When that explanation collapsed, two officers confessed to shooting Pollard and Temple, but asserted self-defense, saying the men tried to grab their guns. Lippitt moved his practice from downtown Detroit to Southfield in the mid ‘70s. Id. Thrust into an incendiary case at age 32, Lippitt says he did what he’s always done: Work hard and win. Since then, the world’s understanding of the social factors that lead to a race riot — or rebellion, as many see it — has evolved. Some of the dead were looters and only one death was a policeman. Boxes of news clips saved by Lippitt’s mother include fashion spreads he posed for in The Detroit News Sunday Magazine. “I’m just pissed off that they’re going to make me look irrelevant. But Hersey said at the time that he felt he could not afford to wait. Detroit and state police, along with National Guardsmen, rushed inside the motel. Blacks were so outraged by the killings that prominent leaders, including Ken Cockrel and civil rights icon Rosa Parks, participated in a symbolic citizens tribunal that found the officers guilty. For 17 years, until 1984, he was lead counsel for the Detroit Police Officers Association, where he defended numerous officers accused of brutality and murder. The police had 4,300 officers – fewer than 250 of them black, says Willie Bell, who joined the force in 1971 and is now chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners. By signing up you are agreeing to our, How We Can Learn to Live with COVID-19 After Vaccinations. I’m not a do-badder, either,” Lippitt says. On the third night of the violence, police reported sniper fire at the Algiers Motel on Woodward, about a mile from the origin of the uprisings. Norman Lippitt makes no apologies. Sometimes, he helped police with phrases, such as “Fearing for my life …,” Lippitt acknowledges. Eight black men and two white women were lined up against a wall. Deal with it. Lippitt was a jock who excelled in sports. He defended Detroit officers in the infamous STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) unit, formed to crack down on street violence in 1971. Win. “I’d rather have them tell me that I’m an asshole or a racist than tell me that I’ve irrelevant. It’s a form of cynicism that is breathtaking.”. “I do fight for the cop, the fuzz, the pig … I think he’s trying to do a near impossible job,” Lippitt told the newspaper. They led one black teen into a side room and fired a gun to make their friends in the hallway think the teen was murdered and become so scared they’d confess. A desire to avoid being a jeweler led him to graduate from Detroit College of Law in 1961. Subscribe for just 99¢. Lippitt is one of the last surviving principals of the divisive case, and a character based largely on him is played by John Krasinski, of television’s “The Office.”. So is the judge and the assistant prosecutor, Weiswasser. “Are you ready for this? “In the Trenches: Guerilla Warfare and Other Trial Tactics.”. “Norman didn’t cause the ‘67 riots. As the 50th anniversary of the Algiers shootings nears, though, his criminal defense work is again in focus. Forty-three people died during the devastating riots that gripped Detroit in 1967. He says he wasn’t making enough money as an assistant prosecutor. “Yeah, it was an all-white jury,” Lippitt says. “The film is a blatant appeal to bias and bigotry,” argued assistant prosecutor Avery Weiswasser. Cockrel, the former city councilwoman, says Lippitt’s legacy is sorrowful. Detroit was becoming a more diverse city in the 1960s, but its police department remained virtually all white. “Does it take a genius to play on people’s racism? Lippitt says he never spoke to his clients again. The motel was the site of the infamous Algiers Motel incident during the Detroit Riots of 1967. Police then dragged seven or more occupants from their rooms and lined them up against a wall. A Negro youth, Carl Cooper, was shot to death just inside the door. “Norman Lippitt and the police acquittals absolutely had a major impact on race relations both in the 1970s and today,” says McGuire, the Wayne State professor. “Norman Lippitt hasn’t passed a lot of mirrors without stopping to say hi,” says Al Grant of the Retired Detroit Police Officers Association, who started with the force in 1970. Most of the witnesses to the shooting, as well as members of their families, told Hersey that they have been constantly harassed by the police. The son of a Highland Park jeweler, he says he grew up in a Jewish family of “tough guys” in northwest Detroit. August, a former clarinet player for the police band, was at police headquarters, giving his statement about the deaths. It was Day 4 of rioting in the city, which would prove to be one of the most damaging community events in American history. Would he be considered a nice guy now if he did a shitty job with those cases?”