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Oh.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It is Friday, March 20th, and I am Heather Holmes Dillard, vice president of marketing communications at the Cleveland Foundation.

And I am so excited to introduce today's form featuring two of my favorite humans, Elliot and Jeremy.

As part of the City Club's author and conversation and Criminal Justice series.

Today we're going back to the 1984, the Reagan 80s, and to a much grittier Manhattan.

Some of us in this audience may recall the story of Bernie gets nicknamed the Subway Vigilante, and how he became the first major true crime story of the cable news era.

Our speaker today, Elliot Williams, is a CNN legal analyst and a Brooklyn born son of Jamaican immigrants.

He grew up in new Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg.

That was the 1980s New York.

In his new book, Five Bullets The Stirring Story of Bernie gets New York's explosive 80s and the subway vigilante trial that divided the nation.

Elliott draws on archives and interviews with many main characters whose names you probably recognize Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani, and Rupert Murdoch.

Today, we'll explore how these events and that subway car 40 years ago continued to shape today's debates about race, crime, safety and the media.

In addition to his work at CNN, Elliott Elliott was also my previous colleague at Raben.

Elliott and Jeremy.

He is a regular host on, Sirius XM w, Amu at NPR's Washington, DC station.

He spent his career thinking about law, crime and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.

Moderating the conversation today is Jeremy Parris, principal at Paris CLS, LLC.

Jeremy is a public affairs expert and has served as senior advisor at the Raben Group.

He is also the former chief of counsel for Nominations and Oversight for the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC.

Before we begin, a quick reminder for our live streaming radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794 and then city club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Elli Elliott, welcome back to Cleveland.

Thank you.

This is good.

You wrote a book?

Yeah.

Apparently, it's it's a good one.

Okay.

All right.

Just we're just going to assume for a second that everybody here is not exactly our age or older.

Exactly.

Tell us a little bit about what happened on December 22nd, 1984.

Right.

And so why don't we start with what is not in dispute, which isn't that much because everything's in dispute about this case, but just the undisputed facts.

December 22nd, 1984.

Four teenagers, black teenagers from the Bronx.

Troy Canty, Darryl K.B., Barry Allen and James Ramseur were on a subway car and heading southbound in Manhattan.

Now they were acting up.

They were roughhousing.

They were doing pull ups.

They were slamming on the seats.

They were asking people for cigarettes and matches, but did not assault, attack or injure anyone in a legal sense.

Just leave it at that.

Bernard Getz got on the subway at some point.

Troy Canty, either he approached Bernard, gets an either demanded $5, give me five bucks, or, requested $5.

Hey, sir, can I please have $5?

Was it panhandling or a threat?

Ambiguous open question.

Needless to say, gets in that moment immediately.

Thought he was about to be mugged, pulled out an unlicensed firearm and shot all of them in succession.

Starting with Canty, then Allen and Ramshaw, and then K.B., he is believed again.

There's a little bit of dispute here believed to have stood over McCabe when he was on the ground and said, you don't look so bad.

Here's another, and shot him again in the chest.

Now, Cobb ultimately ended up paralyzed as a result of that.

And then two weeks later, fell into a coma, went into respiratory arrest and came out months later, brain damaged with the mental capacity of a nine year old.

Gets them fled.

He ended up, in New Hampshire for nine days, came back.

And that's the story begins.

It's it's really a compelling story.

And reading the book took it back.

It's hard to make.

This was a huge, big deal in the 1980s.

It's one of those stories is up there with the challenger explosion and Reagan telling Gorbachev, tear down the wall, and it's in the Billy Joel.

We didn't start the fire song.

You know, it's a sort of larger than life thing that marks the moment, right?

And so what for?

You brought it back.

What drew you to this story?

Now?

You were.

You know, I don't.

Have you always been interested in this?

To the.

How did the light bulb go on?

Yeah.

No, I've not been sitting on a Bernadette's book for for nothing.

All right.

You talk nothing about Bernie.

That's all I want to talk about.

Our friend, our guest.

Back to the Billy Joel point for a quick second.

And it's an important one.

Only because I don't think Billy Joel is the great chronicler of 20th century American history events.

That said, if you notice in the song, we didn't start the fire.

Look at the other, people, places and things that are named.

You're talking about a Doris Day bridge on the River Kwai.

Reagan.

Russians in Afghanistan.

The Ayatollah, major events of the 20th century.

Why is it that this case which is mentioned in it by name.

You know, foreign debts, homeless vets, Aids, crack Bernie gets.

How does he and this rise to the pantheon of biggest events of the 20th century, at least according to Billy Joel?

Well, a few things.

One.

I, at least for me, I grew up with the story.

It's probably one of.

I was eight when the shooting happened.

It was a formative news experience.

And just think about everybody has these in their existence.

The thing that you remember watching on the news or reading in the television, you know, reading on the news or just hearing your parents talking about when you're 8 or 9 years old.

So that was one, two, you know, having been a lawyer and prosecutor and thinking about race and crime and working in media now, a lot of the issues that really made this case into household news and, and, sort of at the top of the Billy Joel pantheon were really present in that story, but also reemerge today.

And we can talk about all of the things again, whether it's race or crime or America's obsession with vigilantes, or just the fact that the media and information makes people scared and whips them up and causes them to do sometimes very horrible things.

