Talk:Panther 21: Difference between revisions
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[[User:Zeddocument|Zeddocument]] ([[User talk:Zeddocument|talk]]) 16:59, 9 April 2014 (UTC) |
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kind of confused by this statment, so I moved it to talk: |
kind of confused by this statment, so I moved it to talk: |
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Revision as of 16:59, 9 April 2014
Considering this article doesn't cite sources... --emc! ╬ (t a l k) 03:37, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
source
Zeddocument (talk) 16:59, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
kind of confused by this statment, so I moved it to talk:
For 10 months the accused were held in jail awaiting trial. They were kept in solitary confinement with lights on twenty four hours a day. Several had no mattresses to sleep on. Panther 21 trial:Another Chicago
excerpts
Zeddocument (talk) 16:31, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
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They threw another champagne party at Jerry Lefcourt's ex-Law Commune on May 12—a first-anniversary-of-acquittal party for the Panther 21. a replay of the champagne party they'd thrown last December 10 for any veterans of the trial who still wanted to talk out that event. A surprising number of people came, including four defense lawyers, a couple of underground- press reporters, six defendants—and nine jurors. Anyone who followed that case through its two tedious years of press coverage could pick out the defendants at that party: the ones with the close- cropped hair and familiar faces. (Pins, posters, banners and graffiti about the "Panther 21" notwithstanding, their number had shrunk to 13 by the time they went to trial). He'd have no trouble picking out the jurors either. Graying. paunchy, white-shirt-and-tied, most of them look as if they'd wandered by mistake into the peacock assortment of radicals. In fact, the jurors felt right at home. If there was any mistake, it happened somewhere back in District Attorney Frank Hogan's $2-million showcase trial. That eight-month exercise in jurisprudence was the longest and costliest in New York State history. The government witnesses cost Si50.000; the transcript alone was $56,800.) Then the jurors took 90 minutes to reach a verdict of "not guilty" on 156 counts of bombing, arson, attempted murder, etc., which works out to something like S23.000 per minute of deliberation. Two hours later they were up in the Law Commune office at 640 Broadway, swigging the Asti Spumante from the bottle amid what one of them called "a warm goo" of hugs and tears. The New York press reacted as if J. Edgar had brought the Bcrrigans home to dinner. As it turned out. the jury- Panther blowout was only the first wave of a juridical revolution: witness the California judge who had just
Acquitted the two surviving Soledad Brothers, flanked and kissed by the wife and mother of defendant John Clutchette on the front page of the March 28 New York Post. This kind of stuff may be baffling to Frank Hogan. but it doesn't startle any juror who has undergone the rarefied political education provided by these million-dollar trials. "You can't go through a thing like that without being affected," insists lawyer Gerald Lefcourt. "I think all the jurors were. I was, totally—all the lawyers were." All juries are hand-picked. The Panther 13 jury was just a little more hand-picked than most. During the six-week voir dire, 209 registered voters of New York County (Manhattan) were sifted before prosecution and defense agreed on twelve acceptable jurors and four alternates. Seven blacks, eight whites, one Puerto Rican. Fourteen men. two women. One Jew. two practicing Catholics and a lot of ex-whatnots, ranging from Baptist through Dutch Reformed. Their ages ranged from 28 to 61; the average was 43. An apparently reasonable cross-slicing of Manhattan's population, or so it must have appeared in D.A. Hogan's office. Ah, well. As chief prosecutor Joseph Phillips (presently laboring in the Washington limbo of the House Select Committee on Crime) put it when informed of the gala December reunion. "You just don't go out and cry over spilt milk." At that December party in the rambling pumpkin-yellow law offices the spillage was still champagne. Seven of the thirteen defendants and twelve of the sixteen jurors came. The "People's Wall" of telegrams congratulating the acquittal showed signs of wear, but the euphoria was good as new. Defendant Bob Collier had a warm hug for Jim Butters. Juror No. II, and discovered he was working with ex-junkies at Phoenix House. "Far out!" Bob said, and talked about his own troubles setting up a new community