Micah Loewinger: This week, a former Proud Boy leader was sentenced to 22 years for his role in the Capitol riot. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories that the FBI planned the January 6th Fedsurrection live on.

Tess Owen: Because there are these tiny little kernels of truth, which is yes, there were some informants in the crowd that day. That's all you need for it to keep having life.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Some 40 years ago, four black teens approached a white man on the subway. One asked for money, the man pulled out a gun and shot them, and he promptly became a hero?

Speaker 4: Gets turned down a $50,000 bail check supposedly from a private citizen.

Speaker 5: A spray-painted mural appeared alongside the FDR drive. "Power to the vigilante," it said, "New York loves you."

Speaker 6: The person has a right to defend himself against 1 or 10.

Speaker 7: Who gets to be a vigilante? If you're someone who takes the law into your own hands, sometimes that's called crime, and other times it's called heroism.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. More than 1,100 people have now been charged in connection with the insurrection on January 6th. This week saw the longest sentence yet.

Speaker 9: Today some history was made. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Micah Loewinger: Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman and face of the Proud Boys starting in 2018 was not in DC on the day. Though prosecutors convinced the jury and judge that his penalties should be commensurate with the role his group under his command played in leading the breach on the Capitol. Last week, two of his co-defendants and fellow Proud Boys saw similar fates; 18 years for Ethan Nordean and 10 years for Dominic Pezzola.

Speaker 10: Today, in front of Judge Kelly, Pezzola expressed remorse, calling his actions, "The worst most regrettable decision in his life." He was also seen wiping away tears while his wife and mother spoke to the court pleading for mercy on his behalf. After the judge announced the 10-year sentence, as he's being led out of the courtroom, Pezzola turned to the gallery, raised a fist, and shouted, "Trump won."

Micah Loewinger: These theatrics struck me as a worthy illustration for where the January 6th trials, commissions, and reports have landed us. Reams of clear evidence and facts have been parsed and justice served, but the conspiracy theories brandished by Donald Trump's supporters live on, including the false belief that the Capitol riot was instigated or provoked by the government.

Tess Owen: I was at the Capitol on January 6th and I saw this play out a little bit in real time while it was happening.

Micah Loewinger: Tess Owen is a senior reporter at Vice News where she covers extremism and political violence. She said that after the riot, there were several attempts by the participants to shift the blame for what happened before they landed on one that stuck.

Tess Owen: This idea that the mob were just Antifa posing as Trump supporters didn't really stick and so the MAGA movement, people on the hard right turn to an old reliable conspiracy, which is the false flag, a centuries-old term that's often invoked by modern-day conspiracy theorists in the aftermath of a disaster or a shooting to claim that this event was actually orchestrated by governments to somehow increase their control over society.

This narrative began brewing online that suggested that perhaps undercover federal agents in the crowd prodded law-abiding Trump supporters into criminal activity with the ultimate goal of smearing the MAGA movement. This is what became known as the Fedsurrection Conspiracy.

Micah Loewinger: Much of the so-called evidence for the Fedsurrection Conspiracy theory was amplified and synthesized by a right-wing website called Revolver News and specifically from a writer for that website who was a former Trump speech writer. He ended up speaking extensively in an influential 2021 documentary called Patriot Purge, made by Tucker Carlson for Fox News, which claimed just that, that January 6th was an inside job. In the film, they refer repeatedly to a man named Ray Epps who became basically the face of the Fedsurrection Conspiracy theory.

Tess Owen: A video surfaced showing this guy saying, "We have to go to the Capitol."

Ray Epps: Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol, peacefully. Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed.

Micah Loewinger: This is on January 5th, right?

Tess Owen: Yes. Exactly. The day before. This guy turned out to be Ray Epps and he was so insistent that online conspiracists thought he had to be some sort of fed that was planting the seed of the insurrection one day earlier.

Micah Loewinger: We've heard prominent Republican lawmakers refer to Ray Epps. We've even heard former President Donald Trump say, "What about this guy, Epps?" His name has become shorthand for a murky plot.

Tess Owen: The select committee said in, I think, January 2022, that they'd investigated him and they can confirm no, he was not involved in any undercover law enforcement investigations. The head of the FBI repeatedly rejected this idea that the FBI were involved in January 6th, calling it ludicrous. Ray Epps, this guy from Arizona, has had his life turned completely upside down by being called the smoking gun of the entire Fedsurrection, which is what Darren Beattie, Donald Trump's former speech writer, said in that Revolver article.

Micah Loewinger: Returning to Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, his connection to the Fedsurrection Conspiracy theory I think goes back to this blockbuster report from Reuters that revealed that he had been a "prolific informant" for local and federal law enforcement after he was arrested in 2012. According to that Reuters article, he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling, and human smuggling. Now that seems to be true.

Tess Owen: When that article came out, it sent some shockwaves through the Proud Boys. They were reeling at the revelations that their leader, their guy was potentially a rat. It caused a lot of division in the Proud Boys. It also earned him the nickname Federique, [laughter] which is quite a good nickname, actually.

Micah Loewinger: It is.

Tess Owen: Tarrio was already a bit of a divisive character. Gavin McInnes, the founder of Proud Boys, also the founder of Vice, he made it pretty clear that he was not particularly a fan of Tarrio so there are definitely some Tarrio loyalists who were like, "No, that was a long time ago." Others say, "This completely makes sense," and so this has simmered ever since then, about Tarrio is somehow a federal informant.

