When dawn came again to west Philadelphia, it seemed that even the skies mourned. The blue skies of May 13 had given way to dark, low clouds. The late spring warmth of the day before had turned thick and oppressive.
In the gray light of dawn, scattered fire fighters stood among the ruins, playing water across still-smoldering debris. Amid the rising steam and smoke, crumbling structures emerged from the darkness—the fire division walls that had once separated the homes on this street. They were the only thing left standing above the rubble.
The 6200 block of Osage Avenue was gone.
Later in the day, investigators would map the site of 6221 Osage like an archaeological dig and begin to sift through the debris. Over the next several days they would uncover the charred, twisted, and half-consumed remains of eleven people. Among them they would find the bodies of five children, most of them curled in fetal positions beneath blankets.
But just now, at sunup, the work at Osage had not yet begun. The block was strangely tranquil. The guns were silent; the loudspeakers that had taunted the police were buried. Now there was only the echo of unanswered questions.
By the time Jim Berghaier returned home in the early morning hours of May 14, he had been up for nearly two days. He lay down, but he couldn’t sleep. The images of May 13 ran through his mind—the early morning assault down the gas-filled alleyway, the wall of the upstairs bedroom exploding in gunfire, the small dark figure making his way through the smoke and flames. Finally, toward dawn, he dressed quietly and went outside. He walked to a ball field near his house, lay down on his back, stared into the black sky, and cried.
No one had expected things to turn out the way they had, so it wasn’t really anybody’s fault that the cops hadn’t been warned about what might happen to them afterward: that even the toughest among them would have their psyches scarred by the bullets and fire in ways they wouldn’t even understand. Powell began to dream about the helicopter and the bomb. Bill Klein, who had taken only a handful of sick days during his entire career with the force, was out a few days that week with a violent case of the flu.
The sick exhaustion that plagued the front-line cops seemed, to greater or lesser degrees, to infect the city bureaucracy itself. On Osage Avenue, no one seemed to know what to do with a crime scene that was a block and a half wide and buried under six feet of hot debris.
Problems began almost immediately. The walls that still stood were so unstable that they swayed in the breeze, and a crane was used to knock them down as a safety precaution before any digging actually began. But instead of knocking the walls of 6221 into the adjoining properties, the crane operator brought them tumbling down on top of the remains of the MOVE house, adding another layer of scrap that investigators would have to sift through and potentially damaging any evidence that lay underneath.
Because of the heat, digging could not begin until the afternoon. By then four different offices had investigators on the scene, under the overall coordination of the Philadelphia fire marshal’s office: fire investigators, homicide detectives, crime scene technicians from the police department, and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Conspicuously absent was the medical examiner. After two calls, Chief Medical Examiner Bernard Aronson told the fire marshal that no one from his office would come out until the first body was recovered.
At four in the afternoon, as the clamshell pulled away from the debris, a shout went up to stop the crane. Dangling from the jaws of the crane’s scoop was a charred and twisted human leg. The crane operator gently brought the scoop back down and opened the clamshell. Someone called the medical examiner’s office as the investigators sifted through the site with shovels and rakes.
It took them twenty minutes to uncover the remains of what they thought was the first body. It was so badly burned and mangled that it was impossible to tell without a detailed autopsy that they’d actually discovered the remnants of two bodies.
The work continued in the area of the first body. A pathologist from the medical examiner’s office arrived at 5:00 p.m. and supervised the digging. When night fell at 7:30, they had recovered a total of six bodies—all of them from the garage that Birdie and Ramona had escaped.
They had been found only inches from the concrete floor, with more than six feet of debris on top of them. Not one body was intact; many were simply fragments of bone and charred flesh.
The investigators found eleven bodies altogether. All of them lay within the walls of the foundation; none were found in the back alley.
Nine of the bodies lay in the area that had been the garage. All five of the children, some of them found beneath blankets, were there: Phil and Tree, whom Birdie had last seen outside in the fiery alley; Tree’s sister Zanetta; Delitia; and Tomaso. Tomaso, the youngest, was approximately nine years old when he died; Tree, the oldest of the children, was about fifteen.
All but two of the adults were there, too. They had been among the most stalwart members of MOVE: Birdie’s mother, Rhonda, who had braved the police blockade in Richmond; Raymond, the demolitions expert who had wired explosives in the Powelton house during the 1978 siege; pretty young Theresa, whose passionate letters to her family had defended and tried to explain John Africa’s teachings; and Conrad—though temperamental and often violent with the neighbors, Birdie’s favorite among the men—who had left the house with Ramona and the children and in those final terrible moments had gone back inside to be with the others.
In the front of the house, investigators found two more bodies. Judging from the amount of debris under the bodies, Frank apparently had been on the second floor or in the bunker when he died. It was not clear how or when he died; though no soot was found in his lungs, his body showed no evidence that he had died by gunshot wounds or explosions.
In the area of the front porch, investigators recovered the body of a muscular middle-aged man. The lungs were free of soot, and blood samples showed no evidence of carbon monoxide, suggesting that the man was already dead by the time the fire reached him. The heat of the fire had completely consumed the body’s head, hands, and feet. Two forensic pathologists examined the body but could not definitively state a cause of death. Months later the pathologist hired by the MOVE Commission would use circumstantial evidence—including Birdie’s testimony as to who was in the house that day—to identify the body as that of Vincent Leaphart.
Investigators sifting through the mess expected to find an arsenal of weapons even greater than they had recovered from the Powelton house in 1978. They did not. In all, they found two pistols, a shotgun, and a .22-caliber rifle.
The medical examiner’s lack of interest on the morning of May 14 set a pattern that would persist throughout the investigation. Virtually every detail, from blood chemistry to the position in which the bodies were found, would be clouded by controversy over the handling of the evidence. Some of the bodies were not photographed until after they had been removed and placed on litters. The crane simply scooped up buckets of debris and deposited them onto Osage Avenue for investigators to sift through with rakes and shovels, making it impossible to establish precisely where much of the evidence had been found. The police, fire department, and medical examiner’s office used three different labeling systems for the bodies, and the truckloads of debris that were hauled to the police auto pound for further sifting bore no identification to indicate from what part of the house they had come. Later, during the autopsies, delays in obtaining blood and tissue samples would compromise laboratory analysis.
The fire marshal’s investigation was directed at discovering the cause and origin of the fire. Using videotapes and police surveillance photos as a guide, investigators sifted through tons of scrap, eventually recovering a charred and twisted gasoline can. It still bore the mark of impact where it had slammed against the parapet wall, and a long ragged rupture where the gasoline had burst through in a fireball, igniting the splintered debris on the roof.
As the investigators began the long and difficult task of determining when and how the people in the house had died, the rumors had already begun to fly. That morning, a front-page story in the Philadelphia Daily News announced:
3 MOVErs Slain; 60 Homes Burn
Three members of MOVE were shot to death in a gun battle with police stakeout units at the rear of the cult’s headquarters, police sources told the Daily News early this morning. The sources said the bodies of the three were lying in the rubble at the rear of the home on 6221 Osage Avenue, west Philadelphia.
A follow-up story three days later would add more details: stakeout police had seen the first MOVE gunman “blown back” into the house by a barrage of bullets. “Everybody started shooting,” one source said. “It became a 100 percent bona fide shootout.”
With the publication of the Philadelphia Daily News report, a disturbing new wrinkle had been added to the emerging tale of incompetence on Osage Avenue. Was it possible that the other MOVE members who were trying to escape from the burning house along with Ramona and Birdie had been pinned down by police gunfire?
The cops who had been in the back alley read the Philadelphia Daily News stories with incredulity—and the first pangs of paranoia. Anyone who had seen the back of the MOVE house would know that there was no way someone could be “blown back” through the two-foot-by-two-foot hatch that was the only ground-floor entrance to the rear of the house. (Three-and-a-half years later, the reporter who broke the story revealed that it had come to him from three police officers, each of whom had heard it from someone else. None of them actually claimed to have seen the events they described, and one of them later changed his mind about what he believed had happened in the back alley that night.)
According to later testimony, none of the cops who had actually been in the back alley had seen or heard police firing their weapons that evening in the alley. Each of them, in fact, had given independent statements to homicide detectives the same night. Cops who had been at far ends of the alley, and who hadn’t spoken to one another that night, all had provided consistent accounts. Nobody could seriously believe that they had all gathered together that night and cooked up a story to cover up the murder of innocent children. And yet already the term cover-up was being heard.
If the cops had hoped that Sambor would dispel the rumors, they were disappointed. Every time he rose to their defense, he seemed to leave them deeper in trouble.
On May 14, Sambor, Goode, Richmond, and Brooks were beyond asking what had gone wrong; they walked and spoke as if they had not yet fully awakened from a terrible collective nightmare. Goode held a brief news conference in which he pledged to rebuild the block but offered few details about what had gone wrong.
That first day, the four of them sat down with Goode’s press secretary and made an initial attempt to sort through the events of May 13. They began to put together a chronology that would plague them throughout all the subsequent investigations. Based solely on their joint recollections and never completed, it placed Goode’s and Richmond’s order to put out the fire at six o’clock in the evening—just fifteen minutes after the fire first became apparent over the Channel 10 MAST camera.
The chronology suggested that Goode and Brooks had reacted relatively quickly to the fire, but at the same time it raised the question as to why that order was not put into effect until almost 6:30, nearly a half hour later—thus pointing an accusing finger at Richmond and Sambor.
Goode would cling tenaciously to this timetable, even after later evidence from police band radios and other sources almost certainly fixed the time of Goode’s order at about 6:25. Unable or unwilling to explain why he watched a fire burn uncontrolled for more than half an hour without picking up the phone and ordering it to be put out, he became increasingly defensive about his handling of the entire affair. Though he said he accepted “full responsibility” for the tragedy, he nonetheless left the clear impression that he had acted properly and honorably by delegating most of the decision-making authority to his managing director and police commissioner.
Brooks came across as soft-spoken and sincere, but he seemed oddly distant. The plan had been conceived and the first phases of it put into place while he’d been in Virginia, and he seemed like a man who’d come back from vacation to find out that the office had gone to hell in his absence. He’d permitted himself one outburst of recriminations when he ran into Sambor on Pine Street the night before, but now he was focused on damage control.
As more attention began to focus on the police, Sambor was unrepentant. The outcome, of course, had been tragic, but it wasn’t his fault. The bureaucratic instincts had emerged almost immediately: he began passing bucks as quickly as they came to him. He suggested that MOVE had set the fire, and if it had burned out of control, it was because the fire commissioner hadn’t been willing to send his men in to fight it.
Of those whom the media would dub “the Big Four,” Bill Richmond was the only one who seemed to be thinking more about the kids who’d died than about his own political neck. He did not try to sidestep reporters’ questions. He explained how and why he and Sambor had decided to let the bunker burn. He tried to describe the fear and fatigue and concern for his men that had contributed to that decision, but he did not try to defend its wisdom.
Two days after the confrontation, he broke down at a memorial service honoring Philadelphia police officers and fire fighters who had died in the line of duty over the years. He was barely able to conclude his speech, which had been written before May 13 with a chilling prescience.
“Once again,” he read, “sad evidence is shown that the dangers in our work as we operate from day to day—” He paused for a long moment, choking back tears. Finally he finished, his voice cracking over a phrase that in its irony seemed to sum up all that had gone wrong that day: “—in the routine performance of our duties.”
At 9:30 A.M., on Friday, May 17, Goode and his subordinates held a press conference. It was a disaster.
The questions were obvious: Why was a bomb used on the house? Hadn’t they foreseen a fire? And most important, why had the city permitted the fire to burn for almost an hour before trying to extinguish it?
Goode, Sambor, Richmond and Brooks did not yet have any clear understanding of what had gone so terribly wrong the Monday before (some of them, in fact, never would), and the more they tried to explain themselves, the worse their claims sounded.
First, Sambor mistakenly confirmed the Philadelphia Daily News report about the mythical back-alley gunfight. Minutes later, Tiers and Marandola, who were watching on television, phoned the pressroom and asked to speak to Sambor. After talking with them briefly, Sambor returned to the microphones and announced that his earlier statement had been based on “unconfirmed reports.” Police had not fired back at MOVE members in the back alley, he said.
Reporters asked whom he’d been speaking with on the phone. “None of your business,” Sambor replied testily. When the questioning persisted, he exploded.
Interrupting Goode, he shouted, “Damn it—excuse me, Mr. Mayor—I’ve said once and for all that in the beginning I said there was gunfire returned. I did not say categorically or unequivocally that gunfire was returned, okay?”
A reporter tried to pose a question, but Sambor cut him off. “Will you let me finish, damn it? Now I said it twice—that it was unconfirmed. And now I’ve confirmed it that no gunfire was returned. I hope that that is clear now. Do you want me to say it in another language?”
Goode himself seemed as poorly informed as Sambor at the press conference. He told reporters that the fire had been permitted to burn because MOVE gunfire prevented fire fighters from getting close enough—despite the obvious fact that the remote-control SQRTs were available but never used; despite Brooks’s explanation on the night of the fire that the fire had been used to disable the bunker; despite the fact that at the news conference itself Richmond gave the same explanation as Goode stood listening.
Richmond unwittingly added to the growing speculation about a gun battle. Describing where the bodies had been found, he stated that all of the bodies were “in the rear of the dwelling of 6221.” But in answer to a reporter’s question, he added: “Yes, that’s the rear alley.”
Charges of a police cover-up were now being made openly—and it was only four days after the fire.
Ever since the fire, Managing Director Leo Brooks had been quiet and reclusive. On May 23, he resigned. His departure, the mayor said, had nothing to do with the disaster of May 13—in fact, he said, Brooks had mentioned plans to retire several weeks before.
There was a cover-up going on in the police department, but it had nothing to do with the back alley. And so far, the press had no inkling of it.
The problem was the C-4. The bomb guys had used a lot of it on May 13. What would happen if people started asking where it had come from?
FBI agent Mike Macys had done them a favor when he’d brought them the C-4 “Christmas present” the winter before. Connor, Powell, and the others didn’t know whether what he’d done was illegal, but it was certainly done outside official channels. Since the controls on procuring C-4 were strict, people would eventually start asking where the bomb squad had acquired so much and why it hadn’t been documented properly. Sooner or later that trail would lead back to Mike Macys. That would mean a major embarrassment for the FBI, and the FBI did not look kindly upon agents who embarrassed the bureau.
The decision to cover up the use of C-4 actually began inside 6217 Osage Avenue on the morning of May 13. According to the grand jury’s public report, after the early morning battle, as the insertion team waited for its next instructions, Connor had turned to Angelucci and Muldowney and asked, “What are we going to say about the C-4?”
“What do you mean?” one of them asked.
“We can’t say we used C-4,” Connor said. He’d been nervous, as if he’d just realized that there might be a problem. “We’re not supposed to have any C-4.” He proposed that if they were asked, they should say that the explosives used that morning had been HDP boosters, commercially available explosives that had similar detonation characteristics.
Angelucci and Muldowney looked at one another. It had been Connor’s idea to use C-4 in the first place. Reluctantly, they agreed to go along with Connor, in part because they didn’t want Macys to get jammed up, in part because they knew about the kind of problems a cop could face if he spoke out against a fellow officer, and in part because the deception seemed so minor—as Connor would later say, “A bomb is a bomb no matter what’s in it.”
Klein had used C-4 twice on May 13, once to construct the charge that had ended up destroying the interior of 6223 late in the morning and later when he constructed the charge that Powell had dropped on the MOVE house roof. Connor urged Klein to keep quiet about the C-4, too.
If Klein had had any doubts about going along with Connor, they were dissipated a few days later when Sambor, relying on information that Klein had provided to homicide detectives, publicly announced that the charge dropped on the roof had been made of Tovex. For Klein to come clean after that would have been a disaster; the department would crucify him.
Frank Powell says that he didn’t know about the C-4 in the charge he dropped from the helicopter until a few weeks after the confrontation, when Graham—the bomb squad technician who had constructed the timer for the charge—mentioned that he thought there had been C-4 in it. Graham hadn’t seen what Klein had used, but from the sound of the explosion he guessed it had been C-4. After Graham told him that, Powell had a conversation with Klein. “Don’t tell me what was in the satchel,” he told Klein. “I don’t know what was in it, and I don’t want to know.”
