New York News Blog

​A middle-aged woman and her teenage son were found stuffed inside a bedroom closet with their throats slit yesterday, police reported. The woman's husband, Otto Herrarte , of Corona, Queens, allegedly told police at the crime scene that the killer was his alter-ego, Roberto, who lived inside of him.

Otto Herrarte , a Manhattan hotel cleaner, claimed that he was only the accomplice to the murder committed by Roberto; after Roberto committed the murders, he went to the corner store to buy black plastic bags and duct tape with which he wrapped their bodies. The murdered individuals were identified as Edna Herarte, 55, and her fourteen-year-old son Daniel...

​A city Sanitation Department chief; his father-in-law, an alleged Gambino family soldier; the owner of the popular Staten Island supermarket chain, Top Tomato, long-suspected by locals of having mob ties; and a New York State Court Officer are among 22 people arrested today in an organized crime takedown on Staten Island.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo charges that Sanitation Department Deputy Chief Frederick Grimaldi and his father-in-law Michael Murdocco were part of a ring of Gambino-connected loan sharks who charged customers 156 percent annual interest, and collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from their fearful customers through extortion and threats of violence...

​The Obama Administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of masterminding the 9-11 terrorist attacks in civilian federal court in New York City has sparked all sorts of ire -- from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's media campaign over the weekend, some members of Congress, and Governor Paterson himself.

So where do New Yorkers themselves come down in this debate? According to new Marist poll, city residents are pretty divided too, and the divisions appear to run on party lines. 57 percent of Republicans think the trials will make New York more of a target, while only 38 percent of Democrats do...

​After a mid-air collision between a small charter plane and a sightseeing helicopter over the Hudson River this summer killed nine people, observers were quick to blame the Federal Aviation Administration for poorly regulating the airspace, letting it become clogged with private planes. Today the F.A.A. announced a host of changes in the way planes can maneuver in the flight zone.

As of Thursday, the airspace over the Hudson -- which stretches to about 20 miles northeast of the Statue of Liberty and is less than three quarters of a mile wide -- will be split into two zones: a low-altitude zone for local traffic, and a higher one for long-distance flights...

Two computer programmers who the government has charged with creating and maintaining the software that enabled Bernie Madoff perpetuate his long-running Ponzi scheme were arrested and taken to Manhattan federal court today. The two former employees of Madoff's brokerage firm - Jerome O'Hara of Malvern, N.Y., and George Perez of East Brunswick, N.J. - are charged with creating programs that generated a completely fictitious paper trail. They allegedly generated phony customer account statements and fraudulent trading confirmations from the London Stock Exchange.

Both men worked for Madoff for at least fifteen years. They reportedly confronted Madoff about the scam in September 2006. According to the criminal complaint, they refused to participate any more. At that point they were given "hush money" to keep it a secret. The "hush money" involved bonus bonues of $60,000 and a 25 percent pay increase.

An FBI agent found a note from that conversation in O'Hara's desk. The note said, "I won't lie any longer."

The men confronted Madoff four months after they had already closed their brokerage accounts, withdrawing hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

​Outed ex-spy Valerie Plame Wilson, whose memoir was heavily censored by the C.I.A., lost a second attempt to get the whole story out today. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the C.I.A.'s right to edit out of Wilson's 2007 memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, information relating to her days as a covert agent.

Wilson and Simon and Schuster had sued the C.I.A. on First Amendment grounds, arguing that information about her pre-2002 service in the memoir was already in the public domain, and prohibiting Wilson from disclosing it violated her freedom of speech.

​After a fire in an illegally and dangerously subdivided Queens basement killed three people last weekend, the Times has been raising questions about whether authorities are doing enough to crack down on the estimated 100,000 units of illegally-converted housing units in the city.

They're right to raise questions. Now let's bring home the point: This house, at 42-40 65th Street in Woodside, had been inspected twice by Buildings Department inspectors -- in 1990 and in 2004 -- in response to complaints that there were "extra rooms" in the basement. Inspectors did not find violations on either occasion...

​On the Bloomberg campaign website, the staff announces that -- as he did one magical day in August -- the Mayor will be personally using Twitter throughout Election Day. "Mike will personally take over our campaign's twitter account," the ad says.

So far, we've hardly had any tweets from Mike -- tweets "from staff" have filled the large gaps -- and the ones we've gotten haven't been very much fun...

Legislators have been quick to condemn wrongdoing in the run-up to the trial of former State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, who was indicted on corruption charges in January. But let's not forget that earlier this fall, Senate Republicans unanimously shot down a bill that would have gone a long way towards stopping corrupt politicians from committing the sorts of crimes of which Bruno is accused.

Bruno is accused of taking three million dollars over a thirteen-year period from consultants seeking business with the state. Unlike the current reporting requirements, this ethics bill, if made law, would have required public officials to report annually the names of their consulting clients, how much compensation they received, and a description of the services provided. In their annual financial disclosure forms, they would have also had to disclose the value of outside income...

​This morning Mike Bloomberg embarked on a whistlestop tour of small business in the five boroughs. So far, he's stopped at two bakeries: Holterman's in Staten Island and Cake Man Raven in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. We caught up with him at Cake Man Raven, where the Mayor spread icing on a six-layer Southern red velvet cake and was gifted with his first baker's jacket (bright red).

After spreading the icing, Harlem Cake Man-cum-Broooklyn Cake Man Raven Patrick De'Sean Dennis asked Mayor Mike if he wanted to eat some cake.

"I'm only doing this to be neighborly," said Bloomberg, as he took a bite of the richest cake on this side of the East River, adding that he was sacrificing his body for the cause. Then he had another bite.

"How many cakes do you make every day?," asked the data-driven mayor of the Cake Man.

The answer is a lot. When Dennis relocated his famous Harlem bakery to Brooklyn in 2000 (he could afford Harlem rents, and he couldn't get a loan), he started out with four employees -- today he has thirty...