August 4, 1979 – dead in the middle of Summer and the Dog Days, especially the East Coast. Sticky humid days, sticky humid nights. Weatherman promising a “cooling trend” that never happens.
Summer in Manhattan – August 4th, 1979 – it was a Saturday. The world kept spinning and news kept happening especially in New York:
The dull red line runs in an arc just inside the garage door and, at first glance, looks like some sort of painted marker. Only on closer inspection does one realize what it is: blood. The blood on the cement floor of the garage at 99-72 66th Rd. was silent testimony yesterday to Friday afternoon’s brutal bludgeoning of Raphael Bleiweis, a 58-year-old resident of the apartment house, and the murder, minutes earlier, of Eugene Flister, 60-year-old vice president of the National Bank of North America branch around the corner on Queens Boulevard. Bleiweis was struck by something heavy enough to crush his skull as he was about to raise the garage door to walk out about 4:30 PM.
He had parked his Oldsmobile in its $50-a- month space, and it remained there yesterday with white powder on its hood where detectives had dusted it for fingerprints.
In other news: John Halpern said that what he placed on a tower of the Brooklyn Bridge was part of an environmental sculpture. The police said it was a bomb and arrested the 24-year-old artist. Whatever the device was, two bomb squad members dismantled it Thursday morning atop the Manhattan tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, 276 feet above. the East River. Because an elevator broke down, the officers had to carry the device to the ground by walking down a bridge cable.
Halpern said he intended to create an environmental sculpture by detonating the device atop the bridge by remote control. He said the explosion would have been accompanied by laser beams and a, flaming raft. in the river, Halpern said that a friend. planted the device on the bridge Thursday morning and that he tried to detonate it two hours later, but it didn’t go off. The artist, who was arrested in May for trying to light a fire atop the bridge, said he had wanted to make a statement about the economy. The foreman of a maintenance crew noticed the device and called the police. They found a five-gallon paint can and inside it a plastic pail containing two batteries, a radio receiver, an amplifier and two pounds of loose gunpowder, rockets and cherry bombs. Halpern said the device wasn’t a bomb and wouldn’t have harmed anyone.
“This was designed to hurt someone,” said Lt. Charles Luici, bomb squad commander. “It could have gone off at any moment. If it had, myimen could haye been killed.” Halpern was charged him with possession of a bomb.
And the apparent robber of a midtown Chemical Bank branch died early yesterday morning from the bullet wounds he received in a shootout, police said. The officer who was shot is reported in stable and improving condition. The dead suspect, who police have tentatively identified as James Bell, 28, of Boston, died of “perforations of the anatomy” in Bellevue Hospital at 3:35 AM, according to a police spokesman. Police will not be certain of the identity until fingerprints are checked. They say Bell held up the bank at Broadway and 39th Street at 4:10 PM Friday.
Officer John Snidersich, 29, who was shot once in the chest, apparently by Bell, was receiving visitors at Bellevue Hospital. “He’s one or two days away from being classified fair or good,” said Det. Richard Chartrand of the 3rd Homicide Unit in Manhattan, who is investigating the case. Meanwhile, the FBI and police reported no progress in their investigation of Friday’s Bankers Trust Co. holdup, which police now estimate netted $536,000, a record theft of cash from a New York City bank.
*The case is still under investigation,” an FBI spokesman said. Four well-dressed men entered the bank at 51 Rockefeller Plaza at 10:30 AM and removed the money from the bank’s vault at gunpoint, the FBI said. There were six other bank robberies in the city Friday.
All that, and liberal sprinklings of tunes from Wings, Barbara Streisand, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway – all for this August 4, 1979 as presented by The Weekend from WOR in New York.
