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This week, a former Proud Boy leader was sentenced to 22 years for his role in the Capitol riot. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories that the FBI planned the January 6th Fed-surrection live on. Because there are these tiny little kernels of truth, which is, yes, there were some informants in the crowd that day. That's all you need for it to keep having life. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Michael Olinger. Some
40 years ago, four black teens approached a white man on the subway. One asked for money, the man pulled out a gun, and shot them. And he promptly became a hero? Gets turned down a $50,000 bail check supposedly from a private citizen.
A spray-painted mural appeared alongside the FDR drive. Power to the vigilante, it said. New York loves ya. A person has a right to defend himself against one or ten. Who gets to be a vigilante? You're someone who takes the law into your own hands. Sometimes that's called crime, and other times it's called heroism. It's all coming up after this.
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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. More than 1,100 people have now been charged in connection with the insurrection on January 6th.
This week saw the longest sentence yet. So today some history was made. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman and face of the Proud Boys starting in 2018, was not in D.C. on the day. Though prosecutors convinced the jury and judge that his penalties should be commensurate with the role his group played,
under his command, played in leading the breach on the Capitol. Last week, two of his co-defendants and fellow Proud Boys saw similar fates: 18 years for Ethan Nordean and 10 years for Dominic Pizzola. Today, in front of Judge Kelly, Pizzola expressed remorse, calling his actions "the worst, most regrettable decision in his life."
He was also seen wiping away tears while his wife and mother spoke to the court, pleading for mercy on his behalf. But after the judge announced the 10-year sentence, as he's being led out of the courtroom, Pozzola turned to the gallery, raised a fist, and shouted, quote, Trump won. These theatrics struck me as a worthy illustration for where the January 6th trials, commissions, and reports have landed us. Reams of clear evidence and facts have been parsed and justice served, but
But the conspiracy theories brandished by Donald Trump supporters live on, including the false belief that the Capitol riot was instigated or provoked by the government. I was at the Capitol on January 6th. I kind of saw this play out a little bit in real time while it was happening. Tess Owen is a senior reporter at Vice News where she covers extremism and political violence. She said that after the riot, there were several attempts by the participants to shift the blame for what happened.
before they landed on one that stuck. This idea that the mob were just Antifa posing as Trump supporters didn't really stick. And so the MAGA movement, people on the hard right, turned to an old reliable conspiracy, which is the false flag. A centuries-old term that's often invoked by modern-day conspiracy theorists in the aftermath of a disaster or a shooting to claim that this event was actually orchestrated by governments to somehow increase their control over society.
And so this narrative began brewing online that suggested that perhaps undercover federal agents in the crowd prodded law-abiding Trump supporters into criminal activity with the ultimate goal of smearing the MAGA movement. And this is what became known as the Fed's Direction Conspiracy.
And much of the so-called evidence for the Fed's direction conspiracy theory was amplified and sort of synthesized by a right-wing website called Revolver News, and specifically from a writer for that website who was a former Trump speechwriter. He ended up speaking extensively in an influential 2021 documentary called Patriot Purge made by Tucker Carlson for Fox News, which claimed just that, that January 6th was an inside job.
In the film, they refer repeatedly to a man named Ray Epps, who became basically the face of the Fed's erection conspiracy theory. A video surfaced showing this guy saying, we have to go to the Capitol. Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Peaceful and fair.
This is on January 5th, right? Yes, exactly. The day before. And this guy turned out to be Ray Epps. And he was so insistent that online conspiracists thought he had to be some sort of fed and was planting the seed of the insurrection one day earlier. We've heard prominent Republican lawmakers refer to Ray Epps. We've even heard former President Donald Trump say, like, what about this guy, Epps? His name has become shorthand for...
for a murky plot. The Select Committee said in, I think, January 2022 that they'd investigated him and they can confirm, no, he was not involved in any undercover law enforcement investigations. The head of the FBI repeatedly rejected this idea that the FBI were involved in January 6th, calling it ludicrous.
And Ray Epps, this guy from Arizona, has had his life turned completely upside down by being called the smoking gun of the entire Fed's direction, which is what Darren Beatty, Donald Trump's former speechwriter, said in that Revolver article. Returning to Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, his connection to the Fed's direction conspiracy theory, I think, goes back to this blockbuster report from Reuters that
that revealed that he had been a, quote, prolific informant for local and federal law enforcement after he was arrested in 2012. According to that Reuters article, he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling, and human smuggling. Now, that seems to be true. So when that article came out, it sort of
sent some shockwaves through the Proud Boys. You know, they were sort of reeling at the revelations that their leader, you know, their guy was potentially a rat. It caused a lot of division in the Proud Boys. It also earned him the nickname Federica. Sweet.
which is quite a good nickname, actually. But Tarrio was already a bit of a divisive character. You know, Gavin McGuinness, the founder of Proud Boys, also the founder of Vice, you know, he made it pretty clear that he was not particularly a fan of Tarrio. So there'd have been some Tarrio loyalists who were like, no, that was a long time ago. Others said, you know, this completely makes sense. And so this has simmered ever since then, that Tarrio is somehow a federal informant.
In the trial, did we hear any evidence that he had been working with the federal government as an informant in anything related to January 6th? Or was his role as an informant something that ended prior to the insurrection? There was no evidence that surfaced during the trial that he was working with the federal government. One thing that did come up was his quite cozy relationship with a D.C. police lieutenant who Tarrio and...
Him was share information ahead of different rallies or events in D.C. But otherwise, there was no evidence that Tarrio was informing or in bed with the federal government. However, there were a number of federal informants who were among the Proud Boys on January 6th. And the defense called those informants because they thought they would have exculpatory evidence to show that there was no actual plot on January 6th.
So they were called not to promote the idea of a Fed's erection, but because they thought that they would show that, you know, that the Proud Boys were just acting spontaneously that day. The mere fact that there were informants became a big part of the counter messaging from Republican lawmakers. Every chance they had to question FBI officials in public over the past couple of years, they kind of got into this song and dance.
Ted Cruz last year questioned a federal agent. Did any FBI agents or FBI informants actively encourage and incite crimes of violence on January 6th? Sorry, I can't answer that. Ms. Sadburn?
Who is Ray Epps? There is no credible evidence that the federal government or federal agents provoked or instigated the events that took place that day. You don't seem to think that the evidence against Fed's direction that we've seen is really going to take root with its believers. Why not? Well, partly, I think, because people who are supposedly trustworthy sources of information, like lawmakers or...
news outlets haven't been willing to fully debunk the Fed's correction conspiracy theory. And I think that because there are these tiny little kernels of truth, which is yes, there were some informants in the crowd that day,
That's kind of all you need for it to keep having life. And I think that there are always going to be January 6 truthers. We have 9-11 truthers. They're just always going to be that way. But whether or not it maintains this hold on such a large swath of the population, I think will take some serious steps.
soul-searching from the people who are meant to be trusted sources of information. Now that Enrique Tarrio has been, you know, proven not to be a government agent, he's just been sentenced the most amount of time behind bars of any defendant in these criminal trials, I feel that it should help disprove this conspiracy theory. But do you think it will?
I think it should disprove in a sense, but the Proud Boys have moved on. The Proud Boys now exist entirely regardless, doing their own thing without Tario. They say that their sovereign chapter, which would have included Tario and the elders, that's been dissolved. And so now there's sort of a network of autonomous pods.
They operate hyper-locally, making alliances with other local groups and showing up to drag shows and showing up to school board meetings. These small-scale events are happening on a weekly basis all over the country, and they've gotten savvier evading detection. You know, I think that there's a concern that the government thought that they could fix the problem of extremism by arresting its way out of it. But the grievances, the conspiracies, the division...
that brought people to the Capitol on January 6th, that's not really gone away. And in some cases, I think that people may have become more entrenched in their grievance politics. U.S. Capitol Police said they investigated 7,500 people
threats against members of Congress last year, which was a bit down from the year before, but significantly up from years prior. And then there's this litany of smaller incidents. The few examples I'd give is the recent incident of the FBI shooting a man who'd made threats online against Biden and Kamala Harris. And in May, a 19-year-old with Nazi paraphernalia crashed into the gates of the White House and
Tess, thank you very much. Thank you. Tess Owen is a senior reporter at Vice News.
Doubting the system, taking matters into your own hands, violence, fear. Up next, a story from 1980 with all four that feels just like today. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to Progressive?
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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
This is On The Media. I'm Michael Lohninger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Earlier this year, a white former U.S. Marine named Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely, a black man, on the New York City subway. In the aftermath of the killing, Penny was dubbed the Subway Samaritan by the Wall Street Journal.
When Leon Nafok, host of the podcast Fiasco, heard that moniker, he had almost finished a project about another violent crime on the New York subway some 40 years earlier. When a white man named Bernhard Goetz was approached by four black teenagers on the train, one of them asked him for money and Goetz pulled out a gun and shot them.
The gunman was later dubbed the subway vigilante by the press. I felt the gunman was right. I think he was justified. I think we should have a few more. Something has to be done. People have to take the law into their hands.
Leon, welcome to the show. Thank you, Brooke. It's great to be here. So now you're taking on a nearly 40-year-old subway shooting at a time when our national struggle with, you know, bigotry and fear is no longer veiled or dog-whistled, but it's nakedly captured daily on video on our streets and in our politics. I'm going to ask you a question.
