The Savage City Read Free Page A

occurred was contained within the fabric of everyday life; though it would continue to fester for more than a decade, the city still functioned. Yet the precipitous decline in quality of life and peace of mind was almost beyond calculation.
    The worst clashes between blacks and the police took place in the streets and within the police precincts. But they often played out within the bounds of the criminal justice system. The courts and prisons were an extension of policing at the street level; they reflected the common attitudes of the day. Beginning in 1963, untold numbers of citizens, police officers, criminal defense lawyers, prosecutors, district attorneys, judges, bail bondsmen, and social activists would get drawn into the maelstrom.
    This book traces the parallel lives of three people whose personal journeys were central to the era—three men who never met, but whose exploits, taken together, would have a revolutionary effect on the nature of criminal justice in New York City.
    GEORGE WHITMORE
    As a young Negro subsisting on the margins of society in the early 1960s, Whitmore found himself the target of a type of injustice that was both typical and extraordinary. While being held in custody at a Brooklyn police station, he was coerced into signing a confession to a series of horrific crimes. His struggle to free himself from false prosecution at the hands of a compromised criminal justice system would become one of the defining narratives of the entire era.
    WILLIAM “BILL” PHILLIPS
    As a boy, Phillips—the son of a twenty-year NYPD veteran—listened to his pop and fellow officers regale one another with stories fromthe days of Prohibition, when a precinct cop received one dollar for every barrel of illegal bootleg beer delivered to a speakeasy. By the time Bill Jr. joined the NYPD, corruption had become so rife within the department—with officers looking to “score” and spread the money around to commanders and supervisors—that few even thought of it as corruption. Phillips was a more aggressive hustler than most, but he was also a classic product of a diseased system—which made it all the more devastating when he turned snitch and exposed the NYPD to the most devastating scandal in its history.
    DHORUBA BIN WAHAD
    For every George Whitmore—simple, compliant, looking to get along—there was a Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who would come to be viewed by many cops as the prototypical black militant. Dhoruba was a product of 1950s gang life and various penal institutions in and around New York City; by the time he was released into the political and racial tumult of the late 1960s, he was ripe to assume the role of the Black Avenger. His position as one of the key founders of the Black Panther Party in New York would lead to his being targeted by virtually every level of law enforcement, from the NYPD’s Bureau of Special Services to the highest levels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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    THESE THREE MEN—WHITMORE, Phillips, and Bin Wahad—represent three points of a triangle: Whitmore, the hapless victim of a repressive law enforcement system; Phillips, foot soldier for that system, which saw its mandate as stemming an incipient racial revolution; and Bin Wahad, inheritor of a new age of militancy inspired and defined by the likes of Malcolm X. Though their stories would unfold independent of one another, all three men became enmeshed in a similar matrix of forces—political, social, and racial—that would alter the direction of the city. Their lives, chronicled closely at the time but largely forgotten today, cast a refracted glow on one another and on an entire generation of contemporaries caught up in the turmoil of the times.
    In the struggle for racial equality, the road to the Promised Land was strewn with land mines and strafed by sniper fire. There were 563 murders in New York City in 1963. By 1973 there were more than onethousand—a 95