New York after Bernhard Goetz

NEW YORK – It was a subterranean explosion, a cataclysmic meeting of all the wrong elements: a white man with a gun and four panhandling black youths, inside a subway car in an era when crime beneath the city streets far outpaced justice above.

On Dec. 22, 1984, a meek-looking New Yorker named Bernhard Goetz rose from his seat on the No. 2 train, shot the young men and set off a national furor over racism, gun control, crime and vigilante justice.

Twenty years later, with subway crime at historic lows and New York once again a hit with tourists, the tale of the subway gunman exists mostly as an artifact of a far different city in a far different time.

“Could it happen now?” asked attorney Ron Kuby, who won a $43 million lawsuit against Goetz on behalf of paralyzed victim Darrell Cabey. “Inconceivable. Inconceivable that the attack would take place. Inconceivable that the attacker would be hailed as a hero.”

Former New York chief of detectives Richard Nicastro, whose officers tracked Goetz down in New Hampshire nine days after the shootings, echoed Kuby’s feelings.

“It’s hard to imagine it happening again,” said Nicastro, who retired in 1986. “What it showed was the fear most people had in traveling about.”

At the time, there were 15,000 felonies a year on average in the subway – more than 40 every day around the nation’s largest mass transit system. Twenty years later, there were just 2,760 felonies reported through Nov. 14 – barely eight per day. Murders in the subways, which topped out at 26 in 1990, are at zero for the year.

Subway ridership is at about 4.5 million riders daily; back then, the number of straphangers was in freefall, with one out of every four passengers abandoning the subways between 1965 and 1982. In 1984, ridership was at about 2.7 million per day.

Back then, the subways were covered in graffiti and inhabited by muggers, junkies, panhandlers, the homeless. The cost of admission was a mere 90 cents for a ride scarier than anything at Six Flags.

Track fires and train breakdowns became standard fare. But it was out-of-control crime in filthy trains and frightening stations that inflicted the heaviest wounds to the city psyche.

“The subways are everybody’s second neighborhood,” said Thomas Reppetto, a police historian who heads the Citizens Crime Commission. “If you live in Brooklyn, and see a story about a robbery in the Bronx, you think, ‘Gee, that’s terrible.’ But if there’s a story about a robbery in the subway, you think, ‘Whoa. I ride down there.’”

One of those riders was Goetz, who brought a nickel-plated Smith &Wesson .38-caliber gun with him when he boarded a train shortly after 5 p.m. on a Saturday. The four youths had boarded the train in the Bronx, carrying sharpened screwdrivers.

“Give me five dollars,” said Troy Canty, one of the four, as he approached the thin, bespectacled passenger. Goetz pulled his illegal weapon just north of the World Trade Center and began shooting.

“You don’t look so bad,” he told a wounded Cabey. “Here’s another.”

Goetz later said he never set foot on the subway again after that day.

He was cleared of attempted murder in 1987 but spent more than eight months in jail for a weapons conviction in the case. In 1996, a jury awarded Cabey $43 million.

The Cabey family never received one cent from Goetz, and Cabey remains in a wheelchair – “in a perpetual state of being an 8-year-old,” Kuby said.

Goetz, a reluctant celebrity at best, slipped into obscurity and resurfaced infrequently: He mounted a doomed 2001 campaign for mayor. He has rarely spoken about the shootings, and attempts to reach him for this story were unsuccessful.

The self-employed electronics calibrator lives in the same Greenwich Village apartment where he has resided for decades. His most recent cause was the redevelopment of ground zero; Goetz recently wrote former Mayor Ed Koch about his opposition to the design for the new Freedom Tower.

“I wrote him back, ‘Bernie, the train has already left the station,’” Koch said.