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Five Bullets: A Book Talk with Elliot Williams

When Bernhard Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers in 1984, half of New York called him a hero. Elliot Williams explains how it happened during an evening conversation with Jonathan Capehart.

On December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz boarded a New York City subway car and opened fire on four Black teenagers from the Bronx — a moment that would divide a city, ignite a national debate, and expose the fault lines of American justice.

Join us for a community conversation around Five Bullets, the acclaimed new book by CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, Five Bullets takes readers back to a gritty, fear-gripped New York to reexamine the case of the so-called “Subway Vigilante” — and asks questions that feel as urgent now as they did forty years ago: Who gets to feel safe in America? Who is cast as the threat? And how do media, politics, and public perception shape what we call justice?

From the courtroom to the tabloids, from Al Sharpton to Rupert Murdoch, Williams traces how one act of violence became a referendum on race, self-defense, and the conscience of a nation — with echoes that reach from the 1980s straight to our present day.

Whether you’ve read the book or are coming with fresh eyes, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

For reasonable accommodations, please contact the Center for Accessibility at 202-727-2142 or DCPLaccess@dc.gov. For ASL or tactile interpretation, please allow at least seven (7) days notice

About the Author
  

Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst and regular guest host on SiriusXM and WAMU, NPR’s Washington, DC, station. He has spent his career thinking about law, crime, and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. A Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg that was 1980s New York. He now lives in Washington with his wife and two children.

About the Conversation Partner
  

 Jonathan Capehart is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is co-host of the morning edition of “The Weekend” on MS NOW (7am - 10am) and the New York Times bestselling author of “Yet Here I Am: Lessons from A Black Man’s Search for Home.” From 2020 until 2025, he was the anchor of MSNBC’s “The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart.” At PBS, Capehart serves as a political analyst on “PBS News Hour” and is featured on the popular Friday segment “Brooks and Capehart.” 

Capehart is a former Associate Editor of The Washington Post, where he served as an opinion writer for 18 years. He was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News (2002-2004) and served on its editorial board (1993-2000). His editorial campaign in 1999 to save the Apollo Theater earned the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

About the Book 

From CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams, a revelatory account of how one man, four teenagers, and a struggling city collided over race, vigilantism, and public safety . . . exposing the fault lines of a nation

On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, four teenagers from the Bronx, at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars.

Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the “Subway Vigilante” saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison…or a medal.

In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era. Drawing on archives and interviews with many main characters, including Goetz, Williams presents a masterful and vivid tale that also tells the origin stories of larger-than-life figures: Al Sharpton, a polarizing young local activist rocketing to national prominence; Rudy Giuliani, a rising-star prosecutor with an important decision to make; the NRA, which needed a poster boy for its transition from hunting club to political juggernaut; and Rupert Murdoch, whose new purchase, the New York Post, grew his empire by keeping a scary story in the headlines.

A shocking account of a pivotal moment in our history, Five Bullets demonstrates why, in order to understand today’s debates about race, crime, safety, and the media, it’s imperative to reflect on what went down in the subway four decades ago. As Williams’s powerful narrative reveals, it was not just Goetz on trial, but the conscience of a nation.

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