About 3,000 New York City taxi drivers routinely overcharged riders over two years by surreptitiously fixing their meters to charge rates that would normally apply only to trips outside the five boroughs, according to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.

. . .

The Taxi and Limousine Commission directed meter manufacturers to modify the equipment, to warn riders when the rate rises.
The drivers’ scheme, the commission said, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip. The drivers, officials said, flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million.

Giant quarterback Eli Manning got a lousy reception yesterday for a secret marketing deal with cash-strapped St. Vincent’s Medical Center that paid him at least $500,000 over the last three years.

After inquiries by The Post Sunday, Manning and the Greenwich Village hospital said they had canceled a $1 million pact that would have paid him $200,000 a year through 2014.

But as late as last December, Manning’s agent requested a $125,000 payment from St. Vincent’s that was months overdue, sources said.

The tardy check was finally sent to Manning’s firm, PWL Inc.

Location Scout: St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan.

Three and a half years after Mayor Bloomberg closed huge portions of Mullaly and Macombs Dam parks to make way for the Yankees new $1.5 billion stadium, the replacement ballfields the city promised are nowhere to be seen.

. . .

Shea Stadium, in case anyone has forgotten, came tumbling down in fewer than eight months. It was leveled quickly because the Mets needed the land for parking.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

Swarms of traffic agents patrol the jammed streets of Astoria’s commercial strips every day, writing tickets for expired meters and double-parked cars — even as drivers sit in their vehicles.

Earlier: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Quotas — We Have Productivity Goals For That!; Countless Hovers Under Cover Of The Street, Or, The Gift Down Below.

The owners of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the iconic middle-class housing complexes overlooking the East River in Manhattan, have decided to turn over the properties to creditors, officials said Monday morning.

. . .

For tenant advocates and urban planners, the sale underscored the loss of affordable housing in the city and the highly speculative financial structures that, they warned, would only end in disaster.

Sorry, wrong link there . . . turns out you can actually pay $100 an hour to rent a pimped out limo and smoke pot with the driver:

For $100 an hour, late-night club crawlers can spread across its red leather seats, roll up its tinted windows and share a fat joint with the driver – Al, the affable cannabis chauffeur.

Two Bronx men were locked up and left to rot in a filthy jail cell for nearly a week after a pair of bumbling cops mistook their candy for a bag of crack.

The “drugs” were finally tested five days later and determined to be popular Coco (coconut) Candy. The charges were dropped — but there were no apologies from the NYPD.

“Sweet happens,” a police source glibly said of the boondoggle.

. . .

The trouble began the night of Jan. 15, as José Pena, a 48-year-old plumber, and his longtime pal and colleague Cesar Rodriguez, 33, were headed to a party, and decided to stop at a bodega on 181st Street and the Grand Concourse.

When they came out, cops were waiting and asked to search their Ford minivan. “I said ‘Go search.’ I even opened the door,” Rodriguez told The Post.

An officer rummaged around, came out holding a “Hello Kitty” sandwich bag, and shouted “Bingo!” the men said.

“It’s only candy!” Rodriguez said, as the cops handcuffed him and Pena, and several other police cars rushed to the scene.

Rodriguez said he buys a 50-cent bag of Coco Candy, a hard coconut-based treat, almost every day. Because it easily crumbles, he puts it in a sandwich bag.

“I didn’t know having candy was a crime,” he said.

New York City officials destroyed tons of new, unworn clothing and footwear last year that had been seized in raids on counterfeit label operations, abandoning a practice of giving knockoff garments to groups that help the needy.

. . .

Another government agency that confiscates large volumes of pirated clothing, United States Customs and Border Protection, donated $78 million in such goods last year. The donations are made only with the consent of the trademark holder, and are limited to essentials like clothing and shoes; they do not include fake Rolex watches or Gucci handbags.

In Los Angeles, shoes that would otherwise have been destroyed were given to Samaritan’s Feet, said John Saleh, a spokesman for the customs agency. Other ports that have participated are Detroit, El Paso and San Francisco. In New York, customs officials recently began working with World Vision.

