The Savage City (9 page)

A quiver of excitement rippled through the police command, all the way from the Seventy-third Precinct to the office of the commissioner. Before Whitmore had even finished giving his statement, someone had leaked to the press that a suspect in the Career Girls Murders was confessing to the crime. Reporters started arriving at the precinct around 4:00
A.M.
; they were held at bay near the station house front desk by uniformed cops and told that Chief McKearney would be down soon to issue a statement.

Upstairs, Whitmore was placed in the cage and left there by himself. He had passed beyond fatigue into what resembled an out-of-body experience. Alone, away from the detectives for the first time in many hours, he began to feel something like anger. For nearly twenty-four hours he had been in police custody. Not once had detectives told him that he could make a phone call or have an attorney present. Not once had they asked him if he had an alibi for the dates and times of the crimes in question. They weren't interested in alibis. They had promised George that, after he satisfied their needs and demands, it would “all be over” and he could go. Well, obviously that was a lie. For the first time, George real
ized that he'd gotten himself into something he might not be getting out of for a long time.

After a while, a big group of white men in suits came and took George from the cell. Along with Bulger and Aidala and Di Prima, there was Detective Martin Zinkand, who'd arrived at the precinct as a representative of the Manhattan homicide squad. Department protocol called for the glory to be spread evenly among the various detective units involved.

With Bulger holding George Whitmore by one arm and Di Prima by the other, they led the accused toward a staircase leading down to the front desk.

It was approximately 5:30
A.M
. At this hour, the station house in Brownsville was usually as quiet as a cemetery. But today was not an ordinary day.

That morning, Fred C. Shapiro, a reporter for the
New York Herald Tribune
who lived in Brooklyn, was awoken by a phone call from an assistant city editor. “Get over to the East New York Avenue precinct,” he was told. “They've got the Wylie killer.”

Shapiro, a veteran reporter, was accustomed to early-morning calls, but this one seemed especially urgent. “Do we know the identity of the suspect?” he asked.

“You never heard of him,” he was told. “It's a jig named Whitmore.”

At the station house, Shapiro crammed into the front desk area with dozens of other print reporters, crime beat photographers, and TV news crews setting up lights. A buzz of excitement permeated the room, punctuated by the incessant ringing of the station house phones. Off-duty detectives were coming by to see what was going on. The reporters' cigarettes created a layer of smoke in the air.

Around 6:30
A.M.
there was a rustle of expectation. Chief McKearney appeared and read an official statement from a yellow notepad: “Suspect's name is George Whitmore Jr., age nineteen…admitted killing one Minnie Edmonds…attempted to commit felonious rape on one Elba Borrero…was apprehended by Patrolman Frank Isola, who had engaged the suspect in a chase…did admit these crimes.”

The reporters shouted questions:
What about Wylie-Hoffert? Yeah, the Career Girls Murders—did he do it?

The chief continued: “Whitmore is a drifter…. He wandered to the apartment on 88th Street…. He found the door cracked…stabbed
the girls repeatedly after binding them with a sheet…. Then he calmly washed his hands and left as he came.” McKearney added that a walletsized photo of Janice Wylie had been found on Whitmore. At first, said the chief, the perpetrator claimed he'd found the picture on a dump in his hometown of Wildwood, but under questioning he admitted taking it from the apartment on the day he killed the girls.

The reporters jockeyed for position, tripping over one another to ask their questions.

The chief was tired and running low on patience. “Look fellas, we wouldn't have booked him if we weren't sure. He gave us facts only the killer could give…. We got the right guy—no question about it.”

From the top of the stairs, Whitmore heard shouting and the sound of cameras flashing. Bulger and Di Prima were still holding him, with a phalanx of detectives behind them. When he spotted the mob of reporters below them, George hesitated. One of the detectives said reassuringly, “It's okay, George. Let's go.”

They descended the stairs. Bright lights from TV cameras illuminated the dingy precinct. Phosphorescent bulbs flashed. Questions were shouted all at once:
George, why did you do it? Did they beat you? What do you have to say, George? George, was it fun?

Fred Shapiro pushed to the front of the crowd. Years later, in a book on the Whitmore case, he would write: “The detectives made no effort to clear a path for Whitmore…. rather, it seemed that he cleared a path for them through massed reporters and photographers who pressed close to, but did not touch him.”

Within a few moments, the prisoner was led out of the station house to a squad car that would take him to arraignment court in downtown Brooklyn.

The police station quickly emptied out, with reporters dashing off to file their stories in time for the next edition. There was nothing left to say. The NYPD had their man.

 

AT ARRAIGNMENT COURT
in downtown Brooklyn, Whitmore felt so weak he thought his legs might give out. The room was packed with reporters, cops, lawyers, and the judge seated on high looking down on the accused. George saw some of his family in the spectators gallery—his aunt, his girlfriend Beverly, his brother Gerald—and felt a wave of humiliation.

“Do you have a lawyer?” barked Judge James J. Comerford. Though the judge had been living in New York most of his life, he had the accent of a man who'd never left the green fields of his birthplace in County Clare, Ireland.

Whitmore stood handcuffed, with Detective Aidala on one side and Detective Zinkand on the other. To the judge's question he answered, “No.”

“Do you intend to get a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“I can't hear you,” said the judge.

“Yes,” said Whitmore.

“When will you have a lawyer of your own choice?”

Detective Aidala spoke up. “He can't afford a lawyer, Judge.”

“Let him speak for himself. Is there any lawyer in court here now?”

The judge scanned the area where lawyers from the public defender's office gathered. “You,” he said, pointing at Jerome J. Leftow. “Do you want to assist the court by speaking with the defendant?”

Leftow stepped forward.

This scene, intended to appear spontaneous, was anything but. In fact, early that morning, when the judge first heard that the perpetrator of the notorious Wylie-Hoffert murders was being brought to his courtroom, he summoned Jerome Leftow to his chambers. Leftow was thirty years old and relatively inexperienced as a criminal defense attorney, but he was a member of the Madison Club, a well-placed political club in Brooklyn. Years later, Leftow remembered how his political connections paid off by netting him the most famous case of his career. “In his chambers Judge Comerford said to me, ‘Young man, I'm going to help you out and get your name in the newspapers. I'm going to assign you a case that's gotten national attention. The reporters are out there, and the photographers are out there.' And then he tells me what the case is about. I say, ‘What about those other more experienced lawyers out there? They're gonna want to be involved.' He says, ‘Don't worry about it—you're getting it.'”

And the scene in the courtroom that morning? “The judge was putting on a show,” Leftow remembered. “It had already been decided.”

Jerome Leftow, whose inexperience as an attorney was matched by his inexpensive suit, purchased wholesale at an outlet in downtown Brooklyn, walked over and stood next to Whitmore.

A court clerk read the docket number and charges, and then asked Detective Aidala to verify the facts of the Borrero assault and the Edmonds murder.

This was the first time that George Whitmore realized Minnie Edmonds had been killed and he had confessed to the murder.

The court clerk then asked Detective Zinkand to swear that he had arrested the defendant “on a charge of homicide with a knife which he believes he committed on August 28, 1963 at 57 East 88th Street, apartment 3C, County of New York, between the hours of 9:30 and 2
P.M.
in that the defendant herein did stab and cut with a knife about the throat, neck and body of two females, Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, as a result of which injuries were inflicted that resulted in death of the aforesaid.”

George wasn't sure, but he figured all of that must mean those two girls were dead. It was another murder he'd confessed to without knowing it.

Judge Comerford offered Leftow ten minutes to speak with his client. The lawyer pulled Whitmore aside. The kid was shaking and appeared confused. He looked at Leftow with suspicion:
Is this another white guy in a suit, working for the police and the D.A. to help make me look guilty?

Leftow handed George a copy of the formal complaint against him. “Do you want to read this, George?”

Whitmore's eyes glazed over the complaint. Leftow saw at once that his defendant wouldn't be able to absorb the document. He was far too tired and unfocused.

“Do you understand the charges against you, George?” asked Leftow.

Whitmore nodded.

“Is it true?”

“No. Definitely not true.”

Leftow took a deep breath. This was going to be more complicated than he'd expected. “George,” he asked, “why did you make these statements to the police if they are not true?”

