S5 Episode 14: The Untold Story of East New York

In the early 1990s, East New York was known as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America, a place dubbed “The Killing Fields” after a wave of murders shook Brooklyn. What if the real crime story started decades earlier, in boardrooms and banks?

Author Stacy Horn takes us inside her new book, The Killing Fields of East New York, to uncover how a well-intentioned housing policy in the late 1960s spiraled into America’s first subprime mortgage scandal. When most people think of a subprime crisis, they think of 2008. But long before that, East New York became ground zero for greed, fraud, and systemic neglect, devastating an entire community.

Stacy traces the domino effect: fraudulent FHA-backed loans, families trapped in crumbling homes, abandoned blocks, and a surge in violence that left East New York with one of the highest murder rates in the country. Along the way, she shares the human stories behind the statistics, the investigators who tried to stop the collapse, and why these failures still matter today.

This is a look at how white-collar crime can destroy neighborhoods as completely as street violence—and why history keeps repeating itself.