Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (19 page)
I went to Brooklyn Supreme Court to talk with J.B. Fitzgerald, a retired court officer who had worked security for all of Berkowitz’s Brooklyn court appearances.
Fitzgerald smiled at the memory. He and other Brooklyn court officers had been exuberant because they thought they were going to make a ton of money in overtime when the case went to trial. Also, since it was the biggest case to hit Kings County in decades, the courts were swarming with media and the officers were looking to become stars.
Fitzgerald was one of ten officers who escorted Berkowitz down a long hallway of 360 Adams Street on the seventh floor for a pretrial hearing. As they reached the back door to the courtroom, Berkowitz suddenly broke away from the officers and tried to throw himself out of a window. It didn’t work. All the courthouse windows have strong steel mesh reinforcing the glass. Security wrestled the wild Berkowitz to the ground. He bit one of the officers, then started to foam at the mouth.
Fitzgerald: “So we bring him into the major’s office to calm him down. I mean, ten guys are restraining him. One guy on one arm, one guy on the other arm, one guy on a leg—like that. After about fifteen minutes, he starts to calm down. We look around the room and it’s just Berkowitz and us. Then one of the guys says, ‘Maybe this flake really is a dog. After all, he bit Murphy.’ One by one we start letting go of him, and just let him lay there on the couch. I remember one guy lit a cigarette, and another said to open the window because it’s getting stuffy in here. I started to laugh, ’cause you gotta remember this nut just tried to throw himself out the window.”
The next day Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the rail between Berkowitz and the victims’ families.
“So Berkowitz walks up to the defendant’s table and he’s looking right at me,” said Fitzgerald. “Then he starts yelling, ‘Stacy’s a whore! Stacy’s a whore!’ I’m thinking he’s talking to me. Then I realize Stacy’s mother, Mrs. Moskowitz, was right behind me. The crowd went wild and rushed the bench yelling they were going to kill him.”
They hustled Berkowitz out of the courtroom and tried again the next day. Fitzgerald was assigned to watch the victims’ families in plainclothes. As soon as Berkowitz came into the courtroom, someone from the Moskowitz family jumped up on a bench and made a dive for him. Fitzgerald caught the guy in midair and wrestled him to the ground.
While awaiting trial in Brooklyn, Berkowitz caught a brutal jailhouse beating from another inmate in the Brooklyn House of Detention, causing his eyes to hemorrhage. Brooklynite doctor David Klein worked on his injuries.
Previously, in July 1977, Dr. Klein had operated on Bobby Violante’s eyes, saving his life, after Berkowitz had shot him in the head.
Klein told the
Sun-Herald
that he looked at Berkowitz and said, “I’m your doctor. I operated on one of your victims and now I am going to treat you.” Klein recalled his mixed feelings: “In the back of your mind you want to strangle him. But you have to respect your oath.”
Maybe the beating in Brooklyn did some good. On May 8, 1978, David Berkowitz pled guilty to all charges. In June he was sentenced to 365 years in prison. But his trouble in jail didn’t end. In 1979, an inmate slashed his throat. It took fiftysix stitches to close his neck wound, but Berkowitz survived.
Berkowitz may have pled guilty to all charges, but he now claims that he only carried out two of the shootings and that members of a Satanic cult he was involved with committed the others. Did he commit all the crimes he was charged with? There are two prominent theories about the Son of Sam case. One is that Berkowitz was a type of Manchurian Candidate assassin who, on some unknown command, was sent out to randomly kill. For proof they offer that one of his letters reads,
I am programmed to kill
.
The other theory is the one that Berkowitz has been braying about for years. Son of Sam was not one person but an evil Satanic cult that wanted to bring mayhem upon the city of New York. The evidence for that, besides Berkowitz’s words, are the police sketches of three distinctly different shooters. One of the closest eyewitnesses—Bobby Violante—said the shooter was a tall and thin blond man—very different from the chubby postman Berkowitz.
Maury Terry, in his book
The Ultimate Evil
, makes some good arguments for Berkowitz not acting alone. But Terry undermines his own perspective by connecting the Son of Sam shootings to the Mason family and every other murder with even the slightest whiff of Satanism that has hit the media from 1969 onward. Even so, there are some strange coincidences with David Berkowitz.
