‘Chivalry has returned to New York,’ proclaimed the Observer on 15 July 1979, as it descended into the lawless New York subway underworld, accompanied by the Magnificent Thirteen Subway Patrol, AKA the Red Berets. The group had formed that February, in response to a violent crime wave. From an initial 13, they now numbered nearly 100 and their mission was to make New Yorkers feel safer. ‘They are in their late teens or early 20s, most of them have some training in the martial arts and all are as streetwise as alley cats.’
Working-class and from diverse ethnic backgrounds, most worked or studied during the day. Their leader was the charismatic Curtis ‘the Rock’ Sliwa, ‘a poor 23-year-old Polish-American who graduated in garbage collecting and street fighting’.
The Red Berets patrol ‘the worst routes, the least well-lit stations and the poorest, most violent neighbourhoods’. The Observer sensibly tagged along for the first 8pm to midnight shift when the police were still on duty. ‘When the cops go off at 2am it’s looneyville,’ explained Sliwa. But it proved uneventful and there’s a palpable frustration at the lack of action: barring an anticlimactic encounter with a drunk man at 8.40pm, and a giggling gang of girls asking for the Red Berets’ autographs, it’s mainly colourful descriptions of menacing stations (‘water drips, shadows tremble’) and recounting of previous skirmishes. ‘One of them, a giant, picks up Keith by the neck, strangling him. I kick him in the head – left my footprint on his face.’ For all that, Sliwa wanted to clarify the group were ‘not vigilantes. We’re out here to protect people, not lynch them.’
Clocking off at 12.34am without even a sniff of action, the journalist was nevertheless impressed. ‘The youngsters who do it are – there’s no other word for it – amazing.’
