Dick Tracy turned the information over to Raab and Beldock. They were on the case.
Raab came up with a way to finance most of the trip to Puerto Rico. For the last year he had been working as a segment producer for a newsmagazine show on public television called The 51st State. The show had debuted in February 1972 as a one-hour program, airing four nights a week. Staffed largely by former print journalists, The 51st State was designed as a forum for longer and more in-depth stories than those shown on network news programs. Raab persuaded the producers to supply him with a modest budget to produce a segment on the Whitmore case, revolving around the hunt for Celeste Viruet. He would travel to Puerto Rico with Maria Mena, a young reporter at Channel 13 who spoke fluent Spanish; Myron Beldock; and a two-man crew.
The capital city of San Juan was seasonably warm when they arrived. Raab, Beldock, and the crew all stayed at the same oceanfront hotel. The morning after they arrived, Raab and Beldock met poolside to strategize. They weren’t sure where to begin.
“Well,” said the lawyer, “why don’t we start by asking the first person we meet if they know of a shop with the word naranja in the name?”
Raab chuckled. He thought Beldock was joking.
“I’m serious,” said Beldock. To illustrate his point, Beldock asked the busboy, who spoke passable English, if he knew of such a store.
“Yes,” said the busboy. “In Isla Verde there is a store named La Naranjal, the orange grove.”
Raab and Beldock looked at each other.
“Do you know this place?” Raab asked the busboy. “Have you been there yourself?”
“Si, señor. I know the place. It is owned by my wife.”
“Excuse me,” interrupted Beldock. “Did you say the store is owned by your wife?”
“Yes, sir, that is what I say.”
Raab said, “Your wife, if I may ask, what is her name?”
“My wife’s name is Celeste Viruet.”
THE TWO MEN and their translator made arrangements to meet the busboy later that day. He led them from the hotel to La Naranjal, a store in the nearby resort area of Isla Verde. There they met Celeste Viruet, a simple, plainspoken women in her midtwenties.
The translator explained to Viruet why the two men had come from New York City to see her. Viruet did not seem surprised. Raab and Beldock began by asking questions about what she saw on the night of the alleged assault. Right away she mentioned that her sister-in-law Elba Borrero had told her things that no one else had known—including the fact that her assailant that night had spoken to her in Spanish as well as English. At the time of the assault, George Whitmore did not know a word of Spanish. And she volunteered other startling details to Raab and Beldock, all of it in a matter-of-fact manner. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
Given the notoriety of the Whitmore case, and the fact that it may have involved corrupt behavior on the part of powerful municipal officials, Viruet would not agree to do an on-camera interview. She would, however, answer any questions they had, and she allowed them to audio-tape the interview. Over the next two days, Raab and Beldock asked Viruet every question they could think of, using a tape recorder and taking notes.
Viruet had witnessed the assault on Borrero. Though she hadn’t gotten a good look at the face of the assailant, her description in terms of height, weight, and clothing didn’t match any of the identifications supplied by the various police accounts. Other than the two people involved in the attack that night, she was the only known eyewitness to an alleged felony assault—but she had been interviewed by police only once, and never questioned again or even contacted by anyone from the district attorney’s office. It was as if she didn’t exist.
If nothing else, the fact that Viruet was known to investigators—but never produced at any of Whitmore’s many trials or hearings—was possible grounds to reopen his case. Beyond that, the substance of her statement was that Borrero had told her a version of her story that was substantially different from what she had been contending in court all these years. If that could be proven, Whitmore’s conviction for assault and attempted rape could even be dismissed.
Raab and Beldock returned to New York City with what they hoped was the raw material to blow the Borrero identification out of the water. They were energized by their improbable discovery—which had descended upon them as if by divine intervention—but they knew that any appeal for a new trial, or even a reexamination of evidence, would be a long shot at best. Whitmore’s previous appeals had already been dismissed at every level of the legal system, right up to the United States Supreme Court. A judge could dismiss a new appeal on any number of grounds—that it was too late, or that Viruet’s statement was not relevant, or for any number of other technical reasons.
