“So the goof comes out of the alley . . . .”
It is nightfall on a Wednesday, and several hundred Chicagoans are in a hotel ballroom thinking about something that is never far from most Chicagoans’ minds at any given moment: getting stabbed, shot, raped, strangled, kidnapped, tortured or beaten.
Their squadron leader for these flights of morbid fancy is Det. J.J. Bittenbinder, a pretty intimidating guy himself-tough-talking, armoire-sized, a listen-up-chum homicide dick with a handlebar mustache and bedside manner worthy of the Great John L. and a message that says, “You better learn how to protect yourself from crime or I’m gonna be in your face.”
In Bittenbinder’s world, good folks are constantly being stalked by “goofs,” his all-inclusive term for the violent criminals he has been locking up for the last 21 years. You want to avoid becoming goof fodder? J.J. will tell you how. Get out your pencils.
“I’m the lifeguard, and you’re the swimmers,” he barks at the 300 or so people bunched around him in a ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and Towers. They are there for a personal-safety seminar, free to the public, sponsored by a mobile-phone company. “There’s sharks out there in the water,” Bittenbinder warns. “If I can teach you how to keep the sharks away, you won’t need me. You can swim anywhere you want to.”
Over the next emotionally draining hour, he will literally talk himself hoarse delivering rapid-fire counsel on how not to become a victim. He browbeats. He cajoles. He cracks wise. He harangues. He is in constant motion, wading into the audience to engage his listeners in mock-derisive one-on-one before bounding agilely back to the podium to resume his harrowing lecture.
Bittenbinder is the gumshoe as showman, exuding equal proportions of shtick and nightstick. He is the Richard Simmons of crime.
It is this gift for performance that has, in little more than a year, catapulted him from Chicago’s spaghetti-supper circuit, where he has dispensed his brand of crimestopping to neighborhood groups for more than a decade, to the big-time world of network television, national press and international business conventions.
Since his first Public Broadcasting System special, “Street Smarts,” aired initially in March 1992, Bittenbinder has been riding the crest of a personal-security boomlet that could ultimately make him a rich man. But to dismiss him as simply the latest passenger on the carousel of instant fame is to ignore his status as a social phenomenon. For Bittenbinder represents the ultimate American marriage-the joining of entertainment and terror.
“Who here knows the key trick for poking an attacker in the face?” he asks. When a woman in the front row rises and arranges her housekeys so that the ends stick out menacingly from between her fingers, he examines the result scornfully and says: “Oh, yeah, you’re the one. C’mon over here.”
Then he takes her hand and bends two of the keys together so that they gently squeeze the finger in between. The woman yelps in sudden pain. “I’m hardly doing it,” he announces to the audience. “If I really squished, like an attacker would, I could get her to go into the parking lot with me and change the oil in my car. It really, really hurts.”
Hurts. The word hangs in the air like a poison-tipped arrow. The sound of it slowly dies away. Abruptly, Bittenbinder bellows: “Now here’s what you really do. You use one key. He lets a single key protrude from his clenched fingers and holds it aloft for all to see. “Then you stick it in his eye. Pop him with it, don’t hold back, because otherwise he’s gonna do something to you that you’re gonna think about every day for the rest of your life.”
To demonstrate how to foil a purse snatcher, he needs a purse. Again, a woman in the front row comes to the rescue. Taking the strap, Bittenbinder lets his body sag theatrically, as if the purse were full of rocks.
“Is it bowling night?” he jokes.
Quickly, he is all business again. “This is how the American woman walks,” he announces deprecatingly, draping the purse strap over the shoulder of his elegant three-piece suit and striding along with his eyes pointing down. Coming to a halt, he admonishes, like a stern father, “Don’t walk looking at your feet. It’s a sign of weakness. Predators are always looking up. It’s the sheep that look down, toward the grass.”
Once more he begins to walk, this time the right way, briskly, his eyes swinging back and forth like searchlights, the purse slung across his chest bandoleer-style, its strap held tightly with two hands. “Steady gait and sweeping gaze are most important,” he says. “They make you look tough and confident. It’s not how tough you are, it’s how tough you look.”
Scritch, scratch. Dozens of pens are immortalizing the words, preserving scripture on notepads, hotel stationery, the backs of envelopes. Oh God, please make us safe. It’s not how tough I am, it’s how tough I look. It’s not . . . .
They have come from as far away as Wisconsin to hear Bittenbinder preach. Nearly all seem to have had some personal brush with crime. “I’ve been attacked before,” Etta Connor says with a shudder, explaining why she is there. “It happened in Engelwood, in the city. I was getting off the bus and had a block to walk, and I saw him coming at me. He wanted the purse and me, both of us. I let the purse go when he grabbed at it, but then he started running after me. I was lucky. I reached the neighbors’ house and they chased him off.”
Connor lives somewhere else now, but the memory never goes away. Tonight she has brought three friends to see Bittenbinder. All are inspectors for the Oak Park Housing Authority. It is a white-knuckle job that takes them almost daily into public housing. “It’s dangerous work,” admits Louise Snyder, herself almost a mugging victim not long ago. “But this seminar’s great. Well worth coming to.”
