Free The Mad Bomber of New York by Michael M. Greenburg

he would purposefully design his bombs to be smaller in scale and less likely to inflict harm. “I’ve read,” Metesky would later say, “that a man with a hammer can wreck a sixteen-inch naval gun, just by hitting it until it shatters. It takes a while. It’s the same way with bombs. Individually, they couldn’t knock a telephone off the wall. Collectively, they had an effect.”
    The New York City police would beg to differ. In each case, investigators would conclude that Metesky’s bombs were purposefully placed in public locations and that each was capable of causing injury or death to anyone within proximity. Every so-called unit was, in fact, “lethal.”

    About three weeks after the Grand Central incident, Metesky struck again. He stole into a telephone booth on the basement level of the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, and placed a three-and-a-half-inch length of pipe fueled with smokeless gunpowder and a .25-caliber cartridge mechanism—throat disc fused—inside the metal fan casing at the top of the enclosure. At 6:10 in the evening of April 24, 1951, the bomb detonated, tearing through the booth’s ventilation apparatus and horrifying (but remarkably not injuring) a library security guard who happened to be leaning against the booth at the time of the blast. Bomb squad detectives immediately saw the connection with the Grand Central bombing, both in the form of the mechanism and in the manner of its placement, and the newspapers were quick to recall the earlier police conclusion that they were dealing with “pranksters.”
    Over the months that followed, Metesky seemed to regroup and assess what, if anything, he had accomplished. He had successfully planted several of his units, each of which had detonated as designed, and each had garnered some minor publicity. Yet, whatever satisfaction he gained from these events was trifling and short-lived. With every painful and labored breath that he drew, he was reminded of his nemesis, Con Ed, and his mission to make them pay for what they did to him. He was compelled to finish what he had started.
    On August 27, 1951, Metesky once again struck Grand Central Terminal. At 9:00 p.m., well beyond the evening rush hour, a length of galvanized pipe detonated in a telephone booth on the west concourse of the terminal, causing damage but no injuries. And several weeks later, in a direct assault against Con Ed, a five-inch pipe bomb, his largest to that point, exploded in a telephone booth in the lobby of the company’s main offices on Irving Place. Again, in an apparent effort to minimize the possibility of injury, the unit was timed to explode at 6:15 in the morning, well before most employees arrived for work.
    The New York City police downplayed the Con Ed incident, again insisting that they were dealing with a prankster and that damage had been “trifling.” Privately, however, bomb squad detectives had begun to grow uneasy. Detective William Schmitt, an affable, brawny veteran of the force charged with the task of examining and cataloguing each fragmented component of the exploded machines, immediately realized that the city was dealing with a serial bomber. Though the contraptions thus far had been constructed on a small scale, he recognized the progressively improved workmanship of each and, along with the bomb squad as a whole, privately worried that the culprit would take the obvious next step of increasing the potency of his work. Contained in the official police record of the second Grand Central bombing was this ominous notation: “This is a well constructed mechanism. It shows considerable advance in technique as compared with earlier bombs.”
    In what would become the standing policy of the New York City Police Department for the next five years of the investigation, department personnel refused to provide any specific details of their investigation. “It