It was the worst crime in New York state for years and it tore the region apart. Tawana Brawley, a pretty 15-year-old black girl, was discovered half conscious in a garbage bag, her body smeared in faeces, the words "nigger" and "KKK" scrawled across her chest. She had been apparently raped and sodomised and when nurses saw her in casualty they noted in their duty log that her clothes were so badly burned they had been forced to cut them off her body.
Brawley had been missing for four days and the small black community in the rural town of Wappingers Falls, a two-hour drive north of New York city, was distraught. They knew this sort of thing happened occasionally in Alabama, but up here, against the backdrop of the striking Catskill mountains? Surely not. This was tourist territory where the police earned their promotions by catching poachers. The headlines in the local Poughkeepsie Journal quoted dozens of bewildered locals exclaiming: "But things like this just don't happen here!" In fact they were right, though no one realised it at the time.
It would take 10 months for a grand jury to decide that Brawley, a persistent runaway, had been lying and that her story was an elaborate hoax, cooked up with her mother Glenda, to fool her violent stepfather. Medical evidence showed all her injuries were superficial. True, her clothes were burned but her body was not and she showed no sign of trauma - not even bad breath. And a neighbour testified that he saw her hopping into a garbage bag shortly before she was found.
For Steve Pagones however, the grand jury's conclusion came too late. The day Brawley was found, his life as a bright young prosecutor was about to change forever. "What you have to remember," he says calmly outside the Dutchess County Courthouse, "is that what happened to me could have happened to anyone." But back in November 1988, when Brawley was first admitted to Westchester hospital, she was apparently so distressed she could barely speak. Her mother, eyes swollen with tears, hinted darkly to reporters but insisted that neither she nor her daughter would ever speak to police on the grounds that Tawana could not face reliving her trauma. It was then some people began to suspect this was not as other crimes.
Despite their refusal to report the attack, the Brawleys hadn't counted on the persistence of one black officer who announced it his personal mission to find the culprit. On a brief visit to the Brawley's house he handed Tawana his notebook and begged her to jot down any clue which might help him find the perpetrator. Hesitantly, Tawana took his pencil and then, after a long pause, quickly scribbled two words: "white" and "cops".
Seventy miles south, pacing the office of his Baptist church in New York city, the Reverend Al Sharpton was smarting. The self-appointed civil rights leader had just been immortalised as the rabble-rousing Reverend Bacon in Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire Of The Vanities. While the book was giving him notoriety, it was also bringing him ridicule as someone whipping up racial tension for the purposes of self-promotion. The preacher needed a cause. A decent cause. And what better than a defenceless black girl raped by white cops? Al was on that first train to Tawana faster than you could hiss the word "racist".
Accompanied by two friends and civil rights lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, Sharpton descended on Wappinger Falls like a ringmaster in search of a circus. Within minutes the trio proclaimed themselves the girl's protectors and flicked open their Filofax. Up popped Bill Cosby offering a $25,000 reward; in flew Mike Tyson removing the Rolex off his wrist and putting it round Tawana's. Flanked by Mason and Maddox, and with his arm firmly around Tawana's shoulders, Sharpton marched through the streets demanding justice. The media covered his every move.
During the late 1980s racial tension was high on the list of America's grievances. Then came Sharpton's big break. The Poughkeepsie Journal reported that Harry Crist, a local white cop, had just committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Spotting his photo in the Journal, Brawley went berserk. It was him, she screamed, it was him! Sharpton solemnly informed the media that Crist had killed himself because he couldn't live with what he had done to Brawley.
Watching the TV news that night, Steve Pagones, son of a local judge and himself an assistant district attorney, was outraged. He knew Sharpton was wrong because he, Pagones, had been Thanksgiving shopping with Crist the day he was supposed to have raped Brawley. Besides, Crist had been depressed for some time and, as he stated in his suicide note, had killed himself because he'd failed to make the highway patrol. By the end of the bulletin, Pagones had contacted the police and provided his dead friend with an alibi. End of story - or so he thought.
He was wrong. Three months later, during which time Sharpton had paraded Brawley as a symbol of black injustice across every front page in America, Pagones's phone rang. "I was getting ready to go to a Christening," he recalls, wincing, "and I got this call from a reporter asking me if I had any comment. I said `About what?' And they said `About Al Sharpton's press conference at the Manhattan Hyatt this morning'. I asked them what he was talking about and the reporter replied: `Sharpton, Mason and Maddox are claiming it was you who raped Tawana Brawley'. "
That night Sharpton challenged him on television. "If we're lying, sue us so we can go into court with you and prove you did it. Sue. Sue right now!" Confident in the knowledge he had never even met Brawley and later armed with the 6,000-page grand jury report exonerating him, Pagones did sue - for $395 million.
But in the 10 years it has taken for his case against the troika to come to court, much has changed. Professionally, Pagones has been ruined. Mud sticks and he was forced to resign from the DA's office. Courtesy of Sharpton, his face became known as a symbol of white oppression across the US. Lambasted on the Web and bogusly linked to the Mob, he needed armed guards at his wedding. "The $395 million is nothing to what I've been through," he says determinedly. "But forget the money - all I want is for Sharpton and his friends to apologise. I want people to know they made this up completely. I would drop this case tomorrow if they just admitted responsibility for all those lies."
Sharpton, too, has changed. Crosseyed with ambition, he's no longer Harlem's angry agitator and he has spent the past five years busily reinventing himself with one iris on New York's mayoral election in 2001 and the other on a seat in Congress. But, ironically, the case which guaranteed him front-page exposure 10 years ago now threatens to unravel his efforts at rehabilitation.
Three weeks in and the trial has turned into such a circus that the judge, forced to keep order amid unruly scenes, has already broken his gavel. "Oh stop it," he shouts miserably, as the lawyers literally scream across the Poughkeepsie courtroom. The court stenographer, unable to type her transcript amid the brouhaha, has been given her own gavel to help keep the peace and she and the judge now bang in stereo.
The following exchange, started by Maddox - disbarred from practising law after advising Brawley to refuse all co-operation with the grand jury - is typical.
Maddox (representing himself and chanting to the court about Pagones's lawyer William Stanton): "Stanton is a racist, a bald-faced racist!"
Stanton (apoplectic): "I resent that! I was a GI in Vietnam, I had black friends and I saw a black man die."
Maddox (hysterical): "YOU probably shot him!"
Judge Hickman (beseeching): "Please, please . . ."
Stanton (spitting each word): "There's no respect here because we're BLACK!"
As Sharpton's lawyer, Michael Hardy, now desperate to distance his client from proceedings, remarked during the recess: "I bet the judge wishes he was anywhere else but here." Who would want to referee a race trial in the US?
Justice Barrett Hickman's unease is palpable. Conscious of intense media attention, he can be grateful only that New York does not permit television cameras inside the courtroom. If it did, it would be O.J. all over again. Instead, the press fight for tickets rationed as early as 8 a.m. for a 9.30 a.m. start.
The pandemonium continued when Justice Hickman reminded the jury the case was about fact not race. They had only one question: did the three men libel Steven Pagones or not? Stephen Jackson, representing Mason, went ballistic. "That is not a realistic assessment of society and it is certainly not a realistic assessment of this case," he hollered. "I'm beginning to suspect whether you are fit to hear and sit on this case!"
Acutely aware that Jackson is looking for any excuse to shout mistrial, the judge weakly assured him that he was.
But Jackson, whose technique is to draw out proceedings by objecting to each of the plaintiff's questions with the tireless energy of a jack-inthe-box, tried again, arguing that an earlier reference by Stanton to the defence team as "these people" was obviously racist. "It's tantamount to calling us niggers," he shouted. "Oh stop," Hickman ordered, banging down his gavel until it snapped.
"But this is a codeword for niggers!" Jackson persisted, to murmurs from his supporters in the gallery, bussed in from Brooklyn where they rendezvous each morning outside the Museum of Slavery. Reddening with exasperation, the judge suggested a quick break.
Pagones insists he doesn't regret pursuing the case and his faith in the American legal system is touching. His brothers are lawyers, as is his wife, and each day in court he sits alongside his father, a retired judge, discussing proceedings. But Stanton, his lawyer, appears to be struggling, unable to deflect the defence's bullying. On several occasions he failed totally to control Mason as a witness.
Stanton (to Mason): "Did Tawana's parents ever . . . "
Mason (interrupting): "Mr Stanton, have you ever represented a rape victim?"
Stanton (nervously): "Mr Mason, please repeat the question."
Mason (confidently): "Have you ever represented a rape victim?"
Judge (feebly): "Mr Mason, please!"
Mason (shouting from the witness box): "I'm asking the questions! And I know you never represented a rape victim because you're so insensitive!"
Stanton (wheedling, to judge): "Your honour, please . . ."
Judge: "Mr Mason, you must answer the question."
Mason (screaming): "Insensitive to women!"
Initially set to last one month, the case is now unlikely to finish before March. Each evening on the steps of the court, the defence team members perform a hugging ritual for the cameras, embracing each other in a rugby-style scrum and chanting: "I love you, man." Sharpton, conspicuous by his absence, has made only a palmful of appearances in court, though he will give evidence, probably in some time this month.
"At the time," his lawyer says carefully, "he believed in good faith that Mr Pagones raped Tawana Brawley." "He had no evidence to make those claims," snaps Pagones. "No evidence, nothing whatsoever."
As for Tawana Brawley, now 25, she has changed her name to Tawana Thompson and is working as a nurse in Washington. Tracked down recently by the New York Post, she hid in shrubs until they left her alone. She has always refused to speak publicly about the case and will not attend the trial. Numerous attempts to subpoena her have failed and she is now officially in contempt of court.
"If only she would talk," says Pagones. "She alone knows what happened. If only she would tell us, none of this would have been necessary."