Dead Air

The rise and fall of a New York shock jock.

- Nick Paumgarten

For Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton, the hosts of the “Boomer and Carton” morning sports-talk program, on WFAN, 660 AM, in New York, the big back-from-vacation week, right after Labor Day, was always a giddy one. You had your pennant races, the first week of N.F.L. games, and the inventory of guy-talk riffs that had piled up over the break. On Wednesday, September 6, 2017, Carton, the manic one, woke up at 3 a.m. He liked to be at the station by four; he rarely slept more than a few hours a night.

For a decade, Craig Carton, with Boomer Esiason, ruled sports-talk radio.

Carton and his wife and four children had just moved into a new apartment, in Tribeca, and he had that heightened awareness one has of one’s surroundings when passing the first night in a new home. On his way to the shower, he glanced out the bathroom window and noticed, in the courtyard, a man and a woman leaning against each other, apparently drunk. After his shower, he saw that they were gone. He dressed— T-shirt, cargo shorts, flip-flops—and ordered an Uber for the short trip to the station. On the stairs, he ran into the woman from the courtyard. She said, “Are you Craig Carton?”

“Yes, I am.”

“F.B.I. You’re under arrest.”

A squad of F.B.I. agents handcuffed him to a park bench and had him call his wife, Kim, who came down in her pajamas. He asked her to call his brother, who is a lawyer, and Chris Oliviero, the head of programming at CBS Radio, which owned WFAN. Then the agents drove him to Federal Plaza, where the driver said to the guard at the entrance, “We got a criminal in the back.”