Berkowitz lived in New Rochelle in 1976 for a few months. His landlord worked at the Neptune Moving Company with Fred Cowan, the aforementioned Nazi, who went ballistic on Valentine’s Day in 1977, killing five people and himself. Renting a room to the Son of Sam and working with another mass murderer is beyond weird.
In August of 1977, an NYPD detective called Yonkers PD on a routine matter, checking out one David Berkowitz, who had gotten a parking ticket in Brooklyn the night Stacy Moskowitz was shot. The daughter of Sam Carr, Wheat Carr, answered the phone. She told the detective that she lived behind Berkowitz and claimed he was a serious whacko. She also told them that he owned guns and she suspected him of being the Son of Sam. The Daughter of Sam was the best tip PD had.
A month after David Berkowitz was arrested, the postman who had delivered his mail to 35 Pine Street committed suicide.
In 1982, Leon Stern, one of Berkowitz’s lawyers when he entered his guilty plea, was killed in his own house by an armed intruder. Stern was gunned down on May 8, four years to the day after Berkowitz gave his plea.
Both of the sons of Sam Carr—I guess that makes them the real Sons of Sam—were dead by 1980. John Carr committed suicide in North Dakota, putting a shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger. Berkowitz has suggested that John Carr (in his letter to Breslin he was identified as
John
Wheaties—Rapist and Suffocater of Young Girls
) was a part of his cult.
The other son of Sam Carr, Mike Carr (
The Duke of Death
in the Breslin letter), died in a car crash on 70th Street and the West Side Highway.
* * *
I talked with former Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Dominic J. Lodato, who handled the David Berkowitz case from the civil side, when the families of his victims were trying to prevent Berkowitz from profiting off of any publications or movies about his crimes. Lodato, along with former Queens D.A. John Santucci, had his doubts about whether Berkowitz acted alone.
Lodato told me, “I was very leery about the case. There was a suspicion that there might have been more than one gunman. The police sketches clearly showed two completely different people, and these were from eyewitness to the shootings. But it wasn’t for me to decide that, and he did plead guilty, so that ended that.”
During the civil case, Lodato got plenty of motions from Berkowitz’s side. He remembered that one was for Berkowitz to change his name. Lodato couldn’t remember what he wanted to change it to. Lodato also received strange and threatening letters from Berkowitz whenever he denied any motions made by him. I asked about the letters.
“I wasn’t too scared,” said Lodato. “He was in jail and I guess you just have to have faith in the system.”
In 2003, I saw Berkowitz on television. He talked about being a born-again Christian and how he now sends Bibles to poor people.
A minister had sent him a letter in 1978. Berkowitz wrote back and said that when he got out of jail he would hunt down the preacher and kill him. Today, Berkowitz and the minister pray together and are, as the minister solemnly states, friends in Christ.
On the TV show, Berkowitz was shown a tape of Mrs. Moskowitz saying that she now believes he didn’t act alone and would he please just tell her who had murdered her daughter.
Berkowitz watched the tape and shook his head. “I can’t, I’m sorry but I just can’t do it,” he said.
Berkowitz’s Son of Samhain pamphlet ends with:
I believe we are now living in … the “last days” … Society
is seeing an increase in demonic activity at this time.
Tens of thousands of people are under intense pressure.
Life in America has never been harder … We are a nation
in chaos and crisis.
Berkowitz first came up for parole in 2002. He refused to attend the hearing, admitting he deserved to be in jail until his death. In 2004, he was denied parole and this year will be the same. Berkowitz will only leave prison in a coffin.
In 2005, Berkowitz wrote a book titled,
Son of Hope
. It is all about his conversion to Christianity and how Jesus is now his savior. Christian organizations push the book and the proceeds go to the needy. It seems that David just can’t quit writing.
When Berkowitz was arrested on August 10, 1977, the
Post
ran his picture with the headline:
CAUGHT
. Berkowitz’s eyes are unnaturally bright and he has the smallest smile on his face. Like he knows something that he’s never going to tell.
