On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the “Killing Fields.”
In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying.
But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin? The answer can be found two decades earlier.
In response to redlining and discriminatory housing practices, the administration of Lyndon Johnson passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968.
The Federal Housing Authority aimed to use this piece of legislation to help low-income families of color finally achieve home ownership.
But they could never have predicted how banks, lenders, realtors, and corrupt FHA officials themselves would use the newly passed law to make victims of the very people they were supposed to help, and the devastation they would leave in their wake.
In a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism and true crime, Stacy Horn’s The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood (Gillian Flynn Books, 2025) sheds light on how the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s and a long history of white-collar crime slowly devastated East New York.
The Killing Fields of East New York reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots.
Following the dual threads of the hunt for the network of criminals behind the first subprime mortgage scandal and the ensuing downfall of East New York, Stacy Horn weaves a compelling narrative of government failure, a desperate community, and ultimately the largest series of mortgage fraud prosecutions in American history.
The Killing Fields of East New York deftly demonstrates how different types of crime are profoundly entangled, and how the crimes committed in nice suits and corner offices are just as destructive as those committed on the street.
Stacy Horn is a journalist and author of nonfiction books, including Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York and The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad.
Upcoming Author Event
Author Stacy Horn will share her investigative journalism in a free conversation about the area’s fair housing, race, violence and misplaced city priorities at the Roosevelt Island Library, 504 Main Street on Roosevelt Island in New York City on Monday, June 8, 2026, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm.
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