. Last month Senak, two other cops and a Negro night watchman were all indicted by a Federal grand jury for conspiring to deprive the victims of their civil rights. Police had been subjected to sniper firing, and one cop had already been killed. Police – and their politically powerful union – did more than fight crime in Detroit. The book poignantly captures the disjointed lives of the volatile black youths —their periodic fits of rage, their more normal sullenness, their fierce loyalty to one another. “It was always more and more money. David Senak, 24, known as “Snake,” served for a year and a half on the vice squad, and he apparently enjoyed his work. You give me a fat, ugly woman and a guy who’s got a lot of money, who’s got a girlfriend, a blonde 20 years younger than his wife. She says she was on a path toward finally telling her Algiers Motel story before the Bigelow project. U.S. attorneys also brought charges against all three police officers, and the guard Dismukes, accusing them of conspiring to deny civil rights to Algiers’ motel guests. Lippitt was a fast typist, so he typed the reports for the cops. (You may want to stop reading here if you consider the history a spoiler for the movie.) Here’s how TIME’s 1968 review of the book described those events: The Algiers Motel shooting occurred at the height of the rioting of July on Detroit’s central thoroughfare. Around that time, Lippitt says he was awakened several times a month by union callswhen police shot civilians. Perhaps, Lippitt says. The judge also allowed jurors to watch 20 minutes of television footage of the violence over objection of prosecutors, who accused Lippitt of playing “on every base emotion” in showing the footage. It was never enough for Norman,” says Sanford Plotkin, a defense attorney who worked with Lippitt in the 1990s and admires his “brilliant legal mind.”. This time, the not-guilty verdict was delivered in nine hours. “He was a winner. (In fact, the book was part of the reason why the trial was delayed and eventually took place in a community outside Detroit, on the theory that the publicity meant a fair jury could not be found closer to the scene.) 25. This is what happened in those first days of that war in Detroit – while the mayor and the governor and the president were indecisive.”. Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Algiers Motel Incident. Lippitt says he never dwelled on the slight and quickly joined the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, where he tried more than 100 felony cases before he turned 30. A bottle was thrown. “Lippitt was a guy who did a good job for us when we needed it.”. Your email address will not be published. Please try again later. Someone has to do the dirty work.”. Will there be enough teachers? But it’s the words Lippitt won’t speak that frustrate veterans of Detroit’s civil rights movement. When he turns on the light, he realizes it’s his teenage neighbor and plants a knife. By 1980, 63 percent of the city’s 1.2 million residents were black. Were some of his clients racist? on real events, The Algiers Motel Incident purports to reconstruct fact, often using literary rather than reportorial techniques to do it. “He got off people who assassinated young men,” says Cockrel. “I would have had an all-white jury in (the Detroit) Recorder’s Court as well.”, “I don’t apologize for that. “Rather than hearing what the community was saying – that the police were operating like a renegade army – they kept doubling down with brutality,” says Thompson, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a book she wrote about the 1971 Attica Prison riot. Among the officers Lippitt successfully defended was Patrolman Raymond “Mad Dog” Peterson. Built in 1952 when Detroit was at its apex, the clientele were initially weary business men in need of a roof before jetting home. Quite the contrary. This is in line with what is shown in the movie. Even if Lippitt is reluctant to say so, he helped defend the Constitution by providing vigorous defenses to unpopular defendants, Mitchell says. Those who opted for the latter stayed on the jury. You have reached your limit of 4 free articles. If it was common today for law enforcement officers who kill black citizens in the absence of a credible threat to be convicted, the Algiers Motel Incident would be a distasteful memory of a less enlightened time. Two years later, he got the police union contract. His strategy, which he’d employ in other brutality cases over the years, was to remove blacks from juries, poke holes in witness testimony and criticize police administration for failing to better train the officers. Guilty for not being allowed to shoot criminals. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Save on the cover price and get a free gift, Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know now on politics, health and more, © 2021 TIME USA, LLC. Charges of murder were brought against two of the police, though not against Senak; one case was dismissed and one is pending trial. Algiers Motel Incident, 1967, the accused police officers. To Lippitt, his suits were the uniform of a “samurai” – a warrior sworn to his patron, right or wrong. Back then, Lippitt looked like “Godfather”-era Al Pacino, in his Ralph Lauren suits, perfect hair and sideburns. Probably. “Someone has to defend them. Cooper’s death has never been explained. ©2021 Detroit Journalism Cooperative. Is Norman supposed to take a fall? To this day, there’s much confusion about what happened in those early hours at the Algiers. You knew it the way he walked into court.”. The Algiers Hotel was an Arabian/Persian-themed hotel located at 2845 South Las Vegas Boulevard on the Las Vegas Strip in Winchester, Nevada.The Algiers was opened in 1953, as a 110-room sister property to the adjacent Thunderbird hotel and casino.The Algiers was noted for mostly retaining its original design throughout its operation, giving it the appearance of an older Las Vegas hotel. He’s discussing his most infamous case: successfully defending white cops accused of beatings and murder at the Algiers Motel as Detroit burned in the summer of 1967. Hersey’s book was published before the 1969 trial at which one of the policemen involved was acquitted of first-degree murder. Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com. The decoy unit consisted of officers posing as bums or drunks to lure muggers. A crowd formed. For about an hour, three young white Detroit cops – Ronald August, Robert Paille and David Senak –  along with a black security guard, Melvin Dismuke, allegedly brutalized motel guests in an effort to learn who fired the gun that started the raid. “People don’t remember, these were violent times,” says Grant, the retired police union leader. “I’m a trial lawyer. Yet, as the film notes, some of the details from the eruption in Detroit remain unclear. In two years, he shot 10, killing eight, including a black motorist who fell asleep at the wheel and rear-ended Peterson’s car at a highway off-ramp. A policeman, said one Negro, “pointed to the body and asked me what did I see, and I told him I seen a dead man. They enforced a social order that separated blacks and whites, says Thompson, the U-M professor. Lippitt was never shy about discussing money. Michigan is struggling to put kids through college. After that, accounts diverge. No sniper weapon was ever found. August’s trial was relocated to tiny Mason, a nearly all-white town near Lansing. And judges, colleagues, retired newspaper reporters who covered his career and even critics agree he’s a hell of a lawyer. Just as absorbing is the anguish and frustration of their parents, their fury at the police and the courts, tempered by the knowledge that they could not do much about it. It would become a theme for much of his life. The moments in question earned only three sentences in TIME’s original report on the riots, but the writer John Hersey began work almost immediately on what would become the 1968 book The Algiers Motel Incident. Police were on edge because, earlier in the day, a revered fellow officer, Jerome Olshove, had been shot and killed during a scuffle with looters. Consequently, nerves were strained when an overwrought National Guardsman sent word of shots being fired from the area of the motel with its largely Negro clientele. “If I was the prosecutor, they would have been convicted. All rights reserved. The Algiers Motel Incident was just one part of an event that left 43 people dead, and, as an article in the Detroit Free Press after the riot pointed out, most of those were avoidable deaths of innocent people who got in the way of bullets fired by police or National Guardsmen. Archive film 94943 Detroit police accused of murder in the Algiers Motel Incident of July 1967 in Detroit. The police dispatcher relayed the message: “Army under heavy fire.” Actually, only a few shots had been heard, and Negro witnesses later claimed that these had come from a blank-cartridge pistol; no gun of any kind was ever found at the motel. All Rights Reserved. All the officers except Senak, who was represented by a different lawyer, are dead. Image from the collection of Walter Jung. After witness accounts began to emerge, the cops initially claimed the teens were already dead when they entered the Algiers. Lippitt entered the case when he was called by the union. Michigan has 1.6M college dropouts. Again, the jury was all white, an easier accomplishment at the time, before the U.S. Supreme Court made it harder to strike potential jurors on the basis of race. No joke. From 1970 to 1980, the city’s white population fell by half, to 414,000. “I don’t know why everybody wants to make me a do-gooder. Norman Lippitt defended Detroit