MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Apr 25
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KEEPING IT IN THE FAMILY No One Likes To Think About Dying, But Estate Planning Is Your Most Important Financial Obligation By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

nullSunday, April 25, 1999

It wasn’t long ago that Gerald and Toby Sindler thought estate planning – setting up trusts so heirs are not hard hit by inheritance taxes – was something that only the wealthy needed to worry about.

“And we do not consider ourselves to be wealthy,” said Gerald, who owns Career Objectives, a Mt. Kisco, N.Y., personnel agency, with his wife.

But a brief course in financial planning opened their eyes.

“Even with modest assets, you’ll be surprised how quickly things mount up,” he said, “what with the house and life insurance, in addition to anything that we’ve managed to accumulate over the years.”

Gerald Sindler is now 59 years old. His wife is 56. The Westchester home they bought for $ 65,000 27 years ago, and now own outright, is now worth at least $ 450,000. And that’s just the beginning. So one day about a year ago they made an appointment with the Ettinger Law Firm, which specializes in trusts, estate and elder law.

What they found out shocked them.

“Our estate was in jeopardy not only from the government and the inequitable tax system, but if one or both of us became chronically ill, the absolute cost of long-term care would virtually eat up any finances we have,” Sindler said. In which case they could also forget about any inheritance they might want to pass on to their two grown children.

Today, with a will, revocable trusts that allow the couple to split their assets in equal halves (by law, each is allowed to protect up to $ 650,000 from inheritance tax), and a long-term health-care insurance policy, they are breathing a little easier.

The Sindlers are not alone.

A generation ago, planning your estate and writing a will was easily put off until much later in life. But changes in tax laws – and in the way Americans accumulate money and plan their retirement funds – have estate lawyers and financial advisers saying that everyone, no matter the size of their estate, should work out a financial plan and write a will.

A DREADED TASK

But estate planning is not something most people do easily.

Whether it is the misconception that they do not have enough assets to merit a proper will, or the too- common belief that they are invincible, many people put off dealing with it until “later.” Someone else will handle it, they say to themselves.

The main reason is fear. “This is always a hard conversation to have with clients because most people are not eager to talk about their own mortality,” said Betsy Dillard, an American Express financial adviser based in Manhattan.

“I feel obligated to have that discussion with my clients because wealth preservation is a critical element of financial planning,” she continued. “Think about it, you save and you save and you save throughout your life. Ultimately, it all comes down to who are you saving for.”

David Dorfman, a Manhattan estate lawyer, said one of the main advantages of estate planning is that it can help you stay out of probate court, or avoid costly guardianship hearings if the surviving spouse – or other heirs – should become seriously ill.

“If you don’t have a will, the court will appoint a public administrator to administer the estate and then the family will be paying unnecessary lawyer fees and other fees to strangers,” he said.

Most people want someone they love, or a charity or organization of their own choosing, to inherit that money, no matter how large or small the amount.

AFTER DEATH, TAXES

Another compelling reason to put your finances in order, according to Arden Down, Chase Manhattan Bank’s director of financial planning services, is the ravenous federal tax system, which imperils unprotected estates.

All a person’s assets at the time of death – cars, houses, jewelry, 401(k) and other retirement accounts, life insurance policies, savings and personal investment accounts – are counted as part of the gross estate and may be subject to taxes at a rate of 37% to 55%, regardless of the fact that taxes may have already been paid on many of these items, in one form or another.

“Isn’t that a dirty trick?” Down said. “If I’m aware of what’s going on from the other side of the grave, I’m now pissed off. I can’t take it with me, but I don’t like what’s happening to it either.”

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 gradually increases the size of an estate that is exempt from federal estate taxes. This year’s limit is $ 650,000, and it is supposed to be raised to $ 1 million by the year 2006. The value of the estate above that amount at the time of a person’s death is subject to inheritance tax.

This has nothing to do with me, you say. I don’t have a million dollars to leave to my family, I don’t even have $ 650,000. Think again, says Michael Ettinger, head of the law firm the Sindlers are using. The strong economy is transforming households in the Northeast Corridor, especially those of the so-called baby boomers, and their attitude toward wealth preservation. And the effects of the long-running Wall Street bull market on the New York region, and in particular on real estate values, find even modest wage-earning homeowners with a net worth beyond $ 1 million.

And even those with assets well below the million-dollar mark need to think about their future, said Sandra Busell, a Nassau County estate attorney with clients in Brooklyn and Queens. An estate that consists of a house worth $ 200,000 and another $ 100,000 in various savings accounts needs estate planning too, she said.

A TAX-FREE GIFT

One of the ways to reduce the size of an estate – and any potential tax liability – is for both spouses to give each of their children an annual tax-free gift of up to $ 10,000.

The experts say it is better to act sooner, rather than later. Consult a financial adviser and a lawyer when drafting your estate plan – each has a valuable role to play.

Taking these steps was how Gerald Sindler and his wife discovered their financial house was not in order.

“Not only did we have to worry about some distant future time,” he said, “it brought it into the very real present for us.”

GRAPHIC: timothy cook illustration

Apr 11
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3 Who Died In ’94 SoHo Fire Remembered By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, April 11, 1999

As the skirl of bagpipes filled the air, scores of firefighters milled about a Manhattan church yesterday, reliving a tragic event the pain of which has not diminished five years later.

It has been a half-decade since three firefighters were killed in a March 28, 1994, fire on Watts St. in SoHo; Firefighter James Young died almost immediately after the blaze, and Firefighter Christopher Siedenburg died a day later.

Capt. John Drennan hung on 40 days before finally succumbing, his heroic battle to survive memorialized at a funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Yesterday, the three members of Engine Co. 24 and Ladder Co. 5 were remembered at a Mass at St. Anthony’s of Padua Church, two blocks from their firehouse.

“These were great guys, and hopefully they’ll continue to be remembered,” said Capt. Pat Ruddick, who was a lieutenant under Drennan until he became a captain three days before the fire. “I know, for myself, that a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about them. Even now.”

For the families, the years have not made their loss easier to take.

Eddie Young, 38, said he was gratified at all the people who came to pay their respects to his brother James and his fallen comrades.

“We miss him too much,” said Young, holding his 3-year-old son James. “I guess being here today makes you remember that he’s not here anymore.”

“I’m proud that we named him after my brother,” Young added. “My brother is a great man, and we’ll always have my son to remind us of him.”

Bob Drennan, 47, said he was consoled by the priest’s words that his brother was in Heaven.

As hard as it was for him to deal with losing his brother, he felt just as keenly the deaths of Siedenburg and Young, Drennan said.

“They were so young, just starting out, really,” he said.

His brother, he said, packed so much into his life it seemed he lived two and half lives.

As a reception began in the church basement after the Mass, scores of firefighters ran out to answer an emergency call.

“You can’t think about the tragedies,” Ruddick said. “If you go out with this constantly in your mind, it’s going to hinder your ability to work. We just come to work and do our job everyday.”

Apr 11
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QUICK CASH STRATEGIES Where to Go When You Need Money in a Hurry By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, April 11, 1999

The man sitting before Clifford Jones had come to him several times before, to bury loved ones. But this time, the man wanted a loan. He needed $ 2,800 to fix the transmission on the car he depended on to get to and from work.

“You know I’m good for it, too,” the man told James, a co-owner of Harlem’s Unity Funeral Chapel.

“How could you turn down someone who trusted you with their loved ones?” James asked. And so he not only arranged for the man to get the loan, but to pay it back over six months without interest.

This is a bit unusual, of course, and not something many people could arrange – but it demonstrates one of the many solutions that could help someone in a sudden financial bind that requires a quick infusion of cash.

Swallow your pride

Whatever is driving your money needs, it’s smart to recognize that no choice is easy, and all likely have both advantages and disadvantages. The range of options run from very good and advisable to pretty awful.

You could certainly seek out your funeral director or pastor, sell jewelry or a family heirloom, get a cash advance on your credit card, even borrow from your employer or against your retirement accounts. But it’s never wise to drop in on your neighborhood loan shark.

That person, said Erroll Louis, a business consultant who was co-founder and former manager of a Brooklyn credit union, is no longer the trench-coat clad thug with a broken nose.

She just might be the kindly old lady down the block who’ll give you the loan – but with not enough time to pay it off and at 150% interest – with friends to enforce the terms.

“The first thing to do is not jump off a cliff, or dig a deeper hole in order to get out of the one you are in,” Louis said. “The idea is to get creative quickly and realize the first option is not always the best.”

The only ways to raise cash quickly is either to borrow or sell something with hard cash value.

Louis said he advises those in need to swallow their pride and call a friend or family member. They might just have enough to spare for a while, or know someone who does, without the onerous conditions that other options come with.

But be aware that owing money to someone you know can quickly put a strain on that relationship. You should weigh that cost before making your request.

Sell your jewels, not your wheels

If a person has a family heirloom or valuable jewelry he or she is willing to part with, it could be sold to one of the many high-end jewelry resalers in New York City.

Paul Lubetsky, owner of Windsow Jewelers on Fifth Avenue, said furniture, clothing or electronics equipment probably won’t fetch much of a return because that type of merchandise has only about a 5% resale value.

You could sell your car, but you probably need it to get around, making jewelry a better option to get your hands on quick dough.

“For example, a Rolex watch that’s in good condition could be worth 40% to 50% of its retail value to us,” Lubetsky said. “If a piece is signed, like Cartier, Tiffany or Bulgari, we would purchase it at a large percentage above its intrinsic value because there is a high demand in the second-hand market.Also, anything that’s antique would go for a large amount above its intrinsic value, sometimes as much as 20 times.”

Another option is to go to a pawn broker, an industry that has been working overtime to clean up its image and, in recent years, has come under tighter state regulations.

Alan Wohlgemuth, manager of Century Pawnbrokers at 725 Eighth Ave., said state law bars his store from buying merchandise. He could only take the item people bring in as collateral for a loan, for which he can only charge 3%, plus a small monthly storage fee.

One advantage in this type of transaction is that there is usually no credit check.

“Usually you leave a diamond or some other jewelry and walk out of the store with the cash and ticket that is good for four months,” Wohlgemuth said.

Hidden costs of quick loans

“Borrower beware” should be the guiding principle of someone who wants to look into a home equity loan, refinancing or a second mortgage on a property, said Sarah Ludwig, executive director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project – which works with groups in neighborhoods underserved by the city’s largest financial institutions.

The problem with going to a commercial lender like the Money Store, or answering any of the mailings that tend to flood some communities, as she sees it, is that there are a lot of hidden fees that could drive up the cost of borrowing and make one’s financial situation even worse.

“What people don’t understand is that there are tons of fees upfront and during the life of the loan. If you are going to refinance to get a small loan, do your homework,” Ludwig said.

The cost of taking this step without being aware of the responsibilities is great, since a home is often the single greatest asset anyone has. Mess up and you could end up homeless and in greater debt than you started with.

One of the quickest ways to free up cash is to get an advance from your credit card, said Paul Quinn, a Chase Manhattan Bank senior vice president for personal credit services. The cash comes quickly, sometimes in just a few moments at an automated teller machine. But the interest rates can be sky-high. Also, something to keep in mind: credit card companies exist to keep you in debt.

“If it is a longer-term need, you need to think about an installment loan that you could take 12 to 60 months to pay back,” Quinn said.

