Leading Economic Indicators: Drug Dealer Customer Service

When small talk means value-added:

Damien, 27, who quit doing coke almost two years ago, has been contacted by three different cocaine dealers, all wanting his business, since June. “None of my friends mess with that anymore,” Damien says, “It’s like they grew up overnight when the banks died.” Eddie was one of the dealers who has recently contacted Damien. When demand first dropped, Eddie took a vacation. But when the situation failed to improve, he decided to call every name in his phone book until he’d arranged a deal. “It worked,” he says. “I’ll keep doing it until it stops working. But I don’t like small talk. I don’t like having to ask them how their day was.”

He Still Makes Less Than The President!

And I guess he’s had a better year, so far at least:

Robert R. Hammond, 39, an artist and entrepreneur who had no experience in the world of public parks, has been paid about $1.2 million over the years of the High Line’s development — the vast majority of it since 2005. And his salary of $250,000 a year as president and executive director of the nonprofit he helped found, Friends of High Line, makes him one of the most generously compensated leaders of the 10 major park conservancies in the city.

. . .

Mr. Hammond’s salary, found in the organization’s tax filings, falls short of that of Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy and administrator of the park. He earns a salary of $364,000 a year. But Mr. Hammond’s salary is considerably greater than his counterpart at the 526-acre Prospect Park in Brooklyn and about $45,000 better than the city’s parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, who oversees approximately 1,700 parks, playgrounds and other recreation facilities.

. . .

The High Line said that Mr. Hammond’s compensation stems from the challenges of operating a park perched roughly 30 feet in the air with a fire code capacity, managing major fund-raising campaigns and working with the city to oversee the design and construction of the High Line, among other duties.

Wow, 30 whole feet in the air . . . maybe if you divide that by 15 feet, which seems to be how wide the thing is, and multiply that by 20 blocks long, you get some sort of formula that comes out to $250,000 a year . . . good thing they decided not to tax everyone within a mile of the place. But then again, you can’t get a peep show as easily in any other park in the city.

Link Of The Day

“The Senate coup that jammed up Albany for weeks, costing taxpayers millions and lowering voters’ already abysmal opinion of state government, was sparked by Democratic leaders’ decision to deny $2 million to Sen. Pedro Espada for two mysterious, newly established charities.”

Mayor Bloomberg Has Thoughts On Health Care . . .

The lesson being, if you ever start a sentence by sneering “the last time I checked,” you probably should have actually checked:

Mayor Bloomberg Friday interrupted a radio health care discussion to blurt out that drug companies — and their execs — don’t make big bucks.

“Last time I checked, pharmaceutical companies don’t make a lot of money,” he said on his WOR-AM radio show. “Their executives don’t make a lot of money.”

Someone must have quickly rechecked, because he backpedaled after a commercial break.

“I looked up the top pay of some of these executives in big pharma,” Bloomberg said.

“Some of them are making a lot of money. Some of them are making a decent amount of — more than a decent amount of money.”

Corollary: Voters probably don’t care about what you think about R&D costs . . .

So Why Can’t We Buy Wine In Grocery Stores, Like Basically Everywhere Else On The Planet?

Because the liquor lobby is a bunch of thugs:

If it wasn’t too surprising that the liquor store lobby had used pros in what it was calling a “grassroots” effort, and had even persuaded some law enforcement groups to go along, what did seem astounding was that some wineries had also been persuaded to join the effort.

If there was any group that would benefit from opening grocery stores to wine, it was the wine makers themselves.

[Liquor lobby grassroots group] The Last Store on Main Street boasted that some 80 wineries in the state opposed the sale of wine in supermarkets. Notably, they claimed, most of Long Island’s wineries opposed the idea.

Last Store spokeswoman Leggitt pointed out that New York’s grocery stores wouldn’t be stocking local wine anyway: “Coming from the small independent-business side, wineries want to keep us out of it for the sake of their fellow members in the wine industry,” she says.

Some wineries did back the bill, however, and say they paid a price for it — in the form of intimidation from the liquor store lobby. (Leggitt says the Last Store group had no involvement in, and did not condone, such intimidation.)

On February 4, Scott Osborn, president of Fox Run Vineyards in Penn Yan, wrote to Governor Paterson and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, complaining that because he testified in favor of the wine bill, he had been targeted by “a coordinated campaign of intimidation and retaliation” by the liquor lobby.

Osborn says he had been uneasy about testifying because “the liquor store lobby had made it explicitly clear that my support of this change would result in my being added to the liquor stores’ ‘enemies’ list, and that my product would be removed from the shelves.”

Osborn claims he received three phone calls the day after he testified from liquor store owners vowing to pull his wines off their shelves. He says he got about 30 e-mails, most of which threatened to pull his wines from their shelves.

Osborn demanded an investigation into his complaint. “There should be no doubt that this is a coordinated effort on behalf of the liquor lobby to damage a well-respected New York State business and put a damper on free speech,” Osborn wrote.

Earlier: Wine, Whine; News You Can Booze.