Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  Detectives were able to lift a palm print off the letter to Borrelli, a fact that they somehow managed to keep from the media, but they had nothing with which to match it. “Our focus,” remembers Coffey, who had joined the task force, “was catching him in the act.” To that end Omega mapped the popular nightspots in the Bronx and Queens and set up decoy teams in unmarked cars. Often a detective positioned himself beside a long-haired mannequin as his partner hid nearby, or two detectives, one wearing a wig, would pretend to neck. When the Police Department decided these tactics were too dangerous, the task force tried ordering bulletproof cars from the company that manufactured vehicles for the Secret Service.

  Apparently frustrated with the lack of progress, in early June the .44-caliber killer decided to communicate with the city again. This time he borrowed a page from George Metesky, the so-called Mad Bomber who had terrorized New York in the 1950s. Only instead of writing to a newspaper, as the Mad Bomber had done, the .44-caliber killer went straight to the city’s most famous columnist since Walter Winchell, ensuring that the story would dominate the tabloids for months to come.

  It was Jimmy Breslin’s secretary at the Daily News, Ann Marie Caggiano, who first noticed something strange about the letter—namely, the return address:

  Blood and Family

  Darkness and Death

  Absolute Depravity

  .44

  Breslin told his secretary to call the cops. Later that night he stopped by Omega headquarters to ask Deputy Inspector Dowd how to proceed. Dowd asked him to publicize the letter.

  That was not a problem. The front page of the News hinted at its contents for days—NEW NOTE: CAN’T STOP KILLING; .44 KILLER: I AM NOT ASLEEP; COPS: .44 KILLER IS TAUNTING US—all the while promising that the paper’s star columnist would answer the letter on Sunday, June 5. When he did, Breslin urged the killer to turn himself in, “to me, if he trusts me.” He also quoted at length from the letter, which began: “Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into these cracks.”

  In late June the Son of Sam struck again. The victims, Sal Lupo and Judy Placido, again a young couple, had just left Elephas, a popular discotheque in an old stone building in Bayside, Queens. Placido usually wore her long brown hair up, but she’d let it down that night in defiance of a police warning. She and Lupo were smoking cigarettes and talking in his Coupe de Ville when a figure appeared on the passenger side and fired four shots through the window.

  Deputy Inspector Dowd passed Elephas every night on his drive home from Omega headquarters. Spotting the crowds of young men and women waiting outside, he had told his detectives to keep an eye on it. At the time of the attack two Omega officers were parked only a few blocks away. They saw a suspicious-looking man, stocky, carrying a brown paper bag, and were about to question him when word of the shooting came over the radio. They promptly left the man and rushed off to the crime scene.

  In early July, Mayor Beame added more men to the Omega force. The city had only a thousand detectives, down from three thousand before the fiscal crisis, but the pressure to catch the killer was intensifying. Omega now had fifty detectives working the case, with twenty more on standby, and well over one hundred uniformed and undercover officers. Another seven hundred cops volunteered for duty in their off-hours, against the wishes of the police union, which didn’t want anyone working for free until the city had rehired all their laid-off brethren. It was easily the largest manhunt in New York history.

  Rupert Murdoch was stepping up his pursuit of the .44-caliber killer as well. Tired of getting his clock cleaned day in and day out by Breslin and the Daily News, he threw his ace reporter and fellow countryman Steve Dunleavy at the story. Lanky and pasty-faced with a gravity-defying pompadour and an eagle beak profile, the thirty-eight-year-old Dunleavy had come to New York via Fleet Street ten years earlier. He drank vodka-tonics with the rest of New York’s British and Australian journos at Costello’s on the East Side, but Dunleavy was different from the other expatriate hacks whose principal attraction to the city was its late-hour pubs. Aside from his right-wing politics, he was, as Mario Cuomo told The New Yorker’s John Cassidy for a profile many years later, a real New Yorker: “He’s feisty, he’s resilient, he’s self-made, he stands up for what he believes in, and he can even, on occasion, be charming.”

