Killings Page 6

  DERIZOTIS: They say they want to see the mayor. I say they will have to wait—he’s in a meeting at this time. So the mayor hollered, “No, let ’em come in. Let ’em come in.” So I let ’em come in. So Casuse pulled his gun right away.

  A lot of people who knew Larry Casuse were astounded to hear that he had pulled a gun on anyone. Young Navajos of the type active in IAE have ordinarily gone in for peaceful, even dignified, protest. At the Gallup Ceremonial in August of 1971, when it was clear that the most effective tactic would have been to create enough raucous harassment to frighten away the tourists, the IAE was interested only in a silent, almost funereal march. As far as anyone knew, Larry Casuse had not even been familiar with guns.

  There were varying speculations as to what might have caused him suddenly to take up arms. Some sympathetic whites believed that he might have, in the words of one of them, flipped out. Even as a high school student, he was the kind of boy sometimes described as “high-strung,” and to some people he had appeared increasingly tense at various public appearances in the previous months. Everyone agreed that he had been particularly upset by an accident in which, while driving toward Gallup at three or four in the morning, he struck and killed a young Navajo woman who had apparently wandered onto the highway. He had been tried twice on a charge of not rendering proper assistance—the prosecution and Casuse differed basically on whether, just before his car became mired on a side road and he pounded on the door of a state policeman’s house, he had been searching for help or trying to dispose of the body—and a hung jury on the second trial stood eleven to one for conviction. A date for a third trial had just been set. Casuse’s remorse about the accident was such that he could not speak of it without weeping. But he believed that the criminal charge was a matter of the authorities’ punishing him for his political beliefs, and those who shared the beliefs tended to agree.

  In the view of a lot of his Navajo friends, Casuse decided to do something as drastic as abducting the mayor not out of insanity but merely out of impatience and frustration. A lot of people who knew him at the university describe him as someone who “couldn’t sit still.” He was apparently becoming more and more impatient with the lack of effect the efforts of the young Indians seemed to have. He was frustrated, his friends say, about his inability to focus attention on conditions in Gallup. In the opinion of one young Navajo who knew him at the university, “He thought he would have to utilize the white man’s way of doing things to get anything done—just to shake people up enough to get a few lines in the paper, to grab people in midair and say ‘Wait a minute! Listen to me!’ ”

  REPORTER: How did the activity change places over here to the sporting-goods store?

  DERIZOTIS: With a gun right to the head, he escorted the mayor all the way down. They broke the glass door, and they entered.

  Casuse said nothing that would have made it clear what he intended to do with the mayor. One of his friends from IAE thinks Casuse obviously intended to hold the mayor hostage as a way of negotiating for an investigation into Gallup’s treatment of Indians or a compromise on specific demands. Precisely that type of negotiation was taking place at the time at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota. When students at the Kiva Club are asked what Casuse might have been up to, they tend to base their answer on a remark he apparently made to the mayor at some point during the abduction—that he was going to march the mayor around the state. Navajo college students who are politically active tend to talk more than other young demonstrators do about shame and dignity and ridicule. In planning the protest march at the 1971 Gallup Ceremonial, they decided to have two demonstrators ride on horseback partly on the theory that men riding above the crowd on horses were more difficult to ridicule. When they talk about having Gallup on the run, they sometimes say that Indians are now “snickering at Gallup.” “Larry wanted to show the people that the mayor deserved no respect,” a Navajo girl at the Kiva Club said later. “Larry wanted to humiliate him, to bring him down to the people’s level. For a long time, the Indian people have believed that white men are better than they are. The mayor was an authority figure. I think Larry would have taken him out and walked him through the streets of Gallup—to show it was just a man, to show that the Indian people should be treated with respect.”

  REPORTER: Did they indicate what their grief was with the mayor?

  DERIZOTIS: No, sir, not at all.

