Visitors arriving at New York City airports in 1975 were greeted by men distributing an unsettling tourist orientation pamphlet. “Welcome to Fear City,” read the headline above a picture of a large, glaring skull. Inside the four-page brochure was a series of tips on how to survive a city that was quickly falling apart. Visitors were urged to stay off the streets after six o’clock in the evening, not to walk anywhere if they absolutely had to go out, and never to take the subway under any circumstances. They were also cautioned against venturing out of midtown Manhattan or leaving valuables in their rooms’ safes, because “hotel robberies have become virtually uncontrollable, and there have been some spectacular recent cases in which thieves have broken into hotel vaults.” Even scarier was who was passing out the pamphlets—the distributors were mainly plainclothes police officers.
New York City was indeed a terrifying place in the mid-seventies, thanks to an unprecedented and out-of-control fiscal crisis. Budget shortfalls had led to virtually all public services being cut to the bone, especially police and firefighters. This was happening at a time when a heroin epidemic was killing scores of residents and sparking violence across the city. Crimes of all sorts were skyrocketing—1975 saw almost seventeen hundred murders, more than doubled from a decade before; car thefts and assaults had also more than doubled in the same period; rapes and burglaries had more than tripled; robberies had risen tenfold. Urban blight was also in full effect—subways were filthy and dangerous, roads and buildings were rotting, low-rent porn theaters and sex shops were multiplying like cockroaches. As historian Kevin Baker wrote, it was hard to overerstate just how precarious and paranoid life in New York felt around that time: “Signs everywhere warned you to mind your valuables and to keep neck chains or other jewellery tucked away while on the subway. You became alert to where anyone else might be in relation to you, augmented by quick looks over your shoulder that came to seem entirely natural.”1 Some police officers, as beleaguered and despondent as everyone else in the city, felt their only recourse was to shame politicians into action. The Fear City pamphlet campaign at airports was their attempt at doing so.
Up in the Bronx, citizens were fed up with the constant paranoia and fear. Among them was Curtis Sliwa, the twenty-four-year-old son of Polish and Italian immigrants and night manager of the McDonald’s restaurant on Fordham Road, just a few doors away from where Fordham Comics would eventually be established. In 1978, Sliwa recruited some of his employees to help him clean up the neighborhood. Armed with brooms, the group—whom he dubbed the Rock Brigade—spent long hours sweeping trash off the streets. Sliwa forced politicians to take notice of the group’s activities with shrewd publicity stunts, like when he had his workers camp out at city hall until Mayor Ed Koch publicly complimented them. Sliwa also convinced local business organizations to acknowledge the Rock Brigade with community service awards.
In 1979, the city announced that police would no longer patrol subways between seven o’clock at night and five o’clock in the morning. The move worsened the situation on the already-dangerous trains, leading Sliwa to refer to them as “mugger movers.” He decided to reorient his volunteer crew toward a new mission: rather than cleaning garbage off the streets, they would sweep the human trash off the subways. Sliwa felt his team’s patrols would be more effective if both citizens and criminals could easily see them coming, so he put together a uniform. He found a box of red Boy Scout berets at a surplus store, removed the badges from them, then emblazoned T-shirts with an image of the number 4 subway train. He handed the gear out to his McDonald’s employees and rechristened them the Magnificent 13.
As with the Rock Brigade, the group’s activities attracted newspaper and television attention, spurred by its increasingly media-savvy founder. This, in turn, drew new recruits from around the city who were fed up with the festering crime. By September 1979, the Magnificent 13 had swelled to a magnificent hundred, which necessitated another name change. Sliwa’s volunteer crime patrol finally became the Guardian Angels, a group that would grow to seven hundred members within a year.2 Growth led to institutionalization, meaning that the group developed policies, background checks and training procedures for every new member. Angels members were schooled in street-level laws—as in how to make citizens’ arrests—as well as in self-defense techniques.
Official reactions were mixed. Still stinging from feeling forced into praising the Rock Brigade, Koch was no fan. He was wary of Sliwa’s slick media manipulation, so he labeled the group with a loaded term that would stick to them no matter what they did: vigilante. “Good Samaritans don’t ask for rewards,” the mayor said at a press conference in 1980. “I suggest they join the police force if they want to continue their efforts to increase public safety. I don’t know everything about the Guardian Angels, but I do know they love publicity.” Captain Gerald McClaughin, commander of the Central Park police precinct, had similar thoughts: “We don’t need ’em and we don’t want ’em. Historically, these groups have always turned bad. I think they’ll probably assault somebody.”3
Other officials, including New York Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo, became fans. “These are not vigilantes,” he said. “They have decided, without compensation and at great risk to themselves, to perform a major public service. They are the best society has to offer. We should be encouraging their kind of strength and their kind of courage.”4
To the beleaguered public, the Guardian Angels were often a welcome sight because they intimidated the right kind of people. In a 1980 New York magazine article, author Nicholas Pileggi reported on a typical Angels patrol on a Brooklyn-bound train:
It was after midnight, and as the young men in their red berets and Guardian Angel T-shirts boarded the train, the passengers smiled…. Their faces were hard and it was apparent that they would tolerate very little from a group of feisty adolescents surprised by their sudden appearance. The youngsters slouched in their seats, pulled in their legs and began giving the Angels furtive, sullen looks.5
Whether officials liked it or not, the Angels were accomplishing what they had set out to do. They were making the subway—at least the cars they happened to be on—feel safer. Sliwa claimed the Angels made ninety-two citizens’ arrests in their first year, though officials and media observers disputed the figures. Their modus operandi involved group patrols in uniform, with teams acting as visual deterrents to would-be criminals. When they encountered crimes in progress, they physically intervened in attempts to stop and apprehend the perpetrators. They were like a street militia, but operating without any sort of official license—and they made a specific point of not carrying weapons.
Before he became a comic-shop owner, Phil Hui was there for all of it. He was attending college in New York at the time while his younger brother, Robert, was still in high school. They were both gym rats who spent hours each day working out and training in martial arts. They also both happened to work at Sliwa’s McDonald’s. “Unfortunately, Curtis found out that me and my brother could fight,” Hui recalls between bites of pizza. Sliwa drafted the brothers into the Rock Brigade, the Magnificent 13 and the Guardian Angels, luring them—as Hui tells it—with promises of television and movie deals. One of those actually materialized in 1981, with the film We’re Fighting Back, an action-drama loosely based on the Angels. Sliwa also surreptitiously counted their volunteer hours as part of their work shifts, so, ultimately, McDonald’s picked up the tab for their subway patrols. “We got swindled into doing it,” Hui says. “But we got paid for doing what we did. It was on the clock, so that was pretty cool.”
The Hui brothers were also avid comic-book readers—evidently, given Phil’s future profession—but that didn’t come into play at the time. They weren’t interested in playing superhero, nor were they particularly civic minded or interested in fame and fortune. It was a far more basic concern that kept them on board for the few years they participated. “Honestly, we were looking for bad guys to beat up,” Hui says. “We just wanted to see if our martial arts worked.”
The Guardian Angels have since expanded and established chapters in more than a hundred cities and thirteen countries. In each case, local authorities, media and citizens have struggled with how to define them. Some, like Koch, have considered them dangerous vigilantes. Others have accepted them as well-meaning community activists. Whichever the case, the Guardian Angels are an example of a uniquely American manifestation of entrepreneurial law enforcement, where everyday citizens step up to augment or replace police work in the fight against criminals. They’re also the connective tissue that joins real-life superheroes to the very beginnings of the United States.
Entrepreneurial law enforcement exists on some level in every country. Whether it’s community patrols or private security, no government in the world has a complete monopoly over keeping crime in check. The phenomenon in the United States, however, goes further and deeper than anywhere else.
Take private investigation, for instance. The profession has a long history in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, where the first detective agencies were all established in the nineteenth century. But the industry’s development in America has been far more robust since. The state of Colorado first instituted detective licenses in 1877, with nearly every state now requiring them. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom—birthplace of Sherlock Holmes—didn’t require licensing and therefore any recognized skills or training until 2001. The United States has an estimated forty-one thousand private investigators and detectives—forty-one thousand and one if you count Batman—while Britain has somewhere between one and five thousand.6 Licenses are also required in France, but stringent privacy laws there have kept the industry small. Only a thousand or so private detectives are estimated to be operating.7
Bounty hunting is also a profession that is almost entirely unique to the United States. Most jurisdictions consider the hunting and capturing of fugitives in exchange for money to be immoral and discriminatory, not to mention illegal. But in America, not only is it allowed, it can get you your own reality TV show. Indeed, Duane Chapman—otherwise known as Dog—of television’s Dog the Bounty Hunter was arrested in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 2003 for illegally detaining convicted rapist Andrew Luster, heir to the Max Factor cosmetics empire. Ironically, Chapman jumped bail and fled back to the US after serving two weeks in a Mexican jail.
