Elliot Williams On New York City, Race, And The ‘Subway Vigilante’

0:07On December 22nd in 1984, Bernard Goetz, a white man, shot and seriously wounded four black teenagers in a New York City subway car. They were Barry Allen, Daryl Cabe, Troy Canty, and James Remser. Getz fled the scene, resulting in a manhut, but in the meantime, New Yorkers dubbed Getz the subway vigilante. The city was experiencing a crime wave, and some residents championed the man who took measures into his own hands. I think he did right. By shooting these guys. Sure, they tried to mug him. I think he was, you know, protecting himself. This is around the Christmas holiday. that you got to look out for yourself.

0:44I think you did right. I really do. Because somebody's got to do something and the police aren't always there. The case sparked a conversation that still echoes today over race, vigilantism, and public safety. It's also the subject of a new book by Elliott Williams. He's a CNN legal analyst and frequent guest host here on 1A. His book, Five Bullets, the story of Bernie Goetz, New York's explosive 80s, and the subway vigilante that divided the nation is out now. Elliot Williams joins us after the break to discuss the book. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll be back with our guest in just a moment.

1:20Stay with us.

1:26Elliot, it's great to talk to you. Jen, let me just say how special and a blessing it is to be here with you moments after this book came out. Just knowing all the time I've spent as a guest on 1A, but also getting to know the audience as a guest host, and what a wonderful place and audience to be. And I know Michelle, the producer's head is probably exploding right now because I just ate up 30 seconds of precious host time by extolling the virtues of 1A, but so great to be here with you, Jen. Well, we're happy to have you. Now, Ali, when this incident took place in 1984, you were just a kid. You were a little guy.

2:05Why did you want to revisit it? Yeah, so I was nine or eight when the shooting happened, nine during the bulk of Bernie Getz being back in New York. And just think all the formative stories of anyone's youth shape the way they see the world. And I saw this playing out on the nightly news as a kid and didn't really grasp how significant it was until quite frankly, being a lawyer or a prosecutor later on. In terms of big issues, we are still grappling with today in America around race and crime, but also how safe cities are. A big thread running through this book, Five Bullets, is the idea that cities have long been seen as unsafe.

2:47Now, historically unsafe in 1984 with stratospheric homicide rates. But even today, a lot of the fights that politicians are having about cities are about how safe or not safe they are. And so the number of really on-the-nose ties to the world we live in was really part of, largely what motivated me to write Five Bullets. Before we get into the details of the case, it was really notable how many touch points it has to figures and groups today, including people like Rudy Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, the NRA. As you were investigating the story, what was most surprising to you? A few things. One, so a couple more.

3:24Curtis Sliwa and Al Sharpton, all of whom I interviewed for the book, Rupert Murdoch and Rudy Giuliani, did not agree to interviews. But I think a few things. One, the arc of the history of the NRA. This book is not about firearms at its core. It's not really a gun book, but it does obviously come up because Bernard Goetz and what he meant. Around the late 1970s, the NRA shifted quite dramatically from being a full-time sporting organization into the kind of full-throated, aggressive Second Amendment advocacy that we associate with the NRA today. And that's right around the time of the Bernard Goetz shooting.

4:02And they used the case to help bolster this self-defense and Second Amendment narrative. Even if Bernie Getz himself was odd and not a likely spokesman, they did latch onto the case as the kind of story where it's a white, runty guy in a blue city with tough gun laws who tried to use a firearm and was punished for it. And they latched onto that narrative and helped fund his defense. I had no idea about, one, the arc of the organization, but two, their role with respect to him. Well, we'll get into that more, but let's dig into what happened the day of the shooting. Some details are disputed, but give us a story of what we know happened in that subway car.

4:44What we know happened is downtown New York City train, express train, Bernard, these four young men that you identified, KB, Allen, Ross, and Ramster, got on in the Bronx. 14th Street, right, lower Manhattan in the village Bernard Goetz got on. Within seconds, one of the four approached Bernard Goetz and either asked for or demanded$5. That is a dispute. Was it panhandling or was it, hey, buddy, give me your money? Either way, Bernard Goetz then pulled out the gun that he carried with him all the time. He was constantly armed with an illegal handgun and shoots the five of them. Now, the four of them, four of them, pardon me, three of them ended up just seriously wounded.

5:29One ended up paralyzed from the mid-chest down and ultimately ended up going into a coma and ending up severely brain damaged on the other side. Now, those are just the facts. Everything else about the case, Jen, is up for dispute. And I think a lot of what I explore in Five Bullets is why and how there remains so much dispute over how people see this shooting. Well, one other fact that's not in dispute is that there were other people on that subway car. Yeah, exactly. So, well, it's funny. So it's established at trial, and I, a former prosecutor, am big on what trials say and don't say, and it's established that there are about 20 people on the train, which also leads to, Bernard Getz ultimately ends up charged with reckless endangerment of the people on the car in addition to attempted murder and possessing the illegal firearm, because he's opening fire in an enclosed, crowded-ish space.

6:25Now, when I chuckled when you said there were other people on the car not being in dispute, Bernie Goetz, who still emails me with some regularity, particularly in how my book is coming out, and I interviewed him, but Bernie Goetz keeps saying and pushing this narrative to me and to others, the car was empty. Why do you think this car was empty? Well, it's because these guys, these thuggy guys were acting up in it. And that's just not, I mean, again, I wasn't there in 1984, but that's simply not established by the facts. Put this incident in the context of the crime rate at this point in time in New York City, because that was a big part of the reaction to the shooting.

7:02Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting, Jen. When I think about the characters in the book, Five Bullets, every major character gets a chapter. There's a Rudy Giuliani and Al Sharpton chapter. There's an NRA chapter. There's a Bernie chapter. There's a victim's chapter. And there's also a New York chapter, and it's where New York is, and I realized after the fact, somebody told me this, New York is the character, the first character we meet in the book. And it's like nothing we would think of today. It's not kombucha bar and, you know, ladies walking little labradoodles New York that we think of today.

7:36It's a place that had a homicide rate that hovered around 2 ,000 a year. And to put that in context, that's roughly quadruple the rate it is now. The city was broke and mismanaged. Some history buffs might remember the iconic Daily News cover story Ford Two City, Gerald Ford Two City, dropped dead after the city had sought a bailout from the federal government because it was broke and firing teachers and firing sanitation workers and firing police. The police union was passing out brochures to people saying, welcome to Fear City, with pictures of the Grim Reaper on them. To tourists, as they were coming into New York.

8:14The tourists, telling them, don't even come to this, don't even walk on the streets, don't come to this town, go away. And all of these things paint this picture of a, just New York that is incomprehensibly unsafe. And everybody, one, everybody I interviewed for the book, everybody who's quoted in articles just says, look, we love New York. We love our home. We love this place. There's nowhere on earth like it, but it's unsafe and we don't feel good here. And that pervaded all through the 1980s in New York. And that comes across in sort of the way I sketch it out at the beginning of Five Bullets.

8:48And so then describe what we know about Bernard Gatz. He was 37 years old in 1984. He was a longtime resident of the city. What can you tell us about him? Yeah, so he's odd. Everybody who, even the National Wife World Association, as I said, everybody who seems to have even praise for Bernard Getz, always couched it in. Well, he was an interesting guy. The police who apprehended him, one called him an interesting fella. It's just, so he's quirky, would pace around with his fists clenched and hyperkinetic movement and speech and just a wound up tense guy or very friendly sometimes. You just didn't know what you were getting.

9:29And even one of his neighbors said, I just didn't know if he was a sickie. I didn't know if he was mentally ill or not. The one thing, and he grew up with some privilege in Westchester County, just outside New York City. But the one thing that motivated Bernie Getz then and now, more than anything else, is public safety. And he was just wound up by what he redeemed as the drunks on the stoop and the panhandlers and the guys walking the streets and anything that he felt caused disorder in his home and his building. He was constantly pushing petitions on people and trying to go to the mayor's office and go to City Hall.

10:08And anytime someone said the word crime, he just, his head sort of exploded. Now, Elliot, as we mentioned, gets shot and seriously wounded four black teenagers that day in 1984. Barry Allen, Daryl KB, Troy Canty, and James Ramser. You weren't able to secure interviews with any of them or their families. So what do we know about them and who they were at the time? Yeah, and I try, Jen, and you know as a journalist, sometimes people just don't want to talk. And I got as far as speaking with two of Daryl Cabe's sisters on the telephone, but they just, after lengthy back and forth, dozens of communicators, they just decided they didn't want to be a part of the book.

10:54What do we know about them? They're four teenagers from the Bronx, and they all had homes and lives and families, particularly Kaby. But there's always just the tragic stories of the housing projects and the South Bronx in the 1980s. Case in point, Daryl Kaby did grow up with a mother and father, a two-parent household, which is wonderful. However, his father had died in KB's youth because he'd been run over by his own taxi cab when fighting off a carjacker. It's just the kind of detail about the lives of these young men who were sort of stamped from early age into sort of much to overcome in life.

11:43And they all ended up with quite serious criminal histories, particularly James Ramsoor. and all, you know, in the path on the way to being on the train that day. You know, Bernie Getz also, in his communications to me, keeps stressing how bad these guys' criminal histories were. Well, you know, a point I make throughout Five Bullets is that, sure, they did, and they did some very bad things. Again, particularly James Ramsour, a really horrific sexual assault. But Bernard Getz knew none of that at the time he opened fire. So the incident occurs, and then there is the immediate response to what people knew about the incident at the time.

12:30And all of the facts, of course, weren't known up front. People just knew there was a shooting on the subway for black teens, and then they filled in some blanks from there. Describe the response. Yeah, it was very easy. So there was nine days in which Bernard Getz is on the lam. He's running. He ran immediately to New England and came back and forth a few times. No one exactly knows where he stopped. But he's in New Hampshire hiding in the snows while New York is back home fantasizing about who this man is, this Avenger. No one knows anything, mind you, about even the particulars of the exchange between Getz and the boys.

13:08What they know is that it's a white guy and four black teenagers from the Bronx. And quickly that turbocharged this idea that this man, this defender, took a heroic act against these individuals that were, again, part of a very unsafe New York. And many, many, many people blamed these boys almost as the face of the terror that many people felt in New York. Quickly, so one bit of color, Jen, the tip line, the NYPD tip line before they identified Getz was inundated with calls, but not with people saying, I know who the shooter is or might be. It was calls saying, pat on the back, this guy should run for mayor, this guy is a hero.

13:52Finally, someone, people are just calling the police department for therapy about public safety. And something about the idea of this vigilante, both in the newspapers and in all these callers, really touched something in many people in New York. Well, you mentioned the newspapers, and this is happening during the time Rupert Murdoch was taking over the New York Post and shaping its editorial direction. What role did the Post play in telling the story of this incident? A profound one. And the Post, Murdoch, prior to buying the Post, had bought up a bunch of tabloids and had Australia and London around, was excited to be in New York and shifted the coverage of the Post, which was actually a somewhat left-leaning paper under the prior ownership, into crime and sensation, but also fear.

14:42The Post's coverage of the 1977 New York blackout of any crime case was three-letter headlines, you are scared, take cover now, city under siege literally was one of the headlines from the New York Post. And remember that this was not the days of CNN and MSNBC and Fox and 1A on WAMU. It was literally the days of three games in town. You had a couple tabloids and the nightly news, and that was it. And if the tabloids, which everybody read on the subway, were constantly reminding a narrative of how unsafe people were, it just created more hysteria among people, which led them to buy more newspapers, which led to more hysteria, which led them to buy more newspapers.

15:30And single-handedly, I think you can trace Murdoch's purchase of the Post just a few years before the Getz shooting into helping to create that environment. And I detail that in an entire chapter in five bullets. Well, and the details of this case are really interesting because there were things shared in media like the teens were carrying sharpened screwdrivers. That was repeated over and over and over again, heightening the danger they allegedly presented to Getz. But what do we really know about that? Not true. And I think it was just an easy narrative. These are thuggy black dudes from the Bronx who threatened this guy.

