Results tagged “theda”

In an extremely embarrassing incident for the Brooklyn DA's office, an audio technician taped over a statement made by a cop killer while in custody. The DA's office will now have to rely on a detective's notes taken during that statement and the videotape recorded during a follow-up interview with suspect Robert Ellis.

New York City is getting safer and safer. Well, at least Manhattan is. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau told reporters yesterday that there have only been 65 murders in the borough this year, down 40% from last year. When Morgenthau took office in 1975, the borough had 648 murders, accounting for almost 40% of the city's total. The 65 homicides this year account for just 14% of the city total. The 88-year-old DA attributed the drop to "excellent work done by the police and prosecutors." Police stats project the entire city with 500 fewer murders this year, the lowest number since 1963.

David Lemus, who was convicted in the 1990 killing of Palladium bouncer Marcus Peterson in 1992, was found not guilty yesterday at the conclusion of his retrial. His mother screamed when the verdict was read and Lemus' lawyers reportedly appeared stunned. The jury took only two days to deliberate and the foreman of the jury from the 1992 trial was present during much of the retrial. Before his original conviction for the 14th St. club killing was overturned in 2005, Lemus spent almost 14 years in prison.

The Manhattan District Attorney's office announced that the Reverend David Ajemian was arrested on charges of stalking and threatening Conan O'Brien. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston placed Ajemian, a 46-year-old priest in Stoneham, Massachusetts, on leave. The DA's office says that Ajemian had sent letters (some on parish letterhead!) to O'Brien's offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and home, contacted his parents, and tried to attend tapings of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He was...

A Manhattan dog walker was charged with stealing more than $50,000 from the 84-year-old mother of a client. According to the NY Sun, the Manhattan DA's office says that Daniel Natale, who runs Luna Dog Service, "allegedly used a checkbook, credit cards, and a debit card to steal cash."

The Manhattan DA's office announced that thirteen people were indicted in a identity theft scam. Credit card information from diners in Chinatown and other areas (Brooklyn, Westchester, Long Island, Florida, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Connecticut) would be stolen by wait staff, using handheld credit card skimmers. A list of restaurants where the scam took place was not released.

Who's that? Why, it's Supreme Court Justice Gerald Garson, taped by the Brooklyn DA's office. Garson is on trial for accepting bribes from lawyers while presiding over divorce cases - and the accusations are incredible. The 74-year-old jurist, who is now suspended, allegedly accepted cash, cigars, meals and more from lawyers who wanted their clients to win. And how was Garson's side business discovered? When a woman wanted to get a "fixer" to bribe the judge because she wanted to win her divorce and child custody case... only to find out that her husband's lawyer already bribed Garson!

We never thought Foxy Brown was all smart (our favorite example: pleading guilty but then trying to take it back) and given her penchant for getting into trouble (smacking manicurists here, "stealing" belts there), but one would think she'd get a clue. Alas, no, and the Manhattan DA's office attempted to get Brown jailed because she had violated her parole by traveling to Florida. The DA's office and the Department of Probation found out because Brown got into an altercation at a Florida beauty supply store, allegedly throwing a bottle of hair glue at an employee and resisting a police officer.

A year ago, the big news out of the Brooklyn DA's office was that an eight month old cat had helped sting a fake vet. And the DA Charles Hynes was able to parlay good will over the adorable Fred (the Detective) until Fred's death in August.

Surrender Monkeys, by Mihow.

An instructor at LaGuardia Community College was charged with accepting payments for better grades. Elvin Escano, who taught computer science, was arraigned on a 137 count indictment; apparently, he would accept cash or liquor (examples cited were a $200 cash payment and a $2,500 bottle of wine). The DA claims Escano changed grades in the registrar's office and even asked students to "steer business his way," according to WABC 7.

The Staten Island DA's office is no longer charging two teens with a hate crime in the murder of Richard Salinas. The DA's office earlier said a trio of teens targeted the chef at an International House of Pancakes because he was Mexican, but now the DA believes the motivation was robbery alone. Daniel Betancourt and Travis King were indicted on murder charges. They and John Messiha stole $60 and a cellphone from Salinas while beating him, and Salinas died of a heart attack. Salinas, who had worked his way up from bus boy to chef at the IHOP, had been headed to a store to buy a phone card for his wife and milk for his kids.

Remember that New York magazine article from two weeks ago, about older women robbing the cradle and going after underage boy? Well, there have been two new cases that are certainly doozies: On Tuesday, a 40 year old female teacher at a private Montessori school was charged with statutory rape and sodomy after it was revealed she had been having sex with underage male students who were only 12 and 13 when the affairs started. The boy who was 13 when the "affair" started is now 23 and now is a police officer in the NYPD! The DA's office asked that bail for Lina Sinha be set at $100,00, but, according to the AP, Sinha's lawyer got that down to $50,000, after arguing "his client had appeared for every court date, was born and raised in New York and educated in the city's schools, including Columbia University, and would not flee." Wow, city cred goes a long way.

Apparently we weren't the only one's pushing boundries today. While we only showed a photograph of the aftermath of an accident, a tipper points out that 1010 WINS has chosen to go full out snuff.

Everybody is getting screwed this year during March Madness! If you thought your brackets getting screwed left and right was bad, how bad would it suck to be one of the people busted Saturday by the NYPD at the height of gambling season. The NYPD raided a $45 million gambling ring with several locations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens according to Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. The raids led to the arrests of 10 people and the seizure of $300,000. The DA said a location in Chinatown was responsible for $14 million a year alone. The gambling ring was allegedly run by a Fukenese gang as a front for the Gambino crime family. Is it not time for the Chinese to step it up and run their own gambling rings? One of the Chinese men scoffed at the classification that they were Fukenese, insisting that he was Cantonese.

He's not quite The Marathon Man, but dentist Michael Mastromarino is turning into a modern day horror figure. Last night, he and two other men turned themselves in to the Brooklyn DA over charges that they had been illegally harvesting various tissues and bones from corpses. The scandal emerged when a Brooklyn funeral home was being sold, the operators claimed that an embalmer removed bones and replaced them with pipe - and given the embalmer's connections with Mastromarino who owned a company that sold human tissue, Mastomarino was targetted. The DA's office believe that he would get a tip from the embalmer and then head to the funeral home to harvest tissues, bones and organs. Huh, Gothamist can sort of understand that you'd be able to reuse a human bone, but an organ from an already dead body at the funeral home? Mastromarino is suspected of forging consent forms as well as changing death certificates to give the bodies a better bill of health.

The Manhattan DA's office has announced they will charge Catherine Woods' yoga-instructing boyfriend with her murder. Paul Cortez, who was a person of interest when the young woman with dreams of being a dancer but the reality of being a stripper to make ends meet was found dead in her Upper East Side apartment after Thanksgiving, will be charged later this week. The prosecutors said they found a bloody fingerprint at the crime scene that matched Cortez. Cortez had made several phone calls to Woods prior to the murder, but then none afterward.

- The murder of a brother and sister in Queens was solved yesterday when the sister's ex-boyfriend confessed to killing both of them in an attempt to rob money. Jin Lin had denied any role in the murder, which took place in Simon and Sharon Ng's Kew Gardens Hills apratment, but the police placed Lin at the scene when they found that Simon Ng had written an entry in his computer "wondering why Lin was there and wished he would leave." Lin then confessed that he went to the Ngs' apartment, and stabbed the brother when he didn't find money in the apartment. He then waited for his ex to return home, stabbing her in the neck. Sharon Ng managed to call her current boyfriend, but died later at a hospital.

The NY Times reported that protesters were illegally fingerprinted. Gothamist's posts from the week of the Republican National Convention.