  As of July ’77, Dunleavy had been at the Post for only six months, but he’d already established a reputation. “Steve drank a lot and fucked a lot,” remembers his managing editor, Robert Spitzler. Legend has it that one snowy winter night, after doing quite a bit of the former, he and a Norwegian heiress were engaged in the latter when an approaching snowplow ran over Dunleavy’s foot. He was so busy pumping away that he scarcely noticed. (“I hope it wasn’t his writing foot,” Pete Hamill quipped the next day.)

  Dunleavy went after the Son of Sam story with a similarly single-minded lust. Along the way he produced a few legitimate scoops and yards of grisly, emotionally overwrought copy. What he lacked in police sources, he more than made up for in imagination. One day Dunleavy took a tape of the Jimi Hendrix song “Purple Haze” to an “audio expert” on Madison Avenue who separated and amplified the lyrics. Someone was apparently singing, “Help me, help me, help me, Son of Sam,” in the background. LYRIC MAY YIELD SON OF SAM CLUE, explained the headline.

  The frenzied coverage fanned the growing sense of fear; the growing sense of fear fanned the frenzied coverage. Salons reported a sharp increase in brunettes who wanted their long hair cut above their shoulders. “Parking”—necking in the car—was out of the question. “If a guy asks me to park with him now, I’d be very, very insulted,” one young woman in Queens told a TV reporter in late July. “He should have the respect to know what’s happening and not even ask.”

  By the middle of July the Omega task force was receiving a thousand tips a day. Every hour a thousand more callers couldn’t get through because all twelve hotlines were busy. Women were naming husbands, ex-husbands, and boyfriends as suspects. Leads were categorized as low, medium, or high priority.

  On July 28, the day before the anniversary of the first attack, the News advertised Breslin’s Son of Sam column on its front page. Breslin dedicated the column to the killer on the occasion of “his first deathday” and resurrected the letter the killer had written him almost two months earlier, quoting one especially newsworthy passage: “Tell me Jim, what will you have for July 29 … You must not forget Donna Lauria and you cannot let the people forget her either. She 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.” Breslin couldn’t help wondering: “Is tomorrow night, July 29, so significant to him that he must go out and walk the night streets and find a victim?”

  The Post answered the following day with a page one story headlined GUNMAN SPARKS SON OF SAM CHASE. Not until the penultimate paragraph did the reporter, Steve Dunleavy, alert readers to the fact that the police had already determined that the gunman was definitely not the Son of Sam.

  That night, the Omega task force blanketed the Bronx and Queens in unmarked cars, vans, and taxis. Uniformed and off-duty volunteers were stationed at the on- and off-ramps of bridges to seal off escape routes. Back at Omega headquarters, Dowd studied the large map on the wall and, like a general in his war room, moved his troops around the city.

  The anniversary passed without incident, but the following night the killer struck for the eighth and final time. The victims, a secretary named Stacy Moskowitz and her date, Robert Violante, who had recently applied for a job at Con Edison, both were twenty years old. As the night wound down, the couple left Jasmine’s, a disco in Bay Ridge, and drove to a service road off the Belt Parkway i
n Bensonhurst. They got out of Violante’s Buick Skylark and walked over a small footbridge leading down to the shore. A full moon illuminated the New York Harbor, and the necklace of lights adorning the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge sparkled in the distance. A few minutes later the couple returned to the car. The .44-caliber killer emerged from the bushes of an adjacent playground. Moskowitz was dead in a couple of days. Violante survived, but he lost one eye and most of the use of the other.

  At the time Omega detectives were tailing their twelve best suspects, seven of whom were former cops. All of them were a safe distance from the site of the attack. What’s more, the killer had ventured into a new borough, and the victim was a blonde. To the Post the leap of logic was easy. NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF SAM, blared its August 1 front page. Dunleavy and Breslin both filed “exclusives” with the families of the victims. Breslin’s name had been enough to secure his interview; Dunleavy had followed Mr. and Mrs. Moskowitz into the hospital at 4 a.m., donned a doctor’s smock, and posed as a bereavement counselor. “When I held their hands and hugged Jerry and Neysa Moskowitz,” he wrote, “I was stunned, shattered and angry.” Over the next several days the Post outdid itself, reporting, among other farfetched things, that the Mafia had joined the hunt for the killer and serializing a suspense novel that “prefigured Son of Sam and—some believe—may actually have been read by Son of Sam.”

