Mugged (9 page)

Soon after Nappi had struggled to a phone and reported the fatal carjacking, the police spotted Summers driving Falcone’s Jeep. He proceeded to lead the cops on a car chase reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour, crashed the Jeep, and leaped from the car to flee on foot. After being captured, Summers gave a detailed, forty-nine-page written confession. Nappi identified Summers as Falcone’s killer.

The media refused to believe it. Summers was a college student from a middle-class black family, with married parents. Why would he steal a Jeep and commit murder? They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Lynn Sherr’s report on the crime for ABC News was titled: “Who Is Ed Summers?—Carjack Killer or Framed Innocent?” “Framed”? This was a case with a living witness and a written confession.

But Sherr reminded viewers that Summers was “an unlikely suspect, a loving son, a college student with a promising future,” before asking: “What’s the real story? Is an innocent man in jail?” Her report featured Summers’s friends swearing he couldn’t have done it, with Sherr adding: “Ed was a junior at South Carolina State University with good grades in pre-med. His friends say he loved his schoolwork and wanted to save lives, not destroy them.”
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In a lengthy brief for the defense,
New York
Magazine
’s Barbara Campbell went further, presenting Summers’s crackpot alibi as completely believable. Despite having confessed, Summers later changed his story, claiming he had been forced into the Jeep by a terrifying neighborhood drug dealer named “Dino” who committed the carjacking, murder and attempted murder all on his own, then made Summers drive the Jeep back to New York.

The cops never found any evidence of a drug dealer named Dino. Nappi
said that only one man had carjacked and shot them and that that man was Summers.

But Campbell found the “Dino” story highly compelling. She dismissed the overwhelming evidence against Summers with the overriding point: “The only question—the question Summers’s astonished friends, teachers and the press raised over and over again—was…
why
?”

To the prosecutor’s simple answer, “He wanted a Jeep,” Campbell answered: This was not “simple at all.” What the prosecution had apparently failed to consider, you see, was that Summers
said he didn’t do it
! Only Barbara Campbell, liberal goo-goo at
New York
Magazine,
understood the importance of the suspect’s denial. “Summers maintains,” Campbell reported, “that despite his being caught in the Jeep, despite the ‘confession’ (he signed no such document), despite his being identified by a victim, he committed no crime.”
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Does anyone write this kind of nonsense on behalf of white criminals?

At trial, Summers’s lawyers even presented a barber named Deno as a defense witness. Deno had agreed to take the stand for Summers to help his lawyers make the rather stupid point that there was someone named something like “Dino” in the neighborhood, proving that the police had not looked hard enough for anyone by that name.

It wasn’t exactly a Perry Mason moment. We may presume the prosecution was not claiming there was no one in the Bronx named Dino, including harmless barbers. Summers’s alibi was that this particular Dino was a major drug dealer, well known in the neighborhood and striking fear into everyone he met—which is why Summers had to do whatever Dino asked. That was the alibi.

Then, in a shocking twist, Summers’s lawyer suddenly accused the astonished Deno of being the real killer! This poor schlub had taken a day off from work to help Summers and his thanks was to be accused of murder by Summers’s lawyer.

The jurors were not overwhelmed by the Dino alibi. It was “smoke and mirrors,” as one put it.
³⁹
Not only had Nappi identified Summers as the killer, but the stocky five-foot-seven Deno did not resemble the slender six-foot-four “Dino” that Summers had described.

MICHAEL LASANE—1996

Journalists would never learn. In 1996, a black seventeen-year-old high school sophomore from the projects, Michael LaSane, abducted a special-education teacher, Kathleen Weinstein, and killed her for her gold 1995 Toyota Camry. We know this because, while Weinstein was in the car with him, she secretly turned on her pocket tape recorder, capturing the last half hour of her life as she tried to talk the young man out of killing her, telling him about her husband and children and asking him questions about himself. He parked the car and smothered her to death.

The tape, with LaSane’s voice and personal details about him, left investigators a gold mine of information.

