Friend of the Devil

More than a decade ago, an acquaintance committed one of the most nefarious crimes in New York history. Then he helped me try to understand why.

I always kind of liked Peter Braunstein.

This is when he was Peter, before he became the Fire Fiend, or Pervy Pete. Before the unusually temperate autumn day, October 31, 2005, when he dressed as a fireman and set off several smoke bombs in the hallway of a Manhattan apartment building. Before he then talked his way into the apartment of a woman he barely knew, knocked her out with chloroform, tied her up, sexually assaulted her, and held her captive for 13 harrowing hours. Before the six-week manhunt that followed, and the armed robberies, and the discovery of his plot to murder Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Back when what he and I had in common — two straight guys on the mostly gay or female staff of a fashion-oriented publishing company, neither one of whom seemed to have much of a future in the fashion world — hadn’t yet been so completely overshadowed by what we didn’t.

True, he could come off like a bit of an asshole back then, a little too full of himself, swaggering around in his leather pants and velvet blazers, his corkscrew curls glistening with product. Then again, plenty of people are full of themselves. There’s no crime in that. It’s why we come to New York, many of us, to get more full.

Peter’s tenure as a writer at Women’s Wear Daily overlapped with mine as an editor at W, the fashion trade paper’s glossy sister title, and in the days before both publications were purchased by Conde Nast, he and I worked just a few steps apart in the massive third-floor newsroom on East 34th Street. His work stood out at WWD, so I suggested he write for the magazine and wound up editing several of his stories, including the piece on Guy Bourdin, a French fashion photographer notorious for his sadomasochistic imagery, that was later taken as a sign of Peter’s twisted mind. He filed on deadline, and his copy was clean. Like I said, the guy seemed okay.