Back to the Future

by Howard Altman

Billy Fisher is a believer.

For the past five years, as head of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Civil Affairs unit, Fisher has believed in the basic goodness of people. As much as any single cop in this city, Fisher has kept civil unrest from boiling over, not with the hard thud of the billy club, but with the softness of the human touch.

Fisher, who was recently and deservedly named winner of the Daily News' George Fencl Award, believes that the public has the right to protest and that it his duty to help maintain the peace.

Then came last Friday.

For the first time on his watch, someone associated with MOVE -- one of Fisher's biggest and most consistent challenges -- met with a violent end.

John Gilbride, who was engaged in a nasty custody dispute with his ex-wife Alberta Africa -- first reported by Noel Weyrich in City Paper two years ago -- was shot to death in his Maple Shade, N.J., driveway. A few hours later, he was supposed to take the couple's 6-year-old son, Zack, for an unsupervised visit.

Though the killing didn't happen in Philadelphia, Fisher was devastated. For years, he worked hard to build up close, mutually beneficial relations with MOVE.

There was no evidence pointing to MOVE's involvement in the Gilbride murder. Yet Fisher was keenly aware of the obvious.

In 1978, after a confrontation with MOVE in Powelton Village, a police officer was gunned down. In 1985, 11 MOVE members were incinerated, along with a good stretch of Osage Avenue.

Already, Pam and Ramona Africa -- promising to prevent Gilbride from taking his boy -- had boarded up their Kingsessing Avenue home, which they purchased with the proceeds from a settlement with the city for the 1985 fiasco.

And on the night before Gilbride was to take his son from the widow of John Africa, who perished in '85, someone pumped several shots into him, continuing MOVE's death march through history.

"It would shock me if this had anything to do with them," Fisher told me last Friday afternoon. "If I was the assigned investigator, I would take a long, hard look at [Gilbride's] personal life before venturing to look into MOVE."

Fisher was saying this completely without malice and without casting aspersions.

But I could also tell, from years of knowing him, that he was also acting on faith.

The sad saga of John Gilbride was quickly overtaken by another sad saga, that of the smelly revolutionary from West Philly.

Ira Einhorn's second trial for killing his long-time lover Holly Maddux began Monday.

It could be a while before Einhorn takes the stand, but if a letter he wrote last month is any indication, it will be well worth the wait for court watchers and denizens of the Asteroid Belt -- those who believe in vast government conspiracies, mind control machines, Tesla rays and "free energy."

In his opening statement on Monday, defense attorney Bill Cannon -- known even among homicide cops as a straight shooter -- spent much of his time poking holes in the prosecution's physical evidence and promising witnesses who claim they saw Maddux long after the prosecution claims she was killed in September 1977. Cannon will even provide a bizarre link between MOVE and Einhorn -- a police officer who will testify he saw Maddux alive in 1978, while he was stationed outside the MOVE house during the group's first battle with police.

But Cannon also told jurors, perhaps as a way to warn them about Einhorn, that they should not be surprised to hear about "psychotronics" -- which he did not explain -- and other such pseudo-science.

And hear it they will. Einhorn all but promised that in a rambling, nine-page handwritten letter, sent from his wife to an Internet Ira-teer named David Crockett Williams, in which Einhorn spelled out the essence of his version of the past, which was all about being framed by the government for his vision of the future.

It has long been Einhorn's contention that his work with mind control and free energy sources led the government to place Maddux's mummified corpse in a trunk in his closet.

Joel Rosen, of course, has an alternate view. As the assistant district attorney trying Einhorn, Rosen in his opening remarks said that he was welcoming the chance to prove Einhorn guilty of fatal domestic violence.

But Rosen winces at the thought of Einhorn waxing weird.

On Monday, a courtroom visitor chewed the ear of an Inky reporter with tales of deep, dark government frame-ups. Tuesday morning, Rosen was distracted momentarily by a deputy sheriff who was worried about a man claiming to have been in contact with Air Force One about this ordeal.

"Get me his name," said Rosen, calmly but sternly.

The wackiness has only begun.

Tuesday afternoon, I had another conversation with Fisher, whom I first got to know as a neighbor in Grays Ferry. His frustration was now palpable.

"It is a mess, to tell you the truth," Fisher said with an air of resignation. "It is a sad situation. I hope, for the sake of a lot of people, that [MOVE] is not involved in this thing."

"Why?"

"All you have to do is go back in history to see what's happened," he said. "There is no easy solution to this."

Besides, Gilbride's murder may be a little too convenient, he said.

"If I were a teacher and a student handed in a term paper with that story, I would hand it back to him for being total fantasy," said Fisher.

Even as a skeptic, Billy Fisher remains a believer.

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