Lawrence Richette's The Fault Line - P.A.W. Print

Today, while the headlines about the "Pay to Play" scams have sworn off the bold print and the latest story about avaricious public officials has become diverted into arguments about the possible racism motivating the investigations by former Philadelphia FBI Director Jeff Lampinski, it would seem that the City en banc is sending another top story the way of the Tom Ridge terror warnings, to an otherwise deserved fine print, to an apathetic seed. While the motivation by United States Attorney Patrick L. Meehan to indict the twelve Philadelphians (seven of whom are African Americans) on theft and conspiracy charges might today seem less sincere than the longing by taxpayers to see the fraud-vulnerable chinks in the armor of Philadelphia's banking and welfare programs filled, the indictments were filed-at least theoretically, for a good cause. However, while it was outrageous for Philadelphia attorney Ronald A. White and former Philadelphia Treasurer Corey Kemp and their ten accomplices to misappropriate millions, subjugating the issue to sub-headlines and ballyhoos of racial discrimination might well be a form of malfeasance. Philadelphia, which journalist Lincoln Steffens commented in 1902 to be "corrupt and contented," may again be allowing itself to miss yet another chance to heel its white collar criminals, simply because the prosecuting camp isn't well liked. Rev. Frank McCracken, who allegedly committed bank fraud with Kemp is sure that he is being persecuted by the same government, which he told the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, "persecuted Martin Luther King."

He might be right. Or do we Philadelphians just enjoy a good fight now and then?

"What's happening in Philly is a version of what is happening now in the Bush Administration," says Philadelphia novelist Lawrence Richette. Richette says overall he is referring to his disdain for Philadelphians refusing to face the "truth" about the MOVE tragedy of May 13, 1985.

He believes that even though a sure means of stopping George W. Bush from liquidizing the treasury and human life to fund an unpopular war would be to vote a better politician into office, remanding our consciousness of yet another abuse of America's security toward a diluting of main issues, is irresponsible and, unfortunately, very Philadelphian. There are far worse examples of apathy that have manifested themselves than the sidetracking of public awareness about thieving politicians through the bleating of peripheral remonstrances about racism and whether or not a pundit knows that he ought never order cheddar on a cheese steak.

"Regarding murder, for one," said Richette, who added, "There isn't even a plaque, dedicated to the people who died in the MOVE bombings on Osage Avenue."


photo, NY Times

Richette's latest novel, The Fault Line (Xlibris, 2004), concerns the torment of a west Philadelphia lawyer representing pro-bono, the LIVE group, a fictional organization based on MOVE. It is early 1985. The main character, Leon Goldfarb, an impoverished idealist who has never sold out and who idolizes Clarence Darrow fails to figure out whether he has become too radical or has not done enough to help the downtrodden.

Suddenly deciding himself to be a radical, Goldfarb declines a monetary offer made by Mason Marshall, the Mayor's chief of staff, to settle a police brutality issue under-the-table, on behalf of his clients, the Uhuru family. 'Uhuru' in Swahili means 'freedom', if you are suddenly catching the author's reference to the Africa family. By haughtily declining the offer (which Goldfarb has also never communicated to his client), Goldfarb dooms the safety of Steven Uhuru, the LIVE member who becomes sentenced to six years for shoving the cop who had been beating him. Steven is shot to death by a law enforcement official while fleeing in handcuffs from the sheriff's vehicle waiting to take him to prison.

Richette liberates the history of the confrontations between MOVE and the police. In real life, there was never a slaying outside of a courthouse. "I was, after all, writing a book that is more about Philadelphia and America than it is about MOVE," said Richette, intending that Fault's linear action would be easier to understand than what happened in real life anyway. Richette had been living in New York City during the May 13 bombing. He says he moved back to his native Philadelphia after seeing the crises in the news. He joined the City Paper in 1986, working as a reporter, "because I needed to get near what was going on in my home city."

As a reporter, Richette covered the proceedings of former Mayor Wilson Goode's Special Investigative MOVE Commission and the MOVE Grand Jury and says he managed to get into the "secret records" of the Grand Jury, which he says were being kept secret by the district attorney. "I found out exactly what testimony they were hearing and printed it in the City Paper, causing a great uproar," said Richette, who continued, "It developed that Wilson Goode had used all sorts of secret intermediaries to try to go [into the house] and negotiate with the MOVE family and bribe them and offer them all kinds of money. Before I covered this, the testimony never came out publicly because the D.A. never punished anybody." Although Richette says, "Goldfarb is based partly on myself and partly on the late Harry Lore who was a leftist lawyer and my attorney several times and was a dear friend of mine," he credits his invention of an intermediary to Goode's real-life dispatching of negotiators, whom Richette insists had approached MOVE several times.

