Crook Manifesto

Pepper is the novel’s most important secondary character. A onetime associate of Ray’s father, Mike, Pepper has been a fixture in Ray’s life since childhood. A small-time crook himself, Pepper works security, participates in heists, and is part of a host of other criminal enterprises in and around Harlem. Although he knew Mike Carney well, Pepper’s ethics, strength of character, and moral code align him more closely with Ray. At one point, Ray’s secretary, Marie, approaches Pepper, asking for help with her abusive husband. Pepper makes sure the man leaves Marie, and Harlem, for good, and he refuses to charge Marie for the job. He and Ray work together in the Harlem underworld, and even when not actively engaged in a job, the two maintain a friendship. During the years of Ray’s hiatus from fencing stolen goods, he and Pepper meet regularly for drinks at Donegal’s, a neighborhood bar.

Pepper is an intelligent, quiet, and calculating man not given to the kind of outbursts and fits of temper that characterize many figures in the Harlem underworld. He is no stranger to violence and is an expert in both firearms and hand-to-hand combat, but his violent acts are methodical, planned, and rarely done in anger. Pepper is also a keen observer and astute judge of character. These qualities have stood him well in his line of work, and he is active, working, and unincarcerated even though he is no longer a young man.

Pepper is also an honorary member of Ray’s family. Ray’s children call him “uncle,” and Elizabeth accepts him even though she is surely aware that his business dealings are not aboveboard. He even has “his own” room in the Carney apartment. He and Ray have a true friendship: In a way, Pepper is a surrogate father to Ray. He and Ray argue and at times cause each other pain, but the strength of their bond is evident throughout the text.

Munson is a corrupt member of the NYPD whom Ray knows from his days as a fence. He is a key antagonist. During their early years together, Munson often brags about his ability to score tickets to popular and sold-out concerts. This is one of the perks of the elaborate network of payoffs and bribes available to police officers, and he frequently brings his wife, his girlfriends, and other business associates to the hottest shows. Ray contacts Munson years after their business dealings have come to an end to obtain tickets to the sold-out Jackson 5 show that his daughter is desperate to see. The timing is serendipitous for Munson, and although he does plan to give Ray the tickets, in return he wants Ray to fence some high profile, difficult-to-sell stolen diamonds.

Munson embodies several key themes. His character, alongside his partner, Buck Webb, is Crook Manifesto’s most direct representation of Corruption, Power, and Institutional Racism. The two cops illustrate the inherent corruption that characterized the NYPD of 1970s-era New York. Tasked with serving and protecting citizens, he instead works both for and with neighborhood criminals. His services are available to the local gangsters, and like them he expects and accepts bribes from ordinary citizens. This rampant police corruption contradicts the notion that authority figures in general, and police in particular, always have the best interest of citizens at heart. Munson, as a police officer, should instantiate an inviolable set of ethics, and yet he instead displays a flagrant disrespect for the law.

Munson also embodies The Situational Nature of Morality. Whitehead blurs the boundary between citizen and criminal in this text. Ray himself is an amalgam of the two. Munson, because he is a police officer, should be straight, and yet he is crooked. This kind of characterization is deliberate, and it allows Whitehead to interrogate fixed understandings of right and wrong, good and bad. Through characters like Munson, Whitehead suggests that no individual is wholly good or bad, as individual choices are often heavily influenced by social and economic circumstance.

Munson often expresses—in deceptively casual aphorisms—some of the book’s thorniest philosophical questions. It is Munson who tells Ray that “crooked stays crooked” and that “bent hates straight” (43). Though he embodies the ethical flexibility that lies at the heart of the book, his moral worldview is more rigid than Ray’s—or the book’s. He views “crookedness” as a defining human characteristic. In his view, people are not complex intersections of competing values; they are simply crooked. He explains the corruption in the NYPD by arguing that all cops (and all people) have the capacity to be crooked, and that individuals who see themselves as straight are delusional. From his perspective, cops (and people) who don’t see their own inner corruption are smug, superior even. This is why “bent hates straight,” because bent realizes that straight doesn’t truly exist: It’s just part of a line that hasn’t been forced out of shape yet. As objectionable as Ray finds Munson, they do share this perspective, at least in part. Ray, too, understands that the division between bent and crooked is largely fictitious. He sees his own propensity for crooked behavior and, in moments such as the one in which he keeps Green’s business card even though he’s sworn off fencing, illustrates Munson’s assertion that crooked stays crooked.

Munson also plays a role in Ray’s characterization. It is Munson who causes Ray’s relapse back into the world of crime, but perhaps even more important than the initial agreement to fence stolen diamonds in exchange for concert tickets is Ray’s ultimate decision to sell Munson out to the BLA. Although Ray has become caught up in Munson’s crime spree and as a result has engaged in some decidedly crooked acts of robbery and violence, selling out Munson is perhaps the closest Ray gets to truly crooked during the novel’s first section, for he understands that in providing the BLA with Munson’s location, he has sealed Munson’s death warrant. He trades Munson’s life for his own, or so he thinks. After the BLA have taken Munson away, Ray finds the concert tickets. Interestingly, when he realizes that Munson was going to let him live, he shows little remorse. Munson has revealed Ray to be, in his own way, just as crooked as Munson himself.

Zippo is an important character in Part 2. Known to Ray because of his friendship with Ray’s cousin Freddie, Zippo is yet another figure who embodies The Situational Nature of Morality. Like other such men in this text, he is a complex, dynamic character who alternates between legitimate and illegitimate business. Zippo is a flamboyant dresser, and his eccentric personality easily marks him as a unique individual. Reminiscent in some ways of Andy Warhol, he owns a loft, which he christens the Grotto, where he works on various art and film projects. He employs a ragtag cast of characters—many friends from his art-school days and some from his time in Harlem’s underworld.

In a one of the novel’s important asides, Ray remembers earlier business dealings with Zippo. (These events were a key plot point in Harlem Shuffle.) A budding photographer, Zippo had specialized in boudoir shots. Ray hired Zippo to take a series of compromising photographs to be used as part of a blackmail operation. Zippo parlays that experience into both the legitimate business of pet photography and “blue,” or pornographic, filmmaking. Thus, even in his early days, Zippo skirts the line between criminal and legitimate businessman. Like Ray, Ray’s father, Pepper, Oakes, and others, the legality (or illegality) of his work depends on the day and circumstance.

Zippo’s name is a nickname, given to him in childhood because of his burgeoning pyromania. Zippo’s fascination with fire aligns him symbolically and spiritually with a neighborhood that is often burning, as unidentified arsonists set fire to abandoned buildings. Zippo might not be starting the fires that are ruining the city, but his character is incendiary in other ways. By the time he enters Ray’s life again, during the second portion of Crook Manifesto, he has emerged from the Pratt Institute with an art degree, fallen in love with the Blaxploitation film Blacula, and written a script of his own. After a stint in Hollywood, he returns to Harlem to shoot his film. He asks to use Ray’s store as a filming location, setting off a chain of events that puts Ray back into contact with his friend and former associate Pepper. (Although it had been years since their last job together, Ray suggests Pepper to Zippo for the role of security guard on set.) In Part 3, Ray himself hires Pepper, this time to track down an arsonist. Ultimately this leads to the events surrounding the novel’s climax: Pepper’s brutal assault, the torching of Ray’s store, the death of Alexander Oakes, and an act of arson that entirely burns down the Dumas Club. In this way, “Zippo” is still a firestarter of sorts, but in a more figurative sense: He ignites the action both directly and indirectly in the final two sections.

Alexander Oakes is a Harlem-born candidate for borough president supported by Elizabeth, her father Leland, and daughter May. Articulate and charismatic, he looks the part of the successful candidate. He once dated Elizabeth, and Ray is aware that Leland would have much preferred the politician as a son-in-law.

However, Oakes is another manifestation of The Situational Nature of Morality. In addition to his candidacy and work in the district attorney’s office, Oakes is also involved in high-level city corruption. Both as an attorney and a city official, he is part of the vast conspiracy behind the arson epidemic. He pays off landlords, fails to prosecute arsonists, secures governmental “urban-renewal” grants for the empty lots left behind after acts of arson, and bribes other city officials. At times Oakes is engaged in legal business dealings; at other times his work is certainly outside of the bounds of the law: He is both crooked and straight. His character also embodies the theme of Corruption, Power, and Institutional Racism, for his crooked dealings are part of a wide system of disenfranchisement that bolsters white neighborhoods as it plunges Black neighborhoods into decline.