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He saw a shine in his eyes and a smile on his face and felt that he was being played with, and because he's being played with like a cat and mouse or whatever else, he needed to take action.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. We're talking about a very famous case this week. In nineteen eighty four, Bernie Gets shot four black teenagers on a subway in Manhattan. He was hailed as a hero in the press, a man who stopped would be robbers. But as the public learned more about the evidence and about Gets himself, the stories
seem to shift. Elliott Williams is a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, and he wrote a book about the case called Five Bullets. The story of Bernie Gets New York's explosive eighties and the subway vigilante trial that divided the nation. Give me context for where we are, what time period, and what is New York City like in this time period.
No one can really comprehend today what nineteen eighties and nineteen seventies New York really looked like. When we think about Labradoodal New York, when we think about Lululemon and Whole Foods New York, and Skyscraper New York and Tech Company New York, it's very different than the nineteen eighties. And the world of this book is a gritty, grimy place that's just not the New York of our imagination.
Think about some of the films that came out of the nineteen seventies about New York City, Death Wish, which comes up a lot in my book Saturday Night Fever. The Warriors Escape from New York are all about somewhat of a healthscape where it's rough, it's dirty, it's overcome with litter, the city faces rampant corruption scandals. The city is broken, mismanaged and seeking bailouts from the federal government.
It's firing teachers and sanitation workers. In nineteen seventy seven, there's a blackout, which happens in every municipality in America, and I start the book Five Bullets with this. But the blackout, unlike say the blackout in two thousand and three that many listeners might be familiar with, where people are outside doing the waltz on the street and rolling out there their barbecues and having cookouts and cooking jerk chicken and sipping mimosas it becomes the most vicious single
evening in New York City history. Literally, The New York Post, I believe, our time magazine Pardon calls it twenty four hours of terror, where arson, looting, homicide, assaults just take the city over. And that's indicative of how rough New York City was at the time. Homicide rate was I believe, seventeen hundred a year, which is about four or five times greater than it is now. So it's just a different place and like nothing we've seen today.
I was in New York in two thousand and four. I lived in New York off and on for about ten years. In two thousand and four, I think, and we had a blackout, and I was scared to death because I had read all about the seventy seven blackout, and yeah, it was pretty much the way you described. I was in the East Village in Tompkins Square Park. They were doing bongo drums. And what was nice about the time period where I lived in New York was when that happened. You have bodega's and they're passing out
free water because of course they have no electricity. And I mean, you know, people were really pulling together. And of course this is post nine to eleven. So in eighty four when your story is taking place, who is in charge? I am mixed up between Dinkins or who's the mayor at this time?
This is Coach, this is Kach, and this is Ed Koch at his height, and he gets re elected in nineteen eighty five. Really at his peak, he was New York City had had a string of Look, everybody's a Democrat for the most part, or a Republican who today would be a Democrat. In John V. Lindsay, who was mayor two mayors before, but the mayor I spoke about the rampant corruption and problematic that was Abraham Beam, who
was the mayor before. Kach Koch gets elected really on a law and order and sort of toughness platform, on a centrist We are not safe. Public safety is a big concern in the city. I represent you Brooklyn, part of me, Brooklyn, parts of Brooklyn, but definitely Queens and Staten Island and the sort of outer Borrows and the working class ethnic whites. And really we're big fans of him.
Cotchin eighty five, So just after, really just after the incident in my book, Cotchin eighty five gets elected and I think the first mayor ever to get elected on both the Democratic and Republican Party platforms and like seventy five percent of the vote. So he's at his height, and he's sort of the guy who, for better or for worse, is credited in many ways for kind of turning around or at least starting the turnaround of New York City from the grit and the grime to the
you know, like I said, labradoodal New York. Now, if anybody's read the book Gods of New York by Jonathan Maller, which came out in twenty twenty five in the summer. It sort of picks up where my book leaves off. Where my book is about the grit and grime of the late seventies into the early nineteen eighties, and one
emblematic incident that came from that. His about the rebirth of New York from eighty six to nineteen ninety, and you sort of some of the characters transfer from one to another and sort of an interesting arc of a city in crisis, which is really what my book was about.
Now, let's talk about the racial tensions, which I know you know really play such a large part in your book. Describe what this is like, Is this sort of segregation situation in the city where you don't have people living together as they might now or what really was it like?
It was rough? And something I refer to in the book Five Bullets is this idea of there's a racial incident, there's a protest and unrest. Al Sharpton shows up, the mayor issues a statement calling for calm. It blows over and then simmers underneath the surface until the next one happens about a year later, and New York city through starting in the late seventies deep into the frankly into
the nineteen nineties. I clocked it ATCHI probably about every year year and a half there was some major above the fold incident that galvanized and just sort of got in the city's consciousness. Now, obviously there's Bernard Getzen. I assume we're going to talk about that a little bit today, the corusue in the book Five Bullets. But then in nineteen eighty three, I believe Eleanor Bumpers is shot by police officers in her home during an eviction with a
shotg They shoot her with a shotgun. She's being evicted, but she's also a grandmother who's mentally ill and naked as they kill her, and that causes a big polarization in the city. There's Howard Beach and benson Hurst and Crown Heights, and I throw them all out together because even having grown up there, they all blur together. For me.
One of them is the guy who's looking for a pontiac in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, in a white neighborhood in Brooklyn, These white guys with baseball bats and guns or screaming ethnic slurs at him, telling him to get out because they thought he was there to meet white girls. So they chase him, run him down. He ends up getting hit by a cars he's crossing a highway. Another one, same thing, crossing into the wrong side of town, chased down and beaten to death by baseball bat wheeling white guys.
That Benson Hurston, Howard Beach. I just can't remember which one was which Crown Heights was Lebovich. Jewish caravan runs over a couple kids, two of them, one gets injured, one dies, a boy named Gavin Cato, and that causes a lot of black and Orthodox Jewish tension. And ultimately that was a big one at the center. You saw Al Sharpton at the center of it. I talk about it quite a bit in the book. That got really ugly because there was a lot of rioting and looting
of Jewish businesses in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Then you move later into the nineteen eighties, you get the Central Park five, which everybody knows about, which these five young men accused of a horrific sexual assault ends up to be inaccurate. Donald Trump, then just a real estate developer takes out an ad in the New York Times calling for their ex acution. There was Amadu Diallo, an immigrant, standing on his porch holding a wallet that police shot him forty
one times. So anyway, all of this happens, and it's literally every year from probably seventy seven, seventy eight to up into the nineties, and they just kept happening, and it was just simmering under the surface in a way that we all internalize, I think as people from the area.
What was the safety like on the subway system in the eighties, because you know, I lived in New York starting I would say ninety seven until probably about you know, two thousand and four, two thousand and five, and I felt safe on the subways. Now, I was also not somebody riding the subways at midnight. Yeah, and you know I was living in Lower Manhattan. So what was it like in the eighties? I suspect a little scary depending on where you were.
Oh yeah, and no doubt. And I was in the city because I was in law school at that time in the city from ninety eight to two really, and so at the same time, the subway was not bad at that point. It was not. And by then the cars had started getting modernized and so on, so it
was just a different experience. The subway was rough, and something I talk about a fair amount in the book is the amount of crime that took place in the subway also was at an all time high, where you're talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of assaults, snatches and grabs, whatever the grammatical plural would be. But the assaults not many homicides or serious serious assaults, but bad ones, really horrible things that made daily life exceptionally difficult for people.
Now another one, and I'm not going to come out here embracing the broken windows theory of policing, which is that brit and grime and roughness make people commit worse crimes. Right, That was the whole thing with Giuliani in the nineteen nineties. But New York City's subways were dirty. They were a place that people through their trash, people went to the bathroom, they were all and I talk about this in the book.
Every subway car in nineteen whatever year, every single one, every single inch of every single one was covered in graffiti. And it became a contest among graffiti artists who have tagged at least one subway car in every one of the five boroughs, and they were called kings. You became a king if you tagged up graffiti in every one of the burrows of the city. Now again you look
at them now and their relics. In many ways, they're almost beautiful and there if you were to wash one down and just see the graffiti covering them, it's a fascinating artistic group of compositions. That said, it is all indicative of how rough the subway was. Signs didn't work, maps didn't work, windows were broken. Trains were constantly breaking down and on fire and derailing at a rate far
more than any subway system we could think of today. Now, obviously you hear about sometimes fires or derail the unhappy. It's a cost of machinery in our world. But it was really bad, and people relied on the subway. They needed it. It is the best way to get around New York City. But it was rough.
What about the transit police? Were they understaffed? I can't imagine they weren't. Aren't they always?
Oh, horribly horribly understaffed, horribly understaffed and also not fully And I say this having worked in law enforcement for quite some time before being a journalist. They were never fully syncd up with the NYPD, and so their radios were on different frequencies, for instance. And so you would have a major incident underground and both NYPD and New York Transit cops were working on it, but they couldn't
talk to each other over their walkie talkie. So that's just the incompetence of eighties New York that set some of the scene here.
Let's go ahead and get into the crux of the book. Is the incident that happened that sparked all of this. Tell me about the day that it happened. And let's start with the victims, who were the four teenage the four black teenage who were on the subway when they encounter burning gets that day.
Okay, so there's four eighteen and nineteen year old young men. They live in a housing project called Claremont Village. It's regarded as a heralded facility, if you want to call it that, but a heralded concept in public housing where they combined all of these edifices under one major, massive, sprawling complex. It's really now the size literally of a
small college campus. It's I think it was thirty thousand residents, although up to seventy thousand lived in it because people had, you know, would multi generational families and friends living together and so on. So it was this crowded, big housing project. And to be clear, you know, we were talking about safety a bit. The projects in the early nineteen eighties
were quite safe for people who lived there. It wasn't until the introduction of crack cocaine in nineteen eighty five to New York City that really made that the projects what we think of today as this place of crime and grit and so on. It pushed a lot of the crime into the housing projects. So these four guys live relatively, I don't want to say, not cloistered, but they had family lives Daryl Caby, Barry Allen, Troy Knty,
and James Ramsur. Darryl Caby is the most interesting story, or the most sort of heart wrenching story of all the people. He grew up with his mother, Shirley. He lived with her and a bunch of siblings in the house. Well, his dad wasn't around because his dad was a taxi driver who'd gotten run over by his own cab because he was fighting off a carjacker, which might be the most single nineteen eighties Claremont Village, Bronx, New York story
of all the others. They'd known each other, they'd engaged in some crimes together, but really they were young men in and around the projects, so they'd interacted together and committed some crimes together. The big one that they where they knew each other from was a common crime from young men of that time, and it was breaking open
video game machines downtown. So fun bit of history. Right around nineteen eighty or so, the video game Space Invaders is invented, is it comes out and creates a boom in video arcades across the United States. Well, because there was all this this new concept of video game machines became really widespread in businesses like bars and bodegas that took a lot of cash. Well, the problem is that a video game machine, if you ever looked at one, was a giant piggy bank. It can hold hundreds, if
not thousands, of dollars at a time. Well, the guys were going downtown to break open video game machines. It was a common crime. It just is what everybody did. You just get a screwdriver. Pop it open. One guy pretends to play the game while other guys pop it open. You just grab the quarters and run away. Well, they were on the subway. They had a couple screwdrivers on them.
Pay attention there. And we're on the subway heading downtown to Pace University in Lower Manhattan to break video game machines. And they get on this train around midday. They're goofing around. They're causing noise, they're doing pull ups on the bars, they're shadow boxing, and they're also going around to different people on the train asking for cigarettes and matches and
causing certainly a disturbance. Now some of the people think, eh, I don't I'm not crazy about how these guys are behaving. But and maybe even some even got up to move. But no one was directly threatened by them or injured by them.
So these guys are sort of troublemakers. No violence in their history that you know of.
Oh, it's definitely violence in their history. No violence on this train, like they certainly two of them, and I want to say Ramser and one other I want to say Canty or KB had gotten They knew each other through a fist fight, through their buddies, like one of them had gotten like I think, and forgive me it's I think it was Kanty's brother fights Ramser's friend fights Ramster, and they knew each other, so they're not tight. But they all had and let's be clear, they had copious
criminal histories. Rams gets really bad in the future, however, it's a lot of the thefts and the robberies, and stealing from Macy's and stealing from kids, stealing from charities, a lot of stealing. It's a lot of stealing. And all four had at some point in varying degrees, had issues with cocaine. Crack, as I've mentioned, doesn't really hit the projects in New York until nineteen eighty five, but one of them had starts smoking marijuana at age thirteen
and then tries cocaine certainly through his teen years. So they all are reflective as much of society's failures as their own and their tragic stories, no matter how you look at it. But to be clear, they all had criminal records, and a couple of them were pending on warrants at the time they were on the train.
So on this train, what burrow are we in? And how many people are we talking about in this one carriage.
They start in the Bronx and it's a train that starts up if folks know the geography of New York City, it starts in the Bronx, head south through Manhattan, then makes the left turn into Brooklyn and goes deep into Brooklyn on the train car. By the time the incident goes down, there's about two dozen a dozen to two dozen people fifteen twenty and no one ever had a clear count. But it's not an empty car, but it's not a packed one, okay.
And you know this is people standing and sitting and all of that. And these guys, these four guys are just sort of as a group, just not harassing necessarily, but just causing an uproar. And I'm certainly making people feel uncomfortable.
Certainly making people feel uncomfortable. And that is the important takeaway before we get to burn ourd gets who gets on the train a little bit later in the West Village in southern Manhattan, people were uncomfortable. Now a few of the band and I spoke to one of the passengers still alive, and he said, look, I've ridden the subway a lot before, I've seen these kinds of guys around. I'm not crazy about their behavior, but this is just part of a cost of life in a big city.
You're going to find young guys who are goofing off on a train, maybe even threatening people. But everyone's in agreement. They did not harm anyone on the train. They were certainly causing a, let's say, a nuisance, but didn't pull one of the screwdrivers out or try to fight with anybody or anything like that.
That's what I was going to ask, because you hinted at the screwdrivers, so they're not pulling these out in any way at least. Okay, no, no, So we have then Bernard Getz getting on the train. You said in the west village. Tell me about his background. How old he is, you know all of that stuff. Electrical engineer, is that right?
Electrical engineer and a very very bright one. He'd gone to NYU, so he'd grown up relatively privileged in Westchester County, starts in Queens, grows up in Westchester County, New York, which is just north of the city, just above Bronx, and privileged. His dad was, i want to say, in the same line of work in engineering, and so on. I think the galvanizing There were a few galvanizing moments in Bernard Gets his life, and I think all identify
two of them. One is when he is a early teenage his father gets arrested and accused for sexually assaulting a few teenagers. These two boys who are regarded as troublemakers in town. Now, the Gets family regarded it as singling out their wealthy father and politically connected father, that that opponents of Dad had really turned on Dad and wanted to embarrass him. So he ultimately sends up spending
some time in jail over this result. Now, this is one of the moments that begins Bernard Gets his total lack of disillusionment with the criminal justice system. He regards throughout life, including my interview with him, he regards criminal justice system as not focused on keeping people safe, being rife with bias, and ultimately a place where criminals get coddled and game the system out. And it turned him off. So that big moment happens. Number one. Number two, he's
actually mugged nineteen eighty one. He's carrying a bunch of engineering equipment on the subway. Once again, rough stuff in the early nineteen eighties, but he's carrying a bunch of electrical equipment. Three young black dudes jumped him for his sheepskin jacket. They jump him, start pounding on him. Two of them get away. The cops grab one of them, and gets completely disillusioned with the system there too, saying that why are the cops so focused on protecting this guy?
Why did they only question him for two hours and me for six hours? All they care about is this guy. I'm the one who's the victim here. Why is this guy not going to jail? The kid just gets charged with criminal mischief I believe, not assault or anything over the fight that they get into. So for all these reasons, at a certain point, Bernie gets starts carrying firearms, and he vowed after that assault at Mugging to never get
victimized again. He was going to start carrying firearms, and so over the course of a pretty long period, he starts amassing a bunch of different firearms, handguns, some legally, many of them, not selling them and giving them to other people. He buys one on the day of his father's funeral when he's down in Florida. So he's just a big gun owner and starts carrying one with him wherever he goes, has a quick draw holster, has his belt buckled to the side so that he can get
to his gun quickly. He doesn't wear gloves in public anymore, and he's just ready in case trouble comes along.
What are the concealed weapon laws like in New York in this time period?
New York as now certainly had very restrictive gun rules, and there were people who could get concealed carry permits. Eleanor Roosevelt fun Fact was a big handgun carrier and possessor, but not in order to get a license to carry a firearm in New York, you really had to have some demonstrated need for it. Now, rich people can make a demonstrat need for anything, but you needed to have
some demonstrated need. And simply I walk around a lot with expensive electrical equipment is not and was not seen as a sufficient need, and so they would just deny them mostly. And part of what turns gets off is he applies for a license and they deny it on that basis you don't have a specialized need for it.
So he's doing this illegal? Is that right?
Oh? Yeah? I mean he had I don't know offhand if any of his guns were procured lawfully, but he certainly had a lot of illegal firearms, handguns, not long guns.
So I think I have a handle on the four guys who ended up being the victims. But tell me about gets his personality and you know, his current family life when all of this stuff happens. Is he still wealthy from his dad's side.
It's hard to say. I don't know if he's wealthy at the time, but he's certainly comfortable doing electrical engineering work around the city. Now. Everybody throughout time has commented on Bernard Getz's timidity and nerdiness, his paralegal eventual paralegal. When Day said he's a nerdy pocket protector kind of guy, for Batim is what she called him.
I haven't heard pocket protector in a very long time, so that's that's a phrase out of the past.
I know, right, bespectacled, thin, blonde guy wearing glasses. He sort of walks with a hunch, he sort of stooped over his skinny, he's tall. But the thing that riled him up was public safety. It was throughout his time he just felt that the city wasn't doing enough to keep people safe. He just felt that it's fat cats in New York, up in Gracie mansion or whatever that
don't care about public safety. And he would constantly be peppering his neighbors and the doorman and everybody with petitions and and why can't we get the streets cleaned up? In all of the above, and it was really a thing. So that's one, just public safety was the thing that riled him up more than anything else. In two, he's just all over the place. People regard to him as I didn't know if this guy was as sicky or not, which is what one of the people said about him.
He was just hyperkinetic and hands clenched and darting from different topics. And someone would say hello to you one day and be warm to you and your kids, and then make eye contact with you several hours later and not not even say hello. Just odd. And they every single person throughout time seems to comment on his oddness as a human. He had been married briefly for about five years back in the early nineteen seventies. Nineteen seventy one.
He gets married but doesn't have kids and at the time was single.
Okay, he steps on the train this afternoon. How long do we know that the guys have been on the train kind of being hooligans before they encounter Bernard gets.
Yeah, so it's about thirty minutes from where they get on in the South Bronx to the West Village fourteenth Street where gets gets on. So it's about thirty minutes and they're gooping around on the train. In the seventh car of the train, doors open up. Bernard gets walks in.
Oh, okay, what line is this just out of cre is it a I can't remember.
