THE WICKED KING WICKER-Michael Benson

There was a time when New York City was dying a fast death. The slums were warzones, the government bankrupt and sputtering. Mobsters disassembled one another nightly and dropped hefty bags off the Canarsie pier. Drug use was rampant, supplied by the most efficient black market since prohibition. Gangs rumbled in the city’s playgrounds, each battle busted up by the sound of gunfire or a police siren. Co-eds from out of town were raped and sent home shattered. Large sections of real estate, former ghettos, were now ghost towns, abandoned, burnt, and left to the squatters. It was a city of vacant lots turned dumpsite, a city in which four murders a night was the norm, where pedestrians routinely dodged angel-dust timebombs and young savage baby boomers washed down black beauties with Rheingold out of a can, where each glance into the shadows was an assault upon civilized sensibilities, a derelict Big Apple, rotten at the core, with no signs of hope.And for a year, there was the scariest shadow of them all, Son of Sam, a terrifying spectre of sadism, and ritualistic blood sacrifice. From a new point of view, this book will take an unblinking look at the deadly events as they unfolded against a backdrop of a moribund metropolis. For the first time, using dozens of first-time interviews with terrorized victims, mostly women, The Wicked King Wicker will examine the psychology of fear mastered by the purported serial killer.