Extra, Extra

- A woman and her 8 year-old son seem to have been killed by her boyfriend, who used a machete. News reports wonder if the boyfriend should have even been on the streets.
- Joe Schumacher finds Teddy Roosevelt at the Pioneer grocery store. Really.
- Over the river and down the turnpike, it seems the NJ restaurant that wrote on one couple's receipt "Jew Couple" had written on another customer's "Dirty Joanne." Wait staffs, please work on the mnemoic devices!
- A Gambino mobster admits to having a hand in the 1989 killing of Yusef Hawkins, one of the late 80s, early 90s racially charged murders that saw NYC in one of its darkest periods of race relations.
- It's like Cold Case Files meets Without a Trace: The 75 year-old mystery of a judge's disappearance may be solved - and it involved burying his body in Coney Island!
- Thrillist puts another "unopened" restaurant on the radar of the bleeding edge.
- The Village Voice's Sydney Schanberg questions the free pass Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau has been getting on Tuesday and on Wednesday, the NY Times looks at his TV ad.
- There might be another car co-op for New Yorkers on the horizon... sounds like a would-be competitor to Zip Car.

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By Jen Chung on August 19, 2005 5:42 PM

Comments [rss]

Dave H.

Am I the only person that finds this new revelation about the Yusef Hawkins murder fascinating? The crime was previously characterized as an act of a viciously racist community murdering a black person for wandering onto their turf. While there's no doubt that racism exists in the city, the fact that the murder was explicitly directed by a mobster against a specific person--albeit not Yusef Hawkins who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time--seems to take the fangs out of the accusations that Hawkins' murder was a general indicator of race relations in NY at that time. As opposed to a random crowd of racist whites attacking a black man, the crowd was actually a crew of lowlifes summoned by a mobster to protect a store from an unrelated argument involving a woman who threatened to have her friends settle a score. When Yusef Hawkins stumbled across this motley crew, he was on the verge of explaining his way out of the mistaken identity when he was shot by a man obviously eager to ingratiate himself to his mob boss. So instead of a representative group of the community killing a man just because he was black, this was a collection of reprobates assembled to hassle a specific black man or group of black men, when things took a turn for the further moronic. I don't know; I just find that very extremely interesting.

Not reading your replies

you know why the black mom and her kid died? Because they were black.

saffron

hey, I was visiting all the city-ist sites, and there is a glaring absence of Sydney! When will there be a Sydneyist? We have such cool things to share with the world