MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Olbermann's SPECIAL COMMENT

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Finally as promised, a Special Comment tonight on the inaccurately described “Ground Zero mosque.”

“They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

Pastor Martin Niemoller’s words are well known but their context is not well understood. Niemoller was not speaking abstractly. He witnessed persecution, he acquiesced to it, he ultimately fell victim to it. He had been a German World War 1 hero, then a conservative who welcomed the fall of German democracy and the rise of Hitler and had few qualms the beginning of the holocaust until he himself was arrested for supporting it insufficiently.

Niemoller’s confessional warning came in a speech in Frankfurt in January, 1946, eight months after he was liberated by American troops. He had been detained at Tyrol, Sachsen-hausen and Dachau. For seven years.

Niemoller survived the death camps. In quoting him, I make no direct comparison between the attempts to suppress the building of a Muslim religious center in downtown Manhattan, and the unimaginable nightmare of the Holocaust. Such a comparison is ludicrous. At least it is, now.
But Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust. He was warning of the willingness of a seemingly rational society to condone the gradual stoking of enmity towards an ethnic or religious group warning of the building-up of a collective pool of national fear and hate, warning of the moment in which the need to purge, outstrips even the perameters of the original scape-goating, when new victims are needed because a country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred — magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without.

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August 19, 2010
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DEMOCRACY MAY BE FACING A DIFFICULT BIRTH

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom VoteNo Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 24, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—After living much of her life with the perverse indignities of apartheid, voting in South Africa’s historic first all-race elections this week comes down to one thing for Louisa Rakale:

“I’ll vote if somebody comes to take me to the polling station,” the 85-year-old Soweto grandmother said.

By the reckoning of racial separation laws that governed their lives, Rakale and her sisters Jeanie Khali, 86, and Alsie Makgamele, 87, were born “colored” to a white (Scottish) man and a black (Xhosa) woman.

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April 25, 2009
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City Urged to Scrap Homeless Shelter Plan By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

March 21, 2002

Opponents of a proposed 400-bed homeless shelter in Williamsburg rallied against the plan last night, calling on Mayor Bloomberg to cancel it.

“What they’re creating is a warehouse for homeless men,” said Jose Leon.

Opening the East Williamsburg Industrial Park facility, at an old factory at 89 Porter Ave., is the first half of a plan to close the 800-bed 30th Street men’s shelter at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. The city will build a second 400-bed facility in the Bronx.

The Giuliani administration signed a $180 million, 22-year contract with the Manhattan-based Doe Fund to operate the shelter, immediately drawing the ire of Brooklyn elected officials and community activists, who sued the city.

Marty Needelman, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services, said the city used subterfuge to avoid input from the community. But the city maintained the plan did not require review because, in part, the Doe Fund is a nongovernmental firm buying a building from a private seller.

“It’s a bad precedent,” Needelman said. “If the city can get away with avoiding the land-review process through this technicality on a $180-million project, then they can do that on a lot of other projects and undermine one of the critical features of the City Charter.”

Lower courts have ruled against the project opponents, but they have filed notice that they intend to appeal.

Even the Coalition for the Homeless — which fights to get the city to live up to its obligations to provide shelter, housing and services for the homeless — is opposed to the project.

“It’s an incredibly shortsighted and poor policy,” Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, said of the plan. “Our position has been that that money would be much better spent to open permanent housing for the rising number of homeless men.”

But George McDonald, founder of The Doe Fund, which finds work and provides treatment for homeless men, said the coalition should be working with The Doe Fund, not fighting it, on this project.

“This is a replacement facility, not a new shelter,” McDonald said. “In a system like we have in New York City, you have to have tranistional facilities. You can’t take somebody right off the street and put them in permanent housing.”

But Assemblyman Vito Lopez (D-Williamsburg) asked why it has to be Williamsburg, which has a waste-transfer station that processes 40% of the city’s trash daily and a 200-bed homeless shelter in nearby Greenpoint.

He said he had heard a bio-tech medical research facility is being installed in place of the Manhattan homeless shelter that would be closed down.

“Instead of giving us the homeless shelter, give us the bio-tech research facility,” Lopez said. “It would be a very positive thing for our community because it would create hundreds of jobs.”

Linda Gibbs, commissioner of the city Homeless Services Department, said the project is a necessary service.

“It is not a matter of making a choice between providing permanent housing, or a homeless shelter,” she said. The city has an obligation to provide shelter for anyone who needs it.”

March 21, 2002
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SUBWAY VOTE POSTPONED A Transit Authority committee has postponed a vote on proposed subway By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

May 16, 2001

Transit Authority committee has postponed a vote on proposed subway service changes, including the controversial plan to shorten the G line.

New York City Transit and Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials will instead consider a new proposal that community groups opposed to the TA plan offered on Monday, leaders of the groups said yesterday.

