So, where else would Peter Braunstein head for cover but Brooklyn? He was a writer, after all.
According to his indictment, freelance journalist Peter Braunstein entered the Chelsea apartment building of a former coworker on Halloween evening, 2005, wearing a New York City Fire Department uniform purchased on eBay.
He thereupon set two small fires in the hallway, then knocked on the young woman’s door. When she answered, Braunstein chloroformed her, bound her, and sexually assaulted her for some twelve hours. For good measure, he videotaped the ordeal.
Soon after, on November 9, the police named Braunstein the prime suspect in the crimes and released photographs of him, taken on November 1 at a Super 8 Motel on West 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan.
The day after his Super 8 stay, Braunstein slid a personal credit card into a subway station vending machine and bought himself a MetroCard. Then he vanished. He could have been anywhere. He seemed to be everywhere.
The media website Gawker chided, “A CITY OF 8 MILLION PEOPLE, ALL WITH THEIR EYES CLOSED.”
As the New York City police department searched frantically for Braunstein, the tabloids delighted in flaying one of their own. The New York Post called Braunstein a “convicted creep” who was serving three years’ probation for menacing another woman. The Daily News went with the “kinky journalist” angle, noting that Braunstein’s victim worked at a high-end fashion magazine. And he had taunted her with designer shoes.
Until 2002, Braunstein was the media reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion trade publication that shared offices with W, the magazine at which his victim worked.
Braunstein’s desk at WWD had sight lines to the fashion closet, where young, pretty women flitted about with shoes and accessories for shoots and stories. Thirty-year-old Greg Lindsay, now a freelance writer and resident of Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, inherited Braunstein’s gig at WWD and was assigned his desk.
“You feel creepy in the sense that you’re inadvertently scoping out these women,” Lindsay recalled. “That part in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter asks, ‘And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? We begin by coveting what we see every day.’ It was totally that.” Ten months after Lindsay characterized Braunstein with that line, the man himself agreed with the armchair analysis. In a jailhouse interview with the New York Post published on December 16, 2007, Braunstein quoted the same Silence of the Lambs bit “to explain his ‘theory’ of why he chose his victim.”
The journalists who populate this city as freelancers and staffers—the writers and editors who pump out the words and ideas that make this place the media capital of the world— began to question each other. There was concern for the victim and horror at the nature of the crime, of course. And not a little bit of fear.
All that along with the impulse to conclude, What a story!
Sex! Depravity! A police manhunt!
But this was no Dominick Dunne society murder. This crime involved two of their own. The alleged perpetrator had worked at enough editorial shops, and long enough, to know a lot of people in this smaller-than-we’d-all-like-to-think world. And so the writers turned to each other, with questions and motives and what-ifs and what-have-yous.
Writing in the online magazine The Black Table on November 16, Greg Lindsay tried to answer the questions: “No, I never met the guy … [A]nd the more I learn now about how much fear and terror and misery he has inflicted upon my former colleagues, the more relieved I am that I never met him, and therefore never gave him the benefit of any doubts.”
The next day, Braunstein was spotted in Brooklyn.
Walt Whitman made Brooklyn the writer’s borough. His own Brooklyn Heights neighborhood was home to the likes of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright—and is where Norman Mailer hung his hat, and boxing gloves, until his death in late 2007. Nearby Park Slope is home to contemporary novelists Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, and husband-wife authors Kathryn and Colin Harrison, among many others. (Brooklyn’s 11215 is rumored to be the American zip code with the highest concentration of published writers.)
Though the twentieth century was the age of Manhattan newspapermen—Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton—many of today’s journalists are Brooklyn-based, and not necessarily bound by employment to a single periodical. The northwest neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens belong nowadays to the freelance writers and magazine editors who attempt to interpret New York to the outside world.
These three neighborhoods, formerly distinct one from the other, have melded to the point where most residents who have established themselves during the past five or so years don’t actually know the lines of demarcation. Real estate agents, attempting to broker rentals surpassing prices even in Manhattan, sometimes call it one area: BoCoCa. And though the name is unpleasant to those people who label everything but themselves, it successfully blends the area into a mass of comfortable familiarity that attracts BoCoCa’s newest tenants.
Roughly speaking—some might say generously—the three neighborhoods run from Atlantic Avenue in the north to 9th Street in the south. West to east, BoCoCa extends from Hicks Street to Hoyt. From Manhattan, you take the F train to Bergen Street, Carroll Street, or Smith and 9th Streets.
