In late November, 1987, a 15-year-old girl was found in a plastic garbage bag on the street, her clothes ripped, her body smeared with excrement and defiled with the words 'Nigger' and 'KKK' (Ku Klux Klan). At the police station, the barely-cogent Tawana Brawley mumbled a few words about being kidnapped and raped for four days in the woods by white police officers.
Even in the tense times of the late 80s, the discovery sent shockwaves across New York and the rest of America. These were times when New York's crime wave was at its height, when inter-racial fear was often primal and when, sociologists believe, the racial consensus which emerged from the civil rights victories of the 1960s was beginning to fall apart.
The combination of young black victim and attackers from the white police establishment was explosive. State governor Mario Cuomo ordered an immediate special panel to probe the crime, and the black community rallied together, with celebrities such as Bill Cosby putting up cash to help find the culprits, and boxer Mike Tyson giving Tawana his diamond-crusted Rolex watch.
Only weeks before, another hate crime had shocked the city, when a group of white youths chased a black man and stabbed him to death. Al Sharpton, already a prominent black leader around the city's ghettos, had, together with the lawyers Alton Maddox and Vernon Mason, earned the trust of their peers in that case, by shaking the authorities into action. After Tawana was found, this trio was the first choice of outraged blacks to pursue the case, and they were brought on board by Tawana's parents.
Mr Sharpton, with his Don King-prototype haircut, big mouth and large opinions, was quick to launch a broadside against all white figures of authority - none of whom, he declared, could be trusted to pursue a fair investigation. If a tense New York needed soft words to calm its citizens down, Mr Sharpton was not the man to offer them.
Only days after Tawana was found, a white policeman named Harry Crist, who was from the same county in which the incident occurred, committed suicide. Despite evidence that he was overburdened with financial and personal problems, the Sharpton trio seized on the suicide. Mr Crist, they said, was one of the attackers, and should be investigated.