The 29th of July came, and then it went. To call it or the days that came between the letter and the anniversary of Donna Lauria’s murder uneventful was to be very selective.
Sam Roberts, the 28-year-old, energetic, needing-little-sleep City Editor—there should be no old ones—years later, in a piece published July 1, 1999, in The New York Times, summed up that Summer of Sam:
In the summer of 1977, New York lost its mind. A mountain climber named George Willig scaled the World Trade Center. Terrorist bombs linked to Puerto Rican nationalists exploded at Manhattan office buildings and department stores. The temperature hit 104 degrees, nearly breaking the record high. A Consolidated Edison blackout triggered looting that resulted in more than 3,000 arrests. Elvis Presley died. Studio 54 opened. The Bronx’s most dysfunctional family, the Yankees, revived their legendary World Series rivalry against the Dodgers. Abe Beame was struggling to avoid being the first elected mayor in more than half a century to be defeated for a second term. And, oh yes, a psychopathic serial killer armed with a .44-caliber revolver and dubbed Son of Sam held New York hostage as no crime figure had done in the decades since a disgruntled former Con Ed worker, George Metesky, periodically vented his rage as the folkloric Mad Bomber.
But he did not strike on July 29. The anniversary came and went.
The killing came on July 31. And this time the victim—and she would turn out to be the last victim—was blonde: Stacy Moskowitz, 20.
She had been watching the moon over Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn, where the view is unobstructed, police said, with her boyfriend Robert Violante, also 20.
He lost the sight in one eye. She was shot in the head and neck and lingered a little while in critical condition before she expired on August 1.
Between killed and wounded, the tally was thirteen for Berkowitz and his demons. Six were dead. But Stacy Moskowitz was to be his last victim. Berkowitz had used his own car. He had gotten a parking ticket, and now it would lead detectives to his Yonkers home. The world would now learn that Son of Sam was a postal worker. The details of a dog’s demonic bark, of a neighbor named Sam, of the signs of madness that painted his apartment, all that would now come out. And David Berkowitz would come out in handcuffs, smirking.
Bill Clark, who was the lead detective on the case, said that although the department told the public there was a task force of fifty hunting Sam, in reality, there were a handful of key detectives on the case: six, he recalled. In an interview for this book, he explained how the arrest of Berkowitz actually happened. Detail after detail.
“The last shooting . . . He went around, parked his car, and fired, shot the two of them. He came back, got in the car, drove away. I started doing a canvass.
“The next day, the woman in this one house says, uh, you know, this guy, he was parked right in front here. He had, he got, a parking ticket. Nobody at that point is looking.
“Now I go back to her, I said, ‘you sure?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I’m sure you gave a summons out.’ ”
Clark checked with everyone in the Police Department and even in the Sanitation Department and of course the parking enforcement agents, who might have given a summons out. “No record.
“I go back and talk to her again the next day she says, listen, when the shooting happened, she said, my boyfriend came to the house to see what happened.
“‘And I told him, don’t park there because I saw a car get a summons there earlier when this happened.’ She said, ‘I know it.’ ”
Clark again calls the cop who had been assigned to that sector and again he gets a denial. But the woman, “She’s adamant, you know,” Clark said.
“This cop was an Italian American who was on Staten Island. So, I got an Italian American detective to call this guy in Staten Island and tell him, listen, nobody’s looking to hurt you if you forgot to turn the summons, it was a busy night.
“He gives it up. We go to his locker, get the summons up, check it. David Berkowitz, 35 Pine Street, Yonkers.”
But even before that arrest on August 10, the shamelessness of a tabloid war was in high gear. In the Sunday, August 7, editions, the News produced a pullout centerfold section reprising Breslin’s work:
No story in recent years has touched a deeper nerve among New Yorkers than the murderous saga of the Son of Sam. And no writer has been closer to that story than News columnist Jimmy Breslin.
From the moment last winter when police discovered a pattern . . . Breslin has been on the job.
He has reported the horror and the tragedy, and the hard, slogging work of the detectives. And when the killer eventually decided to speak from his personal darkness, he wrote a letter to Breslin.
[With that letter] . . . the name immediately joined those of Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler in the gallery of big city monsters. Today, The News reprints the major pieces . . . They provide a chilling, comprehensive narrative of the events that have brought fear to the streets of an entire city.
It was a perfect segue.
On August 10, the spree was over and soon the fear on the streets would dissipate. One version of Breslin’s August 11 column on Page One began:
“Who is Sam,” the man was asked?
‘’You know Sam,” he said.
“I don’t know him,” the detective said.
“Sure you do,” the man said.
“Gee, I’m sorry but I don’t,” the detective said.
“Sam can do anything,” the man said. His eyes started to water and his chest heaved as if he were about to cry.
Somebody shut the door and now there was no way to listen anymore. Inside the room, the short, chunky guy, with the pleasant young face, kept talking. His name was David Berkowitz and he told cops he was the .44 killer who used the name Son of Sam.
Now, a detective came out into the hall and walked down to the end.
“Who was Sam?” he was asked.
“Berkowitz says he’s a dog. The dog lives in the house behind this guy. He says the dog commands him. That’s the word he used. Commands him. He says he understands the dog. The dog commands him to kill.
“To hell with the dog,” says the detective. “Do you know what he was going to do tonight? He was going to Riverdale first and get somebody. Then he was going to drive out to Hampton Bays to a discotheque there . . .”
A discotheque where he intended to commit mass murder.
This time, he was armed with a .45 caliber weapon that looked like a submachine gun—the assault rifle of the time—and, he said, he had planned to go out in a blaze of glory. This kind of killing lends itself to thoughts of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Buffalo, St. Louis, Lewiston, it seems. Lone gunmen. Mass casualties. But not the night stalking of Sam and his Bulldog gun, the subsonic thud of its rounds and the knowledge that he was out there. Somewhere. It would have earned David Berkowitz the notoriety of the mass killer.
Detective Bill Clark had been relentless. He had made a wrong guess or two along the way but stuck with it to the end. He liked to point out that hard work did create its own luck. But he did not admit to being the unnamed detective in Breslin’s column. However, in walking through the case more than forty-five years later, and after a long and successful second career working with the creator of Hill Street Blues, Steven Bochco, in Hollywood, he certainly recalled his meeting with David Berkowitz. He recounted his interview of the suspect this way:
“So, I go right next to him and cross the little table from him, and I start talking to him. And he took me to every one of the shootings and exactly how and why and everything, you know, and he was talking like, he would be talking about making dinner, you know? So, I was the only one that ever got to talk to him [take a statement from him]. Nobody was ever allowed before or after that to talk to him. But he was talking about these shootings as if he were talking about, as I say, just a job, you know, nothin’.”
Berkowitz explained to Clark “that it had started out because he started understanding this dog that was yelling for blood. Yeah. So, he just started driving around and he told me like the, one of the first shootings, ‘I think it was two girls in the car.’
“‘Yeah. Donna Lauria,’ I said. He said, ‘You know, I passed this car and I saw the two girls.’ And he says, ‘I went around the block,’ and he says, ‘I saw a parking space.’ He says, ‘That was my sign. I knew this was it.’ So, he parked, he shot the both of them, then he got back in the car and drove off. I mean, that’s the mentality, you know? Not personal.”
Another version of Breslin’s column reports it like this:
So now I say to him, “Let’s talk. You know, you’re a likable guy.” He sat there and he said, “Likable.” He kind of mused . . . I said to him, “You liked Donna Lauria. Why?”
When I asked him that he said, “She’s a very nice girl.” I said, “Do you know her?” He said. “No.” I said, “How do you know that she’s a nice girl?” And he said to me, “I can tell a nice girl. I only shoot pretty girls.”
The detective in the column told Breslin he thought he was taking a very good statement, one that was legitimate—the suspect had been read his rights. One that would be very good in court. Then the detective realized, “The guy is never going to be in court. They’re arraigning him today and they’ll put him into Kings County [hospital] for mental observation and that’ll do it. They’ll find this guy to be completely out of it. He lives in a couple of worlds . . . He has the world in the room with you and then he has this world of voices. No, I’ll tell you. I’ll never see him again in my life.”
Bill Clark says plenty of people stopped by to talk with Berkowitz but he was the first, the last, and the only one to take a statement from Son of Sam.
It was over for Sam, but for Breslin and Dunleavy the final chapter had not yet begun. Here, according to a man who helped supply that chapter, the tabloid wars led to behavior that was beyond a disservice. It could be called reprehensible as well as sensationalizing. Here the other part of Breslin emerged: like Sam, he needed to be a big shot. Rat-a-tat-tat. The keyboard was his weapon. The victims, this time, were his and Dunleavy’s.
Desperate. Conniving. In need of a front page. Dunleavy didn’t walk so much as he flaunted, and minced, and conducted his sales pitch, wagging his finger in the air in a way that somehow felt decadent and charming. Brilliantly downmarket, he got his sustenance largely from Guinness. He went to Morty Matz, a great public relations man, to ask for help. Matz, who represented the Corrections Officers union, asked one of their number to visit Berkowitz in the Kings County maximum security hospital ward in Brooklyn, where he was being held, and ask him to write a letter to Dunleavy. He was 99 years old in 2023 when he finally revealed his role.
