Posted by Chloé A. Hilliard at 12:57 PM, May 13, 2008
The rapper Papoose exploded in a fit of anger outside a Manhattan courtroom this morning just moments after his tearful bride-to-be, Remy Ma, faced down an eight-year sentence for shooting a woman outside of a West Side hot spot last summer.
Papoose—whose plans to wed Remy got put on ice yesterday when he was allegedly busted trying to sneak a handcuff key into Rikers—exchanged some hard looks and words with friends of Remy's shooting victim, Makeda Barnes-Joseph, in the courtroom hallway.
"Get the fuck off me. Fuck ya'll. Fuck jail," screamed Papoose as his 10-person entourage restrained him and court officers told him to move it along and exit the hallway outside of Manhattan Supreme Court. "I don't care. Lock me up. Lock me up. Take me to jail. Arrest me. It's all about money."
Emotions swelled inside the courtroom too as Remy faced as many as 25 years in prison for shooting a former associate in the stomach over $3,000 that went missing from Remy's purse. Tears rolled down her cheeks throughout much of the sentencing including when Remy made her plea for leniency.
"Throughout this unfortunate case, I was advised from my attorney to stay silent but now I want you all to see me for me and what I've gone through," said Remy as tears fell. "Reporters and newspapers have called me a 'hardcore rapper,' a 'hip-hop harlot'—Remy Ma is just a music industry name. A facade. I'm not a thug. I'm not a hardcore anything. I have feelings. I'm Remy Smith—No, I'm Remy Mackie. I'm a wife, mother, daughter and big sister."
Judge Rena Uviller was unconvinced, saying Remy thinks she is free to take whatever actions she wants based on the hardships of her life. But the judge still hit Remy with a lighter sentence than the 13-year bid sought by prosecutors.
"This is not the first time Ms. Smith has engaged in violence," Judge Uviller said. "This is a pattern. The previous times haven't been as severe. Smith doesn't take responsibility for her actions. Her letter to the court and her statement today showed no remorse. She even painted herself as the victim."
Before delivering the eight-year sentence, Uviller added "This is not about hip hop. This is about the individual, Remy. She is a danger to others."
Later, Papoose clarified what supposedly happened in Rikers Island yesterday, saying that the supposed handcuff key he was carrying had been on his keychain for months, including many earlier occasions when he visited his bretrothed in lockdown.
"Carrying a handcuff key is a felony," said Papoose, whose government name is Shamele Mackie. "And as you can see—I'm not arrested."
Bronx Councilman Larry Seabrook is a target of several probes of financial abuse at the City Council, it was reported today.
Non-profit organizations financed by Seabrook are being probed by both federal investigators and the Department of Investigation, according to the New York Times.
One of those non-profits, the Bronx African-American Chamber of Commerce, was blocked from receiving nearly $1 million in funding that Seabrook had requested for it, the Voice reported last week. The organization is located in Seabrook’s White Plains Road district office and would not produce tax records upon request.
Seabrook and other Council Members have come under fire in recent weeks for funneling taxpayer dollars into suspicious organizations with ties to their friends and families. Such funding, known as “member items,” is handed out at the council members’ request with little, if any, City Council oversight.
You can bet UFO enthusiasts won’t let this go anytime soon, but this week’s sky lights over Phoenix that caught the interest of Matt Drudge turns out to be a hoax by some joker who attached flares to helium balloons.
Thankfully, quick reporting should keep this incident from blowing up into the fiasco of the so-called “Phoenix Lights” of 1997. But what I was predicting would happen as a result of this new sighting did come true: almost no one in the media seems able to harken back to 1997 and report the most basic facts of that famous event correctly.
Once again, reporters are repeating the same old bad information: that the military supposedly explained the 1997 event as “flares” even as others pointed out there’s no way flares would have been able to fly over the entire state in a vee formation.
Sheesh. When is anyone going to pay attention and get this right?