"A hustler named Boo Burrus was one such negotiator. The idea for The Fault Line came from the idea that there were secret intermediaries, emissaries or ambassadors, whose involvement, through this day, the public of Philadelphia does not realize."

In Richette's fiction, the intermediary gets a definite role. While the Uhuru's are fortifying their Turner Avenue headquarters, Goldfarb attempts to make good on his pledge to "defend" his clients by exchanging their money with a rural Pennsylvanian weapons dealer. His illegal transaction is monitored by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Suitably, Goldfarb is in deep. But at least he has his principles, offers Richette, who creates a case for inference that arming the persecuted leftist group in Philadelphia, if not a form of defense, would, at least, have been retaliative justice.


	Lawrence Richette. photo, M. DelVecchia

Richette's depiction of cause is intentionally blurry. He does not show who fired the first shot precipitating the siege of the house. He sequesters the action to the point of view of Goldfarb, who witnesses the siege on television during his wedding reception and is addled by the threats voiced by the mayor, who, in having noted his weapons purchase, judges that the Uhuru's are "criminals… conspiring to destroy the peace." Regarding the real and fictional crises, Richette says that although MOVE's weapons possession frightened the authorities, the only real-life "offenses" charged to MOVE had been health, zoning and building code violations and peace disturbances. Moreover, the guns possessed by the MOVE members had never been determined to be illegally owned and un-registered.

The fictional, African American mayor (whose name, "Winfield Bon" is Richette's Latin cum English corruption of the name of Philadelphia's former and first African American mayor, Wilson Goode) chills Goldfarb. He announces his threatening indifference to the fact that the police are longing to avenge the armed confrontation at "Powhatan Village," in 1978. Richette bases the vendetta on the real life 1978 standoff at Powelton Village, which had resulted in the death of police officer James Ramp and the wounding of seven other officers and firefighters. During the fictional showdown in 1985, Bon's indifference widens to the depraved. He not only refuses to attend the siege in person but approves the use of the C-4 bomb, which a helicopter drops atop the LIVE house. The mayor's chief of staff, ensuring that his boss' interests are fulfilled, is set up to be the fall guy, his begging for the mayor's attendance going unheeded. Richette depicts the failure of his fictional "Boo," Goldfarb, to convince the right and left to resolve matters peacefully.

"It took me several years to write The Fault Line," says Richette, whose pretend negotiator reflects the same mistrust, "for both sides" Richette says he had developed while covering the MOVE Commission. During a book reading/signing at Barnes and Noble in Bryn Mawr on May 14, Richette called the standoff a "no-win situation."

Richette's fake intermediary has dangerous biases. Goldfarb's lifelong apprenticeship to an older, legendary leftist lawyer and his witnessing of racial atrocities in the south precurse his cynical dialogues with government officials and implorations of the Uhuru's to play ball. Goldfarb persuades LIVE to give up the shooter who has recently injured a police officer. LIVE, trusting the optimistic intermediary, agrees to send its brother to the dogs in order to save its headquarters from destruction. The deal quickly goes south.

"I wanted to show how somebody, who happens to be a radical, can, purely through his own good intentions, make a bad situation even worse," said Richette, who added, "Even when Leon steps outside of ethics, his motives are pure but his results are totally shitty." An atheist, Goldfarb embraces the political tinderbox with the naivety of John Silas Reed descending upon Moscow in 1918 and the Lawrence Massachusetts Textile Strike in 1912. The police brutalize the LIVE member who did the shooting. Moreover, Richette seems to winking that he himself had longed to step outside of his journalist vocation to become an activist by writing this novel.

Ending his reporter tenure in 1988, Richette returned in 1990 to the City Paper, for which he would work as Politics Editor until 1992. "The great thing about journalism for a writer," says Richette, "is that it teaches an author how to write with objectivity." Richette lists as a major influence, novelist Don DeLilo, who said during an interview for a magazine article, "The writer is the man or woman who automatically takes a stance against his or her government" (Arensberg, Ann. "Seven Seconds" Vogue August, 1988).

Richette does not, however, depict conversations conducted between MOVE members, or describe the methods or activities occurring inside the LIVE house. He explains, "The reason I didn't go too deeply into the MOVE house is because I wasn't sure of my ability to render the domestic affairs, the conversations, the living environment in the MOVE house effectively. Novelists tend to move toward what they think they can do well and minimize what they can't do well."

Still, there are authors who have taken bolder liberties. Let It Burn (Horizon, 1989) by Michael and Randy Boyette, denigrates the decisions made by MOVE members, whom it says ate cockroaches and vermin found in the Osage house. Subtly demeaning ad hominem MOVE's founder John Africa, the Boyettes suggest that John Africa was illiterate, referring to him provocatively by his pre-MOVE name, Vincent Lopez Leapheart. The Boyettes claim that police occupying the back alley (where MOVE members would have attempted to escape from the burning house) had fired only after the bomb had been dropped. They base their commentary on interviews with the police rather than include the testimony of MOVE members (Let it Burn pp. 209-210). Michael Boyette had served on the 1986 Grand Jury that failed to indict Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor and Fire Commissioner William Richmond.

Richette says, "Philadelphia has never come to terms with what happened. We've just buried it. We re-elected Wilson Goode in 1987, even though he caused the crisis and the bombing. Nobody has ever been punished for the tragedy except for the two cops who dropped the bomb."

History fills in the spots regarding MOVE's harassment by the police, where Richette has instead situated the travails of his fanciful emissary, in building toward denouement; there was much police action leading up to the final conflict, which Richette could spend dozens of pages in dramatizing, but doesn't. He concentrates instead on the life of the lawyer who rues over his selling of the weapons with the remorse of Raskolnikov for killing the pawnbroker and her sister in Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. In real-life, on Saturday, May 11, (then) Judge Lynn Abraham signed an arrest warrant for four MOVE members. The warrants were authorized by then-District Attorney Ed Rendell. Mimicking the bullhorn announcement by Police Chief Gregore Sambor during the standoff, Richette's deputy police chief announces, "Attention LIVE. This is America."

In the fictional situation, a good-intentioned fool causes the tragedy. No coda as vindicating as a later civil trial is a gleam in any character's eye. Realizing that he has put guns into angry hands, Goldfarb attempts to broker peace without compromising his commitment to help the disenfranchised. He refuses to admit that he has purchased the weapons, denying the investigators the chance to charge him and LIVE with conspiracy. To appease the police, he agrees to wear a wire. The mayor's chief of staff, who was Goldfarb's Constitutional Law student at Princeton, persuades his erstwhile mortified mentor to wear the wire tap while negotiating a deal with the Uhuru camp. The new patsy must convince the naturalist group to surrender the LIVE member who has recently fired the shots from the house, which have wounded a police officer patrolling the newly barricaded fastness. Like a boxer agonizing over whether to take a fall, Goldfarb gratifies the mayor's request to negotiate the deal under the condition that no charges are brought against him regarding the arms deal. And lucky for Goldfarb, the Uhuru's never think to frisk him. In the real and contrived stories, there was no eviction notice. Theoretically, the government had no right to attempt to eject occupants from the house, whether by attempting to smoke them out and much less by destroying the house. Dropped from a police helicopter at 5:27pm on May 13, the C-4 bomb, which was supposed to destroy the plywood bunker attached to the roof, began a fire that burned through the roof's tar and beams, quickly igniting a nearby gasoline tank. Though the fire department's vehicles were parked at the barricade during the entire standoff, the hoses were not switched on until 6:32pm. The excuse given by the authorities was that they were trying to produce so much smoke inside the house, that the occupants would be forced to exit. The fire was not contained until five hours later." Sixty-one homes were destroyed, more than 254 people were left homeless, and eleven MOVE members, including five children and the group's founder, were killed.

Richette believes that the prototype for violent administration exists with government's Brahmins. "If you had told me four years ago that the United States was going to launch an unprovoked attack against an innocent, Middle Eastern country that had never threatened or harmed us," he said, "I would have said that's impossible. And yet under Bush, we've seen the same sort of attack, totally irrational and without justification." Richette's Mayor Bon repeats the proclamation by the real-life Goode, who had said that God had ordained him to be mayor. Richette, during his book signing, announced that it's the mere job title that the megalomaniacs want but that the Cheney's and the Rumsfeld's (like Richette's fictional Chief of Staff, Marshall), do the puppeteer dirty work. "Poor excuses are given, such as when Janet Reno's advisors had told her that children were being molested at the WACO house. The excuse with the MOVE bombing was that the people inside the house wouldn't leave, so we had to get them out somehow, so we dropped a bomb. States who commit violence always come up with an excuse," Richette said.


photo, NY Times

When Richette's police force opens fire and drops the inevitable bomb on the LIVE headquarters, the book all but ends. Goldfarb, whose enforcement of his principles has precipitated the Uhuru family's death, is no longer a properly leftist west Philadelphian, but is a sell-out. For Richette, this soul homicide is an apocalypse. The damage is irrevocable. The author does not approach the later civil lawsuits, child custody battles or the future of the sole survivor of his invented inferno, a child who dodges the bullets and runs into the awaiting gaggle of police officers.