  For New York, the bad week got worse. On the morning of Wednesday, August 3, as Stacy Moskowitz was being eulogized in a crowded chapel on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, bombs planted by the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN exploded in two midtown Manhattan office buildings. An additional wave of bomb threats quickly followed, and a hundred thousand people were evacuated from more than a dozen buildings.

  The following day, Mayor Beame ordered the rehiring of more than one hundred laid-off cops and doubled the number of officers assigned to the Omega task force. Having just reversed his lifelong opposition to capital punishment, the mayor now called on Governor Carey to reconsider his recent veto of a state death penalty bill. Beame said he was “damned angry” at the “the reign of fear” caused by the blackout looting, the .44-caliber killer’s latest murder, the rash of arson, and the terror bombs of the FALN. The city’s vigilante fury hardly needed the extra fuel. When a man with two revolvers was arrested near the harbor in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, an angry mob surged out of a nearby bar, shouting, “Kill him!”

  “For those who have lived through this mad week in New York there is a shared sense of outrage and impotence,” the Times editorialized on Friday, August 5. “Is New York City, after all, a failed ultraurban experiment in which people eventually crack, social order eventually collapses, and reason ultimately yields to despair?”

  Arriving for roll call that day, New York City police officers watched a three-minute training film detailing the killer’s method of attack. They were instructed to clear people out of the parking lots, service roads, and parks that were usually dotted with young couples; there was scarcely anyone to clear out.

  The nightclubs were equally deserted. In recent weeks discotheques in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx had been reporting an 80 to 90 percent drop in business and were, according to a story on the front page of Billboard magazine in early August, “teetering on the brink of financial disaster.” A number of them, including Elephas and the Enchanted Garden in Queens, had tried adding security and valet parking, but to no avail. The Enchanted Garden, which had been averaging a thousand people a night only a couple of months earlier, was now logging barely over a hundred. (On the anniversary of the killer’s first attack, fewer than a dozen people passed through its doors.) The extra cops who now loitered around outside in hopes of catching the killer only reminded would-be patrons of the danger of going out.

  Like the tidal wave of looting and arson that accompanied the blackout, the .44-caliber killer hysteria had altered New Yorkers’ relationship to their city. The vague sense of unease that washed over city dwellers whenever they found themselves walking along a quiet avenue late at night had been transformed into a real sense of fear. Police sketches even made it possible to visualize its source. This had the peculiar effect of rendering the vast, violent city into a small town. Or perhaps two small towns: the boroughs, where the killer represented a true source of terror, and Manhattan, where he was already becoming a symbol of kitsch, as evidenced by the Son of Sam T-shirts—emblazoned with the police sketch and the words Son of Sam: Get Him Before He Gets You—now being sold on midtown street corners.

  43.

  I would simply say, “You put two more dingers in the center field bleachers, and all of your problems will go away.” That was my constant refrain. “You just keep banging that ball into the seats, and all this will go away.”

  RALPH DESTINO, RECALLING HIS ADVICE TO REGGIE JACKSON DURING THE SUMMER OF 1977

  REGGIE was following his friend Ralph Destino’s advice. Hitting in the number five spot, sometimes lower, Reggie had been averaging an RBI a game for most of July and early August. That is, when his manager wasn’t benching him against left-handers.

  But Reggie’s problems still weren’t going away. On the contrary, they were multiplying. His fielding had not improved, a fact that his teammates were not letting him forget. One mid-July evening in Kansas City, after hustling into the right field corner to retrieve a Hal McRae line drive, Reggie bobbled the ball like a Little Leaguer as McRae raced around the bases for an inside-the-park home run. When Reggie returned to the dugout at the end of the inning, Sparky Lyle told him to get his head out of his ass. “He was speaking for the whole team, and we were both fully aware of that,” Reggie reflected later.

