Cashing In on the Case of the Subway Vigilante : Everything From a Book to ‘Thugbuster’ T-Shirts Tells Tale of Bernie Goetz

NEW YORK —  Depending on one’s perspective, he is either a saint or a sociopath. In either case, subway shooter Bernhard Goetz, by all accounts the most reluctant of celebrities, has vaulted from subject of instant controversy to object of overnight industry.

Even before the 37-year-old electronics specialist was indicted Jan. 25 on illegal-weapons charges, “Thugbuster” T-shirts bearing such inscriptions as “Acquit Bernhard Goetz” or “Goetz Four, Crooks Zero” were appearing in Manhattan specialty shops.

Act Inspired a Video

Actions and characters obviously inspired by the Dec. 22 incident in which Goetz shot four youths aboard a New York subway car soon popped up in the cartoon strips Doonesbury and Bloom County, and, to a pulsing rock rhythm, a new music videotape, “The Subway Vigilante,” was quick to offer these lyrical thoughts:

He’s the subway vigilante, he’s tired of being had. Don’t bother with him, brother, he’ll get you if you’re bad.

“Stunned” that “anyone would want to buy a T-shirt with his name or a representation of him upon it,” Goetz, said his lawyer, Joseph Kelner, has been “bombarded by your movie producers,” as well as writers, magazines and television shows. “I can show you a sheaf of letters this thick,” Kelner said at a press conference, holding up a right hand with thumb and forefinger a good inch apart, “from the top television shows and magazines, begging for interviews.”

Goetz has so far made “not a dollar” from the commercialization of his name, Kelner said, adding that Goetz pays his own carfare, refusing even to take transportation money from a defense fund set up by Goetz supporters to cover the legal costs he has incurred to date and is expected to face in further litigation. (One of the youths has filed a $50-million lawsuit against Goetz.) “Mr. Goetz won’t even take $10 out of it for taxi fare,” Kelner said.

As for books, Kelner said that yes, his client had issued a “blanket order” to refuse all offers. Still, Kelner said Goetz had received “a lot” of inquiries on the subject. “I wouldn’t care to estimate,” Kelner said when asked exactly how many book offers had come to Goetz. “A substantial number.”

Meanwhile, in a hotel in downtown Toronto last month, awash in a sea of news clips from around the globe, a 38-year-old advertising copyrighter and first-time author named Alvin Frost was charged with the duty of cranking out the first “instant-book” on the subject of Bernhard Goetz. “One hundred and twenty-eight skimpy little pages,” as its publisher, Bill Katz, described the book, “Bernhard Goetz: Vigilante or Victim?” was completed just six hours after Goetz’s indictment. Within a week, nearly a million copies of the $3.95 paperback volume were flooding bookstores from Manhattan to Melbourne.

Bizarre Sales Situation

“This thing is selling in a really strange and bizarre manner,” Katz said. “Those people who have it on sale can’t keep it in stock and others won’t take it, because they say it’s an instant, exploitative volume.

“I had an order from England on Tuesday. We’ve had orders from Hawaii, where I’d say the biggest problem with the subway is finding it. We got a call from the University of Chicago, wanting 100 books for use in their criminology courses or something. We’ve had calls from Tulsa. Why is a guy in Tulsa buying my book? Why would some cowboy in Montana buy my book?”

Seemingly mystified by the publishing tempest he has unleashed, Katz, head of the Toronto-based Little Ones Books, is more at home publishing religiously oriented children’s books. His largest selling book to date, for example, was a workbook with parables from the Bible called “How to Protect Your Child From Sexual Abuse.”

But then Katz got a New Year’s Eve call from a friend.

“Happy New Year,” the friend, “a newsguy, a reporter-type person,” told Katz. “I’m going to Concord, N.H.”

“That’s nice,” Katz said he responded. “Why am I supposed to care?”

“Because they captured the subway vigilante.”

Katz and his friend bantered briefly about the idea of a book on Goetz, with Katz’s friend urging Katz to publish it. “Go ahead, big mouth,” is how Katz remembers his friend issuing the challenge, “and in the mood of New Year’s Eve, the gauntlet was laid down.”

While the idea “bubbled,” Katz began looking for a writer willing to work under what Katz admitted were “ridiculous” parameters. “There isn’t exactly a cadre of guys who sit around and do nothing but quickie books,” Katz said. “It’s not like you can go to the library and read the Harvard Law Review treatise on how to write a quickie book. If you could find 10 in the last decade, you’d probably be hitting them all.”

An Immediate Effort

Finally, Katz found Frost, located a willing illustrator, hired “a bunch of” researchers and engaged a distributor. The date was Jan. 22, and Katz heard himself calmly making a commitment to ship his book by Feb. 1.

Frost received no advance for his efforts. “We locked him in a hotel room,” Katz said, “threw him raw meat every few hours and told him that if he was a good boy and kept typing, we’d let him out.”

Then again, Katz said, “who knows, he may own an island in the South Pacific by the end of the week.”

From the start, Katz said, “this whole deal was put together on speculation.”

Katz would not say exactly how much Little Ones Press had invested in its first non-religious, non-children’s book, not to mention its first overnight printing of a million copies, “but it’s fair to say we’re into this deal for a low six figures.” But as Katz also pointed out, “All I can tell you is if you put Bernie Goetz’s name on a T-shirt, it sells. It’s a legitimate phenomenon. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about newspapers or hard-covers or paperbacks. If the public wants to read it, they’re going to read it. And we’re selling thousands of copies a day.”

Not that Katz pretends that “Vigilante or Victim?” is in any way the definitive version of the Bernhard Goetz story. “I don’t want you to think you’re getting ‘War and Peace’ or the story of the Third Reich,” Katz said. “It’s 32 days in the life of a man and a city. We call it a commuter-type book. If you buy it in the morning, you can read it on the train going home.”

Even as his own book was being crated for shipping, Katz was hearing persistent rumors of a second “quickie” Goetz book. Dell, the publishing house most commonly connected with those rumors, denies that any such project was or is in the works.

With the cover of the current New York magazine trumpeting a piece by writer Myra Friedman called “My Neighbor, Bernie Goetz,” New York literary agent Jay Acton said late Tuesday afternoon that he had already received

Kelner on Goetz: ‘He doesn’t want to be known as a hero on any scale.’

“an offer of six figures” for an “extended version” of the article to be told in book form. Acton would not name the publisher that made the offer, but predicted that Friedman’s book would offer “a sense of texture” about Goetz and a neighborhood Acton compared to “the DMZ.” As Goetz’s neighbor, Acton said that Friedman, author of a 1973 biography of Janis Joplin called “Buried Alive,” “has information that other people don’t have. I mean, she knows the guy.”

And at last sighting, Katz’s own writer, Alvin Frost, was on his way to Hollywood, reportedly to discuss the possibility of a Goetz television movie.

Already, Katz said, there has been talk of updating his book as the case progresses. Katz said he is taking such possibilities under advisement, just as he is merely musing on charges that he has bought into the exploitation market.

“Look, we did not have Bernie eating a baby wrapped in a flag while riding the subway,” Katz said. “What it is is a fast production of a story that people wanted to hear.”

‘The Goetz Syndrome’

Later, Katz suggested, “the psychologists and the sociologists are going to tell the story of the Goetz syndrome.” Indeed, at Avon Books, Executive Editor Roger Straus wasted not a minute in enlisting Berkeley, Calif., psychologist-sociologist Lillian Rubin to undertake just such an analytical approach to the Goetz story.

Like Katz, Straus put his publishing wheels in motion that fateful New Year’s weekend. “When he surrendered in Concord, when I read all that stuff, I thought, my God,” Straus said, “this is a much bigger story.” Straus called Rubin the following day, “and she flipped instantly, so here we go.”

Still untitled, Rubin’s book is not expected to be delivered before the fall.

“The whole thing has just utterly fascinated me from the beginning,” Rubin said, “not so much because of what Goetz did as because of the public response to it. The sense of rage and fear that I think we have always known was out there was really brought together in some very powerful way by Bernhard Goetz’s actions.

“What’s fascinating me about it,” Rubin continued, “is that there are no good guys, and yet it demands our understanding in some reasonable way.”

In a time “when people, especially urban people, have lost their sense of efficacy in the world,” Rubin said, “with four shots, and for a moment, Bernhard Goetz gave them that sense back. What they don’t know is that it’s only for a moment, that it’s illusory.”

A Search for Meaning

Aiming for “an analytical, reasoned examination of the case,” Rubin said her book would “take a serious look not just at the incident, but at its meaning--how and why we got to this place in society.”

Rubin said she was uncertain as to whether she would be permitted to interview Goetz himself. But Kelner, Goetz’s lawyer, said that he and his client had agreed that Goetz would do no interviews until the resolution of his weapons case. After that, Kelner said, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

But Goetz, Kelner said, “is a man who doesn’t want adulation, who doesn’t want praise. He doesn’t want to be known as a hero on any scale.”

Goetz “is a man who abhors it when people say he should have a ticker-tape parade,” Kelner said.

“He has no desire for money,” Kelner said. “He is not accepting offers from anyone who has solicited his endorsement.”

Rather, Kelner said, Goetz “did what he did because he had to do it.”