The Mad Bomber of New York (41 page)

On June 19, 1972, Engel appeared before Justice Beatrice Judge in a closed Brooklyn courtroom accompanied by a newly invigorated and vibrant-looking George Metesky. In an eloquent appeal designed to free his client from the dismal confines of Matteawan, Engel produced evidence of a competent and intelligent man, plainly capable of conferring with his lawyer and assisting in his defense. Though considerate of the attorney's presentation, the counter-testimony of Matteawan's psychiatrists as to their daily observations of Metesky's behavior was, in the end, overwhelmingly persuasive. Like so many other jurists in her position, Justice Judge once again concluded that Metesky was, indeed, a dangerous incapacitated person, and she recommitted him to the custody of the Department of Correction. Visibly disappointed by the ruling, Metesky cast his eyes downward as he was led out of the courtroom to the awaiting van bound again for Matteawan.

Two weeks later, Engel filed a motion with the court seeking the jury trial that had been promised by the groundbreaking federal court decision in his client's favor. In the legal brief filed with the motion, Engel eloquently wrote, “The defendant, George P. Metesky, who is presumed innocent under our laws although under indictment, has languished in a correctional institution for the mentally insane for the past 15½ years and his constitutional rights should be treated with extreme caution.” The Kings County judge agreed. A jury trial on the issue of whether George Metesky was dangerous as defined by the law was finally ordered, and on January 25, 1973, Metesky was once again transported to Kings County Hospital for further proceedings.

He would never return to Matteawan State Hospital.

On May 29, 1973, the United States Supreme Court unanimously and summarily affirmed the decision of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York in favor of George Metesky and his fellow plaintiffs. Adopting the lower court's opinion in its entirety, the Supreme Court had confirmed that without an adjudication of “dangerousness” by a jury of his peers, an individual indicted on a felony charge but untried because of incompetence to stand trial may not be held in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Though noticed by few at the time, the decision would have far-reaching and broad application throughout the country, and would affect nearly five hundred patients in the New York penal system and countless others in various states. In hailing the court's decision, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, Alan D. Miller, said, “The emphasis should be on programs that treat people in treatment-oriented hospitals, and not in treatment-correctional facilities.”

Across New York and beyond, individuals accused of crimes who had been adjudged too mentally ill to stand trial and thus committed to mental facilities managed by state correctional agencies found themselves transferred to kinder and gentler civil institutions and were suddenly offered hearings on their level of dangerousness—the first step on the journey to freedom.

The long road traveled by George Metesky had led him to the highest court in the land, and the injustices that he had so long and bitterly railed against had been addressed. For all the wrongs he had committed and the chaos he had wrought, the Mad Bomber had finally made a difference.

It was clear by now that seventy-year-old George Metesky would never be declared dangerous by a New York jury. Recognizing this reality, the Kings County district attorney stipulated with Irving Engel that the defendant may be moved to Creedmore State Hospital in Queens Village, New York, a civil institution operated by the Department of Mental Hygiene. Though, as stated by the federal courts, the next step in the process would have been a hearing on the thorny question of competence and capacity, such a hearing would, ironically, not be provided to Metesky. In the end, the law that he had fought so hard to change would never be applied to him. He wouldn't need it.

In 1972, as part of a sweeping set of reforms, the New York State Legislature enacted a provision of the penal statutes mandating that no untried criminally insane person could be held in an institution for a period exceeding two-thirds of the maximum term for the highest class felony charged in the original indictment. In the case of George Metesky the highest class of felony charged was attempted murder in the first degree—an offense that carried a maximum of twenty-five years. The two-thirds calculation imposed by the new law reduced Metesky's potential sentence to sixteen years and eight months—a term that would expire on September 21, 1973. In finding that the new statute had specific applicability to Metesky's case, Judge Hyman Barshay of the New York Supreme Court in Kings County wrote, “No longer is the key ‘thrown away' when a mentally ill person is confined by an order of commitment which in the past has resulted in . . . [a] life [term] . . .”

On December 10, 1973, George Metesky stood before a New York judge for the final time, in a highly publicized, media-covered bid to gain his freedom. Notwithstanding the expiration of his sentence as determined by the new law, it had taken several months for the multiple charges in both counties to reach dismissal, but now, after nearly seventeen years, his long legal road appeared to be at an end.

“Sixteen years ago, you caused a great deal of turmoil in this city,” began Judge Joseph Martinis.

The silver-haired Metesky silently bowed his head tensely, clutching a gray fedora close to his breast. His hopes had been dashed by many judges, and though his lawyer had told him that his long fight was finally over, a part of him could not help but worry.

“I remember it well,” the judge continued. “Many of us had sleepless nights because of the terror you were causing. I expect there'll be no repetition.”

Metesky looked up and gave his word.

Several days later he boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Waterbury, Connecticut. Sitting alone, he peered through the rain-streaked window, struggling to recall landmarks that he had passed so many times in earlier days. As the bus rumbled toward the city of his birth, the familiar sights of home began to fill his senses and he sighed with whimsical thoughts of what might have been. Perhaps, he wondered, things would have been better had he just let matters pass.

By the time he knocked on the door of his boyhood home, darkness had fallen on the sullen streets of Waterbury. The porch light switched on, and there in the yellow luminescence stood Mae, now frail and ailing. Anna had passed away many years earlier, and he was eager to care for his only sister. She smiled weakly and said simply, “Hello George.”

He hoisted his travel bag over the threshold and surveyed the familiar surroundings with eager and longing eyes. As the porch light flickered off George Metesky warily removed his overcoat. Beneath was a double breasted suit—neatly buttoned.

That night, as long-suffering New Yorkers locked their doors before turning in, they nervously secured the latch and checked on the children one last time for good measure.

EPILOGUE

A
S
G
EORGE
M
ETESKY LANGUISHED ON THE WARDS OF
M
ATTEAWAN
S
TATE
Hospital in the late 1960s, outside a counterculture generation had begun to emerge that searched for identity as well as inscrutability. Recognizing neither bureaucratic management nor formal affiliation, elusive and radically minded bands such as Abbie Hoffman's Youth International Party—or the Yippies, as they were called—and the Diggers of Haight-Ashbury preached a message steeped in defiant attitudes and revolutionary methods.

Amid this rebellious turmoil and cultural divide, the
idea
of George Metesky had begun to take on an air of cult-hero intrigue. Attracted by his populist message of one man against the entrenched and evil corporate Goliath, many in the movement adopted Metesky as their symbolic champion and figurehead leader, and before long they were discarding their given names and assuming his in a collective cloak of anonymity. “He epitomizes the futility of joining or fighting the system,” observed one member of the Diggers. “We're all Meteskys. We're a generation of schizophrenic mutants.”

Perhaps attracted more to Metesky's perceived expertise in media manipulation than as revolutionary commander, Abbie Hoffman began adopting the name “George Metesky” as a public front to his various theatrics. In August 1967, Hoffman organized a planned demonstration at the New York Stock Exchange, where he and a group of others threw fistfuls of dollar bills to the trading room floor in an effort to disrupt the flow of business and to make comment on the futility of capitalism. When apprehended and cited for the act, Hoffman and each of his accomplices identified themselves as George Metesky, to the puzzlement of police and exchange security. Hoffman would author several “how to live free in New York” handbooks and one,
Fuck the System
, was even published under the Metesky pseudonym. It wasn't until 1971, when Hoffman's
Steal This Book
came out with very similar style and content, that conjecture over the authorship of the first booklet was settled.

Abbie Hoffman attempted to make contact with Metesky at Matteawan at various times in the late 1960s in an effort to identify with and take up the cause of mental health abuses. Conservative in his political views and sharing nothing in common with Hoffman's leftist antics, Metesky wanted no part of the man and rebuffed his attempts at communication. “He was known as the Eisenhower of psychotics,” said attorney Franklyn Engel, who worked on the Metesky case with his father, Irving Engel. Metesky's traditional beliefs could not have been more diametrically opposed to those of Hoffman's, and the possibility of either successfully working with the other was remote.

By the end of the turbulent 1960s, a more violent form of unrest began to sweep through American cities. Fueled by a simmering and desperate anger directed at the entrenched power structures of the nation, a series of militant, neo-anarchist organizations began to surface, and violence soon erupted. Advocating armed rebellion, urban guerrilla organizations such as the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and other radical groups bent on violence terrorized the nation with a rash of bombings that heavily damaged buildings and other property and caused multiple deaths and scores of injuries. Though it was posited by a New York psychiatrist, David Abrahamsen, who had at one time examined George Metesky, that while the fundamental grievance of those engaged in the violent bombings of the 1960s and 1970s may not have been psychotically driven, the perpetrators nonetheless bore a generalized grudge directed at society as a whole. Radical violence, according to Abrahamsen, was an expression of “the most violent and primitive emotion—revenge; here, revenge against society.”