Beldock filed papers in the appellate division in Brooklyn court seeking a reexamination of the evidence in the case, alerting the court that “important new evidence” had come to light. Meanwhile, Raab and his production team at The 51st State began splicing together their minidocumentary on the strange case of George Whitmore, which they hoped to have broadcast on public television in time to have some bearing on the judge’s ruling.
They had one new development going for them: a new district attorney had taken over in Brooklyn. After ten years in the office, Aaron Koota, who had taken such a hard line on the Whitmore case, had decided to step down. The persecution of Whitmore, from the time of his arrest through the Edmonds and Borrero trials, had spanned much of Koota’s tenure. In Raab’s eyes, the D.A. had “made a fool of himself” by staking his reputation on the conviction of Whitmore even after the circumstances of George’s arrest and bogus confession were exposed. Koota had chosen to become the defender of a system from another era, a clubhouse environment in which a black teenager accused of horrific crimes, facing the death penalty, could be assigned counsel based on the fact that the judge and the defense lawyer were members of the same political club.
The new Brooklyn D.A., Eugene Gold, did not carry the same ideological baggage as Koota. His arrival as top prosecutor was the sort of sea change that criminal defense attorneys dream about. Eugene Gold had no vested interest in maintaining the status quo; it wasn’t his regime that had run Whitmore, the hapless Negro, through the proverbial prosecutorial gauntlet. It looked like the Whitmore case might finally get something it badly needed—a breath of fresh air, and a reason for hope.
TO DHORUBA BIN Wahad, hope was an illusory concept. He’d been hopeful once. Back in the fall of 1968, when Eldridge Cleaver first came to town as a candidate for president, the Black Panther Party seemed like an idea whose time had come. Party chapters were sprouting up all over the country; the possibility of global revolution seemed to be within reach. Student protesters, antiwar activists, and leading lights of the counterculture had begun to coalesce around similar movements all over Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Disenfranchised people all over the world were rising up, and the concept of black liberation was a powerful and attractive component of the international groundswell. In New York, the movement revolved around the Black Panther Party, and the party revolved around leaders like Dhoruba, who was committed enough to put his life on the line.
Then, in a short period of time, that dream went up in smoke. The philosophical differences between the East and West Coast factions of the party might have been resolved if the counterintelligence efforts of BOSS and COINTELPRO hadn’t exacerbated them. The infighting, in turn, had brought about a bad case of revolutionary suicide. Cops killed Panthers, Panthers killed Panthers, Panthers killed cops—the vicious cycle seemed to take the struggle from its goals of civil rights, and then Black Power, into the realm of revenge. The big payback.
Dhoruba had been at the center of the maelstrom, and now he was suffering the consequences—charged with an assortment of crimes that could put him behind bars for multiple lifetimes.
By nature, Bin Wahad was a fighter, a South Bronx survivor who often quoted Frederick Douglass:
“Without struggle, there can be no progress.” He was preconditioned to see his current predicament as part of the broader struggle. Had he been charged only with the Triple-O robbery and his role in Sam Napier’s murder, Dhoruba might have been depressed; after all, those were crimes he’d actually committed. By charging him with the double shooting of police officers, though, the prosecutors were making it political—giving Dhoruba, his attorney, and his supporters reason to view his plight as another chapter in the ongoing fight against racism and corruption in the criminal justice system.
Throughout 1972, the legal maneuvers came fast and furious. Under legal advice from his attorney, Robert Bloom, Bin Wahad pleaded guilty to the armed robbery and attempted grand larceny charges. In a Bronx courtroom, he was given seven years in prison, the sentence to begin immediately.
