Broadway star Alton Fitzgerald White remained “still kind of shocked” yesterday as he described a five-hour trip to hell that began when cops roped him in along with suspected drug dealers caught in his Harlem building.
A shaken White said cops from the 33rd Precinct held him for hours on Friday, strip-searching and repeatedly grilling him without reading him his rights, even after learning he was the star of Broadway’s “Ragtime.”
“I realized they don’t care,” said White, who spoke of the incident in his apartment at 935 St. Nicholas Ave. “I could have been a bum on the street or a Broadway star – I was a black man.”
Marilyn Mode, Police Commissioner Howard Safir’s press secretary, insisted cops acted properly.
She said officers went to White’s building after getting a report of four Hispanic men running into the building. They found six men in the lobby, including White, and a kilo of cocaine, she said.
But White said he and three acquaintances were walking through the building’s lobby to the street when cops arrived.
They had noticed two Hispanic men who didn’t live there. White said he opened the front door for a female cop, “trying to be a gentleman,” and thinking the police would shoo out the intruders.
Instead, he and his companions were set upon, searched and arrested with the Hispanics.
White, 35, said he’d spent a sleepless night afterward and was so upset that he skipped yesterday’s matinee at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts.
He never made it to the show the night before, because he was in custody.
White said it was the first time he’d missed a performance of the musical since he took the role of Coalhouse Walker Jr., a successful black man harassed by authorities.