Whitmore's eyes filled. “They made me. They made me say those things.” He gave a rambling minute-long explanation of how he came to sign the confession.

Leftow looked at the kid, unsure what to make of him. Lots of criminals claimed they were innocent. This kid looked and sounded sincere,
but Leftow would need to spend some time with him before he could make an assessment. “George,” said Leftow, “I'm going to tell the judge what you just told me.”

The lawyer and Whitmore walked back over in front of the bench. Leftow cleared his throat and said, “Judge, I'm the first person the defendant has had the opportunity to discuss this matter with, besides the police officials. And at this point the defendant informs me that he made certain statements yesterday pertaining to these particular crimes he is charged with. He now states to me that the statements and confession pertaining to all three crimes he is alleged to have committed were made under duress and threats, and now he recants all confessions and statements made, Your Honor.”

The prosecutor, Assistant D.A. Robert Walsh, jumped up as if on cue. “If Your Honor please, I think the officers ought to be commended for fine police work in this matter…. I know that this man has been wanted for quite some time for this murder in Manhattan. And I think a lot of people feel easier that he has been apprehended.”

Comerford nodded. The judge was a product of the city's Democratic Party machine, a proud member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and one of the chief organizers of the annual St. Patrick's Day parade. The police were his people.

Said Comerford, “The court wishes to point out at this time that nobody is saying the defendant is guilty, nobody is saying the defendant is not guilty. That will be a matter of due process of the law when the time comes. But the citizens of this town are very much pleased with the police department of New York City…. I have found out that the police department do a fine, effective police job, do it efficiently and do it properly. And the court commends the police department of the City of New York, the individual officers concerned, and…our citizens have much more confidence in law enforcement than they may have had a couple days ago in relation to these two major crimes.”

The judge recommended that the defendant be remanded to a psychiatric facility to determine his state of mind. He banged his gavel and called the next case. Whitmore was taken away.

A NEGRO BOY
claiming he'd been coerced into confessing to a crime he didn't commit—it was a symbol of the city's zeitgeist at that moment. To those citizens who raged that the Great City of New York was being destroyed by niggers and spics, it was no big deal. To make an omelet, you needed to break a few eggs. To the city's rapidly growing black population, framing young Negro men in this way was an injustice as deep and resonant as a lash delivered during the bullwhip days. News of the arrest, and of Whitmore's claim of coercion, was one more drop of blood in the rivers of Babylon, its ripples radiating outward from places like Harlem and Brownsville to other interested quarters across the country.

In a prison in upstate New York, one young black inmate received the news. His name was Dhoruba Bin Wahad.

A few days after the arrest of George Whitmore, Bin Wahad sat at a table in the prison library looking for something to read. Great Meadow Correctional Facility—better known as Comstock, after the town where it is located—didn't have the best library, but Dhoruba was usually able to find something to interest him. There were always the newspapers, mostly New York City editions that were his only access to news from back home. The only problem was, the papers were often censored by the Bureau of Prisons. It was not uncommon to pick up a copy of the
Times
or
Daily News
or
Herald Tribune
and find that an entire article had been clipped out of the paper, leaving a gaping hole in the page.
Since neither Dhoruba nor any other inmate was privy to the censorship process, it was hard to know what kinds of things were being cut out. Dhoruba figured that the excised articles were political in nature, probably relating to the civil rights movement down South, with their photos of police attack dogs, fire hoses, and billy clubs being used on marchers—images deemed too incendiary for a predominantly Negro prison population.

On this particular day, all the New York papers led with the same story: The police in Brooklyn had extracted a confession from a young black kid for a notorious double murder. Dhoruba looked over a copy of the
Daily News,
headlined “Confession: Stumbled into Killing Two,” and read: “The Wylie-Hoffert murders were declared solved yesterday with the police-reported confession of a pimple-faced jobless laborer…” He picked up the
Journal American,
which devoted three full pages to the confession. One of its articles was headlined “The Wylie Killer: Boy Jekyll-Hyde,” and described George Whitmore Jr. as a “Negro drifter” who was equal parts milquetoast and psychopath. The main article in the
Journal American
was headlined “How Police Broke the Wylie Case: Step by Step Account.” “Police were astonished at the way the accused described the murder apartment,” it read. “They marveled at his memory and quick recall.” The article heaped special praise on Detective Edward Bulger, who was described as “an astute practical psychologist, as well as a crackerjack detective.”

Both newspapers made special note of a devastating piece of evidence: the photo of one of the victims, which the killer had stolen from the apartment after he did the deed.

It wasn't until Dhoruba picked up the
Times
that he found, in the third paragraph of a front-page article, the following information: “But at his arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court, Whitmore, through his court-appointed lawyer, Jerome Leftow, recanted the confessions. Mr. Leftow said they had been obtained under duress.”

Reading these accounts, Dhoruba felt in his gut that this kid Whitmore was being framed. The story sounded typical of criminal justice in America as he knew it to be, in his experience as a young black man born and raised in the ghetto.

It wasn't that Bin Wahad had been framed himself. He was guilty of the charge for which he was doing time—felonious assault with a deadly weapon. Dhoruba felt that the assault had been an act of self-defense, but
he'd accepted a plea in exchange for a five-year sentence. Long before he violated any laws and wound up in prison, however, he'd come to see the police as the enemy. His attitude toward the men in blue was rooted in his upbringing on the streets of the Bronx in the 1950s.

To Dhoruba, blacks and cops in the Bronx were like cowboys and Indians. The cops were the cowboys; they had better firepower and superior fortifications. The Negroes were the Indians; they knew the terrain and how to live off the land. They shared the same territory, mostly as hostile tribes. When one of the natives became unruly and engaged in a confrontation with a cop on the beat, the cavalry was called in; the police had strength in numbers. But the natives had guile and fortitude and carried with them the spirit of a proud and unconquerable people.

As a teenager, Dhoruba sought to create his own version of strength in numbers: he joined a youth gang. The gang he chose was the Sportsmen Disciples, a division of the Disciples, a citywide gang. The Disciples had many rivals, including the Fordham Baldies, the Scorpions, the Renegades, and various divisions of the Seven Crowns—the Valiant Crowns, the Bohemian Crowns, the Collegian Crowns, and so on. In the Morrisania section of the Bronx, where Dhoruba lived, teen gang culture was a living, breathing organism. A kid joined a gang to embrace the vitality of life. Years later, Bin Wahad recalled:

Whether they were dealing dope or merely seeking solidarity, however, the police considered gangs a threat, plain and simple.

In June 1955, the NYPD initiated a special enforcement program called Operation 42, named after the Four-Two Precinct in Morrisania. Operation 42 was aimed specifically at the southeast Bronx, a squalid,
overcrowded area of slums and small shops. Special patrol units were sent into the community. Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy gave the troops their marching orders: “You shall meet violence with sufficient force, legally applied, to bring violators to justice swiftly. Mob rule and mob violence is an evil thing. We cannot compromise with evil. You must enforce the law.” Youth officers were assigned to every precinct in the area. It was their job to identify the different gangs and monitor their behavior, especially in and around the public schools. Remembered Dhoruba:

By the late 1950s, the gang problem had escalated in the city's Negro communities to the point where Commissioner Kennedy began talking about riots and racial Armageddon: “A race riot could cause more destruction of community relations than an atom bomb, and the lingering effects of such a riot would be worse for the community than that of the fallout of an atom bomb.”

There were, of course, gangs of every ethnicity: Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Chinese, and Negro. Composed primarily of teenagers, gangs engaged in what was called “jitterbugging,” later known as gang banging, or armed warfare between gangs. The dominant weapon of choice was the switchblade, but some enterprising gang brothers were known to make “zip guns,” converted cap pistols rigged with a lead pipe and rubber band so that they could fire .32-caliber bullets. More than anything, the gangs were an intimidating presence in a community: they knocked over garbage cans, endangered innocent bystanders with their jitterbugging, and sometimes mugged and assaulted people.

Youth officers from the NYPD were liable to give an ass-whupping
to any gang kid they caught—black, white, or Latino—but Negro gangs presented a special problem. Blacks weren't supposed to leave the ghetto, especially at night. Those who did learned quickly that New York City was a white man's world.

