It was a Brooklyn crime. You know, half-baked, second best; the kind you might just forget, or worse, never even hear about. Manhattan is an island of headlines. Wall Street hustlers get carted off in handcuffs. A Muslim sheik stands trial for terror. Mafia men named Roco become quick studies on RICO. A jogger in Central Park gets raped.
The crimes of Brooklyn lie low, like its buildings, the stone clock tower on Hanson Place, the borough’s one skyscraper, overlooking Manhattan like granite with a grudge. It’s not that the crimes are all petty. Bad things do happen in Brooklyn. But there is a legal ranking to mischief. Not everything that is felonious is a felony. Murder, for instance, in the eyes of the law where justice is purportedly blind, is worse than attempted murder. Criminals, apparently, receive a break for failure. Society deems some crimes more odious than others. And our culture regards some crimes as simply more newsworthy.
And so in the public imagination, the crimes of Brooklyn are all misdemeanors, all bold face and tabloid, the Page 6 of no consequence, a New York City afterthought, always a river away from a bigger story.
But not a lesser moral lesson.
The New Year was young, still January, and a present arrived in the form of prejudice. 2003 announced itself in Brooklyn as some deranged New Year’s resolution.
Returning home from synagogue on Saturday, January 25, Max Birnbaum walked slowly, his usual speed, hand over wrist and behind his back, cufflinks as handcuffs, a prisoner only to himself. He was wearing a long charcoal gray winter coat and a...
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