In April 1973, he emerged triumphant. A few weeks before all the charges against him were finally thrown out, CBS broadcast a highly promoted movie-of-the-week based on his ordeal. The movie,
The Marcus-Nelson Murders
, based on a book by the
New York Times
reporter Selwyn Raab, was produced and written by Abby Mann, an Academy Award–winning screenwriter. Whitmore was paid a pittance for his cooperation. In the end, the movie is best remembered for having introduced a character named Detective Theo Kojak, played by the actor Telly Savalas. Mr. Savalas and Kojak would go down in the annals of TV history. Whitmore watched the movie from the medical ward at the Green Haven state prison in Dutchess County.
Nine years after his name was finally cleared and he’d been released from prison, Whitmore won a settlement of half a million dollars from the City of New York. But it was too little, too late. He’d been crushed by the system, his self-worth obliterated in ways that could never fully be put back together. He squandered the money he’d been awarded through bad business ventures and at the hands of devious friends and relatives.
By the time I found Whitmore, he was back living in poverty similar to what he’d known in those years before he was led into that police station in Brooklyn back in 1964.
Meeting Whitmore was eerie for me. Though he was sixty-five years old at the time, I could still see that nineteen-year-old kid who had been so horribly wronged all those years ago. You could see the pain in his face. In one of our first meetings, in the backyard of his tiny rented house on Route 9, I took a photo of him. You can look in his eyes and almost hear him asking the question, “Why me?”
Over the next two years, I frequently made the drive to Wildwood from Manhattan, a three-and-a-half-hour jaunt along the Jersey Shore. I’d take Whitmore to the market to buy groceries to fill his empty kitchen cabinets and refrigerator. Then we’d sit and talk.
Going over the past was painful for him. I tried to catch him early in the day. After he had his first couple of drinks, he was lucid and charming. He remembered his ordeal with such detail that it could send a chill up your spine and bring you to tears. After a few more drinks, he would lose focus, get sloppy, and sometimes become ornery and difficult.
When the book was finished, I delivered a couple of copies to Whitmore. He held it in his hands, felt its heft and smiled with pride. Since adolescence, he had had poor eyesight, and I’m not sure he ever learned to read. But after he’d taken a few minutes to look at the pictures in the book and flip through its pages, seeing the familiar names and descriptions of events, he wept at the memory of his lost youth.
In recent months, I’d fallen out of touch with Whitmore. Knowing him, and attempting to assume a measure of responsibility for his life, was often exhausting. While I had come to love him, the drunken phone calls, the calls from hospital emergency rooms and flophouses, and the constant demands for money became overwhelming. When people who claimed to be friends of his started calling me and asking for favors, I decided to back off. But when I received a cryptic e-mail from one of his nephews, informing me that Whitmore had died on Monday, I was overcome with sadness and regret.
Whitmore never saw himself as a race activist. In the 1960s and 1970s, from prison and on the streets, he watched the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement at a wary distance. He did not judge people by their skin color. He knew he had been the victim of a grave injustice, but he did not assume that the detectives who framed him, or his slow torture at the hands of a rigged system, were motivated by racial prejudice.
By staying strong for all those years—by not taking a plea deal, as he had been offered numerous times—Whitmore forced the justice system to come to terms with the injustice that had been done to him. His ordeal was a key factor in the abolition of the death penalty (except for cases involving the killing of a police officer) by the state legislature and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, in 1965, and in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1966 case
Miranda v. Arizona
, which broadened the rights of criminal suspects under interrogation. (The death penalty was restored in New York in 1995, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the state’s highest court in 2004.) Whitmore’s plight turned the wheels of justice, however painfully and incrementally.
Yet there are no plaques in honor of George Whitmore Jr., no schools named after him, or any civic recognition of his humble fortitude. His name should be known to every student in New York, especially kids of color, but it is not part of the curriculum.
This week, a flawed but beautiful man who offered up his innocence to New York City died with hardly any notice. To those who benefited from his struggles, or who believe the city is a fairer place for his having borne them, I ask: Who grieves for George Whitmore?
And now a word about law enforcement.
In the course of my career as a writer, I have encountered or interviewed hundreds of patrol cops, detectives, federal agents, U.S. marshals, border patrol agents, district attorneys, federal and state prosecutors, and other representatives of the U.S. criminal justice system. Any relationship I might have with these people is shaped, of course, by the fact that I am a journalist and they are representatives of the system. To many in law enforcement, and some in the media, the journalist-cop relationship is and always will be an adversarial one.
For any cop or prosecutor to speak with me on the record, they must first have authorization from their department’s press office. If a cop has been authorized to speak with a reporter, it’s usually so that he or she can get their version of events out there. The cop and his bosses are interested in shaping the flow of information to the public, or giving the impression that they are on top of things even when they are not. Having been involved in writing about crime for as long as I have, I have cultivated a network of lawmen who will talk honestly with me—off the record. As a rule, cops or agents who are recently retired make the best sources, because they can speak more freely and with a higher degree of insight and objectivity. Since they were once part of the system, they know how things operate, and now that they are no longer beholden to the propaganda dictates of the job, they sometimes have a lot to get off their chests.
Generally, I like cops and get along well with them, though I sometimes have problems with particulars of the policies they are entrusted to carry out (as do some cops, by the way, though you are unlikely to hear them express it publicly).
Most people in law enforcement take their job seriously and conduct themselves with an adequate level of professionalism and respect. This varies in different jurisdictions depending on the competency of the training, quality of supervision, and the historical forces that have shaped the attitudes of a particular police force or prosecutorial agency.
Law enforcement can be a high intensity endeavor. Our culture tends to glorify the forces of law and order, so that some on the job crack under the scrutiny, or become drunk with the power and authority that has been bestowed upon them. In my time as a journalist, I’ve come across some who deviate from the norm of basic professionalism. They tend to fall into one of three categories:
1) The blowhard self-promoter, a cop or prosecutor who is driven by ego and self-aggrandizement.
Public servants in disguise, this breed of lawmen are driven primarily by the desire to advance their profile in the media and the hope that, soon, they will land an agent and/or book deal. If it’s a detective or federal agent, they are angling for a cushy job as a consultant on a TV series or movie, or dreaming that one day they will meet Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. If it’s a prosecutor in the office of the U.S. attorney or district attorney, they are laying the groundwork for a career in politics that they hope will one day take them all the way to the White House (see: Rudy Giuliani).
Being based in New York, I have encountered many cops and prosecutors who fit this profile, and others who hope to one day fit this profile. They are sometimes entertaining or charismatic figures who are masters at manipulating the media and playing the system. They are also, quite often, a danger to the concept of fairness and justice. In some cases, they will trample on due process, withhold evidence, frame people, or engage in all manner of malfeasance if it is to the benefit of their careers.
2) The lazy bureaucrat.
It is true that you may find this breed in almost any sector of government employment, but in law enforcement laziness and slovenly investigative work can lead to wrongful indictments and convictions, ruined lives, and an incalculable loss of faith in the American system. Not only that, but the lazy lawmen or prosecutors—like all lazy bureaucrats—spend more time trying to cover up for their shoddiness than they do on their actual jobs.
3) The outright corrupt agent of the law.
Movies and TV shows have led the public to believe that for a cop to be corrupt, he or she must be blowing people away, working in consort with gangsters or drug lords, or absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Generally, corruption in law enforcement is far more mundane. It starts with an attitude that the biggest threat to proper police work is “liberals” and that the “liberal media” is out to get cops. Cops and prosecutors in this camp are unable to separate their personal politics from their job, and it affects their relationship with the public. Everything comes down to us versus them. Racism, excessive use of force, bullying and rude behavior, disrespect for community members—these are the true hallmarks of corruption in law enforcement. With attitudes like these, it is a short distance to planting and falsifying evidence, lying on the witness stand, doing whatever it takes to make a case, even if it violates the law.
In the twenty-plus years that I have been writing about crime in America, I have seen the relationship between the public and law enforcement deteriorate. The irony is that during this time period, crime in most major cities in the United States has gone down dramatically. State and federal prison systems throughout the country are bursting at the seams. The United States locks up its citizens at a rate ten times higher than the next highest industrialized nation. The consequence of this spiraling process of incarceration, where people are locked up and put through the system as a form of social control, breeds distrust and hostility.
The primary reason for this bad blood between the police and the public is not hard to pinpoint—the U.S. war on drugs.
Of all the subjects I’ve written about, it is hardest to maintain objectivity when writing about U.S. narcotics policy, both at home and abroad. The narco war is such an unmitigated and costly failure, and has wreaked so much havoc on the criminal justice system, that what seems to be called for is not old-school, two-sides-to-every-story type journalism, but flat-out advocacy journalism from the point of view of decriminalization and reform.
I am not necessarily a legalization advocate, nor do I pretend to know of a magic solution that will staunch the flow of narcotics into the United States and/or alter the drug consumption habits of U.S. citizens. But I do know that the course the United States has been on for forty years, since the war on drugs was first launched by President Richard M. Nixon in 1971, has been a disaster. It has led to a system in which narcotics cops are rewarded for high numbers of arrests, and so they invariably go where those arrests are easiest to make—poor communities primarily populated by people of color. It is the main reason our prisons are disproportionately populated with black and brown-skinned people.
On an international level, the drug war has polluted our relationship with countries around the globe. Though everyone knows that the United States is overwhelmingly the primary marketplace for illegal narcotics from around the world, the U.S. government often bases its relationship with other nations—and its willingness to supply economic aid—on whether or not they fall in line with U.S. drug policies. Successive U.S. administrations have demanded that countries like Colombia and others in South America engage in vigorous eradication programs, often causing a rift between the governments in those countries and their own people. In Mexico, the United States has sponsored and financed the militarization of the war on drugs, adding fuel to a fire that has raged for years and engulfed the lives of an entire generation.
The corrupting consequences of the war on drugs have been almost beyond calculation. Over the last forty years, the number of people who have been killed, incarcerated, and had their lives shattered in the effort to keep people from selling and using a product they clearly want to use makes the thirteen years of alcohol prohibition, from 1919 to 1932, look like child’s play. Perhaps some day in the future, U.S. citizens will look back on this era of the narco war as a violent folly and have as difficult a time explaining it to their children and grandchildren as previous generations have had trying to explain the Roaring Twenties. Both of these eras of prohibition have succeeded in giving rise to an underworld criminal structure and framework for organized crime that has left a legacy of corruption and violence for the generations that followed.
And yet, politicians and civic leaders in the United States seem incapable of having a rational, mature conversation about national narcotics policy. It rarely comes up as a topic in presidential debates. Each year, Congress authorizes, on average, $40 million in expenditures on various anti-narco initiatives, the overwhelming majority of that spent on costly international and domestic investigations, special task forces, raids, seizures of drugs and property, arrests, prosecutions, and other law enforcement activities in the most expensive domestic “war” the United States has ever waged.
The decline in narcotics use in the last forty years has been negligible. Illegal drugs are now easier to get, and cheaper, than ever before. A failed policy is a failed policy. The inability of the United States to alter the direction of this ongoing fiasco has brought about an incalculable level of social devastation. As long as this continues to undermine the relationship between the people and the social system under which we live, it is a subject that, as a concerned citizen and as a storyteller, I plan on revisiting over and over again.