The Man Nobody Killed

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0:36Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. In 1982, Madonna was shooting her first music video in New York City. It was for the song Everybody. The idea for the video was that she would be performing at a nightclub. The room would be mostly dark with a spotlight on her and a crowd of people dancing to her music.

1:24She'd been given a budget of$1 ,500. A friend did her makeup for the video. Friends of friends came in to fill the dance floor. I would hear stories of people in the East Village either going to parties with Madonna or their roommate would be dating Madonna. She would come up in just about every conversation, and it would get to the point where I would get suspicious if somebody didn't bring up a connection to Madonna because I thought to myself, were you really living in the East Village in 1983? I have my doubts. Elon Green is a journalist and writer. One of the people in the music video was a young man named Michael Stewart.

2:08You can see him for a moment, about two minutes in. He's wearing a hat and a vest over a T-shirt, dancing near the front of the stage. And who was Michael Stewart? I mean, how did he fit into the whole East Village scene? Michael Stewart was a young black man. And he was tall, 5 '11", about 140 pounds. He was gorgeous. He was modeling for Diane Brill, the queen of the night. Diane Brill was a popular New York City fashion designer in the 1980s. She'd hired Michael Stewart to model. She said he always gave good faces. Michael had grown up in Brooklyn. His mother said that he started drawing on paper napkins and writing stories as a child.

2:57He went to City College for a year and then attended the Pratt Institute for a summer class. He worked at the phone company and later as a busboy at a nightclub. But he was eventually fired for not being assertive enough to push his way through crowds to bus tables. One of the reasons he stuck out, aside from his looks, was that he was a quiet, contemplative person who did not talk unless he had something to say. And frankly, that was something that was out of character for a very loud, brash era. Michael ran in studio space in an old theater. When he didn't have the money for rent, he paid with his artwork.

3:44His landlord described Michael's art as, quote, slashes of color. I thought that he was trying to leave proof of his own existence. You know, when it came to art, well, he was, you know, by definition of where he was. He was on the avant-garde. In 1983, Michael was still doing modeling jobs and was starting to DJ for big parties. He was 25 years old. On September 14th, he met two friends to go to a party at Keith Haring's, but they couldn't get in. So they went to a place called the Pyramid Club instead. The Pyramid Club was sort of the center of the universe. Anybody who was an artist or filmmaker in the East Village would orbit around the space, whether it be Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thurston Moore of, you know, eventually Sonic Youth, the artist David Wanarovitch.

4:49A typical night would be, there were two floors. Downstairs was kind of where the action was because that's where the regulars and the staff would hang out. And, you know, one of the features or non-features of the pyramid was there was really no velvet rope. It was an incredibly egalitarian place when it came to race, gender, sexuality. I think anybody who was anybody would pass through there in the same way that they would pass through Studio 54 or Dance Interior or any of the places that were probably more well-known to people outside of the East Village. And what was the East Village like in the 80s?

5:38A total dump. It was likened to me like post-war Vienna, basically. most of the buildings were uninhabited or uninhabitable. There were lines coming out of these empty buildings for people buying heroin. Just whole blocks, essentially, being dark. In the 1970s, New York City's government ran out of money. The city froze transit workers' wages, and they cut the budget for park maintenance. Between July of 1975 and November of 1979, the city hired no new police officers. The city even borrowed money from the Teachers Union Pension Fund. Because the East Village was such a sort of desolate place at a time when New York City had not recovered from the financial crisis, it tended to attract a certain type of person who did not mind those kind of conditions, who wanted dirt cheap rent, and was often creative.

6:56and who were all either artists or aspiring artists and were perfectly happy to endure those conditions in order to be able to do what they loved. On the night of September 14, 1983, Michael Stewart called an acquaintance, Patricia Pesci, and asked her to meet him at the Pyramid Club. According to Patricia Pesci, after about an hour, they left. What do we know about what happened after Michael Stewart left the Pyramid Club that night? He and Patricia start walking, and eventually it's time for Michael to go home in Brooklyn. He lived in Fort Greene with his parents. And so they get in a cab, and Patricia and he part ways at 14th Street and 1st Avenue, where the L train is.

7:51and they have a fairly chaste kiss. He walks down the stairs and that's the last that she would see him alive and well. And here's where things get a little murky. A transit policeman named John Costick who's just come on shift there allegedly catches him defacing the wall of the subway with a marker and promptly arrests him. So he's led upstairs, and he and Officer Caustic are standing next to the booth, which houses the token clerk. And depending on who you ask, Michael either runs up the stairs towards the street or walks quickly. Either way, by the time he gets up there, he's quickly followed by Officer Caustic.

9:01And other officers are called to the scene. A man named Robert Rodriguez was working at a Blimpy sandwich shop that night. He was also an auxiliary police officer. He saw what happened next. And he watches as Michael is led, you know, onto the street. He is not able to identify who precisely is doing the leading, But he testifies and in fact tells a NYPD officer the next day that he sees Michael assaulted as soon as he is taken up the stairs. So the one version is that Michael went running up the stairs trying to escape the arrest at the L station, and Robert Rodriguez sees some sort of scuffle where Michael is thrown to the ground or assaulted.

10:06That's correct. Michael was then driven to a transit police station at Union Square. Officers would later testify that he began to make trouble on the ride over. He was kicking the seat, essentially being uncooperative. Now, when Michael is removed from the car, the officers would later testify that he made a run for it and sprinted. and in doing so runs into another officer. And it sets off what can only be described as an assault. The station at Union Square was also just a block away from a dorm for first-year students at the Parsons School of Design. Many of the students had their windows open that night.

11:07We started hearing this kind of crying out, help me, help me, police, help me, over and over and over again. It was a gut-wrenching, screaming, you know, life and death sound that brought us to the windows. I heard this blood-curdling scream that was just, you had to look to see what was going on. It was right down on the pavement. There were a lot of cops down there, a lot of cops that I, you know, maybe 10, 12, something like that. They had him on the ground and he was screaming and they would kind of take turns. It'd be one officer that would be on him and one would get up and another one would get down on him and, you know, start hitting him and beating him.

11:58And they had clubs. This one police officer kneeled right up by his shoulder blades, put a billy club underneath his neck and pulled up, you know, really hard, violently. I just felt sick. I was like, oh, my God, this poor guy. It seemed like they could have just put him in handcuffs and take him away. But then they tied him up and it was horrible. They picked him up. You know, literally his hands and feet were tied behind his back. and they just tossed him into this little paddy wagon they had and they just threw him in there. And then they just left him. They just sat there and talked and it was a big group of cops.

12:37And they were all just hanging out. There were perhaps 40 witnesses. Not one of them went to the phone. Elon Green interviewed many of them years later and asked why they didn't call the police. Some of them, who had only really heard stories about what New York City was like, felt, well, you know, this is what we had been led to believe would happen, so it's not really a big deal. Others would say, well, because he was handled so violently, he must have murdered somebody and tacitly deserved it. while others were just sort of confused about what to do because could you really call the police on the police?

13:29I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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14:40Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at tmobile.com slash switch. The transit police officers brought Michael Stewart to Bellevue Hospital. A nurse wrote in her notes that he was face down, handcuffed in a prone position on a stretcher, and that he had obvious head trauma and battle signs. He wasn't breathing. Doctors tried to resuscitate him, but they had to wait for the police to look for the keys for his handcuffs. The doctors and nurses observe bruising. He has clearly been through some kind of, you know, ordeal. They begin to hear stories about what has happened.

15:22The nurses even begin to suspect that, you know, a cover-up is in the works. What they don't find, though, are classic signs of strangulation. And that would later become important. Michael Stewart was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on a ventilator. He couldn't breathe on his own. He also received a CT scan. Two neurologists looked at the scans and noted there were no blood clots or lesions and no skull fracture. But one of the doctors saw swelling on the left side of Michael's head, something that could happen if he'd hit his head very hard against something. The doctors tested Michael's reflexes.

16:10He showed almost no response. Did he ever gain consciousness again? No, never. Two Transit Authority officers went to see Michael Stewart's parents in Brooklyn. The officers told them their son was in critical condition at Bellevue. Michael's mother then called a woman named Suzanne Malouk. Suzanne Malouk was Michael's on-and-off girlfriend, and also the on-and-off girlfriend of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Suzanne Malouk had met Michael about a year earlier at the Pyramid Club. They had lived together for a while. But eventually, Suzanne asked him to move out. She said she was still in love with Basquiat.

16:55But they were still close. They'd seen each other the day before Michael's assault. Michael's mother asked Suzanne to meet them at the hospital. According to Suzanne, when she arrived, no one would tell them why he had been arrested. She tried to see Michael. She said she was his fiancée, but the nurses wouldn't let her. A doctor said Michael was brain dead. A detective approached her and asked if Michael did drugs, or if he was known to be violent. Suzanne came back to the hospital the next day. She went and borrowed a camera and put on kind of a dowdy, conservative dress and talked her way into Michael's room at Bellevue, which was no small thing because, of course, he was in custody.

17:50Even though he was comatose, he was, by law, handcuffed to the bed. And she proceeded to take photos of him with the tubes coming out of his mouth and the bruises all over his body. And she did this extraordinary thing of documenting the wounds at a time when nobody else thought to do this. What kind of investigation was being done after Michael Stewart's hospitalization? It wasn't really an investigation in the traditional sense. You know, the NYPD was not handling the case. As an ADA said to me, nobody was going to trust the cops. And so it was the investigators of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who were going around Union Square looking for witnesses.

18:52and they went floor by floor in the Parsons dorm and started to talk to the students until they were able to dredge up dozens who had seen the incident. You know, in the hours after the assault, investigators went to talk to each of the policemen. Internal Affairs was asked to investigate the case. And that was something that they did routinely when there were complaints of police malfeasance. And for reasons that remain mysterious to me, they refused, which was something they almost never did. The police charged Michael with criminal mischief, resisting arrest, attempted escape, and possession of marijuana.

19:46A newspaper wrote that a Transit Authority spokesman said Michael, quote, went berserk after officers tried to arrest him for writing graffiti on a subway wall. They said that he had been drawing three-foot-tall letters, by some accounts RQS, by others RAS. Elon Green says it's never been clear whether that was true or what those letters could have been referring to. Michael Stewart died on September 28, 1983. 13 days after his arrest. How quickly did the story of what happened to Michael Stewart make the news? Well, the first story appeared certainly within 24 hours in the tabloids. And the turning point for the story, Because this otherwise, I think, would have been treated as a routine police brutality case, because, of course, they were routine.

20:53But the case got the attention of Gabe Pressman. He was a TV news reporter. In fact, he essentially invented the job of being a TV news reporter. and he became immediately obsessed with the case and began investigating every facet of it. And a New York Times reporter told me that nobody else would have cared about it if Gabriel Pressman had not cared about it first. And once he got on the story, it began to make the cover of every tabloid for days and for weeks. In a TV segment that aired on the day of Michael Stewart's death, Gabe Pressman reported that the transit authority would only say that Michael had gotten a cut over his eye.

21:53And what was the reaction from Michael's own community, from his friends, the artists, from his family, parents? Rage. even before Michael died, that September, there was a protest held in Union Square. As far as I know, it was the first, and it was organized by a man named Howie Montauk. Howie Montauk was a doorman who worked, a famous doorman who worked at the Palladium and Studio 54 and Dance Ateria and all sorts of places. He also was a man who had an activist streak going back to his childhood. And, you know, as soon as Michael was hospitalized, he and Suzanne Malouk and some others began to organize the protest in Union Square.

22:48And David Wanarovich created these beautiful flyers to advertise it. And those were hung from, you know, lampposts in the East Village. The poster showed two skeletons in police uniforms, hitting a faceless figure with his arms handcuffed behind his back. Madonna headlined a concert to raise money for Michael's parents to pay for their legal expenses. They'd hired a lawyer and experts to look at Michael's medical records and autopsy and to make sure the city was investigating. Madonna said that Michael made one really strong impression on me, and that was that he was really fragile. Keith Herring donated the proceeds from some of his gallery sales to Michael's family.

23:39Herring, who was white, said he'd been arrested four times for graffiti and had always been let go. He was even arrested once on camera, drawing on a wall in a subway station, while a news crew was following him for a profile. He may do as many as 30 such drawings in a day. He puts them down here so that millions can see them, and millions do. You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it. But he's got to be careful, because technically what he's doing is illegal graffiti. I'm going to arrest for graffiti on the subway. Herring doesn't think he is defacing anything. He believes it is art, and many subway writers seem to agree.

24:16But the law is the law. For Herring, the arrest is always short-lived, and it's worth the temporary humiliation for him because he wants ordinary people, subway riders, to see his stuff. Art for the people. All for the price of a subway token. You know, later, Jean-Michel Basquiat would wander over to Herring's studio and leave a painting on Herring's wall of a silhouetted black figure, you know, surrounded on both sides by sort of blue pig-faced policemen. Keith Haring later cut out the part of the wall Basquiat had painted and put it in a frame over his bed. Basquiat never named the painting, but based on writing on it, Keith Haring called it De Face Mento.

25:11It was later displayed at the Guggenheim, and called defacement, and then in parentheses, the death of Michael Stewart. On September 29th, the day after Michael Stewart's death, his body was autopsied, and there was a press conference. There was mounting pressure for the city to release their findings about the cause of his death. The chief medical examiner of New York, Elliot Gross, declared that the cause of death was cardiac arrest with survival for 13 days, bronchopneumonia pending further study, which is one of the statements that is both true but also meaningless. Elliot Gross told the press, quote, While there was evidence of healing injuries on the body, the autopsy demonstrated no evidence of physical injury resulting or contributing to death.

26:11When asked by a reporter about Michael's injuries, Dr. Grove said that Michael Stewart's wrists showed abrasions, consistent with injuries caused by handcuffs. But he said that the other injuries could have been caused by other things, like a fall. A doctor who had assisted in the autopsy later told Elon Green, of course they did something to cause his death. A lawyer representing Michael Stewart's family said that one of the doctors who was serving as a witness to the autopsy had said that Michael Stewart's eyes showed signs of strangulation or choking. Elliot Gross said that he'd found no signs of strangulation.

26:53He said they would be conducting further tests, including an examination of Michael's brain and spinal cord. And the next day, he removed Michael's eyes. And he puts them in a solution called formula, which is a preservative. And the removal eventually gets out. And it is widely interpreted as an attempt by Dr. Gross to engineer a cover-up on behalf of police. Why? What could the eyes have shown? They could have shown petechial hemorrhages, which is often an indication of strangulation. The doctors the Stuarts had hired said they hadn't been informed that Dr. Gross had done this procedure. I mean, when those initial autopsy results came out, what was the reaction?

27:53Anger. Justifiably so. because certainly the idea that Michael's cause of death was cardiac arrest was seen as a passing of the buck, an abdication of responsibility, an endorsement of the idea that the cops were not at fault. Protesters gathered outside the office of the chief medical examiner, Chanting, Dr. Gross lied.

28:31We'll be right back.

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29:51Just the facts straight from the experts for more than 140 beverage ingredients. Visit goodtoknowfacts.org. Early 80s in New York, are there a lot of these kind of interactions between the police and citizens? Is this happening often? It happens often enough that in 1983, there are 400 reported police brutality incidents over a two-year period. In the days after Michael Stewart's assault, there also happened to be a congressional hearing being held in Harlem on police brutality. Mayor Ed Koch refused to attend. Mayor Koch's attitude towards police brutality was to act as if it did not exist. As he once put it, it was to him a phony false issue.

30:54I think at the time, just as now, many people were enthralled to law enforcement. And I think that he did not want to believe that the NYPD and the housing policemen and the transit policemen might be routinely assaulting black New Yorkers. Quote, People would get the baton to the head and have to have a neurosurgeon, a doctor at Bellevue Hospital remembered. In 1980, New York City's crime rates were the worst they'd ever been. There were over 1 ,800 murders reported that year. A few years earlier, people visiting New York received pamphlets at the airport titled Welcome to Fear City, with a skull looking out from a hood.

31:46It listed nine rules to survive the city without being killed or robbed, like not going out after 6 p.m. and to never take the subway. The pamphlets had been created by a group called the Council for Public Safety, in response to the city laying off police and firefighters. The group was made up of their unions. A year after Michael Stewart's death, a white man named Bernard Goetz got on the two train. He sold electronics in Greenwich Village. He'd been mugged a few years earlier and had started carrying a gun. He was wearing it under his windbreaker. He gets on the subway, and, you know, in the subway car along with him are some teenagers.

32:35Their names were Troy Canty, Barry Allen, Daryl Cabby, and James Ramser. All four were black and around 18 years old. At one point, Troy Canty asked Bernard Goetz for$5. And these kids, perhaps they looked at him funny. One apparently smiled. And Bernard gets, pulls a gun, you know, out of his windbreaker. And without provocation, shoots them all. All four survived. But Daryl Cabby's spine was severed by a bullet. He was paralyzed. Bernard Getz got off the subway and left the city. He went to Vermont, where he burned the windbreaker he'd been wearing, and buried his gun. Just over a week after the shooting, he turned himself in.