The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

Excuses From Jury Pool? He’s Heard Them All

  By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS | April 13, 2006

  Norman Goodman is the county clerk responsible for every jury trying cases in Manhattan state courts.

  IF YOU HAVE BEEN CALLED TO SERVE ON A jury in Manhattan, you may remember Norman Goodman, if only by name. His name appears on every state summons that goes out to a prospective juror in Manhattan, which, even in these times of low crime, number about 6,000 a week.

  It is a name that fills otherwise imperturbable citizens with fear, loathing and often a need to come up with excuses probably last used in fifth grade.

  One woman sent in a small plastic bag, filled with gray powder, on behalf of her husband, the subject of the summons. “Some of his ashes from the crematorium” the woman scribbled next to the bag.

  Woody Allen sent a note, in cramped printing, protesting that he had been so traumatized by his experience in court during a child-custody dispute with Mia Farrow that returning to sit on a jury was out of the question.

  Given the subliminal perfection of the name Norman Goodman (a reminder that serving on a jury makes one a “good man,” get it?), it might seem entirely possible that Mr. Goodman does not exist, that he is a fictional creation of some bureaucrat in the office of the Manhattan State Supreme Court. He could be one of those apocryphal creations intended to humanize otherwise faceless products, as Uncle Ben is to rice or Betty Crocker to cake mix.

  So on a recent day, Mr. Goodman agreed to entertain a visitor in his spacious office—decorated with photographs of celebrity jurors, like Julianne Moore, and an award for “Your Turn,” the film about the importance of jury duty—in the Greek-columned courthouse at 60 Centre Street, to prove that he does, in fact, exist.

  As county clerk, clerk of the State Supreme Court and commissioner of jurors for Manhattan, he supervises about 180 employees who do everything from filing cases to collecting the $210 fee for the index number needed to start a civil action. But his true talent is for sniffing out malingering jurors and prodding and cajoling Manhattan’s many prima donnas, from Hollywood stars to titans of Wall Street, to do their civic duty.

  Manhattan jury pools are rich in celebrities, and Mr. Goodman can summon a deputy, Vincent Homenick, to provide a comprehensive list of those who have been called: Kevin Bacon, Roberta Flack, Henry Kissinger, Walt Frazier, Harvey Keitel, and so on, scores of them.

  Mr. Goodman, a strong believer in equal treatment, insisted that Mr. Allen show up, bad memories and all. Mr. Allen arrived wearing what Mr. Goodman describes as “army fatigues and a Fidel Castro cap,” surrounded by his lawyer, his agent and a bodyguard. Mr. Goodman escorted him to the jury room, where Mr. Allen insisted on standing, rather than sitting like everybody else. The rest of the jurors gawked at him.

  “We eventually offered him the opportunity to get out of there,” Mr. Goodman said. “Frankly, we were glad to get rid of him.”

  Mean Streets

  CRIME

  New York’s first reported murder was a stabbing in 1638.

  These were the facts of the case: A newcomer from Rotterdam named Jan Gysbertsen got into a knife fight and killed one Gerrit Jansen. The Dutch council that ran the fledgling city believed in capital punishment—and did not believe a defendant was innocent until proven guilty. The council wasted no time issuing a declaration: “Accused, whenever apprehended, is to be punished by the sword until he is dead.”

  But like too many perps who have followed in his tracks over the years—and anyone who has watched more than few minutes of “Law & Order” knows that the word “perp” is police slang for “perpetrator”—Gysbertsen got away.

  So crime has been a part of New York experience from the beginning, and New York remains fascinated by crime even as it is repulsed by it.

  In the early 1970’s there was the “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” murder that provided the framework for Judith Rossner’s novel. The victim was a 28-year-old schoolteacher, her killer a man she had picked up in an Upper West Side singles bar.

