Howard Beach II: More White Male Monsters?

By Nicholas Stix Last updated 440 a.m., July 10. It looks as though those evil white males committed yet another racial outrage in Howard Beach, Queens, on June 29. Since the New York reporters and politicians I’ve seen and heard have not even used the qualifier “alleged,” I don’t know why we should even bother with the formality of a trial. Let’s have us a necktie party! In the incident that allegedly occurred at 3:30 a.m., three black men stopped in the lily white area with the express intent -- as Glen Moore, Richard Pope, and Richard Wood, have all freely admitted -- of stealing a car, specifically a Chrysler 300 (i.e., loitering with intent to commit a crime). One of the white men, Nicholas Minucci, allegedly fractured Glen Moore’s skull with a baseball bat. Another white man, Anthony Ench, allegedly kicked Glen Moore, called him the “n”-word, and stole his sneakers and jewelry. A third white man who participated in whatever it was that transpired, Frank Agostini, was initially named by authorities as a “person of interest” (read: suspect). Agostini, an NYPD detective’s son, has since “flipped” on Minucci and Ench. Agostini has admitted to having punched Moore once before Minucci allegedly worked Moore over with the baseball bat, a story the “victims” have reportedly corroborated. (The alleged victims and alleged attackers apparently range in age from 19 to 25 years of age, with the alleged attackers being described as at the younger end, but media accounts of everyone’s ages are contradictory, even from one page to the next of the same newspaper.) Unlike many murder suspects, Minucci and Ench are in jail without bail, each facing a multitude of charges, including hate crimes, and a possible 25-year prison sentence, which is more than most of New York’s killers are sentenced to. Agostini has not been charged. In the July 2 Daily News, “reporter” Tracy Connor’s shameless lead was, “NICHOLAS MINUCCI might be a tough guy when he’s swinging a baseball bat, but he’s apparently a big wimp when it comes to the needle.” Connor was referring to a tattoo needle, from Minucci’s appearance on the A&E show, Growing Up Gotti. Minucci is friends with the family of late Gambino crime family boss and mass murderer, John Gotti. The caps are from the paper edition. But that was nothing compared to the July 6 Daily News story by alleged reporter Warren Woodberry Jr., who led with, “The baseball-bat beating of a black man by white thugs in Howard Beach caused tempers to flare yesterday on the steps of Queens Criminal Court.” Woodberry also referred to Glen Moore as “victim,” which is presumptuous, as well. Editorialists are supposed to honor the presumption of innocence; reporters are supposed to meet an even higher standard. It was unwittingly comical when Woodberry then referred to defendant Anthony Ench as a “suspect.” Doesn’t Woodberry know what he’s saying? What he did was no better than if I had referred to him first as “an incompetent moron,” and then as “reporter Warren Woodberry Jr.” But my professional code forbids my stooping so low. Had a white reporter written as Woodberry did about a black crime suspect, he would have been cashiered. From the Rev. Charles Norris Files Alleged reporter Warren Woodberry Jr. apparently missed some other things, as well. He quoted rally organizer the Rev. Charles Norris as shouting at attorney Vincent Siccardi, when the latter spoke out on behalf of his client, suspect Anthony Ench, "This is our press conference. You have no business here." Woodberry neglected to mention that since the unofficial (i.e., without permit) rally took place on public property, on the steps of Queens Criminal Court, Siccardi not only had as much right to be present as the Rev. Norris, but also had the same First Amendment right as Norris to speak out. Woodberry neglected to report that the Rev. Charles Norris is a black supremacist, who during the mid-1990s fronted for black supremacist murderer-kidnapper-extortionist Sonny Carson (1935?-2002), when Carson sought to get a veteran Jewish teacher, Rita Altman, fired from predominantly black P.S. 80 in Jamaica, Queens, via a race hoax. In 1996, the Rev. Norris, told Newsday reporter Merle English that it didn’t even matter to him whether the charges were true.

We’re not going to sit still and have this teacher just get away with what allegedly has been said. Whether it’s true or not, her effectiveness as a teacher has been damaged. How is she going to teach effectively in any school where students will be whispering, ‘That’s the teacher that used the N-word’?”

Rev. Norris vowed that if Altman were transferred to another school, his group would hunt her down and prevent her from teaching, the same threat Carson and his allies had made against the Jewish teachers whom they sought to have fired during the 1967-68 Ocean Hill-Brownsville “community control” (read: black power) debacle. A couple of other matters also escaped “reporter” Woodberry. The good reverend is so consumed with hatred for whites and Jews, that in 2000 he made a point of celebrating MLK Day by publicly disparaging Jews to a large crowd he was warming up at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters, just before senatorial candidate Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak, and last year, he fought (apparently with success, since no center bears Byrne’s name) having a Police Athletic League center in South Jamaica, Queens named after police Officer Edward Byrne, who died defending the black community, for the sole and stated reason that Officer Byrne was white. Charles Norris and Sonny Carson figure just as much in this story as do Nicholas Minucci, Anthony Ench, and Frank Agostini. Even in death, Carson’s malevolent spirit hangs over New York. The Readers Beg to Differ Meanwhile, reader letters published by the local dailies were less one-sided than reporters in their sympathies. Of four letters the July 3 Daily News published on the case, for instance, two opposed casting the failed car thieves as victims. Herb Stark of Massapequa, in neighboring Nassau County wrote, “I'm not condoning the attack on three black men by white men in Howard Beach. But the fact that the black men told investigators they were out to steal a car should warrant their arrest for criminal intent. To describe them as victims is not quite right.” And Mark Morgan of Kew Gardens, Queens opined, “A would-be car thief gets beaten with a bat while casing a neighborhood, and we're supposed to care. Get real!” On June 30, when I was considering writing only a brief blog on this case, I received the following letter from a reader:

I was wondering if you have written anything about this attack that recently occured in Queens in which a white guy is getting charged with a hate crime for beating up a black who was planning on stealing a car. I think it is outrageous, the guy should be commended for doing what the cops will not do.

Two More White Males Mayor Mike Bloomberg immediately condemned the attack, as if there were no question as to its racial character (in other words, as if the defendants had already been convicted). Meanwhile, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told New Yorkers that the “victims’” ongoing grand theft auto project, had nothing at all to do with the attack on them, and that New Yorkers should discount the claim that the failed car thieves had sought to rob one of the three white men. Speaking anonymously, Kelly’s minions have insisted to the local media that the white men had no idea what the black men were up to. (Leftwing journalists and academics have for years claimed -- either out of dishonesty or utter ignorance -- that white police officers and security guards are unable to distinguish between suspicious and innocent behavior by black males, painting them with the same broad brush that police are now using on the white Howard Beach men.) Last week (June 30, I think it was), reporter Tim Minton of WNBC 4 said that the (alleged) bias attack bore some “eerie similarities” to another one in Howard Beach 19 years earlier. Let’s see, according to the official story, in the December 20, 1986 attack, three black men (Michael Griffith, 23, Cedric Sandiford, 36, and Timothy Grimes, 20), were driving through the lily-white neighborhood when their car broke down. When they went looking for help, they were set upon by a racist mob, which caused the death of Michael Griffith, when he ran into traffic to escape the mob. Three members of the mob, Jon Lester, Scott Kern, and Jason Ladone, were convicted for the attack. Incidents involving innocent black men trying to get their broken-down car fixed, so they can continue on their way (Howard Beach I), and black men who have stopped for the sole purpose of committing a felony (Howard Beach II) are “eerily similar”? Only if you deny the difference between a criminal black man and a law-abiding black man. Calling stories that have little in common “eerily similar” is a hoary reporter’s cliché. But then, even Howard Beach I wasn’t the “Howard Beach” that the official media and politicians’ story would have you believe. Remembering Howard Beach I You can’t really “remember” Howard Beach unless you were there, even if you lived in New York at the time, as I did. That is because the case was misrepresented by most of the media, who reported on it according to socialist/civil rights boilerplate, and who as the years went on, piled fiction upon fiction. According to the official story, Michael Griffith, Cedric Sandiford, and Timothy Grimes were beaten and Griffith sent to his death because they were saintly blacks who found themselves in racist, demonic Howard Beach. The reality, however, was less black and white. Let’s go to a source more reliable than the New York media, written by an author living hundreds of miles away. In Jared Taylor’s classic, 1992 work, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, Taylor recounted,

One evening in 1986, some white teenagers were driving a girl home when three blacks walked in front of their car and were nearly hit. A shouting match then ensued, a black shouted ‘F--- you, honky,’ another flashed a knife, and one reportedly stuck his head through a window and spat in the face of one of the whites. The whites drove away furious, and after dropping off the girl, returned with baseball bats. They brutally attacked one of the blacks and gave him an injury requiring five stitches. Another black was hit and killed by a car as he tried to escape.

Taylor added that a TV docudrama on Howard Beach I took one black man’s five stitch wound, and turned it into a 67-stitch wound, invented racial epithets on the part of the whites that the blacks did not even claim to have heard, and censored any depiction of the blacks’ aggression that started the ball rolling. As Taylor’s book and the Web site of the magazine he edits, American Renaissance show, racially motivated murders of whites by blacks have long been routine in America, while racial murders of blacks by whites have long been a rarity. And yet the media have for at least the past 20 years presented a parallel universe of bloodthirsty whites and heroic black victims. The rare white-on-black attack is always put on Page One and given saturation coverage by the TV news, while the daily black-on-white attacks are “disappeared”: Either not reported on at all, reported only by local newspapers, but “whited out” of local TV and national newspaper coverage, or reported without informing viewers of the respective races of the attackers and victim. As an NYPD detective admitted to me in January, 1991, after I’d been singled out for attack on the subway by a spontaneously forming black and Hispanic gang, racial attacks on whites are a daily occurrence in New York, “but there are some things you can’t say” for political reasons. I quoted WNBC’s Tim Minton above as saying that the June 29 incident was “eerily similar” to one that occurred in Howard Beach in 1986. You will never hear Minton or any of his colleagues speak of a contemporary black-on-white racial attack as being “eerily similar” to one in the past, because that would require two conditions: 1. That Minton & Co. report on at least one contemporary black-on-white racial attack, and 2. That they reported on such attacks in the past. And unlike most of his colleagues, who only play reporters on TV, Tim Minton is a real reporter! It was not always so. In Vincent J. Cannato’s exhaustively researched political biography/history of a mayor and his city, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York, Cannato chronicles how for approximately ten years beginning in the mid-1960s, the city’s newspapers not only reported on the savage attacks of the city’s crime explosion, the majority of which were black-on-white, and whose racial character fooled no one, but the newspapers -- including the liberal New York Times -- ran crime stories on the front page, day after day after day. But those reporters and editors are all gone, replaced by a new generation of white journalists who are hostile to white crime victims and who are simultaneously fearful of, fascinated by, and patronizing towards New York’s overwhelmingly black and Hispanic violent criminals; and black and Hispanic journalists who feel a loyalty to minority criminals, and who have successfully pressured their editors to downplay or “disappear” most such crime. When today’s journalists travel at night after work, it is not in the subway, but by taxicab or their own car. When they travel to cover stories, it is with news crews that double as bodyguards. The liberal journalists (J-school weeded out any conservatives) live either in luxury apartment buildings with 24-hour security, in neighborhoods where the police are acutely concerned for their safety, or in wealthy suburbs. And when they or their family or friends are crime victims, they go to the district attorney’s office accompanied by their famous attorneys, perhaps paying lip-service to the welfare of criminal as well as victim, and they get a measure of justice. But they feel contempt for the whites who cannot afford the taxicabs, the security guards, the wealthy suburbs, the fancy lawyers or the fancy justice, whites who feel no compassion whatsoever for the devils who attacked them, and who see no reason to feign such compassion. Rank has its privileges and its burdens. In the early 1990s, black journalists formulated the logically circular and historically backwards theory, that black crime was “caused” by the media reporting on black crime. I kid you not. Famous black journalist Ellis Cose promoted just such a theory in his 1993 book, The Rage of a Privileged Class. The theory is a companion piece to the equally circular and historically backwards one favored by leftist academics, that black academic failure is “caused” by white stereotyping of blacks as academic failures (“stereotype threat”). Was the Central Park Jogger Prosecution Racist? One violent crime that was reported on exhaustively was the 1989 Central Park Jogger attack. But the socialist New York media later decided that the reporting on that crime had been an political mistake, just as socialist Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau decided that the