Incident at Howard Beach.

• Author: Cohen, Patricia

Incident at Howard Beach. Charles J. Hynes, Bob Drury. Putnam, $22.95. Howard Beach is many stories-most obviously about race, but also about families and neighborhoods and upbringing; about the media and black activism; about the courts, the police, and organized crime; about cities; about America. This particular book, however, is about an investigation. The result is not unlike an episode of "Colombo." The events of that horrifying December 1986 night (annoyingly referred to throughout the book as "The Incident") are told straightforwardly in the first two chapters. The rest of the book explains bow the prosecutors broke the case and put at least some of the young thugs in jail. Written by Charles J. Hynes and Bob Drury, a former New York reporter for Newsday (the paper I work for), the book doesn't explore how we got to Howard Beach, only how we got from Howard Beach to a cavernous courtroom on Queens Boulevard. That odyssey is not without power. What is most compelling about Incident at Howard Beach is the story itself. Even someone familiar with the case will still wince at the horrifying details, as if reading them for the first time. There's the kids' battle cry"There's niggers on the boulevard, let's go fuckin' kill them!" And the cops' racism: The surviving victim, Cedric Sandiford, was roughly searched and questioned by the police who found him bleeding and shaking on the highway that night, as if he were a perpetrator instead of a victim. His wounds went untreated for three hours and when he called his fiancee to tell her that her son, Michael Griffith, had been killed, a cop snatched the phone out of his hand after a few moments, snarling that his time was up. Hynes's unique perspective adds depth to a familiar story. He reveals, for instance, what a chilling effect reputed organized crime chieftain John Gotti and his pals-who call Howard Beach home-had on potential witnesses. Gotti associates were going around collecting money for the gang's defense. One kid's father explained why he couldn't permit his son to testify: "I don't want to come home from work one day and find a slab of cement where my house used to be." And Hynes explains how his prosecutorial team's ingenious legal strategy was almost sabotaged by demands from two black activist lawyers, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox. Yet one is also disappointed there isn't more of an insider's account. One of the abiding mysteries is why Queens DA John Santucci refused to...