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The legendary social commentator and stand up comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction.
The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be.
*****
Some facts about the case from the PDC (2006):
Mumia Is an Innocent Man Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for nearly 24 years, falsely convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent and mountains of evidence show this, including the confession of another man, Arnold Beverly, to the murder. All the elements of the capitalist “justice” system colluded in framing up this former Black Panther and MOVE supporter because he is an eloquent and defiant spokesman for the oppressed. The fight to free Mumia has now reached a critical juncture. Last December, the federal appeals court put Mumia’s case on a “fast track” for decision, marking the last stages of the legal proceedings. Both Mumia and prosecutors are appealing decisions made in 2001 by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned the death sentence but upheld every aspect of Mumia’s frame-up conviction. The state is as determined as ever to execute Mumia and has appealed. He has been barred by the courts from presenting evidence that he is innocent. But the district attorney filed legal papers in the federal appeals court in April, opening its case with a venomous, lying statement to portray Mumia as a cop-killer who must be executed. In a short time, even as soon as six months, the court could decide what is next for Mumia: death, life in prison or more legal proceedings. Mumia was locked up on death row in 1982 based on lying testimony extorted by the cops without a shred of physical evidence. The judge at his trial, Albert Sabo—known as the “King of Death Row”—was overheard by a court stenographer saying, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.” Rigging the jury to exclude black people, the prosecution incited jurors with the grotesque lie that Mumia’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was committed to kill a cop “all the way back then.” The 1982 conviction was secured with arguments that the jury could disregard any doubts about Mumia’s guilt because he would have “appeal after appeal.” In nearly two decades of appeals, each and every court has rejected the reams of documented evidence of the blatant frame-up of Mumia. For over four years, Pennsylvania state as well as federal courts have refused to even consider the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. The execution of Stanley Tookie Williams by the state of California in December casts an ominous shadow. The legal lynching of Williams, which provoked an outcry nationally and internationally, signaled the determination of the U.S. capitalist rulers to fortify their machinery of death in the face of growing reticence in the population over how the death penalty is applied. Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s foremost political prisoner, is the executioners’ number one target. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this clear when, in denying clemency for Williams, he cited the fact that Williams’ 1998 book, Life in Prison, was dedicated to—among others—Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia’s case demonstrates what the racist death penalty is all about. It is the lynch rope made legal, the ultimate weapon in the government’s arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. A legacy of chattel slavery, the death penalty is maintained in a society where the segregation of the majority of the black population is used as a wedge to divide the laboring masses and perpetuate the rapacious rule of capital. The murderous brutality of the racist capitalist system was displayed for all to see when thousands of people, overwhelmingly black and poor, were left to die in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Mumia’s appeal takes place in the context of the government’s assertion of its “right” to disappear, torture or even assassinate its perceived opponents, and to wiretap and spy on anyone and everyone. In the name of the “war on terror,” rights won through tumultuous class and social battles are being put through the shredder by the Bush administration with the support of the Democratic Party. The purpose is to terrorize and silence any who would stand in the way of the capitalist rulers’ relentless drive for profits and their imperialist adventures, like the colonial occupation of Iraq. As Mumia’s case moves through the final stages of legal proceedings, the fight for his freedom is urgently posed. The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League/U.S.—stands for pursuing every legal avenue in Mumia’s behalf while putting no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. Through publicity and action, we have struggled to mobilize the broadest social forces, centered on the labor movement, to demand Mumia’s freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty. As Mumia faced execution in August 1995, a mass outpouring of protest nationally and internationally—from civil liberties organizations and such heads of state as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to trade unions representing millions of workers—succeeded in staying the executioner’s hand. Today we face greater odds. But if undertaken through a mobilization based on the social power of the working class, the fight for Mumia’s freedom would be a giant step forward in the defense of all of us against the increasingly depraved and vicious rulers of this country. Anatomy of a Frame-Up In the eyes of the capitalist state, from the time Mumia was a 15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in 1969, he was a dead man on leave. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pronounced: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” This policy was carried out under both the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson and his Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, and the Republican Nixon administration. Under the FBI’s “counter-intelligence” program known as COINTELPRO, 38 Panthers were murdered and hundreds of others framed up and railroaded to prison. The 900 pages of FBI files the PDC was able to obtain on Mumia’s behalf, even though highly expurgated, make clear that the FBI and cops used any “dirty trick” in their mission to get him. His every move was tracked and his name put on the FBI’s Security Index, the 1960s version of a “terrorist” hit list. Even with the demise of the Panthers, the state did not call off its vendetta against Mumia. As a journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” Mumia’s impassioned defense of black rights continued to enrage them. The Philly cops particularly seethed over his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization, which was subjected to an onslaught of state terror. Mumia was targeted for death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said. And in the early morning hours of 9 December 1981 at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets in Philadelphia, the cops finally saw their chance. Mumia was driving a cab through the area that night. He heard gunshots. He saw people running, saw his own brother and got out of his cab to help him. Moments later, Mumia was critically wounded by a bullet through the chest. Nearby lay a wounded police officer, Daniel Faulkner. The cops found their long-awaited opportunity and seized on it to frame up Mumia as a “cop killer.” The prosecution’s case rested on three legs, all based on lies: the testimony of “eyewitnesses” coerced through favors and terror; a “confession” purportedly made by Mumia the night of the shooting that was such a blatant hoax that it didn’t surface until months later; and nonexistent ballistics “evidence.” In 2001, this frame-up was completely blown to pieces with Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was the man who shot Faulkner. In a sworn affidavit printed in the PDC pamphlet Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!, Beverly stated: “I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area. “Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene. Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting.” Beverly stated that the second shooter also fled the scene. This is supported by a sworn affidavit by Mumia’s brother, Billy Cook, who testified that his friend Kenneth Freeman was a passenger in Cook’s VW at 13th and Locust that night. Freeman later admitted to Cook that he was part of the plan to kill Faulkner and had participated in the shooting and then fled the scene. This is further corroborated by the testimony of a witness at the scene, William Singletary, who said he saw a passenger get out of Cook’s VW, shoot Faulkner and then flee the scene. At least half a dozen witnesses who were on the scene the night of the shooting saw, from several different vantage points, one or more black men flee. Police radio “flashes” right after the shooting reported that the shooters had fled the scene with Faulkner’s gun. Five witnesses, including two cops, describe someone at the scene wearing a green army jacket, which both Beverly and Freeman were wearing that night. Neither Mumia nor Cook wore a green army jacket: Mumia wore a red ski jacket with wide vertical blue stripes and Cook had a blue jacket with brass buttons. Beverly said that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. This is confirmed by no less an authority than the state Medical Examiner’s office, whose record written the same morning as the shooting quotes a homicide officer saying that Mumia was shot by “arriving police reinforcements,” not by Faulkner. Other witnesses have corroborated Beverly’s testimony that undercover and uniformed police were in the vicinity at the time of the shooting, which Beverly assumed meant that they were in on the plan to kill Faulkner. One witness, Marcus Cannon, saw two undercover cops on the street across from the shooting. William Singletary also saw “white shirts” (police supervisors) at the scene right after the shots were fired. The prosecution dismisses the idea that the cops would kill one of their own as an outlandish invention. Leaving aside that Beverly passed two lie detector tests, his account fits with the fact that at the time of Faulkner’s killing in 1981, there were at least three ongoing federal investigations into police corruption in Philadelphia, including police connections with the mob. Police working as FBI informants were victims of hits in the early 1980s. A former federal prosecutor acknowledged that the Feds had a police informant whose brother was a cop, just as Faulkner had a brother who was a cop. A sworn affidavit by Donald Hersing, a former informant in an FBI investigation into police corruption, confirms that at the time of Faulkner’s shooting the word was out that the Feds had an informant in the police force. The commanding officer of the Central Police Division, where the murder of Faulkner took place, the chief of the police Homicide Division and the ranking officer at the scene of Faulkner’s killing, Alfonzo Giordano, were all under investigation at the time on federal corruption charges. These cops were literally the chain of command in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Giordano had been the right-hand man for Philadelphia’s notoriously racist police chief and later mayor, Frank Rizzo. From 1966 to 1970, Giordano was in charge of the cop “Stakeout” squad, which led the police raid on the Black Panthers’ headquarters in 1970. He was also the supervisor of the 15-month police siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village house in 1977-78, which resulted in nine MOVE members being sent to prison on frame-up charges of killing a cop. Giordano knew exactly who Mumia was. The senior officer on the scene, he had both motive and opportunity to frame up Mumia for the killing of Faulkner. Giordano originated the claim that Mumia’s gun—the putative murder weapon—was lying beside him on the street. But according to police radio records, the cops were still looking for the gun some 14 minutes after hordes of police had arrived on the scene. Giordano arranged the identification of Mumia by cab driver Robert Chobert, who became a witness for the prosecution. Giordano was the central witness for the prosecution at Mumia’s pretrial hearing. But he was never called as a witness at Mumia’s trial. Shortly before the trial, he was assigned to a desk job. One working day after Mumia was convicted, Giordano resigned from the force. In 1986, Giordano copped a plea on federal charges based on his receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal payoffs from 1979 to 1980. He didn’t spend a day in jail. Prosecution’s Web of Lies The prosecution’s story is that two people were on the corner of 13th and Locust where Faulkner was shot: Mumia’s brother Billy Cook and Faulkner. They claim that Mumia ran across the street when he saw his brother being beaten by Faulkner. According to police and prosecutors, Mumia shot the cop in the back, the cop shot back at Mumia and then Mumia stood over the fallen cop and shot him “execution style” several times in the head. Even a close examination of the cops’ and prosecution’s own evidence gives the lie to this scenario. A look at the “three legs” of the prosecution’s case provides not only stark confirmation of Mumia’s innocence but clear corroboration of Beverly’s testimony. The Prosecution’s Witnesses: Even with police