police officers after the 1967 death of three black men, in what's known as the Algiers Motel shooting. By sunrise, two other teens were also dead: Carl Cooper, 17, and Fred Temple, 18. Guilty of working days and nights with little or no rest. “He only had to do a couple of things: Discredit the witnesses and get the whitest jury you could get,” says McGuire, the Wayne State professor, who has interviewed Lippitt several times. If he is bothered, Lippitt isn’t tipping his hand. It seemed as if his career had consisted of one case after another in which a man or woman had confronted him with some obscene gesture or lascivious remark. A union driver would pick him up and take him to headquarters to help officers involved with the shootings write their reports. Debt forgiveness may lure them back. The communes of Hydra, Ben Aknoun, El-Biar and Bouzareah form what the inhabitants of Algiers call the "Heights of Algiers". Now 81, he’s edgy and annoyed – but loving the attention – in the days leading to the Aug. 4 release of “Detroit,” Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s movie based on the Algiers Motel killings. About himself. Lippitt quit the prosecutor job in 1965 because it paid $10,500 per year, about $82,000 in today’s dollars. Gretchen Whitmer wants free college in Michigan. And he hit me with a pistol and told me I didn’t see anything.” Later during the incident two more Negroes were killed, [Aubrey] Pollard and Fred Temple. Instead, it’s a bitter example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. … In a way, Norman Lippitt helped get Coleman Young elected.”, It’s an argument that Lippitt’s former partner calls “ridiculous.”. The women had their clothes torn and were taunted as “n****r lovers.”. For example, historians now say that the snipers mentioned in reports of riots in many cities that summer were more fear than reality. Detroit Police, Michigan State Police, and other National Guardsmen came to the scene to find what they thought was a sniper. His wife’s gonna get a lot of alimony because she’s not marketable.”. Postcard view of the Algiers Hotel, 8301 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, circa 1960. “Ronald August is guilty of working under those conditions. Peterson initially claimed the man, Robert Hoyt, 24, pulled a knife. Kathryn Bigelow’s new film “Detroit” looks to the tragic events at the Algiers Motel during the 1967 riots in the Motor City. Lippitt did it by defending one cop after another accused of brutality. Id. "Responding to a telephoned report of sniping, the police group invaded the Algiers Motel and interrogate Kathryn Bigelow’s take on that city’s violent summer of 1967. At least two, according to motel guests, were executed at close range by white Detroit police. Senak admitted to Hersey that a “bad aspect” of his work was that he had never fallen in love with a girl before he joined the force. The Algiers Motel, despite its mystical sounding name, was a far cry from the palm trees and tropical fronds that adorned its rustic sign off Woodward. Police had been subjected to sniper firing, and one cop had already been killed. “I’m very good to women…. By the late 1960s, the city was nearly 40 percent African American, with most living south of Grand Boulevard. “There was nothing positive to say about the police department then,” says Bell, who is African American. I pay my taxes. In those days, many prominent law firms were reluctant to hire Jews. The case exposed racial wounds that perhaps still haven’t healed. You can unsubscribe at any time. But not one out of 10 will remember my criminal days anymore,” Lippitt says. The judge in the case, William Beer, approved several motions that ended up favoring Lippitt’s client. Lippitt was a “swashbuckler,” a “stick-your-chin-out and take-the-first-swing personality” who worked harder than most and had an easy rapport with jurors, says his former partner, Robert Harrison, a Bloomfield Hills attorney. Related: Cops remember Detroit 1967 riot, racial divide that persisted Protesters compared conditions of the time with today’s tensions with police in black communities. According to trial testimony, newspaper accounts and a book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” by John Hersey, the short version goes like this: Amid the violence, several black teens, includinga music group, the Dramatics, along with two white teenage girls, took refuge in the motel. Lippitt hasn’t seen the movie. When Detroit, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow’s take on that city’s violent summer of 1967, arrives in movie theaters on Friday, 50 years will have passed since the events it depicts took place. To this day, it remains unclear how and when Cooper was shot. 3. For about an hour, three young white Detroit cops – Ronald August, Robert Paille and David Senak – along with a black