The relationship between Negro youths and the cops was circumscribed by a simple fact: the police considered it their job to keep the colored people in their place.

For Dhoruba, growing up in one of the country's most densely populated ghettos, learning the laws of the jungle was a gradual process. He was born June 30, 1944, and raised in a tenement at 166th Street and Boston Road. His name at birth was Richard Earl Moore; he was the son of Collins and Audrey Moore (née Cyrus). Collins Moore was from a southern family that had migrated from Georgia and settled in Harlem during the 1920s. Dhoruba's mother's family was from the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. It was a classic Harlem romance: a southern Negro and a child of Caribbean immigrants meeting on the streets of Harlem and falling in love while the rest of the world fretted about the war in Europe.

Dhoruba grew up mostly without a father. Collins Moore joined the army shortly after he was born; before too long, he and Audrey Moore separated. As a young boy, Dhoruba never knew much about his father, beyond the fact that his aunts and uncles on his mother's side called him a ne'er-do-well and a lowlife.

Dhoruba's mother was a young woman, barely out of her teens, who worked full-time and tried to have some semblance of a social life. By the
time her only son was four or five, he was living mostly with his aunt and his grandparents, all of whom lived in the same general neighborhood.

In 1956 and 1957, the New York Housing Authority constructed two massive housing projects in the area known as Morrisania. The Morris Houses and McKinley projects changed the tenor of the neighborhood. Poor blacks from the South and Puerto Ricans flooded into the projects, and before too long what had once been a small village where everyone knew one another became a kind of armed camp. Muggers and predators were able to prey on merchants and residents and then disappear into the impenetrable maze of the projects. It was a tough environment for an adolescent.

Like many young men coming of age in the Bronx, Dhoruba found refuge in a street gang. It gave him a feeling of belonging, taught him the rituals of manhood, and shaped his feelings toward the police in ways that would determine his life for years to come.

Jitterbugging was a gas, but by the time of Dhoruba's seventeenth birthday he was ready for something more. One of his mother's brothers had been a hero in the Second World War, and she convinced Dhoruba that he should follow in his footsteps and join the army. Dhoruba was only seventeen, so his mother had to sign the enlistment papers. In November 1960, he was shipped off to basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then on to Killeen, Texas, for advanced infantry training (AIT).

Dhoruba liked the physical and weapons-related aspects of basic training, but he had a problem with authority. “I never liked the attitude of the drill instructors talkin' trash about your mama, spittin' in your face,” he recalled. “Where I came from, you talk about somebody's mama and be spittin' in their face, there's gonna be repercussions. I took it for a while, but then I started to stray.”

Two incidents got Dhoruba into trouble with army command. One was a time when he stole a cache of M-1 bayonets from a munitions supply barracks and took them back to the Bronx for his gang cronies. The haul made him a local hero among the Disciples, but when the military police found out about it, he was disciplined.

Dhoruba's second, more serious infraction occurred when he returned to Texas. He and two other soldiers, Jingles and Ralph, devised a scam for selling starched fatigues, which were highly prized by the rank and file. Dhoruba and his partners would steal the fatigues from another battalion's clothesline and mix them with their own battalion's laundry.
Rare camel fatigues, professionally cleaned, pressed, and creased—they sold like hotcakes.

Jingles, Ralph, and Dhoruba got busted and were given extra duty. Instead of complying, Dhoruba went AWOL, sneaking into town to get drunk. He was apprehended and thrown in the stockade. It was his first time behind bars. Two weeks later—after six months in the army—he was given an undesirable discharge and sent packing. “I look back now and I realize that rebellious attitude I had in the military served me well. If I hadn't been that recalcitrant, I would have eventually been sent to Vietnam. If I had pursued things like I thought I would when I enlisted, by '65 I probably would have been a sergeant in charge of a squad with my black ass in the Mekong Delta. The life expectancy of a sergeant wasn't too good. I would have been dead.”

Dhoruba returned to the old neighborhood and resumed his life as a member of the Disciples. His military weapons training put him in good standing with the gang. He was still only eighteen, with a restless energy that earned him the nickname Torch. He was a ball of spontaneous combustion, ready to go up in flames at the slightest provocation.