Free The Savage City by T. J. English Page B

I’d be lyin’.” They called me a liar and kept beatin’ on me. So I just broke down and said, yes.
    After thirty minutes, Detective Joseph Di Prima, the man from the homicide squad, arrived in the squad room.
    Di Prima knew what to do: it was called “the Mutt and Jeff routine,” or “good cop bad cop,” part of a detective’s official training as laid out in Fundamentals of Police Investigation, a manual by Charles E. O’Hara, a former NYPD detective. O’Hara described the tactic: “One interrogator, Mutt, is relentless and menacing, but the other, Jeff, is a kindhearted man…. He disapproves of Mutt and his tactics and will arrange to get him off the case if the suspect will cooperate.”
    Di Prima stepped into the role of Jeff. “Are you hungry, George?” he asked. “Can we get you something to eat?”
    Whitmore nodded; he hadn’t put anything in his stomach in a long time.
    The detective sent Patrolman Isola out for Italian rolls and containers of coffee for the four of them. While they waited, Di Prima made small talk with George, taking care to stay away from criminal matters. He asked George about his upbringing in Wildwood and about his life in Brownsville. He asked George about his father and his mother and about whether he’d been able to find much work in Brooklyn. Whitmore was relieved to talk about something besides the crime of which he’d suddenly been accused.
    The bread and coffee arrived. When George had finished his, Di Prima got down to business. The detective was there to ask George about a different crime—a murder—but he started with the Borrero incident, with the idea of working inexorably toward the other case. According to Di Prima:
    I asked him whether or not he was the person who attacked Mrs. Borrero. I asked him if what she said was true. He said, in the beginning, he said, he did not attack Mrs. Borrero, he didn’t know anything about it. I said inasmuch as Mrs. Borrero had identified him as her assailant there was no other thing for the police to do but to arrest him. If he wanted to tell me anything about it, it was his privilege, he didn’t have to speak to me if he didn’t want to. He thought it over a little while and then asked me, if a fellow was convicted for this type of crime, how much time would he do. I said I honestly didn’t know, the punishment for the crime would be limited to the courts and the judge. He then turned around and says, “Well,” he says, “I’ll tell you the truth. I want to tell you that I’m the one that Mrs. Borrero identified as—I’m the person that she identified as assaulting her.” I again reminded him that he didn’t have to speak to me about this if he didn’t want to, but if he wanted to tell me the truth, I would listen to him and I would relay that same truth to the court. He continued talking to me…. He told me later on, during the conversation, when I reminded him that there was nobody there that would hurt him, and I kept talking to him in a nice level. I asked him was he afraid of me, he said, “No, you’re speaking to me better than anyone else has spoken to me in my life,” he said. “My father never spoke to me like that….”
    With George now on his side, Di Prima moved on to the murder case. It involved a forty-two-year-old Negro woman named Minnie Edmonds who had been sexually assaulted and brutally stabbed to death in an alley near Chester Street. As the detective would later tell it:
    When we were through with the Borrero case, I said to George Whitmore, “You mentioned Chester Street in yourconversation with me, have you anything in your mind about Chester Street?” At first he said, “Well, the boys fight on Chester Street, you know there is a lot of jitterbugging going on.” I said, “This is nothing new to the police. We know about the