Elsewhere in the crowd is Benita Timenieks, an investment counselor. “I’ve been assaulted two times,” she says. “I figured I could get some help tonight.”
The first time she was attacked, it happened at 8:30 at night in her apartment-building lobby. A guy came charging at her while she had the lobby door open. He kicked her and knocked her down. Timenieks fought back, and the attacker fled, later to be caught and arrested. A few weeks ago, she was accosted by a purse snatcher who had been waiting in the alley by her “L” stop. So the goof comes out of the alley. This time Timenieks started screaming, figuring if she made enough noise someone would help her. The guy got away.
“I’m here for some tips,” she says. “Someone told me that if you are willing to fight, you might as well learn to do it effectively.”
Bittenbinder’s catechism is not just about fighting, however. His first line of defense is prevention.
“You never see a lion on a nature special go after the fastest antelope, do you?” he says, to make his point that the best way to avoid crime is to keep from being selected as a target. “No, he always goes after the slowest or weakest. A burglar doesn’t strike a well-lit house, or the one that looks like a fortress. He looks for a house with a broken window or a light that’s busted out. It’s no accident the Big Bad Wolf started with the house that was made of straw.
“If the goof shows up and there are two people standing on a corner, the tough one never gets picked,” Bittenbinder says. “There are only two ways to get picked. The first is to look vulnerable. The second is to be in a vulnerable spot. The back of the bus. Alone. Or on an elevator. Alone.”
A woman in the third row is furiously scribbling on a notepad. Under “hints,” she has written, “Wear purse across chest.” Now she writes, “Sit near bus driver.” The wonder of it is that such thoughts apparently have never occurred to her.
“Suppose,” says Bittenbinder, “that there are two apartments side by side, each exactly alike viewed from the back porch. But one woman went out and got a dog bowl.” Pause. “A big dog bowl.” Pause. “A big dog bowl, and she had written `Killer’ on it.”
The audience breaks into laughter. “This woman,” says Bittenbinder, “has just given her apartment an attitude.”
The woman in the third row writes, “Buy big dog bowl. Write `Killer’ on it.”
John Joseph Bittenbinder didn’t come to police work by the ordinary route. But then he’s not your ordinary cop. Growing up in the De Paul neighborhood, he was the son, not of a police officer, but of an ornamental-iron worker.
Upon leaving the Marines in the late ’60s, Bittenbinder took a job as the manager of a retail store. He wanted to make some money. Instead he got stabbed four times by a thief whom he chased out of the store.
When Bittenbinder asked for reassignment to a store in a safer neighborhood, the company offered to send him to Detroit. Bittenbinder decided to look for another line of work.
Friends talked him into taking the police exam, and in 1971, at the age of 24, he joined the Chicago Police Department. Five years later, he made detective and has been in homicide and violent crimes ever since.
His work has included most of the major murder cases in the city since 1976, and he was the department’s liaison with the FBI during the Tylenol killings. He has interviewed more than 1,000 rape victims. “I’ve handled triple murders, double murders, and murder-suicides,” he says. “I’ve had ’em stabbed, shot, stomped and strangled. They’ve fallen out of windows and through the ice. They’ve been as young as toddlers and as old as it gets. I had a 95-year-old rape-murder victim once.” Bittenbinder’s been there.
He says a callous develops, allowing him to function. “But I had a father confess to me one time that he had beaten his 18-month-old son to death because the boy had messed his pants,” he says. “I nearly lost it then, man. It was too much. When you put your hands on a dead child and you feel the heat of his body still coming through, I don’t care what kind of callous you’ve got. It gets to you.”
It was in 1982 that Bittenbinder first took to the footlights. A serial rapist was loose around Wrigley Field, and the local alderman asked the district commander to supply a cop who could talk about the case with neighborhood residents. Bittenbinder got the nod.
“Department policy is you don’t discuss a pending case because you never know when the bad guy might be in the audience,” he says. “But I had to tell people something. So I started talking about how not to be picked as a crime victim, how to make your home safer and so on.” The act went over well. A few months later he was asked to do it again in a different neighborhood. Then it got to be once a month and finally once or twice a week.
It was always churches, schools or neighborhood groups. He never got paid. “I did it for 10 years and never had any idea there was money to be made,” Bittenbinder says. So what was the attraction? He shrugs. “It will sound corny, but I wanted to help people. That’s why I became a cop. To help people.
“When you’re in uniform, they move you around from place to place, and you help a lot of people a little bit. When you’re a detective, you help only a few people, but you help them a whole lot more. You stay with a case from start to finish. But in these presentations, I get to do both things. It’s the best of all worlds.”
One night in August 1989, television producer Bill Neal was jogging by a church in Old Town when he saw people spilling out of the auditorium onto the sidewalk. Neal, who had produced the “Super Bowl Shuffle” video, among other things, was intrigued. He went in and found that in the wake of the celebrated murder of Dana Feitler at a nearby cash station, Bittenbinder had been brought in to do a presentation.
“Toward the end of the evening,” Neal recalls, “they introduced him, and he just literally blew everybody away. It was a hot August night, with a packed house made up of mostly angry people, upset because of a rash of violent crimes, and J.J. came on as the last speaker of the evening and somehow he held this audience for close to an hour. It was remarkable under the circumstances.”