In March, Dhoruba traveled to Queens, where he and three other defendants were tried for the murder of Sam Napier. The trial was defense attorney Bloom’s first opportunity to hear and cross-examine Pauline Joseph, who would become a fixture at trials involving Dhoruba and others associated with the BLA over the next few years. Joseph described how a group of revolutionaries left 757 Beck Street to burn down the Black Panther offices in Queens, and then returned to tell her that Butch Mason had shot Napier in the head. But her testimony was shaky, and, without an eyewitness to the actual shooting, prosecutors were unable to present a coherent account of who did what. After a six-week trial and seventeen hours of deliberation, the jury announced that it was hopelessly deadlocked. With ten jurors leaning toward acquittal and two toward a guilty verdict, the trial ended in a hung jury.
The Queens D.A. immediately reindicted Dhoruba and the others and announced they would be retried on the same charges.
Dhoruba was being held at the Manhattan House of Detention, better known as the Tombs. He eventually pled guilty to a reduced charge of attempted manslaughter in the second degree for his role in the Napier killing, receiving a four-year sentence to run concurrent with his grand larceny plea conviction. As with the Bronx charges, Dhoruba was willing to accept culpability for crimes in which he had played a role, in order to better fight the charges for which he claimed he was being framed.
In November, a smattering of protesters gathered on the sidewalk outside 100 Centre Street, where the long-running Panther Twenty-one trial had occurred two years before. This time, Dhoruba was on trial alone for the shooting of police officers Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti. A group calling itself the Committee to Defend Richard “Dhoruba” Moore tried to rally the troops, but the days of rambunctious support for a Black Panther in New York were over. Among the small group of supporters was Kisha Green, Dhoruba’s common-law wife, who had been held in jail as a material witness for several months, even while she was pregnant with Dhoruba’s child. She had recently given birth to a baby boy—a child whom Dhoruba, the father, hadn’t yet met.
The press flooded the thirteenth-floor courtroom: Manhattan D.A. Frank Hogan was rumored to be nearing retirement, and he had a lot riding on this prosecution—even beyond the fact that the case involved the shooting of two cops who’d been guarding his own apartment building. Hogan had come under fire for publicly criticizing the jury in the Panther Twenty-one case for having been influenced by “the political climate,” when Hogan’s own critics were accusing him of the very same thing. Dhoruba’s prosecution was a crucial step in the D.A.’s efforts to show that they were not toothless in the ongoing war between black radicals and the police.
Curry and Binetti both testified. Neither had much recollection of the assault, and neither was able to positively identify Bin Wahad as the shooter. But their appearance on the stand—two white police officers, one permanently paralyzed, the other partially disfigured—made an impression. One of the jurors, a twenty-five-year-old white male from the Bronx named Frank Treu, later said: “Here [were] two damaged white people. And they’re police officers, whom we’re supposed to trust. What gripe did they have that caused them to be shot?…[A]s far as any value as witnesses, there really was none. But it set the tone. And the tone it set was: somebody has to pay.”
The primary witness was Pauline Joseph. Her testimony was well rehearsed—perhaps too much so. Throughout the trial, defense attorney Bloom reminded the court repeatedly that the prosecution was required to turn over all notes from interviews of Joseph by investigators—documentation commonly known as Rosario material. ADA Terrence O’Reilly claimed that the only such document was a one-paragraph statement by Joseph that had already been admitted into evidence.
Dhoruba and his attorney believed this to be a lie, and their suspicions seemed to be supported by an article in New York magazine by Robert Daley, the NYPD’s recently retired press information officer. In the article, Daley described how Joseph was cultivated as a witness—with a level of detail that suggested there was more to the written record than the prosecution was presenting in court. Had Daley made it all up? Or was his account based on police reports and incriminating FBI interview notes not entered into evidence? The obvious solution would have been to call Robert Daley to the witness stand, but the judge, Joseph A. Martinis, refused to authorize a subpoena, taking the D.A.’s office at its word.
On the stand, Joseph was caught in lies relating to her psychiatric history, her time as a street prostitute, and the fact that she’d been on welfare. “She [testified] for three days,” said juror Treu. “And by the end of the third day, in my mind, there was enough inconsistency that it was hard to tell ‘Was she telling the truth here or was she telling the truth there?’”
