SUMMER OF FEAR, Part 3: The 1977 New York City Blackout — 25 Hours of Darkness, 1,600 Stores Looted, and Son of Sam Still Out There

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime in Justice for Wednesday, July twenty second, twenty twenty six, Part three of five. This is Summer of Fear, and this is the one I have been building towards since Monday. Where we left it. It is the spring of nineteen seventy seven. Four people are dead, Don Luria eighteen, Christine Freund twenty six, Valentina Suriani eighteen, Alexander Esau twenty, Virginia nineteen years old, who put her school books up in front of her face on a sidewalk in Forest Hills. Five more have been shot and lived, and one of them, Joanne Lomino, will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Three hundred detectives are on it. And on the seventeenth of April, on a street in the Bronx, a police officer picked up a white envelope in which a man who had killed four people gave himself a name. The police locked it in a drawer and told nobody they could have kept it there.

1:06 He wasn't going to let them because a man who writes a letter wants it read. And when the police would not print his letter. He found somebody who would come with me. It's the end of May and it is starting to get hot. Hello from the gutters. The newsroom of the New York Daily News occupies a building on East forty second Street with a globe in the lobby, and in nineteen seventy seven, it is the largest circulation newspaper in the United States of America. And it is fighting for its life because six months ago a thirty something Australian named Rupert Murdoch walked into this town and bought The New York Post, which was old and respectable and dying, and he has spent every day since turning it into something with teeth, bigger headlines. Louder verbs. The Post does not want to inform you. The Post wants to grab you by the collar on the subway platform and shake you. And it is working, and everybody on forty second Street knows it is working. Two papers, one city, one story that everyone in that city is talking about on every stoop and in every elevator, and it has a gun in it, and neither paper can get close to it because the police have nothing and will say nothing.

2:17 And then a letter shows up in the mail. It is addressed to Jimmy Breslin. Of course it is. Breslin is the columnist Capital c the guy who covered the Kennedy assassination by interviewing the man who dug the grave, the guy who wrote about losers and cops and bookmakers and queens. And if you were a lonely, invisible young man in Yonkers who read the paper every night and wanted somebody in this city to look directly at you, Breslin is who you would write to. He was a person in the world. He was reachable. Berkowitz mailed it on the thirtieth of May nineteen seventy seven. He posted it from New Jersey, which is a fact that detectives would chew on for weeks, and which meant nothing at all.

2:59 It all opened like this, Hello from the gutters of New York City, and it goes on from there for pages about gutters filled with filth and sewers that swallow it, and the cracks in the sidewalk and the ants that live in those cracks, and feet on the blood of the dead. He told Breslin he read his column, He said he found it informative. He mocked the police for not catching him. He gave himself a set of new nicknames, and near the end he asked Breslin casually what he had planned for the twenty ninth of July. July twenty ninth, the anniversary of Donna Laia, Breslin took it to the police. The police read it and got very quiet because the handwriting was better than the first letter, and the sentences were cleaner, and there were detectives who genuinely believed that this one had been written by somebody else. And then the Daily News published it in the first week of June, holding back some passages at the request of the police.

3:55 Breslin wrote his column around it, and the paper put it out into the world. It sold. It sold like almost nothing that paper had ever printed, and the phrase son of Sam, which had been sitting in an evidence drawer since April, was suddenly on a million kitchen tables at once. Breslin, in that column spoke to him directly. He told him there was only one way out of what he was in, which was to give himself up to Breslin if he trusted him, and to the police if he did not. People said it was irresponsible. People said the Daily News had just handed a killer a stage and a spotlight and sold tickets. Breslin said his readers had a right to know what was in that letter, and he never backed off it, And years later, when someone asked him about Berkowitz, Breslin said, this, he's the only killer I ever knew who knew how to use a semi colon. Look, I'm going to be honest with you.

4:49 I have gone back and forth on Breslin for twenty years. What I have landed on is this. Breslin did not create the monster. Breslin did not make him kill. But the Daily News in the Post, spent that summer discovering something that every newsroom in America has known ever since, which is that terror sells, and that a name sells better than a body, and that the safest thing you can put on a front page is somebody else's fear. That's not a mistake, that's a business model. It just happened to be invented on top of six dead kids. Because here is what the coverage did. The police had put out a psychological profile in late May. Neurotic, possibly paranoid, schizophrenic, possibly believes himself to be possessed, and the papers ran it, and they ran the composite sketches, all of them which contradicted each other. So now every man in New York City looked like the sketch, and the papers ran the one detail that would define that summer, which was that he liked long, dark hair. So the women of New York City cut it off. They cut it off or they went blonde, and they did it by the tens of thousands. Beauty parlors and queens and the Bronx booked solid wig shops sold out. Girls who had never colored their hair in their lives sat in kitchen chairs while their mothers did it at the sink. Think about that for one second. A whole population of young women changed what they looked like permanently because of a man none

6:20 of them had ever seen. The discos emptied the lover's lanes, emptied bars in the outer burrows, hung signs in the window telling Sam they were closed. Parents sat up, couples stopped parking. An entire city stopped doing the ordinary things that people do at night in the summer. And it did that while the temperature climbed and there was no air conditioning in most of those apartments, and the only cool place was outside, and outside was where he was coming up a seventeen year old girl in a parked car in Bayside, saying his name out loud. There was a discotheque in Bayside, Queens called the Elephice, and on the night of the twenty fifth of June nineteen seventy seven, going into the small hours of the twenty six, Judy Placido was inside it. She was seventeen years old. She had just graduated high school. That is what the night was, if you want to understand it. It was one of those nights at the very front end of a life when you are done with something and not yet started on anything, and the summer is enormous and you go dancing.