school. Clark Squire had a question for jury foreman Ingram Fox: did he or did he not wink at Clark one morning from the jury box? "Yes. I did." Fox agreed. Yeah, that's what Clark had thought. He "went back and told Doc Powell and all the fellows there in jail, 'I think the foreman winked at me.' They said, 'Man, you're really dreaming, he ain't looked at you.' All the time you been staring at me, staring at me like you was after me — I said, 'Man, that cat look vicious.' But when you did that wink I knew there's some hope." Ben Giles, Juror No. 9, got the word from one ex-defendant that the fragmented Black Panther Party was banded together again and "just waiting for the right time for this thing to erupt." Ben's 28-year-old daughter had given him hell for coming to this party ("Oh. you're going out with them hoodlums again"), but Ben himself finds the Panther point of view "very interesting. On some things it makes you think." Hiram Irizarry. Juror No. 7. got in a little trouble when he called William King "Mr. King" and was abruptly told the name was Kwando Kinshasa. That was the kind of thing Hiram's wife Emma thought would happen around Black Panthers. Emma cried for days when Hiram was put on that jury, scratched her face raw from sheer nerves and refused to visit the courtroom. When Hiram was invited to the December reunion. Emma declared he could go by himself. "She was scared to be there with those people," Hiram explained. "1 just made her go. I tell her, come on, you're gonna meet them, you're gonna see how nice they are. And the lawyers gonna be there too, you know." Damn if that wasn't Emma Irizarry at the party, bouncing six-month-old Parish Shakur on her hip as she traded baby talk with his mother Afeni. Alternate juror Claudelte Sullivan chucked Parish under the chin and asked if Afeni was still having trouble with the police? Was she being followed? "Sure we are," said Afeni, who was wearing the big floppy black hat which everyone remembered from the trial. The guests were invited from five to seven, but some of the jurors and defendants were still hanging around when the champagne finally ran dry at 9:30. When a reporter called to get D.A. Hogan's response to that convivial event, a spokesman thundered irately, "This office will have no comment." Which seems reasonable enough. Despite the bubbly and the cheer, these were, after all. the thirteen Panthers who had stood accused of a plot to "blow up the whole city and half of China and Russia too, it seemed like," as one black juror put it. And half the jurors at that December party still believed the Panthers might actually have been guilty more or less as charged. "The point is, the government had to prove that. Believe me, they didn't." said jury foreman J. Ingram Fox. Ah, poor Frank Hogan. This Panther 13 jury never was what it must have seemed to him and his prosecuting arm, Joe Phillips. Take Joe Gary, Juror No. 12: black, age 48, ex-steelmill worker, 25 years in the post office, divorced father of five kids, one of them a career marine. Joe once spent six months in the Tombs on an alimony charge and came out "bitter as hell." His considerable passion was divided between race horses and women. Or take alternate Joe Rainato: age 42, plumpish, graying mechanical engineer. graduate of Jersey's Stevens Tech. sixteen years as design engineer for American Electric Power Co., which makes Ma Bell look radical, foe admitted in the voir dire that he'd read Marx. Engels and Lenin—recently— and the Black Panther Party newspaper. He did not add that he takes economics courses at the Marxist Center, and lives in a two-room Village apartment with 9,000 books and Lucy, a dingbat nude-photo model who is taking an M.A. in speech and drama. And then there was Jim Butters. Juror No. 11: age 33, high school shop teacher; three years as a jet mechanic in the Marines, five years as an elevator construction hardhat ;"dug" Goldwater. Between the Marines and the hard hat Jim spent four years surfing off California, and was "in the joint" three times for drinking and car tampering. When called for jury duty he had just cut off four inches of hair grown during a summer on his 62-acre Jersey farm, bought with his actress- wife's TV commercial residuals. (She was then playing the feathery White Owl). On the day of his voir dire he was still "cruising nice and mellow" from an acid trip two nights before. It was a peculiar trial, where the D.A. sat the jury through a reading of Chairman Mao's little red book and a screening of The Battle of Algiers (Juror Ed Kennebeck was seeing it for the third time, Joe Rainato for the fourth; Ben Giles said it "saved me $3.50 because I was going to see it after the trial anyway.") Its aftermath was still more improbable: witness the Sunday afternoon when defendant Robert Collier and his new Chinese-American wife Priscilla dropped around to composer Ingram Fox's apartment. Collier played a game of chess with Mrs. Fox, and listened to samplings from the shelf of Fox's symphonies, concertos and his grand opera —most of the works unperformed in this country. Collier said, "Mr. Fox. you're a man we should know more about." and offered to introduce juror Fox to "some wealthy people" he knows through his work with community schools. At 58, J. Ingram Fox comes on like a pillar of West Indian rectitude, dressed and mannered like a British prime minister. He insists the United States is "the greatest country in the world." Yet he's been forced to squeeze out a living lecturing on African music at Southern colleges, and when he finally went looking for recognition in Europe five years ago he "got in three months what I couldn't get here in 25, 30 years," he admits. A month after he was called for jury duty in September, 1970, Fox was due to leave for Germany, where the opera he'd spent twenty years writing, Dan Fodio, was finally scheduled for production in Hamburg. Fox lost that commitment when he was chosen for the eight- month trial" he hasn't yet gotten another. And here was a Black Panther sitting in his living room, offering to put him in touch with the money that might pull that off. Fox said, "Don't bring these wealthy people to me," and changed the subject to a fatherly homily: "Now Robert, you've got to go straight." Fox's dentist father always said you can tell a man by the company he keeps. Before the trial Ingram Fox's company did not include black revolutionaries. "Panthers!" he exclaims. "They couldn't come into this house. No! Hell no, with a capital H. I wouldn't associate with anybody with a gun." The trial that rearranged all their lives was launched on April 2, 1969, when D.A. Frank Hogan, who gives about as many press conferences as the Pope, threw one to announce that 21 Black Panther Party members had been charged with a conspiracy to commit "that very day" a battery of crimes. They read like a laundry list of violence: kill policemen and blow up two police stations, some Penn Central railroad tracks, a few subway stations, a Queens Board of Ed office, the Bronx Botanical Garden, and five midtown department stores—Alexander's, Kor- vette's, Macy's, Bloomingdale's and Abercrombie & Fitch. The charges were so splendidly baroque that even some of Hogan's enemies figured they must be true; who could credit a D.A.'s office with that kind of imagination? Not unreasonably, the sixteen jurors selected for the trial set to work assuming the State of New York had a heavy case. For eight months, forbidden to discuss the one thing they had in common —the trial—they filled their time with chess games, reading, discussing everything from hotpants and ballet to Angela Davis. They joked about which of them was the F.B.I, plant, and where the mike was hidden in the jury room. Eight months of jokes. "Right up to that last moment nobody really knew what the other jurors were thinking." said Ed Kennebeck, who couldn't sleep the night before the deliberation, worrying about who might vote to convict. Fox worried about Hills and Chaberski. Hills worried about Fox. Giles worried about Chaberski and Kennebeck. Butters worried about Beiser, Fox and Hills. Most of them worried about Miss Yanes, and Miss Yanes worried about Bowser, Giles and Hills. But when, over lunch of pastrami and roast beef sandwiches, foreman Fox took a sounding around the jury table, all twelve were shocked to find they were unanimous for acquittal. In later explanation one after another put it the same way: "There just wasn't any ease—the evidence wasn't there." So at 4:30 p.m. on that same exceedingly rainy day that Alice Crimmins was sentenced to life for the murder of her son, the jury filed back into the courtroom and were astonished to find it packed with guards—"wall to wall a sea of blue," said alternate juror Clau- dette Sullivan. Their first reaction was fear. Then Fred Hills flashed a triumphant smile to the defense table, where the stunned lawyers (who had expected two weeks of deliberations and "a substantial likelihood of convictions") were still drunk from the bucket of martinis they had consumed over a last-supper lunch. As Ingram Fox started to roll out his 156 "not guiltys"—they took him twenty minutes to deliver—the place busted wide open. Defendants Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird shrieked and sobbed. Male Panthers don't cry in public, but their Jewish lawyers went to pieces. Some of the jury were also in tears. WASPy Ed Kennebeck was waving a black-power fist. As the jurors filed out of the courtroom to