Hullabaloo on The Hudson

By Margot Hornblower/Wappingers Falls

Wappingers Falls is so ordinary that it could serve as a set for the old television show Twilight Zone. Eighty miles up the Hudson River from New York City, the Dutchess County town has an unassuming 1950s air. A highway strip of car dealerships and fast-food joints leads into a village centered on a grassy park with a bandstand. A sign on Main Street announces Saturday-night bingo at St. Mary's Church. The biggest employer is IBM. The second biggest is New York State, which maintains a scattering of prisons and hospitals in the area.

And like a Twilight Zone set, Wappingers Falls (pop. 5,000) has become the scene of a netherworld nightmare, a place where reality seems as distorted as a fun-house mirror. Last Nov. 24 Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl, got off a bus on Route 9 and disappeared. Four days later the onetime cheerleader was found in a daze, crawling into a garbage bag in the backyard of her family's former apartment complex. Her hair was crudely cropped, her body smeared with dog feces, her chest inscribed in charcoal with the letters KKK and the word NIGGER. At the hospital, a black policeman asked Brawley, "Who did it?" She reached for his badge and scrawled on a piece of paper, "white cop."

Brawley gave a disjointed story of being sexually assaulted in the woods by six white men. Shortly afterward, black activists from New York City arrived in Wappingers Falls to take charge of the case. On their advice, Brawley clammed up, refusing to provide investigators with further details. In the ensuing months, the case exploded into a statewide political and racial controversy, bathed in a glow of national publicity.

In a stunning and unexpected turn, last week Brawley's lawyers called a news conference and identified a Dutchess County assistant district attorney as one of her attackers. That set the stage for a catch-22 impasse: the lawyers refuse to provide evidence until arrests are made, while law-enforcement officials say they cannot arrest anyone without evidence. Meanwhile, a swirl of questions revolves around the Dec. 2 suicide of a part-time policeman; the withdrawal from the case by the local district attorney, who cited an unspecified conflict of interest; and a history of violence in the Brawley family.

Against this backdrop, an eccentric cast of characters has been winding its way through the Wappingers Falls mystery in a human tapestry worthy of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Comedian Bill Cosby and Edward Lewis, publisher of Essence magazine, teamed up to offer a $25,000 reward for information in the case. Boxing Champion Mike Tyson spent six hours with Brawley, during which, he said, they did not discuss what had happened; he did bestow his $30,000 diamond-studded Rolex watch upon her. Black Muslim Leader Louis Farrakhan flew in from Chicago to address busloads of protesters transported upstate from New York City.

The publicity has been orchestrated by Brawley Lawyers Alton Maddox and Vernon Mason, veterans of New York City's race-drenched politics, and Pentecostal Minister Al Sharpton, a rabble-rouser from Brooklyn who calls New York Governor Mario Cuomo a racist and has likened State Attorney General Robert Abrams, special prosecutor in the case, to Hitler. Sharpton even contends that the assault is part of a racist plot linked to the Irish Republican Army.

Although the rhetoric surrounding the case crackles with racial tension, relations in Wappingers Falls, where whites outnumber blacks 10 to 1, may be little different from those in most small towns in America. "I'm proud of this community," says Sherwood Thompson, 59, the only black in Dutchess County's 35-member legislature. "It should not be painted as a hotbed of racism, although racism is here." Cheryl Chapman, a black gas-station clerk, searches her memory in vain for any racial incident. She and her husband have happily raised four sons in a mostly white subdivision and a mostly white school. "I don't disbelieve Tawana's story," she said. "But I don't believe a whole community should be indicted. It's been a friendly place to me."

At O'Toole's bar, across from the Pennypincher Thrift Shop, shamrocks gaily adorn the walls, but the mood is somber. Talk of the case centers on Brawley's mother's boyfriend, Ralph King, 40, a burly bus driver who served seven years in prison for killing his first wife. Brawley had told friends she was in trouble with King and didn't want to go home. "It's all a family affair; that's the general feeling," said Bartender Tom Croshier. "I've been here all my life. I've never seen any racial problems in this village." But hardly had Croshier spoken than a patron, a local quarry worker, began muttering about the "nigger" -- King -- who had "gotten off" with a prison sentence too short for the patron's liking.

Although Wappingers Falls' racial record was clean, at least before the Brawley case, disturbing events have occurred in nearby counties. Charges were dismissed against two white policemen who killed a black teenager with a choke hold after a 1986 disturbance at a Wallkill movie theater. Black and Hispanic inmates at the Orange County jail reported that they were assaulted last November by guards wielding hoses, but an internal investigation absolved the guards.

Baptist Minister Saul Williams argues that Brawley's lawyers "feel a need to turn on all the lights so they make sure nothing is hidden." But the confrontational strategy has alienated black politicians and some civil rights groups. Conrad Lynn, a prominent black lawyer, charges that Brawley has been made into a "political football." As a grand-jury investigation enters its fourth week in Poughkeepsie, prosecutors are still baffled. "The trail is growing cold," Cuomo warned recently. "If the Brawleys don't come forward, we are not going to get this case prosecuted." Without the key testimony of the victim, the painstaking investigation is likely to grind on for at least six months -- possibly to an inconclusive end.