Giuliani Shocker: Innocent Black Man Framed! By Robert Lederman

Just two days after calling Federal law enforcement officers whoreturned Elian Gonzalez to his father, Nazi Storm Troopers,evidence has surfaced indicting that Paris Drake, the Black man arrested and charged in the highly publicized brick attack on Nicole Barrett on 11/16/99, could not have been the young woman’s assailant.

According to the 4/25/2000 NY Post, police officer John Cassidy has told the D.A.s office that Drake was inside the Manhattan South precinct at the time of the attack reclaiming a radio that had been confiscated by the police. NYPD records also confirm that Robert Fluken, the police informant who fingered Drake and claimed that he had confessed to the crime while they were in a holding cell together, could not have been telling the truth because they were arrested on different days and were never in the same cell at the same time.

Immediately after the attack Mayor Giuliani announced that the assailant was a Black mentally ill homeless man. The Mayor then ordered a massive sweep of the City’s homeless resulting in hundreds of arrests. No physical evidence of any kind linked Drake to the attack and a sole eye witness who eventually identified Drake in a police lineup admitted she’d only seen the assailant from behind. Despite having no history of mental illness or homelessness, Drake was paraded before the media by Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Safir who claimed that excellent police work had cracked the case. While Drake has a long history of arrests for minor crimes he had no history of violence and insisted that he was innocent.

Giuliani’s NYPD policies are currently under Federal and State investigation. After claiming that the Justice Department had used violent and excessive force in the Elian Gonzalez case and making the Storm Trooper analogy, the Mayor was immediately rebuked by The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, which demanded an apology from Giuliani.

Under Giuliani the NYPD has been continuously accused of making deliberately false arrests as part of its zero tolerance campaign; of illegally stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of inner city males based on their race; and of using excessive force resulting in the police shootings of a number of unarmed innocent people. In response to the Mayor’s accusations of excessive force in the Gonzalez case, NY City Council members and reporters have begun releasing information showing that under Giuliani the NYPD has smashed down the doors of the wrong apartment numerous times while executing drug search warrants and frequently fired shots at innocent unarmed families with children while inside their homes. Critics of the Mayor have also pointed out his well-documented history of using riot police, sharpshooters and helicopters against non-violent demonstrators and his part in leading a racist riot by 10,000 police officers from the steps of City Hall in 1992 while running for Mayor.

While Giuliani continues to furiously attack the Clintons and the Justice Department for removing Elian Gonzalez from his relatives in Miami and returning him to his father, children’s advocates have begun pointing out that the Mayor and agencies under his direct control have taken thousands of children from their natural parents and placed them in unsupervised foster care, often with no more justification than an unconfirmed accusation by a neighbor or ex-spouse. Shortly after demanding the arrests of homeless people in connection with the brick attack on Nicole Barrett the Mayor began requesting that children be taken away from homeless mothers for no other reason than their refusal to submit to his controversial workfare program. “All homeless families in New York City's shelter system will soon be warned that if they fail to work or meet other shelter and welfare requirements, the city may seek foster care for their children, Giuliani administration officials said Friday”-NY Times 12/4/99

Considering his own record of flagrantly abusing civil liberties and of using the police as a weapon against his political foes, the Mayor appears to be following a very risky strategy in denouncing the way Federal authorities have handled the Elian case. While he may correctly believe that calling Federal police Storm Troopers will win him some points and additional campaign donations from Americans on the far right, he may just have opened a can of worms that will eat away at what little credibility he has left.

Speaking of losing credibility, the Mayor has reached a new low, claiming that:

"My involvement in this case predates any political situation. You might remember that I was the person that excluded Fidel Castro from celebrations for the United Nations way back in the mid-'90s, long before any thought of running for office. This comes from things that I really believe very, very strongly."
-Post 4/25/2000 Hill Slams Rudy For Blast At Feds

Giuliani ran for Mayor in 1989 and again in 1993, both periods of time clearly predating, “the mid 90’s”. His credibility in assessing the repressiveness of any nation’s government is also clearly in question. Giuliani forcibly returned hundreds of Haitian political refugees to their almost certain deaths while he was a United States Justice Department official declaring that repression in Haiti under the murderous reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier, “does not exist”.