and prosecution threats and favors at the time of the 1982 trial, no witness testified to seeing Mumia actually shoot Faulkner. Only one, Cynthia White, the prosecution’s star witness, testified that she thought she saw a gun in Mumia’s hand when he crossed the street. A prostitute working in the area, White claimed to have witnessed the events from the southeast corner of 13th and Locust. Yet the other two prosecution witnesses, as well as two defense witnesses who knew White, all denied she was at the scene during the shooting! Other prostitutes testified in subsequent court hearings that White alternately got police favors or was threatened by police in order to extract her testimony. As for Robert Chobert, at first he told police that the shooter “ran away.” After further interrogation, he changed his story, claiming that Mumia stood over Faulkner while the shots were fired and that no one ran away. A cab driver using a suspended license while on probation for felony arson, Chobert was given favors by the prosecution in exchange for his testimony. He later admitted that he never saw the shooting. The third state witness was Michael Scanlan. He initially identified Mumia as the VW driver but then claimed that the shooter ran across Locust Street, which Beverly admits that he did. He also admitted that he did not know if Mumia was the man he saw. Ballistics and Forensics: The prosecution claimed that ballistics evidence was “consistent” with Mumia’s gun being the murder weapon even while admitting that the “consistency” applied to millions of handguns. There is no evidence that Mumia’s gun was even fired that night. There was every opportunity to test Mumia’s hands, or the gun, for evidence that it had been recently fired. But according to police no such tests, which are standard operating procedure, were ever done! The Stakeout officer who claimed he picked up Mumia’s gun did not turn it over for more than two hours, providing more than ample time to have it tampered with. The Medical Examiner’s report states that Faulkner was shot with a .44 calibre bullet, yet Mumia’s gun was a .38 calibre. Although the crime lab claimed that the main bullet fragment removed from Faulkner’s head was too damaged to test, the defense team’s ballistics expert denied this. A second bullet fragment removed from the head wound simply disappeared without a trace. Evidence at the scene—bullet fragments, blood stains, the absence of divots in the sidewalk—refutes the prosecution claim that Faulkner was shot repeatedly while lying on the ground. The bullet patterns are far more consistent with multiple shooters, as Beverly testifies. A copper bullet jacket found at the scene was inconsistent with either Faulkner’s or Mumia’s guns, suggesting that a different gun was fired. Similarly, type O blood was found at the scene, but Faulkner, Mumia and Cook were all type A, suggesting that another person was present and injured. The angle of Mumia’s own wounds is impossible if he was shot while standing over Faulkner as the prosecution claimed. However, Mumia’s wounds are consistent with Beverly’s testimony that Mumia was shot by a cop at the scene. The “Confession”: The frame-up’s final leg was the claim that Mumia, lying in a pool of blood at the hospital where he was taken for treatment, shouted out that he had shot the cop. Yet the police officer assigned to guard Mumia there reported that same day that Mumia “made no comments.” In reality, he was so badly wounded, with a bullet hole through one lung, and had been so badly beaten by police on the street and at the hospital, that he could not have “shouted” anything. The “confession” was manufactured by the prosecution at a roundtable meeting with cops two months after the shooting. Priscilla Durham, a security guard, was the only hospital employee who backed up the cops’ “confession” lie. In 2003 Durham’s stepbrother Kenneth Pate swore that Durham said she was pressured by the cops to say Mumia confessed. Pate also said Durham heard Mumia say, “Get off me, get off me, they’re trying to kill me.” Mumia Abu-Jamal has always categorically maintained his innocence. As he declared in a 2001 affidavit: “I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent…. I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to.” Mobilize Now to Free Mumia! The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class nature of the capitalist state. Its justice system is class- and race-biased to the core. The cops and courts who framed up this innocent man, the living tomb of the prison system in which he is jailed, the executioner who stands ready to kill—all are instruments of organized violence used to preserve the rule of the capitalist class through the forcible suppression of the working class and oppressed. Smashing this racist frame-up machine will require a socialist revolution that overturns the capitalist system. Demands for a “new trial” which have been raised by liberals, self-proclaimed socialist organizations, black nationalists and others have fed illusions that there can be justice in the capitalist courts. Those illusions demobilized a movement of millions around the world in Mumia’s defense. The time is now to rekindle mass protest—nationally and internationally—on behalf of Mumia. Mumia’s freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged “justice” system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. The power that can turn the tide is the power of millions—working people, anti-racist youth, death penalty abolitionists—united in struggle to demand the freedom of this innocent man. Crucial to this perspective is the mobilization of the labor movement, whose social power derives from its ability to shut down production. As we have stated since we first took up Mumia’s defense in the mid 1980s, what’s necessary are labor-centered united-front actions, generating effective protest across a spectrum of political beliefs while assuring all the right to have their own say. The time is now to make Mumia’s case a rallying cry against the racist death penalty, against black oppression, against government repression. Raise your voice and organize now in your union, on your campus, in your community to demand: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! —Partisan Defense Committee, 27 May 2006
An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008)
The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below. Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight.
Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it.
Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price.
I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress.
Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stagest theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud.
