American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Seymour Pine, 1 of 2

And it meant that I would have to give into her, which is only natural. And when I went to Israel, I wasn't particularly impressed, except I wanted to go back. And I did. And then after my wife passed away, I came afterwards. You never would have guessed it'd be a celebrity because of Stonewall. No, no. I probably thought it was going to be a big murder case. We're good, I'm here, low talking, but are you... You listen to talking in the kitchen, suddenly? Maybe we want to get a jump on that before it gets a jump on her. I cancel the request for water glasses from the front desk without that. I can't film that stuff. Would you like a glass of water to have with you?

No, not at all. I'm perfectly okay. Great, the team okay. I got it afterwards. But then I have one now that's made in China. This is real. This is real. Legitimate item. I think? Looks like it. Yeah. Can I come on back? Okay. Okay. We're rolling. Okay. Let's go back. Why don't you just start out by telling you what your job was, what do you think was your responsibility for fixing that? Well, originally my responsibility was just to be a policeman out there and to be a be given assignment that they heard or they anticipated that there would be Arabs coming

in from the outside and just keep your eye on them and wherever you went, of course, they were Arabs. No, in New York City, in 1969 did you have a title or you did that before? No, I was a deputy inspector. What does that mean? That means I was in charge of approximately five precincts that had to do with public morals, gambling, a prostitution, liquor, social crimes that should not have been part of the police department, it should have been a social order of a different kind.

That was the way it was set up and that was the way we worked it. And when I went to Israel, they already had a unit there of Americans. Now, when you were an inspector in charge of public morals, right around the time of the Stonewall, did you get an assignment in June? Well, it was earlier than June that I got the assignment to go to Manhattan from Brooklyn. And did they ever tell you to do anything or who told you to focus on the Stonewall? Can you tell me that story? Well, it wasn't focusing on the Stonewall. It was clear up the situation and the situation was quite bad when it came to the Stonewall. You saw the Rolls-Roses and you saw the big Cadillacs and they were just viewers.

They were just people to come and look over what was going on. Many of them had nothing to do with the Stonewall as a bar. And did anyone tell you you should, I mean, did there come a time when someone suggested you to close it down or look at the black box and the back of the night? There was Interpol, which is the International Association of Police, indicated to the New York police that stocks and bonds were surfacing in European countries. And they had no idea where they came from but suspected.

And then that was dropped in your lap and it was up to you now to find out whether or not they were true or not. And you of course found out that everything they said about the Stonewall was true. And what were your instructions regarding the Stonewall? Your instructions were always to put them out of business. Particularly because there were so many underage people there. And so you're coming on June 27th. What were your instructions on that day? What did you... Well, there were no instructions except put them out of business. I mean, we had just really had an incident with them a few days earlier and they were laughing and indicating that, okay, we'll go quietly but we'll be back in a couple of days and they were.

And so we had to either show our force or throw away the keys. So you had this incident and they were laughing. So on June 27th, what were you planning to do? We were planning to go in and arrest the owners or the people running the place. Confiscate the physical evidence, the wines, the beers, the liquors, the bar itself, and... Can you tell me about the bar itself? How do you confiscate a bar? You take it apart. Can you tell me what you plan to do?

Well, you plan to take it to court to show to the judge what it consisted of. You rebuilt the bar. So when you had people come in to that night, what did you have? Well, you had nothing. We had people in there who had been going into the place for months as we did with many other places to get whatever evidence you could to indicate who was really running the place. Whether it was the bartender, whether there was a backroom, whether there was whatever. And so you had a pretty good setup except for the secret places which you knew almost everyone would have. And so an hour is prior to an arrest, you would have somebody in there not taken written notes but given you enough information

that they can appear before a judge and instead of making a fool of yourself by just going in and saying they broke the law, we would have to show exactly what they did break. Now let's talk about June 27th. Can you tell me what you did that night, what you were expecting to have happened? Well, we didn't expect anything more than anything and anything else except that we didn't think they would do anything. We knew what we planned to do. We planned to take it apart. We planned to show that the New York City Police Department was not powerless and the only way you could do that was close them down otherwise they would be open the following night which is

what was taking place all over the city. So how many cops did you bring down? What what what what made you say what you what you want? Well, you have maybe four to six policemen with you knowing that you had a precinct right nearby that would send assistance. We knew how much backup there was and if things went as they normally did we would have no trouble but they didn't go as normal and we had trouble. Now that night started out. You want to tell me if you sent anybody in before and how did you operate that night? Well, we didn't take anybody in before. Did you send any female officers? Yes, we had a couple of

female officers from other precincts in the that part of Manhattan and in the Chinatown in Manhattan who were familiar with a lot of the local Chinese people. What were they supposed to do? Why did you have a couple of female officers? Well, they were supposed to see whether you see when you came in there was a bar set up and on the bar were bottled with names on them. They were supposed to be individual bottles and they were to be used by those people and the people we sent in visually made notes of these bottles being used by anybody and not just by the people whose names were on them. At that time we already had notified

the federal authorities that we were having trouble, that they were watering down the drinks, which is a federal crime and so the federal authority sent down police officers as well and everything put together made a case. So that night you came down and did you send these two women inside first or how did they work? Well, men were growing in and out all over. Each precinct had its own plain clothes for us, each division, each burrow. They all had men or women in there and the only thing is we didn't know who they were. We decided to go inside because we kind of set a limit

as to how long the women were to be in there after which it would probably be dangerous for them, which in fact was what turned out. And when the time expired and it continued on and the women didn't show up, we began to worry that they had been discovered and from that point on we had no idea of what was taking place and we had to go in and find out. So did you go in alone or with other?

Oh no. The others went in first. As a boy you stayed behind. You saved your skin. So tell me what you did. Nothing at the beginning. We went in and the first police officer that came in with our group said the place is under arrest. When you exit have some identification and it'll be over in a short time. And that was what we thought it would be, but it wasn't that way. They didn't want to go. It was for the first time and I mean usually they went into the police car or the wagon, the police wagon and that was it. They gave the same name that they gave in the bar. We didn't do

very much checking because it was useless. They always had some kind of identification. But this time was different. This time was different. Well this time they said we're not going. That's it. We're not going and they didn't go. And as they were exiting the place instead of going to the police cars and they went on their own and didn't care what we said. So they forced us back into the place. We only had about six people all together from the police department. And there were hundreds of people who were not necessarily homosexual but from all phases.

Now you're the boss. You're getting forced back. What does that mean? How did they do it? Well they had a regular entrance which was covered with steel and it would be very difficult to break in once they closed it. And if you had any men in there, of course you had to protect them and you had to get in and see that they were safe. Which is what we did. Then we finally, Charlie Smyth who was another deputy inspector. This was a strange situation in which there were two deputies. There usually were only one deputy. But in this case there were two

of us working in the Chinatown area and the East Side area. And they were looking for secret exits and things of that kind. And they did find a way out. And one of the police women was able to squirm through this window. And they called but they didn't call the police department because we were being cancelled. Our radio was cut off every time we got on the police radio. But we were able to get on the fire line and we called the fire department and they called the police department. It was stationed up in Harlem. And they met. And of course with all the

sirens blowing and everything else and tearing up with the street, the roadblocks that they had. And the meaters using them as rams to break into the building itself. Until we got enough men, first the fire department showed up. They weren't happy about it. But they showed how did you feel about this? It was terrifying. It was as bad as any situation that I had met in during the army. It had just as much to worry about because they began to throw molotov cocktails. They began to strip the cars from

the gasoline. And they began throwing them in through the glass windows that they were able to cut through or push through. And we had problems because we had maybe six people and by this time there were several thousand outside. They were coming from everywhere. They were calling their friends from Philadelphia from everywhere to bring assistance. So it was the utmost importance that we put us up to it. And for the time being we did. But after that our efforts were no more required. We were the attack and after that the other patrol forces took over and they carried

on the fight for the next five or six days. Let's go back inside the snow wall for a minute. Didn't you guys have guns? Why didn't you fire your gun? Six against how many bullets did you have? And first of all whenever one person fires a gun it sets off a stream. The others can't control what they're firing at or who they're firing at. And so you have six guns and hundreds of people in front of you. And you're dead. There's no question about it. How many of the innocent people

would be dead? Nobody knows. And I assumed at the time that most of the people there were not part of the Stonewall. They were there were people who heard about it and came down to view it. Which is what it turned out to be later. It turned out to be organized. They had regular associations and they came in from California mostly but all over. When you're inside you're the boss. What do you tell your men if you don't want them to tell me what you told your men about using your guns? Don't fire. Don't fire until I fire. Could you say that I told

my men don't fire? Yes. Could you tell me that sentence? Don't fire until I tell you to fire. Keep backing up until we can't back up anymore. And which is what turned out to be the best thing because nobody was shot. And who did you tell us to? We told us to the both to our men who were in the place now, who were in the Stonewall and to those who were on the streets and building up. And we wanted them, well they all saw the guns. And there's a philosophy that comes out. You're going to be the one that gets hit. So it isn't too difficult to scare them. But you know for sure it can't do much damage. The people with the guns. Six people or

whatever we had there was useless. How it smelt? You remember how it smelt? Yes, I remember how it smelt. How it was stuck to me like glue. Can you tell me about how we got in there? Well, he came in and we knew he had his ID cards on him. And he spoke to me and said, can I say with you? I said, sure. And he stuck with me. He was inside there as much as I was, except when I went to each person and spoke to him. And when I got to Howard I said how do you feel Howard? He said, I feel all right. He said, but I'd feel a lot better if you had the axe and I had the gun. But he claims that it wasn't the axe that it was a hose. But I still

and says he had the axe. Did you ever use a hose that night? No. Well, we did use the the small hoses on the fire extinguishers to put out the initial cans that they threw in the bottles of gasoline. But we couldn't hold that very long. That's terrifying. Do you ever been through, like when you said, you've never been through anything like that, including what's, tell me what were you feeling when you're inside there? And how did you have to act? Well, I had to act that I wasn't nervous. This is normal stuff. But everybody knew it wasn't normal stuff. And everyone was on edge and that was the worst part of it. Because you knew they were on edge and you knew that the first shot that was fired meant all the

shots would be fired. And you knew that innocent people would be hurt. People like my son who might might have been there that night and we're going from place to place. And so you were worried. You didn't want to take any lives innocent or not. You had no business taking life for the purpose that we were doing it. I mean, this is gambling. This is a social crime. This is not a, a killable crime. But you still have to protect your own life. Did you feel prepared for what was going to happen? No. Well, you weren't prepared because you never thought you never expected it to happen.

We never run into a situation like that. It was always hands up. What do you want? Here are my ID cards. You knew they were phonies. But that, that was all. And some of them went to court that night. Others went the next day. And that was it. I don't think there were any real records kept because nobody, nobody was really serious about hurting sexual deviates. I guess they deviates. They were to us. Although it was, ladies turned out, there were many homosexual people in oral categories

in the police department as well. Tell me about reading gay bars, homosexual bars. Was this the first time you'd ever rated a gay bar? No. We had rated all we did would go in and go to the bar tender in chief or the office and flash your shield and say the place is under arrest. Okay, what do you want us to do? And that's it. Have you ever done that before? How often did you do it once a night? Once a twice a night. Yeah, particularly on weekends or holidays. Most of them were

school kids, or those who had just recently gotten out of school. Well, you would go in. It would take maybe a half hour to clear the place out. And then your job began of counting bottles and making sure that you had the right people who were dispensing these bottles. You didn't want to get an innocent person arrested because he was taking a drink. You wanted somebody who was selling it, somebody who was mixing it, somebody who was fooling the public.