Tony Allen takes apart the newest addition to the cop killer Mumia’s book shelf, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal by J. Patrick O’ Conner (currently at 40,587 on the Amazon sales rank.)
A few other examples of O’Connor running roughshod over the facts are as follows:
- He claims that in 1978 that Police fired “10,000 rounds of ammunition into the MOVE house and that the nine MOVE members were convicted for the killing of Officer Ramp.” In another paragraph about MOVE, O’Connor claims that there was “no ballistics to prove that Officer Ramp was killed by a bullet from the compound”
The fact is that he pulled the “10,000 rounds fired out of the MOVE confrontation in 1985. MOVE members were not just convicted of killing Officer Ramp, but for the attempted murder of several other Police and Firefighters, some who were gravely wounded by MOVE gunfire, one of them disabled and forced into retirement.
Officer Ramp was shot by a gun taken from the MOVE compound. The bullet matched a MOVE weapon removed from the basement and was of the same type of gun MOVE members were observed with in the basement and purchased by a MOVE member. Ballistically speaking, you can’t get much more of a smoking gun than that.
- He claims that Mumia carried a gun because he had “been robbed at gunpoint”
Mumia purchased that gun two years and five months prior to him using it to kill Officer Faulkner. It was a gun he purchased well before he was a cab driver. I have also not ever heard of any police reports of Jamal being robbed. As a cab driver, working for any company, the policy would have demanded his reportage of such an event. Moreover, when the Police had secured Jamal’s gun, all of the rounds were reported to have been fired, a fact that neither Mumia nor his defense team have ever approached. Was he going to throw an empty gun at robbers? If he fired the weapon at a gun range, certainly staff would have recognized him and could vouch for him, just like the gun dealer had remembered the well-dressed, articulate, dread locked man, had from two years earlier.
- Although Billy Cook is mentioned numerous times in his book O’Connor omits a few key facts concerning Jamal’s brother
O’Connor leaves out the fact that Billy told arriving Officers that he “aint got nothing to do with it”, exonerating himself, but not his brother Mumia. He fails to mention Cook’s affidavit contradicts that of his brothers.
- Typical of all Jamal supporters, O’Connor thinks little of Jamal’s supposed “confession”.
Certainly, reasonable people need to ask just exactly why it took trained, Police Officers months to come forward with an allegation of a murder confession from a cop-killer. However, if you take the confession evidence in it’s entirety, it does gain a level of believability not so easily dismissed. For example, should Jamal get the new trial O’Connor and others think he deserve, he will have to deal with a whole new set of issues regarding the confession.
A problem for Jamal lay in the sheer number of “earwitnesses” who heard Jamal confess in one fashion or another. Priscilla Durham, Officer Alphonse Giordano, Officer Gary Bell, Officer Thomas Bray, Officer Gary Wakshul, Officer Tom Brady, and NBC Producer Kathleen Gerrow all made statements to the effect that Jamal confessed to killing Officer Faulkner.
Back in 1981, Kathleen Gerrow was a radio reporter when she went to the hospital to cover the story when she heard a very distinctive voice shouting, ‘I shot the mother f—-er, I shot the mother f—-er,” said Gerrow. That voice, Gerrow said, belonged to Abu-Jamal.
In total, that means that seven people who allegedly heard Jamal confess. Are they all lying?
- Chapter 32 of O’Connor’s book asks the question “Was Faulkner An FBI Informant”. Although he admits himself that this was “highly unlikely”, he follows crackpot, former Jamal attorney Rachel Wolkenstein right down the conspiratorial rabbit hole when he casually reprints her hearsay, alleged anecdotes, and un-named sources, that combined amount to nothing more than the desperation of a crack-pot attorney who was just lucky to be where she was at the time.
To add insult to injury, O’Connor lists two Philadelphia Police Officers that he believes were killed “under circumstances suggesting a directed hit”.
In May of 1985, not long after the MOVE confrontation on Osage Avenue, Police Officer Thomas Trench was shot while sitting in his patrol car. To O’Connor this must have been a “hit” and further evidence that Officer Faulkner may have been done in the same way. There is a problem with this alleged “hit” scenario. The now twice convicted murderer of P.O. Trench, Willfredo Santiago was not out to silence an informant or a corrupt cop, but rather was out to settle a score with another police officer who had been driving the same patrol car — number 912 — just hours earlier, and that Santiago rode up on a bike and shot Trench in the face. It was a case of mistaken identity that has nothing at all to do with Officer Faulkner of Mumia.
