New York
‘She Said She Lived in Las Vegas Now but Loved New York’
Just Lovely
Dear Diary:
Walking into a coffee shop on Second Avenue and 63rd Street, I was having trouble opening the heavy door. A woman behind me grabbed it and held it open.
“Thank you,” I said. “Are you coming in or are you just lovely?”
“Both,” she said.
Eventually, we headed down Second Avenue together. She said she lived in Las Vegas now but loved New York. She said I looked like a New Yorker.
I said I was.
“Do you know someplace around here where I can get pound cake?” she asked.
I recommended a place three blocks away.
She frowned. I suggested a cafe that was closer.
“Oh forget it,” she said. “My husband doesn’t need it anyway.”
— Marion Barak
Loose Vegetables
Dear Diary:
I was in New York City for a summer program at NewYork-Presbyterian. I would often go downtown after classes ended for a late lunch in Chinatown and to buy some groceries before taking the Q and the 1 back to my Upper West Side apartment.
One sweltering July day when I had been extra ambitious in my grocery shopping, I waited 45 minutes for a 1 train and then had to squeeze into a completely packed car.
As the train left Times Square, I struggled to balance myself while unsuccessfully corralling my grocery bags around my feet.
By the time we left Columbus Circle, my tomatoes had rolled over several pairs of feet, my lettuce was under someone’s seat and I was more frustrated than I had been in a long time.
A gentle tap on my arm pulled me out of my self-pity. It was a young mother sitting nearby. She called her toddler onto her lap and then nodded at the newly empty stroller in front of her.
From there, we traveled uptown in companionable silence as her stroller overflowed with a watermelon, two cantaloupes and three bags of vegetables.
— Amelia Ng
Grand Time
Dear Diary:
I was on a downtown A in November 2023 when I noticed a happy family sitting across from me. Mom, dad and the children all appeared to be having a grand time.
It was relatively warm for the season, and dad was wearing shorts. He obviously did not care if anybody noticed that he was also wearing an ankle monitor on his left ankle.
As a criminal defense lawyer, I certainly noticed. When I got off the train, I smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. He smiled back at me.
— Robert Beecher
Wild and Free
Dear Diary:
We had been married a year and were living in Kew Gardens Hills when we decided to make a Target run at 9 p.m. with our 3-month-old. We could still live wild and free, right?
We picked out two bright-green lawn chairs that would fill our porch (really just a tiny slab of cement off the kitchen). We were not sure they would fit in our compact car, but we bought them anyway. Somehow, stuff always fits, we figured.
When we got to the parking lot, our baby ran out of his patience, and we realized the chairs would not fit after all.
A man approached us to help. The woman he was with called out to him.
“Stop chatting,” she said. “It’s after 10 o’clock.”
“They have a baby!” he yelled back.
He reached down, took the laces out of both of his sneakers and tied down our trunk.
I tried to pay him for the laces.
“Nah,” he said. “Just drive slow and take Jewel. You’ll make it.”
We did and we did.
— Avi Friedman
Summer Clearance
Dear Diary:
This occurred years ago, when I was a newly married New York City public-school teacher furnishing the new apartment my husband and I had moved into.
One late-August afternoon, I met two friends for lunch at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Afterward, I walked to Bloomingdale’s to see if they had any items I could use in the apartment.
As I entered the store, I saw a sign hanging above the lower level: “Big Summer Clearance Sale.”
I went downstairs. To my amazement and delight, I saw tables overflowing with kitchen items like dishes and small electrical appliances; bathroom towels; and blankets, comforters, sheets and pillows for the bedroom. Everything I needed.
A young saleswoman offered to help me. I soon realized that I could not carry all of my purchases home on the subway.
The saleswoman said that Bloomingdale’s would deliver everything to my home at no charge and within a week.
I gave her my address: 495 East 55th Street.
She looked overjoyed.
“Sutton Place?” she asked.
I smiled.
“No,” I said. “Brooklyn.”
Her smile vanished. But my purchases were delivered within a week, as promised.
— Evelyn Oberstein
New York
N.Y.P.D. Narcotics Unit Under Review After a Beating Is Caught on Tape
The New York Police Department said on Tuesday that it was launching a three-month review of its narcotics division after two of its detectives were recorded brutally beating a man they had mistakenly arrested during a drug sweep last week.
As part of the review, the Police Department said it had disbanded the team responsible for the drug sweep, a small group within its narcotics unit in Brooklyn. That team was shut down on Friday, and its members have all been reassigned or placed on desk duty, the department said.
The overhaul of the division was announced a week after videos showing two narcotics detectives punching, kicking and dragging a man across the floor of a Brooklyn liquor store spread online.