The cover-up was conceived hastily, and it had three weaknesses. The first was that Connor and the others had to give statements to homicide detectives. Once they’d identified the explosives they’d used as HDP boosters, there was no way they could change their story—it could cost them their careers if they admitted that they’d provided false information. The second problem was the fact that HDP boosters looked like sticks of dynamite and bore no resemblance to the puttylike bricks of C-4. The stakeout cops who’d been members of the insertion teams weren’t in on the cover-up, and, totally ignorant of explosives, they had innocently given detailed descriptions of charges that could only have been C-4.
The clincher came from the detective work of Eugene Dooley. Dooley was the captain of the homicide division, which was conducting the police department’s internal investigation of the May 13 incident. Unflappable and methodical, he’d overseen a series of tests at the police academy in which police had tried to reconstruct the events that had created the rooftop fire on May 13. Based on Klein’s description of the charge and information about the gasoline and other materials stored near the bunker, they had been unable to start a fire short of actually placing the explosives inside the gasoline can.
The test results reinforced Sambor’s earlier belief that MOVE members had set the rooftop fire themselves—as, in fact, Ramona had threatened to do the night before. But Dooley came to a different conclusion. As he played the tape of the explosion and the tapes from the tests again and again, Dooley felt something was wrong. He was no expert in explosives, but when he played the tapes in slow motion it seemed clear that the size and pattern of the blasts just didn’t match up.
He showed the tapes to Sambor and suggested that he interview Klein again. In August of 1985, Dooley brought Klein in and showed him the tapes. Didn’t he agree that there was something odd about the two explosions? After intensive questioning, Klein admitted to Dooley that he had included C-4 in the charge, and the cover-up quickly began to unravel.
The press had covered the C-4 issue without really understanding what it was about. All they knew was that the cops had lied about what was contained in the bomb and that C-4 was a powerful military explosive, not the “commercial” explosive Tovex, as they had been told at first.
What reporters couldn’t figure out—and what no one was telling them—was why the police had lied about the explosive. The obvious, though erroneous, conclusion was that someone—perhaps Klein or Sambor—had tried to conceal how powerful the bomb was. That, in turn, could only mean that the bomb might have been intended to do more than simply disable the bunker. Perhaps it had been designed to kill.
It was in this atmosphere that a remarkable series of hearings was broadcast in the fall of 1985: the hearings of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission—better known as the MOVE Commission. Goode, moving to deflect the rising tide of criticism, had announced the formation of the commission just two days after the fire.
It had been widely viewed as a clumsy political move on Goode’s part. A group of people handpicked by the mayor could hardly do anything other than vindicate him. At the same time, they would forestall the internal police investigation, as well as a special investigation that was being considered by the city council.
Goode sought to blunt those criticisms by selecting commissioners whose reputations were beyond reproach. Within a week he had established a legal framework for the commission and recruited eleven commissioners who would represent a cross section of views and whose credentials would be above reproach. All of them served without pay.
To chair the commission, he chose William H. Brown III, one of the city’s most prominent black attorneys and a former chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In consultation with Brown, he selected Henry S. Ruth, Jr., who had served as one of the chief Watergate prosecutors; Neil J. Welch, the former assistant director of the FBI who had helped develop the Abscam cases that netted fraud convictions against several congressmen; and Charisse Ranielle Lillie, a law professor at Villanova University just outside Philadelphia, who had been a trial lawyer for the Justice Department’s civil rights division and a deputy director of Community Legal Services.
The commission also contained three ministers: Monsignor Edward P. Cullen, who had been trained as a social worker and headed Catholic Social Services in the city; Reverend Audrey F. Bronson of the Sanctuary Church of the Open Door in west Philadelphia; and Reverend Paul M. Washington, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in north Philadelphia. A well-known and respected civil rights activist, Washington had served as host of the 1970 Black Panthers convention and had attempted to mediate the 1978 MOVE standoff.
Representing widely diverse constituencies were two commissioners whose presence represented (at least symbolically) the conscience of the community: M. Todd Cooke, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society—the region’s oldest savings and loan association—and Julia M. Chinn, who was president of the Cobbs Creek Town Watch and lived near the site of the confrontation. Rounding out the commission were two more lawyers. One was attorney Charles W. Bowser, a political ally of Goode’s who had been the city’s first black deputy mayor in the late 1960s and, as an unsuccessful candidate for mayor in 1975, had helped pave the way for Goode’s election in 1983. Bowser was widely regarded as Goode’s man on the commission, the one who would be most likely to come to the defense of the mayor and his administration if the going got tough.
The other was Bruce W. Kauffman, chairman of the city’s most prominent law firm, member of the state Judicial Inquiry and Review Board, and a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice. Of all of the lawyers on the panel, only Kauffman had served as a judge and had had experience in sifting through tangled legal complexities and weighing the quality of evidence against the often-baffling requirements of the law.
The commissioners kept a relatively low profile over the summer, but investigators had been busy conducting interviews and gathering evidence in preparation for the public hearings. They interviewed virtually every cop and fire fighter on the scene, as well as other key players, but the interviews themselves were neither recorded nor transcribed. Instead, investigators wrote summaries based on their notes. Some of those who were interviewed later said that investigators either misunderstood or misrepresented what they’d said.
To a great extent, these investigators were shooting in the dark. Though Klein had admitted using the C-4, the police still weren’t saying where it had come from. During the summer, MOVE investigators paid a call to Frank Powell at the bomb squad headquarters, looking for C-4, and Powell had given them the runaround.
Then too, the attorneys hired by the police officers’ union actively resisted the inquiry. Concerned that the MOVE Commission’s mission and methods were too vague, they feared a witch-hunt that would place the blame on the cops. Rumors were still circulating about a gun battle in the back alley. The rank-and-file cops began to suspect they were being set up. The lawyers advised the cops to plead the Fifth Amendment—despite the fact that Goode had vowed to fire any city employee who didn’t cooperate with the commission.
To the MOVE investigators—and, later, to most of the commissioners—the cops’ lack of cooperation suggested that they were hiding something. In a criminal proceeding, of course, a court cannot infer guilt because a defendant invokes the Fifth Amendment. But the commission did not consider itself bound by the strict rules of evidence that would be applicable in a criminal court of law, and at least informally seemed to regard the cops’ refusal to testify as evidence of their guilt. In fact, in its final report the MOVE Commission recommended a disturbingly McCarthyistic course of action, urging the city to fire those police officers who had taken the Fifth Amendment.
Officer Tommy Mellor, who had been trapped in the closet with Powell and the others on May 13, would later say that as scared as he was that day, he was more scared by his interviews with the MOVE investigators. To him it seemed clear that something strange was going on.
The first round of interviews didn’t concern him. He simply explained to the investigators what had happened. It all seemed straightforward.
During the second round he sat drinking a cup of coffee as the investigator reviewed his notes. Suddenly the investigator made a perplexing request: “Tell me again about the water charges.”
The coffee cup paused halfway to Mellor’s lips as alarm bells went off in his head. “I didn’t say anything about water charges,” he answered. He didn’t even know what a water charge was.
The investigator became upset. “Yes, you did—it’s right here in black and white!” he shouted, waving his notes from the first interview.
“Let me see,” Mellor answered, reaching for the notes. The investigator pulled them back out of his reach.
Mellor repeated that he didn’t know anything about water charges. The investigator continued to insist that he did. Other statements came up that Mellor didn’t recognize. By the time he left, he was confused and worried.
Angry, he left the interview room by the wrong door and found himself in a stairwell. As he made his way back, he overheard the investigator, still in the room, talking to someone in a loud voice. “They’re all nothing but a bunch of liars,” he was saying.
Outside, Mellor caught up with Berghaier, who was just finishing an equally hostile session with another investigator.
He looked at Berghaier and said quietly, “We’re dead.”
Berghaier and Mellor weren’t the only cops who sensed that they were victims of a witch-hunt. Frank Powell, for example, says that MOVE investigators attributed statements to him that he never made. In fact, he says, they reported an entire interview with him that never took place. The suspicions of the MOVE Commission ran deeply throughout the police department.
