His Sin?: His Skin

As a result, the nightly newscasts rushed to find Howard Beach residents ready to refer to Minucci as "a hero" and "a great kid" while calling his victim "a low-life animal." And although he is an unemployed, high school dropout, he drives a $60,000 Cadillac Escalade and was wearing a $6,000 Rolex and a $4,000 necklace at the time of his arrest. That’s an awful lot of bling for a guy with no visible means of supporting himself. What line of work might he be in? Hmm

Here’s the undisputed facts: On Wednesday, June 29th, Nicholas Minucci, 19, and a couple of his friends spotted three Black men walking through their Howard beach neighborhood in the middle of the night. These white men got out of their car shouting racial epithets. Using a metal baseball bat, Minucci beat one of the men, Glen Moore, 22, so badly that he ended up in the hospital in critical condition with a fractured skull, bleeding around the brain and bruised kidneys. Police arrested Minucci, and based on his own confession admitting the attack, he was held without bail and charged with assault, battery, robbery, criminal possession of a weapon, and a bias crime.

Yet somehow, by the time the story was being reported by a mainstream press all too eager to exonerate this sick racist, the script had been flipped to make Minucci out as some sort of overzealous vigilante who was just protecting the block from car thieves. Thus, the mass media conveniently ignored the fact that Minucci had been accused of robbery in the incident, instead implying that the situation was the other way around, even though his victim was an Army veteran.

Quick to accept Minucci’s attorney’s blow-by-blow description, newspaper and TV coverage related how the three Black men had first tried to rob her client with a screwdriver, even though the police had already dismissed that notion as nonsense. Worse, no mention was made of Minucci’s own extensive rap sheet. You might like to know that at the age of 15 he was arrested on the very day of the 9-11 attack for beating an innocent Indian Sikh silly with a bat and a paintball gun for wearing a turban.

More curious was his subsequent charge for the stabbing of a 15 year-old named John Rich. But because Rich was run over by a subway train just before trial under mysterious circumstances, Minucci was able to beat the rap, pleading guilty to a lesser charge, and receiving no jail time, only a suspended five-year sentence.

Because white skin trumps Black in this electronic age where image is given more weight than substance, the story invariably ends up slanted to make Blacks somehow appear guilty even when the only perpetrators are white. The simplistic, readily digestible equation remains, Black = guilty, white = innocent. As a result, the nightly newscasts rushed to find Howard Beach residents ready to refer to Minucci as “a hero” and “a great kid” while calling his victim “a low-life animal.”

And why might they so earnestly defend an animal in such glowing terms as if what we’re dealing with here is an altar boy? Could it be his Mafia connections? For Minucci is close enough friends with mob boss John Gotti’s grandsons to have appeared on their reality TV show “Growing Up Gotti.” And although he is an unemployed, high school dropout, he drives a $60,000 Cadillac Escalade and was wearing a $6,000 Rolex and a $4,000 necklace at the time of his arrest.

That’s an awful lot of bling for a guy with no visible means of supporting himself. What line of work might he be in? Hmm. I hope I don’t have to draw you a picture, because I don’t want to find myself getting fitted for a pair of cement shoes. And by contrast, not one camera was dispatched to ascertain Mr. Moore’s reputation in his community.

In sum, the media have been so utterly irresponsible in the investigation of this story, that the victim has been virtually victimized again by biased press coverage which blames the Blacks involved, while exculpating the whites. Perhaps the worst culprit, is one predictably-intolerant network, the same one that unfairly condemned those two Black hotel doormen in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, another rush to judgment based on the lies of a white kid savvy enough to work the system by playing the race card. Still, the station arrogantly prides itself on a self-serving slogan, “We report, you decide.” Well guess what? We’ve decided, you suck!

Black Star columnist and attorney Kam Lloyd Williams is a member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars. For more reports please click on “subscribe� on our homepage or call (212) 481-7745 to order the newsstand edition of The Black Star News, the world’s leading Pan-African news weekly.

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