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“When a reporter offered to read Mrs. Clinton's statement for Mr. Giuliani, the mayor cut him off. "I don't really care what she said," he said. The mayor then began a nearly 15-minute monologue about the case, including recollections of his time as the third-ranking official at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration. As associate attorney general, Mr. Giuliani was in charge of drug enforcement, prisons and immigration. "So this is not a new issue for me," he said. He repeated his contention that Elián should be granted asylum from a totalitarian government, and added that New York City would never remove a child in a custody case in such a manner. "We don't use machine guns, we don't use people dressed up in war armament," Mr. Giuliani said. But he did not use the term "storm troopers," as he had over the weekend. The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, a nonpartisan group representing 17,500 federal agents and officers, issued a news release yesterday expressing its "strong disgust" with the characterization and saying that anyone who used the word "storm trooper" owed the officers an apology...Speaker Peter F. Vallone, a Democrat, provided City Hall reporters with a copy of a 1995 Daily News article describing "Any Time Baby," a 50,000-pound armored personnel carrier that was used by the Police Department to evict squatters from three buildings on the Lower East Side. Around the same time, City Council aides made available to reporters a letter, dated Monday to the mayor from Councilwoman Christine C. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, who wrote that she was "surprised" to hear about Mr. Giuliani's "newfound concern" about the use of excessive force by law enforcement. Ms. Quinn said that Mr. Giuliani's statements were "somewhat at odds" with his record, and mentioned in particular a 1998 World AIDS Day vigil at City Hall in which participants were watched by sharpshooters on the roof of City Hall.” -NY Times 4/25/2000

Seizure of Cuban Child Is Grist for Senate Race

"At a time that cried out for healing, the mayor chose to [make] divisive attacks on the United States law enforcement officers," the First Lady said in a statement. "Calling U.S. law enforcement officers 'storm troopers' is extreme and unwarranted."..."You do not send in people with automatic weapons and machine guns in a custody case involving a 6-year-old child," Giuliani said yesterday after attending a graduation ceremony for 292 firefighters at Brooklyn College. "There were 10 better ways to do this than the horrifying, unprecedented and unconscionable way in which the Clinton administration decided to do this," he said, noting his background on immigration issues while an associate attorney general. Meanwhile, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, a nonpartisan 17,500-member group, expressed its "strong disgust and dismay over the use of the term 'storm troopers' to describe federal agents." The mayor had toned down his rhetoric, referring to the law enforcement officers involved as "people dressed up in war armament" and aiming his attack at higherups.” -Daily News 4/25/2000

Giuliani's Exploiting Elian Tale, Hil Says “Locally, the condemnation chorus is led by Mayor Giuliani, who was not at all ashamed to declare: "I think about the Statue of Liberty and watching those pictures on television of American law enforcement agents being used and looking like storm troopers ... to rip a boy away from a family that's caring for him." Up violins. C'mon. Having been the target of radical rhetoric himself, Giuliani should be more rational in his choice of words. Having been in law enforcement, he should support enforcement of the law. The mayor's strategists must have migraines today. Their boy is playing right into the hands of the opposition, giving Hillary Clinton even more ammunition for the Senate race. In a statement issued yesterday, she expressed relief that Elian had been reunited with his father, noted that the raid had been "accomplished rapidly and without injury" and — bingo! — said of Giuliani: "At a time that cried out for healing, the mayor chose to exploit this situation by making divisive attacks on the United States' law enforcement officers. Calling [them] 'storm troopers' is extreme and unwarranted."-
Daily News Editorial 4/25/2000

Elian's Joy Makes Them Miserable

“Under fire from critics, including a federal law officers' group, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani yesterday refrained from using the term "storm troopers" as he did repeatedly over the weekend to depict agents who carried out the Elian Gonzalez raid...As the mayor, in Brooklyn, conducted his daily news conference, the 17,000-member Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association issued a statement expressing "our strong disgust and dismay over the use of the term 'storm troopers' to describe federal agents." Giuliani did so more than six times Saturday, saying one could not "miss" the Nazi imagery, and drawing charges of hypocrisy from his critics in light of past warnings to them not to politically cheapen the memory of Nazi Germany's victims”.
-Newsday 4/25/2000 Rudy Drops 'Storm Trooper' Line By Dan Janison. STAFF WRITER

