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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Within an hour of the shooting, Falotico was at the crime scene, interviewing a man who said he saw the attack in the rearview mirror of his car. Falotico brought the witness, Tommy Zaino, back to the scene the following afternoon to test the consistency of his recollections. Zaino provided the most detailed description of the killer to date.

  According to protocol, as the lead detective on the Moskowitz case, Falotico should have been absorbed into the Omega task force the moment the link to the Son of Sam was established, but he wanted to stay put in Coney Island, where the tenth homicide zone was located. Deputy Inspector Dowd and Captain Borrelli reluctantly agreed, but they wanted Falotico to work with a more experienced homicide detective, Ed Zigo.

  Falotico knew this area of Bensonhurst well from his years in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where he’d investigated the Columbo crime family, which kept a real estate office nearby. He spent his first two days on the case, a Sunday and Monday, scribbling down license plate numbers, ringing doorbells, and passing out his card to local residents. On Tuesday night a woman called the station house looking for him. He had given her his card a few blocks from the scene of the murder.

  Falotico was tied up with Zaino and a police artist, trying to complete a new sketch of the killer, so another detective, Joseph Strano, a tall, strapping man with wavy brown hair and thick sideburns, took the call. The woman explained that her friend Cacilia Davis had been out walking her dog, a fluffy white terrier named Snowball, at the time of the latest attack. Davis, the woman told Strano, was almost positive that she’d seen the killer up close.

  It took a few days of coaxing, but Davis eventually agreed to meet with Strano and his partner, Joe Smith. The man, she told the two detectives, had emerged from behind a tree. He was wearing a jacket and walked with his right arm straight down, as though he were hiding something up his sleeve. Strano asked if she had seen anyone else there. She said no. The detectives continued to press her. Davis eventually recalled seeing cops ticketing cars.

  Hoping to find another eyewitness, Strano and Smith checked with the local precinct, but no corresponding tickets had been issued. They went back to Davis and asked her if she was sure. She was. Strano and Smith tracked down the young officer who’d been assigned to patrol the area that night. The officer insisted that he hadn’t written any tickets. Either Davis was wrong, or in all the excitement this young cop had failed to hand in his summonses and was now trying to cover it up. The next day Strano and Smith had another detective call the officer to assure him that if he’d forgotten to submit them, it was an understandable mistake, one for which he wouldn’t be punished. The young cop’s tickets soon materialized.

  Another detective in the tenth homicide zone, James Justus, followed up on the tickets. One for thirty-five dollars had been issued to David Berkowitz of 35 Pine Street in Yonkers, who had parked his cream-colored Ford Galaxy sedan too close to a fire hydrant. Justus tried calling him several times, but there was no answer.

  On the evening of August 9 the NYPD saturated the city with new WANTED posters describing a man with a “good, athletic build,” a “sensuous mouth,” and “dark, almond-shaped eyes.” That same night Justus put in a call to the Yonkers Police Department in the hope that it might be able to help him track down Berkowitz, who he hoped might be a witness. Justus identified himself to the switchboard operator and explained why he was calling. “When the name David Berkowitz was mentioned,” Justus later wrote in his report, “she got very excited and asked if he lived at 35 Pine Street.” The operator told Justus that her backyard faced Berkowitz’s building, and that he had sent the sheriff threatening letters in the past. She insisted Justus speak with her father, Sam Carr.

  “A short time later the father, Mr. Sam Carr, called the undersigned,” Justus’s report continued. “He stated that … he saw who he believed to be Berkowitz shoot his dog and further stated that there were four shots fired and one hit the dog. And another was found and is in the Yonkers property clerks at this time … The bullet is described as a large led [sic] slug with brass or copper jacket. Mr. Carr further stated that the subject lives alone and he had never observed him with a woman and stated that he has a small yellow Ford. He describes him as follows: M/W/24/5 feet 10 inches/165 pounds/long brown hair/thin face with high cheekbones … Mr. Carr stated that there are two police officers with the Yonkers P.D. that have further information on Berkowitz and they are P.O.s Chamberlin and Intervallo.”

