Giannini returned to the United States and eventually got a law degree. He remains a practicing criminal defense attorney to this day. Vietnam and his ability to draw on his experiences there continue to shape his life and work.
As he tells the story, September 1989, we were out here [in the Hamptons] for the weekend, and my sister had come out with us.
A police officer had been shot in Brooklyn. They were claiming that a Panamanian drug dealer had killed a police officer that was on [an] anticrime [task force] and they’d tried to murder his partner too. I’d been listening to it all day long, and I made a remark to Nikki, my second wife, and my sister, Flo, that it sounded like the police version was bullshit. Well, Flo got really angry at me: “How can you say that? What do you know? You weren’t there.”
About a half hour later I got a call, and it was a friend of mine who’d actually been a client; now he was a friend. He said, “Have you heard about the police officer getting killed?” He said, “They’ve arrested Renaldo, and you know Renaldo.” I said, “Renaldo?” He said, “Yeah. Renaldo Rayside.” He said, “You know him.” I said, “I don’t know him.” He said, “Yes, you do. He was in your office—he came to your office. One of his friends was accused of a murder. You represented his friend and got him off. He was in your office. His family is looking to retain you.”
They do.
It turns out when he gets arrested for this Murder One—Attempted Murder One—he actually has my business card in his wallet. So I get on the case, and it’s the biggest case of my life. It’s really high profile. I mean, it’s on the front page almost every day. Geraldo Rivera gets behind it.
It turns out that the officer who was killed is married. His wife is pregnant. She goes on all these TV shows. If it’s a son, he’s going to be a police officer. And everybody is rallying around this case to bring back the death penalty, which had been suspended for a while. So I get on this case, and to me it was a—it was a challenge. It was the most serious case I’ve ever taken on. This case actually went on, from the time of the shooting till the time of the trial was a whole year. And it was constantly, I call it on the front burner—on the front page. And they really ridiculed me. They were ridiculing me and my client.
I was putting this case together to go to trial, and my theory was that my client was innocent, that the police had been involved in this thing somehow. But I had no story. I’m sitting in the living room. And I had the case file sitting on the living room table, and it’s huge. It covers the whole living room table—stacked. And I’m sitting there and it’s like 3:00 a.m. in the morning and I’m trying to figure out, what am I going to say to this jury? How am I going to show them that he’s innocent?
They have the two eyewitnesses: they have the surviving officer, and they have this young black kid, both claiming they saw my client do it. I’m sitting there, and then all of a sudden it just clicks. I had cross-examined the surviving officer, and I had really gone after him. He was crying on the stand. They had to stop my cross-examination to let him compose himself. He was crying on the stand. He wasn’t angry. He kept crying. So I kept going after him; he kept crying. I kept going after him. I wouldn’t let him go. And as I’m sitting there, trying to think, what am I going to say?
Something just hit me. I had run into this surviving officer, I’d say, maybe four or five times during the year leading up to the trial. For some reason when they were preparing the trial, they had these special offices in this high-rise office building. And I would go over there to talk to the prosecutors to get additional discovery—to look at evidence—back and forth all the time. And every time I went there, he was there. And my reaction was, what is he doing here? And the other thing, every time I walked in, they had him in the reception area, and I had to walk by him to go to where they were. And every time I went in there, he’d look at me and put his head down real fast. And I would say to myself, “That’s a really strange reaction.” If I was him, I’d be saying, “You’re a fucking scumbag. You’re defending a guy who killed my partner.” He just put his head down and turned away from me, every time I walked in.
And then all of a sudden I’m sitting at my table, and I said to myself, “I know where I’ve seen that reaction before.” It was the night that machine gunner was killed by friendly fire.
