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NYC murders lowest since 1963

It was a year of trauma for the nation, and of foreboding for New York City. In 1963, the year that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, New Yorkers were feeling strains in the urban fabric: Affluent families fled to the suburbs, job losses mounted among old-line manufacturers, and 548 people were murdered.

As last year drew to a close, it seemed almost certain that there would be fewer than 500 murders in the city (as of Sunday evening, there had been 492) for the first time since reliable records started being kept.

That was 1963.

The body count that year reflected the beginnings of what was to be an alarming rise in the city's murder rate through 1990.

In that year, the city's worst, there were 2,245 homicides and New York City was known as the murder capital of the US.

In 1963, "the seeds of decay were clearly in the air," said Jim Curran, a professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who spent the year as a rookie in the New York Police Department and still recalls people crying on the street when Kennedy was killed.

"People became less concerned about the rules, maybe even including the one that says: `Thou shalt not kill."'

Most current residents of the city, which had a median age of 34 in the 2000 census, were not even born.

The drug wars had yet to begin, and the mob wars had yet to end. Many of the murders were committed with knives.

This year, fewer than 100 victims were strangers to their assailants, a low number that belies the image of people being killed in New York during random attacks or robberies.

Curran said the availability of guns, including semiautomatic weapons, had vastly changed the criminal environment over four decades.

A review of crime accounts from 1963 shows a variety of methods, motives and weaponry. A Queens shipping clerk was charged with killing his boss with a hammer.

A Brooklyn artist who told an intruder in his home: "Before you take my money you can shoot me," was dispatched with a sawed-off shotgun.

Another victim was Joseph Mendola, 19, a clerk at a Waldbaum's supermarket in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

When the robber entered the store and ordered the workers to line up against a wall, the police said, Mendola asked which one. If it was intended as a joke, the robber was not amused: He killed Mendola with his shotgun.

Many of the homicides in 1963 were committed with knives, and without evidence that guns were present.

But guns were used in several killings that the police linked that year to an underworld war between the Gallo and Profaci families of Brooklyn.

To be sure, last year was not without its brutal, seemingly senseless, killings.

An assistant was charged with killing her boss, Linda Stein, a wealthy real estate broker, after an argument in her penthouse. And a Queens orthodontist, Daniel Malakov, was gunned down as his estranged wife and young daughter looked on.

A relative of Malakov's wife was charged.
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