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Nov 16
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Rudy Backs Regents Requirement

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, November 16, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Mayor Giuliani yesterday supported the state Board of Regents’ new foreign language requirement for high school graduates, setting up a possible showdown with Chancellor Rudy Crew.

“The system should introduce more languages,” Giuliani said at a Bensonhurst news conference. “It’s an excellent idea. This whole movement toward higher standards is exactly what the city public school system should be challenged to do.”

Crew had said he had “grave reservations” about the added requirement, included in a new package of reforms for students entering ninth grade in 2001.

The board’s plan would have high school students take two to three years of instruction in a foreign language, then pass a Regents examination to earn a diploma. But Crew said the requirement would be hard on kids in lower-performing schools, reasoning that they would have less time for remedial work. Board officials said that only 7% of city high school students take Regents exams in foreign languages.

J.D. LaRock, a spokesman for the city Board of Education, said yesterday that although the chancellor supports students who want to take foreign languages for advanced Regents diplomas, he has deep concerns about the costs of the new requirement.

“I don’t want to draw distinctions between the mayor and the chancellor’s positions. I just want to highlight the chancellor’s concerns,” LaRock said, adding that more than 1,000 additional teachers would be needed if the requirement is instituted systemwide.

Original Story Date: 11/16/97

Nov 16
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DOROTHY DAY Life of a Saint?

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, November 16, 1997

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

In the clatter of spoons on soup bowls and excited voices absorbed into murmurs in the smoke-filled first-floor kitchen of St. Joseph House last week, it was hard to tell the poor from their helpers.

The house was not unlike a home, its inhabitants restless siblings in an uncommonly large family, which was as Dorothy Day would have it.

They are, after all, her children continuing her life’s work.

A couple of dozen people had taken shelter for the night in the five-story hostel on First St. in the heart of the Bowery, and another couple of hundred poor and homeless, society’s derelicts and rejects, had just been fed that day.

It has been 100 years, almost to the day, since Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn Heights, and 17 years since she died at her movement’s Maryhouse for women at 55 E. Third St.

Her life encompassed a breathtaking pilgrimage, including a period of fast living that gave way to an ascetic, intellectual and spiritual quest that seared generations of Roman Catholics.

By 30, she had run with the suffragettes and had drunk intellectuals under the table in Greenwich Village. After the birth of her daughter in 1927, Day converted to Catholicism.

In 1933, with mentor Peter Maurin, she started The Catholic Worker movement and the newspaper of the same name.

Reared an Episcopalian, she practiced a brand of Catholicism leavened by her earlier radicalism that scorched the Church’s leaders with its purity.

She took to heart the Sermon on the Mount, living among and as one of the poor, as the Bible said Christians should.

But it was her pacifism, social activism and philosophy of nonviolence that often brought her in conflict with the Church’s hierarchy and with governments everywhere. It would lead to her being jailed and fined numerous times in New York and elsewhere.

Supporters like Jesuit priest the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a friend of Day and an ardent peace activist, said the Church eventually adopted some of her pacifism, but it never was an easy fit.

“They couldn’t sleep at night with Dorothy around,” Berrigan said.

“The Church was very uncomfortable with her. The Church was officially silent all during the Vietnam War and approved the Second World War. She said no war.”

In the very same Catholic Church she drove to distraction with her radicalism, the air now is filled with talk of sainthood for her.

Day’s ‘Children’

Such talk sets the teeth of Day disciples such as Carmen Trotta and Joanne Kennedy on edge.

Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy, in a rueful reminiscence in a recent issue of The Catholic Worker, explained the wariness in her own way.

She said her grandmother turned the life of poverty into something dynamic, full of richly simple moments. But the “impulse to send her off into sainthood, which can be as lethal as complete rejection,” risks placing her beyond the reach of average folks, she said.

In Trotta and Kennedy and countless other young people of conscience who continue to commit to the movement, Day could not have found more faithful followers.

Kennedy, who aspired to be a criminal defense attorney, bagged law school after completing the first year at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

“I was starting to lose faith in that, anyway,” she said.

As others tidied up after a meal at St. Joe’s, as the movement’s unpaid staff calls the place at 36 E. First St., Trotta sat sharing smokes and enduring good-natured ribbing from Kennedy.

At another table, next to a stack of recent issues of the movement’s 1-cent newspaper, The Catholic Worker, Gerry Howard talked to a couple of indifferent companions.

Kennedy, 29, was chatting about the movement’s work with the poor and an ideal of personal responsibility.

“I believe that each person takes care of the other,” she said. “It is not about evangelization, not about making people feel like they are getting a handout, or even about me feeling good about myself because I’m doing this thing. It is about the dignity of every human being.”

Kennedy came to the New York City Catholic Worker community seven months ago from another one in Des Moines.

