The Savage City Read online

  The police spokes people had never heard of Malcolm X. Thirty-one years old at the time, dressed in the Nation of Islam uniform of a bow tie, white shirt, and brown suit, the Muslim leader listened quietly as the police made their statement. Then he looked at the cops, stood up, and proceeded to leave the room.

  When the cops realized that their hard-line tactic had failed, they immediately sent a reporter from the Amsterdam News, Harlem’s black newspaper, to find Malcolm X and bring him back to the negotiating table.

  When Malcolm returned, he made his position clear. “I have no respect for you or your police department,” he told Walter Arm and the other police representatives. If the police wanted the crowd to disperse, he announced, they must transfer Johnson X to Harlem Hospital at once. The police agreed. After making a series of further demands, Malcolm filled out an incident report that noted that Johnson X had been an innocent bystander who was attacked on account of brute viciousness by city police officers.

  Johnson X was escorted out of the station house by a phalanx of Muslims. Then, with a simple hand gesture, Malcolm X motioned the group of protesters to disperse, which they did in an orderly fashion.

  “No man should have that much power over that many people,” one police captain reportedly said.

  It was the beginning of a new kind of relationship between blacks and the police in the city of New York.

  IN RETROSPECT, the hostilities that ravaged New York City in the 1960s may have been inevitable. With such dramatic shifts in the city’s social makeup, the fault line between black and white residents could no longer hold. Blacks felt aggrieved; many whites felt a mounting sense of terror. As one political operative put it, “A boiler that is allowed to get too hot will eventually explode.”

  It is a testament to the resilience of the city that this explosion did not occur all at once. The social upheaval that occurred was contained within the fabric of everyday life; though it would continue to fester for more than a decade, the city still functioned. Yet the precipitous decline in quality of life and peace of mind was almost beyond calculation.

  The worst clashes between blacks and the police took place in the streets and within the police precincts. But they often played out within the bounds of the criminal justice system. The courts and prisons were an extension of policing at the street level; they reflected the common attitudes of the day. Beginning in 1963, untold numbers of citizens, police officers, criminal defense lawyers, prosecutors, district attorneys, judges, bail bondsmen, and social activists would get drawn into the maelstrom.

  This book traces the parallel lives of three people whose personal journeys were central to the era—three men who never met, but whose exploits, taken together, would have a revolutionary effect on the nature of criminal justice in New York City.

  GEORGE WHITMORE

  As a young Negro subsisting on the margins of society in the early 1960s, Whitmore found himself the target of a type of injustice that was both typical and extraordinary. While being held in custody at a Brooklyn police station, he was coerced into signing a confession to a series of horrific crimes. His struggle to free himself from false prosecution at the hands of a compromised criminal justice system would become one of the defining narratives of the entire era.

  WILLIAM “BILL” PHILLIPS

  As a boy, Phillips—the son of a twenty-year NYPD veteran—listened to his pop and fellow officers regale one another with stories from the days of Prohibition, when a precinct cop received one dollar for every barrel of illegal bootleg beer delivered to a speakeasy. By the time Bill Jr. joined the NYPD, corruption had become so rife within the department—with officers looking to “score” and spread the money around to commanders and supervisors—that few even thought of it as corruption. Phillips was a more aggressive hustler than most, but he was also a classic product of a diseased system—which made it all the more devastating when he turned snitch and exposed the NYPD to the most devastating scandal in its history.

  DHORUBA BIN WAHAD

  For every George Whitmore—simple, compliant, looking to get along—there was a Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who would come to be viewed by many cops as the prototypical black militant. Dhoruba was a product of 1950s gang life and various penal institutions in and around New York City; by the time he was released into the political and racial tumult of the late 1960s, he was ripe to assume the role of the Black Avenger. His position as one of the key founders of the Black Panther Party in New York would lead to his being targeted by virtually every level of law enforcement, from the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services to the highest levels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  THESE THREE MEN—WHITMORE, Phillips, and Bin Wahad—represent three points of a triangle: Whitmore, the hapless victim of a repressive law enforcement system; Phillips, foot soldier for that system, which saw its mandate as stemming an incipient racial revolution; and Bin Wahad, inheritor of a new age of militancy inspired and defined by the likes of Malcolm X. Though their stories would unfold independent of one another, all three men became enmeshed in a similar matrix of forces—political, social, and racial—that would alter the direction of the city. Their lives, chronicled closely at the time but largely forgotten today, cast a refracted glow on one another and on an entire generation of contemporaries caught up in the turmoil of the times.

  In the struggle for racial equality, the road to the Promised Land was strewn with land mines and strafed by sniper fire. There were 563 murders in New York City in 1963. By 1973 there were more than one thousand—a 95 percent increase. Rape was up 120 percent, robberies up 82 percent, assaults up 90 percent. Homes and places of business were violated and burglarized at a staggering rate. The city’s descent into criminal pathology seemed to have no narrative thread and no purpose. Urban life became synonymous with a state of chaos.

  There was no disputing that crime was out of control. But the mood of fear and paranoia in the city was also a product of the social agitation of the postwar years—and that, in turn, was a reaction to decades of oppression and abuse. As the civil rights movement moved northward from the South, its tactics changed. The concept of nonviolent resistance gave way to Black Power; the dream of integration was subsumed by the demand for black liberation. The NYPD was assigned the task of containing a revolution. The violence that resulted must have seemed pointless, an expression of hatred and self-destruction in its purest form. But within the conflict there was also hope—the pain and anxiety of a city yearning to be something better than it was, with a criminal justice system that deserved the trust of its citizens.

  THE PAST IS not past: a city’s identity is composed not just of events in the present moment but also of all that came before. If New York City today is a place of prosperity, safety, and good times, as its civic leaders and financial developers contend, it is useful to remember that these things have come at a price. Forty-five years ago, a generation of New Yorkers—motivated by chutzpah, fear, an instinct for survival, and a sense of righteous indignation—changed their city forever. The process was long, agonizing, and ugly, but if we are to understand the city that thrives today, we must first come to understand the past, when the struggle for fairness, respect, and personal security was literally a matter of life and death.

  So let us lift the rock and sift through the detritus of a time, not so long ago, when no one in their right mind would have called New York the Safest Big City in America. Let us revisit an era when the great metropolis was struggling to define itself in the modern age, when crime was on the rise and dread and hostility entwined the citizenry in what seemed to be a dance to the death. It was a time of hope and desperation, a time of reckoning, a time when the nation’s greatest experiment in democracy earned the right to be called the Savage City.

  | PART I |

  I have a dream that one day…the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight.

  —Martin Luther King Jr.

  August 28, 1963

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  BLOOD OF THE LAMB

  WHEN MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. visited the great city of New York, he was greeted with a silver letter opener plunged swiftly and unceremoniously into his chest.

  It happened at Blumstein’s department store in Harlem. King was in town to promote Stride Toward Freedom, his new book about the Negro rights struggle. At Blumstein’s, he sat at a table signing books and making small talk with Harlem residents. King was young—just twenty-nine—but he was already a preacher and civil rights leader of note, a survivor of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts, and a man known for his skills as a speaker. He was famous for his rapturous oratorical style and basso profundo voice, which sounded like the instrument of a much older man and seemed to carry the very wisdom of the ages.

  At one point during the signing, King was approached by a harmless-looking black woman, age forty-two. “Is this Martin Luther King?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is,” he replied cheerily.

  That’s when the woman lunged at the good reverend with something metallic. King tried to block the attack with his left arm; the razor-sharp opener sliced his hand before sinking into his chest a few inches below and to the left of the knot in his tie. Without removing the weapon, the woman stepped back and declared, “I’ve been after him for six years! I’m glad I done it.”

  The woman was easily apprehended, and King was rushed to Harlem Hospital with the eight-inch letter opener still stuck in his chest. Daylong surgery extracted the implement, which had penetrated his chest just a few centimeters from the heart. A surgeon later told King that, given the critical position of the opener, even a sneeze from King could have punctured the aorta and killed him.

  The assailant, a domestic originally from Georgia, delivered a largely incoherent diatribe about the evils of communism and how King’s movement had diminished her Catholic faith. The woman was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in upstate New York.

  The incident left a lasting impression. From that point on, Martin Luther King would capture the attention of locals, in part because he had visited the city and paid the price: he had been baptized in his own blood. Only the coldest-hearted racist could refuse to acknowledge that King deserved respect—or at least an expression of regret—for enduring such an attack, in broad daylight, in a city that should have welcomed him with open arms.

  FIVE YEARS AFTER the stabbing—in the early-morning hours of Wednesday, August 28, 1963—the name of Martin Luther King Jr. was once again on local minds. In the predawn darkness that morning, hordes of New Yorkers gathered together in preparation to travel to a massive public event where King and other civil rights leaders were scheduled to appear. The event itself was occurring two hundred forty miles to the south, yet preparations for it had occupied the city’s most engaged citizens for months. After dozens of strategy sessions, heated arguments, leaflet campaigns, and exhortations to rally the troops, the time had arrived for what was being billed as the March on Washington. It promised to be an unprecedented event, one that would alter the trajectory of race relations throughout the United States—and in New York City itself.