  A few years later, the “Son of Sam” murders terrified a city where self-confidence was already in short supply after a financial crisis had pushed it to the edge of bankruptcy. One of the steps that Mayor Abraham D. Beame had taken to avoid insolvency was to cut the police force. That left New Yorkers feeling all the more desperate in the summer of 1977 with the “Son of Sam” killings. A psychopathic gunman shot and killed six people and wounded seven others, mostly young women making out with their boyfriends in parked cars in Queens and Brooklyn. The police solved the case with old-fashioned detective work that was rooted in the notion that there is no such thing as a perfect crime: They sifted through hundred of parking tickets issued in the neighborhoods where the shootings had taken place, hoping for a clue. They found one. The loner they arrested, David R. Berkowitz, had been ticketed for parking beside a fire hydrant on the evening of one of the murders.

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  By the 1980s, New York had become a battlefield in a drug- fueled crime wave marked by drive-by shootings and deadly turf fights. As the murder rate climbed past 1,000 a year, many New Yorkers said they were fed up with a criminal justice system they believed was protecting criminals, not convicting them. Some considered taking matters into their own hands. One did.

  Bernard H. Goetz, an electrical engineer, carried the psychological scars of an earlier mugging—and an unlicensed pistol. He pulled it out when four young men asked him for $5 on the subway. He fired, they were trying to rob him. Then Goetz walked over to one of them, Darrell Cabey, who was lying on the floor of the subway car, bleeding. “You don’t look so bad. Here’s another,” Goetz said as he fired again. Cabey, 19, was paralyzed from the waist down; the others were less seriously wounded.

  The case polarized the city, in part because Goetz was white and the four young men were black. The Goetz case also reinforced many New Yorkers’ sense that the police had lost control. In 1990, there were 2,262 homicides, making New York the murder capital of the nation.

  Things soon changed. The crime rate dropped by double-digit percentages and kept going down: 2007 ended with 496 murders, the fewest since 1963. Officials credited a police offensive against minor crimes like loitering or subway-fare beating, which they said deterred more serious crime. They also credited CompStat, a computerized system for tracking crime statistics that was created under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s first police commissioner, William J. Bratton. Police officials used CompStat to hold police commanders accountable when the numbers in their precincts went up.

  Despite the improvements, minorities did not feel safer. A disturbing string of incidents left unarmed, innocent black or Hispanic New Yorkers dead or injured at the hands of the police.

  In 1999, officers were accused of brutality in the killing of Amadou Diallo, who had reached into his pocket, apparently for identification papers, when officers on a manhunt ordered him to put his hands up. They fired 19 shots.

  No history of crime in New York would be complete without a mention of Mafia shootings that shocked the city even as they satisfied its appetite for grisly details. Consider the case of the two men who walked into a hotel barber shop and fired 10 shots at a customer getting a haircut.

  The man in the chair wasn’t just any customer: he was Albert Anastasia, like John Gotti a kingpin of organized crime.Anastasia had been the cold-blooded mastermind plotting the contract killings of the ruthless gangland syndicate Murder Incorporated. The police blamed Murder Incorporated for more than 60 deaths.

  There were witnesses in the barber shop, just as there had been when Gerrit Jansen was killed three centuries before, but Anastasia’s killers were never caught, either. Officially, that case remains open, just like Jansen’s.

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  THE INFAMOUS

  New York Numb

  By S. J. ROZAN | March 12, 2006

  CERTAIN CRIMES SEAR THEMSELVES INTO the collective imagination.

  In 1987, when a Greenwich Village lawyer named
Joel Steinberg was arrested for killing his illegally adopted 6-year-old daughter, Lisa, New Yorkers recoiled, as though no adult had ever before beaten a child to death.

  In 1986, when Jennifer Levin, 18, was strangled in Central Park by Robert Chambers Jr. after a night of partying at an Upper East Side preppy hangout, people were appalled, as though underage drinking and casual sex were news.

  The most resonant crimes are the ones in which the victim is most innocent.

  In 1990, when Brian Watkins, a clean-cut, 22-year-old tourist from Utah, was knifed to death defending his parents from muggers on the platform of a Midtown subway station, New Yorkers were horrified, as though seeing before them the realization of their deepest fears.

