by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Living
in Amerika

A fragment
of folk wisdom dubiously attributed to Bismack informs us that God
watches out for “fools, small children, and the United States
of America.” During a campaign stop in Seaman, Ohio, Joe Biden’s
proprietary blend of foolishness and childishness may have proven
fatal were it not for the intervention of Providence – or, at least,
the close supervision of the Secret Service.

Biden inflicted
himself on customers enjoying an otherwise pleasant Sunday meal
at Cruiser’s Diner. Acting on the familiar and entirely unwarranted
assumption that Mundanes delight in being pestered by their tax-engorged
overseers, Biden struck up a conversation with a group of bikers
“in black leather vests and bandanas,” as
Politico recounts the event.

Spying a female
member of the club, Biden “pulled a chair in front of himself
and pulled her nearly into his lap,” continues the report.
“He put his hands on her shoulders and leaned in for a conversation
as photographers snapped away.”

Biden apparently
thought that his behavior was puckishly charming, and the assembled
media lickspittles did nothing to dispel that delusion. One needn’t
have a Betazoid’s
empathic gifts to recognize that the two male bikers who flanked
Biden were neither flattered by Biden’s presence, nor amused by
the adolescent attentions he had forced on their female companion.
After all, this was a brazen violation of the
second rule of biker etiquette (the relevant section of which
could be paraphrased as “Keep your hands off of ‘our’
women”).

Biden’s strained
attempt at a mock-populist photo-op occurred during the same news
cycle in which the
Dear Leader himself took part in a staged bearhug in a pizza joint
in Florida. I find myself wondering how Biden’s campaign appearance
may have turned out if the circumstances had been altered slightly
– if, for instance, his son Beau Biden had decided to make a similar
overture to a group of bikers. Had this happened, there is a small
but tantalizing possibility that Biden the Younger may have been
taught the kind of painful lesson from which fools often receive
necessary instruction.

In addition
to being the glorious outpouring of vice presidential loins – and
thus heir to his father’s incurable foolishness – Beau Biden is
Delaware’s Attorney General. Five years ago, Biden the Younger consummated
the official cover-up of the police murder of Marine veteran Derek
Hale, who was
repeatedly shot with a Taser and then gunned down by at point-blank
range on the front porch of a home in Wilmington on November 6,
2006.

Derek Hale,
an Iraq combat veteran, joined an “outlaw motorcycle club”
(OMC) called the Pagans shortly after being discharged from the
Marine Corps for medical reasons. In November 2006 he was making
a run from his home in Virginia to Wilmington as part of a “Toys
for Tots” promotion. He was unaware of the fact that about
a year earlier the Delaware State Police had opened an investigation
into several members of the Pagans OMC.

Derek was not
the subject of the investigation. He had no criminal record, and
there were no warrants out for his arrest on the day he was murdered.

On November
6, 2006, Derek was house-sitting for a friend, who had broken up
with his wife and was moving to a new apartment. Sandra Lopez, the
soon-to-be ex-wife of Derek’s friend, arrived with an 11-year-old
son and a 6-year-old daughter early in the afternoon to remove some
personal belongings.

Derek – wearing
a hooded sweatshirt – was sitting quietly on the front porch of
the home when an unmarked police car and a blacked-out SUV arrived
at around 4:00 PM and decanted a thugscrum of 8-14 heavily armed
police. According
to a half-dozen eyewitnesses, the officers were dressed in black,
and displayed no police insignia of any kind.

Derek stood
as the police surrounded the porch. Within a few seconds, he was
hit with the first of what would be seven Taser blasts during a
space of 73 seconds. According to eyewitnesses – one of whom, Howard
Mixon, was threatened by the officers when he pointed out that Derek
was helpless and unresisting – Hale’s last words were a plea for
the police to get the children to safety. Witnesses also described
how Derek, who was paralyzed from the Taser assault and left wallowing
in a puddle of vomit, repeatedly attempted to comply with demands
to remove his hands from his pockets.

Derek was
prone, unarmed, and helpless when Lt. William Brown of the Wilmington
Police Department murdered him by shooting him three times at point-blank
range.

The official
report commissioned and signed by Beau Biden dismisses eyewitness
accounts, retailing as irreproachable truth the self-serving version
of the incident provided by the death squad that murdered Derek
Hale.

Biden’s report
asserted that the Taser barrage was necessary “to overcome
Derek Hale’s resistance to the arrest so he could be taken into
custody without injury to himself or to the officers.” The
arrest was unlawful, and Derek Hale offered no resistance – apart
from his inability to comply because of the Taser attack itself.

The document
also claims that Hale “continued to keep his hand in his pocket
as if holding a weapon and turning in a threatening manner toward
a nearby officer armed with an empty Taser.” According to the
description provided by disinterested observers, Derek was thrown
to his side by a Taser strike, and was too busy vomiting into a
flower bed to “threaten” any of the people who had just
attacked him.

Derek was within
easy reach of his armed assailants. But taking a hands-on approach
might have involved a risk to “officer safety” – one that
was both infinitesimal and, to the valiant badasses of the Wilmington
PD, entirely unacceptable. So for the benefit of Beau Biden and
the other authors of the official report the officers confected
a story worthy of a Marvel comic book in which Derek ripped the
barbs from his clothes and stood up in a “threatening”
manner.

Because of
this “menacing” behavior, insists the Biden Report, the
Taser-wielding officer nearest to the victim “believed he was
in immediate danger and, thus, began an evasive move. Lt. Brown
believed that the use of deadly force was immediately necessary
to prevent serious injury or death to that officer.” A second
officer was preparing to gun down Derek when Brown shot the victim.