*****When The Bourgeoisie Was In Full Flower- With The French Painter Caillebotte In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Yeah, the Baron, Baron Haussmann if you need a name to go with the damage, the social damage done, had done a good job, a damn good job of breaking up beloved Paris with his squeaky clean street lines and wide boulevards. Yeah, changed the face of Paris, the Paris of squalid throw your leavings out the window and heaven help who is below, and heaven help what awful thing was thrown down to the trash-filled streets. The Paris of funny crooked cul de sac streets, which reflected the add-ons over centuries to make a great city from the piss-pot small town back in the Middle Ages when the university was the center of attraction and the good bourgeois in embryo were trying to hold off the barbarians, the wayward no account peasant drifters who snuck off the land, or tried to in order to sulk and menace in the shadows down by the Seine, the river of life and of intrigue. The Paris of the small craftsman working his trade in some lonely workshop, maybe an indentured apprentice by his side if the craft was skilled enough to warrant such service, his “home” and hearth in the back rooms where the dutiful wife and undutiful screaming children scratched out their pitiful existence. Said craftsman working furiously always brow-beaten worrying about being edged out by Monsieur So and So with plenty of capital and fifty men in his employ underselling him by virtue of economy of scale (or just plain greed at having anybody even a single slave craftsman in his “invisible hand” market place). The Paris too of the jack-roller, the pick-pocket, the wharf rats, the tavern-dwellers, the drifters, the grifters, and the midnight sifters along the shallow shadows of that same beloved Seine
He, Jean Villon, was called Jean-bon out of respect for his courage under fire in the hell-hole barricade days of 1848when he and his neighbors, all working-men, held out to the last when the vicious petty-bourgeois who would have benefited most from victory deserted the barricades and he and his took to their fallen losses and jail cells with equanimity (he and his comrades ever after called ‘48ers and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town). And called Jean-bon as well for his general good humor when he was not talking politics or scheming the next plot that would bring on the newer world that he and his brethren were seeking. This morning he had had to laugh about the changes in the Rue Madeleine, the urine-laned street where he grew up, about the smell to high heaven of tanning chemicals, rough blacksmith coals, clothe dyes, slaughtered cattles and poultries. Laughed too that in those days, the days before the Baron got the itch (Baron dreams prodded on by ’89 dreams of san-culottes crowds demanding his head on a platter, or maybe just his head any way they could get it preferably via the people’s justice of the guillotine and more recent close calls in ‘48) none of the government’s men dared to enter those quarters even to look for the treasonous or seditious whoever was in power was always nervously pacing the floor about (it did not matter-king-premier-emperor-they all nervously paced their respective floors).
Yeah, back then nothing but crooked little streets leading to harmless little cafes, where he, workingman Villon held “court” with the riff-raff so-called of the old society. Calmly and cautiously quartered where no king’s men would bother to penetrate for they might not come back. Villon descended in some cousin-age degree never quite figured out back to the 15th century from the outlaw poet mad monk bastard saint Francois Villon who wrote longing "exile in his own country" verse with one hand and stole whatever was not nailed down with the other a fact which Jean never tired of pointing out when back in the day, back in ‘48 on the barricades when it counted comrades would wonder whether his revolutionary energies were flagging and he would drag out his pedigree to small-mouthed scoffs and tittles.
Yeah, the Baron was a slick one tearing down the old quarters to let the rising petty-bourgeois have their elegant apartments tucked away from the steamy stinking markets, the riff-raff cafes, the shadow men of the Seine. Let the bourgeoisie laugh in their clubs about how the riff-raff, meaning their working-men, those who slaved for them, those they had fired for being what some wag called “master-less men” for their habit of robbing said masters whenever the shadows fell, and robbing the once innocent peasant girls who followed in their train and cast their fate with the lot of their virtue, would get a belly-full of lead from the phalanx encircling infantry the next time they tried to pull up brick number one in order to build a barricade.
Although for a while when Thiers, that wizened troll who never uttered anything but treacherous remarks and never stopped for one minute to give the orders tosend whatever troops against the barricades which remained loyal to keep him in power. Rammed those troops against the brave Paris communards of blessed memory back in 1871 when the frightened bourgeoisie realized that the barricades could still be constructed when the working-men rose up in righteous anger at the betrayals put upon them. (Those communards like their earlier brethren of ’48 called communards and no further explanation was necessary, none what-so-ever in any street or boulevard in the town.)
But those days were long gone now. The Baron had won, had won his victory over the riff-raff and Jean-bon Villon knew it would be a long time before the blood of the communards dried. Dried and avenged.
A
special one-night-only performance to benefit the DM Scholarship at NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts
Monday, March
28, 2016 at 8 PM The Public Theater, New York
The
Double Man is a rarely staged one-man show based on the poems, essays, and
private correspondence of W.H. Auden, directed and performed by Mark
Wing-Davey.
The
DM Scholarship supports promising graduate acting students who lack funds for
further study. Tickets start at $125. All proceeds go to the DM Scholarship. For
tickets, call 212-998-1960 or purchase online.
In
Honor Of Women’s History Month -Out In The Be-Bop Be-Bop 1960s Night- Save The
Last Dance For Me-With The Drifters’ Song Of The Same Name In Mind.
From
The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin
Scene:
Brought to mind by one of the songs in this compilation, The Drifters classic
end of the night high school dance number, Save
The Last Dance For Me. (And the reason for the kudos to Women’s History
Month in a little off-beat way as well.)
Recently, when I was reviewing a CD AM Gold: 1962, I mentioned, in detailing
some of the events surrounding the North Adamsville Class of 1962-sponsored
version of the traditional late September Falling Leaves Dance that one of the
perks that year was getting to hear the vocals of local singer and classmate,
Diana Nelson, backed up by local rock band favorite, The Rockin’ Ramrods. I
also mentioned that her selection had been the result of a singing competition
held by the town fathers and that I would relate some of the details of that
competition at a later date. That time has come. Additionally, I related that I
had had a “crush” on Miss (Ms.) Nelson since I started staring, permanently
staring, at her ass when she sat a few seats in front of me in ninth grade. At
the time of the above-mentioned dance she was “going steady” with some college
joe, and had not given me the time of day, flirting or encouraging-wise, since
about tenth grade, although we always talked about stuff, music and political
stuff, two of my passions, and hers too. Here’s the “skinny.”
But music, like lots of other things abhors a vacuum
and while guys were still singing, I guess, the girl singers (read young women,
okay, and we will leave it at that) “spoke” to us more. Especially to record-
buying girls who wanted to hear about teen romance, teen alienation, lost love,
unstoppable hurts, betrayal (usually by the girl’s best friend and her
boyfriend, although not always), lonely Friday nights, and other stuff that
teenagers, boys and girls equally, have been mulling over, well, since they
invented teenagers a long time ago.
