My favorite parts:
- trying to make you feel sorry for a drug dealing, murderous hoodlum by repeatedly calling him fat and portraying him as victim.
- Relying heavily on the testimony of a convict who is suing Harrison
- Repeatedly reporting specific threats made by the “victim” toward Harrison, but making Harrison the bad guy of the story.
- naming Harrison’s cousin a suspect for the shooting death of Dixon without any corroborating evidence at all, even admitting that a ‘tip’ the police got couldn’t have been more wrong.
- This hilarious paragraph:
There were a few discrepancies. For one thing, Nixon claimed that Harrison had two guns—same as Pop had eventually claimed, despite his initial stonewalling—but the neat, even spacing of the recovered shells along the street convinced the cops that the shooter had been gripping a single gun with two hands on the stock, keeping it steady. Then there was the tale of the zoo meeting. According to one source close to the investigation, it didn’t happen the way Nixon claimed. It wasn’t Harrison’s people who asked to meet Nixon at the zoo at 2 a.m. It was Nixon who asked them, in a ploy to suss out their intentions; thugs from North Philly never go to West Philly, and vice versa, so Nixon only suggested the meeting spot in West Philly because he thought they’d never agree. When they said yes, that’s when he knew he was in trouble and panicked. (Nixon denies this.)
The cops, however, saw these as minor flaws in a largely truthful tale.
Oh, so the fact that a second gun was fired and they claim it was Marvin’s and the police say it couldn’t have been is a ‘minor flaw’.
- The article makes a big freaking deal out of the code of silence in the ‘hood but then suggests that every word Marvin said to the cops has to be taken seriously (like when he said Dixon didn’t have a gun). It’s like he didn’t even read this paragraph he wrote:
But there are two other theories. The most likely one is that Pop lied to the cops because he had shot back at Harrison with a gun of his own. If this was true, then Pop was potentially on the hook for an attempted murder charge, same as Harrison. No gun of Pop’s has ever been found, but casings were recovered from three types of guns: a five-seven, a nine-milli-meter, and a .40-caliber. And two fired nine-millimeter casings were found in the cab of Pop’s truck.
The second theory is that Pop lied to the cops simply because he didn’t want them to get in the way. He was planning to resolve the dispute himself, in his own fashion.
Ah, so either this guy DID shot at Harrison, or was planning to. So when the police show up to ask Marv about it, he says Dixon didn’t have gun. If we’ve learned ANYTHING about this case it’s that you can’t trust what anyone says to the police at first. Just because Harrison said Dixon was unarmed at the time of the fight doesn’t mean he was. It’s the street. You don’t rat. No one saw nuthin’. That’s the whole point, I thought.
What happened in Philly? I have no idea. I do know (because I’ve been to that neighborhood and live in one like it now), that around there when someone who has done time for murder starts making crazy threats, self-defense plays out differently than it might in another neighborhood. Marv wasn’t arguing with a cardigan wearing yuppie over a dog taking a crap on his lawn. He was involved in fist fight with a murderer who tried to bring a gun into his bar. Maybe Marv shot first, maybe he didn’t. I’m certainly not going judge him if he did. The dude was crazy and allegedly called in a hit on Harrison.
Do I think Harrison shot at Dixon? Probably. It sounds to me like he had good reason to. Do I think Harrison ordered the man killed? No way. There were probably dozens of people who wanted Dixon dead. It was decidedly inconvenient for Harrison that Dixon did die. It came at a bad time for his career, and in the end if he had wanted the whole thing to go away, he could have settled (and still could settle but won’t) for relative chump change. There are lots of parts to this that make no sense at all.
In the end, there’s nothing new in this piece, other than some of the police transcripts which have the same kinds of conflicting information and lousy, criminal witnesses that have plagued the case from the beginning.
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