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All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Life and Death of Artist Michael Stewart
00:25:43
A new book from writer Elon Green is called The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York.
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WNYC Studios is supported by Carnegie hall, which presents the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welsermust and soprano Asmit Gregorian performing works by Haydn, Strauss, Janacek and Puccini. March 18 tickets@carnegiehall.org.
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Elon Green
Listener support WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is a All of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. If you missed any of our segments this week, like the science behind Better Sleep with scientist Lynn Peoples, our conversation about music production with vocalist and producer Paula Cole, or our week long discussion about Covid's effects on how we live, you can listen to any of those on our podcast available on your podcast platform of choice. If you like what you hear, leave us a nice rating. Now let's get back into this conversation. On September 15, 1983, in the early hours of the morning, the aspiring artist, model and DJ Michael Stewart was arrested. Allegedly, he had been tagging a wall in a subway station. Michael was beaten by police officers from the New York City Transit Authority. He was handcuffed. His cries for help could be heard by Parsons students in a nearby dorm room. By the time he was brought to Bellevue Hospital, he was in critical condition. Thirteen days later, Michael Stewart died. His death sent shock waves throughout the tight knit creative community in the East Village where Michael worked and spent a lot of time. Artists like Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring created emotional work inspired by his death and the community activists demanded answers and accountability. Author Elon Green tells the story of Michael Stewart's life, death and the subsequent trials and investigations in a new book titled the Man Nobody Life, Death and the Art of Michael Stewart's New York. Elon Green will be speaking with David Grann at the Upper west side Barnes and noble next Thursday, March 20, but he joins me now in studio. It is nice to talk to you.
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Elon Green
Likewise. Thanks for having me.
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Alison Stewart
I like your hat. It says writer. It's so good that you have a hat on that says writer. What was your research process like for this book?
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Elon Green
Well, it began with just reading every single newspaper account I could find and and from there it was trying to find every single living witness, attorney, friend, loved one of Michael Stewart. Basically anybody who could shed a real firsthand account on what had happened.
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Alison Stewart
Who was it really important for you to talk to?
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Elon Green
Well, it would have been very important to talk to the family, although I never got to. But shedding light on Michael's life in New York was for me the primary goal. And so that meant talking to staff at the Pyramid Club. It meant talking to disc jockeys at the Pratt Institute. Basically anybody who was occupying the same space as Michael would when he would go into New York.
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David Grann
Yeah, that was an interesting part of the book is you really have to sort of understand what the East Village was like in the 80s. Right. How did you. Well, you explained a little bit, but how did you develop that atmosphere, letting the listener know what it was like to be a 20 something in the 80s in the East Village?
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Elon Green
Well, I mean, luckily a lot of that is very well documented, either in memoirs or biographies of people like Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring. But people also have vivid memories of the time and of the place. And so I could ask people what Alphabet City was like or what the interior of the Pyramid was like.
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David Grann
You could ask me. Let's talk a little bit about the East Village artists and creatives who are all very close knit. How would you describe Michael Stewart's role in this community?
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Elon Green
So I don't ever want to overstate his role in the East Village. He worked, as I said, he worked at the Pyramid. I think he was there for six months. But so even though he wasn't at the level of a Basquiat or a Haring, he was visible, both because of where he worked, but also because of how he looked. And not to belabor the point, but he was gorgeous. He's tall, slender.
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David Grann
Just a beautiful face.
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Elon Green
Yes. And he also had a personality, a demeanor that stuck out.
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David Grann
How. How so?
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Elon Green
Because he was quiet and sensitive and he didn't talk unless it was necessary, and that was not the way. And he, like a lot of people in that world, if they weren't established artists that he was aspiring, and he did some modeling and he appeared in Madonna's first music video. You know, one of the things that I've always been struck by about him is that regardless of whether there was a you real talent for painting, this was someone who had the capacity to ingratiate himself with some of the most remarkable people of the era. And there's something very special about that.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting during this time, when you think about what graffiti artists were like, the way they were treated. Why was graffiti art so heavily policed during this period?
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Elon Green
That's a good question. I think it was because the powers that be, whether it was John Lindsay or Ed Koch, felt that it was tarnishing a beautiful city, which maybe to a certain extent that was true, but also the city had much larger problems. It was the aftermath of a fiscal crisis and basically nothing was funded. And the fact that there might be some tags on a subway Train didn't make much of a difference.
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David Grann
My guest, Elon Green, we're discussing his new book, the Man Nobody, Life, Death and Art in Michael Stewart's New York. Would you explain the Man Nobody Killed, the title of your book?
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Elon Green
Yes. I should say first, that is also the title of a wonderful work of art by David Hammons, who was an artist in the East Village, still is an artist, but it comes from an editorial that ran in the East Village Eye, a great neighborhood publication. And in the aftermath of the acquittal, they ran this piece with that title to talk about how essentially there was nobody who was taking responsibility. And for me, that immediately became the title because it symbolized the lack of accountability at every level from the governor's office on down.
