Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation - Hardcover

Williams, Elliot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593833708 ISBN 13: 9780593833704

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

"Read this book to understand human nature." (Preet Bharara) • "An amazing story, well told.” (Anderson Cooper) • "A masterful telling." (Dahlia Lithwick)

From CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, a revelatory account of how one man, four teenagers, and a struggling city collided over race, vigilantism, and public safety . . . exposing the fault lines of a nation

On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, four teenagers from the Bronx, at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars.

Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the “Subway Vigilante” saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison…or a medal.

In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era. Drawing on archives and interviews with many main characters, including Goetz, Williams presents a masterful and vivid tale that also tells the origin stories of larger-than-life figures: Al Sharpton, a polarizing young local activist rocketing to national prominence; Rudy Giuliani, a rising-star prosecutor with an important decision to make; the NRA, which needed a poster boy for its transition from hunting club to political juggernaut; and Rupert Murdoch, whose new purchase, the New York Post, grew his empire by keeping a scary story in the headlines.

A shocking account of a pivotal moment in our history, Five Bullets demonstrates why, in order to understand today’s debates about race, crime, safety, and the media, it’s imperative to reflect on what went down in the subway four decades ago. As Williams’s powerful narrative reveals, it was not just Goetz on trial, but the conscience of a nation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst and regular guest host on SiriusXM and WAMU, NPR’s Washington, DC, station. He has spent his career thinking about law, crime, and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. A Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg that was 1980s New York. He now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two children.

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Chapter One

The Powder Keg

July 13, 1977
New York City

The city went dark.

Violent thunderstorms rolled across the region on a sweltering, humid evening. Lightning strikes clapped down on the earth below, with perhaps the most consequential one in New York history striking a substation about an hour north up the Hudson River in Westchester County at around 8:30 p.m.. The crash tripped two circuit breakers, sending a surge that cut off power from the massive Indian Point No. 3 plant, which served much of the region. Soon after, a second strike cut off power from another nearby plant. As surges knocked out substations one by one, demand increased on other parts of the region's power grid. As a result, a series of catastrophic power failures quickly crept southward, finally nestling in America's largest city.

By 9:30 p.m., New York City's five boroughs and most of Westchester County were literally, and figuratively, powerless. Tunnels leading into and out of the city had to be closed due to lack of ventilation. Thousands were evacuated from pitch-black subway cars that were becoming unbearably hot. Screaming riders got stranded in darkness atop Coney Island's Wonder Wheel, a rickety, fifty-seven-year-old Ferris wheel. Reporters in the New York Post's newsroom had heard over police radio monitors that blackouts were cascading south from the Bronx through Manhattan. Mindful of the city's geography, they did not panic when, a moment later, their lights went out too. Frank Sinatra, cozy on the thirty-eighth floor of the posh Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, passed the time by consuming the "rapidly thawing contents of the refrigerator." A pilot landing a cargo plane of strawberries at JFK Airport watched in shock as its runways vanished into the miles of blackness around them. As the plane circled above, he asked the control tower in exasperation, "Where is Kennedy Airport?" and "What am I supposed to do with the berries?" The control tower, dealing with problems of its own, responded simply, "Eat them." Both JFK and LaGuardia Airports would soon stop all arrivals and departures for the next eight hours, gumming up air travel across the planet.

For a time, the only three lights that remained on New York's silhouetted skyline sat atop symbols of the city's greatest areas of pride-its financial dominance and historic embrace of diversity. Somehow, only the blinking airplane beacons on the World Trade Center and the Citibank Building, and the torch being lifted by the Statue of Liberty, punctuated the shadows. In retrospect, the metaphor was almost too on-the-nose to be real.

Perhaps the blackout of 1977 should not have been anything remarkable; every region with an electrical grid loses power at some point. Indeed, the region had confronted a massive fifteen-hour blackout just twelve years earlier. In 1965, even as 25 million lost power, the public reacted with romance and cheer. People got out of their cars at clogged intersections and directed traffic. Others handed out candles to passersby. Some weary travelers, knowing they could be stuck in Grand Central Terminal for a while, settled in for a night of sleep, unconcerned (or unaware) of any risk. Citywide, police made only ninety-six arrests, mostly for minor offenses. Within days, advertising executives published a book of cartoons titled Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? The experience, almost instantly, became a thing of amusement and nostalgia that unified a resilient city.

The 1977 darkness brought its own moments of magic also. Restaurants on the chic Upper West Side of Manhattan moved their tables outside for al fresco dining. A motorist who spotted an elderly woman struggling to feel her way home was seen spinning his car around so that his lights could help usher her inside. As the lights went out during a performance at the Metropolitan Opera, the orchestra's harpist broke into an impromptu solo of "Dancing in the Dark."

Oh, but 1965 this was not. For the next twenty-four hours, arson, looting, and violent crimes tore through the entire city. The predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods of the South Bronx, East Harlem in Manhattan, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn were among the most devastated. Some 1,037 fires, 50 of them serious, were the most seen in a single day in New York history.

Rioters smashed through the steel door and windows at a Pontiac showroom in the Bronx, speeding off with fifty new cars, valued at $250,000. On Broadway in Brooklyn, the night air was filled with the sounds of iron store gates being forced up and windows smashed open, exposing troves of electronics, furniture, and clothing to be looted. Near Columbia University in northern Manhattan, people were reported to have hooked cars up to the doors of electronics shops in order to tear them off, making way for others to clear the shelves. Even the Brooks Brothers on tony Madison Avenue in Manhattan saw its shelves emptied. A lucky bride-to-be made off with a lace gown from a shop in the Fordham section of the Bronx. All told, 473 shops in the Bronx and 700 in Brooklyn were attacked, and the rioting led to a billion dollars of damage. Time's next cover story, echoing the words of Mayor Abraham Beame, dubbed the event a "night of terror."

Police, themselves dodging snipers and flying rocks and bottles, made 3,776 arrests-more in a single sweep than ever before in the city and some eight times more than were made during massive riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. Before long, every cell in the city's seventy-three police precincts was full. Some in the NYPD turned instead to just cracking heads, in an egregious exercise of force from a department confronting years of allegations of widespread police brutality. Violence broke out in a jail in the Bronx, while several prisoners escaped in the darkness from Rikers Island, a 413-acre prison island and the city's largest jail. Across the city in lockups, the absence of working lights or air-conditioning was the least of the inmates' problems. Facilities were packed far beyond their capacity; one 29´ x 25´ holding pen was reported to have held thirty-six men. Sweaty bodies pocked with welts from nightsticks and open cuts from glass, all in need of immediate medical attention, were crammed together. Forget debating the wisdom of the city's criminal justice practices; the city had a brewing public health crisis.

Even before the first light bulb went out, though, the city was already on edge. A mysterious serial killer, who came to be known as the "Son of Sam," had been terrorizing the city throughout 1976 and 1977. In April 1977, Jimmy Breslin, a prominent columnist for the New York Daily News, received a handwritten note from the Son of Sam mocking the police and warning the public not to forget one of the shooter's early victims, continuing that "[s]he was a very sweet girl but Sam's a thirsty lad and he won't let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood." Though David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, killed or wounded only eight of New York's seven-million-plus people, his unpredictability and the police's inability to catch him bred fear that a menace could emerge anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

With a serial killer on the loose, the teenager running down the street with a looted television wasn't your biggest problem. The desperate mayor called NYPD leadership, pushing for them to do more. Ed Koch, then the congressman who represented the Village, was more direct and at one point called District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, screaming. "The city's verging on chaos," he railed. "If the cops can't do anything, can't you?"


While the blackout and threat posed by the Son of Sam would soon pass, they remained vivid symbols of two unassailable facts: many New Yorkers...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593833708
• ISBN 13: 9780593833704
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar