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After 22 years, five convictions, and one shocking confession that upended the lives of all involved, the Central Park jogger case is about to break open again — pitting the city’s most powerful crime fighters against each other and the teens they jailed for the attack.
The teens are no longer convicted felons or registered sex offenders, but they’re still best known to anyone who lived in New York in 1989 as the Central Park 5: Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana. Each served from seven to 13 years in prison for the vicious rape and assault of 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili, who was left bleeding and nearly dead in a ravine north of the 102nd Street transverse.
The group was among 40 black and Hispanic youths who spent that night assaulting people in Central Park, and accounts of their crime spree — dubbed “wilding” — terrified a city already in the grip of a wave of violence and racial fury.
In 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed black teenagers who surrounded him on a NYC subway, becoming a national lightning rod — a hero avenger or a racist vigilante, depending on your point of view. In 1986, three black men were chased and beaten by a group of white teens in Howard Beach; one was killed when he ran into oncoming traffic. And in August 1989, 16-year-old African-American Yusef Hawkins was attacked by white teenagers and shot to death in Bensonhurst. The homicide rate in the city at that time averaged 36 people per week.
The Central Park jogger case, in many ways, was the apotheosis of outrage: Meili, a white, Yale-educated Wall Street broker, had been presumably gang-raped, then left for dead, during the marauders’ hourlong rampage through the park, police said.
Even the father of one of the five pressed his son to confess.
Two decades later, the accused are the accusers; and what was once regarded as an open-and-shut case is now a reopened wound, not just for those involved but, imminently, for the city itself. Their $250 million lawsuit, bogged down since 2003, is now on a fast track to trial after an order last month in federal court that discovery be wrapped up by June 28.
If the suit does, in fact, hit the Manhattan courtroom of Judge Deborah Batts this summer, the city will call on a roster of New York law-enforcement titans: Police Commissioner Ray Kelly; former sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein, who was hailed for her work on the case; and famed former detective Mike Sheehan. All are defendants.
On the other side will be an equally legendary figure: ex-Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, who put the teens behind bars, but ultimately exonerated them; Nancy Ryan, his former trials chief and Fairstein’s ex-boss; and Peter Casolaro, who is still with the DA’s office as senior trial counsel. They are expected to be witnesses for the defense.
“It’s going to be war,” says a source connected to the matter, noting that Mayor Bloomberg will be watching closely.
“Fairstein wants exoneration. Morgenthau keeps thinking that sooner or later, adults are going to come into the room and start talking about settling. Kelly has Bloomberg’s ear — and he doesn’t want to lose, because the mayor doesn’t like Morgenthau. You have all these heavyweights fighting for their reputations.”
The Central Park Five want $50 million each in damages. Their claim, filed on Dec. 8, 2003 — nearly one year to the day the convictions were vacated — says the cops elicited false confessions through threats and beatings, and that key DNA evidence, which would have cleared them, was deliberately ignored. They allege malicious prosecution, conspiracy, racial discrimination and emotional distress.
The city’s top lawyer, Michael Cardozo, refuses to settle, despite a history of quietly paying out on police misconduct cases, including a near record $117 million in 2009. Kelly ripped him last year for not taking more of the cases to trial.
To Kharey Wise, this is a fight to get back all he’s lost.
“[They] took away my life,” he told The Post. “So $50 million . . . it’s really not that much money.”
Wise wants to go to trial — and wonders why the case has languished so long, and why Kelly and Fairstein won’t consider that the wrong men were convicted.
“Maybe the city [would] like to keep it that way,” he says.
“It’s frustrating to them,” says Sarah Burns, author of the new book “The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding.” (Burns is the daughter of filmmaker Ken Burns, who is working on a documentary about the case.) “There’s the sense that this is taking a really long time, and they don’t understand why.”
The proceedings have been secret.
As many as 30 depositions have been taken, including those of police officers, witnesses to the rampage, and family members and friends of the Central Park Five. The jogger herself cannot ID her attacker, has no recollection of anything that happened to her in the park, and is unlikely to recover that memory.
The 60,000 pages of court papers are mostly hidden from public view — anyone who sees them must sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to reveal their contents. Judge Batts has warned all parties to remain silent.
