The Mystery Behind the Crime Wave at 312 Riverside Drive (Published 2022)
For years, the police have received thousands of 911 calls reporting fights, murders, bombs and hostage situations at the same address. But officers never find victims or make arrests. Why?
www.nytimes.com
For years, the police have received thousands of 911 calls reporting fights, murders, bombs and hostage situations at the same address. But officers never find victims or make arrests. Why?
By Michael Wilson
- Published Sept. 14, 2022
- Updated Sept. 16, 2022
“New York City 911,” the emergency dispatcher answered. “Do you need police, fire or medical?”
“I need police — 312 Riverside Drive,” the caller said in a hushed voice. “The lady in Room 340 on the third floor is cutting herself. She’s mentally ill. She’s buck naked and she’s mentally ill and she’s cutting herself with a razor.”
The dispatcher asked follow-up questions and assured the man: “Help is on the way.”
That call, just past midnight on Dec. 16, was the first of five that day reporting dire emergencies at that same address. Fights, stabbings, sexual assaults, shots fired — all at 312 Riverside Drive. It was the location of thousands of 911 calls going back more than two years — without question, the most dangerous address in all of New York City by this measure.
Again and again, police officers had raced to the tree-lined block of the Upper West Side, between West 103rd and 104th Streets. Firefighters and paramedics met them there.
But the responses all ended the same way: The emergency vehicles turned and left, their sirens off. The police, over time, stopped responding to the calls at all.
Because there is no 312 Riverside Drive.
The calls had been treated like emergencies; now they were a mystery. Who was making them? Why? Was it a coordinated attempt to disrupt the police, or an epic, yearslong prank?
Detectives eventually traced the calls to a single cellphone in a building on West 43rd Street that had once been the Hotel Times Square, but for years has offered affordable housing and counseling to vulnerable men and women in the city.
The police found the phone on the 14th floor, and with it, the man behind every call.
And so the mystery became a puzzle — one that has confounded an entire team of lawyers, caregivers and social workers. His remarkable case is an extreme example of a familiar dynamic. It is one that plays out all over New York when the city’s law enforcement apparatus is confronted with people whose behavior is erratic or delusional, but who do not seem to pose any real danger to others.
This tension feels immediate in New York City, where people returning to their offices after months at home are facing reminders of some of the most visible ways mental illness manifests itself on subway platforms or street corners. A vein of behavior outside the norms runs through the streets, not easily addressed by handcuffs or medication.
One man with a cellphone has created enough havoc to be hauled over and over into court, but not enough to warrant a prison cell. He knows it’s wrong, and he apologizes to the judge, but he won’t stop.
Help is always on the way, but it never quite reaches him.
Decades of Trouble
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When another public defender went out on parental leave, Vickie Mwitanti was handed a remarkable case.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
Vickie Mwitanti walked into her office building near the criminal courthouse on Lower Manhattan’s Centre Street in June and entered the elevator, pushing the button for the 20th floor. She was a lawyer with the New York County Defender Services, a churning and grinding job that can make idealistic young people cynical and exhausted. But three years in, she felt invigorated by the work. She had just been assigned a new client with an unusual case.
Before the elevator doors shut, a tall, older man, 70 and wearing thick eyeglasses, darted inside. He smiled.
“We bonded over the weather, but it was not small talk,” Ms. Mwitanti said later. “He complimented my dress, and we had this engaging back and forth.”
When the elevator arrived at 20, both of them got out. She heard the man approach the front desk of her office, and she realized that he was her new client.
He was not what she had expected. “He was just so warm and kind and sweet,” she recalled later.
His name was Walter Reed.
Mr. Reed had arrived in New York City in the late 1990s, well into his 40s, and trouble followed.
He was arrested and charged with petty crimes starting in the late 1990s, and in 2002 was caught stealing a camera and a phone from someone’s hotel room in Midtown. When the owner of the property confronted him, Mr. Reed struck that person in the face, according to prosecutors.
He was convicted of burglary and sent to prison, where he served almost six years.
Upon his release, Mr. Reed seems to have drifted from shelter to shelter, trailed by arrests for trespassing, larceny and drug possession. He had begun using crack cocaine and in 2018 was arrested for selling a small bag of the drug to an undercover officer for $60 outside his apartment building.