“Being in the video business,” Neal says, “I immediately saw a very talented, charismatic individual with the ability to captivate audiences, combined with this credibility as a cop for 20 years and a message so powerful that I thought it ought to be available to the masses, not just relatively small crowds.”
Neal soon booked Bittenbinder for a personal-security segment on a video he was making on terrorism in America. When Neal showed the segment to Public Broadcast System officials, they were convinced to take a flier on Bittenbinder. And so, in December 1991, Neal’s J Marc Group financed and produced “Street Smarts: How To Avoid Being a Victim.” When the show aired on PBS the following spring, it was so successful that spots on “Prime Time Live,” the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” the “Home Show” and “Sonia Live” soon followed. Last December Bittenbinder and J Marc combined for a second video, “Street Smarts: Straight Talk for Kids, Teens & Parents.” It, too, scored large ratings.
Bittenbinder is suddenly hot. He’s blazing. He is in such demand by conventions and corporations seeking enlightenment on employee security that he has had to engage a speakers’ bureau to schedule his personal appearances. “I spend 75 percent of my time fielding proposals on J.J. right now,” says Cheryl Miller, president of Speakers International. Neal, meantime, has become his personal manager, handling his ever-growing business affairs.
Channel 2 has retained Bittenbinder to do personal-safety tips on a regular basis. Feature stories on him are scheduled in upcoming issues of Runner’s World and Reader’s Digest. A third video, aimed at senior citizens and the disabled, is on the drawing board. And offers from Hollywood and New York publishers are pouring in. For a cop who used to work across the hall from former Chicago detective-turned-big-deal-television-star Dennis Farina, it is a heady experience indeed.
But there is a price. Bittenbinder is on the road as much as three times a week. Recently he crammed in appearances in Orlando and Philadelphia in the span of a few days, before hurrying back to Chicago for his normal police-department work schedule. The department has not rushed to give him the time to conduct his personal appearances.
Moreover, he has not given up the gratis neighborhood shots before local groups. The result is he is beginning to show strain.
“It’s become a real problem because he feels obligated to anyone who asks him into their kitchen or church basement,” Neal says.
Asked why he often works for free, he just shrugs. He is a man in transition, with a foot in two worlds-one comfortable, small-time and nurturing, the other nerve-wracking, huge and commercial. He clearly hasn’t got it all sorted out yet.
“Some of why I do this is ego,” he admits candidly. Some of it is money. I’d like to be able to retire from the force (he is 50 and has his 20 years in) and sustain myself with this. But some of it is people. I have all these memories of hurt children, battered women, broken lives. If I can make people safe, I gotta do it.”
He is warmed up now, pacing, expostulating. “So the goof comes out of the alley. What do you do?” The people in the ballroom shift in their chairs. They haven’t got the lesson down yet.
“Let me tell you about these guys,” Bittenbinder says. “When they come out of that alley, or into a parking lot, they know what they’re gonna do. They know whom they’re looking for, what they’ll take and where they’re gonna run. What do you know? Nothing. You’re not expecting it. But you should be. You gotta have a plan.
“These goofs aren’t rocket scientists. I’ve thrown a lot of people up against the wall, and I have yet to find a Mensa card. But they are ready. Meanwhile, you seem to think you can assess a situation and come up with a plan in the four to six seconds you may have. Is that logical?”
The J.J. method is easy. Five or six things you pound into your skull so they are second nature. They will happen automatically when the goof does you-know-what, the way a pilot reacts instinctively when an engine flames out. “He doesn’t reach for the operator’s manual at 30,000 feet,” Bittenbinder chides.
So: If someone points a gun at you, you run. Chances are he won’t shoot, and if he does, odds are he’ll miss or hit a non-vital spot.
If you’re a woman, don’t try to fight a rapist with your arms. You haven’t got the upper-body strength. Drop down on your butt and start screaming and kicking wildly. The low center of gravity will keep him from picking you up. Above all, DO NOT GET INTO HIS CAR. “It’s a one-way trip,” Bittenbinder warns. “All those women found in the forest preserves over the years weren’t out there walking in the woods. They were brought there in a car.”
Bittenbinder has other refinements. Get a money clip, fill it with a few dollar bills, and if someone holds you up, throw it onto the ground and run the other way. The guy will lunge at the money every time. Or better yet, buy a can of disabling spray. Or a personal alarm.
By now, Bittenbinder has hit millions of people with his message. He believes he has prevented a number of crimes.
The facts seem to bear him out. Carey Tradewell, who heads the Milwaukee Women’s Center, a crisis center for women, caught J.J. on TV last year. Some weeks later she was walking to her car when two men jumped out at her, grabbed her wrists, and ordered her to follow them. “I remembered the cop’s words about dropping to your butt and kicking and screaming,” she says. “And I told myself, `I’ve got a big butt and a big mouth. Time to use them.’ “
Did it work? “Oh yes,” Tradewell says. “They grabbed my purse and ran. The advice saved my life.”
Tradewell’s voice catches. Her eyes have filled with tears.
