Episodes

On the night of July 13, 1977, a citywide power failure plunged New York’s ten million residents into darkness. Chaos ensued. There was looting in every borough, with hundreds of fires set and thousands of arrests — but just one murder. The victim was 17-year-old Brooklyn native Dominick Ciscone.

Over 40 years later, the Ciscone case is still unsolved, despite multiple witnesses, decades of police attention, and even some anonymous tips. Because that murder might not have been part of the Blackout’s chaos at all — it might have been planned, not by someone who anticipated the power going out, but by someone who saw an opportunity to kill in the dark.

The Apollo Theater — the venue that shaped 20th-century Black music more than any other — shut its doors in the mid-1970s and stayed closed for years. It almost disappeared for good. But a mysterious buyer purchased the theater and reopened it in 1978. According to unofficial histories of the Apollo, the new owner was a man named Guy Fisher, one of the biggest heroin kingpins New York City has ever seen. The official history of the Apollo doesn’t ever mention Guy Fisher, and we wanted to know why. Our investigation uncovered a story of ambition. Of a love triangle. Of violence. And of redemption.

In season two, New York Drop Dead, reporters step back into the 1970s. They go beyond the bell bottoms and disco to explore what made this decade notorious in New York’s history. A decade in which the Big Apple went by a far more sinister nickname — Fear City. The city was broken and broke. When city officials asked the federal government for a bailout — President Gerald Ford told them they were on their own. The next day the New York Daily News ran the now infamous front page headline– Ford to City: Drop Dead.

It was the decade the lights went out and The Bronx was burning. When peaceful protestors turned to making bombs, when the legendary Apollo Theater nearly closed for good and the man who saved it went to prison. The decade in which women’s rights would take center stage.

Find out how things have changed since the 1970s – and how they’ve stayed the same.

In the 1990s, in the shadow of the FBI’s large-scale takedown of New York’s most infamous mafia family, an Indian immigrant was quietly building his own criminal organization. Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa came to the United States from the Punjab region of India

On a hot summer night in 1991, seven-year-old cousins Gavin and Angela were getting ready to play. Gavin was undoing his bike chain while Angela eagerly stood nearby.

Only a few moments separated them from Yosef Lifsh’s car and what would soon become one of the worst periods of unrest New York City has ever seen.

In this episode, we go back to that fateful accident that sparked what many know as the Crown Heights Riots. Over the next three days, this Brooklyn neighborhood fell into chaos with residents, police and community leaders clashing.

In looking back at what happened on August 19th, 1991, we explore Crown Heights itself, a neighborhood with many cultures and communities living side by side and ask: why did this happen and how did it get so bad?