Law of Honor

by Michael Newton

  Through it all, according to President Reagan's Afghan Working Group, " The CIA was very reluctant to be involved at all. They thought it would end up with them being blamed, like in Guatemala."

  Reluctant, my ass, Barnes thought, as he entered Andy's Deli on Columbus Avenue, renowned for its hearty corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. If that was CIA "reluctance," with its Stinger giveaways and other weapons, millions in cash balanced out by heroin exports, he'd hate to see the Agency in "eager" mode.

  Of course, Reagan was hypocritical. In June, at West Germany's Brandenburg Gate, he'd been cheered for shouting, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Six months later, back in Washington, he'd been all smiles with the target of his former rage, signing an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty demobilizing all nuclear and conventional missiles and launchers with ranges of 310 to 3,240 miles.

  Peace in our time? Barnes asked himself. And answered back, Not even close.

  Harlem: December 22, 1987

  NYPD Sergeant Payton Sawyer had come to terms with a belief that he would never see the end of simmering hostility among the diverse races of New York City, particularly between white and black.

  A case in point was Howard Beach, in Queens, where white thugs had mobbed three twenty-something blacks after their car broke down on hostile turf. All three were beaten, one of them—Michael Griffith, from Trinidad by way of Brooklyn—died when he fled through traffic and a car mowed him down. Mayor Ed Koch called it the "No. 1 case in the city," with three assailants jailed on second-degree murder charges, while a grand jury cleared the motorist who'd struck Griffith accidentally. Griffith's family retained lawyers to press a civil case, and Governor Mario Cuomo had removed Queens D.A. John Santucci from the case in January, appointing Special Prosecutor Benjamin Ward. New indictments added nine more defendants in February, but the verdict rendered yesterday was a split decision: three guilty of manslaughter, one more of second degree manslaughter, with the rest acquitted.

  And in the interim, there was Tawana Brawley, black and age fifteen when she vanished from her home in Wappinger Falls, Dutchess County, on November 24th. Four days later she'd been found, near home, stuffed into a plastic trash bag, her body smeared with feces, charcoal used to mark her torso with the words "KKK," "Nigger," and "Bitch." She was still alive, although communication with officers from the county sheriff's Juvenile Aid Bureau took time. Initially, Brawley only spoke one word—"neon"—then haltingly described her gang-rape by six white men, including at least one cop, who'd kept her in the woods over the days and nights when she was missing.

  Reverend Al Sharpton signed on as the family's "advisor," quickly joined by Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, the same black southern lawyers—from Arkansas and Georgia, respectively—who'd volunteered to help Michael Griffith's parents sue New York City. Public outrage mounted, including a protest march led by Louis Farrakhan, a $25,000 reward for information offered by comedian Bill Cosby, and a $100,000 donation toward Tawana's future education from former Cleveland bookie and convicted murderer Don King, now a celebrity boxing promoter who managed Muhammad Ali. The Sharpton-Maddox-Mason triumvirate described a vast cover-up plot including the Klan, Irish Republican Army, the Mafia, and U.S. government officials in bed with all of the above.

  One suspect in the case, safely deceased, was Fishkill Police Officer Harry Crist Jr., who'd committed suicide on December 2nd. Steven Pagones, Assistant D.A. for Dutchess County, offered Crist an alibi, saying they'd been together at the time in question—whereupon Tawana's PR team added his name to the list of rapists. The New York Times blamed Crist's suicide on a breakup with his girlfriend, coupled with rejection by the State Police. Sharpton and company denounced the white conspiracy of silence and excoriated journalists who'd used Tawana's name in print despite her tender age—unethical, if not strictly illegal, under New York's Rape Shield Law.

  Meanwhile, police collected and analyzed the available evidence. A sexual assault kit revealed no trace of rape, whereupon Tawana told selected friends her attackers had restricted themselves to "other kinds" of abuse. Also missing were the telltale signs of exposure that would be expected from a victim kept nude in the woods over several nights when temperatures fell below freezing. All racist lies, said Sharpton, Maddox, Mason, and a number of black journalists. The case dragged on, with no arrests in sight, detracting from the credibility of Brawley's claims.