“Giuliani denounced the raid and compared the eight federal agents to Nazi stormtroopers. At least they entered the right house! In 1998, NYPD detectives busted down the door of the wrong apartment in The Bronx and sprayed two dozen bullets. Police spokeswoman Marilyn Mode, admitting the mistake, pointed out that in 1997 only 10 wrong apartments were raided out of 45,000 search warrants. Another wrong-door police raid, in 1997, occurred in a Brooklyn apartment that contained three children. Parents were handcuffed and guns were pointed at their heads. In 1998, Rudy's NYPD paid more than $1,000 to repair the Bronx apartment of Ellis Elliot. The police mistakenly dragged this innocent man - naked - into the street, and fired more than a dozen shots during the terrifying home invasion.”
-NY POST 4/25/2000 Elian Belongs With His Father by Jack Newfield

“The crackhead accused of crushing a young secretary's skull with a brick is claiming an airtight alibi - insisting that at the time of the nearly fatal Midtown attack, he was across town in a police station house. Defense papers to be filed today in Manhattan Supreme Court complain prosecutors are sitting on information proving career criminal Paris Drake's alibi, and that he couldn't have been in the same holding cell as the jailhouse "informant" who fingered him for the heinous assault. The papers - a copy of which The Post obtained yesterday - also say the sole eyewitness to identify Drake in a lineup also identified a photo of someone entirely different in a prior interview with cops...Sources close to the case said Drake's alibi witness, Officer John Cassidy, has admitted to a private investigator working for the defense that Drake was in the Midtown South Precinct reclaiming a confiscated radio at the time of the attack. Cassidy did not deny the alibi when questioned by a Post reporter, but declined to talk about the case except to confirm he is a witness...More than 100 suspects - mostly mentally ill homeless men - had been hauled in for questioning by the time Drake was arrested Nov. 29 on the word of jailhouse informant Robert Fluken, 26. But court papers and sources reveal that Drake and Fluken - who immediately claimed the $11,000 reward - were arrested a day apart on separate drug charges, and couldn't have been kept in the same holding cell, as prosecutors claim. Also, only one of six eyewitnesses - Manhattan lawyer Laura Weiner - identified Drake in a lineup, and only after admitting she saw Drake from behind, sources said. No fingerprints or other physical evidence link Drake, who has no history of homelessness or mental illness, to the crime.”
-NY Post 4/25/2000 Brick-Attack Alibi Shocker

"My involvement in this case predates any political situation," Giuliani said. "You might remember that I was the person that excluded Fidel Castro from [city-sponsored] celebrations [for] ... the United Nations way back in the mid-'90s, long before any thought of running for office. This comes from things that I really believe very, very strongly."
-Post 4/25/2000

Hill Slams Rudy For Blast At Feds

“MIAMI (UPI) -- The third-ranking official of the Justice Department says he is convinced that there is "no political repression" in Haiti. Associate Attorney General Rudolph W. Giuliani, testifying Thursday at a hearing of a class-action lawsuit seeking the release of 2,100 refugees in Government detention camps, said that repression in Haiti "simply does not exist now" and that refugees had nothing to fear from the Government of Jean-Claude Duvalier”.
-The New York Times, April 3, 1982, Saturday, Late City Final Edition, Section 1; Page 5, Column 4; Foreign Desk

Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette [See: http://www.gvny.com/ for an extensive archive of Lederman columns] The Shadow, The Vigo-Examiner [see:http://www.vigo-examiner.com/archive.htm] and Street News, and is the author of hundreds of published essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. His essays and letters have appeared in the NY Times, NY Post, Daily News, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope Courier, The Daily Challenge, Amsterdam News, Sandbox, Penthouse, Our Town, NY Press and are available on hundreds of websites around the world. Lederman has been falsely arrested 41 times to date for his anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted of any of the charges. He is best known for creating hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator.

Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics) ARTISTpres@aol.com (718) 743-3722 http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html Also see: http://www.levymultimedia.com/lederman/index.htm for Lederman’s essays on Malathion and the spraying of insecticides on NYC


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