prosecution of the teenagers who had confessed, mutually implicated each other, and known things that only the attackers could have known about the assault and rape of investment banker Trisha Meili had been a political mistake. (The assault left Meili in a coma for weeks, after losing over 70 percent of her blood. When some of the boys were initially picked up in Central Park by police for a string of attacks they had committed on other parkgoers, they thought it was for Meili’s murder. They assumed she had died. Since police would not find Meili’s limp body for several hours, the officers had no idea what the boys were talking about.) And so, with DA Morgenthau leading the way, in a journalistic version of reparations, the entire episode was re-written. The five confessed attackers were “exonerated,” and recast as “victims of racism.” (See “Race Hustlers Re-Run Central Park Jogger Case,” “Justice Vacated in Central Park Jogger Case,” and “The War on the Police.”) Dropping “N”s Back in Howard Beach II, Anthony Ench allegedly called the would-be car thieves the n-word. Meanwhile, Frank Agostini’s story is that he encountered two of the failed car thieves on the street, and that one apparently mistook the dark-skinned young man for a black, and said to an accomplice, "Look at the little n----- with the chain." If Agostini was telling the truth, he correctly inferred that the two were about to rob him, and he ran off and got his friends. The failed car thieves admit to having encountered the lone Agostini, but deny having said what he attributed to them. The July 2 Daily News reported that Queens assistant DA Brian Kohm maintained that Ench told the failed car thieves, “This is what happens when you rob white boys.” The NYPD Can’t Get Its Lies Straight Interestingly, the July 2 Daily News reported that police sources thought Agostini’s story was credible, in spite of his account depicting Ench as not having said the "n"-word. That could be (as Ench’s attorney, Vincent Siccardi, claims) because Agostini’s father is a well-placed NYPD detective or because Agostini is telling the truth. If Agostini is telling the truth (i.e., if the News’ police official sources are right), the three whites were reacting to a failed robbery by two of the failed car thieves, and none of the whites said the “n”-word. That would mean that even by New York City prosecutors’ twisted, hypocritical, unconstitutional standards and practices, the whites could not be prosecuted under the hate crimes statute. It would also mean that rather than this being a racial attack, it was a response to an attempted robbery, whose prospective assailants misidentified their prospective victim. But we don’t need to rely on the News’ NYPD sources. All of the failed car thieves -- Glen Moore, Richard Pope, and Richard Wood -- have corroborated Frank Agostini’s report of what Anthony Ench said, except for claiming that Ench also said the “n” word. So, what is it? Do police believe Agostini or not? They can't say they believe Agostini's story when doing so helps Agostini, but disbelieve the same story when doing so helps Minucci and Ench. (In the present lynch-mob environment, however, they could certainly get away with such a violation of logic.) Regarding the fork-tonguedness of police officials, I am reminded of the line of TV detective “Andy Sipowicz” (Dennis Franz) in NYPD Blue to suspects whose accomplices were already in custody, "You and your partner need to get your lies straight." Rather than ask such questions, the media have gladly followed the lead of Commissioner Kelly & Co. After all, the New York media like nothing more than demonizing white Catholic men, especially Italians, as racist thugs. After Joey Fama’s 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the media demonized the entire area for years, and I, who lived about two miles from the crime scene, was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I lived in Bensonhurst. (I started telling people I was from “Bath Beach,” which as my Italian landlady pointed out, was true. We were in the Bath Beach section of Bensonhurst, a huge swath of Brooklyn which had over 100,000 residents.) By contrast, though most of New York’s black neighborhoods are among the most racist in the nation, the New York media have never demonized a black neighborhood as racist. In Paved with Good Intentions, Jared Taylor recounts a 1989 incident that occurred in The Bronx one month after the Yusuf Hawkins killing. A white man got out of his car on predominantly black East Tremont Avenue to use a telephone. A black man approached him, said, “What are you white guys doing on Tremont? You don’t belong here,” and gut-shot the white. The story was suppressed by the media, ignored by politicians, and discounted by black activists. (At the time, I had a foster-care client on East Tremont Avenue, which looked like a war had just ended, but I didn’t hear about the black-on-white shooting. The woman, a crackhead, lived atop a hilly street. When I went for a home visit and she wasn’t there, I literally ran downhill to a pay phone a block away, to call her neighbor. Meanwhile, the media had already started telling the fairy tale about the “renaissance” the South Bronx, which included East Tremont, was enjoying.) Breaking Through the Media Wall of Silence Note that when a mob of some thirty black junior high school students savagely beat six white girls while shouting racial epithets (“black power!” "honky b-----s!" “white crackers!” “Martin Luther King!” – go figure), in Marine Park, Brooklyn, on March 30 of this year, Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly ignored the case, the media refused to report on it, and the NYPD covered up the attack’s racial character. Hate crime charges against the black alleged attackers were only brought weeks after the attack, after the victims’ parents fought the city, engaged high-profile attorneys on their children’s behalf, and the attack was publicized via the Internet. (The attack would have been racial in character without the use of the racial slurs, but New York authorities have long claimed and the media implied that the use of such slurs proves that an attack was racial.) Likewise, the New York media only covered the story weeks after the fact, after they were shamed into doing so by a little Brooklyn weekly newspaper, which reached only a few thousand New Yorkers, but hundreds of thousands of people across the country and around the world via the Internet. And many of the reporters from major dailies who then grudgingly covered the story were angrier at the little paper and its reporter for breaking through the media wall of silence, than they were at the attackers. Cross-Examining the Prosecution We can forget about the “n” word in Howard Beach II. It’s irrelevant. I realize that the New York media, police, and prosecutors are obsessed with whites using this term in dealing with blacks, but it’s a red herring. First of all, because as I wrote in the context of Atlanta’s Brian Nichols case, racist blacks lie all the time about whites using the “n” word. More importantly, it is not necessarily relevant to establishing an attacker’s motive. Third, the obsession with the “n” word is part of both the legislative intent and application of hate crime statutes in New York that are unconstitutional, because they target whites for punishment. Fourth, hate crime laws are unconstitutional, since they criminalize one’s thoughts, rather than one’s acts. Fifth, the authorities' exploitation of the "n"-word has been contradictory in this case. And last, because the failed car thieves’ own words show that the intent of the whites’ attack was not racist. 1. Since about the 1980s, racist black criminals have been permitted in New York to use false claims that their white victims called them the “n”-word as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card. 2. I have been racially attacked dozens of times by blacks who simply walked over to me and, without uttering a word, shoved, kicked, or punched me. I’ve also had New York blacks cuss me out before spitting on me or throwing lit cigarettes at me, but without calling me a racial epithet. Meanwhile, a white may be a racist but still have good reason for going after a black (in self-defense, to protect others, or to protect property), and may even call the black a racial epithet, in the course of fighting him, without being guilty of a racial attack. The opposite does not apply, because whites almost never commit crimes against blacks. (And authorities almost always discount white reports of black attackers using racial epithets.) The upshot of elites’ obsession with whites saying the “n”-word is that only whites with certain refined manners would ever be permitted, even in theory or in self-defense, to strike blacks for any reason. That standard violates whites’ 14th Amendment right to equality under the law. 3. Hate crime statutes were enacted in New York, as elsewhere, to privilege certain groups (blacks, Hispanics, gays), and correspondingly to disenfranchise white, heterosexual males. Crimes are labeled hate crimes based not on the act but on who commits it. When blacks or Hispanics target whites or Asians, they are almost never charged with hate crimes (and then only after great political pressure is exerted on criminal justice officials), whereas whites are routinely treated as racist criminals and locked up for interracial crimes in which blacks or Hispanics are the victims (and increasingly for crimes in which the whites were the victims). The intent and application of hate crimes legislation both violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. 4. The state may not criminalize one’s thoughts, as opposed to one’s actions. 5. If Minucci is not alleged to have used the "n"-word during the attack, why is he being charged with a hate crime? And if Ench did not use a weapon on anyone (he allegedly kicked Moore), why is he facing the same possible 25-year sentence as Minucci, who fractured Moore's skull? Legally, the only way to paper over such inconsistencies would be to invoke the legal principle of "acting in concert." But then, Agostini would have to be up for the same 25 years as the others. (If anything, consistency would require that Agostini bear the greatest responsibility, because he has himself said that he called on Minucci and Ench to go after Moore, Pope, and Wood, in the first place. According to the hate crime scenario, by which prosecutors treated Keith Mondello as the ringleader in the Yusuf Hawkins case, despite the fact that Mondello did not kill Hawkins or order Joey Fama to kill him, Agostini was the ringleader in Howard Beach II.) Note, however, that violent blacks and Hispanics who have engaged in mob attacks in New York, have not been charged with acting in concert in recent memory. 6. The failed car thieves agree with Agostini that Ench said, “This is what happens when you rob white boys.” Why would Ench use those very words? Unlike in cases of black-on-white attacks, no one claims he said, ‘This is what happens when you come into our neighborhood.’ He said what he did, because the car thieves had sought to rob Agostini. Even the police have agreed with this story out of one side of their mouths. In any event, after their confessions, Glen Moore, Richard Pope, and Richard Wood not only weren’t arrested, but Moore (who is still in critical condition) is being treated like a victim-hero. What’s wrong with this picture? It is a recent development whereby a black man can commit a crime, but if he finds a racial angle, the authorities don’t even charge him, and he then hits the jackpot in civil court. Glen Moore’s stepfather immediately began speaking with anticipation about Moore's coming lawsuit. Even 20 years ago, no New York criminal would have dared to admit that he was in the act of committing a crime when he was attacked, because it was understood that if you were caught committing a crime and got the hell beat out of you, that the beating was inseparable from your own criminal behavior. Somewhere along the line in the 1980s or early 1990s, New York officials started treating black criminals as victims, if the criminals and their media supporters could come up with a good race story. According to the local media and to Ray Kelly’s NYPD, when blacks single out whites for assault, robbery, rape or murder, race never has anything to do with it. But anytime a white hits a black, or even is accused of hitting a black (even if the white didn’t hit the black at all, or only hit back in self-defense after having been assaulted), it’s a white-on-black “bias attack.” Meanwhile, the media are playing along with Kelly, in portraying Nicholas Minucci as a mobbed-up, racist thug. Which, given Minucci’s history of a racial attack on a Sikh man and his friendship with the Gottis, is pretty easy to do. The hysterical reaction to Howard Beach II by the media, politicians, and police brass is a case of what Ian Jobling has called “competitive altruism,” whereby some whites harm other whites, in relation to minorities, in order to demonstrate their moral superiority. The whites in charge are desperate to show the world that they are morally superior to the Nicholas Minuccis and Anthony Enches, and all who would defend them, but not superior to its Glen Moores, Richard Popes, and Richard Woodses. Nicholas Minucci and Anthony Ench, and yes, Frank Agostini, are not nice guys. In fact, they’re dirtbags. (A case could be made that Agostini, who has played both mob wannabes and the NYPD for fools, is the biggest dirtbag of all.) But the reaction to them by the media and politicians, which includes Commissioner Kelly, has little to do with the alleged severity of what they allegedly did. For let’s assume that the charges against Minucci and Ench are 100 percent true. If the reaction were to the supposed outrage of singling out someone and assaulting him based solely on his race or ethnicity, the Bloombergs and Kellys and the media would be speaking out in outrage the same way on a daily basis, and several hundred thousand New York blacks and Hispanics would each presently be serving a 25-year prison term. Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly are a couple of truly dangerous white males.