Private security is another area in which the US leads. A 2017 investigation by the Guardian found that at least half the world’s population lives in countries where there are more private security workers than public police officers. That’s to be expected in developing nations where police forces are underfunded, overwhelmed or corrupt, but it’s a little surprising in so-called advanced economies. Among G7 countries, Japan, Britain, Germany and Canada employ more private security—which includes security guards, surveillance and armed transport—than police. The US ratio, however, tops them all, with 1.1 million private security employees compared to 660,000 police.8
A 2016 story in Town & Country magazine explains the phenomenon as a side effect of growing inequality in the US, where bodyguards aren’t just for celebrities anymore. The article also suggests that perhaps New York City is still quite frightening for many residents, despite a massive drop in crime since the seventies. “Now it’s like everyone has bodyguards,” says one resident, adding that one of her neighbors has a housekeeper who accessorizes her maid uniform with a holster.9
This assessment of the modern climate may be accurate, but private security is far from a recent phenomenon in the United States. The idea of entrepreneurial law enforcement is indeed baked into the fabric of the country, starting with its founding and romantically enshrined since as an integral part of its evolution. Vigilantism, while not exclusively American, is well associated with the United States. The country’s origin, historical rebelliousness and later glorification of vigilantism in pop culture has inextricably linked the phenomenon with Americanism despite its occurrence elsewhere.
As Ray Abrahams defines the phenomenon in his book Vigilant Citizens, vigilantism exists in the absence of law; it is found in places where official authorities either have little power or have otherwise abdicated responsibility. Abrahams writes, “Its emergence is often a vote of no confidence in state efficiency rather than in the concept of the state itself…. Vigilantism is a social movement giving rise to premeditated acts of force or threatened force by autonomous citizens… it often constitutes a criticism of the failure of state machinery to meet the felt needs of those who resort to it.”10
Vigilantes are often associated with the American Wild West, where they arose in force starting in the eighteenth century as the frontier expanded. Hundreds of groups of “regulators” enforced their own form of law on transgressors, tracking down trespassers, horse thieves, murderers and rapists. Punishments ranged from imprisonment to execution. The mid-nineteenth-century San Francisco gold rush, which saw the city’s population boom from several hundred people to tens of thousands in just a few years, especially heightened the need for civilian law enforcement. The city’s Committee of Vigilance, formed in 1851, attracted hundreds of volunteer members who, in secret courts, tried, imprisoned and executed people they deemed criminals. Similar committees formed and operated throughout California and Montana.11
For the most part, such organizations had the approval of their communities. The public was generally in favor of the order these groups helped maintain, despite the apprehension about the lack of proper due process. As in New York many years later, the lawless alternative was less appealing.
US vigilantism took on an uglier mien with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-nineteenth century. The first version of the Klan was formed around 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by six young Confederate officers as a kind of fraternal order with occult undertones. It began as a club where members gave each other grandiose titles and pulled relatively innocent pranks, such as showing up unannounced at social functions dressed in odd costumes.
They quickly lost control of their creation, however. As Albert C. Stevens wrote in The Cyclopædia of Fraternities, the Klan founders saw their group gradually transformed into something of a Frankenstein’s monster. “They had played with an engine of power and mystery, though organized on entirely innocent lines, and found themselves overcome by a belief that something must lie behind it all—that there was, after all, a serious purpose, a work for the Klan to do.”12 The tenor morphed away from pranks, and toward promoting white supremacy. Membership grew as Klan vigilante groups sprung up around the South. Their targets, who they threatened and sometimes murdered, were mainly Republicans, both white and black.
Historians believe a lack of central organization led to the disparate groups fizzling during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Klan found new life, however, following the 1915 release of the wildly successful film The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith, which portrayed its members as heroes and black men as unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women. The Klan’s second iteration, formed in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the same year, adopted some of the film’s novel imagery, including burning crosses, pointed hoods and robed horses. It was likely the first time an American vigilante group was directly inspired by and a reflection of pop culture, a phenomenon that would repeat many times over the next century. (Why, hello there, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy!)