Micah Loewinger: In the trial, did we hear any evidence that he had been working with the federal government as an informant in anything related to January 6th, or was his role as an informant something that ended prior to the insurrection?

Tess Owen: There was no evidence that surfaced during the trial that he was working with the federal government. One thing that did come up was his quite cozy relationship with the DC police lieutenant, who Tarrio and him would share information ahead of different rallies or events in DC. Otherwise, there was no evidence that Tarrio was informing or in bed with the federal government. However, there were a number of federal informants who were among the Proud Boys on January 6th.

The defense called those informants because they thought they would have exculpatory evidence to show that there was no actual plot on January 6th. They were called not to promote the idea of a Fedsurrection because they thought that they would show that the Proud Boys were just acting spontaneously that day.

Micah Loewinger: The mere fact that there were informants became a big part of the counter-messaging from Republican lawmakers, every chance they had to question FBI officials in public over the past couple years, they got into this song in dance. Ted Cruz, last year, questioned a federal agent.

Ted Cruz: Did any FBI agents or FBI informants actively encourage and incite crimes of violence on January 6th?

Speaker 12: Sir, I can't answer that.

Ted Cruz: Ms. Saburn, who is Ray Epps?

Micah Loewinger: There is no credible evidence that the federal government or federal agents provoked or instigated the events that took place that day. You don't seem to think that the evidence against Fedsurrection that we've seen is really going to take root with its believers. Why not?

Tess Owen: Well, partly I think because people who are supposedly trustworthy sources of information like lawmakers or news outlets haven't been willing to fully debunk the Fedsurrection Conspiracy theory. I think that because there are these tiny little kernels of truth, which is yes, there were some informants in the crowd that day, that's all you need for it to keep having life. I think that there are always going to be January 6th truthers. We have 9/11 truthers. They're just always going to be that way.

Whether or not it maintains this hold on such a large swath of the population. I think will take some serious soul-searching from the people who are meant to be trusted sources of information.

Micah Loewinger: Now that Enrique Tarrio has been proven not to be a government agent, he's just been sentenced the most amount of time behind bars of any defendant in these criminal trials. I feel that it should help disprove this conspiracy theory, but do you think it will?

Tess Owen: I think it should disprove in the sense that the Proud Boys have moved on. The Proud Boys now exist entirely regardless doing their own thing without Tarrio. They say that their sovereign chapter, which would have included Tarrio and the elders, that's been dissolved. Now there's a network of autonomous pods. They operate hyper-locally, making alliances with other local groups and showing up to drag shows and showing up school board meetings, these small-scale events are happening on a weekly basis all over the country.

They've gotten savvy in evading detection. I think that there's a concern that the government thought that they could fix the problem of extremism by arresting its way out of it, but the grievances, the conspiracies, the division that brought people to the Capitol on January 6th, that's not really gone away, and in some cases, I think that people may have become more entrenched in their grievance politics.

US Capitol Police said they investigated 7,500 threats against members of Congress last year, which was a bit down from the year before but significantly up from years prior, and then there's this litany of smaller incidents. The few examples I'd give is the recent incident of the FBI shooting a man who'd made threats online against Biden and Kamala Harris. In May a 19-year-old with Nazi paraphernalia crashed into the gates near the White House and said he wanted to kill Biden and had planned the attack for months.

The man with the nail gun who stormed into the FBI office in Cincinnati last year after the federal raid on Mar-a-Lago. These smaller incidents paint a quite ominous picture of what we might see in 2024.

Micah Loewinger: Tess, thank you very much.

Tess Owen: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Tess Owen is a senior reporter at Vice News. Doubting the system, taking matters into your own hands, violence, fear, up next, a story from 1980 with all four that feels just like today. This is On the Media. This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Earlier this year, a white former US Marine named Daniel Penny killed Jordan Neely, a Black man on the New York City subway. In the aftermath of the killing, Penny was dubbed the Subway Samaritan by The Wall Street Journal. When Leon Neyfakh, host of the podcast Fiasco, heard that moniker, he had almost finished a project about another violent crime on the New York subway some 40 years earlier when a white man named Bernhard Goetz was approached by four Black teenagers on the train, one of them asked him for money, and Goetz pulled out a gun and shot them. The gunman was later dubbed the Subway Vigilante by the press.

Speaker 13: I felt the gunman was right.

Speaker 14: I think it was justified.

Speaker 15: I think we should have a few more like him. Something has to be done, people have to take the law into their hands.

Brooke Gladstone: Leon, welcome to the show.

Leon Neyfakh: Thank you, Brooke. It's great to be here.

Brooke Gladstone: Now you're taking on a nearly 40-year-old subway shooting at a time when our national struggle with bigotry and fear is no longer veiled or dog whistled but it's nakedly captured daily on video on our streets and in our politics. Is that what drove you to do this topic?

Leon Neyfakh: Everyone was talking about crime. It was after COVID. In New York, people were talking a lot about how the subway once again felt unsafe. There's a lot of debate about whether in fact, it was a crime wave. That debate is really what made the Goetz story even more interesting because you had people saying we're going back to the bad old days. On the other side, you had people saying that this is an overreaction. Crime may be a little bit up but not up nearly to the levels that the battle days had, and in fact, it may turn out not to be the beginning of a worrisome trend.

That fear of crime was very much at the center of the Bernie Goetz story. When you get past the opening scene where Bernie Goetz takes his gun out and shoots these four young men you get a story about an entire population of people who saw in him a vigilante who stood up for himself and that's a story about fear.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me more about the political climate in New York at the time.

Leon Neyfakh: New York was a very different city in 1984. Times Square was a place where prostitution was rampant and drug use was rampant, and muggings were common. People were angry at the city government, they were angry at the police department because it felt like these city officials whose job it was to protect hardworking honest people were completely failing to do so.

Brooke Gladstone: The city was also in a financial crunch, and there were cuts to the NYPD-

Leon Neyfakh: Exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: -so the NYPD suggested that with these cuts, they couldn't protect the public.

Leon Neyfakh: At one point, one of the police unions in New York published a pamphlet called Welcome To Fear City in protest of some of the cuts that were happening. It was addressed to people from outside New York who might have been considering visiting. Basically, the police union said, "Don't bother, it's a terrible place, and if you do have to come, don't leave the house after 6:00 PM and avoid the subway if you can." I think it had a Grim Reaper on the cover.

Brooke Gladstone: There was something in episode one that really surprised me. You said that a study found that 3% of people on the subway were carrying guns.

Leon Neyfakh: Can you believe that?

Brooke Gladstone: In New York City?

Leon Neyfakh: Yes, I found that shocking, as did the researcher who arrived at that number. Yes, if you think about it, if there's 200 people on the subway car, that's six guns.

Brooke Gladstone: You note that in 1984 New York actually didn't have the nation's highest crime rates, it just seemed that way because it has so much media. In the late '70s and '80s, New York crime was a popular trope both in the headlines and Hollywood and you cite the quintessential Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Speaker 16: Here is a man who would not take it anymore, a man who stood up against the scum, the filth. Here is someone who stood up.

Leon Neyfakh: Yes, you could have used that tagline for Bernie if you were inclined to see him as a hero out to clean up a cesspool of a city.

Brooke Gladstone: Travis Bickle, the taxi driver who decides that he will be New York's vigilante, is clearly out of his mind.

Leon Neyfakh: Well, I think if people listen to the series, they might reach similar conclusions about Goetz I think particularly one episode in which we draw a lot on an interview he gave to the police immediately after he turned himself in. It goes on for like two, three hours. In it, he comes across as paranoid, as extremely jumbled in his thinking. There was a little bit of Travis Bickle in him, I would say.

Brooke Gladstone: When I think about the depictions of New York at the time, though, I think of NYPD Blue.

Speaker 17: Tuesday, a serial killer is back in the streets.

Speaker 18: This man strangled my child.

Speaker 17: And a father puts a price on justice.

Speaker 19: I'll give you a million dollars to kill him.

Speaker 17: NYPD Blue.

Brooke Gladstone: That was a series, however, that ran in the '90s and early when the city and the country's crime rates were dropping radically. Nevertheless, in one episode, the show's fictional 15th Precinct experienced the same number of homicides that the corresponding parts of the city had experienced in the entire previous year.

Leon Neyfakh: That image of New York as a land of chaos and violence where the sewer grates are emitting steam into the dark alleyway, and there's a guy in a trench coat around the corner. I think those were very powerful images, and they survived the incredible drop in crime that occurred during the '90s. You listen to Donald Trump, and you realize that his image of New York is completely frozen in the '80s.

Brooke Gladstone: The perspective of a suburbanite multi-millionaire who never rides the subway and learns what he knows from tabloids, TV, and vigilante films like Death Wish.

Leon Neyfakh: In Death Wish, Charles Bronson, in a campaign of revenge, I think it involved some horrible thing that happened to his wife, he decided to clean up New York, to be the one that takes matters into his own hands if the cops couldn't do it. Again, I think the core of people's anger back then was at the police falling down on the job. I think you don't see that as much now among people who are vocal about crime today. People today are angry at the liberals who have allowed this hellscape to exist rather than the police.

Brooke Gladstone: We'll return to our conversation with Leon Neyfakh at the end of the hour. Now, we present an extended excerpt of episode two of his compelling series Fiasco Vigilante. It takes us inside New York City newsrooms when word about the shooting first got out.

Ruben Rosario: At the beginning, you really don't know what happened. People shot. Okay, well, what's new? People get shot all the time in the city, but this one felt different.

Micah Loewinger: Ruben Rosario was a crime reporter for the New York Daily News, which in 1984 was the city's most widely-read newspaper.

Ruben Rosario: We got the scanner saying that they've been a shooting the subway station at Chamber Street, I believe.

Micah Loewinger: Did you have a sense of that early point that, based on the fact that there was four Black kids and a white gunman, did you ever sense that it would become a racial flashpoint?

Ruben Rosario: Oh, sure, yes, because the first thing I thought about once we started getting the information going, as one transit cop told me, this sounds like a Charles Bronson type of thing. He was referring to the very popular Death Wish movie. Here we have a white guy shooting alleged robbers who were Black, which was life imitating, I wouldn't call Death Wish art, but for lack of a better word, art.

Micah Loewinger: Rosario filed his story that evening. It ran in the Daily News the following day under the headline Subway Rider Shoots Toughs.

Ruben Rosario: Let me grab that headline here. The neatly dressed gunman suddenly whipped out a revolver from his waistband and fired several shots at the four young men as about a dozen other passengers frantically dive for cover, according to police. "He was seated, they were horsing around on the train, they approached him and asked him for $5.

Speaker 21: Let's see the money, man.

Ruben Rosario: He took objection and he shot them.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Perhaps the most tantalizing detail in Rosario's story was that the gunman had escaped the scene by jumping down onto the subway tracks and running into the tunnel. It was extremely cinematic and mysterious. Who was this guy and where did he go? Almost immediately, the press began to build a mythology around him.

Speaker 22: Since the gunman's side of the story hasn't been told, it's hard to say, but psychologists generally characterize someone as a vigilante when the use of force is to right a wrong.

Micah Loewinger: The Daily News and its chief competitor, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, both published a police sketch of the gunman on their covers.

Speaker 23: The wanted suspect is described as between 25 and 30, 150 to 160 pounds, thin build, golden blonde hair, and wearing glasses.

Micah Loewinger: Perhaps because so little was known. They were able to set the tone for how the shooting was understood and talked about by regular New Yorkers. Through headlines and photos and commentary, the media gave the story shape and meaning.

Ruben Rosario: Typically, a person that assumes this kind of role is somebody that, especially as a child, was very withdrawn, may have been picked on by many, many kids, and would be described as passive.

Speaker 24: There is another side of the story though.

Micah Loewinger: In the post, readers were treated to a speculative profile of the shooter by a famous pop psychologist in which he described him as a tall, thin ectomorph. From what we know she wrote, he is a loner, a person who does a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. Another story in the Post reported that detectives had not ruled out the possibility that the gunman was a cop or a serviceman.

Ruben Rosario: When something like this happens and the largest media market in the largest city in the United States, it becomes world news. It just reverberates.

Cynthia Fagan: New York City was high crime back then. There's no question about it.

Micah Loewinger: Cynthia Fagan was also a crime reporter in 1984, but she worked for the New York Post.

Cynthia Fagan: If you went into the subway, everyone was reading a newspaper. It was either the Daily News or the New York Post.

Micah Loewinger: Back then, the News and The Post were everywhere. On every block, the front pages were displayed at newsstands plastered in storefront windows and piled in news racks. Even if you weren't actually reading the tabloids, it was impossible to escape the bolded all-caps announcement of the day's headlines.

Speaker 25: The story of the New York subway gunman has dominated the local news shows and splashed across the tabloids, syndicated columnists--

Micah Loewinger: All week, both papers were flooded with calls from readers about the shooting. As the search for the gunman intensified, so did the outpouring of praise. The Daily News spoke to a World War II vet from Brooklyn who said he wanted to give his bronze star to the shooter. Others implored the name was shooter to run for mayor. Just before New Year's Eve, a spray-painted mural appeared alongside the FDR Drive in Manhattan, written in a big, bubbly font with stars dotting the I's, "Power to the vigilante," it said, "New York loves you." For NYPD detective Jim Levison, it was hard to tell if the tabloids were merely reporting on the public's reaction or actively shaping it.

Jim Levison: It was front page day after day after day for weeks. The hunt for the subway gunman. The press fed off the public and the public fed off the press.

Micah Loewinger: Jim Levison's boss, the police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, called on the media to show restraint.

Benjamin Ward: What the press has to do in this very critical period is cease trying to panic the public by making up stories about analogies to this case, the movies and TV stories. This is the real world. It's not Alice in Wonderland.

Micah Loewinger: Ward was the NYPD's first Black commissioner. The press did not appear to heed his counsel. The subway vigilante, whoever he was, had become a celebrity and readers couldn't seem to get enough.

Jim Levison: It was like a snowball going downhill. The story began to take a life of its own.

Micah Loewinger: The gunman may have been the moment's breakout star, but the press created a potent image of his victims as well. The Daily News reported that three of them had criminal records. The Post reported that all four had previously been arrested, but the stickiest detail that both papers zeroed in on was that three of the victims had been carrying screwdrivers in their pockets at the time of the shooting. This detail soon evolved in a significant way.

According to a Daily News story that ran on Christmas Eve, the screwdrivers discovered at the scene of the crime had been deliberately sharpened in an apparent attempt to turn them into weapons. Very quickly, the sharpened screwdrivers caught on in the public imagination as a key fact about the incident.

Speaker 25: Over four young men were shot, three, according to police carried sharpened heavy-duty screwdrivers.

Speaker 26: Police say the boys were armed with sharpened screwdrivers.

Speaker 27: A white man said four Black teenagers wielding sharpened screwdrivers pressed him for $5.

Micah Loewinger: The problem with this reporting was that it wasn't true. The police had found three unsharpened screwdrivers in the pockets of two of the teenagers, Darrell Cabey and James Ramseur. Later, the teenagers told authorities they had been planning to use the screwdrivers to pry quarters out of arcade games, a type of petty theft that was common among young people in New York at the time. One of the victims, Troy Canty, had even gotten in trouble for it in the past. This crucial context was missing from the early police reports, but there was more.

