Asked about the raids in his Fifth Precinct office, Captain Chan opts for the role of the dutiful commander. Unequivocally, he supports the action of the NYPD and expresses little sympathy for the merchants. “It is incumbent upon these people to know whether or not they are selling counterfeit merchandise,” explains Chan. “They are jeopardizing themselves and their stores when they do this.”
Aside from the issue of counterfeit, however, is the question of whether or not the raids were conducted in a manner that was counterproductive. As Chan knows, merchants in the Canal Street area are a tight-knit group, recent Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who depend on one another for security. One day, local officers may return to this intersection to investigate a violent robbery or a gang murder, and they will be asking for cooperation. These merchants, remembering their treatment at the hands of the police, will be reluctant—if not hostile. The police will walk away, perhaps cursing under their breath about those inscrutable Asians who, for historical and cultural reasons, never cooperate with the police.
Asked about this, the captain either does not comprehend the question or chooses to sidestep the issue. “If any of the merchants are not happy,” says Chan, “we can meet with them and give them additional information and inform them what the laws are. My doors are always open.”
Captain Chan can certainly expect a steady stream of overtures from the local populace, many of whom will presume a higher degree of sensitivity toward the community from him than that of his Caucasian predecessors. So far, he has been well received by the established business and community associations, though he gets lower marks from community activists, street-level merchants, and others whose standing within Chinatown’s sometimes rigid economic caste system is less exalted. As for Asian-American police officers, there is a similar split.
“I think Tommy Chan’s promotion is a big step forward, at least symbolically,” says Detective Bruce May, president of SCALE (Supreme Council of Asians in Law Enforcement), a recently formed umbrella organization that includes Asian officers at the city, state, and federal levels.
“Tommy Chan is a nice guy, very intelligent,” says another Chinese-American detective. “But don’t kid yourself. He’s one person. For the department at large, I don’t think his promotion means anything.”
“Andy Chow” is a veteran officer assigned to a prestigious citywide unit. He was raised in Chinatown. Like other Asian-American officers not affiliated with SCALE or any of the other official police fraternal organizations, Chow’s feelings reflect a deep-rooted bitterness expressed in varying degrees—almost always off the record.
In contrast to recent recruitment efforts in which the NYPD claims to offer a fair working environment for Asian Americans, Chow feels the department is still a white male-dominated universe mired in an outdated, racially motivated system of approval. “The job is rigged. Everybody knows it. Advancement is not based on performance. It’s who you know, who you drink with.” Chow claims to know one sergeant who got ahead because he mowed his chief’s lawn. “I’m telling you, it’s who you know and who you blow.”
“The department is afraid to be fair with minority officers,” adds Chow. “They’re afraid it will bring down the morale of the department overall. Chinese, Hispanic, black officers know this. That’s why they’re reluctant to try to do anything to rock the boat. The odds against them are too large.”
Chow laughs when asked whether or not law enforcement is prepared to deal with the complexities of Asian organized crime and the gangs. “Every now and then, some Caucasian officer comes forward and declares himself an expert on the subject. It’s a joke.” Chow claims that there are very few officers in the department who speak fluent Foujou, the dialect spoken by Fujianese immigrants—and Fuk Ching Gang members. Language has always been a primary stumbling block for law enforcement when dealing with Asian gangs and their victims. Disdainfully, Chow mentions a recent move by the NYPD to send ten to fifteen officers to a language-training course to learn the dialect.
“Foujou is a very difficult language even for fluent Cantonese and Mandarin speakers,” says Chow. “You need to speak it every day. Now they’re going to send a group of mostly white cops to a class to learn Foujou? C’mon! Maybe they learn how to count to ten, maybe they can say hello and order a meal. But they can’t communicate with the community. They don’t know jack shit. But this is typical of the job. They think they can put a Band-Aid on a major head wound.”
In November 1994, at a press conference to announce the indictment of the Flying Dragons, Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declared, “With today’s indictment, the last of the major Chinatown gangs has been prosecuted and dismantled.” Aspiring young gangsters throughout Chinatown might have chuckled at the irrelevance of White’s proclamation.
In fact, some journalists and law enforcement analysts have for years been warning of a new incursion of Asian criminals into New York. In 1997, Hong Kong will be coming under the domain of the People’s Republic of China, and that city’s large triad-based underworld has begun to move money and manpower into Canada and a number of other U.S. cities. In the recently completed federal trial that resulted in the conviction of Clifford Wong, it was alleged that the Tsung Tsin Association, one of Chinatown’s wealthiest tongs, has already established itself as a beachhead for the Sun Yee On, an international criminal brotherhood based in Hong Kong.
