BY AL DUNCAN
NEW YORK - "Your Honor, I plead guilty to the charges against
me." With these words New York Police Department Officer Justin
Volpe admitted before Federal Court Judge Eugene Nickerson that
he did shove a wooden stick into the rectum of Abner Louima in
the NYPD 70th precinct bathroom on Aug. 9, 1997. The cop also
confessed that he beat Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was 30
at the time, and threatened to kill him if he told anyone about
it.
The guilty plea came May 25, in the third week of the trial of Volpe and four other cops who are charged in the beating of Abner Louima and Patrick Antoine, the torture of Louima, and the attempt to cover up these crimes. Volpe maintained his innocence until it became clear he could not get off. Four other cops testified they had seen Volpe take Louima into the bathroom, or heard him brag about his deeds afterward.
Volpe was jailed upon pleading guilty and will be sentenced at some point during the summer. His lawyers say they expect him to be sentenced to at least 30 years in prison; the charges against him carry a maximum penalty of life. "The rest of them should be in jail," declared Louima's cousin Samuel Nicolas following Volpe's plea.
The assault on Louima sparked outrage among workers in this city. Demonstrations of 7,000 and 15,000 people - most but not all of them Haitian - took place in August 1997, demanding the cops involved be fired and prosecuted.
The victory registered with Volpe's confession is also a direct result of the mobilizations earlier this year in which thousands of people demanded justice the killing of Amadou Diallo. These actions forced the indictment of the four cops who shot Diallo, a young worker from Guinea, on charges of second-degree murder. It occurs on the heels of another victory against police brutality, the conviction of New York cop Richard Molloy of second-degree manslaughter in the killing of Irish immigrant Heslin Phelan in 1996. Molloy was sentenced May 12 to 4-12 years in prison.
The trial of the cops who brutalized Louima also occurs in the context of deepening revelations about police targeting of Blacks and Latinos for harassment in New Jersey, which have caused a crisis for the state government there.
The trial of officers Charles Schwartz, Thomas Bruder, Thomas Wiese, and police sergeant Michael Bellomo is continuing. Schwartz is accused of holding Louima down as Volpe assaulted him. Bruder and Wiese are charged with beating Louima before he was taken to the police station, and Bellomo is charged with covering up this brutality.
Police assault at nightclub
Early in the trial, Louima's own testimony riveted people in
the court and workers throughout the city. Louima described in
graphic detail what was done to him on the night in question by
Volpe, Schwartz, Bruder, and Wiese.
The incident began when police attacked people coming out of the Rendez-Vous Palace nightclub in Brooklyn, after two patrons got in a scuffle. Louima, who was not involved in the initial fight, protested the cop abuse. He was grabbed, struck by Volpe and other cops, and taken to the 70th precinct.
Patrick Antoine, who was simply walking by, was also attacked by the cops and arrested. He testified to seeing Volpe put Louima, who was half-naked and moaning in pain, in a holding cell at the police station that night.
The cops initially accused both Louima and Antoine of assaulting them, then dropped the charges.
Prior to Louima's testimony, some stories in the bourgeois media had attempted to portray him as the criminal, playing up alleged discrepancies in his account. Leading the charge was Volpe's attorney, Marvyn Kornberg. In his opening statement before the jury, Kornberg claimed Louima's injuries were "not consistent with a nonconsensual insertion of an object into his rectum," and implied they were the result of consensual sex. Kornberg also accused Louima of being motivated for financial gain, pointing to Louima's pending civil suit against the city.
During the cross-examination of Louima by Kornberg and the attorneys representing the other cops, they sought to play up Louima's retraction of his earlier claim that the cops who beat him had said, "It's Giuliani time," referring to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
However, despite badgering and not being allowed to even answer questions by Kornberg without being interrupted, the basic story that Louima told of the night he was beaten and tortured never wavered.
When asked by the judge why he did this to Louima, Volpe responded that he mistakenly thought that it was Louima who knocked him to the ground in the course of the police assault on the nightclub patrons. That was the "crime" for which Louima was beaten twice on the way to the police station and eventually tortured.
Hearings on cop brutality
Giuliani is now trying to refurbish the image of the police
department, claiming the cops' testimony against Volpe
"destroys the myth of the so-call blue wall of silence."
One place the mayor sought to put forward this line was at a one-day hearing by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which took place May 26 as the trial of the remaining cops charged in Louima's case resumed. The civil rights commission was asked to hold hearings in the city by Democratic Party liberals as a way of defusing the mobilizations by working people demanding justice for Diallo.
Relatives of police brutality victims and others who spoke at the hearing roundly denounced the mayor's claim that the "blue wall of silence" had crumbled. Iris Baez, of the Anthony Baez Foundation and Parents Against Police Brutality, was one of them. "The cop who murdered my son, Francis Livoti, had a history of brutality and yet he was allowed to remain a police officer," she told the commission. "This was true because all the other cops covered for him. And at his [Livoti's] trial in state court, the judge said that there was a nest of perjury involving all the lies told by the cops covering for him. Yet those officers have had nothing done to them and they remain to this day New York City police officers."