BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
New York cop Charles Schwarz was convicted by a federal
jury June 8 of joining in the 1997 torture of Abner Louima.
The jury acquitted three other cops - Thomas Wiese, Thomas
Bruder, and Sgt. Michael Bellamo - involved in the beating
and cover-up, despite evidence of Louima's blood in Wiese's
patrol car.
Schwarz and Justin Volpe, who earlier pled guilty to abusing Louima, face possible life sentences in prison. Bruder, Wiese, and Schwarz face additional charges - still to be tried - of conspiring to obstruct justice by attempting hide Schwarz's role in the torture case. Bellamo was acquitted of lying to cover up the cops' barbarism against Louima, and Volpe's assault on another man, Patrick Antoine, on the night of the incident. None of the cops took the witness stand to testify in their own defense.
The verdict was delivered two weeks after Volpe admitted he shoved a wooden stick into Louima's rectum inside the New York Police Department 70th Precinct bathroom. Volpe bragged that he "took a man down tonight" while brandishing the blood- and feces-stained stick among his colleagues at the station, inviting them to examine it. The cop threatened to kill Louima if he told anyone and claimed innocence until May 25, in the third week of his trial, when it became clear he would not get off.
Under the pressure of working-class mobilizations against the brutal cop killing of Amadou Diallo earlier this year and simmering outrage over the torture of Louima, four cops testified they had seen Schwarz take the handcuffed Louima into the bathroom or heard Volpe boast about his deeds afterward.
Louima said that Volpe, Schwarz, Bruder, and Wiese took turns beating him after stopping the cop car twice en route to the police precinct. He had been arrested after protesting the cops' abuse of people after two patrons got into a scuffle outside a nightclub in Brooklyn.
Antoine, a passerby, was also assaulted by the cops and arrested. Antoine testified in court that he saw Volpe put Louima, who was partially nude and moaning in pain, into a holding cell at the 70th Precinct that night. The police initially accused Antoine and Louima of attacking them, then dropped the charges.
The cops were not charged with beating Antoine. Bellamo, who was charged with depriving Antoine of his civil rights by arresting him without probable cause, was acquitted.
Seeking to whitewash the battered credibility of the police department, New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani argued that the trial's results prove there is no "blue wall of silence" by the cops. Police Commissioner Howard Safir said the decision proved "that the criminal justice system works."
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury is conducting an investigation of the NYPD to supposedly "break down the wall, piece by piece," the New York Post reported June 9.
While the big-business media proclaims the capitalist court system forced the cops to break their "code of silence," it was the nurses at Coney Island Hospital who treated Louima's injuries who refused to cooperate with the cover-up. They exposed the police torture, which sparked outrage among working people and demonstrations of 7,000 and 15,000 people in August 1997.