And the annual interest rate on this transaction could range from 10.99%, if you already have an account with Chase and are willing to let the bank deduct the payment directly from your account, to 12.99% if you have good credit but no relationship with the bank.

Of course, many credit cards charge north of 20%, so know the terms before you’re obligating yourself to heavy duty interest payments.

Quinn said, however, that a credit union would offer rates on a personal loan that are very competitive with those of banks.

Some people might chose to borrow from a retirement account such as an IRA or 401(k) plan. There are some rules that must be met to qualify, but the one significant advantage is that the interest that you pay back on such a loan typically goes into your own account – meaning you’re paying the interest back to yourself.

“Those type of borrowings are excellent for someone looking to pay off a credit card debt,” Quinn said.

But such gambits scare Erroll Louis, the former credit union manager.

“To me, this is almost the same as selling off your future,” he said. “You may in fact be delaying your retirement by as long as five years.”

GRAPHIC: Christoph Hitz illustrations

Apr 04
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U.S. Serbs Saddened and Angry By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, April 04, 1999

Lana Todorovich was on the phone to Belgrade with an urgent message for her parents: “Get out. Now.”

In the early hours of March 24, U.S. NATO warplanes bearing bombs were on their way to Yugoslavia.

Milan and Yela Simic, 62 and 57 years old, heeded their daughter’s warning. They made the hair-raising journey through the city of Novi Sad, northwest of Belgrade, as the first bombs began to fall.

“They saw bombs and rockets fall on Novi Sad, everywhere just fire and destruction and fear and disbelief,” said Todorovich, a fashion executive from Westchester.

They traveled first to Budapest under cover of darkness, then took a flight on CFA Czech Airlines to The Hague, Netherlands. The paradox of this war and their flight from it: The United States was their ultimate haven from the fighting.

“So the very country that was bombing them,” Todorovich said, “was also their way out of this terrible situation.”

That ambiguous dynamic in which the pain of U.S. attacks was felt along with the comfort of sanctuary in America has played out with many Serb immigrants in the last two weeks.

They love America, they say, but they hate what American-led NATO forces are doing to them.

More than 2 million Serb immigrants live in the U.S., predominantly in Midwestern cities, such as Chicago and Cleveland. In the greater New York area, some 50,000 Serbs live in Paterson and Elizabeth, N.J., and in Astoria, Queens.

Many express disbelief at what they see as the unfairness and injustice of the NATO attack on their homeland. Todorovich, 33 and the mother of a 6-year-old girl, arrived in the U.S. about 10 years ago and is an American citizen. She said the bombing campaign left her disillusioned, frustrated and angry.

“I just believed that we would do the right thing, and we didn’t.” she said. “It is a violation of my American sense of morality, to go ahead and commit aggression, provoke death and atrocities in the name of protecting people from the very same thing,”

Todorovich is not alone in feeling betrayed by U.S. actions in the Balkans. Serbs interviewed in the city said they blame President Clinton, not the American people, who they do not believe support the assault on their nation.

They scoff, however, at the notion that the U.S. quarrel is with Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, not with the Serb people. In protests across the city and all over the world, Serbs have taken to wearing bull’s-eyes on their shirt fronts and backs, suggesting they are also targets of the bombs.

George Bogdanich, 50, of the upper East Side, decried what he sees as President Clinton’s bungling of the conflict.

“These obnoxious references to Hitler and Nazis and so on Clinton ought to be aware that Serbs provided the first resistance to Hitler on the mainland of Europe during World War II,” Bogdanich said.

Americans just don’t understand what is at stake in Kosovo, he said. For Serbs to give in to the Kosovo Liberation Army, many said, is tantamount to a violent separatist movement wanting to secede from Texas and Russia or China saying, “Give them what they want or we’ll bomb you.”

“It’s just a sad situation,” Bogdanich said. “But Clinton does nothing but create ill will and bad policies by demonizing Serbs.”

By bombing and threatening Serb sovereignty, he said, Clinton and NATO did for Milosevic what the Serb strongman had not been able to do for himself: wipe out opposition to him in his own country.

Bogdanich bristled at reports of fresh Serb atrocities against Kosovo Albanians since the NATO bombing began. He insisted there is no evidence of such incidents.

Like many other Serbs, he blamed the reports on a biased Western media that have taken complex issues and created a simplified picture of good and evil.

“As a result of the selective press coverage, Serbs have been demonized,” Bogdanich said.

The media, Serbian-Americans argued, tagged the Serb people as genocidal for the killing of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims. But they fail to report that many Serbs have suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of other warring Balkan ethnic groups, they said. They cited, correctly, the 190,000 Croatian Serbs routed from their homes in 1995 by Croat soldiers being advised by retired U.S. generals under the cover of NATO air strikes.

Mark Milich, 46, a third-generation Serbian-American who lives in Port Washington, L.I., said Clinton’s arrogance was responsible for a debacle.

“Our action is not the way to free people from oppression. America, the land of the free, is now responsible for driving these people deeper into their oppression,” Milich said.

“These are the days of infamy,” said Tatjana, 32, of Bernardsville, N.J., an economist for a telecommunications company who did not want her full name used. “I just don’t believe Tomahawks [cruise missiles] can bring peace.”

Todorovich’s parents are happy to be alive. But their worldly possessions have been reduced to the two suitcases they hurriedly packed when they left Belgrade.

“My parents are just recuperating now,” she said, “trying to get over the fear, the treacherous ride through bombs, through the furnace.”

GRAPHIC: CLARENCE DAVIS DAILY NEWS RALLY: Pro-Serb protesters sporting bull’s-eye look popular in Yugoslavia march outside Grand Central Terminal last week.