This time, after pleading guilty, he was sentenced in the alternative-to-incarceration program of the court, in which defendants can attend regular meetings with counselors and meet other requirements to avoid jail time.
Mr. Reed was in many ways a model candidate for the program, an enthusiastic attendant at meetings with counselors and doctors.
In other ways, he was an abject failure. He consistently tested positive for controlled substances, but more troublesome, in many ways, was his newer habit, one that gripped him as tightly as any drug: a daily, even hourly fixation with a hotel on Riverside Drive that he had imagined from thin air.
‘3-1-2 Riverside’
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Walter Reed at his home in what was once the Times Square Hotel.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
“New York City 911, do you need police, fire or medical?”
“I need police, ma’am. 3-1-2 Riverside Drive.” The caller continued: “The people there just hurt an old woman, 94. They beat her up and took her money and they’re still there, but they might get away with it.”
“How long ago did this happen?” the dispatcher asked.
“This is happening right now as we speak.”
“OK,” the dispatcher said, her voice rising with urgency. “We’re going to send some help.”
That call arrived on Feb. 28 at 5:24 a.m. It was one of 24 calls to 911 that day alone regarding 312 Riverside Drive, and one of a staggering 501 calls to the location that month. All the calls were closed as false reports.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the 911 calls began. But in 2020, there were 1,937 calls to that location. In 2021, that number grew to 2,336.
The calls brought real-world responses to the stately, Art Deco tower known as the Master Building located at 310 Riverside Drive — next to where 312 Riverside would be, if it existed. The Master opened to fanfare in 1929, and none other than Albert Einstein wrote the building’s designers with congratulations and regrets for missing the celebration. Over the years, the Master Building was home to artists, a museum, an art school and a theater.
Now, it is a renovated apartment building, and the setting for Mr. Reed’s delusions.
“We get firemen coming in, asking about 312,” said Dawn Bent, a concierge at the Master Building. “Firemen and cops. When the night guy works, too.”
The 911 calls were often announced simultaneously over the popular Citizen app, which reports nearby emergencies on users’ phones.
Charles Gross, 27, who lives near that corner of West 103rd Street, described looking with shock at his app and its drumbeat of reports of crime at 312 Riverside. “Stabbing,” he said. “Assault. Distress.” He said he would run to his window for a closer look: “But it’s always silent.”
In January 2021, one woman spoke up at the 24th Precinct’s monthly community meeting and asked about 312 Riverside: “What’s going on here?”
The question was hardly unusual. “I would say it comes up each meeting,” Deputy Inspector Naoki Yaguchi, the commanding officer of the 24th Precinct, said in an interview this summer. “Sometimes every other meeting. ‘What’s going on over there? Should I be worried?’”
New officers had similar reactions. “It was a rite of passage,” Deputy Inspector Yaguchi said. “There is obviously a sense of excitement that they’re about to go to this very serious call, until the training officer beside them says, ‘Relax, kid. It’s just a fake call.’”
He explained the situation at the 2021 meeting, as he has many times since. “That is an individual that’s basically making fake 911 calls,” he said, according to the news site West Side Rag. “He perceives that something is actually going on in that place.”
In 2022, by late March, the calls about 312 Riverside were on pace to beat the prior year’s record.
Disturbing Visions
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Mr. Reed’s 911 calls often lead the authorities to the Master Building, at 310 Riverside Drive.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
In Mr. Reed’s mind, 312 Riverside Drive is chillingly real. He sees it as if standing outside on West 103rd Street. “You see the big numbers right on the stone wall,” he said in an interview this summer.
There is a revolving door to a lobby, and on the other side, in his quietly urgent telling in call after call after call, lurks a cast of violent predators.
He describes them to dispatchers: men in hoodies and jeans, attacking an old woman on the floor. A crew with a man known as the Director, assembling what looks to him like a pipe bomb — “I’m not professional, send someone over who’s professional.”
He knows at least one person there quite well. “My girlfriend,” he said. “They won’t let her leave that building. That’s the only reason I call 911.”
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