It's the two. It's a downtown two Express. Yeah, so the so the stops would be right there, So it would be thirty fourth Street, which is Harold Square which where Macy's is and Penn Station and Madison Square Garden. Then fourteenth Street, which is the West Village basically NYU where that's where gets gets on.
Okay, so he gets on what a witnesses say, because you have I think what a couple doesen' Is that what you said, witnesses?
I mean that that's probably that's probably a liberal estimate, probably about twenty Okay, Yeah, so they again they're commenting on the guys No one really notices Bernard gets get on. He just immediately gets on and sits down. In fact, some witnesses weren't sure if he got on at fourteenth Street or a few stops before at ninety sixth Street. They just weren't sure. But he gets on and sits down, and immediately Troy Canty, one of the four young men, approached him.
So what do you think made Bernard gets somebody that this guy thought would be approachable or were they just approaching everybody?
That's the million dollar question of many million dollar questions, Kate about this entire case. What was it about Bernard gets Now again, I said, he's meek, he's timid, he's frail, he's a white guy, he's feeble. Maybe that's it right the Canty and the testimony later comes out, Oh, he was just there. He was just the guy who was there, and he walked on. We were up there. He enters at the north side of the train where the guys are hanging out, and that's why Canty approached him. That
at least that's his theory. Now it doesn't strain common sense. Say, look, this guy looks pretty feeble. Let's go up to the feeble guy and see if we can mess with him a little bit. But it's just not clear what it was about Bernard gets Now. To be clear, they'd approached a lot of people on the train. They had encounters that were probably not that different from the encounter they had with Bernard Gets, which was walk up to them and ask him for money.
So they just said, hey, buddy, can I have five bucks? Give me five bucks? How does the convo go after that? I mean, what does he do?
Well, there's not much convo after that because the guy comes out. But even the second thing, this is the second great mystery, what does Troy Kanty say to Bernard gets Now? And you really touch on this well, k because it remains a mystery forty one years later, which is does he say give me five dollars? Or hey, mister, can I have five dollars? One of them is a demand, one of them is a request for money. One of them's panhandling. And the guys all say that Kanty was panhandling.
They was just asking for money. Is that's money? Because quite frankly, they're going downtown to play video games before breaking the machines open. They needed some money and so they just wanted some cash. Bernard Gets remains adamant that those guys were specifically coming to rob him, to mug him, and because of that fear, he felt empowered to act.
What about witnesses, somebody standing right there or sitting right next to him, right.
No one really really knew exactly what had gone down. One woman said, hey, look at that. She testifies this later because she leans over to her husband, this is the guy I interviewed. Hey, look at those four punks bothering that man. Or look at those four punks bothering that white man, one of those two things. That wasn't clear whether she said that the memories and testimony conflicted, but hey, look at those four punks bothering that man.
So at least one witness thought, wait a second, they're sort of acting up around him, maybe they're attacking him. But no one else, I believe, really saw the initial exchange, or at least was so struck by it to think, wait a second, what's happening up there at the north end of the car.
But nobody Also, I know everybody's trying to mind their own business as what I but nobody is picking up on a feeling like Bernard Guests is being threatened. I mean, you would just kind of get a vibe from I think if these kids were really going to do that.
I think that's an excellent question, Kate. It's sort of what's the vibe and are people really picking up that something bad is about to go down? Part of what undermines that point or that question is it just happened so quickly. It's from the moment. From the moment Gets walks in and sets down, it's probably a matter of seconds before Kanty approaches him, and then the whole thing just spiraled out of control very quickly.
So Gets doesn't even respond. He just pulls out a gun and start shooting.
So he looks down. He thinks it's rude to make eye contact and just just doesn't really respond. But he felt that the mugging was going on, so he stood up, reached into his jacket and knew he had his gun there.
What are people saying about the days before this? I mean, is there any change in him? Was there an inciting incident? There's nothing. He's just kind of the.
Weird guy, weird gadfly about New York who's really mad about the drunks. And the beggars on the stoopid his building in the West Village, and nothing really was different, and particularly nothing was different, and that it was just another day. He was just going out of the house with a gun. He in two occasions, at least two occasions, had pulled a gun on people, folks that were yelling
at him or barking at him or threatening him. One guy like he was walking and Harlem gets off got off the wrong on the train and is walking and the guy came up behind him, and Guts just pulled out his gun held it up and the guy freaked out, turned white and ran away. Another one, he's in the West Village, same thing. He's on sixth Avenue and a young guy comes up behind him, white kid or I don't know how old he was, but I'm going to get you, and when I do, I'm gonna u MF.
I'm going to do this, and then to do that. And then the same thing gets pulls out his gun and just pulls it out and sticks it at him, and same thing, and Guts felt almost empowered and excited when he saw the guy turn so scared and run away like he knew he did. The one thing he could do to sort of like clap back and frighten this guy. And so those were the at least two incidents that are documented of him having pulled a gun
out before, but he'd never really had any training. He claimed that playing cowboys and Indians that as a kid was what taught him how to use a gun, and that's really his only meaningful training in the use of firearms.
It's a thirty eight, Is it right that he pulls in It's.
A thirty eighth? Okay, thirty eight Smith and Wesson.
He pulls out eight and there are upwards of twenty people around in this car, and what is tell me just kind of lay out the scene, what ends up happening, and who gets shot first.
Yeah, so he apparently Now again, a lot of these things are in dispute in some way four decades later, but generally, here's what we think happens. I'll give I'll give all those five dollars to you, or I'll let you have five dollars, pulls out his gun and immediately shoots Canty in the chest, then turns and shoots both Alan and Ram Surr, both of whom end up with wounds in their back. Now it's an open question as to are they running away, are they turning, are they flinching?
The train is lurching and going back and forth as is going on, so no one really knows what really happens here except somebody says that they were looks like they were trying to get out climb through the walls of the train, like they're in a slasher movie, and so gets says I let them have it, and then shoots them right, so boom, boom boom. Both end up with wounds in their back or in their sides, suggesting
they're shot in the back. Then he goes to Darryl Kby, sees him maybe slumped in a chair or slumped in a bench at the end, and either shoots him and then says, you don't look so bad. Here's another and then shoots him again, or fires a shot and maybe says you don't look so bad. Here's another and then shoots him again. That's again, it's inconclusive what he actually says to him, although he seems to have acknowledged that he said that you know, look so bad. Here's another,
shoots KB ends up shooting him in the chest. It severs his spine right there in the moment, and then that's it. Somewhere one of the panels on the side of the train ends up with a bullet hole in it. People don't quite know. This is why the inconclusive nature of what happens to Daryl Kby at the end there. Does he just fire a shot off that missus? Does he then go up to KB and shoot him? Does he say he don't look so bad? I mean, it's
just it's just open and memory faded about that. But the general thing is it is believed that he delivers that line looking into Darryl KB and shoots him. Now a point I left out a second ago, And there's an important one when he shoots Troy Canty like bang right away, real quick. The first guy that says it to him, he says, he is about to take his keys out and gouge Troy Canty's eyes out. He was so filled with rage that that's what he wanted to do, but he saw fear in his eyes and backed off
of it. And eyes it's really interesting, you know, just thinking this through. Eyes were such a powerful motivator in all of this, because also Gets claims that before he shot him he saw a shine in his eyes and a smile on his face and felt that he was being played with, And because he's being played with like a cat and mouse or whatever else, he needed to take action. So he just was looking at these men's eyes and sort of judging what he saw as motivating his decision to do open fire.
I have a bunch of tiny, detailed questions. You said that he gets on the train, he's quickly approached by one of these guys, and his response is quick, so you think this is all what's the estimation? As soon as he steps on there just like thirty seconds.
For the many many listeners of this program in New York City who are familiar with it, the train's going from Fourteenth Street to Chambers Street, which is really only one express stop. Train never makes it to Chambers Street. It's a short short ride before the train gets stopped. When the emergency brake gets pulled, it's within a minute, and ultimately it's unclear whether the shots are fired off. Bang bang bang bang bang or bang bang bang bang.
You don't look so bad. Here's another bang. Needless to say, he empties the firearm within three seconds four seconds of opening five ten seconds of the first time he opens fire, and so it's an incredibly short amount of time.
How can he be clear when he sits down, Troy comes over and says, you know, give me five dollars or can I have five dollars? Whatever it is, and he starts shooting. How can he be clear that the other three men are working with or even know Troy? If it happens? Is he just shooting black men who were standing nearby?
So somehow folks figured out that these guys were together. I guess they were who knows, but yeah, he shoots those four. One of the other passengers on the train wondered if is this a hate crime or a terrorist act? And is this man just walking around shooting black people? So he literally grabs his baby and his wife and runs because he's thinking, oh my god, he's coming after us next because that was the pandemonium that broke out in the car, just not knowing what was going to happen next.
Yeah, because I have to think they're not in a semicircle surrounding him.
I mean, they're on a train.
He's sitting down, and I'm just thinking, I mean, how does he even know who to shoot? At this point, what about the not the main doors, but the doors between the cars. Are those both unlocked and opened? Like, can people flee through into other cars?
People can flee through into other cars, and some people actually did. In fact, at least one person ran screaming into the car the next car, which is the sixth car of the train. I only mentioned that it's the sixth because that's where the motorman sat, and at least one of the passengers. A savvy train rider always sat in the sixth or seventh car of the train, so that if there were trouble on the train, at least there'd be an official set of eyes watching over people
just expected crime or just badness or trouble. Gosh, yeah, isn't that wild. It's a wild little detail. So, you know, so at least one ran into the motorman's car screaming. And then and after the train stops, the motorman runs into the seventh car say hey, what's going on here? You know? We hear gunshots?
So gets what he sits down as they approach Chamber Street.
Well, he's nervous and start sitting down and standing up and sort of pacing around a little bit. He's silent, and many passengers in the train are commenting on his poise, his calm, his sense of balance. He wasn't freaking out, but he seemed nervous at that point. The cars stopped the emergency break and the train's not moving anywhere. The motorman comes in and says, hey, wait a second, are
you a police officer? And Gets says no, And he says give me the gun, and Gets says, I don't want to misquote it or make him say a statement that he didn't make, but those guys were those guys were bothering me, and I shot them. I think that's like it's in any for the lawyers in the room. It's it's a confession. What he gives. You don't have to like it or not. But he ultimately confesses right there. He says, they were askling me, and I shot them. So motorman asks for the gun, Gets, does not give
it to him, and doesn't respond and walks away. He then, to your question, Kate goes through the doors between the cars and jumps down onto the tracks and then runs away. And so all those questions you had about where is this between Chambers Street, it's relevant because he then gets off the train and sprints to the Chambers Street stop, climbs up, climbs up to the you know, to the platform above, takes the steps up hits Sixth Avenue or
whatever broadway, and just starts running home. And as he's running home, police cars are zipping by because word has now gotten to the NYPD that wait a second, there was a massive shooting on the number two train and Bernard Guess is just walking by up sixth Avenue or whatever street he was on in New York seeing these cars zip by. They were going to the carnage that he left there.
Now, I remember you saying that there were frequently communication issues between transit police and NYPD above ground because their radios weren't in sync. Was that the case here too? Was there a significant delay?
No? No, no, because the NYPD got there very very quickly. The problem is that their guy has gone and nobody knows where he is. They literally don't know where he is. And a fun little bit of policing fact is part of the reason why. You know, I've mentioned a couple times that they pulled the emergency brake and the car
stops right and the train stops. Well, they do that so that if there's a crime on board and they need to arrest somebody, all that evidence and all the people are still there and police can deal with it easily. That's the thing that enabled Bernie gets his escape. Because the train was stopped, he just could quickly jump off and run away. So he sprints and got away and immediately got off that subway platform at Chamber Street, hops in a cab back home and goes back to his house.
Tell me about the status of the four victims. So the police come, ambulance comes, everybody gets off the train, The interview witnesses, and you still have these four guys. What's happening with their health?
They're bleeding and fading in and out of consciousness. The general consensus is that Troy Kanty, who's the first one if you remember who approach gets he's in the worst shape, that's the consensus, because he's shot in the chest and he's bleeding through a hole in his chest, and so they're treating him. He's going into shock. Barry Allen is lucid. But they're all kind of out of it and bleeding a lot, lot and in various places through the train.
Now I mentioned KB in the mid chest. He's certainly paralyzed at this point, not feeling his legs, but all of them. It's interesting. I've never been shot by a firearm, but Barry Allen claims that he thought he was paralyzed as well. He claimed that he felt his arm when the bullet goes in. He felt his arm sees up and like he'd been shot with what he called a paralyzer gun. So they're all in various states of shock or confusion, eyes lolling and passing in and out.
Everybody survives, so all four.
Everybody survives except and everybody has varying degrees of serious injury. Everybody goes into some form of surgery, some you know Barry Allen. Still they leave the one of the bullets in there, it's somewhere in his shoulder. One of them has a spleen removed. But they all get out in a couple of weeks, except Daryl Kaby, who again paralyzed. And then after because of the paralysis, things start compounding
in his body with his diaphragm. He had trouble breathing, went into respiratory arrest maybe a week or two later. So he's blacked out for I want to say it's around eight minutes, and then goes into a coma before going you know, so he's blacked out, then goes into a coma, doesn't wake up for two months, and at the time he wakes up, because of that time that they're performing CPR and trying to resuscitate him, he's just not getting oxygen to his brain and he ends up
brain damaged quite severely. He ends up with at the time, believed to be the intellectual capacity of about a nine year old. Couldn't tell you what day it was, couldn't tell you who the mayor was. So he the rest of them end up in pain and with gunshot wounds and out and bandaged up, but he ended up probably the worst shape.
How do they truck down gets It's really wild.
It's they couldn't figure out the guy. And at this point the city is a buzz this mysterious vigilante who finally clapped back and stood up for us. But no end, they're flooding the police tip line, not with ideas about the shooter, but with praise saying that, my god, somebody finally stood up for us. Overwhelmingly to the mayor, to the prosecutors and so on, so they're at an impasse. Finally, after a little while, the police, the NYPD's tip line, gets a tip about a man named Bernard Gets who
lives in the West Village. That's it. And they knew that they could check city records, and they knew that Bernard Gets, remember, had applied for a gun license. So yeah, so they went back, found a photograph of Bernie Getz, went to the motorman and the train and said, do you see this guy? Do you know who this is? Motorman says, I didn't see nothing. I don't know nobody. I don't know anything. I ain't touching this get away. Get off my train. So he didn't want he'd wanted
no time for that smoke. Then they knew they were onto something, so figured out with the photograph and the address, they went to the apartment building that Gets lived in and just put a note under his door saying, mister Getz, this is the New York Police Department, please call us. And one of the door, one of the mailbox, maybe one under the mat or something, and that was it. That was the steps they took. And then they just.
Waited, who's the DA this is Morganhaw.
This is Morgan Thaw.
Yeah, oh well, because he was there for how long was he there thirty years or something?
Oh yeah, more than thirty It was much of the great part of a generation, I think, the sixties into the early two thousands.
Did you end up talking to somebody with the police during that time period or to get the idea of what was happening, you know, behind the scenes.
The guy who came up with the idea for leaving the note, I spoke to him, Jim Levison, who was the lead detective on the case, and I interviewed him, and he believes it wasn't a great piece of police work at all. It's just sloppy. But they were out of options. But they think that is the step they took that actually got them to figure out who and where Bernie gets was.
So does he contact them?
He does, but now he disappeared. No one knows where he is. He's not in his apartment, He's not anywhere, Remember I said, soon after the shooting, he went back home. He quickly grabbed a duffel bag, took off the windbreaker, took the gun, put into a duffel bag, goes and rents a car and drives north out of the city and ends up in New Hampshire, and he was just
hiding in the snows of New Hampshire. He buries the parts of the gun, he burns his jacket, thinks he's going to freeze to death because he has no jacket now because he's burned the one he had and is hiding in New Hampshire. He went up there, came back to New York, at which point he met with one of his neighbors who told him they left a note for you, at which point he hands her a package, doesn't tell her what's in it, but says, this isn't
the gun that was used. Can you just hold onto this for me for a little while, And then disappeared. And then about a day later, in conquered New Hampshire, he walks into the police department shivering and says, I'm the man they're looking for in New York. And so Levison that detective really believes. He said to me, it was not a good piece of police work. I don't think this was good detective work, but that's really all I had. But he thinks that is the thing that
spooked Bernie gets so much. They felt he had to turn himself in.
But what is Morgenthal saying once he does turn himself in, what is the general attitude of the DA's office about what the heck do we do with this guy who shot so called vigilantes and put him all in the hospital but at the same time took off and it's illegal and had an illegal gun.
He was torn, torn, torn because, like all prosecutors, knew and felt there was a crime committed, a potential homicide, at least an attempted homicide, but it was a very popular homicide in the city, and the victims were unsavory. These were drug addicted black boys from the Bronx who were muggers and shakedown artists and so on, and Morgan Thha was torn about what to do. So they ultimately try, but in a ham fisted way. But they try to indict Gets for murder, for attempted murder pardon and end
up the grand jury doesn't even buy it. The grand jury only indites him for gun possession. And nobody was happy. Gets wasn't happy with being charged with gun possessions. Supporters weren't happy, the police weren't happy. Nobody was happy with that decision, but the prosecutors just didn't have a ton of options with what to do.
What is the media saying at this point, what is the I'm thinking of it, like the Daily News, and what the different the different tabloids and what these headlines must be.
Yeah, the Daily News, well it's really the New York Post. Rupert Murdoch had just bought the New York Post and shifted the coverage of the cities tabloids, using a lot of the tactics he'd used in other markets. He'd been buying up a lot of tabloids around the country and certainly in Australia, but just to frighten people. It was, you know, the headlines where screams ignored, she's shot dead and things in all these these giant capital letters, and
so they were. The Daily News and the New York Post were largely quite supportive of the shooter and driving some of the public sentiment, which in turn was pretty turebo charged. Now it was. It was divisive. There were certainly many people who thought that this was racist open season on black people, but a lot of people were lined up behind Bernard Gets and the papers reflected that.
At some point is there an investigation into his background. Of course, you know, we know about what happens with his father and the mugging and all of that. Is there any sort of digging into maybe his viewpoints on people of other races.
Yeah, And it over time, the world starts learning more and more about Bernard Gets and about these four young men, and it just starts seeming, it starts blurring a little bit. They realize how quirky and odd he is. They realize about his firearm possession. They realize that he's gotten in trouble and kicked off his co op board for using ethnic slurs and saying that we got to get the
ends and the s's. You can speculate as to what those words are, but we've got to get the only way to clean this neighborhood up is to get the ends and the s's out of here. Well, everyone else in the co op board, this is okay. That's not cool. Even you're not even saying the quiet part out loud.
You're just yelling. And he claims he was high on angel dust and weed that night and that he didn't really know what he was saying, but he was just making a point that we need to clean the neighborhood up, and the bad elements in the neighborhood are black and Hispanic. And it all started trickling out over time, and eventually people started getting a less sunny or rosy idea of who Bernard Getz was and what he stood for.
Now, I mean, he is claiming self defense, I'm assuming right.
Now, I say he is in New York law, not just self defense. It's New York law at the time allowed lethal force to prevent an imminent violent crime, okay, and that violent crime being a robbery or a mugging. And so because he felt that one was imminent, or at least claim to feel that one was imminent, he was able to use lethal force.
Can you explain though, the other end of this, which I kind of think about battered women and you know, women who kill well, I don't know why I connected always to this, but the idea that the prosecutor will say she could have left any time. He had exit strategies, right, he could have or he had exit options. He could have gone to another car. There were other witnesses. Was there not a way for Morgan thought to look at this and say, yeah, but this was not a last resort for you.
The law in New York did not require retreat. It was in apprehension of an imminent mugging or robbery, one could use lethal force and full stop. This is what the law allowed. Now, and you're touching on an important point, this idea of duty to retreat, and different jurisdictions have different rules around the obligations someone has to retreat before trying to kill somebody. Here at the time, oddly enough,
New York would have just let you. If you thought a violent crime was coming, you could you could try to kill the person who was coming at you.
Now, what is the case now if this happened today, what would be the likely outcome if there were not all of these political ramifications surrounding it.
Forgive the lawyer speaking to you right now, But there is an interesting New York State Court of Appeals case that set the law on this. It's called State versus Gets. Literally, this story ends up changing the standard in New York law, and it's complicated. It's both subjective and objective. Do I feel threatened? Right? If I can say that I feel threatened, and if people the jury ultimately believes that you feel threatened, Okay,
that's bucket one. And separately, did I act in a way that I would expect a reasonable person to have acted under the same circumstances. That's objective, right, So it's both what are my feelings, but also how do we expect other members of society to act in the same circumstance? And if both of those things are true, then you will not be found guilty of having killed someone. Right.
This case set that law. It was complicated, no need to get into the weeds of the law that it goes all the way up to the highest court in the state New York, but ultimately sets that standard that courts would first look at what the guy felt and was it genuine and real? Was it real fear that he felt? And in acting with lethal force, would we have expected an ordinary or reasonable person to have done the same thing?
How do you get into that though as an attorney of being able to say, I don't you can't even say definitively look at the look on his face from CCTV or the witness next to him said, you know his tone was this way or that way. I mean, you can't lean totally onto that, right, This is apparently what he was feeling, and he made a couple of racist remarks you know, in the past.
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, the racist remarks in the past wouldn't come up in trial, probably in a criminal trial, in a straight criminal trial. Now if it were a hate crime trial or something, maybe that would
be relevant. But it's hard getting into someone's head, is the and something for me as a CNN legal analyst, this is the thing that I find explaining on air the most, this idea of criminal intent being exceptionally hard to prove, exceptionally hard to establish what was in someone's mind, absent finding a manifesto or him screaming I'm going to kill you because you have threatened to mug me, and I felt that I was an imminent apprehension of a
mugg you know, absent that. It's really just trying to divine the circumstances. Now any jury, there are all juries of peers who live in the neighborhood, and they were probably going to bring whatever they thought of New York City subways and quite frankly, young black kids from the Bronx into their views of what actually happened. In judging what was right and wrong, it ends up getting to a grand jury. The first time, they only get him
on gun possession. They go back a second time, two of the four victims testified, and he ends up getting charged with attempted murder, attempted assault, and gun possession.
Has the narrative in the media changed now that we find out that he's used the in word, and you know, I don't know what else gets dug up about his past. Is there at any point where they were the media or whoever kind of says, oh okay, maybe there's more to this than we thought it.
Definitely the tone shifts a little bit. But in general, there is a widespread notion that the city, remember all that stuff we talked about blackouts and riots and looting and bailouts in the city and joblessness and fire tee, all of that, that the city is a rough place and someone needs to stand up within days. Remember we talked about the movie Death Wish a little bit earlier,
the Death Wish Vigilante. That's the nickname he got. The New York Post called him the Death Wish Vigilante in the mold of Charles Bronson and the movie Death Wish, that there's this guy who is going to clap back against the forces of disorder, and he's doing it for our common good. So yes, it got more nuanced overtime. There were certainly commentators who were not so on board with gets and the narrative. Jimmy Breslin, a very famous
long time columns of the Daily News. Earl Caldwell was another one, Less Pain, who has ended up being the head of the National Association of Black Journalists. They all took some issue with it, but for the most part there was a pretty universal rush to support Bernard Getz.
So if they had not had screwdrivers in their jackets, would this have changed the case? I mean, I assume that's what was brought up by the defense it.
Was and the screwdrivers. You know, it's interesting a number of newspapers right off the back comment on the screwdrivers saying that the men were armed, including The New York Times right off the bat, so that the men were armed. That narrative shifted over time. Get still points at that, saying that, look, they were armed, they were armed, they had screwdrivers and so on. I don't I think irrespective of the screwdrivers, I just think the narrative would would
have still been the same. It was just too easy to not to have, you know, timid, weak white guy scared of being or tired of being bullied and pushed around for his entire life, and black dudes from the Bronx who were rorizing this train car. It just it was the narrative took hold within within hours literally, and it was just it was never going going back.
Well, I think I know the answer to this, But tell me ultimately what happens with this case with these two guys.
Yeah, so he ends up gets ends up getting acquitted of violent of all the violent crime charges, assault, attempted murder and so on. He's so he ends up getting acquitted. He ends up getting convicted of gun possession, of just the possession of the illegal gun and actually acquitted. Remember I told you he hands his neighbor of package. He was charged with illegal possession of those guns, the guns that were in that bag. He got acquitted of that too.
They did not convict him of even possessing those guns that were widely known to have been given to a neighbor. They felt that the neighbor who was actually Janis Joplin's publicist. Oddly enough, she'd written a whole. She'd sold her story to New York magazine, and they saw her as capitalizing
on the tragedy. He's such that she might have lied about receiving this package in the first place, and they just didn't trust They didn't trust her testimony, and so he's equitted of those So he ends up spending eight months in jail just on that illegal gun possession charge.
It was pretty much now that the interesting thing about jail is that quickly they figure out that he's an engineer, at which point he ends up making money as the helping repair New York City bus radios while he's in prison, and he's making he makes like forty nine cents a day, and he's just they knew this guy's an engineer, We're
going to put him to work. And so he ends up in this inmate who is a big help in the you know, because you can have a job in prison depending on the nature of the you know, the nature of the crime you committed. And they let him. They let him do that.
Well. As an attorney, well educated attorney, what do you think about the verdict being objective?