  The fans were no better. In New York, Reggie had been signing autographs after the All-Star Game when a thirteen-year-old kid called him a motherfucker. Reggie chased the kid across the parking lot. Moments later the kid was on the asphalt. Criminal harassment charges were filed. When Phil Pepe called Reggie at home, looking for a comment—JACKSON: I DIDN’T STOMP THE KID, read the back page of the next day’s Daily News—Reggie gave him a good one: “I don’t want to be in New York anymore.” There was also the constant jeering in the Bronx and in ballparks around the country, where Reggie was a convenient symbol of the greed that had overtaken the national pastime. (In Chicago, White Sox fans greeted him with an enormous banner that read: REGGIE: YOU GET PAID WHAT? FOR A .245 AVERAGE?)

  Reggie endured this torture the only way he knew how—publicly. He stuck a “Be Yourself” button above his locker and talked about an escape clause in his contract that would enable him to leave after two years. “Get a good picture of that fucker,” he told one writer, gesturing toward his uniform. “It’s gonna be a collector’s item.” The escape clause didn’t exist. Reggie had no more control over his Yankees’ contract than he did over his deal with Greatest Sports Legends, the syndicated television program that fired him as a host in late July. (“He was arrogant, egotistical, and extremely hard to work with,” said the show’s executive producer.)

  With all the fuss, it was easy to overlook Reggie’s statistical line as it ticked past respectable and toward impressive. Come August 5, he was hitting .291 with eighteen home runs, ten stolen bases, and fifty-eight RBIs, eleven of which were game winners. That night he recorded his nineteenth dinger, a two-run drive to right-center, the three hundredth of his career.

  The Yankees, for their part, were in the tank. After pulling within one game of the Red Sox and Orioles at the end of July, they had proceeded to lose four of their next six. Boston meanwhile was in the middle of an eleven-game run, the club’s longest winning streak in more than twenty-five years.

  Eight days into August, on the heels of a 9-2 drubbing by the Seattle Mariners, the Yankees flew back East a season-high five games out of first with fifty-three left to play. Two of Martin’s starting pitchers, Ed Figueroa and Don Gullett, were coming home via Los Angeles, where they had appointments with an orthopedist to discuss their recurring shoulder problems.


  Martin’s pain was elsewhere. He had a sit-down scheduled with Steinbrenner and Gabe Paul. The word was that Frank Robinson, an old pal of Reggie’s, was going to be replacing him. ‘Just say that Jackson smiled for the first time all year,” responded Reggie when asked to comment on the rumor.

  The meeting took place on August 9. Martin maintained in his 1980 memoir, coauthored by Peter Golenbock, that he had already decided to try Reggie in the number four slot. That was not true. A few nights before the meeting, Martin stumbled into the hotel room of the Post’s Maury Allen and told him that Reggie would never bat cleanup. Golenbock himself corrected the record in his 1994 posthumuous biography of Martin. “Steinbrenner,” wrote Golenbock in Wild, High, and Tight: The Life and Death of Billy Martin, “gave Billy one more chance—bat Reggie fourth or else.”

  And so, on the afternoon of August 10, Reggie found himself penciled into the cleanup slot. He responded with a run-scoring single up the middle against his old Oakland teammate Vida Blue. After the game Martin got in another jab at Reggie—“I can bat Chris Chambliss at any spot in the lineup and he won’t complain”—but the Yankees had a new number four hitter for the remainder of the season.

  44.

  THE first real break in the Son of Sam case came a couple of hours before sunrise on August 1, the morning after the attack on Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, courtesy of Detective John Falotico, a thirty-one-year veteran of the NYPD who had never before worked a murder case. A small, clean-shaven man with bushy white hair, Falotico had only recently been transferred to the tenth homicide zone, which was responsible for all murders in West Brooklyn. For Falotico, who was always grousing about something, the reassignment was one more thing to complain about. But beneath the grumpy exterior was a steady, conscientious detective who was still on the force at fifty-eight, well past retirement age for most officers. He had split with his wife and the Catholic Church years earlier. Aside from his three teenage daughters, everything took a backseat to the job.