cries of "Power to the people! Power to the jury!," a cop in the hall shot a fat wad of spit toward their feet. The jubilation gradually shifted to the corridors outside. Jerry Lefcourt was one of the last to leave the courtroom; when he did, D.A. Joe Phillips was sitting at the prosecution table, his bowed head in his hands. Supreme Court Justice John Murtagh sat on the bench, staring ahead of him "like into blank space," Lefcourt recalls. Later another D.A. told him that the news hit Hogan's office "like the death of John Kennedy. Frank Hogan is the most powerful D.A. in this country, and it was the most overwhelming defeat that office ever suffered." The twelve architects of this defeat were at that moment caught in a blizzard of celebration in the murky lobby of the Criminal Court Building, with press, families and friends of the defendants swarming in a blaze of television kliegs. Five defendants—Lumumba Shakur. Bob Collier. Clark Squire, Kwando Kinshasa and Ali Bey Hassan —were held in jail on other charges. But six others—Katara. Curtis Powell. Shaba Om, Joan Bird, Baba Odinga and Afeni Shakur—were set free to walk down the center aisle and out. most of them after 25 months in jail. Down in the lobby Afeni spotted jury foreman Fox, and the kissing started. Somebody said why not move the party to the Law Commune, and the $50 that defense attorney Bill Crain won in the office pool (winning bet on the length of deliberation: one day) was snatched to finance the first wave of champagne and cold cuts. As the first juror walked in, a "tremendous cheer" went up. "You felt like a big conquering hero," said Joe Rainato, who remembers it as the happiest day in his life. Claudette Sullivan says that she hadn't even felt that way at her own wedding. If you can believe the newspapers, what judge Murtagh had planned for that evening was dinner for 76 at Doyle's Corner Pub on Lafayette Street —dinner for twelve jurors and 64 guards. Instead there were 200 people milling around the back room of the Law Commune, pummeling and clutching, bottles waving, cameras popping, phones jangling. Arriving jurors, whose stony faces had been searched for months like sheep entrails, were seized and bussed by total strangers. In the middle of the pandemonium sat five stunned defendants, "acting like they were in a dream," said one juror. (Antigua-born Baba Odinga, who had immigration troubles over his head, never showed. When the lawyers asked, "Where's Baba?" the quiet answer was. "He split.") Steve Chaberski's wife Laraine had gone to the trial only once and found the Panthers "really scary to look at"; she walked into the acquittal party and was clapped into a bear hug by Joan Bird, who cried, "You have a wonderful husband!" Jubilant lawyers pounced on the jurors for details: when and how did they decide? Jerry Rubin crashed the party in a Superman shirt. But the stars of the party were those unlikely guests, the jurors. Most of them took the chance to deliver brief exhortations to the defendants about straightening up and flying right. But nobody laid it on the line like Joe Gary, who told Curtis Powell and Shaba Om."It could just as easily have been the other way, and your ass woulda been cookcd. From here on out you spit on the sidewalk and they'll lock you up for fifteen years." The defendants all smiled politely, said, "Yeah, thanks," and took another pull on their champagne bottles. Jim Butters walked in with his wife, the dynamite S50.000-a-ycar model, and even in her dazed condition Afeni recognized Toni Butters as the "good- by sugar, hello Tab" girl. It had not been lost on (im during the trial that Afeni, the dedicated revolutionary, dressed "better than my wife." Obie was telling anybody who would listen that the four alternates were also unanimous for acquittal, fackic Freidrich, from The East Village Other, begged Ingram Fox not to read her earlier columns, which described him as "a 57-year-old Uncle Tom." There was a lot of talk about beards—the one Chaberski suddenly shaved off (Bill Crain said he decided then Steve was the C.I.A. plant), and the one Butters grew during the trial. Everyone remarked on the fact that Ingram Fox could actually smile. On his way out the door Ingram Fox was waylaid one last time by a Daily News photographer: "Take your coat off—kiss him, loan!" Joan Bird obligingly pecked. The resulting buss appeared the next day, framed by a News editorial that began, "We are profoundly bored with the beefs and bawls of some of those acquitted." Late that rainy night down in the IND subway station Ben Giles walked up to a bench where some kid sat alone. He was amazed to see it was Katara, the youngest of the 21. Ben sat down and said, "Gee, you left the party early." Katara shrugged: "What's