Listen up, people: There were TWO very different, very separate events over the night sky of Phoenix on March 13, 1997. At about 8:30, a vee formation of lights passed over the city and was seen by many people, including two of my colleagues at the Phoenix New Times. Earlier, the vee had passed over Prescott and would later travel over Tucson. Eyewitness reports showed that the vee had covered about 200 miles in a half hour – which means it was moving at 400 mph, despite the insistence of eyewitnesses who, relying on eyeballs to make estimates of the altitude of point sources of light in a night sky, believed it was just over their heads and traveling slowly. An amateur astronomer, Mitch Stanley, using a large Dobsonian telescope (which, as a Dobsonian builder myself, I can assure you, in the hands of an experienced user, is quite easy to move smoothly enough to observe high-altitude jet planes) saw that the vee was actually a formation of planes. He reported this to his mother, who was standing nearby.
Later that night, at about 10 pm, after many people had come out of their homes as word of the vee formation spread, a SECOND VERY UNRELATED event occurred: airplanes of the Maryland Air National Guard, in Arizona for winter training, dumped flares over the North Tac range southwest of Phoenix. This was the event that was seen and videotaped the most. The flares fell in an arc and disappeared behind the Estrella mountain range. Rather quickly, television reporters suggested that these were flares, but it took a while for my colleagues at Tucson Weekly and the Arizona Republic to get the military to confirm which group of planes was responsible.
Got that? When someone says flares explain the 1997 Phoenix Lights, they’re ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE SECOND EVENT.
So, when you hear people on the endless dishonest shows on networks like the Discovery Channel scoffing at “flares” explaining the famous Phoenix Lights vee formation, you’ll understand that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
Posted by Maria Luisa Tucker at 11:24 AM, April 22, 2008
Last week, we reported that the city parks department reluctantly approved an August punk show to commemorate the violent 1988 police riot in Tompkins Square Park. Among those celebrating the news was Clayton Patterson, an East Village artist who filmed over three and half hours of the 1988 riot. Patterson provided the Voice with clips from that footage, which show in graphic detail a number of protesters, bystanders and even reporters being beaten by cops. That video played a large part in backing demonstrators' claims of police brutality. Watch the video here:
Patterson's many years of documenting the turmoil and transformation of the Lower East Side are featured in a new
film, Captured, which premiers this Thursday at NYU's Cantor Film Center.
By Shaunna Murphy, Shea O’Rourke, Marguerite A. Suozzi
Tabloid headlines and even New York Times editorials echoed City Hall last week in targeting Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as the one-man wrecking crew who obstructed Mike Bloomberg’s congestion pricing program. The mayor’s post-defeat scapegoating, however, has been as politically tilted as his pre-defeat contributions. The mayor has written checks totaling half a million dollars to Senate Republican boss Joe Bruno, who, like Silver, never brought the traffic plan to the floor yet miraculously became “the invisible man” in all the finger-pointing that followed.
Since congestion pricing's defeat, The Times has called Silver "unworthy of his office." "Here was a chance for Silver to show some real leadership," Schenectady's Daily Gazette railed. "His shortsightedness will cost the city $354 million in federal funds," Newsday piped in.
And the mayor certainly isn't going out of his way to refute the blame. His deputy mayor, Kevin Sheekey, told New York 1 that Silver has not been an effective leader in the past week. "I don't see any courage in Albany," he added. Bloomberg also made several statements implicating Silver as the main culprit. "I do not think that any one person should decide what's right," the mayor said at a press conference at Georgetown University.
But others find the finger-pointing unwarranted. "The editorial attacks on Shelly [Silver] are totally unfair," said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), the plan's leading opponent in the Assembly. "In the end, the overwhelming majority of the Democratic conference made the decision here. Probably 80 percent opposed the legislation."
Despite the onslaught of editorial boards blaming Silver for the plan's failure, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno had an equal chance at passing the bill. Silver stepped forward and said he wasn’t bringing the pricing bill to the Assembly floor because the overwhelming majority of Assembly Democrats opposed it during a protracted, closed-door, conference. Bruno, on the other hand, never said what the position of the majority of his GOP conference was, particularly the many Republican senators representing commuter districts as far away as Rockland County.
Bruno appears to have flirted with the notion of a floor vote only to put Senate Democrats in the difficult position of voting for or against it, but no one in Albany believes he had the votes to pass the bill from his own conference. Silver and Bruno, like the legislative leaders that preceded them for decades, rarely, if ever, allow floor votes on a bill unless a majority of their own members favor it.
Three senators interviewed by the Voice indicated that Bruno was merely posturing on the bill, raising questions about the Bloomberg administration’s evenhandedness in their assessment of how the biggest reform effort of their second term was scuttled. The difference was that as the Monday night deadline got closer, it was Silver who finally spoke up about what was actually true in both houses: This bill didn’t have enough support to pass.
“The assembly, by not voting, gave Joe an out — he appears to have made a promise to the Mayor without actually believing he could deliver it,” said Senator Liz Krueger (D- Manhattan), who was in favor of the bill. “Joe didn’t think he had the votes in the senate, and once the assembly publicly announced that they weren’t bringing a vote, he didn’t have to try anymore. ... At least the assembly said they didn’t try to bring it to the floor.
Since introducing the plan on Earth Day last summer, Bloomberg has donated an estimated $1.2 million of his own money to the Senate Republican Committee and $50,000 to the Republican Assembly, but has not donated a dime to statewide committees for senate and assembly Democrats. In the final accounting, Bloomberg's actual contributions will probably be even greater than initially projected, according to Senator Krueger.
“They don’t have to report any new filings until July," Krueger said. “He could have given them anything they wanted — we have no idea what he gave them in total. I suspect that the adding up of the amounts will be much more than reported so far."
Polar divisions between upstate Republicans — with access to Bloomberg's campaign contributions — and metro-area Republicans — whose constituents didn't want to pay $8 every time they drove into Manhattan — would have left the deciding votes in the hands of the Democrats. Had the Dems rejected congestion pricing, the city’s pro-pricing and pro-Bloomberg media certainly would have taken notice again and again before the fall election season.
According to Long Island Senator Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington), who opposed the bill, there was never strong support from his GOP counterparts in the Senate, primarily out of fear that Long Island would turn into a giant parking lot. As to why upstate Republicans would have any interest in going against the wishes of their city brethren, Johnson could only guess: "Obviously there were stories about how the mayor donated half a million dollars to the senate campaigns, so that might have had something to do with it," he said. "I just think it's rather a shame that we didn't get a chance to hear from them."
Krueger said that communities outside of the metro area, who wouldn't be nearly as affected by the bill, don't necessarily need to have that much of a say in the matter. "If you’re north of commuting distance from New York City, you don’t have a horse in this race,” Krueger said. Still, even if there had been a vote, Krueger said, there was enough vocal opposition from metro-area Republican senators to make Bruno question whether he could do his part in getting Bloomberg's bill passed.
"I’m up there, and I never heard any Senate Republican saying they would support this bill," Krueger said. "There were plenty of Long Island, Staten Island, and Westchester Senators who had no intention of voting for it. Joe Bruno would have needed a lot of Republican Senators to vote for this for it to pass, and he never implied he had those votes. He never brought it to the floor."
But according to Senate spokesman Mark Hansen, Bruno "has a very good relationship with mayor Bloomberg," "is supportive of the plan for congestion pricing" and would have brought the bill to the floor for a vote last Monday, when the assembly passed on taking it up, had enough senators been present. As many as 17 Democrats boycotted the session that day, according to press reports.
Senator Johnson said the idea that Bruno wanted a vote but was let down by a boycott by the Democrats is a fiction. “He had enough members in the Senate chamber to bring this to the floor," Johnson said. "At one point, there were 34 members of the Senate on the floor, and by the end of the day Monday there were 45. He could’ve brought it to a vote at any point, but he chose not to, and the reason is that he knew he didn’t have enough votes to pass it.”
Krueger said that Senate Democrats were primarily concerned with budget disputes that day, and that Bruno never actually called the Rules Committee or the Finance Committee into session about congestion pricing; a necessary step before bringing any bill to the floor.