William B. Lytton III, who supervised the MOVE Commission investigations, later defended both the methods of the investigation and its personnel. The investigation team, he said, was made up of seasoned law enforcement professionals who, if anything, would be expected to be sympathetic to the cops’ point of view. He stated that because of the number of interviews that were conducted over such a short time period, it is possible that some errors crept into the statements. And he acknowledges that as the investigations went on, there was a great deal of friction between the investigators and the police.
But he lays responsibility for that with the attorneys who represented the cops. He believes it was their behavior and hostility, not the investigators’, which contributed to the atmosphere of paranoia. There was no witch-hunt, he insists.
By the time the MOVE Commission public hearings began in October 1985, considerable evidence seemed to point toward a police conspiracy: the two Philadelphia Daily News stories suggesting that police gunfire had driven MOVE members back into the house, Sambor’s confusing confirmation and subsequent denial of a gun battle in the back alley, the police department’s admission that the bomb had contained more powerful explosives than the department had first stated, and the lack of any valid explanation for the deception. Goode had told the people of Philadelphia that the fire had been permitted to burn because fire fighters had been shot at by MOVE members; his subordinates had said they had been trying to disable the bunker.
These points taken together, it is easy to see why the commission—and many other people—already believed that the cops had something to hide. The conclusion that there had been more than incompetence on Osage Avenue was nearly inescapable.
And now “cover-up” was not the only accusation echoing throughout the city. Starting to make the rounds—sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted—was a new word: murder.
The public hearings did nothing to allay the growing suspicions. The attorneys for the police officers clashed openly with the commission, contending that the commission, with its relaxed procedural and evidentiary standards, did not provide adequate protection of their clients’ Constitutional rights. They sought and obtained a court order that prohibited the commission from using the investigation reports to challenge or cross-examine witnesses. They repeatedly objected to the questions that were asked of their witnesses—objections that Brown usually overruled with ill-concealed anger. They filed a lawsuit challenging the validity of the commission’s charter to conduct the investigation.
All of that, as well as the revelations of poor planning and execution, made for good television drama. The hearings, held in the studios of local PBS affiliate WHYY-TV, were broadcast live, six hours a day, four days a week, for five weeks. Every day the viewing audience included at least one million people in the Philadelphia area.
Jim Berghaier was one of the officers who chose to testify before the MOVE Commission. He had nothing to hide, and he wasn’t about to take the Fifth Amendment.
Even so, he had been feeling the weight of the suspicions and speculations about what the police might have done in the back alley. By the time he testified he was a nervous wreck, and his composure deteriorated as he sat before the glare of the television lights.
Mellor and Tursi had been called to testify the same day, and the three of them appeared together. As Berghaier sat next to Mellor and told his story, he felt as though he would break down and cry, as he had so many times already over the summer. He curled his toes inside his shoes and counted the tiles on the ceiling to calm himself down. Somehow he got through his testimony.
The strain showed on his face as he testified. As Mellor spoke about the burning transformer that had threatened to fall into the pool of water, one could see Berghaier’s eyes darting upward, searching for the transformer. While Mellor spoke, Berghaier felt he was no longer in the studio; he was out there in the alley again.
When it was over, Commissioner Bowser, who had been one of the harshest critics of the operation, spoke of Berghaier.
“I’ve been sitting here listening for many days, and it’s all been depressing and discouraging—except for what I’ve heard of Office Berghaier and heard from Officer Berghaier today. And if there’s any hope for this entire situation, it’s from that officer. And I want to thank him.”
The other commissioners joined in commending Berghaier, and over the next several days letters came to his home—from an old schoolmate, from a stranger, and one from Birdie’s attorney, who thanked Berghaier on behalf of the boy’s father and stepmother.
But the praise did little to boost his spirits. In the weeks after the confrontation he had waited for the black despair to pass, for his life to settle back into the happy routine it had been, but it did not. He was having trouble sleeping, and when he did drift off he was haunted by one recurring dream: He was in the alley, and he could see MOVE children running around in circles in the flames, melting before his eyes. And off to one side, untouched by the flames, he could see his daughter. “Daddy,” she cried. “Do something!”
The horror of it all for Jim Berghaier was that no matter what he’d done that day, no matter how many people had praised his heroism, he felt as though he should have found a way to save the other children. And yet when he went over that day in his mind, he knew he’d responded with sure instincts; he couldn’t think of anything he could have done better.
That was the worst: he had done everything right, and yet everything had turned out so wrong. Eleven people were dead, and the newspapers were calling the cops murderers and liars.
Even the other cops seemed against him. There had always been cops who’d said Berghaier was full of himself, a show-off who looked down his nose at other cops. Now, in the aftermath of May 13, it seemed that he was the only one who was going to be painted a hero for saving the kid. Every time someone called him a hero, he could feel the hot, angry eyes of the other good cops out there who’d been ignored or who were being treated as if they were murderers.
And there were cops who weren’t going to shed a tear over the deaths of May 13—even the kids. There were cops who said Berghaier hadn’t done them any favors by saving the kid; he’d just grow up and kill some other cop. There were, frankly, guys who didn’t give a damn about a bunch of “crazy niggers” in west Philadelphia. And there were those who said that they couldn’t do any “real police work” in the alley that night because Berghaier was there. Someone painted the words “nigger lover” on his locker.
For Jim Berghaier, the weeks passed and the nightmares did not go away. One more week, he would tell himself; one more week and I’ll be fine. But he was not.
The thing he loved most about police work was that the job was so moral: it was the good guys against the bad guys. But now he couldn’t tell which were the good guys and which were the bad.
One night Berghaier was working a stakeout operation on the elevated railway in west Philadelphia with his old partners Tommy Mellor and Jesse Freer. A group of muggers had been robbing people as they left the el stop late at night. Berghaier was the decoy; he would dress as an old man and walk down the dark and menacing stairwells from the el station. He put his pistol in its shoulder holster, slipped a sweatshirt over it, and pulled a jacket over the whole thing.
“Jim,” Freer told him, “you’ll never be able to get to your gun in time.”
“Sure I will, Jesse. No problem,” Berghaier told him.
The operation didn’t come off; the muggers were scared off by a passing police car. Afterward, as he walked down the stairs to meet up with Mellor, Berghaier felt as if he were coming out of a daze. He looked down at his sweatshirt and realized that his partner had been right: there was no way he could have pulled out his gun. And then an even more frightening realization hit him: He had done it on purpose. He was shaking by the time Mellor reached him. “Tommy, I can’t get to my gun.” Mellor looked at him quizzically. “I don’t want to get to my gun,” Berghaier went on.
Tommy Mellor said nothing for a long time. Then he laid his arm across Berghaier’s shoulder. “That’s it, Jimmy,” he said quietly. “You’re done.”
It was Jim Berghaier’s last stakeout operation.
At home there were fights, as his black moods spilled over into his relationship with his wife and kids. A cop’s life is rough on families, as the divorce rates testify, but Berghaier had always had the kind of family life that other cops kidded him about. When they went out for drinks after work, he usually headed straight home.
To his wife and kids, he’d always been a tower of strength. Maybe he pushed his kids a little too hard, worried about them a little too much, but they knew he did it only because he wanted the best for them. Now he seemed so distracted that they weren’t sure what he wanted. They did not know how to deal with his black moods and long silent spells. His marriage faltered, and his kids began to look at him the way one would look at a wounded animal—half pitying, half fearful. He’d always felt his life was built on solid bedrock. Now the ground was giving way beneath him, and he was falling, falling into darkness.
The highlight of the MOVE Commission’s public hearings came at the end, with the testimony of the Big Four. Here, laid out in detail, was the story of Goode’s delaying tactics and the final frantic planning that led to the confrontation. Here too were revealed the confusion and terror of May 13 and the stumbling series of decisions that led to the fire and then permitted it to burn.
Appearing before the MOVE Commission in his Idi Amin-style police commissioner’s uniform, Sambor seemed angry and defiant, and his testimony was confused and contradictory. Brooks was earnest, but it was clear that he had chosen to stay on the sidelines that day. Richmond wept openly for the lives that had been lost.
