The Golden Door: An African-American & The Criminal Justice System

By Robert T. Floyd Jr.

Writing about one’s own life is not a simple task. It consumes years and years of research in addition to the recalling of experiences, many of which are unsettling. I began with an incident regarding a position applied for along with a co-worker who was like myself, a former Philadelphia police officer. How, I asked, can deference fail to exist in the arena of public service?
Over the years, I have come to see that not only I have experienced these mishaps, but there are untold others, too numerous to mention. I just happen to be of African-American ancestry. This book is for them. It’s for the soldiers and airmen I served with in Vietnam, indeed it is for generations of Americans yet unborn.
There is always a struggle between good and evil. Plato describes it as a two-headed horse, each wanting to go in opposite directions. In law-enforcement this arises when innocence crosses the path of corruption. In the final analysis this is to let us not forget those who tried to serve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664124363

Robert T. Floyd Jr.

Robert T. Floyd is an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War. He returned to serve as a Police Officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Subsequently he served as a Correctional Officer with the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, DC Englewood, Colorado, and New York, NY. He has completed college work at Villanova University and Temple University. He resides in Colwyn, Pennsylvania.

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The Golden Door

An African-American & The Criminal Justice System

Robert T. Floyd Jr.

Copyright © 2020 by Robert T. Floyd Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 08/20/2020

Xlibris

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817507

For

Those

Who Tried To Serve

"How much would it be worth to a young man entering upon the practice of law, to be regarded as a white man rather than a colored one? Probably most white persons if given a choice, would prefer death to life in the United States as colored persons. Under these conditions, is it possible to conclude that the reputation of being white is not property?

Indeed, is it not the most valuable sort of property, being the master-key that unlocks The Golden Door of opportunity?"

The legal brief of Homer A. Plessy, who was 7/8 Caucasian and 1/8 African blood in the Landmark U.S. Supreme Court case: Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896).

Chief Inspector’s Squad

PREFACE

This writing illustrates how my police career in Philadelphia, and its connection to former Commissioner Frank L. Rizzo’s liaison with federal intelligence, had a profound affect on my life following police service. I was reassigned from the 19th District, at 61st and Thompson streets to the Chief Inspector’s Squad (CIS) at Frankford and Castor avenues in 1970. CIS was a plainclothes intelligence unit, concerned mainly with vice operations and information gathering on many levels in the city of Philadelphia.

I had become familiar to police commissioner Frank L. Rizzo through an attorney whom I had contact, and who had a close relationship with the commissioner. This attorney intervened to have me transferred from an undesirable assignment at the 1st District in south division to the 19th District in west division. The 19th, a huge section of west Philadelphia is the area of the city where I had grown-up.

The utilization of surveillance, whether physical or electronic became a powerful tool in apprehending vice characters. The squad worked closely with the FBI. However, surveillance and apprehension brings with it information pertaining to internal matters, i. e. inside the department itself. One thing I came to see, was that vice characters who pay for protection from arrest, usually identify a bagman, especially when that official holds high rank. It follows then, that vice characters whom I dared not arrest as a result of offering this kind of information would pass it back through the bagman in an effort to avoid reoccurrence. The Greek philosopher Socrates held that the only thing in life worth caring for was not wealth or social distinction, but the soul and its perfection. Jesus said: For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul? Mark 8:36.

In CIS there were approximately twenty-five (25) officers, a lieutenant and a corporal. Four (4) officers were African-American. Following my first year, my supervisor gave me the highest performance evaluation I ever received as an officer. Ultimately, the squad was being used to reinforce corruption. Once my supervisor became aware of this scheme, our days were numbered. My supervisor, Lt. Chris DeCree resigned, along with the corporal, taking positions with the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. The squad was disbanded by the commissioner. Most of the white officers were promoted, or reassigned to other special units. Many went to the prestigious Organized Crime unit. The blacks were reassigned to uniformed patrol. My assignment was the 22nd District, a densely populated ghetto and high crime area of north Philadelphia, where a riot had occurred in the 1960’s. For a uniformed patrol officer, the 22nd was the department’s front-line. One of the other blacks from the squad was forced to resign, taking a job as bus driver with the public transit system. Still another was overheard by wiretap talking to a vice character. Another former black officer from CIS died mysteriously, while I was forced to submit to a polygraph, to ascertain whether or not I was a double agent, working for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. I also learned that I was placed on Commissioner Rizzo’s enemy list. Therefore being assigned to the 22nd district, rather than back to the 19th was similar to a combat soldier being assigned permanent point duty in Vietnam. One week following my assignment to the 22nd District, I laid across the front seat of my patrol car for cover from the engine-block, while gunfire ruled the night as the new year arrived. In February, an officer in my squad was shot and killed while he sat in his patrol car at the exact location where I had laid across the seat as the new year began. Following a year in the 22nd District, I decided to also resign. During the exit interview, I stated I would seek employment in Washington, DC with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

In 1972 a prostitute I contacted in New York city, with knowledge of the Vietnam War, seeking information regarding whether I was a veteran for or against the war, became a Philadelphia police asset when her male associate sent a hand-written letter and photo of myself and the woman to Philadelphia police. The letter stated: The man in this picture is a pimp, the woman is one of his whores. She peddled misinformation on my Vietnam war experience and character for cash.

On the evening of March 8, 1971 Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met for the first time at Madison Square Garden in New York for the world heavyweight boxing championship. While millions of people around the world watched the bout, a team of burglars broke into the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania just west of Philadelphia. The stolen files they removed, were subsequently photo-copied and mailed to various media outlets for publication. The information contained in the files sent the 47 year career of director J. Edgar Hoover into a tailspin.

The overall impression in the Media files of how the FBI regarded black people was that they were dangerous and must be watched continuously. To become targets of the FBI, it wasn’t necessary for African Americans to engage in violent behavior. It wasn’t necessary for them to be radical or subversive. Being black was enough…The FBI thought of black Americans as falling into two categories - black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI. (1)

Once I arrived in Washington, a plot was hatched to place an access agent into position to monitor my contacts. A Deputy US Marshal whom I had formed a working relationship with encouraged me on a blind date with the sister of a woman he was dating. The date was of little interest, yet for all my effort it seemed nearly impossible to back out. This individual worked for an intelligence agency of the federal government. The prostitute from New York also reappeared unexpectedly. Following three years in Washington, I was reassigned to a federal prison in Englewood, CO. (Denver). I made the mistake of agreeing to marry this woman. My brother encouraged the marriage, agreeing to purchase the rings for the ceremony.

The job in Englewood, Colorado was not great, in fact I was better-off back in Washington. The government bent-over backward to keep their access agent in-place, transferring her from the U.S. Information Agency in Washington to the Denver Federal Center. The agent was subsequently moved to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, and finally to a position in Philadelphia when I returned east. Upon arriving at New York, I was informed of a month long training class in Atlanta, Georgia that I would have to attend. Following the training in Georgia, my wife informed me she was pregnant. Subsequently she was terminated from the job after a meeting with her supervisor. According to her account, the supervisor questioned the pregnancy before she was fired. I wrote letters to the job in Philadelphia seeking to ascertain the reason for the termination. I received vague replies, yet my wife was blackballed from further employment for the following two (2) years. When the child was born, she made every effort to create a barrier between the child and myself. I attended classes at Temple University, while working for the university’s police department. It was only after she received an offer to return to Washington for a job with the CIA did she abandon the relationship, taking the child.

Blacks in Philadelphia most targeted were students. Whether or not they were peaceful, they were under the FBI’s watchful eyes. The prostitute from New York unexpectedly showed-up on Temple University’s campus, attempting to entice me to visit her in New York. I declined while questioning how she had located me at Temple University in the first place? John Raines, Professor of religion at Temple University was one of the individuals that surreptitiously raided the FBI’s Media, Pennsylvania office. In a book Professor Raines wrote titled Attack on Privacy he remarks: They depend upon persons who have many opportunities of corruption and are daily exposed to the retribution of angered interests and powers. David Kairys, a professor at Temple University school of law was familiar with some of the Media burglars. When asked whether he would represent them in the event of arrest, Professor Kairys replied: Yes.

The CIA subsequently offered me a job, requiring that I leave Temple University, where I had served from 1980-87 for the Washington area. The CIA laid the ground-work to create a situation for my betrayal of trust. My pay was attached for child-support, while another female agent was assigned to monitor my contacts. The fact that I was assigned to the Russia section at headquarters on a daily basis to check for security violations caused concern. Forced to reside in a ghetto section of Baltimore due to my financial status, the apartment was entered surreptitiously, my telephone hot-miked, and my mail was opened. I paid more in child support, per month, than I paid for rent on my one bedroom apartment at one of the lowest pay grades in the federal government. I operated my vehicle to and from work for more than a year without insurance. I existed in deep poverty, while baited with classified information. Finally I was dispatched to Vienna, Austria where possible contact with foreign intelligence officers could occur. The CIA essentially engaged in an endeavor to undermine and discredit me at the behest of Frank L. Rizzo. The agency finally concluded they had been duped.

