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Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. The albums alone occupied an entire wall of shelves in the family room, and another in the garage. On his desk were a set of drumsticks from Nirvana and an old RCA microphone that Prince had given to him at a recording session for Prince. A neon Beach Boys sign—as far as he knows, one of only eight remaining in the world—hung above the dining table. In his laundry room was a Gibson guitar signed by the Everly Brothers; near his fireplace, a white Stratocaster signed to him by Eric Clapton.

Last month, the night the Eaton Fire broke out, Charlie evacuated to his girlfriend’s house. And when he came back, the remnants of his home had been bleached by the fire. The spot in the family room where the record collection had been was dark ash.

I’ve known Charlie for as long as I can remember. He and my father met because of records. In the late 1980s, Charlie was at a crowded party in the Hollywood Hills when he heard someone greet my father by his full name. Charlie whipped around: “You’re Fred Walecki? I’ve been seeing your name on records.” Dad owned a rock-and-roll-instrument shop, and musicians thanked him on their albums for the gear (and emotional support) he provided during recording sessions. Charlie was a national sales manager at Warner Bros. Records and could rattle off the B-side of any record, so of course he’d clocked Walecki appearing over and over again. Growing up, I thought every song I’d ever heard could also be found on Charlie’s shelves; his friend Jim Wagner, who once ran sales, merchandising, and advertising for Warner Bros. Records, called it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame West.

Charlie’s collection started when he was 6. He had asked his mother to get him the record “about the dog,” and she’d brought back Patti Page’s “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No, not that one—he wanted a 45 of Elvis’s recently released single, “Hound Dog.” He’d cart it around with him for the next seven decades, across several states, before placing it on his shelf in Altadena. At age 8, he mowed lawns and shoveled snow in his hometown outside Chicago to afford “Sweet Little Sixteen,” by Chuck Berry, and “Tequila,” by the Champs; when he was 9, he got Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” And when he was 10, he walked into his local record shop and found its owner, Lenny, sitting on the floor, frazzled, surrounded by piles of records. Every week, Lenny had to rearrange the records on his wall to reflect the order of the Top 40 chart made by the local radio station WLS. Charlie offered to help.

“What will it cost me?” Lenny asked.

“Two singles a week.” Charlie held on to all of those singles, and the paper surveys from WLS, too.

When he was 12, he bought his first full albums: Surfin’ Safari, by the Beach Boys; Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut; and Green Onions, by Booker T. and the M.G.s. He entered a Wisconsin seminary two years later, hoping to become a priest. There, he and his friends found a list of addresses for members of Milwaukee’s Knights of Columbus chapter, and sent out letters asking for donations—a hi-fi stereo console, a jukebox—to the poor seminarians, who went without so much. Radios were contraband, but Charlie taped one underneath the chair next to his bed, and at night, while 75 other students slept around him, he would use an earbud to listen to WLS. “And I would hear records, and I would go, Oh my God, I gotta get this record. I have to. ” Seminarians could go into town only if it was strictly necessary, so he’d break his glasses, and run between the optometrist and the five-and-dime. That’s how he got a couple of other Beach Boys records, the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.”

Charlie dropped out of seminary in 1967, at the end of his junior year. All of those five-and-dime records had been in his prefect’s room, but when he left, the prefect was nowhere to be found. So, Charlie got a ladder, wriggled through a transom, and got his collection, stored in two crates which had previously contained oranges. (“Orange crates held albums perfectly,” he told me.) Then he hitchhiked to San Francisco and grew his hair out just in time for the Summer of Love. He moved into a commune of sorts, a 16-unit apartment building with the walls between apartments broken down, and got a job hanging posters for the Fillmore on telephone poles around the Bay Area. He’d staple up psychedelic artwork advertising Jefferson Airplane, Sons of Champlin, the Grateful Dead, or Sly and the Family Stone. (He still had about 75 of those posters.) He worked at Tower Records on the side but would hand his paycheck back to his boss: The money all went to records. Anytime one of his favorites—Morrison, Mitchell, Dylan, the Beach Boys—released a new album, he’d host a listening party for friends. When he moved back to Chicago, his music collection took up most of the car. The record store he managed there, Hear Here, would receive about 20 new albums every day to play over the loudspeakers. When Charlie heard Bruce Springsteen’s first album (two before Born to Run), he thought it was such a hit, he locked the shop door. “Until I sell five of these records,” he announced, “nobody is getting out of this store.”

Next, Charlie worked his way up at a music-distribution company, starting from a gig in the warehouse (picker No. 9). Later, at Warner Bros. Records, he’d work with stores and radio stations to help artists sell enough music to get, and then sustain, their big break. To sell Takin’ It to the Streets, he drove with the Doobie Brothers so they could sign albums at a Kansas City record shop; to help Dire Straits get their start, he lobbied radio stations to play their first single for about a year until it caught on. He was also on the shortlist of people who would listen to test pressings of a new album for any pops or crackles, before the company shipped the final version. Charlie held on to about 1,000 of those rare pressings, including Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Prince’s Purple Rain.

He moved to Los Angeles in the ’80s to be Warner’s national sales manager, and in 1991, he bought his home on Skylane Drive, in Altadena. Nestled in the foothills, the area smelled of the hay for his neighbors’ horses. Along the fence was bougainvillea, and in his yard, a magnificent native oak that our families would sit beneath together. He started placing thousands of his albums on those shelves in the family room, overlooking that tree.

In Charlie’s house, a record was always playing. He had recently papered the walls and ceiling of his bathroom with the WLS surveys he started collecting as a child, in his first record-store job. Every record he pulled off the shelf came with a memory, he told me. And if he kept an album or a memento in his house, “it was a good story.”

A gold record from U2, on the wall next to the staircase: “All bands, when they first start off, they’re new bands, and nobody knows who they are, okay? … I went up with U2, on their first album, from Chicago to Madison, and they played a gig for about 15 people, and then we went to eat at an Italian restaurant. I went back to the restaurant a couple years later, and the same waitress waited on me, and I said, ‘Wow, I remember I was in here with U2.’ And she goes, ‘Those guys were U2?’ I was like, ‘They were U2 then and they’re U2 now.’”

In the kitchen, a poster of Jimi Hendrix striking a power chord at the Monterey Pop Festival: “Seal puts his first record out, and I have just become a vice president at Warner Bros. And I go to my very first VP lunch, and I announce, ‘Hey, this new Seal record is going to go gold.’ The senior VP of finance says, ‘You shouldn’t say that. Why would you make that kind of expectation?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I know with every corpuscle in my body it’s gonna go gold’ … So we make a $1 gentlemen’s bet. About six weeks later, it’s gold.” At the next lunch, he asked the finance executive to sign his dollar bill. Just then, Mo Ostin, the head of the label, walked in and heard about their wager. “Mo said, ‘So Charlie, is there something around the building that you always liked?’ I was like, ‘Well, that Jim Marshall poster of Hendrix.’ And he goes, ‘It’s yours.’”

*Illustration sources: RCA / Michael Ochs Archive / Getty; Stoughton Printing / Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Warner Brothers / Alamy; Sun Records / Alamy

The band are among 14 nominees, alongside Mariah Carey, New Order, Cyndi Lauper and White Stripes.

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The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

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Naga sadhus, or Hindu holy men, arrive in Prayagraj, India. (ANI / Rahul Singh / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On a Wednesday morning in October 2014, in a garage in the woods of Pennsylvania, Tommy Trotta tried on some new jewelry: a set of rings belonging to the baseball great Yogi Berra. Each hunk of gold bore a half-carat diamond and the words NEW YORK YANKEES WORLD CHAMPIONS. The team had given them to Berra for each of his 10 World Series victories—no player had ever won more.

Trotta, a balding 39-year-old who lived with his wife and two kids in Scranton, had grown up a Yankees fan. He’d dreamed as a boy of one day joining the team. Berra had been the favorite player of his beloved godmother, who gave Trotta his first Yankees uniform when he was a toddler and took him to games at Yankee Stadium.

Trotta never competed past Little League. But there was more than one way into a hall of fame. In a methodically planned heist in the dark and rain of that October morning, he’d climbed onto a balcony at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center, in Little Falls, New Jersey, carrying a duffel bag of tools and dressed entirely in black. He’d cut through a double-reinforced window built to withstand foul balls from an adjoining stadium. Then he’d used a 20-volt DeWalt grinder, with a fire-rescue blade, to slice open a bulletproof display case labeled BASEBALL’S RING LEADER.

Berra’s rings now glinted on Trotta’s hands. They evoked for him a magnificent time before his own birth: the mid-century years when Berra had won World Series after World Series with teammates such as Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, and Mickey Mantle. How many men besides Berra—and now Trotta—would ever know the feeling of those rings on their fingers? How many besides Trotta could sense the weight of all those victories, then destroy every last ounce of it for cash?