The second Klan was better organized, employing full-time paid recruiters and a publicity department. Though still political, the organization broadened the focus of its violence to a wider array of opponents, including Jews, black people, Catholics and newly arriving immigrants from southern European countries such as Italy. At its height in the mid-twenties, the Klan claimed up to four million members.13 Internal divisions, criminal activities by members and public opposition caused the group to fade over the next two decades before reviving once again in the fifties and sixties in lockstep with the civil rights movement. The third Klan was also notable for its close ties to southern police departments.
The unifying force behind each iteration of the Klan, including its resurgence in recent years, is members’ common perception that authorities and institutions weren’t (or aren’t) upholding the will of their constituents—in their case, predominantly white Protestants. Members felt justified to take matters into their own hands in the absence of enforcement of the supposedly higher rules they believed to be self-evident. Members were also motivated by the belief that those who weren’t white Protestants were imperiling their way of life. Whether or not that belief was supported by facts was irrelevant.
Despite the Klan’s co-opting and distortion of the concept, American vigilantism hasn’t remained a solely white-supremacist pursuit. At the other end of the spectrum, the Black Panthers emerged in Oakland in 1966 as a group that sought to protect African Americans from police brutality. The group was primarily defensive in nature, though they brazenly carried rifles and shotguns in the streets as a warning—and implicit threat—to police, with whom they engaged in several firefights. Across the bay in San Francisco, the Lavender Panthers formed in 1973 as a response to attacks on gay men and women in the Tenderloin, the city’s infamous slum. The group patrolled the city armed with shotguns, looking for gangs or police officers who were hassling gay individuals. They never shot anyone, but they did engage in numerous street fights.14
The motivations of these groups, regardless of who they were representing or protecting, were similar on a basic level: when there is no one in power to do to the job, it’s incumbent on citizens to do it for themselves. This self-help, do-it-yourself attitude has—for good or for ill—become fundamental to many aspects of the American experience; it is integral to the founding of the country and remained omnipresent through its growing pains, continuing to the present day. As Abrahams suggests, the strong early adoption of vigilantism by Americans “partly shows that their emergence reflects freedom from, rather than simply absence of recourse to, state control.”15 Citing Richard Maxwell Brown, Abrahams posits,
The vigilante tradition is a firmly established feature of American society and culture. It arose… from the peculiar combination of a revolutionary tradition, the post-revolutionary inheritance and persistence of an outdated legal framework, the emphasis on “popular sovereignty” and the state’s obligations to its citizens, and the special nature of the frontier and the accompanying ideas of “do-it-yourself” localism…. [Vigilantism is] an intrinsic, if informal, feature of the total social system, coexistent with the formal legal and judicial apparatus.16
Twentieth-century pop culture has played a large role in romanticizing vigilantism in the American consciousness. A steady stream of movies starring the likes of Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen made heroes of Wild West regulators, while comic books and then films and television shows turned Batman, Wolverine and the Punisher into household names. Robert De Niro and Charles Bronson became stars in the seventies in vigilante films such as Taxi Driver and Death Wish, respectively, which reflected and capitalized on American society’s growing angst about inner-city crime and moral decay. Audiences and readers ate up these fictional works about heroes, super and otherwise, ostensibly serving a higher good and making the world safer for the average Joe. Today’s superhero movies tap into the same vein, inspiring a certain strain of individuals to step up and make a difference.
Sliwa, with his animated rhetoric delivered through a tough-guy Bronx accent, has consistently been sharp in his criticism of the status quo. He told a documentary crew in 2017 that the time in which the Guardian Angels were founded was “an era of Uzi-toting, dope-sucking, psychopathic killing machines laying siege to the outer boroughs and Manhattan itself.” The Guardian Angels were a movement against political indifference—and not one that would stay rooted as merely an intellectual exercise. “Bronson in Death Wish, De Niro in Taxi Driver—I wasn’t going to live vicariously through these vigilante movies that were hits in the seventies,” he said. “We would bring together young men and women, the least likely to get together, the ones that you were generally afraid of, paralyzed of, and we would proactively get them to preemptively stop crime and if necessary grab the individuals responsible and be positive role models. If that meant I was going to be labeled with the scarlet letter, the big V, a vigilante, so be it.”17
Talking to Sliwa directly, I found him to be no less animated, even four decades on. Guardian Angel chapters have launched and folded in numerous cities over the years, but the group remains active today. Sliwa estimates overall membership at about five thousand, though it’s difficult to verify that claim. He sees a direct link between his group and the Wild West regulators. “When you’re a student of history, you understand how important vigilantes were. The birth of the nation was filled with this constant battle of good versus evil,” he says. “If I existed in those times, would I have been a vigilante? Absolutely. Would I have joined together a posse comitatus to protect the little town that I lived in? Without a doubt.” A good portion of Americans, it turns out, have always felt beleaguered—the challenger or underdog mentality is ingrained in the psyche of having to establish a new country out of nothing. Or perhaps fear has simply become part of the national consciousness. “What were these people to do? They were being victimized time and time again,” Sliwa says. “Rather than fight it, if people insist you’re a vigilante, then yeah, okay. If you want to call me a vigilante, fine, I can deal with it, but it’s nothing compared to what you think it is.”18
Distrust of authorities has also been a distinguishing and unifying feature of entrepreneurial law enforcement throughout its history in the United States. Official crime rates in New York have declined dramatically since the days of Fear City, but Sliwa argues that the numbers don’t necessarily reflect the reality. The Guardian Angels resumed patrols in Central Park in 2015, for example, because of that perceived discord. “I saw a noticeable difference, the number of crimes, particularly that involve assault and robbery at night, had skyrocketed,” he says. “The police certainly don’t want us here because they take it as if it’s a suggestion that they’re not doing their jobs. Tough noogies. The cops don’t want to get out of their cars, they don’t want to get out on their mountain bikes, they don’t want to go undercover, they don’t want to go up these hills, they don’t want to be in the dark… They know, with proper policing, the Guardian Angels would not be needed in Central Park. Don’t blame the messengers because you don’t like the sound of the message.”19
Though crime was the catalyst for the group’s formation, superhero fiction was also a major motivator for many recruits. “Not so much for myself,” Sliwa says. “But definitely for a lot of our members who would live vicariously through comic-book characters and had no way of exemplifying what they found to be the best characteristics of crime fighting in those characters… They felt this was a transition from fantasy into reality as a crimefighter.”
The Guardian Angels also set the template that many real-life superheroes would adopt in the years to come in terms of approach, patrol tactics and community outreach efforts. Some prominent real-life superheroes, including Mr. Xtreme in San Diego, got their starts in entrepreneurial law enforcement as members of the Guardian Angels. Some, such as New York’s Dark Guardian, continue to moonlight as both. “We’re considered the grandfather of these types of efforts,” Sliwa says. “People start saying, ‘yeah, if we [try to stop crime] we’ll get killed out there. People will set upon us and attack us.’ But then other people will say, ‘Well, the Guardian Angels have been doing it for some time and that’s not the case.’”
Sliwa says he respects the basic motivation driving many real-life superheroes—to make their communities better and safer—but he questions what’s really at the heart of their activities; he isn’t convinced that altruism is the true spark. “They’re more into a ‘I and me’ kind of thing. Our motto is ‘us and we.’ In our situation, a lot of people join because they want to use the vehicle of the Guardian Angels to make a change in their community,” he says. “Being a particular character is so important to [RLSH]. In the Guardian Angels, you have to play the role you’re designated. You may be the medic or the one who runs to [emergency] response when everyone else is running to a problem. It requires that you come in without a pre-fixed idea. If someone were to say to you, ‘No, you can’t be Batman, you have to be Robin,’ I think they’d be crestfallen.”
Phil Hui, Sliwa’s onetime disciple, is more charitable when it comes to the real-life superhero phenomenon. He doesn’t consider his past actions with the Guardian Angels—beating up and chasing off subway muggers—to be superheroic, but he’s otherwise proud of the fact that he helped some people feel safer during their nighttime commutes, and that the group as a whole played at least some role in New York shedding its “Fear City” moniker. Sitting at his desk at Fordham Comics, a shop that somehow finds itself at an odd, almost mystical nexus between where Batman was created and where the Guardian Angels were born, he gives his blessing to today’s real-life superheroes, the latest inheritors of the spirit of American entrepreneurial law enforcement. “They’re great,” he says, “as long as they learn to protect themselves and patrol in groups.”