The day after the movie aired, George was returned to his regular cell. Some inmates congratulated him about the movie, but his familiar ambivalence toward the public exploitation of his case soon returned. Sure, the movie had been a success; it made other people rich and famous. But what had it done for Whitmore? The three grand he’d made from Universal had gone right to his attorneys. And there he sat, still in prison, still guilty in the eyes of the law.
George did not know that, beyond the prison walls, his case was perched on the edge of a startling reversal.
The previous December, shortly after returning from Puerto Rico, Beldock had filed papers with a state supreme court justice in Brooklyn, including the affidavit signed by Celeste Viruet. At around the same time, PBS aired Selwyn Raab’s segment about the Whitmore case on The 51st State. Both of these events caught the attention of Eugene Gold, the new Brooklyn D.A. Gold recognized that the existence of an eyewitness to Elba Borrero’s assault, who had never been thoroughly questioned by investigators, was a stain on the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. And so he did something that his predecessor, Aaron Koota, would never have done: he sent two investigators from his office down to Puerto Rico to question Celeste Viruet. The trip confirmed what Raab and Beldock had already discovered: that the account of the attack Borrero had given Viruet cast major doubts on the official record.
Two days before Christmas 1972, Gold announced that the Brooklyn D.A.’s office was reopening the Whitmore case.
Beldock and Raab were ecstatic. In the interest of caution, though, they decided not to tell Whitmore. Gold’s willingness to reopen the case was a good sign, but there was a chance that it would go nowhere; he might still decide that Borrero’s identification of George was valid—or he might even call for the case to be tried once again, for the fourth time. Whitmore had already been through hell, subjected to an endless array of legal and emotional ups and downs; Beldock didn’t want to get his hopes up until they were relatively certain that there would be a positive result.
Weeks passed. With The 51st State segment and The Marcus-Nelson Murders generating considerable press attention, there seemed to be a new groundswell of curiosity about what had happened to George Whitmore. After a decade of civil rights marches, riots, Black Power speeches, high-profile trials, Panther frame-ups and assassinations of cops, was Whitmore’s case a major miscarriage of justice that had slipped through the cracks?
Late one April afternoon, Beldock got a call from an assistant D.A. in Brooklyn. A date had been set for a hearing in the courtroom of Justice Irwin Brownstein in state supreme court, he said—and D.A. Gold himself would be in attendance. This was significant: the presence of the district attorney suggested a major development.
“Would you like to give me some indication of which way this is going to go?” Beldock asked.
“No,” said the ADA. Then he cleared his throat. “I think it’s safe to say that it will be a ruling that you and your client will find favorable.”
Beldock hung up the phone, his heart thumping in his chest. It wasn’t clear whether this meant a new trial or a dismissal, but it sounded promising. One of the first people he called was Selwyn Raab. “Selwyn was pretty certain it was going to be a dismissal,” he recalled. “I wasn’t so certain. We decided it would be best to keep George in the dark, so to speak, for his own state of well-being. If it was a ruling in our favor, there would be plenty of time to celebrate after the fact.”
ON THE MORNING of April 9, 1973, George Whitmore was in his cell when he got word that he would be picked up later that day and transferred to New York City for a court appearance the following morning. Although Beldock had mentioned that he had a court date coming up, George didn’t know what to make of it.
It was a time of considerable unrest at Green Haven, with riots and other disturbances occurring on a semiregular basis. The previous September, not long after Whitmore arrived, Green Haven had seen a major riot between two rival groups of black inmates, one a Black Muslim sect faithful to Elijah Muhammad and the other described by prison authorities as a group of former Black Panthers. After a major rumble in the prison yard, seven inmates were rushed to a hospital in the nearby town of Poughkeepsie. Superintendent Vincent declared a state of emergency, and the entire inmate population was placed on lockdown. Two months later a prison guard was slashed in the neck with a knife. Once again, full-scale lockdown, with periodic cell searches for weapons.