Oct 17
Love0

’60 batboy sees it again through 14-year-old’s eyes By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

nullSaturday, October 17, 1998

NEW YORK–As ace Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera punched out the final Cleveland batter last week, tears welled up in Fred Bengis’ eyes.
“Are you OK?” Terry, his wife, asked.
“I’m just happy,” he said.
And as Yankees jumped in joy, an image of James D’Angelo, the 14-year-old honorary bat boy during the league championship series against Cleveland, flitted across their television set, and Terry turned to her husband:
“If you could say anything to that kid right now, what would you tell him?”
Bengis didn’t hesitate.
“I would tell him, ‘Kid, this is the very best time of your life. You should really take it all in and enjoy it.”‘
Bengis should know. His entry into the Yankee family began as a 14-year-old bat boy with the legendary Yankee team of 1960. He would stay through the ’61 and ’62 World Series-winning teams.
“The years that I was with the Yankees were, beside being with my family, the most exciting years of my entire life,” Bengis said.
He is 54 years old now, a resident of Yorktown Heights in Westchester County and a national accounts manager for a Maryland-based microbrewery. But those teenage days are as vivid today as when he worked with Yankee greats like Roger Maris, Whitey Ford and Tony Kubek.
The pinstripes, he said, feel like part of his skin, and putting on the uniform today still brings back memories of the first time as a 14-year-old.
Bengis grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, on Morris Ave. about 10 blocks away, and idolized Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth. So, when Lou Zaklin, a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, opened Lou’s Sports Store on 170th St. and Grand Concourse Bengis started frequenting the store. Pretty soon, he got a job as a stock boy.
Zaklin found out from his friend Pete Sheehy, the long-time Yankees clubhouse man, that the Yankees needed a bat boy during the 1960 season. He sent young Bengis along for an interview.
“It was unbelievable,” Bengis said. “When he told me he was going to hire me, I started to cry. My father had tears in his eyes.”
Headier days were to come: Being tongue-tied on first meeting Mickey Mantle; traveling on the road with the team, and becoming a celebrity in his own right. He appeared on television shows and was profiled in Sports Illustrated.
The best part was befriending Maris, he said.
“I just had a lot of fun with him, and I respected him very very much,” Bengis said. “I liked the idea that he was a major-league ballplayer, but he was a down-to-earth, real nice human being who had deep feelings for people. He appreciated my nervousness, and he helped me.”
(c) 1998, New York Daily News.

Aug 26
Love0

A MALEVOLENT HULK Sunken ship continues to claim lives By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

nullWednesday, August 26, 1998

NEW YORK–On a foggy July night in 1956, 52 people died when the cruise ship Stockholm rammed the luxury liner Andrea Doria off Nantucket Island.

But 42 years later, even as the Andrea Doria lies a rusting hulk 240 feet under the Atlantic Ocean, its appetite for blood has not been quelled.

From 1981 through last year, seven divers had lost their lives in search of sport or riches rumored to be beneath the ship’s collapsed deck. Since June 28, three more have died in the dark and deep waters of the North Atlantic.

For divers, the Andrea Doria holds an almost mystical allure.

But it is sinking deeper into the seabed, and its insides are rotted out, with webs of cables everywhere that often snare divers. They risk being blinded by silt stirred by their own motions. And the ocean itself is subject to capricious changes.

Craig Sicola of Surf City, N.J., died June 28 after suffering decompression illness while exploring the wreck.

The body of Richard Roost was discovered July 9, floating face-down in the mud inside the ship’s first-class bar and lounge area. Like Sicola, Roost, 46, of Ann Arbor, Mich., was an experienced diver.

Vincent Napoliello, a 32-year-old stockbroker who lived in Brooklyn, was the latest of Andrea Doria’s victims.

Napoliello was a careful man, those who knew him said. He came home to his apartment one day to find his fiance, Marisa Gengaro, sitting on the sofa wearing a helmet.

“Marisa, what are you doing?” the puzzled Napoliello asked.

“Well, Vincent, accidents do happen in the home, you know,” Gengaro jokingly replied.

“I was making fun of him because he was just so careful about everything,” she said.

By all accounts, Napoliello took that care to his sport, where he was recognized not only as a top-notch diver, but also as a conservative, well-prepared wreck explorer.

William Cleary, a 37-year-old lawyer from Hackensack, N.J., who had been Napoliello’s dive partner for several years, said Napoliello always told everyone not to take foolish chances.

Napoliello’s message was simple: If you run into trouble, leave. You can always go back.

“Vincent had been there for me inside shipwrecks, on a few occasions saving my life,” Cleary said, “including on the day that he died–on the dive prior. He freed me from an entanglement.”

Built at a cost of $ 30 million shortly after World War II and called the Grand Dame of the Sea, the 700-foot, 11-story Andrea Doria was a virtual floating museum of murals, rare wooden panels, and ceramics and mirrors commissioned by its owner, the Italian Line.

Designed with 22 watertight compartments, it was advertised as unsinkable.

It was en route to New York City on the night of July 25, 1956, from Genoa, Italy, with more than 1,600 people aboard when it was broadsided by the smaller Stockholm, whose 750 passengers and crew were bound for Sweden.

It took the Andrea Doria 11 hours to sink, plenty of time for valuables to be removed. But that has not stopped rumors of treasures being locked in her compartments or strewn on the ocean floor.

And a purser’s safe, where passengers kept jewelry and other valuables, is one of 16 still believed to be in the wreck 46 miles off Nantucket.

The most famous explorer of the Andrea Doria was department store heir Peter Gimbel.

In 1981, Gimbel brought up a Bank of Italy safe from the wreck. It contained only soggy paper currency.

His quest for the safe nearly killed Gimbel. He was brought up unconscious, suffering from oxygen poisoning, on his first dive that year. Afterward, he declared that the wreck had a “malevolent spirit.”

