The Nation's Pulse/Howard Beach Bums
Tucker, William
THE NATION'S PULSE HOWARD BEACH BUMS I n 1982 three black subway workers 1 returning home from their afternoon shift on Coney Island stopped at a bagel shop in Gravesend, a tough Italian...
...District attorneys and police officers everywhere say that the most difficult problem in prosecuting criminals is getting victims and witnesses to come forth and testify...
...Blum crept home with a broken windshield...
...Ordinary people on both sides have a common interest in maintaining this informal armistice...
...Even if I took some weird pleasure out of seeing innocent blacks beaten to death, the only major consequence of the event for me is that my chances of being jumped in the subway next week by a group of "young bloods" screaming "Howard Beach...
...Under extreme pressure, Cuomo finally took the case out of Santucci's hands and gave it to Charles Hynes, a WASPish special state prosecutor...
...Yet all this outcry had a distinctly anti-Italian flavor...
...Antennae in Howard Beach are so attuned to the presence of strange blacks that, five minutes after the three men stopped for pizza at a busy intersection, police arrived to investigate the "suspicious incident...
...Within minutes they were set upon by a.gang of white teenagers wielding rocks and sticks...
...The attackers were quickly identified to police by people in the neighbor- hood...
...No one would deny that there are racial tensions in any American city—and that these tensions can easily mushroom into violence...
...He made it across the east-bound lane, but was struck by a car on the west-bound side and killed...
...Maddox and Mason, both criminal attorneys, are part of an emerging "second-tier" of black leadership that finds itself challenging not only white politicians but the established black leadership...
...In a city where race relations are not notably antagonistic, the cry has suddenly gone up that "blacks can't William Tucker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent and the author of Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime in America...
...Instead, they were looking for an indictment against the whole white race...
...We've got our own agenda'—to which the New York Post responded: "That's precisely the point...
...Blum had already said his windshield was so badly cracked that he barely made it home...
...The story was front-page news on Sunday...
...I recall a left-wing fringe group plastering my neighborhood with posters urging racial warfare...
...possibly get a fair shake out of the system...
...Blum told police the accident occurred when he was forced to make a fast turn into the right-hand lane after the car in front of him suddenly slowed down (probably to avoid Griffith...
...Jon Lester—a 17-year-old who looks 13, with bleached hair and a pending gun rap—was identified as the main instigator...
...W hat is most remarkable about the Howard Beach incident is how quickly irrationality can take over public discourse...
...Jimmy Breslin, New York's most reliable weathervane of demagoguery, carefully noted that the situation wasn't surprising since Santucci was Italian and Italians are known to be involved in organized crime...
...It was worse than a lynching since there wasn't even a pretense that the three men had done anything wrong...
...The owner stayed with the car while the three passengers—Cedric Sandiford, 36, Michael Griffith, 23, and Timothy Grimes, 18—went for help...
...Maddox, a lesser known figure, has also been critical of the justice system on several issues...
...I mention all this only because it proves that the justice system can and does work'in New York—when victims, witnesses, and attorneys are willing to give it a chance...
...While glancing behind him, he struck something that broke his windshield...
...Griffith tried to cross the highway...
...A couple of these courageous hoodlums had spotted the trio earlier, shouted racial epithets at them, and then returned to a birthday party to arm themselves and round up more brave recruits...
...asked the Daily News, trying to add its own aura of mystery...
...They would not allow either Sandiford crr Grimes to testify unless Blum was also charged with murder...
...Both were beaten until they found a hole in a chain-link fence and ran out onto the highway...
...The impact woke his girlfriend, who was asleep on the front seat...
...The family received hundreds of threatening phone calls from angry blacks...
...Within a year, four youths were put on trial...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 27...
...He claimed he was driving home with his girlfriend from a play at Brooklyn College and had several witnesses to his whereabouts throughout the evening...
...Minutes after the police left, the men were set upon by three carloads of white teenagers wielding baseball bats and atree limb...
...Sandiford headed west along the east-bound shoulder and escaped...
...The three ringleaders were charged only by William 'Ricker with assault and released from jail...
...If it were up to me, the whole gang from Howard Beach would be put away for twenty years...
...Only when the extent of the damage to the front end of his car became apparent did Blum'F 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 father—a policeman—drive him back to the scene to report the accident...
...Maddox withholding cooperation by Mr...
...Their argument for a "cover-up" was ludicrous almost beyond description...
...If he was in the area and saw whites chasing a black, he could have joined in, especially since he's a court officer...
...A 11 this might be of interest to people who are still trying to prove that Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, or that Shakespeare really didn't write Shakespeare's plays...
...Even the Daily News's ordinarily intelligent columnist, Bob Herbert (who is black), couldn't resist taking a swipe at "Dominick CI Thought I Hit a Tire') Blum...
...There really doesn't have to be any connection between Blum and the gang," Mason explained later...
...Several local witnesses, including three obviously terrified teenage girls, testified against them...
...By Monday fifty detectives had canvassed the neighborhood and made eleven arrests...
...Why did Blum not bring his own car back to the accident scene...
...The two killings, although identical, have had almost the opposite consequences...
