"Long Island Compromise" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Don't mention the race of the kidnapper

From a book review in the New York Times:

When a Father Gets Kidnapped, His Family Pays the Price

“Long Island Compromise,” the new novel by the author of “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” fictionalizes a true story.

By Sloane Crosley

July 7, 2024

LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

What does it mean to come by one’s life honestly? This is the question at the heart of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s generation-spanning sophomore novel, “Long Island Compromise,” which tells the story of a wealthy, dysfunctional suburban Jewish family.

It sounds like the sit-com Arrested Development, except that instead of the father committing a crime, the father was the victim of a notorious crime: in real life, the 1974 kidnapping of Jack Teich, who was released by his two kidnappers after a week when his family paid a record $750,000 ransom. Poor Mr. Teich was a friend of the novelist’s father.

Given the unavoidable success of her debut, “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” I will spare curious readers the suspense and answer a more cynical question: Is this book as good? It’s better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel. …

A fictionalized account of a true story, “Long Island Compromise” begins in 1980, when the prominent businessman Carl Fletcher is ambushed in his driveway, taken to unknown parts and tortured by unknown parties. Bubble burst, the house is suddenly teeming with F.B.I. agents as Carl’s frantic wife, Ruth, finds herself taking her younger son, Bernard, on an elaborate ransom drop, a day that will scar both him and his older brother, Nathan, for life.

… Carl spends the next several hundred pages on an ineffective cocktail of antidepressants, alternating between jags of hysteria and vegetation, a glass ornament of a father to Nathan, Bernard and Jenny, who has the questionable luck of being born just after the family tragedy. …

The novel is loosely divided into three sections, told from the third-person perspectives of the three children, now in their late 30s and early 40s, laying out the cornucopia of ways in which they are screwed up by latent generational trauma, their father’s repression and the affluence that insulates them.

It seems a little much to write a loosely fictionalized account of a series of unfortunate events that happened to people you know, people whom everybody else knows you know. But successful novelists tend to be voracious and ruthless when it comes to transforming other people’s life stories into their novels.

In reality, the Teichs appear to be admirable people who have dealt with their victimization far better than most people would.

And then in the same edition of the New York Times, the novelist writes a really long article about the true story behind her novel:

The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape

Fifty years ago, my father’s friend was taken at gunpoint on Long Island. Then he went on with his life — and that’s the part that haunts me.

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the magazine. The kidnapping that begins her new novel, “Long Island Compromise,” was inspired by the Jack Teich kidnapping in 1974.

July 7, 2024

Most of Brodesser-Akner’s piece is about trauma:

But I was more interested in certain demographic questions:

… They asked him his name. He told them it was Jack. “Jack Teich, right?” one of them asked — the only one who would speak to him from then on. Then he said, “You’re a Jew, right?” Jack replied that he was and grew even more scared because it was not good news then (or, really, any time in history) to be asked that question. …

He berated Jack for hours about the plight of the Palestinians, ranting that the Jews were going to kill Yasir Arafat, the P.L.O. leader. He ranted further about “Jewish slumlords” …

Me being me, I wondered who this head kidnapper was. Was he, by any chance, you know, black?

The long NYT book review doesn’t mention the race of the head criminal. The novelist’s even longer account in the NYT account eventually gets around to dropping some hints for those still reading closely, but Taffy doesn’t dare be too explicit:

In 1994, the one convicted kidnapper, a man named Richard Warren Williams, who had been in prison for 17 years, appealed the verdict by citing a 1986 Supreme Court ruling that held jurors could not be dismissed on the basis of race. The jury for Williams’s case had been all white. Of the 40 total potential jurors that had been dismissed, six were Black; records for the case were destroyed in a fire, and the prosecution was not able to remember the reasons for three of the six dismissals and was therefore unable to prove they were not racially motivated. Williams won his appeal, and a new trial was ordered.

This time, Williams pleaded guilty. … The judge sentenced Williams to time served, and he was freed.

Wikipedia offers another insight into the not so good old days of liberalism in the criminal justice system:

In January 1984, while still serving his sentence, Williams was awarded $35,501 in damages after his lawyer Fern Steckler successfully argued he was denied civil rights in 1976–1977. He was awarded $25,000 for not receiving eyeglasses despite eye strain, $10,000 for being repeatedly handcuffed to other inmates for four to eight hours in smoke-filled courthouse detention cells, $500 for being harassed by a corrections officer, and $1 for not receiving a magazine subscription in a timely fashion.

So, who was this pro-Palestinian kidnapper? Was Richard Warren Williams, by any chance, black?

Yeah, of course he was. From the New York Post in 2020:

Obviously, from a social novelist’s perspective, the irony of nice liberal pro-civil rights Jews being violently victimized in liberal 1974 by a black criminal is interesting.

But from the perspective of the New York Times’ subscription department in 2024, well, the no longer failing New York Times is thriving by providing paying subscribers with articles that vindicate their worldview, not undermine it.

The irony of a black criminal preying on liberal Jews does not make paying customers of the New York Times feel intellectually and morally superior to New York Post readers, so they go easy on it.

In contrast, the Times of Israel was more frank in its 2020 article about the victim finally publishing his memoir, Operation Jacknap (as the FBI dubbed the case).

Victim of 1974 NY anti-Semitic abduction, record-high ransom finally tells all

Jack Teich’s kidnapping at gunpoint, huge payoff, and trial made national headlines, but even his family didn’t know the gruesome details… until, aged 80, he wrote his memoir

By ELISSA EINHORN

23 July 2020, 7:04 pm

… On the evening of November 12, 1974, 34-year-old New York businessman Jack Teich was abducted at gunpoint from the driveway of his suburban home in Kings Point, Nassau County.

“You’re a Jew, right?” Teich remembers his kidnappers asking.

“They knew I was a Jew,” he tells The Times of Israel in a Zoom interview. “They knew more than they let on.” …

But Teich’s memoir is also a disturbing reminder of enduring anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories about Israel, some of which are again being propagated by extremists in the United States.

The mastermind of the home ambush, Richard Warren Williams, confronted Teich about being a member of the Jewish Defense League [Teich wasn’t] and said that Teich’s “arrest” was in return for crimes against poor people. Mumbling slurs such as “Jew slumlords,” Williams accused the Jewish people and the State of Israel of everything from planning Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat’s assassination (Arafat died of a stroke in 2004), to dropping bombs on African villages.

Calling his ransom a “fine” for these and other transgressions, Williams told Teich that the money was going to “help Palestinians and poor people.”

“They were blatantly anti-Semitic and radicalized by the Black power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s,” Teich says of Williams and one of his accomplices, Williams’s childhood friend Charles Berkley.

Berkley, an ex-employee of Teich’s Brooklyn-based Acme Architectural Products, had inside information about the company’s finances which became the impetus for the kidnapping. Remarking that these weren’t mere street criminals, Teich points out that “Richard Williams was a bright, successful real estate broker. He taught college, he was a pilot. Berkley was a paratrooper, a family man with a wife and four kids.”

This makes the Teich case a good one for true crime: competent people on all sides: crooks, cops, and victims.