The other Police Officer mentioned by O’Connor was Police Officer James Mason. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get much in the way of information in the media regarding Officer Mason. I did, however, manage to get in contact with a Police Officer who actually had worked in the same district as Officer Mason and was sadly familiar with the circumstances of Mason’s murder. He sent me the following statement on the matter:
“Officer James Mason and Officer Singletary were finished handling a “Disturbance House” radio call on 36th street. The house faced the Mantua Hall housing project. The building “was” 18 floors high and a juvenile was in his apartment window with a rifle. He has discovered the rifle under his mother’s bed and was playing with it and pointing it out the window. The juvenile was watching the police activity across the street and when the two Police Officers had returning to their police vehicle and were filling out paperwork. The juvenile fired the rifle and the bullet struck Officer Mason in the side of the head. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Presbyterian Hospital. The courts found the juvenile guilty of manslaughter and he was sent to a juvenile home until he was 19 years old. He was 15-16 years old at the time of the shooting.”
Clearly, O’Connor, has not just shown himself to care nothing for facts, but also a callous disregard for the families of murder victims other than just the family of Officer Faulkner. His fatuous and disingenuous attempts to link the completely unrelated murders of James Mason and Thomas Trench with that of Daniel Faulkner make that much clear. More than just a poor writer and an inveterate liar, he has shown himself to be a pitiful researcher who has just cut and pasted enough pro-Mumia blather to cobble together a book. Victims, truth, reality be dammed
- O’Connor paints Jamal as a man of “peaceable nature” and notes how shocked Jamal’s friends were at the news that he was arrested and charged with murder.
…Jamal’s own animus towards the Police is hardly a secret and his youth wasn’t exactly the one of a perpetual, spiritual quest, and naive political acts. In his Black Panther days, 11 years before shooting Officer Faulkner, he was writing that he was feeling like “putting down the pen” and implored readers of a Black Panther Party publication to “write epitaphs for pigs”. In addition to idolizing MOVE members who killed cops, Mumia to this day, still adores Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton. The former black militant, turned crack addict, was gunned down in during a drug dispute in 1989, yet his luster has not been diminished in Mumia’s eyes. Like his MOVE heroes, Newton gunned down Police Officer John Frey, but after careful and very good legal maneuvering, Newton was able to walk out of jail after only three years. Incidentally, Newton’s account of the Police shooting was very similar to Jamal’s 2001 affidavit. Prior to his death, Newton would beat another murder rap, this one for the “alleged” killing of a 17 year old prostitute after two trials ended in deadlocked juries.
Even before Jamal’s days as a Panther and MOVE supporter, it appears he was enamored by violence and may have participated in gang violence. During his 1995 hearing, one of Jamal’s own witnesses, a man named Arnold Howard, blurted out that he and Mumia “used to gang war together”, so much for Mumia’s life of non-violence.
The fact of the matter is the Mumia morons have tried to come up with excuse after excuse on why Mumia is innocent. Take for example the lie that there were four eyewitnesses to the shooting who say someone else shot Officer Faulkner.
Other witnesses, whom the court-appointed attorney couldn’t produce during the trial, also reported seeing a man flee the scene after the shooting. In all, four witnesses situated in four separate locations on the street reported seeing the shooter flee, and all had him going in precisely the same direction. Nonetheless, no police investigation was made to locate or identify the fleeing suspect.
The witnesses? Deborah Kordansky, Robert Chobert, Veronica Jones and Desie Hightower.
Out of the four it was later found that only one, Robert Chobert, witnessed the shooting and he has consistently identified Mumia as the shooter. The other three have admitted they did not witness the shooting at all.
1. Debra Kordansky
Ms. Kordansky stated that she was in her bedroom watching TV when the shooting occurred. In her original statement to police she said that she “didn’t go to her window until drawn there by the flashing lights of the police cars that had already arrived on the scene”. She also stated while looking out her window, she saw “someone run.” While being questioned by Leonard Weinglass at the 1995 PCRA hearing, Kordansky specifically stated that this person “was not the shooter” and that “they ran after police had already arrived”. (N.T. 8/3/95, 248-249)
2. Desie Hightower
Mr. Hightower stated that he was down the street, behind a building in a parking lot, getting into a car when the shooting occurred. When asked by police at the scene if he could identify Jamal as the shooter Hightower told them, “I couldn’t say, because I didn’t see the officer actually shot.” (N.T. 6/28/82, 28.131)
3. Veronica Jones
Ms. Jones has always stated that she was over 2 blocks away, around a corner and behind a building, when Officer Faulkner was shot. In 1996 she testified that she “waited for a few minutes” before looking around the corner to see what happened and that she then saw two men approach Officer Faulkner’s body. She further stated, “I was not there, I did not see him [the shooter].” (N.T. 10/1/96, 24)
Another of the dozens of conspiracy theories floated by the free Mumia morons is that the hospital confession by Mumia, where he said “I shout the motherfucker and I hope he dies,” is a fabrication based on the fact that the two transporting officers didn’t report the confession until months later. Problem is that a hospital security guard also heard it and reported the incident to her supervisor the very next day.
The conspiracy is that the admission never occurred. But how bad of a conspiracy could it be if the officers never reported it for months? Wouldn’t they have conspired that day and wrote it in the report?
If there was a skillful conspiracy, why was it so badly handled that Bell and Wakshul forgot to report the confession? It must be remembered that these are the same Philadelphia Police that Leonard Weinglass regularly alleges were so “skilled at framing defendants,” that they organized five supposedly phony eyewitnesses, none of whom knew each other, at the crime scene. In less than 20 minutes, the clever police conspirators got all of these people (even Robert Harkins) to agree to tell the same made up story about the shooting, and they did such a good job that all of the eyewitness accounts meshed perfectly and stood up under hours of cross-examination months after the event. How could such skilled craftsmen of framing be so effective at the crime scene only to make such a glaring mistakes with the “phony” confession?
Now, if that report about the confession had only come from the officers months later then there would be questions. But the fact that the security guard, a black female named Priscilla Durham, heard it also and reported it hours later demolishes the conspiracy.
There is plenty more where that came from at the excellent site Justice for Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Also, if you have a chance visit this petition to deny the MOVE 9 members parole.
The MOVE 9 were convicted and sentenced to 30-100 year jail sentences in 1981 for the murder of police officer James Ramp and for the attempted murder of seven other police officers and firefighters during a MOVE instigated 1978 shoot-out in Philadelphia.
At sentencing, Judge Malmed said that he found the notion of rehabilitation for MOVE members to be “absurd” and that each must share equally the guilt for the killing and attempted murders.
Soon, the parole proceedings will begin for the surviving eight members of “MOVE 9″ (one member of the cult died in prison in 1998) and MOVE has been attempting to pressure the parole board into releasing these convicted murderers.
Since the petition went up three of the MOVE members had parole hearings….all denied!

See author page
I lived within one block of the MOVE House when this happen. It was botched all the way around.
Mayor Frank Rizzo tried to starve the MOVE people out of their house, rather than rushing it. At that point it became something (though not completely, don’t stretch the analogy too far) like Waco, with a group inside the house that the neighbors hated and wanted out suddenly being “persecuted” by the police. When that failed (after a couple of months) the rush did wind up with one police officer killed. It was a sad day.
That said, there is absolutely nothing sympathetic I can say about the MOVE. They were, IMO, urban terrorists and a major health hazard to the city. The fact that they managed to live in that house on 32nd Street so long is either a testament to the patience of the city, or to its not caring what happened in the Powelton Village section.
MOVE always escalated any attempt at reason to extreme violence at the slightest request. Either they got to do whatever they pleased or you were the total enemy (“You are either With Me or Against Me” taken to insane extremes). They “went back to nature” by dumping their garbage in the front yard, attracting rats like crazy. They did not believe in cooked food, so they ate their chicken raw. It was an absolute mess.
The second confrontation years later, on Osage Avenue, was even worse. Mayor Wilson Goode and Police Commissioner Gregory Sandborne were disgraced when an attempt to “smoke” them out wound up burning down four square blocks of the city. They both should have gone to jail for it. (Again, there is still nothing good to say about MOVE in that situation either, the neighbors also wanted them out).
Incidentally, Birdie Africa (they all took the last name “Africa”, after a man called “Joe Africa”, the founder of MOVE) survived the fire (he was about three) and was adopted by a couple in the Philadelphia area. He has gone through counseling and is doing OK.
But I digress…
Since I do not believe in the death penalty, all I can say is that Mumia should spend the rest of his life in prison. Solitary Confinement would be fine with me. It is still better than Daniel Falkner got.
Other than that, I have no opinion at all.
All liberals hate America, hate the police, and hate the military, so why would anyone read, much less buy, one of their books? All of the criminals should have been executed within 90 days. The police and military are going to have to adopt the same tactics (based on the idiots on the SCOTUS) and take no prisoners.
of course MuMu-JaJa pulled the trigger. Who sports that rag and doesn’t squander-swine? O’Conner is liberal-filth. The first question; Is MuMu-JaJa Guilty or Innocent? Guilty! The last question; Was MuMu-JaJa Right or Wrong? You have your answer. We over at http://officerdownofficerdown.blogspot.com/ have our own.
Pigs. Liberals. Conservatives. Obama. McCain. All filth. All in service to one another; “you oppose me, and I’ll oppose you”. Different dingleberries from the same branch.
More Swine-Worshipping, please!
Dude, step away from the pipe…
Re: “All liberals hate America”
Hey moderator(s). When I post a comment like “All Conservatives….” you come down on me like a ton of bricks. When the situation is reversed, do the same rules apply?
Steve,
That was a refreshing, cohearant, and insightful post I have not seen you make in a while. I grew up near Detroit and only saw the snippets of the fire on TV with no investigative reports on who, or what, MOVE was (or still is? Do they still exist?).
Question though, considering they ate raw food, and along with the rodent population they attracted, were many of their members found to have salmonella, rabies, ecoli, or tuberculosis type diseases common with uncooked food and filthy surroundings? Did others in the area contract such diseases (though obviously not samonella)? The health and safety impacts alone to the community from piles of garbage and infestations, never mind the security concerns, must have been dramatic. I was really just wondering as I have never researched this group. From the sounds of it, I would feel the need for another shower after researching them.
As it stands, I hope the cult left the area and dispanded. But like ants, these groups in various incarnations seem to always return.
Looking at the quotes from the book above, the first thing I saw was the alledged “10,000 rounds” fired by police in 1978. Most police carried 38 Special or 357 revolvers (6 rounds per load) or shotguns (most holding 6 rounds). Most police, though I do not know about Philly’s departments, did not carry semi-autos (10-17 rounds average) until the mid 80s-90s. Some departments still use revolvers as they malfunction and cost less.
I state the above as 10,000 police rounds would be hours and hours of continuous shooting, even by SWAT teams (if any were available in 1978). Even with a 9mm Glock or Berretta (avg 15 rounds/mag), 10,000 rounds is 667 magazine reloads! With revolvers and shotguns, it is 1,667 reloads! So the numbers do not add up. For police to use THAT many rounds at one building in a city would be insane. Even firefights with machine guns do not use that much ammunition. Bullet travel from overpenetrations would create legal havoc as people in the surrounding area filed damage or injury/death claims. It may also exceed what some departments would store for extra ammunition per year (again, I do not know how much ammunition a police department keeps on-hand).
The MOVE standoff was bungled, but it was a hard situation to deal with. Always easy in hindsight to spot the mistakes (though I like to think I wouldn’t have been fool enough to firebomb the place). Sometimes I wonder to what extent media attention drives politicians to both try to fix things as quickly as possible. With more patience and less escalation both Waco and the second MOVE confrontation could probably have been wound down without further loss of life, but to do that someone would have had to tell the news organizations ‘yeah, we’re just going to stand down and do nothing for a couple weeks (or months), we’ll arrest them when they get tired of sitting around and come out.’
As for Mumia, I think anyone who reviews the case with an open mind will conclude that Mumia is guilty. Glad to see that you’ve taken it on yourself to rebut the flood of nonsense, though I’m afraid your words will be wasted on anyone who seriously believes Mumia is innocent.
were many of their members found to have salmonella, rabies, ecoli, or tuberculosis type diseases common with uncooked food and filthy surroundings
Thing is, if only one group of people lives like this they can (mostly) free ride on the better hygiene of their neighbors. Salmonella in the food supply is rare, tuberculosis hasn’t been endemic in the US in years, rabies is more of a rural issue, and there are only a few strains of ecoli that can really make you sick (and those too are rare in the food supply). Of course that would quickly change if we all decided to live like MOVE did.