  A lot of Gallup residents thought of the mayor, Emmett (Frankie) Garcia, as what used to be called a real go-getter—an energetic, ambitious, pragmatic young man who was the first person to treat the mayor’s office as a full-time job. He had hired some people from outside Gallup and had tried to take advantage of any federal money that was available. He had helped organize an alcoholism project—working against the inclination of Gallup citizens to believe that Indian alcoholism is an Indian problem, even if the alcohol is provided in Gallup—and had rounded up financial support from the city and the county and the state in anticipation of a large federal grant for a rehabilitation center. He had served all but a few weeks of his first two-year term, and his reelection seemed almost certain.

  To Larry Casuse, Frankie Garcia was the man who presided over a town that enriched itself on Indians—on their trade, on their artistic talents, on their ceremonies, on their drinking. Even worse, he was a part owner of the Navajo Inn, a liquor store a few hundred feet from the Navajo reservation. The Navajo Inn is a small cinder-block building surrounded by open space and on some paydays by so many passed-out Navajos that it takes on the appearance of a bunker in a recently contested battlefield. Frankie Garcia had said that, as one-third owner, he had no control over the way the Navajo Inn was run. He had also argued at times that a liquor store next to the reservation was less dangerous than one in Gallup, twenty-five miles away—the difference being how many miles a Navajo had to drive drunk to get home. It is possible to argue, of course, that the Navajo Inn, however grotesque and callous and ugly it might be, is not the real headquarters of the enemy, any more than a Jewish pawnbroker on 125th Street is the real agent of the miseries afflicting black people in Harlem—that blaming the Navajo Inn for the alcoholism problem is no more accurate than blaming tribal prohibition or the Navajo bootleggers who support it. But if the Navajo Inn is only a symptom of the condition the Navajos find themselves in, it is a particularly visible and profitable symptom, and the one most despised among Navajos, who have seen many of their people destroy themselves with alcohol. According to Frankie Garcia, the Navajo Inn, a cinder-block hut miles from the nearest large town, has steadily been the single most profitable liquor store in the state of New Mexico.

  Larry Casuse and his friends had become increasingly interested in the traditional Navajo way of thought—a way of life based on man’s living in harmony with all that surrounds him. Casuse had written poems and fables about the harm brought by change. He had spent some time talking to Navajo medicine men, and had spoken to his mother about wanting to go back to the reservation to live simply in the traditional Navajo way. He and his friends seemed particularly taken with the concept of “false people”—people who pretend to understand but actually are so lacking in the compassion and sensitivity inherent in the Navajo way that they have a questionable claim on being human beings. Frankie Garcia, who was chairman of an alcoholism project while profiting from Indian drinking, was their prime example of a false person. Despite that, the governor of New Mexico had, in January, appointed Frankie Garcia to the University of New Mexico Board of Regents.

  REPORTER: A man has apparently just been shot and thrown out the window. We can’t tell at this time if it is the mayor….Another shot has been fired…and another shot….Chief Gonzales has a rifle.

  The University of New Mexico student newspaper printed some editorials critical of Garcia’s appointment. The student senate, after hearing a speech about the appointment’s being a political payoff and watching while a doll representing Garcia was burned, passed a resolution calling for “a more q
ualified and suitable candidate.” But the strongest opposition was from the Kiva Club, and particularly from its president, Larry Casuse. When Garcia’s nomination came before the Rules Committee of the New Mexico Senate, Casuse and some other students went to Santa Fe to testify against it. Casuse had gathered documents and photographs and had circulated a petition. “The man is an owner of the Navajo Inn, where numerous alcoholics are born, yet he ironically is chairman of the alcohol-abuse rehabilitation committee,” Casuse told the senators. “Does he not abuse alcohol? Does he not abuse it by selling it to intoxicated persons who often end up in jail or in a morgue from overexposure?” The nomination was approved by the committee—“They were just like stone-faced men,” one of the students said—and then by the Senate.

  When Garcia was about to be sworn in, at a regents meeting held on the UNM campus in Albuquerque, Casuse stood to ask permission to make a statement, and the permission was politely granted. Casuse spoke of the charges he had made against Garcia and of the lack of interest exhibited by the senators. “These are the type of people who run our government, and these aren’t The People—these are the false people,” he said. “There’s no reason for me to scream or shout. There’s no reason for me to bring documents. There’s no reason, because you people will just turn your head, like you always turn your head. There’s no reason for that. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to find all the human beings in this country, in this state, and we’re going to get the human beings together and we’re going to put an end to people like Emmet Garcia, and we’re going to start with Emmet Garcia. We don’t really care what you people do. Because you people aren’t human beings.”

  Casuse sat down, and there was scattered applause from his supporters. Then the chairman said, “The second item on the agenda is the swearing in.”

  REPORTER: City Manager Paul McCollum, can you give us a report on the mayor’s condition?

  MCCOLLUM: He is all right….He came out through the window….

  REPORTER: Do you know at this time what the grievance is?

  MCCOLLUM: I have no idea at this point of time what the grievance might be.

  REPORTER: Do you know why they released him?

  MCCOLLUM: I think that he must have escaped himself….

  REPORTER: Shots are continuing to be fired from out of Stearn’s Sporting Goods….What appears to be a tear-gas bomb has just been shot into Stearn’s Sporting Goods….

  VOICE: They’re going to come out shooting.

  REPORTER: They’re coming out with their hands on their head. One of them thus far has come out….He has been directed by the officers to lie flat….His partner in having taken the mayor hostage remains in Stearn’s Sporting Goods store….Police are now pouring into the Stearn’s Sporting Goods store….They have now dragged out what appears to be Larry Wayne Casuse. He is covered with blood….I am approaching the body….From a distance of about thirty feet, Larry Wayne Casuse appears to be dead.

  VOICE: Get a blanket.

  Eventually, someone did get a blanket. But Larry Casuse’s body lay uncovered on the sidewalk in front of Stearn’s Sporting Goods store for a while—long enough for the local paper to take a picture of it with three police standing over it like hunters who had just bagged their seasonal deer. It is now speculated that the appearance of the picture on the front page of The Gallup Independent may have had a lot to do with the outrage expressed even by Navajos who ordinarily have no interest in politics and no sympathy for the activist students of Indians Against Exploitation. For whatever reason, it soon became apparent that the incident had made an extraordinary impact on all sorts of Navajos. A white with wide contacts on the reservation said later, “People I had expected to say ‘Well, he asked for it’ said the only thing they couldn’t understand is why he didn’t kill the mayor when he had a chance.” The elected chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, Peter MacDonald, a Nixon Republican who had never been a supporter of the militant young people, at first responded to the incident by expressing his shock and sending his sympathies to Garcia, but by the time Larry Casuse’s funeral was held, MacDonald had decided to be among the mourners. When the Albuquerque Journal did a long piece on the aftermath of Casuse’s death, some of the harshest statements about the city of Gallup gathered by its reporter, Scott Beaven, were from the kind of Indians most despised by the young activists—middle-aged Indians who work for the local government or the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A Gallup protest march Casuse had helped organize on Thanksgiving Day had drawn a hundred and twenty-five young people; a march four weeks after his death attracted a couple of thousand Indians of all ages.

  Gallup officials said Larry Casuse had shot himself, although they also said that a bullet wound inflicted by the police would have killed him anyway. Some white sympathizers thought suicide was a possibility—“After all, the whole thing was suicidal,” one of them said—but Casuse’s Navajo friends said suicide was out of the question, since it was contrary to the Navajo beliefs he had come to hold important. A flyer announcing a march just after his death was headed WAS LARRY CASUSE MURDERED?, and some Indian groups demanded an investigation. But a statement from the Kiva Club—addressed to “All Human Beings”—said, “The real issue is not who-shot-whom, as the national media seem to imply, but rather why Larry Casuse so willingly sacrificed his life in order to communicate with the world his dream of unifying human beings with Mother Earth, the Universe, and Humanity.”

  REPORTER: There is speculation that the mayor has been wounded, but he has been taken to his family and is apparently all right.

  The mayor’s injuries—a shotgun wound and some cuts incurred when he leaped out of the window—were minor, and it appeared that the incident could only enhance his political career, there being no significant Navajo vote in Gallup. Some citizens were concerned that the shooting might shift the attention of the American Indian Movement from Wounded Knee to Gallup, but Garcia removed the most obvious focus for a demonstration by buying a controlling interest in the Navajo Inn and announcing, after a meeting with local Indian groups, that he would close it for thirty days. He made it clear that during the closing he would either sell the store to the tribe at a reasonable price so that it could be closed permanently or move the license into Gallup.

  To the surprise of just about everyone, Frankie Garcia lost the election. The defeat is now usually explained as having been caused by Garcia’s apparent reluctance to campaign and by the possibility that Gallup voters had begun to associate Garcia with Indian trouble and figured the trouble might stop if he was no longer there to provoke it. Garcia himself singles out the huge Indian march on the Saturday before the election as the most damaging factor in the campaign. The people in Gallup who were working for an alcoholism-rehabilitation center tend to believe that there is less chance of having one with Garcia no longer present to push the project, although the general cutback in federal funds for such programs made the prospect of an elaborate center highly unlikely anyway. The tribe could still buy the Navajo Inn, but Garcia now sees no reason to accept anything but a good price for it. If a profitable arrangement cannot be made with the tribe, Garcia told a visitor recently, he plans to leave the Navajo Inn right where it is and make as much money as possible from it. “I’ve gone strictly business now,” he said. In that spirit, he has decided to resign from the University of New Mexico Board of Regents.

  Harvey St. Jean Had It Made

  * * *

  Miami Beach, Florida

  MARCH 1975

  Criminal lawyers are not the kind of lawyers who claim to be just as happy if their names never appear in a newspaper. One guide to how well a criminal lawyer is doing, in fact, may be how many times he is mentioned in the newspapers and in what size type—the criminal case that attracts the attention of the press often being one in which the defendant is important enough to be able to pay his attorney. A top criminal lawyer has his biography written serially in the tabloids. In the private office of Harvey St. Jean, by a
ll accounts the top criminal lawyer in Miami Beach, the wall decorations were not just framed diplomas but framed newspaper clippings. His outer office had the Spy caricatures of English judges that most American lawyers must receive from their wives most Christmases, but it also had a series of originals by a local newspaper artist who had drawn the lawyer in the courtroom scenes as a tall, imposing man with gray hair and heavy black eyebrows—Harvey St. Jean. St. Jean had plenty of clients who made the front page of the Miami papers. (“ ‘I’m so happy,’ cries Mrs. Shirley Mae Lewis Tuesday after a circuit-court jury acquitted her in the murder of a Miami Beach widow. Donald C. Bliss pleaded guilty Monday to the stabbing of Mrs. Ruth Berkman and accused Mrs. Lewis of handing him the knife.”) He also had clients whose fate was of importance to newspapers in Philadelphia and New York. For years, St. Jean was in the papers as the attorney for people who had become familiar enough to be given nicknames, the way halfbacks and middleweights are given nicknames. The Crying Adjmis, for instance, a family of bric-a-brac hustlers accused (and acquitted) of bilking a rich widow out of half a million dollars with the help of a phony French priest who said that only the widow’s money could save his orphanage and village from a greedy German named Finklestein. (“I was a softie,” the victim acknowledged.) Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy, who, with a couple of other Miami beachboys, managed to steal the Star of India sapphire and the DeLong Star Ruby from the American Museum of Natural History and pass the ruby along—or so the government alleged—to Richard Duncan Pearson, another client of Harvey St. Jean’s. The widow of Arthur (Fat Man) Blatt, who became a widow by putting five bullets into the Fat Man, a jeweler by trade and someone suspected by the police for a while of having the DeLong Ruby in his inventory. And Candy—Candace Mossler, who was accused of having arranged with her nephew Melvin Powers to beat her millionaire husband to death with a large Coke bottle. Candy hired both Percy Foreman and Harvey St. Jean to argue her innocence. The fruits of their triumph included a wire-service picture of Candy kissing St. Jean in appreciation and a huge acquittal headline on the front page of that final law journal for big-time criminal attorneys—the New York Daily News.