In a lengthy brief for the defense, New York Magazine’s Barbara Campbell went further, presenting Summers’s crackpot alibi as completely believable. Despite having confessed, Summers later changed his story, claiming he had been forced into the Jeep by a terrifying neighborhood drug dealer named “Dino” who committed the carjacking, murder and attempted murder all on his own, then made Summers drive the Jeep back to New York.
The cops never found any evidence of a drug dealer named Dino. Nappi said that only one man had carjacked and shot them and that that man was Summers.
But Campbell found the “Dino” story highly compelling. She dismissed the overwhelming evidence against Summers with the overriding point: “The only question—the question Summers’s astonished friends, teachers and the press raised over and over again—was…why?”
To the prosecutor’s simple answer, “He wanted a Jeep,” Campbell answered: This was not “simple at all.” What the prosecution had apparently failed to consider, you see, was that Summers said he didn’t do it! Only Barbara Campbell, liberal goo-goo at New York Magazine, understood the importance of the suspect’s denial. “Summers maintains,” Campbell reported, “that despite his being caught in the Jeep, despite the ‘confession’ (he signed no such document), despite his being identified by a victim, he committed no crime.”38
Does anyone write this kind of nonsense on behalf of white criminals?
At trial, Summers’s lawyers even presented a barber named Deno as a defense witness. Deno had agreed to take the stand for Summers to help his lawyers make the rather stupid point that there was someone named something like “Dino” in the neighborhood, proving that the police had not looked hard enough for anyone by that name.
It wasn’t exactly a Perry Mason moment. We may presume the prosecution was not claiming there was no one in the Bronx named Dino, including harmless barbers. Summers’s alibi was that this particular Dino was a major drug dealer, well known in the neighborhood and striking fear into everyone he met—which is why Summers had to do whatever Dino asked. That was the alibi.
Then, in a shocking twist, Summers’s lawyer suddenly accused the astonished Deno of being the real killer! This poor schlub had taken a day off from work to help Summers and his thanks was to be accused of murder by Summers’s lawyer.
The jurors were not overwhelmed by the Dino alibi. It was “smoke and mirrors,” as one put it.39 Not only had Nappi identified Summers as the killer, but the stocky five-foot-seven Deno did not resemble the slender six-foot-four “Dino” that Summers had described.
MICHAEL LASANE—1996
Journalists would never learn. In 1996, a black seventeen-year-old high school sophomore from the projects, Michael LaSane, abducted a special-education teacher, Kathleen Weinstein, and killed her for her gold 1995 Toyota Camry. We know this because, while Weinstein was in the car with him, she secretly turned on her pocket tape recorder, capturing the last half hour of her life as she tried to talk the young man out of killing her, telling him about her husband and children and asking him questions about himself. He parked the car and smothered her to death.
The tape, with LaSane’s voice and personal details about him, left investigators a gold mine of information.
Nonetheless, as soon as the cops arrested LaSane with Weinstein’s car, the New York Times asked in a headline: “Abduction Suspect Wanted a Car, But Would He Kill for It?”40 The article quoted friends of LaSane’s saying they thought he had been set up. Many also said LaSane had talked about getting a car for his seventeenth birthday. He “even had a model picked out: a gold 1995 Toyota Camry.” He had the model picked out! Well, that changes everything.
There are soulless, remorseless killers of all races, but only black killers will be defended relentlessly by imbecilic liberals at places like the New York Times. We don’t get credulous defenses of Scott Peterson or read about “lingering doubts” in the case of Phil Spector.
ROBERT CHAMBERS—1986
No one puzzled over why “Preppie Killer” Robert Chambers would kill Jennifer Levin. Chambers was arrested in August 1986 for murdering Jennifer Levin in Central Park after a night of drinking at the Upper East Side’s Dorrian’s Red Hand. He claimed Levin was his girlfriend and that their consensual rough sex had gotten out of hand.