What happened is, a listening post had panicked, and they ran back, and as they were running back panicked, they were firing at us. And a machine gunner was shot in the head. When the listening post came in, they were standing there—why? This Marine was dying. And we had surmised now that he’d been hit by a small-caliber round because there was a small hole in his helmet. The round came straight in, then it deflected a little bit and went right in his eye. He’s dying. These Marines are standing there, and I walk over to them and I just said one thing to them: “Did you receive any incoming?” I was trying to give them a way out. On occasion, the enemy would pick up our weapons and use them. That’s what we were told—I never saw it happen. They would pick up our M16s and fire them at us. I was trying to give them a way out. And they just, all four of them just put their head down, and they wouldn’t look at me. A few moments later I learned that this Marine had completed his tour and was due to rotate home on the next chopper.
I knew right then and there that one of them had killed this Marine. The same reaction that this guy had to me every time I saw him. Guilt. So I decided that night while I was sitting alone with this huge file that that was my story. I would summarize the evidence, but this is what it would come down to. I would tell the story—I wouldn’t use the term “friendly fire.” And this is how I would end my summation about an incident that happened in Nam. I was the one who started the cover-up. I wouldn’t tell the truth.
I went to court that morning, and I started to sum up and it’s a very long summation because they had called about fifty witnesses—between crime scene, ballistics, the officers who responded, the interrogation, hair evidence, fiber evidence, this and that. Fifty witnesses who testified, and the defense had called about six witnesses. And I was going through my summation, a very long summation. I was taking breaks. Every once in a while, maybe every forty-five minutes to an hour, I would take a break. And now I was into my last hour [or so] and I got up to my last hour, I told the jury, “I’m going to take you back to August 1967, Vietnam.” The prosecutor jumped up and objected. He wanted to approach and talk to the judge.
So we went up to the judge, and [the prosecutor] said, “Mr. Giannini is about to tell a story about Vietnam. It’s not appropriate for him to do that.” And the judge, who was a really tough judge, had been the head of the homicide bureau in Brooklyn before he became a judge, he said, “You know something, it’s been a really long trial, and if Mr. Giannini wants to tell some stories, he can tell some stories.” So I went up and told that jury—I tried to tell it in the third person—in detail what happened on August 12, 1967.
I gave them the whole account of what happened and that I made a decision right then and there not to tell the truth. How could I? These parents are waiting for him to come home—to walk through the door—and he’s dead. I actually told [them] the enemy killed him. He got killed by small-arms fire. And that was the official story. So I told that story—the whole story—to the jury.
I said that it was a cover-up, “and that’s what happened here, and there’s guilt.” I pointed to the surviving officer. And you could see the guilt on his face. You could see him squirming. You could see it. There was the guilt.
The jury deliberated, I think for two days, and they found him, Renaldo, not guilty on everything—the murder, all the serious charges. I won the case. I won it because, I think, of that story. And I only could tell that story because from what I experienced in Vietnam.
One New York newspaper wrote: “One juror, who asked not to be identified, said the verdict was ‘agonizing but the evidence did not support a conviction … It was a very upsetting case.’”3
A few weeks after this verdict was rendered, G
iannini testified as a witness for the defense in the murder trial of the ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran Reuben Pratts. Pratts, a Brooklyn resident, had been charged with killing a man he found breaking into his sister’s car and with wounding an accomplice. Giannini’s testimony made direct reference to both the booby trap and the friendly-fire incidents he described to me, and the traumatic nature of those episodes. In what was believed to be the first successful use of a PTSD defense in New York state, Pratts was found not criminally liable for the shootings on July 11, 1990.4
Vietnam continued to be relevant, and Giannini believes the meaning of the war endures. During the recently ended war in Iraq, he participated in a number of antiwar demonstrations, and he hosts a local public access television program called East End Veterans, which airs on Long Island TV four times a week. The program aims to connect the lessons of Vietnam to the present global war on terror. I’ve been a guest on the show.
