HOW THE NEWS COVERED THE NEWS

It was the 41 shots heard ’round the world. In the early hours of Feb. 4, 1999, four members of an NYPD street crime unit were about to question a man standing outside his building in the Soundview section of the Bronx when he made what turned out to be a fatal move.

The man, 23-year-old Amadou Diallo, reached for something in his back pocket, and the jittery cops reacted by taking a combined 41 shots at him.

Diallo, a native of Guinea, was hit 19 times and died at the scene. He was also unarmed — he had apparently been reaching for his wallet, which the plainclothes cops mistook for a gun.

His body wasn’t even cold before the outrage spread across the city and beyond as people fumed over what they considered a clear-cut case of police brutality, excessive force and racial profiling.

The Daily News was there from the jump — covering the crime scene (the plastic cups are covering bullet shells), the protests near City Hall and the anguish of Diallo’s mother, Kadiadou Diallo, as she searched for answers about her slain son.

(The quartet of cops, who had each been charged with second-degree murder, were eventually acquitted.)

As the Daily News counts down to its 100th birthday on June 26, New York’s hometown paper – the first daily tabloid in the U.S. when it debuted in 1919 – is giving loyal readers a look into our famed archives to help celebrate the centennial.

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange is a blur of activity in 1926, three years before a crash would take the roar out of the Twenties and help usher in the Great Depression. The Normandie was a state-ofthe-art French ocean liner that was docked in New York at the start of World War II and seized by the U.S. Renamed the USS Lafayette and in the process of being converted into a troopship, the vessel caught fire in 1942 and capsized in the frozen mud off the Hudson at Pier 88 on W. 48th St.