BED STUY'S SLAVE THEATRE FIGHTS FOR SURVIVAL

By TRYMAINE LEE
Published in the New York Times: November 18, 2007

John L. Phillips Jr. took a seat in the last row of the theater and surveyed its crumbling ceiling, the debris strewn in the aisles and the faded art that he had hung a generation ago.

The Slave Theater’s décor was a tribute to black history, with portraits of Marcus Garvey and other leaders.

“Hardy!” Mr. Phillips, 83, called out to Clarence Hardy, his assistant and friend, who was down the aisle a bit. “Quite a place, isn’t it? We ought to think about opening up again.”
“Yes sir,” Mr. Hardy responded. But Mr. Hardy knew better.

Nostalgia and a touch of Alzheimer’s shielded Mr. Phillips, a retired Civil Court judge, from the truth, but not his old pal. Nothing short of a miracle could avert the theater’s sale.
Mr. Phillips had once been a millionaire property owner, with the Slave Theater and its sister, the Black Lady Theater, both in Brooklyn, his prize possessions.

When racially charged killings in the 1980s unstitched already flimsy race relations in the city, the Slave Theater grew to be more than just a movie house, it became a symbol and center of black activism. Bedford-Stuyvesant and the theater became platforms for a new crop of black activists the way Harlem had been a lifetime earlier.

But in 2001 Mr. Phillips was declared mentally incompetent — a result of an investigation that some believe was politically motivated — and a series of court-appointed guardians took over his affairs. For years, according to accusations in court by the current guardian, they siphoned off his fortune and failed to pay his taxes.

Now, the old man is basically broke, living in an assisted-living facility in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a world away from his old neighborhood. Selling the theater and what is left of his other real estate holdings seems the only option. Some people are reluctant to see that happen.

“The Slave Theater is definitely a community treasure,” said Brenda Fryson, chairwoman of Community Board 3 in Brooklyn, which is trying to get landmark status for the theater. “It goes back some years, and people remember going to that theater as little kids. It really is a great part of our history in this neighborhood.”

Mr. Phillips amassed a fortune of roughly $10 million by buying property in Bedford-Stuyvesant when others were scared to walk its streets. A maverick lawyer and World War II veteran, he was twice elected Civil Court judge without the support of Brooklyn’s powerful Democratic machine. A 10th-degree black belt, he called himself “the kung fu judge.”

James P. McCall, a Republican lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for Civil Court judge in Brooklyn this year, said he tried his first jury trial before Judge Phillips in 1985.
“Whenever you were in his presence you knew he was there; he was not a wallflower, he was very big,” Mr. McCall said.

Mr. Phillips, who first served in the Civil Court in Brooklyn in 1977 and retired in 1994, got into the movie theater business in the early 1980s. A few years earlier he had written, produced and directed a movie after failing to get a major studio interested in the project. The film was “Hands Across Two Continents,” a tale of taboo interracial love set in 1970s Brooklyn.

When no one wanted to produce the film, he paid for it himself.

When no one wanted to distribute the film, he bought two movie theaters in his neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and showed it himself.

The first theater was the century-old Regent Theater at 1215 Fulton Street. He renamed it the Slave No. 1 Theater “so that no one would ever forget our struggles,” he said recently, “or what we, as black people, have gone through.”

The second, at 750 Nostrand Avenue, he called the Black Lady, or the Slave No. 2.
Mr. Phillips turned the inside of the Regent into an homage to African-American history. The walls are lined with portraits of Malcolm X, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marcus Garvey and Kwame Nkrumah, the founder of Ghana.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who grew up in Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant and attended church not far from the Regent, said that as a youngster he and his friends often “played hooky from choir rehearsal” to catch whatever films were playing there.

Years later, in the late 1980s, Mr. Sharpton returned to the theater. By then its name had been changed, and New York City itself had become the stage for heated racial drama.

In the days after the racially charged killings of Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986 and then, three years later, of Yusuf K. Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the Slave Theater played host to rallies and press conferences. The theater became a grand soapbox where the social and political careers of many black activists began, including Mr. Sharpton’s.

The theater was "a centerpiece" of black activism, the Rev. Al Sharpton said, with a mix of "church people and business people and hard-core black nationalists." Rallies like this one with Mr. Sharpton in 1990 were held at the theater.

“It became the centerpiece of the movement,” Mr. Sharpton said recently. “What became so interesting about it was the mix of church people and business people and hard-core black nationalists and militants.”

Mr. Phillips drew the ire of many local black politicians in 1989 when he backed Rudolph W. Giuliani in the mayoral race against David N. Dinkins, the Democratic candidate. He told The New York Times that black voters should support Mr. Giuliani because of his experience fighting crime.

“I’m 6 feet 1,” Mr. Phillips was quoted as saying then. “I can kill you with my hands faster than you can believe, and I carry a gun. But I’m scared to walk the streets at night. How do you think black women feel?”

