—ONE-OF-A-KIND ODYSSEY OF REDEMPTION & ACTIVISM, CHRONICLE OF HIGH- & LOW-LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY 1970-2020

—CONVICTED OF MANSLAUGHTER 1991, PAROLED 2003, GRADUATED NYU 2006, CREDENTIALED AS JOURNALIST BY NYPD 2007, WORKED AS REPORTER & NEWS PHOTOGRAPHER, WENT FROM RIKERS ISLAND TO WHITE HOUSE

—CAPTURED CRIME, COURTS, PRISONS, PROTESTS, POLITICS, CELEBRITIES & BOHEMIAN SCENE IN BROOKLYN, INCLUDING WOMEN-RUN “HOUSE OF YES”

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Nov. 7, 2024

There's only three reasons to ever go to New York City: to get high, laid or paid. 

Ever since Joan Didion lamented the loss of "the schoolgirl who used to me" in her 1967 requiem, Goodbye to All That, refugees from the City that Never Sleeps have unloaded thousands of pages mourning their tragedies and trumpeting their triumphs. 

No one ever told the tale like I'ma 'bout tell it. 

None was ever penned by a convicted killer-turned-journalist. Who was caged in the City's notorious jail on Rikers Island and then, four years later, walked into the White House as a journalist to photograph Pres. Barack Obama award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to rock star Bob Dylan.

Not just a one-of-a-kind Odyssey of redemption, here is a chronicle of the City told from the street up—from the time it hit rock bottom in the 1970s, to when it regained its crown as world's greatest in the 'Aughts. I saw and survived both eras. That's what makes reading this gritty, first-person report a blast—if you want to know the stone-cold truth about what life was really like in the City back then.

(1) Sharon Alice Nicholas (Cosentino) bringing me home from the hospital some time in April 1970; (2) mom wearing a stylish coat while posing with a high-powered rifle and a dead whitetail “buck” deer, likely in Maine in the 1950s. Photo credits: (1) Faye Ruth Cosentino, (2) unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

I'm pretty sure my hippie Flower Child mom was only half-sane from the start.

Maybe someone did something bad to Sharon Alice Nicholas (Cosentino) when she was a kid. Maybe she was born that way. Which ever it was, normal Catholic high school kids don't strip off their uniforms and storm out in their underwear when called to account for some alleged transgression—not like my mother did when she was 16, not the way my grandmother told it to me.

Faye Ruth Cosentino (Austin) was the Sgt. Joe Friday of grandmothers: she wanted "just the facts." Faye never exaggerated. Never. She was born on a kitchen table in a farmhouse in Maine, during the Depression. She was as no-nonsense as no-nonsense gets. So if Faye said mom stripped down to her skivvies after being summoned to Mother Superior ‘s office then paraded half-naked down the hallway of that Catholic school and out into the street, I know for a fact that's exactly what mom did. 

When mom moved us to the Bronx in 1973 most white families were fleeing.

She wanted to be closer to her heroin dealers. She told her parents it was to finish earning a bachelor's degree in psychology at Fordham University. She did that too, somehow, but she also enrolled me in West Tremont Daycare because it was close to the methadone clinic she was going to at the time—in a failed effort to kick. Sometimes she took me there after school. The “program” was a couple of trailers in the middle of an overgrown field.

Mom and I survived on welfare and food-stamps. We never paid to ride the subway. Mom used fake tokens called "slugs"—blank, round pieces of metal the same size as real subway tokens. In Summer, the fire hydrant unleashed a thick jet of cold water we all danced in front of to cool off. Sometimes mom and I rode a city bus past a stinking city dump to swim in the polluted water off Orchard Beach. Dirty diapers and needles sometimes washed ashore.

My closest friends were Sam and Samantha, the Puerto Rican brother and sister who lived next door; James, the black kid who lived across the street; and Joey and Tony, two other white kids. We played stickball and Ringolevio—chasing each other through the streets with the goal of tagging members of the other team and putting them in "jail," or avoid being tagged and freeing our team from jail.  When the Mr. Softee truck came around, our mothers came out and bought us ice cream—if they had any spare change.

To celebrate America's 200th anniversary on July 4, 1976, New York City through a huge party. 

(1) 6-year-old me during the Nation’s 200th anniversay celebrations in New York City in 1976; (2) My fifth birthday party 1975 or so, with (far left with mom) Joseph, Sam (second from left giving thumb’s up, the author (center, far back), Anthony (second from right, holding both hands up) and Samantha (far back right); (3) Christmas 1973 in the Bronx. Photo credits: (1) Sharon Nicholas; (2) Faye Cosentino; and (3) Sharon Nicholas, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

That day, 225 ships from 30 countries, including warships and 16 four-masted sailing ships—most in the world at the time—sailed up the Hudson River from New York harbor to the George Washington Bridge and back. Mom and I sat on top of a bluff in Riverside Park overlooking the river watching the Empire's great fleet sail past on parade. When it was over, we visited the ships docked at piers along the west side of Manhattan. 

A Polaroid captured six year-old me, tanned and bare-chested, smiling in cut-off Osh Kosh B'gosh overalls held aloft by a sailor. My filthy sneakers contrast with his pristine white sailor’s uniform. As the sun fell, mom and i walked down to the Battery. When night closed around us, she lifted me up on her shoulders and we watched fireworks explode over the Statue of Liberty.

Almost everything mom and I did back then seemed like an adventure.

Even the infamous 1977 Blackout. Some neighborhoods devolved into wide-spread looting, chaos and arson. Our block was quiet. Mom and I sat outside on our stoop with a gas-powered Coleman camping lantern and hung out. We turned it into a block party. We just hung out on the street, all night, talking with our neighbors and telling stories.

Besides the Blackout, the Yankees won the World Series for the first time since 1962. Bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium cost about $2.50 back then and mom took me alot. I had a baseball signed by every player on that team and the manager, Billy Martin. Somehow mom even scored us tickets to a playoff game.

As the team won game after game in its epic run to a World Series championship, arsonists literally burned building after building around the stadium to the ground. You could smell the smoke just riding the subway through the Bronx to get to the stadium. Public School No. 3 was lit on fire during Game 2 of the World Series that year. ABC television producers bravely decided to show the fire burning live to more than 37 million Americans.  

“There it is, ladies and gentleman, the Bronx is burning,” Howard Cosell, the noted sportscaster, famously quipped.

The Bronx burned because Republican Pres. Gerald Ford let it. 

Two years before, Pres. Ford denied the City's emergency request for federal financial aid. The Oct. 30, 1975 New York Daily News front-page chronicled the President's cold-blooded rejection: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” 

It got worse. David Berkowitz, a/k/a the “Son of Sam," stalked the City’s streets, randomly blasted people to death with a .44 magnum handgun. 

"Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C., which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood," Berkowtiz introduced himself in a letter to Jimmy Breslin, legendary newspaper columnist for the New York Daily News.

1977 was also the year a stranger broke into our our basement apartment. He held a knife to mom’s neck and threatened to kill her, and me, unless she did whatever he wanted to do. What he wanted to do was rape her. 

(1) me in abour 1977; (2) the living room of the basement apartment mom and I lived in in the Bronx. Photo credits: (1) unknown, (2) Faye Cosentino, , courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

I came home from school a few weeks later and found mom sprawled across its shaggy blue carpet on the living room floor with a needle sticking out of her arm. I knelt beside her, shook her and yelled at her to wake up but she didn't. I picked up the rotary telephone and dialed 9-1-1. Waiting for the rotary phone's dial to unwind backward so that I could dial another number seemed to take forever. When the paramedics and cops finally showed up, they put mom in an ambulance and drove her to Jacobi Hospital. 

I stood on the street and watched the ambulance pull away. 

Mom lived, thanks to the paramedics of the New York City Emergency Medical Service and the doctors at Jacobi. Instead of coming home to the Bronx, Mom went to New York Hospital—a Victorian Age miracle and mercy high on a wooded hill in a suburb north of the City.

I moved in with my grandmother, Faye, in Yonkers, on the northern border of the Bronx.  Faye worked in Lawrence Hosptial in Bronxville, a tony suburb next to Yonkers.

(1) Faye with a soldier at a dance hall, possibily the Roseland Ballroom (note the camera she’s holding in her right hand); (2) Faye in lipstick; (3) Faye in Brooksville, Maine in 1941 or ‘42 with her three sisters; (4) Faye’s four brothers. Photo credits: (1-4) unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

Faye graduated Brooksville, Maine high school in the middle of World War II. The next day she get on a train to Washington, D.C. She found a job handing out checks to soldiers, but broke out in hives. She moved to New York City, where the hives disappeared. Walking around her new home, Faye saw posters advertising the Cadet Nursing Corp and signed up.

The Nursing Corp sent her to nursing school at Metropolitan Hospital and got her a bed in a single-sex dormitory on Roosevelt Island. One night, Faye broke the dorm’s curfew, climbed down a fire escape and found my grandfather—on the dancefloor of the Roseland Ballroom. A first-generation Sicilian-American raised in the Bronx, Alfonso Cosentino soon left to fight Nazis in North Africa—and even a few Fascist Italians.

Back home after the war, Al helped build the camera equipment for America's first spy satellites. Then he helped put men on the moon as part of the Apollo program team that built NASA's lunar lander. In the 1970s, he helped design the avionics for one of the U.S.'s most iconic war planes, the F-14 Tomcat. In the 1980s, he free-lanced for the CIA in Iraq but said no to Sadaam Hussein when the dictator offered him lavish riches if he moved to Iraq and trained his military engineers.

When Al returned to the Bronx, he slept with a loaded .45 Colt automatic under his pillow. I know because I found it one day, and held it in my hand. I think it was the same gun he carried into combat in North Africa during World War II.

The CIA “kidnapped” Al—his word—in the lead-up to the Gulf War in 1991. He openly hated it after that.

In the 1960s, while Al was off driving his Corvette Stingray from his Cocoa Beach hotel to work at Cape Canaveral in Florida, back in New York Faye decided it was time for a change. She left him and turned herself into a Feminist trailblazer: the first nurse to have a research paper published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. She went on to become Director of Lawrence Hospital's intravenous therapy department. 

Maybe that's why mom wasn't afraid of needles.

(1) Metropolitan hospital nursing class 1944 or 1945, Faye first row, second from right; (2) Faye at work with patient; (3) Faye with Al on a bicycle; (4) Al; (5) Sharon, Faye & Al. Photo credits: (1-3) unknown, (4) Faye Cosentino; (5) unknown, , courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

It felt like I could be killed at any second growing up in the 1980s.

It wasn't just surviving what I'd already survived in the Bronx that made me feel that way. Almost the entire decade, Americans lived under a constant threat of nuclear annihilation, thanks to the Cold War and stockpiles of about 70,000 atomic bombs the U.S. and Russia kept ready to drop on each other at a moment's notice. 

"In 1983, the two nuclear superpowers were like blindfolded boxers careening toward a death match," is how Brian J. Morra, a former Air Force Intelligence officer who served in the 80s, described it in Air & Space Forces magazine in 2022. 

The 1983 made-for-TV ABC movie The Day After vividly depicted the gruesome effects of a nuclear attack—complete with human beings incinerated and the slow, painful deaths of initial survivors from radiation sickness.

While mom was away, Faye enrolled me in the Boy Scouts. I loved the Boy Scouts because they took me upstate to the mountains—where I didn’t have to worry about anything. I also liked the idea of a code to live by. I spent two summers living in a tent at a rustic camp in the Adirondacks. I discovered I was born to hike, fish, shoot and climb. I may have lived in the city, but I was a country boy in my heart.

The Boy Scouts encouraged civic engagement, which to me included international affairs. I protested for the anti-Fascist Polish labor movement Solidarity in 1980. There was something about their fight I liked. I made a homemade Solidarity flag with a white pillowcase and red marker and waved it from a broomstick at a busy intersection after school one day. Drivers honked in support.

When mom was finally released from the mental hospital, she threw a party.

When you throw a party you invite your friends. Mom’s friends were the people she'd been locked up with and met at Daytop, a drug rehabilitation program she had to attend as a condition of her release. I always acted older than my age—the solo Solidarity protest was just one example—and could hold conversations with grown-ups. I sweet-talked one of mom’s 20-somthing year-old friends into my bed and was about to strip her panties off when someone busted in and cut our fun short.

Mixing meds and booze is always a bad idea.

1980s New York City was my dark and twisted backyard playground. 

In junior high, I met a bunch of young troublemakers from a Yonkers neighborhood tougher than mine, right on the Bronx border. What brought us together is difficult to explain, rationally, with dry words on paper. What brought us together was primitive and primal. More instinct than conscious effort. It was like we smelled our own kind and sniffed each other out. The basic thing was that we were all explorers and, being explorers, we were also rule-breakers.

My new friends wrote graffiti, and soon so was I. Style Wars, a 1983 PBS documentary, was our guidebook. We'd rack spray paint and markers and "bomb" the subway. Usually we hit the twos and fours because those were closest to the park we hung out in the back of.  Using thick felt-tip markers, cans of spray-paint and bottles of black or white shoe polish, we'd tag as many surfaces as we could before the train came.

Sometimes we did some quick fill-ins. Sometimes we'd bomb the lay-ups: isolated stretches of track where empty trains are stored overnight. Breaching a train parked at a lay-up is like boarding a ghost ship—eerie, dark and quiet. Once inside, the only sounds are the hiss of spray paint and the squeak of markers.

By the end of the night, we’d be spattered with ink and spray paint. It was bad because if a cop saw you like that on the subway they’d automatically throw you up against a wall and take whatever they found—spray paint, markers, drugs, weapons (usually knives or nunchuks in those days), sometimes even our money. Usually they let you go, but if they arrested you that was serious because that might mean a trip to Spofford—the City’s notorious jail for kids in Hunt’s Point.

We formed our own group, the Coyne Park Crew, and joined forces with other groups. Cap, who was from an old Italian enclave in the Bronx, put us down with the Morris Park Crew, MPC. You wanted to be down with as many crews as possible, which you could add to your tag. To get down with MPC, we all had to meet, greet, get high and go bombing. We met at the MPC clubhouse. It was a place they called "the Founds." 

The Founds was beneath a subway train trestle, just south of the Bronx Park East station. The twos and fives passed overhead. The walls of the Founds was MPC's Hall of Fame, covered in ornate, colorful murals spray-painted by MPC's founding members. Cap and all the other older MPC kids smoked angel dust, a powerful hallucinogen. We smoked some with them then went bombing together. It was a primitive rite of initiation.

The first time the CPC kids copped angel dust on our own was on Daly Avenue just south of the Bronx Zoo.  

Bronx landlords faced massive white-flight in the 1970s. No one wanted to live in their decrepit, dangerous tenements but the City kept sending them property tax bills. Instead of paying, landlords burned their buildings and collected insurance checks. Seven Bronx buildings burned down per eight-hour fire-fighting shift on average by the mid-1970s. Dozens burned every day, 100s per week, 1000s per year. Entire blocks were incinerated.

AK and I tread a path through the ruins a decade later. 

My comrade's graffiti tag was inspired by the infamous Soviet assault rifle, the AK-47. A few more than a dozen of us cut school and went on an outlaw school trip. We hopped the two train at 238th Street and rode it to East Tremont, where a very long escalator took us down, down, way down to the street below. In a park beside the Bronx River, we pooled our money. Because AK had been to The Spot before, he got tasked with making The Buy.

Out of all the kids there, AK asked me to go with him. He knew, even then, I was good to have around in a jam. 

It was like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. AK and I traipsed through fields of rubble. A "steerer" employed by the dealers pointed out an abandoned building. We walked inside and up a staircase with shattered, red steps and crumbling walls. Through a chest-high hole, I looked outside and glimpsed a courtyard filled with piles of bricks, abandoned refrigerators, smashed TVs and garbage. On a landing, AK handed over the cash to kids a few years older than us and pocketed several bags of dust in return. 

The "bags" themselves were small, glassine pouches tucked inside only slightly larger brown paper envelopes—the kind of small envelopes extra buttons come in.

We made it back to our friends and spent a languid afternoon getting "zooted"—another slang for Angel Dust was "zoot"—in the black-top covered park by the river before hopping the train back home.

South Bronx in the 1970s and ‘80s. Photo credits: (1 & 2) by Camilo J. Vergara via the Library of Congress; (3 & 4) Martine Barratt via the photographer’s website.

Heavy metal and hardcore punk rock was the soundtrack we lived our lives to.

Before Webster Hall was Webster Hall—the second time—it was The Ritz. We saw Voi Vod, Cro Mags and Venom at the Ritz, just to name a few. On weekends, we went to hardcore punk matinees at CBGBs. In winter we usually went home, but in summer we bought quarts of beer (before 40 ounce bottles replaced quarts) and walked over to Tompkins Square Park afterwards to keep the party going.

L'Amour was a club in Bay Ridge that called itself the "Rock Capital of Brooklyn." We saw shows there too, including Metallica, Slayer and Merciful Fate.  The only thing bad about L'Amour was the long subway ride back in the middle of the night. That ride was always like the 1979 movie The Warriors, about a street gang framed for a murder they didn't commit and trying to get home. The Warriors gang made their fictional Odyssey from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to Coney Island in Brooklyn—almost the exact opposite of the trip we made from L'Amour’s to Woodlawn. 

My comrades and I looked the part too: in leather MC jackets,  denim vests adorned with patches and buttons and big, black biker or combat boots. 

Crack ruined everything. The first time I saw Crack I was in a high school homeroom in 1984 or '85. One of the kids had a 3/4-inch high by 1/4-inch wide clear plastic vial with a yellow top and a tiny rock of Crack inside. He was just passing it around openly, like it was legal. 

First it was the fucked up kids who started smoking it, then normal kids—even those who played sports. The caricature of the innocent cheerleader-turned-whore to fund her Crack habit was based on real-life events. Even parents got Cracked out too.

I wasn't into Crack—or even Dust. I was into tripping balls on "mescaline." That's what the dealers at a place called The Door near Woodlawn called it, but it was really a synthetic copy of mescaline. It was probably invented in a Berkeley, California college lab in the 1960s. It was probably "DOB"—a kind of LSD. But by the time I turned 16 in 1986, I'd sworn off all drugs—including marijuana. I even kept a big, round "Just Say No" button on the dashboard of my Jeep.

I got by in school but loved to work and always had a job to go to afterwards to earn money. 

The legal age to work full-time in New York then was 16. When I was 14 I said I was 16 to get a full-time job working as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a chain Mexican restaurant called El Torito with more than 300 seats. I looked like I could've been 20, so they never checked. The kitchen served more than 1,000 meals a night on weekends. The chef, a Spaniard from the Canary Islands named Charles Garcia, respected by hustle. He made me a prep cook after about three months as a dishwasher. Every night I left smelling like rice, beans, oil and sweat.

Two years later, when I actually turned 16, Garcia made me head line cook. That's how I bought the Jeep. 

(1) On the beach in the Hamptons with my 1986 XJ Jeep Cherokee; (2) the interior showing the custom-made dashboard I fabricated; and (3) passport photos from 1988. Photo credits: (1) unknown; (2) JB Nicholas; (3) unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

I hung out with my co-workers after work. They liked to go drinking and dancing at clubs in Manhattan. Legendary New York City clubs like the Underground, Red Parrot, Limelight and 10-18, later the Roxy. I got in with a fake employee ID I bought at an arcade called Playland in Times Square for less than $20. I had this whole, entire other life. It wasn’t exactly secret but none of my Yonkers crew knew anything about it. I liked it that way.That way It was all mine.

Times Square was still full of movie theaters in the early 1980s. These mostly showed current Hollywood releases. A row of theaters on the north side of 42d Street west of Broadway showed old Westerns, Blaxploitation, Asian martial arts and softcore porn movies. By then, most of the hardcore porn theaters had relocated around the corner to 8th Avenue. There they joined "dirty" book stores, camera stores, strip clubs, peep shows, massage parlors, underground sex clubs, licensed bars, unlicensed after-hours bars and illegal gambling dens.

The hookers who strolled the streets were epic and legion. The busiest times, Thursday through Saturday nights, they occupied almost 20-square blocks in Hell's Kitchen somewhere between 8th to 12th Avenues, West 43th Street north to 48th. Men in cars cruised through the zone looking for something they liked. Weekends there were so many cars they sometimes created traffic jams waiting to turn into popular blocks. 

Condom-covered blowjobs were as low as $20 and increased from there. The money was always paid, in full, before the sex. Business men and other out-of-towners took the girls back to hotels. Some rented rooms by the hour. Suburbanites had sex in their cars—maybe along the nearby Hudson River with its many abandoned piers. Anyone without a car or money for a hotel room got blown or they fucked standing up in alleys, loading docks, parking lots or between parked cars in a shadowy spot on the street. 

That was only midtown. There were another dozen or more smaller “‘ho strolls” throughout the City—plus hundreds of whore houses. 

The wildest stroll, hands down, was the Meatpacking District. It was basically an open-air slave auction. Midtown's street walkers were a racially mixed assortment of women who lived off blow jobs and vanilla vaginal sex. The Meatpacking District's whores were trans, teenage boys and sometimes even girls. They strolled its cobblestoned streets, offering anal and all kinds of super-freaky sex in exchange for cash or Crack. Some would literally do anything.

The area was then still full of commercial butchers who used water hoses to wash down their abattoirs. Blood flowed out on the street and pooled around cum-filled used condoms and Crack vials.

AIDS lurked constantly in the background. 

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome meant sex of any kind was like playing Russian Roulette, even if you didn't pay for it. The HIV virus that causes it was a death sentence that killed slowly in 1990. On the street, AIDS was called “the Monster.” When the Monster tightened its grip, victims typically lost weight and developed sunken, hollowed-out cheeks. No one would admit they had AIDS, but if someone was skinny with a sucked-in face you knew they had it—even if they swore they didn't. 

ACT-UP laid siege to St. Patrick's Cathedral, at Christmas time, to protest the Catholic Church's opposition to safe-sex education and free condoms during the AIDS epidemic. The activist group calls “Stop the Church” its most “notorious demonstration and the one that brought it worldwide attention for the first time. “

That was the City in the '80s.

2,245 killings made 1990 New York City America's murder capital. 

That's six bodies per day, sometimes seven. Thousands more were shot and wounded. Bullets buzzed through the air like angry black flies. The Crack wars were raging. Rival crews of poor neighborhood kids battled for control of certain, well-known corners from which to sling Crack. In previous times, they would have waged war with fists and switchblades, bats and pipes, maybe a single-shot zip-gun. By 1990, their weapon of choice was the first generation of modern, magazine-fed 9mm semi-automatic handguns. 

Firearms enthusiasts called them "Wonder Nines." Wonder Nines fire up to 18 shots without having to be reloaded. 

Even the cops decided they needed bigger guns that shot more bullets in 1990. The NYPD traded in their six-shot .38 revolvers for magazine-fed, semi-automatic 9mm Glocks. It didn't help. Criminals were undeterred by the prospect cops could now shoot them 18 times without reloading, instead of merely six. 

Among the 1990 killings were several so infamous, because of the circumstances surrounding them or who was killed, they made national and even international headlines: 

Brian Watkins, 22-year-old tourist from Utah in town with family, stabbed to death in the subway protecting his parents from a gang of muggers; 

Meir Kahane, Zionist terrorist, assassinated outside the midtown Marriott hotel by El Sayyid Nosair; 

John Reisenbach, 33-year-old advertising executive, shot to death while making a call on a pay telephone across the street from his West Village apartment;

Sean Healy, young Bronx prosecutor, killed on his lunch break by a bullet apparently meant for someone else; and 

Julio Gonzalez murdered 87 people in a single act of arson at the Happyland Social Club.

Meanwhile, stick-up kids and muggers were a constant threat. Crackheads roamed the streets like zombies, springing to life now and then to pull knives and generally terrorize. "Squeegee Men" occupied high-traffic corners in every borough, extorting cash from drivers by spraying windshields—with what drivers could only hope was soapy water—and demanding payment to wipe whatever it was off. 

In the chaos, mafia chieftains were folk heroes. Everyone knew who alleged Mafia leader John Gotti was. He was acquitted so many times the City’s vibrant tabloid press nicknamed him “The Teflon Don.” He remains a street legend to this day. Gotti and his fellow mafiosi were Robin Hoods with Cadillacs to many. When they killed, they only killed other "bad" men. They never hurt "civilians." Their crime was "organized," even noble in a sick and twisted way.

The police could not be relied on for protection, from criminals, AIDS or anything else. They were so overwhelmed by crime it sometimes took them hours to respond to 9-1-1 calls. A few took bribes to look the other way. Still, the NYPD and borough prosecutors filled the City’s jails with 21,000 people in 1990. Rikers Island alone held 14,000. Life there was so cheap it cost only a carton of tax-free cigarettes to get another prisoner cut or even killed. 

The notorious spofford juvenille jail in Hunt’s Point, the Bronx, in 2013 before it was demolished. (1-2) prisoner-made art found inside the jail; (3) the outside; (4) the inside. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

The City’s juvenile jail was worse. Everyone knew Spofford was “gladiator school.” The world champion boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson is a graduate. Spofford created violent career criminals out of juvenile delinquents. No one, it seemed, had the motivation or money to fix it—starting with the police and prosecutors who sent kids there to kill or be killed in the first place. 

Conditions in jails and prisons grew so dire the White Plague made a comeback. 

Previously, the disease, Tuberculosis, was a Victorian Age scourge. A new strain of TB emerged in 1990. It was officially called Multidrug Resistant Tuberculosis: "MDR TB" for short. The street called it "Strain W." Strain W caused at least 54 outbreaks, in 52 hospitals and two prisons, before public health officials wrestled it under control. 

All this meant a night out on the town back then did not just mean partying and good times. Sometimes it meant facing down death. Before you went out, you had to plan what to do if confronted by a man with a gun or knife. Most people stashed their cash in a sock or some other odd place. These people kept a small amount of cash handy to surrender if demanded. 

I wasn’t like most people. I kept something else. 

(1) Firing an AR-15A2; (2) preparing to fire an Israeli-made Galil assault rifle in 7.62mm; (3) Israeli-manufactured Galil assault rifle in 7.62mm; and (4) an Oneida Screaming Eagle reverse-recurve compound bow. Photo credits: (1-2) Ralph D’Angelo, (3) JB Nicholas and (4) Janine Crescenzo, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

Three months into the decade, I was headed home from the city with three friends when we stopped to pee in a desolate place just barely on the Mt. Vernon side of the Bronx border. Because we were stopping to pee, we stopped beside railroad tracks, amid darkened factories and warehouses. As I was peeing, I saw a man crossing the T-bone intersection down the block in front of us. He didn't see us at first but, when he did look our way, he started walking directly at us.

Something about the way the man moved told me he was Trouble, with a capital-T. I'd been reading people and tuning my sixth sense to detect Trouble for more than a decade by then. I knew Trouble when I saw it. This man was it.

I reached into my friend's car and got my gun. I kept a small shotgun in my Jeep. I put it in a gym-bag and took it with me when I changed cars that night. I'd already been shot at once, I wasn't taking any chances. Especially given all the random killings that were happening all over the place, all the time. The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared." Prepared is what I was. Prepared as-fuck.

I got the gun in my hands and yelled "FREEZE!" at the man coming at us. He reached for a gun in his waistband. I fired three times. He vanished across the tracks. It seemed he’d miraculously escaped. We got into the car and left.

Unseen by us, the man collapsed dead on the other side of the tracks.

It took eight months for the cops to catch up with me and that's only because one of my three "friends" snitched. All three got immunity to testify.

The cops were waiting for me when I pulled up to a friend's house in Yonkers.

One came up behind me after I’d already surrendered, put his Glock to my head, pushed me over the hood of a car and spread my legs with his foot like he was going to rape me. The way he did It was totally creepy. So creepy I’ve never been able to forget it. Whenever women talk about rape, I think of that moment and it fills me with rage. I know exactly what they’re talking about.

I’d just come home from completing boot camp for the U.S. Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I thought I was headed to Iraq for the first Gulf War. Instead I was charged with murder and sent to the Westchester County jail.

An old friend's father worked there as a guard. He brought me food from the officer's mess hall the first morning I woke up there and for a week after. Smitty was cool like that because his son, Steven, and I used to have BB gun shoot-outs in the woods by his house in Van Cortland Park. Sometimes an Albanian kid named Bobby joined us and we’d have three-way shoot-outs.

Faye visited me in jail and gave me a choice. My bail was $50,000: she could pay it or she could use her money to hire a lawyer. I told her to get the lawyer.

Choosing jail turned out to be one of the smartest decisions I ever made.

I met a guy who told me the 26-year-old I'd killed was a stick-up kid. He said they robbed Crack dealers together. I believed Robert Minihan because he was a stick-up kid himself. He stuck up the stationary store where Faye bought the Sunday Times every Saturday evening. He went to high school with the girl behind the cash register, the one he pointed his pistol at. She recognized him. He pleaded guilty to armed robbery and got four-to-eight.

I thought Minihan secretly wanted to shank me, but he ended up testifying in my defense. I was the best man at his jail wedding.

Instead of parole, Minihan got shanked to death at Fishkill four years later.

Police never found the gun I'd seen his partner-in-crime draw, but a police investigation report explained why: at least three other people found his body in the hours it laid there before police did. Street scavangers hunt for treasure by digging in the pockets of corpses for cash, drugs and anything else of value. A good gun is worth good money on the street.

Instead of murder, the jury only convicted me of manslaughter. Instead of life in prison, I got 6 1/3 to 19. The jury blessed me with a real second chance. I spent the next 12 2/3 years preparing for it.  I earned an associate’s degree, mastered de-escalation training, taught it to others and facilitated a "scared straight" program. 

I also taught myself the law in the law libraries of the various prisons I was held in and fought for justice as a jailhouse lawyer. In 2001, I even established the Nation’s first prisoner run, prisoners’ rights advocacy group.

In 2001, I established the Nation's first prisoner-run, prisoners' rights organization. I ran it until my parole in 2003. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

To handle all the new felony convicts Government's so-called "War on Drugs" was creating, New York went on a prison-building spree—allegedly supervised by then Gov. Mario Cuomo’s son, Andrew. Cuomo-the-Younger himself was elected governor a generation later. He closed some of the same prisons he helped open and signed into law bills that helped make New York’s criminal justice system less harsh.

Some of the new prisons New York built in the 1980s where shuttered psychiatric hospitals but most were giant box-like structures that housed prisoners in dormitories instead of cells. Instead of stone walls, they were surrounded by double-rows of razor-wire fencing. These looked so much alike everyone called them “cookie cutter jails.” Still, the system created more new felony convicts than it could create new prisons to keep them caged in. 

When cages for prisoners ran short, officials started stuffing two inmates into one.

Witnessing the birth of militarized law enforcement and mass incarceration in the faces of the men that filled the cells around me, I turned my pen into the only weapon I could legally wield.

"Jason is the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer in the history of New York State," legendary criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer Ron Kuby wrote in a 2004 reference letter. "He surpasses even the storied skill of Jerry Rosenberg, a/k/a 'Jerry the Jew' whom I have also been privileged to know."

My "clients" won acquittals and reversals of convictions, collected cash settlement awards, were sprung from solitary confinement, went to work release programs, obtained life-saving medical care, secured the return of seized property and funds, met their children, enjoyed conjugal visits with their wives and said goodbye to loved ones during heart-wrenching deathbed visits. 

At least five of my clients walked free from prison, possibly more.

I even sued in federal court to block part of the infamous Crime Bill of 1994. 

Two of my clients were outlaw "celebrities"—and both founded notorious national street gangs.

I got Luis "King Blood" Felipe, founder of the Latin Kings, sprung from solitary confinement at the Collins Correctional Facility in 1992 and I basically saved Pistol Pete's life in 1997. 

Felipe was doing time in solitary for assault when I landed at Collins from Coxsackie in 1992. He’d requested assistance from the law library to write an appeal from the administrative hearing a prison official held to find him guilty. I wrote his appeal and a couple weeks later he got out. He thanked me in person, shook my hand and quietly said he owed me a favor—which came in handy.

Two years later, Felipe was convicted of ordering three murders via letters mailed from Collins. He was sentenced to life in solitary with no contact with the outside world.

I met Sex, Money, Murda gang leader and founder of the East Coast Bloods Peter "Pistol Pete" Rollack at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. We were confined to the same double-cell in solitary confinement. I was there to testify in a federal civil rights lawsuit—against double-celling. The seemingly spiteful move reeked of retaliation—even an attempt to silence me.

That’s because Rollack was facing drug distribution and 9 federal murder charges in three states. One of those murder charges was a capital case.

That’s right, the Sex, Money, Murda leader was facing the death penalty and they put me in the same cell with him. But Pistol Pete liked me. He liked talking to me. We were both from the Bronx. He trusted me with details of his case. We became friends.

He revealed that prosecutors offered to settle the death penalty case for a life sentence if he pleaded guilty. Rollack wanted to know if he should take the deal. I told him he should because "I would want to live to fight another day." He took the deal.

Something extraordinary happened while I was in that MCC cell with Rollack: fireworks exploded in the night sky over lower Manhattan outside the jail, filling our cell with strobe-light like flashes and booming, echoing explosions.

That's probably the last time Pistol Pete saw fireworks. 

Both Rollack and Felipe remain, to this day, caged beneath the Federal "supermax" prison high in the Rocky Mountains outside Florence, Colorado.

In 1999, I won a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit establishing prisoners' rights to organize for political expression. I leveraged that legal victory to extract a settlement from New York State allowing me to form the Nation's first prisoner-run, prisoners' rights organization. We called it the Government Education Organization. I ran it until my parole in 2003.

In 2002, my group and I won another, major precedent-setting decision that had the effect of making parole hearings in New York fairer—for every single prisoner in the state. State Supreme Court Justice Edward A. Sheridan ruled in Chan v. Travis that then-Gov. George Pataki violated the law by instructing the parole board to deny release to all violent offenders because state law allowed it to consider all offenders for parole. 

My "client" in the case, Dennie Chan, and I ended up living a block away from each other in the Village a year later. He went to Parsons, I went to NYU.

In 2019, I asked Karen Murtagh, the-long time Executive Director of Prisoners Legal Services of New York, about the impact of the Chan decision. She called it "a terrific decision." 

It "helped pave the way to many more successful challenges to the Parole Board’s cursory review of people’s accomplishments and rote use of the statutory language," Murtagh explained. 

The Chan decision is so powerful it's cited today by WestLaw in its model petition for lawyers to use to challenge parole board decisions in New York.

(1)With (c) with Dennie Chan (r) at the V-Bar on Sullivan Street in 2004. I did legal work for Chan that resulted in a landmark court decision triggering Chan’s parole; and (2) the Feb. 5, 2003 New York Law Journal report covering the decision. We lived a block away from each in the West Village while we completed college degrees in 2004: Chan at Parson’s and Nicholas at NYU. Photo credit: Joe Gannon, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

New York City's renaissance started almost as soon as I was arrested. In 1991, the total number of homicides fell from 1990's record high of 2,245 to 2,154. It fell again in 1992 to 2,020 and continued falling until 2017 when the City recorded the fewest killings since 1951: 292. It ticked back up to 488 the second year of the Wuhan virus pandemic in 2021, but fell again in 2023 to 391. 

I witnessed the transformation in progress during a trip to Manhattan in 1997. 

My comrades in the law library filed a federal lawsuit to stop New York from "double-celling" prisoners. Their lawsuit alleged it violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments. I agreed to testify in support of their lawsuit since I'd been double-celled with a smoker: the second-hand smoke I'd been forced to be exposed to threatened my health. 

Testifying in support of the plaintiffs in Bolton v. Goord meant a trip to the then-brand new federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street. It was the first time I'd been back to the City since 1990. It was obvious big changes were happening. When we cruised down the FDR that evening I didn't see what I'd seen back in the day: homeless Crackheads warming their hands over fires burning in trash cans under broken street lights.

The Lower East Side had been a proverbial war zone—a smaller, Manhattan version of the burned-out South Bronx I knew in the 1970s and 80s. The Lower I saw flash past on the other side of the window of the prison van I was riding in, on a warm, lush May evening in 1997, was resurrecting itself. Broken street lights were fixed and flickering to life. Where once drug addicts and stick-up kids lurked, children played. Young mothers were pushing baby carriages in the park along the river. 

Technological advances drove increases in public safety. Newly available pagers and mobile telephones meant drug dealers no longer needed to defend physical territory to sell drugs. Instead of the customers going to the drugs at a few well-known locations, drug dealers gave out their beeper and mobile numbers and brought the drugs to the customers.

Because Rudolph W. Guiliani's 1994-2001 reign as mayor coincided with the great American crime decline, and because he had a big mouth that maximized the effectiveness of his bully pulpit, he's frequently given false credit for the City's renaissance. Even the squeegee men were mostly gone by the time Guiliani was elected, as Wayne Barrett reported in his biography, Rudy!

9/11 interrupted the City's magnificent resurgence but did not stop it. The wave of New Yorkers who left the City for greener pastures was almost immediately replaced. I was one of them.

(1) Tub in the Mercer Hotel where I took my first bath after almost 13 years in prison; (2) on the roof of my apartment in the West Village a month after my parole. Photo credits: (1) Sue Bailley; (2) JB Nicholas, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

Paroled for good-behavior in 2003, I could have gone anywhere in the world, thanks to cash I banked from legal work and a whole lot of “luck.” But New York City was the only place I could imagine going. It called to me, like a Siren. After earning an associate's degree in jail, I wanted to finish and earn a bachelor’s. Columbia, Fordham and NYU all had adult education programs so I applied to all three. I applied from the prison, even before I was released. 

Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan, a federal judge who had presided over a trial in a civil rights lawsuit I filed, actually wrote a letter in support of my college applications. With Judge Kaplan's letter, I got into NYU and Fordham. I chose NYU, mostly because I'd already lined up a job working as a paralegal for Kuby and his office was at Astor Place. Since the Village was where I was going to work and go to school, it made sense to live there too.

I got out Bastille Day, July 14, 2003. A friend sent a black Cadillac to pick me up and drive me to my hotel in SoHo. When I walked into the Mercer, the manager gave me the biggest suite in the hotel for free. I’d never seen anything like that suite. It was a huge, classic SoHo loft, complete with tall ceilings and back deck. I took my first bath in almost 13 years in its giant, white tub. I spent a week there and, to balance out the high life with a little low life, a week at the St. Mark's—where they still rented rooms by the hour on the first floor.

I found a sweet place to live on Sullivan Street and moved in Aug. 1.  Technically it was a penthouse. It was tiny, but it was a penthouse. A spiral, iron staircase led to a roof-top bedroom with sliding glass doors and a deck. 

The way I came back to the world was a fuck lot better than the way I left. I did it in style. I even set the standard.

I moved into my first apartment Aug. 1, 16 days after I was paroled. It was a very small penthouse at 220 Sullivan Street. (1) As seen during a blizzard from an NYU building; (2) rooftop bedroom; (3) living room, spiral staircase to the rooftop bedroom; (4) one-time club kid Venus Alers under a black-and-white nightime photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge sometime in 2004; (5) Sharon Pell pin-up art, drawn on a phonebook page and unknown friend of a friend; (5 & 6) view from the roof up and down Sullivan Street. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

Never in my life, before or since, have I ever been filled with as much hope as I was filled with when I painted that apartment. Just the act of painting it.

On the first floor, I left the ceilings in the bathroom, kitchen and eat-in living room white and painted the walls pale lavender. On the wall behind the spiral staircase, I hung a gilded, crystal clear leaded-glass mirror in a black-lacquered frame. The other walls had a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge at night and Sharon Pell pin-up art, which Pell drew on newsprint and pages torn from telephone books. (Pell and others sold art from tables on the sidewalk along West Broadway on weekends.) 

Above the fireplace I hung a giant print of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii—to remind me to keep the austere code that helped me survive and even thrive in prison. The fireplace was no longer functional, so I filled it with white candles. On the mantle above it, I piled mementos from my mother's second life—including her silver New York City paramedic's badge. Mom redeemed herself by becoming a New York City paramedic in 1986 or so—the same ones who saved her when she OD'd in 1977. 

She served in the Bronx into the 1990s. Then she retired on disability and joined Faye in Maine. She died in 1997, at 49.

(1-4) Sharon Nicholas worked as a paramedic for the New York City Department of Emergency Medical Servics in the Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s; (5) mom’s graduation from paramedic school in about 1985, kissing my grandfather, Al,. Photo credits: (1 & 5) JB Nicholas, (2-4) unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas. 

Up the black spiral staircase, I left the bedroom ceiling white and painted the walls peach. I blocked out the day with dark purple velvet blackout drapes and covered my queen-sized bed with a matching purple velvet blanket and pillow cases. Another gilded mirror, this one with a gold and black-lacquered frame, hung on one wall.

I filled the shelf that ran the length of the space with the books I mailed home ahead of me from prison.  Titles included Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Cleveland's History of the Modern Middle East, Machiavelli's The Prince, The Divine Comedy with Gustave Dore's illustrations and Soft Maniacs by Maggie Estep.

I bought a mobile phone and one computer. It was a Dell laptop, almost as thick as a Manhattan phone book. I'm exaggerating but it was more than an inch thick. I used it for school work, my paralegal job  and finding new friends.

The Internet was still relatively new in 2004. It was totally new to me.

It was also totally untamed. About that time, a lot of people discovered they enjoyed being able to find not just new friends but random strangers to fulfill sexual fantasies with on the Internet. The Internet was, in fact, the Wild West of unrestricted sexual freedom at the time if you knew where to look. Craigslist was a good place to start, and it's where many people did. It had something for everyone. Some charged a fee. Many did whatever they wanted to do for free.

The first time I did anything naughty with anyone I met on the Internet it was a couple. She wanted me to shave her and he wanted to watch. That's it. I figured I could use the practice. It wasn't really sex, except we were all naked. 

That was just the first time.

I spent my first night of freedom at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo on July 14, 2003. The hotel upgraded me for free to the biggest suite in the hotel so I came back a year later to celebrate the anniversary and brought my new friends. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I discovered Arc, an after-hours dance club on Huber Place in Tribeca and, with it, rediscovered my love for dancing. Arc was legendary. It was a relic of the 1970s when someone spent a shit ton of money to custom make a sound system on the first floor of a giant warehouse originally built for American Express. Back then, club owners spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to create "immersive audiotopias," as Micah Silver wrote in Design Observer. 

The goal, Silver says, was to create

rooms that were hypersensitively aural in ways the general public had never experienced, and the most advanced DJs of the era were exploring the potential of this sensitivity with sophistication. A social architecture emerged around liberated sexuality and identity within the semiautonomous, near-imaginary air that the disco sound environment enabled. 

Going to Arc really felt like falling through a rabbit hole and waking up in Wonderland. The place didn't even have a liquor license, but was always packed. Everybody was there. Old, young, white, black, brown, Asian, Latino, gay, straight, bi, trans, rich, poor. Every fucking body. Seeing everybody on the dancefloor like that was beautiful. It was almost mystical. There was zero beef and zero bad vibes. I never saw a fight. 

The party at Arc was late. The doors opened at midnight, but it really didn't start popping until 4:00am. It rocked hard until nine or ten then slowly died until only a few dozen dancers were left when the lights came on around noon. When everyone was lost in the trance and dancing and sweating the place smelled a little like a locker room but that just added to its greatness. 

I went home alone most of the time, but not all the time. I really went there to dance, not hook up. A place like that, it has to happen organically. Nothing you can do can make it happen. You have to patient, and let it come to you.

The warehouse that was home to Arc and generations of dance clubs was sold in 2004. It was converted into multi-million dollar condominiums. DJ Danny Tenaglia, one of Arc's resident DJs, closed it out. He started spinning on Sunday and didn't stop until Monday afternoon. I was there, dancing until the very end. Nobody wanted to leave. Nobody ever wanted to leave but this time people really didn't want to leave. 

I remember standing there when the music finally stopped and seeing people crying all around me. Straight-up bawling. Tears just streaming down their cheeks. Everyone knew exactly what it meant. The billionaires, banks, hedge funds and real estate developers won. It was truly the end of an era—the end of real clubbing in Manhattan. I took it all in, made notes in my head and moved on. I strolled out into the sun like I had done a hundred times before, hopped into the cab that was always waiting at the curb out front and sped home. 

People were waking up to start their days—I was just ending mine. I lived like this for years.

(1) Dancing at the goth club the Bat Cave in 2005; (2-3) Mardi Gras; (4) with (l) writer Eric John Meyer and (r) actor Ian Schoen in New Orleans; (5) Venus’s birthday party at my apartment in 2004. Photo credits: (1-4) unknown,  (5) JB Nicholas, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

I was having too much fun, enjoying life, to think about activism. Then the Republican National Convention came to town.

Animosity against Republicans and their policies was especially high in the City at the time because of Republican Pres. George W. Bush and his bogus invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Bush sold the war to America on the false allegation Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It didn't. It was a deathtrap. Bush strolled right into it. Americans and Iraqis were dying for nothing. Now the Republican Party was celebrating at Madison Square Garden. They wanted to put lipstick on their war pig and parade it around Manhattan. 

New Yorkers weren't havin' it. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest. Protesters included not just activists but ordinary folks showing up after work and school. I stopped at Herald Square where a huge crowd swarmed all around the intersection. Herald Square was a strategic chokepoint. Buses carrying convention delegates from midtown hotels to the Garden had to pass through it. Protesters were trying to flood the streets to stop the buses. 

They tried to push past the police that lined the curbs. Cops pushed back, hard. Basically it was a street battle.

Republican National Convention in New York City 2004. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I climbed on top of the roof of the newspaper stand to get a better look. I hadn't planned to protest. I just wanted to see what was going on. But seeing all the people out there fighting for what they believed in was inspiring. A bus entered the square. The crowd erupted in booing. I started yelling too. 

"WELCOME TO NEW YORK," I yelled, from on top of the newstand, "NOW GO THE FUCK HOME!"

Protesters all around Herald Square picked up the refrain. We started a call and response. I yelled, "WELCOME TO NEW YORK!," the crowd responded, "NOW GO THE FUCK HOME!"

Later that night I met a group of young protesters on the street. They'd come to the City from all across the country. A few of them were having a hard time. One got robbed. I invited the group to stay with me. We'd all have to share a small bathroom and they'd have to sleep under a giant tarp on my roof, but if they didn't mind, I didn't mind for a few days. A few of them were crust punks. First thing I did was make them take a shower. I got Mama's, the hearty, home-cooking style restaurant on the first floor of my apartment building, to donate trays of leftover food to feed my guests. 

"FUCK BUSH! NO WAR!," is what I got falsely arrested for yelling outside a firehouse in Queens two days later. Pres. Bush was using the firehouse as a campaign photo op. 

All of this was duly chronicled in the New York Times by Michael Brick.

Things got better. Mr. Scionka and Mr. Schnack found each other, and then they found friends from Dallas. They were introduced to Jason Nicholas, 34, a jailhouse lawyer turned paralegal and political agitator who was housing young protesters on the roof of his apartment near Washington Square Park.

Mr. Nicholas served as something of a pied piper during the protests, leading his teenage charges from rally to rally. On Wednesday night, he took them to Queens, where they were arrested shouting slogans in protest of President Bush's arrival in New York. They said they were detained for 19 hours.

Spending nights on Mr. Nicholas's roof was not perfect, but the teenagers found it preferable to St. Mark's. All week, the artificial green turf on the roof was covered with sleeping bags and strewn with backpacks and gas masks. Mr. Scionka and Mr. Schnack shared quarters with a kid named Fitch, another called Doofus, who played folk guitar, and a couple of girls referred to as the supermodels.

Helicopters buzzed the roof at night. On Tuesday morning, a tarpaulin hung to block the rain gave way. A wave cascaded over Mr. Scionka, soaking his clothes.

'That was one way to wake up,' he said.

My new friends went back to their old lives when the RNC ended. I had to deal with the bullshit charge.

Luckily, an NYU film student friend loaned me an NYU video camera to carry with me to the protests. I had it rolling that night in Queens. I refused to plead guilty and demanded a trial. I played the video at the trial and the judge acquitted me. 

It was likely the first time in American history a criminal defendant captured video that the defendant himself used to win his own acquittal—as opposed to video captured by a bystander. 

(1) Speaking (r) to police in a successful attempt to have one of the protesters released, (3-7) protesters who slept at my apartment during the 2004 RNC in New York City and (8) the author with the group. Photo credits: (1 & 2) unknown,  (3-7) JB Nicholas, (8) unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas. 

Though crime was nothing like it was in the 1970s and 80s, that didn't mean there wasn't any crime at all.

Motherfucker was a huge rock-n-roll dance party held on major holidays. It was heir to the anything-goes club Mother tradition. Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield offered my favorite description of it. Citing the New York Dolls, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Punk Rock and Disco, he explained in an unreleased 2006 documentary, Motherfucker NYC, the party's promoters "take all these different decadent, seedy, polysexual traditions and make them explode together."

Raelynn was a pretty, 20-something bleached-blonde girl from Australia I met at Motherfucker. She had zero fucks to give and that was one of the sexiest things about her. It took us about two hours to go from grinding on the dancefloor to her face-down on my bed—panties dangling off one of her ankles. She stopped me to ask me to find her purse and hand it to her. She wanted to do a little coke first. I played a CD, Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights.

Later, a bright shaft of sunlight shot around the edge of a curtain and lit the iris of one of her eyeballs, perfectly breaking the evening's spell. She fished her mobile telephone out of her purse to see what time it was and cursed—”Fuck!”—in an exquisitely lilting, lyric Australian twang when she saw it was after 6 am. She hurriedly dressed and half-ran out of my apartment, saying she had to get home to her husband. 

It was the first time she mentioned anything about a husband, let alone that she had one. I gave her $20 for a cab and put her number in my phone.

(1-6, 8) Dressing for Motherfucker with Stephanie 2004; (7) detail of 6 showing Sharon Pell pin-up art, drawn on phonebook page. Photo credits: (1-7) JB Nicholas, (8) Stephanie, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas. 

I met her again the next night, at another club. I hadn't called her and wasn't looking for her. It was totally random. The next night I randomly bumped into her again, a third time, at yet another club. We were an open couple after that. Raelynn worked for an independent film festival, but she was Downtown famous for a daily email list of open bars. With her list in hand, it was possible to hopscotch through the night, drinking for free.

One night, Raelynn and I met Shelby at a small club in Chelsea.

Shelby flirted with Raelynn—even though I was with her. She smiled a lot, batted her eyelashes, leaned close into her, gently touched her. They were making out in a dark corner an hour later. At the end of the night, Shelby was with friends, and didn't want to leave them. Raelynn and I hopped in a cab, straight to my place. Ten minutes later, Shelby called Raelynn. Rae gave her my address, hung up and told me Shelby was on her way. 

Shelby called back 20 minutes later. Raelynn hung up and turned to me with a look of alarm on her face.

“We have to go get her," she said as she rose from the bed and started dressing.

"What's the problem?," I asked.

"There’s some guys there," she answered. "It doesn’t sound good.” 

The birthday cake Joe Gannon got to suprise me for my 34th birthday, the first since my parole, in 2004. He had a joke written on it that referenced the 9:00 pm curfew parole sometimes enforced on me. Photo credits: (1) JB Nicholas, (2) unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas. 

Speed is what mattered most in that moment. 

I jumped outta bed and straight back into what I'd just stripped off: coal gray Dolce & Gabbana suit, dark red shirt and black shoes. I was John Wick before there was a movie named John Wick. As I dressed, Raelynn told me Shelby said she was on the corner of 7th Avenue and Bleecker Street, a brisk 10 minute walk or 3 minute run from my apartment. We jumped down the stairs and ran out onto the street. I ran ahead—assuming Raelynn would call 9-1-1 and catch up. 

When I got to 7th Avenue, I saw three men had Shelby cornered in a doorway on the far side. I couldn't see her face but I knew it was her because I saw a white shirt and remembered she had on a white shirt in the club. I didn’t know it then, but later she told me one of them tried to stab her with a knife seconds before.

I ran up on them from behind, but silently. I caught them completely by surprise. I slipped past them, into the alcove where Shelby was sitting, and grabbed her hand. She recognized me and held tight. I yanked her up to her feet. I lead the way out of the trap, positioning her behind me. They blocked our way. One of them had a box cutter in his hand. 

I let go of Shelby’s hand. She knew enough to let go. Then she did something no one expected: she screamed and punched one of the three thugs.

Now I had two problems: the thugs and furious, fearless Shelby.

"If she hits my man again you're getting it," the thug with the box-cutter standing in front of me barked. 

Because Shelby was behind him, the thug had to turn his head to see if she struck again. When she did and he turned his head, I closed the distance between us in a half-second and unleashed a blow to his wrist that dropped the blade to the ground. A quick kick sent him flying backward. I yelled "RUN!" to Shelby. When she did, I put my body between her and the three thugs so they couldn't chase her. Not without going through me. 

Raelynn re-appeared at precisely that moment on the far side of 7th Avenue. She sized up the situation in an instant and smartly did exactly the right thing: she flagged down the yellow cab that luckily happened to be passing by.

“COME ON!,” Raelynn yelled as the cab slowed to a stop. Shelby was already in the back seat by the time I dove in behind her. 

“GO! GO! GO!” I yelled to the cabbie as I closed the door behind me. 

One of the thugs ran up on the cab. Raelynn saw him coming, reached all the way across Shelby and me in the backseat and pushed the door-lock down—just in time. 

We were back at my apartment in five minutes.

The adrenaline was still pumping in all of us. We sat on my couch and slurped down gin-and-tonics and tried to chill. Of course, the only thing we could talk about was what happened. We replayed it over and over. Who did what when etc. Everyone had a starring role at some point in our successful escape.

After a few rounds, Shelby started looking at Raelynn with the same lusty hunger she'd looked at her in the club with. Finally, after long moments of anticipation, Shelby took the tip of her finger and put it to Raelynn's hot lips.  Raelynn sucked on it, lightly.Shelby slid it inside her mouth. A hypnotic moment later, Shelby slowly slipped her wet finger out and looked at the spiral staircase in the corner of my living room. 

“What’s upstairs?,” she asked.

Wesley Autrey, the City's Subway Superman, helped me change my life again.

When I graduated NYU in May 2006, 21 of my new friends signed a card with congratulatory messages and gave me a I-Pod as a gift. It was inscribed with the words “Congratulations With love your friends.” Kuby was breaking up with his law partners at the time so I needed to find another job. I sent my resume as a paralegal to 100 law firms. I thought now that I had a fancy NYU sheepskin doors would magically open for me notwithstanding my felony conviction. Not a single one invited me for even an interview.

The card and I-Pod my new friends gifted me with when I graduated NYU in 2006. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I go job at the New York Post as a news photographer instead. I'd bought a camera to stay busy while I wandered the streets aimlessly for hours every night. I talked my way into a Fashion Week press credential that September 2006. A month later, I scored my first front-page photograph for a newspaper in upstate Kingston. My new girlfriend was from the suburbs and had a four-door silver Saturn. We went on a weekend drive in the Catskills and happened upon a horrific car accident that killed four people. 

There was no cell service. I used the pay telephone and the phone book that came with it in Brio's dinner in Phoenicia to find and sell my photograph of the wreck to the Daily Freeman.

That was the kind of luck I had. I was good at finding trouble. It made me a natural breaking news photographer.

Fatal motor vehicle accident, N.Y. Route 28 in the Catskills, Oct. 8., 2006. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

Back home in New York City, I bought a police radio scanner and started riding around in my girlfriend's silver Saturn waiting for something bad to happen. Responding to reports captured by the scanner, I raced to the scenes of crimes, fires and accidents and took pictures. I obtained the telephone numbers to the newsroom photo-desks of New York City’s daily newspapers and started calling them whenever I had something good. Newsday and the New York Post usually wanted to at least see what I’d shot. Then they started actually buying them sometimes.

I had no idea who Arthur Fellig, a/k/a “Weegee The Famous,” was. Unknowingly, I set out hard on the path he blazed in the 1930s.

Autrey forever became Gotham's "subway Superman" the day after New Years Day 2007. That's when he and his two daughters were standing on the platform of the southbound one train station at 137th Street in Harlem. Suddenly, a young, white 20-year-old stranger named Cameron Hollopeter fell onto the tracks in front of them. The headlights of an approaching train glowed in the tunnel at the end of the station. 

Autrey did not hesitate. With his children looking on and screaming in horror, Autriey jumped down onto the tracks. But there wasn't enough time to lift Hollopeter to safety so Autrey wrapped him up in a bear hug and squeezed both of them into a small drainage trench between the rails. The train passed over them and they miraculously survived without a scratch. 

Wesley Autrey the New York City “Subway Superman” and his daughters after saving the life of Cameron Hollopeter, Jan. 2, 2007, and New York Newsday, Jan. 3, 2007. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I arrived to find Autrey laughing and joking with paramedics in the back of an ambulance. When I looked closely, I saw a grease stain from the undercarriage of the train—a black streak across Autrey’s powder blue Playboy scully. That's how close death came. After answering reporters’ questions at an impromptu news conference, Autrey hugged his two daughters and walked away with them down Broadway. 

Newsday published that photograph of Autrey and his kids on its cover the next day. 

Juan Arellano, deputy photo editor at the New York Post, called me that morning and offered me a “job.” 

Arellano guaranteed me three days of work a week if I sent everything I shot to him first. I accepted but, instead of working just three days as Arellano promised, I always worked six days and sometimes even seven. In short order, I scored three more front pages. The Post called them "woods" in Tabloid-speak because printers once used wooden block letters to make the extra-large font used on the front page.

(1-3) Three of my front-page newspaper photographs, (4) one that should have been a front-page and (5-6) the author’s first “wood” as a reporter for hunting down the concrete-laying Boston Red Sox fanatic who emtombed a Red Sox jersey in the new Yankee stadium when it was being built, and getting him to give me the photos from his cell-phone that proved it. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

Working for the New York Post was like waking up and finding myself in the World Series of News Photography. 

My competition included all the photojournalists who worked for all the newspapers. Not just the Post, Daily News and the Times but the Staten Island Advance and a dozen or so weekly neighborhood newspapers like the Queens Chronicle and Bronx Times. My competition also included photographers who worked for international news agencies the Associated Press, Reuters and Getty Images. Finally it also included all the TV camera operators for the five local television stations. If the story was international, there would be more, sometimes many more, sometimes more than a 100.

Some of my new colleagues were living legends, like Daily News photographer David Handschu. He was buried alive under an FDNY truck on 9/11 when one of the Twin Towers collapsed on top of him—all 1,362 feet of it. Amazingly, he lived to tell the tale. 

When I first started working, all the other news photographers talked about 9/11 like it happened yesterday. Since it was only five years in the past at the time, it just about did. It wasn’t just the attack itself they talked about, but all the full-dressed, firefighters’ funerals they’d covered. They all said it changed their lives, without saying how. They didn’t have to. There were 343 of them.

My new journalist colleagues had seen the best and worst of life—at close range. Their memories, like their photographs, dripped with thick, red blood. It was their job to witness, not turn away, and they never blinked. They were killers with cameras instead of guns. Maybe that’s why I fit right in. 

New York changed in the 2010s, and not for the better. 

The global elite colonized Manhattan. It was a gift and a curse. The more wealthy people moved in, the more money there theoretically was to make. But everything also became more expensive. Wages didn't keep pace with rising rents and other increased living costs. Creative, Bohemian types who had been coming to Downtown Manhattan since the Roaring Twenties now couldn't afford to live there. They started out in Brooklyn instead.

Kae Burke and Anya Sapozhnikova were two of them. They came to the City to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but instead founded an underground theater and club called the House of Yes. As I knew it, the House of Yes was a like a Do-It-Yourself, circus-themed Punk House.

With two co-conspirators, Lauren Larkin and Kiki Valentine, Burke and Sapozhnikova pulled a public relations stunt to put the House of Yes on the City's cultural map. The Post sent me to photograph it. 

The stunt was a protest. They lampooned the increased services a planned subway fare increase might pay for—by dressing up as "subway stewardesses." Kae made their outfits in her design studio, "Make Fun." They all wore identical retro, short-skirted, blue-and-gold outfits, complete with pillbox hats. They pushed a small cart around piled high with candy and hand-sanitizer, offering some to riders. 

Their scheme worked. The Post published a photograph of them the next day, in the Sunday edition. The ladies proudly hung a copy of it in the House of Yes's communal kitchen. Before social media, this is what enterprising, self-promoting, night-life entrepreneurs did to establish themselves.

My photograph earned me an invitation to hang out with them at the House of Yes and see a performance. My camera was my passport into another world. The place was like something you only see in a trippy, psychedelic movie. An alternative universe sprung from some half-crazy person’s wild imagination. A fever dream brought to life.

The first thing I saw when I walked in was a giant gold birdcage. It was hanging from the ceiling near a stage. Inside the giant gold birdcage was a red velvet-covered swing that hung on gold rope. Red tassels hung beneath it. Red roses were stuffed into the spaces between the bars. The bottom of the giant gold birdcage was open—where performers climbed inside to swing, sing and strip.

(1) Anya Sapozhnikova and Lauren Larkin as “Subway Service Specialists” handing out sweet treats and hand sanitized on the L train; (2) Sapozhnikova performing in a giant, gold birdcage; (3) Kae Burke, who founded the House of Yes with Sapozhnikova; (4) Larkin as “Songbird” singing on the 365 songs she wrote in 2008, one for every day of the year, with Aaron Goldsmith on guitar; and (5) hop performance on the roof overlooking Queens; and (6) more “Subway Service Specialists,” at the first House of Yes in Ridgewood, Queens, Apr. 7, 2008. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

The place was part theater, speakeasy, dance club, after-hours party spot and artists’ loft. It was out there. It wasn't just out there in terms of what went on there, it was also physically out there. It wasn't in Manhattan. It wasn't even in Brooklyn, really. It was just over the border in Ridgewood, Queens. You had to cab it out there, and back. That meant you had to be prepared to verbally explain, without a smartphone, how to get there to the driver.

Not everyone was able to do this, but if you were with a group usually at least one person did.

Kae, Anya and Larkin, Aaron, Kalin, Hassan, Katie, Stephanie and one or two other people lived in the first House of Yes in rooms built around the edges of the triangle-shaped warehouse space. A communal kitchen and dining area were off to the side. A giant paper mache dragon hung from one of the kitchen walls, above a toaster. Off to the side was a stage, and the birdcage. 

The night I first visited in April 2008 Larkin, a/k/a "Songbird," sat inside the giant gold birdcage and sang some of the 365 songs she wrote everyday for a year. When she was done signing, she climbed out of the bottom of the giant gold birdcage and Anya climbed in. Anya wore her stewardess outfit. She pinned her pillbox hat to her head so it would not fall off. Anya spun and flew around hanging upside down on the trapeze, inside the giant gold birdcage. 

It was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. It looked like God gave a stripper wings and let her fly. 

It was obvious to me immediately this was how Anya saved herself.

Burke and Sapozhnikova pose amid the burned out ruins of the first House of Yes, Apr. 20, 2008. Photo creditsL JB Nicholas

Tragedy struck the House of Yes a week later: a piece of burning toast lit the paper mache dragon hanging about it on fire and ignited a dramatic two-alarm fire. Everyone made it out alive. 

Everyone except Pilgrim, Larkin's cat. The first House of Yes was a total, epic loss. 

I made it back to its blackened husk a week later—with my cameras. People were picking through the charred ruins for anything that could be salvaged. There were a few only partially-melted or soot-coated things here and there that could be saved. Kae and Anya jumped into dresses and started posing amid the debris. Kaye put on a white prom dress; Anya an autumn-toned, multi-color bustier with a gauzy purple and red tutu. 

They took turns posing with a gnarly crown of metal and bolts like post-apocalyptic queens in a burned out steampunk castle.

There was a surreal twist. A bespectacled man strolled around with a clipboard examining things: the insurance adjuster.

Sapozhnikova and Baker perform aerial on the street near Ground Zero in front of the Pussycat Lounge on Liberty Street, May 4, 2008. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

Brooklyn rallied for the ladies. The street saw the long odds Kae and Anya were up against and wanted them to win. Half the borough reached into their pockets and donated dollars, fives and tens to the ladies to help them get back on their feet and relaunch the House of Yes. In the meantime, they crashed at nightlife duo Winkle & Balktic's DUMBO loft and held a months-long, floating fundraising party at various places around the City. 

That included a massive blowout at the Pussycat Lounge, a strip club blocks from Ground Zero. Sapozhnikova and Jordann Baker hung from the high scaffolding out front and did an aerial routine right there on the sidewalk.

A year later we were back at the Pussycat Lounge for one of Will “Danger” Etundi’s “Danger” parties. That one got raided after Phoenix started literally spitting flames out of her mouth on the roof and neighbors looking down from the surrounding luxury hi-rises called 9-1-1.

Sapozhnikova and Burke used the money to rebuild the House of Yes in Bushwick. HOY 2.0 was a pimped-out ice house. It was a three-story tall rectangular cube structure originally built before electricity to store ice harvested from frozen freshwater lakes outside New York City. With help from a small army of volunteers, they installed a 30-foot tall, Broadway-quality truss to swing from in the back half. They built out the front half with three floors. 

The first floor was the main floor. It had the stage, room to seat 100 people, bar and red velvet couches—scrounged from a shuttered strip club. Without the seats, 200 could cram into the space to dance. Burke’s Make Fun studio was on the second floor, with a recording studio, sound and lighting controls for the main room and a bathroom with a shower. The third floor had five living spaces. Sapozhnikova's had a stripper pole built into her bed. Because the building was legally commercial space, everyone called the rooms “offices.” 

Performances and life in and around the second House of Yes, HOY 2..0, 2009-10, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I became the House of Yes house photographer and, once again, lived a double-life. Soon I was photographing not just the House of Yes but at Will’s “Danger” parties along with Winkle & Balktic’s parties too—which included a local alternative to Burning Man called “Stranded.” I even went to Art Basel in Miami with them. I also hung out and photographed parties at a punk house at 13 Thames run by Vlad Teichberg, a Wall Street coder-turned-Anarchist video activist. It was next to another punk house called “Surreal Estate.”

I was officially credentialed by the NYPD as a journalist in 2007. During the day, I was a serious news photographer, capturing crime scenes, court scenes, press conferences, protests, politicians, celebrities and alleged wrongdoers of all kinds. At night, I danced, drank and photographed my way through the City’s demimonde—as it set up shop in Brooklyn after decamping from Manhattan.

I shot circus performers, dancers, graffiti artists, aerialists, average-but-adventurous , Anarchists, sex workers, strippers, bands, homeless punks, hackers, a slumming Getty heiress and other "low lifes" at strip clubs, warehouse raves, loft parties, parks, bars, apartments, Coney Island, a re-enacted Roman gladiator naval battle and even a retired Nantucket ferry boat repurposed as a club and off-the-grid living space. 

Everyone simply called it, "The Boat."

My first night at the House of Yes I met Larkin’s boyfriend, Clark. Clark was from Kansas, Missouri in town earning a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College. His graduate thesis was a grassroots, guerrilla get-out-the-vote project for the 2008 presidential election. Clark designed a stencil that spelled “VOTE” shaped like Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE sculpture. He went around with the stencil and a can of spray paint leaving “VOTE” graffiti everywhere. 

Clark's thesis was also a crime. He could have gone to jail for it. In fact, he was arrested for doing it and did go to jail for it—for one night. It amazed me that Clark's outlaw curriculum could earn him a college degree but it did. It was like Wharton giving out business degrees to Crack dealers. I loved it. 

Besides that, the 2008 American presidential election was no ordinary presidential election: a black man named Barack Obama was running.

(1) Olivia and friends at Coney Island, Mermaid Parade, 2010; (2) Winkle’s birthday, DUMBO 2009; (3) Anya’s birthday 2008; (4-5) Kae’s birthday 2010; (6) Stranded 2010; (7-8) 13 Thames rave 2011; (9) afterparty 2011; (10) mushroom tea party DUMBO loft 2010; (11-2) Disorient 2011; (13) rave at 13 Thames; (14) police raid on rave at 13 Thames; (15-6) new tattoo at underground party in the basement of a Bushwick frame shop 2011; (17-20) Kiki Valentine and company 2009; (21) Xango Shola fashion show at 3d Ward in 2010; (22) Jordan Baker at a Danger party at the Pussycat Lounge singing along to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana in 2009; (23) Phoenix and friend on the roof of the Pussycat Lounge in 2009; (24) Olivia and friends at “Night Market” in 2010; (25) Akeem Funk Budda and friends performing at Stranded in 2009; (26) morning after-party in a van; (27) Julia, 2010. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I photographed then-candidate Obama for the first time during a campaign rally in Brooklyn in 2007.

"Maybe, just maybe," Obama told the crowd, "this election cycle we can bring about the kind of change that we're proud of."

At the House of Yes, Clark told me he was planning to drive across the country at the end of August and leave a line of his VOTE graffiti from New York to Denver—where the Democratic National Convention was being held. From there, Clark was going to St. Paul, Minnesota, for the Republican National Convention. Clark's girlfriend Larkin and a Hippie from Michigan named Dallas Wonderland were going to. They were all riding in Dallas's pick-up truck.

There was a spot left for me and my camera, if we wanted to ride along with them. Because I wanted to see my Nation, I had to say yes. 

Clark Stoeckley “Vote” on the road across America to the Democratic National Convention 2008. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

That's how I ended up on the field at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado as Obama beat Hillary Clinton to become the first black American to be nominated by one of the two major political parties to run for president.

"Thank you," Obama kept saying over and over again as the crowd clapped and cheered louder. "Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much." 

The more Obama thanked the crowd the louder the crowd cheered. He said "Thank you" 33 times before the crowd quieted enough to allow him to speak.

"With profound gratitude, and great humility, I accept your nomination for presidency of the United States," he finally said.

Barack Obama accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for president at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colo. on Aug. 28, 2008, with (3) Michele Obama, (4) Michele Obama and crying delegate, (5-7) the scene and (8) Jesse Jackson jr. and Brooklyn-based movie director Spike Lee. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

The RNC was totally different. Militarized police confronted a coalition of anti-war and anti-Capitalist Anarchist protesters on the streets of St. Paul and turned the City into a war-zone. On the first day of the convention, riot cops shot one of my cameras literally out of my hands, beat me with truncheons and falsely arrested me.

I spent three days jailed on bogus charges before I was released—with an apology from the police department's main spokesman and a free lunch in a fancy downtown restaurant courtesy of Minnesota taxpayers. The black-and-blues around my groin where the riot cops hit me with the ends of their riot sticks lasted for more than a week.

By the time the 2008 RNC was over, at least 40 journalists had been falsely arrested for doing nothing more than their jobs, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.  Both the RCFP and the National Press Photographers' Association filed official complaints. Photojournalists "deserve to be protected by police," NPPA President Bob Carey protested, "not falsely arrested by them."

Protesters and police clash outside the 2008 Republican National Convention, St. Paul, Minnesota. Sept. 1, 2008. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

The lawyer who sprung me from jail in St. Paul was a legend in his own right.

Bill Tilton was one of the Minnesota 8. In the middle of the Vietnam War they broke into local draft board offices and destroyed draft records. Tilton and all but one of the rest were sentenced to five years. Tilton did just over 20 months. In 1977, he became the first convicted felon licensed as a lawyer in Minnesota.

“I’m proud of what I did, but you don’t talk about your old medals,” Tilton said in 2008. “There’s a danger of getting stuck in a time warp.” 

I always felt that the cop who shot the camera out of my hand intentionally targeted me because I was a news photographer, but feelings are not facts. I did some digging while researching this report and discovered I was not the only journalist who had his camera shot out of his hands by police while covering anti-RNC protests. 

Kelly R. Benjamin had his camera shot out of his hands by police too, according to police records I obtained.

Back home in New York, my parole officer sent me to Rikers Island. 

I wasn't jailed for a crime. I was jailed for allegedly violating a technical condition of my parole: leaving the state without written permission. I had permission, it just wasn't in writing because high-ranking parole officials wouldn't allow it. Front-line parole officers would give you oral permission, but wouldn’t put it in writing. It was a way to cover their ass in the bureaucracy. If something went wrong on a parolee's trip, they could always say "he didn't have permission to leave."

That wasn’t how “the system” was supposed to work, but that’s the way it in fact actually worked. A lot of systems are like this, I discovered.

Because I wasn't charged with a real crime, that meant I wouldn't face a real judge in a real court. I faced a fake "judge" in parole's own special administrative "court" on Rikers Island. Parole called the process a “hearing,” but in truth it was a proverbial "kangaroo court." The biggest problem for me was the real possibility of being sent back to state prison for 15 months—what I owed New York on my maximum 19 year sentence at the time. Guys were getting numbers like that and worse for non-criminal, “technical” violations all the time.

I was waiting to face my fate at parole court when my past, present and future lives collapsed into one. It was like a living Twilight Zone episode.

Dwayne Erskine, 18, murdered Brandon Graves, 16, Delroy Gumbs, 19, and Michael Robinson, 21, in Brownsville, Brooklyn on June 7, 2007. He did it by mistake. He thought they robbed him earlier that night but they were innocent. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

Dwayne Erskine was 18 when he pulled the trigger in a triple murder I'd covered for the New York Post in 2007.

Erskine was in the bullpen waiting to go to real court when he saw me going to parole court—carrying a thick stack of legal work in a file-folder. Seeing all the legal paperwork, he assumed I was a jailhouse lawyer. He walked up to me, wearing a rosary and carrying a bible, and asked for advice. He wanted me to tell him whether he should plead guilty or not. It looked like I wasn't going anywhere for a little while so I told him he'd have to tell me about his case. 

After he spoke a few sentences, I realized who he was.

Erskine shot three young men to death on a hot summer night in Brooklyn: Brandon Graves, 16, Delroy Gumbs, 19, and Michael Robinson, 21. He murdered them by mistake. He had been robbed earlier in the evening and thought he was retaliating. Not one of the three people he killed had anything to do with it.

New York Post reporter John Doyle was there in Brownsville with me. 

"I'll never forget all the blood," the veteran crime reporter told me when I asked him what he remembered about it. "On the staircase. It was that thick, congealed blood. And brains." 

Bianca Rivera-Valderrama, 28, witnessed the shooting. She said that after gunshots rang out, Gumbs ran down the street before collapsing. Graves and Robinson never made it off the stoop.

“One was hunched over,” she said, “and the other was in his arms, like a mother would hold a child.”

Blood spilled down the stoop onto the sidewalk, she recalled. Graves, the 16 year-old, was “clenching his fist and coughing. He was trying to make it.”

That didn’t seem likely to her. “I said a prayer to God to watch over them.” 

Renette Robinson, 46, cleans the blood of her nephew and two of his friends off the stoop they were shot to death, June 7, 2007. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

I got there an hour later. I watched NYPD detectives as they gathered evidence on and around the blood-soaked stoop. They finished at first light. Yellow police tape fluttered softly in the cool morning breeze. People gathered around the bloody stoop. Renette Robinson, 46, was one of them. Her sister’s son was among the dead. 

Robinson took one look at the blood, left and came back carrying a white towel and a wash basin filled with water, soap and white bubbles. She set the washbasin down and dipped the white towel into the washbasin. She used that wet, white towel to scrub the red blood off the stoop. The white towel soaked up the blood and turned red in her black hands. She dipped the bloody towel back into the washbasin and wrung it out. Bloody water dripped from the towel.

Two young girls watched in horror through a half-opened window at the top of the stoop.

When I realized the young man standing in front me was the one responsible for spilling all that innocent blood, I looked Erskine in the eye and finally revealed who I was—and what I had seen on that stoop in Brownsville. Then I left him standing there, walked to the opposite side of the bullpen and tried to think of something else beside that stoop.

In the end, my colleagues rescued me from Rikers. More than a dozen of them wrote letters to the Parole Board.  Including three photographers from the Daily News who, technically, were my competitors because I worked for the Post. Even City Council member Rosie Mendez wrote a letter. I was, she wrote, “a model of a successfully rehabilitated individual.”

I chased down the jogging exhibitist transvestite "Elegant Elliot" with Post reporter ML Nestel. Nestel‘s letter in support of my release foreshadowed the Black Lives Matter movement. He condemned "the system's chokehold" on "a man who has rehabilitated his life." 

