Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ‘80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial that Divided the Nation, by Elliott Williams
In December 1984, a violent encounter on a New York subway station made national news, with headlines that would stretch across many years and ramifications still felt today. An anxious white man, Bernard Goetz, drew a handgun and shot four rowdy Black teenagers—Barry Allen, Darrell Carey, Tray Canty and James Ramseur. The case for attempted murder hinged on Goetz’s claim of proactive self-defense. In 1987 a jury acquitted him on all counts except a firearms violation.
CNN reporter Elliott Williams puts a big frame around the case in Five Bullets. NYC in the ‘70s and ‘80s was out-of-control dangerous as crime spiked and confidence plummeted. The four Black kids already had criminal records. They came from South Bronx, an urban wasteland whose landlords made more money from arson than rent, a hopeless place where theft or dealing seemed the only tickets. The foursome were dealt a bad hand and played it poorly. Goetz came from an affluent but troubled background. He lived in a Manhattan neighborhood overrun with junkies and pick pockets and had been assaulted and injured on the street. On that December day in 1984, four misbehaving petty criminals met an unstable man with a gun.
Was race a factor? Race certainly became the subtext of media coverage and the trial. Would the press, the court and the public have responded differently if a Black man shot four rowdy white teenagers on the subway?
The author, born in Brooklyn to Jamaican immigrants, approaches the loaded topic with fair play. He tried but failed to reach the Black teens (now approaching old age) but interviewed an unrepentant Goetz. He spoke with Goetz’s attorney, with Al Sharpton who seized upon the case as another battle in the social justice war, and with Curtis Sliwa, whose Guardian Angels civic patrol sided with Goetz. Unanswerable is the question of when vigilantism, deeply rooted in frontier America and American pop culture (isn’t Superman a vigilante?), becomes understandable if the law is unable to maintain safety, as seemed the case in ‘80s New York.
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The Goetz story continues to resonate as gun laws are lifted and characters such as Kyle Rittenhouse are acquitted for killing, claiming self-defense in situations where they had no business. Goetz and many of his defenders were already speaking the language of MAGA, decades before the movement coalesced around the current president.
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