80s News Today

NEW YORK CITY — The sun crawled over the Manhattan skyline like a bruised eye this morning, but for the denizens of the underworld and the literary elite alike, the light was blinding for a different reason. The New York Times Bestseller List—that holy scroll of high-brow validation—has finally been breached by the barbarians. Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy has officially debuted on the list today, February 16, 1986. It is a grim, jagged spike in the heart of the "polite" reading public. Pileggi has done it. He didn't just write a book; he performed a public autopsy on the American Dream, using the vocal cords of one Henry Hill—a man who lived his life in the wet, red gears of the Lucchese crime family. "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." It’s a line that drips with a terrible, infectious honesty. It’s the kind of truth that makes the suburban book-club set tremble in their loafers. They want to believe the Mafia is a collection of o...

My dear readers, let us cast our minds back, if you will, to that frigid Saturday in December, the twenty-second of the month, 1984. The very air of Manhattan, crisp and brittle as a dried leaf, crackled with that peculiar, electric tension—a subterranean thrum, really—that only a city teetering on the precipice of its own magnificent chaos can truly generate. Ah, New York! A symphony of grime and glitter, a dazzling, dangerous carnival where every denizen, from the haughty Beekman Place dowager to the denizen of the deepest, graffiti-scarred subway car, played their part in the grand, cacophonous opera of urban life. On this particular day, our stage was set in the very bowels of Gotham, a downtown No. 2 express rumbling south, rattling its way from Fourteenth Street to Chambers. And who, pray tell, was our unlikely protagonist? Not some gilded titan of Wall Street, nor a strutting denizen of Studio 54, but a small, bespectacled engineer, a man of modest means and—it would soon become...

A decade of neon and pastel got off to a much darker start when America failed to get out of its first year without the shocking loss of John Lennon . The creative giant and political activist was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building on the evening of December 8, 1980, in an assassination that had all the hallmarks of a government conspiracy, complete with an unconvincing patsy pulling the trigger. Lennon had been hounded by the FBI, and illegally by the CIA, since moving to the United States. The powers-that-be feared his potential influence on elections, particularly among younger voters. Gunman Mark David Chapman remains in prison, serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Beekman, New York. He has been denied parole all fourteen times he has been eligible for it. His explanation for killing Lennon, who was only 40 at the time, doesn't add up. He claimed on the one hand that he was obsessed with what he thought was Lennon...