16:08Well, why they had screwdrivers of any kind, between the guys, there were three screwdrivers. They were actually heading downtown to go break into video game machines. It was a big form of theft in the 1980s in New York because of how ubiquitous video game machines were to go use a screwdriver, pop one open and take all the quarters from it. I mean, think about if you remember the 1980s, the bars, the bodegas, the movie theaters, the bowling alleys, they all had video game machines. Well, they had screwdrivers on them. They weren't sharpened and they didn't show them to Bernie Getz, but merely their existence sort of got people thinking these men were armed, they had weapons and they threatened this white man.

16:44All right, Elliot, let's take a quick pause here. Still to come, what Goetz has to say about the crime he committed over four decades later. That's just ahead.

16:57Let's get back to the conversation with this message we got from Hannah, who emails, America's history of white supremacist vigilantes is something I thought a lot about when defund, abolish the police was at its peak. While the message from the left stressed that marginalized groups experience more violence from the police than protection, I couldn't help but think of the equal and opposite reaction, businesses instead using private security firms with no public accountability and vigilantism. There are recent examples of racist civilians taking the law into their hands, killing Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery, but I do believe the reality of the backlash needs to be accounted for when discussing what a safe and just system would look like.

17:36Now, Elliot, a huge piece of this story is the racial tension at the time. One columnist questioned if the reaction to the shooting would be the same if the shooter was black and the teens were white. How much was race acknowledged at the time as a factor of both the crime and public reaction? Well, it certainly was not explicitly acknowledged at trial quite deliberately by the judge. He wanted to keep all references of race out. Now, we can question whether that's legal caution, which is entirely valid because it wasn't a civil rights lawsuit where you're allowed to talk about race. And he also just didn't want to get the case overturned on appeal if he went too far in talking about race.

18:17Or whether it was a blind spot where just the undeniable racial dynamics of this individual shooting, but also New York City at the time. You know, everyone, Jen, remembers the term Central Park Five. Okay, that's the big one from late in the 1980s. Many people of the era remember Bernard Goetz. But, you know, off the top of my head, Crown Heights, Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, Amadou Diallo being shot 41 times by police officers. Every year, and again, this is me as a kid watching the news, literally every 12 to 18 months there was some, Matt, Eleanor Bumpers is another one, but a massive high profile racially motivated incident.

19:01And I want to be clear, Crown Heights, it's on its head because it's blacks versus Jews, black people versus Jewish people where, you know, a motorcade, a Jewish motorcade kills a black kid. And then there's widespread rioting and looting of Jewish businesses. So it was just New York City at the time was a racial powder keg. And it was impossible to escape. how tense and simmering underneath the surface all of this was at the time. But was reaction to the shooting divided along racial lines? Not entirely. Now, to exactly your point about civil rights leaders, civil rights leaders up and down the board, going up to even the police chief at the time, who's Benjamin Ward, not a civil rights leader, but he was a black man, unequivocally said, if the races were switched, we would all see this differently.

19:52You know, I think even people who would deem themselves evolved on matters of race would see this differently. And I would urge everyone to look inside themselves and really think if you heard of a black man shooting four white teenagers knee jerk, what your thought would be. And I acknowledge that in the book. I just think it's more complicated than people want to let on. So black leaders were unequivocal about this. Some columnists, you might have heard the name Jimmy Breslin, the historic columnist of the Daily News. He dug in on the idea as a white man saying, look, folks, race is inescapable from this case.

20:28And, you know, here and there, there were political leaders, but a lot who, you know, who sort of noted the racial issues. But to the broader point, you know, there were lots of black people, Jen, who were quite supportive of the shooting, or at least of the idea that, look, I walk these streets and live in this incredibly rough city right now, and maybe I would have done it too. I carry a gun too. And I was struck by the number of black folks, given how unsafe New York was, who really talked about that. And some of that comes through in Five Bullets. Now, after the shooting, Getz fled the scene, but he eventually turned himself in.

21:08And Getz could then be heard in his own words. And we should say some of those words were shocking. Here's a part of his confession and a warning it is a little graphic. I wanted to kill those guys. I wanted to main those guys. I wanted to make them sucker in every way I could. If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets, and I was going to gouge one of the guy's eyes out with my keys afterwards. You can't understand this. I know you can't understand this. That's fine. The only reason I didn't do it is because he had changed his luck. Now, Elliot, as I said, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, people could fill in the blanks.

21:48They could project whatever they wanted onto Bernie Getz. But after this audio of his confession was released, after more became known about him, did the story become more complicated? It became more complicated. I would not say that it became completely, there was a vast turnaround when people figured out who Bernard Getz actually was. But certainly, it just got more complicated. And he, one, it's two events, Jen. It's one, this event, this video coming out, I believe ABC had, I believe, had aired some of it. But also when news of Daryl Cabe, the severity of Daryl Cabe's injuries became public, people wanted, you know, many people still said, wow, you know, it's a cost of life or whatever else.

22:34But I think a lot of people softened a little bit their views around the case when it realized that this young man, regardless of what he did, and clearly not mugged Bernard Getz because he was sitting on the other side of the train car at the time that Getz was approached, this young man is now not only paralyzed from the waist down or chest down, brain damaged with the mental capacity of a nine-year-old, unable to tell you what day of the week it is, couldn't tell you who the president is. That had some impact on people. But let's be clear, Bernard Getz enjoyed a lot of support in New York at the time, and it was really quite remarkable.

23:07Well, we got this email from Judith who says, hadn't Getz been mugged before this incident? And Elliot, this is something you write about in the book. He had been the victim of a crime prior to the shooting in the subway. He had. It was a very brutal mugging by three young Black men. And he even acknowledged in the interview with the police, Like, why would I start with three young blacks in the subway or, you know, on the streets, noting that race was still an element, even if he wasn't walking the streets of New York seeking to hunt down black people. It was in the back of his mind. And that mugging that left him injured, it tore his meniscus in his knee and banged up his face and his chest, his pectoral muscle quite a bit.

23:53That's when he started carrying a firearm. and he had procured a lot of illegal firearms, a lot of guns, and everywhere he went, he carried one. He buckled his belt to the side so that he could get it out easier. He didn't wear gloves so he could get it out easier if he needed to. And he was just, if not looking for trouble, hoping to be ready for it if it ever presented himself. And that comes across certainly when you talk to him, but also hear his words. It's really interesting to note the political reaction to this shooting. New York Mayor Ed Koch was trying to navigate both the responsibility he bore as the mayor for handling crime and public safety in the city.

24:45But there was also this opportunity for him to appeal to certain constituencies after the shooting. How did he use this incident in his political career? Right, it's interesting. So Koch is a fascinating figure because he ran as a, quote, liberal with sanity, and he really saw himself as a tough-on-crime Democrat, pro-death penalty, and so on. Now, he was a consummate retail politician. One person said to me that, you know, Ed Koch and Donald Trump are actually the same politician, but just in different packaging and different even partisan leanings, but just the way they marshal public opinion and public support and bombastic personalities.

25:26But Koch came out somewhat measured about the shooting, which is that ultimately, even if our city is unsafe and I'm working to clean it up, you don't have a right to be a vigilante. Well, within days, he started seeing the public opinion, but also, to your question, Jen, started seeing the public opinion in the outer boroughs of New York City, the wider parts of whether it's Bronx, Staten Island, queens, you know, ultimately, literally where Archie Bunker came from in American history. And he shifted his tone and eventually just never came out bashing the young men, but certainly came out in his public statement saying that, you know, we are under threat in this city and we're all doing our best to clean it up.

26:09But yeah, it's real rough out there. So he really shifted his tone. Well, Bernie Goetz was eventually charged with criminal possession of a weapon, assault, attempted murder, and reckless endangerment. And this is a case that still divides people today. Here's what some of our listeners had to say. My name is Harriet, and I live in Delray Beach, Florida. I took the subways in Manhattan every day back and forth to work when Bernie Goetz shot those guys on the subway. I felt that he was provoked. There were gangs and there were groups that used to go wilding through the subways at that time. I'm not excusing what he did, but I certainly understand why he did it.