12380: NY Times: Louima (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>


June 23, 2002
No Way Out
By JIM DWYER


Of course he had a dream of escape, back when he was
working days at factories all over northern New Jersey, and
on weekends when he sold used cars for cash commissions, or
at night when he guarded the sewage treatment plant.
Instead of the humming of sewing machines, the haggling
with car customers, the tolling of drips in the lonely
sewage plant, Abner Louima would be in the air: a pilot
flying his own plane, on his own schedule, in his own sky.
He had a plan. Bank the money from one job, pay the bills
with wages from the other, start a business with the
savings. Be his own boss. Then fly.

In search of Louima today, the visitor drives west from
Florida's Atlantic beaches. The rearview mirror shows the
eastern skies above the ocean filled with paragliders,
towed by motorboats hundreds of feet below. The illusion is
lovely to behold: you, strapped to your own cloud, scudding
high above the curling blue water.

The directions call for a turn at a risque clothing shop,
which is the only landmark he, clearly embarrassed, can
offer to guide a visitor. In the multilane anonymity of the
Florida boomlands, nothing marks his company's door, wedged
between the lingerie joint and a storefront evangelical
church. Inside, the scent of paint, the Sheetrock still raw
from cuts made to divvy up the workspace, declare this to
be a place of starts fresh if modestly made.

A few turns past the receptionist is the office of Abner
Louima, president, Babou's Enterprises. The stated purposes
of the company are property management, consumer financing,
real-estate investing. Its undeclared cause is the
reclamation of his life. The business takes its name not
from Abner Louima, internationally famous torture victim,
but from Abner (Babou) Louima, emigre electrical engineer,
multilingual graduate of a Haitian college led by
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, driven man who long held down a
minimum of two menial jobs and played soccer in Prospect
Park. He was Babou until the night in August 1997 that he
walked into a Brooklyn police precinct a healthy
30-year-old and was wheeled out with a crater inside. Then
his name became some run-on version of
Louima-Diallo-Dorismond, an entry in the street thesaurus
under ''victim.''

And for nearly five years, a group of New York police
officers and their lawyers have tried to tag Louima with
still another definition: liar.

As he rises to greet his visitor, he seems taller and
broader in the shoulders than the frightened,
hospital-gowned man who was first presented to the world on
a gurney five years ago. Now, from behind a desk, his hello
comes wrapped in a grin. Like his premises, he seems
unmarked. His smile is easier; his rage, more fluent. The
strong temptation is to believe time and money have worked
as cures.

Last August, he received one check for $2,046,098.34 from
the City of New York and a second check from the country's
largest police union, the New York City Policemen's
Benevolent Association, for $1,625,000, the first trickles
in a river of money that will flow to the Louima family.

Two annuities, purchased by the city at his direction, not
only provide an undergirding for the family's financial
security but also offer a window onto their values. The
smaller of the annuities will pay out nearly $400,000
during the years Louima's three young children reach
college age. The larger one has been pumping out $5,000 a
month, a payment that will increase 3 percent annually for
the rest of his days, or no less than 20 years. That same
annuity will also pay him lump sums at various moments over
the next 24 years amounting to $2.5 million. Virtually all
the annuity revenue is tax-free. Abner Louima's wealth,
while not extravagant, makes for a substantial pile.

This was supposed to be his carfare to exile. New York,
celebrated as a paradise for the privacy obsessed, had
turned Abner Louima inside out. There, his name, his
history, his wealth are taken as public property.

A few days ago, on a short visit to New York, Louima stood
on a quiet street in Queens. A man spotted him. ''Oh, my
God -- it's Abner Louima,'' the man said, throwing his arms
around Louima, who gently parried the embrace.

''I'm having some problems,'' says the man. ''Can you help
me out?''

''How can I help?'' asks Louima.

''I'm a little short,'' says the man.

''I'm sorry,'' says Louima. ''I don't deal in cash.''