So it was natural for the musically-talented girls
around North Adamsville, and maybe around the country for all I know, to test
themselves against the big name talents and see what they had. See if they
could make teen heaven- a record contract with all that entailed. In North
Adamsville that was actually made easier by the town fathers (and they were all
men, mostly old men in those days so fathers is right), if you can believe
that. Why? Because for a couple of years in the early 1960s, maybe longer, they
had been sponsoring a singing contest, a female vocalist, singing- contest. I
heard later, and maybe it was true, that what drove them was that, unlike those
mid-1950s evil male rockers mentioned above, the women vocalist models had a
“calming effect” on the hard-bitten be-bop teen night. And calm was what the
town fathers cared about most of all. That, and making sure that everything was
in preparedness for any Soviet missile strike, complete with periodic air raid
drills, christ again.
In 1962 this contest, as it was in previous years, was
held in the spring in the town hall auditorium. And among the contestants, obviously,
was that already "spoken for" Diana Nelson who was by even the casual
music listener the odds-on favorite. She had prepped a few of us with her
unique rendition of Brenda Lee’s I’m
Sorry so I knew she was a shoo-in. And she was. What was interesting about
the competition was not her victory as much as the assorted talents, so-called,
that entered this thing. If I recall there were perhaps fifteen vocalists in
all. The way the thing got resolved was a kind of sing-off. A process of
elimination sing-off.
Half a dozen, naturally, were some variation of
off-key and dismissible out of hand. These girls fought the worst when they got
the hook. Especially one girl, Elena G., if anyone remembers her who did one of
the worst versionsof Connie Francis’ Who’s Sorry Now I had (and have) ever
heard. The more talented girls took their lost with more grace, probably
realizing as Diana got into high gear that they were doomed. But here is the
funny part. One of the final four girls was not a girl at all. Jimmy C. from
right down the end of my street dressed himself up as girl (and not badly
either although none of us knew much about “drag queen” culture then) and sang
a great version of Mary Wells’ Two Lovers.
Like I said we knew from nothing about different sexual preferences and thought
he just did it as a goof. (I heard a few years later that he had finally
settled in Provincetown and that fact alone “hipped” me, after I got hip to the
ways of the world a little better, to what he was about, sexually.)
I probably told you before that one part of winning
was a one thousand dollar scholarship. That was important, but Diana, when she
talked to me about it a couple of days later just before class, said she really
wanted to win so she could be featured at the Falling Leaves Dance. Now, like I
said, I had a big crush on her, no question, so I was amazed that she also said
that she wanted me to be sure to be at the dance that next late September.
Well, if you have been paying attention at all then you know I was there. I
went alone, because just then I didn’t have a girlfriend, a girlfriend strong
enough for me to want to go to the dance with anyway. But I was having a pretty
good time. I even danced with Chrissie McNamara, a genuine fox, who every guy
had the “hots” for since she, just the night before, had busted up with Johnny
Callahan, the football player. And Diana sang great, especially on Brenda Lee’s
I Want To Be Wanted. She reached
somewhere deep for that one.
Toward the end of the evening, while the Rockin’
Ramrods were doing some heavy rock covers, Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen I think, and she was taking a break, Diana
came over to me and said, I swear she said it exactly like this- “save the last
dance for me.” I asked her to repeat herself. She said Bobby (her college joe) was
not here that evening for some reason I do not remember and that she wanted to
dance the last dance with someone she liked. Well, what’s a guy to do when
someone like Diana gives her imperial command? I checked my dance card and said
“sure.” Now this last dance thing has been going on ever since they have had
dances and ever since they have had teenagers at such events so no big deal,
really. Oh, except this, as we were dancing that last dance to the Ramrod’s
cover of The Dubs Could This Be Magic
Diana, out of the blue, said this. “You know if you had done more than just
stared at my ass in class (and in the corridors too, she added) in ninth grade
maybe I wouldn’t have latched onto Bobby when he came around me in tenth
grade.” No, a thousand times no, no, no, no…
Note: After reading the above heart-rending story I
believe that we can safely put aside those accusations by my Salducci’s corner
boys, especially my chieftain, one Frankie Riley, that I was totally
skirt-addled. That I would chase anything in a skirt, anytime. Needless to say
that also puts to rest that vicious rumor that I “hit” on Chrissie McNamara
that night of the dance after she gave Johnny Callahan the big kiss-off.
And hence this quirky contribution to Women’s History
Month.
The
Carny Caper- With Raymond Chandler’s Farewell,
My Lovely In Mind
By
Sam Lowell
Whatever
you do don’t let anybody kid you that the life of a real life private
detective, shamus, gumshoe, keyhole peeper, private dick or the thousand and one
other names I have been called in my life is anything like you see on film, or
the television or what you read in those paperback books with the lurid covers
showing a some half-naked broad showing just enough cleavage to whet the
appetite and some steely-eyed guy with felt hat and a smoking gun coming out of
all hands going round and round. Maybe a dead bad guy body on the ground to
show that said private dick was doing his job before taking home the prize. And
if anybody asks you why I said that then just tell them Ray Robertson (Raymond
on my Riverdale Police Department-issues license but Ray to clients and friends
alike) a guy who has been on the mean streets of private detection for the past
twenty years told you the skinny, told you true, told you in twenty years he
never had a case that was close to all that fiction jazz. Never.
