The Mad Bomber of New York (2 page)

Then, as unaware New Yorkers made plans for an evening out on the town, he deftly funneled the fine, smokeless black powder from the cartridges of fifty .22-caliber long rifle bullets into the filling hole of the iron cap and reinserted the plug, completing the final step in the arming process.

The beads of sweat that had formed on his brow during this process in earlier years were missing on that December morning. To the contrary, he admired his workmanship, regretting only that no one would ever see it. By now the process had become rote to him. According to official police records, he had performed it no less than thirty-one times before; his own later estimates ranged closer to sixty. Yet his message, so clear, so right, so
just
, seemed lost on all but himself. Why were they not listening? When would justice prevail? This time, he pondered, would be different. This time they would be forced to reckon with him.

The Bomber wiped the “unit” (as he coldly referred to all of his bombs) clean of powder and fingerprints, placed it in what had become a signature red wool sock, and then he held it to one ear. Listening for the faint and soothing sound of the ticking Timex, he smiled with smug pride at the barely audible heartbeat emitting from his creation. He knew that later that evening the metal hands of the watch would make contact with the copper wires leading from the battery to the flashlight bulb, completing the lethal circuit and detonating the surrounding cache of powder.

The timing mechanism had been set for shortly before eight o'clock.

The sixty-mile drive from his home in Waterbury, Connecticut, to New York was well known to the Bomber. As he had done so many times in the past, he drove through the affluent suburbs of Westchester County and stopped in White Plains for a bite to eat at a local diner. On some occasions he had parked his Daimler outside of the city and traveled into Manhattan via the New York Central Railroad. Feeling uncomfortable as one of the only men on the midday train rides, however, he had elected on his more recent trips to park closer to the city and blend into the chaos of the New York subway system. On the afternoon of December 2, 1956, the Bomber drove straight into Brooklyn.

He had wrapped the wool sock that housed his device with a rubber band and attached a length of string. A few moments prior to the start of the movie, he entered the theater and found a seat toward the left rear of the orchestra section. As the opening credits of the film began to roll and the attention of each moviegoer was transfixed, he looked to his left and then to his right. With feigned nonchalance, he reached into the side pocket of his wool overcoat, and with eyes firmly affixed to the movie screen, grasped the string and gently lowered the device to the floor just behind seat 19 of row GG. With his foot, the Bomber carefully nudged the unit out of sight. Within twenty minutes, he had left the theater and was hurrying to his car.

The words of Tolstoy's voluminous classic leapt off the page and onto the silver screen with much the same fury as Napoleon's 1812 march into Russia. Though Henry Fonda himself had misgivings about his casting in the film,
War and Peace
was eagerly greeted by moviegoers and reviewers alike upon its release in August 1956. “There are sequences and moments of fire and beauty, and certainly the mighty spectacles of clashing armies and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow are pictorially impressive and exciting beyond words,” wrote one New York critic. In a “Technicolored panorama,” director King Vidor captured the fury of the Russian invasion— and the imagination of an engrossed American public with breathtaking scenes of battle that burst onto theater screens across the country. The film would later receive three Academy Award nominations, and by the end of 1956, nearly five months after its release,
War and Peace
was still drawing patrons into crowded movie houses.

Post–World War II America seemed to roar with a cultural vitality and social clamor. A young performer from Tupelo, Mississippi, stormed onto the national scene with his hit recording “Heartbreak Hotel,” and before long Elvis Aaron Presley would redefine music and canonize “rock and roll” as America's signature form of entertainment in the twentieth century. The new medium of television, with broadcasts such as the
Ed Sullivan Show
and
Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour
, would bring an endless variety of new musical acts, comedians, and drama directly into the living rooms of neatly aligned suburban tract homes. And development of an interstate highway system, the hallmark of the Eisenhower administration, would bring people and products together in a web of personal and cultural interconnectivity unseen prior to that time.

In the halcyon days of the American movie industry, however, a picture show often provided a singular respite from the rigors of life during the Depression. The Paramount Theatre arose in an era when competitive movie houses were owned by and often took the name of their founding production companies. The construction of the Paramount and several other rococo or Renaissance theaters, with their splendorous arrays of architecture, stole the show from the movies themselves and represented an early local foray into the entertainment business. They would become Brooklyn's theater district.

Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, the Paramount was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Rapp and Rapp, specialists in the creation of the so-called atmospheric theater. With an ornately decorated sixty-foot satin-embroidered stage curtain and 4,400 seats adorned in burgundy velvet, the Paramount at its 1928 opening was Brooklyn's largest and perhaps most opulent theater, and the second largest in New York City. According to the
New York Times,
the Paramount was fashioned along “the plans of an outdoor moonlit Italian garden.” Nearly $3 million worth of elaborate sculpture, paintings, and tapestries together with domed and frescoed ceilings provided “scenic effects . . . not confined to the stage but made to envelop the audience by carrying a scenic architectural treatment completely around the auditorium.” The rather drab exterior façade of the eleven-story office building to which the Paramount Theatre was appended was strikingly enlivened by the placement of a neon-powered sign that stretched nearly four stories in height above the roof. The massive glowing letters,

PARAMOUNT THEATRE

implored the bustling populace of Brooklyn, New York, to come and enjoy.

Though the Paramount was considered by some to be the area's “most famous movie place,” the theater was by no means limited to film presentations. Behind the opulent décor lay a very practical and financial motivation for the owners, who demanded a diverse use of the property to help defray the ever expanding cost per seat. In its early days, frequent guests included musical performers such as Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman, and in the mid-1950s Alan Freed's renowned rock and roll shows introduced acts such as Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. Through the years, the Paramount would play host to other marquee names, including Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, Bobby Rydell, Neil Sedaka, the Drifters, and many others, earning the theater the reputation as one of America's premier rock and roll venues.

With no warning of the distressing events that would follow, cheery moviegoers braved the cold northeastern winter winds and began lining up outside of the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre for the evening show. Nearly 1,500 New Yorkers, warmed with pre-holiday cheer, clamored with eagerness over that night's screening of
War and Peace.
As Horatio Tedesco, the theater's assistant manager, greeted patrons, he couldn't help but compare the refined makeup of the gathering to the raucous throngs attending the recent musical performances. He was grateful for the easy cleanup and closing that would follow.

It was sure to be another uneventful evening at the Paramount.

Horatio Tedesco heard the explosion and the muffled sounds of a commotion coming from the crowd. Rushing into the auditorium and scanning the escalating panic, he mustered his most authoritative voice and announced that a “firecracker” had exploded and that everyone should remain calm. He then summoned the police and rounded up several ushers to assist the injured through the lobby and into his private office. Ambulances from Cumberland Hospital joined officers from the 84th squad of the New York City Police Department in response to the call. As the injured were removed and order was restored, investigators from the mobile crime laboratory, under the direction of Captain Howard E. Finney, and detectives from the New York City Bomb Squad took over the scene. They conducted a row-by-row search of the theater and roped off a section of about twenty rows closest to where the explosion had taken place in an effort to gather evidence. Through the years the detectives had investigated many of the other bombings that had plagued the city, and it took them little time to pinpoint the usual markings of their elusive suspect. Soon after, Kings County district attorney Edward Silver huddled with police detectives and pronounced to the gathering of newspaper reporters that “old screwball” had struck again. The citizens of New York knew him better as the “Mad Bomber.”

As Doris Russo fought for her life following surgery to relieve the pressure that had developed from a depressed fracture of the skull, the Bomber watched and waited. Would the world finally stand up and take notice of his plight? Would the “dastardly deeds” of his enemies be redressed? Would he finally make them pay?

On no less than thirty-two separate occasions, he had slid into his automobile, his jacket pocket bulging with iron and gunpowder, and traveled from Waterbury to New York City with a deluded rage and nefarious intent. For sixteen years, he had imperiled unsuspecting New Yorkers, placing his insidious units in locations all over the city, without so much as a sniff of suspicion from family members or an inquisitive glance from frustrated police departments. For sixteen years, the man who could “easily pass as a person who could be your next-door neighbor” had evaded investigators, detectives, patrolmen, and citizens alike from Connecticut to New York, avoiding the killing of innocents only “through some quirk of fate.” He had planted his bombs among women, children, workers, and patrons, and he had solemnly pledged to continue until he was either apprehended or dead. He bore no lofty social goals or political objectives. He harbored no broad civic message or popular agenda. He espoused neither government overthrow nor violent rebellion. He sought no extorted money and gained no pleasure from indiscriminate injury. The Mad Bomber simply held a grudge—a grudge that was relentlessly fueled by a simmering madness.