After the man walked off, Louima explained that he has
developed some expertise at managing such requests. Even
so, no nimble evasions can spare him from a loop he thought
had finally been severed.

Within the next week or so, he is due in a federal
courthouse in Brooklyn to revisit the details of that lost,
ugly week in August 1997. A former New York police officer,
Charles Schwarz, will be retried on charges of helping
another officer torture Louima. Schwarz has been convicted
twice in separate cases rising from the attack; both
verdicts were overturned in February on procedural grounds.


Louima has testified to these events a half dozen times or
so in one venue or another, his affect flat, his voice
uninflected, his manner understated. On a night in August
1997, after working an evening shift as a security guard in
a sewage treatment plant, he went to a Brooklyn nightclub.
Mistaken for someone who had thrown a punch at a cop, he
was arrested, booked and, with his pants pulled below his
knees, walked in handcuffs across the 70th Precinct
stationhouse. In the prisoners' toilets, a broken
broomstick was jammed up his rectum by Officer Justin Volpe
while Louima was held by another officer, never identified
by Louima with more specificity than ''the driver'' of the
squad car.

At the hospital, the medical people first grasped the
damage when Louima passed feces in his urine. He had three
major surgeries to repair his torn colon and bladder. He
nearly died from infection. He spent 64 days in the
hospital.

Last summer, after the trials seemed finished, when the
city and the police union had put the money in his pocket,
he got out of town. He purchased a just-about middle-class
home in Miami Lakes for $220,000, on a block where the cars
in the driveways are mid-priced Toyotas and Nissans. For
himself and his wife, he has bought a pair of nice,
slightly used cars. ''No matter how much you have, if you
don't invest that money the right way, you're going to have
money for two or three days,'' he says.

His neighbors did not know his past, and the classmates of
his school-age son and daughter greeted them as just two
more new kids. He started his company. ''My children need
to see me right now as a working man,'' he said. ''They are
going to grow up with the mentality that they have to work.
When you have children, they are watching everything you
do.''

The 70th Precinct is a thousand miles away. Justin Volpe
has gone to prison for 30 years. Louima's colon works
almost the way it used to. In the night sky of his mind, he
says, the firmament of his family is brighter than ever;
only occasionally does the cosmic horror of that memory
erupt into his dreams. He leans toward normalcy.


When Louima goes to visit Petionville, where he grew up,
his brother Jonas calls a pal at the Port-au-Prince airport
to escort them past the lines. They change hotels when news
crews track him. One time, coming back to New York, Jonas
could not put in the airport fix, and they were trapped on
a slow-moving check-in. Heads cranked. Whispers started. A
clerk pulled them aside and upgraded their tickets.

The ties between Louima and his extended family,
first-generation immigrants, have not yet unspooled; if
anything, the calamity has wound them closer. He has also
developed a grab bag of new relationships since the attack
-- with the police officers who for three years were
assigned to protect him from other police officers and with
the Rev. Al Sharpton, at whose side he has often appeared.
These have amplified his life, not defined it. Last year,
he endorsed a Sharpton enemy for mayor, finding laughable a
published suggestion that he might have to clear such an
action with the minister or with anyone else.

His deepest feelings of obligation were shaped not by
Justin Volpe on the one hand or by Al Sharpton on the other
but by events in his own home. He and his wife, Micheline,
had a son, Steven, in 1999. They already had a son, Abner
Jr., now 5, and Louima was raising a daughter, Abnia
Samantha, 11, from a previous relationship. The birth of
Steven, two years after Louima was maimed and nearly
murdered, crystallized a sense of destiny beyond the
ambitions of his younger days. ''They wanted to end my
life,'' Louima said. ''I would never be able to see my
children grow up. I would be history right now. God saved
my life. For a reason. For people to find out how evil some
of the cops are. To take care of these children.''

He indulged the demands on his public person at rallies and
conferences, where he made modest calls for reform, offered
a few words of consolation to some new victim. With each
appearance, his currency as Babou dwindled and his stock as
Generic Victim soared. Even the name Louima was no longer
needed to describe him. Last April, at a conference in
Washington, he was approached by a state trooper who was
suing officials in New Jersey for discrimination against
African-American officers.

''It's a great honor to meet you, Mr. Diallo,'' said the
trooper, invoking the name of Amadou Diallo, the African
immigrant shot 41 times in his doorway.

''Thank you,'' said Louima, smiling faintly.

Even Alan Hevesi, the politician Louima endorsed for mayor
last year, had a hard time telling the quick from the dead.
The day after Louima's endorsement, a man in Harlem asked
Hevesi if he could be trusted to forcefully engage police
misconduct. But of course, said Hevesi proudly.
''Yesterday, Amadou Diallo endorsed me.''

Louima shrugs it off. ''Probably 50 percent of the people
on the street call me Diallo,'' said Louima. ''I don't feel
offended by it.''

Louima may not mind if his name fades into obscurity,
confused with the names of others, but as it does, a new
opinion has taken hold among prominent members of the New
York and national press: namely, that the wrong police
officer has been named as an accomplice to the torture. In
this view, all the credible evidence shows that Charles
Schwarz was not in the bathroom. To support this
contention, ''60 Minutes'' cited claims by Volpe and ran an
interview with Schwarz's partner, Thomas Wiese -- who said
he, and not Schwarz, had been in the bathroom with Volpe.

At his sentencing, Schwarz said he was a victim of people
who catered to minorities. ''This case,'' he said, ''was
about many things, but it was never about justice. The
outraged masses had to be appeased. Desperate politicians
concerned with their political futures had to take drastic
action. The Police Department is an organization that is
always sensitive to criticism, especially from those in the
minority community.''

Understandably, Schwarz was a bit modest.

No credible system of justice could ignore the assault on
Louima, although it is now beyond dispute that a number of
police officers in the 70th Precinct on the night of Aug.
9, 1997, tried to do at least that and perhaps worse.
Moreover, no system could ignore the robust -- if imperfect
-- body of evidence that puts Charles Schwarz at the center
of events he denies any connection with.

Those proofs, as outlined by the federal prosecutor, Alan
Vinegrad, consisted of four witnesses: Jeffrey Fallon, the
70th Precinct desk sergeant, who ordered Schwarz to take
Louima away from the desk; Louima himself, who from the
beginning said he was led into the bathroom by the driver
of the patrol car -- Schwarz that night; Mark Schofield, a
70th Precinct police officer who lent Volpe a pair of black
gloves before the assault and who said, after claiming to
have seen nothing, that he saw Schwarz lead Louima away
from the front desk; and Eric Turetzky, the first police
officer to come forward, who said unequivocally that he saw
Schwarz escort Louima down a hallway that runs only to the
bathroom.

Impossible, Schwarz swore. He had been outside the
stationhouse, in the patrol car, checking the back seat for
contraband. His partner, Wiese, told investigators that he
-- not Schwarz -- had been the second police officer to
walk into the bathroom, but that he entered after Justin
Volpe had finished the attack, so he didn't know anything
about it either.

One side is lying.

The Schwarz camp suggests Louima calculated that he would
get more in a civil suit by saying he had been assaulted by
multiple police officers rather than by a single deranged
individual. Why else would Louima also claim that the
officer pinning him down said ''This is Giuliani time,'' if
not to run up the financial score? That Louima voluntarily
recanted that statement is of no moment to Ronald P.
Fischetti, the leader of the relentless, loyal, pro-bono
defense attorneys working on behalf of Schwarz. By
Fischetti's reckoning, not only was the ''Giuliani time''
quote a fabrication, so was the second police officer that
Louima claimed uttered it. ''This entire case turns on the
different versions, the different accounts given by Abner
Louima,'' Fischetti said in court last month.