“I then went about trying to get a letter for Steve Dunleavy because I had the Correction Officers Benevolent Association for many years and I knew everybody . . . I contacted them there and they got a letter for Dunleavy.”
It was prosaic and demon-free, a letter that suggested a medicated inmate, or a man whose demons were resting. But it was finally a win for Murdoch. How it came about has never before been reported.
“So then Jimmy wanted a letter,” Matz said, and he got it for him. He doesn’t recall how exactly that message got to him—whether Breslin called direct, which Matz thought was probably unlikely, or someone else made the call. Breslin got his letter.
Dear Mr. Breslin, it has come to my attention that you wish to speak with me. Well, all you have to do is come to my home at Kings County Hospital at this time I am unable to visit you.
Again: Prosaic stuff.
“I am quite disgusted with how the press has been spreading lies,” Berkowitz wrote. “This is like a circus event with clowns and criminals. Please bring a beer when you come.” He had a sense of humor, it seemed, and an awareness of what he had created.
The dog, certainly, was no longer in charge. Matz, Dunleavy, and Breslin were.
The staid hold-up-the-coffee-table New Yorker made the mistake of biting the dog. Breslin, the big dog, bit back.
THE NEW YORKER LOOKS FOR SAM ON A DEAD-END STREET
In the New Yorker’s July 25 report on the blackout, for example, the magazine devoted one page to Diana Vreeland (a French-American fashion columnist who died in 1989 having made the Best Dressed List Hall of Fame) having dinner in Greenwich Village and expounding on blackouts: “In Paris when I opened my desk at the Crillon (a five-star Paris hotel that in 2022 prices had some cheaper rooms at around $2,000) it was all candles.” The New Yorker did not print a line about Bushwick where so much of our city fell apart.
The New Yorker had written at length on the sins of the tabloids, taking particular umbrage at Breslin’s July 28 column that wondered if, as Son of Sam alluded in his letter to Breslin, he would strike on the next day, the day when Sam killed Donna Lauria: “Journalism schools could use these paragraphs as examples of journalistic irresponsibility.”
Breslin’s simple answer was not the “fuck you, fuck you” bluster he would have used at one of the bars he frequented. Instead, he wrote:
In the world of the New Yorker writer . . . everybody [is] sitting around talking about this Son of Sam stories and these grubby people on tabloids—tabloids!—who receive letters from killers. Letters they reveal to the public! God, isn’t there one of us left to retain some taste?
The New Yorker’s grasp of the city’s realities was as wan as its grasp of The New Journalism was when the magazine attacked Tom Wolfe in the 1960s and Breslin sprang to his Herald Tribune colleague’s defense when he called the fabled editor of that magazine, William Shawn, to a bar. When Shawn arrived, Breslin told him what he could do to stop Wolfe from eviscerating the magazine.
“Burn it down,” Breslin bellowed.
Wolfe’s work, which he had thought might be met with a sense of humor by the literati, did not. But it did run in the Trib, where it entertained a few hundred thousand readers.
Now summer waned, any trial was far away, and the frenzy began to die down.
✶✶✶
By December 5, Breslin had written dozens of other columns—on Jimmy Carter and his tightfisted response to the city of New York’s finances, on Mayor Abe Beame’s political obituary after one term of trying to rein in the city’s debt and crime, and on the very real question of whether the city was spinning out of control. While Sam had been the Demon, the serial killer who both captured and captivated, haunted and hunted, Breslin and the city, Sam was not all-consuming. Breslin had his eyes wide open and his heart wide open too, in order to alert and inform his readers to the insidiousness enveloping New York.
One of those columns, “Dies the Victim, Dies the City,” captured the cheapness of life in the death of one young man, by a shot to the back of the head from a killer who had demanded and already had received his winter coat. A cold murderer. A cold murder. The young victim’s two friends ran away as fast as they could. No shots followed. The killer already had his coat and his victim. If you had to ask Breslin which was the more important story to him, then the day you asked, the time of day you asked, and the mood he was working himself up into when you asked might determine your answer. But if you read the bulk of his work, the determination is easy to make. It is there: the Victim. The City. The Nation. That was important. Celebrity. That was fun. And it paid the bills for six children, a house, a heavy drinking habit, cigars and good suits.
And it would, he knew, bring in more stories.
Dunleavy and the Post put the coda on that frenzy when they smuggled a camera in and photographed Berkowitz sleeping on his prison cot. “Sam Sleeps,” read the caption.
“And then all hell broke loose,” Morty Matz said. “Obviously he (Dunleavy) screwed it up for everybody. Somehow, he knew to get out of town real quick and he got Murdoch to send them to Cuba for thirty days.”
And Sam—well, years later he had a little more to say.