With a fresh set of players arriving to stake their claim to local rackets, law enforcement can expect the area’s multilayered Asian crime-scape to become even more challenging. In the past, an inability or unwillingness on the part of police to vigorously address criminal developments as they unfolded has helped make it possible for a vast underworld to evolve. A tradition of police indifference has helped make it possible for established gangs to constantly regenerate, ensnaring hundreds of Asian youths and making life for the community’s street-level merchant class a sometimes perilous struggle.
Now the local police establishment and some federal law enforcement agencies claim to have gotten themselves up to speed, with more Asian officers and increased manpower focused on a violent underworld that stretches far beyond New York to communities in Hong Kong, Europe, Canada, and numerous U.S. cities. It may be some time before this claim can be fairly evaluated, but given the tragic human consequences for Ying Jing Gan, the parents of Chong Hui Chen, and other Chinatown residents who have been on the receiving end of police screwups in the past, it is a claim that cries out for careful and continued scrutiny.
4.
WHO WILL MOURN GEORGE WHITMORE?
The New York Times, October 13, 2012
In 1964, a black teenager confessed to a double homicide he didn’t do.
I received news this week of the death of George Whitmore Jr., an occurrence noted, apparently, by no one in the public arena.
That Whitmore could die without a single mention in the media is a commentary on a city and nation that would rather bury and forget the difficult aspects of our shared history.
Forty-eight years ago, as a New York City teenager, Whitmore was initiated into an ordeal at the hands of a racist criminal justice system. For a time, his story rattled the news cycle. He was chewed up and spit out: an ill-prepared kid vilified as a murderer, then championed as an emblem of injustice and, finally, cast aside. That he survived his tribulations and lived to the age of sixty-eight was a miracle.
I first met Whitmore in the spring of 2009 while doing research for a book that posited that his experiences constituted an important sub-narrative to the racial turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Finding him was not easy. I eventually tracked him down in Wildwood, New Jersey, nor far from where he’d been born and raised. I found a man who was broken but unbowed, humble, with glimmers of an innocence that had been snatched from him a long time ago. For a time in his adolescence, he’d been infamous. By the time I found him, he was anonymous, and that was okay with him.
The case had become known in the media as “The Career Girl Murders.” The killings took place on the same day—August 28, 1963—and perhaps the exact time that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The confession was front-page news. The Brooklyn cops who were involved congratulated themselves; one was given a special award for exemplary work. But the confession was a fraud. To most objective observers, it didn’t seem likely that Whitmore could have committed the murders. At his arraignment, he told the judge that he’d been coerced into admitting guilt. Few cared: He was a disposable Negro who’d been raised in a shack alongside a junkyard in Wildwood—a “drifter,” described in one account as “possibly mentally retarded.” He was indicted, imprisoned, and declared a monster.
America was just on the cusp of the civil rights revolution; it was a time of pernicious institutional racism. A black kid had been railroaded, and he wasn’t the first nor would he be the last. But the detectives had made the mistake of pinning on him the city’s most notorious open murder case, which brought about a higher level of scrutiny than the average homicide.
The case quickly began to fall apart. The detectives claimed that they had found a photo of one of the career girls in Whitmore’s wallet when they arrested him. He’d told them he’d found it at the murder scene and stolen it, they said. None of it was true. (He did have a photo on him, but it was not of either of the victims.) On the day of the murders, witnesses had seen him sitting in an empty catering hall in Wildwood, where he was working at the time, watching King’s speech on television.
Despite a mounting belief among some civil rights activists associated with the NAACP, and a few intrepid journalists, that Whitmore was innocent, he remained in prison, facing two death sentences. Depressed, frightened, and alone, he pondered his imminent demise at the hands of the state. He asked other inmates, “If you were going to be put to death, which would it be? The chair? Lethal injection? What’s the least painful way to die?” A teenager, having committed no crime—ever—at that point in his life, pondering what means of execution he would choose: This was his reality.
It would take nine years for Whitmore to clear his name. It wouldn’t have happened without the help of many lawyers, a few newspaper reporters, and the civil rights activists. Though the “Career Girls” murder charges were dropped early on—and the actual killer, Richard Robles, was eventually tried and convicted—Whitmore had also been forced to confess to another murder charge, and the assault and attempted rape of a woman in Brooklyn. There followed a numbing cycle of trials, convictions, convictions overturned, retrials, and appeals. Whitmore went from being a nobody to being a perceived murderer to being a terribly “wronged man” and back to being a nobody. In prison, he learned to make rotgut hooch and, trying to dull the pain, became an alcoholic.
In April 1973, he emerged triumphant. A few weeks before all the charges against him were finally thrown out, CBS broadcast a highly promoted movie-of-the-week based on his ordeal. The movie, The Marcus-Nelson Murders, based on a book by the New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab, was produced and written by Abby Mann, an Academy Award–winning screenwriter. Whitmore was paid a pittance for his cooperation. In the end, the movie is best remembered for having introduced a character named Detective Theo Kojak, played by the actor Telly Savalas. Mr. Savalas and Kojak would go down in the annals of TV history. Whitmore watched the movie from the medical ward at the Green Haven state prison in Dutchess County.
Nine years after his name was finally cleared and he’d been released from prison, Whitmore won a settlement of half a million dollars from the City of New York. But it was too little, too late. He’d been crushed by the system, his self-worth obliterated in ways that could never fully be put back together. He squandered the money he’d been awarded through bad business ventures and at the hands of devious friends and relatives.
By the time I found Whitmore, he was back living in poverty similar to what he’d known in those years before he was led into that police station in Brooklyn back in 1964.
Meeting Whitmore was eerie for me. Though he was sixty-five years old at the time, I could still see that nineteen-year-old kid who had been so horribly wronged all those years ago. You could see the pain in his face. In one of our first meetings, in the backyard of his tiny rented house on Route 9, I took a photo of him. You can look in his eyes and almost hear him asking the question, “Why me?”
Over the next two years, I frequently made the drive to Wildwood from Manhattan, a three-and-a-half-hour jaunt along the Jersey Shore. I’d take Whitmore to the market to buy groceries to fill his empty kitchen cabinets and refrigerator. Then we’d sit and talk.
Going over the past was painful for him. I tried to catch him early in the day. After he had his first couple of drinks, he was lucid and charming. He remembered his ordeal with such detail that it could send a chill up your spine and bring you to tears. After a few more drinks, he would lose focus, get sloppy, and sometimes become ornery and difficult.
When the book was finished, I delivered a couple of copies to Whitmore. He held it in his hands, felt its heft and smiled with pride. Since adolescence, he had had poor eyesight, and I’m not sure he ever learned to read. But after he’d taken a few minutes to look at the pictures in the book and flip through its pages, seeing the familiar names and descriptions of events, he wept at the memory of his lost youth.
In recent months, I’d fallen out of touch with Whitmore. Knowing him, and attempting to assume a measure of responsibility for his life, was often exhausting. While I had come to love him, the drunken phone calls, the calls from hospital emergency rooms and flophouses, and the constant demands for money became overwhelming. When people who claimed to be friends of his starting calling me and asking for favors, I decided to back off. But when I received a cryptic e-mail from one of his nephews, informing me that Whitmore had died on Monday, I was overcome with sadness and regret.
Whitmore never saw himself as a race activist. In the 1960s and 1970s, from prison and on the streets, he watched the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement at a wary distance. He did not judge people by their skin color. He knew he had been the victim of a grave injustice, but he did not assume that the detectives who framed him, or his slow torture at the hands of a rigged system, were motivated by racial prejudice
By staying strong for all those years—by not taking a plea deal, as he had been offered numerous times—Whitmore forced the justice system to come to terms with the injustice that had been done to him. His ordeal was a key factor in the abolition of the death penalty (except for cases involving the killing of a police officer) by the state legislature and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, in 1965, and in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1966 case Miranda v. Arizona, which broadened the rights of criminal suspects under interrogation. (The death penalty was restored in New York in 1995, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004.) Whitmore’s plight turned the wheels of justice, however painfully and incrementally.
Yet there are no plaques in honor of George Whitmore Jr., no schools named after him, or any civic recognition of his humble fortitude. His name should be known to every student in New York, especially kids of color, but it is not part o
f the curriculum.
This week, a flawed but beautiful man who offered up his innocence to New York City died with hardly any notice. To those who benefited from his struggles, or who believe the city is a fairer place for his having borne them, I ask: Who grieves for George Whitmore?
III.
NARCO WARS,
AT HOME AND ABROAD
And now a word about law enforcement.
In the course of my career as a writer, I have encountered or interviewed hundreds of patrol cops, detectives, federal agents, U.S. marshals, border patrol agents, district attorneys, federal and state prosecutors, and other representatives of the U.S. criminal justice system. Any relationship I might have with these people is shaped, of course, by the fact that I am a journalist and they are representatives of the system. To many in law enforcement, and some in the media, the journalist-cop relationship is and always will be an adversarial one.
For any cop or prosecutor to speak with me on the record, they must first have authorization from their department’s press office. If a cop has been authorized to speak with a reporter, it’s usually so that he or she can get their version of events out there. The cop and his bosses are interested in shaping the flow of information to the public, or giving the impression that they are on top of things even when they are not. Having been involved in writing about crime for as long as I have, I have cultivated a network of lawmen who will talk honestly with me—off the record. As a rule, cops or agents who are recently retired make the best sources, because they can speak more freely and with a higher degree of insight and objectivity. Since they were once part of the system, they know how things operate, and now that they are no longer beholden to the propaganda dictates of the job, they sometimes have a lot to get off their chests.
American Gangsters Page 12