The police
had the advantage of numbers and firepower. Their subject had been
under surveillance for days; he was clearly not a threat. He had
been Tasered seven times when Lt. Brown pulled the trigger.
According to Beau Biden, this was entirely justified because of
fears on the part of the assailants that Derek – who was in convulsions
– had not been rendered entirely immobile.

Attorney
Thomas Neuberger,
who represented Derek’s widow Elaine in a lawsuit filed against
her husband’s murderers, described Biden’s report as “a shameless
cover-up because the use of deadly force was not justified. Fourteen
heavily armed and trained police officers should be able to arrest
a citizen without killing him after they have Tasered him seven
times and he is lying in a pool of his own vomit.”

Shortly after
he filed the lawsuit on behalf of Derek’s widow and stepchildren,
Neuberger told
me that when Thomas MacLeish became commander of the Delaware
State Police in 2005, his most urgent priority was to improve the
public image of his scandal-plagued agency.

“Over
the past several years, we’ve represented a lot of police officers,
including some from SWAT teams, so it’s not as if we’re anti-police,
even though we consider the State Police [DSP] hierarchy to be corrupt,”
Neuberger told me in early 2007. “We’ve gone to court on behalf
of whistleblowers and officers who have filed civil rights complaints
of various kinds. Of the ten lawsuits we’ve filed, we’ve either
won or successfully settled nine of them. Most of the cases have
involved the Delaware State Police, and the DSP’s hierarchy has
received a lot of negative publicity. I suspect that might be what’s
behind the raid in which Derek was killed.”

Clearly, the
DSP wanted to find a suitable “threat” – preferably one
that was telegenic without posing significant risks to “officer
safety” – to cast as an antagonist in a high-profile PR campaign.
The Pagans were a perfect fit. The Feds cut themselves in for a
piece of the action, and a joint “task force” was created
to target the Pagans.

Eventually,
the DSP was able to produce a 160-count indictment against several
members of the motorcycle club. That document was replete with lurid
– and studiously vague – allegations of “racketeering”
and “gang activity.” Derek was never a criminal suspect.
In fact, he
didn’t become a “person of interest” until after he had been
murdered by the police.

Immediately
after the shooting, the DSP contacted the Virginia State Police
and – in a deliberate act of official perjury – told them that Derek
was a suspect in a narcotics investigation. Police from Delaware
and Virginia barged into the Hale family’s Manassas home, shoving
aside a grieving wife and two devastated children in order to carry
out a charade of a search in the service of an official fiction.

Not content
to murder Derek and terrorize his already traumatized family, the
people who orchestrated that charade defiled the victim’s memory.
On November 21, 2006, the DSP issued a press release that was a
Soviet-grade specimen of official mendacity. The State Police claimed
that Derek “was at the center of a long term narcotics trafficking
investigation” and that his death was a justifiable use of
force because he had “resisted arrest.”

By exonerating
the police who murdered Derek Hale – including William Brown, who
actually pulled the trigger – Beau Biden conferred his imprimatur
on the post-mortem assassination of the victim’s character. He also
disposed of the matter before a suitable answer was found to the
most important question: Why was a paramilitary strike team sent
to arrest him? The most reasonable explanation is that the federally
supervised task force wanted to intimidate him into becoming an
informant.

At the time
of Derek Hale’s murder, several other Pagans were already on the
federal payroll. One of them, James
“Pagan Ronnie” Howerton, was recruited by the FBI in 2004.

While being
paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as an undercover Fed, Howerton
– a convicted murderer became the club’s sergeant-at-arms.

In 2009, the
Feds breathlessly announced that they had compiled a massive indictment
against the Pagans as an interstate criminal conspiracy– only to
see that document deflate into a small number of relatively trivial
charges against specific members of the club. The “criminal
enterprise” claim boiled down to the accusation that the Pagans
had committed a federal offense by running a raffle. The
City of Wilmington paid a $975,000 settlement to Derek’s family
in December 2010, avoiding a civil trial scheduled for the following
July.

The biker milieu
isn’t to everybody’s taste. Like every other private association,
biker clubs do occasionally attract people inclined toward violent
crime. Clear-eyed social observers would conclude that innocent
people are far safer in the company of bikers – including members
of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs – than in the company of police.

William
Queen, an undercover agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms, spent roughly 30 months infiltrating the Mongols Motorcycle
Club. His labors – which cost a great deal in money extracted from
tax victims, and nearly destroyed Queen’s family – yielded an insignificant
haul of controlled substances and “illegal” firearms.

Trite and pointless
as the operation proved to be, it did give Queen an opportunity
to strut and preen about his supposed accomplishments.

“While
they are wearing that patch, they are untouchable to the world at
large,” wrote Queen of the Mongols in his memoir, Under
and Alone. “No one can make trouble for them without
bringing down the fury of the whole Mongol Nation.”

As Queen conceded,
that description applies much better to the violent, lawless brotherhood
that employs him: “Living full-time as an outlaw gave me a
perspective few law-enforcement officers ever get to experience.
I was often more at risk from my supposed brothers in blue than
from my adopted brothers in the gang.”

By covering
up the murder of Derek Hale, Beau Biden performed an indispensable
service on behalf of the people to whom Queen refers as “outlaws
with badges.”

Biden the Younger
is now serving as the Obama Campaign’s semi-official emissary to
military veterans, some of whom might want to confront him about
traducing the memory of Derek Hale, an honorably discharged Marine
combat veteran who was murdered by the police.

September
13, 2012

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program.

Copyright
© 2012 William Norman Grigg

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