there to do, where's there to go? People take two years out of your life, it makes you kind of bitter." The train came in; the two got on. Katara sat by himself, head back, brooding, until he wandered off at 125th Street. Well, it had been a hell of a party. Everyone was there except the judge, the D.A.s and the lady from The New York Times who noted distastefully in the Sunday edition, quoting some onlooker, "It was almost as if the jurors had been sitting there growing fond of the people they were being told such terrible things about." The morning after the notorious party loe Rainato was confronted by an irate boss, holding a Daily News open to Joe's picture and demanding, "What were you doing here?" Sitting on a Harlem park bench with some retired black men, Joe Gary overheard indignant discussion of the jury- Panther blowout: "Disgusting, awful disgusting. Can you imagine something like this happening?" Back at the post office Joe took considerable flak from white co-workers angered by the verdict. Chaberski got one crank letter; Butters got fifteen or twenty. In her mixed neighborhood around 228th Street Eleter Yanes got a lot of raised fists and "Right on!"—even her Italian bulchcr approved. But on his 148th- Strcct block Ben Giles "lost a lot of friends. They all said, 'How the hell did you ever come to a verdict like that? You're gonna be sorry you turned a bunch of killers like that loose.'" His only support came from the neighborhood Panthers who run a karate school across the street; they gave him the fist and said, "Hey, Ben- nie! Right on, man." Doting grandfather and dedicated Mason, Ben Giles understands why even his daughter's friends opposed the verdict: "Just the word 'Panther,' you know, terrifies some people. You'd be surprised." But he himself still feels he "did the right thing," and he prizes a postcard from Afcni. a Christmas card from Bob Collier. Alternate juror Murray Schneider was stirred enough by post-party afterthoughts to draft a letter to The Times complaining that the jury should have done more deliberating of the evidence: "It's a two-million-dollar trial—you don't settle it in an hour and a half." Murray never sent the letter and, when pressed, he will agree there was "no real, solid, hard evidence. But I didn't want them to go scot-free. We didn't feel they were completely innocent." Curtis Powell put it nicely the night of the acquittal: "The jury knew we did somelhin'." Oddly enough, none of the jurors have since inquired of the defendants exactly what they did or didn't do. Joe Rainato says he'd be afraid to ask. Hiram Irizarry figures, "They never going to tell you the truth, right? What's the use to ask?" Lawyer ferry Lefcourt is convinced the jurors knew his clients were trial changed everyone it touched. After it was finally over Jerry broke down and got married, and gave up socialized law; the much-touted Law Commune with its pooled fees barely survived the acquittal hangovers. The Panthers? Some marriages broke up—casualties of that two-year separation. The various Panther factions are still at war, and the New York party has regrouped under the banner of "the Panther 21." Lumumba told one of the jurors that the acquittal actually did "restore my faith in humanity." His ex-wife Afcni said later, "You can translate that as 'whites.'" The jurors? Murray Schneider says he hasn't changed at all—he's still "an honest middle-income American who believes in apple pie, motherhood and the American flag." Jim Butters says he was deradicalized. He thinks that the way things are now the Miranda warnings and the search-and-seizure laws "could be utilized to protect someone who has committed a crime." But Ben Giles, the 62-year-old ex- longshoreman, says, "If I was going to indict anybody, I would have indicted the D.A. and the judge for a conspiracy to break up the Panther Party. I really would." Ingram Fox, the 58-year-old composer, thinks the grand jury should be investigated for bringing the charges in the first place. Eleter Yanes, the 53-year-old insurance clerk, used to be "a little afraid of the Panthers and not as afraid of the police. Now I'm a little more afraid of the police than I am of the Panthers." guilty of something: "Some believed the undercover agents had lied. Some said, 'So what?'" He sees the fact that all were acquitted as something of a political statement. "No question about it in my mind—we're very proud of that." says Lefcourt. "At the time of that verdict the climate changed radically in this city in terms of other cases—even run-of-the-mill cases, burglaries. robberies which involved poor black defendants. All of a sudden there were incredible numbers of acquittals, hung juries, people refusing to convict in overwhelming circumstances. Here