Results tagged “da”

Mayor Bloomberg is fighting with Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and Morgenthau is hitting back with "barnyard" vulgarity, as the Times decorously puts it. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Morgenthau said, "If you all weren't newspapers of record, I'd say these were chickenshit comments." He was referring to the Bloomberg camp's supposed discovery of $80 million in settlement money that's being held by the DA's office in what one official described as the equivalent of "offshore accounts." The heated feud underscores long-standing tensions between the mayor and DA.

Back in August photographer Zach Hyman brought one of his muses to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for some naked time. The 26-year-old model, Kathleen Neill, stripped down in the Arms and Armour exhibit, only to be arrested shortly after for public lewdness. Just a few days later she said: "I want people to have the freedom to express themselves. I want the city to drop the charges. I would love to be able to go to museums and see stuff like this happen on any scale."

Brooklyn prosecutors expect to meet next week with gotcha "journalists" James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles to view raw hidden-camera footage recorded by the duo at an ACORN office in Brooklyn, where they duped employees of the community organizing group into giving bad advice to Giles, posing as a prostitute with O'Keefe as her pimp. A spokesman for the Brooklyn DA tells the Daily News, "This is a first step, and there are possible criminal charges." As you probably know by now, the heavily edited video has become a rallying cry for drown-government-in-the-bathtub right-wingers, and yesterday the House of Representatives voted 345 to 75 to deny funding for ACORN. The vote came on a provision attached to a student aid bill; on Monday the Senate voted 83 to 7 to deny housing and community grant funding to ACORN. According to the AP, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the latest allegations against ACORN as "horrible," but she still believes the group has many honest employees and stresses that it's up to House-Senate negotiators to determine whether the provision to cut funding remains in the final version of the bill.

Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau wants to hold a Queens tax preparer accountable for allegedly threatening to kill a prosecutor who's handling a grand larceny case against him. 54-year-old Jack Chang (not pictured) did a year in prison in the mid-'90s for funneling nearly $1 million from his clients to his own account; in April he was arrested on similar charges in a case that's being conducted by the same prosecutor who put him away the first time: Gilda Mariani, head of the money laundering and tax crimes unit.

A company whose entire business is centered on verifying the safety and quality of building materials is being investigated for falsifying or faking test results with materials being used in the some of New York City's most high-profile construction sites, such as the new Yankee Stadium and the Freedom Tower.