Goode, who had at first accepted responsibility for the tragedy, hinted in his testimony before the MOVE Commission that he had not been kept informed about the course of events that day. He had not been told, he said, that the police would use a helicopter to drop the device, and he would not have approved the plan if he had known. He made the startling assertion that his order to fight the fire had been delayed because of poor television reception at City Hall: as he watched the news reports, he said, he had mistaken “snow” on the TV screen for water from fire hoses.
The public hearings came to a close toward the end of November, and the commissioners voted to reconvene after the first of the year to review the evidence and begin drawing up their final report.
On November 13, 1985, Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor resigned, six months to the day after the fire. Goode and Sambor both described the resignation as voluntary. Several weeks later, however, Sambor displayed his customary flair for making a bad situation even worse. He told a group of reporters that he had been “forced out” by Goode.
By the following February, a bloodied but unbowed Sambor was telling a police conference in Florida that he had been “given a choice . . . to retire or be fired.” Goode had made him the scapegoat for the May 13 fiasco, he contended, because of the mayor’s plans to run for reelection in 1987. He warned the cops attending the International Disaster Management Conference to “deal with political realities.” He had not done so during the May 13 operation and, he said, had lost his job as a result. He also repeated his claim that MOVE members had set the fire themselves, despite clear evidence to the contrary. And unrepentant to the end, he said that he would take the same action again under similar circumstances.
Christmas of 1985 was a bleak one, especially for MOVE’s former neighbors. For seven months they had lived scattered throughout the city, some in temporary housing supplied by the city, others with relatives. Goode had pledged to have them back in their rebuilt homes in time for Christmas, but the reconstruction was marked by delays and incompetence.
Goode had pledged to give the work to a black contractor, and he bypassed the usual competitive bidding process to award it to a man named Ernest Edwards. He did so despite the fact that the city’s most prominent real estate developer, Willard Rouse, had offered to rebuild the houses at cost, and he also spurned an offer by a manufacturer to provide furnaces for the new homes free of charge.
When it became apparent that Edwards was having trouble obtaining credit, Goode had intervened, personally telephoning bankers about the loans. Despite his assurances, however, Edwards proved to be a bad credit risk. He used some of the money that the city advanced him on the project to pay off old loans, and soon it came to light that he had left a trail of bankruptcies and unfinished projects behind him.
The city fired Edwards, and a grand jury began an investigation of his finances and his handling of the Osage Avenue project. Meanwhile, a second contractor came in and soon ran into delays and cost overruns.
The cost of rebuilding the sixty-one houses, originally estimated at $4.9 million, eventually ran to more than $8.5 million. When other expenses were included, such as demolition costs and restoration of utilities, the cost to rebuild each house—each of which had a market value of perhaps $35,000 when they burned—totaled $154,673. And they were not finished until August 1986—eight months after the Christmas deadline.
When they finally moved back home, the neighbors were critical of the contractor’s work. One neighbor pointed to the ten-year warranty that the builders had provided. “I have a feeling I’m going to need this,” he said. He was right; with the first big snowfall of the following winter, several neighbors discovered that their brand-new roofs leaked.
While the neighbors were waiting for their houses to be rebuilt, the MOVE Commission reconvened and began wrapping up its work.
It took the commissioners all of January and most of February to slog through the transcripts and other evidence and hammer out a series of findings. Many of the factual issues were readily settled, as were the recommendations submitted for improvements in city policies and practices. But as the commission’s work drew to a close, a number of issues proved to be thorny indeed.
Bruce Kauffman and Chairman William Brown had been at odds throughout the investigations and hearings. Kauffman had made no secret about the fact that he felt the cops on the line were getting a raw deal from the majority of the commission. Where others saw evidence of “unconscionable” police force—and perhaps even premeditated murder—Kauffman reminded them that, under the law, the police had been well within their rights to meet MOVE’s resistance with deadly force. “You can beat up on the leadership all you want, but I won’t go for beating up on the guy on the line. . . . Once an assault is under way and police are fired on, they have a right to fire back to kill,” he argued in one discussion.
Nor could he fault them morally for their actions. He remained convinced that the commission’s evidence of police shooting in the back alley was far too incomplete and circumstantial—a caveat that was nearly lost in the din at the time but that would prove to be prophetic. And Kauffman took profound exception to proposed wording that charged racism and that suggested the confrontation would have been handled differently in a “comparable white neighborhood.” In the end, he broke with the rest of the commission on key findings and wrote a dissent.
The most difficult moment for the MOVE commissioners came on the very last day of deliberations, as the commissioners debated whether they should call for any resignations.
If Kauffman had been looking out for the cops, Bowser was watching out for the interests of Wilson Goode, and that became obvious as the commission came to the very brink of calling for Goode’s and Richmond’s resignations.
Bowser pressed for Richmond’s resignation but adamantly opposed any suggestion of Goode’s resignation. His justification was that Richmond, an appointee, was an appropriate target for the commission’s recommendations to the mayor, but that Goode himself was answerable only to the people who had elected him. In addition, he argued that Richmond had played the key role in permitting the fire to burn; though Goode had “just walked away,” his very detachment insulated him from responsibility. During the deliberations Bowser argued that “Mayor Goode cannot be held responsible for the dark tragedy of May 13th for the worst reason of all: he was not leading when it counted most.”
During that meeting on the evening of February 24, 1986, the commission seesawed over the resignation issue. Todd Cooke, the savings and loan chairman, had drafted the original language, which stated simply that the MOVE Commission would not make any recommendations regarding the continued service of the mayor or top city officials. For the commission to do otherwise would “arrogate to itself the power which properly belongs to and should be exercised by the electorate,” Cooke had written.
Bowser didn’t buy it. “We can’t tell people who to vote for or not vote for . . . . This commission needs to be careful to avoid any political scapegoating. But we must say something. I’d like to say that the mayor’s decision to retain Richmond was ill advised, and he ought to rethink both that and his own position.”
Kauffman wasn’t crazy about the proposed language either, but for different reasons. To him it constituted an endorsement for Goode to stay in office.
Reverend Paul Washington searched for a middle ground. The commission could express its displeasure with the administration without openly calling for resignations: “Our findings are harsh. They speak loudly for themselves. And in light of these findings, the electorate can reach its own conclusions.”
To Monsignor Cullen, the Catholic social worker, it looked as though Bowser were looking for a scapegoat that would get Goode off the hook. “If we say one should go, then all of them should go,” he insisted.
The discussion continued into the night. Toward the end Brown suggested that the entire comment be taken out of the record. Bowser countered by calling for a poll of the commissioners. Cooke defended the original comment once again.
Bowser persisted, reading a new version he had jotted on his notepad: “The mayor has to consider the impact his performance on May 13, 1985, has on his continued performance in office. The mayor should also consider whether the fire commissioner should continue in office—”
“We’re waltzing around the issue,” Commissioner Welch interrupted. “At least the fire commissioner has to go.”
Brown suggested that Richmond be given the opportunity to exit gracefully. But Cooke was now agreeing with Cullen: “Either we go all the way and tell them both to quit, or we say nothing.”
Welch and Kauffman agreed. The report could simply speak for itself. A consensus seemed to be building, but Bowser saw an opening to go after Richmond once again: “We must make recommendations on each individual.
“We accuse the fire commissioner of homicide,” he persisted. “We only accuse the mayor of cowardice and racism.”
Cullen retorted, “If we say the fire commissioner must go, and don’t say it about the mayor, we are definitely a mayor’s commission.”
After a few more minutes of debate, Brown took a straw poll. Cullen, Cooke, Kauffman, and Ruth insisted the mayor and Richmond would have to stand or fall together. Bowser, backed up by Washington, Chinn, Lillie, Bronson and Welch, felt that the commission could recommend Richmond’s resignation without demanding that the mayor step down. They weren’t saying that the commission should make that recommendation, only that it need not link the two men.
The division was probably a fair reflection of public opinion in Philadelphia. But if the MOVE Commission was to have any meaning at all, it would achieve that by searching for and finding some common ground on this, the last and most important recommendation that it would make.
And so, once again, the weary commissioners groped toward compromise. Cooke offered an olive branch. He began to read from his notepad a new version of his original proposal. Once again, he embraced Washington’s simple idea: let the report speak for itself. The final decision would lie with the voters.
Finally the consensus coalesced around this proposal. Bowser warned that the black community would be “outraged” if Richmond didn’t go, but in the end he voted with the others to adopt Cooke’s language.
In its published report, the commission concluded:
Finally, in our democratic form of government, it is the voters who have the unique responsibility of choosing those who shall govern. The elected officials, in turn, select the key administrators to assist in the operations of government.
The Commission considered at length whether it should make recommendations relative to the retention or termination of elected or appointed senior city officials who had grave responsibilities before and during the May 13, 1985 incident. The Commission has attempted in this report to state its findings fairly and fully. After thoughtful discussion, the Commission concluded that the Report speaks for itself.
If some saw in these words an attempt by the commission to duck the issues, no one could say the same about other conclusions in the report. The language was harsh and uncompromising—which was all the more shocking coming from a panel that had been appointed by the mayor himself:
The Mayor abdicated his responsibilities as a leader when, after mid-day he permitted a clearly failed operation to continue which posed great risk to life and property.
In the end, the most controversial part of the report was not the question of resignations that had so troubled the commissioners. Rather, it was an issue of fact that most of them—all but Kauffman—had seen as fairly well settled: police culpability for the shooting in the back alley.
The MOVE Commission had concluded that “police gunfire prevented some occupants of 6221 Osage Avenue from escaping from the burning house to the rear alley.” The cornerstone of the MOVE Commission’s evidence for this finding was young Birdie Africa’s testimony. All of the commissioners but Kauffman had concluded that his testimony before the commission “so clearly supports [the commission’s finding] that it is difficult to imagine any individual who saw this child testify or who has had the opportunity to read the transcript of his testimony could possibly reach any other conclusion.”
Kauffman wrote a dissent challenging the commission’s characterization of the police gunfire as “unconscionable” and its conclusions about the shooting in the back alley.
In light of MOVE’s history of violence and the fortifications of the house, Kauffman did not agree that the police gunfire was “clearly excessive and unreasonable” or that “the failure of those responsible . . . to control or stop such an excessive amount of force was unconscionable.” In his dissent he wrote:
The life-threatening task of confronting this terrorist group did not fall to social workers or politicians or lawyers. This dangerous duty was assigned to the police. With the luxury of hindsight, contemplation, and analysis, and without a word of recognition for individual acts of police heroism, this Commission now presumes to second-guess the actions taken under fire by those brave officers. This Commission criticizes both the caliber of the weapons the police carried and the number of bullets they fired. This, to me, is unconscionable.
Regarding the shooting in the back alley, he wrote:
Michael Ward [Birdie Africa] testified that there were two escape attempts. During the first, Conrad Africa, carrying a child, allegedly was driven back in the house by police gunfire. Significantly, Michael did not actually see this surrender attempt. Rather, he remained inside 6221 and testified that he heard shots after Conrad attempted to leave. Moreover, Michael also testified that he had never heard gunshots before in his life and that he could not tell where the shots were coming from or who was firing them. (See testimony of Michael Ward, 10/31/85 at 323 et seq.)
Most significantly, both the police and Michael agreed that when he surrendered, neither he nor the others leaving the house with him were fired upon by anyone. (See testimony of Michael Ward, 10/31/85 at 365-66.) This critical fact strongly corroborates the police version of the events in the alley.
Finally, the record clearly confirms that Officer James Berghaier exposed himself to gunfire and risked his life to save Michael from drowning after he fled from 6221. (See testimony of Officers James Berghaier and Michael Tursi, 11/1/85 at 107 et seq.) This heroic act is totally inconsistent with any police attempt to fire on those MOVE members and children who tried to surrender.
One of the recommendations of the MOVE Commission report was that the Philadelphia district attorney convene a grand jury to investigate possible criminal charges arising out of the May 13 confrontation.
Later that year, DA Ron Castille petitioned the court to establish an investigating grand jury to examine the events that had occurred on Osage Avenue. In the summer of 1986, a jury of twenty-three regular jurors and seven alternates was selected by lot from a pool of three hundred Philadelphia voters. Shortly after Labor Day, they began hearing testimony.
Meanwhile, Berghaier continued his long dark plunge into despair. He was no longer living at home. Reassigned to the police pistol range, he was restless and unfocused. He already knew that he was finished as a cop, but the police department bureaucracy was fighting him over his eligibility for disability payments; it feared a flood of similar claims if it granted Berghaier disability pay for a service-related stress disorder.
In February 1987, with the disability issue still unresolved, he left the force. A friend gave him a bartending job. He had never been a heavy drinker, but now he was drinking himself into a fog virtually every night, just to blunt the pain.
At the age of thirty-seven, his career was over. The bills were piling up. His marriage was gone. His kids were probably better off without him. Jim Berghaier had always known where he stood in the world. He knew he’d made a difference to those in his life. Now it seemed he was just dragging them down. He began writing suicide notes.
What was left of his survivor’s gut-trusting instinct that had helped him on the street now helped him hang on, to reach out for help.
He was admitted to Philadelphia Psychiatric Center for treatment. The staff put him on a suicide watch, taking away his belt and placing him under continuous observation. Slowly, over a period of weeks, he began to sift through the backlog of guilt and pain, piecing his life together a little at a time.
One evening he saw his picture in the paper, next to a story that reported his admission to the hospital. All of the old feelings came welling back—and along with them his shame at being locked away. It crashed over him as he lay on his bed sobbing.
A nurse came in. The nursing staff didn’t know how patients had come to be admitted, but she stopped when she saw the paper with his picture in it.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” she asked, already knowing the answer. “I want to tell you something,” she said to him. “God put you in that alley to save that child. There’s a purpose to all of this. Read the Bible. It will all be clear.”
Berghaier had never been especially religious, but he was ready to look anywhere for help in understanding what had happened to him. He did not find it in the Bible, but he continued to search.
On May 6, 1987, a Philadelphia grand jury returned indictments against Ernest Edwards, the contractor Goode had handpicked for the reconstruction of Osage Avenue. The report also sharply criticized the role of Goode’s administration and the mayor personally in the awarding of the contract to Edwards and the bureaucratic bungling that followed. It charged Edwards, along with his former partner, with stealing more than $200,000 from the project. Edwards, who is black, called the indictments racially motivated. The city housing director, who had overseen the project, resigned abruptly in the wake of the report.
The report came in the midst of a heated primary battle in the mayoral race, and Goode branded the timing of the report “political” and “inflammatory.” Running under the cloud of the county as well as a federal grand jury that was convened to look into potential civil rights violations, criticized by yet another grand jury that had investigated the rebuilding of the block, and lambasted by his own commission, Goode had seen his political career written off by many of the experts.
At the beginning of his first term, Goode had enormous political capital among his black constituency. His election as Philadelphia’s first black mayor was a historic occasion in the city and a source of enormous pride to the black community. The question in 1987 was whether he would be able to hold on to that loyalty despite the MOVE incident.
The race was full of familiar faces. Goode’s challenger in the Democratic primary was former district attorney Edward Rendell, who had himself played a key part in the events leading up to the confrontation. At first, Rendell said that he did not consider Goode’s handling of MOVE a campaign issue, and he studiously avoided it. But the primary race turned brutally nasty toward the end. Behind in the polls, Rendell aired commercials showing the burning houses on Osage Avenue. “In the end,” the voice-over announced, “Wilson Goode will be remembered for only one thing.”
Both of the city’s daily papers and Philadelphia Magazine endorsed Rendell, but the black vote stayed with Goode during the primary and he easily defeated Rendell. In the fall he faced another familiar personality: former mayor Frank L. Rizzo.
Rizzo had run against Goode as a Democrat in the 1983 election and lost. Now he’d switched to the Republican Party and had taken up the standard against Goode once again. Unlike Rendell, he didn’t hesitate to bring up MOVE. He dubbed the mayor “Bomber Goode” and made the MOVE confrontation and the subsequent rebuilding project key campaign issues. He was quick to point out that his own administration’s confrontation with MOVE in 1978 had had a very different ending from Goode’s in 1985.
In November, Goode was reelected by 14,201 votes—a margin of only 2 percent.
In May of 1988, two years after the probe began and three years after the fire itself, DA Ron Castille announced that the grand jury had concluded its work without bringing any indictments. The jurors found the decisions that had led to the dropping of the bomb “morally reprehensible” but not illegal. The actions of Goode, Brooks, Sambor, and Richmond may have been poorly thought out, but they did not constitute a crime under the law. An essential requirement—intent—was missing. In addition, the grand jury report specifically disputed the MOVE Commission’s finding that police gunfire in the back alley had driven people back into the house.
During his testimony before the grand jury, which was made public in the report, Goode had been shown videotapes and radio transcripts that clearly established that he had given the order to put out the fire at approximately 6:25 p.m.—almost 45 minutes after the fire was first spotted and too late to save the house. He had conceded that there was an “absolute possibility” that the order had come as late as 6:25, but he could not explain why he’d waited so long, other than to say he had expected someone to put the fire out at any moment. The videotapes, which had been time-coded by the television station that supplied them to the grand jury, showed that the flames were rising half a dozen feet into the air before Goode became concerned enough to pick up the phone.
(It is a striking coincidence that his decision to call Brooks and Brooks’s order to Sambor to put out the fire came at almost precisely the same moment—and that both came just minutes after the front bunker collapsed. The timing raises the question of whether Goode and Brooks both knew about the decision to let the bunker burn and, like Sambor, waited until the bunker was gone before ordering the fire put out. The grand jury found no witnesses or other evidence that would prove such a scenario, but it remains a possibility.)
The reaction to the grand jury report was loud, often predictable, and in many quarters harsh. The Philadelphia Daily News succinctly (and accurately) boiled down the 279 pages of legal and factual analysis into a five-word headline: “MOVE Jury: Stupidity No Crime.”
The more staid sister paper of the Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, approved the grand jury’s decision in an editorial.
William B. Lytton III, the chief counsel for the MOVE Commission, angrily disputed the back-alley findings. Only gunfire, he said, could explain why “three ran back into an inferno with an estimated temperature of 2,000 degrees.” David Shrager, Birdie’s attorney, told a meeting sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee that “every single thing [Birdie] said before the commission, he said before the grand jury, and then some . . . . When you heard from the district attorney that there was no gunfire at any time in the back alley . . . that is utterly false.” Shrager, who had been in the grand jury room with Birdie and his father, claimed that Birdie had testified that two children had been forced back into the house by gunfire after they had tried to climb up on the sidewalk and onto a tree.
Despite Rendell’s earlier campaign rhetoric, he praised the grand jury report. It had come to the same conclusion that he had when he’d first entertained the possibility of calling a grand jury in the summer of 1985. What had happened on May 13 was a result of tragic incompetence, but it was not criminal, he said.
But for the man on the street the grand jury report raised the issue: How was it possible for eleven people to die and a neighborhood to burn without a crime being committed?
The answer to that question requires a careful examination of the law—the grand jury report itself required 279 pages to cover all the issues—but it reveals a great deal about the philosophical underpinnings of the law.
The decision to drop the bomb may have been ill considered, but those involved in the decision understood it to have a limited purpose: their intention was to disable the bunker and blow a hole in the roof, not to burn down the house or harm the occupants. Whatever the wisdom of that decision, it was legally permissible for them to use such force to make arrests.
Under the law, it was the decision to let the fire burn that was the most significant from the standpoint of intent. That decision had been made by just two people: Sambor and Richmond. Again, their intent was not to set the house on fire or to drive the occupants out of the house with the fire.
The MOVE Commission suggested that the decision to let the fire burn was, at the very least, criminally reckless. The grand jury, however, concluded that neither Richmond’s nor Sambor’s conduct rose to the level of criminal recklessness. The report stated that “‘recklessness’ has a specific definition under the law”:
A person acts recklessly with respect to a material element of an offense when he consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the material element exists or will result from his conduct . . . .
The key phrase in that tortuous legal definition is consciously disregards. Sambor did not “consciously disregard” the risk that the fire might spread if left to burn; in fact, he was concerned enough about it to seek the advice of an expert at the scene—namely Richmond. And, as the report stated, “A reasonable person would reasonably rely on an expert’s opinion.”
That, finally, left William Richmond’s acts at issue. Though Sambor raised the question, it was in the end his call as to whether to let the fire burn. Once again, it was clear that Richmond did not intend the consequences that occurred: the spread of the fire and the loss of life and property. Lacking evidence of intent, he could not be charged with murder or manslaughter. But did he act with recklessness?
Again, the legal question turned on whether Richmond had consciously disregarded the risks of letting the fire burn. Testimony from fire expert Charles King suggested that Richmond had been right when he told Sambor that he could control the small fire that burned on the roof at the time. What he didn’t consider, however, was the possibility that the fire might burn down into the structure of the roof and weaken it so much that the bunker would fall through. By Richmond’s own admission, he simply didn’t think of it: “I did not factually follow that through,” he told the grand jury. “It was a unique kind of thing. It was something I had never seen in twenty-seven years. I guess in retrospect I certainly could have pursued it with Mr. Sambor . . . . I just did not follow through with that logic . . . .”
King’s testimony suggested how Richmond might have overlooked the risk that the fire might spread out of control. He said that Richmond’s conclusion that the fire could burn the bunker and still be put out was a “fair call”; because fires generally burn upward, it would be reasonable to assume that the bunker would burn without involving the rooftop. His answer to Sambor’s question, King said, was reasonable, though tragically mistaken.
Some legal analysts criticized the grand jury findings, saying that there is enough latitude in these statutory definitions to establish at least recklessness, if not actual intent. But academic dissections of legal prose ignore the terrible reality of the circumstances. It was Richmond himself who described those circumstances most vividly in the grand jury report:
There is no way you can recreate Osage Avenue in this room. You cannot do it. When you looked up at that bunker, it was just the most awesome thing you ever saw in your life. To say you were scared—everyone was scared. There were bullets ricocheting over the streets, which was frightening, for a long, extended period of time. I did not make the decision I normally make. I have a good history in Philadelphia. If I didn’t make those decisions on that day, I feel—maybe they cannot be excused, but they certainly should have taken some consideration to the environment that we were working in at the time.
The grand jury’s findings on the decision to drop the bomb and let the fire burn turned on legal analysis—a judgment call—but the facts that the grand jury had found were essentially in agreement with those of the MOVE Commission. In its other major conclusion, however, the grand jury flatly contradicted the MOVE Commission’s key factual finding: It found that police had not shot at MOVE members in the back alley.
In part that conclusion was based on testimony from cops who had not appeared before the MOVE Commission, but the report also criticized the commission’s interpretation of its own evidence. The commission, the report said, had jumped to conclusions that weren’t warranted by the facts—just as Commissioner Kauffman had warned in his dissent.
The commission had based its finding about the back alley on a relative handful of evidence: statements by “earwitnesses” that they heard what sounded like automatic gunfire and .22 caliber shots in the back alley; the testimony of Detective Stephenson that Sergeant Griffiths had said he’d “dropped” a MOVE member in the back alley and its apparent corroboration by Battalion Chief Skarbeck of the fire department; and, most important, Birdie Africa’s videotaped testimony.
The “earwitness” testimony was the vaguest of the three. By the time the MOVE members had left the house that evening, Osage Avenue was a cacophony of noise. There were all the sounds that accompany a fire that is burning out of control: windows shattering from the heat, aerosol cans exploding, electrical wires crackling, and the roar of the flames themselves. But there were also countless rounds of ammunition left behind in the abandoned police posts and the houses that the insertion teams had entered, as well as whatever bullets, explosives, and fuels MOVE had stockpiled in 6221.
More important, according to Mark Gottlieb—the prosecutor in charge of the investigation and the report—the grand jury considered the testimony of the “earwitnesses” according to their proximity to the alley itself. Not surprisingly, the recollections of those who were the farthest from the alley tended to be inconsistent and contradictory. Fewer of the witnesses who had been close to the alley thought that they had heard automatic gunfire. Among those who had a direct view of the alley itself—fire fighters as well as cops—not one testified that he had heard automatic gunfire—although many of them had heard the half dozen or so shots allegedly fired by the MOVE member with his .22 rifle.
Detective Stephenson’s testimony that he thought he’d overheard Sergeant Griffiths say he “dropped” a MOVE member in the alley also proved to have a number of flaws. Stephenson wasn’t sure he’d heard Griffiths correctly; he was standing next to the diesel engine of the crane, on Osage Avenue, and Griffiths was at least fifty feet away, on the walkway in the alley. Second, Stephenson could not produce the notes he claimed to have made at the time; the originals had disappeared from his cubbyhole at the office, and he had only a “copy” of them to refer to.
Griffiths, meanwhile, testified before the grand jury that he’d pointed out to investigators the spot where the male had “dropped” out of sight in the smoke.
Skarbeck, whose statements to the MOVE Commission had seemed to corroborate Stephenson’s testimony, clarified his statements before the grand jury. He was sure that the man he had seen had not been Griffiths at all.
The grand jury also differed with the MOVE Commission’s evaluation of Birdie’s testimony. Birdie testified before the grand jury itself, but the report noted that the MOVE Commission’s findings weren’t even justified by what Birdie had told the commission, much less by what he testified to later.
Even assuming that Birdie’s recollections were accurate (his testimony on other points was confused and inconsistent), the simple fact remains that he did not tell the MOVE Commission that police gunfire had prevented people in the house from escaping into the rear alley.
He said that when Conrad opened the hatch, the police started shooting. But from inside the garage, he could not see them shoot; he simply heard sounds that he assumed were police gunfire. He could not tell where they were coming from; it could have been the noise of the fire or exploding ammunition. It could have been MOVE members shooting at police from the upper floors. It could have been Conrad or another MOVE member shooting.
But whatever it was, it occurred at least several minutes before anyone left the house, not while they were in the back alley. Birdie did not testify that he witnessed any police gunfire while he was in the alley. He did not say that the other children returned to the house because they were being shot at; in fact, he didn’t know what happened to the children after they were lost in the smoke.
According to the public report, his testimony before the grand jury offered even less support for the murder-in-the-back-alley theory. He testified that Conrad opened the door, heard gunfire, and shut the door again. It was only then, Birdie testified, that the adults began to yell that the kids were coming out. After the door was opened again and the people started to come out, Birdie testified, he neither saw nor heard police fire their guns.
The only witness who has refused to testify about the back alley is Ramona Africa. But her behavior that day also suggests that police did not fire. Numerous witnesses testified that she walked slowly along the fence, in full view of the cops. She stopped and looked back a number of times, at one point stamping her foot as if in frustration when the others did not follow her. Twice she bent over the fence and tried to help Birdie climb up. She never tried to take cover from the cops or to shield herself or Birdie. Earlier in the day, by contrast, people three and four blocks away could be seen diving under cars and behind porch steps when the gunfire erupted.
The one area where the grand jury could have brought indictments but chose not to, according to Mark Gottlieb, were perjury charges related to the cover-up. Both Klein and Connor lied in their testimony before the grand jury, denying or obscuring their use of C-4 and where they had obtained it. Connor later returned and admitted that he’d lied in order to protect FBI agent Macys. Klein was not recalled.
In the end, the decision not to issue indictments against Connor and Klein came down to a judgment call, taking into account both the nature of the deception and the motives behind it: “Ending this massive investigation by charging a few front-line officers would not serve any purpose . . . when it was the city’s high and appointed officials who were at least morally responsible for this great tragedy.”
Since 1987, Jim Berghaier has won a personal battle or two: He feels he is past the suicidal stage, and inch by inch he is creeping away from the edge of the abyss. But he will never be the man he was. His marriage is beyond repair. With his history of mental illness, he can no longer be a shopping mall guard, much less a cop.
His search for the meaning of what happened to him is not over. So far, it has yielded no flash of insight that would make him whole again. His victories have been small and hard-won, and the struggle is far from over.
He has come to understand—and is beginning to accept—the fact that he cannot control his world. It is not an easy thing to do, for it means that he must face the world without that inner confidence that carried him through those dark and dangerous nights on the Granny Squad.
Jim Berghaier was not the only cop whose life was shattered by the events of May 13. All of them who were out there that day have become casualties in some sense. Some have suffered more than others.
In November 1987 the Philadelphia Police Department granted 70 percent disability pensions to four officers: William Klein, described in a psychiatric report as suffering from nightmares, suicidal depression, and “thoughts of shooting the mayor and other city officials”; James Berghaier; Daniel Angelucci; and Sergeant Donald Griffiths. A panel of psychiatrists concluded that all of them suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the May 13 siege. Griffiths took an extended sick leave and left the department in December 1987. Angelucci quit the force in October. Klein officially left in November.
Tommy Mellor is still a cop, still working on the Granny Squad. Of the people who were in the back alley that day, he seems the least affected—at least outwardly. Berghaier sees Mellor as the rock-solid foundation of his old team, the kind of guy who simply lets trouble roll off his back.
But Mellor says that he is not the same person that he was before May 13. When he was trapped in the closet by gunfire, he was convinced he would die there, and he made his peace. Since then, he says, he likes to be by himself more. He used to feel that he had too little time and too many obligations to do all the things he’d always wanted to do. Now he makes the time. In the summer of 1988 he got onto his motorcycle and took a trip out west, all by himself, just to have time to think.
What worries Berghaier are the walking wounded—the cops he’s heard about who are still on the force and carrying their pain inside them. He was surprised, after he testified before the MOVE Commission, when a burly cop quietly told him, “Don’t think I haven’t cried a few nights about what happened out there.” His friends who are still on the force say that there are cops who are ready to crack but won’t seek help, either because they’re too proud or because they fear it will ruin their careers. He’s afraid that when they do crack, it will be with a badge on their chest and a gun in their hand, and they’re going to hurt either themselves or someone else.
Several months after the grand jury issued its findings, the U.S. Justice Department tersely announced that a federal grand jury probe had concluded without bringing any indictments. Barring any unforeseen developments, the criminal investigations of the police action of May 13, 1985, are closed. That does not mean, of course, that the story is over. Civil suits brought by relatives of those who died are still pending. In 1987, one of the displaced residents shot and nearly killed his lawyer, angered by the city’s low settlement offer and the lawyer’s hefty cut of it. An estimate in 1987 put the total price tag for the MOVE confrontation at nearly $18 million. And that did not include the costs of the three grand jury investigations or any money that the city may eventually have to pay in damages awarded in civil suits.
The city’s handling of MOVE quickly became a political touchstone. Only five days after the tragedy U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese said that Goode’s handling of MOVE was “a good example for all of us to take note of.” (Later, his chief spokesman “clarified” that statement, saying that the attorney general had been referring to the mayor’s candor in explaining things to the public.) A documentary produced by Philadelphia’s PBS station saw racist overtones in the confrontation, suggesting that it was but the latest chapter in a long history of violence against black neighborhoods—and apparently ignoring the fact that a black mayor and black managing director had explicitly approved the dropping of the bomb as well as the entire police operation that day.
The confrontation even became the subject of ads. One ad proposed in 1985, before the rebuilding delays surfaced, was designed to promote the city to outside businesses and potential residents. Headlined “Home for Christmas,” it praised the mayor’s pledge to the displaced residents of Osage Avenue as an example of how Philadelphians look after their own. The ad never ran, but two years after the tragedy a fire insurance ad in the city subways showed a picture of Earl and Pearl Watkins of Osage Avenue. The copy read:
“Thank God we had Hanover Mutual Fire Insurance!” Do you?
By 10:30 on the night of the MOVE catastrophe, the roof of Earl and Pearl Watkins’ home was in the basement. Like all victims of the MOVE disaster, they had lost everything. Unlike many of the others, the Watkinses received a check from Hanover Mutual Fire Insurance two days later.
Today the scars of Philadelphia’s long and bloody conflict with MOVE remain. In Powelton Village, wildflowers grow where the headquarters once stood. On Osage Avenue, a block of uncharacteristically modern row houses stands out among the older homes. In a suburb of Philadelphia, Michael Ward—formerly Birdie Africa—lives a quiet middle-class existence with his father, who has never been involved with MOVE. Ramona Africa is in prison. Vincent Leaphart and ten of his followers have been buried.
And at another house in west Philadelphia, people live without heat and electricity wear their hair in dreadlocks, and eat raw food. They are living by the principles of their founder and leader, a man who, it is said, can never die: the Coordinator, John Africa.