  Justus called Officer Chamberlin. The report recounts their conversation: “He [Chamberlin] saw the composite in the New York Post and he stated that Berkowitz bears a striking resemblance to the sketch. He further stated that their department did a psychological profile on him and that he is disturbed.”

  The following afternoon William Gardella, the sergeant for the tenth homicide zone; Falotico; and another detective from the tenth by the name of Charlie Higgins made their way toward the Pine Hill Towers in Yonkers, a bleak city of boarded-up red-brick factory buildings that marked the beginning of Westchester County.

  They were not the first to arrive at Berkowitz’s building. Falotico’s partner, Ed Zigo, and another detective had heard what was going on and quickly drove up to Yonkers on their own. Zigo didn’t have a search warrant, but that hadn’t stopped him from entering the Ford Galaxy, which was parked nearby. In the backseat was an army duffel containing a rifle, a toothbrush, and a pair of dirty Jockey shorts. In the glove compartment was a letter addressed to the Suffolk County Police Department promising an attack at a disco in the Hamptons. Zigo’s hands shook as he read the note.

  Falotico’s group arrived on Pine Street, and Sergeant Gardella sent Zigo out for a search warrant. Falotico and Gardella stayed behind. More and more officers and detectives appeared as the afternoon turned to evening. Residents started monitoring the scene from their windows. At one point a passenger van pulled up near Berkowitz’s car. Falotico asked him to park as close to the Galaxy as he could. In case Berkowitz managed to get to his car, Falotico wanted to make it harder for him to flee.

  As officers continued to assemble outside, Berkowitz remained upstairs in apartment 7E, a $238-a-month studio with pornographic magazines strewn about the floor, a box spring sitting on a shag rug, and manic red scribblings covering the walls. (“My neighbors I have no respect for And I treat them like shit. Sincerely, Williams.”) Dirty sheets hung over the windows, obscuring what would otherwise have been an uninterrupted view of the Hudson.

  At ten-thirty that night Berkowitz finally emerged from the building in frayed jeans, tennis sneakers, and a wrinkled light blue sport shirt over a white undershirt. Falotico saw him walking casually down the hill toward his Galaxy. The detective moved briskly to the car, his gun drawn, as Berkowitz started the engine. Falotico put his pistol against the window and ordered him to cut the ignition and step out of the car. Resting against Berkowitz’s thigh was a brown paper bag with something resembling an apple turnover inside. Falotico recognized the shape immediately; in the summer, when it was too hot to wear a jacket, he himself often carried his gun in just such a brown paper bag. It had to be the .44.

  Their exchange was brief.

  “You got me,” said Berkowitz.

  “Who are you?” Falotico asked, his heart pounding.

  “You know met.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m the Son of Sam.”

  “I looked at him, and he had that Mona Lisa smile,” Falotico recalls. “I drew him out of the car, and he was still smiling at me. Nobody with a gun facing his nose would stand there and smile.”

  45.

  THE convoy of police vehicles arrived at Centre Street at around one the following morning. The plaza was already choked with reporters, camera crews, and cops. Roone Arledge, the head of ABC News, was on the scene, personally directing his network’s coverage with a walkie-talkie.

  Falotico, Gardella, and Zigo, who was still fuming about having been tied up with paperwork when the suspec
t was collared, hustled Berkowitz through the sea of flashing bulbs. New York got its first glimpse of the man who’d been terrorizing it for more than a year. He was about five feet eight and pudgy, with thick black hair and bushy sideburns. His small belly drooped over his snug belt. His mouth was slightly open, and he smiled wanly.

  It was perhaps inevitable that when the .44-caliber killer became a man, not a nameless, faceless demon, he wouldn’t square with the city’s image of him. But even discounting for inflation, this twenty-four-year-old postal clerk was a pathetic-looking character. Detective Coffey, the first to interview him, says it was like “talking to a head of cabbage. I walked into the conference room in a rage,” Coffey recalls, “but I wound up feeling sorry for the guy.”

  Mayor Beame, who had been awakened in Gracie Mansion minutes after the arrest, was waiting upstairs for Berkowitz to enter the building. When he did, the mayor rushed down to congratulate the arresting officer. Mistaking Berkowitz for a detective, Beame moved toward the killer and tried to shake his manacled hands. “The photo op from hell,” as the mayor’s press secretary, Sid Frigand, later described it.

