You (Private) Dick!

Landlords are going to great lengths to challenge their rent-regulated tenants:

Bill Golodner idled his sport utility vehicle beside the curb a few doors down. He clipped a surveillance camera to the steering wheel and brought the house into focus. He ran a rough paw over his shaved head, switched on a camera concealed behind the third buttonhole of his dress shirt, then slipped out into the chill morning, heading for the front door.

Philip Marlowe, if he were around, might be doing rent-fraud cases, too.

These are busy times for private investigators in the real estate racket in New York City. Market-rate rents are in the exosphere. Denizens of the city’s 1.1 million rent-regulated apartments have dug in, and landlords are shelling out serious money in search of grounds to dislodge rent-law violators and get a chance to push up rents when an apartment turns over to a new tenant.

At the confluence of those crosswinds, a private eye can flourish. Investigators like Mr. Golodner sweep up whatever incriminating evidence can be used by building owners and their lawyers to show scofflaw tenants the wisdom of, say, relocation.

Mr. Golodner and his partner, Bruce Frankel, both former New York City police detectives, say their firm has handled close to 500 real estate cases in the past year. They mine public records, plumb the depths of the World Wide Web, plant hidden cameras — trawling for proof of illegal subletting, income-limit violations and the improper use of apartments for businesses, even prostitution and drug dealing.

Then again, sometimes you don’t need to hire a private dick to discover the truth:

Take the tenant who seemed to be allowing her Manhattan apartment to be used for illicit business. The owner of the building answered an ad for what Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner call a massage. Unexpectedly, he found himself in a building he owned. When Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner investigated, they say the found the tenant of record was paying $800 a month but living in Westchester County, while collecting $2,700 a month from the woman in the apartment selling her services.

Some people’s luck . . .

And then there’s the use of private investigators as leading indicator of housing prices:

Another private investigator, Nick Himonidis, founder of NGH Associates in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., recalled a case in which a tenant was operating an architectural office out of a rent-regulated apartment: three architects, support staff, cleaning crews. Two investigators from Mr. Himonidis’s office made an appointment, talked to the architects and asked for a tour of the office. They captured the whole thing on hidden cameras.

“As a percentage of our business, our work for landlords as clients has probably gone from 5 percent to closer to 20 percent in the last 24 months,” said Mr. Himonidis, who believes the rise in rents has made an owner more likely to call in an investigator. “It simply might not have made economic sense 5 or 10 years ago. And now it does.”

We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges!

Is the cute name supposed to distract us from the fact that hundreds of fake badges and thousands of guns have been confiscated from people trying to get into secure areas around the city? Because then it’s not so cute:

Authorities have confiscated 243 fake police badges and some 21,000 weapons and made 164 arrests or citations at city federal buildings since May 2005, according to sources and documents obtained by The Post.

Sources said most of the busts came at 26 Federal Plaza, home of the FBI’s New York office, considered a prime terror target.

They added that one arrest turned up an individual suspected to have terrorist ties, and that other fake-badge arrests have nabbed criminals with outstanding warrants and lengthy records, including a convicted child molester.

A children’s nursery is located at 26 Federal Plaza.

One elderly man confessed after his arrest that he was using an old badge to sneak a brick into a federal building and assault a Social Security Administration employee whom he believed had bilked him on a payment.

A source with intimate knowledge of the Federal Protective Service’s crackdown — dubbed Operation Stinking Badges after the often-quoted line from the Humphrey Bogart flick “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” — said it was initiated in part after police “noticed a spike in people coming in with badges.”

In May 2005, the Federal Protective Service, a Department of Homeland Security agency that protects government buildings, changed its policy and started verifying every badge.

Prior to that, it was possible for someone to flash a shield and walk into a federal building unchecked.

Some visitors are packing plenty more than a fake badge. Officers netted bulletproof vests, 10 guns — even a spiked bat.

City Neighborhoods Simply Crawling With “Sex Sickos”

They act like being a convicted sex offender is a bad thing:

Nearly a third of the city’s most dangerous sex offenders live within just two blocks of an elementary or middle school — and authorities have no power to make them move farther away, the Daily News has learned.

The sobering findings emerged from the most exhaustive examination ever conducted of the state sex offender registry.

The disturbing report, completed by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn), shows that about 670 of the city’s 2,114 worst sex offenders live within two blocks of a school.

The clusters of sickos grow even larger a few more blocks away.

More than 85% of the city’s Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders — the worst of the worst — live within a quarter-mile of a school, Weiner’s examination found. “Every day my kids when they leave the house I say a little prayer that they won’t cross one of these sex sickos,” Bronx mom Cynthia Hawkins, 35, said as she walked her kids home from Public School 33 in Highbridge.

Anthony Weiner: master of the low-hanging fruit.

The Urban Spotted Owl

Activists seeking to stop the Parks Department from renovating Washington Square Park take things to an absurd point, charging that construction in the urban park will damage the habitat of a red-tailed hawk:

The lawsuits keep on mounting against the embattled Washington Square Park renovation plan, threatening to further stall, if not outright kill, it. Two new lawsuits take aim at the $16 million project on environmental grounds. Among their charges are that the renovation will chainsaw down a full third of the trees in the park’s northwest quadrant, create pedestrian bottlenecks and threaten the habitat of a juvenile red-tailed hawk that recently took up residency and started hunting in the park.

Last Friday, two plaintiffs, Jonathan Greenberg, coordinator of the Open Washington Square Park Coalition; and Luther Harris, author of the definitive history book on Washington Square, filed the first of the two lawsuits. An Article 78 suit in State Supreme Court, it charges that an environmental impact assessment, or E.A.S., the Parks Department did for the project was faulty and that a more lengthy and involved environmental impact statement, or E.I.S., must be done.

In addition, the Emergency Coalition to Save Washington Square Park, or ECO, was expected to file suit in State Supreme Court on Wed., Jan. 24, also challenging the renovation on environmental grounds.

. . .

On Tuesday, attorney Joel Kupferman, representing ECO, said he couldn’t publicly discuss much yet about the second suit, which he hoped to file the next day. However, he said, it does contain a bird specialist’s affidavit on the significance of the new hawk’s presence.

“The bird story is a good part of it,” Kupferman said. “The long-range damage — what’s going to happen to the trees — what’s going to happen to the root system” are other significant aspects of the suit, he added.

Councilmember Alan Gerson, however, feels that not court, but the recently started Washington Square Park Task Force, set up under the so-called Gerson-Quinn Agreement with Parks on the renovation, is the best venue to solve disagreements.

“An E.I.S. is not a binding document,” Gerson said. “We’ve seen E.I.S.es that don’t result in any significant change on a project. To go to court — you don’t know how the court’s going to rule. I think enough is enough. We have a process in place. I think the best thing at this point is to work it out through the task force. Under the Gerson-Quinn Agreement the Parks Department is required to work with the task force in good faith.”

As for the trees, Gerson said he believed Parks’ revised bid documents now accurately reflect how many will be removed.

If the renovation doesn’t move forward soon, though, Gerson warned that more of the park will become “cordoned off, like the mounds.”

As for the hawk’s figuring prominently in Kupferman’s lawsuit, Gerson said, “This is the first I’m hearing of it — again, that issue could be dealt with through the task force.”

Location Scout: Washington Square Park.

At Least They Waited Until After Bonus Season Was Over

NYPD undercover agents — with no guns blazing this time! — get back on the ball by busting Scores strippers for alleged prostitution:

Several Scores strippers — including a lovely who still lives with her parents in an upscale suburb — were caught with their G-strings down after they allegedly offered to sell sex to undercover cops inside the Chelsea club.

The four strippers agreed to engage in various sex acts in locked back rooms for prices ranging from $200 to $750, police sources said.

Another dancer and two male managers were also arrested on charges of promoting prostitution in what appeared to be the first vice roundup at the famed flesh palace on W. 28th St. “It was wide open,” a police source said. “They didn’t have to work for it.

“Somewhere the managers are sweating,” another police source said. “They put the club’s legitimate money at risk. . . . People above them can’t be happy.”

. . .

Manhattan South vice cops raided Scores just before midnight Wednesday after getting a tip some of the girls were performing sex in rooms at the back of building.

Unlike the club’s glitzy Champagne and President rooms that VIPs rent for private strip shows with their favorite girls, the secluded sex rooms had doors that locked, a police source said.

“Management was involved. They were prepping the backroom. They escorted them back,” another police source said.

The strippers also set their own rates for certain sex acts.

. . .

Last night, a Scores manager who asked not to be identified said the vice squad has been raiding a number of strip joints — not just Scores. “I can guarantee you no girl did anything like that,” he said. “Lap dances or table dances, that’s what we do. There is no friction.”

A raven-haired stripper at the club seconded the manager’s claims. “I don’t do anything like that,” she said. “My mother would kill me.”