his own blood. Dhoruba remembered:

In childhood, Dhoruba's view of his father had been colored by the constant negative comments made about him by his mother's family. “That man is no good,” his aunts and grandparents would say whenever the name of Collins Moore was mentioned. As a boy, Dhoruba sometimes saw his father working the streets or coming out of a bar, a shadowy figure with a bebop strut. Young Dhoruba wanted to approach the man and ask, “Pops, why they talk so bad about you?” But he was just a kid, without the courage to approach this unfamiliar street hustler they said was his father.

Dhoruba didn't bring it up now, either. It was Cokey Moore who broached the subject with his son. “You a young man now,” he told Dhoruba. “So let me explain why I wasn't around much when you was little.”

Over the course of three days in the prison yard at Green Haven, Old Man Moore told Dhoruba how he met his mother in Harlem. The mother's family were hardworking immigrants, “old-school West Indians, very clannish and family oriented.” Moore was from Georgia, the southern slave tradition, with its legacy of bullwhips, lynching, and familial decimation. To the mother's family, Moore was a lazy malcontent with the heart of a hustler. “They never could accept me,” he told Dhoruba.

The breaking point came in 1944, right around the time Dhoruba was born, when Collins Moore decided to join the army. He was motivated in part by a desire to show his wife's family that he could be somebody. The wife's family came from a military tradition: her father had been a merchant marine and her brother—Dhoruba's uncle—had been a war hero who died in combat during a rescue mission. The uncle's death had been a touchstone event in the family history; a plaque commemorating his service and death during the Second World War was on a wall in the house. It was one of the reasons Dhoruba had joined the service.

In 1945, however, Collins Moore went AWOL. To his wife's family this was a disgrace to the memory of Dhoruba's heroic uncle, and it was one of the factors that led to his separation from Dhoruba's mother.
From that point on, they acted as if Collins Moore had never existed—except when they wanted to curse his name.

Hearing this side of the story for the first time, Dhoruba felt an unexpected emotional connection with his father. The surroundings only added to the sense of intimacy: it took a prison encounter for Dhoruba to learn his family's secrets, the undercurrents that had shaped his African American family and set him off on his own rebellious course.

“I'm glad you told me,” Dhoruba said to his father. “I never knew the whole story.”

“Well, now you know,” said Pops.

Their time together was brief. Three days after Dhoruba first met Collins Moore in the yard at Green Haven, he got into an altercation in the mess hall. It wasn't a serious incident—there weren't even any punches thrown—but Dhoruba's disciplinary record was so bad that any small event was enough to get him hauled off to the Box. He would spend the remainder of his sentence there in isolation, with no library, limited rec time, and only one hour a day outside the unit. He was a twenty-year-old male entering into manhood, a manchild serving out his time as ward of the state. He would spend the remainder of his sentence fixating on one thing: his release date.

 

GEORGE WHITMORE WAS
also in prison. Since his last legal proceeding he'd been housed at the Brooklyn House of Detention, with easy access to the courts. That was the cycle that defined his weekly routine: prison to court, court to prison. Like Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Whitmore found himself surrounded by mostly African American inmates and white guards, escorted from one institution to another by court officers and armed marshals, handcuffed, searched, told to “sit right there” or “stand right there” until further notice. Unlike Dhoruba, though, George had no release date to look forward to. Not even his lawyers knew for sure how his future would play out. He was told not to lose hope, which was, of course, the battle cry of the era. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders implored their followers to “keep hope alive.” Hope had become the placebo of an entire generation.

In the public arena, Whitmore's case had become a potent symbol of injustice. In May 1965, as the New York State Senate legislators prepared
to vote on whether to abolish the death penalty, one legislator declared: “This is the year of Whitmore.”

Bertram L. Podell, the Brooklyn assemblyman and attorney who spearheaded the initiative to outlaw capital punishment, used the Whitmore case as Exhibit A. In introducing the bill, he told his fellow senators: “A sixty-one page, completely detailed confession was manufactured and force-fed to Whitmore. On the basis of this confession, this defendant not only could have been, but probably would have been executed. I don't have to highlight the terrible effect Whitmore's execution would have had if the falsity of his confession and the tactics used in securing it had come out
after
the switch had been pulled, instead of before.”

It was a watershed in the history of capital punishment in New York. State legislators had introduced legislation to do away with the death penalty ever since it was introduced in 1948, but every year the bills had failed. With the story of George Whitmore in the ether, though, the State Senate dramatically reversed its position, voting 47–9 to eradicate capital punishment in New York. In June, the bill was signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

In another bill, legislators challenged the state's practice of employing well-heeled Blue Ribbon juries, which tended to find against impoverished defendants. Using the Minnie Edmonds murder trial as an example, proponents of the bill argued that Blue Ribbon juries “perpetuate a systematic exclusion of women, Puerto Ricans and Negroes…thereby making it a near-mathematical certainty that a defendant would be tried by a lily-white, all male jury.” The bill was approved later that year, and Blue Ribbon juries became a thing of the past.