In March 1991 I decided to resign from CIA after receiving an offer to work at Lincoln University, an historically black institution in Pennsylvania, as campus police officer. Frank L. Rizzo died suddenly in July 1991. In September 1991 I was the lone campus police officer on duty on the campus of Lincoln University when a riot erupted. Two (2) car loads of contracted thugs from New York created the disturbance that resulted in serious personal injuries, as well as property damage. Even though my uniform was blood-stained, I emerged uninjured. A letter I forwarded to the local press, revealing the fact that I most recently served with the Central Intelligence Agency was published.

Robert T. Floyd Jr.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Vietnam: The Psychological Experience of War

The Philadelphia Police Department

U. S. Customs Service

Bureau of Prisons

Temple University Police

The Central Intelligence Agency Police

Lincoln University Police

Haverford College Security

Ghana; West Africa

Department of Veterans Affairs Police

Conclusion

Footnotes

INTRODUCTION

This book chronicles three decades of law-enforcement experience. It takes me across the oceans at various points, and extends to both coasts of the United States. My mother, Marion Chapman Floyd was born to Samuel and Mary Chapman in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. My father, Robert T. Floyd Sr. was born in Laurens Country, South Carolina. My father’s family migrated north following a racial incident that resulted in the KKK threatening to kill every Floyd in Florence, South Carolina. In Philadelphia, my father enlisted in the United States Marine Corps during World War II. My parents met and married in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where I was their first born. My mother gave me a book titled A Day in The Jungle. I couldn’t read very well, yet the pictures and stories of the animals daily lives in the wild fascinated me to no end. I understood immediately that books were the gateway to a world of mystery.

I began school at Brooks elementary on Haverford avenue at 57th street in west Philadelphia since we lived only one block away. However, by age seven, my family had relocated to the house where I would grow-up on north Robinson street, just west of 61st street in west Philadelphia. Shortly after we moved, my mother’s parents passed-away. My grandmother and grandfather had resided in a small third floor apartment on Vine street near 55th. My mother used to say: Whites have their heaven right here on earth. I could see the sadness in my mother’s eyes, feel the pain in her heart. My father’s family filled the void very well. Grandma, as the family called my father’s Mom was the most beloved, honored, and respected relative I had. I loved to sit at Grandma’s knee while she talked of slavery in the south. She lived for more than a century, actually outliving three of her children. Grandma’s words were wise and filled with wisdom. I attempted to grasp each and every word she spoke. When Grandma went to church, I was right by her side. Her children, Kate, Carrie, Lois, Elizabeth, Richard, and Robert all lived within walking distance in west Philadelphia. When grandma moved to her brother’s home in Pelham, New York I discovered the joy and leisure of Westchester County. All of my relatives played an integral role in raising my sisters and brothers.

It wasn’t long after we moved to Robinson street, that I discovered Cobbs Creek golf course. Situated just a few blocks west, it meant I had to risk venturing through a hostile white community, where I heard the word nigger. I earned money as a caddy, or by selling a few golf balls.

My school studies confirmed what Grandma had said…that my ancestors had been slaves in America for two and one-half centuries. Following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, my ancestors wandered all over the south, and finally drifted north. Our drifting is an expression of our hope to improve our lives. Our roots are nowhere. To linger where we are born is to live a slow death. To move means facing the unknown. This had been our history, and was to be my future. In 1957, my father left the family after losing his job, relocating to New London, Connecticut. Therefore at age fifteen, I was pushed prematurely into manliness as man of the house. My mother became more dependent on the money I earned at the golf course. I often wondered why my mother singled me out, for what I considered harsh treatment. In Belsky’s book Child Maltreatment I learned my mother’s message was: You hurry and grow-up and take care of me the way your father never did. Belsky explains that Parents turn to their offspring for the love and caring denied them as children…maltreatment then occurs as parents become frustrated and angered by their children’s inability to take care of them satisfactorily.

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court handed-down its landmark decision and desegregation order in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education. I was preparing for junior high school, after completing sixth grade at Brooks elementary. Most of my friends and kids from my neighborhood were assigned to Sayre or Shoemaker junior high schools, therefore I was perplexed when I learned I had been assigned to the previously all-white and predominately Jewish Beeber junior high school in Philadelphia’s Wynnefield section. I asked my mother Why me? She replied: Because you’re smart. I didn’t think I had any intelligence at all.

Prior to 1954, segregation in public education was legal, as mandated by the high court in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896). The Plessy doctrine of separate but equal was the law of the land. In Justice Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy, he wrote: Our constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision in the Dred Scott case.

In overruling itself, just as Justice Harlan had prophesied fifty-eight years before, the Supreme Court said in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms. To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated are by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.( 1)

In his book titled The Education of Black Philadelphia, Professor Vincent P. Franklin of Yale University writes: Other schools, notably Sulzberger junior high, have become 99% colored because of the skillful zoning maneuvers. The zoning line is so arranged that the white section of the area sends its children to Beeber school.( 2) When I arrived at Beeber, I came with my old learning habits, acquired through the sixth grade at my all-black neighborhood school. For example, when a problem was presented in arithmetic, the teacher would go over the problem again and again until the teacher felt that a reasonable number of students understood the solution. However, at Beeber, the teacher would present a problem once, explain it, and that was the end of it until exam time. Therefore at an early stage of my educational development, I had to transcend the inferior learning habits I had acquired. The education and environment at Beeber, and subsequently at Dobbins Tech. High have had a lasting affect. However, education for a black man does not go hand in hand with equality of opportunity, it is merely a means of coping in a racist society.

Since the United States Supreme’s Court’s decisions have such a devastating effect on the lives of millions of Americans, it is a strange irony that I should take the reader on a journey through concrete experience, that spans the length and breath of the criminal justice system. I was a Philadelphia police officer for eight years. A federal correctional officer for five years. A campus police officer at Temple University in Philadelphia for seven years, and a uniformed police officer for the Central Intelligence Agency for four years. I have been denied positions with the U.S. Customs service and the Los Angeles county sheriff department because of my race. Like Moses, I have grown-up in Pharaoh’s house.

There were less than ten African-American students at Beeber when I arrived for classes. The total population of the school was between five-hundred and six-hundred children. Being the only black in all my classes was initially difficult, yet I eventually became accustomed and felt somehow that I fit in. Growing-up on Robinson street, I had always excelled at baseball and football. However, I rarely played basketball, therefore I had no skills at that game. Two of my classmates at Beeber, Jerry Serlin and Larry Ruttenberg who were both great players took me under their wing. In one class, our teacher devised a method of eliciting an opinion without my understanding the under- lying effects until the experiment had concluded. The teacher requested that each student select a classmate that they found attractive. There was a very pretty girl in the class named Vivian that I had secretly admired. When my turn came to make a selection, I chose Vivian. The reaction from my classmates made it unequivocal that I should never display openly an affection for a white girl. Richard Wright wrote: The white woman is valued, overvalued by a culture which depicts her as a highly desirable, a sexually desirable, object which, of course, the Negro can only approach under penalty of death.

The student body at Beeber was more than 90% Jewish in 1954. Thus on Jewish holidays, I would be in class alone. From Jewish culture and history, I learned of the striking similarity between the Jewish experience and that of African-Americans. In his books and speeches, Booker T. Washington repeatedly stated that blacks in America should model themselves on the European Jewish community of the diaspora, who through two millennia as social outcasts had produced a world of their own within the larger world. Chased from England in 1290, next from Spain in 1492, and then all across the German speaking provinces and kingdoms that made-up the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the Jews ended-up bankrupt and humiliated in the prison confines of autocratic Czarist Russia. In Russia, the answer to the Jewish problem under Czar Alexander II in 1881 was to kill one-third, convert one-third, and force the remainder to emigrate.

The Nazis hit on the ultimate association. Sexual intercourse between Jew and Aryan, they declared, poisoned the bloodstream of the world. Therefore Hitler sought to annihilate the Jew, and in the process slaughtered 6,000,000 of them. It is this psychological juncture of race mixing holocaust or genocide, that anti-Semitism and the African-American experience meet. During the slave trade period (1619-1863) 100,000,000 blacks were slaughtered. To the racist, both the Jew and the African are inferior people whose very presence in the world is contaminating. To protect its purity, the white race is forced to separate itself from this debased stock.

Under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. peaceful blacks demonstrating for their constitutional rights were subjected to the power of fire hoses and the violence of police dogs. Dr. King drew the analogy between his purpose for leading the demonstration and the plight of the Jews under Hitler from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama.

When the Jews fled Europe for America, they settled on New York’s lower east-side, Boston’s Roxbury, and Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion areas. In 1908, New York police commissioner Theodore A. Bingham declared Jews to be a criminal class. For six decades they were wage earners rather than entrepreneurs. Their neighborhoods merely recreated the ghettos of the old country. They were identified by their language, customs, and costumes. The Jew was the white black man. Educated in the public schools, their children wholeheartedly adopted the American ideology of mobility and equality. They refused to stay in their place. These were my classmates at Beeber junior high school.

At graduation, our class recited the story of Moses, and the verse inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. When Moses learned of his true identity, a Hebrew, he threw-off the garments of Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian. Then the Lord said to Moses: Go to Pharaoh and say unto him - this says the Lord; Let my people go. When Pharaoh released the Hebrews from their long night of slavery, it is written; "Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord