Food Cart

Dear Diary:

I was near Central Park South for a doctor’s appointment, so I decided to stop at a food cart I used to frequent when I worked in the area.

The cart was owned by an Egyptian couple. The woman who worked there gave me a free banana and said “love you” without fail every day.

She didn’t know that I was going through a rough time, and that she was often the only bright spot in my otherwise grim days.

As I got in line on this occasion, I worried that she wouldn’t be there anymore and that if she was, she wouldn’t remember me. After all, it had been six years.

But there she was, at the rear of the cart. We made eye contact, and she kept looking back at me.

“Did I see you at Costco the other day?” she asked.

I smiled and shook my head.

She stepped in front of the cart. Her shirt said, “I love you.”

“No, no,” she said. “I remember you.”

She gave me a free bagel and told me proudly that her daughter was a big shot at Chase now. She told me to come back soon.

As I walked away, I began to tear up. I wished she knew what her kindness had meant to me all those years ago.

— Kelly Krause

Puzzling

Dear Diary:

I’ve taken the A to work for 20 years. And for 20 years, I’ve done puzzles on the train during the ride.

I didn’t think there could be any more firsts for me on my commute after so long until a recent morning.

As I sat there working on a Sudoku puzzle, a man stood over me telling me where to put the numbers.

At first, I was inclined to tell him he was out of line. Instead, I complimented him on his ability to read backward, and we did the Sudoku together until he got off the train.

— Sandra Feldman

‘Misty’

Dear Diary:

I walked to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade at the end of a long week. I planned to go for a run after taking in the view for a few minutes.

Golden shadows danced tenderly against the red brick that flanks one side of the ramp down. Tree branches and falling leaves were momentarily etched by orange rays. The sky was pink and glorious.

Two young men set up their saxophone, electric guitar and small speaker. The music started so gently: “Misty.”

The saxophone carried the melody. I settled against the fence, my back to the skyline, and watched, an audience of one.

A man in a red flannel shirt slowed to a stop. His hair, brownish and thinning, shined in the setting sun. His face softened as the music played. He caught my eye with a quick smile and settled against the fence a few yards away.

We stood and listened together, taking in the dying leaves on the trees, the people of New York and the beautiful music.

When the song ended, he clapped first, and then I joined in. The musicians nodded. A prickling of tears in my eyes, which had begun at the start of the song, grew as I wondered what to do next.

The man approached the musicians. I turned away and started my jog. I thought about my endless nights alone in my room.

A few minutes later, I saw the man who had been listening to the music walking in my direction with a grinning woman at his side.

I caught his eye for a moment, and I think he recognized me before I looked away. My face, already warm from the run, sizzled more.

The sky was starting to darken. As I turned, I saw my shadow, indistinguishable from the pavement.

— Dylan Nadelman

Albertine

Dear Diary:

What do I know about France?
What do I know about French bookstores in New York City?
Not much is the answer to both questions.
But I do know about sisters.
And I saw two sisters in the French bookstore.
It’s not like I asked them: “Are you sisters?”
I didn’t need to. I could tell by watching them amid a dispute.
When sisters have conflict, their reactions are unique.
Sister #1 said something I couldn’t hear.
Sister #2 replied: “In Malaysia, people don’t mention the tiger for fear it will draw him out.” I’m not sure if this was an allegory, but for a moment, the moment became sharp. Coincidentally, in a moment, after that moment, the sisters hugged each other with their eyes, while allowing each other red carpets of retreat.
I didn’t end up buying a French book.
Instead I considered sisters.
Before leaving in pursuit of ice cream.

— Danny Klecko

Tasty Contraband

Dear Diary:

We were waiting to get into a comedy show in Brooklyn on a Thursday night. Members of the venue’s security staff were checking bags.

“No drinks,” they hollered. “No food. No cookies.”

Pieces of fruit were confiscated. Some people had their chocolate taken away.

After clearing security and heading for the entrance, we saw a box filled to the brim with delicious contraband: apples, bananas, oranges and, to top it all off, a large, vacuum-sealed package of cooked octopus.

— Betty Tsang

Over the years, Jeffrey B. Maddrey toiled as a beat cop in half a dozen Brooklyn precincts. He nurtured hundreds of officers he oversaw as an inspector. He quelled violent crime in a dangerous part of Brownsville.

But not until he shepherded officers through the pain and anger of seeing one of their own shot dead in 2011 did he attain the high profile that would later undo him.

After the officer, Peter Figoski, was killed while trying to stop a robbery, Mr. Maddrey became the face of law enforcement in the 75th Precinct. He spoke to reporters about the murder and led a weeklong search for the fatal bullet. At the funeral on Long Island, he handed the Figoski family a folded American flag.

Mr. Maddrey “has certainly been in our sights for a while as someone deserving of recognition,” said then-Commissioner Raymond Kelly at a ceremony in which he posthumously promoted Officer Figoski to detective and elevated Mr. Maddrey to deputy chief.

The base of support Mr. Maddrey built in those years with Brooklyn pastors, rabbis, anti-violence groups and politicians — including, crucially, Eric Adams, a former police captain who would become mayor — vaulted him to the highest uniformed rank of the nation’s largest police department. It insulated him during a string of scandals — until the one that ended his career.

In December, a lieutenant and former subordinate, Quathisha Epps, accused Mr. Maddrey of demanding sex in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime. Mr. Maddrey, who was chief of department, resigned. Federal agents have searched his home, and the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau has launched its own investigation.

Mr. Adams, who is facing federal corruption charges, has defended how he had pushed Mr. Maddrey to the upper echelons of the Police Department.

In an interview last week with Corey Pegues, a retired deputy inspector and host of a YouTube channel, Mr. Adams said Mr. Maddrey “was beloved in Brooklyn North,” Mr. Adams said, referring to the territory that Mr. Maddrey once oversaw.

Mr. Pegues said Mr. Maddrey had weathered repeated scandals with few repercussions. “You gave him that second or third chance,” Mr. Pegues said. “How many chances do you give him?” Mr. Adams said, “People gave me 10 chances.”

“I needed someone with that police experience and great interaction” with the public, Mr. Adams said. “He went beyond the call of duty.”

The mayor’s relationship with Mr. Maddrey dates back at least two decades.

In 2006, the year Mr. Maddrey was promoted to deputy inspector, Mr. Adams was elected to represent a Brooklyn district in the New York State Senate. Both Mr. Maddrey and Mr. Adams spoke at community board meetings, and they were invited to talk with students in Bedford-Stuyvesant about policing.

In 2015, a year after Mr. Adams became Brooklyn borough president, Mr. Maddrey was chosen to lead the 10 precincts that compose Patrol Borough Brooklyn North, another major career leap. The two went to an awards banquet for the Mo Better Jaguars youth football team; a school gymnasium where students played double Dutch; and an event in Bushwick to improve police relations.

By then, Mr. Maddrey had long been a large presence in the borough, said the Rev. Robert Waterman, a pastor at Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn who has known Mr. Maddrey for more than two decades.

Mr. Waterman said they met when Mr. Maddrey, then an inspector in the 81st Precinct, had invited him to talk with veteran officers and recruits about concerns over neighborhood policing. He said Mr. Maddrey took children to special events and suited up as Santa Claus for Christmas.

“I had never known him to be anything but an officer who had not only walked the beat, but was part of the beat of the neighborhood,” he said.

Mr. Maddrey first became fodder for the city’s tabloids in 1993. Then a rookie, he was leaving a woman’s apartment building in Staten Island when two men approached him, including the woman’s suitor. The suitor’s friend fired several shots, striking Mr. Maddrey in the left wrist.

But his real troubles began in 2016, a year after he had been promoted to assistant chief and the head of Brooklyn North. They arrived in the form of a lawsuit: A subordinate with whom he was having an affair accused him of beating her, prompting her to pull out a gun, according to court filings. Mr. Maddrey, she said, tore it away. The suits were tossed out, but James O’Neill, then commissioner, docked Mr. Maddrey 45 vacation days.

Nonetheless, in 2020 Mr. Maddrey was made head of the Community Affairs Bureau, which educates New Yorkers about policing and crime prevention. The appointment set the stage for his push to the top after Mr. Adams was elected the next year.

The new mayor, who continued to identify himself closely with the department and took a strong hand in its affairs, supported a quick succession of high-level promotions for Mr. Maddrey. He became chief of housing, then chief of patrol and, by the end of 2022, chief of department — the person who oversees operations, crime-fighting strategies, quality of life initiatives and all of the agency’s 33,500 officers.

Even after that, problems emerged. Mr. Maddrey faced disciplinary charges from an oversight board in 2023 for voiding the arrest of a retired officer accused of brandishing a gun at three boys in Brooklyn.

Keechant Sewell, then the police commissioner, agreed with the board. But that June, she resigned after months of talk that allies of Mr. Adams had been undermining her.

Her Adams-appointed successor, Edward A. Caban, dismissed the case against Mr. Maddrey. In the interview with Mr. Pegues, Mr. Adams denied exerting pressure on Ms. Sewell or Mr. Caban.

Then there were the lawsuits. Cases filed in the past two years claim that Mr. Maddrey had an officer in the traffic unit transferred after he issued Mr. Maddrey’s female friend a ticket; that he protected a former officer and senior adviser to Mr. Adams who was accused of sexual harassment; and that he defamed an anti-violence activist.

Christopher Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired Police Department lieutenant, said none of the disciplinary or legal accusations were enough to hinder Mr. Maddrey’s career.

“He’s friendly. He shakes everyone’s hand. He comes in the room and fills the room,” said Mr. Mercado, who has attended events with Mr. Maddrey. “He came up at a time when there were few African American executives at the department, and the community adored him.”

And, Mr. Mercado said, even as Mr. Maddrey’s personal problems intensified, he tackled policing problems aggressively, impressing executives.

“They’ll say: ‘Oh, they grinded it out. They handed that shooting well. They were there at that riot. They protected their cops,’” Mr. Mercado said.

“If you’re a guy like Maddrey, and you’re willing to do all of that, even if you have had issues in the past, people at the top might look the other way,” he added.

Looking away became impossible last month.

Lieutenant Epps, a single mother of three children, told the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Mr. Maddrey had humiliated her during unwanted sexual encounters, many at his office at police headquarters in Manhattan. In an interview with the New York Post, she said that, on one occasion, she pleaded with him to stop, crying out, “You’re hurting me.”

During the 2024 fiscal year, Lieutenant Epps had made $204,453.48 in overtime, roughly doubling her salary while working under Mr. Maddrey — the most of any department employee.

She and Mr. Maddrey were both suspended amid the federal investigation.

Mr. Maddrey’s lawyer, Lambros Lambrou, did not respond to requests to interview the former officer. But in an interview last month on NBC New York, Mr. Maddrey denied demanding sex in exchange for overtime pay. He said his relationship with Lieutenant Epps was a consensual “office fling.”

Mr. Maddrey then recited the high points of his career, talking about his relationships with people in Brooklyn and how crime overall fell while he was chief of department.

“I’ve given so much to the city — so much — and I’ve never asked anyone for anything in return,” he said. “Countless people can never repay me for what I’ve done for them.”

Mr. Adams is no longer in a position to repay him: Mr. Caban, who is being investigated by the F.B.I., resigned in September, and two weeks later, Mr. Adams was federally indicted on corruption charges. Last month, he appointed Jessica Tisch as commissioner. She has already reassigned many officers and several top police officials, including at least one allied with the mayor.

Mr. Adams has distanced himself from Mr. Maddrey. “I’ve never defended any accusation of any inappropriate behavior,” the mayor said in an interview last month with Fox 5 New York.

“He has had an exceptional police record,” he added. “Those are the knowns. I cannot defend or speak on the unknowns.”

In October, Mr. Maddrey spoke at Linwood Street and Sutter Avenue, a corner the city had renamed in honor of the officer who was shot there.

“What Pete Figoski did for this community should always be recognized,” Mr. Maddrey said, tapping the lectern for emphasis and pointing to a new street sign bearing Detective Figoski’s name.

Mr. Maddrey was met with a round of applause. Two months later, he resigned.

Seymour P. Lachman, a former New York State senator who was so fed up with the political shenanigans in Albany that he quit the Legislature and wrote two books that helped spur reforms, died on Jan. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

His wife, Susan Lachman, confirmed the death.

