Stacy Horn

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.

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.

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.

Someone is bringing back the Wowee Whistle! It’s a Halloween candy I have been missing these since childhood, I can’t wait!! This is the place: click here.

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.