I think a different jury and certainly in a different time, would have convicted him. I see why they acquitted him. I understand, and you can read the record. The thing that we left out when he was in New Hampshire that we talked about a little bit, he confessed to police for two hours. Oh I know, it's four hours. Part of its two different two hour confessions, first of the Conquered Police Department and then to the New York City Police Department, using language like I wanted to murder
them and make them suffer as possible. I was. I wanted to butcher them. I felt savage. I was overcome with rage all plain as day, saying he wanted to kill these guys. The difference is the jury felt that he was in in a dreanal haze at the time he went into New Hampshire. He'd been on the run for nine days and was out of his mind and didn't really know what he was saying, and so they discredited his entire confession.
Going back to what we just talked about, how do you know unless you are that person, what the person's intent was in making that confession. How did they he they know? I mean, that's making assumptions that you shouldn't make.
Absolutely, his defense was very mindful of this fact and leaned into even though our guys confessed, you can't trust his confession. He's out of his mind. He didn't He doesn't even know what he's saying. Why do you trust what he's saying?
Okay, well tell me the future of these five people who become just inexplicably intertwined one afternoon on the Number two train going from the Bronx all the way down to Brooklyn.
Bernard gets has a fascinating future, and I interview him in the book Five Bullets, and I talked to him about what life is like today, which is a little bonkers. He ends up just this gadfly, crazy gish guy around town who he runs for mayor and public advocate, which is like the city's ombudsman on a vegetarian meals in schools and anti circumcision platform. He shows up in the media sometimes. He is an animal rights activist. He's a
pro vegetarian activist. He almost was evicted from his apartment for washing squirrels in his saying he would find squirrels in Washington Square Park and try to wash them and nurse them back to health. He ended up getting arrested in twenty thirteen, oddly enough for marijuana sales, because he says an undercover cop flirted with him and tried to he wanted to give her the drugs, she insisted that he pay, that she pay, and then as soon as
there was a transaction of money, he got arrested. Well, ironically, the whole case gets thrown out because police waited too long to charge it, which is fascinating because Bernard gets his whole ethos was that the city is slow and incompetent and devoid of decision making. Well that's how he got off. So that's Bernard gets his future.
Wait is he still alive?
He is close to eighty, seventy eight years old, seventy years old and just all over the place. He's just you talk to him, he's all over the place. He's literally all over the place.
And he's okay with the book? Or how do you think he feels about this book?
I don't know. I mean he made clear to me he wanted me to do a reenactment of the shooting that rather than doing a book, I should get television to reenact the shooting because nothing else would be fair.
He has conveyed through an intermediary actually that if my book does not accurately convey the criminal histories of the four young men, that it's not a fair book, which okay, I mean, what I would respond is that the book Five Bullets makes at least forty one different references to the criminal histories or drug abuse of these young men, but also notes that Bernard Getz didn't know any of it at the time he decided to shoot them. So okay, sir, So yeah, he's just around and it is what he
is now. Daral Caby ends up paralyzed and brain damaged and just moved out of the city. Doesn't like coming back, but he's around and has family around him. I tried to interview him and his family. They passed. So Kanty is the one that seems to have gotten his life the most back together. He's in upstate New York as
an auto mechanic. Barry Allen ended up in jail for a whole bunch of things, end up dying in prison in twenty eighteen, and James Ramseur, who ended up with the ugliest criminal history of all of them around the time of the shooting, ended up being charged with a horrific sexual assault, in robbery, in battery, ends up going to jail for eight to twenty five years for that, gets out back end parole violations and so on, and
then ends up killing himself on December twenty second. I believe it's twenty seventeen or twenty twenty eleven, the anniversary of the shooting. Oh yeah, found in a dingy low rent hotel room and a highway in the Bronx, just pill bottle floating in the toilet. Oh my gosh.
And you must have reflected over and over again about how this one incident, this one minute incident in these people's lives, changed the trajectory of their lives. Really. I mean, we don't know what would have happened with Gets, but these four guys.
Yes, immeasurably. You can't tell me now. Again, odds weren't great for kids from Housing Pride in the South Bronx in nineteen eighty five, as Crack was getting there. However, being shot does not help. Being brain damaged certainly did not help del Kby's prospects, or being paralyzed from the midchest down didn't help his prospects at all for his future.
All of them expressed or at least two expressed some interest, some desire to move on from it all before the shooting, to get out of the city, to move up to just find a new life, and were sort of pulled by the forces that got them there. But the four
of them and every figure attached to the case. I've been talked about Greg Waples, the prosecutor who I interviewed for the case for the book, too, and he felt that it just he was one of the most seasoned prosecutors in New York City and one of Robert Morgenthaw's top lieutenants, and a great widely respected on all sides.
He just felt broken by the case. He felt that the hate and the acrimony that came his way dogged him for the rest of his career, and he was just sort of trying to live his life and do his job. And everybody who touched this case seemed to really be brought down by accept the national figures who sort of rose to prominence out of it, which is Rudy Giuliani, who was the US Attorney and certainly used it on his path to start him Al Sharpton. It
was his first big national story. Rupert Murdoch. Anything that gave the New York Post something to glom Onto was good for Rupert Murdock. And finally, the National Rifle Association had just pivoted from being a hunting with Grandpa organization to being a self defense and political advocacy organization, and they funded his trial a little bit, given twenty thousand dollars.
So, finally, how do you think this specific story is framed? Now we've heard a lot about the menindas brothers and how it's been sort of reframed. Now that we have all of this context, now, what do you think is there a reframing.
I don't think there's a reframing, but there's a gentle shift in how we think about these people. Many people who I think might have been quick to think of Bernard Gets as a hero in nineteen eighty four would be more skeptical of him and his behavior in twenty twenty six. I just think he's a more nuanced, complex
figure than the avenger who's standing up for us. And I think the four victims would be seen as, Yeah, they did bad things, and I am not going to gloss over their misdeeds, particularly James Ramser's vicious sexual assault. They committed awful crimes that hurt many people, but they would be treated with a little bit more care than certainly the media would have regarded them, or tried to regard them in the early nineteen eighties, and just well, this is far more complex and one of the epigraph
I always get the epi's wrong. I think it's the quote at the beginning of the book. One of the two that I use is from an old New York State case, which is that the worst man in society has every right to live in society as the best man in society, regardless of his status. Right. And the fact that you're sort of a shakedown artist and a bad guy might mean that you should go to jail for that, But that doesn't mean that a vigilante has the right to just open fire on you because you
look at him funny, and that's kind of you know. Again, I don't want to be too dismissive of Gatz, but that's kind of what happened here.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinners All Bow, The Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and don't forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis m Rosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
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