Son of Sam was bumped from the headlines that August thirty years ago after one week. The reason: the death of Elvis Presley.
He’s never gone away, either.
W
ith land you have food, drink, and shelter,” Olga said in a lilting Caribbean accent. Her rusty eyes peeked over her mirrored sunglasses to register my reaction. “They created eminent domain while we were sleeping, you see. And all those shops over on Fulton Street are there to distract us.”
We were a few blocks from the Fulton Street Mall, standing in front of a row of Civil War–era buildings on Duffield Street that had been declared “blighted” by the city, in order to build a parking lot for a new hotel. The owners fought back, claiming the nineteenth-century buildings were part of the Underground Railroad, that they were the homes of abolitionists who harbored fugitive slaves on their way to freedom.
Signs that read
Eminent Domain Abuse
, the words circled and crossed out in red, were plastered on the windows and doors. Remnants of their historic past were still visible in the architecture of the small brick buildings, but over the years burglar bars and shoddy repairs had scarred what was left of any beauty. It would take millions of dollars to restore them to what they once were, but that was not going to happen. Using outside consultants, the city commissioned a study and found no conclusive evidence of Underground Railroad activity. The construction of the hotel had begun. Directly across the street from the homes, a bulldozer emitted a loud beeping sound as if it were counting the days until their destruction.
Olga had seen me taking pictures and came over to check me out. I could tell she wasn’t sure whose side I was on. I introduced myself but she would only give me her first name. “They make us slaves by taking away our land. You know, all these people going off to get their master’s degrees. I call them Master’s Degree. Because that’s who it is for. They get
Master’s
Degree to become highly qualified slaves.” Olga walked with me toward the Fulton Street Mall. She wanted to know what I was doing on Duffield Street. I told her that I was researching the city’s connections to the Underground Railroad for a play I was going to be reading in the fall. I’m not sure if she believed me.
The play is about Elizabeth Keckly, a seamstress who bought herself out of slavery and became the dressmaker to Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd. After writing her autobiography, Keckly moved to 14 Carroll Place in New York and I wanted to see it, but first I had to find it. Originally I assumed Carroll Place was in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, but there was no such street on the local map. I decided to go anyway, and after several hours of walking the neighborhood and asking around, I gave up. At home on the computer I discovered a Carroll Place on Staten Island, but I told myself Keckly was sophisticated, and a seamstress to the elite. It didn’t seem possible that she would live all the way out on Staten Island. There had to be another Carroll Place that Google Maps hadn’t heard of. One that had been lost or renamed in subsequent years. But the old maps in Manhattan’s Midtown library pointed to the New Brighton district on Staten Island, which in the 1860s was a fashionable summer resort. A place where the rich would bring their seamstresses and hairdressers to have on hand. It had been staring me in the face, I just didn’t like what I saw.
The librarian scolded me. “See, this is why we have to be wary when reading history. We have to ask who wrote it and what their motives were. You can’t change history because you don’t like what you find.”
Of course he was right, but I was not going to Staten Island. The building where Keckly lived had been torn down, and it wasn’t going to help me to look at what I was sure by now was an office building or a parking lot.
Researching the everyday lives of African Americans in the nineteenth century and earlier is like putting together a puzzle with almost all of the pieces missing. You get accustomed to seeing words and phrases such as, “most likely happened,” “probably,” and “no conclusive evidence.” Keckly’s memoir made it a bit easier. As a slave, she had learned how to read and write, and she freed herself and her son by paying off her owners. She achieved some fame as a seamstress and a companion to Mary Todd Lincoln. Even then, what was written in her book,
Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave
and Four Years in the White House
, seemed to me to have been composed mostly for white consumption during a time when few African Americans could read, or even purchase a book. I wanted to know about the daily life of a black woman in the 1860s, which was how I ended up at the library going through government and police records and reading old newspapers. But whenever I do something like this, I inevitably find myself taken in a completely different direction than where I started. That’s what happened when I began with 14 Carroll Place and ended up at the Underground Railroad homes on Duffield Street.