Book Events for The Killing Fields of East New York

My new book titled The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood came out on January 28, 2025. I have a few book-related events coming up.

June 10, 2025
KGB Reading Series
85 E. 4th Street, 7PM

August 13, 2025
Bryant Park Author Series
A panel about crime with author Peter Moskos.
Details to come.

August 27, 2025
Book Talk, West Islip Public Library
3 Higbie Lane, West Islip, NY, 7PM

October, 2025
Book Talk, Cypress Hills Local Development Center/United Community Centers.
Details to come.

Clifford Glover

In 1967, President Johnson established The Kerner Commission to determine the reasons for riots that had erupted throughout the nation. Their conclusion was breathtakingly simple. America is a racist country. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans . . . White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

According to Johnson’s committee, among the most serious problems, in a long list of them were the police, unemployment, and housing discrimination. Racism in America was so bad and so systemic, that only a “compassionate, massive, and sustained” effort could even begin to address it. The Commission had found that complaints of police brutality were shockingly legitimate.

5 years later, 10-year-old Clifford Glover, who was Black, was shot in the back in Queens by police officer Thomas Shea. Shea claimed that he and his partner, who were in plain clothes and driving an unmarked car, had stopped Glover and his step-father to question them about a taxicab holdup. The step-father said the officers never identified themselves, and they took off running, thinking they were about to be robbed. Lending credence to his claim, the step-father had run and flagged down the first patrol car he saw and cried, “They’re shooting my son.”

The officers who’d chased and killed Clifford would give several versions of their story, until seemingly landing on the one they felt was the most plausible: the 4th grader had pointed a gun at them. No gun was ever found. At the trial, jurors were played a recording of Shea’s partner, Walter Scott, saying over the radio, “Die, you little fuck.” The voice wasn’t his, Scott claimed. The indifference to Clifford’s imminent death was shared. When Sergeant Thomas Donohue took the stand he testified that as he stood over Clifford, the boy said, “I’m dying.” Without a measure of kindness or compassion for the frightened child he answered, “That’s right … you’re dying.” Shea was acquitted.

The picture is of an article in the Daily News.