  Another case drawing attention from the media, although less titillating, involved three members of the Black Men's Movement Against Crack, founded by middle-aged Korean War vet and Brooklyn director of the Congress of Racial Equality Sonny Carson. In 1974-75 he'd pulled fifteen months in Sing Sing on a kidnapping charge, for his "citizen's arrest" of two suspected stickup artists in the Bed-Stuy ghetto. Now, he told reporters, "We're at war. And there's only one way to go and that's to fight back.''

  Ten days after that pronouncement, state troopers had stopped a car occupied by BMMAC members Arthur Majeed Barnes, Abdul Haqq Muhammad, and Robert Taylor, arresting all three on various weapons charges. Subsequent indictments had them on their way to trial and, if convicted, off to prison.

  On what Sawyer called the "plus" side, Brink's bandits Marilyn Buck and Mutulu Shakur were finally on trial, the state's key informant catching hell on the stand from their lawyers, but those proceedings would drag on into next spring, at least.

  Another Shakur—Assata, born JoAnne Chesimard—had surfaced in Havana, calling Cuba "one of the largest, most resistant and most Courageous palenques that has ever existed on the face of this planet." Payton had looked up palenques and found it translates as "arenas," though Chesimard interpreted it as "Maroon camps" established in the 19th century by escaped Afro-Caribbean slaves.

  Of course, she also called herself a "20th-century escaped slave" and dubbed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a "hero of the oppressed." Maybe that was the price of admission in Havana, where Chesimard had recently written Assata: An Autobiography, glossing over the New Jersey Turnpike murders except for saying her trial jury "convicted a woman with her hands up!" Likewise, the book offered no details of her other actions with the BLA, but any income from its sales was shielded from "Son of Sam" statutes by her selection of a publisher based in London.

  Not so dumb, thought Sawyer. Not so dumb at all.

  Chapter 5

  One Police Plaza, Manhattan: October 8, 1988

  Sergeant Payton Sawyer was collecting his retirement papers on the sly. It wasn't quite an undercover operation but required some after-hours rummaging through various NYPD administrative files after the day shift clerks and secretaries had gone home.

  He wasn't quitting now, mind you, but wanted to be ready when that moment came and he knew it was time to pull the pin.

  One case was winding up at last, with the May conviction of Black Liberation Army members Marilyn Buck and Jeral "Mutulu Shakur" Williams, convicted on multiple racketeering and robbery charges. Buck had other legal problems pending, while Williams began serving his sixty-year sentence. Four years earlier, the Sentencing Reform Act had abolished federal parole, but that law didn't take effect until 1987, after Williams was captured. Under the old rules, he'd be considered for parole after serving half his sentence. That was 2016, counting time served prior to trial, and if he wasn't freed then, new hearings would cycle up every two years.

  By which time Payton would be too damned old to care, if he were even still alive.

  Meanwhile, the Tawana Brawley case continued stirring up a fuss right here, right now. State Attorney General Robert Abrams had convened a special grand jury investigation, and that 170-page report had been released on Thursday. After questioning 180 witnessed, reviewing 250 exhibits, and recording 6,000 pages of testimony, the panel concluded there had been no kidnapping or sexual assault, calling Tawana's tale a pack of lies. The girl had ducked a subpoena, getting a free pass because of her age, but mother Glenda got thirty days and a $250 fine for the same act of defiance. Perry McKinnon, Al Sha
rpton's former aide, testified that Sharpton didn't care about Tawana's case, nor did attorneys Maddox and Mason. Their plan, McKinnon said, was to "take over the town" and become "the biggest niggers in New York."

  Forensic evidence wrapped up the case. Aside from the negative rape kit and lack of injuries from hypothermia, technicians traced the feces smeared on Brawley's body to a neighbor's dog. The slurs scrawled on her torso had been written upside down from her perspective, indicating that she likely did the clumsy work herself. When found in the woods, she was also well nourished, her teeth recently brushed. Although her clothes were charred, Brawley had suffered no burns. Neither were her feet injured, despite one shoe being cut in half.

  With release of the report, Glenda Brawley fled the state and surfaced with Tawana in Virginia, her contempt citation insufficient to grant extradition. The grand jury cleared Assistant D.A. Steven Pagones of any offenses and he was suing all concerned for libel. Even so, opinions on the case were still sharply divided along racial lines, with 85 percent of blacks responding to a June opinion poll still solidly behind the Brawley-Sharpton team.

  But since the story obviously was a lie, why was it perpetrated in the first place? The best evidence suggested Tawana had skipped school on the day she "disappeared," visiting a boyfriend who was serving six months in the county jail, then pulled her stunt to avoid violent punishment from Glenda and stepfather Ralph King, a sweetheart who'd served time for killing his previous wife. Grand jury witnesses described Glenda beating Tawana on other occasions, for running away and spending nights out with boys. King had tried the same at a police station in May, after Tawana was convicted of shoplifting, and sworn testimony also described him speaking about Tawana "in a sexualizing manner."

  And at the bottom line, as usual, was money. One witness heard Glenda Brawley chastising King for pocketing donations after the scandal broke, saying, "You shouldn't have took the money because after it all comes out, they're going to find out the truth." Another heard Glenda say, "They know we're lying and they're going to find out and come and get us."

  People, thought Sawyer. Sometimes it was hard for him to think that any one of them was worth a damn.

  FBI Headquarters: October 14, 1988

  Twenty months without another Unabomber incident so far, and Agent Wyman Gantt had to assume the psychopath was sitting out another self-imposed hiatus. Even so, Gantt still had plenty on his plate with other terrorists from coast to coast.

  Trial had convened for the United Freedom Front's "Ohio 7" sedition defendants on April 21st, but veniremen were so busy squirming out of duty for the predicted lengthy proceedings that selection of a jury might drag on into next year. On May 12th, a federal grand jury indicted seven members of the May 19 Communist Organization's "Resistance Conspiracy" for multiple interstate bombings. Six were presently locked up, one in the wind, but that trial, like the UFF's, would be pushed back to sometime during 1989.

  Three female radicals already imprisoned—Silvia Baraldini, Susan Rosenberg and Alejandrina Torres—had dealt Justice a setback on July 19th, when D.C. Senior District Judge Barrington Parker granted part of their appeal stemming from confinement in what the Federal Bureau of Prisons called "control units." Barrington agreed that those conditions violated First Amendment freedom of communication but denied any violation of the Fifth or Eighth Amendments, claiming breaches of due process and the Constitution's ban on cruel or unusual punishment. Justice was appealing even that limited win.

  On the race front, members of the Black Guerrilla Family were acting up again, since Johnny Spain's March parole from the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. Three months later, BGF leaders James "Doc" Holiday and "Ray Ray" Browning had been convicted and sentenced for running an L.A. drug ring, drawing life terms in August. That same month, successor drug boss Stanley Bryant's mob had tried to eliminate competition by killing four people at a crack house in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood. One of the dead was a two-year-old girl found strapped in a car seat outside. Police nabbed Bryant and two alleged accomplices on October 13th, charging all three with murder, but Bryant's lawyers were fighting the rap tooth and nail.

  The ghetto rumbling almost made Gantt wish the Unabomber would return and give him something else to think about.

  Almost…but not quite.

  Birmingham, Alabama: November 8, 1988

  "Christ on a crutch!" Fiona O'Hara quaffed off her wine and reached out for the bottle to refill her glass. "Another four years of the same old shit and voodoo economics."

  David Jordan managed to suppress a smile at that. George Bush had coined the "voodoo" phrase in 1980, running for the presidential nomination against Ronald Reagan, but he'd quit that after being tapped to run as Vice President. Tonight, finally chosen by America to stay the course established by his onetime rival, "Reaganomics" was the byword of conservatives, especially on Wall Street.

  Bush's nomination to succeed Reagan—barred from a third term under the Constitution—had been automatic when Republicans held their New Orleans convention in August, at the Louisiana Superdome. The only mystery had been his choice as running mate, which turned out to be Dan Quayle from Indiana, known for doing little in the House from 1977 to '81 and less still in the Senate since then. A virtual nonentity, he smiled a lot and seemed eager to please his boss.

  By August the Bush team knew their opponents would be popular Michael Dukakis, the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history, and running mate Lloyd Bentsen, four-term senator from Texas. Jordan's favorite moment of the campaign had occurred in October's vice-presidential debate, when Quayle tried to silence claims of inexperience by comparing his years of public service to JFK's before 1960. Aides had forewarned him, but Quayle charged ahead and Bentsen slapped him down, saying, "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Quayle's petulant rejoinder—"That was really uncalled for, Senator"—only brought Bentsen more cheers and applause.

  But in the end it hadn't been enough. While Dukakis touted his economic "Massachusetts miracle," Bush spoke vaguely of "a thousand points of light" across America and ran on Reagan's dubious record—a potential drawback, since it included the Iran-Contra scandal and wholesale looting of deregulated savings and loan companies. Finally, perhaps in desperation, he'd pulled out Willie Horton, a black Massachusetts convict serving life for murder who'd absconded from a weekend furlough, committing assault, rape and armed robbery before police caught him in Maryland. Horton's brooding mugshots were a standard feature of GOP political ads, campaign manager Lee Atwater bragging, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder if Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate."

  The National Security Political Action Committee's Americans for Bush piled on from there, and when Democrats rightly denounced the campaign's racist turn, Bush pled both innocence and ignorance—the latter claim, perhaps, not so far off the mark.

  Today, some 49 million voters had answered Reagan's final wish, handing Bush forty states and 426 Electoral College votes to the Democrats' ten and 111. Pundits said it marked the first time in forty years that either party had won a third straight presidential election, but Dave knew their math was defective: FDR and Truman had carried five elections for the Democrats from 1932 through '48.

  Even the Donald lynching case had run aground this year. Frank Cox's trial in Mobile was consolidated with that of codefendant Bennie Jack Hays, beginning on February 1st, but Hays collapsed in court from chest pains five days later, prompting Judge Michael Zoghby to declare a mistrial for both. The court would have to try again with Cox, while septuagenarian Hays did his best to cheat death.

  Dave wondered whether it was wrong to hope he lost.

  FBI Field Office, Manhattan: November 22, 1988

  The twenty-fifth anniversary of Dallas had rejuvenated interest in the JFK assassination, forcibly reminding Agent Erin O'Hara of the case that had obsessed her grandfather and likely drove he
r father to his death in Washington.

  In fact, the case was inescapable on television and in print today, and one participant was speaking out at any given opportunity. Jim Garrison, no longer D.A. of New Orleans, was now a judge on Louisiana's 4th Circuit Court of Appeal, elected in 1978—five years after his acquittal on corruption charges—and twice reelected since then. This year, he'd published his second book on the assassination, a best-seller titled On the Trail of the Assassins, and sat for an interview with Pacifica radio station KPFA in Berkley, California, while participating in a TV documentary series, "The Men Who Killed Kennedy."

  In Garrison's view—echoing opinions voiced in private by Erin's grandpa and in public by her dad—those men included rabid elements of the CIA's Operations Division, fanatical anti-Castro Cubans, and a collection of mobsters aided by late Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa.

  Leaders at Justice predictably disagreed, despite vague congressional findings that JFK—and Dr. King as well—were "probably" killed by separate but equal conspiracies. Trying to silence the persistent rumblings on Capitol Hill, William Weld, Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ's Criminal Division, had sent a three-page memo to the House Judiciary Committee, assuring its members that "no persuasive evidence can be identified to support the theory of a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy." That said, and taking no further questions, he'd retired to private practice in his native Massachusetts, with hopes to run for governor in 1990.