All of that comes up in this story, and it really made sense to put into a book what I certainly was expecting to talk a lot about Billy Joel today.

Yeah, so we can do that.

We're going to read.

We've got 43 minutes.

That's right.

Maybe maybe the audience can say goodbye to Hollywood.

Yeah.

What are your favorite songs?

Piano man.

I think Piano Man is overrated.

All right, here we go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A separate conversation.

You.

So you paint this incredible portrait of a gritty New York in the 1970s and 80s.

It's sort of unimaginable today to spend any time in New York or in any of our cities.

And it's sort of like this main character in the book.

And I kept having this like, you know, Grampa Simpson moment.

Like in my day, we didn't have safety, right?

We like we didn't we didn't know about it.

You know, why is this portrait of New York such a central part of the book?

And, you know, it didn't occur to me like, when you write a book, there's what it's like Donald Rumsfeld.

They're known knowns and known unknowns and unknown.

And that's another time.

Another is, I know, I know, like, I can I only have things that are 30 years old in my head, but but needless to say, something I did not realize I don't remember what the thing I was going to say was, because I, we got so bogged down with the gritty character of New York.

Someone pointed out, thank you, Jeremy.

Someone pointed out to me that the way the chapters were structured was that, every major character in the book gets a chapter.

And it didn't occur to me that the city of New York is a character in this book.

That's why the first chapter of the book is called The Powder Keg, and it's about literally how much New York City was on the verge of explosion.

And not just New York City, but cities around America, Cleveland, Ohio, being another one that was struggling in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were the first major city to go bankrupt, to go bankrupt.

So by way of example, just the most obvious, the most obvious sort of metric point, if you look at the homicide rate in New York City in 1984 was about 1700 homicides a year.

It's now about 3 or 400 a year.

And I will note that New York City's homicide rate was was going up and increasing to a high of over 2000 as its population was dropping over the course of the 60s to the 80s, New York City lost about a million people, but its homicide rate was through the roof.

The city was broke and mismanaged, laying off sanitation workers and teachers and firefighters and, transit strikes.

The iconic.

You mentioned Cleveland's bankruptcy.

The city was on the verge of bankruptcy and sought a bailout from Gerald Ford, who was president at the time, leading to one of the most iconic newspaper headlines in American history.

Sing it with me if you know it.

Ford.

The city dropped dead with a picture of Gerald Ford on it there.

That was New York.

And I just thank people with all of the energy today.

Look at beautiful Cleveland now and all the energy into revitalizing downtowns and bringing investment and businesses, downtowns, and the same happening in New York.

It's just a different place.

It's glassy, it's shiny.

There's pretty ladies and yoga clothes.

Walking labradoodle is everywhere.

It's just not not or at least a shar pei or something like that.

But not the kind of gritty place that certainly I remember as a kid.

And that the world, you know, I think and certainly younger readers or viewers of history just don't have this relationship to this, to cities that.

Well, that I want to ask you whether you have a deeper knowledge of, of dog breeds or Billy Joel.

But I want to go somewhere I will say I'm I censored myself because because we are on the clock.

But, you know, there's a rumor that the The Piano Man is actually about a gay bar.

When you think about they're all men who are alone, right here.

Right.

But just closeted.

No, Not fascinating.

Hey, you asked so.

Yeah.

All right, all right, all right.

Fine.

All right, well, look, we will we will revisit Billy Joel later.

So going back to the gritty city and sort of on the edge, this is a city that that that people feel unsafe.

Black and white people feel unsafe.

94 is on the verge of the the crack epidemic.

Yes.

Which you talk about in the book, you get how, you know, and there's a real question about whether New York could even be governed, you know, whether whether it how do you do those that sort of background, the city call in to question the ideas which are really central in your book, what is reasonable to be afraid of?

Right.

And to very quickly talk about sort of the central legal issue in the book, very quickly, the word reasonable was not defined in New York law.

The law said that if someone reasonably believes they're about to be mugged, they can use deadly force.

And up until 1984, I guess 85 at the time, it wasn't defined.

What reasonable meant was it's subjective reasonableness.

I feel frightened in my heart.

It's subjective or objective reasonableness.

Is it?

I feel afraid, but my fear generally tracks how other people in society would also fear.

Right?

And that just never got defined.

Well, you know, Bernard gets himself felt afraid, on account of his own sort of having been mugged in 1981 before by three young black men.

The young teenagers.

Pardon?

The city was rough and mismanaged, but also, he was a bigot, with a history of having used ethnic slurs in public, unambiguously in the past.

Now, I will just note a quick sort of aspect of writing the book, because I didn't.

We're going to talk about my interview, and my conversation with Bernard gets a little bit later, I think.

But, you know, it's interesting.

The last question.

That's fine.

Well, I'm not telling you what I'm going to say, but, but I will say this, you know, he, he, he still writes me occasionally, with just thoughts or he reads or sees an interview or, or whatever else.

And right before the book came out, right before he hadn't read it yet.

He, sent me an article detailing the criminal histories of the four young men and making clear and and some of them are pretty rough, particularly James Ramseur has a very ugly criminal history, ugly, horrific acts that he committed.

And he says, you dwell on my use of the N-word.

If you don't include this information about their criminal histories, your books.

Not fair.

And, you know, I didn't respond.

What I would say was two things can be true.