About 125 hospitality houses, farms and communes inspired by Day are now spread across the nation and seven countries.

Howard, 48, lived in the abyss of homelessness for nine years, including six in the subway tunnels near the St. Joseph House. Transit police officers roused him from sleep daily in time for him to get on the soup line at the hospitality house, where he found his salvation.

Walking down First St. one day 2 1/2 years ago, wracked with the pain of his myriad sufferings, Howard said he burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

“I was trying to figure out why my life was going the way it had gone for so long and wanted a way to turn it around,” he said.

A staffer beckoned him inside and allowed him into the basement, where he spent a couple of hours crying and begging God and pleading with his parents, long dead, to forgive him for the shame that was his life at the time.

Six months later, he walked back into the life of a son that, because of his addiction to crack, he had never seen. He has been clean since and now has a job at an antique shop. He continues to live at the house as he puts back together pieces of a life shattered by addiction.

The movement does not consider the assistance the shelter shared with Howard as charity.

Trotta decries the practice in some churches in the city where they set aside a few cots a night for the poor and homeless only to turn them out in the morning.

“The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor,” Trotta said. “Someone said, ‘You must pray that the poor forgive you the charity you give them,’ because in reality all that the Earth contains is meant for us to share.”

The ideal that Dorothy Day lived, and which The Catholic Worker movement continues to practice, Trotta said, is that “each Christian conscious of a duty in the Lord . . . should take in one of the homeless as an honored guest into their homes.

She Urged Action, Duty

Trotta, behind the desk later in the day at the Mary Gearhart Gallery at 252 Mott St., where an exhibit of Day’s photographs and writings are on display through Dec. 7, railed against the American government, the World Bank, the greed of American corporations and society’s complacency in the face of injustices everywhere.

Reared a Catholic and a rock-ribbed Republican in Inwood, L.I., Trotta came to the movement disillusioned with the lies of American history and the Church. Private studies, he said, allowed him to shed his “mindless conservatism” and led him to The Catholic Worker movement.

Some visitors to the exhibit, devotees of Mother Teresa, departed, and Trotta mentioned how someone called Day “The Mother Teresa of Mott St.” in a recent article on Cardinal O’Connor’s assertion that he would begin the formal process to declare Day a saint.

Trotta did not take the comment as a compliment to Day.

“I am not speaking against Mother Teresa . . . ” he said, “but I have a devotion to the sort of sharpness of Dorothy Day, that doing of charity that didn’t come at the expense of justice, of speaking out about justice.”

Making Dorothy Day a saint could allow people to shirk this duty that she expects of them, some of her supporters say.

“I don’t care to be dismissed so easily,” she had said when during her own life people thrust sainthood on her.

Patrick Jordan, the managing editor of Commonweal magazine, who lived at St. Joseph House from 1969 to 1975, said making her a saint would be good if it meant that her whole life would be taught, not just the part that the Church finds comfortable.

“When the lives of the saints are recounted, often you only hear certain aspects of those lives,” Jordan said.

“If you study more deeply, you find out that some of these people were very challenging, not only to individuals and society, but to the Church itself.”

Day’s pacifism, her real attempt to love her neighbor, sacrifice herself for just causes, place herself in God’s hands and pray for her persecutor, were all a real part of her legacy.

“If those aspects of her life were forgotten because of her canonization,” Jordan said, “then that would be a loss to the whole Church.”

Said Berrigan: “Anyone who knew Dorothy or has done any reading of what she wrote would say she is already a saint. She doesn’t need this official kind of mark on her life.”

The Road to Sainthood

A long-time friend of Dorothy Day’s likened the Catholic Church’s canonization ritual to shooting someone out of a cannon.

Some of the early Christians did come by sainthood in a sudden and violent fashion, but today the Catholic Church puts candidates through a complex, decades-long saint-making ritual.

  • The process begins with a local bishop, in this case, Cardinal O’Connor, confirming the local fame of a servant of God for good works or martyrdom after examining evidence gathered by an informal guild of supporters. That examination, even before the process moves to Rome, can take years. O’Connor is about to embark on that process.
  • A bishop then will argue the person’s cause before a Congregation of the Causes of Saints, which will investigate the candidate’s heroic practice of virtues in a trial-like setting. Success at this level would lead to the candidate being declared “venerable.”
  • The candidate would be deemed “blessed” when two provable miracles occur in his or her name after death.
  • A third miracle would allow the person’s cause to be taken up again so he or she could be canonized as a saint.
Nov 09
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ISLAM ON THE RISE; Converts, a Boom in Births Help Swell Rank of Muslims

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

nullSunday, November 09, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN

NADIA BARNES RECITED the shahada, or central principle of Islam.

“La ilaha illa Allah, sa Muhammadun rasulu Allah,” Barnes said after Imam Muhammed Salem Agwa: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is the messenger of Allah.”

The 23-year-old fashion designer and finance student descended from the balcony, where women pray apart from men, into the main hall of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York for a ceremony as old as time itself.

Under the copper dome of the nation’s most resplendent mosque, a gilded crescent pointing to Mecca as she was encircled by a dozen men, Barnes pledged belief in eternal life and hellfire, that “Jesus is a prophet, not a god,” that Muhammed is the “last prophet” of Allah and that Islam is the one true religion. Also, she vowed to give alms to the poor, pray five times a day and one day go to Mecca.

With that, Agwa welcomed her into the umma, or community.

“Good,” Agwa said. “Now you have faith; now you are a Muslim.”

Barnes is part of the dramatic rise for the religion of Islam in New York and in the nation.

Fueling the growth is immigration from predominantly Islamic nations, a high birthrate in Muslim families, and conversion to the religion by African-Americans and women, such as Barnes, who marry Muslims.

Immigration from countries with large Muslim populations, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been rising.

And, more recently, Muslims have come here from Indonesia, Africa, and, with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union, new nations like Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many of the newcomers are highly skilled workers doctors, engineers, pharmacists who have been able to come because of less restrictive immigration laws.

The impact of Islam on New Yorkers’ lives is hard to miss, from the mundane changes, like alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules, to the most heartfelt.

The star and crescent moon now are displayed alongside Christmas trees and Chanukah and Kwanzaa candles during the winter holiday season.

Eid Al-Fitr, a feast that follows the Ramadan month of daylight fasting, was added to the 29 holy days of various religions for the estimated 100,000 Muslim students in city schools.

Mosques and traditional Muslim modest clothing now are commonplace in many city neighborhoods.

As Nadia Barnescompleted forms in a basement office of the nation’s most resplendent mosque at 96th St. and Third Ave., she spoke about the spiritualism of Islam and the calm and peace it has brought to her.

“I just felt the most strength of my life, that I was doing the right thing, that I was meant to do this,” she said.

Not only was Barnes converting to Islam, she was bringing a stray back to the flock: her husband, Muhammed Gundel, 33, a Pakistani immigrant who said he allowed his faith to lapse about 21/2 years ago.

As their ranks have grown, Muslims have done like other religions and established parochial schools for religious and cultural education.

At the Al-Iman School at the Imam Al Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens, Masooma Hussain, 13, and her 11-year-old sister Fatima typify the emerging generation of Muslims.

Now of Elmont, L.I., they came to New York from Pakistan with their parents seven years ago.

The girls, wearing scarves to cover their hair, were outspoken about their place here, belying the stereotype of Muslim women as docile, compliant and oppressed.

Fatima, who wants to be a doctor, said she feels at home in New York.

“It’s not like I’m from another planet,” she said.

Marc Ferris, who teaches in the general studies program at New York University and has written about the city’s Muslim communities, said mosques bring a welcome brand of tolerance.

“In New York City, we’ve got the most international and cosmopolitan Muslim community in the world,” Ferris said. “Africans, Guyanese, Asians, Americans.”

And Muslims from countries that are mortal enemies somehow find a way to worship together in the same mosque when them come to New York, he said.

“At an Albanian mosque in Brooklyn, Turks and Albanians, who are historic enemies, pray side by side. The same with Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. They seem to be more united here in religion because they are minorities. A lot of the Old World stuff gets buried,” Ferris said.

A source of anguish to them is when Islam is equated to terrorism. They complain that the phrase “Islamic terrorist” unfairly taints their religion for nationalistic acts by groups and individuals who happen to be Muslims.

Numan Okuyan, 42, owner of Metropolitan Graphic Art, a gallery on 82d St., notes that no one referred to Timothy McVeigh as a Christian terrorist when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma.

And, like many Muslims interviewed by the Daily News especially non-Arabs Okuyan, who was born in Turkey to Uzbek parents, blames the media for defining his faith by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Okuyan pointed out that his mosque has worshipers from all over the world; others note that Arabs make up just 20% of the faithful.

Dr. Abdul Rehman, who immigrated here in 1968 from Pakistan, recalled some of the early struggles finding a place to worship or the proper food to eat. Today, he is chairman of the board of trustees for the Al-Noor Mosque in Staten Island, which was started by Pakistani immigrants like him but now has a largely African-American congregation.

By far the largest number of Muslims in the United States are African-American converts.

The Chicago-based Nation of Islam opened a temple in Harlem in 1946 and saw membership soar when Malcolm X arrived eight years later as the imam. But its emphasis on black empowerment and exclusion of whites has been controversial.

M.T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs, said members of the Nation of Islam are not genuine Muslims because they are in a political movement, not a religious movement.