The ship’s reputation doesn’t deter several hundred technical divers–those trained to go below 130 feet–from exploring the wreck each summer. About a dozen charter vessels ferry divers from late June to early August.

Napoliello was one of them.

On his first trip of the season, in late June, he and other divers discovered a china closet full of cups, saucers, bowls and pitchers, all bearing the Italian Line logo in gold leaf.

Napoliello returned a week later, on the Fourth of July weekend, and salvaged more artifacts.

On Aug.3, Napoliello was among 12 passengers and three crew members aboard The Seeker, the most active of the Andrea Doria dive vessels, as it departed Montauk Harbor on Long Island.

Anticipating success on this last trip of the season, Napoliello brought cigars and Scotch. The boat reached the site about 8 a.m. the next day, and about an hour later, Napoliello and Cleary made their first dive.

Later in the day, Napoliello dove without Cleary, who was exploring another deck on the ship. Instead, he went down with a man making his first trip to the Doria.

Cleary said Napoliello went into the foyer deck through an opening known as Gimbel’s Hole, down to a depth of about 210 feet, then swam toward the back of the ship to the china closet.

According to Cleary, Napoliello had been breathing the necessary pressurized gas mixtures out of just one side of his double tanks, instead of both. A valve that regulated breathing from both sides somehow had shut off, Cleary said.

So Napoliello thought he was running out of air. He motioned to his partner that he was going up, Cleary said. But instead of using the anchor line on which the Seeker was moored to the wreck, Napoliello swam toward the anchor line for another dive boat, the Sea Inn, a move that has puzzled his colleagues, because Napoliello had not made other mistakes that disoriented or panicked divers make.

At that point, Napoliello had been in the ship for about 17 minutes. Instead of ascending slowly, taking about an hour and breathing gas mixtures with more oxygen to expel the helium and nitrogen from his system, he surfaced in three minutes.

Cleary said Napoliello must have passed out outside the hull of the Andrea Doria, and his lungs ruptured as he floated to the surface.

He had no vital signs when he was pulled aboard the Sea Inn. The Coast Guard was called and helicoptered him to Cape Cod Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.

Medical examiners are still waiting for results of tests to determine what killed him.

Cleary said it would be an insult to Napoliello for him to stop diving.

“I could picture him saying, ‘I’m dead now, and you are not going to do this anymore?”‘

Aug 02
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3 Nudie Bars Get Shuttered By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and FRANK LOMBARDI, With Mike Claffey, Daily News Staff Writers

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, August 02, 1998

The city’s crackdown on sex shops officially got under way this weekend with the padlocking of three topless bars, Mayor Giuliani announced yesterday.

The three were closed Friday as part of at least a dozen enforcement proceedings the city launched against live-sex entertainment premises and book and video stores.

The padlocked bars are: El Coche, 904 Hunts Point Ave., the Bronx; Wiggles, 8814 Avenue D, Brooklyn, and Sharks Go Go Bar, 589 Lincoln Ave., Staten Island.

The closure of Sharks, a topless club in residential Midland Beach, was greeted with relief by neighbors and parishioners of St. Mary Margaret Catholic Church, which is a block away.

As young children rode bikes on the quiet street, a woman who lives next door to the bar said that patrons sometimes had sex with dancers in cars on the street. She requested anonymity.

Mario Pisciottano, 74, a neighborhood resident on his way to Mass last evening, said, “It’s about time they closed that place. We’ve been fighting to get them out of here for a long time. The only ones complaining are the patrons who have got to hunt for a new place.”

Pisciottano said the brick building had housed a neighborhood bar until its owners converted the place into a strip club almost 10 years ago.

Two bright orange stickers on the bar’s metal gate announced that the place was “closed by court order.”

The orders were obtained from state Supreme Court justices under the city’s nuisance-abatement procedures a civil process that allows a premise to be padlocked after three separate violations of various laws, including the 1995 sex-shop zoning law.

Under that statute, sex shops are prohibited within 500 feet of residential areas, schools, churches, day care centers and other X-rated businesses.

Though the sex zoning law was enacted in 1995, opponents managed to block enforcement until now through numerous constitutional challenges and appeals that were finally resolved in the city’s favor.

Judges granted temporary closing orders against the three topless bars based on evidence city inspectors and plainclothes cops gathered by posing as customers, according to the mayor and his criminal justice coordinator, Steven Fishner.

Fishner said the sex-enforcement inspectors either saw dancers in a prohibited “state of undress,” or dancing in forbidden ways, such as simulating sex acts.

The city’s enforcement action will now trigger protracted case-by-case litigation that will revolve around specific provisions and definitions in the zoning law, rather than the law’s constitutionality.

For instance, the law covers book or video stores that devote “a substantial portion” of their stock to material featuring “specified sexual activities” of a graphic sexual nature. Lawyers for padlocked shops plan to squabble over each definition.

Giuliani was confident yesterday that the closures marked the beginning of the end of most of the 146 sex shops originally targeted for closing under the sex-zoning law.

“The race here will go to the steady, not the quick,” Giuliani said of the expected court fights triggered by the crackdown.

Herald Price Fahringer, a lawyer who represents most of the endangered X-rated businesses, said the three closed bars are not among his clients. All he would say was, “When they start with my clients, I’ll be ready for them.”

Closing orders against one of his clients, Show World in Times Square around the corner from a Catholic church are to be argued tomorrow.

Jul 29
Love0

Bus slams, kills father & son, 11: Witnesses say driver ran red light By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, JAMES RUTENBERG and TARA GEORGE with Ruth Bashinsky

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

July 29, 1998

A father and his 11-year-old son were struck and killed by a charter bus yesterday that plowed into them at a notoriously dangerous Broadway intersection.

Scores of work-bound commuters watched helplessly as Peter Dennison, 55, and his son, Morgan, were hit crossing 22nd St. at Broadway on their way to the boy’s school.

The father and son were carried a half block on the front of the bus before it could screech to a stop.

Witnesses told cops that bus driver Cornelius Still barreled through a red light before striking the Dennisons at 7:45 a.m. But Still insisted the light was green and was not immediately charged.

“There was a deadly thud,” said Glenn Hutcherson, 44, a motorist who witnessed the accident. “The next thing I know, they were lying on the street, their legs were intermingled, and the father was under the son.”

They were lying a half block from their hats a baseball cap and floppy fishing hat which were knocked from their heads.

“It was a horrific visual scene,” said Max Sabrin, 45, who works nearby. “My heart goes out to them.”

The Dennisons, just blocks from the subway stop where they caught the No. 6 every day to Morgan’s upper East Side school, were dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Medical Center.

Their wife and mother, Jeannette Kossuth, a massage therapist, was working at New York Downtown Hospital when she was told about the accident.

“I hope you understand this is my husband and my only child,” said Kossuth, 45, her voice quivering, as she returned to the family’s small W. 21st St. apartment with a priest and a friend. “I’m in shock.”

The site of the accident is part of a tangle of streets around where Broadway and Fifth Ave. crisscross. From 1991 to 1996, 51 pedestrians and bicyclists were injured in the area, according to statistics compiled by Transportation Alternatives, a pedestrian advocacy group. One person was killed.

“This is a very dangerous area,” said Elizabeth Ernish, the Transportation Alternatives campaign coordinator. “Ten injuries per year is very high.”

Said George Esthimiagis, manager of Zoop Soups on E. 23rd St. and Broadway: “All the streets crisscross, so no one knows what’s going on until they get to 23rd St. It’s a really bad light.”

Morgan, who suffered from mild autism, was a fifth-grader at Reece School. Friends called him a sweet kid who loved dinosaurs and often visited museums with his father.

Peter Dennison taught kindergarten and pre-school at Park Avenue Christian Church Day School and had a passion for sculpting.

“He was a gifted teacher and talented human being,” said Nancy Vascellaro, the school’s education director. “He was loved by everybody.”

A spokesman for the bus company, Premier Coach, said they’d never had any problems with Still, and were cooperating with the authorities.

May 24
Love0

HERO, BROTHER, EVERYMAN: BRONX MONUMENT IS ONE ALL OF US CAN EMBRACE By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

nullSunday, May 24, 1998
The monument to Cpl. Walter J. Fufidio, which has come to serve as memorial to those who served in World War II and the other wars that have followed, stands almost nondescript most of the year in the square named after him.
It will be spruced up in time for Memorial Day, for those who want to remember.
But for the surviving Fufidio brothers, the monument is a shimmering beacon to the good old days, to the values of sacrifice, family and community that typified that old Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx, something current and future generations can take lessons from.
Arthur, the oldest, went into the Air Force. Walter came next and he couldn’t wait to join up. He was in the Marines. Michael followed, joining the Navy in August 1945, but the war ended three weeks later. And George, the baby of the family, was too young to fight.
“We belonged in World War II and everybody knew it,” Michael Fufidio, now 71 and a resident of Melbourne, Fla., said. “A lot of us volunteered and for a small neighborhood, we sent a lot of people off to that war.”
In scenes that were probably repeated in every neighborhood, block, or corner in the city, kids played seemingly endless games of stickball in the streets one day and the next day their families were seeing them off to go fight in a distant war.
Michael Fufidio, their father who himself fought in the World War I a few short years after arriving in America from Italy in 1914, would take three of his sons over the Spofford Avenue hill to go to the Longwood Ave. station.
Walter Fufidio, an artilleryman, would participate in the campaign that came to symbolize the United States Marine Corps: The bloody invasion of the volcano island of Iwo Jima and the planting of the America flag on Mount Suribachi.
Nearly all of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima were killed. Among the 6,821 Americans killed was Cpl. Walter Fufidio. In the waning days of that campaign, Marines undertaking a mop-up operation were pinned down by shattering shell fire from a fortified Japanese position.
As his posthumous Navy Cross Medal, second only to the Medal of Honor in American military honors, described, Walter was without cover when he delivered a steady stream of neutralizing shell fire against the enemy position, enabling his infantry unit to charge and wipe out the resistance.
“He galantly gave his life for his country,” the citation read.
George Fufidio said his mother took the loss very hard. Anna Fufidio, now 96 and living in a Throgs Neck nursing home, visited her son’s grave at St. Raymond Cemetery on Tremont Ave. for many years afterward.
“She’d go up there and she’d wipe the snow off the grave,” George Fufidio, who is 62, said.
In the years after the war, Michael would serve 20 years in the New York City Police Department and Arthur and George each served 20 years with the city Fire Department.
Arthur Fufidio was reflective when asked what lessons should be drawn from his brother’s monument. Government officials make wars and call on regular folks like him, his brothers and the other boys they grew up with to fight, he said.
“We were meant to serve and that was it,” Arthur Fufidio said. “It doesn’t seem like the world is in any different position now. That was supposed to be the war that ended all wars but we seem to live under a constant threat of war.”

Apr 26
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FENFLURAMINE STUDY HURT BOY: Single Dose of Controversial Drug Altered Personality, She Says By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, April 26, 1998

The Brooklyn woman said she got a letter telling her to bring her 8-year-old son to the state psychiatric institute for a survey on children whose older brothers had been convicted in Family Court of crimes as juveniles.

“They wanted to do a study on my son to find out if he had any behavioral problems,” said the woman, who spoke to the Daily News on condition that no one in her family be identified.

Last week, she was in tears after reading in The News that the study was steeped in controversy, with critics blasting the use of fenfluramine on children and questioning the use of only black and Latino boys. The Food and Drug Administration last year banned fenfluramine, the offending half of the prescription diet drug fen-phen. The researchers, meanwhile, issued statements denying wrongdoing, but refused to discuss their studies.

In all, the parents of 34 boys ages 6 to 10 made the trip to the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Washington Heights in 1994 and 1995. The boys fasted for 12 hours, were given psychiatric and psychological tests, then a single oral 10 mg. dose of fenfluramine. Then, while hooked to a catheter, they had blood drawn each hour for about five hours.

The Brooklyn woman said she and her son were given $ 230, plus a $ 100 Toys “R” Us gift certificate for their participation, then were sent home.

But that is no solace to the Brooklyn woman.

Her son was happy-go-lucky, did well in school and never had a behavioral problem. But she figured she had to cooperate with the letter because an older son was incarcerated on a robbery conviction.

Her son ceased being his happy-go-lucky self soon after the experiment, she said. The boy, now 11, suffers anxiety attacks, has severe headaches, has developed a learning disability and is about to be put in special-education classes.

Claudia Bial, a spokeswoman for the psychiatric institute, expressed surprise at the symptoms the boy’s mother described.

“A single dose of fenfluramine poses no risk,” Bial said. “I’m sorry that the child suffered these things, but I don’t think it has anything to do with that one dose.”

But critics of the studies disagree with Bial. Vera Hassner Sharav, the head of Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry and Research, cited a study published in 1996 in the journal Society of Biological Psychiatry that said a single dose of fenfluramine had been shown to cause headaches, lightheadedness and difficulty concentrating in 90% of adults who took just one dose of the drug.

“Since there is no study to show the drug is safe for children, but there is plenty of evidence to show that it is unsafe for adults and it is unsafe for animals I mean it causes brain damage in animals you would think that little children would never be exposed to it,” she said.

Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Queens College Psychology Department conducted a study about the same time, experimenting on a group of boys diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder. That study and the one that tested the Brooklyn woman’s son were trying to determine: Were these boys predisposed to violence or crime?

Some criminologists and psychiatrists increasingly use fenfluramine in studies to stimulate and measure serotonin in the brain. The more serotonin a person has, the less likely he or she is to engage in anti-social behavior, they hypothesize.

Evan Balaban, senior fellow in experimental neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is a leading critic of the fenfluramine behavioral genetic studies. The studies have become more prevalent in the past 10 years.

“What people were trying to say beforehand which I believe I’ve shown is not true is that they [those prone to violence] are not releasing enough serotonin and that for some reasons, which are not specified very well, this predisposes you to violent behavior,” he said.

Irving Gottesman, a professor of psychology and genetics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, defended fenfluramine studies, saying they help researchers understand individual differences in human aggression, He said the studies could lead to interventions that are ethical and based on science.

Apr 05
Love0

HIS CAUSE His Spirit Moved Them by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

nullSunday, April 5, 1998

Children were raising innocent voices in freedom songs in church basements as adults braved firebombs, water hoses, dogs and jails for full rights as American citizens.

As a 5-year-old, Suzan Johnson joined the other children singing at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Now 41, the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook is pastor of the Bronx Christian Fellowship Baptist Church and a
member of President Clinton’s race-relations panel.

“Those were the wonder years for us,” say Johnson Cook, whose mother taught public school in Harlem for 22 years and whose father was one of the city’s first black trolley car drivers. “I remember the energy of our
community, as if we were all moving as one wave, not waves clashing against each other. We had a common purpose, a common cause, and we worked toward making it happen. And there hasn’t been in my lifetime
another movement like that. It was a spiritual movement.”

Virginia Fields was 17 in 1963 when a bomb exploded in Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, while she was worshiping there. She was primed for activism when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came through town months later for his first march on Birmingham.

Fields, 52, now Manhattan borough president, was swept up in the mass arrest that ended the march and spent five days in the Birmingham City Jail, where King wrote his now-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
“We all believed so much in his leadership,” she said. “We felt that he was going in the right direction, and after so many earlier attempt to desegregate the schools and the lunch counters had failed. With his leadership and his mass action, we just felt a renewed sense of excitement, of energy.”

African-Americans had endured the horrors of some 300 years of slavery to arrive at the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 free, but with few rights of citizenship. But by the end of World War II, black patriots returned from their service with the sense of a rightful place at the table as members of the American family.

In the years that followed, a migration of blacks from the rural South to the cities gave birth to a sizable black middle class—and the civil rights movement.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, established in 1909, attracted funding from new members made up largely of educated blacks in the North. Many of these included young lawyers who, through the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, methodically waged court challenges that clarified and expanded the rights of African-Americans.

In one such case, the 1954 Supreme Court allowed Linda Brown to attend Summer Elementary School, an all-white school near her home in Topeka, Kan., paving the way for desegregated schools and many of the civil rights gains to come.

Resistance in the South to the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling would propel the fledgling civil rights movement in its struggle to bring down many of the barriers to black participation in American life.

The battle gave the nation generations of African-American leaders, including King, who as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would go on to captivate America and the world.

Percy Sutton, who in 1966 had been elected Manhattan borough president, marched with King a week before he was killed.

“He was a quiet and effective revolutionary in bringing about changes in the human condition here in America,” Sutton said.

Julian Bond and the group he co-founded, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, joined other young people from the SCLC, the Congress of Racial Equality and the NAACP to stage sit-ins, boycotts,
marches and freedom rides to test the enforcement of desegregation. Weeks ago, Bond was elected chairman of the NAACP.

Bond said he is old enough to know that things are better now, but he also admits, “There are some indices of black life in America that are abysmal.”

