By Steven Kurutz, The New York Times
IN the early 1970’s, a young officer named Richard Buggy held one of the stranger and more harrowing positions in the New York Police Department. Five days a week, working a 6 p.m.-to-2 a.m. shift for the department’s anticrime unit, he got mugged for a living.
The anticrime unit, based on Randalls Island, was a squad of 200 plainclothes officers created, in part, to stem the city’s then-endemic mugging problem, and Mr. Buggy was its star decoy. Transforming himself into a cast of assailable characters, including an old woman, a tourist, a blind man and - his showstopper - a well-lubricated drunk, he wandered the city’s avenues like a wounded gazelle roaming the high plains, enticing muggers to pounce.
And pounce they did. Once, at 14th Street and Third Avenue, disguised as a drunk, he was jumped by a mugger disguised as an old lady. Another time he was mugged near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, brushed himself off, and was promptly robbed by two men who had watched the first mugging. “It was so easy to get mugged in those days,” said Mr. Buggy, now retired and living in Middle Village, Queens. “I couldn’t stagger down the street and not have 10 muggers come after me.”
Though newcomers to the city or New Yorkers under a certain age will find it nearly impossible to believe in this era of single-digit crime statistics, mugging was once the central threat to public safety in New York, and muggers the great urban terrorists. During a 20-year period, from the mid-60’s through the mid-80’s, muggings occurred at epidemic levels in the decaying tenements of Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. But they also took place in genteel ZIP codes like the Upper East Side, considered prime turf because the streets were empty at night and criminals could slip into Spanish Harlem.
As vast parts of the city - Times Square, Central Park, Upper Broadway - became danger zones, normally intrepid New Yorkers reacted with paranoia and fear. Restaurant business fell off. Errands were made in the light of day. If people did venture out at night, they walked in the middle of the street so nobody could jump them from behind a building. Even children carried “mugger’s money,” and sharing mugging stories became fodder for dinner party conversation.
It was in the heart of this era that perhaps the definitive study of the crime, its perpetrators and its effect on the culture as a whole made its appearance. That work was “Jones: Portrait of a Mugger,” written by James Willwerth, a veteran Time magazine reporter, and published 30 years ago. Shadowing a mugger who “worked” the Lower East Side, the book offers a gripping street-level perspective.
Loosely defined, a mugging is a robbery that involves a physical assault. The mugger approaches the victim, usually from behind, and demands cash, generally to buy drugs, through either the overt or implied use of force. Indeed, the mugging boom coincided with the heroin epidemic and peaked during the era of crack cocaine.
Because mugging is not recorded as a separate crime (it falls under the broader umbrella of robbery), it is hard to pin down exactly how many muggings were committed in a given year. In 1968, however, to cite one example, the police in Manhattan alone received 16,200 reports of muggings, and many more were likely committed but never reported. Women and the elderly were particular targets, but muggers were never ones to discriminate. In 1974, even John F. Kennedy Jr. was mugged in Central Park, which by then had become an overgrown no man’s land.
FOR all the wallets and jewelry taken by muggers, perhaps the most damaging theft was of peace of mind. Mugging is an insidious crime, relatively benign on the surface but able to undermine a person’s sense of safety. “There was a tremendous fear,” said former Mayor Edward I. Koch, now a partner at Bryan Cave LLP, who himself was once threatened by a mugger in Washington Square Park. “People believed the city was out of control.”
They needed only to read the headlines to see their fears confirmed:
“Queens Man, 65, Murdered Near Home in $10 Mugging.”
“Yeshiva Students Arm for Muggers.”
“U.S. Marshals to Serve as Anti-Mugging Escorts.”