The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF SAM on 1 August 1977. And this is remembered as a classic item of alarmist salesdrumming (for of course serial murderers, horrible as they are, never pose a significant threat to people in general). Less often remembered is the timing. ‘Sam’ had by this time committed his last murder; the Post had taken so long getting hold of the story that the tocsin sounded only days before it was redundant.

  In media folklore Murdoch’s Post advent resembles a shirtsleeved Assyrian descending like a wolf on the fold. Shawcross describes ‘Dolly Schiff’s staid liberal backwater’ abruptly changed to a ‘roiling, clamorous torrent of news, mostly conservative opinion, and hucksterish entertainment’. And without Larry Lamb sharing the charge, this was editor-in-chief Murdoch’s own show. Steven Cuozzo, the devoted eyewitness, has Murdoch transfixing New York with revelations of ‘human emotion as a topic for serious consideration – even when that emotion reflected the dark side of the human psyche … The street-brawler publisher and the street-brawling city proved a combustible mix.’

  If so, it hung fire for the first six months of 1977. Entertainment was there (‘101 THINGS YOU CAN DO FOR FREE IN NY’) and flecks of conservative opinion. But when one reviews the pages with an eye to newsflow, it hardly seems torrential – rather, it’s intermittent and erratic. The noun might be ‘trickle’. If Son of Sam was then fighting a ‘one-man guerrilla war’ against the city (that is how the subsequent assertions of the Murdoch team added up) then the Post wasn’t covering it. In July it was trying to start a ‘war’ of its own against arson gangs, and lamenting public indifference to the issue. ‘The Post has in the last week told of mindless destruction by arsonists – gangs who burn for the fun of it, greedy landlords who pay hoodlums to burn buildings to collect insurance …’ A $500 reward was offered to counteract apathy, with a two-page spread (supplied from the trade magazine Firehouse) explaining ‘how the underworld turns fire into profit’. This looks like a newspaper peering around for big stories and not finding them.

  To be sure, inhibitions existed. Murdoch had recruited several subs adept in Fleet Street style, and as early as January one showed the way with a tale of capital-punishment protesters ‘storming’ the Utah jail where Gary Gilmore was being shot (in restoration of the American execution). Authority’s repression of violence against its own violence made a piquant mix – blended from reports of a peaceful protest. Maybe executive editor Paul Sann knew he was blocking progress when the sub said it would ‘juice up’ the coverage, but he demanded a rewrite without juice.

  Murdoch’s strategy was to add a morning edition, head to head against the News – tough work, for its circulation was roughly two million against half a million. The team certainly needed a big story, and in the event the story found them, but through the pages of the News.

  At 3.00 a.m. on 28 April Berkowitz came upon Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau in a parked car. He shot each of them twice – Valentina dying instantly, Alexander after several hours – and left a demented note, addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli and signed ‘Son of Sam’. Two days later the News columnist Jimmy Breslin received a letter, crazy but not illiterate, signed likewise and reading (in part), ‘Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of NYC and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead …’ When the News ran it in May – after discussion with the police – the edition sold out immediately. The ‘.44 killer’ had for months been a big story in the News; now as ‘Sam’ he was incandescent melodrama. The paper doesn’t seem to have spiced it with invention. But with a correspondence between lethal madman and its star columnist there was no occasion to.

  In July Murdoch drafted Wood and Dunleavy from the Star, and what Cuozzo calls the ‘real fun’ began. The Post had to find its own angle – the standard tactic of ignoring a competitor’s story was out of the question. The NYPD understandably feared that the killer, having become a celebrity, would attempt something on 29 July, the anniversary of his first attack, and heavily publicised the danger. Both the Post and the News provided major coverage. But essentially it was the story-so-far.

  Nothing happened. Then at 1.45 a.m. on 31 July Berkowitz found Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz in a car at Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn. He shot Robert twice, Stacy once; she died after thirty-eight hours in hospital, while the doctors discovered he was blinded, and their parents shared a bleak vigil amid intense media pressure. This ‘inspired one of Dunleavy’s memorable acts of competitive mischief’ (Cuozzo), when he found a doctor’s smock and entered Violante’s hospital room posing as a ‘bereavement counselor’, which:

  naturally enabled him to score an exclusive interview with the griefstricken family … It was this kind of Dunleavyan effort, Murdoch chuckled at the time, ‘that gives the young reporters confidence’.