7:34 She left with a young man named Salvatory Lupo. He was twenty and he worked as a mechanics helper. They had met that night. They went out to his car parked on the street nearby, and they sat in it and talked at around three in the morning, the way you do, and what they talked about was him. Judy Placido said out loud in that car that this son of Sam was really scary. That was the conversation two teenagers in a parked car in Queens in the summer of nineteen seventy seven, discussing the man who shot teenagers and parked cars and Queens because that was what everyone in that city was discussing, and because when you are seventeen, the thing that frightens you is also the thing you cannot stop poking. The window blew in. He fired three or four rounds through the closed passenger side glass. Judy Placido was hit three times, including in the head. Salvatore Lupo was hit in the forearm. He got out of the car and ran back toward the disco, screaming for help, with blood coming off him, and behind him in the front seat, a seventeen year old girl was still conscious and did not yet understand that she had been shot.

8:42 They both lived. It is close to a miracle that they both lived, and Judy Placido did not speak publicly about it for twenty two years, not to reporters, not to documentary cruise, not to anybody. Twenty two years. When she finally did in nineteen ninety nine, she described what her life had actually been, which was panic attacks and a fear of being alone outside her own house and a body that never fully believed the danger had passed. And then she was asked whether she hated him, and she said no. She said, how can I hate him? He was deranged. I don't have a joke for that. I don't have a burn for that. Twenty two years of silence and panic attacks, and she came out the other side with more grace than the rest of us are ever going to manage. Judy Placido Salvatore Lupo say the names because the newspapers that summer had stopped bothering with them. The newspapers were writing about Sam. It is Wednesday, the thirteenth of July nineteen seventy seven, and it is ninety three degrees in New York City. This is the first day of a heat wave that is going to run for nine days and top out at one hundred and four. Unemployment in this city is at twelve percent.

10:00 The subway fare has just gone from thirty five cents to fifty, which does not sound like much unless you are counting. There are bombs going off in Midtown this year, set by Puerto Rican nationalists. There is a mayor's race coming, and everybody in it is running on fear. And there is a man with a revolver who has now told the newspapers in writing that he is thinking about the twenty ninth of July. At Chase Stadium, the Mets are playing the Cubs. It is the bottom of the sixth At thirty seven minutes past eight, lightning hits a con Edison substation called Buchanan South up on the Hudson River in Westchester and trips two circuit breakers that should be survivable.

10:41 Twenty minutes later, lightning hits again and takes two more lines. Then a big generating plant out in Queens drops off, and the grid, which has been carrying this city on a shoe string the same way everything else in this city is carried on a shoe string, begins to eat itself. At in' Shay, the lights die and the players stand in the dark on the infield. By half past nine, the largest city in the United States of America is black. No street lights, no traffic signals. The subway stops between stations with four thousand people inside it. Kennedy and LaGuardia are shut down for eight hours. From the New Jersey side you can look across the water and see nothing where the skyline is supposed to be except the very bottom of the World Trade Center, where somebody has a generator.

11:28 It is ninety degrees at midnight, eight million people in the dark, in the heat, in a city that has spent two years being told by everybody, including itself, that it is finished. And then it comes apart. In Brooklyn, along thirty five blocks of Broadway, where Bushwick meets Bedford Stuyvesant, they tie ropes around the security gates of the storefronts and hitch the other end to the bumpers of cars and pull the gates off the buildings, and then they empty the buildings, and then some of them burn the buildings. One hundred and thirty four stores looted on that stretch alone, forty five of them set on five two blocks of Broadway, burning at the same time. In Crown Heights, seventy five stores in a five block run. In the Bronx, somebody backs a truck up to a car dealership and takes fifty brand new Pontiacs off the lot. On the Upper West Side, a man stands outside his own sporting goods store all night with a baseball bat guarding it from the people taking everything else on the block. In Harlem, the looting goes on straight through sunrise and into the daylight of Thursday, and then into Thursday night, and by then there is almost nothing left to take. Sixteen hundred and sixteen stores damaged, one thousand and thirty seven fires, fourteen of them multiple alarm, and the fire department answering them with a force that had been cut to the bone in nineteen seventy five by a city that could not pay it. Something on the order of five hundred and fifty police officers hurt, although the official federal study of that night puts it lower around four hundred and thirty six. And I will let you decide which agency

13:00 had a reason to round three. Seven hundred and seventy six people arrested, the largest mass arrest in the history of New York City. They ran out of cells, They put people in precinct basements, They put people anywhere there was a door with a lock on it. Twenty five hours, the power came all the way back. At thirty nine minutes past ten on Thursday. Night Time magazine put it on the cover and called it the Night of terror. A congressional study eventually put the damage at just over three hundred million dollars, which in today's money is somewhere north of a billion and a half, and some estimates ran higher. Mayor Beam stood in the wreckage and accused con Edison of gross negligence, and con Edison said it was an act of God, and both of them were partly right, and neither of them was going to fix anything.

13:47 And nine months later, in the spring of nineteen seventy eight, the maternity wards of this city were overwhelmed. Because that is also what happens when eight million people spend a summer night in the dark. Both things are true. That is New York. Now. I want to be precise about something, because this is a true crime show and not a mood piece. The son of Sam did not do this. He shot nobody on the night of the blackout. There is no evidence he was anywhere near any of it. The looting of New York City on the thirteenth of July nineteen seventy seven was done by New Yorkers in their own neighborhoods, to their own neighbor's stores. And I am not going to hand that to a man in Yonkers, so he can carry it around. But here is why this night belongs in the middle of this week. Twelve years earlier, in nineteen sixty five, the lights went out across the whole Northeast and New York behave beautifully. People directed traffic with flashlights, Strangers walked strangers home. It became a legend about what the city was, and they made a movie about it, and it was a comedy. Twelve years later, same city, same darkness, and it tore itself to pieces in a single night. Nothing changed about the dark.

15:00 Everything changed about what the city thought would happen to it in the dark. That is what two years of bankruptcy does. That is what five thousand laid off cops does. That is what twelve percent unemployment and a burning bronx and sixteen hundred murders a year does. And that is what one man with one revolver and a newspaper column had done to eight million nervous systems by the middle of July. He didn't turn out the lights. He just made sure that when they went out, nobody in New York believed for one second that they were going to be all right. The heat broke on the twenty first, and then the city started counting because he had asked in print what Bresln had planned for the twenty ninth of July, and the papers had printed it, and so the entire city of New York knew that the anniversary of Donna Lourie's murder was coming. And the police flooded the Bronx and Queens with every officer they had, and the discos closed early, and the parents did not let anybody out of the house. And on the night of the twenty ninth of July nineteen seventy seven, one of the largest cities on Earth essentially sat still and held its breath and waited for a man to come and shoot somebody's daughter. Nothing happened. The night passed, the sun came up. Two nights later, in a part of Brooklyn nobody was watching, a twenty year old girl went on a first date. Her name was Stacy Moskowitz. That's tomorrow,

16:31 before we go. If this series is doing something for you, tell one person about it today, not a post a person. Send it to somebody who would sit still for a story about a city, and let them find it the way you did. That's how a show like ours actually grows. And I would rather earn you than buy you. If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment. I especially want to hear from anyone who is in New York on the thirteenth of July nineteen seventy seven or whose family was, because I have read the numbers one hundred times and the numbers are not the story. The story is what your mother did with the candles. Tell me I read everyone.

17:13 Follow Daily Crime and Justice wherever you're listening, and turn notifications. On tomorrow he gets caught and it is not because of three hundred detectives. I'm Garrett Fisher until tomorrow, do better. Daily Crime and Justice is an independent podcast produced by Calaroga Shark Media. This episode covers the shootings of Judy Placido and Salvatory Lupo, the son of Sam, letters to the New York Daily News, and the New York City Blackout of July thirteenth and fourteenth, nineteen seventy seven. It draws on contemporaneous reporting from The New York Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times, and Time Magazine. The Federal Impact Assessment of the nineteen seventy seven blackout prepared for the Department of Energy. New York City Police Department records and public accounts of the case, along with AI assisted research. We do our best to get it right, but we are a podcast, not a court room. Notes on accuracy. The date that Daily News published the Breslen Letter is reported variously as June fifth and June sixth, nineteen seventy seven. We say the first week of June.

18:20 The Breslen Letter is quoted here only in a single brief passage. Casualty and arrest figures from the blackout differ across sources. Police injuries are given as five hundred and fifty in most press accounts and as four hundred thirty six in the Federal Impact Assessment, and arrest totals range from roughly three thousand to forty five hundred, with three thousand, seven hundred seventy six the figure most commonly cited as the largest mass arrest in city history. Damage estimates range from just over three hundred million dollars in a congressional study to as high as one billion. The number of homicides during the blackout is disputed, and we have not stated one Judy Placido's nineteen ninety nine remarks are quoted from New York Post interview. David Berkowitz has never been connected to any crime committed during the blackout, and nothing in this episode should be read as suggesting otherwise. His own accounts of these events have changed repeatedly over five decades, and we take that up. On Friday, this series discusses gun violence and the deaths of young people. If you are struggling, you can reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States by calling or texting nine to eight eight