The Mad Bomber of New York (13 page)

With city newspapers maintaining a foreboding (though often inaccurate) count of the Bomber's sorties, the police department was forced to divert extraordinary resources to the case. Time, money, and manpower typically expended in other crime-fighting or community endeavors was redirected to the investigation, and officers with little formal training in explosives became adjunct deputies of the city bomb squad. Following the second Radio City incident, extra details of detectives—fifty additional men in all—were assigned to covertly watch rail stations, bus terminals, and movie theaters, with special instructions to search for suspicious characters carrying packages of any kind. Crime lab technicians conducted detailed technical analyses of past unexploded devices as well as fragments from the ones that had exploded, and opinions and conclusions were taking shape as to the Bomber's motives, capabilities, and vocations. An exhaustive study of numerous samples of handwriting as well as reliable firsthand descriptions of the Bomber's voice (derived from the various advance warning calls that had been placed) provided a baseline source of comparison as well as clues into his background and even ethnicity. His routines and assumed habits had been examined and re-examined. Police detectives had, in short, become intimately familiar with the behaviors and persona of the Mad Bomber. As one commentator wrote of the police investigation, “You are dealing with a man who can be described in such detail that at times you feel he is sitting in the room with you, just across from you . . . The picture of him that has slowly been blocked in over the years almost comes alive before your eyes . . .”

Yet for all the police did know about him, the Bomber remained as elusive and faceless as he was on the first day of the investigation. Even the mundane tasks of simple police work frustrated detectives at every turn. The Bomber's assiduous selection of commonplace materials for use in his devices made tracking them virtually impossible, and, to the utter consternation of the bomb squad, rendered analysis utterly fruitless.

“I personally have taken the watch-timing mechanism from one of the bombs this clown has made to 75 stores around Times Square,” lamented Detective William Schmitt. “Every one stocked that watch.”

Investigating the possible origins of the bomb casings, squad Detective Joseph Rothengast remarked that he “once spent a solid day going to plumbing-supply stores. Every one stocked the kind of pipe I had. And every one looked at me as if I had holes in my head when I asked if there was any way to trace this particular piece.”

By the start of 1956, frustrated by the lack of any concrete leads in the case, police again found themselves chasing shadows. On February 21, a seventy-four-year-old porter named Lloyd Hill, who was working on the lower level of Penn Station, was informed by a young man that there was a clog in a toilet in the men's washroom. Shortly before four o'clock in the afternoon, as Hill applied a plunger to the obstruction, the fixture exploded, firing shards of metal and porcelain in every direction—and into Hill's head and legs. “The whole inside of the booth was wrecked. People were running in every direction, scared. So was I,” reported one witness. “The porter must have been seriously hurt. He was bleeding all over. I could see blood on his face, hands, arms and legs as police arrived.” Hill would recover from his injuries, but the thirty detectives investigating the explosion, led by Chief James Leggett, were dismayed to find threads of a familiar red wool sock, charred remains of a watch frame, and fragments of an iron pipe casing that had been carefully waterproofed with a paraffin coating among the rubble of the Penn Station washroom. The next day, newspapers reported that the FBI had joined city and railroad police in the search for the Mad Bomber.

In the coming years, Metesky would insist that he felt “sick” over the prospect of causing injuries, but in the same breath he blamed the police for failing to properly evacuate targeted areas after receiving prior warnings. In any event, he would continue, “I took an oath to keep on placing them until I was dead or caught.”

By the end of summer 1956, Metesky would strike an IRT subway train (by chance containing only three passengers), a telephone booth at Macy's in Herald Square, and the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. He would later admit to planting several other bombs in 1956 that apparently failed to detonate and were ultimately unaccounted for—including one in the Empire State Building—which, as far as anyone knows, could still be unceremoniously lodged into a little-noticed cranny of the 37 million cubic foot structure a half-century later. The RCA bomb, however, would immediately illustrate the untoward consequences and unpredictable results of Metesky's endeavors.

On the afternoon of August 4, a security guard at the RCA building had stumbled upon what he thought to be a harmless length of pipe that he thought could be put to good use. He gave the pipe to another guard, one William Kirwan, who, near the end of his shift, showed his prize to a third guard named Thomas Dorney, who was preparing for the 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. shift. As the two men talked, Kirwan playfully batted his palm with the end of the pipe and told Dorney that he could have it if he wanted. “You never know when a piece of pipe is going to come in handy,” said Dorney, accepting the gift. Dorney carried the pipe with him all that evening throughout his guard duties and during the bus ride home after work. Upon arriving at his house on Fifty-ninth Street, West New York, New Jersey, he removed from his pocket the length of pipe and a small card bearing a picture of Jesus that he got earlier in the day at a friend's funeral, placed both on the kitchen table, and went to bed.

At precisely 6:00 a.m. the Dorney family was awakened by what they described as a sound “like two cars coming together.” Rushing into the kitchen, Dorney, fighting the pungent smoke, witnessed what his wife would later describe as “a mess . . . like an atomic bomb hit it.” “I haven't been as religious as I ought to be before,” explained Dorney. “[B]ut I'm very religious now; that's a cinch.”

With each new incident, the police learned more and more about the Bomber—except for his identity. Their files brimmed with fascinating and for the most part disjointed and worthless pieces of information. As the winter of 1956 approached, the top brass of the department were forced to admit that their investigation was going nowhere. “His face remains a blank no matter how you try to visualize it,” wrote one reporter, summing up the mood of the police. “And this juxtaposition of feelings, knowing so much yet nothing at all, can suddenly give you the sensation, after hours and days of talking with detectives and thumbing through records, that you are walking down the streets crowded with gray and faceless men, looking for a man you wouldn't recognize.”

The New York police were not the only ones frustrated with the flow of information. With all the destructive energy George Metesky had brought to bear upon the greatest city in the world, his seething hatred of Con Ed had yet to be sated. The newspapers were printing the details of his bombings but had failed, in any meaningful way, to capture the purpose and significance of the campaign—to expose to the world the brutal actions of his mortal enemy and to exact, once and for all, his full measure of vengeance upon them. The frustration churned within like an ulcer.

. . . WHILE VICTIMS GET BLASTED—THE YELLOW PRESS MAKES NO MENTION OF THESE GHOULISH ACTS. THESE SAME GHOULS CALL ME A PSYCHOPATH— ANY FURTHER REFERENCE TO ME AS SUCH—OR THE LIKE—WILL BE DEALT WITH—WHERE EVER A WIRE RUNS—GAS OR STEAM FLOWS—FROM OR TO THE CON EDISON CO.—IS NOW A BOMB TARGET—SO FAR 54 BOMBS PLACED—4 TELEPHONE CALLS MADE. THESE BOMBINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL CON EDISON IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE—MY LIFE IS DEDICATED TO THIS TASK— EXPECT NO CALLS ABOUT BOMBS IN THEATERS AS YOUR ACTIONS—NO LONGER WARRANT THE EFFORT OR DIME—ALL MY SUFFERINGS—ALL MY FINANCIAL LOSS—WILL HAVE TO BE PAID IN FULL—IT MUST ALARM—ANGER AND ANNOY THE N.Y. YELLOW PRESS & AUTHORITIES TO FIND THAT ANY INDIVIDUAL CAN BE JUST AS MEAN—DIRTY AND ROTTEN AS THEY ARE. I MERELY SEEK JUSTICE.

F.P.

The editors of the
Herald Tribune
again delivered the letter to police brass and wondered, along with the rest of the city, what the Bomber's next move would be. Meanwhile, the evening showing of
War and Peace
was only hours away as George Metesky rolled down his driveway and headed for the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, New York.

