New York
Timberlake Pleads Guilty to Driving While Impaired in Hamptons Case
The singer Justin Timberlake pleaded guilty on Friday to driving while impaired, resolving a case that began with his June arrest on drunken-driving charges in the Hamptons.
As part of his plea, Mr. Timberlake agreed to pay a $500 fine and serve 25 hours of community service for a charity of his choosing. He also agreed to a 90-day suspension of his driver’s license in New York.
The singer, who was originally charged with the more serious crime of driving while intoxicated, entered the plea during an appearance at a 30-seat courthouse in the village of Sag Harbor. He wore a black cardigan and khaki slacks, with a double strand of pearls peeking out from beneath a dark T-shirt.
During the hearing, Mr. Timberlake looked on with his hands folded in front of him. His original plea agreement stipulated that he would make a public safety announcement discouraging drinking and driving. Justice Carl Irace, the village court judge overseeing the case, said on Friday that it would be more meaningful for the singer to commit himself to “a period of reflection and contemplation” through community service.
Mr. Timberlake agreed, and acknowledged that he had erred in driving rather than calling a taxi or getting a ride from a friend.
“It was a clear misjudgment,” he said.
Justice Irace, satisfied with Mr. Timberlake’s contrition, commended him for his sincerity. The judge also asked about drug and alcohol counseling for the singer, calling its absence from the plea deal “concerning,” but did not impose it.
Speaking in front of a throng of reporters and cameras outside Sag Harbor Police Headquarters after the hearing, Mr. Timberlake urged people following the case to learn from his mistake.
“Many of you have probably been covering me for a lot of my life, and as you may know, I try to hold myself to a very high standard, for myself, and this was not that,” he said.
The arrest occurred in the early hours of June 18, when a Sag Harbor police officer pulled over a new-model BMW that was driving erratically.
Mr. Timberlake, glassy-eyed and smelling of alcohol, was at the wheel, according to an arrest report. After stepping out of the car, he struggled to complete several sobriety tests, the report said. He was placed in custody and held overnight.
The singer told the police that he was on his way home after having had “one martini.” His lawyer, Edward Burke Jr., insisted to reporters that his client was not drunk when he was arrested. (Mr. Burke’s statements about the charges outside court prompted Justice Irace to scold him at an August hearing.)
The guilty plea concludes a summer of embarrassment for Mr. Timberlake. His arrest inspired a flood of mocking memes and tabloid attention. And even the court dates he did not attend in person drew crowds of reporters and film crews to Sag Harbor’s downtown, where the municipal building is surrounded by clothing boutiques, upscale galleries and the American Hotel. Mr. Timberlake had been seen there imbibing on the night of his arrest.
The legal woes have not interrupted his Forget Tomorrow world tour. He has continued playing stadium concerts, and even cracked a joke about the charges at a show in Boston in June. Justice Irace, acknowledging the demands of Mr. Timberlake’s tour schedule, made the unusual decision to allow the singer to attend the August hearing via video conference from an undisclosed location in Europe.
Mr. Timberlake is scheduled to perform at the Prudential Center in Newark at the end of September as part of a charity show that will benefit a suicide-prevention nonprofit.
Although social media users had a laugh or two at Mr. Timberlake’s expense, some prominent people with ties to the Hamptons sympathized with his public relations headache. In a recent New Yorker profile, the celebrity chef Ina Garten said she felt bad for “poor Justin Timberlake.”
Asked about Mr. Timberlake’s arrest in June, Billy Joel, a Sag Harbor resident who crashed his car three times on Long Island in the early 2000s, advised a local news reporter to “judge not, lest ye be judged.”
On Friday, Sag Harbor’s lesser-known residents were unsympathetic.
Interviewed on Main Street, Helen Hernandez, an accountant with homes in Sag Harbor and Westchester County, said she thought prosecutors should not have agreed to let Mr. Timberlake plead guilty to a less severe charge. Ms. Hernandez said a member of her family had spent $10,000 in legal fees to fight a similar charge in Westchester.
“I’m not a big fan of his,” she said.
Lawrence Rich, a real estate broker who splits his time between Sag Harbor and New York City, said he thought Mr. Timberlake’s celebrity status might have helped his case.
“Rich and famous people get away with things,” he said. “Somebody who’s not rich and famous would be in jail.”
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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