You have a history of using ethnic slurs.

They have criminal records, but you had no access to that information at the time you decided to shoot them.

And so this idea that somehow the shooting or the acts created this binary between, race being an issue looming over the city and these guys individual records and his decision to perhaps unlawfully pull the trigger, it just doesn't gel.

But I just think that's an interesting you don't shy away from that in the book at all.

I think that's very front and center.

You actually talk about how it was not just white New Yorkers, but black New Yorkers were among the people cheering on Bernie Getz or feeling like he was a hero and somebody finally fighting back.

Of course, these are people that also lived in neighborhoods where they were victims of crime.

And one of the interesting, as you point out, is these are people who could absolutely understand that if the race were reversed, if this were a black man in subway that shot for white teenagers, the legal outcome would have been different.

Yeah, I don't know if the legal outcome would have been different.

The way the public reacted to it would have been vastly different.

Now.

One of the, a moment I detail in the book at some length, that is a pivot point in American media.

And certainly New York City media was Rupert Murdoch's takeover of the New York Post.

Now, he, did not I did not interview him for the book.

I tried, I reached out, they politely declined.

He and his team now, Murdoch had an empire of tabloids in Australia and the UK and really wanted an American newspaper in a big city and saw that Dorothy Schiff was selling the New York Post, this liberal newspaper.

It was a left leaning publication.

He wanted to just sort of tabloid ified New York City and really wanted to create a paper that focused on crime.

Frightened people whipped people up.

Page six, the gossipy page.

He added that as a way of getting people to to sort of buy more newspapers.

Now that led to all the tabloids in New York City, the Daily News and Newsday and others to get more sensational, but particularly about crime.

And so just imagine a world where you're largely sole source of information is telling you every single morning, you're frightened, you are under siege, you are under attack.

We are under attack.

We are, the the police can't care for us.

And that just sort of got in people's heads.

Point one just the media was really frightening people at this point, particularly the print media.

The other one is that for nine days, Bernard.

And this is on the race point Bernard gets was he ran, as I mentioned, and was hiding, or at least traveling in New Hampshire and Vermont in that nine days before anyone knew who Bernard gets was the jig was up.

Everyone had, through reading all of this information that they were getting from the press about who this Avenger, this Deathwish Avenger might be that shape the public narrative.

And you had nine days of all you knew was it's a white guy who shot four black people who were threatening him, ostensibly in the subway.

That's all the newspapers needed.

And they created a narrative.

And I think that fed into some of that, ambivalence from black folks where, yes, you know, I'm scared, too.

I know the cops might shoot me if given the opportunity, but I'm also scared in this city as well.

It is.

It was nuanced.

Well, there's this sort of rise of the modern world feature of your book where you sort of see you do you tell a story of the buying the post and what it means?

And there's something I kept sticking out to me reading it, which is, you know, the and you're talking about the public reaction to Bernie Gets, which was formed before they even knew who Bernie gets was they knew these baseline facts, these wildly different perspectives.

Is he a hero who's who's fighting back as a racist, wannabe murderer who should be in jail?

These things are driven by people's experience of the city, their personal experiences with crime, their broader opinions about society.

Where does it go?

So this is you really this is a complicated feature of your book, is the determination of whether an action is reasonable to take.

And I'm talking about morally and culturally, if not legally.

Legally is a complicated feature, which you cover quite a bit.

But is it just in the eye of the beholder?

Like, how do we sort this out?

Like if we, you know, we all will look at a same fact and have a different opinion and it can't just be, well, you thought that way and that's okay.

You took that.

I don't think you can really answer that question.

I mean, I think different people are going to have different conceptions of what reasonableness is.

And typically I and quite frankly, this is how the law of obscenity works in the country.

It's in terms of what the prevailing societal standard is now that's vague, and no one can really put a finger on what that actually is.

Now, I think the a legal conception is, is one of the rare actual frameworks you can use, even though it's complicated and messy and vague and it's, well, how do we assess or track what would what would gel across all of society?

So but I just don't know if if there's one defining answer for what constitutes reasonableness.

Well, even in the in the legal part of it is like is it objective, reasonableness, subjective, reasonable answers?

Yes.

It's both.

Both.

And that's what New York said.

And it led to a confusion.

So this is a question.

It's even bigger now, I think, than it was then.

So we're a bigger country.

We're 340 million people.

We we don't have three TV stations.

We have every channel.

We get to pick our own news.

It gets to pick us through algorithms.

Right.

How do we, you know, we have wildly different access to to to to information, you know, how do we decide the big questions for crime and public safety, right.

Treatment of immigrants.

Like what are we doing about, you know, race, equality and access to opportunity when we have these vastly different notions of right and wrong?

Is, is is that is that something you thought of as you wrote in, like what?

What is this the story Bernie gets?

Tell us about where we are now.

So it's interesting, you know, something that came up from a few different sources over the course of the reporting of the book is this this idea that back then there were only a few different sources of information, you know, a few newspapers, the nightly news or whatever else, and you could get stuff changed.

If something was wrong, you'd call them up, you could reach out, you could issue a retraction or whatever else.

I think on this is complicated because only a few news sources is actually maybe not a great thing if everybody is consuming the same bit of information.

The problem is that the pendulum has swung so wildly, and the world we're in now where a lot of information that people consume, they're shaping how they see questions like crime and safety or whatever else are completely unvetted sources.

Even I mean, setting aside individual biases of reporters or individual news organizations or whatever else, the mere fact that you can self-select, the information you get often from sources that that literally are not fact check, I think, is having a corrosive effect on how people see and interact with the world.

It definitely had an impact in 1984 and certainly is having a profound impact.

If you read, I'm proving that I read the book.

So I quote, yeah, did the homework.

I did the homework.

You wrote somehow, even as we've evolved, the internet has made us even more a vigilante nation than we were in 1984.

Can you say a little more about this and talk of bringing some of the recent moments of what is that?

What did you mean by that?

You know, it's interesting, the on the nose examples of that, and I mention them in the book, are obviously Kyle Rittenhouse.

When I posed the question, who would Kyle Rittenhouse be without social media, a social media feed telling him and the days of like, feeding him images of Kenosha, Wisconsin, burning and saying, in effect, saying it's up to you to step in.

Imagine him without that.

Would he have done it?

Hard to speculate.

So it's a little on the nose.

It's it's a self-defense instance.

And obviously the most on the nose example is, Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely in New York.

The an individual, a Michael Jackson impersonator was having a psychic or psychiatric episode on the train yelling and screaming.

An ex-Marine named Daniel Penny came out, put him in a chokehold, ostensibly for the protection of everybody on the train, and ultimately killed him and ended up getting acquitted of homicide.

And all of the above.

Those are, you know, literal examples of the point, particularly the Daniel Penny one, because it happened on the New York City subway.

Right.

I think the better example, which has nothing to do with these, is Luigi Maggio and, the, the, the killer of the UnitedHealth CEO.

And the point is, there is not the same racial element to it, of course.

And there isn't a self-defense element, at least based on the facts that have come out publicly.

However, the fact that before people knew who he was, he was getting marriage proposals and a host of support and love online solely on account of the fact that, he had taken a violent action against a health care CEO.

Now, to be honest, if I were to ask for a show of hands in here, how many people have been frustrated at some point in their lives with their coverage or customer service or whatever else, and a health care company, all the hands would shoot up?

Okay, no question.

However, how many of you have committed an act of homicide?

The answer the hands would quickly go down, right?

Don't raise your hands.

Yeah, it has no statute of limitations.

So no matter how long ago you did it, you're in trouble.

But point being, all people knew was that one fact.

The one fact was, as a health care CEO and somebody who's mad about health care and that support that got turbocharged for him online, just shows how America and Americans have long had a fascination with vigilantes and vigilante acts.

Even in the absence of more information.

And I really think, though, it's not a perfect parallel because the self-defense element isn't there, it really, you know, and I only spend about a paragraph or two on it in the book, but but it's a notable example.

It really is.

And he he is again, like Bernie gets hailed as a hero by people who don't know him at all.

And even before they knew the facts.

So one of the things that's sticking with me the most, and I think this will stick with me the most, is the idea of safety.

And you write about this book and you wrote the gates case was a Rorschach test about what safety meant in America and who even has a right to feel safe in the first place.

So tell us more about who is entitled to feel safe.

Like do people safe?

Is feeling unsafe a justification for action?

Well, the law says yes.

And but morality and law, we absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.

But the law and many people have come to me saying I had no idea that you can just be afraid and you can kill somebody.

That's kind of how self-defense law in the United States works.

And I use the metaphor in the book, our conception of safety is not an eye for an eye.

It's your eye for the idea that maybe you might take my eye in the future.

And I just preemptively want to take yours away.

That's ultimately what the law allows in the United States.

If you're scared that someone's about to harm you or is unlawfully on your property or whatever else.

So we're yearning for him or Robbie, we're going on, I quote the Code of Hammurabi in the book, but the, but that's exactly it.

Now, the most another enlightening thing that came up, and this was from my editor.

In the book, she made the point that James Ramseur, who I mentioned is one of the four he shot in the back by gats and had a really bad criminal history.

But there's a I'm not going to sugarcoat that at all.

But she made the point.

You know, the interesting thing is that Bernard, Ramseur and Bernard Gatz, to some extent, this poor black kid from the Bronx and this relatively affluent man from Westchester County who lived in the West Village of New York, really say the same things about safety, but they're framed very differently.

James Ramsden's whole conception is they're all lined against me.

The police are not there for my protection.

The police might actually harm me.

And I just don't trust the system right now.

Draw a circle around that, and then a Venn diagram, because Bernard gets says the elites and the fat cats are ruling everything.

The cops are sort of impotent and aren't able to do their jobs.

And at the end of the day, I don't feel safe.

And the and the authorities can't keep me safe.

They both distrust and mistrust authority quite profoundly, but they frame it in different ways, some of them racial, some of them, sort of more conceptual, but they really are really at their core.

And the editor flagged this, and I made a note of it, in the book, at their core, these very different people, really are kind of saying the same sex.

Tony, I want to turn to you as an editor because you've edited my work before and you're an editor with that conscience, and you're quite good at it.

But we won't make this.

I want to make this global and not personal.

So I want to circle back.

I've got, I've got I've got two more questions for you.

And then I'm going to forecast that we we do every guest.

The city club answers questions from the audience, including the, the audience.

I'm not going into the room.

You're not.

You're out now.

I'm kidding.

No, I changed my mind.

That's when Dan almost got out of his face.

Dan would have.

Don't give Dan a heart now.

We so so in two question, two more questions, then we're going to turn to the audience portion and you'll have your chance.

Be ready.

You talked about the level of crime in New York in 1984.

It was almost 2000.

It rose to 2000 homicides a year, actually, last year in New York, the level of homicides is 305, which is the lowest number since the 1950s.

Yeah.

Even though it's a much bigger city, I mean, New York gets a bad rap in politics.

The much safer place to be than than most places in America.

Yes.

And even during the Covid spike in crime, where there was a spike in crime, it it was fractional compared to what it was back then.

And yet and you wrote this, you wouldn't know it.

But the country is objectively much safer today than it was in 1984.

But I've got a supercomputer in my pocket that accesses the social media, that feeds me that program.

Deliver us bad news.

Yeah, we feel unsafe, or at least as unsafe as we did then, even though we are objectively safer.

Yeah.

What do we do with that?

Because we're we construct whole political decisions around do I feel safe or not?

Yes.

Look, I think a lot of the discourse today and I don't say any of this in a partizan manner, a lot of the discourse today and certainly what, one as a sort of winning rhetorical point in 2024 was the idea that American cities are not safe, right?

I'm not saying it's true.

I'm not saying I buy it, but it won and people bought it.

I think, in my now hometown of Washington, D.C., the National Guard, whose presence is there and very visible, is 100% a function of the narrative that cities, quote unquote, are not safe.

This idea that somehow, in order to make this rough hellhole of a place Washington, DC, safe, it was necessary to bring, federal law enforcement or military in to there.

I think, the Ice enforcement actions in Minneapolis are to some extent rooted.

And yes, there's the whole immigration fight, which is, you know, a topic for another book, but also the idea that cities are not safe.

This idea sort of took hold.

Now, again, if you were to, just look at the kind of data that Jeremy cited there.

Obviously these places are sort of numerically, mathematically, statistically more safe than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago.

The problem, and this is what Democrats stepped in in 2024, was when people, for whatever reason, claim that they feel unsafe or say that they feel unsafe waving statistics in their face is not a winning strategy.

And I and I and I do, you know, it's not a, it's not a politics book.

It's not a Partizan.

It's not a, you know, political road map.

But I referenced that at one point in the book, just making the case that whether it's New York in 1984 or whether it's Cleveland or DC or wherever else in 2026, when people feel scared, whether it's legitimate or not, telling them that they should not feel scared, actually alienates them a great deal.

And and the criticism of many in New York leadership in the 1980s was everything's fine, everything's fine.

We're totally fine.

Don't worry about it.

We got this under control, and that really turned a lot of the public off, including the main character of this book.

It's it would be a whole different conversation of politics.

And, you know, the projection of I feel your pain is an important part of politics.

They really enlarging it is that people have a right to feel how they feel, and also about prices and also about prices are another one, another one in American politics today where, I feel scared that milk is milk and gas are more expensive and people are being dumb.

Now, you know, it's not as a percentage of your tax rate.

It's just all of it.

And just if you're explaining stats, you're losing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's why I make sure to never understand stats.

Don't don't, don't.

Yeah.

Winger I'm a word guy.

All right.

Here's the last question before we turn it over to the the audience.

You you talked about your interview with with Bernie Getz, and there's a point.

The moment has come.

This is point in the book.

And it is, I got to say, surreal.

I have known you a long time.

And the idea of just, like getting on the phone, the idea of these, by the way, emailing you is also a real there's a lot, you know, what?

What was that like?

Was was there anything about talking in that surprised you?

Did it?

Was it what you expected?

Was it so a couple so macro answer then micro answer.

The macro answer is I found in interviewing people who are alive and sort of still in the game 42 years after it or at the time was 39.5 years after an event.

Was a really interesting experience in that a lot of them are elderly now and really just wanted to talk.

The I think some of the most enlightening interviews were the police that I interviewed in New Hampshire and New York City who apprehended Gatz.

You know, it was it was almost poignant in a way, to talk to people for decades after something when someone, several decades their junior is just calling them to talk about their stories.

And so that was kind of cool.

As was the case with some young, Curtis Sliwa, who ran for mayor in New York and and just another bonkers, totally bonkers conversation.

Bernard gets, no, it was it was it was it was a wild conversation.

Because we'd been emailing back and forth, I told him I was writing a book.

I had told him I'd hoped to speak with him.

And one day I just picked up the phone and called him.

And then just for 45 minutes, I'm talking to Bernard Getz.

Which kind of wild, And my wife was in the next room and could hear because I had it on speaker and she would just, like sharing some of the like, because he's all over the place.

Incredibly lucid at the time, I think he was 76 years old.

Incredibly lucid, but all over the place.

All over the place, my parents kind of way in the audience.

That's fine.

You're not looking, I don't know.

No, I don't, I, I state purely descriptively what his age was.

It was just I'm talking to, the the thing that surprised me the most, when talking to him was any lack of self-reflection about the event or anything else.

I would have thought that after engaging and one of the more notorious acts of the modern 20th century, someone would have at least had a little bit of self-awareness about it.

And even even had that been, those guys were thugs and murderers, and they needed it needed to happen, comma.

However, it was a tragedy what happened.

I was a younger man at the time.

Maybe I would have not had an unlicensed gun at the time.

Maybe.

I'm sorry for what happened to that paralyzed kid.

But no.

When I asked him because I asked him the question, I worded it this way do you believe you committed an act of public service?

And he responded, those guys needed shooting.

That's not why I shot them, but they needed shooting.

And there is not even any reflection.

I gave him the opportunity to reflect on it.

He took no, you know, easy outs.

And he is, really believes almost in a to B and I in a eugenic sense almost that some people are worthy of living among us and some are not.

And I just happened to do what needed to be done.

I mean, he the way he spoke about it and that, you know, I'm not saying I'm stunned by it, given everything I had read and heard about him, but hearing someone express that little nuance about anything was was jarring.

And I made clear to put that in the book.

Well, it's and he's had he has had a bonkers life sense and all the political things that run for mayor of New York.

But this is the problem with all of this, the fact and it's it's how America makes celebrities out of sort of people who engage in pretty bad violent acts.

The fact that I used the example of Daniel Penny at one point in the book, this was the subway Joker.

Who literally within days of his acquittal, was in Donald Trump's box at the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia at Lincoln Financial Field.

Who within a week or two, two weeks of that, he had a job offer from Andreessen Horowitz, the major venture capital firm in America, solely on account of trying of killing somebody.

Right?

Like, I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not I'm not here to speculate as to Daniel Penny's resumé, but it's a little remarkable that that this is the individual who has earned a significant amount of celebrity on account of a violent act, and Bernard gets running for mayor and running for Public Advocate, which is city's ombudsman in New York.

Yes.

Fine.

He doesn't get a lot of votes.

You know, 1300 people vote for him, not on his platform, which was all about vegetarian meals and schools, as you would expect, naps for municipal workers, animal safety and anti circumcision.

He I'm telling you, bonkers.

Bonkers.

Yeah, but the people that vote for him didn't vote for him on account of his platform.

They voted for him on on gun safety, which was so the mere fact that he still gets 1300 people to vote for him and earns or gets a certain measure of celebrity on account of this act, says something far greater about the rest of society than it does about him.

And we in America make celebrities out of vigilantes.

It's just part of who this country is.

Well, I also look forward to the fact that you might be watching this on our live stream, or you might email you, or you could email you again.

It's a critique of I'll pass on whatever I don't.

Yeah.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

For those just joining via our live stream and our radio audience, I'm Jeremy Paris, principal at Paris CLE, LLC, and I'm the moderator for today's conversation.

Today, we're joined by Elliott Williams, legal analyst at CNN and author of Five Bullets The Story of Bernie Getz, New York's Explosive 80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial of the Divided the Nation.

Elliott will deny it, but he's also my longtime friend.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our live stream at City club.org or the live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

I know City Club staff have the mics on on both sides and maybe have the first question.

Good afternoon.

We're going to start with a text question.

It reads when you look at the media landscape today and you see how crime and violence is covered, what do you see as a legacy of the Bernie Getz era specifically, and how the media behaves?

Not in the behavior of vigilante.

Yeah.

The van.

Thank you for the question.

Caller.

The writer, that texter that I think it's how we define quote unquote, the media capital T, capital M, and I just think so much of the information we consume is not technically coming from the media, but it's how people learn about the world.

And, because of the fact that we are fed information both from more legitimate legacy media and from knuckleheads on Twitter, it's all blurry and really affects how angry people are.

And I think people are pretty angry today because of the echo chambers.

The gun debate or the Supreme Court justice asked the question when the New York, debate the gun, that wouldn't you want to have a gun to be feel safe in New York City?

I mean that it goes all the way through our society.

But my question for you is, Luigi, is that now with the concentration of wealth in the small population, is that going to create more problems for them and people, average person feeling out of it and become more violent, looking to avenge what they think is due to them?

You know, I don't know if I had a crystal ball.

What what makes people more violent?

And you know what the sort of sociological impacts might be of the concentration of wealth or what?

Whatever else, you know, I will note, at least on the firearms point, very quickly.

Something I learned in the course of the book was, the National Rifle Association, which also is a character in the book.

I did not know.

Despite being perhaps one of the world's foremost experts on Bernard Getz, I did not know that the NRA prior to the late 1970s was actually not focused on in any way, or at least in any meaningful way, on Second Amendment advocacy.

It was all an organization focused on, shooting clay pigeons with grandpa and or Boy Scouts and ultimately, you know, they were literally taken over from within, from sort of an activist wing that, you know, pushed them into sort of more of the posture you see today.

This case actually was a first test case of the NRA funding someone in a Second Amendment manner.

They gave him $40,000 for his defense.

So you, hi.

I noticed that you introduced this program by using the word true crime.

And I was reading an article this past week beginning to summarize this.

There's a movement about true crime.

I mean, TV and so on.

And some of these recent horrific incidences have taken validation from their crimes because, as you mentioned, anger inside anger at society, but they are studying these incidences from Columbine, all the way up to the shooting in British Columbia.

Yeah.

So is this a bigger problem?

How do you see this validation they're saying they're getting from stories about true crime?

Yeah, I mean, and whether it's the term true crime, I just think the everyone's got a platform in their pocket for spreading information.

And I think it incentivizes behavior.

People are incentivized to behave.

And whether it's funnier or silly or maybe even sometimes more violent ways, on account of the fact that, hysteria is rewarded online.

Anger is rewarded online, just simply how the algorithms work.

And I don't mean to suggest that the book Five Bullets is a sort of anti media or anti-social media screed, but it is a reality of the world we live in that, when we are fed information that is tailored to us and is probably going to make us upset, we end up more upset.

And I think that factors into decisions about criminal justice and all sorts of other things as well.

I, I know you're not asking me that question, but I will jump in to say, I do think that's when I think about how do we wrestle with platforms today and the question of reasonableness and, and run reasonable and the different information we have to get to truth and how it drives our behavior?

It's it's very interesting.

Yeah.

So, you're obviously very, very busy, with the Raven Group and CNN.

How did you go about what's your process?

What was their process of writing and, and how did you get the book all done and how long did it?

Oh, I don't know how I got involved in public libraries.

Are you really interested in the book success?

I'm sure.

You know, it's if I had to say anything.

And I wish I believed this at the time.

In the moment.

Think of it less as a 90,000 word project or an 80,000 word project and more, you know, 24,000 word op eds, which is still a lot of words and still a lot of op eds.

But, you know, I think I just treated it as, as, you know, each almost each chapter as a discrete entity, ranging from 1500 words to 5000 words or 6000 words for the longest ones thinking in terms of numbers and just hitting those targets.

I mean, I also think, you know, Joyce Carol Oates says that the great enemy of writing, or at least creativity, is the inability to be alone.

And made the very hard decision, once at the beginning and once at the end.

I took a week in the Poconos.

There's a retreat space run by highlights magazine, of all places, the Highlights Magazine Foundation that is devoted to writers getting away.

And I literally spent to a week at each.

It was hard.

I don't like being away from my kids for that amount of time.

It can be lonely in a cabin in the woods, but you can write the hell out of a book, when you have that kind of sort of, focused time and space.

And I think that that sort of kick started and sort of ended a lot of the writing.

But you know, it's really interesting.

I, you know, the the window shifts as to what you regard as productive and where every 500 words felt like a slog in the very beginning.

By the end, I was like, oh, I'm 10,000 words from the end.

That's an hour of writing.

I can crush that.

So I just, you know, psychologically it evolves.

Did you have to sort of circle and find objects, get access to your highlights hotel room?

Yeah.

No, it's it is.

I had to I had to write an essay.

Are you Goofus or are you gallant?

Yeah.

And I, Goofus, obviously.

Mr.

Williams, first of all, great book made me feel like I was, there at the time.

In the moment, my question is regards to, at some point in the book, you shared that the jurors decided to have a verbal vote rather than, yes, potentially anonymous written vote Mark.

So interesting point to pick up on.

Yeah.

How did that impact potentially the, you know, the sway potentially of a juror?

They might be one way or the other and maybe even the race factor in that space.

So a bigger question I'll first answer is that Gregory Whipple's, the prosecutor, told me when I interviewed him that the, he knew it was over.

He called the he used the word fool's errand when the jury had been seated.

He knew before even saying a word at trial because he felt that, six of them were victims of crime.

Three of them had been victims of crime on the subway in New York City.

And it just he he just felt that the defense, the judge let them get away with a little more with, with with picking who they picked.

Now, that point of switching from open ballot to closed ballot, at least for their preliminary votes.

It's really interesting.

I've never been on a jury.

I always get excluded, I think perhaps because I was a prosecutor.

But they become these little mini societies.

It's Lord of the flies ultimately, in this in that room and who's leaders and who's in charge and how will we operate?

They felt that they started doing close ballots, but they felt that because the goal was unanimity, either unanimously acquit or unanimously convict, they felt that it would be easier to talk it through if they knew who was voting.

How now?

Yes.

I heard some groans or chuckles in the room, because that ultimately pressures people into feeling or, you know, behaving a certain way because you know who the two know votes are.

And then once you know that ten people can crowd on top of them and, and ultimately sort of force unanimity, I did like the story about how they were watching the 1985 NBA finals.

They were watching the Lakers, Celtics.

It's like the one thing the judge allowed them.

But the idea that somebody had to be there to to turn off the TV, a commercial break in case there was some news about the.

Yeah, it was.

It gave a real vivid picture of the place.

They were.

Hello.

I wanted to ask, what do you think the people from the 20th century still believe in eugenics?

I don't know why.

People from the 20th century still believe in eugenics.

I and I, that is as far outside my pay grade.

I just know that Bernard Gatz, from the things he said to me, to things he said that he's ultimately sued in a civil trial.

Darrell KB, his family, Susan, for tens of millions of dollars.

And things he says there, which I put in the book as well, also seem to suggest that I think he just has a notion that some people don't belong.

And I can't explain it.

I can't, I'm not even going to try to other than, you can.

Yeah.

What is your driving force?

Like?

Why don't you get up and do what you do every day, especially nowadays?

I feel like it's a little easier to get lost in your course.

So, Yeah.

I just want to ask you, why do you do what you do?

Why do I do what I do?

That's a wonderful question.

I've been waiting to ask this question for years, so thank you for, Why do I do what I do?

I because I find it gratifying.

And I think, there ends up being some public service component to writing, to sharing ideas, engaging and thoughts and so on.

But I think gratification is ultimately it is hard to even if it's something that is socially valuable, it's really hard to invest in something that you are not passionate about.

I am finding this when trying to come up with my next book, which is You Got to Love the Thing in order to be able to do the thing right.

And I think I'm not saying that I'm a hedonist, only seeking out joy and pleasure, but finding things that that I really like to do, defining things that I really like to do that also, you know, involve informing people, you know, a lot of my work in the last years, both on television and writing and radio, is about the spreading of information or sharing of information or shaping of information, even in some way.

And then, of course, is the obvious answer because of my kids, you know, it's they children are a great motivator for all kinds of things.

So yeah, countless statistics show that violence and poverty are directly correlated with one another.

Do you believe that violence in cities like New York and Cleveland can be mitigated by providing adequate financial support to impoverished communities?

Yeah.

I mean, I think this is this is an enduring question and debate, this notion of what causes crime, what causes disorder.

And in cities, people have been saying since time immemorial that in order to fight crime 20 years from now, start fighting hunger, in kindergartens or preschools or, or whatever else.

You know, the most fascinating thing in the book, you know, in a chapter about Claremont Village that I write about the housing project that these poor young men grew up in.

It was actually a place of refuge.

It was home until one new tenant came in in 1985, crack cocaine.

And you know this, it's widely report documented that housing projects or, you know, subsidized housing in New York City actually had a lower crime rate than the rest of the city.

Crack up ended that across the United States in sort of forcing violence and, and unease and disorder into people's homes.

And I think that created helped create along with sentencing policies in the 1990s, which is another book, but helped create sort of, you know, almost a permanent class of people, who are incarcerated and, and set off many communities, black and brown, into a very dark place.

And today, can I, can we just circle and underline some sort of hunger and gun violence?

Because that is a really important, lesser known thing that that the relationship between hunger, especially hunger among youth.

Yeah.

And a provision of gun violence.

So if you're looking at how to stem the tide of gun violence, one of the things that people in our community need to look at is how do you make sure that they're not hungry?

Kids need a meal.

Yeah.

So, I have a question that I don't know if everyone knows this, but the man confessed.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Waiting for this question.

Well, I didn't know anyone.

Okay.

No.

So.

And I got a sense that the defense attorney was more forward.

Yes.

As a former prosecutor, what would you have done different?

Again, I have to reiterate, the man confessed.

He confessed.

And it's not so real quick.

I don't know.

There's a lot, you know, I take Waples at his word.

There's not a lot you could have done in this case, just based on the jury pool and how it played out.

Now, he confessed for hours in New Hampshire to the NYPD and the Concord, New Hampshire, Police Department gets his attorneys ultimately allowed that confession end.

Now, it would have been up to them to object to it.

That's the way confessions work, right?

Prosecutors can seek to get it in.

But once the defense, jacks, it wouldn't have been allowed into court for for a host of reasons.

They chose not to object to it because they felt that gets confessing and being scared and on the run actually helped him and their case.

And ultimately the jury bought it.

They thought, well, he seemed frightened.

He seemed scared.

You know, ultimately to me, and this is a little cynical, but it's why I wrote it.

They saw kinship with Bernard.

Gets the jury did they did their best, but they were looking, I think, looking for and looking for an acquittal to some extent.

And the notion of a man saying the words, I hoped to murder them.

I wanted to make them suffer as much as possible.

They discarded that, saying, well, he was scared and he was on the run.

He'd been in the woods for nine days and was frightened, and ultimately they just chose to cast aside.

Just one of the additional things in your book is you talk about, you know, he was not he did not testify at his trial, which which they made the decision not to come to testify.

He did testify because you don't have the same protections.

Yeah.

At the civil trial times the change.

Also the feeling in the public about Bernard gets because the years had passed and then his testimony did not help him in the civil trial.

No.

No.

And he mouths off and goes on the eugenic rants and the civil trial as well.

But now he did not testify at the criminal trial.

that incident that you talk about in your book is a very, like, really changed a lot of stuff about society, a little bit politically.

So how do you think, society would have reacted or would have changed or morphed if something like that would have happened today?

I don't know, what I will say is, again, the roughness of the city certainly affected how people saw it.

The races of the respective people affected how people saw it.

Right.

And you can't tell me that if if a black man had shot four white teenagers, people's knee jerk wouldn't.

If everybody in this room's knee jerk would be different, just based on how people would have seen it, I don't know, other than on this sort of broader reasonableness point that we've been talking about a little bit through today.

As in a weird way, and hear me on this gun shots being fired in a New York City subway would just seem so much more out of place today, than almost they almost felt not welcome in 1984.

But people.

Oh, yeah, that happened where today it would just be regarded, given how everything about the subway or the city is.

I just mean people might see it differently, but I don't know.

I mean, it's it would also be an we're still yeah, we're still a complicated, fraught country when it comes to race and acts of self-defense, and class and also all of the things.

So it's just hard to to.

Yeah, depend on.

Look, is five bullets.

The author is Elliott Williams.

The moderator was Jeremy Paris.

Thank you guys so much.

It was fascinating.

My name is Dan Moulthrop, I'm the chief executive here.

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Our form today is part of our Criminal Justice series, with support from the Schar and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation.

It's also part of our Authors and Conversation series in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Thank you once again, Elliot.

Thank you Jeremy.

Thank you.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland.

Our forum is now adjourned.

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