VII
THE “TWELFTH STREET PROPHET”

T
HE MODESTLY APPOINTED TENTH-FLOOR APARTMENT IN
G
REENWICH
Village had become one part family home, one part psychiatric office, and one part bird sanctuary. Parakeets flying freely throughout the Twelfth Street high-rise could be seen fluttering before the thin face of the eccentric homeowner, stealing bite-size parcels of food strategically placed between his upper and lower front teeth—a position typically reserved for his smoldering pipe. A pencil-line mustache accented otherwise gaunt and wiry features that provided only a hint of the brusque and authoritative nature of the man within. “It is a comfortable enough face . . . ,” he would write in his memoir. “It is an ordinary human face, marked by the tracks of many years.” A New York columnist would describe Dr. James A. Brussel as simply, “Bow-tied, Mustachioed and Natty.”

From his office at one end of the apartment, family members on the other could hear him, on any given day, impatiently shouting at patients undergoing heartrending psychoanalysis. His more subdued moments were spent composing crossword puzzles for the
New York Times
and other syndicated newspapers across the country. His submissions were so frequent that he was often forced to present his puzzles under assumed or pen names. A prolific and incessant writer (in 1959 he boasted 250,000 words in a period of ten months), Brussel authored a variety of books on psychiatry and a full-length published novel titled
Just Murder, Darling
, in which the antagonist commits murder—and gets away with it. “[A] man has to be paranoid to turn out something like that,” he once said with a broad smile. “So I guess I am. I have a dirty, rotten, no-good mind and my wife and I laugh about it all the time.”

He was a product of the Roaring Twenties—collegiate culture, raccoon coats, the Charleston, fraternity pranks, and jazz. His brash and uninhibited talent for self-expression gave him an air of supreme confidence—and some would say downright arrogance. On one of many working vacations abroad with his family, a tour guide aboard a sightseeing bus pointed out a cement plant along a highway outside of Rome, and from the back of the bus came the sarcastic quip in a distinctive Damon Runyon–styled New York accent: “Is that where they make the bread?” His uninhibited mind could coin a phrase, in rapid-fire fashion, tailor made for any moment. “There is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that James A. Brussel, M.D. . . . really exists,” observed a friend. “He should be found only in fiction.”

A native-born New Yorker, James Brussel graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and performed his psychiatric residency in the early 1930s at Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood, New York. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for the army and, for a time, provided psychiatric services aboard the
Queen Mary
, which had been used during the war to transport troops and prisoners from the front. Later, he served as head of the army's neuropsychiatric service at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and as a psychiatrist at the military prison in Greenhaven, New York. During the Korean conflict, Brussel was once again called into military service as chief of the Neuropsychiatric Center in El Paso, Texas. As a civilian in the mid to late 1940s, he worked as assistant director of Willard State Hospital in New York's Seneca Lake region and as a criminological consultant, focusing his curiosities on the mind of the criminal offender as he had done in the military. Returning home to New York following Korea, Brussel was appointed director of the Division of New York City Services, and in June 1952 was named assistant commissioner of mental hygiene for the state of New York—a position he would hold, in addition to maintaining a flourishing private psychiatric practice, for the next twenty years.

Throughout his career, Brussel's extensive range of professional writing would distinguish the broad intellect and creative composition of the man. Though he focused some of his early authorship on military psychiatry, he developed an intriguing interest in the personality traits of the masters and published psychiatric studies of Dickens, Van Gogh, and Tchaikovsky (who he argued suffered from an unresolved Oedipus complex). In 1948, while working at Willard State Hospital, Brussel was awarded first and second prizes in a national contest of the American Physicians Literary Guild for his satirical operatic rendition of
Dr. Faust of Flatbush
and a short story titled “Café Au Lait.” Through his career, he would weigh in on subjects ranging from the practical aspects of geriatrics to the dangers and concerns of hypnosis, and would even later posit that cognac should be recognized as an acceptable treatment for a number of heart ailments. He would be called upon as a psychiatric adviser to the National Broadcasting Company and as an expert witness in a variety of criminal trials where competency or sanity was at issue.