Secrets and Standoffs: The Great Brooklyn Heist

It was nearly dusk on January 19, 1973, when a crowd gathered on Broadway in Brooklyn, staring at the glowing windows of John and Al’s Sporting Goods. The street outside was cordoned off by police barricades, lined with squad cars and armed officers, while inside, for almost two full days, 11 hostages lay trapped. The standoff—what would become known as the Great Brooklyn Heist—unfolded not with an explosion of bullets, but with a protracted, uneasy silence, punctuated by negotiations blared over megaphones, whispered conversations through walls, and the thudding heartbeat of a city waiting for gunfire that, against all expectation, never came.

This was the moment the NYPD abandoned the script. Up to that point, the American police playbook dictated force: surround, storm, overwhelm, and subdue. But for 47 hours, officers, psychologists, community leaders, and the four desperate men inside the store danced around a new, fragile idea—that talking, not shooting, could end a siege. The Brooklyn hostage crisis became the crucible in which the modern art of police negotiation was forged, and its outcome would ripple through policing for decades.

The story begins in a Brooklyn that was tense and frayed. On the evening of January 19, 1973, four African American Sunni Muslim men—Shulab Abdur Raheem, Dawd A. Rahman, Yusef Abdallah Almussadig, and Salih Ali Abdullah—entered John and Al’s Sporting Goods at 927 Broadway. The store sat at the border between Bushwick and Bedford–Stuyvesant, neighborhoods battered by crime and poverty throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. The store itself was no stranger to violence: its founder, Speilberger, had been killed there in 1967 during a robbery. By 1973, its new owners, Samuel Rosenblum and Jerry Riccio, ran the shop with the knowledge that it was targeted for robbery at least once every three months.

At around 5 p.m., the four men browsed the aisles, eyes on the wall of firearms behind the counter. When the moment came, they drew a sawed-off shotgun and three handguns, demanding more guns and ammunition. Their motive, they later claimed, was self-defense. Just one day earlier, the Black Mafia had murdered seven Hanafi Sunni Muslims in Washington, D.C.—an act of violence that sent shockwaves through the Sunni Muslim community and convinced these men that they, too, could be targets. Their fear was real, and it was immediate.

In the chaos that followed, the store’s silent alarm was triggered, and a student from nearby Bushwick High School managed to slip out, alerting the authorities. The first police officers arrived on the scene at 5:42 p.m. The four men, desperate to escape, grabbed Rosenblum as a human shield and tried to push their way out onto Melrose Street. Gunfire erupted—Officer Jose Adorno was struck in the arm, Almussadig was hit in the abdomen, but Rosenblum managed to break free and run. The four robbers retreated back inside, dragging with them eleven hostages: customers, employees, and bystanders who suddenly found themselves bargaining chips in a battle they never signed up for.

Within minutes, the block was transformed into a war zone. The NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit arrived, shots rang out, and officers took positions behind cars and lampposts. At 6:10 p.m., Officer Stephen R. Gilroy, only 29 years old, was shot in the head as he tried to take cover behind an elevated railway pillar. Frank Carpentier, another officer, was hit in the knee as he tried to rescue Gilroy. The police responded with overwhelming force, shooting out streetlights for cover, then moving to cut power to the block. Riccio, one of the store’s owners, later described the scene as chaos and confusion—no one knew who was firing at whom, only that the stakes kept rising.

But as the evening wore on, something happened that set this siege apart from every other American standoff before it. The police, stung by the loss of Gilroy, wanted revenge. Many at the 90th Precinct demanded an all-out assault. But one voice—Harvey Schlossberg—argued otherwise. Schlossberg, the NYPD’s newly appointed head psychologist, was not a typical cop. He saw that violence would likely mean more death, not less. Schlossberg believed that patience was a weapon. He convinced police brass to try talking to the hostage-takers and learned that building a relationship—even with armed criminals—could save lives.

The robbers, meanwhile, set up watch from the store’s mezzanine, keeping the hostages at gunpoint. The police, denied use of the store’s phone lines after the robbers cut them, switched to megaphones, broadcasting offers and pleas from behind barricades. Around 8 p.m., the first breakthrough came: a female hostage was released, her message clear—the men inside would kill everyone if police tried to storm the store.

As midnight turned to morning, the tension inside the sporting goods store took on a surreal quality. The hostages slept in sleeping bags, watched over by the four men, who had now armed themselves with rifles, shotguns, and handguns scavenged from the shelves. By 12:50 a.m., another hostage was released, this time carrying a written plea for food, medical attention, and a call for Muslim unity. At 4:00 a.m., Reverend Roy Brown, a local minister, tried to appeal to the perpetrators’ conscience over a megaphone from the police’s armored personnel carrier—nicknamed “Annie” or “The Tank”—but received no response.

At 4:40 a.m., three local imams tried their hand at negotiation. One was allowed into the store for five minutes and emerged to report that the men were “willing to die for Allah.” Schlossberg, listening closely, saw through the posturing. He noted their repeated requests for food and medical supplies—signs, in his mind, that they wanted to live. Negotiations continued by walkie-talkie, megaphone, and handwritten notes passed to the police.