  At 1:40 a.m., Beame entered the packed press room at police headquarters: “I am very pleased to announce that the people of the City of New York can rest easy tonight because police have captured a man they believe to be Son of Sam.”

  The arrest was page one news across the country and overseas as well. London’s Daily Express gave it bigger play than Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Northern Ireland. Izvestiya, the official organ of the Soviet government, noted in its coverage that mass murder was not uncommon in capitalist cities with such high rates of crime and mental illness. In America, a new joke made the rounds: “New York is a place where you can get away with murder—unless you’re parked near a fire hydrant.”

  Murdoch’s Post ran its banner headline—CAUGHT!—in red. Inside were sixteen stories and thirty-six photographs, as well as the first in a series of installments from another gory crime novel “that might have inspired” the killer. The paper sold more than a million copies, nearly twice its average daily circulation, prompting a proud follow-up story the next day: “Kids who usually bought comic books bought The Post and tourists snapped up souvenir copies to take back home.” The News also opted for saturation coverage, including a Breslin column headlined A DOG TOLD HIM TO KILL; it sold 2.5 million copies, 600,000 more than usual. All the local TV stations ran lengthy special reports. There were endless interviews with the families of the victims, psychiatrists, and men and women on the street. Dunleavy paid a visit to John Diel, the bartender boyfriend of the killer’s fourth victim, for his reaction. “I wanna feel the guy’s blood,” said Diel. “I wanna put my hands around his throat … and I want him to know he would be dying by my hands.”

  When Berkowitz was arraigned in Brooklyn’s Central Courts Building, the mob outside chanted, “Death to Sam,” and, “Kill! Kill!” Five young men, friends of one of the victims, were arrested as they tried to enter Kings County Hospital, where Berkowitz was being held. Stanley Siegel, the host of New York’s most popular morning news show, compared the bloodthirsty atmosphere in New York with that in Dallas in November 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended.

  In the days following the arrest, the appetite for Son of Sam stories was heartier than ever. Four journalists were arrested for breaking into Berkowitz’s Yonkers apartment. Not surprisingly, two were from the New York tabs, but the third was from Time magazine, and the fourth from The Washington Post.

  A portrait of Berkowitz quickly came into focus. He had been adopted and raised by a childless Jewish couple, Nathan and Pearl, in the Bronx. He graduated from high school and logged one year at Bronx Community College, as well as several months as an auxiliary police officer, before joining the army, where he learned to handle an M-16 rifle and experimented with hallucinogens. (“Paunchy postal worker David Richard Berkowitz took a series of mind-bending LSD trips while a soldier in Korea and returned to the Bronx … destined to terrorize the city,” the News reported.)

  After a stint with an infantry division in South Korea, Berkowitz finished out his tour in Fort Knox. While he was stationed in Kentucky, he attended a church with an army buddy and became a fervent Baptist overnight. Berkowitz stood out among his fellow Bible thumpers. “Anytime a Jewish person comes forward to take a stand in a Baptist church, it’s a little special,” his pastor told the Louisville Courier-Journal. Berkowitz moved back to New York after his discharge in 1974. By the time he quit his job as a private security guard to pursue a career in civil service, he had already struck twice. And that was before he’d met Sam Carr’s black Labrador, who, according to Berkowitz, had conveyed the message from Carr—“the devil”—to kill.

  Murdoch’s Post sank to a new low in the wake of the arrest, publishing a series of letters that Berkowitz had written to an old girlfriend. The headline read, HOW I BECAME A MASS KILLER. (The byline, naturally, belonged to David Berkowitz.) But the paper also hit a new high with a grainy front-page photo of Berkowitz lying on a cot in a mental ward beneath the banner headline SAM SLEEPS.

  It was, in a sense, the perfect postscript to the .44-caliber killer’s reign of terror. The headline writer was alluding to Berkowitz’s oft-quoted letter to Breslin, in which he’d warned: “Don’t think that because you haven’t heard from me for a while that I went to sleep.” But with those two words, the Post had done much more. In an essay a few years later in Harper’s magazine, Ron Rosenbaum captured the headline’s tabloid genius: “How do we know that any of us ordinary citizens—looking just as ordinary on the surface as Sam there—might not be harboring a Sam sleeping within us. SAM SLEEPS might be the single most grim and poetic summation of the horror of the whole case.”

  The opinion shapers of the time were less generous, to both the Post and the New York media in general. In addition to citywide hysteria, the Son of Sam had touched off a heated debate about the coverage of the case. Now that Sam was sleeping, the hand wringing could begin.

  The New Yorker had fired the opening salvo in its August 15 issue, which hit newsstands a few hours before Berkowitz was arrested. By transforming the .44-caliber killer into a celebrity, the magazine charged in an unsigned “Comment,” the tabloids hadn’t simply made a bad situation worse for New York; they had encouraged, perhaps even driven, Sam to strike again.

  Breslin answered the charge himself and leveled one of his own, that of elitism. The New Yorker was, Breslin hastened to point out, a magazine whose blackout coverage featured a full page on fashion maven Diana Vreeland’s candlelit dinner in Greenwich Village. “In the world of the New Yorker writer, one sits in the Algonquin lobby and sips daiquiris while discussing such as the Herb Society of America and the Third Annual Great Connecticut River Raft Race,” Breslin wrote. “When you go into the Algonquin these nights, here is everybody sitting around and talking about this Son of Sam story and these grubby people on tabloids—tabloids!—who receive letters from killers. Letters they reveal to the public! God, isn’t there one of us left to maintain some taste?”

  The New Yorker’s case was, at least in part, vindicated by the discovery among Berkowitz’s meager possessions of a thick scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the .44-caliber killer. The killer had already professed to be a fan of Breslin’s in his letter to the columnist. (Apparently, Berkowitz enjoyed the Post too. HE ASKS TO SEE THE POST, read a Post headline a couple of days after the arrest.) It was also true that in its heaps of stories on Berkowitz, neither of the tabloids allowed for the possibility, minute though it might have been, that he was actually innocent. Still, as Thomas Powers, in a rare voice of dissent, wrote in Commonweal magazine in September ‘77: “Criticizing the tabloids for their all-out pursuit of Sam is a bit like criticizing the lion for gorging upon the lamb. It neglects the nature of the beast.”

  In the end the mounting backlash had less to do with concerns about prejudicing potential jurors—after all, Berkowitz had already done that wit
h his epistolary rantings—and more to do with a distaste for the sensationalism that tabloids trafficked in. Rupert Murdoch had made his mark. Not since the days of Hearst, Pulitzer, and the Daily Mirror had New York’s newspapers pandered so shamelessly to the city’s id. Yet in his own hamfisted, irresponsible way, Murdoch deserved at least a little credit for reminding New Yorkers that reading the newspaper, like living in the city, was an emotional experience.

  46.

  THE candidate’s bald head glistened with small beads of sweat as he stood before the growing crowd of weary Staten Islanders at the Battery Park ferry terminal at the end of a long workday in August.

  “All those who thought we should have called in the National Guard during the blackout, raise your hand!” the candidate bellowed through his battery-powered bullhorn, thrusting his own right hand in the air.

  “All those who are in favor of capital punishment, raise your hand!” Again, the candidate’s right hand shot straight up.

  The doors on the opposite side of the terminal flung open, and the crowd spun around and began surging toward the arriving ferry. But the candidate was not done yet. “Society has the right to express its moral outrage,” he barked at the departing masses.

  The candidate, Edward Irving Koch, had surely been expressing his. While Beame was busy campaigning against Con Edison in the weeks following the blackout, Koch had been calling for Police Commissioner Codd’s head and demanding to know why the mayor hadn’t summoned the National Guard, not to help New Yorkers manage without power but to intimidate the looters. It was a genuinely bad idea: Even the law-and-order Daily News recognized that bringing in the Guard would have caused even more violence. Still, there was no denying its emotional appeal to the ravaged city. “There is naked fear here,” wrote Evans and Novak on August 4, “that the looters may reassert their impunity some ordinary evening at sunset without waiting for a power blackout.”