By March 1973, the atmosphere had quieted down, until one afternoon when maggots were discovered in the food served in the mess hall. This touched off another riot. A group of prison riot police—separate from the guards employed by the Bureau of Prisons—were periodically raiding individual cells and beating prisoners.
With the atmosphere so fraught with violence, Whitmore spent much of his time at Green Haven in a state of terror. One day, when prison authorities made an unscheduled visit to his cell, he was certain they had come to beat him up. Even after they told him he was being transported to New York later that day, he was still skittish, half-convinced he was being set up for a beating.
Around four in the afternoon, Whitmore was retrieved from his cell. “What’s this all about?” he asked the guards.
“Sorry, George,” one of the guards replied. “We are under strict orders not to tell you anything.”
Whitmore was startled to find that they were taking him to New York by helicopter. He’d never been in a helicopter before. Yet he still couldn’t shake the fear that he was being taken somewhere for a beating. At one point, one of the guards joked, “If you wanna try to escape, George, go ahead, we won’t stop you.” George wondered if they were trying to trick him into fleeing so they could shoot him down like a dog.
As the chopper approached the city, George’s anxiety settled into an unusual sense of comfort. The flight was so strange—like an amusement park ride, with the city’s lights twinkling like diamonds and the skyline like the world’s biggest Erector set. Whitmore had seen the New York skyline many times before, but always through the windows of a Greyhound bus coming from New Jersey. Seeing it from above, as he hovered in the sky—this was incredible, and it filled George with the sense that something monumental was about to take place.
They landed at Kennedy Airport. George was escorted by his bodyguards to a car and driven to a nearby motel.
“This is where we stay tonight,” they told George. He was given a room that was connected to one where the guards would stay. Once again, one of them said jokingly, “Now remember, George. If you wanna run away, you go right ahead. We won’t stop you.” The others laughed.
George allowed himself a smile, but he still didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.
The guards stayed up all night playing cards. Whitmore slept until they woke him up in the morning. He showered, combed his hair—he was now wearing it in a kind of mini-Afro style—and put on his black horn-rimmed glasses. He was given a fresh suit, white dress shirt, and black tie to wear. Standing in front of the mirror dressed in his new clothes, he felt reborn.
The guards put George in the car and drove into Brooklyn, to the state supreme court building on Court Street. George was loaded onto a freight elevator and then taken to a small room “no bigger than a bathroom.” There was a small desk in the room. George was given a breakfast of cereal, some fruit, and a cup of coffee.
“Stay put until we come to get you,” they said. “Do not open the door unless you hear this knock.” One of guards tapped out a code, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap. George nodded. The guards departed.
George sat alone in the tiny office. He tried to eat the food, but he was so filled with excitement and apprehension that he couldn’t stomach the meal.
Twenty minutes later he heard the coded knock on the door. He opened the door.
“Okay, Mister Whitmore. Time to go.”
George followed the guards into the elevator, up a few flights, then down a hallway and into a courtroom.
Whitmore was
unprepared for what he found there: a roomful of people, reporters with notepads and pens, uniformed guards lining the room, lights so bright that for a few seconds he was blinded. Eventually, he noticed familiar faces—his attorneys Beldock and Miller, his mother, his brother Gerald, maybe some others he knew. He was led over to a table where Beldock and Miller stood smiling.
Within a few minutes of his arrival, Judge Irwin Brownstein entered the courtroom. “Mister Gold, I believe you have a statement you would like to read to the court.”
A man George didn’t recognize stood at the prosecutor’s table to speak.
“Who’s that?” George asked Beldock under his breath.
“Eugene Gold, Kings County D.A.,” the attorney told his client.
Gold announced that “fresh new evidence” uncovered by his office had shown that Elba Borrero’s identification of George Whitmore as her assailant was “hopelessly suspect.” Borrero’s relatives, Gold stated, now declared that she had told them a number of things that “either contradict or undermine the testimony she has given against Mister Whitmore.” Among other things, Gold noted, his office had learned from Celeste Viruet that, before Elba Borrero identified Whitmore at the Seventy-second Precinct station house in Brownsville, she had first been shown a collection of mug shot photographs by the police—and identified one among them as her assailant. It was not George Whitmore. This fact—that Borrero had identified someone else as her assailant before she ever identified Whitmore—had never been revealed by cops, prosecutors, or Borrero herself in all the criminal proceedings Whitmore had been subjected to over the years.
Gold stopped short of affirming Whitmore’s innocence. But the new evidence, he declared, “renders the case so weak that any possibility of conviction is negated.” Gold asked the judge to vacate Whitmore’s conviction, to dismiss the indictment, and to have the defendant discharged immediately.
Cheers broke out in the courtroom. Whitmore felt his knees go weak. He was afraid he might fall to the floor.
Gold had one final comment: “Your Honor, if in fact George Whitmore is guilty of these charges, surely his debt has been paid by his incarceration. If in fact he is innocent, I pray that my action today will in some measure repay society’s debt to him.”
The attorneys Beldock and Miller were allowed to add their own pleas for dismissal. Then the judge spoke.
“Gentlemen, I won’t waste any more of your time. It is indeed disgraceful that this defendant has been subjected to nine years of prosecution and appeals. I hereby declare that he be released from custody immediately and that all charges against him be dismissed.”
Again, the courtroom erupted in spontaneous applause.
Then the judge turned to George. “Mister Whitmore, I would like to say to you on behalf of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, I am sorry for what you have had to go through.”
Now George felt tears coming to his eyes. In all his years struggling to break free from the chains of false prosecution, he had never dreamed that one day a judge would look him in the face and apologize for what happened. Whitmore felt a lump in his throat; he was speechless.
The people spilled out of the courtroom. George was led by his attorneys out onto the steps in front of the courthouse. It was a bright spring day. Whitmore squinted in the sunlight. A reporter shouted a question: “George, what do you have to say?”
After nearly giving up hope for so many years, Whitmore tried to summon his feelings. The rush of emotion was almost too much.
“I feel it’s just beyond expressing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “They dropped my case. I’m overwhelmed.”
Years later Whitmore recalled:
I never expected to see the day when I would be cleared, so I didn’t allow myself to think about it too much. When it did come, I was in shock. I kept thinking of all those years earlier, when they told me I was facing two death penalty charges. That weighed heavy on my mind for a long time. Even after the Wylie-Hoffert charges was dropped, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Electric chair, lethal injection, which was the most fast and least painful. Would I be ready to die when the time come? Would I cry or feel any pain? Now, well, they let me go. I got to go home. Man, I was so happy.
George was taken by his attorneys to a waiting car. Someone asked him something about getting revenge against the prosecutors. “I’m not bitter,” George told a reporter. “I appreciate greatly what the D.A. did.”
From the backseat, he waved shyly to the crowd. Then the car drove away.
For George, the next three days were one long parade of press conferences, interviews, and TV appearances. The news reports tried to sum up the Whitmore case in sixty-second spots—but there was more to the story than any report could contain. It had been ten years since the horrific murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, nine and a half since Whitmore was plucked from the streets of Brooklyn and thrust into a drama that would destroy his life and call into question the basic fairness of the city’s justice system. From the time of the Career Girls Murders, the city had descended into a kind of urban madness; a tidal wave of injustice and insurrection, ambushes and assassinations, led some to believe that the city could not be saved. White people continued their exodus from the city, and black people stepped forward to claim what they felt was rightfully theirs. Others—black and white—tried to cauterize the trauma with words of caution, with nonviolent protests and peaceful marches, but the historical moment seemed to hold forth its own bloody agenda.
Ten years earlier, the voice of a prophet had echoed throughout the city’s concrete canyons: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of unspeakable acts of police brutality.” In a speech that heralded the beginning of a new era in the struggle for human dignity, King called on a nation to “live up to the meaning of its creed.” The nation had been trying to do so, but the process was not pretty. The costs were nearly incalculable. The framing of a semiliterate Negro youth for one of the most heinous double murders in a generation had been one of many sparks for the racial conflagration that followed, troubling the collective conscience of those who cared about social justice.
In the year 1973 most would have agreed that the struggle was far from over. But a weary people will take their moments of triumph wherever they can be found. The story of George Whitmore symbolized the injustice that had long pervaded the system. Now, it seemed, the wheels of time were moving forward. Police corruption, prosecutorial malfeasance, civil unrest, and institutional racism still existed, but at least one grave injustice had been undone, one crooked place had been made straight.
George Whitmore was a free man.
EPILOGUE
ONE PERSON’S HARDSHIP is another’s opportunity. The Savage City was like a kaleidoscope, its moods and shadings shifting with the angle of the instrument and the perspective of the participant. The cliché was that the city could make or break a person. The harder truth was that life in the big town could set an individual off on a blind path, one that could change a person in ways that were difficult to assess. You could attain high levels of accomplishment and still become lost in a world of self-righteous illusion. And, yes, on any given day you could be crushed by the wheels of progress.
To Mayor John Lindsay, the era of civic disorder and rising crime over which he presided was a sign that the American city was struggling to redefine itself. It was also in great danger of being abandoned by the federal government. In November 1971—against a backdrop of police executions, spectacular criminal prosecutions, and a level of racial conflict that had become the norm—Lindsay reasserted his mission as self-appointed guardian of the urban ideal and used it to announce that he was running for president of the United States.
There was no great clamoring for Lindsay to run. His poll ratings in New York City were low, though he was in good standing among black voters. Lindsay took this as a sign that his day had arrived. He switched his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat and traveled so
uth to Florida to take part in the presidential primary. His pitch to voters was based largely on the argument that the country’s future depended on the health of its major metropolitan areas. But Florida was a state filled with New Yorkers who had fled the city during Lindsay’s years as mayor. As far as they were concerned, he was prescribing a medicine they did not want to take. Lindsay finished a distant fifth in a field of six candidates, with 7 percent of the vote. The winner of the Florida Democratic primary, with 42 percent of the vote, was George Wallace, an avowed segregationist.
After a couple more disastrous primaries in other states, Lindsay returned to the city a beaten man. He finished his term as mayor in 1973, but his political career never recovered. In the end, he was one more casualty from an era that claimed many victims.
There were still some scores yet to be settled. The war between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army continued down a dark alley. The battlefield spread nationwide; there were BLA–law enforcement shoot-outs in St. Louis, San Francisco, Florida, and elsewhere. All of these confrontations ended with BLA members succumbing to overwhelming police fire-power. Between 1971 and 1974, the BLA killed ten police officers around the United States; dozens of militants were captured or killed.
The last to go out in a blaze of glory was Twymon Myers, who was believed by police to have been involved in the murder of Officers Foster and Laurie in Manhattan and also another shooting of a policeman in Brooklyn.
On November 14, 1973, at 152nd Street and Tinton Avenue in the Bronx, members of a joint FBI-NYPD task force surrounded Myers outside the apartment building where he had been hiding out. According to the police version, “Myers turned, pulled a 9-mm automatic pistol from under his coat and opened fire.” The lawmen then returned fire, hitting Myers “multiple times.” Eyewitnesses in the neighborhood offered a different account: Myers did have a weapon, they said, but the police fired first. Four officers were hit by bullets; one witness suggested that it was another case of friendly fire, as more than a dozen cops and agents unloaded their weapons in a shooting frenzy. Riddled with bullets, Myers died in the street. He was twenty-three years old.
The Savage City Page 46
