New York News Blog

​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...

​Last week the Freelancer's Union sent an email encouraging its 75,000 members to go out and stump for Michael Bloomberg's reelection campaign. "Will you join us?" asked Union president Sara Horowitz, who said she'd be volunteering personally. The group is supporting Bloomberg because earlier this year he delivered on a signature issue -- citing the impact of the recession and freelancers' lack of safety nets, he was able to push through the city council a bill that exempted sole proprietors from a tax on unincorporated businesses that was costing many freelancers thousands of dollars a year.

But as of this coming Monday, much of those hard-won savings are going to be offset by a new tax that hits freelancers and sole proprietors hardest of all...

​A former Queens car dealer -- who was once written up in the Daily News for risking his life to save a woman who had been kidnapped by an angry taxi driver -- was charged today with attempting to provide weapons, supplies, and funds to the terrorist organization Hezbollah.

Patrick Nayyar, a 45-year-old Indian immigrant who has been living in the country illegally for more than a decade, was caught on tape telling an FBI informant posing as a member of Hezbollah that he was going to sell him guns, ammunition, vehicles, and bullet proof vests. Nayyar also provided the informant with a hand-gun, ammunition, and a pick-up truck, under the pretense that the items would go to Hezbollah in Lebanon...

After last week's landmark Stuyvesant Town decision -- in which a state appeals court found that the mega-developer Tishman Speyer had misused city tax breaks and illegally converted to market rate thousands of rent-controlled apartments in the historic complex -- one would expect some confusion. But one wouldn't expect the tenants whose apartments were illegally deregulated to be told that, at least for now, they should continue paying market-rate rents.

But that's just what tenants are being told to do, reports Curbed. In addition to that disappointing bit of information, in an email blast sent shortly after the decision, the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association advised residents not to file a rent overcharge application with the state. According to that email, the tenants could risk forfeiting their rights to be a member of the giant class action lawsuit they brought against the landlord...

When a state appeals court decision came down today that private equity-backed realty company Tishman Speyer illegally converted thousands of Stuyvesant Town tenants into luxury units, the company pleaded with the judge that the ruling could be a death blow.

Tishman and its partner, the firm Black Rock Realty, do have troubles: they already owe bondholders $1 billion more than the property is worth. The companies are at risk of defaulting on a $3 billion loan, and now they owe thousands of tenants around $200 million in rent overcharges and damages. (Under the law, tenants are entitled to triple damages on rent increases.)

In 2006, the companies paid a whopping $5.4 billion for New York's City's biggest housing complex, a record New York City real estate deal that was based on the expectation that the real estate boom would continue and that their thousands of middle-class rentals could be converted into luxury units. (The lawsuit, based on the way the company illegally used tax-breaks for rent-controlled buildings, saved the developers $25 million dollars.) Today the properties are devalued at $1.99 billion.

Since the decision, Real estate lawyers have been chattering nervously, echoing dire predictions that this decision could "trigger the collapse of the entire commercial real estate market."

Wait a second. Don't those predictions seem a little exaggerated?...

​A billionaire hedge fund manager and a well-known philanthropist in New York City's South Asian community was one of six hedge fund managers and corporate executives arrested Friday in an insider trading case that prosecutors say reaped more than $20 million in illegal profits.

Raj Rajaratnam (pictured), a partner in Galleon Management and a portfolio manager for Galleon Group, a Madison Avenue hedge fund that managed around $7 billion, was accused of conspiring with others to trade based on insider information about several publicly traded companies, including Google. Rajaratnam was ranked number 559 by Forbes magazine this year as one of the world's wealthiest men. His net worth was estimated to be $1.3 billion...

The much-anticipated trial of Sholom Rubashkin -- former CEO of the country's largest kosher meat processing plant and a member of a powerful Crown Heights Lubavitch family -- began in at a federal court in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Wednesday, with a slaughterhouse worker testifying that she faked records for Rubashkin.

Rubashkin faces 72 counts of immigration fraud relating from a May 2008 raid that gutted the plant's workforce and pushed the factory into bankruptcy.

In the raid -- one of the largest in the country at the time -- authorities charged that the Rubashkins withheld pay and used workers as young as sixteen. In this first trial, Rubashkin is accused of presenting the plants lender with false financial papers so he could obtain advances on a $35 million dollar loan. He faces 91 criminal charges including bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud...

Forty-one people in the New York area were arrested today, charged by U.S. Attorneys in connection with mortgage fraud schemes totaling $64 million dollars -- one of the biggest such sweeps ever.

The alleged scam artists profited off the housing crisis by running fraudulent foreclosure rescue operations, issuing false property appraisals and loan applications, flipping houses, and stripping them of their equity. Usually the schemes involved more than one company: law firms colluded with mortgage brokers and real estate agents in order to defraud both homeowners and banks.

Here are a few stories of how they did it: