The Free Mumia Hustle
By Steve Dunleavy - NY Post - 5-23-99
'Truthfully - and somebody will find it out - he has become a money machine for a lot of hustlers, but mainly for anti-death penalty people," fumed Maureen Faulkner to The Post's Steve Dunleavy last January.
Not even Mrs. Faulkner, we'd bet, planned on being proved right quite so soon.
"He" is Mumia Abu-Jamal , who was sentenced to death for the June 1981 killing of her husband of 13 months, Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal has used his time on death row to turn himself into a celebrity, writing two books and doing a radio commentary called "Live from Death Row." He has become a cause celebre for All The Right People (including former New York Mayor David Dinkins and the Rev. Calvin Butts), with no fewer than 30 Web sites devoted to "proving" he was framed.
What rarely gets mentioned is that Abu-Jamal has never himself actually denied shooting Faulkner. All his attorneys will say is that he is not guilty of the crime with which he was charged. That's lawyer-talk for a whole lot of different things. If Abu-Jamal can win the retrial he is demanding, and gets convicted only of a lesser charge, he would likely walk free with time served. The "free Mumia" crowd, meanwhile, doesn't seem too worried about the law.
The Black United Fund of Pennsylvania is an umbrella organization that raises money for local charities from thousands of city employees in Philadelphia. One of the so-called charities for which the fund solicits is Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal , for which it has raised a whopping $203,000 in the last eight months alone, according to an investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer. That came as news to Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell and the city's branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. Four years ago, when the Mumia connection became public and the cops protested, the Black United Fund claimed to have severed all ties with the organization. Instead, it appears, all it did was drop any mention of Concerned Family and Friends from its literature. This is no small matter. The Black United Fund is tax-exempt - and tax-law experts consulted by the Inquirer said that a tax-exempt organization passing money on to a non-exempt organization is highly questionable from a legal standpoint. But the moral point seems clear. "They were still doing the offensive conduct, but they were hiding it," said Richard Costello, president of the Philadelphia FOP. That Maureen Faulkner has had to wait 18 years for justice is an outrage. That well-intentioned Philadelphia city employees have been duped into further delaying that day of reckoning is something close to obscene. That Mumia & Co. continue to bamboozle gullible Americans of all colors ratifies an old adage: Fools are indeed born every day.
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