Nowhere in America do poverty and wealth exist so closely to one another as in New York City. Even from the darkest corners of Brooklyn, one need only look up and across the East River to see the great temples of Wall Street wealth looming over the night. Since the birth of the city, New York’s poorest residents, whether Irish, Jewish, black, or Puerto Rican, have made their own gold from the streets of the city. Sometimes the elements of crime were needed to harvest this gold.

But as the violence slowly spread toward the rich and powerful, the apparatus of control, the police and the government, swung into action and, miracle of miracles, New York, the rotten apple, became the safest big city in America… or that’s the official story. In New York City, 1970, heroin was the king. Teenage gangs terrorized the streets of Brooklyn and Bronx, and mafia leader Joe Colombo decided to fight the government, not in the street but on television. Colombo’s crime family was locked in a war with crazy Joey Gallo. Gallo had aligned himself with black gangsters from Brooklyn while serving time in prison.

In 1990, a 15 year old male in Harlem had a 30% chance of reaching the age of 35.”