"Folk music is being challenged by a creative cadre of insurgents, all city intellectuals and almost all in their early or mid 20s, who write and sing topical songs characterized by radicalism, wit, immediacy, and poetry."

The fundamental question about the Koch administration is no longer why the mayor gave power to so many crooks, but exactly what happened years ago when whistleblowers, law enforcement investiga­tors, and private citizens first tried to warn him

“I’m scared,” says a Federal investigator of Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito. “We’ll work our ass off for the next six months to make a case. We’ll work 18 hours a day. But I admit it. I’m afraid of what happens after that. This guy Meade has more power than the Pope.”

“The murder of RFK left a void. No one came after him who could speak simultaneously for the unemployed black teenager and the white worker trapped in a dead-end job and feeling misunderstood”

Her close friend Jimmy Breslin told me on the day she was picked: “This broad is just eight years out of the kitchen. She’s just starting to grow. She’s gonna be president.”

“The Movement in Amite County is pure and religious, uncontaminated by organizational in-fighting and hy­per-militancy. It is just two soli­tary organizers and a handful of local Negroes.”

“There were rabbis, junkies, schoolboys, actors, sharecroppers, intellectuals, maids, novelists, folk-singers, and politicians — 40,000 motives and 40,0000 people marching to Montgomery”

“Five years ago my friend José Torres told me that Cus D'Amato had found a trou­bled 14-year-old kid from Brooklyn who is going to become the heavyweight champion of the world”

Five specific, systemic, attainable reme­dies to the epidemic of police abuse

“By 3 a.m. Tuesday the liberals had been routed at the convention, the kids had been repulsed on the street ... Almost every noise was martial: fire sirens, the squawking of radios, cop cars racing, the idle chatter of police on duty”