The prosecution’s case was riddled with doubt, but they did have one key piece of evidence: the gun. Although no witness was able to give an account of who actually pulled the trigger on the night of the shooting, the prosecution tried to link the gun to Dhoruba through a jailhouse conversation that ADA O’Reilly characterized as a “confession” on Dhoruba’s part. His crew member Augustus Qualls, an admitted heroin addict and recidivist criminal, while the two were sharing a cell after their arrest for the Triple-O robbery, asked Dhoruba, “Why didn’t you tell me the gun you used was the one that was used in the shooting of those two pigs?”
“If I had told you that, would you have come with us?” Dhoruba allegedly replied.
During his closing statement, ADA O’Reilly handed the machine gun to a juror and asked that it be passed around among the jury. It was a powerful bookend to the prosecution’s opening presentation: having begun with the spectacle of two damaged cops, their lives altered irrevocably, the prosecution was closing with the weapon that had injured them. And there, ladies and gentlemen, at the defendant’s table, was the man behind it all—the man who, according to Pauline Joseph, loved that gun so much he gave it a nickname.
“That man,” said O’Reilly, “Richard Moore, known to some as Dhoruba, he shot those two police officers.”
Treu recalled that emotions ran high during deliberations: “One of the other jurors says, ‘What’s the difference if he did it or not? You want a guy like this running around on your streets?…My feeling now is that I want to take this guy and shake him and say, ‘This is America, you idiot. We don’t do it this way.’”
He wouldn’t get that satisfaction. After deliberating for two and a half days, the jury of eleven men and one woman announced to the judge that they were deadlocked. Justice Martinis had no choice but to declare a hung jury.
D.A. Hogan wasted little time getting Bin Wahad back into court on the same charges, but by January 1973 that effort ended in another mistrial, after the judge became ill during jury selection.
Finally, in June, the D.A.’s office got the conviction they sought. After a four-week trial that was virtually identical to the first proceeding, a jury took just forty-five minutes to declare Dhoruba Bin Wahad guilty.
After the verdict was announced, Justice Martinis individually polled each of the jurors. From the defendant’s table, Dhoruba jumped to his feet and pointed at the judge. “You did e
verything in your power to deny me a fair trial. I did not want those twelve men, but you forced me to accept them. Now they have convicted me of a crime I didn’t commit.” Then he turned to the jury and told them: “Anything that happens from now on, it is on your shoulders, not mine.”
“It’s on yours,” said the judge.
“No, it’s not. It’s on theirs,” countered Dhoruba.
After Dhoruba was taken away, the D.A.’s office allowed itself a moment of self-congratulation. ADA O’Reilly, who the Times described as “jubilant with his victory,” noted at a press conference that Bin Wahad was the first black militant in New York to be convicted of attempting to kill policemen. D.A. Hogan called the verdict “a major triumph.”
At his sentencing hearing a month later, Dhoruba remained angry and unrepentant. He told the judge he would leave the courtroom and stay in the nearby detention pen unless all detectives and prosecutors were removed from the courtroom. When the justice refused to comply, Dhoruba stalked out, leaving it to his attorney to explain, “Many people here in the courtroom—police officers and others—have conspired to convict Mister Moore on perjured and unlawful testimony. In their own specific way they’ve seen to it he could not receive a fair and impartial trial.”
The judge stood firm. Holding her new baby, Kisha Green cried, “Please, Judge, as a matter of human dignity…”
“I order that woman removed from this court,” Justice Martinis yelled.
“But, Your Honor, that is Richard Moore’s wife,” Bloom pleaded as guards escorted Green and child from the courtroom.
“I don’t care who she is,” said the justice. “I’ll have order in this courtroom.”
Martinis then announced that he was sentencing Dhoruba to life in prison.
A court clerk was sent to the holding pen to inform Dhoruba of his right to appeal. The clerk returned with a message from Dhoruba: “My appeal will be over the barrel of a gun.”
The Savage City Page 44
