Ex-militant seen as likely to testify at cohorts' trial

SFGate.com
- Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 25, 2007

More than 30 years ago, Ruben Scott testified against his alleged Black Liberation Army brethren in the slaying of two New York City police officers.

Now, defense attorneys suspect, Scott will be alone among the former militants to testify against his one-time confederates, who were charged Tuesday in the 1971 slaying of San Francisco police Sgt. John Young and a larger conspiracy to kill police.

While state prosecutors won't say whether Scott will take the witness stand, defense attorneys say he is the only insider whose testimony has ever been used to convict BLA members of a crime.

And he is the only former BLA member previously indicted in the slaying of Young whom prosecutors have chosen not to name again in the current case. The charges against him were dismissed in 1976.

"We assume he is a witness for the government -- he had a case dismissed in San Francisco on this very same incident," said Stuart Hanlon, a lawyer for Herman Bell, an alleged leader in the group who was convicted when Scott testified in the New York case and who now is accused of killing Young with a shotgun.

If Scott is slated to take the stand for the prosecution, a major issue will be whether his testimony should be allowed -- or believed -- because of statements he long ago gave implicating himself and two other reputed BLA members in Young's slaying while incarcerated in a New Orleans jail.

The confession led to the 1975 indictments of Scott, Harold Taylor and John Bowman in the ambush attack on San Francisco's Ingleside Police Station that resulted in Young's death and the wounding of a civilian clerk.

But the statements were ruled inadmissible because of court findings that they had been obtained after the men were tortured by New Orleans police and denied access to defense lawyers.

Scott, in a taped interview with a radio journalist in December 1975, said he was subjected to days of torture in New Orleans. The abuse relented, he said, only when he was speaking to federal agents and San Francisco police.

He recounted how he was stripped and punched in the stomach and chest. He said at one point his feet were put in a water tank and he was threatened with electrocution. New Orleans police also stuck him with cattle prods and needles, he said.

"They have a little thing: They don't hit you in the face, where it would show," he said. One investigator cocked a gun and threatened to shoot him through the ear "to see if the bullet would come out the other ear," he said.

Over a period of four to five days, he said, "New Orleans police department would whup on you, beat you, then bring you to the FBI to talk."

The alleged abuse occurred two years after Young was shot on Aug. 29, 1971, when at least three men stormed into Ingleside Police Station and, through an opening in the station's bulletproof glass, blasted the veteran police officer with a shotgun, killing him. A civilian clerk also was shot in the attack, but she survived.

The current charges name Bell as Young's killer. Also named in the charges is another man convicted of killing the New York officers, Anthony Bottom. They are also accused of orchestrating a larger conspiracy to kill officers between 1968 and 1973. Taylor and Bowman, who recently died, are also named in the charges, as are Richard Brown, Francisco "Cisco" Torres, Ray Boudreaux and Henry Watson Jones. Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth is charged but has not been arrested. Richard O'Neal, a custodian at San Francisco City Hall, is named in the broader conspiracy but not in the Young slaying. Brown and O'Neal appeared in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday but did not enter a plea.

Hanlon, Bell's defense lawyer in the new San Francisco case, said that given what Scott has been subjected to -- and other statements he has made at odds with his past confession -- his credibility as a witness is doubtful.

"He has given various statements saying he was tortured," said Hanlon. "He's just all over the place. He had been tortured. He is a tortured soul."

Scott also recounted the torture when he testified in 1975 to help convict BLA members Bell, now 59, Bottom, now 55, and the late Albert Nuh Washington of the slayings of the two New York police.

The prosecutor in the New York slayings, Robert Tanenbaum, now a private lawyer in Beverly Hills who co-wrote a book on the case, said Scott's testimony helped gain convictions of three men in the May 21, 1971, slaying of New York police Officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini.

The first trial of five men originally charged in the New York officers' death did not go well for prosecutors, Tanenbaum said. After the first trial ended in a hung jury, a New York police investigator went to New Orleans to talk to Scott again, Tanenbaum recalled.

The investigator said Scott had previously suggested he had an "ace in the hole," Tanenbaum said. At that point, Scott -- facing charges in San Francisco in the slaying of Young four years earlier -- suddenly agreed to testify against the five men who were accused, helping secure three convictions. The charges against two brothers, Francisco and Gabriel Torres, were dismissed during the second trial.

Scott, at the time of the second trial, was being held on suspicion of a bank robbery in New Orleans.

It was Scott, Tanenbaum said, who led authorities to a missing gun that belonged to one of the New York officers. Scott went to Mississippi with authorities, who unearthed the gun where Scott said he watched Bell bury it on a farm where Bell grew up.

"Everything he said to us was corroborated -- when you put a witness on, you vouch for his credibility as an officer of the court. I thought he was credible. Based on the corroboration, I thought he was highly credible," the former prosecutor said.

Scott also recounted how New Orleans police tortured him into confession, using cattle prods, Tanenbaum said. He also expressed fear to the judge that his life was at risk in custody.

Amid the allegations of abuse, the first San Francisco case collapsed in 1976. The grand jury indictment was dismissed after a court found that the men lacked counsel and had been tortured in New Orleans.

Michael Burt, who represents Boudreaux in the Young slaying, said Scott apparently testified before the grand jury that later indicted him. Burt said he has records showing that Scott was the only one of three accused who got such a subpoena. He apparently was a cooperating witness, Burt said.

Still, Burt said, defense lawyers have never seen any grand jury testimony by Scott or anyone else in the indictment.

"The file is missing -- we have made lots of efforts to get it," Burt said. "The original file and testimony and everything that happened are no longer part of the public record."

E-mail Jaxon Van Derbeken at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/25/MNGAUNOPVJ1.DTL