Where mom-and-pop corner stores and butcher shops and bakeries once lined Court and Smith, the neighborhoods’ right and left ventricles now pump bars and boutiques. The restaurants have gained new respect among food critics; you are not necessarily eating Brooklyn food at Manhattan prices anymore.
Apartments are often entire floors of brownstones, large and sunny with the kind of amenities people leave Manhattan for—washers, dryers, dishwashers, backyards!—and include smallish rooms perfect for a desk and filing cabinet. BoCoCa is, accordingly, well-suited to those who write from home all day.
In the fall, when the treelined streets turn red and gold, and in the spring, when the canopy above you is green, it is enough to forget that you are even in Brooklyn—anyhow, the Brooklyn you thought you knew a decade ago. The Italian immigrants who settled there have given way to yuppies who fled the suburbs for the city.
While the old Brooklyn was made up of ethnic enclaves, immigrant warrens, and strivers’ rows of the middle class, BoCoCa has transcended traditional insularity. For some, this is all so different as to suggest that Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens—and most certainly the Valhalla of Park Slope—are not truly a part of Brooklyn anymore. For others, it is all some sort of über-Brooklyn, a Sesame Street for grownups where the neighborhood cinema shows foreign films and friends gather at readings rather than potluck suppers.
In warm months, the Gowanus Yacht Club on Smith and Warren serves beer outside on rickety picnic tables, sating its customers with a side of irony: The establishment is not at waterside. Laptops abound in cafés and bars, leaving a weekday visitor with the impression that no one here actually works. On Fridays, friends meet for drinks at Abilene and potential lovers set dinner dates at Grocery, the restaurant. Sunday mornings are reserved for brunch at places like Bar Tabac, or Bloody Marys at the Brooklyn Inn.
Where is Manhattan in all of this? Nowhere. Unless you have a staff job, Manhattan exists only as a place for meetings. The Gotham skyline is moot; the city that everyone thought they came for has been abandoned by many.
It was here, in this demimonde of BoCoCa, where Peter Braunstein was sighted on November 17, some two weeks after the Halloween attack, buying a cup of coffee—in a place named after the real estate brokers’ made-up moniker, the Bococa Café. (The café opened in 2005. It’s cheering and bright, and stocked with dozens of coffees you’ve never heard of. Go in the morning. The place shuts down early in the evening.)
John Arena, proprietor of the Bococa Café, was at work on the morning he thought he saw Braunstein.
A man in an overcoat bought a large coffee—“regular,” which in Brooklyn means with milk and sugar—and paid with two singles. Just as Arena was checking his face against a photograph in the New York Post, Mr. Large-Coffee-Regular took off without collecting his sixty cents in change. The customer was heavier and had longer hair than the photos circulating of Braunstein, but Arena did not doubt his identity.
“I looked at him like I saw a ghost,” Arena told the daily papers. “He caught on right away. In other words, he knew that I knew who he was.”
Large-Coffee-Regular left the café and walked north at about half past 7. Arena notified police.
By 9 o’clock, reporters and cops in riot gear were sharing the sidewalks with moms and strollers. Other officers perched on rooftops. The press trolled for a scoop and a team of dogs sniffed for Braunstein. “I was working from home all day,” Greg Lindsay remembered. “I heard the helicopters circling overhead for hours.”
A reader wrote in to Gawker to describe a “gaggle of reporters … standing across the street from the stupidly named Bococa Café.” Cops mingled with the press on the street while helicopters looked down from above. “On a side note,” the reader added, “a beat cop walked up to one of the cameramen and asked what was going on. The cameraman gave him the 411. I love when the media fill in the fuzz.”
Patrick Cadigan, who lived on Smith Street between Dean and Pacific at the time, was following the story in the papers and found the café owner’s account at least somewhat credible.
“He saw him, thought he recognized the customer, and the guy took off. That sealed it. It must have been him,” Cadigan said. “Or,” he considered, “it was a guy who got his coffee and wanted to leave.”
Braunstein’s mother spoke exclusively to the New York Sun, telling the conservative broadsheet that her son regularly drank coffee with milk and was likely at least somewhat familiar with Cobble Hill, as his ex-wife lived near the Bococa Café.
Sophie Donelson, then an editor at City magazine, believed Braunstein was around somewhere nearby, but doubted that he got his coffee at Bococa Café.
