The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  The toughest test for New York’s new crime-fighting philosophy will come in high-crime neighborhoods like East New York, where officers work in an atmosphere of fear, hostility and alienation.

  The rules that govern residents’ everyday existence prohibit them from developing close ties with the police, enveloping them in a code of silence almost as strong as that of the “blue wall” of silence that is said to exist among police officers. Tenant patrols or neighborhood watch groups are fragmented, if they exist at all.

  “People don’t want you to come to their houses because the criminals might think they’re giving up information,” said Officer Lopez, who works in an area west of Pennsylvania Avenue once labeled the “Dead Zone” because of the vacant lots and the frequency of killings there. “They could get hit. So I do a lot of work by phone.”

  Seven Masked Thugs Get More Than $3 Million in JFK Holdup

  By PRANAY GUPTE | December 12, 1978

  SEVEN MASKED MEN, BRANDISHING SHOTguns and automatic pistols, drove up to a Lufthansa cargo facility at Kennedy International Airport in the middle of the night, handcuffed nine employees and beat up another, disconnected an alarm and made off with a reported $3 million in cash and jewelry worth possibly $2 million.

  If estimates of the loss are correct, the robbery would be the second largest cash theft in United States history, exceeded only by the $4.3 million loss in the robbery at Purolator Security in Chicago in October of 1974.

  The police noted that the robbers at Kennedy were familiar with the layout of the cargo building and knew the exact location of a high-value storage room where the currency was kept.

  “It went off like clockwork,” said James Connolly, a spokesman for the police force of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.

  Officials said the trouble began at 3:15 in the morning. Kerry Whalen, an employee of the West German airline, was working in the ramp area of the huge building. Mr. Whalen heard a van approaching, but because vans and trucks come and go in the cargo area, he thought little of it.

  It was a black 1978 Ford Econoline Series 150 van, and there were seven men in it. Six of them, all masked and waving shotguns or automatic handguns, jumped out. Mr. Whalen ran back toward the ramp, shouting: “Help!” He was overtaken by one of the intruders, hit on the head with a pistol and pummeled with fists as he fell to the ground. The gunmen moved up the delivery ramp toward a high-value storage room behind the ramp.

  As they went there, Ralph Rebmann, a guard, arrived. He had heard, from a distance, Mr. Whalen’s cry for help. Mr. Rebmann was spotted by the masked men, overpowered and dragged along to the storage room. The bandits knew where the alarm was, and as they approached the storage room, they accosted another employee, whom they forced to disconnect the alarm.

  Four men then opened the storage-room door with a key that one produced from his pocket. Eventually nine employees were handcuffed and taken to a third-floor cafeteria.

  It was laborious work carting off the currency; the money was in solid metal boxes. The jewelry, too, was in boxes—35 in all.

  At 4:15 a.m. the masked men took one last look around, went back to their van and drove away. About 15 minutes later one of the handcuffed employees managed to stand up and stagger toward the stairs. He apparently saw an incoming worker, who quickly assessed the situation and called the police.

  Not Exactly Dillinger, But Prolific

  By MICHAEL WILSON | September 12, 2003

  FOR TWO YEARS, THE MAN SLIPPED AWAY from a remarkable 36 bank robberies in Queens and Manhattan. He came away from eight other attempts empty-handed. Nothing flashy: Mets cap, sunglasses and a long-sleeved shirt, passing the teller a short note demanding money, and rarely showing a gun. There was even the hint of opportunistic cleverness: on the day after Sept. 11, 2001, he robbed three banks.

  So whomever the police expected to find when they came through an apartment door in Jamaica, Queens, it was probably not the 44-year-old man they said they found loafing on the couch: Raymond Masi, a homeless heroin addict for most of his adult life, a man with a long, low-level criminal history who sometimes lived in the woods.

  Others have been arrested recently in serial bank robberies: 12 robberies here, 14 there. But nothing close to 36.

  Asked if he could recall a more prolific bank robber, Capt. Michael Hines, commander of the major case squad, said, ‘’Not in my memory, no.”

  The police did not release a dollar amount of the money Mr. Masi is accused of stealing, but said he had robbed banks 36 times and made 8 other attempts that were unsuccessful.

  The police said the long gaps between some robberies—sometimes a month or more—correspond with Mr. Masi’s jail time for smaller crimes, most recently in January, when he served 120 days for petty larceny, Captain Hines said. “He’s basically claiming he learned about it”—robbing a string of banks—“in jail,” Captain Hines said.

  Workers Foil Bank Robber; Passers-By Return His Loot

  By CHRISTINE HAUSER | November 26, 2008

  THREE A.T.M. TECHNICIANS HELPED FOIL A robbery at a garment district bank on Tuesday morning, the police said, and passers-by helped gather the bills that scattered when the robber fled, and returned them.

  All the stolen money was accounted for, the police said.

  The scene unfolded just before 10:45 a.m., when a man walked into the Sterling National Bank at 512 Seventh Avenue, near 38th Street, and handed a teller a note demanding money. The teller handed over $1,082 to the man, who did not have a weapon, said the chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne.

