Thomas Adcock - Brooklyn Noir 3 - Nothing but the Truth

I never knew the dead man’s name. I suppose I might have known it for a brief time and forgotten. There were posters put up around the neighborhood by his family and the cops. But the posters faded and frayed and fell off the telephone poles like the ones for missing pets or the guy who’ll rake your yard for ten bucks. To the best of my knowledge, the murderer’s never been apprehended.

Near the conclusion of my novel The James Deans , the protagonist-P.I., Moe Prager, having learned the truth about a thirty-year-old murder, goes to reveal that truth to the victim’s long-suffering mother. But as he steps out of his car to confront the dead boy’s parent with the truth, he stops himself and returns to his car. For at that moment, Moe learns the lesson I learned over thirty years ago.

In my writing, I try always to keep that day in mind. Whenever the urge strikes me to get too flippant or fanciful about murder, I remember. I remember that this nameless man had a family, and that for them his loss is nothing like the extended absence of a vaguely known kid from junior high. For them there is no such thing as arm’s length or closure or justice. Serious crime is not about glamour or fame or gangsters with funny nicknames. Murder is about pain and loss. Murder is no roses for Bubbeh.

Bensonhurst

The Bogeyman came to life in New York City in 1977. The fiend was born in Brooklyn in 1953, an unwanted child who was put up for adoption because his biological father — a well-off Long Island businessman screwing around with a Brooklyn housewife — would have nothing to do with this unwanted progeny. The kid’s penniless mother had no choice but to dump him on a family that wanted a child but were unable to conceive. Little did the couple know that the bundle full of joy they took out of Brooklyn was a monster.

The Furies must have been full of wicked humor as they walked the halls of that Brooklyn hospital on June 1, 1953. As soon as the Bogeyman was born he was taken out of Brooklyn. The Bronx and later Queens would have to deal with him as he morphed into a psychopath. In 1976 and ’77, as the evil started to cut short the lives of young kids from Queens and the Bronx, the people of Brooklyn thought they had dodged a bullet.

“Son of Sam is too scared to come into Brooklyn,” was a common boast of young Brooklyn men.

But like the Bogeyman of legend, he waited until everyone figured they were safe. Then he sneaked in during his last stages of malevolence and broke out his final act of wrath. And there have been rumors that Berkowitz’s killing in Bensonhurst may have been recorded and made into a snuff film.

David Berkowitz, a.k.a. “Son of Sam,” appeared in 1977 New York City as the place was at its nadir. His killing spree added to the woes of a seemingly dying metropolis. It was a city that was told to — in a famous Daily News headline — “Drop Dead” by President Ford. The coffers of the treasury were empty. Crime was rampant and the city’s answer was to lay off cops. Arson became pandemic, and with the ruined budget new firemen couldn’t be hired to help already overworked smoke eaters. If you were in New York in 1977, you knew murder and mayhem. Not much scared you, because if it did you would have moved out.

In fact, between 1970 and 1980 the population of New York dropped by 800,000 people. Many left, few moved in. New York was not a choice destination in those days. In 1976, when the Bogeyman started to come alive, he killed one person. Others, full of passion, jealousy, viciousness, evil, poverty, and anger killed another 1,621 people in New York that year. In 1977, the Bogeyman killed five and other killers came up with 1,548 murders. In those two years, 3,175 people were murdered in New York, yet it was the Bogeyman’s six killings that made the headlines. People couldn’t get enough of the story once it broke in the daily papers.

Everyone knew about muggings, shoot-outs, and drug wars. But for someone to come out of the shadows at night and gun down innocent girls and boys, well, that was beyond even a New Yorker’s ken. In the Big Apple, you’re usually killed for a reason, not just randomly picked out by a madman and slaughtered.

The origin of the word Bogeyman is hard to trace. In the southern regions of America, he is called Boogerman — elsewhere the standard appellation of Bogeyman applies. Some think it came out of Indonesia where the word bugis means pirates. Pirates were known to steal children and take them away from their homes to work on their ships. So parents would warn their children to be good or the Bugis would get them.

The Bogeyman’s legend has lasted and thrived for hundreds of years. Sam Raimi, the director of Spider-Man and one of the classic horror films of all time, The Evil Dead , is fascinated by the Bogeyman. Raimi once said, “He’s a mythical character that is the stuff of stories of generations. He is a horrible creature that consumes human beings...”

William Safire, the noted wordsmith for the New York Times , traced the oldest form of the word Bogeyman to thirteenth-century France. The word they used was Bugibu . In the later Middle Ages, Satan became known as Old Bogey . Safire suggests that there is a link between Satan and the Bogeyman. And some people — including Berkowitz himself — believe that Satan and the Son of Sam are also connected.

Safire explains how in Iceland the Bogeyman is puki , in Scotland he is called boggart , and in Germany he is Boggelmann . He also has theorized that the scarifier Boo comes from Bogeyman.

Writer Sharon K. West once did an essay on the fiend. “Bogeymen have no distinct habitat and can appear out of nowhere,” she concluded.

Well, New York had its own Bogeyman. No one knew where he lived and he did appear out of nowhere.

It was on April 17, 1977, that the Son of Sam came out of his lonely and twisted closet to show all of New York City just who they were going to have to deal with.

On that early Sunday morning at 3 a.m., a young couple, Alex Esau and Valentina Suriani, coming home from a date in Manhattan, were parked in a Mercury Montego along the lonely service road of the Hutchinson River Parkway in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx. As the couple hugged and kissed, David Berkowitz sneaked up to the car and shot them through the passenger-side window, killing them both.

He walked away and dropped a note addressed to NYPD Captain Joe Borrelli. In simple block letters, the message read:

I am the “Son of Sam”... I am the “monster” — “Beelzebub” — the “chubby behemoth”... I am on a different wavelength then [sic] everybody else — programmed to kill... to stop me you must kill me... I’ll be back! I’ll be back!

After thirty years he has never really gone away.

In the summer of 1976, I started hearing some disturbing rumors about Satanic cults operating in the wooded sections of Orchard Beach in the Bronx and up in Untermyer Park in Yonkers. After Son of Sam’s arrest, it was revealed that his home address was a short walk from Untermyer Park.

I was employed that summer as a parkie at Orchard Beach, and one day as I was raking sand, a fellow worker said, “Yo, man, stay out of those backwoods here, they’re dangerous! Especially at night. There’s some sick shit going on out there with these devil-worshipping dudes. I think they kill dogs and drink the blood.”

I had been going to Orchard Beach since I was a kid and I couldn’t see devil-worshipping going down there. It was a place my father called the Bronx’s Riviera. The beach had seen racial wars, when whites would wander into what the Puerto Ricans had claimed as their section, or vice versa. But it is a big leap from stupid territorial brawls to Satanism.