By half past 11 o’clock on the night of November 2, Peter Braunstein was in Cleveland. Not Brooklyn. He never came back to the city after that. He spent a few nights chewing a bartender’s ear about working on the plastic surgery TV drama Nip/Tuck. He said he was researching striptease joints for his next writing project — and isn’t that what they all say?
“He didn’t strike me as creepy,” the Moriarty’s bartender told the Daily News.
At the University of Cincinnati on November 17, Braunstein robbed a psychologist’s office at gunpoint for sixteen bucks in cash, plus a Visa card. He made his way south, first to Nashville and then to Memphis, where on November 28 he sold his blood for twenty dollars.
At the University of Memphis, better than a thousand miles from the Bococa Café, Peter Braunstein collapsed in a pool of his own blood on December 16. A campus police officer found Braunstein after a woman named Annette Brown, who’d seen him on the TV show America’s Most Wanted, spotted him walking around with a backpack and sleeping bag.
“I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine,” Brown told the Daily News. “They were very dark, empty, unfeeling, and cold. I felt like I was looking at a dead person, just evil. He was so close to me, I could have hugged him.”
Brown flagged a campus patrol car from a safe distance away. The car trailed Braunstein for a while, until an officer ordered him to stop in his tracks. Braunstein pulled a knife and began to stab himself in the neck. The officer sprayed Braunstein with half a can of pepper spray, but the knife went in and out thirteen times.
“I give up,” Braunstein said, dropping the knife. He fell and the officer took away the gun he was packing. Cuffing him, the officer asked his name.
“Peter Braunstein,” he said, after which he passed out. Alternate versions of the capture had Braunstein declaring, “I’m the guy the world is looking for.” But such are mostly television accounts and not to be trusted.
In his backpack, police found a video camera, two digital video tapes, and a diary. The tapes were blank. But in the diary, police read Braunstein’s commentary on his own press coverage.
“He was very interested in what was being written about him, and how he was portrayed,” a cop told the Daily News.
Under court order, New York police on January 23 released notes of a conversation detectives had with Braunstein shortly after his capture in Memphis. Braunstein laughed off media reports. “[He] stated that he thought the Cobble Hill thing was funny because he does not even know where Cobble Hill is located,” police told the papers.
On his return to New York, Braunstein repeated his Manhattan-to-Queens trip of the previous November.
First housed in Bellevue, he was then moved to Rikers Island to await trial. Braunstein’s defense team released a psychiatric report on June 1, 2006, indicating a likely diagnosis of schizophrenia. In her report, Braunstein’s psychologist said it was the gig at Women’s Wear Daily that made him snap.
“Working in the highly competitive, glitzy, and sexually charged atmosphere of a celebrity-driven fashion periodical was an extremely toxic and unsuitable environment,” according to the doctor.
Was it a life that he missed? When the Daily News published an interview with Braunstein at Rikers on October 8, 2006, it appeared that he was happy to chat. “Look, I used to do this,” Braunstein told the journalist. “I used to be you.”
Hear that, Brooklyn?
Postscript: Peter Braunstein was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in a trial ending on May 23, 2007. The jury deliberated for only a few hours. In a letter to the judge pleading for leniency, Braunstein railed against the tabloid coverage of his case, singling out New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser. She “declared that I was not sick; I was evil,” Braunstein wrote. “This kind of tabloid rhetoric is essentially a mandate for harsh sentencing.” Braunstein is now in prison, serving an eighteen-years-to-life term.
About the contributors
Thomas Adcock is a veteran New York City journalist and an Edgar Award — winning novelist. He has contributed stories to New Orleans Noir and Bronx Noir. A longtime Manhattan resident, he is nevertheless often seen in the company of his granddaughter, Gianna Maria, who lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.
Denise Buffa is a native of Brooklyn. A New York Post reporter for more than a decade, she has covered numerous beats, including Brooklyn courts. She is currently penning Mushy & Mama, a book about the life and times of her mastiff, Mushy. A former Bay Ridge babe, she currently resides with her new dog, Baci, in Harlem. She has a not-so-secret weapon when chasing down stories on New York City streets: her accent!
Constance Casey, who was a New York City Parks Department gardener for five years, is a member of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden board of trustees, and a judge in The Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest. She writes about gardening and natural history for the online magazine Slate. In a former, more indoor life she was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News and the Washington Post, then a national correspondent for Newhouse News Service.
Reed Farrel Coleman was born and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The James Deans, the third installment of his Brooklyn-based Moe Prager mystery series, won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony awards. The novel was also nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, and Gumshoe awards. He is the editor of Hardboiled Brooklyn and his short stories have also appeared in Wall Street Noir and Dublin Noir.
Aileen Gallagher is an editor at New York magazine’s website, nymag.com. She was a founding editor of the online magazine The Black Table and has written for the New York Law Journal, New York Post, New York Press, Bust, Maxim, and New York magazine. A native of suburban Philadelphia, she resides joyously in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
Dennis Hawkins, formerly Chief of Rackets, retired from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office on April 1, 2001. Since then he has taught, written, and circumnavigated the globe as an anticorruption advisor. He is currently working on a novel about the down and dirty office politics of a large, urban prosecutor’s office.
Robert Knightly spent his youth in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, leaving for Manhattan at the tender age of forty-four. During his Brooklyn years, he was an NYPD patrol officer and sergeant in the Brooklyn North neighborhoods of Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene — Clinton Hill, and Williamsburg. He has published three stories in the Akashic Noir Series, one of which was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2007.