Is that what drove you to do this topic? Everyone was talking about crime. It was after COVID. In New York, people were talking a lot about how the subway once again felt unsafe. There's a lot of debate about whether, in fact, it was a crime wave. That debate is really what made the Getz story even more interesting, right? Because you had people saying, we're going back to the bad old days.
On the other side, you had people saying that this is an overreaction. Crime may be a little bit up, but not up nearly to the levels that the bad old days had. And in fact, it may turn out not to be the beginning of a worrisome trend.
That fear of crime was very much at the center of the Bernie Getz story. You know, when you get past the opening scene where Bernie Getz takes his gun out and shoots these four young men, you get a story about an entire population of people who saw in him a vigilante who stood up for himself. And that's a story about fear. Tell me more about the political climate in New York at the time.
New York was a very different city in 1984. Times Square was a place where prostitution was rampant and drug use was rampant and muggings were common. People were angry at the city government. They were angry at the police department because it felt like these city officials whose job it was to protect hardworking, honest people were
were completely failing to do so. And the city was also in a financial crunch, and there were cuts to the NYPD. Exactly. So the NYPD suggested that with these cuts, they couldn't protect the public. And at one point, one of the police unions in New York published a pamphlet called Welcome to Fear City in protest of some of the cuts that were happening. And it was a
addressed to people from outside New York who might have been considering visiting it. Basically, the police union said, don't bother. It's a terrible place. And if you do have to come, don't leave the house after 6 p.m. and of
avoid the subway if you can. I think it had a grim reaper on the cover. There was something in episode one that really surprised me. You said that a study found that 3% of people on the subway were carrying guns. Can you believe that? In New York City? Yeah, I found that shocking, as did the researcher who arrived at that number. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, if there's 200 people on the subway car, that's six guns.
You note that in 1984, New York actually didn't have the nation's highest crime rates. It just seemed that way because it has so much media. In the late 70s and 80s, New York crime was a popular trope both in the headlines and Hollywood. And you cite the quintessential Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the filth. Here is someone who stood up. Yeah, you could have used that tagline for Bernie if you were inclined to see him as a hero out to clean up a cesspool of a city. Yeah. Travis Bickle, the taxi driver who decides that he will be New York's vigilante, is clearly out of his mind.
Well, I think if people listen to the series, they might reach similar conclusions about Getz, I think. Particularly one episode in which we draw a lot on an interview he gave to the police immediately after he turned himself in. It goes on for like two, three hours. And in it, he comes across as paranoid, as extremely jumbled in his thinking. There was a little bit of Travis Bickle in him, I would say.
When I think about the depictions of New York at the time, though, I think of NYPD Blue. Tuesday, a serial killer is back in the streets. This man strangled my child. And a father puts a price on justice. I'll give you a million dollars to kill him. NYPD Blue. That was a series, however, that ran in the 90s and early aughts when the city and the country's crime rates were dropping radically. Nevertheless, in one episode, the show's fictional 15th producer,
experienced the same number of homicides that the corresponding parts of the city had experienced in the entire previous year. That image of New York as a land of chaos and violence where the sewer grates are emitting steam into the dark alleyway and there's a guy in a trench coat around the corner, I think those were very powerful images and they survived the incredible drop in crime that occurred during the 90s.
You listen to Donald Trump and you realize that his image of New York is completely frozen in the 80s. The perspective of a suburbanite multimillionaire who never rides the subway and learns what he knows from tabloids, TV, and vigilante films, you know, like Death Wish. In Death Wish, Charles Bronson, in a campaign of revenge, I think it involved some horrible thing that happened to his wife, he decided to clean up New York.
to be the one to take matters into his own hands if the cops couldn't do it. And again, I think the core of people's anger back then was at the police falling down on the job. I think you don't see that as much now among people who are vocal about crime today. People today are sort of angry at the liberals who have allowed this hellscape to exist rather than the police. ♪
We'll return to our conversation with Leon Nafok at the end of the hour. Now we present an extended excerpt of episode two of his compelling series, Fiasco Vigilante. It takes us inside New York City newsrooms when word about the shooting first got out.
At the beginning, you really don't know what happened. People shot. Okay, well, you know, it's new. People get shot all the time in the city. But this one felt different. Ruben Rosario was a crime reporter for the New York Daily News, which in 1984 was the city's most widely read newspaper. We got the scanners saying that they'd been shooting at the subway station at Chambers Street, I believe.
Did you have a sense of that early point that, you know, based on the fact that there was four black kids and a white gunman, did you have a sense that it would become a racial flashpoint? Oh, sure. Yeah, because the first thing I thought about once we started getting the information going is one transit cop told me, this sounds like a Charles Bronson type of thing. And he was referring to the very popular Death Wish movie.