Mr. Lachman (pronounced LACK-man), a college professor who had also briefly served as president of the New York City Board of Education in the 1970s, was first elected to the State Senate in 1996 to fill a vacancy in a Brooklyn district that originally included the Bensonhurst and Borough Park sections and later also included part of Staten Island.

A Democrat, he often described himself as a traditionalist. But he would have been the first to acknowledge that the tell-some book he wrote about secretive power-brokering in Albany probably had more impact than his party-line votes as a legislator.

The title of the book — written with Robert A. Polner, a Newsday reporter — was a giveaway: “Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse” (2006).

Its thrust was that anything of consequence that occurred in the state capital was predetermined by the governor, the Senate majority leader and the Assembly speaker and reflected “a subservience by lawmakers that has no peer in the United States Congress nor in many American statehouses.”

The book told of the corrupting power of money, the outsize influence of lobbyists, and public authorities’ lack of accountability.

“The reward for lawmakers’ compliance includes party assistance and taxpayer-financed pork-barrel morsels for community organizations in election years,” Mr. Lachman and Mr. Polner wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in early 2007.

They added: “Those who play by the rules of the leadership also benefit by having their names appended from time to time to bills of importance. They receive committee assignments that can earn them as much as $40,000 on top of their $79,000 yearly salary, and their district lines are rigged in their favor for lifetime job security. Is it any wonder that while Democrats won big across the country this November, in Albany just one Republican seat in the State Senate went Democratic?”

“Three Men in a Room” vividly described Albany’s backstage machinations and argued for change, some of which Gov. Eliot Spitzer and later Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said they favored.

The two authors also wrote “Failed State: Dysfunction and Corruption in an American Statehouse” (2017), in which they lobbied for revisions in New York’s bloated and anachronistic Constitution.

At his death, Mr. Lachman was director emeritus of the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform, which he founded in 2008 at Wagner College on Staten Island.

“His books added fuel to the fire,” Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said in an interview. “His bird’s-eye insights coupled with the research produced by the Carey Institute bolstered the need for reforms. The work contributed to an atmosphere that resulted in some changes — flawed, but changes — to redistricting, campaign finance and ethics.”

Those changes were nudged along by embarrassing indictments of leaders in the Senate and Assembly, who had largely opposed major reforms.

As a member of the Board of Education from 1969 to 1974 and its president from 1974 to 1975, when he resigned to spend more time teaching, Mr. Lachman proposed the appointment of an educational ombudsman, worked to alleviate religious and racial tensions in the schools, and was the principal architect of a resolution on the rights and responsibilities of senior high school students and on the workings of peer group programs that provided drug education and draft counseling during the Vietnam War.

After leaving the board, he was appointed to a joint professorship in the history and politics of education, teaching at both the City University’s Graduate Center and Bernard M. Baruch College, where he was later named university dean for community development. He also taught at Adelphi University, on Long Island.

Seymour P. Lachman (the middle initial did not stand for a name, his family said) was born on Dec. 12, 1933, in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. After losing his candy store during the Depression, his father, Louis, worked as a steam presser in the garment industry and as a ditch digger. His mother, Sarah (Koniarsky) Lachman, looked after the household. The family moved to Brooklyn when Seymour was an infant.

After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, Mr. Lachman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Brooklyn College, in 1955 and 1958, and a doctorate in history from New York University in 1963.

He taught in Brooklyn public high schools until 1963, when he was hired as a professor of history at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, part of the City University system. Two years later he was appointed dean of its mid-Brooklyn campus.

Early in his career, Mr. Lachman was director of the foreign affairs department of the American Jewish Committee. From 1980 to 1983, he headed the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.

His other books include “One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society” (1993, with Barry Kosmin), based on the 1989-90 National Survey of Religious Identification conducted by the Graduate Center; “The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975” (2010), with Mr. Polner; and “Mr. New York: Lew Rudin and His Love for the City” (2014), about the real estate developer who was a behind-the-scenes force during the city’s fiscal crises in the 1970s and early ’90s.

Mr. Lachman married Susan Altman in 1961. In addition to her, he is survived by their children, Rabbi Eliezer Lachman and Sharon Lachman Chesir; 11 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.