Blowing The Whistle on Tawana

By Frank Trippett

"The Tawana Brawley story may be that there is no Tawana Brawley story." With that stunning declaration last week, a former aide to Brawley's team of advisers threatened to turn one of the country's most bizarre and frustrating legal cases inside out. Almost since the first report last November that Brawley, a black teenager from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., had been abducted and raped by six white men, officials investigating the matter had been stymied. The reason: at the prompting of three controversial advisers -- the Rev. Al Sharpton and Attorneys Alton Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason -- Brawley and her family had refused to cooperate with the inquiry. Seeming to confirm growing suspicions about the case, Perry McKinnon, a private investigator and former assistant to Sharpton, told the New York Daily News that the whole story was a "pack of lies."

A decorated Viet Nam veteran and former policeman who rated high marks in a previous job as a hospital security chief, McKinnon, 39, was denounced as a "pathological liar" by Sharpton. McKinnon was quickly subpoenaed to testify before the special grand jury investigating the case in Poughkeepsie. Attorney General Robert Abrams, special prosecutor in the case, declared that "if Mr. McKinnon is right, then Attorneys Mason and Maddox and the Rev. Sharpton have been consciously perpetrating a hoax."

While withholding their cooperation from investigators with the claim that a white-run system will not accord justice to blacks, the trio of advisers has manipulated the case into a long-running multimedia sensation. Last week the affair was the centerpiece for an extraordinary episode of TV's Phil Donahue show. The one-hour broadcast was shot on location in Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist Church, where Brawley's mother Glenda, 33, had ensconced herself to avoid arrest on a contempt-of-court charge resulting from her refusal to obey a grand-jury subpoena.

McKinnon told the Daily News that he quit his job as Sharpton's aide five weeks ago because he could not "live with all those lies" the Brawley advisers were concocting. Interviewed later on New York's WCBS-TV, he repeated his charges while hooked up to a lie detector. The polygraph, said the operator, indicated that McKinnon was telling the truth. According to McKinnon, the Brawley advisers did not really believe her story of abduction and rape. He said that when he personally offered to investigate, they showed no interest. "I don't care about no facts," he quoted Maddox as saying. "I'm not going to pursue it legally; I'm going to pursue it politically." Sharpton, McKinnon asserted, was all for exploiting the case to get a political protest movement going and boasted that the controversy would make them the "biggest niggers in New York." A new wrinkle developed at week's end, when McKinnon's cousin, Alvin McKinnon, revealed that Perry had a history of mental problems. Alvin, a Sharpton supporter, said his cousin "had popped the cork again." Other Sharpton aides, however, were said to be on the verge of corroborating Perry McKinnon's charges.

Governor Mario Cuomo had said earlier that the allegations against the three Brawley advisers demanded a "whole new look at the situation." In a strongly worded letter to the attorney general, Cuomo warned that the judicial process could not be "deliberately and contemptuously violated." Meanwhile, U.S. investigators began probing to see whether Sharpton, Maddox and Mason had committed any federal offense while raising funds by mail. As for Brawley, currently living quietly in Monticello, N.Y., how she came to be found last November, wrapped in a plastic bag and covered with scrawled racial epithets, remained a mystery.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York