This time, there were no wide-eyed journalists to champion a dubious alibi. No one would wonder why he would put his future at risk or questioned whether he could do something so “stupid.” No one asked: “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 Irish?”
Oh no. Real life had finally produced a suspect as close as liberals were going to get to Law & Order’s version of the typical New York murderer: white—and, by God, liberals were going to make him privileged.
Journalists had batches of ready-made, sense-of-entitlement articles sitting around, but never got to use them. Oh, it’s just a low-class, common thug. Damn! Chambers was white, and that was close enough. The media finally had their man, even if they had to fiddle with the facts to make him their man.
Raised mostly in Queens by his striving but not wealthy parents, an Irish nurse and an often absent, heavy-drinking father, Chambers had attended various prep schools and one semester of college—but was thrown out of most of them, most recently, Boston University. So he moved back in with his mother.41
And yet Chambers was still incessantly described as “rich,” “privileged,” “entitled,” and “preppie.” 42 He wasn’t rich, privileged or entitled, and was only “preppie” in the strictly technical sense. (Edmund Perry could more accurately have been described as “preppie,” but that didn’t fit the story line.)
So with Chambers, instead of searching inquiries from wistful reporters asking: “Why would he do it?” the media were more than happy to delve into the dark side of the accused—his burglaries, psychiatric care, troubles with the law, cocaine habit, rotten grades and disciplinary problems in school and chronic unemployment.
Here’s another interesting thing: You didn’t see mobs of white people clogging the courtroom to heckle the prosecution or holding “No Justice, No Peace!” rallies defending Chambers. White people said: Go ahead, lock him up.
HOWARD BEACH—DECEMBER 20, 1986
Everyone was required to pretend that the real crime wave sweeping the nation was the epidemic of whites assaulting black people. As rare and precious as sightings of the aurora borealis, each one of these events would be covered like the 9/11 attack.
The media loved white goons! Where had they gone since those Democrat strongholds in the 1950s and ’60s? Whenever a white perpetrator came along, journalists would write about the crime from this angle and that, roll out references to Selma and Birmingham, and polish up their incomprehensible spiels on the “social and political context” of “the Reagan Administration’s [lack of] concern for the aspirations of minorities”—as the New York Times put it in one editorial.43 Every false, meaningless platitude liberals believed was concentrated in their white-on-black crime stories.
The vicious attack on a group of blacks by a white gang in Howard Beach, Queens, was, as Joe Sobran called it, “the literary event of the season.” It required around-the-clock coverage from newspapers, TV networks, the international press and major magazines including Time, Newsweek, Maclean’s and the Economist. Mayor Ed Koch called it a “racial lynching” and requested a federal investigation. Even the governor’s office got involved.
The deadly encounter in December 1986 began when three black men, Cedric Sandiford, Timothy Grimes and Michael Griffith, walked in front of a car full of white teenagers in Howard Beach, and the two groups exchanged epithets. A short while later, the whites returned, liquored up, with reinforcements and a baseball bat, spoiling for a fight. Grimes ran off unharmed, Sandiford got beaten and Griffith tried to flee by climbing through a hole in a fence—and ran directly onto a busy six-lane highway, where he was hit by a car and killed.
That same n
ight, the white gang, or a similar one, beat up an off-duty white fireman and a couple of Hispanics in two separate incidents in Howard Beach. But those were overkill. The whites’ attack on the black victims had secured their place in history, landing them on the cover of every newspaper in the city.
The FBI opened an investigation on the mugging of black victims and fifty police officers were assigned to investigate it. But no one heard about the gang attacks on white and Hispanic victims that same night in the same town.44
Although most of those involved were teenagers, there were criminal records on both sides. The ringleader of the white hoods, a British immigrant named Jon Lester, seventeen, had been arrested a month earlier for illegal possession of a firearm and attempting to steal a car. The victimized Grimes would be arrested days after the confrontation for stabbing his girlfriend in the back because she woke him too early.45
This was a turf fight instigated by teenage toughs, driven by alcohol and testosterone—both known to cause violence—not race. Lester had a black girlfriend, who sang his praises, saying, “He treated me better than all my other boyfriends, even my black boyfriends.” She said he took her to see the movie The Color Purple on their first date and reacted movingly.46 As one Howard Beach local said, the white kids were “punks” who “don’t like anyone.”47
White people felt no compulsion to defend the delinquents just because they were white—although residents of Howard Beach were a little testy about their whole town being portrayed as a racist cauldron on the basis of the actions of a few individuals. Thousands of black protesters repeatedly marched through Howard Beach, condemning racism and comparing the town to South Africa. One resident complained, “We don’t go to Harlem when a black man kills a white man. So we don’t want them coming here when it happens the other way around.”48
The assault in Howard Beach was the sort of crime that probably happened dozens of times every week in the United States. The only unusual aspect to this particular crime was that the perpetrators were white and the victims black. Although there are no precise numbers on territorial battles among teenagers in which one of them runs onto a highway, gets hit by a car and dies, that year, blacks committed 49.1 percent of all homicides in the country, despite being only 12 percent of the population. Only 2.6 percent of all homicides in 1986 were white-on-black killings. Black criminals killed nearly three times as many white people (949) as whites killed blacks (378) and killed sixteen times as many black people (6,235) as whites did.49
Mayor Koch called the Howard Beach attack “the most horrendous incident of violence in the nine years I have been mayor.”50
Earlier that year, a twenty-year-old white design student, Dawn Livecchi, answered the doorbell at her Fort Greene townhouse and was shot dead by a black part-time security guard, Anthony Neal Jenkins, who had followed her home from the grocery store.51 Also that year, Robert Chambers had raped and murdered Jennifer Levin. One Queens woman interviewed by the Times about Howard Beach incidentally mentioned that her husband had been beaten so badly by a group of blacks that he remained in a coma two years later—this as Koch was uttering the words that the Howard Beach attack was “the most horrendous incident of violence” he’d seen as mayor.52 Even the Howard Beach crowd didn’t beat anyone into a coma.
The full-dress news coverage for the Howard Beach episode wasn’t to highlight a rare, once-a-year occurrence. It was portrayed not as a man-bites-dog story, but a dog-bites-man story in a universe with packs of roving, rabid dogs. According to press accounts, whites attacking blacks was an epidemic—a nationwide “cancer” in the words of Mayor Koch. Of course, if that were true, this case wouldn’t have attracted so much attention.
Liberals had finally gotten the freakishly atypical crime they had been searching for. They desperately wanted just one example to illustrate the popular America-is-still-racist thesis that was so rarely evident in real life.
Thus, in the deathless prose of columnist Jimmy Breslin, “Howard Beach suddenly has become what Birmingham once meant.”53 (A few years later, the ethnically sensitive Breslin was suspended for trashing a young Korean American colleague in the newsroom as a “slant-eyed bitch” and a “yellow cur.”54)
The winner of the most pompous, treacly, self-serving—and yet at the same time, revealing—commentary was Atlantic magazine editor Jack Beatty. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Beatty blamed Howard Beach on the Republican Party: “From Richard M. Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ to Ronald Reagan’s boilerplate about ‘welfare queens,’ the legatees of the party of Lincoln have wrung political profit from the white backlash. Howard Beach shows that the politics of prejudice may have some vile life left in it yet.”55
The attorneys for the black victims were Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason. It will not surprise those familiar with their work that the entire case quickly became a circus. The victims, Grimes and Sandiford refused to testify. They wouldn’t even show up at lineups to identify their presumed attackers.
The purported reason for this lack of cooperation was to protest the failure of the police to arrest Dominic Blum, the driver of the car that stuck Griffith. Maddox and company claimed Blum had conspired with the Howard Beach gang, somehow arranging to be driving along that stretch of highway at the precise moment Griffiths ran onto it.
Even if that were logistically possible, the police found no evidence that the twenty-four-year-old Blum knew any of the defendants. He was a court officer and policeman’s son, who happened to be driving home with his girlfriend after they had seen a play at Brooklyn College that night. He didn’t even know he had hit anyone until he returned to the scene of the accident an hour later, thinking he’d hit a deer. Because of Maddox and Mason’s screwball accusation against him, Blum needed police protection and was forced to move out of his home.56
Without the victims’ cooperation, the police were only able to criminally charge the three teenagers who admitted to participating in the attack and the judge was forced to reduce the charges from murder and assault to reckless endangerment.
This provided another opportunity for accusations of racism. There were marches and demonstrations to denounce the judge for reducing the charge. Throngs of blacks filled the courtroom shouting “Injustice! Injustice!” Maddox stood outside the courthouse and proclaimed: “There will never be a conviction of a white man who murdered a black man in New York City.”57 He accused the police and court officers of misconduct and demanded that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate his allegations and also to try the case because, again, the entire New York justice system was apparently shot through with racists.
The city had put fifty cops on this case, while virtually ignoring the beatings of non-black victims in Howard Beach the same night. When the defendants were tried, the judge created a new rule just for them, limiting the number of blacks the defense could excuse from the jury—a restriction on peremptory challenges that had never before been applied to the defense.58
But the justice system was racist.
With Al Sharpton staging marches through Howard Beach and more riots threatened, Governor Mario Cuomo complied with Maddox’s insane request and appointed Charles Hynes, special state prosecutor, on the case. The governor also directed Hynes to investigate Maddox and Mason’s fantastical accusations of police and prosecutorial corruption.
Hynes approached the case like an indulgent parent making excuses for a spoiled child. “I came to believe,” he said, “that if police had acted sooner in running down Blum’s account of his evening, Maddox might well have allowed Sandiford to cooperate.”59 Yes, and maybe if they had given him a lollipop, he would have been happy, too. The police had established Blum’s whereabouts that evening within days of the attack, thus fully disproving the preposterous idea that the driver of the car had conspired with the Howard Beach thugs.
In the end, the three defendants were convicted of manslaughter. State Supreme Court justice Thomas Demakos sentenced Lester to a staggering ten to thirt
y-one years, requiring his sentences to be served consecutively. He was deported to Britain as soon as he had served his time.60 The other two defendants got six-to-eighteen and five-to-fifteen-year terms, also to be served consecutively. But the foulest punishment was forcing the defendants to listen to the judge’s little homily on how “racism breeds hatred.” 61
As was customary, the Howard Beach incident was followed by a slew of retaliatory crimes by blacks against whites, none of which would receive 1 percent of the attention the original attack had generated. The day after the attack, a dozen blacks beat and robbed a white seventeen-year-old boy sitting at a Queens bus stop, shouting, “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!” “He’s a white boy, and they killed a black boy at Howard Beach.”62 One of the suspects was picked up a few days later. He was so intimidated by the rising white supremacist influence in New York City that he had gone on TV to brag about mugging a white kid.63
A few days after that, John Santiago, a lightskinned Hispanic, was beaten and robbed by a dozen black men shouting “Howard Beach! Howard Beach!” The mugging was almost called off when Santiago spoke Spanish to them, with one saying, “Leave him alone, he’s not white.” But the crowd was more persuaded by another assailant who argued, “He looks white.”64
The retaliatory crimes were not reported with the fanfare of the Howard Beach incident. And that’s despite the black assailants’ specific mention of “Howard Beach,” offering journalists another opportunity to remind readers that: America is still racist. The press couldn’t have been less interested.
In all, the police said that thirty bias crimes were reported in the three weeks following Howard Beach, compared to four during the same period a year earlier.65 The absence of any news reports on most of these crimes meant either that they were black-on-white crimes—or they were hoaxes. If there had been one other genuine white-on-black attack, we would have heard about it.