Fairstein, Morgenthau, Meili and lawyer Paul Callan, who represents Ryan and Casolaro, all refused to comment. Sheehan, who spearheaded the original investigative work, wouldn’t talk. Cardozo and the NYPD did not return calls.
What is clear is that the case turns on the 2002 confession of serial rapist and murderer Matias Reyes. After encountering Wise in the same upstate lockup, Reyes told a guard there was something he needed to reveal: He was the real rapist of the Central Park jogger, and he acted alone.
His confession was detailed: Reyes followed her from the road and clubbed her head with a stick, then dragged her into the woods. He raped her, but she rallied and ran. He followed, smashed her face and head with a rock multiple times, then left her struggling for breath, sure she would die.
Those and other details matched what cops found at the scene, and DNA tests on semen from her clothes and body proved to be Reyes’.
In August 2002, Wise completed his sentence and was released, just as his lawyers were preparing to petition the court to overturn his conviction. The others had all gotten out of jail previously.
At the same time, Morgenthau ordered Ryan to prepare an in-depth report on what happened. Her 58-page filing, on Dec. 5, 2002, recommended that a judge toss out the convictions of all five, finding that Matias Reyes did indeed act alone. The report also stated that the DA’s office wanted the matter closed: “Under all circumstances,” Ryan wrote, “no purpose would be served by a retrial on any of the charges contained in the indictment.”
But Kelly quickly commissioned a competing version of events.
His team, headed by Michael Armstrong, a former federal prosecutor and counsel to a police-corruption panel in the 1970s, found that though there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude Reyes acted alone, it was “more likely than not that the defendants participated in the attack on the jogger.”
The theory was that the five teens attacked the victim before Reyes got to her, and the rapist either hid and watched, or stumbled upon her afterward.
The report reasons that the five youths gave expansive and unprompted confessions, accurately saying that she was jogging on a road and was dragged into the woods; Wise knew she had a Walkman, and the teens knew where the attack happened; and some were found with hairs on them “consistent” with the victim’s.
The report speculated that Reyes confessed because he feared Wise — the two had fought a decade earlier at Rikers, where the teen might have recognized the rapist from the night of the attack, and when their paths crossed again years later at an upstate jail, Wise threatened him through an underground prison network. Reyes came clean to protect himself, or simply get transferred to a more desirable location at the prison, it says.
The Ryan report disputes many of those claims.
Much of what the teens asserted about the jogger and the scene was dead wrong, it says. They incorrectly thought the assault occurred near the reservoir, and three who pointed out the right location did so only after being taken to the scene. Two said they cut her legs, but she had no such wounds. Hairs said to look like the jogger’s turned out not be hers, DNA tests showed. Other joggers who were attacked in the park that night wore Walkmans.
But perhaps most telling: A single, narrow path of 16 to 18 inches, with no footprints on either side, indicated one person dragged the victim across the softened earth and vegetation, not a gang, the report said.
Reyes’ own history as a vile thug bolsters his claim.
On April 17, 1989, two days before the attack on the Central Park jogger, Reyes assaulted another woman in the park. He went on to commit at least five more rapes in the city, and he murdered one victim, who was pregnant. Reyes always worked alone, and had two signatures: His victims had cuts and bruises around their eyes — he’d attempt to blind them — and he tied one up with a very specific ligature that was also used on the Central Park jogger, whose hands and head were bound together with her white T-shirt.
Wise says that he had no idea who Reyes was when they squared off at Rikers.
Wise said he was in a common area, watching the news on Channel 7, when Reyes’ face came up, and Reyes told him to change the channel. They got into it, fists flying, until guards broke it up.
Wise didn’t see Reyes again for 11 years, when they were both at Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Reyes apologized for the fight over the TV station all those years ago, he said.
“I said, ‘It ain’t nothin’ man, we was kids, forget about it,’ ” Wise says today. “I was still naive.”
“If Kharey knew that [Reyes] was the other guy who did this,” Burns asked, “wouldn’t it have made sense to point this out in 1989?”
Still, if they didn’t do it, why would all five confess?
“The New York City Police Department,” says Wise today, “beat my ass. They treated me like a piece of trash — beat me up, spit in my face, abused my rights.
“After the threats, when they said, ‘If you don’t say this, you’re going to jail’ — I thought I was going home.”
Sheehan has long insisted that none of the Five were subjected to so much as a raised voice during interrogations.