Here we have a white guy shooting alleged robbers who were black, which was life-imitating. I wouldn't call it deaf-wish art, but for lack of a better word, art. Rosario filed his story that evening. It ran in the Daily News the following day under the headline, Subway Rider Shoots Tufts. Let me grab the headline here.
The neatly dressed gunman suddenly whipped out a revolver from his waistband and fired several shots at the four young men as about a dozen other passengers frantically dived for cover, according to police. Quote, he was seated. They were horsing around on the train. They approached him and asked him for $5. He took objection and he shot them.
Perhaps the most tantalizing detail in Rosario's story was that the gunman had escaped the scene by jumping down onto the subway tracks and running into the tunnel. It was extremely cinematic and mysterious. Who was this guy and where did he go? Almost immediately, the press began to build a mythology around him.
"Since the gunman side of the story hasn't been told, it's hard to say, but psychologists generally characterize someone as a vigilante when the use of force is to right a wrong." The Daily News and its chief competitor, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, both published a police sketch of the gunman on their covers. "The wanted suspect is described as between 25 and 30, 150 to 160 pounds, thin build, golden blonde hair, and wearing glasses."
Perhaps because so little was known, they were able to set the tone for how the shooting was understood and talked about by regular New Yorkers.
Through headlines and photos and commentary, the media gave the story shape and meaning. Typically, a person that assumes this kind of role is somebody that, especially as a child, was very withdrawn, may have been picked on by many, many kids, and would be described as kind of passive. In the post, readers were treated to a speculative profile of the shooter by a famous pop psychologist, in which he described him as a tall, thin ectomorph.
From what we know, she wrote, he is a loner, a person who does a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. Another story in the Post reported that detectives had not ruled out the possibility that the gunman was a cop or a serviceman. When something like this happens in the largest media market, in the largest city in the United States, it becomes world news. It just reverberates.
New York City was high crime back then. There's no question about it. Cynthia Fagan was also a crime reporter in 1984. But she worked for the New York Post. If you went into the subway, everyone was reading a newspaper.
It was either the Daily News or the New York Post. Back then, the news and the Post were everywhere. On every block, the front pages were displayed at newsstands, plastered in storefront windows, and piled in news racks. Even if you weren't actually reading the tabloids, it was impossible to escape the bolded, all-caps announcement of the day's headlines. The story of the New York subway gunman has dominated the local news shows. It's splashed across the tabloids. Syndicated columnists...
All week, both papers were flooded with calls from readers about the shooting. As the search for the gunman intensified, so did the outpouring of praise. The Daily News spoke to a World War II vet from Brooklyn who said he wanted to give his bronze star to the shooter. Others implored the nameless shooter to run for mayor. Just before New Year's Eve, a spray-painted mural appeared alongside the FDR Drive in Manhattan, written in a big, bubbly font with stars dotting the I's.
Power to the vigilante, it said. New York loves ya. For NYPD detective Jim Levison, it was hard to tell if the tabloids were merely reporting on the public's reaction or actively shaping it. It was front page, day after day after day, for weeks. You know, the hunt for the subway gunman.
The press fed off the public and the public fed off the press. Jim Levison's boss, the police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, called on the media to show restraint. What the press has to do in this very critical period is cease trying to panic the public.
By making up stories about analogies to this case, to movies and TV stories, this is the real world. It's not Alice in Wonderland. Ward was the NYPD's first black commissioner. The press did not appear to heed his counsel. The subway vigilante, whoever he was, had become a celebrity, and readers couldn't seem to get enough. It was like a snowball going downhill. The story began to take a life of its own.
The gunman may have been the moment's breakout star, but the press created a potent image of his victims as well. The Daily News reported that three of them had criminal records. The Post reported that all four had previously been arrested. But the stickiest detail that both papers zeroed in on was that three of the victims had been carrying screwdrivers in their pockets at the time of the shooting. This detail soon evolved in a significant way.
According to a daily news story that ran on Christmas Eve, the screwdrivers discovered at the scene of the crime have been deliberately sharpened in an apparent attempt to turn them into weapons.
Very quickly, the sharpened screwdrivers caught on in the public imagination as a key fact about the incident. Of the four young men shot, three, according to police, carried sharpened heavy-duty screwdrivers. Police say the boys were armed with sharpened screwdrivers. A white man said four black teenagers wielding sharpened screwdrivers pressed him for $5. The problem with this reporting was that it wasn't true.
The police had found three unsharpened screwdrivers in the pockets of two of the teenagers, Daryl KB and James Ramsour. Later, the teenagers told authorities they had been planning to use the screwdrivers to pry quarters out of arcade games, a type of petty theft that was common among young people in New York at the time. One of the victims, Troy Canty, had even gotten in trouble for it in the past. This crucial context was missing from the early police reports. But there was more.
According to witnesses on the train, none of the victims had brandished the screwdrivers during their interaction with the shooter. So even if the screwdrivers had been sharpened, the shooter would not have known about it. But reporters took their cues from the NYPD, and they ended up painting an indelible picture in the minds of readers, in which the gunman had shot his would-be assailants after they threatened him with what might as well have been knives.
Amidst all this misreporting, one voice attempted to correct the record.
A few years, let me get rid of this one canard here. A couple of years ago... Jimmy Breslin was one of the greatest, legendary newspaper old school columnists in journalism history. Mr. Breslin, you're part of the news corps, and if the news reports that we got were incorrect... They were. Mine weren't, but the others were. You just heard one incorrect answer. Jimmy Breslin was a longtime Daily News columnist and a mentor to Ruben Rosario.
He first started working in newspapers as a teenager in the 1940s. And by the 80s, he had become a prominent voice in New York media. When awarding him a Pulitzer Prize in 1985, the awards committee said his columns consistently championed ordinary citizens. Breslin had a way of putting his readers in other people's shoes that few other reporters could match. And on top of that, he was popular.
Breslin's columns were so widely read and so heavily debated that he became something of a pop culture personality. This man won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns in the New York Daily News. Please welcome Jimmy Breslin. Jimmy! He even starred in a series of commercials for a New York-based beer called Peels. I'm Jimmy Breslin, a writer. But beer is a subject that's not exactly unknown to me. He was crabby. He was probably most joyful person
when both sides of the people that he was writing about in his column disliked what he wrote. Because he was there to make people uncomfortable, to make people think whether they liked his opinion in the end or they didn't. Breslin began to question the official narrative that had been reported and amplified in the Post and by his own colleagues at the Daily News. For one thing, Breslin seemed interested in who the victims actually were, beyond their arrest records.
His first column on the shooting followed the cousins of James Ramsour, who told him about how Ramsour wanted to be an emcee and how he could always make girls laugh. The piece Breslin ended up writing was headlined, Why Shoot Him? It's the $5 Question. In it, Breslin wrote that the story of the subway vigilante had become as popular as a Christmas carol. In rendering the victims as human beings, Breslin made clear that he was not there to sing along.
This posture put him in the uncomfortable position of essentially shaming an entire city. — If you're going to cheer for that, there's something the matter with you. Absolutely, you have no respect for the law. — On New Year's Eve 1984, Breslin wasn't scheduled to publish a column. But he wrote one anyway, about the public celebratory view of the gunmen. "They burned down something irreplaceable in New York this week," he wrote. "And there were people who looked at the ashes and termed them beautiful."
It was his fourth column on the shooting in just over a week. All of them took the crowds to task. Would the gunmen have fired, and would people now be so jubilant, he asked, if the four had been white? Breslin went on to clarify a few key facts in this column. He emphasized that the screwdrivers found on the teenagers had not, in fact, been sharpened, and that in any event, the gunmen probably never saw them when Troy Canty approached him. All he saw, Breslin wrote, was a young black guy from the Bronx.
If the tabloids often seem to be yelling alongside their readers, New York Post reporter Cynthia Fagan says that was by design. The New York Post served up what we all thought was happening with big blaring headlines. It sort of like was sexy. It was reverently irreverent. The Post never talked down to its readers. Not saying that Daily News did, but it kind of like said, hey, I'm in this with you.
The Post had once been a staunchly liberal paper. But when Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1976, he turned it into the raunchy, right-leaning tabloid we know it as today. Murdoch had been building tabloid empires in his native Australia and in the UK for years. But he was less well-known in America. Here is a young Murdoch being interviewed by a reporter from Australian Broadcasting. Do you like the feeling of power you have as a newspaper proprietor? Of course one enjoys the feeling of power.
Although I think the discretion of a power of newspaper proprietors can be greatly overdone. We have more responsibility than power, I think. He wanted a foothold into New York City, its politics. I can't speak for him, obviously, but as we look back, we can see that it was his stepping stone to television and Fox TV. Cynthia Fagan saw the Murdoch takeover of the Post from up close when she was a copy girl in the late 70s.
Did you ever see him in the newsroom? All the time. He was always there. He had sleeves rolled up and he, you know, he would chat with the editors or people who were doing the page layouts. He was very much a presence. I asked Fagan how the paper changed after Murdoch bought it. Well, it certainly got livelier. You had an influx of Australians and they applied their almost no-holes-barred sense to covering a story.
It was all out and it was front page news. This is Jim Rutenberg. He's a reporter for the New York Times who has written about Murdoch's media empire. Any crime, no matter how small, if it had the right details to forward the notion that this city is in total chaos, then Murdoch would do it.
Just a year after Murdoch's takeover, the mayor bemoaned the paper's new direction. He held a press conference just savaging Rupert Murdoch. He denounces the Post as, quote, a fine old newspaper that had been, quote, corrupted into a sensationalist rag by an Australian carpetbagger. Whether the mayor liked it or not, by 1984, the Post's circulation had nearly doubled under Murdoch's leadership. Since then, the Post has been a big part of the newspaper's history.
Cynthia Fagan says the paper's crime coverage was a key part of that success. People love reading about crime. It was always on anybody's mind. I mean, a train wreck is a train wreck. Who slows down when they see a train wreck? Everybody. Everybody, yeah. Murdoch had the secret recipe, the secret sauce. Crime sells, crime pays for newspapers. The year of the subway shooting, the Daily News got a new publisher who was determined to keep the Post at bay.
The solution, it seemed, was to become more like the Post. In a Times story about the rivalry between the two papers, the Daily News was said to be shedding its low-key tone for louder, sassier headlines. As it turned out, a shooting involving a white gunman, four black teenagers, and a possible mugging attempt was the perfect ammunition for a media war. Coming up, Bernie Getz turns himself in, and the media war rages on. This is On the Media.
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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're back with the story of how the press covered a notorious and divisive 1984 New York City subway shooting, part of a new series called Vigilante from Fiasco, the podcast hosted by Leon Nafuck, which you can find only on Audible.
We pick up with the gunman's emergence far from the scene of the crime. New Hampshire is a land of history, of contentment and charm. Here are quaint covered bridges. Nine days after the shooting, big news came from an unexpected place. My name is Robert F. Libby.
I go by Bob. In 1984, I was a lieutenant on duty for the day shift of the Concord Police Department. Concord, New Hampshire, was home to about 30,000 people. It was so quiet that it had earned the nickname, the city in a coma. There were some days when it was boring. People would come to the window I would have to talk to, or people would call on the phone I'd have to talk to. I'd review police reports and pass them along in the system.
On Sunday, the day before New Year's Eve, Libby happened to be reading about a high-profile crime in his local newspaper. It had taken place more than 250 miles away in a New York City subway station. And then the next day, I'm sitting in my office, and this guy walks in the front lobby, and the sergeant says, this guy wants to turn himself in. And I said, what for? And they said something to the effect of, you heard of the subway vigilante?
After nine days of media speculation and a manhunt that seemed to be stuck in neutral, the gunman had surrendered. And at some point he told me his name was Bernie Goetz. Bernard Goetz was a 37-year-old electronics engineer who had lived in New York for almost a decade.
Judging by how he introduced himself at the Concord police station, it seemed he had been following the news closely enough while on the run to know about his new nickname. At that point, I had an officer, a patrol officer in the station. I had him come up, take him upstairs to the library and get a statement from him. Now that the subway gunman had a name, he was instantly the biggest story in the country, and journalists flocked to Concord to get a look at him.
An assistant district attorney from Manhattan went up as well, along with two detectives. Together, they questioned Goetz, and bit by bit, the timeline of what he'd been up to since the shooting began to come together. It seemed that Goetz had left the city and then returned to his apartment a few days later.
This is Jim Levison, then the detective supervisor for the precinct where the shooting had taken place. And when he entered the building, his doorman said a couple of detectives were here a few days ago and they left their car. They wanted to talk to you, you know, not knowing the doorman had no idea what it was about. So then he knew the gig was up.
After two days in the Concord jail, Goetz was brought back to New York. I remember there was a caravan of press cars that followed them from New Hampshire down to the courthouse in New York. Levison eventually asked his detective, did Goetz ever explain why he turned himself in in Concord and not New York? Bernie said that he was afraid the New York cops were going to beat him up because he had caused so much trouble. So I said, okay. Okay.
thinking, you know, New York City wants to give him a medal, and we're going to beat him up? Bernhard Goetz waived extradition from New Hampshire after earlier saying he was afraid to return to New York. He said, I feel like a sitting pigeon. Once Goetz was back in the city, the public was voracious for more information about him. Even his booking and his arraignment, brief courtroom procedures, drew huge crowds.
On January 2nd, the Post wrote about a neighbor who had once joined Goetz in a rent strike. "He is a gentle and caring soul," she was quoted as saying, "and he cared about doing good and cleaning things up. Every garbage can on this street is because of Bernard." "But neighbors in his Greenwich Village apartment building say Goetz is an unlikely vigilante." "Bernie was a regular guy, you know what I mean? He's a regular guy. There's no big thing about him, you know? I was really surprised."
Upon his return to New York City, Goetz was placed in a special high-security wing on Rikers Island, the same one that had once held John Lennon's killer.
Goetz's bail was set at $50,000. Right away, offers of help flooded in. Money is being donated in his apartment house, at an electronics store where he was a customer, and people are sending money from as far away as Florida. Comedian and New York native Joan Rivers sent Goetz a telegram at Rikers with, quote, love and kisses.
The chairman of New York's Republican Party offered him $5,000 towards his bail. I think a person has a right to defend himself against one or ten or whatever. Goetz turned down a $50,000 bail check supposedly from a private citizen. Goetz declined all the offers and paid the bail himself. Once Goetz was released from Rikers on January 8th, the media frenzy around him somehow reached even greater heights.
Here again is Ruben Rosario from the Daily News. This was balls-to-the-wall coverage, you know, in a city that has big news pretty much every week. This was the biggest news for a period of weeks and even months. The news media pretty much camped outside his apartment building. I made quite a bit of money just sitting in the car,
munching on donuts and coffee, trying to get a glimpse of Bernhard Goetz. The Post assigned Cynthia Fagan to write about Goetz's background. Her piece was published under the headline, The Vigilante's Untold Life Story, and it described young Goetz as a quiet, scholarly boy. Fagan quoted Bernard's sister, Bernice, as saying that her brother was always taught to be a polite gentleman. Fagan also included an important detail.
Goetz had been mugged several years earlier, and in the wake of that mugging, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a license to carry a gun. The Post found the transcript of the gun permit hearing and published excerpts from it in which Goetz said the experience of getting mugged had changed him profoundly. The incident was an education, Goetz stated in the hearing transcript. It taught me that the city doesn't care what happens to you.
This attempt by Goetz to buy a gun prompted a conversation about New York's gun laws. And soon, the National Rifle Association jumped into the fray. New York media was very scary to NRA at the time. The anti-gun New York media, oh my God. Richard Feldman worked for the NRA, helping to direct the organization's political efforts in the Northeast.
After the shooting, Feldman was not scared of engaging with journalists. He saw it as an opportunity. You know, I'm from New York. To me, they were my hometown media. And knowing that the people in New York were very much on the side of Bernie Goetz, it was a moment to make a statement about changing the gun laws in New York.
Feldman convinced his boss at the NRA to take out ads in New York's local papers that read, "Self-protection is your right." And he came back to me a few days later and said, "Richie, I can't believe it. You were completely right. These ads are doing fantastic." In a remarkably short period of time, Goetz had become a national figure. A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken in mid-January showed that 86% of Americans were aware of the Goetz shooting.
That was higher, according to the Post, than nearly every other national event, including the Iran hostage crisis. At a White House press conference on January 9th, ABC's Sam Donaldson even asked President Reagan about Bernie Getz. Mr. President, a man in a subway in New York City took a gun and shot four youths who apparently were trying to shake him down. What do you think about the use of deadly force in trying to defend oneself against attack?
In general, I think we all can understand the frustration of people who are constantly threatened by crime and feel that law and order is not particularly protecting them. On the other hand, I think we all realize there is a breakdown of civilization if people start taking the law in their own hands. So while we may feel understanding or sympathy for someone who
was tested beyond his control, his ability to control himself. At the same time, we have to abide by the law and stand for law and order. Reagan didn't specify what exactly had tested Goetz beyond his control. He also didn't say how much control people should be expected to possess. Meanwhile, back in New York, Jimmy Breslin was not wasting time on equivocation, even though only a few others had joined him in condemning Goetz.
Les Payne, a columnist from New York Newsday, called Goetz a hero to the hysterical and accused the media of dispensing spoon-fed police details instead of pursuing the truth.
Mayor Koch called out Breslin specifically for his coverage of the Goetz case, saying that he was exacerbating racial tensions. Breslin has been outspoken in his criticism of Goetz, saying in one column, he shot the four of them because they were black. Don't worry about it. Shot them bang, bang, bang, two in the back. Bernie Goetz of the Light Brigade. But no matter how much Breslin appealed to reason, much of the public remained as supportive of Goetz as ever.
Just one day before the White House press conference, talk show host Phil Donahue dedicated an entire episode of his show to the controversy. The Phil Donahue show was among the most widely watched in the country at the time, and it was there that Jimmy Breslin came face-to-face with the public's support for the subway gunman.
Newspapers can't seem to write enough about the issue of Bernard Goetz. We seem to be coming apart at the seams, and we are giving standing ovations to people who appear to be taking the law into their own hands. You should also know that on the person of three of the four victims were found sharpened screwdrivers. Wrong. Jimmy Breslin is here to correct me in public. Wrong.