Like
a lot of P.I.s (my preferred name from my profession but you call it what you
will since you will anyway especially those ill-disposed youth, or former youth
now sated with age who lived and died by the names thrown out in those lurid
books which never included P.I among them) I started out in the service, in the
Army, as Military Police, an MP in the mid-1970s after I got out of high school
but that duty was mostly breaking up Saturday night fights at the Enlisted
Men’s Club and cleaning up traffic accidents some caused by that same Saturday
drunk business. After I got out of the service I tried to get on the Staties
here in Massachusetts but didn’t make the grade on the written test to go
forward in the training. Tests, written tests not physical tests, were never my
strong side. So I latched onto a job with the Gloversville Police which wasn’t
as exacting. I did that for a five years until they got themselves a new chief
who was all show and who didn’t want to tackle the cocaine problem that was
growing in the town (not just the drug itself but the B&Es, the robberies,
the A&Bs those clowns did to get their dope money from honest if poor citizens
who expected better protection that to have what they had to live with in the
neighborhoods day to day get brushed under the rug by some promotion happy
chief). So I left that job, that town and good riddance. They still have their drug
problem in that town but now it is heroin, and that hot-shot chief turned out
to be all front and they still have him there running the show sucking wind.
Sure
I read all those books, those paperback detective books that I was telling you
about before with the half-naked broads and brawny P.Is. And I have re-read
them, one recently that I want to tell you about since that particular book is
why I am on my high-horse today. I don’t know about the academic part, about
where these guys stood in over-all literature but I heard they stood pretty
high. I’m talking about Dashiell Hammett, the commie writer who took the fall
for Joe Stalin back in the 1950s and spent a few months in jail for not
answering questions like a real American would have then and Raymond Chandler
who didn’t start writing detective stuff until later in his life, sold
insurance of something before. Those guys who best work was before my time, way
before, back in the 1930s and 1940s at least that seems to have been when they
did their best work had a way of putting a story together that kept me reading
until I was done, finished and then I would re-read it again. That was why I
wanted to be a cop, a guy who solved the ugly problems of the world. Maybe too
like Chandler’s Marlowe I was tilting at windmills myself. Like I said I
believed that was what being a cop was about-fixing the ills of society as best
you could.
Every
once on a while I get on a kick to re-read those guys and so one night after
having been on the road all day trying to find out the whereabouts of a guy who
had skipped out on his alimony payments and the irate wife though he might be
in Providence where he had grown up hanging around his mother’s house (he
wasn’t I never did find him, or didn’t find him before the wife said the hell
with him it wasn’t worth the money she was paying me to keep tabs on him) I was
too dogged to do any paperwork on that case so I grabbed an old moth-eaten
frayed copy of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell,
My Lovely, the paperback edition with that fetching red-headed doll with
her dress half off her shoulder and a snub-nosed gun in her hand that wouldn’t
scare a ten-year old kid, a guy on the ground looking very dead and felt-hatted
Marlowe with hands up like he was heading for the bastinado. Naturally once I
settled into my bed in my studio apartment after having a good stiff drink, the
first and last of the day, I read the whole thing through again, this maybe the
tenth time I had read it since I was a kid.
That
night’s reading is what got my goat. Let me give a couple ofthe highlights and you will know that it was
nothing but hogwash, nothing but Chandler blowing smoke, maybe even making fun
of the profession since real life guys like me, and there were guys like me
then doing the nasty little jobs the coppers couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. Something
was wrong about the whole set-up that was for sure. Figure all this action in
the book took place in the 1930s although in detective fiction the times aren’t
that important, not as important as the continuous action, except the cars then
were to die for and I wish I had one of those early Hudsons. Figure L.A. and
that is important because some guy said Chandler wrote about that town, about
the slumming streets, before it got out of hand like today like nobody’s
business.
Marlowe
was walking along minding his own business and he see this monster of a guy
Moose looking like he just got out of stir, from his complexion Marlowe could
tell that he had been in a while, which he had once they met. Moose was kind of
shaking his head. Couldn’t figure out what happened to the gin mill that he
used to hang out in with his honey, his Velma, a torch-singer and maybe a good
time girl on the side. Maybe a broad who took a few guys in the back alley and
“played the flute” on them, gave them a smile on their faces. Moose wouldn’t be
a guy who cared as long as she tossed the dough his way, and gave him that
smile too. But that was then. Nobody knew who the hell Velma was, or cared. The
big guy didn’t like that and wasted a guy, a black guy, for not providing the
information he was looking for fast enough, or maybe just enough. Marlowe stepped up to the plate whether he
liked it or not. He would find Moose’s Velma, find her no matter what.
Naturally
in Hollywood, then, now, anytime, Velma could have been anything from dead in
some potter’s graveyard to the Queen of Sheba. After eight years, so you know
why he had that deep prison pallor, Moose’s tough inside eight years, though
the trail was as cold as ice. So Marlowe worked his way back, worked back to
the rummy wife of the guy that used to own the gin mill when Velma worked
there. That mere fact of visiting the old hag, plying her with liquor too, nice
touch, Marlowe, wish I had thought of that on a few cases, set off murder and
mayhem. See Velma had moved up in the world, had once she unburdened herself of
Moose and his pimp ways hit the jackpot, got herself a Mayfair swell, an older
guy with plenty of dough, and plenty of forgiveness too when Velma, not exactly
a tramp but close, got her wanting habits on. That life was worth protecting,
worth killing a pile of guys better that Moose for if you couldn’t figure it
out already. And the prime target turned out to be Marlowe. Why? Well he
stirred up the pot, he threatened the gravy train. Three people, a guy who
could identify photos of Velma back in her back alley tramp days, an emissary
from Velma to Marlowe over some bogus story about lost rare jade jewelry stolen
in some bogus heist, and that rummy wife took the fall for being in the way,
for knowing too much.