According to witnesses on the train, none of the victims had brandished the screwdrivers during their interaction with the shooter. Even if the screwdrivers had been sharpened, the shooter would not have known about it. Reporters took their cues from the NYPD and they ended up painting an indelible picture in the minds of readers in which the gunman had shot his would-be assailants after they threatened him with what might as well have been knives. Amidst all this misreporting, one voice attempted to correct the record.

Jimmy Breslin: A few years. Let me get rid of this one [unintelligible 00:26:28] here. A couple of years ago--

Ruben Rosario: Jimmy Breslin was one of the greatest legendary newspaper, old-school columnist in journalism history.

Speaker 28: Mr. Breslin, you are part of the News Corp, and if the news reports that we got were incorrect, then what do--

Jimmy Breslin: Mine weren't, but the others were. You just heard one incorrect there.

Speaker28: I'm really--

Micah Loewinger: Jimmy Breslin was a long-time Daily News columnist and a mentor to Ruben Rosario. He first started working in newspapers as a teenager in the 1940s. By the '80s, he had become a prominent voice in New York media. When awarding him a Pulitzer Prize In 1985, the awards committee said his columns consistently championed ordinary citizens. Breslin had a way of putting his readers in other people's shoes that few other reporters could match. On top of that, he was popular. Breslin's columns were so widely read and so heavily debated that he became something of a pop culture personality.

Speaker 29: This man won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns in the New York Daily News. Please welcome Jimmy Breslin. Jimmy.

Micah Loewinger: He even starred in a series of commercials for New York-based beer called Piels.

Jimmy Breslin: I'm Jimmy Breslin, a writer, but beer is a subject that's not exactly unknown to me, so I tried once.

Ruben Rosario: He was crabby. He was probably most joyful when both sides of the people that he was writing about in his column disliked what he wrote because he was there to make people uncomfortable, to make people think whether they liked his opinion in the end or they didn't.

Micah Loewinger: Breslin began to question the official narrative that had been reported and amplified in The Post and by his own colleagues at The Daily News. For one thing, Breslin seemed interested in who the victims actually were beyond their arrest records. His first column on the shooting followed the cousins of James Ramseur who told him about how Ramseur wanted to be an MC and how he could always make girls laugh. The piece Breslin ended up writing was headlined, Why shoot him? It's the $5 question.

In it, Breslin wrote that the story of the Subway Vigilante had become as popular as a Christmas carol. In rendering the victims as human beings, Breslin made clear that he was not there to sing along. This posture put him in the uncomfortable position of essentially shaming an entire city.

Jimmy Breslin: If you're going to cheer for that, there's something the matter with you. Absolutely. You have no respect for the law.

Micah Loewinger: On New Year's Eve, 1984, Breslin wasn't scheduled to publish a column, but he wrote one anyway about the public celebratory view of the gunman. They burned down something irreplaceable in New York this week, he wrote, and there were people who looked at the ashes and termed them beautiful. It was his fourth column on the shooting in just over a week. All of them took the crowds to task. Would the gunman have fired and would people now be so jubilant? He asked if the four had been white. Breslin went on to clarify a few key facts in this column.

He emphasized that the screwdrivers found on the teenagers had not in fact been sharpened and that in any event, the gunman probably never saw them when Troy Canty approached him. All he saw, Breslin wrote, was a young Back guy from the Bronx. If the tabloids often seemed to be yelling alongside their readers, New York Post reporter, Cynthia Fagen says that was by design.

Cynthia Fagen: The New York Post served up what we all thought was happening with big blaring headlines. It was sexy. It was reverently, irreverent. The Post never talked down to its readers. Not saying that Daily News did, but it like said, "Hey, I'm in this with you."

[music]

Micah Loewinger: The Post had once been a staunchly liberal paper, but when Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1976, he turned it into the raunchy, right-leaning tabloid we know it as today. Murdoch had been building tabloid empires in his native Australia and in the UK for years, but he was less well-known in America. Here is a young Murdoch being interviewed by a reporter from Australian Broadcasting.

Speaker 29: Do you like the feeling of power you have as a newspaper proprietor?

Rupert Murdoch: Of course, one enjoys the feeling of power. Although I think the discretion of the power of newspaper proprietors can be greatly overdone. We have more responsibility than power. I think the newspaper--

Cynthia Fagen: He wanted a foothold into New York City. It's politics. I can't speak for him, obviously, but as we look back, we could see that it was his stepping stone to television. In Fox TV.

Micah Loewinger: Cynthia Fagen saw the Murdoch takeover of The Post from up close when she was a copy girl in the late '70s. Did you ever see him in the newsroom?

Cynthia Fagen: All the time. He was always there. He had his sleeves rolled up, and he would chat with the editors or the people who were doing the page layouts. He was very much a presence.

Micah Loewinger: I asked Fagen how the paper changed after Murdoch bought it.

Cynthia Fagen: Well, it certainly got livelier. You had an influx of Australians and they applied their, almost no-holds-barred sense to covering a story.

Jim Rutenberg: It was all out and it was front-page news.

Micah Loewinger: This is Jim Rutenberg. He's a reporter for the New York Times, who has written about Murdoch's media empire.

Jim Rutenberg: Any crime, no matter how small if it had the right details to forward the notion that this city is in total chaos, then Murdoch would do it.

Micah Loewinger: Just a year after Murdoch's takeover, the mayor bemoaned the paper's new direction.

Jim Rutenberg: He held a press conference just salvaging Rupert Murdoch. He denounces The Post says, "A final newspaper that had been corrupted into a sensationalist rag by an Australian carpet bagger."

Micah Loewinger: Whether the mayor liked it or not, by 1984, The Post's circulation had nearly doubled under Murdoch's leadership. Cynthia Fagen says the paper's crime coverage was a key part of that success.

Cynthia Fagen: People love reading about crime. It was always on anybody's mind. A train wreck is a train wreck. Who slows down when they see a train wreck?

Micah Loewinger: Everybody.

Cynthia Fagen: Everyone, yes. Murdoch had the secret recipe. The secret sauce. Crime sells. Crime pays for newspapers.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: The year of the subway shooting The Daily News got a new publisher who was determined to keep The Post at bay. The solution it seemed, was to become more like The Post, in a time story about the rivalry between the two papers. The Daily News was said to be shedding its low-key tone for louder sassier headlines. As it turned out, a shooting involving a white gunman, four Black teenagers, and a possible mugging attempt was the perfect ammunition for a media war.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, Bernie Goetz turns himself in and the media war rages on.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're back with the story of how the press covered a notorious and divisive 1984 New York City subway shooting, part of a new series called Vigilante From Fiasco. The podcast hosted by Leon Neyfakh, which you can find only on Audible. We pick up with the gunman's emergence far from the scene of the crime.

Speaker 30: New Hampshire is a land of history, of contentment, and charm. Here are quaint covered bridges--

Leon Neyfakh: Nine days after the shooting, big news came from an unexpected place.

Robert Libby: My name is Robert F. Libby. I go by Bob. In 1984, I was a lieutenant on duty for the day shift of the Concord Police Department.

Leon Neyfakh: Concord New Hampshire was home to about 30,000 people. It was so quiet that it had earned the nickname that city in a coma.

Robert Libby: There were some days when it was boring. People would come to the window. I would have to talk to, or people would call on the phone, and I'd have to talk to. I'd review police reports and pass them along in the system.

Leon Neyfakh: On Sunday, the day before New Year's Eve, Libby happened to be reading about a high-profile crime in his local newspaper. It had taken place more than 250 miles away in a New York City subway station.

Robert Libby: Then the next day, I'm sitting in my office and this guy walks in the front lobby and the sergeant says, "This guy wants to turn himself in." I said, "What for?" He said something to the effect of, "Have you heard of the Subway Vigilante?"

Leon Neyfakh: After nine days of media speculation and a manhunt that seemed to be stuck in neutral, the gunman had surrendered.

Robert Libby: At some point, he told me his name was Bernie Goetz.

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Leon Neyfakh: Bernhard Goetz was a 37-year-old electronics engineer who had lived in New York for almost a decade. Judging by how he introduced himself at the Concord Police Station, it seemed he had been following the news closely enough while on the run to know about his new nickname.

Robert Libby: At that point, I had a patrol officer in the station. I had him come up, take him upstairs to the library, and get a statement from him.

Leon Neyfakh: Now that the subway gunman had a name, he was instantly the biggest story in the country. Journalists flocked to Concord to get a look at him. An assistant district attorney from Manhattan went up as well, along with two detectives. Together they questioned Goetz and bit by bit the timeline of what he'd been up to since the shooting began to come together. It seemed that Goetz had left the city and then returned to his apartment a few days later. This is Jim Levison, then the detective supervisor for the precinct where the shooting had taken place.

Jim Levison: When he entered the building, his doorman said, "A couple of detectives were here a few days ago and they left their car, they wanted to talk to you," not knowing the doorman had no idea what it was about. Then he knew the gig was up.

Leon Neyfakh: After two days in the Concord jail, Goetz was brought back to New York.

Jim Levison: I remember there was a caravan of press cars that followed them from New Hampshire down to the courthouse in New York.

Leon Neyfakh: Levison eventually asked his detective, "Did Goetz ever explain why he turned himself in in Concord and not New York?"

Jim Levison: Bernie said that he was afraid the New York cops were going to beat him up because he had caused so much trouble [chuckles] I said, "Okay," [laughs] Thinking New York City wants to give him a medal and we're going to beat him up.

[music]

Speaker 31: Bernhard Goetz waived extradition from New Hampshire after earlier saying he was afraid to return to New York. He said, "I feel like a sitting pigeon."

Leon Neyfakh: Once Goetz was back in the city, the public was voracious for more information about him, even his booking and his arraignment brief courtroom procedures drew huge crowds. On January 2nd, The Post wrote about a neighbor who'd once joined Goetz in a rent strike. He's a gentle and caring soul. She was quoted as saying, "And he cared about doing good and cleaning things up. Every garbage can on the street is because of Bernard."

Speaker 31: Neighbors in his Greenwich Village apartment building say Goetz is an unlikely vigilante.

Speaker 32: Bernie was a regular guy. You know what I mean? He is a regular guy. There's no big thing about him. I was really surprised.

Leon Neyfakh: Upon his return to New York City, Goetz was placed in a special high-security wing on Rikers Island. The same one that had once held John Lennon's killer. Goetz's bail was set at $50,000. Right away, offers of help flooded in.

Speaker 31: Money is being donated in his apartment house at an electronic store where he was a customer, and people are sending money from as far away as Florida.

Leon Neyfakh: Comedian and New York native, Joan Rivers sent Goetz a telegram at Rikers with, "Love and Kisses." The chairman of New York's Republican Party offered him $5,000 towards his bail.

Speaker 32: I think a person has a right to defend themself against 1 or 10 or whatever.

Speaker 33: Goetz turned down a $50,000 bail check, supposedly from a private citizen.

Leon Neyfakh: Goetz declined all the offers and paid the bail himself. Once Goetz was released from Rikers on January 8th, the media frenzy around him somehow reached even greater heights. Here again is Ruben Rosario from The Daily News.

Ruben Rosario: This was balls-to-the-wall coverage in a city that has big news pretty much every week. This was the biggest news for a period of weeks and even months. The news media pretty much camped outside his apartment building. I made quite a bit of money just sitting in the car, munching on donuts and coffee, trying to get a glimpse of Bernard Goetz.

Leon Neyfakh: The Post assigned Cynthia Fagen to write about Goetz's background. Her piece was published under the headline, "The Vigilantes Untold Life Story," and it described young Goetz as a quiet scholarly boy. Fagen quoted Bernard's sister, Bernice as saying that her brother was always taught to be a polite gentleman. Fagen also included an important detail. Goetz had been mugged several years earlier. In the wake of that mugging, he had tried unsuccessfully to get a license to carry a gun.

The Post found the transcript of the gun permit hearing and published excerpts from it in which Goetz said the experience of getting mugged had changed him profoundly. The incident was an education, Goetz stated in the hearing transcript, "It taught me that the city doesn't care what happens to you." This attempt by Goetz to buy a gun prompted a conversation about New York's gun laws, and soon the National Rifle Association jumped into the fray.

Richard Feldman: New York media was very scary to NRA at the time. The anti-gun New York media, oh my God.

Leon Neyfakh: Richard Feldman worked for the NRA helping to direct the organization's political efforts in the northeast. After the shooting, Feldman was not scared of engaging with journalists. He saw it as an opportunity.

Richard Feldman: Yes, I'm from New York. To me, they were my hometown media. Knowing that the people in New York were very much on the side of Bernie Goetz, it was a moment to make a statement about changing the gun laws in New York.

Leon Neyfakh: Feldman convinced his boss at the NRA to take out ads in New York's local papers that read, "Self-protection is your right."

Richard Feldman: He came back to me a few days later and said, "Richie, I can't believe it. You are completely right. These ads are doing fantastic."

[music]

Leon Neyfakh: In a remarkably short period of time, Goetz had become a national figure. A Washington Post, ABC news poll taken in mid-January showed that 86% of Americans were aware of the Goetz shooting. That was higher according to The Post than nearly every other national event, including the Iran hostage crisis. At a White House press conference on January 9th, ABC's Sam Donaldson even asked President Reagan about Bernie Goetz.

Sam Donaldson: Mr. President, a man in a subway in New York City took a gun and shot four youths who apparently were trying to shake him down. What do you think about the use of deadly force in trying to defend oneself against attack?

President Reagan: In general, I think we all can understand the frustration of people who are constantly threatened by crime and feel that law and order is not particularly protecting them. On the other hand, I think we all realize there is a breakdown of civilization if people start taking the law in their own hands. While we may feel understanding or sympathy for someone who was tested beyond his control and his ability to control himself, at the same time, we have to abide by the law and stand for law and order.

Leon Neyfakh: Reagan didn't specify what exactly had tested Goetz beyond his control. He also didn't say how much control people should be expected to possess. Meanwhile, back in New York, Jimmy Breslin was not wasting time on equivocation, even though only a few others had joined him in condemning Goetz. Les Payne, a columnist for New York, Newsday called Goetz a hero to the hysterical and accused the media of dispensing spoonfed police details instead of pursuing the truth. Mayor Koch called out Breslin specifically for his coverage of the Goetz case, saying that he was exacerbating racial tensions.

Speaker 34: Breslin has been outspoken in his criticism of Goetz saying in one column, "He shot the four of them because they were Black. Don't worry about it. Shot them, bang, bang, bang, two in the back. Bernie Goetz of the Light Brigade."

Leon Neyfakh: No matter how much Breslin appealed to reason, much of the public remained as supportive of Goetz as ever. Just one day before the White House press conference, talk show host Phil Donahue dedicated an entire episode of his show to the controversy. The Phil Donahue show was among the most widely watched in the country at the time, and it was there that Jimmy Breslin came face-to-face with the public support for the subway gunman.

Phil Donahue: Newspapers can't seem to write enough about the issue of Bernard Goetz. We seem to be coming apart at the seams, and we are giving standing ovations to people who appear to be taking the law into their own hands. You should also know that on the person of three of the four victims were found sharpened screwdrivers.

Jimmy Breslin: Wrong.

Phil Donahue: Jimmy Breslin is here-

Jimmy Breslin: Wrong.

Phil Donahue: -to correct me in public. [laughter]

Leon Neyfakh: Breslin had not given up on his attempt to correct the misreporting around the event. He wasn't going to let this moment pass by without calling it out.

Phil Donahue: What's your point, Mr. Breslin?

