I pretty much got along with everybody, but as a Jew I did feel like I stuck out.
Some New Yorkers fear that Mayor de Blasio is bringing us back to the bad old days of the pre-Giuliani era. As someone who used to be an insider, what’s your take?
When I was there, in the 75th precinct, it was one of the very worst years ever in terms of crime in New York City, and the 75th precinct had the largest number of murders of any precinct. The detective squad I was in almost exclusively handled murders because there was no time to do anything else.
Drug gangs were also rampant. They would kidnap kids off the street and put them into abandoned buildings to sell drugs under the threat that if they don’t do it, they’ll kill every member of their family. So it was really bad back then. Is it going to go back to that level? I’d really be surprised, but who’s to say?
Your most recent books, Lucy’s Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein’s Brain; Jumbo’s Hide, Elvis’s Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha; and Scandals, Vandals, and da Vincis are what can be categorized as quirky history books. Can you talk a bit about them?
What I was trying to do in the first two books was take artifacts of history and use them as launching points to talk about particular events. For example: the bed Lincoln died in. After he was shot in Ford’s theater, he was carried out by soldiers, brought across the street, and put into this bed that John Wilkes Booth, his assassin, has allegedly occupied just a couple of weeks earlier.
This bed was my entrée point to telling about many of the artifacts associated with Lincoln’s death – from everything he had in his pocket, to his clothes, to the vial of blood that his embalmers took. No one knows what happened to this vial of Lincoln’s blood, but all these stories came out during my research of just the bed.
There’s a whole slew of artifacts associated with the assassination, and a lot of them still exist. Lincoln’s hair was cut, there’s the bullet – a lot of this stuff is still around and I tell the locations of everything in these books.
How about Einstein’s brain?
Well, I always felt kind of weird writing about his brain because he’s Jewish and according to the Torah you’re supposed to be buried intact right after death. But I did it because I knew people would be interested.
I was very fortunate to be able to talk the pathologist, Dr. Thomas Harvey, who took out his brain. It took me a long time to track him down in Kansas, and he didn’t want to talk to me at first, but eventually he told me the whole story. He was Einstein’s doctor in Princeton, New Jersey, and when Einstein died he did an autopsy and took out pieces of his brain to test for his genius – to see if he could come up with anything. He also sent some specimens of the brain to other scientists.
Did they find anything?
Not really, except that Einstein had a little bit larger area of the brain that’s associated with creativity. Dr. Harvey kept the brain specimens locked in his home and over time gave out different pieces to different scientists.
Have you ever thought of writing a book on Jewish artifacts?
After my books were published and did well, a lot of articles and books came out on artifacts. One was called A History of the World in 100 Objects, which was put out by the British Museum. That book became a huge bestseller, so I’ve thought of doing The History of Judaism in 100 Objects.