you have a society that forces people into crime in many instances—you'd be surprised how many people know that, and want to say so once in a while with a jury vote." Lefcourt believes the Panther 13 Sieve Chaberski and his social- worker wife Laraine are now planning to put each other through law school; Laraine goes first. Hiram Iri- zarry is starting work toward a B.A. in social work at Bronx Community College. He doesn't believe everything he reads in the papers any more and thinks "what happened to the Panthers might happen to me just as easy —that 1 had to spend a lot of time in jail for something I never do." Fred Hills thinks anybody who's impressed with what a fair trial the Panther 13 got on the thirteenth floor of the Criminal Court Building should drop by the second floor, where the routine arraignment and plea-bargaining go on amid "a sea of black faces." Joe Rainato thinks now his phone is tapped for sure. But he never talks on it anyway: "Lucy does. But they'd go crazy if they listened to that." Joe Gary says he's giving up trying to get rich as the best handicappcr that ever lived, but he doesn't credit that to the trial. It probably has more to do with his postman's-paradise life during the trial, living with two different women. After the first happened to find out about the second, she spent a lot of time on the phone to the courthouse, the D.A., the post office, the police, anyplace that would listen. telling them Juror Joe Gary was a Black Panther who was getting instructions in bomb making from that other woman. Joe "went through hell and high water" worrying that he might cause a mistrial—or wind up in the slammer himself—and by the time the trial ended he needed three months off work to recover from what the psychiatrist diagnosed as "a state of anxiety and nervous depression." Most jurors agree that the man most radicalized by the trial was 48-year-old Colorado-born Ed Kennebeck, Two years ago Ed was something of a timid Milquetoast, a copy editor who once described himself as "a believer in The New York Times." The trial jolted him through anger into activism. Now he's writing his own book on the trial, he has supported the Yippies at press conferences, and even went on Channel 13 to roast D.A. Hogan. Not that any of this comes easily: still nervous and diffident, full of sclf- doubts, he moans, "The fact that 1 didn't throw up all over the cameras was a triumph." One summer night when lawyer Bill Crain was eating out at the Sevilla with Ed and Joe Rainato, he brought along a surprising guest in red hotpants —Afeni Shakur. Ed greeted her with hugs and asked her to autograph his copy of Look for Me in the Whirlwind. the collective biography of the Panther 21; Afeni asked Ed if he knew of any jobs available. A few weeks later she happened to move two blocks from Ed's apartment in the Village. She got the habit of popping in to see him. sometimes bringing Lumumba or Curtis Powell. They collaborated on a few articles; Afeni plugged him in to some prisons and prisoners. The friendship still surprises Ed: "Every time Afeni rings my bell and we have dinner, I'm amazed," he says. "I'm templed to say to my friends. 'Guess who's coming to dinner?'" Ed and Joe Rainato still drag each other to every radical demonstration going, but Joe hovers on the brink of his convictions, hedging on a standing invitation to join the Communist Party: "I say I'm not sure. I'm afraid of losing my job." Ed, these days, isn't afraid of much. Increasingly, he doesn't "think people can call themselves radical unless they're willing to act on it." All he questions is which action to take: "Blow something up? I'm for it—not people. But if I thought bombing would work, I'd be for it. I'm sure a lot of people arc." The crowd at the first-anniversary party was thinner than expected. Ingram Fox confused the hours and came late. Fred Hills had a sore throat, Ben Giles was homebound with high blood pressure, and Claudette Sullivan's aunt had died the day before. Some of the defendants also had good reasons to skip the party. Cete- wayo has been in Algeria with Eldridgc Cleaver since he jumped $50,000 bail during the trial. Dharuba, who jumped SI00,000 bail, has since been convicted of a Bronx social club stick-up, and is facing charges in the arson-murder of West Coast Panther Samuel Napier and the machine-gun wounding of two cops on Riverside Drive. Ali Bey Hassan recently jumped $15,000 bail on the charge of attempted murder of a Newark cop. Baba Odinga hasn't been seen aboveground since the acquittal afternoon a year ago. (The F.B.I, recently told lawyer Lefcourt they have no warrant out for Baba; Baba is not convinced.) But among those who did turn up to sample the champagne, a good time was had. |