News exclusive: Fat Nick denies racism led to 2005 clash
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/401320p-339880c.html
Me & my black friends, 'We called each other 'n---a' all the time'
Call him Phat Nick.
Nicholas (Fat Nick) Minucci is gonna throw down with a hip-hop defense when he goes to trial next month on his hate crime assault charge stemming from a baseball bat attack in Howard Beach, Queens, last June 29.
Wearing a bright orange jumpsuit and white sneakers in a beige cinder-block visitor's room in the Eugene J. Grogan Correctional Facility in Rockland County, Minucci declared Saturday he was "looking forward to going to trial because I'm gonna prove everybody wrong. I'm no racist. This was no hate crime."
So what's his defense?
"After the three African-Americans tried to rob me, I tracked them down with two friends," Minucci said. "And when I approached them I said to the main guy, Glenn Moore, 'What up, n---a?' I didn't say 'n---er' with an 'er.' But 'n---a' with an 'a' at the end.
"There's a very big difference in the hip-hop world that I come from between 'n---a,' which is a greeting and 'n---er,' which is racist. 'What up, n---a?' is like saying, 'What's up, pal?'"
Minucci also flatly denied he hit Moore in the head with the bat, and his new attorney, Albert Gaudelli, said medical reports will support that claim.
Moore was walking with two other young black men who cops have said were planning to steal a car, when the 3:30 a.m. incident occurred.
Minucci has been identified with Howard Beach - a catch phrase that echoes in the New York lexicon as code for white racism stemming from the 1986 race crime in which a group of white teens chased a black man named Michael Griffith to his death on the Belt Parkway.
But Minucci said he lives in nearby racially mixed Lindenwood and was born and raised in the predominantly black inner city of East New York, Brooklyn.
"I went to Junior High School 226, where I was the only Italian in a school of 2,000 mostly African-American kids," Minucci said. "All of my friends, 10 or 15 of them, were black. All of them. We hung out. We played ball. We goofed. A lot of us went to John Adams High together. And we always called each other 'n---a' all the time."
The night of the incident, Minucci said, he drove his cousin's $60,000 Cadillac Escalade through Howard Beach, wearing a $6,000 Rolex he said he bought with money left to him by his late grandmother, and a $4,000 gold chain given to him by his grandfather.
"Yeah, I wore my bling," he said. "And all the CDs in the car were hip hop - 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Biggie, Ja Rule, Mobb Deep. Every song, every track, on every album all you hear day and night is 'n---a this, n---a that.'"
In the rap industry bible, "Hip Hoptionary: The Dictionary of Hip Hop Terminology" by Alonzo Westbrook, the hip-hop slang word "n---a" has four definitions: 1) Black person in a derogatory or oppressive sense; 2) lazy person; 3) a term of familiar address to people of all races; 4) term used loosely in conversation among some Blacks in a nonthreatening way as a reference to one another.
No. 3 could certainly raise reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury.
If a dozen grandmothers raised on Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole are selected for the jury, he's toast.
But if he gets a jury of his peers, which includes young blacks, Hispanics and white hip-hop fans, the prosecution's entire hate-crime element of this case might hang on the first letter of the alphabet, used as a suffix.
"We intend to call several of Nick's African-American friends who can attest to his claim that 'n---a' is a word he freely used with them as a term of familiarity and greeting over the years," said Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor and seasoned trial attorney. "We will also argue that he was acting to defend his person and his property."
"Without that hate crime in the charge, the prosecution is left with a felony assault," said Stephen Murphy, the noted defense attorney who won the only acquittal for his client in the first Howard Beach race trial. "Take the hate speech away and you have kids having a rumble. A good lawyer like Gaudelli has a very winnable case here."
"The newspapers only put in the paper what will sell," Minucci said. "You never read that the church I went to when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 every Sunday, St. Lawrence's, on Flatlands Ave., was 95% black. Or that every Wednesday me and my grandmother and my uncle and six African-American ladies used to go to prayer groups run by a beautiful black woman from St. Lawrence's named Beverly, in her house.
"They'd come by my house for dinner," he adds. "I'd eat by their house. Color and race never meant nothing to me. Hey, my girlfriend is half-Spanish."
Minucci also said he believes that if this incident had happened anywhere else but Howard Beach, he wouldn't have been charged with a hate crime.
"When the cops heard 'Howard Beach' in an election year it was like hitting the Lotto," said Minucci, who has dropped 50 pounds in eight months of solitary confinement. "The mayor used me to help get elected. ... Like I says, I can't wait to go to trial where the truth will come out. I'm no racist. This was no hate crime."
Originally published on March 20, 2006
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/401320p-339880c.html
Me & my black friends, 'We called each other 'n---a' all the time'
Call him Phat Nick.
Nicholas (Fat Nick) Minucci is gonna throw down with a hip-hop defense when he goes to trial next month on his hate crime assault charge stemming from a baseball bat attack in Howard Beach, Queens, last June 29.
Wearing a bright orange jumpsuit and white sneakers in a beige cinder-block visitor's room in the Eugene J. Grogan Correctional Facility in Rockland County, Minucci declared Saturday he was "looking forward to going to trial because I'm gonna prove everybody wrong. I'm no racist. This was no hate crime."
So what's his defense?
"After the three African-Americans tried to rob me, I tracked them down with two friends," Minucci said. "And when I approached them I said to the main guy, Glenn Moore, 'What up, n---a?' I didn't say 'n---er' with an 'er.' But 'n---a' with an 'a' at the end.
"There's a very big difference in the hip-hop world that I come from between 'n---a,' which is a greeting and 'n---er,' which is racist. 'What up, n---a?' is like saying, 'What's up, pal?'"
Minucci also flatly denied he hit Moore in the head with the bat, and his new attorney, Albert Gaudelli, said medical reports will support that claim.
Moore was walking with two other young black men who cops have said were planning to steal a car, when the 3:30 a.m. incident occurred.
Minucci has been identified with Howard Beach - a catch phrase that echoes in the New York lexicon as code for white racism stemming from the 1986 race crime in which a group of white teens chased a black man named Michael Griffith to his death on the Belt Parkway.
But Minucci said he lives in nearby racially mixed Lindenwood and was born and raised in the predominantly black inner city of East New York, Brooklyn.
"I went to Junior High School 226, where I was the only Italian in a school of 2,000 mostly African-American kids," Minucci said. "All of my friends, 10 or 15 of them, were black. All of them. We hung out. We played ball. We goofed. A lot of us went to John Adams High together. And we always called each other 'n---a' all the time."
The night of the incident, Minucci said, he drove his cousin's $60,000 Cadillac Escalade through Howard Beach, wearing a $6,000 Rolex he said he bought with money left to him by his late grandmother, and a $4,000 gold chain given to him by his grandfather.
"Yeah, I wore my bling," he said. "And all the CDs in the car were hip hop - 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Biggie, Ja Rule, Mobb Deep. Every song, every track, on every album all you hear day and night is 'n---a this, n---a that.'"
In the rap industry bible, "Hip Hoptionary: The Dictionary of Hip Hop Terminology" by Alonzo Westbrook, the hip-hop slang word "n---a" has four definitions: 1) Black person in a derogatory or oppressive sense; 2) lazy person; 3) a term of familiar address to people of all races; 4) term used loosely in conversation among some Blacks in a nonthreatening way as a reference to one another.
No. 3 could certainly raise reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury.
If a dozen grandmothers raised on Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole are selected for the jury, he's toast.
But if he gets a jury of his peers, which includes young blacks, Hispanics and white hip-hop fans, the prosecution's entire hate-crime element of this case might hang on the first letter of the alphabet, used as a suffix.
"We intend to call several of Nick's African-American friends who can attest to his claim that 'n---a' is a word he freely used with them as a term of familiarity and greeting over the years," said Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor and seasoned trial attorney. "We will also argue that he was acting to defend his person and his property."
"Without that hate crime in the charge, the prosecution is left with a felony assault," said Stephen Murphy, the noted defense attorney who won the only acquittal for his client in the first Howard Beach race trial. "Take the hate speech away and you have kids having a rumble. A good lawyer like Gaudelli has a very winnable case here."
"The newspapers only put in the paper what will sell," Minucci said. "You never read that the church I went to when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 every Sunday, St. Lawrence's, on Flatlands Ave., was 95% black. Or that every Wednesday me and my grandmother and my uncle and six African-American ladies used to go to prayer groups run by a beautiful black woman from St. Lawrence's named Beverly, in her house.
"They'd come by my house for dinner," he adds. "I'd eat by their house. Color and race never meant nothing to me. Hey, my girlfriend is half-Spanish."
Minucci also said he believes that if this incident had happened anywhere else but Howard Beach, he wouldn't have been charged with a hate crime.
"When the cops heard 'Howard Beach' in an election year it was like hitting the Lotto," said Minucci, who has dropped 50 pounds in eight months of solitary confinement. "The mayor used me to help get elected. ... Like I says, I can't wait to go to trial where the truth will come out. I'm no racist. This was no hate crime."
Originally published on March 20, 2006
