The hit movie Joker was not just great cinema, it was often eerily familiar to those of us of a certain age. The film draws heavily on the milieu of late 70s and early 80s New York, when the pre-Giuliani city was a wasteland of crime and dereliction. Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are obviously referenced, but so is a very real-life drama which grabbed headlines for months in 1984.
In the late December of that year, an unassuming man on a New York subway shot four young black men. That man was Bernard Goetz, and his actions sparked a firestorm.
To the race-hustling left and the pearl-clutching media, Goetz was a vicious vigilante, a white supremacist, who needlessly gunned down four innocent, good boys who din’t do nuffin’. To many New Yorkers, though, Goetz was a hero.
Bernard Goetz was always adamant that he was a victim who was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore.
To understand Bernhard Goetz’s actions that day, one must go back several years before when he found himself being mugged for the first time.
In 1981, Goetz was attacked in the Canal Street subway station by three young men who he claimed were trying to rob him. They threw him through a plate glass door and onto the ground, permanently injuring his chest and knee. Despite his injuries, he was able to assist a police officer in arresting one of the men.
Unfortunately, the man was only charged with criminal mischief. Goetz was angered beyond belief, resentful of the fact that the others had gotten away, and the one who hadn’t barely received a slap on the wrist.
Jeez, he was angry? How unreasonable.
Goetz applied for a concealed carry permit, but was denied. So, he procured an unregistered Smith & Wesson .38. A couple of years later, he used it.
According to Goetz, on the afternoon of December 22, he entered a full subway car as it was pulling out of the 14th subway station. He entered through the rear of the car and took a seat on one of the benches.
At that point, he says, four black men accosted him. The men in question were Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrel Cabey and James Ramseur, all teenagers from the Bronx, who had been on the train when he entered.
Unsurprisingly, two of the muggers insisted that they were totally innocent, honest. They were just begging for cash. Ignore the fact that two of them were carrying screwdrivers, common mugger’s weapons. Or that another, Allen, chose to plead the Fifth Amendment rather than talk to police about what they were doing.
Also unsurprisingly, Goetz fled the scene immediately. After hiding out in states across New England for several days, he turned himself in to police.
Upon his arrest, Bernhard Goetz gave a two-hour videotaped interview with police. He described being mugged in the past and the events that lead to his surrender. He expressed wanting to shoot them again, and an insatiable need for revenge on those who had wronged him.
All That’s Interesting
Imagine being angry about being mugged again. Of course, liberal media were shocked, shocked, that any white person could feel anything but remorse and sympathy for the black criminals who attacked them. The media were even more horrified that New Yorkers rallied in support of the “white vigilante” and “racist madman”.
Today, Goetz still lives in the same apartment he did in 1984, and spends his days feeding squirrels.
And his “victims”?
James Ramseur went to jail for robbing, raping and sodomising a pregnant teenage girl, the year after he was shot by Goetz. It was the culmination of a long rap sheet. Ramseur died of an apparent suicide in 2011.
Barry Allen was jailed for violating his probation on a series of theft charges. He was later jailed again for robbing a diabetic woman of $54.
Troy Canty ended up in rehab for crack addiction. His last known criminal offence was shoplifting a home pregnancy test, in 1990.
Darrel Cabey went straight, at least: possibly because he was paralysed by the shooting. An outstanding armed robbery charge was dropped, due to the injuries he sustained in the shooting. He sued Goetz for $43 million, but Goetz declared bankruptcy and refused to pay.
All that’s left now is for Netflix to make a pseudo-documentary about four innocent young black men who were gunned down for no reason by a racist white madman.
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