Rights

Racial politics, ethnic hatreds, crime and crack tear apart the multihued fabric of New York City in this hardboiled first novel, which reads more like straight reportage than like satire or fiction. Black activist lawyer Herbert Whiffet, self-appointed champion of the people, uses inflammatory, racially divisive cases to further his career. One of his clients is a homeless black man whose habit of defecating in front of a delicatessen forces the owner into retirement. Whiffet also represents the family of a young black woman shot to death by a Hispanic cop in a drug raid; she was a gang leader's girlfriend, also said to be an informer who slept with police. . In this glum, scathing study Goldstone lambastes white liberals, black rabble-rousers, the media and a colossally inept legal apparatus for creating a system where criminals' rights count more than those of victims. He is also unsparing toward the white, idealistic assistant DA who sleeps with Whiffet, a Jewish TV reporter posing as a WASP, a ghetto drug lord and sundry others. (Mar.)