The videos show the two detectives beating the man, a security guard named Timothy Brown, as they struggle to wrestle him into handcuffs for nearly eight minutes. The department said the arrest had been part of an undercover operation in the area and that the detectives had believed Mr. Brown to be involved in a drug deal. After beating and arresting Mr. Brown, the police determined that they had targeted the wrong man and that Mr. Brown had not been involved in the drug sale.
The police charged Mr. Brown with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, but the Brooklyn District attorney’s office said it would decline to prosecute the case.
The footage, and news of the mistaken arrest, prompted immediate backlash from New York lawmakers, civil libertarians and police critics, some of whom described the behavior as extrajudicial punishment. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been careful not to anger the city’s police force, last week condemned the conduct in his strongest words of criticism since taking office. “The violence used by N.Y.P.D. officers in this video is extremely disturbing and unacceptable,” Mr. Mamdani wrote in a post on social media on Wednesday.
The Police Department moved quickly to discipline the two men in the video, Volkan Maden and Michael P. Algerio, both of whom have served with the N.Y.P.D. for more than a decade. On Wednesday, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the videos “deeply disturbing” and said that both detectives had been placed under investigation and stripped of their guns and shields.
In the following days, the department removed the sergeant who oversaw Detectives Maden and Algerio from his post and placed him on modified duty. By Friday, six more detectives on the team, as well as the lieutenant and captain who oversaw the entire North Brooklyn narcotics operation, had all been reassigned.
In interviews last week, several lawmakers praised Ms. Tisch and Mr. Mamdani for taking swift disciplinary action against what they called a shocking display of police brutality.
“This video looked like something from the 1990s,” Oswald Feliz, the chair of the City Council’s Public Safety committee, said. “This had nothing to do with public safety, it had everything to do with violence and that is violence that we will not and cannot accept.”
But for some, the behavior of the two veteran detectives raised concerns about how the unit and department was functioning.
Some critics have pointed out that Detectives Maden and Algerio appear to use cellphones, rather than police radios, to call for backup. Others noted that neither appeared to be wearing, or using, body cameras during the arrest.
Lincoln Restler, a city councilman who used to represent the Brooklyn district where the mistaken arrest happened, said the episode had concerned him enough to refer it to the city’s Department of Investigation. In his referral, Mr. Restler requested that the agency examine the Police Department’s communication practices for instances of unauthorized text and phone communication, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.
In the city’s policing community, reactions to the video have been more mixed. Union leaders and several former officers have chafed at the mayor’s response, defending the behavior of the two detectives and saying that Mr. Brown had no right to resist arrest. (It is not clear from the video whether Mr. Brown was in fact resisting arrest or if he was unable to comply while being beaten.)
“This is what happens when City Hall rushes to judge based on a viral clip instead of facts,” the detective union’s president, Scott Munro, said in a statement last week. “It’s reckless. It’s dangerous. And it’s a failure of leadership.”
The Police Department said on Tuesday that the 90-day review will aim to address and reform the kind of policy violations raised by Mr. Restler and others. It added that both detectives were being investigated by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which looks into reports of police misconduct.
The review will be led by the chief of department, Michael J. LiPetri, and will examine the policies of the entire narcotics division to make sure that its officers are enforcing their duties “safely and effectively,” the department said.
As part of the process, the department will review the current training that narcotics detectives receive and will ensure that all officers in the unit use “appropriate equipment.” The department also said it would clarify its current policy to require detectives to use body cameras during drug operations.
The department also said it will require commanding officers to regularly check in on the narcotics unit to ensure that it is meeting departmental standards for professional conduct during its operations.
New York
Harvey Weinstein’s Third Trial on Rape Charge Opens in Manhattan
She testified last year that she first met the former producer when she was about 27, after moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. He pressured her into giving him a massage shortly after, she said.
In 2013, she was visiting New York and had planned a morning meal with friends and the producer. He arrived early and got a hotel room over her objections, Ms. Mann testified. Still, she went with him to the room, where he injected his penis with medication that produced an erection and then raped her, she said.
She tried to fight, she said, but eventually “I just gave up, I wanted to get out.”
In the years that followed, Ms. Mann said, she fell into a complex relationship with Mr. Weinstein, which included friendly email exchanges, phone calls and several consensual sexual encounters. In her testimony last year, she called it a “dance” in which she tried to keep him both happy and at a distance. At one point, Ms. Mann said, she decided to enter a romantic relationship with him.
During cross-examination, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein questioned Ms. Mann about money — close to $500,000 — that she had received as settlement payments through a fund established as part of the bankruptcy of Mr. Weinstein’s company.
“This is not about money for me,” Ms. Mann testified.
For this trial, Mr. Weinstein has hired a new trial team of Jacob Kaplan, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos.
The lawyers have already signaled that their defense will differ, at least slightly. They have indicated that they will not argue that Ms. Mann made the accusations against their client for financial gain.
New York
Gotti Grandson Is Sentenced to 15 Months for Covid Relief Fraud
The grandson of an infamous mob boss was sentenced to prison on Monday after pleading guilty to defrauding the federal government out of more than $1 million in Covid relief funds, some of which he invested in cryptocurrency.
Carmine G. Agnello Jr., the grandson of John J. Gotti, the former leader of the Gambino crime family, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y. She also ordered Mr. Agnello to pay $1.3 million in restitution to the Small Business Administration.
Mr. Agnello, 39, fidgeted in court on Monday. Some of his family members were in attendance, including mob figures previously convicted of federal crimes: his father Carmine (the Bull) Agnello and his uncle John A. Gotti.
Wearing a gray, checkered suit, Mr. Agnello read a brief statement in court calling his crime “wrong, selfish and criminal.” He added that he never wanted to “find myself in prison” like so many of his relatives.
“I regret not only what I did, but the disappointment I caused my family,” he said.
Starting in April 2020, Mr. Agnello applied for at least three loans for his Queens-based company, Crown Auto Parts & Recycling L.L.C., through a program meant to support small businesses hurt by the pandemic.
He applied for the loans under false pretenses, claiming he did not have a criminal record when he in fact did have one, prosecutors said. He then used more than $400,000 of the borrowed money to invest in a crypto business.
Mr. Agnello pleaded guilty in September 2024 to a single count of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York had sought a sentence of around three years, as well as $1.3 million in restitution.
He “shamefully lined his own pockets with government and taxpayers’ dollars,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
As a child, Mr. Agnello starred on the reality television show “Growing Up Gotti” alongside his mother, Victoria Gotti, and two brothers, Frank and John. The show, which ran on A&E for three seasons and was canceled in 2005, depicted a Long Island household in the milieu of “The Sopranos.”
At the time, Mr. Agnello’s father was in prison and had been divorced from Ms. Gotti, a former columnist for The New York Post, leaving her to raise three rowdy sons. The intense media focus on the Gottis gave the grandson “a distorted sense of reality,” wrote John A. Gotti, Mr. Agnello’s uncle and the leader of the crime family in the 1990s, in a letter to Judge Choudhury before the sentencing.
“Being part of the Gotti family meant growing up with too much attention, expectations and society’s judgment that most kids never have to deal with,” Mr. Gotti wrote. He added that his nephew faced pressure “to live up to the Gotti name.”
Mr. Agnello found his way into the family business, in a way. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to running an unregistered scrap business. That case echoed his father’s racketeering conviction after he firebombed a rival scrap company in Queens that was run by undercover police officers.
Mr. Agnello’s grandfather exercised power with unrelenting brutality and delighted in the spotlight. He seized control of the family by organizing the 1985 assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, before running enterprises that investigators estimated earned about $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud.
After numerous acquittals in state and federal trials, aided by juries that had been tampered with, Mr. Gotti earned the nickname “Teflon Don” from New York City’s tabloids. He was ultimately convicted in 1992 on 13 criminal counts and died of cancer in 2002 at age 61 in a federal prison hospital.
Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for Mr. Agnello, told Judge Choudhury that Mr. Agnello had grown up with no male role models in his life, as 15 of his family members had gone to prison, including his grandfather when he was 5 and his father when he was 14.
Mr. Lichtman, who also represented Mr. Agnello’s uncle, called his client’s crime “horrific behavior” but added that his conduct was inevitable.
Charles P. Kelly, a federal prosecutor, said in court on Monday that Mr. Agnello’s family history was no excuse for his fraud.
“This case is not about John Gotti; it’s about Carmine Agnello,” Mr. Kelly said.
This year, Steven Metcalf, another lawyer for Mr. Agnello, asked Judge Choudhury for a sentence with no prison time so that Mr. Agnello could donate a kidney to his mother, who has renal disease and also appeared in court on Monday. Without the transplant, Ms. Gotti could die during her son’s prison term, Mr. Metcalf said.
But in April, Mr. Agnello hired Mr. Lichtman, who apologized to the judge for Mr. Metcalf’s “voluminous argument” in support of Mr. Agnello, which stretched hundreds of pages.
As Judge Choudhury announced the sentence, Mr. Agnello kept his gaze forward and nodded. Judge Choudhury pushed back on the notion that his upbringing drove him to commit wire fraud.
“You were raised with access to opportunities. These are opportunities that many people in our society do not have,” she said.
After the sentence on Monday, Mr. Agnello embraced his family members in a hallway of the courthouse, one by one, kissing his uncle and his father on the cheek. He must surrender to the authorities to begin serving his prison term by July 20.
Outside the courthouse, his uncle John A. Gotti addressed a group of reporters.
“We had 15 members of our family who went to prison,” he said. “I think that’s enough. I think we did our time.”
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