Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama

  Garcia, an illegal immigrant, convicted crack dealer, parole violator and cocaine addict was pronounced dead at the hospital. He became an instant martyr to the race agitators and one less vote for the Democrats.

  The hardworking immigrant was first honored with three days of violent rioting in his Washington Heights neighborhood, estimated to contain one hundred thousand illegal immigrants. The riots left one person dead, 90 injured, 53 policemen hospitalized, 121 vehicles torched, 11 police cars damaged, and dozens of businesses burned or looted.32 Even a police helicopter was struck by gunfire. An industrious Haitian couple stood and watched their livery cab blown up with a Molotov cocktail and burned to rubble. “This car is what we use to pay the rent, feed the kid and take care of our family overseas,” the woman told the Times.33

  Next, Garcia was honored with preposterous lies told by those in “the neighborhood,” recycled in the press and given credibility by Mayor Dinkins.

  About an hour after the shooting, neighbors Juana Rodriguez Madera and her sister Anna Rodriguez told detectives that they had seen nothing and heard only a baby crying and a “couple” of shots. But in no time they were blanketing the airwaves with vivid, minute-by-minute eyewitness accounts of the confrontation, in which they claimed—in various versions—that an unarmed Garcia had pleaded for his life as Officer O’Keefe beat and kicked him, then shot him in the back multiple times while he was facedown on the lobby floor.

  About six months before this incident, the police had executed a raid on Madera’s apartment in the building where the struggle took place and found cocaine, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, a loaded .38 caliber handgun and forty-two rounds of ammunition. (But, thankfully, no soda, salt, or saturated fats.) The police also found a videotape of Madera’s nephew tossing small drug packets in the air, saying, “It’s legal here; it’s liberated,” with Garcia visible in the background as the nephew’s lookout.

  Garcia’s earlier drug conviction and his involvement with Madera in the drug trade was known to Mayor Dinkins before he paid a highly publicized visit to Garcia’s family. The mayor offered the crack dealer’s family his condolences, promising a full investigation and also announcing that the city would pay for Garcia’s funeral expenses in the Dominican Republic. He invited the family to Gracie Mansion the next day.

  Dinkins didn’t so much as call Officer O’Keefe, the policeman who came within seconds of losing his life after being attacked by an illegal alien crack dealer, while he was trying to keep a black neighborhood safe.34

  Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morganthau convened a grand jury to investigate Officer O’Keefe for murder—murder—in the shooting of Garcia, a clean-living hardworking man with a ready smile.

  From the beginning, O’Keefe told one consistent story about what had happened.35 By contrast, the drug-den sisters had a whole bunch of different stories. All the physical and forensic evidence supported O’Keefe’s version—and often directly contradicted the sisters’ testimony. This was according to the city’s forensic experts, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—as well as a pathologist and criminologist hired by the Garcia family, who stood to make a lot of money if O’Keefe were found to have acted improperly.

  Not a single bullet mark, for example, was found in the floor, despite the sisters’ claim that Garcia had been lying on the ground unconscious while O’Keefe repeatedly shot him in the back. However, a bullet mark was found in a lobby pillar right where it would have passed through Garcia’s stomach if he had been standing where O’Keefe said he was.

  The bullet wounds on Garcia’s body were consistent with his being shot once in the stomach, spinning from the impact, and then being shot in the side of his back—just as O’Keefe had said. The bullet wounds were inconsistent with the sisters’ claim that Garcia was flat on his stomach, unconscious, as O’Keefe shot him three times in the back.

  Apart from the handcuff marks, medical experts found only two bruises on Garcia’s body—on his nose and head, exactly where O’Keefe said he had hit Garcia in the struggle. The absence of any other bruising strongly contradicted the sisters’ claim that O’Keefe savagely beat Garcia all over his body, including his knees, shoulders and hands.

  The bullets recovered from the foyer, a ballistics report on O’Keefe’s gun, and Garcia’s wounds all showed that only two shots were fired—as O’Keefe said. Not three—as the sisters testified.

  As for why Garcia might have reacted violently to a policeman, the pathologists concluded that Kiko was a chronic cocaine user and that there was cocaine in his system at the time of death. The fact that he was an illegal immigrant, a convicted felon and a parole violator might also have influenced his decision to try to kill the cop.

  But reporters were earnestly broadcasting every outlandish claim to come out of “the neighborhood”—a neighborhood that held the record for the most murders of any police precinct in New York.36 CBS News called Garcia “a Dominican immigrant.” (How about, “Heinrich Himmler, a Munich native”?) As the camera panned over his sorry living quarters, reporter Giselle Fernandez posed a question from his aunt: Does “this look like the lavish style of a drug dealer, as police allege?”37

  Viewers might have been able to better answer that question if CBS had also mentioned that Garcia was a prodigious cocaine user, a convicted drug dealer and had appeared as a lookout on a home video seized during a drug bust months earlier.

  A New York Times article cited “[p]eople on the street” contending that “the officer pushed Mr. Garcia into the building and then shot him.” One man, Genefonsio Yiquiya, described a whole posse of police beating Garcia: “Undercover police hit him on the knee. After they break his legs, they pulled him in and shot him three times.” He claimed he “heard Mr. Garcia screaming, ‘Mama, Mama, they are killing me,’ in Spanish.” The Times also quoted, without correction, the Garcia family lawyer’s claim that “this kid never was arrested; he wasn’t a drug dealer.”38

  Soon the Times was referring to the illegal alien/coke addict/convicted drug dealer as “Mr. Garcia, a twenty-three-year-old father of two.” (“Himmler, a forty-five-year-old father of two…”) Mixed in were slanderous allegations from “the neighborhood” about O’Keefe being part of a criminal gang of cops, who stole money and cocaine from drug dealers.39 Liberals have unadorned affection for any Third World dictatorship, but our police arrest a black man and it’s always a fascist police state—in a negative way.

  The Times was a model of journalistic skepticism compared to New York Newsday, which ran a banner headline on its cover: “Cop Shooting Victim: He Was Shot in the Back.” Another Newsday article said it was “not clear what happened” because, although the police claimed Garcia was a convicted crack dealer, on the other hand, “the community”—i.e., drug dealers—said he was “a clean-living immigrant.” 40 Who could possibly sort out these conflicting perspectives?

  Newsday’s Jim Dwyer dedicated an entire column to repeating the allegations of drug-den proprietress Madera. Describing Madera as a “mother of four,” Dwyer said she “runs a small cafeteria in the kitchen of Apartment 110 at 505 W. 162nd St.” The “cafeteria” noted by Dwyer was in the same apartment where she also stored drugs and guns, based on the recent police raid.

  Dwyer also unskeptically reported that Madera saw O’Keefe beating Garcia from the second-floor landing, adding—as if the gritty street reporter had performed an inspection of the building himself—that the “lobby is visible from there only by kneeling.” 41 In fact, it was not visible by kneeling, or even by lying prone—as was later established by city investigators as well as the Garcia family lawyer. Dwyer was so breathtakingly easy to fool, in no time he was hired by the New York Times, where he now holds the Anna Quindlen chair in Extreme Gullibility of Belief In Anything.

  The drug-den sisters who claimed they had witnessed O’Keefe beating and shooting Garcia from a stairwell landing must have realized the grand jurors would be brighter than Jim Dwyer, so they explained they could see
what was happening because they were lying down with their heads on the floor. All forensic experts concluded that, even lying down, it was impossible to see the lobby from the second-floor landing. The Garcia family’s criminologist even used a laser beam to try to confirm the sisters’ claim, but found that, at most, they could have only seen someone’s feet. (Or maybe they saw the whole thing by “kneeling,” as Jim Dwyer reported for Newsday.)

  Also inconsistent with the sisters’ description of a trigger-happy cop pitilessly torturing Garcia were tapes of Officer O’Keefe’s high-pitched shrieks of “Ten-thirteen!” into his police radio, meaning “Officer in need of assistance”: “Ten-thirteen! Ten-thirteen! 163 Street and St. Nick, send help! Ten-thirteen, 163 Street and St. Nick, send help!” 42 His partners barely recognized O’Keefe’s voice, saying it sounded like a woman screaming.43

  In the end, the grand jury concluded that O’Keefe was telling the truth and had acted in self-defense, and that the sisters were telling big stinking lies. (The rest of “the neighborhood” disappeared when it came time to make their statements under oath and not just to naïve reporters.)

  After noting that the officer’s account was corroborated by the autopsy, the toxicology tests and physical evidence at the scene, DA Morgenthau summarized the grand jury’s conclusions as to the credibility of O’Keefe’s accusers:

  Those accounts are unsubstantiated. The critical two witnesses have given different versions of events at different times. Their description of how they happened to see the shooting does not fit logically with the physical features of the lobby where it occurred. They deny matters which are provably true. And the version of events which they offered to investigators is not only not corroborated by the physical evidence in the case; it is actually contradicted by that evidence.44

  The drug-den sisters had provably lied under oath to a grand jury—admittedly, not about something as important as whether they had used the N-word in the prior ten years—but in accusing a New York City cop of cold-blooded murder. As a result of their lies, the city was forced to waste two months of the grand jurors’ time, as well as that of ten investigators and six prosecutors, who interviewed hundreds of people and presented more than a hundred exhibits to the grand jury.45 If the sisters’ claims had not been proved false by mountains of physical evidence, their lies could have sent a policeman to prison for life for the crime of risking his life to get a drug dealer out of a black neighborhood.

  But—as with so many other lies about racism—no charges would be brought against the perjurious women. To the contrary, it was Garcia’s family that was looking for a lawsuit. They responded to the grand jury’s painstaking investigation by demanding a federal civil rights investigation of the police department46 and a state investigation into the grand jury.47 In Washington Heights, protestors dissatisfied with the grand jury’s conclusion marched in protest, requiring yet another infusion of police into the neighborhood to prevent more riots.

  The endless stream of false civil-rights claims on behalf of cop killers and drug dealers debased the cause of real civil rights and caused the immiseration of many people—always with dollops of abuse for anyone who dissented from conventional wisdom. When all the people the media had ridiculed turned out to be right, liberal zealots were still praised for their admirable goals. Why should it matter if they thought they were doing the right thing at the time? Hitler thought he was doing the right thing at the time. But on the left, you can never fail your way out of public life.

  CHAPTER 3

  GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN BLACK

  In the world before OJ, racial intimidation ruled the day—except against liberals, who were immunized from charges of racism even if they had been Klansmen. Reporters became junior G-men ferreting out racist thoughts, knowing full well that the mere accusation of racism could destroy careers and reputations.

  The racism hunters ruined lives, but they never paid a price. To the contrary, they got their butts kissed, collected awards, appeared on the David Susskind show and were the subject of “profiles in courage” testimonials. Any white person could get a standing ovation for accusing other white people of being racist. Let’s be honest, we live in racist society.

  Why is that courageous? Normally, being honest consists of admitting something about yourself, not slinging slurs at others.

  Defending the race-baiting courtroom techniques of famed black attorney Alton H. Maddox Jr., for example, Legal Services NYC attorney James I. Meyerson told the Washington Post that Maddox was “making all of us confront the barriers of our own racism.”1 “Our” racism means “yours”—not his. Liberal honesty consists of saying: I didn’t do it! They did!

  While white people lived under a presumption of guilt, black crimes were excused, lied about or unreported. White people have done their part by telling everyone not to be prejudiced against black teenagers. The next step is for black teenagers to stop committing so many crimes. That’s the problem, but for decades it was hidden under a tsunami of excuses for black criminals and alerts about pervasive white racism every time any white harmed a black person.

  EDMUND PERRY—1985

  In the summer of 1985, Edmund Perry, a black teenager from Harlem, had just graduated from Exeter and was headed to Stanford on a full scholarship when he mugged a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop, and ended up dead.

  Officer Lee Van Houten was patroling the St. Luke’s Hospital parking lot dressed as a medical intern. Perry and his brother, Jonah, grabbed him from behind, threw him to the ground and started pummeling and kicking him. Van Houten screamed that he was a cop, but they kept pounding on him and shouting, “Give it up!” On the verge of unconsciousness, Van Houten pulled his ankle gun and fired at his attackers, hitting Perry who died a few hours later.

  And then we were off to the races.

  The New York Post: “COP KILLS HARLEM HONOR STUDENT”

  The New York Times: “HONOR STUDENT, 17, IS KILLED BY POLICEMAN ON WEST SIDE.”

  The Los Angeles Times: “SAYS VICTIM ATTACKED HIM, MOTHER CHARGES RACISM; OFFICER KILLS TOP STUDENT, SETS OFF FUROR.”

  How about, “Hero Cop Attacked by Privileged Teen”?

  Unfortunately for the twenty-four-year-old Van Houten, he was white, so the press had all the information it needed. Until that night, Van Houten had an unblemished record during his two years on the force and had never fired his gun in the line of duty. But instead of waiting for the facts, the media rushed out with a story about a trigger-happy racist cop. Van Houten’s claim of self-defense was surrounded with quotes from others expressing skepticism.

  When they’re maligning Joe McCarthy, liberals are happy to remind us that an accusation is not proof of guilt. But all that innocent-until-proved-guilty claptrap flies out the window in the case of a politically incorrect crime. This is the racism exception to journalistic skepticism. For certain charges—racism, police brutality, rape—the media have decided to suspend all doubt about the accuser. The allegation alone is proof of guilt. If the accused says he’s innocent, liberals stare in wonderment: What kind of monster defends himself from a charge of racism? You just had to hope no one accused you.

  From the moment Edmund Perry was shot, the media noisily jumped on the bandwagon of a phony police brutality charge. When it turned out to be false, the New York Times silently looked at its shoes. It was the kind of story the elites wanted to be true, so it should be true. We had such high hopes for that one. Damn!

  Typical was an article in the Village Voice on the Perry shooting that explained: “[L]ike so many other victims in this city,” Perry was “just too black for his own good.”2 The Voice’s Nelson George went on to report fanciful accounts of the shooting from unnamed witnesses, as well as his own unfounded speculation. He hypothesized that Van Houten had been mugged by three other men; that he had not been knocked to the ground by muggers because, George claimed, the autopsy indicated Perry was shot from a distance and from a standing position; and that the officer was not
on duty but “moonlighting” as a security guard.

  None of this would be backed up by witnesses who testified to the grand jury and at trial. To the contrary, a number of witnesses, including black witnesses, supported Van Houten’s account. If a conservative journalist retailed this many false facts about, say, Obama’s birth certificate, he’d never get another serious job.

  Most amusingly, George reported that Perry’s friends and family had seen Officer Van Houten leave the hospital at one a.m. the night of the shooting, surrounded by “eight plainclothes and uniformed police” and…he had no visible signs of injury!3 Of course, the only member of Perry’s entourage who would have had the first idea what Van Houten looked like was his brother, Jonah, who participated in the mugging. But he said he wasn’t there, so he couldn’t very well claim to recognize the officer.

  In any event, Van Houten was not walking out of St. Luke’s surrounded by other officers at one a.m. because he was kept overnight for treatment to “cuts and bruises to his face, arms and back and injury to his neck,” according to the New York Times and every other news outlet other than the Voice.4

  Evidently, Perry’s friends and family saw a different white guy leaving the hospital at one a.m with no visible scratches. (Just as when, in 2012, MSNBC triumphantly presented grainy videos of Trayvon Martin’s shooter, George Zimmerman, in the police station hours after the shooting to proclaim him scratch-free—until more contemporaneous photos were produced showing bleeding welts on the back of his head.)