Some people will believe anything

03/26/01

Well, the greatest political murder mystery of the 20th century has been solved.

This whodunit occupied the attention of right-thinking people from Berlin to Berkeley, Holland to Hollywood. The question was who killed Daniel Faulkner, a Philadelphia police officer who was shot between the eyes with a pistol on a cold December night in 1981.

One suspect was Mumia Abu- Jamal, a former Black Panther activist whose gun was found at the scene of the crime with five spent cartridges in it. Another suspect was Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former radio journalist whose brother was being arrested by Officer Faulkner at the time of the incident. A third suspect was Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was hit by a shot from Faulkner's pistol and had his own gun at his feet when arrested.

So whodunit? Here's a shocker: It was Mumia Abu-Jamal. That's the only possible conclusion after the latest absurd development in the increasingly absurd saga of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

It seems that Abu-Jamal fired his legal team two weeks ago because one of them has written a book that was going to call into question some of the more absurd conspiracy theories pushed by the Mumia cult. Those who've read the galleys say former Abu-Jamal attorney Dan Williams argues in the book "Executing Justice" that those fantastic stories actually hurt Abu-Jamal's defense, though they did wonders for keeping the crowds happy at rallies from Copenhagen to California. Williams argues that Abu-Jamal's best chance of avoiding the death penalty would have been to argue that he didn't get a fair trial on constitutional grounds.

Abu-Jamal's 1995 appeal hearing showed the weakness of this defense tactic. Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, Newark native and Chicago Seven member Leonard Weinglass, produced two "eyewitnesses" who had conflicting stories. One told of seeing a guy with "Johnny Mathis hair" jump out of a car during the melee, shoot Faulkner, and then drive away. Another eyewitness said a guy ñ this time without Johnny Mathis hair or a red car ñ shot the officer in an entirely different sequence of events and then fled on foot. Both stories couldn't have been true, and the judge threw the appeal out.

Abu-Jamal went to court last week seeking an injunction to stop the publication of the Williams book. He is also maneuvering to prevent the publication of another book that questions the theory that a mystery gunman shot Faulkner, this one by a California author who started out believing Abu-Jamal's tales about a phantom gunman.

Writer Gerry Nicosia held a press conference in Philadelphia last week. I first met Nicosia a year ago, when he came to visit Star- Ledger Editorial Page Editor Richard Aregood and me in Newark. We both were working in Philadelphia at the time of the Faulkner shooting, and he knew we were skeptical about Mumia's claims of innocence. Rich and I pointed out to Nicosia the weaknesses in the defense story, the most prominent of which is that Mumia himself has never denied shooting Faulkner. Nicosia seemed unconvinced at the time.

But he is a serious writer. His exhaustive 700-page book on Vietnam veterans, "Home to War," will be published next month by Random House. For his Mumia book, he started out close to the Mumia crowd and interviewed many of them. He went to see some fund-raising speeches by Leonard Weinglass, the Newark- born attorney and former Chicago Seven member who was Mumia's chief counsel until the convicted killer fired him in the Williams flap.

"I heard Leonard Weinglass on numerous occasions tell people there was no way Mumia could have killed Faulkner because Mumia had a .38 and Faulkner was killed with a .44," Nicosia said.

But when he asked Williams about the ballistics report that proved this, Williams said there was no such report. Even the expert witness hired by the defense conceded the bullets that killed Faulkner came from a .38.

Last May, Nicosia reviewed Mumia's book "All Things Censored" for the San Francisco Chronicle. He mentioned in the review that there is some evidence that showed Mumia shot Faulkner. The Mumia crowd turned against him. They somehow got their hands on the book proposal he was sending to publishers and began pressuring them not to publish the book. In 1999, Nicosia was responsible for getting his chapter of the writers group PEN to confer its anti-censorship award on Abu-Jamal. Now he found himself subjected to a censorship effort led by the cuddly cop-killer.

When his book finally comes out, it should be a good one. Nicosia closely followed the fight within Abu-Jamal's legal team over the question of whether to push yet another wacky story in court, this one involving a Mafia hit team that decided to bump off Officer Faulkner at the exact moment he happened to run into Abu-Jamal. If Mumia had pushed the theory that space aliens abducted Faulkner, a substantial number of his acolytes would have bought it.

Would the media have? Probably not. But they've bought most of his story so far. Also at Nicosia's press conference was Charles Grant, who was the prosecutor in the 1995 appeal. He recalled how virtually every member of the national media who interviewed him was sympathetic to Abu-Jamal. They didn't ask about the gun at Abu-Jamal's feet. They asked about the mystery gunman.

Well, it was no mystery, except to the Mumia cult, which up until now seems to have included a good number of members of the media.

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist.