One Saturday afternoon in December 1984, a man got onto the number 2 train going downtown at West 14th Street in Greenwich Village. Blond, glasses-wearing, and scrawny, he did not fit anyone’s stereotype of a dangerous man. But he was carrying, under his waistband, an illegal weapon: a .38 Smith & Wesson in a quick-draw holster.
The man got on the train, boarding in the same car as four Black teenagers. The four kids were hanging out, chatting loudly, dangling on the handrails, joking. They were on their way to a downtown arcade, they later said, where they intended to jimmy open video game machines to steal the quarters, a low-grade crime in a city that still ran on change rather than plastic. To do that, though, they needed a few bucks to play. Most of the passengers in the car were at the other end of the train.
What happened next? Everyone agrees that one of the young men, Troy Canty, leaned over to ask the slight man for five dollars, a gesture that virtually no one interprets as friendly. But did the teenagers surround the man with the intention of intimidating him, even mugging him, as the man would later claim? Was there a plan to commit a robbery? Or were they sprawled throughout that end of the car, as they insist and eyewitnesses agreed, the farther two not even sure what their friend was saying to the strange man?
Regardless, the man’s response was immediate: He got into a crouch, took out his gun, and started shooting. First, he shot Canty. Then he blasted away at the next closest, Barry Allen, and then James Ramseur. Panic spread among the passengers; one rider thought his intent might be to kill all Black passengers, and a young couple riding with their infant was desperate to protect the baby. When he got to Darrell Cabey, the fourth young man, who by that time was cowering, terrified, in a subway seat, he said: “You don’t look too bad—here’s another,” before shooting and severing his spinal cord. Cabey would never walk again. Then he disappeared into the tunnel, vanishing into the winter afternoon.
The louche metropolis of New York City in the 1970s is a site of intense nostalgia. In popular accounts, the graffiti-stained, arson-plagued city resembles Florence in the Renaissance, a musical genius at every block party and dive bar. New York in the 1980s—not so much. Hyped up on “Bolivian marching powder,” defined alternately by tragedy and crass commerce, with AIDS, the stock market, and homelessness all on the rise, New York in the 1980s is grim, and it doesn’t get nastier than the story of Bernhard Goetz, the “subway vigilante.” Forty-two years later, the raw facts of the case remain shocking: that this act of violence happened at all, in the middle of the afternoon, in a New York City subway car; that the shooter was on the run for nine days until he turned himself in in New Hampshire; and most of all, that a man who could unleash such chaos would become known as a hero in the city, celebrated (at least briefly) for his willingness to stand up for something called public order.
Two new books—journalist Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ’80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation, and historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage—explore the Goetz shooting and the ferocious responses to it in the city, with an eye toward what these tell us about racism, crime, and gun violence in the United States. Each book stays close to the events of December 22, 1984, the reaction in the city, and the trials that followed, and yet they come to very different conclusions about its meaning for the city. Williams provides a streamlined, careful narrative of the shooting and its aftermath. It is more conventional, in that Goetz (whom Williams interviewed) is the focus—his psychology, the question of whether there is any way that his actions could be justified, and the way he became a cause célèbre for gun rights organizations including the National Rifle Association. Thompson has a different project. She shows, in depth and detail, the damage done by Goetz’s bullets to the bodies and psyches of the four young men and their families. Relying heavily on the papers of Ron Kuby, the lawyer who represented the Cabey family in civil court, her narrative is suffused with anger and indignation, and at times it can feel as though Thompson is mounting her own brief against Goetz and the machine that promoted his side of the story.
The public response to the shooting demonstrated that there was a reservoir of support for revanchist violence if it were justified under the guise of fighting crime. The aggrieved paranoia of white New Yorkers in the early 1980s, Thompson suggests, taught the right a new political language—one that would be adopted and honed by figures including Rudy Giuliani and, ultimately, Donald Trump.
Thompson begins her story with Darrell Cabey. We learn that his nickname was Bean, that he spent his early years in Rockaway, Queens, with his parents, four brothers, and a dog named Flocko. The defining event of his childhood came in 1973, when his father, a truck driver, was killed when someone was trying to steal his truck (which was his livelihood). Cabey’s mother, Shirley, tried to keep things together afterward. She managed to move the family to public housing in the South Bronx, where she kept a neat apartment while working in food service at a state psychiatric hospital. Social Security from her husband’s death helped to keep the family from falling apart economically.
But Cabey suffered. By 1984, he was 19, an unemployed high school dropout—although one who by all accounts remained very close to his family. On the day he got shot, he had been staying at his grandmother’s apartment, helping to care for her while she had the flu; before he decided to go for a ride downtown, he had been heading home to help care for his younger siblings.
Cabey was not especially good friends with the other young men he was hanging out with on December 22: Ramseur, Allen, and Canty. None of them had a regular job. Allen (who was a teenage parent) was selling crack cocaine and using it himself, although after his son was born he tried to get into a drug rehab program only to be deterred by long waiting lists. Canty was also using cocaine; Ramseur, who was known as a jokester, had just gotten a 60-day sentence for smoking marijuana. Even though they didn’t know Cabey well, they agreed to let him join them for the adventures of the day: riding a bus to the subway and heading down to the arcade to break open video game machines.
The man they ran into on the subway had his own troubled past. Goetz was born in Queens to two German immigrants who had met in New York in the 1930s. (His mother was Jewish but had converted to Lutheranism.) His father, a small businessman, made enough money to move the family out of the city to Rhinebeck, New York. From the outside, all looked well. Within the family, however, Goetz’s father was a low-grade tyrant who could not tolerate disagreement, disobedience, or independence in his children. As time went by, it became clear that there were more serious problems still. When Goetz was a young teenager, his father was convicted of sexually molesting two 15-year-old boys. (He appealed and managed to avoid serving any time—several counts were dismissed, and he wound up with a suspended sentence on a single charge of disorderly conduct.) But he forced his children to attend every day of the trial as a show of support, and afterward, Goetz was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.
When he came back to the United States, Goetz was aimless. He dodged the draft for Vietnam by feigning mental illness. His life was unstable—he dropped out of college once before going back to finish, got married and divorced, fought with his father. In the late 1970s, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked from home, running his own company testing and repairing electrical equipment. Living on 14th Street, he became distraught by the street noise and homelessness that were becoming increasingly evident in the neighborhood. He joined the tenants’ association for his building. “Let’s face it; the problem with 14th Street is the Sp-- and the N-- and until we deal with that problem we can’t deal with any others,” he railed at one meeting, after which he was removed from the leadership of the group. Goetz bought his first gun in 1970. He filed for a permit in New York that was denied, but he brought his gun to the city anyway. By 1984, he owned four of them, including the .38 he brought on the subway that day.
Much of this basic information is in Williams’s book as well as Thompson’s, but Williams leaves open the question of whether the four young men might have been interacting with Goetz in a way that was intended to intimidate or threaten him. In the story told by Thompson, Goetz is moving through the car, essentially hunting the teenagers down even though two of them are “ten feet away.” He shoots one in the back while he is fleeing, another as he is turning away. Then he turns to Darrell Cabey, by that time sitting in a subway seat hoping that the shooter would move on. In this version of the story, Goetz would not have any reasonable grounds for self-defense at all—certainly not after the first bullets were fired, and probably not even then. There is no cell phone video to consult, but the eyewitness reports seem to corroborate this: No one saw the four young men take out a weapon or use physical threats to force Goetz to hand over money. (The newspapers would later erroneously report that the screwdrivers they carried were “sharpened,” which had an ominous sound—they weren’t, but Goetz never saw the tools or knew they had them.)
Goetz’s own original confession in New Hampshire also repeated this story. There, he described shooting the teenagers deliberately, one by one, even checking on the first two to make sure they were out of commission before shooting the second pair. “My intent was to kill,” he said in that first confession. Unstable and embattled, enraged at a city that seemed out of control, Goetz was, in Thompson’s account, primed to hate the authority figures and prissy bureaucrats who seemed scarcely able or simply unwilling to protect the innocent, and all too ready to take matters into his own hands.
The public frenzy that followed set a pattern for the rest of the decade and beyond. Goetz’s spectacular violence was treated by many of New York’s politicians and pundits as that of an avenging angel. He was the victim, fragile and scrawny; anyone would do it if they were pushed too far. The language of enraged victimhood would become familiar on the right. Goetz’s sense that his own safety was endangered gave him—and people like him—the right to enact violence with impunity.
The Daily News and the New York Post led the way, reporting the story as a “fantasy come true” in which “prey turns predator,” a rare example of the erstwhile crime victim fighting back. Meanwhile, the victims of the shooting would become the targets of the kind of harassment campaign that now is waged on the internet. Even as Cabey slipped into a coma as a result of his injuries (he would emerge with brain damage), the families of the young men received hate mail in the form of Christmas cards, such as one addressed to Cabey’s mother: “I hope your son is crippled for life to remind you that it was your responsibility to raise your child to be a decent human being and not an animal.”
The hysteria only increased after Goetz turned himself in. Despite Goetz’s initial statement to police, his lawyers would later make the argument that the teenagers were standing up, surrounding him, acting in a concerted fashion to intimidate him, and that he shot them in a blind panic, a spray of bullets, without any time to consider what he was doing. A ballistics expert buttressed this argument, observing that Cabey could not have sustained his injury if he were shot while sitting down. This distinction was crucial, because to admit that Goetz could have stopped with shooting Canty meant acknowledging that there was no justification for maiming Cabey. Goetz’s lawyers said that his original confession should be discounted, given that Goetz was under stress and had been on the run for nine days. Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels protested his incarceration on Rikers Island, asking why he was imprisoned while the teenagers were free. The Guardian Angels fundraised for his legal defense on the subway, calling him a hero. The chairman of the New York State Republican Party donated $5,000 to his cause, while the comedian Joan Rivers offered to pay his bail and signed her note to him “love and kisses.” The district attorney’s office got vast amounts of mail about the case, three to one in support of the shooter.
Goetz was not seen as a mass shooter who had terrorized a subway car full of people and then fled, but as a hero who had stood up against the crime in the city and defended himself and perhaps his fellow passengers. The National Rifle Association, which was becoming more aggressive in its gun rights advocacy, saw an opportunity in the Goetz case to challenge laws in New York that made it harder to carry a concealed weapon or get a permit. The NRA tapped Roy Innis, the head of Brooklyn’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, to speak at its press conference in New York; Innis was vociferous in Goetz’s defense, calling him “the avenger for all of us.” The lesson of the Goetz case was that if only more people owned guns, and were allowed to carry them, criminals would think twice before menacing strangers on a train. The NRA took out advertisements: “Self-Protection Is Your Right,” a “basic right held sacred by all law-abiding citizens.”
Seeing the swell of public support for Goetz, New York’s elected officials sought to capitalize. Initially, Mayor Ed Koch decried the shooting as reckless and a sign of social breakdown. But as days went by, he began to express his sympathy for Goetz, saying he knew that the public was “fed up” with crime. When a grand jury declined to indict Goetz for anything other than criminal possession of a weapon, the New York Post celebrated the decision as “a victory for common sense and self-defense,” and Koch said he thought the jury was right. (Koch’s police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, the first Black commissioner in city history, disagreed: “You don’t shoot two people running away from you and say it’s self-defense.”)
This was not the end of the legal saga. A second grand jury (called with new evidence) did indict Goetz for attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment. The criminal trial unfolded over several years and contained many bizarre twists and turns—among them, the decision of the trial judge to allow Goetz’s legal defense team to stage a “re-creation” of the crime within the courtroom, bringing in four Black Guardian Angels (who were buffer and burlier than the actual teenagers) to play the shooting victims while a white defense lawyer played Goetz. The defense was then allowed to take the jurors out of the courtroom to a “field trip” to the subway, where they could imagine the crime unfolding. Perhaps because these tactics helped to sway their minds, the jury found Goetz innocent of everything other than illegal possession of a weapon. Eventually, Cabey’s mother brought a civil suit against Goetz; here, a jury awarded her a judgment of more than $40 million, but it was a Pyrrhic victory, because Goetz claimed he had no money to pay.
Goetz went on to become a pop culture reference point, a lone hero whose violence was an inevitable reaction to a city out of control: There was an infamous Subway Vigilante board game modeled on Monopoly in which players race to see who can survive a trip from the Bronx to Brooklyn. (“Punk shot, but still moving. USE TWO BULLETS.”) Even people who might have identified with the young men, not with Goetz, referred to the shootings as part of the fabric of the gritty city. The Beastie Boys and the Wu-Tang Clan allude to it in songs (“Pickpocket gangsters, paying their debts/I caught a bullet in the lung from Bernie Goetz”). And Billy Joel wove it into his montage of the insanity of life in ’80s America: “Foreign debts, homeless vets/AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz!” All of these, in their way, rendered the horror of the shooting just another part of the daily experience of New York, and by extension of urban America in the 1980s.
For Williams, the Goetz story is part of the city’s past, a relic of an uglier New York. But for Thompson, the story does not end with the 1980s. She suggests that Goetz’s violence and the public response to it came to form a playbook and a strategy for the right. One of Trump’s early interventions in political debate, for example, came when he took out full-page advertisements in the city’s major newspapers in 1989, following the sexual assault and beating of a young white woman jogging in Central Park. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote, calling for the five young men suspected in the case to receive the death penalty. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” (At that time, capital punishment was outlawed in New York state.)
It is not just the act of violence itself, but the way that it is justified and praised that matters. Heavily armed men can lay claim to extreme vulnerability when their authority seems questioned, even momentarily. Violence in the name of self-defense would become a leitmotif for the right down to the present day. This was the defense cited by George Zimmerman when he shot Trayvon Martin and by Kyle Rittenhouse when he killed two protesters and injured one more at a Black Lives Matter march in the summer of 2020. And one can hear the same theme echoed by the Trump administration as it tries to explain why heavily armed ICE officers were justified in killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Both Thompson and Williams see the 2023 strangulation of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless subway performer, by former Marine Daniel Penny on the F train as a modern-day Goetz affair. There are certainly differences: Neely was unstable, visibly angry and in pain, rather than threatening violence to get money. But many of the arguments used to defend Penny were identical: Was he right to see Neely as an imminent threat? Was he protecting the vulnerable on the subway, or was he using force to subdue and ultimately kill someone who was vulnerable himself? Whose quality of life matters, whose subway and whose city is it? Like Goetz’s, Penny’s case unfolded at a moment when media was covering a crime wave, in this case a spike in crime on the subway at the height of the pandemic (since reversed). And when Penny stood trial in December 2024, he was acquitted on all charges, walking cleaner than Goetz, who was found guilty of possessing a firearm.
One major difference lies perhaps in their lives after acquittal. Penny was championed by the right. He attended the Army-Navy football game as the special guest of JD Vance and Trump (then vice president-elect and president-elect), and, though he had no background in finance, the prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired him, commending his “courage in a tough situation.” Goetz’s fate has been quieter. Today, he still lives in New York. He is known as “Squirrel Man” for his penchant for rescuing squirrels in Union Square. Occasionally, Fox News asks him to comment on a story, but he is far from a right-wing star. He has never expressed remorse for shooting the teenagers, and in his interview with Williams, he reiterates that the real problem in the 1980s was people coming down “from Harlem,” and that anyone who didn’t like what he had done on December 22, 1984, could “go fuck themselves.”
Meanwhile, the young men Goetz wounded carried their injuries with them. Troy Canty did the best: He got into rehab, learned auto mechanics, and got married. Barry Allen was in and out of prison and rehab; he died in 2021. James Ramseur served time in prison for sexual assault and committed suicide on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the shootings. Darrell Cabey’s mother moved him out of the city, to a care facility in upstate New York. He never recovered from the brain damage he suffered in the coma that followed the shooting, and his sister says he still misses their mother, who died a few years ago.
Fear and Fury and Five Bullets join other recent works that revisit the history of New York in the 1980s from the perspective of those who were vilified at the time: Tell Her Story, historian LaShawn Harris’s remarkable elegy for Eleanor Bumpurs, the 66-year-old grandmother who was killed by police in her own home in 1984; journalist Jonathan Mahler’s chronicle of the city in the late 1980s, The Gods of New York, which opens with the funeral of Yusuf Hawkins, the Black teenager killed in Bensonhurst in 1989; and two documentaries about the wrongful convictions of the “Central Park Five,” Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us and Ken Burns’s The Central Park Five. The journalist Leon Neyfakh also devoted a season of his podcast series Fiasco to Goetz, some of which makes it into Thompson’s book. If at the time, the media trashed the victims of these crimes and miscarriages of justice, recent works aim to indict a culture that gleefully cast Black victims as perpetrators.
These are important correctives, yet the depiction of New York in the 1980s in most of these accounts remains one-dimensional: The focus remains on the tabloid headlines, even if the victims and the perpetrators have changed places. What is more, the relentless emphasis on violence in the 1980s—the number of homicides had swelled from 390 in 1960 to 1,787 in 1980, the year the NYPD declared the worst for crime in the city’s history—has the effect of underwriting Goetz’s defense.
From the vantage point of the present, when the number of homicides has declined to closer to 300, the exceptional level of violence in the 1980s city does stand out. But to understand the embrace of the figure of the vigilante, we need to look away from crime and violence to the larger dynamics of the city in these years. Private security forces were rife in the city in the 1980s: Businesses hired rent-a cops, neighborhoods set up foot patrols, the Guardian Angels stalked the trains in their red berets and combat boots. They patrolled a city where rich and poor were ever more separate. More people in New York in these years were homeless, sleeping outside on the streets and begging on the subways. Healthy young men were suddenly dying of rare and obscure illnesses, filling the wards at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Wall Street wealth flooded the city, transforming the East Village and downtown Brooklyn. And the Murdochs and the conservative radio talk show hosts, the Manhattan Institute think tank elite and the CompStat crime-fighting technocrats, all were poised to take disorientation and turn it into fear.
New York has long been celebrated as the center of the left and radical politics for the United States. But over these years of widening inequality, the city was primed to act as an incubator for a politics that glorifies violence enacted in the name of self-protection and communal defense—bringing us, eventually, to where we are today: a country governed by comfortable people who invoke looming menace and imminent danger to justify their own acts of inhumanity.
