If he couldn’t stop disgruntled Yankees from talking, Martin could at least threaten to keep the press out of earshot when they did. Before the first game in Milwaukee on July 12, he called a meeting with the beat reporters to warn them that he was going to bar them—“Not everyone, just certain writers”—from the clubhouse and the team plane and bus if they continued to use “off-the-cuff comments.” The threat was based of course on an assumption that Martin knew to be false: Every one of the quotes that had stoked clubhouse controversy since the spring had been spoken with deliberate and malicious intent. Some of the beat reporters who covered the 1977 Yankees enjoyed the locker room intrigue; others just wanted to get back to writing about baseball. That wasn’t an option.
On July 13, a few hours before darkness descended on New York, Steinbrenner turned up in Milwaukee. He was just in time to watch his team lose a heartbreaker. The Brewers had beaten up on Catfish Hunter, taking a 9-3 lead into the top of the eighth, when the Yankees scored five to pull within one. The tying run, in the person of Reggie Jackson, came up with two outs in the ninth and struck out on three pitches.
Munson and Lou Piniella went out for dinner after the game and talked, inevitably, about the state of the clubhouse. A few drinks later they decided to go have a word with Steinbrenner. It was after midnight by the time Steinbrenner came to the door in his pajamas and invited them in. Munson told him either to fire Martin or to get off his back: “Nobody can live with the kind of pressure you’re putting on him.” Piniella also defended his manager, urging Steinbrenner to strike the clauses in his contract that kept him on permanent parole.
At about two in the morning Martin came tottering upstairs. He had just closed the hotel bar, but he wasn’t too loaded to recognize the voices in the owner’s suite. Martin knocked.
“Do you have a couple of my players in there?” he asked.
“No,” Steinbrenner answered, opening the door a crack.
Martin barged in and started looking around. Huddling together in the bathroom were Munson and Piniella, who somehow managed to reassure Martin that they weren’t plotting against him.
This time, at least, the story didn’t make the papers—not then anyway. (In a couple of weeks Steinbrenner told a reporter about it off the record. In his version, Munson and Piniella had urged him to take a stronger hand to the team’s troubles.)
A few days later the forty-eighth All-Star game brought a badly needed respite, both for Billy Martin, who showed up late to the pregame press conference and never removed his sunglasses, and for New York. “For this night,” wrote Maury Allen in the Post, “blackouts and brownouts will be forgotten, looting will not be a topic of conversation and the oppressive heat will be ignored.”
The regular season resumed in 104-degree heat in the Bronx on Thursday, July 21, with a twin bill against Milwaukee. The Yankees came thundering out of the gate. Catfish Hunter blanked the Brewers in the afternoon affair, and Ed Figueroa took a 4-0 lead into the ninth inning of the night game. That’s when the wheels came off. Three errors later the score was tied. The Brewers won it in the tenth. Still reeling come Friday, the Yankees lost again.
By the time Martin arrived at the ballpark Saturday morning, the heat wave had finally broken, but he was experiencing no relief. Reports of his imminent dismissal were again swirling, and this time Steinbrenner made sure he was unavailable to deny them. Martin’s friend Phil Rizzuto suggested that he request a meeting with the front office to ask about the rumors. Martin said he’d made that mistake before, in Texas. “I called Brad Corbett and said, ‘What about these rumors?’ He said, ‘They aren’t rumors.’” Neither were these. Earlier that morning Gabe Paul had interviewed Martin’s third base coach, Dick Howser, for the job and had alerted Howard Cosell to stand by for a big story.
After a sleepless Saturday night at his apartment in Jersey, Martin waited for the fateful call. Sunday’s Daily News carried a report that Howser had turned down the job but that “Yankee bosses are hot on the phone looking for a new man.” Martin drove to the ballpark and sat in his office, drinking coffee and smoking a cigar beneath his mounted bonefish long past the time he usually changed into his uniform. With nothing left to lose, he told the newspapermen that he’d seen the handwriting on the clubhouse wall way back in Fort Lauderdale, when Steinbrenner stormed into the locker room after a game to berate him in front of his players, and Martin yelled at him to get the hell out of his locker room. “What all of this is doing,” Martin said, “is making a martyr out of me.”
The next day, Monday, July 25, it was Steinbrenner who summoned the newspapermen to a ninety-minute meeting around the polished wood table in his Yankee Stadium office. Martin was still his manager—by now Walter Alston, the erstwhile manager of the Dodgers, had also turned down the job—but Steinbrenner wasn’t planning to issue a vote of confidence. “When is somebody going to have enough intelligence to say … maybe the guy’s in the wrong profession?” he said. Later Steinbrenner produced a list of seven qualifications, which the newspapermen promptly named “the Seven Commandments,” that he expected Martin to meet if he wanted to hang on to his job. Two stood out: “Is he emotionally equipped to lead the men under him?” and “Is he honorable?”
Steinbrenner hardly needed to be reminded of Martin’s popularity in New York, but one of the writers did so anyway. “He’s the little man and the people can identify with him,” Steinbrenner acknowledged. “But … New York’s a pretty sophisticated, astute place, and there comes a time when even the fans wake up.”
The only thing that New York’s fans were waking up to was a deep and abiding hatred of George Steinbrenner. After all, who was a man found guilty of making illegal donations to the Nixon campaign, a man whose company was being investigated by the Justice Department for fraudulent billing practices, to tell Billy Martin about honor? New York magazine, still an unfailing gauge of the city’s temper, captured the consensus in an article headlined GEORGE STEINBRENNER, GO HOME! (Among other things, its author, Jeff Greenfield, observed: “Billy Martin was helping the Yankees win titles when Steinbrenner was dreaming of his first leisure suit.”)
On Tuesday, July 26, the Seven Commandments were all over the papers. The first-place Orioles were in town for a three-game set, and it was no secret that if the Yankees didn’t take at least two, it was Billy Martin who would be going home.
When the Yankees’ skipper emerged from the dugout with his lineup card that night, 32,097 fans stood and whistled encouragement. Martin tipped his cap once, twice, three times.
The din died shortly thereafter, when the O’s took a quick lead in the top half of the first on a single by Martin’s old nemesis Elliott Maddox. Come the home half of the ninth, Baltimore was clinging to a 4–2 lead. With one on and one out, the Yankees’ Cliff Johnson lumbered to the plate and hammered the second pitch he saw into the seats to square things at four. Reggie finished it off in the tenth, admiring his 420-foot line drive as it dropped from the sky into the fifteenth row of the bleachers.
The next night, July 27, the fans were roaring again, and the first pitch was more than an hour away. Steinbrenner, who was sitting in his office with a reporter from Newsweek, went to the window to see what all the fuss was about. It was Martin playing a little pregame pepper. “He hasn’t had a bat in his hand on the field in six weeks, but after he got an ovation last night, he needs to milk the fans for more,” Steinbrenner snarled. “The sad thing is that it means so much to him, and he has no idea how shallow it really is.”
On July 28 the O’s took game two of the series, roughing up Yankees’ ace Catfish Hunter in a manner that had become all too familiar. The stage was set. “Yeah, this is a big game,” Munson said in the clubhouse before the rubber match the following afternoon. “But do we win this one for Billy, George or the team? I haven’t quite got straight yet which one comes first.”
The Yankees proceeded to pummel the Birds, 14–2, on fifteen hits. Reggie watched the feast from the dugout. According
to his manager, he had hyperextended his left elbow during a recent collision with Mickey Rivers. No one remembered the collision, and in any case wouldn’t he have hurt his right elbow if he had run into the team’s center fielder? “Everybody knows that when you get hit on the right elbow, it’s the left elbow that gets hurt,” Reggie answered when questioned about the discrepancy.
42.
STORES were still tallying up their blackout losses, looters were still being sentenced, and New Yorkers were still living with the daily anxiety that the underclass might rise up again when the tabloids gave the fragile city another reason to be afraid of the dark.
For the past twelve months a serial killer, New York’s first since the 1930s, had been preying on young women (chiefly brunettes) in the outer boroughs (chiefly Queens). Since July 29, 1976, when he first attacked two young women on a residential street in a working-class Italian neighborhood in the North Bronx, the so-called Son of Sam had killed five and injured six.
The approaching anniversary of his first attack prompted a flood of stories across the country—even public television’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report devoted an entire show to the manhunt—but nothing compared with the frenzied coverage in the city’s warring tabloids. For the News and the Post, anything Sam-related was newsworthy. Reporters visited the families of all the victims (“A Year Can’t Erase Their Grief”), endlessly rehearsed the facts of the case, covered the nonexistent progress of the investigation, and wrote up a steady stream of psychological profiles based on interviews with so-called “expert psychiatrists.”
Until recently the city’s sense of fear had been building slowly. The Bronx detectives charged with investigating the first attack initially suspected an ex-boyfriend who had recently moved out west. In a city that averaged fifteen hundred homicides a year, the vast majority of which were committed by acquaintances of the victims, there was no reason to assume this one was any different, at least until they questioned the suspect and test-fired a .44-caliber gun that had been purchased in his New Mexico neighborhood. The bullets didn’t match.
On October 23 there was another attack, this time on a young couple sitting in a blue Volkswagen Beetle on a quiet block in Flushing, Queens. A month later it was two teenage girls in Floral Park, Queens, a virtually crime-free working-class Italian neighborhood. The girls were chatting late at night on the steps of a white frame house when a man in an army fatigue jacket approached asking for directions. Before they could answer, he pulled a gun from his waistband. Neighbors heard nothing but the crack of the pistol and the subsequent screams. The Long Island Press, the only paper that covered the attack, quoted a Queens detective on the shooting: “This is not something that usually occurs out here. It may never happen again.”
Two months later, on a bitterly cold Saturday night in late January, it did. The victims were sitting in a Pontiac Firebird in Forest Hills, Queens, waiting for the engine to warm up. Captain Joseph Borrelli, the head of homicide for Queens, arrived at the crime scene and noticed a .44-caliber slug sitting on the dashboard. One of the sergeants recalled that there had been a couple of unsolved .44-caliber shootings in Queens in recent months, plus the one over the summer in the Bronx.
The following day Borrelli brought the detectives on these various cases together for a private meeting in his Queens office. The similarities were hard to ignore. Not only had all the victims been young women or couples in the outer boroughs, but the weapon used in every attack, a .44-caliber Charter Arms revolver, was an unusual one. (It had been designed for sky marshals several years earlier in the wake of a rash of hijackings; because of the gun’s low muzzle velocity, bullets fired from it wouldn’t puncture the fuselage of an aircraft.) Still, Borrelli told everyone present to keep mum until they were certain. Someone apparently didn’t. A few days later, the Long Island Press published a brief story reporting that police were considering the possibility that these attacks were linked.
Conclusive proof came when the killer struck again in Forest Hills in early March. The victim, a Columbia student named Virginia Voskerichian, was walking home from the subway shortly after sunset. As she turned onto Dartmouth, the dimly lit street that marks the start of Forest Hills Gardens, an upscale enclave of Tudor-style homes, a man with a gun jumped in front of her. Voskerichian lifted her textbooks to her face. The killer put his gun against them and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet was extracted from Voskerichian’s head the next morning and placed under a microscope at the Police Academy on Twentieth Street in Manhattan. Joseph Coffey, a Queens homicide detective, was on the Columbia campus interviewing Voskerichian’s acquaintances when a ballistics expert at the academy beeped him to say he’d matched the grooves on the Voskerichian bullet with the lines on the fragments from the other slugs.
The next afternoon, March 10, reporters packed into the 112th Precinct station house in Forest Hills for a news conference. With Mayor Beame standing beside him, Police Commissioner Codd made the announcement: The bullets that killed Voskerichian, Freund, and Lauria and that wounded DiMasi, Lomino, and Denaro all had been issued from the same .44-caliber revolver. “Be careful,” Codd warned, “especially the young women.”
In the weeks that followed, the side streets of Forest Hills were deserted by dusk. “I’m scared to death,” a female student at City College told the Long Island Press. A neighborhood vigilante group was formed to patrol the neighborhood. Five hundred residents crowded into a public school auditorium to air their fears and demand more police protection.
The rest of March passed without incident, as did the first two weeks of April. Then, on April 17, the .44-caliber killer returned to the North Bronx. The victims were parked in a Mercury Montego on a dark service road off the Hutchinson River Parkway. When the detectives pulled their bodies out of the car, an envelope addressed to Captain Borrelli fell to the ground. Inside was a four-page letter, handwritten in slanted block letters. The NYPD refused to make its contents public, but the Daily News learned enough for a front-page story the following day: KILLER TO COPS: “I’LL DO IT AGAIN.” (The actual wording in the letter was “I’ll be back!”) The News’s police source told the paper that the letter writer lived in “a nightmare world of blood-sucking vampires and Frankenstein monsters” and that he had “indicated his belief that homicide officers don’t know what they’re doing.”
Days later the Police Department created a central unit, Operation Omega, to coordinate the investigation. Thirty detectives were to be posted to the new division. A few of the city’s best men refused to go. They were sure the police would never catch the killer and worried that the assignment would damage their careers. Many of those who did join Omega were in their early forties, lived in one of the outer boroughs, and had teenage daughters.
Deputy Inspector Timothy Dowd, a sixty-one-year-old Irish-American with neatly combed gray hair and steely blue eyes, was placed in charge. Though he had some major homicide cases under his belt, Dowd was considered bookish by police standards. He had studied Latin and literature at City College, and he was famous for kicking ungrammatical arrest reports back to his men, a habit that had earned him the nickname Captain Comma.
Dowd’s new task force was based on the second floor of the 109th Precinct, a modern brick building not far from Shea Stadium in Flushing. It was a sleepy station house chosen precisely because of its remote location. The walls of the office were soon covered with pictures from the various crime scenes; detailed maps of the Bronx and Queens showing the times, dates, and places of the shootings; two composite sketches of the suspect; and glossy photos of a black revolver with a brown handle, a .44-caliber Charter Arms Bulldog.
Leads were scarce, and the task force had no choice but to try everything. Psycholinguists studied the handwriting of the letter to Captain Borrelli, while psychiatrists studied its contents. The ensuing psychological profiles—the killer is a paranoid schizophrenic, a loner who lives in a cheap furnished room, who feels rejected by women and may even consider
himself possessed—didn’t help investigators much, but when leaked to the press, they immediately enhanced the suspect’s aura of mystery and stoked the city’s sense of fear.
Detectives tracked down and test-fired each of the 56 Charter Arms Bulldogs registered in the New York area by shooting a bullet into a large tank of water, where nothing could obscure the markings left by the barrel of the gun. When that yielded nothing, they set about trying to locate every one of the 28,000 Bulldogs manufactured since 1972, an effort hindered by the fact that 677 of these guns had been reported stolen. Detectives pored over the medical records of local mental hospitals, exhaustively researched the various victims in hopes of finding any connection, and followed up on hundreds of tips called into a .44-caliber hotline.
Borrelli brought a psychic to the scenes of the various crimes. Dowd read tracts on demonic possession and even studied the Bible, looking for clues. Astrologists were brought out to Omega headquarters to match the strange symbols adorning the letter to Borrelli with the movement of the stars. In that letter the killer had claimed to be directed by a father figure named Sam. He was Sam’s son, the Son of Sam. (Hence the Daily News’s nickname for him.) But what did that mean? Was he a Vietnam veteran, a son of Uncle Sam? Was Sam somehow a reference to Satan? Was it short for Samson, a reference to his affinity for women with long hair? Or to Sam Colt, the inventor of the revolver he used? Several survivors remembered seeing their attacker fire his weapon with both hands, the combat stance taught in New York’s Police Academy. Could the killer be a laid-off cop? Police suspects were placed in a separate file that quickly grew to three hundred men.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 26