Breslin had not given up on his attempt to correct the misreporting around the event. He wasn't going to let this moment pass by without calling it out. What's your point, Mr. Breslin? After the shooting, they found three screwdrivers unsharpened, two in one jacket and one in the other. The captain in charge of the investigation for the New York City Police Department says that the screwdrivers unsharpened
never came into play and were no part of the investigation that they are conducting. This vivid but totally false image of sharpened screwdrivers had stuck in the minds of the public and in much of the media.
In fact, nearly 40 years after the shooting, press accounts still frequently mention the sharpened screwdrivers, which, again, never existed. The screwdrivers apparently are not going to be any part of the case. In other words, from what he is saying, the screwdrivers never were shown. They were there, obviously, for thieving. The guys were going to break into these Pac-Man games and hit subway turnstiles, but they were unsharpened.
The press has made it sharpened, and each one of them had one, and thereby giving people a vision of these three kids putting the screwdriver in the guy's eyes or something. It's all part of the story of the fear and resentment that's produced this outpouring. It's a part of the prejudiced effort to railroad these victims. Is that your point? They're trying to make a poor guy, a fellow I've...
regard as being a little unstable, gets, went and shot four people. He's going to go to jail for it. Whether anyone likes to hear that or not, he will go to jail. He shot four kids. And when he's sitting in the jail, they'll still remember, sharpened screwdrivers, that never were sharpened. He appears to be getting a standing ovation from more than a... From the unwashed, the loudmouths, of course. There are quite a few of them. They all stand up good.
It was an audience member who confronted Breslin first. Are you a doctor, sir? What does that got to do with it? Well, you're passing judgment that the man was unstable. How can you say that? He shot four people in a subway car. What's that, stability? Are you kidding? It should have happened to you. What reaction would you have had then, sir? What happened? Yes, if they shot you. What happened? What would have happened? Wait a minute, what happened? You don't know what happened. You weren't there. What? I know four kids got shot, two of them in the back. And I know one man's in jail, but I still don't believe it. Why? Oh, you don't believe why? No, sir.
You don't believe why he's in jail? Because he pulled a gun and shot four people. Very simple. You go to jail for that. There's laws. Well, we'll see. Laws, not your emotion. Big difference. For Ruben Rosario, this was Breslin at his best, challenging the worship of Goetz even when few others were willing to do so. He was a journalist at heart, meaning that he would try to find the truth wherever it lay. There was a genius to his journalistic madness. Mm-hmm.
Breslin's madness wasn't enough to break through the madness that had seized the public. Bernard Goetz was still a hero, and the popular appetite for uncritical news about him did not abate. On January 10th, 1985, two days after the Donahue panel, New Yorkers woke up to a special edition of the New York Post. Murdoch star columnist Steve Dunleavy had managed to score a long, exclusive interview with Goetz.
"'I really hope some good comes of this,' ran the pull quote from Goetz on the front page. Below that, in a smaller font, was a headline about 19-year-old Daryl KB, whose spine had been severed in the shooting. KB had developed a severe case of pneumonia in the hospital. He had fallen into a coma. And in the words of the Post, he was fighting for his life. And if Daryl KB died, the DA would have to consider prosecuting Goetz for murder."
KB and Goetz, three other victims, did survive the shooting. And Goetz, well, he did less than a year in prison. About the fate of Daniel Penny, the white man who killed Jordan Neely, a black man, on the subway earlier this year, Goetz quipped to the Post that Penny has, quote, got to pay.
Leon, it seems both obvious and yet worth pointing out that in life and art, most would-be vigilantes are white and their victims are black. Yeah, who gets to be a vigilante? You know, if you're someone who takes the law into your own hands, sometimes that's called crime. And other times it's called heroism. Who gets to be called a vigilante is a question that runs through our series for sure. It's also a question that runs through coverage of something like January 6th because those are individuals
indeed people who felt that the government was letting them down and they needed to take their country back. And that's a pretty good distillation of the vigilante spirit. In Fiasco, you share a clip of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, former NYPD transit officer and police captain, suggesting that crime needs to be addressed equally as a real problem and as a feeling.
Yeah, and it's a little bit scary to hear him say that the perception matters as much as the reality, because if that's what we're going off of, then the policy choices that we're going to make are very different than what's actually going to solve our problems as a society. There's a balance that everyone should be seeking. And I'm worried when I hear someone say that the perception matters as much as the reality, because it seems like a recipe for getting that balance badly wrong.
Thank you, Leon. Thank you, Brooke. Leon Nafok is the host of Fiasco, a podcast about pivotal moments in U.S. history. The latest season, Vigilante, is available exclusively on Audible, but you can find previous seasons of Fiasco wherever you find your podcasts.
On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Suzanne Gabber, with help from Sean Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Micah Loewinger.