He also has said he intends to sue Louima -- after I prove
Chuck Schwarz's innocence,'' he says -- and not
surprisingly, plans to go right at Louima's credibility in
the coming trial.

''What matters is what happens in court,'' Louima says.
''That is where the truth comes out. They even went back to
Haiti to see if I had any dirt on me. My record is clean,
so they can't put any dirt on me.''

To save Schwarz, the new jury must not only disbelieve
Louima and three police officers but will somehow have to
integrate the story told by Wiese, which has two intriguing
difficulties. In his interview with investigators, Wiese
insisted Volpe was not wearing gloves (bloody gloves were
found stashed in the locker of another officer) and that
Volpe disposed of the stick in the bathroom trash can
(other officers saw him waving it as he left the bathroom).


According to a member of the anonymous jury, interviewed
earlier this year on Pacifica Radio, the cops and their
lawyers ''wanted to throw smoke and dust in the eyes of the
investigators, plant enough reasonable doubt in the record
so a jury wouldn't be able to find anybody other than Volpe
guilty of anything. Their goal was to keep Schwarz
completely away from the bathroom during this time. And all
the evidence points to Schwarz being in the bathroom,
having been the one to take Louima to the bathroom, going
in with him to the bathroom, being in the bathroom.''

ours after the Daily News columnist Mike McAlary broke news
of the torture in 1997, a tireless machine began to crank
out counterreality. Louima was a victim of gay sex gone
bad. A political pawn. A greedy liar. Louima has lived in
this fog from the beginning. It was only Volpe's admission
to the attack, three years ago, that began to bring Louima
some serenity.

Before the attack, his family had been regular churchgoers
at the Evangelical Crusade Church in Brooklyn, where an
uncle presides as pastor. During a flight to New York, he
fielded a general query about whether religion had a big
role in his life now. For a long time, he said nothing. It
was hard to say if he had picked up the question under the
shushing noise of the jet or had simply forgotten. His eyes
seemed to glisten, and he spoke carefully, and with great
composure: ''I don't see how I can avoid it. I don't know
how to break it down.''

The ancient Roman technique of crucifixion runs toward the
same point as Justin Volpe's station-house impalement. ''I
cannot compare myself to Jesus Christ,'' he said. ''But you
don't have to be on the cross to be crucified. You could
kill someone without using a weapon, by your tongue; you
might say something about that person. By what I've been
through, the price I've paid, I could compare it with
that.''

For nearly five full years, the same players have been
working over the same moment in time and space, fingering
at the event until its meaning has all but rubbed away,
like the lost language of weathered gravestones. There is
no mystery, of course, about what happened to Abner Louima;
the mystery is what happened to those cops.

As things have turned out, Abner Louima has not got around
to those flying lessons. Yet until February, he was more
than content with his unmarked Florida life, where his
children were secure, every day another stride further from
August 1997. His anonymity there was as precious as
anything, though he did not want to live as a shut-in. His
brother recalls one of his first nights out in Miami,
dinner at a celebrity hangout called Nikki's. Unlike in New
York, no strangers approached him, knowing his name (or
perhaps mistaking it) and asking how he felt and calling
for God's blessing. The new life had begun.

Then the phone call came from New York, telling him that
the convictions of Schwarz, Wiese and another officer,
Thomas Bruder, had been overturned. Louima thought it was a
dumb joke and hung up. Another caller told him to put on
CNN. At school, the other children asked the Louima kids
about their dad. At home, Louima screamed. He was finished
with all that. He wouldn't go back to court again. He and
the children peeked out the front door. The news crews had
found their home, at the end of the development, past all
the midlevel Toyotas and Nissans parked on a street where
no one had known who he was. His name had been called once
more. Abner Louima, torture victim, was back.



Jim Dwyer, a reporter for The Times, is a co-author of
''Actual Innocence,'' a book about wrongful convictions. It
was written with the lawyers Peter Neufeld and Barry
Scheck, who have represented Abner Louima.