Jimmy Breslin: After the shooting, they found three screwdrivers unsharpened, two in one jacket and one in the other. The captain in charge of the investigation for the New York City Police Department says that the screwdriver never came into play and were no part of the investigation that they're conducting. Apparently--

Leon Neyfakh: This vivid but totally false image of sharpened screwdrivers had stuck in the minds of the public and in much of the media. In fact, nearly 40 years after the shooting, press accounts still frequently mentioned the sharpened screwdrivers, which again, never existed.

Jimmy Breslin: The screwdrivers apparently are not going to be any part of the case. In other words from what he is saying, the screwdrivers never were shown. They were there obviously for thieving. The guys were going to break into these Pac-Man games and hit subway turnstiles, but they were unsharpened. The press has made it sharpened and each one of them had one, and thereby giving people the vision of these three kids, putting the screwdriver in the guy's eyes or something. It's all part of the story of the fear and resentment that's produced this outpouring.

Phil Donahue: It's a part of the prejudiced effort to railroad these victims. Is that your point?

Jimmy Breslin: They're trying to make a poor guy when a fellow I've regard as being a little unstable, Goetz, went and shot four people. He's going to go to jail for it. Whether anyone likes to hear that or not, he will go to jail. He shot four kids. When he's sitting in the jail, they'll still remember sharpened screwdrivers that never were sharpened.

Phil Donahue: He appears to be getting a standing ovation from more than a--

Jimmy Breslin: From the unwashed, the loudmouths. Of course, quite a few of them, they all stand up.

[background noise]

Leon Neyfakh: There was an audience member who confronted Breslin first.

Speaker 35: Are you a doctor, sir?

Jimmy Breslin: What has that got to do with it?

Speaker 35: Well, you're passing judgment, the man was unstable. How can you say that?

Jimmy Breslin: He shot four people in a subway car. What's that? Stability?

Speaker 35: Are you kidding? It should have happened to you, what reaction would you have had then, sir?

Jimmy Breslin: What happened?

Speaker 35: If they shot you.

Jimmy Breslin: What happened?

Speaker 35: What would've happened?

Jimmy Breslin: Wait a minute. What happened?

Speaker 35: You don't know what happened. You weren't there.

Jimmy Breslin: I know four kids got shot. Two of them in the back.

Speaker 35: I know a man's in jail, but I still don't believe it why?

Jimmy Breslin: Oh, you don't believe why?

Speaker 35: No, sir.

Jimmy Breslin: You don't believe why he's in jail? Because he pulled a gun and shot four people. Very simple. You go to jail for that. There's laws-

Speaker 35: Well, we'll see.

Jimmy Breslin: -not your emotion. Big difference.

Speaker 35: Thank you. We'll see

Leon Neyfakh: For Ruben Rosario, this was Breslin at his best, challenging the worship of Goetz even when few others were willing to do so.

Ruben Rosario: He was a journalist at heart, meaning that he would try to find the truth for wherever laid-- There was a genius to his journalistic madness.

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Leon Neyfakh: Breslin's madness wasn't enough to break through the madness that had seized the public. Bernard Goetz was still a hero, and the popular appetite for uncritical news about him did not abate. On January 10th, 1985, two days after the Donahue panel, New Yorkers woke up to a special edition of the New York Post. Murdoch star columnist, Steve Dunleavy had managed to score a long exclusive interview with Goetz. "I really hope some good comes of this," ran the pull quote from Goetz on the front page.

Below that in a smaller font was a headline about 19-year-old Darrell Kabe, whose spine had been severed in the shooting. Kabe had developed a severe case of pneumonia in the hospital. He had fallen into a coma and in the words of The Post, he was fighting for his life. If Darrell Kabe died, the DA would have to consider prosecuting Goetz for murder.

Brooke Gladstone: Kabe and Goetz, three other victims did survive the shooting, and Goetz, well, he did less than a year in prison. About the fate of Daniel Penny, the white man who killed Jordan Neely, a Black man on the subway earlier this year gets quipped to The post that Penny has, "Got to pay." Leon, it seems both obvious and yet worth pointing out that in life and art, most would-be vigilantes are white and their victims, they're black.

Leon Neyfakh: Who gets to be a vigilante? If you're someone who takes the law into your own hands, sometimes that's called crime and other times it's called heroism. Who gets to be called a vigilante is a question that runs through our series for sure. It's also a question that runs through coverage of something like January 6th because those are indeed people who felt that the government was letting them down and they needed to take their country back. That's a pretty good distillation of the vigilante spirit.

Brooke Gladstone: In Fiasco, you share a clip of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, former NYPD transit officer and police captain, suggesting that crime needs to be addressed equally as a real problem and as a feeling.

Leon Neyfakh: Yes, and it is a little bit scary to hear him say that the perception matters as much as the reality because if that's what we're going off of, then the policy choices that we're going to make are very different than what's actually going to solve our problems as a society. There's a balance that everyone should be seeking, and I'm worried when I hear someone say that the perception matters as much as the reality because it seems like a recipe for getting that balance badly wrong.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you, Leon.

Leon Neyfakh: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Leon Neyfakh is the host of Fiasco, a podcast about pivotal moments in US history. The latest season Vigilante is available exclusively on Audible, but you can find previous seasons of Fiasco wherever you find your podcasts.

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Brooke Gladstone: On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Suzanne Gaber with help from Shaan Merchant, our technical directors, Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Andrew Nerviano. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

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