New York's 'Subway Vigilante' Was Loved and Hated

With street crime, racial tensions, homelessness, AIDS, crack cocaine, ineffective policing, and broken-down public services raging out-of-control, New York City circa late 1984 was not infrequently likened to “Hell on Earth.”

And if that was the case, New York's famed subway system, then at the height of dangerousness and disrepair, oozed and burned like the dankest, deepest pit of the urban inferno.