The Mad Bomber of New York Read online

  The EXTRAORDINARY

  TRUE STORY of the MANHUNT

  that PARALYZED a CITY

  Michael M. Greenburg

  STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greenburg, Michael M.

  The Mad bomber of New York : the extraordinary true story of the manhunt that paralyzed a city / Michael M. Greenburg.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4027-7434-8

  1. Metesky, George P., 1903-1994. 2. Bombers (Terrorists)—New York (State)— New York—Biography. 3. Mentally ill offenders—New York (State)—New York— Biography. I. Title.

  HV6430.M48G74 2011

  363.325092—dc22

  [B]

  2010038795

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  © 2011 by Michael M. Greenburg

  Article by Jamie James from Rolling Stone, November 15, 1979

  © Rolling Stone LLC 1979.

  All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing

  c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6

  Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution Services

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  Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

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  All rights reserved

  Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-7434-8

  Sterling ISBN 13: 978-1-4027-8952-6

  For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales Department at 800-805-5489 or [email protected].

  Designed by Gavin Motnyk

  To my mother, Elaine Greenburg, who always provides love and encouragement.

  “Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.”

  —Sigmund Freud

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: War and Peace

  I: “A Real Boom Town”

  II: Hell Gate

  III: The Seeds of Madness

  IV: “Selected by Destiny”

  V: “A Man with a Hammer”

  VI: Chasing Shadows

  VII: The “Twelfth Street Prophet”

  VIII: “The Greatest Manhunt in the History

  of the Police Department”

  IX: A City in Turmoil

  X: Profile of a Bomber

  XI: Christmas in Manhattan

  XII: “An Innocent and Almost Absurdly

  Simple Thing”

  XIII: “Plenty of Whacks”

  XIV: “The Four Fishermen”

  XV: Alice Kelly

  XVI: “The Price of Peace”

  Photo Insert

  XVII: “Your Next Door Neighbor”

  XVIII: Rewards, Accolades, and Accusations

  XIX: A Question of Competency

  XX: “As Plain as the Nose on Your Face”

  XXI: “His Days on Earth are Numbered”

  XXII: The Birth of Criminal Profiling

  XXIII: Right from Wrong

  XXIV: Matteawan

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note on Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  PROLOGUE

  WAR AND PEACE

  AT 7:55 ON THE EVENING OF DECEMBER 2, 1956, AS THE EPIC NARRATIVE of War and Peace began to unfold on the screen of Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre, there was no mistaking the sudden and violent explosion that ripped through the rear of the auditorium for anything remotely connected to that evening’s movie presentation. In a blinding moment of fierce light, smoke, and fire, a locally powerful device had detonated at precisely the moment determined by the simple timing mechanism within.

  A thirty-six-year-old postal clerk named Abraham Blumenthal, who had taken his wife, Ruth, out to the movies for the first time in what seemed like ages, was immediately thrown from his twelfth-row seat. Fierce pain began to radiate from his left leg, where shards of jagged metal had inflicted their damage. “Suddenly I heard a report like a grenade. Then a small column of smoke rose in front of me and drifted across the screen,” Blumenthal would later tell reporters.

  Panic began to envelop the room, and as War and Peace continued without pause, patrons began rushing for the exits. Seated about eighty feet from the explosion itself, a young mother, Doris Russo, and her sister Joyce were pummeled with scabrous debris, which settled deep in the face and scalp of each. Earlier that day the sisters had made their way through the retail menagerie of Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn on a shopping spree with their mother, Mary Young, and Doris’s two children in tow, and decided to cap off the evening with a movie. Mary Young would later say, “The shock and terror of what happened that evening will never leave my memory.”

  The unarmed outer casing of the “infernal machine” that he had hurriedly prepared for use earlier that day had already been assembled. He had many of them securely stored where only he could find them. To the maddening frustration of law enforcement authorities, the raw materials that composed these creations were commonplace and generic; they could be purchased in virtually any retail outlet throughout the country, and they provided little if any evidence as to their origin. In keeping with his meticulous manner, the Bomber purposely omitted any specialized or unique components that would betray their points of purchase.

  A length of galvanized iron or “coupling” purchased from Sears and Roebuck had been carefully fitted on each end with metal plugs (prudently purchased elsewhere) that were machine tooled and neatly threaded into the cavity of the pipe. With the precision of a machinist, he had drilled a small hole into the cylinder to allow the later arming of the device with a detonative material, and a so-called “filling plug”—a -inch allen screw—was used to close the puncture. This, the Bomber would later state, ensured a “neater package.”

  Alone in his garage, his castle—“the one place on earth where nobody could bother me,” he would later recall—he worked with painstaking resolve. The workspace was meticulously ordered; against one wall was a neat and sturdy workbench, and hanging above on evenly arranged hooks were rows of carefully polished tools. Situated around the structure in even intervals were seven windows of smoked glass that allowed neither sunlight nor view into this grim and very private world. An organized collection of blueprints lay on a wooden desk, and beside them, a worn Remington typewriter whose ribbon had been frequently replaced. Though the garage housed a rather out-of-place black English Daimler automobile, the focal point of the space was a metal machinist’s lathe that ominously suggested craft beyond the typical household project. And beneath this well-oiled machine lay a small wooden box temporarily housing the various components of a deranged endeavor, stockpiled for later use and burrowed daily behind two soapstone tubs in the basement of his home. The ten-by-fourteen-foot detached garage, constructed of sheet metal and corrugated iron, was, in the later words of the New York City Police Department, “as clean and orderly as a hospital operating room.”

  On the morning of December 2, 1956, with the structure of the device complete, he began the process of converting this harmless assemblage of iron into an instrument of hate and potent danger. He fashioned a fusing mechanism by carefully grinding a flashlight bulb on an emery wheel to reveal a small hole that he perfected with a nail file and filled with black gunpow
der. To the case and center conductor of the bulb he had soldered two silk-covered, multistranded copper wires that led to a chrome-protected no. 7 Burgess battery used to heat the filament. Interrupting this nefarious circuitry was nothing more than the distance between the hour hand of a shock-resistant Timex wristwatch and the contact point of a metal ignition terminal. With a steady hand, he slipped the fusing mechanism into place and screwed the iron plug back onto the body of the cylinder.

  Then, as unaware New Yorkers made plans for an evening out on the town, he deftly funneled the fine, smokeless black powder from the cartridges of fifty .22-caliber long rifle bullets into the filling hole of the iron cap and reinserted the plug, completing the final step in the arming process.

  The beads of sweat that had formed on his brow during this process in earlier years were missing on that December morning. To the contrary, he admired his workmanship, regretting only that no one would ever see it. By now the process had become rote to him. According to official police records, he had performed it no less than thirty-one times before; his own later estimates ranged closer to sixty. Yet his message, so clear, so right, so just, seemed lost on all but himself. Why were they not listening? When would justice prevail? This time, he pondered, would be different. This time they would be forced to reckon with him.

  The Bomber wiped the “unit” (as he coldly referred to all of his bombs) clean of powder and fingerprints, placed it in what had become a signature red wool sock, and then he held it to one ear. Listening for the faint and soothing sound of the ticking Timex, he smiled with smug pride at the barely audible heartbeat emitting from his creation. He knew that later that evening the metal hands of the watch would make contact with the copper wires leading from the battery to the flashlight bulb, completing the lethal circuit and detonating the surrounding cache of powder.

  The timing mechanism had been set for shortly before eight o’clock.

  The sixty-mile drive from his home in Waterbury, Connecticut, to New York was well known to the Bomber. As he had done so many times in the past, he drove through the affluent suburbs of Westchester County and stopped in White Plains for a bite to eat at a local diner. On some occasions he had parked his Daimler outside of the city and traveled into Manhattan via the New York Central Railroad. Feeling uncomfortable as one of the only men on the midday train rides, however, he had elected on his more recent trips to park closer to the city and blend into the chaos of the New York subway system. On the afternoon of December 2, 1956, the Bomber drove straight into Brooklyn.

  He had wrapped the wool sock that housed his device with a rubber band and attached a length of string. A few moments prior to the start of the movie, he entered the theater and found a seat toward the left rear of the orchestra section. As the opening credits of the film began to roll and the attention of each moviegoer was transfixed, he looked to his left and then to his right. With feigned nonchalance, he reached into the side pocket of his wool overcoat, and with eyes firmly affixed to the movie screen, grasped the string and gently lowered the device to the floor just behind seat 19 of row GG. With his foot, the Bomber carefully nudged the unit out of sight. Within twenty minutes, he had left the theater and was hurrying to his car.

  The words of Tolstoy’s voluminous classic leapt off the page and onto the silver screen with much the same fury as Napoleon’s 1812 march into Russia. Though Henry Fonda himself had misgivings about his casting in the film, War and Peace was eagerly greeted by moviegoers and reviewers alike upon its release in August 1956. “There are sequences and moments of fire and beauty, and certainly the mighty spectacles of clashing armies and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow are pictorially impressive and exciting beyond words,” wrote one New York critic. In a “Technicolored panorama,” director King Vidor captured the fury of the Russian invasion— and the imagination of an engrossed American public with breathtaking scenes of battle that burst onto theater screens across the country. The film would later receive three Academy Award nominations, and by the end of 1956, nearly five months after its release, War and Peace was still drawing patrons into crowded movie houses.

  Post–World War II America seemed to roar with a cultural vitality and social clamor. A young performer from Tupelo, Mississippi, stormed onto the national scene with his hit recording “Heartbreak Hotel,” and before long Elvis Aaron Presley would redefine music and canonize “rock and roll” as America’s signature form of entertainment in the twentieth century. The new medium of television, with broadcasts such as the Ed Sullivan Show and Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, would bring an endless variety of new musical acts, comedians, and drama directly into the living rooms of neatly aligned suburban tract homes. And development of an interstate highway system, the hallmark of the Eisenhower administration, would bring people and products together in a web of personal and cultural interconnectivity unseen prior to that time.

  In the halcyon days of the American movie industry, however, a picture show often provided a singular respite from the rigors of life during the Depression. The Paramount Theatre arose in an era when competitive movie houses were owned by and often took the name of their founding production companies. The construction of the Paramount and several other rococo or Renaissance theaters, with their splendorous arrays of architecture, stole the show from the movies themselves and represented an early local foray into the entertainment business. They would become Brooklyn’s theater district.

  Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, the Paramount was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Rapp and Rapp, specialists in the creation of the so-called atmospheric theater. With an ornately decorated sixty-foot satin-embroidered stage curtain and 4,400 seats adorned in burgundy velvet, the Paramount at its 1928 opening was Brooklyn’s largest and perhaps most opulent theater, and the second largest in New York City. According to the New York Times, the Paramount was fashioned along “the plans of an outdoor moonlit Italian garden.” Nearly $3 million worth of elaborate sculpture, paintings, and tapestries together with domed and frescoed ceilings provided “scenic effects . . . not confined to the stage but made to envelop the audience by carrying a scenic architectural treatment completely around the auditorium.” The rather drab exterior façade of the eleven-story office building to which the Paramount Theatre was appended was strikingly enlivened by the placement of a neon-powered sign that stretched nearly four stories in height above the roof. The massive glowing letters,

  PARAMOUNT THEATRE

  implored the bustling populace of Brooklyn, New York, to come and enjoy.

  Though the Paramount was considered by some to be the area’s “most famous movie place,” the theater was by no means limited to film presentations. Behind the opulent décor lay a very practical and financial motivation for the owners, who demanded a diverse use of the property to help defray the ever expanding cost per seat. In its early days, frequent guests included musical performers such as Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, and in the mid-1950s Alan Freed’s renowned rock and roll shows introduced acts such as Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. Through the years, the Paramount would play host to other marquee names, including Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, Bobby Rydell, Neil Sedaka, the Drifters, and many others, earning the theater the reputation as one of America’s premier rock and roll venues.

  With no warning of the distressing events that would follow, cheery moviegoers braved the cold northeastern winter winds and began lining up outside of the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre for the evening show. Nearly 1,500 New Yorkers, warmed with pre-holiday cheer, clamored with eagerness over that night’s screening of War and Peace. As Horatio Tedesco, the theater’s assistant manager, greeted patrons, he couldn’t help but compare the refined makeup of the gathering to the raucous throngs attending the recent musical performances. He was grateful for the easy cleanup and closing that would follow.

  It was sure to be another uneventful evening at the Paramount.

  Horatio Tedesco heard the e
xplosion and the muffled sounds of a commotion coming from the crowd. Rushing into the auditorium and scanning the escalating panic, he mustered his most authoritative voice and announced that a “firecracker” had exploded and that everyone should remain calm. He then summoned the police and rounded up several ushers to assist the injured through the lobby and into his private office. Ambulances from Cumberland Hospital joined officers from the 84th squad of the New York City Police Department in response to the call. As the injured were removed and order was restored, investigators from the mobile crime laboratory, under the direction of Captain Howard E. Finney, and detectives from the New York City Bomb Squad took over the scene. They conducted a row-by-row search of the theater and roped off a section of about twenty rows closest to where the explosion had taken place in an effort to gather evidence. Through the years the detectives had investigated many of the other bombings that had plagued the city, and it took them little time to pinpoint the usual markings of their elusive suspect. Soon after, Kings County district attorney Edward Silver huddled with police detectives and pronounced to the gathering of newspaper reporters that “old screwball” had struck again. The citizens of New York knew him better as the “Mad Bomber.”

  As Doris Russo fought for her life following surgery to relieve the pressure that had developed from a depressed fracture of the skull, the Bomber watched and waited. Would the world finally stand up and take notice of his plight? Would the “dastardly deeds” of his enemies be redressed? Would he finally make them pay?

  On no less than thirty-two separate occasions, he had slid into his automobile, his jacket pocket bulging with iron and gunpowder, and traveled from Waterbury to New York City with a deluded rage and nefarious intent. For sixteen years, he had imperiled unsuspecting New Yorkers, placing his insidious units in locations all over the city, without so much as a sniff of suspicion from family members or an inquisitive glance from frustrated police departments. For sixteen years, the man who could “easily pass as a person who could be your next-door neighbor” had evaded investigators, detectives, patrolmen, and citizens alike from Connecticut to New York, avoiding the killing of innocents only “through some quirk of fate.” He had planted his bombs among women, children, workers, and patrons, and he had solemnly pledged to continue until he was either apprehended or dead. He bore no lofty social goals or political objectives. He harbored no broad civic message or popular agenda. He espoused neither government overthrow nor violent rebellion. He sought no extorted money and gained no pleasure from indiscriminate injury. The Mad Bomber simply held a grudge—a grudge that was relentlessly fueled by a simmering madness.