Blood in the Water

Thompson gives a description of the perspective of Anthony Simonetti. He had worked for Robert Fischer in the Organized Crime Task Force (OCTF), Rochester office. Simonetti was brought to Attica on September 13 by Fischer and would take on most of the responsibility for investigating the uprising and its aftermath. As Thompson notes, his task, and his potential impartiality, were compromised from the start. This was because, first, he was working for Rockefeller, and second because it would be NYS troopers, who had retaken the prison, who would be collecting the evidence for his cases.

Following the retaking and its controversial events, various committees and investigative groups were set up to look into events at Attica. One, created by Rockefeller, was the Jones Committee. A higher-ranking one, headed by congressman Claude Pepper, was a federal investigate body known as the Pepper Commission. Both groups criticized the existing prison establishment’s poor conditions. They also rejected the claim by Mancusi and Rockefeller that the uprising had been the result of a “conspiracy influenced by Marxists, Maoists, and far leftists, enhanced by an atmosphere of permissiveness in the outside world” (277).