Reflecting on the experience of Vietnam, Giannini said:
It had an effect on me, of course, but it didn’t make me bitter and it didn’t make me angry. It made me more caring. Being so close to death and watching people die, in the end I came out caring more. I care more. I don’t know if I would be this caring if I hadn’t gone through that experience. I have a feeling there’s a lot of people like me who came out on the other end and they were more human for what they’ve been through. I mean, we almost lost our humanity. I’m telling you it was a struggle. But in the end, it seems like we’re more human.
5
FOLLOW ME: ANTHONY WALLACE
Like Richard Eggers, Anthony Wallace fought with the First Cavalry Division (though four years later, in 1970). Eggers was a white college-educated officer. Wallace, by contrast, was a noncommissioned officer, a black man, and a draftee. As such, he saw the war from a very different angle than Eggers did. Yet, like Eggers, he stresses that his experience in the Vietnam War was shaped by the leadership training he had received in his youth.
Wallace is a tall, strong, broad-shouldered man in his early sixties, with silver sideburns, a mustache, and a powerful handshake. In our interviews he has a tendency to lean in as he speaks, which lets you know he is fully engaged, intent, and focused. He is a natural teacher and an articulate speaker, with a gravitas that has something to do with his long connection to one of the most prominent Baptist congregations in New York: Brooklyn’s Cornerstone Baptist Church. The church and its worship music have shaped and guided him his entire life, he says. He works to live by Christian principles, to preserve the teaching with which he was raised.
He believes, he says, that there is peace to be found in sharing and communicating his experiences with others.
Some Vietnam veterans can’t talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it, whereas I made the choice. It needs to be spoken about so people will know what a veteran goes through, what a soldier goes through, so when folks make a decision to send someone in harm’s way, you understand exactly what you’re asking that person to do.
Wallace’s parents reached New York from the South, having joined the big northern migration that took place as southern agriculture mechanized in the 1930s and 1940s. His mother was from Alabama, his father from North Carolina.
When folks migrated from the South, you hoped first you could get a job and get a place to live, and then you found a church. You hooked up with people you already knew. Relatives of mine found Cornerstone. That’s where we ended up.
Wallace’s parents, Benjamin and Virginia, met on Greene Avenue in Brooklyn and married in 1947. Anthony was their first child, born on a day with twenty-five inches of snow on the ground that made getting to the hospital difficult. Two more children would follow, Cynthia and Vincent. His parents eventually found an apartment in the Marcy Houses, a then-new public housing project in Brooklyn, bordering Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Family legend has it that the Wallace family was one of the first to move in. The Marcy Houses were part of a large-scale effort by the city to build affordable postwar apartments. Completed in 1949, the buildings gave priority to World War II veterans, as long as their income did not exceed Housing Authority guidelines. Wallace’s father was a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, which may have helped the family get into the complex.
Wallace recalls an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a unique flavor. He remembers Italian, Polish, Jewish, and German families.
At Christmastime everybody’s home or apartment was your apartment. You ran from one kid’s house to another to see what they got for Christmas. It was a joyous time. I have to stress, it was diverse.
As a young boy in New York City, Wallace had the freedom to visit other kids’ houses, taste food from other cultures, and share other cultural traditions, which led to a certain innocence when it came to racism. On one occasion, his family traveled by train to visit relatives in South Carolina. As his mother unpacked the food brought along for the train ride, Wallace kept asking why they couldn’t eat in the dining car, with its linen-covered tables. She chose not to answer. It wasn’t until much later that Wallace realized why they wouldn’t have been welcome there. Even though segregation in railway dining cars had been outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950, Mrs. Wallace did not want her children to experience the racial tensions that might have arisen had they tried to eat in one. Segregation, a fact of life for southern African Americans in the 1950s, was not something he had so directly encountered before.
In some ways, he recalls an upbringing that echoes small-town life. In and around the Marcy Houses, child rearing was a neighborhood business. Living next door to the Wallace family was a single mom raising three daughters. Even though she was not a family member, she had a very real authority: If Mrs. Madeline spoke to you and told you to do something, it was like your mother speaking or your father. You listened to [other adults in the neighborhood] as if they were your parents.
Despite the communal nature of life in the Marcy Houses, Wallace remembers being something of a loner. His time was spent in school and going to music rehearsals and church. He loved riding the New York City subway system, watching the airplanes land at LaGuardia Airport, and visiting the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Wallace’s mother worked part-time at the Industrial Home for the Blind on Gates Avenue, now P.S. 297. Wallace’s father worked in a foundry in Red Hook. Wallace grew up with a sense of his family’s place in the city’s social hierarchy. He remembers playing in the band in junior high at I.S. 33, the only student playing a school-issued trumpet. His family was not what he would call poor, but there were real-world financial constraints that affected everyday living.
It was a combination of church life and church music that would ground Wallace through the tumultuous times ahead. Christmas and Easter music gave him an appreciation of classical music that served him well in school and became a source of pride. Music opened doors: his trumpet playing later enabled him to play taps and reveille during infantry training. He also played for church services at the Noncommissioned Officer School chapel. As he puts it, The instrument gave you the opportunity to do something different.
A church usher by the time he was eight, at age eighteen he was teaching Christian education and leading youth groups. The roles of student and teacher would prepare him for the rigors of military training and for military leadership. He developed a desire to inspire, instruct, and motivate others.
I wanted other people to understand and believe it [the Gospel] just as much as I believe it. So much so, that after I came back from the service, I was ordained a deacon, and I was one of the youngest deacons to be ordained in our church history.
After high school, Wallace attended Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn for two years and at the same time worked at the Sherman Creek facility of Con Edison, the New York City power company. In 1969, he resigned from Con Ed so he could return to school full-time and finish his degree. He handed his letter in on a Friday and went home to find his draft notice in the mail. He returned to work on Monday and as
ked for his resignation letter back. His boss was happy to oblige, thinking this hardworking young man had changed his mind.
I tore it up in front of him, reached in my jacket pocket, and showed him my draft notice. He said, “No wonder.”
Because Wallace had been drafted, the company was legally obligated to offer him a job on his return from service. In this way he had preserved his place at Con Ed, where he still works today, albeit now in a management position.
One of the ministers in his church offered to try to help him get out of the draft. Many others were urging him to find a way out of going to war, including his parents. In the end he felt resigned to going, and on a cold January morning, at the age of twenty-one, Anthony Wallace reported to Fort Hamilton, not far from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
I went and I did what I had to do, and I don’t regret that. If I had to do it again in another life, I would do the same thing. I said, “Maybe this was a chance for me to venture out. Maybe I won’t end up in Vietnam. I’ll end up in the Army band.”
He recalls that he wanted to take the first steps into the Army on his own, saying: The day I left it was cold, but sunny and bright. I walked to the subway. I didn’t want anyone to go with me.
It didn’t work out that way. Going to induction, he ran into an old neighborhood friend, Willard Kelly, and they walked in together. Once inside, they found hundreds of men, some of them having ridden for hours on the subway to make the 7:00 a.m. start time. The experience made quite an impression on Wallace.
It was like New York, a diverse group. There were Latinos, blacks, whites. Some folks were apprehensive, of course. What I always think about was the people telling you what to do. There were clerks, specialists, ordering you around like they were generals. I laugh about it now, but that was their job. We stayed there all day, paperwork and more paperwork. Buses, charter buses, came to the base and loaded us up. Took us to LaGuardia Airport and flew us to Fort Jackson … We were still filling out paperwork, I would say, until one in the morning. You were tired, hungry; I don’t think we really slept until the next day. Haircuts, uniforms, fatigues. Some folks were still shocked by the haircuts. In the meantime, while we’re doing all this, we had a meal or two, but then they put you out there to police the base. It was an awakening, the first day or two in the military.
Bringing It All Back Home Page 7
