Five Bullets

“[Williams is] good at giving the reader mini law-school lessons, clarifying for example the significant difference between motive and intent. He’s also Black and from Brooklyn and works in TV, which likely accounts for his well-tuned antennae for the overheated madness that was the 1980s New York City news environment. In those years, a miserable and extensive roster of racially inflected deaths, from the Central Park jogger and the Exonerated Five to so many more, dominated local news programs and the tabloids, especially Rupert Murdoch’s Post. Five Bullets is a brisk journalistic trip through that history.” —Curbed

“Five Bullets, by the CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, is a carefully wrought account . . . Williams closes with an interview with Goetz, who is allowed to emerge, if not exactly sympathetically, then at least as a three-dimensional figure.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“Five Bullets presents a deeply researched, richly detailed portrait of how a racially divided city came to excuse potentially deadly white-on-Black violence.” —Columbia Magazine

“Outstanding account . . . Williams’s book is well written, deeply researched, and presents important questions about race, fear, media bias, and the purpose of criminal law.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A fast-paced tale of one of New York City’s defining moments unfolds in the 1984 subway shooting of four Black youths by Bernhard Goetz . . . Journalist and legal analyst Williams offers a vivid portrait of 1980s New York and the social and economic pressures that shaped the backdrop of the case. Through brisk, evocative prose, the author captures the complexities of a troubled city and the crime that mirrored its contradictions. He deftly weaves in the roles of figures such as Ed Koch, Rudolph Giuliani, Al Sharpton, and Rupert Murdoch in crafting the public narrative of the ‘Subway Vigilante’ . . . A lively and haunting account of five men linked by a shooting—echoing New York’s enduring tensions over fear and race.” —Kirkus

“CNN legal analyst Williams debuts with a thorough reassessment of the 1984 subway vigilante shooting, when white 37-year-old Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a New York City subway after one of the victims asked him for $5 . . . Williams explores how the central legal argument of the case—the ‘reasonableness’ of Goetz’s fear—still resonates today. It amounts to a sharp look at a touchstone moment in American conceptions of race, self-defense, and who “has a right to feel safe.” —Publishers Weekly

“Never has a book about the 1980s felt more like current events than Elliot Williams’s journey back to one of America’s most notorious shootings, when Bernie Goetz opened fire in a crowded New York City subway. Deeply researched and carefully crafted, Five Bullets is a haunting examination of our nation’s complicated fascination with vigilantes and the politics of crime—one that, given today’s headlines, will feel all too close to home.” —Garrett M. Graff, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist Watergate: A New History

“In his striking retelling of the story of Bernie Goetz, the so-called ‘Subway Vigilante,’ Elliot Williams manages to make sense of a complex and notorious case that transfixed and frightened an entire city. Even as he takes us back in time, Williams grounds us in the present, identifying all the hot button issues that are arguably just as hot or hotter today: race, violent crime, prosecutorial discretion, the right of self-defense, and media bias. Read this book to understand human nature and how shocking events can have a lasting impact on society even more than 40 years later.” —Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York

“Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets is a masterful telling of the characters, the currents, and the media madness surrounding the 1984 shooting by Bernhard Goetz of four young Black men in a New York City subway car. As a meditation on fear and fame, rubbernecking and vigilantism, it soars as a riveting piece of legal history, gorgeously told. But as a cheat code to the present moment, this headlong dive into the racial divisions, policing anxieties, and institutional mistrust that pervaded Manhattan in the mid-1980’s, perfectly presages our discourse and politics. Four decades later, we are all of us still on that train with Goetz and his gun, still trying to understand how much violence is necessary to make us feel safe.” —Dahlia Lithwick, New York Times bestselling author of Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Five Bullets illuminates how a few pivotal minutes in a New York City subway car would go on to expose America’s uneasy tensions around race, crime, fear, and justice. Elliot Williams asks who gets to be afraid in America, and who will be cast as the victim, the threat, and the hero. Brimming with new details about the case of the Subway Vigilante–and its decades-long impact on our country–and written with a delicate touch, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the media, politics, and public perception shape America’s justice system. More than forty years later, we’re still living the same headlines, and Williams masterfully holds a mirror up to America, urging us to recognize that in order to move towards the vision of America we hope to be, we must first confront who we still are.” —Van Jones, CNN host and founder, Dream Machine Innovation Lab

“Wow, what a ride back to New York in the 1980s, and the case that captivated the country! Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets is an amazing story, well told.” —Anderson Cooper

“Elliot Williams’s Five Bullets is a wise and sane guide to a great moment of 1980s madness – Bernie Goetz’s attack against (or is it defense against?) four Black teenagers in a New York City subway car. Williams weaves the personal, the political and the legal into a compelling and highly relevant story about the way we lived then and still live today.” —Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy