And speaking of police: William Phillips has passed away, and this is one of the most interesting obits I’ve read in a bit.
Who was William Phillips? He was a cop with the NYPD. He was also corrupt.
He acknowledged that he partook in police corruption as a patrolman in the 1960s and early ’70s. When not golfing at a country club, flying his plane, taking ski trips, playing the horses or darting around town in his red sports car, he was walking a beat in Gucci loafers and collecting bags of cash from brothels, gamblers, drug dealers and others “on the pad” — cop slang for payoff lists.
Finally, he was caught by investigators taking bribes from Xaviera Hollander, the madam who wrote the best-selling 1971 book “The Happy Hooker.” Mr. Phillips wore a wire and went under cover to avoid prosecution. He joined Officer Frank Serpico and Detective David Durk as star witnesses at the hearings of the Knapp Commission, which detailed endemic police corruption in New York.
(On a side note, Xaviera Hollander is still alive, according to Wikipedia. She’s 80. And she has a website.)
Then it gets weird.
Mr. Phillips may have been a hero to the public, but a homicide detective who saw him testify on television told prosecutors that he resembled the sketch of a man wanted in a cold murder case. Reports later emerged that the detective who had started the inquiry was a close friend of a police lieutenant who, believing that Mr. Phillips had identified him as a grafter, killed himself.
Mr. Phillips was arrested and charged with murdering a pimp and a prostitute in a Manhattan brothel at about 8:30 p.m. on Dec. 24, 1968. But from the start, evidence against him was contradictory. A half-dozen relatives and friends gave Mr. Phillips hour-by-hour alibis, placing him in three homes on a round of preholiday visits from 4 p.m. until past midnight.
The only evidence the prosecution had was the testimony of a man named Charles Gonzales, who was patronizing the prostitute at the time of the murder. Mr. Gonzales was also shot by the killer.
Mr. Phillps was tried twice. F. Lee Bailey defended him the first time: “…the jury deadlocked 10 to 2 for acquittal. Jurors said they had not believed Mr. Gonzales.” Mr. Phillips was convicted in the second trial. The conviction was overturned on appeal by New York state appellate courts (“It was later revealed that a juror had applied for a job with the Manhattan district attorney’s office during the trial, and that the prosecutors did not tell the judge until after the verdict.”) but the Supreme Court allowed the conviction to stand.
…
When he became eligible for parole after 25 years, his records were filled with recommendations for his release from wardens, college deans, judges and federal agents. Manhattanville College, in Westchester County, offered him a job. But the parole board denied his application. His defenders said it was because he had refused to admit guilt.
At another hearing, in 2003, he acknowledged being guilty of “reprehensible conduct” but not of murder. Parole was again denied. The board called Mr. Phillips “a criminal of the worst kind whose danger to public safety is in the highest degree.”
He appealed, and Justice Alice Schlesinger of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called the board’s ruling “perverted” and “contrary to the law.” She asked, “Does the board honestly believe that Mr. Phillips, a 74-year-old man, half-blind from cancer, who has helped countless people and learned and taught the principles of law to many, truly is a continuing threat to society?”
Another judge ordered his release in 2006, but the parole board argued sucessfully that the judiciary didn’t have that authority.
…
The authorities over the years have agreed that the commission helped break a culture of police corruption. But the immediate fallout was minimal.
Dozens of officers were charged, while top police and city officials were not. Many prosecutions were dropped because Mr. Phillips’s murder conviction destroyed his credibility as a witness and to some extent undermined the findings of the commission.
I don’t know if he was guilty or not, and the paper of record certainly puts their own pro-Philips spin on things. But I think at the very least there was reasonable doubt.
“The entire case they had against me was the identification that I was a 5-foot-8 pockmarked Italian,” he said. “Do I look like a 5-foot-8 pockmarked Italian?”
He was six feet tall and, friends said, had a ruddy Irish face.
