Said Donald F. Cawley, the newly appointed police commissioner: “Tonight we’ve culminated a very long journey that involved the final capture of Twymon Myers, who we consider the last of the known leaders of the Black Liberation Army. We believe we have now broken the back of the BLA.”
But the BLA’s bloody rise and fall wasn’t quite played out. There was one last saga; this one involved Assata Shakur, aka JoAnne Chesimard, occasional bank-robbing partner of Twymon Myers.
Since she’d gone underground in late 1971 Assata had been linked to a staggering array of bank robberies, attempted murders, kidnappings, and other crimes on the East Coast. Her face appeared on FBI wanted posters in New York and elsewhere around the country. In his 1973 book Target Blue, Robert Daley described her as “the final wanted fugitive, the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”
Assata was captured in May 1973 after a ferocious shoot-out on the New Jersey Turnpike between state troopers and three BLA members—Assata Shakur, Zyad Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli. Zyad Shakur was killed in the shoot-out, as was one of the state troopers. The other trooper and Assata were injured. Acoli and Assata tried to escape, driving five miles along the turnpike until their car was surrounded by state troopers. Bleeding from gunshot wounds in both arms and a shoulder, Assata surrendered to troopers at the scene.
From 1973 to 1977, Shakur was indicted ten times in New York and New Jersey, resulting in seven different trials. She was charged with two bank robberies, the kidnapping of a Brooklyn heroin dealer, the attempted murder of two Queens police officers, and eight other felonies related to the turnpike shoot-out. All the charges for which she was originally hunted by the FBI were either dismissed or ended in acquittal at trial. She was, however, found guilty at trial on all eight felony counts relating to the shoot-out on the turnpike. Her role in the murder of the state trooper brought with it a mandatory life sentence.
During her incarceration, Assata had a child by one of her codefendants, James Hinton. Her imprisonment, which included long stretches of solitary confinement—and instances of physical abuse, claimed Shakur—was condemned by a panel of jurists representing the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, who stated that her treatment “was totally unbefitting any prisoner.” Her cause as a political prisoner was championed by the dwindling faithful in the black liberation movement.
No doubt there were those who cheered when, on November 2, 1979, Assata was sprung from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in a daring escape engineered by, among others, former Black Panther Sekou Adinga and Mutulu Shakur. Using false IDs, the team of BLA members penetrated prison security, then seized two guards as hostages and used a prison van to escape. Assata was able to evade an intensive FBI manhunt and live underground in the United States for nearly five years. In 1984, she fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum and still lives in exile.
Assata Shakur was one of many whose lives were scattered to the winds by events of the 1960s and early 1970s in New York City. For the three main players in this narrative—Phillips, Bin Wahad, and Whitmore—the years that followed were no less dramatic:
BILL PHILLIPS
After the hung jury in his first trial for the double murder of a pimp and a prostitute, Phillips began his retrial in November 1974 expecting to be found not guilty. In terms of the evidence, the second trial was a replay of the first, but this time Phillips was without the services of star attorney F. Lee Bailey, with whom he parted ways after a dispute over the lawyer’s fee. At trial, Phillips’s new attorney, Harold Rothblatt, was unable to undermine the eyewitness testimony of the surviving victim, Charles Gonzales, who, when asked if Phillips was the man who shot him, said, “Yes sir. I’ll never forget his face as long as I live.” After an eight-week trial, the jury deliberated eleven hours over two days before finding Phillips guilty on two counts of homicide and one count of attempted homicide. “The 44-year-old defendant blanched and sank into his chair at the defense table after the foreman replied ‘guilty’ when asked for the verdict on each of the three counts in the indictment,” the New York Times reported. Phillips was sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.
For the high-flying corrupt cop who became a media star during the televised Knapp Commission hearings, it was a fall of mythic proportions. Phillips did not fear many things, but he did fear prison. As he put it in his memoir, “I could never, never spend the rest of my life in fucking jail. I would kill myself first. The thought of suicide is the only escape. To be locked up like an animal in some fuckin’ jail, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t survive. I’d have to find some way to end it.”
Given Phillips’s trepidation about being an ex-cop locked up with criminals, the next thirty years of his life were a time of considerable accomplishment. He was first sent to Attica, a correctional facility seething with racial hostilities in the wake of the infamous riot that had taken place three and a half years earlier. In general population, Phillips was “terrorized” every minute of every day, as he would later put it.
Around 1978 Phillips began spending nearly all of his free time in the prison library studying the law. At first it was just a hobby, but eventually he began helping out fellow inmates with their cases. He took full advantage of educational programs that were instituted in the state prison system as a result of reforms brought about by the Attica riot. Eventually, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Empire State College and a master’s degree from Buffalo State University with a 4.0 grade point average. He earned a state certification in legal research and taught a course on the subject at Attica. He helped dozens of inmates with their cases, and in the late 1980s he was profiled on the CBS newsmagazine Street Stories. The program’s producers interviewed inmates whom Phillips had helped get released from prison through his legal work. “I’ve been championing the cause of the underdog in here,” Phillips would say on the program.
Phillips would eventually be transferred to various other state penal facilities. He used his incarceration time well, doing charity work through an upstate Quaker group, rewriting a prison substance and alcohol abuse treatment program, and receiving counseling from a Mormon prison organization. By the time of his first parole hearing in 1999, he had become known as a “model inmate” who was respectful to prison authorities and helpful to other inmates.
As the hearing approached that September, Phillips had reason to believe he might have a favorable reception. He had letters of recommendation from Whitman Knapp and Mike Armstrong, the Knapp Commission’s chief counsel, who wrote that Phillips had been “resourceful, courageous, tireless, and extremely effective” in his work for the Knapp Commission. “It is fair to say that, without the undercover work and testimony of William Phillips, our committee would not have been able to hold its public hearings.”
Yet the pleas on Phillips’s behalf were to no avail. He was turned down for parole; the board called him “a criminal of the worst kind whose danger to public safety is to the highest degree.” Of the parole board members, Phillips said only, “Most of these guys were in diapers when I was testifying. They don’t know what it’s about. They have no idea about my story.”
From 1999 on, Phillips went before the parole board every two years, and was turned down every two years, until he was one of the oldest inmates in the state prison system. Over the years, he had three cancer surgeries, including one that claimed his left eye. He suffered a minor stroke and developed diabetes. Despite his infirmities, Phillips kept himself in shape in the prison gym and never lost hope that he would eventually see the light of day.
The problem was, Phillips was not only unwilling to express remorse for the double homicide for which he’d been convicted, he wouldn’t even admit to the killings. To Phillips, the reason was clear: he didn’t do it. At his first hearing in 1999, he was asked,
Parole board officer: So it is your position on these convictions that you’re innocent of these crimes?
Parole board: Do you suppose the witness could be wrong about who shot him?
Phillips: I believe so.
Phillips was asked if he had any ideas about who might have done the actual murder.
Phillips: Yes, I have a theory. It was a loan shark. Every report that was put in this case was put in by the detective that it was a loan shark. This individual [Jimmy Smith] had 33 or 35 arrests. He owed everybody money. He had been beat up on several occasions for nonpayment of his loan shark bills, and my theory of the case is that, yes, it was a loan shark.
Parole board: You are saying that another person was responsible?
Phillips: My theory, yes.
After three or four parole hearings over an eight-year period, it became clear to Phillips that he would never be released unless he copped to the killings. In 2007, a new regime took over control of the state parole board. Phillips was informed by his attorney that there was a good chance he could get a favorable ruling, but he would have to say the magic words: I did it. This was easier said than done. The parole board was likely to ask Phillips specific questions about the night of the shootings. He would have to come up with a scenario that matched the actual details of the crime.
On September 19, Phillips came before the board in what would likely be his last shot at receiving parole. When he was asked “How are you feeling today?” he answered, “A little nervous. It’s my fifth time before the parole board.” He was told, “Take a few minutes to calm down. Take your time, sir. Take a deep breath. It’s a fresh, new panel.”
Phillips decided, at last, to tell the board what it wanted to hear—that he had shot the three victims in that whorehouse in 1968. He proceeded to take the board members through a rambling description of the crime, seeming at times incredulous at his own words:
Going back now, I can’t possibly imagine that I could do such a thing and act like that. It’s just beyond me…. I never had a problem with people and money on the Force, and things like that, or threatening people. I don’t know what came over me to do this. It’s just like out of my character, you know. Okay, I took money as a police officer but I never was involved in hurting nobody to collect money or attempting to kill them or kill them. This is something I can never fully explain.
Phillips’s account of the events of that night was nearly incomprehensible; when asked about details, he floundered, confusing one of the two dead victims with the survivor. He sounded like a man determined to convince the board he was guilty—and remorseful—for a crime he didn’t commit. Ultimately, his act was successful: on November 10, 2007, after serving thirty-three years in prison, Bill Phillips was released on parole. He was seventy-eight years old.
Upon release, Phillips went into hiding. After living for a time in a U.S. veterans halfway house, he was taken in by the Mormon group he’d become associated with in prison. As of 2010, he was working with two filmmakers who planned to produce a documentary about his life.
DHORUBA BIN WAHAD
In the late 1970s, while incarcerated at Green Haven, Dhoruba started reading about a covert FBI counterintelligence program that had been revealed during Senate hearings in Washington, D.C. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Senate had vowed to usher in a new era of transparency in government. A committee was formed to investigate the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies. The Church Committee hearings, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, focused in part on the activities of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover (who had died of natural causes on May 2, 1972). For the first time, the American public learned of the FBI’s efforts to infiltrate and destabilize the black liberation movement via COINTELPRO.
Dhoruba became convinced that he might have been a target of the FBI’s counterintelligence efforts; if that was true, he might have grounds to claim that his civil rights had been violated. COINTELPRO had engaged in the use of illegal wiretaps, paid informants, and the spreading of false information that, in some cases, led directly to the deaths of people in the movement. If Dhoruba had been a target of the program, it also bolstered his argument that police authorities had targeted him, because of his politics, to take the rap for the shooting of police officers Curry and Binetti.
The problem for Dhoruba was that he was locked away in prison on a life sentence. No lawyer was likely even to listen to his claims, much less devote time and effort to helping him prove his theories. Then, in 1975, he got lucky. A group of college students visited Green Haven prison. Among the group was Robert Boyle, a twenty-year-old student majoring in sociology. Boyle met Dhoruba and became convinced that, if what the imprisoned black militant was saying was true, it might open a window onto a pattern of FBI wrongdoing that had affected an entire generation of civil rights activists.
Thus began a legal saga that would last the next fifteen years. Boyle decided to become a lawyer. He attended Brooklyn Law School and was admitted to the New York State bar in 1981. At the same time, he brought Dhoruba’s case to Elizabeth Fink, a civil rights attorney whose career had been inspired by William Kunstler. Together, Fink and Boyle began a long process of filing legal injunctions against the FBI and the NYPD in an effort to get their hands on any and all files relating to Dhoruba Bin Wahad.
At every turn, government lawyers stonewalled. At first, they claimed there were no secret files. Then they claimed there had been files, but that they were destroyed or lost. Finally, in 1989, the government not only revealed that FBI and NYPD intelligence files did exist, but they also launched a counterstrategy: they released a mountain of files, more than three hundred thousand pages in all, hoping to overwhelm Dhoruba and his attorneys.
Over the next ten months, the lawyers pored over the files—and were astounded by what they found. Not only was the name of Richard Moore aka Dhoruba all over the FBI files, they uncovered extensive documentation of the covert program known as NEWKILL—the first time that program was revealed to anyone outside of law enforcement. The implications were explosive: the files proved conclusively that the Manhattan D.A.’s office had been lying when it insisted that there were no relevant files or notes concerning Dhoruba’s case. In particular, the NEWKILL files revealed that—despite the prosecution’s repeated denials during Dhoruba’s trial—star witness Pauline Joseph, whose testimony helped convict Dhoruba and others at numerous BLA-related trials, had been briefed and interrogated dozens of times over a period of two years, and much of what she told detectives and prosecutors contradicted what she had testified to on the witness stand.
Fink and Boyle believed they had hit the jackpot. They filed a motion to have Dhoruba’s conviction overturned, citing (among other factors) the fact that the government had failed to turn over essential Rosario material at trial.
At first the motion was denied; then the denial was overturned. Finally, in March 1990, Dhoruba’s case came before Justice Peter J. McQuillan. After examining the motion filed by Dhoruba’s lawyers and all the relevant material from the NEWKILL files, McQuillan rendered his verdict. “I acknowledge that [my] decision is not free from doubt,” said the judge. “The Rosario materials do not contain clearly exculpatory statements, nor any statements that would undermine a witness’s entire testimony. But they do include statements by Pauline Joseph which depart significantly from some of her most crucial testimony, and that testimony was essential to the People’s theory of the case. It follows, then, that there is a reasonable possibility of a different verdict if the defendant had been afforded the opportunity to cross-examine her with these statements. To vacate a conviction some twenty years after the jury’s verdict on the basis of a possibility, however reasonable that possibility may be, is not a pleasant duty…. A conviction that can no longer be called a just conviction…must be remedied no matter how much time has passed. Accordingly, the motion to vacate the defendant’s conviction is granted.”
After nineteen years of imprisonment, Dhoruba walked out of court a free man.
&
nbsp; Immediately, the former Panther and underground guerrilla became a symbol to a generation of activists who had been beaten, shot at, hunted down, and incarcerated during the years of conflict between police and the black liberation movement. Dhoruba became a popular speaker at political rallies and, occasionally, on television. After a 1992 appearance on The Phil Donahue Show alongside rapper Sister Souljah and Prince ton University professor Cornel West, Dhoruba was derided by a New York Times reviewer for his “soapbox radicalism.” In speeches and essays in leftist journals, Dhoruba’s rhetoric remained fiery and unrepentant, though in many ways the movement he helped forge had since moved on.
The inevitable civil litigation followed. Dhoruba sued the FBI and the NYPD. In a 1995 settlement with the federal government he was awarded $400,000. Five years later, in a settlement with the City of New York, he collected a further $490,000. Some of this money went to pay legal fees, some to taxes. The rest Dhoruba used to finance a project he had dreamed about while he was in prison. In the late 1990s he moved to Ghana, Africa, and, in partnership with the local government, constructed a school for children. Dhoruba became something of a player in African politics, jetting back and forth between the continent and the United States. In 1999, he introduced Nelson Mandela at a rally in Harlem. A documentary about his life called Passin’ It On was produced and shown on PBS. But by the early years of the new century, Dhoruba’s ventures in Ghana had fizzled out. His school was forced to close after financial improprieties by his business partners, and the political party he had supported was voted out of office.
The Savage City Page 47