Daily News photographer Debbie Egan-Chin and I covered countless breaking news events in Brooklyn and sat in the stands while Sheryl Crow sound-checked the afternoon before Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination at Mile High Stadium in Denver. The male photographers on her team had sidelined her and I’d seen her sitting there alone. Egan-Chin wrote the parole board I was a "fine colleague, dedicated photojournalist and friend who has 'got your back' while out on the streets of New York City." 

The letter submitted by Daily News veteran reporter Kerry Burke, on Daily News letterhead no less, made me cry because it was proof how far I came. 

When it comes to breaking-news photojournalism, Jason Nicholas is the class of the field. His work for the New  York Post over the last three years leaves me wishing he worked with me at the Daily News. Nicholas' career and body of work is a paragon of intelligence, compassion and storytelling. 'Rehabilitated' is an understatement; Nicholas' climb from the depths of jail is nothing short of astonishing. He is the finest example I have ever seen of parole working. Putting him back in prison would be a horrific waste. Jason Nicholas shouldn't just have his parole restored. He should be celebrated.

Letters my colleagues, friends and City Council member Rosie Mendez sent to the New York State Parole Board urging it to release me from Rikers Island in 2008 and not send me back to state prison.

Even the New York Times was paying attention to what the Parole Board was doing to me, which had the effect of making the newspaper of record my ally. The day of my hearing, Corey Kilgannon reported: "A certain segment of the New York Press Corp, namely the photographers and reporters who routinely cover street crime, is awaiting word of a parole hearing scheduled to take place on Rikers Island this morning." 

With a spotlight on its parole revocation process like never before, the Parole Board ordered I be restored to parole.

Bad news waiting for me when I got out of Rikers. Faye, my grandmother, was dead. 

All those decades smoking red box Marlboros finally caught up to her. Of course the parole board wouldn't let me travel to Maine for the funeral. All I had to console myself with was the outstanding obituary Faye's close friend and fellow member of the Brooksville Historical Society, Abbie McMillian, wrote and had published in the Bangor Daily News.

Faye Ruth Cosentino holds a photograph of her and one of her four brothers in her log cabin in Brooksville, Maine. She retired to her hometown in 1990 to take care of her aging mother. After she died in 1992, Faye self-published several books on local history until she died in 2008.. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I moved into an artist loft in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2009. 

Ernesto Arencibia and his Cuban “cousin” Joe were my new roommates. The five-story tall building at 240 Broadway was architecturally rare because it had a cast-iron facade and was built in about 1891. It was originally home to a sleigh fur factory—when the rich rode around in winter in sleds instead of SUVs. Its roof offered a 360-degree view of Manhattan and northern Brooklyn. It was the kind of ancient warehouse building no one was really supposed to be living in.

That was the feeling you had looking at the front door bell buzzers. Instead of being labeled with residents’ names, they were labeled with the names of city landmarks, like St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Station and Madison Square Garden. My home was the World Trade Center. My room had 14-foot ceilings and a giant, oversized window. It faced Manhattan, the Williamsburg Bridge and the elevated subway running across it. Trains passed 50 feet from the window, but had to slow because of a curve so they glided, clicked and hummed past. It was a noir movie come to life.

I froze in winter and sweltered in summer but I also looked out that window and saw the Empire State Building—every single night I was there. 

The view from 240 Broadway overlooking Manhattan, Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the East River, Jan. 26, 2015. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

Ernesto, Joe and a bunch of weird, wonderful roommates became my family.

Ernesto was an artist from Guanabacoa, Havana. He described it to me as the Bronx of Cuba: poor. Ernesto graduated from Instituto Superior de Arte in the 1980s. It was the most prestigious art school in the Global South at the time. He and two friends from Guanabacoa won their way into the school outlaw style. They smoked marijuana with a couple of its senior students. Once they were all stoned, the seniors revealed to Ernesto and his two friends exactly what they had to do to ace the school's entrance examination. 

Their scheme worked. Ernesto and his two friends got in.

After graduating, one of his two friends was jailed for his art by the Castro regime. Ernesto escaped, first to Sweden then to Miami. Because artists were being persecuted by the Castro regime at the time, the U.S. granted him asylum. He earned American citizenship a few years later.

Joe had a great job as an electrician and production assistant on movie and television productions—mostly in and around New York City. He eventually got a job as a highly-specialized crane camera operator. The company he worked for had a garage where it kept its equipment on the Williamsburg waterfront. Joe stayed there while he was in the City. Ernesto moved to New York, and lived in the back of the garage with Joe. Joe got Ernesto hired and eventually admitted to the electricians’ union. 

The Williamsburg waterfront was a wasteland in the 1990s. There were fields of rumble and crumbling concrete warehouses and factories—like the empty Rheingold brewery. Entire wharfs fell into the East River and the rest were slowly falling in. One of the few things left was the Domino sugar factory. 

18-wheeler tractor trailer trucks lined up outside it every night waiting to deliver their loads of raw sugar. And every night street-walking sex-workers clad in scant clothing strolled up-and-down the line of trucks like lot lizards in a rural truck stop. Hasidic men who lived in their own insular neighborhood on the south side of Broadway came for cheap, dirty street sex too.

The area’s long-time Hispanic residents called it “South Side” or “Southie.” Dominican and Puerto Rican street crews dominated South Side real estate. A few blocks east of the river, they operated open-air drug bazaars in about a 10-square-block area. They sold heroin largely to poor black and brown neighborhood addicts and cocaine to the white kids who came from Greenpoint, Queens or other middle-class areas. 

Still, when the Orthodox Jewish owners of 240 decided to convert what had been a commercial building to residential lofts in 1999, crime of all kinds had been steadily declining for years. Since the building was a short walk away from the Kent Avenue garage that had been Joe and Ernesto's home, they checked it out. They decided the no-frills apartments were better than the back of the garage and moved in.

Plus they were only one block away from the J train's Marcy Avenue subway stop and had those high ceilings all New Yorkers dream about. 

(1) “Broadway Brooklyn with Horses,” about 2013, by Ernesto Arencibia depicts 240 Broadway in an imaginary streetscape after Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012; (2) 240 Broadway Brooklyn; (3) inside Suite 305, 240 Broadway Brooklyn, where I lived in a room built aroud the left front window for a decade. Photo credit: (1 & 3) JB Nicholas; (2) New York City archive.

Joe and Ernesto signed a lease for apartment number 305. They paid about $1000 a month when they moved in. The skilled carpenters and electricians built the 1000 square foot raw space out to professional standards. They added three rooms, with floor-to-ceiling walls—even though the walls were 14 feet high. They used metal studs instead of wood 2x4s for added fire safety. They installed sprinkler heads in each room they created. The electrical work, by the two electricians, was fireproof.

While crime had declined, South Williamsburg remained dangerous in 1999.

Ernesto recalled witnessing a murder soon after he moved in. He had just got off the subway at Marcy and took a few steps along Broadway. A man with a handgun chased another man past him. A shot rang out. The man who had been getting chased was now sprawled on the sidewalk. Blood and brains spurted out of a hole in his head. Ernesto didn’t wait around to talk to the cops. He went home, smoked a joint, drank a beer and talked about it with Joe instead.

Ernesto hated cops. To Ernesto, all cops were cops, whether they were Cuban or American.

Ernesto's art was like nothing I’d ever seen before, or since. 

Ernesto Arencibia., Cuban-born artist, at work in the third-floor hallway of 240 Broadway, Brooklyn, about 2014. Arencibia. and a rotating cast of roommates was my family from 2008 until 2019. When I left, I took a piece of it with me: a painting of the building. Photo credits. all except 4 JB Nicholas. 4 unknown, courtesy of the archive of the author, JB Nicholas.

One of his aunts in Cuba was a Santeria Orisha. The witch and the secrets she taught him inspired his art. Ernesto painted landscapes in bright, sometimes garish colors. Almost all of his work had primitive religious symbols painted on them. There were all kinds of arrows and four-pointed, compass-like mystic symbols. 

Another collection of Ernesto's paintings incorporated Hasidic men. It was not just his proximity to the Hasidic community in South Williamsburg that inspired him, he told me. There was a Hasidic community near where he grew up in Cuba too. Sometimes his Hasidic paintings were giant portraits. Others streetscapes or landscapes with masses of black-hated, beared, black silhouettes.

Sometimes, a random woman on the street caught Ernesto's eye and she’d start showing up in his paintings. She usually had red hair, like his by-then lost love, a mysterious red-haired Russian vixen named Katerina. 

Life inside 240 Broadway, Brooklyn, 2009-2018: (1) Pride 2015; (2) Luis in 2014 (became noted Bushwick nightlife photographer); (3) Isabella in 2013; (4) smoking out the hallway window on the third floor in 2014; room inside 305; (5) Kyndall; (6) Baptiste in 2013; (7-8) holidays 2017; (9) Ethan Levitas, a photographer who also lived in the building, in his studio in 2017. 240 Broadway was home to artists and creative types of all kind, including an independent toy maker. Photo credits: JB Nicholas

After the RNC, I started doing less breaking news and more paparazzi work. 

That meant living off the land instead of drawing a steady paycheck from a newspaper. The land I lived off was the mean streets of New York City. To better hunt celebrities, I bought a bicycle. It had eight-speed custom gearing to make it go faster, quicker. Because it was so fast, it had disc brakes that stopped it faster too. I sawed an inch off each end of the handle bars so that I could ride through even the narrowest gaps between vehicles. I finished it with flat black spray paint—to make it less visible and attractive to thieves. 

I was outside everyday, patrolling the canyons of Manhattan, searching for celebrities and other newsmakers. I scanned crowds for their faces and streets for the big black Cadillac SUVs they typically rode around in. If I saw one, I followed it until I saw if anyone newsworthy was inside. If there was, I photographed them—usually with a very long lens from a distance.

A good score was a couple hundred dollars. A great score was a couple thousand. A bad day meant zero dinero, but at least I was outside fully living—not inside an office or any other kind of cage. 

(1) Kim Kardashian, first trip to New York City, July 1, 2010; Russell Simmons and Kanye West at Occupy Wall Street, Oct. 10, 2011; (3-5) Kim Kardashian & Kanye West hold hands in public for the first time, Apr. 20, 2012; (6) Prince Harry, May 20, 2012; (7) actor Mathew Modine filming “Batman” on Wall Street. Nov. 5, 2011; (8) former New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo with his family at the funeral for former Gov. Mario Cuomo, his father, Jan. 5, 2015; (9) former president Bill Clinton in Harlem, Aug. 12, 2009; and (10) Victoria Beckhan, Fashion Week, New York City, Sept,. 10, 2009. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

A tip Ernesto and Joe gave me lead to my first big paparazzi score.

It was a photograph of Gordon Gekko, actor Michael Douglas’s character and the protagonist in the Wall Street movies, being released from a fictional federal prison in the 2009 sequel after serving time for his crimes in the 1987 original. Douglas won the best actor Oscar for his role in the original and Oliver Stone directed both so that shot was a big deal. It was, in fact, a major coup.

They filmed it at Sing Sing, a notorious New York State prison on the Hudson RIver in Ossining, New York. Sing Sing is about a half-hour train ride north from Grand Central Station and is the source of the euphemism for being sent to prison: “going up the river.” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed there for spying for the Soviets in 1953. Ernesto and Joe told me about the shoot at Sing Sing night before, so I rode up on the train the next morning. I shot it from the roof of the town sewage treatment plant next door.

Movie production people yelled at me to stop, but plant workers standing on the roof with me laughed at them and told me to keep shooting pictures.

“Who do they think they are?,” one asked with a wry smile, “Their shit stinks too.”

The Post paid me $1,500—a very good price at the time—and put it on page 3. It alone paid almost my entire $800-a-month rent for two months.

Until then, the paparazzi in New York City didn’t know me because until then I’d been strictly a newspaper photographer. Until that shot, the two worlds never met. I lived and learned in both worlds and combined what I learned into my work. I paired the stealthy tactics of the paparazzi with the technical mastery and ethical code I learned as a news photographer. I evolved into a hybrid, and was as good as the best from either world.

Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone filming “Wall Street 2” on location at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Ossissing, New York, Sept. 19, 2009. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

Another early score was Kim Kardashian the first time she came to New York City, also in 2009. 

I figured all the other paparazzi would shoot her with tight-in closeups intended to showcase her looks and clothes because that's usually the only thing that matters to photo editors. I chose to shoot her with a wide-angle lens that would capture all the photographers and fans crowding around her. To me, her visit was a story and that story started with her but also included the scene that swirled around her. That was the news photographer in me, informing my paparazzi work.

Sam Dickerson, my editor at Splash News, liked the wide-angle shots so much it featured them on the Splash News blog, which helped boost their sales. It also helped boost my bragging rights among the paparazzi: the Splash News blog was their version of the New York Times front page in those years.

Sam was great people. It was Sam who, in 2012, got me into the White House to shoot Bob Dylan receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President Barack Obama. It started with my photographs of Kim. He treated me as a news photographer because of them, not just another paparazzi.