Traditional Islam is a color-blind religion, and the Nation of Islam is reacting to white racism in this country, Mehdi said. Of special concern to Muslims, he said, is the baggage Louis Farrakhan brings in his history of statements that have been deemed anti-Semitic.

But Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan reacted angrily to that characterization of his movement.

“I’m a Muslim,” Farrakhan insisted. “Don’t try to make me a politician. When we say that the Nation of Islam will be more political, it is out of our spiritual underpinning, our faith in Allah that we challenge the forces of evil in this society.”

GRAPHIC: MARK BONIFACIO JON NASO DAILY NEWS JON NASO DAILY NEWS MARK BONIFACIO BENEATH DOME of Manhattan’s Islamic Cultural Center, worshipers, including Nadia Branes and her husband, Muhammad Gundel, pray and study (photos opposite and top). Dr. Abdul Rehman and daughter Naheed (above) worship at Al-Noor Mosque in Staten Island, where he serves as chairman of the board of trustees.

Nov 09
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Rudy Won’t Return 10G Gift From Abe

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, November 9, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN and RICHARD T. PIENCIAK, Daily News Staff Writers

Mayor Giuliani said yesterday that he has no intention of returning developer Abe Hirschfeld’s $10,000 campaign contribution, even though the gadfly politico and one-time newspaper publisher is being investigated for allegedly plotting to kill a long-time business partner.

“Generally, the rule that I follow here is if someone gives me a contribution and it turns out they are alleged to have done something, I either return it or not, depending how the allegation works out,” Giuliani said. “Right now, it’s an allegation.”

Daily News columnist Mark Kriegel reported yesterday that Hirschfeld, 78, a failed candidate for Manhattan borough president and one-time candidate for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate, is being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a possible murder-for-hire plot.

The News identified the alleged victim as Hirschfeld’s long-time real estate associate, Stanley Stahl, 72.

The two moguls have been partners in several major real estate transactions over four decades, but their relationship has grown acrimonious in recent years.

Sources told the News that investigators are trying to determine whether Hirschfeld contracted through a third party to have Stahl murdered, then changed his mind.

Hirschfeld, who declined yesterday to comment on The News story, is free on $1 million bail on charges he cheated the city and state out of $2.2 million in taxes.

He claims the 123-count indictment is part of a political conspiracy to prevent him from gaining public office.

DA Robert Morgenthau’s murder-for-hire investigation grew out of the tax fraud prosecution, according to the sources.

Hirschfeld, who served briefly as publisher of the New York Post, has not been asked to appear for questioning, the sources said.

When asked about the murder-for-hire allegations earlier last week, Hirschfeld told The News: “I have no idea what kind of bulls— you’re talking about. I am stunned.”

Stahl, who has been accompanied by bodyguards since early this year, declined to comment.

When the tax indictment was returned in May, Giuliani declined to return $10,500 in contributions his campaign had received from Hirschfeld and his wife.

In keeping the money, the mayor reversed a long-standing policy of refusing donations from those under indictment.

The mayor was asked yesterday about keeping the contribution “now that [Hirschfeld] is a murder suspect.”

Giuliani avoided answering directly, responding instead about Hirschfeld’s outstanding criminal charges.

He said returning the contribution now wouldn’t be fair to Hirschfeld’s reputation: “He is going to go to trial. Let’s see what the outcome of his case is.”

Original Story Date: 11/09/97

Oct 26
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SENIOR CITY-ZENS; They left only to find there’s no place like home

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, October 26, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Horst Liepolt left New York City in 1995 for Berlin, where he was born 70 years ago, only to discover his heart belongs to the Big Apple.

Ditto for Dolores White, now retired, who yearns to live in the city again.

Howard and Arlene Sommer, in their 50s, are giving the city another whirl after their children flew the coop. And, two years into their return from a 40-year sojourn in suburbia, Mort and Sonia Goldstein are loving every second of life in the city.

In all the good notices New York City is getting for its historic reduction in crime and improved quality of life, not to mention the burgeoning economy, a little-remarked-upon but growing trend is that the city is also becoming haven to a group that appreciates the big town’s excitement: retirees and the so-called “empty nesters.”

Although statistically difficult to measure, anecdotal evidence confirms that a growing number of retirees, especially former New Yorkers, are choosing the city and spurning such traditional retirement locales as Florida, California and Arizona.

Commissioner Herbert Stupp of the city Department for the Aging said he is not surprised.

“It’s a very senior-friendly city, perhaps the most in the country,” he said.

New York is a good place to grow old because of all its conveniences, including access to health care, the most developed mass transit network in the Western Hemisphere and discounts everywhere for seniors, Stupp said.

Retirees themselves cite the ease with which they can live, the excitement of the city and its cultural offerings.

