I’d spot him on Center City streets in the 1980s. He was not young but in fact had a rumpled, unkempt look: longish white hair, thick Bennett Cerf-style glasses, and a tall, skinny frame visible from great distances. In his trademark coat and tie, he cut a picture of ruined yet elegant aristocracy.
He was journalist John Guinther (1927–2004), who wrote for Dan Rottenberg’s Philadelphia Forum (1996–1998) and the Welcomat, where I was also a columnist. In those days I remember thinking that Guinther looked as though he’d been through a war. Or maybe three wars. Later I learned that he had not only been through a war but he had pretty much played the role of an Old Testament David who had just beaten the giant, Goliath, with persistent uses of a slingshot.
Goliath in this case was then Philadelphia DA Edward Rendell. Mounting a Rendell offensive then was pretty much seen as foolish or suicidal, but that’s what Guinther did when he challenged the conviction of Neil Ferber, a furniture salesman, in the 1981 shooting death of Philly Greek mobster Steve Booras and his girlfriend in a South Philadelphia restaurant.
The murder rattled the city, but rather than taking time to investigate the case, the prosecution put a jailhouse snitch on the stand, one Jerry Jordan, who testified (in exchange for a reduced sentence) that Ferber shot Booras and his girlfriend. Jordan’s testimony was taken as gospel despite his having flunked a lie detector test.
It took Goliath — in this case, Rendell — three years to acknowledge Jordan’s test results but by this time Feber was on death row about to be executed.
Guinther, meanwhile, published a feature on Ferber in Philadelphia magazine. Goliath’s people ignored the piece, forcing Guinther to publish a piece entitled, “An Innocent Man on Death Row,” which caught the attention of WWDB radio personality Irv Homer, who read it on the air.
Goliath then ordered another lie detector test for Jordan. Jordan failed the test a second time and this resulted in Ferber’s freedom.
Today, a journalist like Guinther would have the support and backing of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project (PIP), a non-profit organization founded in 2009.
PIP was the brainchild of two Philadelphia lawyers, David Richardson of Pepper Hamilton, and David Rudovsky, one of the country’s leading civil rights and criminal defense attorneys and a teacher of criminal law at the University of Pennsylvania.
Guinther was also the author of a number of books, including Brotherhood of Murder (1989), of the inside story of The Order, one of America’s most violent neo-Nazi groups. The book is the true story of Tom Martinez, a former member of The Order who became involved in the largest armored car robbery in American history, an event that led to the killing of Denver talk show host Alan Berg on June 18, 1984. The book was written with Martinez, who became an FBI informant, and was made into a SHOWTIME movie starring William Baldwin.
Five months ago, the Philadelphia Citizen published a piece on Tom Martinez. The article focused on the neo-Nazi philosophy behind The Order and mentioned John Guinther’s only once. Once is better than nothing, of course, even though Guinther’s name is not very well known today. People often get him confused with writer John Gunther (1901-1970), author of the classic, Death Be Not Proud, about the death of Gunther’s seventeen-year-old son from a brain tumor.
Philadelphia’s Ed Bacon wrote the foreword to Guinther’s book, Direction of Cities (Viking/Penguin, 1997), a work that explores the factors that make cities livable. Though Guinther was a political writer, not a city planner, he looks at U.S. cities through a Baconian lens. Guinther takes to task cherished modernist icons like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.
“They removed the art from architecture and made it a technology,” he writes. The book is also a sweeping condemnation of New York’s Robert Moses and his Cross-Bronx Expressway. He calls Moses an “influential progenitor of chaos.”
Guinther’s investigation of the Ferber case won him a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
When he published Brotherhood of Murder (1999), the neo-Nazi and so-called white supremacist threat was viable in a way that it is not today. In 2025, the term ‘white supremacist’ has been elongated and abused to include anyone who questions DEI policies, the abuses of affirmation action and the war on illegal immigration. Violence today generally comes from the Left, not the Right. The country is not the same as it was when I would see Guinther walking in the vicinity of 20th and Chestnut Streets in his long seedy overcoat and scarf, head bowed in genuine humility.
The new neo-Nazis are not the people calling for the death of the Jews, but the people calling ICE “the enemy” and who celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk.
Thom Nickels is a Broad + Liberty’s Editor at Large for Arts and Culture and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.
