Beecher Academy was on lockdown, and a police officer called out instructions through a megaphone. “Please lock your doors and stay inside until order has been restored. Please stay away from windows, and do not open your door for anybody.” There were rumors Molotov cocktails were flying in front of Borough Hall.
The riot became a media sensation, another link in the narrative of Brooklyn’s racial strife. Only this time, the spin was new: African Americans were not at the boiling center. The oldest conflict in the world, as old as Isaac and Ishmael, was playing out on Brooklyn’s mean streets, and the media descended hungrily.
A boy had been run over on Atlantic Avenue, and in the ensuing riot one Arab man had been killed, almost a dozen injured.
A twenty-two-year-old yeshiva student named Isaac Brilliant, who worked as a part-time stock boy at the medical supply shop, was charged with aggravated assault and the murder of Nasser Al-Bassam, a sixty-three-year-old Palestinian-born shopkeeper who died of his injuries.
The case went before the Supreme Court of the State of New York; Walter J. Stone presiding.
The flamboyant Reverend Randall Roebling Nation, a preacher who claimed to have been ordained at the age of eight, took up the fight in his daily soapbox orations: “The elucidation of the struggle is coming to a head; the judges will be judged and the people will have justice, freedom, and liberty at last!”
Matthew knew Nation, with his tailored suits and gold jewelry, was full of wind, politicking simply to get his face in the papers. Every day in front of the courthouse, he took aim at the Judge, shouting, “I beseech you all to listen to R. R. Nation, as Nation speaks God’s truth. Judge Stone is a criminal, a crook, and a thief, and if he is not punished in this life, God will punish him in the next.”
Even as Brooklyn’s Arab community protested Walter Stone’s selection, picketing outside the Supreme Court building, the Judge said nothing. A spokesman stated, “The Judge’s record speaks for itself.”
Matthew heard nothing from his father, who had receded into his study with his law books for days on end, leaving only to dump his full ashtray into the toilet. By the time the case went to trial, Matthew had developed constant canker sores in his mouth; he found it difficult to speak, his mouth a piece of tenderized meat. Some days he didn’t even want to leave his room. He gargled salt water, apple cider vinegar, peroxide; nothing helped.
One evening, his mouth on fire, sucking on ice cubes to numb the pain, Matthew knocked on his father’s study door. “I want to go to the emergency room,” Matthew said through the closed door.
“Fine,” his father said after a moment.
Matthew remained at the door, his fist poised to knock again.
“I said fine.”
How wretched, how awful Matthew felt knowing he was just a repulsive, inconsequential insect in the pitiless eyes of his father. That night, Matthew burned himself for the first time. He realized, as he stood, match in hand, in his bathroom, that out of all things in the entire universe, he truly had control only over his own body. He could cause pain whenever he wanted and remove it just as easily. What a release!
MURDER INC. KIN TO RULE was headlined the day before the trial, and the story was picked up by the national media. The trial had all the makings of a Movie of the Week, said a Los Angeles Times columnist, who joked that Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now should be cast to play Judge Walter Stone. Matthew was amazed by the shallowness of some of the coverage, at the reporters playing casting director as if this trial were first and foremost a commodity to be gobbled up by Hollywood.
The Judge broke his silence the day before the trial was to begin. Appearing on the front steps of the Supreme Court, wearing his gray three-piece suit and half-moon glasses, he read from a prepared statement: “I am addressing the spurious canard that appeared in this morning’s paper in relation to my father. What my father may or may not have done before I was born holds no bearing on today’s proceedings, and I expect to hear nothing more on this matter.”
The jury was comprised of seven women and five men, three of whom were African American, four Hispanic, four white, and one Korean American. There was one Jew on the jury: Emile Alcalai, a teacher from Sheepshead Bay.
Brilliant, flanked by his lawyer and the court bailiff, wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black silken yarmulke on his head. He smiled from behind his beard and nodded his head confidently at the court assembly, as if he knew all along he would soon be free.
When friends and family members attesting to the character of Al-Bassam were cross-examined by Brilliant’s lawyer, the courtroom buzzed. “Is it not true Mr. Al-Bassam, a fervent Muslim, has three times made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca—”
“The question is not relevant,” the prosecutor interjected.
Judge Stone flatly said, “Answer the question.”
Later, Brilliant’s lawyer said, “Mr. Al-Bassam left the Samarian town of Tulkarm in June of 1971. Local records show he had his daughter killed two years earlier in what is known as an honor killing—”
“Objection. The question is inflammatory and improper,” the prosecutor said.
“The question is allowed,” Judge Stone answered.
When Brilliant took the stand, he was unable to fully explain how the bloodstains on his shirt had come by self-defense, but when grilled by the prosecution he claimed he was attacked by a vicious Nasser Al-Bassam, whom he identified in a photograph as the man he had tried to stop from throwing a garbage can through a plate-glass window. Brilliant maintained that Al-Bassam had turned his fury on him.
“Considering the victim’s chronic epilepsy,” the prosecuting attorney replied, directing his comment toward the jury, “where convulsing seizures strike in moments of exertion and stress, it is unlikely, almost impossible to believe, that Mr. Al-Bassam, a very careful man who was in fact so impaired by his condition that he did not drive, was capable of posing a threat toward Mr. Brilliant. In addition, witnesses at the scene testified Mr. Al-Bassam was turned away from Mr. Brilliant when he received the deadly blow to the back of his head.”
Judge Stone commenced his charge to the jury after lunch. Quoting Gibbon, the Judge said, “‘In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.’ Here we are absent the heart and the head, so I ask you, is there an act of mischief, a crime?” He spoke at length into the early evening, explaining the nuances and minutia of the law until the jury retired to deliberate. The jury reached a decision shortly before midnight. The press was confident Brilliant would be found guilty of murder. But instead he was found guilty of the lesser charge of aggravated assault and not guilty of murder. The headlines screamed the next morning: NOT SO BRILLIANT VERDICT.
Now, Stone puzzled over the words his father had underlined in Beecher’s book: “There is more moral power in one of these than in one hundred Bibles.” Stone was captivated by the quotation, the violence of it, the self-assurance of it, and he flipped through the pages to see if his father had marked anything else; he had not. The book was an old hardcover with crisp yellowed pages, bound in soft leather. He pressed his nose to the cover and breathed in deeply, the smell rich and luxurious and soothing. Something told him to open the book again, and he spread the pages wide before him on the floor, cracking the spine. It was a terrible sound, like a tiny bone breaking. He had destroyed something beautiful and it sickened him. Henry Ward Beecher smiled an inscrutable half smile from a black-and-white photograph on the book’s frontispiece. How could a simple