But Charles Longino Jr., a demographer at Wake Forest University, was brutally blunt on the reason the elderly are returning to the city.

“They are coming back because they’ve gotten old and widowed in Florida, and their health is failing, and they want to be near their families,” he said.

Andrew McPherson, a junior equity research analyst at Salomon Brothers, concurs.

Seniors often move to warmer climates when they retire, he said. But as they hit their mid-80s, especially when one spouse dies, they have a harder time getting along on their own.

“The kids still live up in the Northeast. Then the issue is, every time Grandma slips and falls or has a problem, the kids have to hop on a plane and fly down to Florida,” McPherson said.

It makes more sense for Granny to be near the family.

And, sensing a need, developers in the city are offering upscale continuing care and assisted-living apartment buildings, where older residents receive personal care, including help with getting dressed, bathing and medication.

Glenn Kaplan, chairman of the Kapson Group, which owns and operates 20 such facilities in the region, said his firm has another 22 on the drawing board or under construction, including five scheduled to open in the city within three months. Other developers recently opened senior care apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Other evidence supports retirees who say they are returning because of their love of the city and what it offers. Real estate firms, which are on the front line of selling and renting homes and apartments to the returnees, say they are experiencing a boom.

Andrew Heiberger, president of Citi Habitats, which rents more than 3,500 apartments a year in the city, said returnees make up about 6% of his business, up from about half that just a few years ago. His firm found an apartment for Horst Liepolt just this month.

Liepolt was a Grammy-winning jazz record producer who ran the Sweet Basil jazz club in Greenwich Village for 10 years before returning to Berlin with his wife, Clarita, two years ago.

“I thought with the Wall coming down, and with the whole rebuilding thing, it was going to be like the Wild West and honky-tonk, something happening, excitement,” Liepolt said.

He found quite the opposite.

“In those 2 1/2 years, there was no excitement, only Doomsville.”

Contrast that to an awestruck Liepolt visiting New York for the first time almost 40 years ago.

“You see it in movies, you see it in pictures, but it was another thing to actually be here. It was amazing. That was it. I felt very good and right at home,” Liepolt said.

It’s a sentiment Howard Sommer, a 57-year-old president of an investment fund who was born and reared in the South Bronx, understands.

Sommer’s journey took him briefly through Chicago before plopping him down in Long Island for 30 years of the whole suburban treatment: two children, a big house on 31 /2 acres, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

But when the kids grew up and went to college and, upon graduation, moved to Manhattan, Howard and Arlene Sommer, 55, found themselves with too much house. Howard was itching to get back to the city, but his wife was not too sure she was ready to give up the space and comfort of their home and the bonds she formed over the years.

They sold the home anyway and have been renting a Manhattan apartment for seven months now. Arlene is back in school studying to become a psychoanalyst. And Howard is having a terrific time.

“At this point in my life I want to be in the middle of everything,” Sommer said. “I love stepping out of my apartment and being on the streets and all the people and the energy and the excitement. . . . It’s good to be a New Yorker again.”

When she turned 65, Sonia Goldstein decided it was time that she and her husband, Mort, leave Plainview, L.I., and return to the city, where he was reared.

The dossier: 40 years in the suburbs, three children, a dog and a large house that had an office for Mort, a psychologist. He needed some convincing because the move meant ending his practice. Solution came in the form of a two-day-a-week practice on Fire Island. He feels now he has the best of both worlds.

And Sonia is just loving it.

“New York is the place to be when you are retired,” she said. “You are not dependent on a car. You can get to wherever you want to go with mass transportation, and you are not locked in isolation in your home.”

The couple has subscriptions to practically all the cultural institutions in the city.

“The way we get together with friends that we don’t see as much anymore is we have subscriptions with them,” Sonia Goldstein said. “So, I have a subscription to Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club, the Roundabout and then in between, my daughter and I love the ballet so we go to that, either traditional ballet or Alvin Ailey.”

The older-than-60 crowd numbers 1.3 million in a city of 7 1/2 million people, so cultural institutions, even as they court families and younger audiences, find their base is highly dependent on retirees.

At the Roundabout Theatre Company, for instance, more than 30% of the 35,000 people on its subscription roll identify themselves as retired, said marketing director David Steffen.

“It’s important that everyone realize that there is this huge influx of people coming back into the city,” he said.

Dolores White, for one, has been to all the retirement places and thought they were nice — but not for her.

And when she says “I’m a city girl,” she doesn’t mean just any city.

“I’ve been to Chicago, which I liked. I was in San Francisco. I liked it. I’ve been to Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, but I like New York the best,” White said.

The 68-year-old former teacher grew up in Brooklyn, and remembers cutting class to see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount in the 1940s. She remembers Harlem, Little Italy and Chinatown.