Richette says he did not speak with MOVE members in creating his characterizations. "Unless MOVE sees you as a sympathizer, they won't deal with you," Richette explains.

Instead of "sympathizing," Richette positions Goldfarb as an ideal spectator who espouses Richette's own views. "It's both sides' fault," Richette explains. When the founder convinces Goldfarb to purchase the weapons, Goldfarb tells the founder that he is a fanatic, whose cynicism is allowing him to risk the lives of his family. This is Richette on the nose. At his book reading, he explained how during the real-life battle between the police and MOVE, each side was ruthlessly antagonizing the other.

Goldfarb is rewarded materially for his selling out. No longer a radical, he splits west Philadelphia and moves to the suburbs, accepting a lush attorney position granted by an old friend whose law practice is dedicated to freeing drug dealers.

The ironic prosperity of whitey is the best and worst thing that has ever happened to Richette's peace broker. The subsequent death of the house's occupants was not the only liberation that the negotiator and his fellow Philadelphians suddenly enjoyed; after LIVE gives up its shooter, the gunman's instant brutalizing by the awaiting officers becomes conveniently the fault of parties other than the hapless intermediary. The watching public becomes mortified that its tax money and votes empower a barbaric police force but is instantly exculpated in learning that the savage beating by the cops precipitates the immediate and armed retaliation by the victims who inexcusably try to deny themselves martyrdom. Bullets are fired from both camps whereupon Goldfarb is luckily freed from his ideological struggle about compromising his principles in order to prevent bloodshed while covering his own ass.

"Like MOVE," says Richette, "the LIVE group does itself in." There is nothing that can be done now except to mime the dialectic, which Richette has his hero ruminate, is at best simulated in America but is never practiced, by "tired men squabbling, tired men improvising."

In a last ditch effort to save the lives of the occupants, Goldfarb, upon whose head Richette has plopped the spiffy, part-time, pro-bono halo of the conscientious objector, begs his former protégé to persuade the mayor to restrain the police force. When refused by Marshall, Goldfarb runs toward the crossfire that is ripping apart the burning house, intending that his presence will stalemate the hostility. But he is downed by an officer wielding a nightstick. Through woozy eyes, he watches the house become peppered with bullets while it burns, hearing the screams of the dying occupants who flee the awaiting gunfire by running back into the house.

"As an author," says Richette, "I want to show that both sides, cops and MOVE, were wrong." Richette enlists support for his egalitarian sense of culpability by mentioning that Kitty Caparella, Daily News writer, "who is very anti-MOVE, read my book and told me it was very balanced because it showed the MOVE people were just as crazy, just as intransigent and stubborn as the police and the rest of the government."

Not all writings about MOVE come from leftist authors. The Boyette's, in Let it Burn leave salient room for inference of their view that the police had no choice but to drop the C-4 bomb. They describe the MOVE family as being irrational. "No place stood as too sacred for MOVE's bold, jarring protests. The members used loudspeakers set up on their house, shouted to passersby on Philadelphia street corners, disrupted meetings of the school board and other governmental agencies, as well as court proceedings. In proclaiming their demands for complete animal freedom (if people should be free, so should animals) they confronted visitors to the Philadelphia zoo and patrons of pet stores throughout the city" (Boyette, 1989).

Richette said, "That the LIVE members just kept inviting the insane brutality is an accurate reflection of what happened in real life. The MOVE people were definitely victims of the bombing, but they brought the catastrophe onto themselves." Richette complained at his book reading that MOVE's instigative methods were met in turn by the negligent disposition of the authorities that would doom the five children and six adults occupying the house on Osage Avenue.

Positioning Goldfarb to jinx the cold war waged since 1978, Richette steeps the famed contest in volatile pretext, as if he is Virgil covering Rome's final showdown with Carthage or Alexander's conquering of Persia. The police want revenge for old scars. Officer Ramp was killed in 1978. Now it is time to torch the enemy's villages.

In real life, a ballistics test performed on the bullet that killed Officer Ramp yielded inconclusive results. Autopsy reports, however, showed that the bullet that hit him in the back had traveled in a downward direction. The leftist camp has claimed that because MOVE members had been occupying the basement of their house below street level, it was impossible for the besieged to have fired the shot killing Ramp, who they claim was on the street, facing the house. Moreover, they have argued, even though destroying evidence is illegal, police bulldozed and leveled the house as soon as MOVE members had been taken away, making forensic and ballistic studies impossible.

While the court battles held between two parties of "bad guys" are usually won by the group that doesn't view rats, humans and cockroaches as being equal, it is Richette's contention that power, rather than legality, decides each close contest. Moreover, killing a police officer gets a perpetrator into more trouble than killing a civilian if you accept that the police are "more" equal than the rest of us. "The only legal cover the police had were the [four] arrest warrants signed by Ed Rendell," says Richette. "This was the government's only legal authority to act on May 13." Richette's LIVE group relies on live demonstrations, handheld bullhorns, loud posters and court disruptions to proclaim its outrage.


The former MOVE headquarters at 6221 Osage Avenue is now a police station. photo, Hans Bennett

Filmmaker Karen Pomer and her partner Jane Mancini, covered the period starting from 1977 and ending with the 1978 confrontation at Powelton Village in a documentary, as part of Pomer's graduating thesis at Temple University. Pomer had been a Powelton Village neighbor of MOVE at the time. Her film, MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia showed the actual shootout between MOVE and Mayor Frank Rizzo's police. It featured interviews with MOVE members, neighbors and the police and won the Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival.

This year, Massachusetts filmmakers Benjamin Garry, Matt Sullivan and Ryan McKenna created the documentary MOVE, On September 2 and 5, the Prince Theatre will screen the documentary MOVE by Garry, Sullivan and McKenna. It is narrated by Howard Zinn, author of The People's History of the United States (Perennial, Rev., 2001). The filmmakers were unable to interview any of the authorities (police or otherwise) who were part of the 1985 ordeal.

Richette explains that "the system" is not the only producer of obstacles preventing getting a MOVE movie made. Several years ago, Richette's Hollywood producer friend, Martha Goldhirsch, read The Fault Line manuscript, became very excited about it and decided to option it. Goldhirsch contacted novelist David Bradley whom she asked to write a first draft screenplay. "Bradley turned down the idea, saying that only black people should write about MOVE," said Richette.

There is also the touchy subject of how to represent first blood. In the Richette book, a television reporter announces, "shots were fired from this house." In the real life reports, testimony regarding the originator of the first shot is mixed. Another trip wire is representing the naturalist founder and his minions on the big screen. The call for austerity is similar to the cautioning Benjamin 2X had given Spike Lee before filming Malcolm X. "Don't get anything wrong because these are Black Muslims and you had better be sure you don't upset them," remembered Lee's actor, Jean Lamarre, who portrayed 2X.

Richette's motivation to write The Fault Line could be characterized as the passionate yearning by an author to protect his city with the same passion for the denouncing of patricians practiced by Juvenal ridiculing Domitian and Suetonius exposing the Casers--- albeit Richette's fight is practiced through the veneer of a reporter's objectivity. Richette's flight from Manhattan to Philadelphia when the crisis erupted reflected his desire to report honestly on the MOVE Commission. Like most Philadelphians, Richette had been an innocent who suddenly became ignited by the tragedy. "When Larry started with us as a freelance writer in the early eighties in our decrepit, old room on 13th and Sansom," remembers City Paper founding editor Chris Hill, "he wrote me some beautiful social pieces, such as his pieces about the seventies, capturing perspectives of the time wonderfully." Hill, who is now editor of Rodale Press' New Farm website (www.newfarm.org), added, "Larry was also always very passionate about city politics." Hill receives partial dedication in The Fault Line. He is credited by Richette as being a journalism mentor. Hill had left the City Paper by the time of the MOVE bombing.

Back in Philadelphia, Richette showed the editors at the City Paper that he was worthy of a full time reporter's job and began covering the MOVE Special Investigation Commission organized by Mayor Goode. "What I want Philadelphia to take away from my book is to remember what happened and no longer repress it," says Richette, who adds, "The city built new houses where Wilson Goode burned down sixty-four houses and made homeless 250 people. All power structures are capable of this kind of violence."

The former MOVE headquarters at 6221 Osage Avenue is now a police station.

In late July, Xlbris Corp., the Philadelphia-based print-on-demand publishing company laid off 35 customer service workers. The jobs were moved off shore, to the Philippines. Richette's contact person at this publisher is now located there.

Richette's character Leon Goldfarb recalls a quote by his mentor, the lawyer, McLynch, "Reality is everything you can't change."

The Fault Line can be purchased at www.xlibris.com.