Then There Are Those Who Love Pigeons

People are sure edgy nowadays:

Judith Monaco Callet was walking her neighbor’s dog one afternoon in April when she saw a man in an S.U.V. with tinted windows park on the west side of LaGuardia, near Bleecker. The man –Callet thinks he was Caucasian, and wearing a cap — got out of the S.U.V., crossed the street, and threw a big pile of birdseed onto the pavement. “Out of the corner of my eye,” Callet said the other day, “I saw a big black net, like a butterfly or fishing net. So I see it moving, and I’m thinking somebody’s lost a cat. The guy swooped the net up, closed it off, and there he went.” He made off with about fifteen pigeons.

. . .

In and around LaGuardia Corner Gardens recently, theories abounded on where all the birds have gone. [Wilhelmine] Hellmann, snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, asserted that her first sighting of the birdnapper, on Eighth Street, had left her stunned. “I can’t judge people, but that a person thinks he has a right to scoop up pigeons — that just drives me crazy,” she said. She wanted to put to rest, while she was at it, the stereotypical association of pigeons with breadcrumb — sprinkling elderly women. “That is a made-up concept,” she said, rooting around in the dirt for a dead rat. “There are plenty of little old men.”

Only a few weeks ago, Hellmann said, she was at the garden when a van pulled up. Same deal: sprinkle, net, swoop. Joe O’Connell, the resident rosarian, tried to scare the intruder off. “I was waving a shovel, screaming every word under the sun,” he recalled. “Boom — he was in the van with them and gone.” O’Connell said he had heard that the birds were being ground up to make meal for ferrets. He added, “This may sound like a paranoid theory, but does it have anything to do with bird flu?”

A few plots over from Hellmann, a gardener who gave his name as Jack was pruning his daylilies. A couple of years ago, he said, he’d seen something similar happen early on a Sunday morning. He put forth two explanations: either the pigeons were being eaten, perhaps in Chinatown, or they were being taken to shooting ranges in Pennsylvania. “You know something — just hit me right now?” he asked, his tone turning ominous. He looked across LaGuardia to the umbrellas of Señor Swanky’s. “Rich folk don’t like pigeons.” Jack pointed out a set of spiky metal apparatuses that, along with a parliament’s worth of owl decoys, had been installed on the window ledges of a nearby building. “It’s, like, follow the money.” Another gardener whispered, “Maybe it’s N.Y.U.!”

Law & Order Writers Pump Fists: “Who Needs Fred Thompson Anyway?”

Hey, Post — they’re called “little people” — not “midgets” — even if you are talking about a dice-throwing, beer-guzzling crack-dealing midget whose only concern is that he’s not known as a “dwarf”:

The short, troubled life of a drug-dealing Harlem midget came to a violent end yesterday when he was gunned down while guzzling beer and shooting dice outside a housing project.

Cops found a huge .380-caliber pistol in the waistband of little person Joshua Agard, 18, along with 15 vials of crack that he was peddling while hanging out in a courtyard with pal Manuel Zabater, who was also killed in the attack.

“He was just so big. So [I thought], how much could he get into?” said distraught neighbor Debra Daniels, 61. “He was a good person. I loved him.”

Though Agard was just 3 feet tall, he had a police record a mile long. So far this year, he had been busted twice, once on assault charges for throwing a bottle at a man’s head and once for trespassing when he was caught inside 425 E. 105th St. He also had two other arrests, cops said.

The final, fatal trouble for Agard came at about 4:30 a.m. yesterday while he and Zabater, beers in hand, were in the courtyard of the East River Houses project on East 105th Street.

According to cops, three or four black males approached and, without saying a word, blasted Agard several times.

Witnesses told The Post that the project grounds were clear of the usual cast of thugs at the time of the shooting, indicating that many knew the hit would be going down.

As rounds tore through the tiny target’s head and torso, Zabater committed an act of bravery when he rushed to his friend’s side and tried to pull him to cover, witnesses said. That’s when Zabater — who was on parole for drugs — was hit twice in the torso.

. . .

The bloody end for Agard came after a life in which he struggled to overcome the deaths of his parents, and his size, which sometimes made him the object of mockery.

“When people would taunt him, he would say, ‘I’m a midget, I don’t want to be called a dwarf,'” said one pal. “He did everything normal. He played ball, everything. Everybody knew him. He’s a loving person.”

Things weren’t always so bad for Agard. When he was 9 years old he appeared in a performance of “A Christmas Carol” put on by Harlem’s The Play’s The Thing Theatre Company. Fittingly, he played Tiny Tim.

And Here You Sneer At Big Love Like It’s Such A Foreign Concept

Now that a little time has passed*, the Times can finally address the salient fact of that particular story:

She worked at the Red Lobster in Times Square and lived with her husband near Yankee Stadium. Yet one night, returning home from her job, Odine D. discovered that African custom, not American law, held sway over her marriage.

A strange woman was sitting in the living room, and Ms. D.’s husband, a security guard born in Ghana, introduced her as his other wife.

Devastated, Ms. D., a Guinean immigrant who insisted that her last name be withheld, said she protested: “I can’t live with the woman in my house — we have only two bedrooms.” Her husband cited Islamic precepts allowing a man to have up to four wives, and told her to get used to it. And she tried to obey.

Polygamy in America, outlawed in every state but rarely prosecuted, has long been associated with Mormon splinter groups out West, not immigrants in New York. But a fatal fire in a row house in the Bronx on March 7 revealed its presence here, in a world very different from the suburban Utah setting of “Big Love,” the HBO series about polygamists next door.

The city’s mourning for the dead — a woman and nine children in two families from Mali — has been followed by a hushed double take at the domestic arrangements described by relatives: Moussa Magassa, the Mali-born American citizen who owned the house and was the father of five children who perished, had two wives in the home, on different floors. Both survived.

. . .

But the Magassas clearly are not an isolated case. Immigration to New York and other American cities has soared from places where polygamy is lawful and widespread, especially from West African countries like Mali, where demographic surveys show that 43 percent of women are in polygamous marriages.

And the picture that emerges from dozens of interviews with African immigrants, officials and scholars of polygamy is of a clandestine practice that probably involves thousands of New Yorkers.

*It makes you wonder whether someone at early editorial meetings yelled out “Too soon!” as if it were a tastelessly ill-timed 9/11 joke.

Community Board 5 Unswayed By Waterston’s Lincoln-Douglas Theatrics

Even this generation’s Raymond Burr* couldn’t convince Community Board 5 to honor Jerry Orbach with a street renaming:

In a twist worthy of a “Law & Order” script, the decision on whether to name a Midtown street corner for the late actor Jerry Orbach effectively ended in a hung jury last night. Not even a cameo appearance by his longtime colleague Sam Waterston could change the outcome.

The members of Community Board 5 were evenly divided, and admittedly conflicted, about whether to relax their standard objections and approve the naming of the 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue intersection the Jerry Orbach Corner.

A few hours after a committee voted 3-2 for the renaming, the full board voted 18-17 for it, with one abstention. But that slim margin was not enough to qualify as an approval because the votes in favor were not a majority of the votes cast. The decision — or lack of one — is merely advisory; the City Council ultimately decides on street renamings.

. . .

[Orbach’s] regular-guy appearance and lifestyle made him a sentimental favorite among the board members, who have routinely rejected applications for street renamings in the last few years. They turned down Guy Lombardo, Hal Holbrook and even St. Francis of Assisi. But many found it hard to say no to Jerry Orbach, consummate New Yorker, especially in the face of his widow, his son Tony and a living, breathing star, Mr. Waterston, who plays the prosecutor Jack McCoy on “Law & Order.” He read passages from a letter from the Detectives Endowment Association and from Mr. Orbach’s obituary in The New York Times.

It wasn’t Mr. Waterston’s presence that flustered Vikki Barbero, a board member who voted against the renaming. It was the face of Tony Orbach, 45, who bears a strong resemblance to his father.

“It’s like he’s here,” Ms. Barbero said, referring to Mr. Orbach.

“That’s why I’m here,” Tony Orbach responded.

*See, for example, quasi-Atticus Finch Forrest Bedford, white-shoe sounding stock trading pitchman and even Abraham Lincoln.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges . . .

. . . but super-tough nickel-alloy ones, on the other hand:

A rookie cop was “shielded” from death in Queens yesterday when his badge stopped a drunken maniac from plunging a knife into the officer’s heart, authorities said.

The kitchen knife broke into five pieces as it hit the shield.

Officer Stuart Ingram, who joined the force just three months ago, suffered only cuts to his hand in the dramatic clash with crazed Joseph Leonardi, 50.

“When it happened, I was in shock,” Ingram said.

Despite the force of the knife, there were no scratches on Ingram’s NYPD shield. The nickel-alloy badges have been known to deflect a bullet.

“Thanks [to the badge manufacturer] for making it stronger than the knife,” Ingram said.

Leonardi had earlier tried to run over a Catholic nun, cops said.