  Dunleavy’s account of the ordeal of the families wasn’t perfectly exclusive, but it splashed over two pages of the Post. Some of the text must have challenged its readers:

  So he goes to a movie in Brooklyn and this.’ Neysa this .44 guy that did it. And this might says: “You know Stacy wasn’t scared of this guy because she is a blonde. I suppose it is Wouldn’t it be terrible for other kids of there sound terrible bit I hope it is the guy were two of these madmen running around?”

  … Jerry know what the doctor is telling the press: “I know, I know it doesn’t look and Neysa. Their boy is running the same good for her.” Teresa and Pat comfort Jerry race.

  Sic. Robert Lipsyte, an ex-colleague, has noted that Dunleavy’s words, devoted to ‘frenzy’, aren’t ‘orderly, measured or intelligent’. Gibberish, though, is rare. The cause was production incompetence: the stone-sub getting cut-lines badly scrambled. It happens, but not often at such length in the hot pages of a major newspaper. The arts of Christiansen’s Express were black perhaps, but they were always artful.

  On the first day of August the Post moved fully into big-story mode and declared Sam a universal menace. It was an alarmist gem of sorts, but it created a problem. The paper clearly had no real information to offer – a regular difficulty with murder stories. There were simple ways to stoke alarm, like crediting the .44 Bulldog with invincible (‘awesome’) lethality (its forensic significance, its rarity, came from being notoriously inaccurate, thus allowing some victims their lives). Dunleavy produced speculations (baseless) about the cops letting Sam escape. There were sidebars about Britain’s ‘Yorkshire Ripper’. Combing the archives produced ‘THE WAVES OF FEAR’, a series indicating that figures like Sam were New York regulars. ‘The .44-caliber killer is not the first human monster to hold the city a hostage to fear …’ Adding force to this text was a picture of the shoes of Frances Hajek and her boyfriend, victims of the ‘Lipstick Killer’, in 1937.

  Four days into August the Post led (exclusively) on Carmine Galante, America’s ‘most powerful Mafia chieftain’, deciding that his own daughter was not safe and joining the hunt for Sam. If anyone was reassured by Galante putting 5,000 ‘soldiers’ on the case, they must have been troubled next day when the police collared him for another matter. Murdoch of course wasn’t, for he knew the lead was spurious, as he told Thomas L. Kiernan lightly. The confession has an interesting background. Kiernan wrote a book about Murdoch which began as a co-operative biography, but relations grew hostile over discussion of Murdoch’s editorial tactics. Kiernan failed to see that ‘We didn’t have anything else’ justified a fraudulent lead, especially in the Son of Sam context. Citizen Murdoch (1986) is considered deeply unfair in Post circles.

  Elmer ‘Trigger’ Burke from the 1950s and Francis ‘Two-Gun’ Crowley from the 1930s provided the final Waves of Fear on the same day. Neither case was remotely relevant, suggesting the cupboard indeed was bare. Now Dunleavy showed the way again with his celebrated Open Letter, offering Sam therapy in exchange for surrender. He began by saying he had been ‘stunned, shattered and angry’ when embracing the Moskowitz parents three days earlier. (He omitted mention of his role as a ‘bereavem
ent counselor’.) ‘But it’s time to put aside anger … and make a genuine, lasting appeal to the man who calls himself “Son of Sam”.’

  Many people had called the Post claiming to be the killer. None had been authentic, but ‘chillingly’ the possibility existed, so Dunleavy made:

  a straightforward and genuine appeal to the ‘Son of Sam’ to give himself up. Call us, and we pledge that together with the New York City police, perhaps the finest department in the world, we will see that you will be given the best help this city can afford.

  We know you are intelligent, no matter how monstrously misguided you might be. We know you have suffered and we feel for you …

  The electric chair was a thing of the past. What the Post wanted was to find the real causes of the tragedy in Sam’s troubled mind: By turning yourself in to us now, we feel that not only would it bring an end to the slaughter, it might also give the world an insight into what triggered this terrible nightmare.

  Help us help you to help the city to once again sleep in peace. Call us. Berkowitz made no response, but the Post anyway came up with its own theory about the trigger and the nightmare. And it was one justifying tracts of ready-made copy which required no strenuous recyling into factual guise. Four years earlier Lawrence Sanders had produced a novel, The First Deadly Sin, about a crazed New York publisher butchering people for thrills. What about Sam having developed his lethal mind-set by reading Sanders? Naturally the Post must introduce everyone swiftly to this potent text – ‘COMING NEXT WEEK!’

  It’s your kind of reading.

  His name was Daniel Blank … he prowled the city, picking out his victims … Don’t miss the digest of this thriller starting Monday in the Post … Police think Son of Sam may have modelled himself on the aimless killer [it describes].

  Sanders is a writer of some account, but the digestion clearly did something to his dialogue, especially in the metaphysical exchanges between the killer and his morbid girlfriend. ‘“I’m not talking about evil for the sake of evil,” said Celia. “I mean saints of evil – men and women who see a vision and follow it.”’ He wanted her to know just how profound the vision thing was for him: ‘“When … I … saw him walking toward me I thought yes, now, he is the one. I loved him so much then, loved him. And respected him. That he was giving. So much. To me. Then I killed him.”’ These serious considerations of human emotion were suitably illustrated. Had there been even a scintilla of truth in the publishing pretext it would have been an insane act. But elsewhere in the Post a news-stand man was quoted saying, ‘Fifty copies of anything about Sam go like hotcakes in 10 minutes.’

  It wasn’t a novel which led the NYPD to Son of Sam, but a parking ticket collected near the Moskowitz-Violante shooting scene. Arrested on 10 August, Berkowitz admitted all his crimes (killing six people, blinding one, paralysing another, wounding seven less seriously). Remorseless, and relishing celebrity, he was jailed for 364 years.

  The Post of 15 August devoted fifteen pages to recording a twelve-month ‘war’ which it said Berkowitz had waged against New York. This appeared to centre on a major personal communication from ‘Sam’ to the paper, with his own account of the psychological processes which had turned him into a serial killer (Sanders being superseded). These were not just notes like the Daily News had received, but seemingly his autobiography:

  By David Berkowitz

  The man the police say is Son of Sam How many readers penetrated this fakery is unknown. Notoriously, the material was cobbled up – without participation by Berkowitz – out of letters sent to a girlfriend years before and sold to the News as well as the Post. They were certainly the letters of a bombastic misfit, with a disagreeable interest in weaponry. Not by any stretch were they the story of his homicidal activities in New York.

  This seems an embarrassing circumstance, but the interesting point is that Murdoch has never been much embarrassed, either on his own behalf or on the Post’s. Questioned by William Shawcross, he said, ‘I didn’t write it, but I certainly approved it. I think it was wrong. But that’s hindsight.’ In another explanation, he implied that the critics just haven’t had to take the heat: ‘When you get in there at 3 o’clock or 5 o’clock in the morning, you’ve got five minutes to make an edition, and you’re trying to choose between two headlines, it’s easy to make a mistake.’

  We’re being offered a slippery pronoun: when Murdoch says he didn’t write ‘it’, the impression is of a quick slip in a stressful second, a small enhancement gone just too far. But making a tabloid edition isn’t a five-minute process, it’s an extended architectural operation – which is why broadsheets are better for hard news. It aims to produce a sledgehammer ensemble which can’t be misunderstood at the hastiest glance. There’s evidence that Murdoch’s production team weren’t quite as slick with detail as Old Fleet Street liked. But if we look at the actual presentations of 15 August 1977 it seems they got the basic message into solid shape. For an experienced newspaper executive to suggest that only ‘hindsight’ revealed to him a possible impression that the Post was offering the personal story of a famous killer is grotesque. Most likely they knew what they were doing, and hoped to get away with it, though that calculation must have involved a large amount of professional naïveté.

  Since that hot, apparently terrifying summer of 1977, New York has suffered ordeals which make us think again about the entire notion of a city being at threat from ‘guerrilla warfare’. But, leaving some recent nuances aside, the Post remains pretty much the same newspaper, working in the same way. After two interludes in other hands, it is back with Rupert Murdoch, and still losing money. Its relevance, as both its friends and its enemies say, is now in its imitators more than in itself.