“No one really goes to that café. If he was at Bar Tabac or Patois, I’d believe it,” she said. “But there were moms and nannies everywhere and a rapist on the loose. It was such a weird juxtaposition.”
Gawker was quick to blast Bococa Café owner John Arena on November 18:
Oh, you saw the fiend, did you? Peter Braunstein came into your Cobble Hill coffee shop and bought a $2 cuppa joe? You even looked him in the eye? You were sure it was him, yeah? He knew that you knew, oh yes!
So, uh, why the hell did you just watch him walk away? Here’s a suggestion: follow him out the door, shout and point, and CHASE THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! He’s a journalist, for chrissakes, just some wussy writer!
Clearly, this was a matter best left to police dogs.
With a pillow from Braunstein’s mother’s house in Kew Gardens as a reference, the NYPD’s canine members picked up the fugitive’s scent. A bloodhound named Chase tracked Braunstein two blocks and then lost him again, the Sun reported. A few blocks on, Chase showed signs of a trail. He took his handlers to an abandoned brownstone on Henry and Congress, but Braunstein wasn’t there. Police found no evidence that anyone had been there at all. But still, it was possible.
Possible enough for the Post’s Andrea Peyser, who gave Braunstein a shrill, staccato scolding for showing up in Brooklyn, headlined, BRAZEN BRAUNSTEIN’S GOT A LATTE NERVE. Whereupon the column tore into neighborhood residents for failing to lead the manhunt.
“As he walked through a neighborhood where his former colleagues live, no one recognized Peter Braunstein,” Peyser wrote. “That’s because no one was looking.”
But Cobble Hill is not the type of place for neighborhood watch groups. That’s more Park Slope. The mob did not light torches, grab pitchforks, and go from brownstone to brownstone. Instead, neighbors stayed home. Children disappeared from the streets. Police distributed Wanted leaflets with an unflattering drawing of a Jheri-curled Braunstein and the promise of a $12,000 reward for information leading to his capture.
“Every single door on our street had that blue flier attached with that awful, awful sketch,” Lindsay remembered with disgust. “For days you would see them up and down the street. Peter Braunstein had come to my block, my entire universe as a freelancer. He was there for at least a week, quasihaunting us.”
Lindsay tore the flier down—“I couldn’t bear to have it there,” he said—but Braunstein’s face lined Smith, Court, and countless cross streets for days. Patrick Cadigan saw the posters littering the train station for at least a week, but noticed that the fear died down after a day or two.
“I wondered why he would still be here unless he had a network of people hiding him, which didn’t seem very likely,” Cadigan said. He walked his girlfriend to the train station as usual, but tried to be more alert. Otherwise, what else was to be done?
Andrea Peyser’s urgings to the contrary, the people of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill got self-cautious. It is a similar mind-set to the one adopted after September 11: Protect yourself as best you can and be mindful that there is little you personally can do about terrorists flying into buildings or depraved sex offenders on the lam in your neighborhood. Detached thrills are perhaps, in part, why people live here.
Laura Davis was working at HarperCollins in November 2005 and sharing a Cobble Hill apartment with two roommates. One of them joked about seeing a man on the roof who may have been Braunstein. But in a serious conversation concerning personal safety, Davis said, “We talked about making sure we pushed the door to our apartment shut as we were coming and going, instead of trusting it to swing shut on its own. It had been left open many times before and I remember Peter Braunstein’s name being invoked as to why we needed to make a greater effort to close the door.”
Braunstein was spotted again on November 18, this time at a business on Henry Street. At M&N Cleaners, a man who the Post said was “looking rushed, and possibly covered in stage makeup,” asked for a coat hanger because he had locked himself out of his car. An employee told the tabloid that the customer was rude and demanding and then took off. “It is not known if Braunstein really had a car, or what he wanted with the hanger,” the Post reported dryly.
Then again, just past midnight on November 21, a resident swore he passed Braunstein walking east on Degraw between Hicks and Cheever.
So—memorize the face, lock the door, walk the ladies to the train. Be mindful to whom you sell coffee. Report all agitated people who lock their keys in the car to the police. Be vigilant during your late-night walks home. Because you never know who you might see.
“I have never known my son to even go to Brooklyn,” Peter Braunstein’s estranged father told the Daily News. The article—published on November 19 and smugly titled, CAFÉ SEARCH GROUNDLESS?—was the first whiff of doubt about Braunstein hiding out in BoCoCa.
The New York Observer, a contrarian weekly, pooh-poohed the bulk of daily tabloid reportage by suggesting in a December 5 article that maybe—just maybe—Braunstein had never been on the unglamourous side of the river.
“Forget the massive manhunt,” wrote the Observer’s Mark Lotto. “Is Peter Braunstein the last freelancer in New York who thinks he’s too good for Brooklyn?”
Well into December, more than two weeks after the last Braunstein sighting, there was no hint of him in Brooklyn. The Wanted posters got weirdly more detailed—Braunstein drinks Guinness and vodka! He likes beef curry with extra mustard!—but BoCoCa’s watchful citizens saw nothing.
Which makes sense, really, because when the city thought Braunstein was buying coffee and borrowing coat hangers in Brooklyn, the closest he got to the County of Kings was at a storage facility on 36th Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, which is home to so few media folk that it took newspapers at least three days to report the extent of a 2006 blackout affecting more than 125,000 residents.
By half past 11 o’clock on the night of November 2, Peter Braunstein was in Cleveland. Not Brooklyn. He never came back to the city after that. He spent a few nights chewing a bartender’s ear about working on the plastic surgery TV drama Nip/Tuck. He said he was researching striptease joints for his next writing project—and isn’t that what they all say?
“He didn’t strike me as creepy,” the Moriarty’s bartender told the Daily News.
At the University of Cincinnati on November 17, Braunstein robbed a psychologist’s office at gunpoint for sixteen bucks in cash, plus a Visa card. He made his way south, first to Nashville and then to Memphis, where on November 28 he sold his blood for twenty dollars.
At the University of Memphis, better than a thousand miles from the Bococa Café, Peter Braunstein collapsed in a pool of his own blood on December 16. A campus police officer found Braunstein after a woman named Annette Brown, who’d seen him on the TV show America’s Most Wanted, spotted him walking around with a backpack and sleeping bag.
“I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine,” Brown told the Daily News. “They were very dark, empty, unfeeling, and cold. I felt like I was looking at a dead person, just evil. He was so close to me, I could have hugged him.”
Brown flagged a campus patrol car from a safe distance away. The car trailed Braunstein for a while, until an officer ordered him to stop in his tracks. Braunstein pulled a knife and began to stab himself in the neck. The officer sprayed Braunstein with half a can of pepper spray, but the knife went in and out thirteen times.
“I give up,” Braunstein said, dropping the knife. He fell and the officer took away the gun he was packing. Cuffing him, the officer asked his name.
“Peter Braunstein,” he said, after which he passed out. Alternate versions of the capture had Braunstein declaring, “I’m the guy the world is looking for.” But such are mostly television accounts and not to be trusted.
In his backpack, police found a video camera, two digital video tapes, and a diary. The tapes were blank. But in the diary, police read Braunstein’s commentary on his own press coverage.
“He was very interested in what was being written about him, and how he was portrayed,” a cop told the Daily News.
Under court order, New York police on January 23 released notes of a conversation detectives had with Braunstein shortly after his capture in Memphis. Braunstein laughed off media reports. “[He] stated that he thought the Cobble Hill thing was funny because he does not even know where Cobble Hill is located,” police told the papers.
On his return to New York, Braunstein repeated his Manhattan-to-Queens trip of the previous November.
First housed in Bellevue, he was then moved to Rikers Island to await trial. Braunstein’s defense team released a psychiatric report on June 1, 2006, indicating a likely diagnosis of schizophrenia. In her report, Braunstein’s psychologist said it was the gig at Women’s Wear Daily that made him snap.
“Working in the highly competitive, glitzy, and sexually charged atmosphere of a celebrity-driven fashion periodical was an extremely toxic and unsuitable environment,” according to the doctor.
Was it a life that he missed? When the Daily News published an interview with Braunstein at Rikers on October 8, 2006, it appeared that he was happy to chat. “Look, I used to do this,” Braunstein told the journalist. “I used to be you.”
Hear that, Brooklyn?
POSTSCRIPT: Peter Braunstein was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in a trial ending on May 23, 2007. The jury deliberated for only a few hours. In a letter to the judge pleading for leniency, Braunstein railed against the tabloid coverage of his case, singling out New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser. She “declared that I was not sick; I was evil,” Braunstein wrote. “This kind of tabloid rhetoric is essentially a mandate for harsh sentencing.” Braunstein is now in prison, serving an eighteen-years-to-life term.