Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
Heather Ann Thompson:
Pantheon, 560 pages
Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur.
Four young black men. shot on a New York City subway on December 22, 1984. They were turned into caricatures almost overnight: would-be criminals, symbols of menace, abstractions. Their shooter became a folk hero.
Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury restores what was erased: the victims’ humanity. Thompson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Blood in the Water, her definitive account of the Attica prison uprising, brings the same archival rigor here. She reconstructs the Goetz case not as a morality play, but as a system under stress. She insists on the victims’ specificity: their injuries, their families, their voices, their absence from the narrative.
Here’s what actually happened that day: One of the boys had asked Bernie Goetz for five dollars, then let it go. No coercive or intimidating follow-up. Other passengers later testified that they did not find the teenagers threatening. Goetz fired anyway. After wounding the first three, he walked up to nineteen-year-old Darrell Cabey, who was already injured and seated. According to Goetz’s own taped confession, he looked at Cabey and said, “You seem to be all right. Here’s another,” and shot him point-blank.
The bullet severed Cabey’s spinal cord and caused catastrophic brain damage. Goetz later told police that if he had been “thinking more clearly,” he would have put the barrel to Cabey’s forehead and fired. He said that if he’d had more bullets, he would have shot them “again and again.” The question of whether the teenagers posed a real threat, he added, was “irrelevant.”
For this, Goetz served eight months for illegal weapons possession, not for the shootings.
I have been asking how this happened for forty years. Seen from today, the verdict no longer feels anomalous. Daniel Penny put Jordan Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway and held it until Neely died; a jury acquitted him. Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a rifle, shot three people killing two (Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber) and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz during civil unrest in Kenosha, and walked free. George Zimmerman followed an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, initiated a confrontation, killed him, and was acquitted under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Different facts, different decades, different jurisdictions, same logic. Reasonable fear. Justified violence. No one held responsible. And the killers become folk heroes.
Thompson finally answers my questions. She illuminates how Bernie Goetz got away with his crimes in a trial shaped by race, fear, and 1980s New York. More crucially, she traces how the case birthed a media playbook, pioneered by Rupert Murdoch’s Post and later perfected by Fox News, that turned fear into profit and vigilantes into heroes. She makes the convincing case that it’s a moment we never really left.
To understand the Goetz case, Thompson argues, you have to understand the moment. New York in the mid-1980s was a city saturated with fear: fear of crime, fear of disorder, fear of young Black men. Goetz didn’t just become a defendant; he became a symbol. A skinny, socially awkward electronics technician was transformed by the press into the “Subway Vigilante,” a stand-in for every grievance about urban decay and public safety. He had fans. He had groupies. He had defenders who spoke of him not as a man who shot four teenagers, but as someone who finally “stood up.”
A Jury of Victims
The Goetz case did not collapse for lack of legal firepower. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau was one of the most respected prosecutors in the country. When public outrage forced him to convene a second grand jury, he assigned Gregory Waples and Robert Pitler, prosecutors known for their mastery of criminal law and evidence. On the defense side, Barry Slotnick was so in demand that jury selection had to be scheduled around his simultaneous defense of John Gotti.
This was not David versus Goliath. It was titans on both sides.
The trial section is a page-turner, which is impressive since we know the verdict. Thompson shows the battles fought in opening statements, evidentiary admissibility, cross-examination. Yet the unrelenting negative press coverage shaped public opinion before the trial even began. And then came jury selection, which took six months, in part because Slotnick was available only one day a week due to the Gotti trial, and in part because of the jury pool itself. Every potential juror had an opinion about Bernie Goetz. Neutrality was not just rare; it was almost unimaginable.
When twelve jurors were finally sworn in, the panel was ten white and two Black. But demographics alone do not explain what followed.
What mattered more was experience, specifically experience with crime. Six of the twelve jurors had been victims themselves. Three more had close friends or relatives who had been victimized. The jury foreman, financial analyst James Hurley, had been mugged on the subway. Thirty-one-year-old Carolyn Perlmuth had been walking with her mother when the older woman was mugged.
Several jurors made clear they had little sympathy for people accused of street crime. Even those without direct experience spoke in the language of siege. When asked if he’d ever been afraid of being assaulted, forty-something bus driver Robert Leach said, “Every time you get on a bus … [t]he driver has no chance … some kids surround you … you’re trapped.” Sixty-three-year-old Ralph Schriempf, the very last juror chosen, had unabashedly “told the court he believes the days of turning the other cheek are ‘behind us.’” Michael Axelrod, a thirty-four-year-old telephone technician and speech therapist, stated he had “no problem with the concept of self-defense.”
Thompson doesn’t need to editorialize here. The quotes do the work themselves. Read together, they form a portrait of a city terrified of losing control and eager to excuse someone who claimed to take it back.
When Coverage Became Evidence
This was the era of tabloid wars in New York City. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post covered the Goetz relentlessly and favorably, turning him into a folk hero. But the most damaging moment may have come from the rival Daily News.
In November 1985, famed columnist Jimmy Breslin gained unauthorized access to Darrell Cabey’s hospital room while Cabey was undergoing post-coma rehabilitation. Breslin conducted what he called an interview. The resulting column claimed Cabey had admitted his friends planned to rob Goetz, a claim Breslin published without explaining that Cabey was brain-damaged, disoriented, and struggling to speak. Somehow, this was treated as journalism rather than what it plainly was: an unvetted confession extracted from a brain-damaged teenager.
During the trial, prosecutor Gregory Waples addressed this head-on. He called neurologist Dr. Claude Macaluso to testify about Cabey’s condition, injuries, and cognitive abilities. Macaluso testified Darrell had indeed suffered permanent, irreversible damage to the cortex of his brain. His memory was impaired. Macaluso stressed that people with Cabey’s type of brain damage tended to say what they felt they wanted to hear.
None of that context had made it into Breslin’s column. The damage was immediate and irreversible. In the public imagination, Cabey was no longer a paralyzed teenager. By the time the trial began, the narrative had hardened.
The Aftermath
The criminal verdict acquitted Bernie Goetz of attempted murder and assault. But Darrell Cabey’s mother, Shirley, had another avenue. She brought a civil suit seeking not vengeance but survival: money for lifelong care, and restoration of her son’s name. Represented by legendary attorney William Kunstler and his partner Ron Kuby, she won a $43 million judgment.
Shirley knew she would never collect most of it. What mattered was the recognition. “I’m happy the rest of the world knows my son didn’t do anything,” she said. The criminal trial had been about Goetz’s fear. The civil trial focused on what he did and the damaged he caused.
That distinction sits at the heart of Fear and Fury. Thompson is not simply revisiting the Bernie Goetz case; she is tracing the birth of a media and political ecosystem that learned fear could be monetized. The Goetz case helped pioneer a template: white grievance framed as a rational response, violence reframed as necessity, victims demonized.
I had forgotten how insane this era was. The more unsettling realization is how little of it now feels unfamiliar. Thompson’s book is a reminder that forgetting was never really an option. Thompson’s great achievement is not simply reconstructing a notorious case, but making its consequences unmistakable. This was decades before the Say Their Names movement. She gives the victims back their names, their stories, their humanity.
Fine Print: Thanks to Pantheon and NetGalley for the ARC. A version of this post was published on www.judicialjunkie.com.
Terrific review! Do you have the time and are you interested in reviewing the competing book , also from a Random House imprint: 5 Bullets? I would be interested in your comparing and contrasting! Nice work!