Selective Retelling

A few minutes into Vigilante, journalist Leon Neyfakh’s riveting and heart-wrenching new podcast, we hear from Garth Reed, a gravel-voiced New Yorker who had immigrated from Jamaica in the late twentieth century. He recalls traveling south through Manhattan on a dirty, graffiti-covered 2 train. It was a Saturday afternoon, just a few days before Christmas, in 1984. The train was not especially crowded, but most of its passengers had apparently eased away from four rambunctious black teenagers taking up a lot of space toward one end of the car. They were “hanging onto the handrails, swinging around, walking around the train,” Reed recalls.