“Usually the holder of the intellectual property rights allows us to do it,” Mr. Saleh said. If the trademarks can be removed, the goods are given to organizations near the ports, Mr. Saleh said. If they can’t be, they are shipped abroad.

Until recently, New York had a similar policy. In 2006, Mr. Bloomberg announced that the city would send shipments of knockoffs to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. In that case, said Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, the city had the assistance of World Vision in sorting through the materials, a daunting task — but one that World Vision and the clothing bank say they still do.

Many major fashion brands have their headquarters in New York City, and Mr. Bloomberg has made prosecution of trademark infringement a priority for his administration. The companies also take actions in civil court against the pirates, an expensive process, to protect the designers’ names.

“These are people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of them millions, to get counterfeit goods off the street,” said Robert Tucker, a lawyer with the firm of Tucker and Lafiti, whose fashion clients include Chrome Hearts, Steve Madden, Zac Posen and Ed Hardy. “Everyone wants to feed and clothe the homeless. But how are you going to spend all this money and then put it back on the street?”

Subway worker Juan de los Santos suffered a broken nose, broken teeth and a gash that needed eight stitches when he slammed into the tracks at the Wilson Ave. station on the L line early Wednesday, he told the Daily News.

. . .

De los Santos said word spread among track workers that he was a whistleblower.

“No matter where I go, always someone says, ‘This is the guy. This is the rat,’ ” de los Santos said. “All the time, I have felt threatened.”

Callous union administrators refused to give a dead track worker’s grieving family a customary Bible because he fell behind on his dues before dying, colleagues charged Monday.

. . .

[A friend and fellow signal maintainer] went to the union’s Manhattan headquarters last week to pick up the Bible, but a clerk and Local 100 staffer told him they couldn’t authorize release of the Bible, prompting him to go to the president’s office.

Then a president’s office secretary said a Bible wouldn’t be provided because [dead track worker Jose] Rodriguez was not up to date with his dues and not a “member in good standing,” [the friend] said.

. . .

[O]ther signal maintainers chipped in to buy a Bible, which was presented to the family at the wake last Wednesday, they said.

Union dues are automatically deducted from transit workers’ paychecks, but the checkoffs were suspended for approximately 16 months as punishment for the illegal 2005 bus and subway strike.

During that time, Local 100 urged members to actively make the payments, but many did not. Union leaders disqualified thousands of workers from voting in union elections for not keeping up with their dues.

See also: 2005 Transit Strike.

Gennarelli has lived on E. Tremont Avenue between Philip and Randall avenues since 1996. In 2000 or 2001, the city extended a bus stop from the corner of E. Tremont and Randall avenues, in front of Pete’s Donut Shop & Restaurant, up further, in front of five private homes, the widow said. The bus stop is designed to hold two tandem buses, Gennarelli added.

Prior to the change, the city consulted Community Board 10, but Gennarelli, who returns home from work in Manhattan at around 7 p.m., wasn’t able to attend the meeting, she explained. Not only are Gennarelli and her neighbors ticketed for trash, buses and bus passengers often block her driveway, she said.

Some two years ago, Gennarelli purchased a trashcan for the bus stop. She locked it to a pole but when the city Department of Sanitation stopped by to take the trash, the trashcan was unlocked and stolen, Gennarelli said. When Klein interceded, she spoke to a DSNY supervisor who told her that trashcans are only allowed on corners.

The supervisor had Gennarelli’s property observed and found her guilty of no violations. But the ticket barrage didn’t end. Gennarelli thinks that the city uses ECB tickets to raise revenue; her tickets have all been excused.

Gennarelli thinks that a single DSNY agent wrote her tickets on November 14 and November 19. Her November 19 ticket reads: “I observed a large accumulation of scattered bottles, cigarette packs, paper bags, pieces of paper, tissue wrappers and other debris in the front yard,” Gennarelli said. It was issued between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.

“I don’t smoke cigarettes!” Gennarelli groused. “I get to work at 8:30 a.m.”