She is now working on exchanging her rambling East Northport, L.I., home for an apartment in the Tribeca-Battery Park area, or in Brooklyn Heights.

“There’s such an array of cultural activities, restaurants, shopping . . . you could just sit on the stairs of some of the office buildings and people-watch for hours,” White said.

The city’s rejuvenation recalls for her the old days.

“We felt very free in those days, traveled in the subway with ease. I see that coming back. I see it coming back again. That is what is drawing me back to moving back to the city,” she said.

Original Story Date: 10/26/97

Oct 26
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Rudy Pooh-Poohs Dem Bigs’ Digs

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, October 26, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN and LISA REIN Daily News Staff Writers

With a comfortable lead in the polls, Mayor Giuliani yesterday refused to engage in a war of words with Democratic challenger Ruth Messinger — even allowing harsh comments from his predecessor, former Mayor David Dinkins, to go unchallenged.

Dinkins, who spent the better part of a rainy afternoon campaigning with Messinger in Brooklyn and Queens, accused Republican Giuliani of running an “out-of-control” campaign that would “self-destruct” before Election Day.

“I predict that Mayor Giuliani has a great capacity to self-destruct, and I think he’s going to do that in the next 10 days,” Dinkins said, at times stealing the spotlight from Messinger yesterday.

“He’s out of control right now,” Dinkins continued, recalling the mayor’s blistering attack on Messinger for not attending Mass on Columbus Day. “He seems to think that the whole world started on Jan. 1, 1994, when he became mayor.”

But Giuliani, crisscrossing the city with campaign stops in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Harlem and Throgs Neck in the Bronx, refrained from attacking Dinkins, saying only, “The best thing for me to do with a question like that is to say, ‘I’m not going to respond.’ ”

When asked if he thought Dinkins could rescue Messinger’s flagging campaign, the mayor said he “couldn’t evaluate the other side.”

The mayor’s comments came at Sylvia’s Restaurant, a Harlem landmark where he capped a swing through clothing stores along W. 125th St., receiving warm greetings from proprietors.

Earlier, the mayor tasted meatball calzones and onion rings on his first-ever tour of a superstore, the Costco in Sunset Park. The visit came a day after he pledged to mount an aggressive campaign to revive his failed proposal to speed up the opening of more megastores if he wins reelection.

But as he marched in the small Parade of Flags along Fifth Ave. just a few miles away, some merchants told the mayor that superstores would decimate their mom-and-pop stores.

Messinger campaigned in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, getting thumbs-ups from shoppers and merchants along Broadway.

She then took the stage with Dinkins at the Panamanian Day parade in Brooklyn, where she accused Giuliani of positioning himself for a run for national office, a move she insisted would push him to the right politically and divert his concerns from the city’s schools.

Giuliani denied the charge, calling it an “irrelevant issue” and calling his “sole focus” his race for reelection.

Original Story Date: 10/26/97

Oct 05
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Debate Can Wait For Yanks – Rudy

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, October 5, 1997

By PAUL SCHWARTZMAN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers

Mayor Giuliani said yesterday that he wants to reschedule his Thursday night debate against Democrat Ruth Messinger to avoid a potential conflict with a Yankees playoff game.

The lifelong Yankees fan said most New Yorkers, himself included, would rather watch the Yankees chase the pennant than the mayoral candidates duke it out.

“I would want the maximum number of people to watch the debate,” he said.

“I also have to admit that I’d rather watch the game. Wouldn’t you? . . . You have to admit the reality that huge numbers of New Yorkers want to watch the ballgame.”

The Yankees will be playing if they beat Cleveland to advance in the playoffs.

Messinger said she would debate on another day as long as Thursday’s encounter remained on the schedule, too. Giuliani aides rejected the offer.

The Campaign Finance Board scheduled the debate under a law requiring candidates to take part if they receive public financing for their campaigns. A second debate will be held later in the month.

Giuliani has rearranged his schedule for the Yankees before. He postponed a campaign fund-raiser last year because of a potential conflict with the World Series.

The debates represent a chance for Messinger to gain ground in her underdog candidacy.

Mayoral aides denied Giuliani was trying to send a message that it’s okay for people not to watch.

Meanwhile, it appeared that Brooklyn Councilman Sal Albanese, an also-ran in the Democratic mayoral primary, was moving toward endorsing Messinger, possibly this week.

Messinger participated yesterday in a march against child labor in overseas sweatshops. The march included criticism of the Disney Co.

Messinger said that she was not against patronizing Disney’s stores, but that people still could “send a message” that child labor is unacceptable. She said it would be “tragic” if Giuliani did not attend because of Disney’s business interests in the city.

Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel said it was hypocritical for Messinger to march when she accepted a $5,500 contribution from a Disney family member.

Oct 05
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FBI’s Most Vaunted

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, October 5, 1997

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

The Most Wanted List, an icon of a seemingly bygone era, started innocently enough.

A wire service reporter asked the FBI in 1949 for a list of the toughest guys it would like to capture. The resulting story in newspapers around the nation generated so much publicity that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made it a permanent list.

The Most Wanted Lists of the ’50s featured bank robbers, burglars and car thieves. By the ’60s, radicals made it onto the list. Revolutionaries, serial killers and mobsters hit the list in the ’70s.

Since the late 1980s, the FBI has been using tabloid television shows, such as “America’s Most Wanted,” to generate publicity.

That program’s first show in 1988 profiled David Roberts, an prison escapee who had been serving six life terms, two of them commuted death sentences.

After the show, New Yorkers tipped off law enforcement that Bob Lord, a homeless man who quickly worked his way to director of Carpenter Men’s Shelter in Staten Island, was none other than Roberts.

New York has been a favorite haunt of the famed list’s fugitives. At least 37 of 451 suspects that the FBI has put on the list have been nabbed here.

Gerald Watkins was profiled on “America’s Most Wanted” in 1995. In 1994, his girlfriend turned down his marriage proposal; he shot her, her son and their 18-day-old daughter. He then came to Harlem, his boyhood home.

Cops caught him trying to duck out of the window of an apartment.

Even serial killer Andrew Cunanan came this way once.

The current list includes Queens hoodlum Paul Ragusa.

“What the numbers might lead you to conclude is that fugitives think New York is a good place to come, to sort of blend in, be anonymous, disappear,” FBI Agent Jim Margolin said. “We think otherwise.

“What the numbers also indicate is that we and the NYPD are very good at finding people who don’t want to be found,” he said.

Even beyond the city limits.

Before his late son Tupac branded himself an outlaw rapper, Mutulu Shakur was a black revolutionary who masterminded a string of armored car robberies, including a 1981 Brink’s holdup in Nanuet, in Rockland County, that went haywire and led to the deaths of three people.

After 3 1/2 years on the Most Wanted List, Shakur was captured by two New York cops on a Los Angeles street corner in February 1986. One of the cops stopped Shakur with a flying tackle.

Mutulu Shakur is serving a 60-year prison sentence.

Sep 14
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Green: Nix Pix-Tix Fix

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, September 14, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN and RICHARD T. PIENCIAK, Daily News Staff Writers

A possible merger of the Loews-Sony and Cineplex Odeon movie chains would violate federal antitrust law and raise ticket prices — already the highest in the nation, Public Advocate Mark Green charged yesterday.

Green said a “new Sony” would account for 42% of the 351 movie screens across the city. He said just two chains — the combined Sony-Cineplex Odeon along with United Artists — would own 67% of screens in the city, with the next closest competitor holding only 8% of the action.

As a result, Green charged at a news conference outside the Sony Lincoln Square Theatres at Broadway and 68th St., prices would surely go up.

“The $15 movie ticket will be coming to a theater near you if the Loews-Sony acquisition of Cineplex Odeon is approved,” Green said.

In a formal petition to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Robert Pitofsky, Green contended the merger would represent a “blatant violation” of the Clayton Antitrust Act, which prohibits any acquisition that may “substantially lessen competition” or “tend to create a monopoly.”

Green said he feared such a merger would force independent movie houses to close.

“What big movie studio would sell ‘Forrest Gump 2’ or ‘Terminator 4’ to an independent exhibitor or a small movie chain when the new Sony could dictate price because they have market power?” Green asked.

He warned particularly of a “Manhattan movie monopoly,” because the combined conglomerate would control 61% of screens in the borough, already home to average ticket prices of $8.75.

To assess the impact of the acquisition, Green’s staff checked theaters showing the top 10 grossing films for the weekend ending Aug. 17.

All nine Manhattan theaters showing “Cop Land” were owned by Sony or Cineplex Odeon. Of the nine showing the No. 2 film, “Air Force One,” five would be owned by the “new Sony.”

Officials from the movie chains have confirmed talks regarding the possible merger to industry trade publications, including the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety.

Original Story Date: 091497

Sep 10
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SAL WHO? Runs Strong 3rd

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Wednesday, September 10, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN and JERE HESTER, Daily News Staff Writers

Maverick City Councilman Sal Albanese surprised the experts again last night with a strong third-place finish in the Democratic mayoral primary.

The 47-year-old Brooklyn lawmaker had 21% of the vote with 99% of ballots counted — a good showing by a candidate who was met with responses of “Sal who?” when he announced his candidacy in March 1996.

“We came up short in . . . a tremendous battle for the soul of New York,” Albanese said in his concession speech at the New York Hilton last night, as his supporters chanted, “Sal! Sal! Sal!”

He said he hadn’t decided whom to support in the run-off. “I’m a Democrat, I’m a strong Democrat, but tonight I’m not going to make any decision,” said Albanese (pictured, with his daughter), who left the door open to a potential run as an independent candidate in November’s general election.

Albanese, who ran his grass-roots, citywide campaign on a shoestring budget of less than $900,000, blamed money woes for not being able to take out TV advertisements until the race’s final days.

“We ran hard and we ran against all the odds. But we never gave up,” said Albanese, who made labor and wage issues the centerpiece of his campaign.

“It’s clear that we began to connect with the voters,” he said. “We just could not reach enough people. We shook a lot of hands. But you have 8 million people in this city, you have 2 1/2 million registered voters. You have to get on the air.”

Still, for Albanese, the third-place showing marked a high point in his quirky political career.

It wasn’t the first time that the Italian immigrant and former public school teacher has surprised naysayers.

“Sal has always fooled the experts,” said his campaign manager, Don Crouch.

A graduate of John Jay High School in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn and York College in Queens, Albanese launched his political career in 1982 by ousting Brooklyn City Councilman Angelo Arculeo, a 29-year incumbent.

He quickly made his mark as a maverick who often defied Council Speaker Peter Vallone (D-Queens) and his conservative Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst constituents by backing liberal causes such as gay and abortion rights.

On the campaign trail, he hammered Mayor Giuliani for doling out tax breaks to big corporations that pay low wages to nonunion laborers.

His mayoral platform called for cutting taxes for small business. But he also pushed to raise income taxes for families earning more than $150,000 and for suburban residents who work in the city.

He wrote and worked with fellow council members long enough to pass a popular piece of legislation requiring city contractors to pay prevailing union wages.

Original Story Date: 091097

Sep 07
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Volpe’s Return Spurs Angry Blast

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, September 7, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Lawyers for alleged police torture victim Abner Louima yesterday criticized city officials for allowing the central suspect in the 70th Precinct scandal to return to police duty.

Officer Justin Volpe, accused of sodomizing Louima with a stick, will return to modified duty this week. That means he has been stripped of his gun and badge, and will work at a desk job.

Under civil service law, cops cannot be suspended without pay for more than 30 days.

“It is shocking, it is unfair, it is morally unacceptable that while Abner Louima continues to languish in his hospital bed, the man who stands indicted for putting him there can be allowed to return to business as usual,” said Vladimir Rodney, a spokesman for the Haitian-American Alliance.

The Rev. Al Sharpton and Carl Thomas, Louima’s lead attorney, said that Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir should have taken steps to prevent the return of the officers, and that they should not hide behind provisions of the police union contract.

Aug 31
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KIDS ON PARADE; Get jump on grownups

By Homepage, New York Daily News No Comments

Sunday, August 31, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, TARA GEORGE and DON SINGLETON, Daily News Staff Writers

Eastern Parkway boomed with Caribbean music and bloomed with bouquets of colorful feathers and flowers yesterday in a warmup for tomorrow’s 30th West Indian American Day Carnival Parade.

It was Children’s Day, and thousands of youngsters paraded up the broad thoroughfare in costumes that were smaller versions of the ones their parents, uncles and aunts will be wearing tomorrow. Everywhere you looked, folks were dancing to reggae and calypso and soca beats.

“The adults are going to have their parade Monday, but today’s our day,” said Dennis White, 18, who was dancing with a group of relatives at Eastern Parkway and Kingston Ave. “It’s a chance for us to show pride in our West Indian culture.”

Andrew McKenzie, 38, of Jackson, N.J., was standing with his daughters, Melissa, 5, and Kimberly, 6, who were dressed as queens of Sheba with gold crowns and lots of gold glitter.

As Melissa’s mom encouraged her to dance, her dad beamed with pride and moved to the beat of the music. “This is my culture,” he said. “I did this myself, and I want my kids to enjoy it, too.”

Iwojima Lewis, 49, was there with his 7-year-old twin daughters, Vanessa and Denise. Vanessa was having a ball. “I love the costumes,” her mom said, “and I love to see the children in a parade. It’s good to know where you come from and hear all the different music.”

More than 2 million people are expected to turn Eastern Parkway into a sea of color and calypso tomorrow in one of the city’s largest annual events.

“This is what we live for,” said performer Harriet James, 38, of Queens. “This is carnival!”

Months of planning and rehearsing will bear fruit as thousands of dancers in sequins and feathers sashay to the pulsating sounds of steel and brass bands.

The parade starts at 10 a.m. at the corner of Utica Ave. and Eastern Parkway. Floats will move west down the parkway to Grand Army Plaza, where they will turn onto Flatbush Ave. and proceed to the finish at Empire Blvd.

Original Story Date: 08/31/97