And
it almost became Marlowe too as in the final show-down at his place, at that
run-down studio where Velma played her final hand. Or thought she was playing
her final hand. All she did that time was waste old Moose, threw five big slugs
into his stomach, who she had actually snitched on for the crime that got him
those eight hard years and needed him quieted.Marlowe only got shot at, missed of course, or the writer has to go to
another character in a new series and break a sweat. She got away, for a while,
until some P.I. in Baltimore hearing her voice on the radio or seeing her on
some gin mill stage and putting two and two together cornered her and she
killed herself rather than face the music. But as far as the story goes here is
what is amazing. This Velma must have had something men couldn’t resist because
while Moose didn’t die with a smile on his face it was close, that rich old
goat she married was ready to put up with anything even a column of lovers at
her door as long as she stayed with him, and Marlowe, well, Marlowe had had his
moments too once he got a whiff of that jasmine or whatever she was wearing
that drove every guy, even street-wise guys to distraction.
But
see that is all the story, and a good one. Here is where it breaks down, here
is where the so-called romance of the profession gets an unwarranted jump
start. Marlowe spent about half the book finding or being around dead people.
First the guy who could identify Velma, then Velma’s emissary, then the rummy
wife and of course in the end the Moose. I never had one dead body case. Like I
said that was police business and not only was it made clear to me to stay away
but there would have been no percentages in it for me. If I had run up against
that many dead bodies in a case I would have been fired, no question. Then
there is the question of Marlowe holding out on the coppers in favor of his
clients. Never happens. If they need to warn you off a case you are off it.
Period. Nor, as happened to Marlowe, do you wind up in the slammer as a
material witness. You are walking down cheap street wondering where you will
get the dough for next week’s room rent, or whether you can wash dishes at
Jerry Bob’s Diner to grab a bit to eat.
The
biggest fake thing though is how many times Marlowe took a bonk on the head, or
got roughed up. More times than an NFL football player, and for chump change.
And you know now about the concussions too. You couldn’t last in the profession
twenty minutes much less twenty years if you took that much punishment in each
case. Better off being a repo-man. The only real stuff in the whole story when
you think about it is that bottle of cheap whisky in the bottom drawer of that
office desk, the ten thousand crushed cigarette butts, the gallons of cold
coffee, the ratty food on the run, and the running around in circles like on
that Providence case I mentioned. Not enough for a real life story, okay.
Once
I got to bed after finishing Farewell, My
Lovely, I was tossing and turning for a while because I was racking my
brain trying to remember my most dangerous case, the one that I want to put up
against Marlowe’s. The only one I could think of was what I will call here to
give it a name the carny caper.
Here
is how it played out.
Three
or four years ago I was sitting in my office watching the dust gather ever
thicker thinking that after about fifteen years of plugging away at private
investigation I still was sitting in that same minimalism furnished back alley
office in a run-down building ready for the wrecker’s ball if there was an real
justice in the world in a run-down part of town, the old textile factory
district long gone south and then overseas back in the 1950s sometime, in the
run-down town of Riverdale which never really got back on its feet after the
mills went belly up. And me, Ray Robertson, kind of followed the pattern
running down the string of a short money career when I spent most of my time
dunning people for rent money, repo-ing cars, a few peep-hole jobs when anybody
gave a damn about adultery and gave a damn about getting the goods on the
adulterers when you needed much more than mere incompatibility to get yourself
out of a tough loveless marriage, and maybe a skipped trance, a missing person
job where the family didn’t mind spending a few dollars, usually just a few
before they handed it over to the police which they were trying to avoid like
the plague.
I
would always tell them straight up that if a person went missing, skipped out leaving
no forwarding address that no mere mortal private investigator was going to
find them and that they were better off just filing a missing person’s report
with the police and see what happened. So, yeah, between life’s disappointments
and watching the dust accumulate I was in a touchy mood. The only upbeat thing
was the essential detective tool, the bottom drawer of the desk whiskey bottle
to chase the blues away. The only change in that drawer was whether it was in
the money Chivas Regal or cheap street looking for my next paying job Johnny
Walker Black which was hiding there.
I
was just reaching for my luncheon shot of Johnny Walker Black when this
thirty-something blonde, at least the look was blonde but you never know with
blondes about how blond they really are until you get under the sheets with
them and investigate other parts of their anatomy for the truth, trim and fit
looking with just that faint beginning of crow’s feet around the eyes they
scares a woman to hell, gets then thinking surgery and about twelve thousand
other things, dressed in off the rack stuff, a dress from Macy’s maybe, which
told me right away that this was not going to be a situation where I could
abandon the office, the building, the town for the bright lights of the big city
came walking in the door after a light knock. Old as I am I immediately thought
of bedroom sheets and tussles, she had that look, the look that after a couple
of drinks she would not let you down. It didn’t hurt that among the baubles of
jewelry on her hands and wrists there was no wedding ring. Hey a trained P.I.
notices those things.
