Throughout 2020, Tom Grech could only watch as the borough of Queens inched towards a financial and human calamity. Sirens wailed day and night as ambulances shuttled patients to Elmhurst Hospital, ground zero for the pandemic in New York.
Nearby, the dead piled up so rapidly that a refrigerator stored dozens of bodies outside a funeral home. Grech, the president and chief executive of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, stood helpless as the relentless march of Covid cases in his working-class borough pushed scores of local businesses towards financial ruin.
Into this unfolding catastrophe stepped Steve Cohen. The hedge fund billionaire, who had just acquired control of the New York Mets baseball team in a $2.4bn deal, was not yet a household name in the diverse district that’s home to New York’s two airports and scores of immigrant communities.