  “As the man was leaving the bank, the teller shouted: ‘Stop him! He just robbed the bank!’” Mr. Browne said.

  The technicians, who were repairing the bank’s A.T.M.s, heard the cry and gave chase, Mr. Browne said. The bank robber ran onto 38th Street, where traffic was at a standstill. As he wove between cars, the technicians grabbed him, the police said, and pushed him onto the hood of a vehicle.

  When officers arrived, Mr. Browne said, one of the posse was holding the robber, while the other two were nearby, with a large crowd around them. The cash had scattered, some of it in a small pile between two cars. Pedestrians walked up to police officers or bank employees and handed over bills they had picked up, a witness and the police said.

  “Even in the bad economy, all $1,082 that had been scattered before the police arrived was recovered in full,” Mr. Browne said.

  The robbery suspect was identified as Thomas Slater, 43, Mr. Browne said. He faces a bank robbery charge and is being investigated in three other bank robberies, Mr. Browne said.

  A short time later, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said at a briefing, planned before the Seventh Avenue robbery, that bank robberies were on the rise this year, and that most were carried out by robbers who passed notes. As he has before, he attributed the increase to the opening of more branches and to the extended hours offered by more banks. He also some banks were not adopting practices recommended by the police department, like using bullet-resistant barriers as dividers between customers and tellers.

  The Sterling National branch, where tellers work behind partitions, was closed for several hours. Only bank employees were allowed in.

  Cyrus Harrison, the owner of a small clothing and accessories store on Seventh Avenue near the bank, said he was standing in front of his shop when the robber fled. “He dropped the cash on the ground, then got apprehended,” said Mr. Harrison.

  Victims and Heroes

  DISASTERS

  Ordinary police-blotter entries, these are not: snowstorms that break records dating to just after the Civil War; construction cranes that tumble from high above crowded sidewalks; gasoline-laden barges that explode with a rumble like an earthquake, rocking everything for miles.

  In New York even the close calls are closer, the miracle escapes more miraculous. A window washer survives a 47-story plunge from an apartment building. A jetliner taking off from LaGuardia Airp
ort crosses paths with high-flying Canada geese that knock out both of the plane’s big engines, but the pilot steers the way to a smooth landing in the Hudson River. Everyone—all 150 passengers and 5 crew members—steps out onto the wings, safe.

  Or what about the man who had a seizure while waiting for the subway, and fell to the tracks as a train pulled into the station. A 50-year-old construction worker named Wesley Autrey dove from the platform and pushed the man into the shallow space between the rails. The worried crowd on the platform sighed with relief on hearing the hero’s voice: “We’re O.K. down here.”

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  In New York, there are century-old steam pipes that split open once in a while, shooting geysers of steam like Old Faithful. There are needless tragedies: fires that engulf social clubs where the exits have been chained shut.

  These are events the journalist and best-selling author Jon Meacham had in mind when he said that “the dramas particular to New York, a place of extremes, are more often of universal interest than, well, Kansas City’s.”

  So the lights go out—all the lights, at once. In seconds, eight million people are totally disconnected. Imagine that.

  In forty years that happened not once, not twice, but three times, and the three blackouts caught the city at three different moments. As noted in one of the articles excerpted here, the first big power failure, in 1965, was the good blackout, the one when the city could still grin and bear it. The social fabric did not fray that night. But in some neighborhoods it disintegrated completely during the second blackout, twelve years later—the bad blackout, the one that is remembered as yet another chaotic night in a troubled summer when people were already jittery about the Son of Sam serial killings and financial crises that had left City Hall all but bankrupt. That night in 1977, it was as if there were suddenly two New Yorks. In the one that encompassed the lower two-thirds of Manhattan, people once again pulled together—pedestrians stepped in to direct traffic because the stop lights were out, and restaurants gave away food before it spoiled. In other parts of the city, looters smashed plate glass windows, emptied store shelves, even carted away major appliances like washing machines. The police arrested 3,700 people, 10 times as many as during race riots in Harlem and Brooklyn in 1964.

  The 2003 blackout was different from either of the earlier ones. It was the first citywide catastrophe since the 9/11 attacks 20 months before. This time, the cause was nothing so deliberate—or ominous. Somewhere in the Midwest, a tree had knocked down a power cable. A cascade of overloaded circuits shut down about 100 power plants in the Midwest and Northeast in about nine seconds.

  In New York, people went home, relieved that their first suspicion had been wrong: this was not a terrorist attack on the nation’s electrical grid. In some neighborhoods people partied in the streets until the wee hours. In midtown Manhattan, suburbanites who could not make it home or hotel guests who could not make it to their rooms simply slept on the sidewalks. Some 850 people were arrested overnight, noticeably fewer than the usual nightly average of 950. “New Yorkers showed that the city that burned in the 1970’s when facing similar circumstances is now a very different place,” the mayor said.

  It was indeed a different place, because the 9/11 attacks had changed things in ways that other catastrophes could not. The scope remains almost unimaginable: the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in less than two hours, leaving behind tons of debris smoldering at what came to be called “ground zero” and leaving rescue workers to sift through twisted metal and potentially toxic dust. They hoped that the next time their radios crackled with word of trouble, it would not be like this.

  PAGE 315

  BLACKOUTS

  Power Failure Snarls Northeast; 800,000 Caught in Subways

  By PETER KIHSS | November 10, 1965

  THE LARGEST POWER FAILURE IN HISTORY blacked out nearly all of New York City, parts of nine Northeastern states and two provinces of southeastern Canada. Some 80,000 square miles, in which perhaps 25 million people live and work, were affected.

  It was more than three hours before the first lights came back on in any part of the New York City area. When they came on in Nassau and Suffolk Counties at 9 p.m., overloads plunged the area into darkness again in 10 minutes.

  Striking at the evening rush hour, the power failure trapped 800,000 riders on New York City’s subways. Railroads halted. Traffic was jammed. Airplanes found themselves circling, unable to land.

  Five thousand off-duty policemen were summoned to duty. Ten thousand National Guardsmen were called up in New York City alone.

  The Fire Department, too, brought in off-duty firemen because their overloaded telephone and telegraphic communications made it difficult to keep contact with scattered fire apparatus in the field. The Fire Department radio was out of service from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and the dispatchers had to keep in touch with the firehouses and vehicles by telephone. They had the radio system back in operation at 8:30.

  The lights and the power went out first at 5:17 p.m. somewhere along the Niagara frontier of New York State. Nobody could tell why for hours afterward.

  At 5:27 p.m. the lights began sputtering in New York City, and within seconds the giant Consolidated Edison system blacked out in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and most of Brooklyn—but not in Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn that were interconnected with the Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey.

  Down These Mean Streets

  By FRANCIS X. CLINES | July 15, 1977

  THE LOOTERS SCATTERED, ROACHLIKE, IN the morning sunlight, then stopped to watch when the owner of Joe’s candy store showed up and saw his store disemboweled on the Brownsville sidewalk. He let out a howl and went after one edge of the crowd that held his candy bars and cigarettes.

  The looters skittered off a bit more, the children and women in screams and laughter, the teenaged boys swaggering, like toreadors.

  The crowd was discovering after a night of looting that not only could the store-breaking be continued in daylight, but also that the arrival of the owner only heightened the occasion to a mass tease, like the running of the bulls in Pamplona.

  “Oh, those scum, those bastards, those rotten scum,” said Frank Mason. All along Pitkin Avenue, the Brownsville shopping district where he grew up, the texture of the blackout this time was becoming visible. And on Pitkin Avenue the texture of the blackout this time eclipsed fond remembrances of 1965 and its sense of friendly survival.

  The darkness this time was blood on the window shards of Kiddie Bargain Town on Pitkin Avenue, where the looters wadded themselves in and popped back out with baby carriages and strollers and infant paraphernalia. The darkness this time was two little boys initiating themselves into theft, clambering through the charred remains of John’s Bargain Store, coming out with school supplies and almost getting trampled by an old woman protecting an armful of pots.

  “Hey, like everything’s free,” said Albert Figueroa, summarizing the crowd’s mood even as he helped his neighbors at a looted jewelry store by keeping his leashed German shepherd, King, snarling at the doorway.

  Mr. Mason took it all personally. “This is my roots, where I grew up,” he said, moving toward his own auto repair shop, which had been spared. He stopped outside 1707 Pitkin, the Jewel Box, plundered apart. “That’s where I got my wife’s engagement ring—aw, man,” Mr. Mason said. He looked sad standing next to a small boy who was showing off a fine gold chain he had picked up in the daylight.

  When Looters Loot Looters

  By MARTIN GOTTLIEB and JAMES GLANZ | August 15, 2003

  Looters in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn began running after hearing police sirens in 1977.

  THERE WERE, UNTIL NOW, THE GOOD BLACK-out and the bad blackout: the 15-hour power loss in 1965 that was largely characterized by cooperation and overriding good cheer, and the 25-hour one in 1977 that was defined by widespread looting and arson in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

&nb
sp; Until Sept. 11, 2001, they were the most wide-ranging catastrophic events in modern New York City, causing, in the case of the 1977 blackout alone, 3,800 arrests and more than $1 billion in damage that can still be seen in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The first blackout instantly became an emblem of civic spunk and resilience, the second of civic disarray and uncertainty at a time of overwhelming municipal budget woes, economic deterioration, and fear caused by a serial killer known as Son of Sam.

  In 1965, the city underwent an epidemic of pluck. People voluntarily directed traffic, handed out candles and settled down at Grand Central Station for a night of sleep, without much of a worry about their wallets.

  In 1977, many veterans of the 1965 blackout headed to the streets at the first sign of darkness. But they did not find the same spirit. The Fire Department counted 1,037 fires in the city that night, more than 50 of them serious. On streets like Brooklyn’s Broadway the rumble of iron store gates being forced up and the shattering of glass preceded scenes of couches and televisions being paraded through the streets.

  “The looters were looting other looters, and the fists and the knives were coming out,” said Carl St. Martin, who was a third-year medical student and spent the night suturing a succession of angry wounds at Wyckoff Heights Hospital. Before the lights came back on, even Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue had been looted.