It is two in the morning on May 5th and we are in New York, more precisely in Astoria, a neighborhood in the north-west end of Queens. Three people wearing thigh-high fishing boots and holding flashlights approach a manhole, lift the lid and disappear underground.
Observing them is Aki Jakupovic, owner of a workshop in the area (whose surveillance cameras record everything), who told NBC New York about his experience: “I was looking at them, they were looking at me, you know, I immediately understood that they had no good intentions. They came in, they closed the door, as if they had never been there.” Three strangers, strange clothes, a scene that he himself compared to a cartoon: “Three ordinary guys walking around in overalls, opening the sewer and climbing down like the Ninja Turtles.”
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That video, at the time, remained a neighborhood curiosity. Only weeks later, when almost identical episodes repeated themselves in Brooklyn, the New York police pulled him out of the archive and the entire city realized that something difficult to explain was happening under his feet.
From Astoria to Brooklyn, the same scene repeats itself
The case exploded on May 28, when eight people were seen lowering themselves into a manhole in the middle of the night in Williamsburg, an hour later a second report came from Gravesend, both neighborhoods in the Brooklyn borough. The first call went out around 11pm on Thursday: someone had seen a group remove the cover of a manhole between McDonald Avenue and Colin Place and climb in, some of whom then re-emerged about three hours later.
While the officers were busy there, another one arrived. Around 1 a.m. Friday, about ten miles away, other people uncovered a manhole near Heyward Street and Bedford Avenue. In another video shot in Brooklyn, a man in a red t-shirt is seen opening the lid from below and hoisting himself up in the middle of a busy street; Behind him, six more people come out, at least three with shovels, all with headlamps. The group came back up more than two and a half hours later, got into a vehicle and disappeared.
The police: “No danger.” The why remains open
Meanwhile, on social media, hypotheses have begun to spread, including terrorists and alligator hunters, and the police have tried to bring the matter back down to earth. On Monday the NYPD announced that a team from the Emergency Service Unit, together with environmental officials, had inspected the sewer system, concluding that there was no threat to the community, neither criminal nor health, therefore there were no reports of arrests and no confirmed connection between the different cases.
The explanation that investigators consider most credible is also the least spectacular. A senior law enforcement official believes it is possible that the group was hunting for valuables that ended up in the sewers, a theory based on similar incidents dating back to at least 2024. To be on the safe side, ESU officers went down to check that nothing dangerous had been left behind: they found nothing. The Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the network, also found no damage to the facilities.
12 thousand kilometers of tunnels, and the risk of not going back up
Whatever the motive, going down there is still a bad idea. Under the streets of New York runs a network of over 7,500 miles of sewer pipes, more than twelve thousand kilometers, which however is not a playground. “It’s dangerous, it’s like running a red light or walking down the middle of a highway,” warned John Monaghan, a retired NYPD captain. “They can be electrocuted, they can suffocate: there are gas lines and electrical cables down there.” Sewers, DEP spokesperson Rob Wolejsza recalled, can contain harmful and potentially lethal gases, unstable surfaces, the risk of flooding and confined spaces: no one should ever enter a pipe, a well or a manhole. The warning is not theoretical. Last month a woman died when she fell into an open manhole in the center of Manhattan: the lid had been dislodged by a truck.
It’s not the first time it’s ended in an arrest
The trail of the sunken treasure already has some judicial confirmation. The same official explained that the NYPD has investigated similar cases in recent years, a theory that rests on incidents dating back to 2024, and that on those occasions those responsible were looking for valuables. In one case, a person had been arrested. The most sensational precedent, however, is older and also has the contours of an internal mockery. In August 2015, in the East Flatbush area (also in Brooklyn), an employee of the Department of Environmental Protection (we are talking about 21-year-old Marquis Evans, an intern) opened a manhole at the intersection of Avenue H and East 35th Street and had two friends go down in search of jewels and lost objects, complete with metal detectors. At first, the Emergency Service Unit agents weren’t even able to chase them because the fumes were too strong. They therefore waited for the two to come back up and after four hours, covered in sewage, they were arrested. Evans was suspended and charged with aiding and abetting and other crimes, and the friends, David Hannibal and Damion Nieves, with trespassing. “God only knows what they were looking for,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton commented at the time. “It certainly wouldn’t be me crawling through the sewers of New York.”
A more recent, and better filmed, version was staged in April 2025 at Bensonhurst, once again in Brooklyn. A video showed five people wearing fluorescent vests and tools opening a manhole in the middle of the street: four lowered themselves inside, one hand closed the lid from below, the fifth opened a folding chair on the sidewalk and made himself comfortable. The police arrested three of them, aged between 25 and 39, on charges of burglary and criminal damage. The versions of those arrested oscillated between the banal and the absurd, given that one said he had been hired to clean the sewer, another that he was looking for treasure.
For now the only fixed point in this story is the mythology that New Yorkers come up with every time someone disappears down a manhole. As for the rest (who they are, what they’re really looking for, where they go once the lid is closed) the investigation by the NYPD’s Intelligence Division is still open.
