By John Burtis
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Poor old Mike Nifong; he's prepping right now for his upcoming state bar trial for unethical behavior in withholding evidence, lying to a sitting judge, and making inappropriate and prejudicial comments about the twists and turns of his benighted case to an overeager and cheerleading press.
You remember that all too familiar rerun of the Norwegian skier crashing and burning on the ski jump while some sports wag intoned, "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat?"
Well that scene pretty much represents the long roller coaster ride to hell that Br'er Nifong has been aboard these past few months as his whole wildly popular house of cards fell apart on his baize covered living room card table, as his family scurried for cover, and the suspects and now the newly minted victims, the once proud but slightly dottie victim and the now medically exonerated and describably disturbed suspect, her honest but dysfunctional family members, the "good" folks of North Carolina, the for him and agin' him college big wigs, and the rich out of town interlopers with tall talk, exchanged roles.
A year ago he was being paraded around on the shoulders of cheap jacking, race chasing reporters who trumpeted his fictitious charges like the music which felled Jericho; 88 Duke professors or was it 77, who can say whether, like Mr. Nifong's failures as an attorney, they were really professors at all; sad and now sorry local pundits; "upright" evocative members of the local Black community; the "Reverend" Jesse Jackson and his criminally troubled sidekick, the also ran Reverend Al Sharpton, late from the stealing of the "Rev." Jackson's LA girlfriend or was she from Detroit, the facts are somewhat unclear in that romantic caper gone from bad to expensive and on to melancholy, too.
Anyway, Mike Nifong became a household word for his snappy delivery, his perfect John Edwards-like hairdo, his rather perplexing appearance in that rather shabby, blue terrycloth bathrobe and well worn slippers when he retrieved his hound dog in front of about a hundred cameras, his formidably empty bluster, and for his seeming nonchalance in the face of incredible public pressure and scrutiny.
Too bad the three kids involved in this raucous insensate caper never had much of a chance to guffaw at his hopeless approach, his lack of legal grasp, his failure to even meet with the accuser, and his sheer inability and refusal to see this fraud of a hoax of a sham for what it really was – the chance for a small Southern DA in a tight political race to railroad a few innocent white folk while chasing an election with an absolute slam dunk case of rich white kids lasciviously and lewdly assaulting a poor though earnest black strip tease artist against her will, and who was only working to support her kids and pay for her college tuition. She, of course, never in God's holy name ever expected a group of drunken college jocks to act like anything less than the supreme Southern gentlemen who run in her entertainment circles nor get rowdy during her abbreviated and now famous stage act in their somewhat rundown off-campus joint before she wandered off and fell into an intoxicated sleep in some poor guy's automobile and had to be roused by the somewhat petulant local gendarmerie.
And Uncle Mike's in trouble today because he failed to alert the three innocents to the utter and complete absence of their dreaded DNA evidence anywhere at the scene in the lengthy report he toyed around with and whose author he had a secret deal with not to disclose anything exculpatory to the suspects and now victims, for shooting his mouth off about the kids being nothing but trouble and by God he was going to get to the bottom of their highly disturbing and problematic calumnies, and because he fibbed to a doggone judge in the run up to the hoped for the hoped for kangaroo trial which would've happened if the suspects didn't take his plea deal of 60 years to life or something resembling similar idiocy.
This whole collapse has been rather disheartening for his most rabid supporters, too, as most of whom have now scrammed, gone on an extensive sabbatical in unnamed foreign countries and are now unavailable for lengthy comments about the "rich", just plain slunk off to lick their all too public wounds, or gone back to race hustling in newly identified national forums.
Imagine the poor man's family – feted like celebrities not long ago and now shunned in their old neighborhood and merely getting a terse yes or no from the bag boys at the local supermarket today, where they once all waxed eloquently together about Mike's bright future, his keen eye for social justice, and his bucking of the economically advantaged and his televised promises to break their long stranglehold over American justice.
And now Mr. Mike Nifong is preparing his own complex and internecine defense for being a churl, a liar, a loudmouth, and a total fool. Too bad none of his most rabid supporters aren't sharing this hot seat.
Hey, are there any more "Nifong for DA" T-shirts kicking around? I'd love one. And maybe some local political hack or streetwise local radio jock can shoot a couple off to Patrick Fitzgerald, the man who was able to convict some guy for lying about something which never even took place and stole a page from the Nifong handbook. Or was it the other way around?
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