  Where does a detailed look at the Post’s treatment of the Son of Sam story leave the Columbia Journalism Review’s accusation of ‘evil’? Lately, that word has been much used in cases where it is undoubtedly appropriate. The first impression one gets from the record, overwhelmingly, is of lavish incompetence, and this frequently disarms. Most of the attacks on Newscorp are put in terms of its ruthless skill, and the deadly intuitions of its boss. In earlier chapters it’s been suggested that such a picture may be overdrawn. But earlier chapters don’t contain anything as absurd as the Post’s attempts to peer into the mind of Berkowitz and exploit him as a celebrity. If a newspaper proprietor is effectively represented as Dracula, an evil reputation will surely accrue. But will Dracula still seem evil if he can’t make his false teeth fit properly? Isn’t he just a clown?

  Certainly a lot of what the Post was up to – ‘competitive mischief’ and so on – looks immediately like clowning. But on any closer look it’s obvious that the raw material of this clowning was the pain and agony of real people. Just as obviously, the belated two-week pursuit of Son of Sam was exploitative. To be sure, that’s true of much newspaper work. But there is something additionally chilling about exploitative behaviour married to childlike professional clumsiness. The Daily News coverage doesn’t look very pretty in today’s retrospect. They didn’t make things up, and they didn’t wildly inflate the threat from Son of Sam. But neither did they step out of their tabloid role and remind the citizens that the real risk to any individual New Yorker from Son of Sam was utterly negligible compared to the ordinary chances of urban life. They were, all the same, observing limits.

  Murdoch and his Post team, with their wild calls to panic, their Mafia fantasies and their ludicrous psychological theorising, saw no limits except what they could get away with – and even that they couldn’t competently judge. Dunleavy said as much: Anything goes.’ He did, of course, nominate accuracy as a constraint, but this didn’t mean anything when Murdoch thought the headlines needed juicing up’.

  Steven Cuozzo, having spent his working life at the Post, has developed several lines of defence for its style, which he considers to be inspired wholly by Murdoch. One – the proposition about making human emotion a topic for ‘serious consideration’ – explodes o
n contact with The First Deadly Sin and its ‘angels of evil’ used as a means to comprehension of the Berkowitz murders. Another claims that Murdoch’s Post has brought to journalism a ‘dark playfulness’ which sustains people amid the pressures of modern life. Here D. H. Lawrence is brought in with a variant of his ‘intentional fallacy’ thesis, in which subs juicing up headlines may unconsciously assist the American people to purify their emotions.

  Cuozzo’s examples generally resemble the sort of black humour cops and nurses use – but privately – to release stress. Incivility apart, parading it weakens the release, but for Cuozzo anything’s grist to the headline mill, most of all the rather notorious Post item: ‘HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR’. He was pleased that a friend in the National Review could expound its metaphysical wit and (yes) ‘trochaic rhythm’ conveying ‘appropriate ancient truth about sex, violence, and death’. Otherwise it might just be turning a murder into a joke – thus being pretty callous somewhere. Of course murder mostly affects people who can’t object to becoming joke material, but busybody critics do exist, and Cuozzo suggests that ‘dark playfulness’, tinged with classicism, has helped the Post and its boss to see them off.

  An effect of 9/11 is to make this kind of hokum more transparent. The Post would not dare to attempt ‘dark playfulness’ in respect of anything close to Ground Zero. Public black humour, in reality, applies only to those nobody troubles much about, or are for some other reason no danger to the wits who devise it. The Post mixture displayed in Cuozzo’s celebratory history is exploitative enthusiasm, incompetence, ruthlessness, institutional toadying and an operational inability to distinguish fact from fabrication – topped off with some pseudo-intellectual bullshit. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to call such a newspaper ‘a force for evil’.

  That it hasn’t – so far – worked any better than the Daily Graphic is striking, because it has been allowed to try three times longer. Had it been simply a newspaper operating in the marketplace it would have disappeared long ago. But at some level it has worked for Murdoch, and in the first place this seems to mean some personal gratification. However rigidly he controls them, none of the other Newscorp titles have given him so unencumbered a domain – here was no Lamb, no Deamer actually setting the operation in motion. An observer can only say: how clearly it shows, in the sheer awfulness of the paper, and in its failure to make a living – let alone a fortune – out of the city Murdoch appeared to take by storm a three-and-a-half decades ago.