Later I shot Kanye West visiting Occupy Wall Street protesters at their encampment in Zuccotti Park in 2011. A year after that, I shot Kanye and Kim the night they held hands in public for the first time. It was a once-in-a-lifetime tabloid trifecta: the New York Post, New York Daily News and Daily Mail.com all published my pictures of the iconic couple.

Perhaps the most personal of all interactions I had as a paparazzi with a celebrity was with, of all people, the Australian bad boy actor Russell Crowe. Our impromptu 7.7 mile bicycle race from Manhattan to Brooklyn became literally world news: after I reported on it in a first-person piece for the Daily News, it was re-reported by news organizations in countries all around the planet. 

Because I covered politics, when the White House announced Pres. Obama would give folk music legend Bob Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony on May 29, 2012 I knew I had to go and cover it. 

At the guard booth on Pennsylvania Avenue, I presented my New York ID half-expecting to be turned away at the last minute. Instead, I was given a press credential and let in after passing through a metal detector and having my gear inspected. Inside the West Wing of the White House the first thing I found were the press offices. A narrow corridor led to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. Beyond that was the White House press secretary's office and, a little further down the hall, the center of presidential power: the oval office. 

The Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony was held in the largest room in the White House, the East Room, intended for "public receptions and other ceremonial occasions," according to the White House historical society. Of the eight presidents who died in office, seven laid in state in the East Room. I made my place dead center in front of the speakers' podium and opened the small step ladder I brought with me. I sat on it until the ceremony began.

 "Hail to the Chief" started playing and I stepped up on my ladder, camera ready.

"Welcome to the White House," President Obama began when he strode in.

"It is an extraordinary pleasure to be here with all of you to present this year's Medals of Freedom," the president added. "And I have to say just looking around the room this is a packed house. Which is a testament to how cool this group is. Everybody wanted to check 'em out." 

Then the president said a little something about each of the people receiving the award . 

Besides Dylan, black writer Toni Morrison was one of the receipients. I went to see Dylan but when I saw Toni Morrison and heard her name I smiled. You couldn't find any of her books in any jail library because people had loved them so much they stole them and kept them as treasured possessions. I’d even known killers who started calling each other "Beloved" after they read one of Morrison’s most popular books with that title.

"Toni Morrison's prose brings us that kind of moral and emotional intensity that few writers ever attempt," President Obama said when he got to her name. "From ‘Song of Solomon’ to 'Beloved,' Toni reaches us deeply, using a tone that is lyrical, precise, distinct and inclusive."

When it came to Dylan, Obama said he started out singing other people's songs but "there came a point where I had to write what I wanted to say because what I wanted to say no one else was writing."

In true rock star fashion, Dylan never took his dark black sunglasses off—not even for the President of the United States. 

When Pres. Obama finished hanging medals on all the recipients, there was a rousing round of applause and a long pause before he spoke again. 

"Everyone on this stage marked my life in profound ways," he revealed. They "are my heroes individually."

Pres. Barack Obama awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bob Dylan, writer Toni Morrison and basketball coach Pat Summit in the White House on May 29, 2012. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.

I filed my photographs in the White House press room, walked back to Union Station and splurged for a celebratory first class ride home on the Acela. Back in New York, I grabbed a cold beer from my refrigerator and walked up my stairs to my roof. I cracked my beer, had a smoke and took a long, loving look at the twinkling lights of my City: laid out all around me.

I paused and savored the moment. I felt like a general whose cunning but slow-acting plan to seize the enemy's capital had finally succeeded.

I proved the cops wrong, the parole board who denied me parole three times wrong and even the judge who sentenced me to the maximum wrong—I proved all the doubters wrong. You give people s a real second chance, they can succeed. There’s no such thing as once a felon, always a felon. That’s fiction. My life proved it. I wasn’t a criminal anymore, I was one of the best photojournalists working—anywhere in the whole wide world. I’d won.

I could fill a book with stories from my career as a news photographer—and maybe some day I will. For now, I'll highlight winning the working-class news photographers’ Pulitzer Prize: the cover of Paris Match magazine.

(1) Paris Match magazine; (2) Occupy Wall Street, Oct. 14, 2011; (3-4) Hurricane Sandy, Oct. 29, 2012; (5) Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Sandy Hook, Ct., Dec. 15, 2012; (6) terrorist car bomb misfires in Times Square, May 1, 2010; (7) Harlem murder, 123d & St. Nicholas, Oct. 2, 2013; (8) wake for “Craigslist Killer” victim Julissa Brisman, Apr. 22, 2009. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

I won it for a photograph of Dominque Strauss-Kahn’s wife and daughter entering the Manhattan Criminal Court building for DSK’s arraignment on charges he raped a black hotel maid. I also covered Occupy Wall Street from start to finish; waded through Hurricane Sandy's storm surge when the ocean flooded lower Manhattan and shot up out of sewers like geysers; the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut; a couple of terrorist attacks; and dozens of murders.

I also dusted off my legal skills to get my press credential back from the NYPD when they revoked it in 2015.

I got photographs of a construction worker crushed in a possibly preventable "accident" that City Hall ordered the NYPD to block. With the help of legendary First Amendment law firm Cahill, Gordon and Reindel (whose star litigator Floyd Abrams won the Pentagon Papers case for the New York Times), partner Joel Kurtzberg and I reformed the way the NYPD handles press credentials—to prevent the City from using them to censor news reporting.

(1) Eric Garner funeral, Brooklyn, New York, July 23, 2014; (2) Eric Garner-inspired protest, downtown Manhattan, July 17, 2014; (3) highway outside St. Louis after police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Aug. 22, 2014; (4-6) Michael Brown funeral, Ferguson, Mo., Aug. 24, 2014. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.

After the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in 2020, the City Council revoked the NYPD's jurisdiction over press credentials entirely and re-delegated that authority to a new civilian office in City Hall. My lawsuit motivated them to do it.

I even sued and beat Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg for his unprecedented use of giant screens to block the public and photographers while he was shooting on the public’s streets in Harlem. I won a court injunction requiring him to stop. My old friends at the Post reported it.

Arguing against Steven Spielberg’s lawyers to State Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden in 60 Center Street, the “Law & Order” courthouse where the hit TV show films. Photo credits: (1) Steven Hirsch via the New York Post; (2) screengrab.

When I finished parole in 2009, I could finally travel freely without being sent back to prison for it.

I took summers off to go hiking and explore the great, wide wilderness in upstate New York and northern New England. I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Pennsylvania to Maine, most of the Catskill mountains that rise above 3,500 feet and most of the 46 peaks that rise above 4,500 feet in the Adirondacks. I explored the Taconic, Ramapo, Shawangunk, Kittatinny and Allegheny ranges. I hiked the Long Path, the Long trail, the Shawangunk Ridge trail, the Mohawk trail, the Hudson Highland trail and the Northville-Placid Trail.

I was growing. I was evolving. I was healing. I was re-creating the wild, nature-loving boy I'd been, step-by-step, mountain-by-mountain.

I found Gigi on Facebook in 2014. We hadn't seen each other since prom night in 1989, riding in a white limo with our lovers and friends. We renewed our friendship and discovered we had a deep connection. We'd both not just survived rough childhoods, we'd transcended them. Anyone can be a "survivor," only a few become transcenders. We were both transcenders—though she still slept with a switchblade in her nightstand, just in case.

That winter, we were marooned inside her mountainside home by a blizzard. Two feet of freshly fallen snow filled the Hudson Valley forest outside. At night, a frigid north wind rose up and blew the last of the clouds away. Moonlight cast long, eerie shadows of leafless trees onto the snow like skeletons. In the middle of the night, Gigi had a dream and woke me up. She rolled over to face me, but her eyes never opened.

“You have to go and save the other ones,” she said softly and slowly, like she was in a trance.

Later she told me she did not remember what she’d said and called it “a nightmare.” It seemed more like a vision to me. Whatever it was, I made it my destiny.

I traded in my life as a news photographer to become an investigative criminal justice reporter. My reporting was regularly published by The Village Voice and Gothamist.com, a local New York City news website. It was also published by The Daily Beast.com, New York Post, New York Daily News, Oxygen.com, The Appeal.org, Narratively.com and The Villager—a community newspaper covering lower Manhattan. 

Because Gothamist was brought by WNYC radio, another twist of fate allowed me to report by radio on the arrest of disgraced Hollywood heavyweight Harvey Weinsetin for rape in 2017. My WNYC radio report was, in turn, rebroadcast by National Public Radio. I missed it, but a couple of my old paparazzi pals didn't. They sent me text messages like: "YO! Motherfucker I just heard you on NPR!"

My biggest hits solved a killing by prison guards; detailed how New York’s courts and prisons killed Benjamin van Zant, a mentally-ill juvenile offender; revealed the City was building a $1 billion jail on Rikers Island when activists were agitating for closing it; exposed statutes of Confederates Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson in the Hall of Fame of Great Americans; debunked a right-wing conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre never happened; and documented the history of the Internet's first "viral video"—capturing an NYPD officer assaulting a bike rider during a rolling environmental protest ride in Times Square called "critical mass."

My WNYC radio report on a lawsuit alleging “rape culture” among guards on Rikers Island encouraged one of them to rape a female prisoner.

My Daily Beast van Zant report, and two Village Voice folos on the fight to reform New York's juvenile justice laws spearheaded by van Zant's parents, helped spur the 2017 enactment of new laws raising New York’s age of criminal responsibility to 18. It has spared thousands of juvenile offenders jail time. 

I was there in Harlem when then-governor Andrew Cuomo signed the “Raise the Age” Act into law.

Afterward, I did something I shouldn’t have done. I reached across the table, the same table where he signed the bill, and I shook the governor’s hand. As an indepedent journalist, I shouldn’t have done it and it’s the only time I did anything like it. But given who I was I had to personally thank him on behalf of all the teenagers' whose lives would be saved by the new law—kids like the one I had been.

That turned out to be not just one of my proudest moments, but one of the governor’s too: he resigned in the face of sexual harassment allegations four years later in 2021.

Work on the new $1 billion jail on Rikers Island was halted after my Village Voice report revealed its existence. Then it was canceled.

Because the Hall of Fame of Great Americans was on the grounds of a state-funded CUNY college, Gov. Cuomo ordered the Confederate icons removed after my Gothamist report revealed their existence. 

After another of my Gothamist reports revealed New York State was denying drug-addicted prisoners access to Medication Assisted Treatment, the state legislature passed news laws mandating the prison system provide access to the treatment. 

Finally, after my reporting revealed that accused parole violators were being systematically denied lawyers and due process at administrative hearings on Rikers Island, the state legislature passed and the governor signed "Less is More" legislation reforming the entire parole revocation system—the same system that jailed me on Rikers in 2008.

Despite all these accomplishments as a free lance reporter, I was never even interviewed for any of the dozens of staff reporter jobs I applied for. The same hypocrites who cheerlead “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” decided I didn’t deserve any. I wasn’t enough of a victim.

In 2019, gentrification finally drove me, Ernesto and all the other artists and weirdos out of the South Williamsburg loft building we'd made our home.

I moved in with the environmental activist I was seeing. She was once known by more people as La Femme Nikita than by her real name. She was beautiful and fit and smart and still is. She lived in a doorman building on Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights. I could see the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge from her bedroom window. We shopped at the farmer’s market on Broadway in front of Columbia University every week. Bought cheese from an Amish diary farmer in Pennsylvania. Picked up our CSA from a church across the street. Even went hiking together.

The only problem was me. I wasn’t ready to retire. I was ready for more action.

Then there was the train whistle I heard every morning around 8:30 am sitting at my writing desk. I knew it was Amtrak train six-nine thundering out of the old "mole people" tunnel under Riverside Park, speeding north up the Hudson and through the Adirondacks to Montreal. By then, I'd rode it dozens of times to the mountains and back. Its whistle called my name every single day.

Besides, New York wasn't New York anymore. I liked New York dirty, dangerous and unpredictable. They made it clean, safe and very boring.

It’s beyond too expensive. There are too many new rules and the new people are way too uptight. Machines we once used to bring us together are driving us apart. Everyone is stumbling around like zombies, plugged into so-called "smart" phones. If you do manage to talk to anybody, you can't speak your mind. There’s a long list of “banned” words. The number of “likes” you get on social media is tied directly to how dumb and stupid you are.

Even the new LED street lights are too bright: the harsh, white lights sucked the last of the noir out of the New York City night. 

I settled my lawsuit against the NYPD for taking my press credential in 2021. I didn't just stop censorship by personally rewriting the law, I received some cash too. I decided to go fly fishing for trout again like I did when I was a Boy Scout. I went fishing for three straight years. I fished from New York to Maine, and back. During the long winters, I wrote three books. 

I transformed my life, again.

I'm not just a journalist anymore, I'm also a writer and licensed outdoor guide—specializing in fly fishing for wild trout and wilderness backpacking.

The older I get the more I think about the past, especially my grandfather and what he said living a good life was shortly before his own death in 2002. 

It “can't be measured in terms of money,” Al said. "The most important thing in life is to achieve what you feel in your heart."

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