Senator Carl Marcellino (R-Syosset), one of several Long Island Republicans opposed to the bill, said his impression was that the Senate was never planning to consider congestion pricing that day, an omission that could only be attributable to Bruno, who sets the Senate calendar.
"To my knowledge, it was not meant to be brought to the table that day,” Marcellino said. “It was never on the schedule."
Council Speaker Christine Quinn is the most honest person Mayor Bloomberg knows. The mayor said so himself earlier this month when Quinn found herself in hot water thanks to a federal-city probe into a hide-the-money scheme involving council slush funds.
But Quinn shouldn't get too excited.
Mike "I'm not a politician" Bloomberg said the exact same thing about State Senate majority leader Joe Bruno earlier this year when the Albany big was facing his own investigative troubles.
And he said it about another Republican political ally, Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro, when Molinaro's dealings with a mobster surfaced in 2005.
Here's the battle of the quotes:
April 3, 2008, re Quinn: "She's the most honest person I know."
March 10, 2008, re Bruno: "The most honest and trustworthy person I've ever met."
February, 2005 re Molinaro: "Just the most honest, straightforward person you can meet."
Posted by Michael Clancy at 1:39 PM, April 10, 2008
Yesterday's Clip Job (an excerpt every day from the Voice archives) featured a dispatch from a writer by the name of James Breslin who chronicled Jack Kerouac's visit to Brooklyn College in March of 1958. Curious as to whether this Breslin was the Pulitzer Prize-winner who later wrote under the byline Jimmy Breslin, I asked the Voice's Tom Robbins about it. And he put in a call to the man himself.
It's not the same Breslin. But, as you might have guessed, Jimmy had a little something to say about Jack:
"It is not me. I knew Kerouac he lived in Richmond Hill, on 134th, near 101st.... The Philadelphia Inquirer, gave him the whole roll of UPI [teletype] paper so he could just keep typing. I should've given him a fucking box of periods. Taught a whole generation how to write run-on sentences. A disgrace!"
Though a bill that would bind New York’s votes in the Electoral College to the winner of the presidential popular vote has not moved in Albany, Illinois is the latest state to embrace an idea that has the potential to reshape the way we choose our president.
Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed a law earlier this week that will require Illinois to elect the president using the National Popular Vote. The move, which has won approval in New Jersey and Maryland, would prevent a repeat of the 2000 presidential election should it be approved in all 50 states.
Illinois is the 16th state to pass such a bill. In 2000 George W. Bush, despite his defeat in the popular vote to Al Gore by roughly 500,000 votes, was victorious after having won enough states through the Electoral College, including a hotly contested Florida race, to clinch the presidency.
“It is rare that we see such a sweeping reform move so swiftly,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar, whose organization is a driving force behind the legislation. “Legislators are clearly picking up that citizens want every vote to count equally for president and that the candidate who gets the most votes should win.”
Three officials with alleged mob ties got the boot today from the union representing the city's 15,000 school bus drivers and escorts. Union delegates Paul Maddalone, his brother Nick Maddalone, and Gary Gugliaro were told they were personnae non grata by union trustee Tommy Mullins, who has been running Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transport Union since the local was exposed as a nest of mob corruption by a federal investigation.
All three men were closely associated with ex-local president Sal Battaglia, a Genovese crime family associate who pleaded guilty in January to federal bribery and conspiracy charges.
An attorney representing the local's trustees said the internal probe is continuing.
"This action was taken based on published accounts including The Voice, as well as an indpedendent investigation conducted by the trustee," said Bruce Maffeo, a former federal prosecutor brought in to help clean up the local. "We believe it was an appropriate response. The investigation is continuing and we remain prepared to take additional action."
The Voice reported that UNICEF, the celebrated relief organization, did what it described as a “preliminary investigation” and could not independently confirm that the incident took place.
The Voice then asked Beah’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, whether this disclosure would lead to a change in the book or a disclaimer of some kind.
Jeff Seroy, a spokesman, replied, “Doesn’t ‘preliminary” suggest that it’s not conclusive?”
The Voice followed up, making the point that had such an incident taken place, UNICEF would have fully investigated it.
Without directly answering the question about the brawl, Seroy replied “I don’t know enough about UNICEF to say what they would have done…Their statement clearly describes the book as a “credible account” and their investigation as “preliminary.”
Posted by Chloé A. Hilliard at 4:27 PM, March 27, 2008
Lauren Raysor, the attorney for Makeda Barnes-Joseph, Remy Ma's shooting victim issued the following statement about Remy's assault conviction.
"Today justice has been served. This process has been draining upon my client. From the beginning, the defense has tried to portray Ms. Ma as the victim. The jury saw through it and has sent a message to those in the recording industry who do not feel they should abide by the same rules as the rest of us. It is time to put an end to this senseless cycle of violence that is glorified by Hip-Hop marketing."
Posted by Chloé A. Hilliard at 12:30 PM, March 27, 2008
A Manhattan jury has convicted rapper Remy Ma of two counts of assault for shooting a friend, she suspected of stealing $3,000, outside a nightclub last July. She faces 25 years in prison at sentencing.
After the verdict today, her lawyer Ivan Fisher told the Voice "I'm not shocked but I'm greatly disappointed in the verdict. The evidence from the Players Club should have never been admitted in the case. We are going to appeal but it's going to take many months."
Remy faces a mandatory five-year minimum and she was remanded to custody following the verdict.
During his closing remarks in Remy's trial, Fisher admitted his client did it. "There is no other explanation for why Remy Smith would have chosen that unique moment in time to shoot her," Fisher reportedly said.
In an interview with the Voice prior to the conviction, Fisher tried to clarify: "What I did say was even if you assume everything [victim Makeda Barnes-Jospeh] said about the events in the car leading to the shooting, Remy isn't guilty of intentional assault."
Posted by Michael Clancy at 12:32 PM, March 25, 2008
Now that's he dead, tell us what you really think of William F. Buckley, Mr. Vidal? Wow. The headline on Truthdig.org says it all "Gore Vidal Speaks Seriously Ill of the Dead."
In an op-ed piece, Vidal rails against the founder of The National Review, Buckley's son Christopher, Newsweek magazine and the state of modern journalism.
Vidal labels Buckley a liar, ass-kisser, a most hysterical queen. Chris Buckley is called a creep. Is there an antonym for obituary? A posthumous take-down?
Posted by Michael Clancy at 3:11 PM, November 9, 2007
The Maricopa County Medical Examiner has ruled the death of Carol Gotbaum an accident. No word yet on what the forensic pathologist hired by the Gotbaum family has concluded.
The results are in on the autopsy of Carol Anne Gotbaum, the 45-year-old mother of three who died September 28 in police custody at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport. In the opinion of Maricopa County Medical Examiner Ann L. Bucholtz, Gotbaum expired "as a result of asphyxia by hanging." She adds that "contributing factors were acute ethanol and prescription medication intoxication." Bucholtz lists the manner of death as an accident.
Bucholtz does not explain how exactly Gotbaum was able to "hang" herself. However, in her visit to the holding cell at Sky Harbor where Gotbaum was found dead shortly after being arrested for disorderly conduct, Bucholtz notes that the officer who discovered Gotbaum slumped over, "described her facing the wall, her hands together in the front near the left side of her neck." She goes on to say that, "He does not recall seeing the position of the leg iron chain, however her hair was loose about her shoulders and it would have been easy for it not to have been observed."
Posted by Michael Clancy at 11:43 AM, November 2, 2007
In the tapes from 1997 that were first published yesterday, the prosecution's star witness Linda Schiro tells Voice reporter Tom Robbins and mob expert Jerry Capeci that ex-FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio had nothing to do with three of the four mob murders that the Brooklyn DA was trying to pin on him before the trial this week. But mob moll Schiro does say DeVecchio did play a role in the murder of Patrick Porco.
Schiro, however, was inconsistent in what Schiro said on the stand in a Brooklyn courtroom and what she told Robbins in 1997 at her dining room table. In both instances, she said DeVecchio told her mobster boyfriend Greg "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa that Patrick Porco, the best friend of her son, Joey, was going to implicate her son in a killing on the prior Halloween. On the stand, she said DeVecchio called in the tip.
But she told Robbins that DeVecchio delivered the deadly message in person.
"Lin came to the house," Schiro says. "And he's telling him that Patrick will talk. So now Greg brought it up with Joey, and Joey says, 'Come on, Dad, what are you crazy? Patrick would never do that."
Posted by Michael Clancy at 5:45 PM, November 1, 2007
Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum called Phoenix police on the day of her step-daughter-in-law's death and asked them to use Carol Gotbaum's maiden name to shield the family from unwanted publicity, according to a new report released by the Phoenix Police Department.
The 45-year-old Carol Gotbaum broke down several times during the flight from New York to Phoenix to attend rehab and may have ordered a Bloody Mary, according to new eyewitness accounts contained in 200-pages of documents surrounding the Gotbaum's mysterious death in a Phoenix airport holding cell on September 28.
But the Arizona Republic reports that other eyewitness accounts contained in the report say that Gotbaum did not consume any alcohol during the flight.
Phoenix authorities also released new videotape of Gotbaum's arrest and audio files of Gotbaum's husband Noah's frantic phone calls to the airport inquiring about his wife, which Phoenix New Times writer Stephen Lemons thoughtfully posted to his site.
The questions remain: Does it matter how many drinks, if any, Gotbaum had on the flight? We think not. Would that somehow excuse that this woman died in custody? And isn't it a tad bit callous of Public Advocate to request that her dead daughter-in-law's maiden name be used no matter how harsh the glare of the media spotlight might be?
Posted by Michael Clancy at 12:36 PM, November 1, 2007
These are the extracts of tape recordings of interviews of Linda Schiro by Voice reporter Tom Robbins and mob writer Jerry Capeci back in March of 1997 that caused the Brooklyn District Attorney's office today to dismiss murder charges against former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio.
Tape 1:
Schiro discusses the murder of Lorenzo Lampasi, a Colombo crime family soldier, gunned down in 1992 by Greg Scarpa Sr. and his gang. On the witness stand, Schiro claimed that DeVecchio—at Scarpa's insistence—gave the mobster Lampasi's home address and work schedule. On the tapes Schiro said that it was Scarpa's niece who provided the information.
Tape 2:,
A week later, Schiro was again asked about Lampasi. On the witness stand, Schiro said she recalled Lampasi sending Scarpa a letter accusing him of being "a rat." But when Schiro was asked about it in 1997, she said she's never heard of the letter. "No, I told you about Greg's niece," Schiro responded.
Tape 3:
Amid a clicking of chinaware and the pouring of coffee, Schiro talked about the murder of Joseph "Joe Brewster" DeDomenico, a member of Scarpa's crew whacked in 1987. On the witness stand this week, Schiro said it was information gathered by DeVecchio that prompted Scarpa to kill his old friend. Back in 1997, however, Schiro remembered Joe Brewster fondly. And when she was asked if DeVecchio had anything to do with it, said "No."
The case was teetering on collapse Tuesday afternoon when the Voice published Tom Robbin's story "Tall Tales of Mafia Mistress" online, sending both the defense and prosecutors scrambling. The story revealed that the prosecution's star witness, Linda Schiro, contradicted her sworn testimony at the trial in interviews she made in 1997 with Robbins and mob expert Jerry Capeci. On the stand, she said DeVecchio had a hand in four rubouts. In those interviews, she said DeVecchio only helped ice Patrick Porco.
The Daily News noted that Robbins, whose stories put ex-Giuliani administration official Russell Harding in the clink, has the distinction of writing stories that got one man locked up and helped another guy get out.
Posted by Michael Clancy at 3:47 PM, October 31, 2007
The case of Lindley DeVecchio, the former FBI agent accused of collaborating with mobsters on four murders, is on the verge of collapse after the Village Voice unearthed decade-old recordings of the star witness contradicting her sworn testimony.
The case was put on hold in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Wednesday as prosecutors review audio tapes of interviews that star prosecution witness Linda Schiro made with the Voice's Tom Robbins for a book project in 1997. The tapes and the startling admissions contained in them were first revealed yesterday in the Robbin's exclusive "Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress."
Schiro's account of the mafia murders ordered by her former companion Greg "the Grim Reaper" Scarpa in those interviews with Robbins and mob expert Jerry Capeci directly contradict two days of sworn testimony linking DeVecchio to four mob rubouts.
"If we can't go forward after listening to these tapes, or we shouldn't go forward because of what's on these tapes, then we're prepared to do what would be necessary, and that would be to dismiss this case," Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione told Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach according to the Daily News.
Posted by Michael Clancy at 3:53 PM, October 24, 2007
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has cleared the campus police of any wrongdoing in the infamous tasering of a University of Florida student last month. The video of campus cops tasering student Andrew Meyer at a Sen. John Kerry speaking event inspired the "Don't Tase Me Bro" catchphrase, scores of YouTube remixes (see the Can't Tase This remix) and a fierce debate about whether Florida police acted appropriately.
Here's a shock:—but not of the 50,000-volt variety— Florida law enforcement officials say the cops did. University of Florida President Bernie Machen released a 17-page executive summary of the report on Wednesday but said it would at least a week before the full 300-page report could be redacted and made public.
Machen said:
In short, the [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] determined that our officers acted well within state guidelines. The two officers, who were placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, were reinstated by the University Police Department this morning and are back on normal duty.
The rapper Papoose exploded in a fit of anger outside a Manhattan courtroom this morning just moments after his tearful bride-to-be, Remy Ma, faced down an eight-year sentence for shooting a woman outside of a West Side hot spot last summer.
Bronx Councilman Larry Seabrook is a target of several probes of financial abuse at the City Council, it was reported today.
Tabloid headlines and even New York Times editorials echoed City Hall last week in targeting Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as the one-man wrecking crew who obstructed Mike Bloomberg’s congestion pricing program. The mayor’s post-defeat scapegoating, however, has been as politically tilted as his pre-defeat contributions. The mayor has written checks totaling half a million dollars to Senate Republican boss Joe Bruno, who, like Silver, never brought the traffic plan to the floor yet miraculously became “the invisible man” in all the finger-pointing that followed.
Despite the onslaught of editorial boards blaming Silver for the plan's failure, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno had an equal chance at passing the bill. Silver stepped forward and said he wasn’t bringing the pricing bill to the Assembly floor because the overwhelming majority of Assembly Democrats opposed it during a protracted, closed-door, conference. Bruno, on the other hand, never said what the position of the majority of his GOP conference was, particularly the many Republican senators representing commuter districts as far away as Rockland County. 
Polar divisions between upstate Republicans — with access to Bloomberg's campaign contributions — and metro-area Republicans — whose constituents didn't want to pay $8 every time they drove into Manhattan — would have left the deciding votes in the hands of the Democrats. Had the Dems rejected congestion pricing, the city’s pro-pricing and pro-Bloomberg media certainly would have taken notice again and again before the fall election season. 
Council Speaker Christine Quinn is the most honest person Mayor Bloomberg knows. The mayor said so himself earlier this month when Quinn found herself in hot water thanks to a federal-city probe into a hide-the-money scheme involving council slush funds. 
Yesterday's Clip Job (an excerpt every day from the Voice archives) featured a dispatch from a writer by the name of James Breslin 
Though a bill that would bind New York’s votes in the Electoral College to the winner of the presidential popular vote has 
Three officials with alleged mob ties got the boot today from the union representing the city's 15,000 school bus drivers and escorts. Union delegates Paul Maddalone, his brother Nick Maddalone, and Gary Gugliaro were told they were personnae non grata by union trustee Tommy Mullins, who has been running Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transport Union since the local was exposed as a nest of mob corruption by a federal investigation.
A footnote to the 
A Manhattan jury has convicted 
rss feed