  It was a sight to behold, the throngs of activists gathered together before dawn like algae in a vast pond. In Harlem, Greenwich Village, and Brooklyn, church groups, civil rights workers, students, and community activists piled into automobiles. At the commuter terminals of Penn Station and Port Authority, thousands waited patiently in line to board buses and trains. Many carried a sack lunch that had been prepared for them by nuns and volunteers at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side: a cheese sandwich with mustard, a piece of marble cake, and an apple, price fifty cents. On 125th Street in Harlem, dozens of buses had been chartered for the occasion. A huge crowd spilled out into the street. Some were there to board the buses; others, who couldn’t make the trip to Washington themselves, had come to wish the marchers well.

  “They look just like soldiers going off,” said an elderly woman as the travelers boarded the buses, lined up along the curb past the Apollo Theater as far as the eye could see.

  “Tell them I want a job,” a man shouted to no one in particular.

  The main headquarters for the march was just a few blocks away, in a four-story tenement building on 130th Street and Seventh Avenue. For months a banner had hung below the headquarters’ third-story window: MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM—AUGUST 28. Hundreds of community and church organizations had pledged to deliver high numbers of participants—pledges that seemed overly optimistic at the time but now were proving true.

  As dawn approached, the buses kicked into gear and departed for tunnels and bridges out of the city, a vast civilian army—black, white, young, and old—headed toward the nation’s capital. Later reports estimated that 917 chartered buses, thirteen special trains, and untold numbers of vans and cars—carrying roughly fifty-five thousand people in all—left New York for Washington that morning. It was the largest self-generated evacuation in the city’s history.

  As the morning wore on, those who remained in town caught snippets of the march on television. At 11:30 A.M., all three major networks interrupted their regular programming to begin live coverage of the event. By then, the estimated two hundred thousand people who had arrived in Washington from all over the country had already assembled at the Washington Monument. They began to march along Constitution and Independence avenues in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. Television cameras captured the procession, beaming the black-and-white images across the nation.

  In New York City, these images appeared on TV screens in diners, barbershops, beauty salons, homes and apartments, in newsrooms, and in the front windows of electronics stores. Pedestrians stopped to catch a glimpse of the marchers, a sea of humanity, heads bobbing as they walked, placards hoisted with slogans and demands: THE TIME HAS COME!; DECENT HOUSING NOW!; END POLICE BRUTALITY!

  The initial news reports hardly slowed the hustle of life in the big city. Regardless of how many people had left that morning, it was still a city of nearly eight million inhabitants with people to see, places to go, bills to pay. It wasn’t until a couple hours later—after dozens of marchers and celebrities had been interviewed by TV reporters; after poets and singers had done their thing; after the preliminary speakers had variously excited and taxed the patience of the demonstrators in D.C. and the estimated ten million TV watchers nationwide—that the city of New York was riveted to attention. The day’s keynote speaker had finally arrived at the podium, his face in close-up in living rooms everywhere.

  The voice was piercing, a mellifluous baritone that emanated from the TVs and radios and swept out over New York City like a sweet summer breeze.

  “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of this nation,” King told the crowd, to applause that was eager but restrained. As he began his speech in earnest, the telecast cut from the podium to tight shots of the crowd—and, from a camera mounted high on the Lincoln Memorial, to a breathtaking overhead panorama of the massive gathering of people on the steps of the monument and all around the Reflecting Pool.

  King’s voice filled the air with the certitude of a small-town preacher speaking to his personal congregation. “We have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” he declared. “The Negro is not free. The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity…. We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of unspeakable horrors of police brutality…. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual…. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”

  All around New York City, people stopped to listen, or at least to acknowledge the voice. As his voice grew i
n timbre, his vocal inflections more biting and precise, it became clear that King was laying down a gauntlet, challenging all Americans to demand a society that lived up to “the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

  The speech was short, but it maintained an inner rhythm that swelled to a rousing finale, the preacher’s voice echoing across the city from taxi stands, restaurant kitchens, tenement apartments, and car radios.

  “When we allow freedom’s ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up the day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

  NOT LONG AFTER the speech was over, and before the dust had settled on the March on Washington, a phone rang at the Twenty-third Precinct station house on East 104th Street in Manhattan. Detective Martin J. Zinkand was on duty, having just returned to the station house with his partner after investigating a burglary. He had just sat down at his desk when the police switchboard operator told him there was a call on the line. He picked up the phone. “Zinkand, two-three detective squad. How can I help you?”

  A young woman’s voice responded. “My name is Patricia Tolles. I live at Fifty-seven East Eighty-eighth Street, number three C. I think something bad happened in my apartment. I don’t know if anything has been stolen, but the whole place is a mess—and we can’t find my roommate.” The woman was distressed, if only mildly.