In a week when borders dominated the news, David Goren was drawing up a different kind of map. On a recent Saturday afternoon, he was on the hunt for pirate radio stations. With one hand, he tuned an FM dial connected to a directional antenna. With the other, he jotted frequencies onto a notepad advertising Ortho Tri-Cyclen. (“That’s my wife’s,” he said. “She’s a nurse-practitioner.”) Jazz, from a legal station, started playing. “Sometimes there’s a Haitian station near here,” Goren said. He swivelled the antenna, and the music turned into a burst of Creole. “This is Fièrte Haitienne”—Haitian Pride. “Of the thirty-plus stations I hear at my home, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about a third of them are Haitian,” Goren said.
Goren, who has lively eyes and a graying beard, works as a producer on licensed radio shows, but since the mid-nineteen-nineties he has been obsessed with pirates: unlicensed stations that people create by setting up transmitters on the roofs of churches and apartment buildings. The Federal Communications Commission has identified New York as a problem area, and Brooklyn, with its diverse immigrant communities, is the epicenter of the city’s pirate scene.
Goren recently launched the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map, a Web site cataloguing some of his discoveries. He moved to his computer. “Caribbean, Latino, and Orthodox Jewish are the main flavors,” he said. He played a clip. “It’s Mount Zion, the city of a king,” a Jamaican-sounding voice intoned. “To all my Jewish people out there in Crown Heights, vus machst du? Everything is good, oh yeah! Baruch Hashem! ”
“That’s ‘Bless the Lord’ in Hebrew,” Goren said. Pirate radio creates spaces for cross-cultural exchange. “It’s one of the wonders of New York. Like going into a Jewish appetizing store, where the African-American guy behind the counter is speaking Yiddish to the little old ladies.”
Goren’s listening area, on the third floor of his home, is filled with gear: a computer and a loop antenna, for picking up medium-wave radio, and a black box labelled “Quantum Phaser,” which blocks out stronger radio signals.
He stopped the dial at 88.7, which was emitting a barely audible hum. “This is Kol HaShalom, for the Orthodox Jewish community,” he said. “They broadcast in Hebrew.” The station was down for the Sabbath; the humming sound was a placeholder, blocking out the signal from Long Island’s WRHU. “They’ll come back on the air after sunset.”
He tuned the radio again, and a fuzzy burst of religious music came out of the speaker. “This is 92.1—a Caribbean religious pirate,” Goren said.
“Good evening, Mr. Junior,” a man’s voice said, addressing a listener. “Mr. Junior up there in Toronto, Canada.”
“I’m not sure by what means that person is listening,” Goren said. “It could be online.”
Last year, when Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai chairman of the F.C.C., Pai promised to “take aggressive action” to stamp out pirates. In early May, the Preventing Illegal Radio Abuse Through Enforcement, or PIRATE, Act was introduced in Congress; it would increase fines from a maximum of a hundred and forty-four thousand dollars to two million dollars. But the stations aren’t going away, Goren said, and transmission equipment has only become cheaper and more sophisticated. “The problem, as I see it, is that the technology has gone beyond what the law has been able to do.”
Between 87.9 and 92.1 FM, Goren counted eleven illegal stations, whose hosts mainly spoke Creole or accented English. Pirates, he said, “offer a kind of programming that their audiences depend on. Spiritual sustenance, news, immigration information, music created at home or in the new home, here.”
He clicked on another clip. It was an interview with a lawyer named Brian Figeroux, on Triple 9 HD radio. He recommended a hotline for immigrants in legal trouble, before launching into a rant: “The President of the United States of America ain’t like people of color. Why? Because most of us become Democrats—eighty, ninety per cent of all new immigrants. And the Republican Party, headed by K.K.K., Russia, and Trump, they want to stop the flow of us here!”
Goren counted thirty-three pirate stations in all, that day, including a new one, on 94.9. Two women were discussing International Women’s Day: “You know what, this is a day—it’s not bashing men. It’s not about you, actually. It’s about us.”
“I am surprised,” Goren said. “Stations are still finding ways to come on the air.” ♦
