Podcasts and Damnation Island

Concidentally, I am on two podcasts this week talking about my book Damnation Island. Philip Yanos, Ph.D., the author of excellent and important book, Exiles in New York City: Warehousing the Marginalized on Ward’s Island, has started a podcast which focuses on stories of banishment. I am the guest in the current episode! From my blurb for Yanos’s great book: “A riveting look at the untold history of the treatment and mistreatment of marginalized groups banished to Ward’s Island. Combining compassionate understanding with clear and informed insight, this account is impossible to put down. The final chapter, with an alternative vision for the island’s future, is positively thrilling.”

I am also on Travis Myers’ podcast, Another Nobody! Myers is a crime author, including the three book series which begins with Sister Margaret, A Tommy Keane Novel. “Sister Margaret is a gut punch of a tale that takes the reader behind the crime-scene tape and onto an exhilarating tour of the streets, drug dens, dive bars, and precinict houses of New York City, with an insiders view that rarely makes the papers.” -Jesse Smith, Crime Journalist, Kingston Times

Bryant Park True Crime Panel

As part of the Bryant Park Author Series, I will be on a True Crime Panel on August 13 at 12:30pm. Bryant Park (40th & 42nd) is in back of the New York Public Library. We’ll be on the 42nd Street side of the park, in between the back of the NYPL and 6th Ave. Look for the yellow and white umbrellas.

The panel will be hosted by the fabulous Peter Moskos, who is a former Baltimore police officer, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the author of Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990’s Crime Drop. On the panel will be myself (The Killing Fields of East New York) and author Casey Sherman, Blood in the Water: The Untold Story of a Family Tragedy.

This is a picture of me on another panel, for Claire L. Evan’s book Broad Band: The Untold History of the Women Who Made the Internet. That’s Claire on the left, me, and Jaime Levy, a new media artist and interface designer.

Twenty Years!

I started this blog twenty years ago! I didn’t post a lot at first. It was mostly cat pictures back then (Finney and Buddy, that’s them on the far left and right of the banner), and about my books, of course. The paperback for The Restless Sleep was coming out, and I’d already started on my next book about the former Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University.

I was still doing commentaries for NPR’s All Things Considered at the time. I haven’t done a commentary for them in I don’t know how many years, but publishers keep putting it in my bio. I understand why they do that. I once mentioned my embarrassment about it to my former producer and he was very understanding. They know why publishers do that, too.

I was also still drumming with Manhattan Samba! This is me at the Halloween Parade in 2005, with fellow drummers Ellen and Maddy. Maddy lives in Florida now, but Ellen still drums with Manhattan Samba and I just saw her and the band at the annual Dance Parade. In fact, I’ll include a picture of her now, with the band. Scroll down to see it. That’s her on the far right. Do something in your life that makes you as happy as Ellen is, drumming in the band.

Manhattan Samba

Manhattan Samba

I’m Reading at KGB’s!

Monday, June 10, 2025 @7pm
KGB Reading Series
85 E. 4th Street

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 in January! I’ll be reading with Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, Lucian Truscott, a former Village Voice staff writer, author of Dress Gray, and Jonathan Coleman, author of the true crime classic At Mother’s Request and the biography of basketball titan Jerry West, West by West, My Charmed, Tormented Life.

The Killing Fields of East New York

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