New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt and reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets – and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions were boiling over. Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events – involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters – would widen those divisions into chasms. In this book, Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these outsized characters and of these convulsive, defining years.