In the garage in the Pennsylvania woods, an electric melting furnace was reaching a programmed temperature of more than 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Trotta handed Berra’s rings to a friend, who used jewelers’ tools to pluck out the diamonds and cut up the rings. The dismembered rings were then dropped into the furnace, where they liquefied into a featureless mass of molten gold.

Mining has a proud history in the parts of northeastern Pennsylvania that Trotta and his crew called home. Scranton, the biggest city there, was named after a pair of brothers who exploited the region’s rich deposits of iron and coal. But where earlier generations had descended into the ground for raw minerals, Trotta broke through windows. His mother lode was the championship rings, belts, and trophies—veined with precious metals and gemstones—that sat, almost for the taking, inside low-security sports museums across America.

[From the June 2023 issue: Ariel Sabar on the billion-dollar Ponzi scheme that hooked Wall Street, Warren Buffett, and the U.S. Treasury]

Trotta so perfected this niche line of burglary that he evaded the FBI and more than a dozen police agencies for two decades. His longevity was all the more remarkable given the size and makeup of his crew: three friends he’d known since grade school; his cousin’s fiancé; Trotta’s eldest sister, Dawn; two of her ex-boyfriends; and a neighbor of one of the exes. By day, they had normal jobs: plumber, carpenter, building contractor, bar owner, mechanic, Uber driver, real-estate closing agent. By night, they allegedly served as Trotta’s getaway drivers, toolmakers, and assistants.

Trotta told me his story last year, while he was on pretrial release, awaiting sentencing. He has pleaded guilty to a single count of theft of major artwork, as part of a cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors who have indicted and are seeking to convict his entire crew. I interviewed Trotta in his lawyer’s office, at the apartment he shared with Dawn, and over a few meals and car rides. This article draws on those conversations and on details in the federal indictments, police records, and other public documents.

Trotta stands at about 5 foot 8 and has a round, expressive face—cleft chin, narrow eyes, jutting nose and lips. He speaks like an earnest 10-year-old telling of adventures so grand, he can barely sit still. He turns 50 this year. He hides his bald head beneath a newsboy cap; his once lean, CrossFit-hardened body has grown pear-shaped and wobbly. “Fat Elvis,” he told me.

Trotta claims now to know what he never grasped during a lifetime of thieving: the pain he caused people, particularly the families and fans of the sports heroes whose hard-won trophies he’d plundered. Yogi Berra was nearing his 90th birthday—his last—and grieving the recent death of his wife, Carmen, when Trotta broke into the museum that October, stealing 16 of Berra’s baseball rings and two of his MVP plaques.

“I’m hated in the sports world,” Trotta told me. “I’m hated at a very deep level.”

Trotta felt as though he was born to steal. “In the blood” was how he put it, and it wasn’t just a metaphor. His father—Thomas Trotta Sr., known as “Big Tom” to Trotta’s “Little Tommy”—served as a police officer in Passaic, New Jersey, for seven years before discovering that he liked the other side of the law better. In March 1976, nine months after Trotta was born, his father accepted $750 from an associate of the Genovese crime family to torch a Hackensack dance club. A jury convicted him of arson and conspiracy, and a state judge sentenced him to two to three years in prison, rejecting any “sentimental concern for the family of a crooked cop.”

Left: The Trotta siblings pose with their father’s guns. Right: Thomas Trotta Sr., or “Big Tom.” (Courtesy of Tommy Trotta)

Big Tom was a Vietnam War veteran, fond of camouflage, jean shorts, and exotic firearms. Four months after leaving prison, he held up a Rite Aid pharmacy and was quickly caught. Later he ran heroin and cocaine for a New Jersey drug ring. Little Tommy was 15 years old—and watching from the back seat—when FBI agents yanked his dad out of the driver’s seat of the family car to arrest him. (Trotta Sr. agreed to testify against his associates and was sentenced to 22 months in prison.)

Big Tom may not have been cut out to be a successful arsonist, stickup man, or drug trafficker, but he did better as a thief, supporting his family without once getting caught. To steal without violence was a sly art, and Little Tommy loved when his dad asked for help. Where other fathers took their sons fishing, Trotta’s dad took his to steal salmon from a hatchery. Where other dads took their kids to see historical sites, Big Tom took his son to loot them: Little Tommy, at age 11, would look out for rangers at the Gettysburg battlefield at night as his father dug up Civil War artifacts with a metal detector and spade.

They’d moved from northern New Jersey to rural Pennsylvania in 1986, supposedly to escape the corrupting influences of city life. But it was there, in tiny Madison Township—on a former hay farm, off a dirt road, 15 miles east of Scranton—that Trotta’s criminal education began in earnest. His sister Dawn, who was four years older, had started dating a boy named Nicholas Dombek, a floppy-haired blond who’d quit school, robbed a gas station, and moved in with the Trottas after having had enough of his own parents. Dombek became a kind of older brother to Trotta, and a second son to Big Tom. (Dombek did not respond to requests for comment.)

Big Tom mentored Dombek in home and commercial burglary; Dombek, in turn, mentored Trotta; and by high school, Trotta had helped turn a group of boys he’d known since he was about 11 into a surprisingly disciplined band of thieves.

The gang would listen to idle talk among schoolmates and neighbors to figure out when houses might be unoccupied or stores flush with cash. Then they’d strike, syncing their movements over walkie-talkies and fleeing on ATVs and snowmobiles (also stolen) down wooded trails that police cars couldn’t reach. Trotta never used weapons: His code was always to run if spotted. But in other ways he could be ruthless. He stole $6,000 from the home of a schoolmate’s great-grandmother, he told me, then gave the boy a cut for his advice on how to do it. And he stole a safe from a clothing shop managed by his own girlfriend. Police interrogated the girlfriend, who had no idea he was responsible, but Trotta didn’t mind. The suspicion that fell on innocent employees after his burglaries, he said, “was good for me.”

After graduating from North Pocono High School, in 1994, Trotta got a student loan and enrolled in a six-month vocational-training course in alarm-system technology. He learned that you could disable an alarm by ripping its control panel—or “brain”—off the wall. He found out that many motion detectors had a “pet alley,” an unmonitored area near the floor for small animals. And he discovered that most alarms had a built-in delay: 60 to 90 seconds between when a sensor was tripped and when security was called. The feature was designed to reduce false alarms by giving owners time to punch in a code if they triggered the system accidentally. Trotta took away a different lesson: If a burglar got in and out in under 90 seconds, he could vanish into the night before anyone knew he’d been there. This insight, more than any other, became the basis for the next phase of his career.

Clockwise from top left: Tommy Trotta, Dawn Trotta, Nicholas Dombek, Damien Boland, Al Atsus, and Joe Atsus (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: 1989 and 1994 North Pocono High School yearbooks; Tommy Trotta.)

In August 1999, Keystone College, in La Plume, Pennsylvania, held a celebration for its most famous alumnus: the Baseball Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson, who pitched for the New York Giants from 1900 to 1916 and won an astonishing 373 games. Mathewson had helped invent the fadeaway pitch and was nicknamed the “Christian Gentleman” for his refusal to play on Sundays.

Trotta was invited to the festivities by a baseball-card dealer he knew. They watched a one-man show about Mathewson’s life, then walked to the gym for an exhibit of memorabilia that Mathewson’s widow had given the school. Keystone’s athletic director was such an exuberant promoter of Mathewson’s legacy that she slid open a case to give visitors close-ups of the most thrilling items: Mathewson’s 1902 contract with the Giants; his 1916 contract with the Cincinnati Reds; and a World’s Champions jersey he wore after winning the 1905 World Series, its right sleeve cut off at the elbow for friction-free pitching.

Trotta didn’t think much of any of it until the car ride home, when his friend casually said that the Mathewson memorabilia in that one case might be worth more than half a million dollars. It was the most interesting thing Trotta had heard all evening.

He called Joe Atsus—a member of the thieving crew he’d known since middle school—the moment he got home. As Atsus made his way to the house, Trotta dug out a ski mask, a crowbar, and a pair of walkie-talkies. When they got to the Keystone gym, after midnight, Trotta noticed a parked car near the glass side door he’d planned to break through, and a plugged-in vacuum cleaner just inside. If a janitor was there, they’d momentarily stepped away. Trotta was reaching for his crowbar to smash the door when it occurred to him to try the handle. The door was unlocked. Trotta ran to the display, jimmied the sliding glass free of its ratchet lock, and grabbed the jersey and contracts. He was in and out, he recalled, in about 25 seconds. “It was like it was meant to just be taken,” he told me.

Nicholas Dombek (left) and Tommy Trotta in the 1990s (Courtesy of Tommy Trotta)

Trotta continued to burglarize homes to cover his day-to-day living expenses; unlike his assistants, he had no other job. But homes were haystacks: Somewhere in all that clutter, you’d maybe find an antique, a gun, some jewelry, but nothing to make you truly rich. Exhibits like Mathewson’s, Trotta realized, were clutter-free—everything in them was precious. If you could snag half a million dollars in memorabilia in half a minute from a college gym, imagine the takings in an actual museum.

The most prestigious museum in northeastern Pennsylvania was right there in Scranton. Founded by a local physician in 1908, the Everhart Museum had a diverse collection that ranged from a Tyrannosaurus rex skull to paintings by important artists. In 2000, a year after the Mathewson heist, the Everhart made headlines when it proposed strengthening its finances by selling its one Matisse. The painting, a 1920 still life called Pink Shrimp, had been appraised at more than $4 million. Trotta and his crew set in motion a plan to steal it; they began by filming the museum’s layout with camcorders while pretending to be tourists.

They lost their chance when the museum abruptly sold the Matisse. But Trotta was undeterred. On a return visit, he started talking about the painting with a guard, who mentioned that another artwork was probably worth more: Springs Winter, a movie-poster-size drip painting attributed to Jackson Pollock.

Over the next five years, Trotta, Dombek, and other members of the crew took turns visiting—and at times filming—the museum. They mapped the location of each security camera and motion detector, each entry and egress. In bed at night, Trotta replayed the footage obsessively, until he felt he could walk the museum blindfolded. The heist’s exact timing would depend, in a sense, on the gods: The crew needed a storm to hit Scranton between 2 a.m. and dawn. From burglarizing houses as teens, they knew that bad weather slowed the police and muffled the sound of breaking glass. Rain or snow was particularly effective an hour or two after bars closed, when police—tired after the usual arrests—tended to lose steam and become, in Trotta’s phrase, less “peppy.”

But all of those plans were set aside one early morning in November 2005, when a giant brawl erupted at a Scranton bar called Whistles. Trotta, Joe Atsus, and another schoolmate, Damien Boland—whose great-grandmother’s house Trotta had burglarized years earlier—were having a drink when the melee (which they’d played no part in) drew seemingly every last police cruiser to Whistles’ front door.

[From the April 2018 issue: An OurTime.com con man and the women who busted him]

Let’s do it now, Trotta told his friends. He had no ax, no crowbar, no ski mask. But a huge bar fight near closing time was a diversion as providential as a 3 a.m. downpour. He had more luck still when his friends dropped him off behind the museum: A large tent—erected for the Everhart’s annual ball the next night—blocked sight lines to the back door.

After failing to kick in the door, Trotta grabbed a ladder beside the tent and used it as a battering ram, bashing a hole in the glass and crawling through it. In the pitch dark, he bounded up the stairs to the second-floor gallery. He removed the Pollock from the wall and, on the spur of the moment, took an Andy Warhol silk screen, La Grande Passion, right near it. He was downstairs, out the hole, and in his pickup in less than a minute. “We’re rich!” Atsus said, according to court documents.

But by sunup, Trotta was so convinced of his imminent arrest that he pulled a lawn chair into his driveway and just sat there, waiting for the police. Lacking a mask, he’d improvised inside the museum by lifting his sweater over his nose, like some Looney Tunes bandit. Worse, it was a colorful sweater, which anyone at the bars he’d visited the previous evening might recognize.

Yet by the end of the day, no police had showed. The Scranton Times-Tribune soon reported that the museum’s surveillance cameras were under repair and not working that night.

Trotta’s relief was replaced by a new anxiety, captured in a front-page Times-Tribune headline the next day: “FBI: ‘No Market for Stolen Art.’ ” “The true art in an art theft is not stealing the material,” Robert Wittman, then the FBI’s lead art-crime investigator, told the newspaper. “It’s selling it.”

No one had linked the Everhart and Mathewson heists, but word of both had spread among museums, dealers, and collectors. Anyone who tried to sell the Pollock and the Warhol—together potentially worth millions—or the Mathewson memorabilia would almost certainly be discovered. Buyers, for their part, could face both civil and criminal liability, having no credible excuse for ignorance.

At first Trotta thought he could sell the items, no problem, once the five-year statute of limitations for theft expired. Later he realized his error: Under federal laws governing museum crime, prosecutors had as many as 20 years to bring charges. In desperation, he sent a videotape of the art and memorabilia to his father, to see if any of Big Tom’s underworld connections might bite. “I can’t move this,” his dad eventually reported back.

A few months after the Everhart job, one of Trotta’s crew saw an article in Electric City, an alternative Scranton weekly. Arthur Byron Phillips, an eccentric artist who had loaned the Pollock to the museum, was offering a biblical-sounding reward. “Return the purported Pollock to him,” the paper said, “and he’ll grace your palms with silver.” Phillips told reward seekers to be prepared to verify their bona fides by naming the gallery on the painting’s reverse side: “Anyone coming up with that name will prove that they have the actual picture.”

Hot art might not be sellable, Trotta realized, but apparently it could be ransomed. He found a gas station with a pay phone, checked for security cameras, and dialed.

“The Parsons Gallery,” Trotta said.

Phillips replied after a long silence. “You have my attention.”

“I want a million dollars in cash. Don’t call the police.”

“I don’t have a million dollars in cash.”

“Then you’ll never see the painting again,” Trotta said, hanging up.

When Trotta passed the gas station the next day, the pay phone was gone. He suspected that Phillips had called the FBI. The phone was likely on its way to a crime lab. Trotta was glad he’d wiped his fingerprints off his quarters. But he’d screwed up again: He’d asked for too much. “If we went, ‘$50,000,’ I tell you what—he pays, he gets his painting back, okay?”

Dombek eventually decided that art was dangerous. According to prosecutors, he burned a painting by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey—valued at $500,000 and stolen by Trotta from a New Jersey museum—rather than risk getting caught with it. Dombek was like that. Whereas Trotta shone at getting loot, Dombek always had ideas about what to do with it.

The garage Nicholas Dombek had built, on the six acres he lived on in Thornhurst Township, was essentially an improvised chemistry lab. Its long shelves were lined with beakers, droppers, funnels, jugs, calipers, and cookers, alongside containers of various acids, powders, and solutions. Chemical formulas were handwritten on the walls beside what appeared to be personal affirmations. DREAMS ARE EXTREMLY [sic] IMPORTANT YOU CAN’T DO IT UNLESS YOU IMAGINE IT, read one. Another read ALWAYS KEEP SECRETS. It wasn’t necessarily the science that Dombek’s father and older brother taught in the public schools (his dad had a master’s degree in chemistry from Bucknell University), but it reflected at least some of what he’d picked up before quitting school after eighth grade and moving in with the Trottas.

Though Dombek would later testify in court that he was trying to change the bond of water “to cure cancer,” his successes tended to the more pedestrian: S-hooks for attaching stolen license plates to getaway cars; a spiked metal ball for pulverizing reinforced glass; a chain that trucks could use to rip ATMs off their base. Dawn Trotta, who dated Dombek as a teenager and remained friends with him, recalled his particular facility for annihilating cars for her father, who helped people dispose of them for insurance money. “Nick could disappear a vehicle in hours,” she told me. Among the literature Dombek kept handy were The Anarchist Cookbook, A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, and Recovery and Refining of Precious Metals.

After the Mathewson and Everhart fiascoes, Trotta told me, Dombek had one of his ideas. The thing that made most museum pieces valuable—their status as unique, instantly recognizable objects—was also the thing that made them unsellable. But what if you scrapped a museum piece, almost like you did a car? Could certain one-of-a-kind objects be remade, in a lab, into tradable commodities?

In March 2011, Trotta stole 13 silver golf trophies from the Country Club of Scranton during an overnight storm, then delivered them to Dombek’s garage. Five had been awarded to the club’s most illustrious member: Art Wall Jr., who had won the 1959 Masters at Augusta National, beating the defending champion, Arnold Palmer.

The trophies buckled under the heat of Dombek’s torches and furnaces, then puddled and cooled into an untraceable blob of silver. (As Dombek refined his methods, the blobs would come to look less “criminal”—as Trotta put it—and more like professionally made ingots, in the shape of bars or pucks.) Lumps of metal might sell for a tiny fraction of what the original objects, with their feel-good history, would have fetched in a legal market, but there was no legal market. Trotta drove the silver blob to precious-metals dealers in Manhattan’s Diamond District, who bought it for about $6,000, no questions asked.

A business model was born, and Trotta—newly married, with a wife to support—dedicated himself to its perfection. He began mornings now on his laptop at the local Starbucks or Dunkin’, Googling for websites where the words gold, silver, or diamonds showed up alongside terms such as museum and display. When a promising target appeared in the search results, he’d immediately drive, for hours sometimes, to see it; some were mining museums, but far more were halls of fame or sports museums, many of them in small towns. (The crew cased the National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York, for years, but gave up after discovering that the diamonds on the championship belt they were after had been replaced by inexpensive replicas.)

Trotta’s reconnaissance grew bolder. On return visits to a target, he’d often bring his sister Dawn’s two preschool-age kids, which gave him cover to film its interior under the guise of recording his little loved ones. He’d ask his niece and nephew to walk over to certain windows, to see if their movements made lights blip on nearby motion detectors. (Dawn told me she appreciated the child care and was unaware of her brother’s ulterior motives.)

When it was Dombek’s turn to visit a target, he’d discreetly tap display cases with a penny, Trotta told me, to glean from the sound whether the glass was easily breakable or bulletproof—information that helped Trotta decide whether to bring his DeWalt grinder, Estwing camper’s ax, or center punch on heist night. With each successful job, Trotta became more convinced that his “dorky” face—together with the button-down shirts he wore on museum visits—made him look like the most generic of American tourists.

When the weather app on their phones showed storms nearing a target, Dombek, like a football coach, would chalk arrows and X’s on his garage floor, diagramming Trotta’s path through a museum. Then, in Dombek’s yard, Trotta would rehearse the moves at full speed, tracking his times on a stopwatch.

Dawn did her part by renting cars at the Scranton airport, then handing the keys to her brother. Not only did rentals rarely break down; they were so new and clean that police tended to overlook them, even in the immediate aftermath of a heist.

Trotta’s system left almost no detail unconsidered, from the way he activated burner phones and bleached his burglary tools to the music he psyched up with—AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” or Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”—before crashing through a window. A trophy could be stolen from a museum at 3 a.m., melted in Dombek’s furnace by 8 a.m., and sold in Manhattan by 1 p.m.—enough time to enjoy a vodka with the Russian dealers they sold to and to pick up a new batch of ski masks at the Army-Navy store on their walk back to the Port Authority garage, where they’d parked.

From the summer of 2011 through late 2013, as gold prices hit record highs, Trotta’s crew made nearly $500,000, more cash than they’d seen in their whole lives. Trotta had launched nearly flawless heists on the Sterling Hill Mining Museum, in Ogdensburg, New Jersey; the United States Golf Association museum, in Liberty Corner, New Jersey; the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, in Goshen, New York; and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Among the objects melted into oblivion were golf’s historic U.S. Amateur Trophy; a replica of the golfer Ben Hogan’s 1953 Hickok Belt, a diamond-studded gold strip given to the best professional athlete of the year; an 18-karat Memphis Gold Challenge Cup awarded in 1902 to the trotting horse Lou Dillon; a silver Fabergé tureen that Czar Nicholas II gave to Dillon’s American owner in 1912, to thank him for introducing harness racing to Russia; and two 1903 trophies designed by Tiffany, one for the Brighton Cup, the other for the Belmont Stakes.

In 2012, Trotta stole from the United States Golf Association Museum, in New Jersey. (Bernards Township Police Department)

By late 2013, the FBI and the sporting press started to suspect a connection among the heists. Theories ranged “from the common street crime variety to complex schemes worthy of ‘The Sopranos,’ ” The New York Times reported that October. A year later, Trotta was in and out of the Yogi Berra Museum so fast that nothing looked amiss from the front doors when the police got there, about five minutes after the alarm sounded. “Because of the rain and wind,” one officer wrote in a report, “our visibility was limited.” Not until Berra’s son Dale arrived at the museum the next morning—he kept an office there—was the theft discovered.

When Trotta disappeared, sometimes for days, to case or burglarize a museum, he’d lie to his wife. He’d say he was in New Jersey doing HVAC work with Joe Atsus and Joe’s brother, Al, who had a contracting business. On their marriage certificate, in 2009, Trotta listed his profession, falsely, as “plumber.” Trotta told me that his wife never asked questions, so long as money came in. Trotta’s parents’ relationship had worked much the same way.

The trouble began after they had children. Trotta’s wife started to resent his frequent absences, which left her with too little help around the house. One night, while Trotta was on his way to a museum, she called to demand that he immediately return with supplies for their 1-year-old son. “She’s like, ‘Thomas needs diapers, you motherfucker,’ ” Trotta recalled. (His wife, who filed for divorce in 2018, told me that she preferred not to involve herself in this story, writing in an email, “I am ok with whatever Tommy stated.”)

Money was becoming tighter, too. Berra’s 16 rings and two MVP plaques—valued at $1.5 million intact—had grossed Trotta’s crew just $10,300 after melting. The more he and his wife fought, the more he wondered how long he could keep it up: the burglaries, the lies, all of it. He thought about day-trading or opening a restaurant. If he could pull one last job—a really big one—he’d have the capital to start an honest business, draw a steadier income, do better as a husband and dad. He was turning 40. It was time.

Yogi Berra poses with his World Series rings in 2000. (Steve Crandall / Getty)

He found an exit the way he’d found everything else: on Google. In 1894, the Russian Empress Alexandra wore a spectacular crown at her wedding to Czar Nicholas II, the same Nicholas, incidentally, whose Fabergé tureen Trotta had stolen from the racing museum in Goshen. Some 1,535 diamonds covered six velvet-draped silver bands, which converged beneath a cross made of six larger diamonds. Trotta believed he could get $5 million in the Diamond District by scrapping the crown’s stones.

The crown, he discovered, sat shockingly close to a first-floor window in a Washington, D.C., mansion once owned by one of America’s wealthiest women. Marjorie Merriweather Post—the cereal heiress, businesswoman, and philanthropist—had purchased Hillwood, as the 25-acre estate was called, in 1955 and filled it with fine art and collectibles from 18th-century Russia and France. In 1977, four years after her death, Hillwood opened to the public as a museum and gardens.

Trotta had cased it more than a dozen times before returning in the summer of 2015 for a crucial, final step. He called it a “night check”: hours spent in a car or in bushes, searching through binoculars for guards and other nocturnal activity. Trotta was a few minutes from the night-check spot when he got into a shouting match with his wife over the phone. He was jolted out of it by a flash in the street: A speed camera had photographed his vehicle, placing it uncomfortably close to Hillwood. He called off the night check and drove the four hours home, furious.

Back in Pennsylvania, he grew so impatient that he dispensed with his usual caution. Forget the night check, he thought. He’d return to Washington with a single mission: to take the crown and retire. He could misdirect the police by setting fire to—or, as he put it, “cooking”—a Hillwood outbuilding as a diversion. But Boland and Ralph Parry, another friend who’d agreed to accompany him, talked him out of the fire. “You want more charges?” Parry said, according to Trotta.

In the darkness of an August morning in 2015, Trotta used fence cutters to enter Hillwood’s grounds and a grinder to cut a bulletproof window some eight feet from the empress’s crown. As Trotta reached for his ax to smash open the display case, he heard a voice shout “Halt!” In the red glow of his headlamp, he glimpsed a man in uniform down the hall. The Hillwood, it turned out, employed night guards. Trotta leaped out the window he’d entered, yelling, “Pop the smoke.” Boland yanked the pin from a smoke grenade and lobbed it behind them as they ran toward Rock Creek Park and forded the creek to Parry’s waiting car. (In a statement issued through his lawyer, Boland called Trotta an “inveterate liar” with “no credibility.” Parry’s lawyer did not comment.)

The failure drove Trotta into a depression. Why hadn’t he returned for a night check? Why had he let his less experienced friends talk him out of a diversion? What was wrong with him?

Since childhood, he’d tried to abide by the one scruple his father seemed to have: Don’t do drugs. But after Hillwood, as his marriage crumbled, he needed release. He began taking Percocet, a narcotic painkiller, and became hooked, paying as much as $50 on the street for each 30-milligram tablet.

The money he made from a 2016 heist of the Roger Maris Museum—all the way out in Fargo, North Dakota—hardly seemed worth the hours of travel. And the drugs were making him sloppy. He cut himself so badly breaking into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in Canastota, New York, and the Franklin Mineral Museum, in Franklin, New Jersey, that he trailed blood on the windows and floors. All for nothing; the boxing belts turned out to be made of a cheap alloy, and the mining stones—tourmaline, zircon, alexandrite—were worthless. Some malignant force seemed to be conspiring against him. When he entered Harvard’s Mineralogical & Geological Museum, disguised as a Hasidic Jew and ready to snatch a large diamond in the middle of the day, the stone, which he’d seen every time he’d cased the museum, was no longer on display.

His edge dulled by narcotics, he returned to the petty thievery of his youth: houses in his own neighborhood, dinky antique shops, convenience-store ATMs—whatever, whenever, for another handful of pills.

Trotta was driving to a friend’s apartment in the snowy early morning of March 4, 2019, when a Pennsylvania state-police cruiser came up behind him. His Pontiac had been fishtailing on the slicked roads, but the troopers didn’t make a traffic stop until he inexplicably pulled over. (Trotta told me he’d wanted to let the car pass, not seeing its police markings until too late.)

Trotta failed a field sobriety test and was charged with a DUI, illegal possession of controlled substances, the unauthorized use of someone else’s car (his cousin’s), the use of a different car’s license plates (his sister’s), and other motor-vehicle violations. He kept it together enough to refuse a blood-alcohol test: The last thing he needed was anyone tying his DNA to the blood he’d shed at various crime scenes. At the police barracks, however, he asked for water. A trooper fished his cup out of the trash and sent it to a forensics lab.

When troopers opened the Pontiac’s trunk the next day, they realized that the driver might be someone other than their usual yahoo out past his bedtime. Inside the vehicle were bolt cutters, a sledgehammer, a headlamp, ski masks, walkie-talkies, burner phones, bits of jewelry, a checkered shirt that had been caught on security cameras during a recent jewelry-store heist, and brochures for sports museums. When Trotta met his lawyer, he asked what the police had found in the car. The lawyer, a seasoned defense attorney named Joe D’Andrea, replied, “Everything but Jimmy Hoffa.”

Nine days after Trotta’s arrest, FBI agents gathered at a state-police barracks with law-enforcement officers from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. They’d come to review a long list of burglaries with similar MOs and to figure out whether Trotta was their missing link. The DNA results that came in after the meeting erased all doubt.

Trotta was turning 44 that year. He’d known the core members of his crew since Ronald Reagan was president. They’d seen one another through graduations, marriages, kids, joblessness, substance abuse, divorce. Joe and Al Atsus were godparents to Trotta’s children. “If you’re robbing stuff at 11 or 12 with people, and at 40 you’re still robbing stuff with these people,” Trotta told me, “you can’t actually get a closer bond than that.” He estimated that over their lives together, they’d done more than 1,500 burglaries.

But when he was arrested, he said, not one of them came to his aid. No real money for lawyers or bail. No sympathy for the years of prison he might face—for crimes that had enriched them all. “He’s a big boy; he’ll eat it,” one of them told his sister. Dombek, claiming to be broke, gave Trotta a handful of screws, suggesting that he scrap them for a bit of cash, according to Trotta. The police, meanwhile, started using evidence from the Pontiac, and interviews with at least one associate, to charge Trotta with a series of local crimes: a 2016 ATM theft, a 2018 house burglary. “My friends,” Trotta concluded, “were prepared to bury me.”

In April 2019, with his lawyer’s encouragement, he began cooperating with state police and prosecutors, and eventually with the FBI. The police fitted him with a listening device, and he recorded damning conversations with Dombek, a man he loved like a brother. In one of those conversations, Dombek said that if anyone turned on him, he’d “sneak on their property, turn off the well cap, and pour a gallon of some kind of substance down their well and would kill that person and their whole family,” according to a police summary of the recording. Dombek also talked about destroying evidence of their crimes, and about plans to kill one witness by mixing fentanyl into his cocaine or by poisoning him with a toxic plant called false hellebore.

In August of that year, the state police raided Dombek’s property, discovered the makeshift chemistry lab, and charged him with burglarizing a house with Trotta. Released on bail, Dombek stormed over to the homes of Trotta’s mother and sister. He called Trotta a “fucking rat,” according to court records, and threatened violence if Trotta didn’t shut up or change his story. The police promptly charged Dombek with five counts of witness intimidation.

U.S. attorneys, meanwhile, persuaded their state counterparts to let them mount a single prosecution of nearly all the museum heists. As federal agents gathered evidence, Dombek and Trotta remained in a Pennsylvania prison on state charges: the former for three years, until he pleaded no contest to a single charge each of witness intimidation and home burglary; the latter for almost four years, until he pleaded guilty to the DUI, the ATM theft, and two home burglaries.

Then, in June 2023, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced federal charges against Trotta, Dombek, and seven other alleged ring members, including Joe and Al Atsus. (Al Atsus’s lawyer told me that any criminal allegations against his client were “absolutely ridiculous and patently absurd”; Joe Atsus’s lawyer declined to comment for this story.) Investigators had linked the ring to 21 burglaries across five states over more than 20 years. A press release credited 20 state and local police departments, as well as the FBI, for helping solve the case.

Boland and the Atsus brothers have pleaded not guilty. Dombek vanished into the woods when he learned of his arrest warrant but reappeared after six months and pleaded not guilty. Tommy and Dawn Trotta, Ralph Parry, and two others pleaded guilty as part of cooperation deals. “Very guilty, Your Honor,” Trotta assured a federal judge.

“We ripped the guts out of people emotionally,” Trotta told me. “I know that now.” In May 2019, while out on bail on the state charges, Trotta broke into a vacant house in New Jersey that the Atsus brothers owned. It was the last place he’d seen the Mathewson memorabilia, the Pollock, and the Warhol. He’d hoped to restore them to their owners, he said. But if the items were there, he couldn’t find them. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

In the days after the 1999 Mathewson heist, two of the pitcher’s biggest fans were among the most heavily interrogated. Eddie Frierson, an actor who’d written and performed the one-man show about Mathewson that night, endured searches by the state police and grillings by the FBI while still deep in grief himself over the loss to the college and to baseball history. “I was aching,” he told me.

Terry Wise was the Keystone College official in charge of the Mathewson display that weekend. When she’d been hired as athletic director a few years earlier, she’d encouraged the college’s president to do more with the memorabilia: How many schools could claim as an alumnus an inaugural inductee of the Baseball Hall of Fame? It was Wise who had opened the case that night to give visitors—including Trotta, she now realizes—a better look at Mathewson’s contracts and jersey. Worse than being questioned by six cops the next day are the feelings of guilt and naivete she still lives with. “I can’t believe it’s 25 years,” she said as we spoke in the gym parking lot, a few steps from the door where Trotta had let himself in.

Haley Zale launched a “Bring Back the Belts” campaign on social media after her great-uncle’s championship belts were stolen in 2015 from the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Tony Zale had beaten Rocky Graziano in 1948 to become the middleweight champion of the world. After Tony’s death, in 1997, Haley visited the museum every year to say her Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and to remember the shy man who’d come up from nothing, beaten Graziano, and been a grandfather figure to her—teaching her boxing stances, applauding her childhood ballet routines, and calling her Miss America. “Visiting Uncle Tony’s belts,” she told me, “was like visiting his grave.”

Lindsay Berra told me that her grandfather Yogi reacted to the disappearance of his rings and plaques with his familiar good humor. “Well, I know I won them,” he said. He worried only about the schoolchildren who visited the museum: Could the broken glass be cleaned up so the kids didn’t get cut?

Berra’s relatives took the theft harder. “Every one of those rings has a story behind it, and it’s about him and a team and the Yankees and a time in our country,” Lindsay told me. “You’re taking little pieces of American history when you take them. They belong to all Americans, not just the guy who won them.”

When the museum’s director called in 2023 to tell her that the alleged culprits had melted the rings for the sake of a few thousand bucks, Lindsay cried as much in sorrow as for the stupidity and waste. Wouldn’t it have been easier and more lucrative to knock off a Kay Jewelers? she thought. She couldn’t understand how Trotta could try on her grandfather’s rings—claiming to be a fan—only to moments later destroy them.

I asked if she believed Trotta’s professions of remorse. “No,” she said. “I think he’s sorry he got caught.”

Even after the police had found “everything but Jimmy Hoffa” in the Pontiac, even after he’d agreed to cooperate, Trotta burglarized a New York jewelry store and came close to ransacking the Saratoga Springs racing museum a second time. He aborted only because he’d spotted a guard during a night check. Then, in January 2024, as half his crew was headed for trial—with himself the star witness for the prosecution—Trotta allegedly stole gift cards, cash, and jewelry from the house of a woman he’d driven home from a bar. The police dropped the charges after Trotta’s lawyer gave the home’s owner a $7,500 check for the missing items, the local police chief told me. Trotta claims that it was a misunderstanding, but the federal judge overseeing the heist cases was displeased enough to revoke Trotta’s pretrial release.

The instinct to steal remains so strong, Trotta told me—so “in the blood”—that he feels as if his brain needs rebuilding. Like a recovering addict, he has to stay constantly on guard against his own impulses. He worries, too, about his son. At 11, he’s now the age Trotta was when Big Tom led him into a life of crime. When Trotta calls from jail, he talks with his son about the misery of incarceration: the bad food, the piece of metal with a half-inch mat that passes for a bed.

The only steady paycheck Trotta earned in his adult life was at Walmart in the early 2000s. (Courtesy of Tommy Trotta)

For a couple of years in the early 2000s, to satisfy probation on a minor theft charge, Trotta held a part-time job loading Walmart trucks. It was the only steady paycheck he’d earned in his adult life; he was miserable. “It was like the coal mines of old,” he told me. “It’s honest and you could wake up and feel proud, but, like, you’re in a category now of real broke-ness.” Guys could live paycheck to paycheck there for 20 years and never save enough for even a little self-indulgence.

Trotta had never grown rich as a thief. He’d taken some nice vacations, eaten some expensive steaks. But he drove junkers, dressed plainly, and had owned a house for just a couple of years before the payments became too much for him. His sister’s place, where he’d lived in a basement bedroom before and after his marriage, was perhaps the closest thing he’d had to a stable home. Yet a thief’s life—like a gambler’s—made wealth something other than impossible. Months would pass in which Trotta would scrape by on penny-ante burglaries. “Then, all of a sudden, a big thing would hit: Boom, we’re good.” And for however many days the money lasted, he felt free.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “Trophy Hunters.”

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Last week, I pronounced unequivocal judgment—as I tend to do regarding many things—on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I think it’s a contrived and embarrassing idea driven by nostalgia and capitalism, and antithetical to the youthful rebelliousness that drives rock-and-roll music.

Usually, I make these pronouncements and then let the chips fall. This time, however, we asked The Daily’s readers for their views. And I was surprised: Many of you, far more than I expected, agreed with me. But your responses—and I regret that I could not include more of them here—also raised some good points of disagreement.

First, of course, a fist bump to the folks who agreed with my basic argument that the idea of the Rock Hall, not the building itself, is the problem. One reader, Brian, thought the degree to which the whole thing was “over-hyped” was “really quite sad and pathetic, actually.” Pamela wrote that the Rock Hall reminded her of the participation trophies given to her children years ago: “They, too, were unnecessary, and in my mind are a very similar notion as inducting random old rockers for random attributes into the random concept of a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

Right on, Pamela, and I want you to know I made devil horns with my fingers and bobbed my head while reading your comment.

Ahem. Moving on. Some of you volunteered your ages, and many of you chided me for being churlish about nostalgia. Angie, 67, said that she looks back on her youth “fondly” and has no issue with reminders of some of “the best days of my life.” And many readers took offense at the fact that I have never actually been to the Rock Hall or to Cleveland: They thought I was attacking the museum and the city. M Anderson didn’t pull any punches: “Ah, Tom, to have such a low opinion of a place that you admit you have never visited—the deeply entertaining Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—is just wrong. Do yourself a favor and visit the place … Your narrow and uninformed opinion comes off as beneath you, and that is [a] sad fact of too many opinion pieces today.”

And a good day to you, sir or madam. Look, I’m sure I’d find the exhibits in Cleveland fascinating. I love pop-culture museums. I’ve been to the Louvre and seen the Mona Lisa, but it wasn’t nearly the thrill of gawking at Archie Bunker’s chair or at a costume the late Christopher Reeve once wore as the greatest movie Superman. I’m the guy, after all, who loves Las Vegas, and I read the plaques and labels on almost every bit of memorabilia plastered on the walls of its casinos and restaurants. But I don’t need a committee of music pooh-bahs to tell me that the Beatles were great while they also tell me that Mary J. Blige or Donovan are legendary “rock” stars. It’s not about Cleveland or the Hall itself, I promise.

As Anders, a reader from Minnesota, rightly notes, the word rock is now thrown around so loosely “that it doesn’t seem to have much real meaning in regard to the actual Hall of Fame these days. And while I’m sure any band would mostly be honored to be recognized by the Hall, I don’t begrudge those like Iron Maiden who laugh in its face.” Exactly. Although Iron Maiden isn’t my cup of grain alcohol, I get why they and other bands likely wouldn’t give a hoot about getting an attaboy from the suits in the music industry.

A Canadian reader, Laura, spoke for many of you when she suggested just having a general rock museum, especially if it could ensure that lesser-known works “don’t get lost among the big names.” But that’s the problem with a “hall of fame”: The museum aspect is lost in the spectacle of voting and the sometimes wince-inducing performances of the inductees.

Lee pointed out that the Rock Hall “is organized primarily around how much curatable material has been donated,” which means that the origins of rock in the Deep South and the Mississippi Delta are ignored, while there is an “abundance of space dedicated to midwestern bands that nobody has heard of that were inconsequential.” Lee is right that “when Elvis is celebrated as a bedrock of rock and roll, and the people he imitated [are] ignored[,] the whole thing is disingenuous.”

Jay from Washington State was also pretty blunt: “The problem for the hall is that rock is in fact essentially a dead art form. Trying to be really good at it today is a bit like trying to be an impressionist painter in the 1960s—it might be nice to look at or hear, but it’s been done (to death) by now.” I’m not sure rock is dead, but Jay is right that the period we normally associate with the rise of rock as a music form, a 20-year span that begins in the mid-’50s, was a cultural moment in time, not an ongoing revolution.

Let’s end on a more positive note. One thing the Rock Hall can do is keep reintroducing music to younger listeners. Sandra, 82, wrote: “I can attest the museum is an enjoyable visit to the past. However after going to a recent Billy Joel concert I realized nothing can replace youth or innocence.” True enough, but each generation can offer the music of its youth to the next generation. As Gael MacGregor, a recording artist who once sang backup for the legendary Dick Dale, warned us in her note: “Ageism in the arts has always been an issue—whether the claim is ‘You’re too young to know anything,’ or ‘You’re too old to be singing/playing this music.’”

So let’s celebrate the one thing the Rock Hall does well: start arguments about music. That’s a good thing, because then we all have to be aware of the acts we’re talking about. Ralph, a 77-year old reader, recently lost his wife of 52 years. (Our condolences, Ralph.) “The songs of lost love I listened to in my teens,” he wrote, “have a painful new resonance now.” But Ralph also saw these older songs as a bridge: “Maybe the Hall of Fame will inspire some new listeners to experience these old artists,” he said, “but will it light their fire”?

Perhaps the Rock Hall isn’t a great idea, but if it gets us to listen to the music, then long may it stand on the shores of Lake Erie.

Related:

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist. The secret joys of geriatric rock

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. These bizarre theories about the L.A. wildfires endanger everyone.

Today’s News

President-Elect Donald Trump was sentenced to unconditional discharge in his New York criminal hush-money case. He will avoid jail time, fines, and probation for his conviction, but he became the first president to be sentenced as a felon. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the TikTok case. The justices seem likely to uphold the law that could ban the app. Meta is ending major DEI programs at the company, including for “hiring, development and procurement practices,” according to Axios.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Scientists have collected troves of DNA and microscopic imaging data from human cells—and now they have a tool that might make sense of all that information, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka explains why The Atlantic’s Books department likes to make an extra toast on January 1 for a concurrent holiday: Public Domain Day.

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Evening Read

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The Return of Havana Syndrome

By Shane Harris

Two years ago, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, in unusually emphatic language, that a mysterious and debilitating ailment known as “Havana syndrome” was not the handiwork of a foreign adversary wielding some kind of energy weapon. That long-awaited finding shattered an alternative theory embraced by American diplomats and intelligence officers, who said they had been victims of a deliberate, clandestine campaign by a U.S. adversary, probably Russia, that left them disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills. The intelligence report, written chiefly by the CIA, appeared to close the book on Havana syndrome.

Turns out, it didn’t.

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The following contains spoilers for the films The Substance, The Last Showgirl, and Maria.

In the 1990s, Demi Moore became the kind of movie star whose off-screen activities made more headlines than her acting did: She formed one half of a celebrity power couple with the actor Bruce Willis, posed nude while pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, and prompted a bidding war between the producers of Striptease and G.I. Jane, resulting in her being crowned the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Her fame, when contrasted with some of her forgettable films—The Butcher’s Wife, The Scarlet Letter—turned her into an easy punch line. As the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane sneered at the start of his review of the latter: “What is the point of Demi Moore?”

Look at Moore now. Since the writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May, Moore, who stars in the movie, has solidified her position as a serious awards contender for the first time in her career. The actor plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging celebrity who takes the titular elixir to produce a younger version of herself. What follows is an excessive and unsubtle display of body horror: After Elisabeth’s nubile clone, Sue (Margaret Qualley), bursts out of her spine, she quickly becomes a starlet who antagonizes Elisabeth. Moore is tremendous, imbuing Elisabeth with a haunting vulnerability as she injects herself again and again with a body- and soul-destroying concoction. On Sunday, the 62-year-old won a Golden Globe—her first—for her performance; she delivered the night’s best acceptance speech, eloquently reflecting on how her career has evolved. “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a ‘popcorn actress’ … that I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged [for them]—and I bought in,” she said, choking up. “That corroded me over time to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I’ve done what I was supposed to do.” Now Moore is experiencing the classic comeback narrative: the Hollywood veteran reminding audiences that they’ve underrated her talent all along.

She’s one of several actors doing so this awards season, and with roles that explore how rapidly the entertainment industry can turn women into has-beens. In the Gia Coppola–directed The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson, 57, plays Shelly, a Las Vegas dancer left to confront her feeling of expendability when the revue she’s been in for decades is set to close. Throughout the intimate film, Shelly insists on her value, echoing Anderson’s own trajectory as someone whose work was never taken seriously. Meanwhile, Pablo Larraín’s gorgeously rendered biopic Maria stars the 49-year-old Angelina Jolie as the opera singer Maria Callas in her final days, struggling to repair her voice and maintain her composure. Jolie, like Callas, has endured an especially tricky relationship with the A-list; she’s been a tabloid mainstay in spite of her artistic ventures.

[Read: What is it about Pamela Anderson?]

Elisabeth, Shelly, Maria—all are women who can’t resist the spotlight despite its cruelty. The films about them interrogate the true price of their fame, exploring how their chosen field turns youth into an addiction. Films such as All About Eve, Death Becomes Her, and Sunset Boulevard have long proved the endurance of these themes. The Substance, The Last Showgirl, and Maria go further, however, exemplifying how this lifelong pursuit of beauty is also an act of constant self-deception. Fear, not vanity, animates each woman; losing their celebrity means losing their sense of worth. “It’s not about what’s being done to us,” Moore said of The Substance in an interview. “It’s what we do to ourselves.”

The actors who portray these characters have all coincidentally, and conversely, returned to the spotlight by embracing their age. Each has achieved a so-called career renaissance as a result. But such appreciation can be a double-edged sword: Anointing older female performers as “comebacks” concedes to, and maybe even reinforces, the rigid expectations Hollywood has placed on them. Of these three films, The Substance most clearly establishes that tension as something more than just tragic. The effort to retain an ingénue-like appeal, Fargeat’s fable posits, is both irresistible and preposterous.

The Substance almost immediately pushes the idea that the endless quest for beauty produces its own kind of overpowering high: After she emerges from Elisabeth’s back, Sue—housing Elisabeth’s consciousness—begins to examine her body in the mirror. She relishes her appearance, gazing at her face and running her hands over her smooth features; Elisabeth, meanwhile, clings to life, sprawled on the floor with her hair fanned out and her spine split open. Sue then auditions for the television executive who had just fired her older self. Never mind that the network callously discarded Elisabeth once she turned 50: Given the opportunity to be gorgeous and “perfect” once more, Sue heads straight for the gig that she knows cares about little beyond her looks.

Then again, this is the only life Sue knows. Her identity is rooted in Elisabeth’s experiences; Elisabeth believes that her value is her supposed flawlessness—a punishing worldview that neither she nor Sue can escape. The film’s most penetrating terror, then, is rooted not in the way Fargeat makes every mutilation squelchily gross, but in how Elisabeth and Sue sabotage themselves as a result of their insecurities. The pair are supposed to switch consciousnesses every seven days for the drug to work, but when Sue spends more time awake than she should, Elisabeth ages. The sight of her wrinkled skin repels her, and she responds with searing self-hatred, chastising herself by binge-eating. One especially chilling sequence doesn’t involve body horror at all: It just shows Elisabeth readying herself for a date, only to give up as soon as she catches the smallest glimpse of her reflection in a door handle.

The women in The Last Showgirl and Maria similarly cannot move past their fixation on the fame they enjoyed when they were younger. Shelly, the Las Vegas dancer, reaches out to her estranged daughter, only for the relationship to fall apart as Shelly insists on the importance of the revue. Jolie’s ailing Maria finds comfort in a dangerous sedative called Mandrax, which causes hallucinations of a journalist pressing her to discuss her legacy. The more these women attempt to figure out who they are beyond their profession, the more they fall back into old habits.

All three films also suggest that their protagonists find their twisted actions thrilling. Maria hides her pills from her household staff with the glee of a child stashing her Halloween candy. Shelly, unlike Elisabeth, makes it to a date with the revue’s stage manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista). She glams herself up in a slinky silver dress and a full face of makeup; as she sits down, she compliments Eddie, and then pauses. “Do I look nice?” she prompts him, grinning widely when he responds affirmatively. And when Elisabeth goes to pick up more boxes of the substance, she acts as if she’s carrying out a pulse-pounding robbery, darting into alleyways and glancing suspiciously at passersby. Keeping up appearances, in other words, delivers an adrenaline rush that justifies the never-ending chase for perfection and acclaim. “Being an artist is solitary, but if you’re passionate about it,” Shelly insists, “it’s worth it.”

[Read: Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with Angelina Jolie]

Still, as much as these characters may perpetuate their own pain, the movies aren’t seeking to condemn their choices. Instead, they scrutinize the consequences of a lifetime spent facing society’s insurmountable and fickle pressures. These women don’t seem to consider those who have wronged them to be their antagonists: Eddie is a sympathetic character despite having to close Shelly’s revue, Maria’s critics rarely faze her, and Sue continues to chase the approval of the network executive who fired Elisabeth. Rather, the women’s age and perceived attractiveness pose ever-present threats to their livelihood. The Substance captures this best; the camera leers at Sue and Elisabeth both, closing in on their hyper-sexualized bodies. The costumes are replete with garish hues. The production design transforms Los Angeles into a phantasmagoric nightmare from which Elisabeth cannot be roused—as herself or as Sue. Her only solution is to allow her burdens to consume her. Turning external pressures into brutal obsessions is a metamorphosis as visceral as that of a younger self bursting forth from your back.

In its high-concept outrageousness, The Substance lands on a catharsis that’s missing from The Last Showgirl and Maria. The two latter films end with a mournful—and frustratingly hollow—air of resignation: Shelly is seen performing in one of her last shows after enduring a humiliating audition for a new program, and Maria dies at home after a final hallucination, of an orchestra accompanying her while she sings an aria. The Substance’s conclusion is anything but elegiac, however. Sue, after killing Elisabeth during a violent showdown, takes the substance herself, even though the drug is supposed to work only on its original subject. Out of her spine emerges a creature with too many appendages, body parts in the wrong places, and Elisabeth’s face protruding from her back. Yet she—dubbed “Monstro Elisasue”—does what Sue did when she was “born.” She admires herself in the mirror. She primps and preens. As she gets dressed, she even pokes an earring into a strip of flesh.

Yet as soon as Monstro Elisasue steps onstage, she repulses her audience. They gawk, and then they scream, and then, drenched in the blood that starts spewing from her body, they run. It’s an utterly ludicrous ending—and a liberating one. Only Elisabeth’s face remains as Monstro Elisasue stumbles out onto the streets of Los Angeles and melts into a bloody mess. She leaves with the last laugh, cackling as she pauses over her star on the Walk of Fame. And Moore, in those frames, is transcendent, her expression ecstatic and maniacal and unhinged. What is the point of Demi Moore? Perhaps it’s to reveal how sophomoric such questions were in the first place.

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On New Year’s Day, while looking for something to watch, I came across a channel with a loud, gray-haired British guy in a nice suit and a scarf bellowing about something or other. I assumed that I had turned to CNN and was watching its ebullient, occasionally shouty business and aviation correspondent, Richard Quest. I wasn’t even close: It was Roger Daltrey of the Who, and he was excitedly introducing the new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Peter Frampton in a condensed version of the October ceremony.

Frampton’s music was, for a moment in the 1970s, the soundtrack to my misspent teenage nights; on the broadcast, Keith Urban joined him to perform his megahit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” and I remembered every word. And Frampton seems like a man who is genuinely loved by his peers. It was a nice moment. But when 80-year-old Daltrey—who, at 21, famously sang, “Hope I die before I get old”—is introducing a man whose biggest hits were produced nearly 50 years ago, it’s a reminder that the entire Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concept is utterly wrongheaded.

As the saying goes, good writers borrow, and great writers steal. I was once a professor, however, and professors give attribution, so let me rely on John Strausbaugh, who wrote a wonderful 2001 jeremiad against Boomer music nostalgia, Rock ’Til You Drop, to explain why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame shouldn’t exist: Because it’s “as true to the spirit of rock’n’roll as a Hard Rock Cafe—one in which there are way too many children and you can’t get a drink.”

The Hall of Fame is about old and dead people; rock’n’roll is about the young and living. The Hall of Fame tries to reform rock’n’roll, tame it, reduce it to bland, middle-American family entertainment; it drains all the sexiness and danger and rebelliousness out of it …

Strasbaugh winces especially hard at the Rock Hall tradition of “honoring” classic acts by “dragging their old butts out onto a stage” and then making them “go through the motions one more time” as they pretend to feel the music the same way they did when they were kids. Writing almost 25 years ago, he said that the Rolling Stones were way past their retirement clock, and that Cher in her late-1990s performances “was so stiff in her makeup and outfits, that she looked like a wax effigy of herself.”

Last year, the Rolling Stones went on tour again and were sponsored by—I am serious—the AARP.

And Cher was also just inducted into the Rock Hall in October, at 78 years old. When you’re asking Cher to suit up so that she can be lauded by the young-enough-to-be-her-granddaughter Dua Lipa, you may be trying to honor the artist, but you’re mostly just reminding everyone about the brutal march of time.

I am sometimes blistered on social media for my bad music takes, and I will confess that with some exceptions, I didn’t really develop much of a taste in music beyond the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Top 40 ear candy until I was in college. (My musical soul was saved, or at least improved, by the old WBCN in Boston and by my freshman-dorm neighbor at Boston University, who introduced me to Steely Dan.) But you don’t need a refined taste in music to cringe when a bunch of worthies from the music industry assemble each year to make often nonsensical choices about what constitutes “rock and roll” and who did it well enough to be lionized for the ages. Look, I sort of like some of those old Cher hits from the ’70s—“Train of Thought” is an underrated little pop gem, in my view—but Cher as an inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? If she, and Bobby Darin, and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Woody Guthrie, and Willie Nelson are all “rock,” what isn’t?

This is where I must also admit that I’ve never been to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or even to Cleveland, for that matter. But I’d argue that seeing it all up close—as Strausbaugh notes in his book, it’s full of this rock artist once wore this shirt and that rock artist once touched this mic stand—isn’t the point. Trying to trap the energy and spirit of youthful greatness behind the ice in some sort of Fortress of Rock Solitude is nothing more than a monument to nostalgia. Worse, it’s an ongoing tribute not to music, but to capitalism. Perhaps the music business was always a business, but most rock and roll was about opposing the establishment, not asking for a nice table at its Chamber of Commerce ceremonies.

Don’t get me wrong: I love both rock music and capitalism. I am also prone to a fair amount of my own nostalgia, and I will pay to see some of my favorite elderly stars get up onstage, wink at the audience, and pull out a few of their famous moves—as long as they do it with the kind of self-awareness that makes it more like a visit with an old friend than a soul-crushing pastiche of days gone by.

But even when a return to the stage is done with taste, age can still take its toll on both the performer and the audience: I’m now in my 60s, and as much as I liked seeing Peter Frampton get a big round of applause, I didn’t feel warm or happy; I just felt old, because he was obviously old. (Frampton has an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness, so he had to sit to perform his arena anthem.) And when Keith Urban is playing along as the representative of the younger generation at 56 years old, it makes me feel a certain kind of pity for people who gave me the musical landscape of my youth.

Maybe America doesn’t need to commercialize every Boomer memory. Artists become eligible for the Rock Hall 25 years from the release date of their first commercial recording, but rock can’t be distilled in 25-year batches like some sort of rare whiskey. Rock is more like … well, sex. Each generation has to experience it for themselves; later, each generation thinks they invented it; eventually, we all realize that no generation can fully explain their feelings about it to the next one.

Speaking of sex and rebellion, one of the best arguments against the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is that Warren Zevon isn’t in it. His continuing exclusion is one of the great ongoing controversies of the selection process, but the point is not that Zevon should be in it; rather, the question is whether Zevon would ever want to be honored in such a place. The man who wrote “Play It All Night Long” and “Mr. Bad Example” simply doesn’t belong on a pedestal next to Mary J. Blige and Buffalo Springfield. And that’s reason enough that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should not exist at all.

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The secret joys of geriatric rock Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser.

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The FBI said that the attacker who killed 14 people in New Orleans on New Year’s Day appears to have acted alone. Military officials said that the driver of a Cybertruck that exploded in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas yesterday was an Army master sergeant who was on leave from active duty. Federal agents searched the home of former NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, who was accused of sexual misconduct last year. Maddrey has denied the allegations.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: The poet Julia Ward Howe wrote an anthem of fervent patriotism in 1861—and it’s remained the soundtrack to American conflict ever since, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Giacomo Bagnara

We’re All in “Dark Mode” Now

By Ian Bogost

Dark mode has its touted benefits: Dimmer screens mean less eye strain, some assert; and on certain displays (including most smartphones), showing more black pixels prolongs battery life. Dark mode also has its drawbacks: Reading lots of text is more difficult to do in white-on-black. But even if these tradeoffs might be used to justify the use of inverted-color settings, they offer little insight into those settings’ true appeal. They don’t tell us why so many people suddenly want their screens, which had glowed bright for years, to go dark. And they’re tangential to the story of how, in a fairly short period of time, we all became creatures of the night mode.

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Updated on January 1, 2025, at 2:43 p.m. ET

Despite the devastating terror attack that killed at least 10 people on Bourbon Street in New Orleans in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, it seemed at first as though the Sugar Bowl college-football playoff game would continue tonight in the city’s Superdome, less than two miles from the carnage. This afternoon, officials announced they would postpone the game for at least 24 hours.

Getting on with activities as normal, to whatever extent is possible, is the correct approach. Responses to terror or violent attacks need to be based on the specifics of the incident, but the default should always be to remain open. A nation, any nation, must have the capacity to mourn and move forward simultaneously.

The question isn’t whether proceeding with scheduled events is disrespectful to those who have been directly affected by terror. In some ways, it obviously is; the Sugar Bowl is only a college football game. But the decision should be based less on emotion and more on the level of ongoing risk, and the available security, for those who are asked to continue with their lives.

First, can the situation legitimately be described as no longer posing a continuing danger? In 2015 in Paris, a wave of terror attacks over one long night resulted in 130 deaths. The entire country was placed under what amounted to a three-month lockdown, with most public events canceled. That made some sense, given the sophistication and planning behind those attacks, and the fact that a concert hall and sporting venue were targeted. “People have come from all over the country,” Louisiana Representative Troy Carter told CBS, “but nothing is more important than public safety and making sure that we're protecting the citizens and visitors alike.”

In a statement, the FBI identified the suspect as 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas. He was killed at the scene by law-enforcement officers. An Islamic State flag had been located in the vehicle, the FBI said, and law enforcement is working to determine the suspect’s affiliations. Although what additional information might be available to the FBI remains unclear, the unified messaging suggests they are not overly concerned about continuing risk.

Second, if a city chooses to close down or delay events, does it have clear standards for what will allow it to reopen? This was the dilemma after the Boston Marathon bombings on a Monday in 2013, when the two terrorists initially evaded law enforcement. After the Tsarnaev brothers, who had carried out the attack, killed an MIT police officer while making their escape, the governor asked residents of nearby towns to remain indoors as the search proceeded. The governor’s request, accepted by the scared public rather than enforced, ceased to be sustainable as the search dragged on for an entire day. European cities such as Brussels have faced the same issue after major attacks. It is easy to close down but harder to have metrics for what is perfectly safe, because that is an impossible standard.

Third, can public-safety resources and planning be redeployed or reassessed in light of the terror attack without forcing the city to a standstill? A preplanned sports event, such as the Sugar Bowl, already has in place safety and security protocols that can be amended in just a few hours to allow for more resources from other jurisdictions and changes to vehicle access. Indeed, just a day after Boston’s lockdown, the Red Sox played at Fenway with a ramped-up public-safety presence. The Hall of Fame slugger David Ortiz memorably welcomed the anxious crowd by saying, “This is our fucking city.” He was reflecting a sense that terrorists elevate their cause if they can affect entire populations, and the best response can be an insistent normalcy.

There is no perfect answer to the challenge posed by an attack, but asking the public to stay put can be unnecessary. In Maine in 2023, after the tragic shooting of 18 victims by a lone gunman, the town of Lewiston and areas across southern Maine went into shelter-in-place mode for several days until he was found dead from suicide. Fear and isolation may have been unnecessarily amplified by the lockdown, originally issued for an indefinite period.

After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush tried to calm a grieving nation by telling citizens to still “go shopping for their families.” The quote has been mocked as both tone-deaf (the term consumer patriotism was coined) and insensitive, but the for is often forgotten in the retelling. No matter how terrible an attack, we still need to be there for one another—whether that means gathering or grieving or, when the time comes, just watching a football game.