Jenny,
Jenny Pringle was her name. I asked her to sit down and tell me why she had
come to my precincts. She had been referred to me by a woman from Gloversville
where she was from, Gladys North, a name I recognized from the couple of times
I had to run down her ex-husband for alimony and child support in the days
before the government got serious about making guys pay up, or else. That
Gladys while not a great looker, and I had a couple of tumbles in the hay so
that idea rested in the back of my mind as the Jenny told her hard luck story.
Seems that her daughter Jessica, about sixteen so I was pretty right on Jenny’s
age, and something of wayward hellion to her had run away with the carnival,
had fallen for some roustabout named Jamie Jason, maybe in his early twenties,
who had some kind of spell on the kid as they headed off to parts unknown.
Jenny
confessed that Jessica was no sixteen year old kid in a lot of ways since she
had had to raise her herself after her deadbeat husband took off with some
floozy (her word) when Jessica was eight and she had subsequently divorced him-no
contest but no dough either since she could never catch up with him. (I took
note of that divorced status of Jenny’s for future reference just in case you
forgot about that.) Jenny knew that
Jessica had been into dope and drinking the past year or so. Smelled it on her
breathe more than one night when she tried to cover it up with Listerine her
clothes occasionally wreaked of marijuana but you know how kids are. She also knew that
Jessica had given up her virginity in the recent past because she had found
condoms, a vibrator, and some birth control pills in her bureau drawer a few
months before when she was putting away some of Jessica’s clothes.
Jenny
asked me what I could do, how long it would take, how much money would be
involved. I gave her my standard go to the police missing report routine but
she said she did not want Jessica to wind up in reform school or anything like
that so she wanted to keep the police out of it. When I gave her my rates and
how long I thought it would take Jenny quickly added up the numbers in her head
and gave me a pained look. She, as usual for me, told me she didn’t have a lot
of money but then gave me a wicked look and said maybe we could make some other
arrangements to pay the freight. I let that slide but you can figure out what
the deal was, figure it out easy.
So
after giving me a hundred dollar retainer (and after a pained look another look
like she hoped we could work something else out which I also let slide for the
moment) I was on the case. As missing person cases go this one had an easy
start since everybody around Riverdale knew that each spring Jim Benson’s Wild
West Carnival hit Mechanicsville for two weeks and then headed out to the
western part of the state, out to Springfield. So I made plans to head out
there after I checked with Angelica, Jessica’s best friend, from the
neighborhood over in Gloversville to see what she knew about what happened to
Jessica.
One
thing you can bet your last dollar on is that any, and I mean any, teenage
girl, maybe guys too but I don’t know about that, will confide every last
detail, including sex stuff like giving guys blow jobs to avoid chancing getting
pregnant rather than conventional sexual intercourse and kinky twists, to their
closest girlfriend. And that girlfriend if approached in the right way meaning
kind of causally will spill that information if it will “help her friend.” So
Angelica told me that one night, the first Saturday the carnival was open, she,
Jessica and another girl, Sandra, who had a car went to Gloversville with the
sole purpose, after checking out the rides, games, and horrible food, of
getting picked up by some guys. Jessica was in particular “hot to trot” that
night since she had over the previous several months been sexually active
starting with her first boyfriend, Steve, from school. Angelica said Jessica
told her she really liked sex and when she told me that I knew I was in for
something, some tough going because if I knew my carny guys this Jaime probably
already had Jessica working, doing tricks to keep them in clover.
With
that information I headed to Springfield to see what was what. I got there one
Monday morning when the fairgrounds were just coming alive with night owl
people who were getting ready for the next day’s suckers, that is just the way
carny people are. I asked around for Big Jim and was directed to a trailer at
the edge of the fairgrounds. Big Jim greeted me with the frown every carny man
does when he smells copper, even private copper. After I showed him my license
I asked him about Jaime and about whether Jessica was with him, and why I was
looking for her.
Big
Jim told me that the pair had split the first week of the engagement in
Springfield for New York City he said, said also that Jessica liked being
around the carny but that Jaimie had a big idea for them in New York so had
grabbed his pay and said he would catch up with the show as it headed out to Western
New York. My heart sunk for I knew from other cases P.I.s told me about when we
gather for our annual national conventions that it could only mean that Jaime
planned to put her on the street, probably Times Square, probably had her all
doped up and probably would abandon her once he saw the next best thing come
along. Might even sell her to some pimp if he was moving on. I asked Big Jim if
I could talk to some other of the carny people to see if they knew anything. He
said no, he had given me all the information he had.
Naturally
once I left the trailer I asked around for people who knew Jaime. I didn’t get
far and this is where whatever you see and hear about fictional detectives
forget about it. Every decent size carny has some strange exotic performers,
sword-swallowers, stuff like that. Strong geeky looking giants too. Before I
got too far along in my questioning out of the blue appeared Mighty Max a
behemoth. Big Jim had sent him out to stop me bothering his people. Now with
fictional detectives I would have taken a beating and then when I recovered
(quickly) continued to pursue the truth. Here is the reality check. Once I saw
Mighty Max I headed for the exit, though it better to live to fight another
day.
As
for Jessica I never found her before the money ran out, and after that a few
dates with Jenny to clear the books. Jenny then decided to turn it over to the
missing person’s bureau and that was that for us, and the case. A couple of
months later just for curiosity’s sake I had a private eye I knew in Cleveland
check to see if Jaime had rejoined the carny. No. And, no, Jessica as far as I
know never was found, never came back home. True story.