Nonetheless, as soon as the cops arrested LaSane with Weinstein’s car, the
New York Times
asked in a headline: “Abduction Suspect Wanted a Car, But Would He Kill for It?”
⁴⁰
The article quoted friends of LaSane’s saying they thought he had been set up. Many also said LaSane had talked about getting a car for his seventeenth birthday. He “even had a model picked out: a gold 1995 Toyota Camry.” He had the model picked out! Well, that changes everything.

There are soulless, remorseless killers of all races, but only black killers will be defended relentlessly by imbecilic liberals at places like the
New York Times
. We don’t get credulous defenses of Scott Peterson or read about “lingering doubts” in the case of Phil Spector.

ROBERT CHAMBERS—1986

No one puzzled over why “Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers would kill Jennifer Levin. Chambers was arrested in August 1986 for murdering Jennifer Levin in Central Park after a night of drinking at the Upper East Side’s Dorrian’s Red Hand. He claimed Levin was his girlfriend and that their consensual rough sex had gotten out of hand.

This time, there were no wide-eyed journalists to champion a dubious alibi. No one would wonder why he would put his future at risk or questioned whether he could do something so “stupid.” No one asked: “How do you teach a boy to be a man in a society where others may view him as a threat just because he is Irish?”

Oh no. Real life had finally produced a suspect as close as liberals were
going to get to
Law & Order
’s version of the typical New York murderer: white—and, by God, liberals were going to make him privileged.

Journalists had batches of ready-made, sense-of-entitlement articles sitting around, but never got to use them.
Oh, it’s just a low-class, common thug. Damn!
Chambers was white, and that was close enough. The media finally had their man, even if they had to fiddle with the facts to make him their man.

Raised mostly in Queens by his striving but not wealthy parents, an Irish nurse and an often absent, heavy-drinking father, Chambers had attended various prep schools and one semester of college—but was thrown out of most of them, most recently, Boston University. So he moved back in with his mother.
⁴¹

And yet Chambers was still incessantly described as “rich,” “privileged,” “entitled,” and “preppie.”
⁴²
He wasn’t rich, privileged or entitled, and was only “preppie” in the strictly technical sense. (Edmund Perry could more accurately have been described as “preppie,” but that didn’t fit the story line.)

So with Chambers, instead of searching inquiries from wistful reporters asking: “Why would he do it?” the media were more than happy to delve into the dark side of the accused—his burglaries, psychiatric care, troubles with the law, cocaine habit, rotten grades and disciplinary problems in school and chronic unemployment.

Here’s another interesting thing: You didn’t see mobs of white people clogging the courtroom to heckle the prosecution or holding “No Justice, No Peace!” rallies defending Chambers. White people said: Go ahead, lock him up.

HOWARD BEACH—DECEMBER 20, 1986

Everyone was required to pretend that the real crime wave sweeping the nation was the epidemic of whites assaulting black people. As rare and precious as sightings of the aurora borealis, each one of these events would be covered like the 9/11 attack.

The media loved white goons! Where had they gone since those Democrat strongholds in the 1950s and ’60s? Whenever a white perpetrator came along, journalists would write about the crime from this angle and that, roll out references to Selma and Birmingham, and polish up their incomprehensible
spiels on the “social and political context” of “the Reagan Administration’s [lack of] concern for the aspirations of minorities”—as the
New York Times
put it in one editorial.
⁴³
Every false, meaningless platitude liberals believed was concentrated in their white-on-black crime stories.

The vicious attack on a group of blacks by a white gang in Howard Beach, Queens, was, as Joe Sobran called it, “the literary event of the season.” It required around-the-clock coverage from newspapers, TV networks, the international press and major magazines including
Time
,
Newsweek
,
Maclean’s
and the
Economist
. Mayor Ed Koch called it a “racial lynching” and requested a federal investigation. Even the governor’s office got involved.

The deadly encounter in December 1986 began when three black men, Cedric Sandiford, Timothy Grimes and Michael Griffith, walked in front of a car full of white teenagers in Howard Beach, and the two groups exchanged epithets. A short while later, the whites returned, liquored up, with reinforcements and a baseball bat, spoiling for a fight. Grimes ran off unharmed, Sandiford got beaten and Griffith tried to flee by climbing through a hole in a fence—and ran directly onto a busy six-lane highway, where he was hit by a car and killed.

That same night, the white gang, or a similar one, beat up an off-duty white fireman and a couple of Hispanics in two separate incidents in Howard Beach. But those were overkill. The whites’ attack on the black victims had secured their place in history, landing them on the cover of every newspaper in the city.

The FBI opened an investigation on the mugging of black victims and fifty police officers were assigned to investigate it. But no one heard about the gang attacks on white and Hispanic victims that same night in the same town.
⁴⁴

Although most of those involved were teenagers, there were criminal records on both sides. The ringleader of the white hoods, a British immigrant named Jon Lester, seventeen, had been arrested a month earlier for illegal possession of a firearm and attempting to steal a car. The victimized Grimes would be arrested days after the confrontation for stabbing his girlfriend in the back because she woke him too early.
⁴⁵

This was a turf fight instigated by teenage toughs, driven by alcohol and testosterone—both known to cause violence—not race. Lester had a black girlfriend, who sang his praises, saying, “He treated me better than all my other boyfriends, even my black boyfriends.” She said he took her to see the movie
The Color Purple
on their first date and reacted movingly.
⁴⁶
As one Howard Beach local said, the white kids were “punks” who “don’t like anyone.”
⁴⁷

White people felt no compulsion to defend the delinquents just because they were white—although residents of Howard Beach were a little testy about their whole town being portrayed as a racist cauldron on the basis of the actions of a few individuals. Thousands of black protesters repeatedly marched through Howard Beach, condemning racism and comparing the town to South Africa. One resident complained, “We don’t go to Harlem when a black man kills a white man. So we don’t want them coming here when it happens the other way around.”
⁴⁸

The assault in Howard Beach was the sort of crime that probably happened dozens of times every week in the United States. The only unusual aspect to this particular crime was that the perpetrators were white and the victims black. Although there are no precise numbers on territorial battles among teenagers in which one of them runs onto a highway, gets hit by a car and dies, that year, blacks committed 49.1 percent of all homicides in the country, despite being only 12 percent of the population. Only 2.6 percent of all homicides in 1986 were white-on-black killings. Black criminals killed nearly three times as many white people (949) as whites killed blacks (378) and killed sixteen times as many black people (6,235) as whites did.
⁴⁹

Mayor Koch called the Howard Beach attack “the most horrendous incident of violence in the nine years I have been mayor.”
⁵⁰

Earlier that year, a twenty-year-old white design student, Dawn Livecchi, answered the doorbell at her Fort Greene townhouse and was shot dead by a black part-time security guard, Anthony Neal Jenkins, who had followed her home from the grocery store.
⁵¹
Also that year, Robert Chambers had raped and murdered Jennifer Levin. One Queens woman interviewed by the
Times
about Howard Beach incidentally mentioned that her husband had been beaten so badly by a group of blacks that he remained in a coma two years later—this as Koch was uttering the words that the Howard Beach attack was “the most horrendous incident of violence” he’d seen as mayor.
⁵²
Even the Howard Beach crowd didn’t beat anyone into a coma.

The full-dress news coverage for the Howard Beach episode wasn’t to highlight a rare, once-a-year occurrence. It was portrayed not as a man-bites-dog story, but a dog-bites-man story in a universe with packs of roving, rabid dogs. According to press accounts, whites attacking blacks was an epidemic—a nationwide “cancer” in the words of Mayor Koch. Of course, if that were true, this case wouldn’t have attracted so much attention.

Liberals had finally gotten the freakishly atypical crime they had been searching for. They desperately wanted just one example to illustrate the popular America-is-still-racist thesis that was so rarely evident in real life.

Thus, in the deathless prose of columnist Jimmy Breslin, “Howard Beach suddenly has become what Birmingham once meant.”
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(A few years later, the ethnically sensitive Breslin was suspended for trashing a young Korean American colleague in the newsroom as a “slant-eyed bitch” and a “yellow cur.”
⁵⁴
)