Transcript: Psychos, Muggers, Thieves (And Agents)

Why budgets need to be big enough for everyone to get a piece

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for the Ankler.

“Young people in this city,” a 60-ish native New Yorker said to me last week, “don’t even know what mugger money is.”

He went on to explain. Mugger money was the small wad of bills most New Yorkers would carry around with them between the mayoral administrations of John V. Lindsay (1966-1973) and David N. Dinkins (1990-1993).

Mugger money was what you kept with you because you expected to be mugged eventually and you needed something to hand over to placate the attacker and persuade him not to kill you. It was kept separately from your actual money in your actual wallet — my friend told me that some more theatrical friends of his would keep their mugger money in a dressed-up fake wallet — and you’d toss it to the mugger and then make a run for it.

The criminal would get some cash and the victim would keep the bulk of his money, along with his identification — a bureaucratic nightmare to replace — and his credit cards. It was, as social scientists might say, a win-win. It was the tax you paid for living in the crime-infested City that Never Sleeps.

This wasn’t all that long ago, either. I remember when the windows of nearly every parked car in the city was a handwritten sign, addressed to petty thieves and drug addicts looking for a quick score: No Radio in Car.

That same mugger money friend also remembers growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — now one of the swankiest and most expensive quarters of the city — during the early 1970’s, a time when the neighborhood was terrorized by a sex criminal who castrated young boys. “Charlie Chop-Off,” the neighborhood kids called him, as in: “Keep an eye out for Charlie Chop-Off when you’re playing in the park.” The kids still played in Riverside Park and freely roamed the neighborhood, as was usual back then. The presence of a psychopath was something they and their parents took in stride, just another gruesome reminder that things were sliding inexorably into chaos.

Keep you eyes peeled, they said to each other, because no one expected the police to be effective. And they weren’t: the case is still unsolved.

Crime just is, New Yorkers told themselves for nearly forty years. Put a sign in your car, keep an eye out for Charlie Chop-Off, and get your mugger money ready. You make adjustments, sure, but you live your life. Mugger money is just an accommodation you make to walk the streets.

So, obviously, when you’re talking about psychos and muggers and thieves, you’re talking about show business, too.