...Here is the sequence of events: On Friday, December 19, around midnight, a car carrying four black men stalled in a remote spot near the Gateway National Recreation Area on Jamaica Bay...
...The Howard Beach case, on the other hand, has brought New York to the fringes of racial warfare...
...Hazel Dukes, director of the New York NAACP, expressed satisfaction that the arrests had been made...
...Clearly Queens Italians couldn't be trusted on such matters...
...As the heir apparent to 1960s liberalism, Cuomo obviously had to appease blacks...
...Howard Beach...
...The resolution of the case lasted one week...
...At that point, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, two black attorneys representing Sandiford and Grimes respectively, announced they would not allow their clients to testify any further because District Attorney Santucci was "covering up" the case...
...Mayor Koch expressed outrage over what he charitably called a "lynching...
...Yet when two key witnesses and their attorneys decide to blow a solid murder case by insisting on their own bizarre interpretation of events, this suddenly proves the system is "racist...
...But no such thing happened...
...The main task of the justice system is to patrol the borders between the races and make sure that hotheads on either side are kept under control...
...Why was Mr...
...Grimes ran three long blocks north to the entrance to the Belt Parkway, where he hitched a ride and escaped...
...Sandiford and Griffith fled east on 156th Avenue, running seven blocks until they were trapped on a grassy shoulder beside the Belt Parkway...
...Like racism, the questions seemed to go on and on...
...THE NATION'S PULSE HOWARD BEACH BUMS I n 1982 three black subway workers 1 returning home from their afternoon shift on Coney Island stopped at a bagel shop in Gravesend, a tough Italian neighborhood a few blocks north in Brooklyn...
...The newspapers—not wanting to say that two black attorneys were making jackasses out of themselves—tried to hum along as best they could...
...Blum stopped the car and the couple tried to peer behind them through heavy traffic to see what had happened...
...have increased significantly...
...Probably the best measure of success of the Willie Turks prosecution is that, in the middle of the current controversy, few people have even mentioned it...
...Blacks themselves announced they would dramatize their anger by refusing to eat pizza on Martin Luther King Day...
...The Belt Parkway is the major limited-access highway through the area, with hundreds of cars passing every minute, even late at night...
...W by did the Howard Beach case explode while the Willie Turks case did not...
...By now you have probably heard all about the infamous Howard Beach incident, where yet another group of white teenagers beat three black men and chased one of them to his death on the Belt Parkway...
...This thing is bigger than Michael Griffith," Mason told reporters...
...Police had already investigated Sandiford's tenuous claims that Griffith had been run over by one of the gang members, but found the logistics highly improbable...
...When nothing became visible and no other cars stopped, they decided they must have struck "an animal or a tire...
...Mason has been highly critical of Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau on several incidents involving blacks—including the Bernhard Goetz case—and ran an unsuccessful primary campaign against Morgenthau in 1985...
...Yet simple justice was obviously not what Maddox and Mason had in mind...
...Queens district attorney John Santucci announced plans to charge three ringleaders with second-degree murder, worth about 25 years in prison...
...Blum lives in Flatbush five miles away and had never even visited Howard Beach...
...One of the workers, Willie Turks, age 35, was beaten to death...
...All four of the young men were convicted, one of manslaughter, and three are still in prison...
...But to Mason and Maddox, it was just the sort of fantastic plot of which all white people are capable...
...Since Sandiford was the only witness who saw the gang chase Griffith onto the highway, the tenuous murder charge had to be abandoned...
...In order to have been part of the initial attack—and then to have gotten out onto the highway—Blum would have had to split off from the chase somewhere along 156th Avenue, drive north three blocks to the cloverleaf entrance, drive west on the Belt Parkway at 50 mph for over a mile, and then finally—with perfect prescience—arrive at the exact spot where Griffith was trying to cross the highway...
...Gangs of blacks have attacked whites, shouting "Howard Beach, Howard Beach...
...The system seemed to be working about as well as it ever does...
...In the Willie Turks case, justice was done, swiftly and surely...
...No one bothered to ask what would happen when Hynes reached the same conclusion Santucci had—that Blum was just an innocent third party...
...The Times and the News breathed a sigh of relief and hailed Cuomo's "compromise...
...Maddox and Mason announced a "people's victory" and expressed confidence that Blum would be arrested shortly...
...Based only on Sandiford's recollection that he had been pursued by a gang member in a "black Chevrolet," Maddox and Mason decided that the driver of the Dodge Aspen that struck Griffith—a 24-year-old court officer named Dominick Blum—was part of the gang that first attacked the three men at the pizza shop...
...About three miles up the road they wandered into Howard Beach, a tightly knit Italian community tucked between the Belt Parkway and JFK Airport...
...Sandiford...
...On cue, however, blacks all over New York suddenly decided that Blum, the son-of-a-policeman, must be the real villain...
...Usually, the problem is a witness's indifference—or fear of retaliation from criminals...
...ingenuously inquired the New York Times...
...As black anger mounted, Governor Mario Cuomo found himself in what may soon become a familiar dilemma...
...When the justice system fails to do this, or is subverted by radicals with a different agenda, then ordinary people of both races are left with no one to confront but each other...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