  And although 96 homicides were recorded in New York in the first nine weeks of 2006, none have riveted the attention of the press and the public as powerfully as the rape and killing of Imette St. Guillen, the 24-year-old John Jay College graduate student whose body was discovered two weeks ago in a deserted patch of land in East New York, Brooklyn.

  The most resonant crimes are the ones in which the victim is most innocent, or perceived as innocent. Everyone is, in his own eyes, innocent. It is terrifying to think that coming home late from work, or unwinding with a quiet drink, or smooching in a parked car—things everyone does—could get you killed.

  The death of Nixzmary Brown, the 7-year-old from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, who was beaten to death in her home earlier this year, held the public’s attention for a time, because it was shockingly brutal enough to overcome her disadvantages in the climb to iconic status: she was from the wrong ethnic group and from the wrong class.

  The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime’s perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens, but not surprised. The furor over Nixzmary’s death focused largely on how the system failed her, and though she may be memorialized by changes to the law, her name is unlikely to bring a shudder of recognition a decade from now.

  The horror of Lisa Steinberg’s death, on the other hand, stemmed from the identities of the couple raising her, upper-middle-class professionals. The middle class and the rich were appalled: This can happen here? Equally appalled were the poor, those struggling to make it into the middle class, as a refuge from the dangers and ills of poverty: If a lawyer and an editor living in a Greenwich Village brownstone can do this to a child, where is safety?

  After children, young women get the most credit for innocence. The Central Park jogger. Roseann Quinn, a 28-year-old schoolteacher whose horrific murder in 1973, by a man she had met in an Upper West Side singles bar, was the model for the tale “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” And now, Imette St. Guillen.

  Almost none of these victims are men, except where they’re auxiliary to young women. This was the case with the victims of Son of Sam, whose target was young couples stealing a private romantic moment. This culture has a harder time assigning innocence and its associated vulnerability to men. Men are expected to be able to take care of themselves, and if they can’t, that in itself puts them at fault. Two recent victims of crimes that lingered powerfully in the public mind, though, were both male and black: Michael Griffith, chased to his death on a highway in Howard Beach, Queens, in 1986; and Amadou Diallo, shot 19 times at his own front door in 1999 in the Bronx. These cases achieved iconic status because both victims, though men, were overwhelmingly innocent, and because in each case a larger fear came into play.

  Mr. Griffith was the stranger, a man whose car broke down in a hostile, insular neighborhood and who was killed for that: for being from out of town. Who, on a dark rural highway, has not had that worry? And to see that it can happen here? That is terrifying.

  Mr. Diallo’s death embodies the deepest of fears. Unarmed, mistaken for someone else, reaching for his papers to correct that error, he was killed by police officers, the final bulwark against the forces of chaos. If the protectors become the perpetrators—not deliberately, through wickedness, but casually, by mistake—what hope does order have?

  The Night That 38 Stood By

  March 12, 1984

  Kitty Genovese was 28 when she was murdered.

  IT FLASHES THROUGH MARGARET Swinchoski’s mind, each time she walks past the Kew Gardens, Queens, train station: This was where Kitty Genovese met her killer. Even in the small town in Vermont where Miss Swinchoski grew up, Catherine Genovese’s case became a shocking symbol of apathy.

  Now Miss Swinchoski lives in the same quiet, middle-class neighborhood where Miss Genovese was slain 20 years ago as she tried to make her way from her car, parked in the train station lot, to her apartment on Austin Street. For more than half an hour that night, Miss Genovese’s killer stalked and stabbed her, again and again, as 38 of her neighbors silently turned away from her cries.

  “I walk here during the day but not at night,” said Miss Swinchoski, a 25-year-old flutist, “because of what happened then and because of what might happen now.”

  The killer, Winston Moseley, had followed Miss Genovese into the parking lot at 3:20 a.m. on March 13, 1964. Mr. Moseley, a 29-year-old machine operator, was convicted after he confessed that he had been cruising around, planning “to rape and to rob and to kill a girl.” He is serving a life sentence in Green Haven state prison, and was recently denied parole.

  Most of the witnesses have moved away, or died. One who remembers is an 83-year-old woman who lived next door to Miss Genovese. She was awakened at 3:30 a.m. that night when a friend called to say he had seen the attack but was intoxicated and did not want to deal with the police. She put on a coat over her nightgown and went down the street to find a door ajar and Miss Genovese crumpled behind it.

  The woman said she wished people would forget. “We weren’t apathetic,” she said. “There are good people here. There’s so much else bad in the world. Poor Kitty.”

  “.44-Caliber Killer” Wounds Two In Car Parked on Queens Street

  By EMANUEL PERLMUTTER | June 27, 1977

  THE PSYCHOPATHIC KILLER WHO CALLS himself “Son of Sam” struck again early yesterday when he shot at a young couple, wounding them as they sat in a car parked on a street in Bayside, Queens.

  Detectives said the four bullets that wounded the couple—Judy Placido, 17 years old of the Bronx, and Salvatore Lupo, 20, of Maspeth, Queens—had been fired from the same .44-caliber “bulldog” revolver that had already been used to kill four young women and a young man and to wound three women and a man in six other car and street attacks since July 1976.

  Yesterday’s victims were shot about 3:20 a.m. as they sat in a car on 211th Street south of 45th Road, under a large oak tree and beside a white picket fence at a frame house. The shooting took place three blocks from the 111th Precinct stationhouse.

  Yesterday’s attack followed the pattern of other assaults on car occupants by the “.44-caliber killer,” the police said. He approached the vehicle from behind and fired through the closed window. Neither victim saw him either before or after the shootings, according to the police.

  Most of the women victims had shoulder-length dark hair. This, the police said, has caused anxiety among women in Queens and the Bronx, where all seven of the shootings have taken place. Miss Placido, too, has shoulder-length hair.

  Where the “Son of Sam” Struck, Women Walk in Fear

  June 30, 1977

  “MOST OF MY FRIENDS ARE WEARING THEIR hair up,” Debby Pannullo said, as she slowed her car for a red light on Northern Boulevard in Queens. “My boyfriend wanted me to dye mine, it’s so scary. If I have to go out, I try not to come home late.”

  In Bayside, brunettes—and even a few blondes and redheads—are piling their hair on top of their heads or staying in after dark these days.

  It was in Bayside that the elusive “Son of Sam” killer struck for the seventh time since July 29, 1976, wounding a couple as they sat parked in a parked car four days ago.

  No sooner had Barbara French returned from vacation Monday night than three friends c
alled her about the shooting. “They wanted me to promise I’d put my hair up,” she said. Barbara de Muccio puts hers up as soon as it gets dark now and, like Miss Pannullo, she admits to being “very frightened.”

  “Three women have had their hair cut to here because of the shootings,” said Andy Petrides, proprietor of a beauty salon on Northern Boulevard, pointing to a spot an inch below the hairline of the customer whose hair he was setting. “Even in the past four or five weeks people have come in and said, ‘Cut my hair, I’m afraid.’ I’ve heard of a couple of women who have dyed their hair, and one woman I know went out and bought a wig.”

  “People have come in and said, ‘Cut my hair, I’m afraid.’”

  Recalling the Year of “Son of Sam”

  By COLIN MOYNIHAN and SEWELL CHAN | August 7, 2007

  Berkowitz, convicted of the “Son of Sam” shootings.

  THIRTY YEARS AGO NEW YORKERS WERE HELD in horrified thrall as a serial killer armed with a .44-caliber revolver and calling himself Son of Sam prowled the nighttime streets for just over a year. He killed six people and injured seven, mostly in Queens and the Bronx, before being captured.

  The killer, whose name was David Berkowitz, created his own pseudonym in apocalyptic, taunting letters that he sent to the police and the press.

  Yesterday, dozens of people revisited the facts and emotions surrounding those events during a symposium at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, where three panels of speakers reminisced about the case and analyzed the killer and his impact.

  Participants included criminologists, journalists, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly (a young lieutenant when the killings took place) and Edward I. Koch, who attributed his election as mayor in 1977 to the hysteria and paralysis partly created by the string of murders, which had begun in the summer of 1976.