security guard, Melvin Dismuke, allegedly brutalized motel guests in an effort to learn who fired the gun that started the raid. Was he on the wrong side of history? Of old age. I give to charity. He became famous defending ‘Algiers Motel’ cops. When I was a judge, they used to say about me: I was a woman’s judge. “We could smell a tiger the moment Norm took his first case,” an anonymous lawyer is quoted in a 1971 profile in The Detroit News. “I can’t believe all the shit I’ve done in my life,” says Lippitt, who spoke to Bridge Magazine for six hours about a career that’s included a judgeship, celebrity clients and a thriving commercial law firm, Lippitt O’Keefe Gornbein, PLLC. Five days later, 43 were dead, hundreds of stores were burned or looted and thousands were injured or arrested. Friends of the murdered teens, who were themselves brutalized, later told investigators the gunshot police heard was a toy starter’s pistol one teen had fired as a prank. Lippitt leans back in his corner office in downtown Birmingham. As the trial closed, another victory for the defense: Beer told jurors they could only convict August of first-degree murder or acquit him, leaving them with no option for a “compromise” verdict of manslaughter. Police played a gruesome “game” to find out who fired the gun. The Algiers Motel shooting occurred at the height of the rioting of July on Detroit’s central thoroughfare. Senak, said a witness, ripped the clothes off one with the barrel of his shotgun and ordered the other to undress before the officers. Deal with it. “Norman had no reservations about representing police officers in matters that weren’t always popular. Subsequently two cops changed their story and admitted shooting two of the Negroes. “Our directive as lawyers is to zealously represent clients and to consider nothing other than their defense. Another teen, Aubrey Pollard, 19, was led into a second room, apparently as part of the game. The Algiers Motel neon sign as depicted in the movie 'Detroit'. Beautiful Gaby meets a romantic jewel thief in the mysterious Casbah. This description comes from his own 2011 memoir, “In the Trenches: Guerilla Warfare and Other Trial Tactics.” It’s on prominent display in his office alongside another favorite: “Warriors’ Words,” whose quotes – particularly those about self-confidence – are highlighted. It was less than a year after the summer of ’67 when the first major attempt was made to distill the events that make up the film’s centerpiece. Now, media from as far away as Japan are calling. In a move Lippitt admits he “would never get away with today,” he picked jurors by presenting them with a scenario during jury selection. He made big money winning acquittals for cops accused of brutalizing blacks in Detroit. The Algiers Motel Incident was just one part of an event that left 43 people dead, and, as an article in the Detroit Free Press after the riot pointed out, most of those were avoidable deaths of innocent people who got in the way of bullets fired by police or National Guardsmen. With John Boyega, Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore. I don’t think so.”. Friends have heard that sort of talk before. “And he did it with no ideology behind it other than ‘winning.’ To me, this is behavior of someone who stands for nothing other than self-aggrandizement.”. That was the atmosphere leading to the night of July 23, 1967, when police raided a black-owned, after-hours speakeasy on 12th and Clairmount. Last year, he met for three hours with Bigelow, the director of the “Detroit” movie, which will have its premiere in Detroit on July 25. Lippitt got the federal conspiracy case moved to Flint, claiming he couldn’t get an impartial jury in Detroit because of the publication of “The Algiers Motel Incident” book. You’re going to fall off that chair,” he says. In less than two years, police killed 22 men, all but one were black. Norman Lippitt defended Detroit police officers after the 1967 death of three black men, in what's known as the Algiers Motel shooting. The three cops are shown as bad apples not part of a broader system of policing. The Negroes, whose stories shifted rather erratically, reported they were all beaten. “It was a war! Then-state Sen. Coleman Young, who was in the courtroom when August was acquitted in the Algiers case, campaigned against police tactics during the 1973 mayoral campaign. NPR's Michel Martin discusses the case with Lippitt. City police, state troopers and National Guardsmen arrived at the motel. The all-white jury returned with a not-guilty verdict in less than three hours. “All I did was my job,” Lippitt says. They sigh. When a hair found on the weapon matched Peterson’s cat, Lippitt opted for a different defense. In Bigelow and Boal’s Detroit, there is no larger structure of law enforcement that enables what went on at the Algiers Motel.