Sutton said the battle to solve current problems of black life would have to be waged without a towering figure like King.

“Dr. King was the last of the singular civil rights leaders.” Sutton said. “The day of the singular leader is gone.”

“Now in every city, or every town there is a man or a woman who stands up for the rights of minorities who is that leader in that town in that factory, in that bus line, in that community. They are all leaders,” Sutton said.

Johnson Cook carries on the struggle in her work in the church, in her community and especially on the President’s race-relations panel.

“What I’ve seen in the two short years I’ve been here (in the Bronx) is a complete transformation of a people who are reclaiming our sense of community that we all learned as kids but lost,” she said.

Johnson Cook said the discussion on race has also changed from the time of the civil rights movement, when the issue was largely getting social justice for black Americans. Today, 33 years of immigration have changed the face of America.

“We are always wrestling with the issue of whether we should forget the black-white struggle and move on to the diversity question,” Johnson Cook said.

She said the chapter is not closed yet on that struggle because blacks are still fighting for justice in this society. At the same time, other minorities have their voices in the debate now, she said.

“The question we are asking is, ‘Can we be one America in the 21st century?’ And the strong implication in that question is that, in many ways, we are not,” Johnson Cook said.

Feb 22
Love0

Five Points Had Good Points By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments
THE FIVE POINTS ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT

In the early 1990s, a group of archaeologists began an excavation in Five Points. Their research revealed that there was much more to Five Points than the filthy, poor, and crime-infested area that early visitors had described. On February 22, 1998, the Daily News published an article by Michael O. Allen that described some of their findings.

February 22, 1998

Even today, nearly 100 years after its demise, much of what is known about the old Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan is legend and lore. This crossroads of Old New York came to be known as a refuge for Irish immigrants, where vice, crime and unspeakable poverty prevailed. But according to a report to be delivered soon to the U.S. General Services Administration, the neighborhood was much more complex and diverse-like today’s New York.

The Daily News has obtained portions of the report based on an excavation completed in 1992 by John Milner Associates, a Philadelphia archeological and architectural firm. Archaeologists, before work could begin on the construction of the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, dug up 14 lots in the neighborhood and looked through garbage and other buried belongings. They unearthed 850,000 artifacts, 100,000 alone from a tenement that housed 98 tenants at 472 Pearl St. Their findings challenged all known assumptions about the area.

They found expensive Asian and European porcelain, gilded bone china, household ceramics, elaborate tea sets and glass, tobacco pipes, textiles, jewelry and other household items that showed people had disposable income. They also found evidence-in the form of professionally butchered beef, lamb and pork bones-that people consumed expensive meats.

Using census data and bank records, especially those of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, founded by the Irish Emigrant Society of New York, they were able to show that lawyers, doctors, teachers, bankers and politicians lived in the neighborhood. Many people were drawn to Five Points because of its cheap housing and ready jobs, said Rebecca Yamin, the project manager on the excavation. But there were also many well-to-do families who owned property and businesses.

“When we look at this collection, we got this sense that life was very difficult, unspeakably overcrowded and unsanitary, but there was also this sense of exuberance,” Yamin said. “This was the period that New York became what it is today, which is this phenomenal thing.”

The artifacts also show clearly the city’s ability to contain vast wealth in proximity to abject poverty, said Heather Griggs, an archaeologist involved in the project. “It was a neighborhood of poor people and people who were living the American Dream,” she said. “Each apartment held a different family with a different dream. Some made it. Others didn’t. That’s the American experience.” Five Points, named for the intersection of Anthony (now Worth), Orange (now Baxter), and Cross (now Park) Streets and a small park, Paradise Square, sprouted at a low, marshy spot northeast of City Hall. Artisans and other tradespeople came, as did tanneries, breweries and slaughterhouses next to 46-acre Collect Pond. But the pond became so polluted that by 1803 the city’s Common Council ordered it filled. It was this landfill area that became known as Five Points.

The neighborhood grew to be overwhelmingly Irish, although there were a sizable number of East European Jews, Germans, blacks, Italians, Poles, East and West Indians and a smattering of Prussians. Most Irish lived in rooms, cellars and garrets of buildings along Park and Pearl Streets, Griggs said.

No sooner had the neighborhood taken shape than its image as a dangerous place began to set in. Residents worked a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs, such as construction, carpentry, masonry and dressmaking. But concerns over street peddling of fruit, oysters and sexual favors caught the attention of outsiders. In 1842, a terrified Charles Dickens said he would not venture into the neighborhood without a police escort, noting “ruined houses,” a “world of vice and misery” and “all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed.”

In recent years, Caleb Carr used Five Points as backdrop for dark doings in The Alienist, and Luc Sante offered lurid tales in Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York.

Social reformer Jacob Riis, through his book, How the Other Half Lives, persuaded the city to undertake slum clearances that in 1894 began to spell the end for Five Points. By 1919, remnants of the neighborhood were swept away with construction of the New York County Courthouse, now the state Supreme Court, as Worth and Baxter Streets.

But experts say there are vibrant, living examples of what Five Points may have been. “Chinatown is a perfect modern example of what the neighborhood may have been like,” Griggs said. “I love walking through Chinatown today because I can imagine what it was like 150 years ago when the Irish and Jews and Germans lived at Five Points. That’s what this project is about, dispelling myths of the immigrant slums.”

“Life is always more complicated than caricature makes it out to be,” Sante said. “This archaeological dig was very important. People will write interesting books about why there is this disparity between the way these people lived and how the legend got reported.”

The archaeologists also created a website that gives much more information on Five Points and includes a virtual tour of the artifacts they found.

http://schools.nycenet.edu/csd1/museums/fivepoints/points4.html

http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm