Mother New York, Let Me Dive Into Your Deep Pockets

As much as it pains me to say it — I’ve been trying to slip on ice for years now! — people probably wouldn’t be bum rushing smashed-up buses (“A dozen Brooklyn residents falsely claimed they were injured last night after witnessing an accident involving a city bus, police said.”) if juries stopped awarding people millions of dollars for slipping on the sidewalk:

It was the city’s responsibility, the jury found, to clear the ice-covered sidewalk outside the city-owned Bronx apartment building where Wilfredo Ferrer hurt his knee.

On Feb. 1, 2000, Ferrer, a 25-year-old security guard at the time, was helping a paraplegic friend clean his apartment at 1386 Prospect Ave. when he went outside about 2 a.m. to take out some trash and wound up taking a fall on the icy sidewalk.

He was taken to Montefiore Medical Center’s emergency room, where doctors there determined he had suffered torn ligaments and cartilage in his right knee.

During the seven-day trial before state Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Thompson, Ferrer said because of the weight he had to put on his other leg after the fall, he had to undergo surgery on his left knee a year later.

“The city should have been aware that its sidewalks were hazardous,” said Ferrer’s attorney, Steven Cohen. “The city has a responsibility to clean up the ice.”

The four-unit building had been taken over by the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, but during the seven-day trial, the city’s attorney argued that the city was not aware that the sidewalk was hazardous and that it did not have enough time to clear it.

The city attorney also said that Ferrer fell because he was drunk, producing medical records from Montefiore that indicated Ferrer emitted an odor that suggested that he had been drinking at the time of the fall.

Ferrer testified that he suffered ongoing knee pain and limitations that constitute a permanent partial disability.

An orthopedist who testified on his behalf agreed, but the city’s attorney contended that Ferrer is still capable of sedentary work. At the time of the accident, Ferrer’s annual salary was $20,000.

The jury awarded him $31,564 for past medical expenses, $130,000 for lost earnings and $1.5 million for pain and suffering.

A spokeswoman for the city Law Department said it is weighing an appeal.

Silly, The Inverted Pyramid Is For Sissy Papers Like The Times!

Someone at the Post gets it — reducing salacious, violent stories into theatrical components is the new inverted pyramid:

This is a love story with a moral: Don’t dally with your friend’s mommy or you might find a Valentine Day’s card carved on your face.

The characters: Elias Nazario, 18; his mom, Nelly; his pal Robert Quinones, 20; and her former boyfriend, a man known only as Freddy.

The place: 852 McDonald Ave. in Borough Park, where the aforementioned reside.

The back story: Robert is having a dalliance with Nelly under the unsuspecting eyes of Elias and the man known only as Freddy.

The action: Elias and Freddy find out about the affair on Valentine’s day, and Elias slashes Robert’s face, authorities say.

The result: Robert gets stitches. Elias gets Rikers.

And the past tense is for wussies like the Daily News:

On Valentine’s Day morning, Freddy goes to work. At 7:55 a.m., Robert wakes up to find several deep cuts on his face and Elias standing over him with a sharp metal object, authorities say.

Elias flees and his mother calls 911. Cops arrive. Robert is taken to Lutheran Hospital, where he gets stitches for the cuts.

Elias did it, he tells the cops.

The youth is picked up at his aunt’s home on Ocean Avenue and taken to the 66th Precinct stationhouse, where he is formally arrested at 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Later in the day, he is arraigned in Brooklyn Criminal Court on charges of assault, menacing, harassment and weapons possession.

Unable to make bail of $2,500, he is lodged in Rikers.

Nelly stonewalls.

“Nothing happened here. I have no comment. It’s all lies,” she said yesterday.

Now that’s the way we like to read these stories!

Silly, Disaster Trophies Are For Museums!

We’ve all seen enough cop shows to know that the cretins who work in the medical examiner’s office are sick fucks:

Two staffers in the city medical examiner’s office were investigated for keeping ghoulish mementos of two disasters, the fatal Staten Island ferry crash and the attack on the World Trade Center, the Daily News has learned.

Both avoided criminal charges after giving back the sorry souvenirs, but now underlings who blew the whistle on them claim they have come in for some callous treatment.

One worker, Robert Yee, a crime scene investigator, kept a grappling hook from the Andrew J. Barberi in his office along with a smiling photo of himself, hook in hand, at the site of the crash that killed 11 people in 2003, authorities said.

The city’s Department of Investigation looked into the matter last year and referred the case back to the medical examiner, said DOI spokeswoman Emily Gest.

“He was appropriately disciplined,” said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.

Borakove said it was a supervisor who spotted the hook in Yee’s office and reported it to higherups.

DOI also probed how a mangled piece of steel from the door of a hijacked plane that crashed into the World Trade Center ended up in the possession of Barbara Butcher, the medical examiner’s investigation director.

Butcher said she received the remnant after the attacks from someone she declined to identify but returned it 24 to 36 hours later when she realized keeping it would be inappropriate, according to Borakove.

But Kenneth Dotson, who has spent 18 years as a crime scene investigator for the medical examiner, says he remembers handing Butcher a bag carrying the item in the weeks after Sept. 11 and that Butcher cheerfully showed it off.

“She said, ‘This is going to look great on a coffee table,'” Dotson told The News.

Scofflaws!

Unless I’m missing something here, this former parking ticket judge seems sort of smart, is all:

A former judge at the city’s Parking Violations Bureau who thought he could beat the system got his law license suspended yesterday for trying to evade $12,000 in parking tickets.

Attorney Glenn Caldwell was barred from practice for the next three years by a state appeals court that found his behavior “appalling.”

The panel of judges said Caldwell, 56, must pay the price for attempting to beat the tickets by using an insider’s knowledge of the system.

“This was not an instance of a mere ‘error of judgment,'” the panel said. “But rather persistent misconduct by a former judicial officer.”

Caldwell, who presided over thousands of cases as an administrative law judge between 1991 to 1995, amassed 167 of his own parking tickets after he left.

Often, he parked illegally near courthouses — where he was representing other scofflaws as a ticket broker.

According to a board investigation, Caldwell kept his expired administrative law judge identification card on the dashboard, “ostensibly to discourage a traffic agent from issuing a summons to the vehicle,” the court found.

He also slyly ordered vanity license plates for two family cars, “intentionally requesting a combination of letters and numbers that he knew would provide him with a technical defense to any summons issued to those cars.”

Caldwell’s plate numbers, 4GZ-Z50 and Y50-V26, were often confused for regular plates by ticket agents and cops, a mistake that could be a basis for voiding a summons.

“That [Caldwell] . . . would utilize his expired identification card and his knowledge of the inner workings of the PVB adjudicatory process for his own personal gain, is simply appalling,” the court added.

I mean, the vanity plate thing is just brilliant, and the old ID card — well, what if he was just absent minded and forgot to take it off of his dashboard? But to be barred from practicing law because you’re crafty . . . isn’t that kind of the point?

A Honest Day’s Work

A Sun reporter does a stint as one of the city’s emergency snow laborers and files this report:

The work isn’t steady or easy, but it beats minimum wage by $3.25. Several laborers confided to me that they didn’t think it was much of a sacrifice to give up comfort and the integrity of their lower back for that wage. “That’s a lot of money,” one told me.

. . .

The job is fairly simple: Clear out the areas near fire hydrants, bus stops, drains, and intersections; throw the snow into the street and let it melt. A supervisor from the Sanitation Enforcement unit of the department hovers in the background, occasionally grabbing a shovel to help out, and keeping the van in proximity to the crew — mine included small-time cigarette hustlers, maintenance workers, and elevator repairmen.

Before we headed out, we met at a giant sanitation garage full of trucks. Light filtered through pale yellow windowpanes. Ray, who lives in the nearby housing projects, was the first one there. A jack of all trades, he works as a busboy, dishwasher, factory worker, and part-time laborer, among other jobs. “I do whatever’s available,” he said, showing a cracked tooth.

To get on the list for the much coveted snow jobs, you have to be in line as early as 7:30 a.m. (7 a.m. on busy days). A grumpy sanitation administrator named Willie takes down names and doles out the jobs. In theory, if a laborer puts in 40 hours, he gets a raise to $15 an hour. This is nearly impossible, though, because Willie gives out jobs to newcomers first and veterans second. Several old-time snow laborers said this wasn’t the case last year. At eight hours of wages, the city spent about $41,000 on the 512 extra workers yesterday. The storm could end up costing the city more than $100,000 in emergency snow labor.

. . .

At first, the work was easy and almost fun. There was a pleasure in the immediacy of the progress. It’s all right in front of you: a cleared path, an unburied hydrant, or slush going down the drain. But it quickly becomes clear that this is a thankless job. Several times young women with large sunglasses rudely interjected “Excuse me” as we shoveled and scraped — as if we were being selfish by taking up part of the sidewalk. A few passers-by smiled, but it seemed like it was mostly out of awkwardness in having encountered our ragtag clean-up crew.

At every corner my squad members razzed each other and the attractive women that walked by. When you carry a shovel and are working for the city, you can’t help but have a bit of a swagger.