The TA meeting, originally scheduled for tomorrow, will instead be held May 24.

The subway service changes had initially been on the agenda of the MTA board in March, but were taken off the table at the request of Gov. Pataki, and have been under discussion ever since.

John Leon, a consultant to the Noble Street Block Association in Greenpoint, which has led the fight over G train service, said the group had submitted a plan proposing the G train remain as it is, and the F train continue to use the 53rd St. tunnel between Queens and Manhattan.

“This should make the Queens riders happy and, of course, it would make Greenpoint-North Brooklyn G riders happy as well because their train would continue to go to Continental Ave.-Forest Hills,” Leon said. The MTA has proposed ending the G line at Court Square in Long Island City.

Tina Chan, transportation chairwoman for the Queens Civic Congress, said the communities’ proposal — which would have the new V line go through the new 63rd St. tunnel instead of switching the F to the 63rd St. tunnel— answers all of the agency’s concerns while keeping vital subway services to Queens.

“The F train needs to service quite a few important stations on the west side of Queens, such as the Queensboro Plaza, Court Square, and there are quite a few important facilities along the line such as Citibank, LaGuardia College, the School Construction Authority,” she said.

“Most important is that a lot of F train commuters transfer to the No. 6 train at the 53rd and Lexington Ave. station,” she said.

“If you reroute the F train to the 63rd St. tunnel, people would lose that transfer. In order for them to transfer, they are going have to walk out of the station from 63rd St., walk about four blocks to the 59th St. station. We feel that’s just not a viable transfer at all.”

Present at the meeting Monday where the proposals were presented were MTA Executive Director Marc Shaw, TA President Lawrence Reuter, and other TA and MTA staff.

Representatives of the Straphangers Campaign and the Regional Planning Association, an independent planning group, helped the opponents draft the alternate plan.

“The MTA representatives looked at it very objectively and the TA president said he would check it out,” Leon said. “He wasn’t as enthusiastic so we have to wait to see what his ultimate decision is.”

Tom Kelly, spokesman for the MTA, said the community groups made “suggestions” rather than a proposal at Monday’s meetings.

The TA will continue meeting with community groups and listening to their suggestions, he said.

May 16, 2001
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HIS CAUSE His Spirit Moved Them by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo 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.

April 5, 1998
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SENIOR CITY-ZENS; They left only to find there’s no place like home

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo 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

October 26, 1997
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Green: Nix Pix-Tix Fix

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo 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

September 14, 1997
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FLEETING INFAMY Many are called, but few are frozen in spotlight By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and RICHARD T. PIENCIAK, Daily News Staff Writers

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, May 4, 1997

Most people who grab fleeting notoriety — Sukhreet Gabel, the kid who stole the A train, Lady Bing and Yankee switcher Fritz Peterson — disappear quickly and quietly.

Then there are those like Burton Pugach, resurrected at regular intervals, and Donald Trump, who never seems to leave the stage.

Pugach has defied the odds by stretching his fame to 45 minutes with front-page appearances in 1959, 1974 and 1997.

The 70-year-old ex-attorney first surfaced when he paid three goons $2,000 to throw lye into the face of a girlfriend who had discovered he was married. After serving 14 years in prison, Pugach hit the front pages again in 1974, when he married the woman who had been blinded in the attack.

His third major foray into the public arena concluded last week with his acquittal in Queens on charges that he had threatened to kill his most recent ex-mistress.

In Trump’s case, his soap opera — separation from Marla — is just beginning.

Here’s a reprise of what happened to some others who just faded away:

Howie Spira

Howie Spira, George Steinbrenner’s one-time archrival, would love to return to center stage. These days, Spira has an entertainment lawyer and a literary agent; he’s hawking a book and movie about his life and says he is dating a beautiful 25-year-old airline employee from California.

Howie’s big moment in 1990 produced dire consequences for a variety of people: The Boss got suspended from baseball; Fay Vincent ultimately was booted from the baseball commissioner’s office; and Spira ended up in federal prison.

Spira claimed Steinbrenner had paid him $40,000 to dig up dirt on slugger Dave Winfield. The FBI charged him with extortion.

Several weeks before his parole in October 1993, Spira made the acquaintance of another inmate, former New York Judge Sol Wachtler.

“He was very upset,” Spira, now 38, recalled. “I introduced him to people. We became friends.

“It’s been very, very difficult. The same people who to this day chase me for autographs or want to talk baseball will not give me a job because of the stigma. . . . I’m frightened about my future.”

Francine Gottfried

Front-page allegations of sexual harassment lodged last week by several female employees of a Long Island brokerage house suggested that the more things change in Wall Street circles, the more they stay the same. Take the case of the Wall Street Sweater Girl of 1968.

At the time, Francine Gottfried was 21 years old, stood 5-foot-3 and earned $92.50 a week as a data processing operator for Chemical Bank. A completely different set of numbers brought intense public attention to the Brooklyn native: her 43-25-37 figure.

The frenzy over Gottfried began spontaneously; several brokerage house employees noticed she exited the BMT subway station near the New York Stock Exchange each workday shortly before 1:30 p.m. The workers told their friends and colleagues, who told more people.

During a two-week period that September, the crowds grew from several hundred to more than 15,000 — all in search of a glimpse of Francine in her extremely tight yellow sweater.

“A Bust Panics Wall Street as the Tape Says 43,” blared one Daily News headline. Added The New York Times: “10,000 Wait in Vain for Reappearance of Wall Street’s Sweater Girl.”

Meanwhile, Francine began considering whether to charge for interviews and photos. “I’ve got a million dollars of publicity already, but no money,” she said. “This is the biggest thing to hit Wall Street since the Crash of ’29, and I should be compensated.”

But Francine eventually dropped from the radar screen by taking a different route to work.

Keron Thomas

On May 8, 1993, at the age of 16, Keron Thomas took Duke Ellington’s musical advice one step too far: He didn’t simply take the A train, he stole it.

A train buff since his childhood in Trinidad, Thomas rode the subway at all hours.

Thomas became such fast friends with trainman Regoberto Sabio that one day he found himself behind the controls of the shuttle between Franklin Ave. and Prospect Park.

Psyched by the experience, Thomas called the 207th St. subway yard in Inwood, identifying himself as Sabio and requesting an overtime shift.

The dispatcher failed to ask Thomas for photo I.D. or his employee badge, which enabled the older-looking teen to take control of a 10-car train.

An estimated 2,000 passengers were aboard during the ensuing three-hour ride.

Thomas might have gotten away with the caper had he not exceeded a 20 mph speed limit, tripping an emergency signal.

The sheer brazenness of Thomas’ act captivated New Yorkers. Friends at Brooklyn Automotive High School took to calling him “A Train.”

The charges were reduced to misdemeanors, and Thomas was sentenced to three years probation.

But 18 months after the A train incident, Thomas was arrested for stabbing a teen.

Charged with attempted murder, Thomas spent 177 days on Rikers Island and pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree assault. He was credited with time served and was released in July 1995 on five years probation.

Last week, Probation Department spokesman Jack Ryan said Thomas’ file was sealed. Despite being 18 at the time of the stabbing, Thomas ultimately was treated as a youthful offender.

Sukhreet Gable

For nine riveting days in 1988, Sukhreet Gabel testified against her ailing 75-year-old mother — a respected judge — former Miss America Bess Myerson, and Bess’ lover, contractor Carl (Andy) Capasso.

The prosecution alleged that Sukhreet had been given a city job in return for her mother’s fixing of Capasso’s divorce settlement. The bribery trial ended, however, in acquittals for all.

“I think I was naive,” says Gabel, now 47. “I might do it differently if I had to do it all again. But my mother’s words always come back to me. What she said was to always tell the truth, and I think those are good words to live by. My mother was a wise woman.”

Sukhreet remembers her moment in the spotlight as having been quite awful.

“So often I would be misunderstood and labeled crazy, when I don’t think I am,” she said. “I’m certainly a character, but I’m not crazy.”

These days, Gabel is busy importing and exporting traditional and high-end contemporary textiles, a job that takes her all over the world.

Lady Bing

At age 22, Carroll Lee Douglass married 65-year-old moviemaker Jack Glenn. Following a divorce, she married William Rickenbacker, son of World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker. In 1987, at 47, she married retired Metropolitan Opera impresario Sir Rudolf Bing, 85 at the time.

The wedding ceremony had taken place only two days after Bing’s relatives succeeded in getting a judge in Manhattan to schedule a competency hearing for him.

Bing and his wife, who took to calling herself Lady Bing, appeared at the hearing on Jan. 12, 1987, but vanished once the judge declared that the groom was incompetent to handle his financial affairs.

Within a month, the Daily News traced the newlyweds to the idyllic Caribbean island of Anguilla.

Eventually, the pair returned to New York, where a judge annulled the marriage; Sir Rudolf entered the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.

Last Thursday, a worker at the home confirmed that Bing still is a resident. “He’s doing fine,” she said.

Does Lady Bing ever come to visit?

“No,” the employee said. “She hasn’t been here in well over a year.”

Harvey Sladkus, Lady Bing’s attorney, said she appeared unannounced at his law offices on Park Ave. several weeks ago. “She looked very sad. She had lost considerable weight.”

Lady Bing wondered whether Sladkus would hire her as the office receptionist.

“I told her, ‘We already have someone in that position,’ ” the attorney recalled.

Alice Crimmins

Alice Crimmins may well have achieved her aim of blending anonymously into the community. But more than three decades ago, her crime held the city spellbound.

Her daughter, Alice Marie Crimmins, 4, and the child’s brother, Edmund, 5, disappeared from their Kew Gardens Hills apartment July 14, 1965. The girl’s body was found a half-mile away and the boy’s a mile away.

It took two trials over a six-year period before Alice Crimmins was convicted of her son’s murder and of manslaughter in her daughter’s death. The investigation focused on Crimmins’ many boyfriends.

The murder conviction eventually was overturned for lack of evidence, but she was sentenced to 5 to 20 years for the manslaughter conviction.

On Friday, Thomas Grant, assistant to the chairman of the state Parole Board, said Crimmins no longer is under parole supervision. He said records indicate she was released from a state correctional facility on Sept. 9, 1977, after serving nine years. He said her official file also showed a closure date of Jan. 17, 1993.

Crimmins, who married a Long Island construction contractor while on a weekend furlough, no longer talks to the media. Her last known address was a high-rise in Bayside, Queens.

She consistently has denied killing her children.

Yankee Wife Swappers

Even if former Yankee left-handed pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson had produced Hall of Fame numbers, their off-the-field exploits would have overshadowed what they did on the mound.

At the beginning of the 1973 baseball season, the two close friends and free spirits told the world they had swapped wives, children, dogs and houses.

Peterson moved in with Susanne Kekich and her two daughters, Kristen, 4, and Reagan, 2. They married soon after she divorced her husband.

For Mike Kekich and Marilyn Peterson, the exchange had an unhappy ending. They broke up two months after he moved in with her and her sons, Gregg, 5, and Eric, 2.

Fritz and Susanne remain married. Peterson works as a craps dealer at Grand Victoria Casino Boat in Elgin, Ill.

Original Story Date: 050497

May 4, 1997
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Chopper Firm Opts To Battle Eviction By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullSunday, May 4, 1997

A tourist helicopter service that the city ordered to vacate the 34th St. heliport last week is seeking bankruptcy protection in an effort to avoid eviction, the Daily News has learned.

National Helicopter Corp. first asked federal court to stop the eviction, then tried state court before going to U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan on Friday to ask that it be allowed to reorganize its business.

The eviction would prevent the firm from returning to solvency, the company is expected to argue.

But the city will ask the bankruptcy court for permission to evict the firm because it does not have a lease and owes $700,000 in back rent, David Klasfeld, chief of state to the deputy mayor for economic development and planning, said yesterday.

“We have them running from court to court,” Klasfeld said. “It is important that they be evicted from this site and that the number of flights in the city be reduced.”

No one at National Helicopter could be reached for comment yesterday.

The city action has grounded 54,000 annual flights and addressed complaints by Manhattan residents about helicopter noise. City officials described their action as the first in a series of steps to eliminate tourist helicopter service over Manhattan and cut chopper flights by 40%.

Johnson Controls, a business helicopter service based at E. 60th St. that does not operate tourist flights, would be shifted to the heliport vacated by National. In turn, the E. 60th St. heliport, site of a business chopper crash on April 15 that killed one person and injured three, would be closed.

May 4, 1997
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Rudy Trashes Rent Decontrol Compromise By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, April 20, 1997

Mayor Giuliani yesterday rejected a potential compromise in the battle to save state rent laws, saying the protections must be maintained for 2 million tenants.

The mayor said it was “unacceptable” to lift the ceiling on rent hikes for units where tenants move out or die because that would eventually eliminate the protections.

However, Giuliani said it was “a good sign” that state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, who has threatened to let rent laws expire June 15, has signaled new willingness to compromise.

“We are urging Sen. Bruno and the Senate and the Assembly to continue rent stabilization completely for everyone, protect everyone,” Giuliani said at City Hall.

Bruno (R-Rensselaer) warned that outright renewal “is not going to happen.”

But Bruno, who first demanded a two-year phase-out in exchange for dropping the June 15 expiration, added he “would be willing to consider a lengthier transition in the context of a negotiated resolution.”

Giuliani’s statements represent the latest effort by the mayor to aid tenants without attacking fellow Republicans trying to end regulations.

The exchange came a day after Bruno softened his initial threat, hinting he might accept vacancy decontrol, enabling tenants to keep their apartments for years.

But even as he offered willingness to compromise, Bruno said he was “not locked in” to a deal on vacancy decontrol.

Bruno criticized Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) for holding to an all-or-nothing demand for renewal of the rent laws.

“Such an unwillingness to negotiate . . . makes it more likely that the laws governing rent controls will lapse on June 15,” Bruno warned.

Original Story Date: 042097

April 20, 1997
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