Vince Keenan: Book: The Cruel City, by T. J. English (!011)

"It`s ten p.m. Do you live where your children are?"

For decades, New York`s WNEW led into their nightly newscast with that ominous pronouncement. It never failed to unnerve me, conjuring up visions of lost boys and girls huddled under streetlamps as dark and the metropolis itself shut in on them.

That story of fear was endemic in the Gotham of the sixties and `70s, the era laid bare in the new non-fiction book by T.

J. English. Its history of "race, murder and a multiplication on the march" begins with a gruesome coincidence: the murder of two young white women in their Manhattan apartment on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr.`s "I bear a dream" speech. English weaves together the stories of 3 men who never met, but whose lives repeatedly intersect with the fallout of what became known as the Career Girls Murders.

There`s Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who became a key figure in the Black Panthers. This material, while fascinating, is the weakest of the book`s three legs as the Panthers get bogged down in paranoia and infighting. Bill Phillips, the bent cop who would end up a principal witness for the Knapp Commission at which Frank Serpico testified, personifies the NYPD`s entrenched corruption. (ASIDE: Phillips` hold On the Pad, co-written by sportswriter Leonard Schecter, was an aspiration for Lawrence Block`s Matt Scudder. The latest Scudder novel A Drop of the Tough Stuff will be out shortly. I reviewed it a few months back.)

The book`s primary stress is George Whitmore, Jr. a new dark man in the wrong place at the wrong time who would be charged with the Career Girls Murders and pass a decade protesting his innocence. Whitmore would get more symbol than man as the issues played out just to get an afterthought amidst the excitement of the times, but English never strays from telling his personal story. A stark instance of Whitmore`s funhouse-mirror fate: what started out as a film about his wrongful imprisonment ended up becoming the world`s introduction to Telly Savalas` Kojak. Whitmore couldn`t even be the lead in a movie about his own life.

English, whose The Westies is another true crime favorite, has written a life of both a target and a sentence that look almost alien now but are closer than we wish to think. The Cruel City is a hugely ambitious book, and one that largely succeeds.