This Day in Crime History (Kitty Genovese Murder Sparks Urban Myth)

March 13, 1964—The rape and murder of 28-year-old Queens bar manager Kitty Genovese around 3 in the morning might have become one more crime statistic in a New York becoming full of them, except that nearly two weeks later, The New York Times gave its imprimatur to a story claiming that the stabbing had not only occurred within yards of her Kew Gardens apartment, but within full view of 38 neighbors who did nothing while it occurred. More than 40 years would pass, with the incident entering psychology, sociology, urban-affairs and criminal-justice texts, before it was established that the basic outlines of this paradigmatic tale of mass urban indifference were, fundamentally, mythical.

How inaccurate was the front-page story? One area resident who made it his business to deconstruct the tale has claimed that the article contained six errors in its first two paragraphs.

(Not much has changed over the years, I’m afraid. About 15 years ago, perusing a Times article about my industry, I counted three mistakes in two sentences. To my knowledge, none were ever corrected.)       

The fact that the piece came to be written and the myth perpetrated owes much to a lunch involving the paper’s A.M. Rosenthal and police commissioner Michael Murphy. Even in his current post as metropolitan editor, Rosenthal was exerting enormous, even questionable, influence on The Gray Lady’s coverage—forbidding, for instance, any mentions of Malcolm X, according to colleague Harrison Salisbury. At the end of the decade, he would begin a 17-year reign as executive editor that might be likened to a journalistic tyranny, marked by rages and sycophancy. Successor Max Frankel was given a telling mandate upon taking over: "Make the newsroom a happy place again."

At the March 1964 lunch, Rosenthal quizzed Murphy about why two men had confessed to the same recent murder. Murphy let him in on another unusual “fact”: one of the two confessed killers, 29-year-old computer punch-card operator Winston Moseley, had participated in another crime, attacking Genovese three times, with not one of her neighbors phoning the police over a half hour of stabbing and screaming.

While the Times had mentioned the murder already in a news brief, Rosenthal now assigned it to a reporter who followed the see-no-evil-bystanders approach favored by his boss, best stated in its lead: "For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens." The paper’s longstanding disdain for tabloid-style sensationalizing of crime furnished even more credibility to the astonishing story it covered now.

One has to wonder why Rosenthal was so quick to credit Murphy’s explanation. It amounted to believing not only that not a single person would come to someone’s aid, but that more than three dozen eyewitnesses wide awake in the wee hours of the morning would decide not to alert the authorities to a threat not just to Genovese but also to themselves and everyone else in the neighborhood.

The Times story had several problems, though the errors got lost in the hullabaloo. First, two attacks on Genovese occurred, not three. The fact that there were two at all was because one neighbor, hearing Genovese’s cries outside, yelled at Moseley, frightening the attacker momentarily and giving the victim enough time to slip inside the vestibule, where Moseley came around to pursue her again. Moreover, one quote from a supposed eyewitness-- I didn’t want to get involved”—was anonymous and, therefore, could not be proven.

But only two or three people had a clear view of what was going on and, thus, exemplified the indifference that was the theme of the Times story. One was an assistant superintendent in an apartment building across the way.  Seeing the first attack, he did not call the police but simply went downstairs and took a nap. The second man, a friend and neighbor of Genovese’s who was drunk that night, saw both phases of the attack. He did nothing after the attack outside, largely because a friend he phoned told him not to do so. Then, after the vestibule stabbing occurred right outside his door, he called a neighbor, who urged him to come over—which he did by crawling out his window, across the roof, and down to the apartment, where he called the police—the second person to do so that night. Others who heard the shouting that night thought it was a drunken fight.

Later that year, Rosenthal wrote a book-length account of the case, Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, in which he repeated the basic outlines of the story. By the time he died four decades later, the case had embedded itself into social-science research as the “Genovese Syndrome,” with all kinds of explanations for why the supposed callous indifference to human life had occurred. In the last 10 years, more in-depth studies (including two current books, Kevin Cook’s Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America and Catherine Pelonero’s Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences) have revealed deep problems with the narrative. If you begin to type “Kitty Genovese” in Google, you will now see sizable results not just for “Syndrome” but for “Myth.”

According to a Huffington Post article from last November, Moseley—now 78—was denied parole for the 16^th time last year, with his next chance not coming until 2015. 

After stepping down as executive editor of the Times in the mid-‘80s, Rosenthal wrote a column for several years that the paper called “On My Mind” but that the satirical magazine Spy dubbed “Out of My Mind.” However, John Darnton, in his hilarious roman a clef mystery about the paper, Black and White and Dead All Over, used an even more devastating moniker for the pieces by the novel’s counterpart to the real-life character, Max Schwartzbaum: “Under My Thumb.” It’s a useful shorthand not just for the fear he exerted over staffers, but also for his thumbprint over the Genovese case.

Quote of the Day (Jeff Greenfield, on the ‘Times’ Non-Story on A-Rod’s Contract)

“FLASH! NYT reveals exclusively that A-Rod's contract is a problem for team. Next up: ‘Lindbergh makes it to Paris!’”—Veteran news commentator Jeff Greenfield, March 31, 2013 tweet, on the New York Times’ front-page article of the same day on Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez

The derisive reaction of PBS’ Jeff Greenfield toward David Waldstein’s piece in The Gray Lady on Alex Rodriguez’s contract with the New York Yankees is absolutely on target. I can’t recall such a wasted amount of front-page space since Patrick Healy’s analysis of the relationship between Bill and Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential campaign.

The A-Rod piece bore all the same marks of that earlier piece: A failed attempt to discover the truth about something everyone wanted to know. The Healy article, it seems, was motivated by the desire to know the state of a marriage that, the decade before, had survived an extramarital affair and the resulting impeachment effort. In the matter of A-Rod, two things were on everyone’s minds: 1) how the Yankees got into this mess in the first place, and 2) how they proposed to get out of it.

If the Healy piece searched for a rat, it came up with a mouse: the news that the Clintons’ union involved a “complicated candidacy”—entirely predictable, given their past history. Evidence to this effect: the separate travel schedules they maintained—something that nearly all Presidential candidates and their spouses maintain at one point or another, in an effort to maximize their efforts on the road.

Similarly, Waldstein turned up the fact that the camp of A-Rod’s former agent, Scott Boras, had been stunned when, after a presentation about how much he could make as a free-agent, the third baseman stunned everyone by saying he would rather stay with the Yankees. Nor is it exactly news that, in the wake of explosive allegations about A-Rod and performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)—in 2009, and again more recently—the team had looked unsuccessfully high and low in his contract for something that could help them void the whole thing, to no avail so far.

The article could have presented some information on how the Yankees' Tampa brain trust, in renegotiating A-Rod’s contract, failed to include enough legal protection to cover themselves in case the slugger was found to have used PEDs—the same dumb mistake they made with Jason Giambi a few years before. It could have analyzed the fate of other teams, burdened with similar albatross contracts. But nothing doing.

You can judge the value of a news article pretty simply, I think: does it tell me something I didn’t know or could not have guessed before? The A-Rod article fails on that simple count. It’s a huge swing-and-a-miss from a source that many people, based on past performance, had come to expect more from. In this way, it mirrors the enigmatic subject it did nothing to reveal. 

(The photo shows Alex Rodriguez on at Ameriquest Field on May 22, 2004, toward the start of his usually tortured tenure with the Bronx Bombers. My hunch is that, on this occasion, he grounded out--failing, once again, to deliver in the clutch. If only the Yankees had this kind of problem with him now...)

Quote of the Day (Holly Brubach, on the Virgin Mary, “A Minor Character in the Bible”)

“The dogma that has grown up around Mary will come as a surprise to anyone outside the Catholic church, even — or particularly — to those already familiar with the New Testament, in which she makes scant appearances and speaks no more than a few lines. (Full disclosure: I was raised Presbyterian.) How did such a minor character in the Bible come to be so omnipresent? How did a mere human get promoted to the realm of divinity, where she lobbies Jesus on our behalf while he in turn pleads our cause with God the Father? How many intermediaries do we need? If all creation were a corporation, the layers of middle management would seem to indicate that the chief executive is aloof and disengaged, sequestered in a penthouse office or spending afternoons on the golf course."—Holly Brubach, “Immaculate Perception: Exploring the Cult of the Virgin Mary,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, December 5, 2010

The “Immaculate Perception” essay by Brubach, formerly Style editor of The New York Times, was published in the heart of the Christmas season, and only a few days before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It draws heavily on two books taking dramatically different views of the mother of Jesus: Marina Warner’s Alone of Her Sex and Judith Dupre’s Full of Grace. Yet if there were any justice in the world, Brubach makes clear, the former rather than the latter would be on every bookshelf.

Brubach doesn’t waste any time telegraphing her viewpoint, leading off: “At a time when the weight of scientific evidence would seem to call into question the Bible’s account of history and the God who set it in motion, the Virgin Mary enjoys a kind of free pass.” Question: From whom?

Later, she contrasts “fact-based” with “faith-based.” It doesn’t take too long to conclude that Brubach feels she has ventured into what she regards as Bizarro-World.

But “Bizarro-World” is likely to be the first phrase that enters the mind of those moderate-to-liberal Catholics who don’t mind sitting in the back of the Times church of secular, “reality-based” news, news analysis and opinion (shading into each other more often than the newspaper would care to admit) but who won’t sing from its quizzical hymn book concerning matters of religion. After all, how are they otherwise to account for the Gray Lady’s decision to publish Brubach’s piece in T, its style magazine?

Style? Did I miss something? Aren’t there more logical places for pieces like this? The paper’s Saturday column on religion? An op-ed piece? The Book Review? Why place it among articles on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Chloe Sevigny, Mick Jagger, or the Kardashian-Jenner clan?

Oh, wait—T has another piece, by one Suzy Menkes, considering nuns as “fashion inspirations” for Parisian and Milanese designers.

If you ask me, the editorial judgment of the masterminds at T is more preposterous than any belief in the Immaculate Conception.

Because, really, even aside from the patently ridiculous decision to place Brubach’s pouting pensees in this sort of editorial vehicle, there’s a more fundamental question: Is she (and/or her Times editors) even functionally literate about her assigned subject? Three points bring this into question:

1) The title of the piece is, of course, a pun, but its use—and Brubach’s constant references to “the virgin birth”—raise the question: Does she even understand what “immaculate conception” means? The constantly juxtaposed references to “immaculate conception” and “virgin birth” suggest that, her clucks of approval about the “feminist” and “scholarly” Marina Warner book to the contrary, she has collated the two very different ideas. (For an explanation of the “Immaculate Conception,” click here.)

2) Bruback states that Mary has entered “the realm of divinity,” but Catholics claim no such thing.

3) Brubach claims that Mary is a “minor character” in the New Testament. Has she ever read the Gospel of Matthew or, especially, Luke? Has she ever measured the amount of space given to her instead of St. Joseph?

Quick, now: do you recall the Times taking on after Yom Kippur, Ramadan or Kwanzaa on the eve of these religious occasions? Neither can I.

Brubach and the Times could have taken another, more objective tack in this piece, one typified by the new “Sacred Journeys” special issue of National Geographic (the issue with an image of Mary on the cover).

They could have considered why Protestant-raised Kathleen Norris came to consider the mother of Jesus a force for female empowerment in works like Meditations on Mary. They could have asked why the convention-flouting 19th-century feminist icon Margaret Fuller came to feel likewise before the end of her tragically short life. They could have speculated about the meaning for our time in a poor peasant woman challenging the power of the greatest empire of her day by accepting the puzzling birth of her child.

But no. In the cult of Mary, we learn, “A woman’s right to her own sexual pleasure has no place here.”

Some may wonder why New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan hasn’t mounted the pulpit at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to denounce the article and the Times. Simple: the whole thing is so ignorant and hilariously predictable that it will be as ephemeral as the Kardashians exalted in the same issue of T in which Mary is debunked.

You can call Brubach a 21st-century feminist, but she is still serving up the same old prejudice--the charge by mid-century author Paul Blanshard equating Catholicism with the Kremlin--that’s become practically an article of faith at the Times.

Once again, the Newspaper of Record finds itself coping with the same phenomenon noticed by its first (and best) “public editor,” Daniel Okrent, who noted several years ago: “If you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”

Yes, Bizarro-World.

Song Lyric of the Day (“Nine,” With Words for Mrs. Woods to Fling at Tiger)

“You grabbed for everything, my friend
But don't you see that in the end
There will be nothing left of me.”—“Take It All,” from the musical Nine, lyrics and music by Maury Weston, sung in the film by philandering director Guido’s wife Luisa (played by Marion Cotillard)

Over the last month, following his overnight SUV crash outside his home—and his admitted marital “transgressions”—many labels are being applied to Tiger Woods that had never occurred to anybody before this year, notably “lecher,” “cad,” and “dog.”

At minimum, the world’s greatest golfer has fallen to “the Hugh Grant syndrome” (i.e., tomcatting around with an inferior woman when his significant other, by universal agreement, is nothing to sneeze at). He might even be a sex addict, as none other than Dr. Drew has speculated.

All in all, the angry response of Luisa above to her husband’s adultery applies nicely here. No matter how much money Tiger makes on the tour now, the departure of his wife and children will leave him spiritually empty. Tiger, who goes crazy on the links when he hears the slightest interruption, is going to have to get used to some of the most ferocious insults ever to come an athlete’s way.

But it takes flights of fancy, hours of free-association on the psychiatrist’s couch—okay, lunacy—to liken the golfer to Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay in epitomizing this past decade’s hucksterism. For that, we have none other than New York Times columnist Frank Rich to thank. Surprise, surprise!

I am mildly amused by media outlets that add political and public-affairs coverage to the portfolio of staffers whose education and prior job experience have prepared them for everything but that: the likes of Mike Lupica, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh. Sure, the magic of the Internet has allowed anyone, no matter how limited their expertise, to comment on anything under the sun, and yes, this is, as they say, a free country. It’s just that you’d expect major organs of the mainstream media, when they’re under severe financial pressure, to think twice about throwing their money around so haphazardly.

Yet the Times has seen fit to give a large portion of its op-ed page to Rich, who had been previously known as a theater critic--perhaps believing, like James Carville, that politics is merely show business for ugly people.

I agree with most of the commentary related to Woods’ philandering. Wife Elin Nordegren (in the accompanying post) is certainly entitled to unleash her attorneys on her horndog hubby in divorce court (though first, given just how much he’s fooled around, she’ll probably want to go to a doctor—and drag him along—to make sure he hasn’t contracted a sexually transmitted disease). I daresay that if she ever shot him, the best prosecutors in the land might find it difficult to gain a guilty verdict from any jury with women on it. (You can almost hear the song from another Rob Marshall movie musical, Chicago: “They Had It Coming.”)

But Rich has gotten himself into a serious moral lather over Woods’ affair(s). Such high dudgeon is a real head-scratcher for longtime readers of his column, as he previously only concerned himself with matters of the flesh when miscreants in its thrall were hypocrites (i.e., conservatives and/or Republicans).

The op-ed columnist has long been tolerated by the Times because he serves red meat to its largely liberal-leaning readers.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not on principle against roasting right-wingers myself (see this prior post on the GOP intransigence on health care). But unlike Rich, I like to vary my ideological diet. (Lunatics appear on both ends of the ideological fringe—and anyway, why unnecessarily narrow my targets or deprive myself of much-needed belly laughs, no matter their source?)

Moreover, if you’re going to wield the ideological cleaver, you’d better have your eye firmly on your quarry and not miss when you slash. Unfortunately, the former “Butcher of Broadway” doesn’t bring the same precision to this task as he did to dissecting high-priced musicals years ago.

All kinds of problems exist in this piece, starting with the tongue-in-cheek title, “Tiger Woods, Person of the Year.” (A play, of course, on Time Magazine’s venerable tradition.) David Quigg of the Huffington Post demolishes Rich’s argument until not a brick is standing, making the following points:

* In claiming that Tiger’s “con” might be “more typical of our time” than 9/11, Rich ignores the fact that the latter event is not “typical” (otherwise, why would the Times columnist be disputing the notion that it was “the day that changed everything”?). Like fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman (who suggested something similar in 2002), Rich is wedded to the bizarre and obscene notion that the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans are less crucial to an understanding of this past decade than business wrongdoing.

* Rich’s column assumes that Tiger became fabulously wealthy by being a family man. Nonsense—he did so, Quigg notes matter-of-factly and correctly, by being “really, really, really good at playing a game that lots of Americans spend lots of time, effort, and money striving to play even slightly well."

* Quigg has lots of fun with Rich’s superficial research into Accenture, one of Tiger’s corporate sponsors. The columnist merely quoted from the firm’s Web site when he could have found far more interesting facts on Wikipedia--a highly superficial (and sometimes suspect) source, for sure, but better than what he found. (I’ll go a step further: haven’t Rich and the Times editors heard of Nexis? And for all the effort the paper has made in securing research assistants for their columnists, couldn’t they at least have found one who found more material than a company Web site?)

For all his fine work in taking Rich down a peg or two, however, even Quigg missed some points. The main one is this: Tiger’s deceit, no matter how distasteful or despicable, was designed to fool one person only: his wife. Lay, Madoff, and their ilk concocted schemes to delude government regulators and fleece thousands of investors, many of whom lost their life savings. Tiger revealed nothing more than his own emotional bankruptcy; the financial scammers made millions of dollars disappear like smoke.

Let’s look at other figures—members of both political parties--who have committed marital transgressions. We’ll then judge if Tiger was guilty of the same kind of moral (or legal) outrageousness:

* Governor Mark Sanford went incommunicado for a South American jaunt to his "soul mate," leaving aides totally confused about how to reach him in case of an emergency in South Carolina. Did Tiger? No.

* Former Presidential candidate John Edwards had an affair behind the back of a wife who had just experienced a cancer scare. Did Tiger? No.

* Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told his wife—still in the hospital recovering from a cancer operation, mind you—that he was leaving her for another woman. Did Tiger? No.

* Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy tried to appoint his male lover--a man with minimal, if any, qualifications--to the highest national-security post in the state after 9/11. When the news broke, he told his wife Dina that at the mortifying press conference they were about to endure, she'd have to put on a stoic face, "like Jackie Kennedy." Did Tiger? No.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger, while still a movie star, became what Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau termed “the Gropenator” by fondling underlings on film sets, enjoying the fact that Hollywood’s #1 box-office draw of the time could get anyone fired who objected. Did Tiger do this? No.

* Eliot Spitzer, only months after signing into law some of the nation’s most stringent penalties against johns, himself patronized high-priced call girls. Did Tiger do so while governing a state? No.

* Nev. Senator John Ensign not only had an affair with the wife of an aide, but had his parents pay off the aide and violated lobbying laws by meeting with the cuckolded employee’s new clients. Did Tiger do this? No.

* Bill Clinton hit on an employee while he was in the White House. Has Tiger hit on an employee? No.

* Senator Edward Kennedy had a young woman die in his car when it drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick. Has Tiger had anyone die under such unusual circumstances? No.

It takes a mind such as Rich’s—i.e., one used to cheap moral equivalence—to equate Woods’ real, repeated sins against his wife with the gigantic wrongdoing that ruined philanthropic activities supported by Madoff, let alone the violations of public and/or private trusts represented by the above figures.

The only action that Woods could have perpetrated that might have begun to rise to the level suggested by Rich would be if the golfer used steroids. That would have involved cheating everyone competing with him on the tour, as well as all the professional golfers who preceded him whose records would have fallen by the wayside as a result. And even that would not have the sheer ripple effect created by fraud in a huge public company. And so far, nobody has come forward to accuse him of such use.

Tiger can be blamed for much, but—unless he decides to press charges against his estranged wife for assaulting him (which doesn’t look likely at this juncture)—his wrongdoing involves nothing more than the problems of two people in (or out) of love. His infidelities do nothing to rob Rich, you, me, or anyone else of our hard-earned money. To claim otherwise makes a travesty of a newspaper that has long claimed to stand for the finest in American journalism.

Like Nine's Guido, Tiger has tried to take it all, but now he's paying the price. Frank Rich has tried to claim it all, and continued columns like this will make him pay a price, too: becoming the laughingstock of the Paper of Record's op-ed pages.