ChrisG
No. At that time the police in Philadelphia carried .38’s (I had a few friends on the force). The 10,000 assertion is absurd
All of the MOVE members died in the Osage avenu fire, except for Birdie and one woman. She was not convicted of anything (I believe she was not at Osage and not part of any siege), and has appeared in the news sporatically trying to gain sympathy. She is pretty much ignored by everyone (Right, Left, Middle) and mostly I read about her in the “Whatever became of…” articles that the papers use as filler every few years.
I never read anything about salmonella or other food poisoning of any of them. And it is likely I would have since had one of them been taken to the hospital I’m sure we would have heard the commotion they would certainly have created ther with whatever happened.
Another item that should make your Conservative heart glow 😉
William Kunstler came to Philadelphia to try to mediate during the first siege (32nd Street). And the MOVE member even drove HIM away. He left town hating and denouncing them! That’s how bad they were.
There is no MOVE movement left any more, or if there is, it has gone so far underground.out of the city that no one notices. My opinion is that they are gone. They were too alienating to anyone, of any political stripe. It went beyond any ideology (as you would expect, MOVE’s dogma was pretty much an incoherent babble, to the extent it existed at all.)
bbartlog
“With more patience and less escalation both Waco and the second MOVE confrontation could probably have been wound down without further loss of life, but to do that someone would have had to tell the news organizations ‘yeah, we’re just going to stand down and do nothing for a couple weeks (or months), we’ll arrest them when they get tired of sitting around and come out.’”
Not to be too pessimistic, but I am not sure that any method could have prevented bloodshed at Osage Avenue. MOVE was just too violent.
The bungling I spoke of centerd on the fact that while the MOVE house on 32nd streete (first time) was a single house, the one on Osage (2nd) was a row house. That meant that there wer houses touching on both sides. The Philadelphia police launched the raid to empty the house (in response to numerous neighbors’ complaints) by first evacuating everyone in the other houses on the block, then trying to go inside (it was early morning).
They were spotted by the MOVE members (which was unusual since they tended to sleep until Noon) and the siege began.
The MOVE members had built a “bunker” on the roof (scrap lumber, railroad ties, …) and police were concerned that they might be shot at from the roof (another reasonable assumption, considering the first confrontation). The police commissioner (Gregory Samborne) on site ordered a police helicopter to drop a small explosive device on the “bunker” to get rid of it so the police could approach over the roof’s.
Unfortunately, instead of packing the device with industrial explosives, as was requested, the bomb preparers used C4! The explosion not only blew up the bunker (actually it missed and the bunker was only damaged, not destroyed), but it set fire to the house and the one next door.
Then, the police stood there for about two hours and watched the house burn. There were no fire trucks on site and none were even called (there were none includedin the original police plan either).
When the Police Commissioner (Gregory) testified afterward at the inquiry and was asked why he did not at least call out fire engines answered, “[I’m police.] It’s not my job” (Honest!). So he just stood there, on site, at his command post and watched it burn and spread to other houses for a couple of hours.
By the time the Fire Commissioner saw the houses burining (on the TV news) and ordered out the fire engines, it was too late and half the block was burning. It jumped the streets and burned both sides of Osaga and parts of two other blocks.
It does not mitigate the violence of MOVE, but Gregory Samborne was also part of the botched results.
Steve,
Thank you again for the insight on this. I do not know who William Kunstler is but will have to research. I remember the fires as it was played out in different ways by various media outlets. By that time, I began openly questioning media coverage.
I do not know why comments are being caught in moderation. I am signed in fully and mine are also being caught, including this one. Several comments a day are caught up in the filters.
MOVE was a difficult group to cover. They were so strange, and so prone to instant violence that there were few analogies. That is why I said that analogies to Waco were very thin. Because the group inWaco did not have loadspeakers attached to the sides of their house, blaring speeches and music at the loudest possible volume, day and night. And, if anyone approached even asking to please turn it down, they were turned away with screams and shouts, and the MOVE members would retreat into the house and barricade the doors.
I cannot come up with any analogies to other groups because even the violent ones of any persuasion: KKK, Black Panthers, The Breed Motorcycle Gang (spent a fun summer at the shore with them) would leave you alone if you left them alone. MOVE sought out confrontations with everyone, then launched into violence whether you reacted positively or negatively. They essentially wanted war with everyone, and chose the middle of the city to do it.
Have a nice weekend.