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David Grann
Let's start at the beginning. So Michael's in the subway, he's arrested, and then there are these conflicting accounts of what happened next. Based on your research, what happened to him when he reached street level?
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Elon Green
I think what happened to him is more or less what the witnesses say happened. I think that he tried to get away. I mean, he tried to flee and which for understandable reasons, there were 11 transit police surrounding him, you know, all for the crime of possibly tagging a subway station. And I think he accidentally bumps into one of the police and this sets off something that I don't think you can describe as anything other than an assault. And I don't think we'll ever know who did what, but one way or another, he ends up in the back of an emergency services vehicle, comatose.
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David Grann
Now, these officers were from the Transit Authority Police Department. It is now a division of the nypd, but at the time that was a separate policing group. How did the Transit Authority Police, how did they differ from the NYPD at this time in 1983?
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Elon Green
They were basically the red headed stepchild of the system. They made the same amount of money as the city cops, but they had inferior equipment. They patrolled solo as opposed to with partners. And also very few people actually wanted to be transit police. Usually what ended up happening is that you would apply to the nypd and if you didn't get in the, you know, in the case of the arresting officer, he didn't pass the psychological exam, you would get shunted off to transit.
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Alison Stewart
That's a. That's what happened to the officer who ran into him.
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Elon Green
That's right, Correct, yes.
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Alison Stewart
Tell us a little bit more about him.
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Elon Green
His name is John Kostick. He was the arresting officer. I interviewed him. And he is very unapologetic. He was A young man at the time, I think he'd been on the job for maybe a year and a half. And it was a very, it was a hard job. Like, I also don't want to look at the job of being a transit police just through the eyes of 2025 and the Manhattan of 2025. It was a very difficult job. One of the people I interviewed for the book said to me, she said, look, I think that Michael Stewart was murdered. However, I also think that, that being a transit cop in Manhattan in 1983 was the hardest job you could possibly have, and a terrifying one at that. And I think one of the reasons why what happened to Michael Stewart happened is precisely because of that. You know, all of these people were just on a hair trigger.
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David Grann
I was curious in reading in the beginning of the book, how many students saw or heard what was happening at the time? Did they know that a man on the street saying, help me, somebody help me. What was actually going on?
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Elon Green
No. You know, all of these students were from out of town, students who lived in the freshman dormitories, the Parsons freshman dorm on the west side of Union Square were not local. And so that meant that they had been in Manhattan for maybe two or three days at that point. Most of them had never spent any time in the city. All they knew is what they had heard, which was that it was a dangerous, crime ridden place. And so the reactions from them at the time tended to be, well, this is what, like everything else we've heard, it's not really a big deal. Or some of them thought, you know, well, if he's being beaten like this, he probably murdered somebody. And so they didn't really do much of anything. I mean, I heard stories that, you know, eventually some of them got bored and closed their windows and went back to bed.
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David Grann
My guest is Elon Green. We're discussing his new book, the Man Nobody Killed. Life, Death and Art in Michael Stewart's New York. What do the police officers, what did they say happened?
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Elon Green
They say that he fell of his own volition. You know, maybe trips on the steps or trips when they're in Union Square. But they say nobody hit him, nobody kicked him, nobody used a blackjack, it was all self inflicted. And of course they say, well, he was drunk and he was on cocaine and he had a heart attack because of the excitement. All of which, with the exception of the fact that there was alcohol in his system, there is no evidence for.
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David Grann
Once he got to the hospital.
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Alison Stewart
What did the hospital staff observe about Michael Stewart's condition?
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Elon Green
They immediately realized that there had been, you know, physical violence inflicted on him. Word spread immediately that there seemed to be some kind of COVID up going on. Certainly that was the attitude of the nursing staff who would have had the greatest amount of contact with him. But he arrives without a heartbeat. The heroic efforts of the ER staff, they managed to restart his heart, though he never regains consciousness.
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Alison Stewart
At one point, from your research, did that idea of the thin blue line start to assemble?
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Elon Green
I think that was just the way it was. I don't think that there was any kind of conscious decision to cover this up. I just think that was just the instinct. It was unusual that Internal affairs decided not to investigate what had happened. I mean, that is a genuine cover up. The detective who was assigned immediately to investigate was furious that Internal affairs wouldn't investigate. Not because she thought that the police had actually beaten Michael Stewart into a coma, but because she felt they didn't. And she did not want their reputations tainted in the minds of the public, and so she wanted them cleared by Internal Affairs.
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David Grann
A big part of the story is the Chief Medical Examiner, Elliot Gross, who performed Michael's autopsy before the Michael Stewart case. What was his reputation like?
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Elon Green
I mean, he never had a sterling reputation, neither worse or better than anybody else. The position of Chief Medical examiner of New York is pretty thankless. If you do your job well, nobody will hear about it. And if you make a mistake, everybody will hear about it. But as far as medical examiners go, he was quite high profile. You know, when John Lennon was murdered, he did the autopsy. When Tennessee Williams died under sort of strange circumstances, he did the autopsy for that too. Anytime there was, you know, a fairly high profile case or a very sensitive case, he would do it.
