Mugged (10 page)
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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 thirty-one years, requiring his sentences to be served consecutively. He was deported to Britain as soon as he had served his time.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
Right after the Howard Beach assailants were convicted, a year later, a white cab driver was beaten and robbed by eight blacks in Harlem, who said it was for Howard Beach. Only one newspaper, the
Chicago Tribune
, mentioned the attack, according to Nexis archives.
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A week after that, two black men dragged the white wife of a police officer into the back of a van in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, pulled her pants down and robbed her saying, “This is for Howard Beach” and “This will happen to other white women.” That attack merited short, unsigned items in only two newspapers, the
Miami Herald
and the newspaper in the town where the attack occurred: the
New York Times
.
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ANN VINER AND EVELYN WAGLER
A corollary to the hysterical overreporting of any white-on-black crime is that black-on-white hate crimes will be utterly unreported by the media, except in the town where it happened.
Hollywood made a movie about Howard Beach (and the brave prosecutor who brought racists to justice). A street in New York is named after Michael Grimes. The
New York Times
still celebrates anniversaries of the Howard Beach attack. Michael Stewart, artist, is memorialized in paintings and songs. The shooting of black immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York City cops who thought he had a gun has been featured in songs by Bruce Springsteen, Lauryn Hill and Cyndi Lauper and about four dozen other musicians. It has been written about in more than a thousand
New York Times
articles.
But does anyone know about Ann Viner? A week before the Howard Beach attack there was another interracial attack in a white neighborhood only a little father away from the
New York Times
’s building than Howard Beach is. A sixty-three-year-old white woman, Ann Viner, was attacked at her home in New Canaan, Connecticut, savagely beaten, dragged to her swimming pool and drowned by two twenty-year-old black men. It was the first murder in the affluent town in seventeen years, since a disturbed man killed four of his family members in 1970. That seems like a newsworthy story. But if you remember the wall-to-wall coverage this case got in the mainstream press at the time, immediately stop taking Ambien and call your doctor right away.
The
Times
briefly mentioned the New Canaan murder in three short news items, totaling less than a thousand words. The longest article, five hundred words, was the initial report on the murder—when there was still hope that the killers were not black.
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No other major newspapers or magazines mentioned Viner’s murder.
Twenty years later, the home invasion murders of a mother and two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut, another white-picket-fence town, received, appropriately, a lot of coverage, including more than fifty articles in the
Times
. The killers were white.
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Say, has anyone heard of Evelyn Wagler? At twenty-four, Wagler, who was white, had just moved from Chicago to Roxbury, a black part of Boston. At around 9 p.m. one evening, she was set upon by six black youths, forced to douse herself in gasoline, and set on fire. Only a few newspapers picked up the AP report on her tortuous death in 1973.
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CHANNON CHRISTIAN AND CHRISTOPHER NEWSOM
There were so few cases of white-on-black crimes that each one could be lovingly covered for months on end—while equally heinous, and far more numerous black-on-white crimes barely made the police blotter. This suggested the possibility that, at least by the 1970s, white racism against blacks wasn’t the country’s most pressing problem. But the media and their designated black spokesmen kept everyone so riled up about ghosts, no one seemed not to notice that blacks weren’t advancing. (They were probably living in fear of the black criminals white liberals kept defending.)
About the same time that the
New York Times
was giving saturation coverage of a stripper’s (false) claim that she had been raped by white Duke lacrosse players, there was a non-hoax rape case also involving white college students in North Carolina’s neighboring state of Tennessee. Channon Christian, twenty-one, and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, twenty-three, were carjacked by five blacks. Both were repeatedly raped, sodomized with objects and tortured—bleach was poured down Channon’s throat and on her bleeding genital area to eliminate the evidence while she was still alive. Newsom was shot in the head and set on fire, while Christian was tortured for several more hours before being put in a plastic bag and left in a garbage bin where she suffocated to death.
Other than a TV listing mentioning the Investigation Discovery channel’s program on the crime,
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the following constituted the
Times
’s entire coverage of this gruesome interracial rape-torture-murder, which itself was from the Associated Press:
A man convicted in the killing of a young college student and her boyfriend has been sentenced to death. The man, Lemaricus Davidson, showed no reaction as jurors announced the sentence. Mr. Davidson, 28, was found guilty of abducting Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, 23, in Knoxville during a 2007 carjacking by several armed men. Both victims were raped. Mr. Newsom was shot and Ms. Christian suffocated after she was choked and stuffed in a garbage bag and a trash can. Mr. Davidson’s brother was also convicted in the attack in August and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Two other defendants await trial.
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Since the OJ verdict, the non-Fox media still refuse to cover black-on-white hate crimes, but at least they no longer ferociously defend the killers. The Tennessee murderers are not being defensively profiled by ABC’s Lynn Sherr or
New York
magazine’s Barbara Campbell. There are no
New York Times
editorials weeping over the guilty verdicts or
Village Voice
articles claiming the defendants were “just too black for [their] own good.”
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If “hate crimes” were honestly prosecuted, we’d have another crime category where minorities lap the field. But the profusion of black-on-white hate crimes doesn’t fit the “racist America” thesis the media have been trying to sell us, so these spectacular crimes don’t make national news.
The people who report the news simply would not show a black person in an unfavorable light. When wild claims of racism were proved false, they’d just drop the matter, leaving wrecked lives in their wake, and tell themselves, “Our cause was good.” With no disincentive to manufacture even the most preposterous claims of racism—and plenty to be gained by crying “racism”—the charlatans ran riot.
How on earth was defending criminals helping the black community? And why were only black people expected to instantly defend any member of their group?
One big change since the OJ verdict is that people will now openly talk about the obvious guilt of black criminals who are obviously guilty. No longer is that a social faux pas. There is also a lot less newsprint dedicated to exploring the difficult lives black criminals have had.
Apart from everything else, criminals are also incredibly lazy, rarely venturing beyond their neighborhoods to rape, kill and plunder. Why should we care about the criminals’ tough luck when they’re busy destroying the lives of other black people who have also been dealt a bad hand? But the victims of black criminals weren’t the ones writing editorials on how to “heal” after this or that black criminal was shot by the police. White liberals were.
HEY, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT STORY…
Whenever a much-celebrated claim of racism turned out to be a hoax—which was almost always—you’d just stop hearing about it. There would never be a clippable story admitting that the media’s harrumphing had been in error:
Attention readers! That story we’ve been howling about for several months turned out to be a complete fraud.