Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama

  George characterized the police’s position thus: “[W]hen Edmund saw a chance to mug a white person he took it. Really, what other motivation would a young nigger need?”5 There was no evidence that Van Houten or anyone else had used the N-word. Only the liberal used it.

  Perry’s mother blamed her son’s death on white resentment toward successful blacks: “White people hated to see his success. That’s the only way I can figure it. They wanted to wipe him out.”6 It’s not unusual for a mother to refuse to believe her son committed a crime. What’s unusual is for the media to encourage such unfounded beliefs.

  News accounts stressed not only that Perry was a graduate of Exeter on his way to Stanford, but that he was unarmed. In all white-on-black shootings, the media expect the white person to have RoboCop-like superpowers to detect weapons or the lack thereof, as well as the attacker’s resumé.

  A few weeks after the shooting, the New York Times editorialized about Perry, “a prized symbol of hope.” In a telling bit of obtuseness, the Times said that “all New Yorkers have extraordinary reasons to wish for the innocence of the young man who was killed.” I doubt very much that the cop being accused of murder hoped for that.

  The Times criticized the police for saying they had numerous witnesses backing up the officer’s story, but giving no details (after two whole weeks). Following Times guidelines, the paper blamed everyone but the black assailant: “Was deadly force necessary?”…“Why didn’t Officer Van Houten’s backup team, following in a station wagon, intervene to prevent the beating and killing?”…“Why would [Edmund Perry] put his promising future at risk for a street crime?”7

  One might also have asked: “Why would an undercover cop shoot a black kid for no reason?” But that did not pique the Times’s curiosity.

  Then, twenty-three witnesses corroborated the officer’s account in testimony to the grand jury. Some said that they heard Edmund planning the mugging with his brother Jonah, who was a sophomore at Cornell University. According to the district attorney, a “significant number” of witnesses said they saw the mugging. Other witnesses told the grand jury they heard Jonah saying his brother got shot when they were mugging a “D.T.” or “detective.”8 God help Officer Van Houten if he had been mugged someplace other than a hospital parking lot with plenty of witnesses.

  After considering the evidence, the grand jury cleared Van Houten of all wrongdoing and indicted Jonah for the mugging.

  Needless to say, there would be no apology from the media for filling the air with accusations against a policeman. When the story first broke, everyone knew exactly where to place the blame. There was no tender search into a police officer’s troubles, no praise for his educational achievements, no vaporous sorrow about the strain of his job, no “puzzle” to be solved. The cop was a racist.…The end.

  But when it turned out Van Houten was telling the truth and that Edmund Perry had in fact mugged him, delicate reporting was called for. The truth about Perry was revealed amid great sorrow. It was no one’s fault, but a problem of “confusion, frustration and pain” and “two worlds” colliding.9

  Bard College produced a play about the incident, Purgatory, about “a lonely black teen-ager who tries to live in two worlds, one black and one white.” One student explained, “I wanted to open people’s eyes to the fact that racism is still very much alive, although it’s not as visible.”10

  Again: PERRY MUGGED A COP.

  For some journalists it was easier to deal with their grief by pretending they missed the news about all the witnesses supporting the cop’s account. Even after the indictments, for example, Dorothy J. Gaiter of the Miami Herald wrote about Edmund Perry in an article titled, “To Be Black and Male Is Dangerous in U.S.”11 Based on not having been there, seen anything, or been on the grand jury, but rather on having met Edmund once, she announced: “I can’t say whether he would do something that stupid.”

  So even if he mugged a cop, it wasn’t wrong or bad, it was “stupid.”

  Having just allowed that she “couldn’t say,” Gaiter decided she could say, after all, and proceeded to ask: “How do you teach a boy to be a man in a society where others may view him as a threat just because he is black?” Numerous witnesses corroborated Van Houten’s account that Perry had jumped him from behind, punched him in the face and demanded his money. Isn’t it possible that Van Houten saw Perry as a threat for reasons other than “just because he is black”?