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David Grann
In this case, he made inconsistencies, inconsistent statements. How did that help the case or hurt the case of Michael Stewart? How did it cause it to become more. More, I guess, more of a headline than it normally would have? I know it's a hard question.
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Elon Green
So what I would say is that he generally did not actually make inconsistent statements, but they were widely interpreted that way.
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David Grann
Okay.
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Elon Green
You know, he came out in the hours after the autopsy and issued a statement that just frankly, he shouldn't have, which was that the cause of death was cardiac arrest pending further study. And people sort of conveniently didn't pay attention to the pending further study part of the statement. So that whatever it was, a week later when he came out with a more refined cause of death, people treated that as if it were was a flip flop, an Inconsistency, when in fact, it really was just a much closer version to what he would finally arrive at now. He did, in fact, change his mind on cause of death as time went on, but he probably did. His real sin, if anything, was being a poor communicator.
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David Grann
Hmm. That's a really interesting way of putting it, I think about that. Our guest is Elon Green. We're discussing his new book, the Man Nobody Killed. Life, Death and the Art in Michael Stewart's New York the Criminal Trial. This case, you go into his parents, his parents, lawyers, his parents, doctors who sat in on the autopties. There's a lot in the book, but you do talk about the case, the trial that that happened, including one grand.
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Alison Stewart
Juror who kind of got in the midst of things.
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Elon Green
He sure did.
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Alison Stewart
Would you explain what it was he did and why he did it?
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Elon Green
So Ronald Fields had been sitting on the grand jury, I think, for a couple of days at that point, and he was pretty incensed about one of the cases where there had been a. I believe it was like a cement truck that had rolled over a car in Manhattan and had killed a family. And he only learned later, after there was no indictment, that the man who was driving the cement truck had been under the influence. And he felt that, you know, that had been withheld from the grand jury. And he believed that basically that the withholding was an excuse to cover up incompetence on the part of the district attorney's office. And so when Michael Stewart's case comes before the grand jury, he's already in the mindset of wanting to have as much information as possible when he wants it. He gets a hold of press releases from the chief medical examiner's office. He goes off and takes photos of Union Square from a great height and to try to get a sense of where the incident happened. And he keeps doing things that get him upbraided by the judge overseeing the grand jury, and he's chastised by the prosecutor, and he always promises to do better and he never does. And ultimately his indiscretions end up tanking the first round of indictments, the first much stronger round of indictments, and the district attorney has to do it all over again.
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David Grann
What happened to the police officers in this case?
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Elon Green
Well, they all ended up acquitted, which would not be shocking now, and it certainly wasn't back then. But none of them went on to have long, distinguished careers. I think to some degree, the case probably broke them, too.
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David Grann
The tail end of your subtitle of your book is Art and Michael Stewart's New York. You write in the book, Michael Stewart and Jean Michel Basquiat were both handsome Brooklyn born black men who wore their hair in short locks, made art and dabbled in graffiti for the rest of his short life. Whenever the subject of Michael Larose, Basquiat would say, it could have been me. How did Michael Stewart affect other artists in his peer group and in New York?
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Elon Green
Well, you know, really it was about proximity. You know, this was not a community that it had to really confront police brutality as a systemic problem. And, you know, the East Village was very sheltered in that regard. And so, you know, when Michael was beaten, they were suddenly affected by it in a way they never had before and realized they had to band together to do something about this. And so with Basquiat, he immediately begins. He goes home the night that he hears about Michael and begins drawing skulls on the floor. Keith Haring eventually does a painting about Michael. George Kondo does one as well while Michael is still in a coma. And you know, I believe after, after Michael dies, Basquiat goes to Haring's studio and does a gorgeous painting on the wall. Everybody was sort of activated by what had happened to him.
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Alison Stewart
We got an interesting text that says, as a kid who grew up going down Cross Bay to Rockaway every summer weekend, I didn't know about my own privilege. Michael Stewart's death made me a different person. What do you hope people learn about Michael from reading this book? And what do you hope they learn beyond just the tragedy of his death?
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Elon Green
That's a good question and not an easy one to answer because so much of about what happened with Michael Stewart's life is. So much of it was potential and we'll just never know what he could have become. I mean, I think he was someone with a tremendous talent in a number of areas, whether it be his interest in art or his skill as a model. He had a tremendous instinct and interest, interest for music, really esoteric taste. And I want people to take away sort of what didn't happen to him and what wasn't allowed to happen to him. He was never allowed to become who he would have become. And I also. The larger, maybe 30,000 foot view is, I think I want people to understand both how much has changed and how much has not changed.
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David Grann
My guest Elon Green will be with David Grann at the Upper Westside Barnes and noble next Thursday, March 20th. They'll be discussing his book, the Man Nobody Killed. Life, Death and Art in Michael Stewart's New York. Thank you for joining us.
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Elon Green
Thank you for having me.
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