In 1997, Mr. Phillips, who had left the bench in 1994 after having reached the mandatory retirement age of 70, was back in court, arrested for gun possession and resisting arrest after a pair of plainclothes police officers saw him with a holstered gun. The charges were later dropped.
In the years since then, his health and might have faded. He has high blood pressure, and Alzheimer’s has crept in more recently, friends and relatives said.

Back at the theater, which closed in 1998, Mr. Phillips stepped into the aisle and took in the humbled place as if it were as perfect as the day he opened it.

“A lot of people were shocked by the name, Slave Theater, but I had a reason,” he said. “I named it after me. I got a slave name, my ancestors were slaves, a whole race of people were slaves. Women were raped and men were lynched, all kinds of murders and no one was ever prosecuted. I say it’s the worst crime known to mankind. This is a reminder of that.”
In some ways, the judge’s life began to unravel in 2001, after he announced that he planned to run for Brooklyn district attorney against the four-time incumbent, Charles J. Hynes.
About that time, Mr. Hynes’s office began investigating allegations that Mr. Phillips had been swindled out of real estate holdings. Prosecutors said the investigation was aimed at protecting Mr. Phillips, but he and his supporters believe it was a way of removing him from the race.
No one was arrested, but in the course of the inquiry, a judge determined that Mr. Phillips was mentally incompetent, knocking him off the ballot and removing his control of his own affairs.
Mr. Phillips, who had never married or had children, became a ward of Kings County’s guardianship system. It placed him and his estimated $10 million in assets, including 10 mostly residential properties and the two movie theaters, in the hands of court-appointed guardians.
His current guardian, James Cahill Jr., asserts in papers in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn that a string of guardians sold off or mismanaged Mr. Phillips’s property in the years that followed. Thousands of dollars placed in escrow simply disappeared, according to the papers.

Mr. Cahill said the previous guardians took hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves without going through the courts, while others made big cash payments to mystery contractors. Most never filed proper or timely accountings of what was spent out of Mr. Phillips’s account, the papers say. And for six years none of the guardians, all of whom are lawyers, paid taxes on behalf of Mr. Phillips’s estate, according to the reports Mr. Cahill filed with the court.
Now, according those reports, Mr. Phillips owes upward of $2 million in taxes, interest and penalties to the I.R.S.

In September, John Kennedy O’Hara, a disbarred lawyer and longtime friend of Mr. Phillips’s, filed a complaint with the I.R.S. accusing four former court-appointed guardians — Harvey L. Greenberg, Frank J. Livoti, Ray Jones and Emani P. Taylor — and State Supreme Court Justice Michael L. Pesce of violating tax law while overseeing Mr. Phillips’s guardianship case.
Mr. Greenberg said he served as guardian only for a few months, “long enough for a cup of coffee,” and that when he saw that Mr. Phillips’s friends and associates — his “own people, excuse the racist expression” — had “robbed him dumb, deaf and blind,” he did not want any part. He said he stepped down without accepting any fees.

Mr. Livoti and Mr. Jones, the next guardians, declined to comment for this article. Justice Pesce did not respond last week to a request for comment.

Ms. Taylor, the most immediate prior guardian, has acknowledged paying herself hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Phillips’s accounts, and also paying family and friends. She said that the previous guardians left the estate a complete mess, and that she was simply repaying herself for expenses and services rendered.

Guardians would typically submit orders to the court detailing their expenses and fees and seeking approval for payments.

Ms. Taylor said she believed she did nothing wrong by taking payments without court approval.
The district attorney’s office declined to press charges against Ms. Taylor but referred the matter to a lawyers’ disciplinary committee for a review. Separately, a court is to decide whether Ms. Taylor took money improperly.

The district attorney did prosecute one person, Maria Leyna Albertina, in 2005 on charges that she defrauded a number of people out of property, including Mr. Phillips, who owned a parking lot that she sold for $175,000.

Ms. Albertina pleaded guilty to two counts of grand larceny, according to the district attorney’s office; the length of her prison term will depend on her ability to pay $2 million in restitution.
Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago, Mr. Cahill filed an application in State Supreme Court to sell the Slave Theater, the lot behind it and the Black Lady Theater.

For some, it seems an injustice Mr. Phillips, at 83, should not have to bear.
“He has been through a lot,” said Dee Woodburne, a former paralegal and head of the Committee to Free Judge Phillips and Restore His Estate. “My concern is whose hands are those theaters going to go into. What has to happen is for this man to get a real investigation. People need to be held accountable, regardless of who they are.”

Mr. Cahill said the sale of the theaters was a last resort to satisfy Mr. Phillips’s tax obligations.
Back in the theater, Mr. Hardy tried to explain all this, as he saw it, to Mr. Phillips. “They’re trying to do the best they can to take it from you, sir.”

“They want to do what, Hardy?” Mr. Phillips asked, as he stood in a dusty and dim aisle in the theater. “No, no. We can’t lose this here. We need to think about opening up again. Hardy, what do you say? I imagine once we open up you won’t be able to get in here, all the people that will be coming in. Won’t be any room.”
Mr. Hardy nodded respectfully.

“Sir, I’m with you 100 percent,” Mr. Hardy said.