  Reaching for the same “just because he was black” thesis as Nelson George in the Village Voice, Gaiter asked whether the policeman would have “shot to kill if Perry had looked like your typical prep-school student—that is, white?” Yes, Van Houten probably wouldn’t have minded being kicked and stomped by a white man.

  Racial filters paralyze logical thinking.

  Numerous stories cited the fact that people “who knew the brothers well agree that it is unthinkable they were involved in a street mugging, as the police contend.”12 Do friends and family ever think their loved ones could have committed a crime? These consanguinity defenses were a staple of police brutality stories in the eighties. The beliefs and feelings of the officer’s friends and family, however, were not deemed newsworthy. How could you trust the relative of a racist?

  (One of the classics of the genre was a Newsweek article claiming “others” disputed Bernie Goetz’s allegation that the four men he shot were mugging him. On close examination, the “others” turned out to be two of the muggers 13, who, by the way, later admitted to both the media and police that they were, in fact, mugging him.14)

  Somewhat amazingly, friends of the Perry family were not unanimous in their publicly stated refusal to believe the mugging story. Among the twenty-three prosecution witnesses, two were neighborhood acquaintances of the Perrys. One testified that Jonah told him on the night of the incident that his brother was shot when they were mugging someone. The other said Jonah told her that night that he tried to beat up a guy who turned out to be a cop.15

  These intrepid souls told the truth, knowing they’d have to go back to the neighborhood.

  Jonah did not take the stand in his defense and presented no witnesses to support his version of events. Rather, defense lawyer-cum-racial agitator Alton Maddox—soon to be concocting the Tawana Brawley hoax—accused the police of conducting a “frame-up” and claimed Van Houten was drunk on the night of the shooting. He presented no evidence for these charges.

  Maddox attacked the family friend who testified that Jonah told her they had mugged a detective, accusing her of being a prostitute. He ridiculed the other Perry neighbor for his lack of education and having had troubles with the law. (And if there’s one thing Alton Maddox cannot abide, it’s a lawbreaker!) Throughout Maddox’s summation, there were choruses of “Amen” from the gallery.16

  In a courthouse jammed with Perry supporters, the jury acquitted Jonah of the mugging, leading to cheers from the courtroom.17

  Still, the truth had come out and, whether or not Jonah was there (as the evidence indicated), there could be no question that Officer Van Houten had been mugged and had fired in self-defense. Instead of rounds of mea culpas from the media, the matter was quickly forgotten.

  But not by the Village Voice’s Nelson George, who unabashedly included his essay on the Edmund Perry frame-up in a 1993 collection of his columns. The evidence had evidently not changed his opinion that something “stinks” in the NYPD.18

  Why didn’t we ever get any stories on the courageous neighborhood witnesses who testified against Jonah? Aren’t they the heroes? They went against “the community” to tell the truth. Yeah, I heard him say he mugged a cop. Why aren’t there any movies about such real bravery?

  Instead, there was a movie about the mugger: Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story. Without motive? The motive was: The cop was being mugged! The IMDB movie summary states: “Edmund Perry appears to have things all going his way when he graduates from Phillips Exeter Academy with a scholarship to Stanford U. wh
en an unfortunate meeting with a police officer ends his life.” (Emphasis added.)

  Instead of turning every story about a black person shot or killed by a white person into an occasion to announce that “the simple fact is, America is a racist society,” liberals might, just once, have asked the question: Why do you suppose there would be a generalized fear of young black males? What might that be based on?

  Throw us a bone. Perhaps it’s because a disproportionate number of criminals are young black males.19

  What stinks in the Edmund Perry case is that the culture encouraged an entire ethnic group to develop a deeply adversarial relationship with mainstream society. Hollywood and the universities celebrated gansters and criminals. Black kids got beaten up for doing well at school. And when a Stanford-bound black teenager mugged an undercover cop, the New York Times trotted out the police brutality theory, later downgraded to “a tragedy.”

  MARLA HANSON—1986

  Journalists needn’t have worried about manufacturing a Hollywood-ready story. Hollywood was willing to alter the facts of actual cases all on its own in order to create a politically correct narrative.

  In June 1986, model Marla Hanson’s face was slashed by two black men. An Irish cop investigating the case determined that her assailants had been hired by Hanson’s slimy landlord, upset that she had spurned his sexual advances. A white woman—a “white Hispanic” in the Trayvon Martin-era lingo—prosecuted the case, and a racial demagogue, Alton Maddox, represented the black defendants. At trial, Maddox attacked the victim with baseless accusations about her sex life and accused her of being prejudiced against blacks.

  Maddox said, for example, that Hanson “saw two men coming toward her and feared she was going to be assaulted…sexually assaulted.” He said Hanson had “racial hang-ups…Just the simple sight of two black men…and she went absolutely nuts.”20 He said she invented the story to frame the black defendants.

  Leaving aside the question of why the victim of a vicious crime would be more interested in falsely accusing two random black guys than in punishing the men who slashed her face so badly she needed a hundred fifty stitches and was left scarred for life, Maddox had not a shred of evidence for any of these claims. If Hanson had feared that the two black men approaching her were going to assault her, surely that is mitigated by the fact that they were.

  Flash to the 1991 made-for-TV docudrama about the Marla Hanson case. In the movie, Hanson’s champion was a black cop. The case was prosecuted by a black female. The defense attorney putting the victim’s sex life and racial attitudes on trial was a white guy. It was like a Soviet documentary.

  If Hollywood is cleaning up reality to send the right message, why not have eighty-five of one hundred U.S. senators be black? Or why not my fantasy: nine black Supreme Court justices, like Clarence Thomas, and I mean all nine exactly like Clarence Thomas.

  MARION BARRY—WASHINGTON, DC, 1989

  Another victim of white racism was Marion Barry, mayor of the nation’s capital.

  Despite Barry’s being captured on videotape smoking crack cocaine and perjuring himself, the majority-black jury simply would not convict him—except on the single count his attorney had admitted to in open court: misdemeanor drug possession.

  The DC police had happened upon the mayor’s cocaine habit completely by accident. Two undercover officers were at the Washington, DC Ramada Inn, investigating suspected drug dealer Charles Lewis, when they happened to run into the mayor’s security detail outside Lewis’s room. After confirming that the mayor was inside, they promptly aborted the operation and turned it over to the FBI. Traces of cocaine were found in Lewis’s hotel room—a room he had paid for with a city government credit card.21

  During Barry’s trial, Lewis testified in detail about his use of drugs with the mayor. A female witness told the jury that she had smoked crack with Barry in his hotel room in the Virgin Islands—and that he had then raped her. Two other women said they also smoked crack with Barry in the Virgin Islands and that he tried to have sex with them.22

  But the key witness was the mayor’s former mistress, Hazel Diane “Rasheeda” Moore, forever memorialized in Barry’s immortal line, “The b—ch set me up.” Moore had cooperated with the FBI, leading to the sting that produced videotapes of Barry smoking crack with her in a hotel room. She testified that she had smoked crack with the mayor at least a hundred times, sometimes two or three times a day during their three-year relationship.23 For being his mistress, she said Barry gave her a lucrative city contract and then threatened to revoke it if she did not comply when he stood naked before her, demanding oral sex. 24

  The jury saw videotapes of the mayor smoking crack with Moore, along with Barry’s videotaped testimony to the grand jury in which he denied ever having smoked crack or even knowing Rasheeda Moore.

  Here was the mayor of the nation’s capitol, which had a majority black population that was being decimated by the crack epidemic, caught on videotape smoking crack cocaine. But Barry checkmated the prosecution by entering the courtroom with a black power salute, wearing African kente cloth.25

  Every day, when Barry emerged from the courthouse, a cheering throng of blacks began singing “We Shall Overcome.”26 Some threatened riots if Barry were found guilty.27 Everywhere he went, there were standing ovations and cries of “Run, Barry, Run!”28 George Stallings Jr., minister of a black separatist church Barry attended, affirmed that Barry was “more popular now than ever before.”29

  During his trial, Barry was the headline speaker at rallies for Nelson Mandela and Louis Farrakhan, presenting himself as a victim of white oppression in the mold of Mandela: “Let the people speak about what is happening in Washington, DC—not just here, but for the other black elected officials all over the land who have misfortunately [sic] been harassed and arraigned by U.S. prosecutors.”30 Jesse Jackson said the FBI sting of Barry reminded him of Soviet justice.31

  The jury deadlocked on all courts, save the misdemeanor charge, despite the government’s “overwhelming” case—as put by the presiding judge, U.S. District Court judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. Jackson said he had “never seen a stronger government case” but that some jurors simply “would not convict under any circumstances.”

  According to the Washington Post’s reporting on the case, Judge Jackson was right. There was a block of five black jurors who held out for acquittal on all but the misdemeanor count. Meanwhile, four young educated black women were adamantly in favor of conviction, believing the case against Barry was overwhelming on at least ten of the counts.32

  But nothing would satisfy Barry’s supporters on the jury. They denied that the bag of crack the FBI seized from Barry was crack, saying it looked more like sugar or baking soda. (The fact that the bag contained crack cocaine was contested by no one at trial.) They refused to convict on one of the possession counts because it referred to Barry smoking crack “on or about” January 1 to January 18—meaning the precise day was irrelevant—because they believed, irrelevantly, that Barry had actually smoked crack a few days earlier. They claimed the FBI “planted” evidence on Barry because he was black.

  One of the pro-acquittal jurors, Valerie Jackson-Warren, was a DC Department of Corrections secretary. She explained her weighing of the evidence to the Post: “I believe [the government was] out to get Marion Barry. I believe that with all my heart.” 33

  When other jurors were making arguments based on the evidence, one of Barry’s supporters snapped at her, “I’m sick of you bourgeois blacks.” Another told two black jurors who favored a guilty verdict that they should read a book about the oppression of blacks by whites.

  After being sentenced to six months in prison, Barry went on the Phil Donahue Show and was greeted with “wild cheering” from the audience at the University of the District of Columbia. He complained about receiving any prison time at all, rather than community service.34 Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the once-respected NAACP, embarrassed himself by appearing on the show with
Barry to denounce the “vicious” prosecution of Barry and calling it part of the “incessant harassment of black elected officials.”35 He, too, said the “fair thing” would have been to sentence Barry to community service.36

  By defending black elected officials like Barry, race hustlers left the impression that all black leaders were inevitably corrupt, incompetent or criminal. Why else would it be “racist” to punish a crack-smoking mayor?

  EDWARD SUMMERS—JANUARY 1994

  In January 1994, Edward Summers needed a new car. So he went to a shopping mall in Nanuet, New York, and waited in the parking lot until he saw Michael Falcone and Scott Nappi getting into Falcone’s Jeep. He forced them at gunpoint to drive to a remote location three miles away, assuring them he wasn’t going to hurt them. Summers then had the boys lie face down on the grass, straddled them, and shot each one in the head at point-blank range. Nappi flinched just as the gun went off, so the bullet lodged in his cheek, saving his life and making him a living witness to the entire crime.

  Soon after Nappi had struggled to a phone and reported the fatal carjacking, the police spotted Summers driving Falcone’s Jeep. He proceeded to lead the cops on a car chase reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour, crashed the Jeep, and leaped from the car to flee on foot. After being captured, Summers gave a detailed, forty-nine-page written confession. Nappi identified Summers as Falcone’s killer.

  The media refused to believe it. Summers was a college student from a middle-class black family, with married parents. Why would he steal a Jeep and commit murder? They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

  Lynn Sherr’s report on the crime for ABC News was titled: “Who Is Ed Summers?—Carjack Killer or Framed Innocent?” “Framed”? This was a case with a living witness and a written confession.

  But Sherr reminded viewers that Summers was “an unlikely suspect, a loving son, a college student with a promising future,” before asking: “What’s the real story? Is an innocent man in jail?” Her report featured Summers’s friends swearing he couldn’t have done it, with Sherr adding: “Ed was a junior at South Carolina State University with good grades in pre-med. His friends say he loved his schoolwork and wanted to save lives, not destroy them.”37