The NYPD’s strategy shifted into something new: containment and dialogue. They assembled a “think tank” of officials, psychologists, and FBI agents to consider every angle. Four options for ending the siege were drawn up—including a plan to tunnel into the store from a neighboring building—but each was dismissed or delayed, buying more time for negotiations to gain traction.

On the afternoon of January 20, a key moment arrived. Almussadig’s untreated gunshot wound was worsening, so the police proposed a deal: send out a hostage, and in return, a doctor and nurse would enter to treat Almussadig. The men inside agreed. Dr. Thomas W. Matthews and a nurse entered the sporting goods store, treated the wounded man, and returned with the names and numbers of the remaining hostages. During the exchange, they carried out the perpetrators’ latest message—an Arabic letter urging “all oppressed people to fight against their oppressors”—and an apology for Officer Gilroy’s death, along with the claim that police had fired first.

By now, the city was transfixed. Spectators crowded outside the police cordons, standing on cars to see the drama unfold. Some cheered for the police; others, for the gunmen. Some viewed the standoff as entertainment—one was quoted as saying, “It’s better than the Super Bowl.” Tension in the crowd boiled over at times, with bottles thrown and attempts to breach police lines, forcing officers to divert energy from the siege itself.

Inside the NYPD’s command center, the debate over tactics raged. Some officers insisted on a shock assault, others—Schlossberg foremost among them—preached patience and negotiation. At one point, the idea of letting the perpetrators leave in exchange for the hostages was seriously considered, with a car prepared for a potential ride to JFK Airport. But this was never offered, and when a perpetrator mentioned a travel visa, Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Ward quickly changed the subject.

By the morning of January 21, the siege was at a breaking point. Barbed wire coiled across Melrose Street. The NYPD’s Aviation Unit took aerial photos for planning, while the Emergency Service Unit prepared to drill into the store from a neighboring basement. The robbers sensed the noose tightening and fired nine shots at a parked squad car and nearby storefronts. Inside, the hostages and gunmen alike were fraying from exhaustion.

At 12:45 p.m., Jerry Riccio, one of the store’s owners, managed to convince the perpetrators to move the hostages into a corner supposedly out of the line of fire. What the hostage-takers didn’t realize was that this corner concealed a plasterboard wall leading to a stairwell up to the roof. As the robbers investigated suspicious noises from the furniture store next door, the hostages broke through the wall, climbed the stairs, and escaped onto the roof. On the other side, Emergency Service Unit officers helped them down a ladder to safety.

Suddenly, the hostage-takers were alone, their only leverage gone. Sporadic gunfire rattled out from the store as the men inside weighed their dwindling options. At 4:55 p.m., after a final prayer, Raheem, Rahman, and Abdullah emerged carrying Almussadig on a makeshift cot, surrendering to the police outside. The siege was over. Not a single hostage had died.

The immediate aftermath was raw. Inside the NYPD, especially at the 90th Precinct where Gilroy had served, anger simmered that the men responsible for his death had been captured alive. One officer later told a reporter they should have responded with “hand grenades and bazookas.” But for many in the department and beyond, relief and pride mingled with the grief. The police, against tradition and pressure, had resolved a crisis by talking, not shooting.

In the year that followed, the four perpetrators stood trial in Brooklyn’s New York Supreme Court. The defense argued they only sought weapons to protect themselves after the murders in Washington, D.C. and that the police fired first. On June 21, 1974, after a trial in which the judge warned jurors not to be swayed by race, religion, or politics, the men were found guilty on 41 counts, including assault, robbery, and kidnapping. Raheem was convicted for Gilroy’s murder.

Yet the true legacy of those 47 hours was not in the verdicts, but in what changed in police work. The NYPD used the lessons from John and Al’s to build the first Hostage Negotiation Team later in 1973, codifying tactics that had been improvised in the heat of the crisis. Harvey Schlossberg’s influence grew, and police departments across the country began to adopt negotiation and psychological tactics as essential tools for resolving standoffs and hostage situations. The era of “shock and awe” policing began to fade, replaced by a measured, human-centered approach that prioritized life over force.

The ripple effects of Brooklyn’s standoff extended far beyond New York City. Over the next decades, police around the United States—and the world—looked to the model established on those cold January days in 1973. The incident has since been described as the “birthplace of hostage negotiation” in the U.S. The NYPD’s approach—using psychologists, patience, dialogue, and discipline—became the foundation for modern crisis negotiation teams. These developments saved countless lives in the years that followed, as hostage negotiation turned from a desperate gamble into a science.

Nearly 50 years later, Stefan Forbes released the documentary “Hold Your Fire” in 2021. The film chronicled the 47-hour siege, spotlighting the people, the moments, and the decisions that shifted the future of policing. Viewers saw, frame by frame, how a botched robbery and a trembling city birthed a new kind of law enforcement. The film brought the story to new audiences, cementing the crisis’s place in American history as the moment when police learned, at last, to put down their guns and hold their fire.

As of 2022, the old John and Al’s Sporting Goods building at 927 Broadway had become Enrique’s Unisex Salon—a quiet, ordinary storefront where strangers once gambled with death and changed the course of American police history.