What Allen Funt Hath Wrought

It’s been over 50 years since Candid Camera first aired and we’re still dealing with the ramifications:

A Queens man who apparently wanted to become the next “Jackass” is now facing up a year in jail after posting a video on YouTube showing him and some pals posing as cops and randomly searching people on the street.

Gazi Abura, 21, of Astoria, and two other camera-toting pranksters allegedly accosted a 31-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy in July 2005 by donning fake badges and pulling phony “stop-and-frisk”-style police searches. They recorded the encounters and then put the video on the popular YouTube site under the name “Crack DVD . . . The Re-Up//Crack Cops.”

“Amigo, you’re getting thugged right now,” one of the video police fakers told their first victim, Alexis Montoya, 31, of Elmhurst, after stopping him on a sidewalk and “scanning” his driver’s license by putting it into to their car’s CD player.

. . .

The prank video went up on the Web site in mid-August. One of Trivino’s classmates saw it and told him. The teen went to authorities, who later charged Abura with second-degree criminal impersonation, second-degree coercion and second-degree unlawful imprisonment. The charges could get Abura up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

He was ordered held on $3,500 bail at his arraignment last night.

The Unluckiest Guy On The Face Of The Earth

Leave it to the unluckiest guy on the face of the earth to hit on a gang of lesbians with steak knives:

Dwayne Buckle picked the wrong woman to hit on.

When he stopped Patreese Johnson, 19, on a West Village street corner early yesterday to tell her she was “pretty,” she stabbed him in the stomach with a steak knife, authorities said.

Then her six pals — all lesbians, according to family and friends — joined in on the attack, cops said.

Terrain Daindridge, 19, of East Orange, N.J., and Newark women Venice Brown, 18, Renata Hill, 24, Chenese Loyal, 19, Lania Daniels, 21, and Khamysha Coates, 31, were apprehended a block away and arrested with Johnson on charges of attempted murder and gang assault, police said. The knife also was recovered.

The women were all charged early today with attempted second-degree murder, two counts of assault and gang assault. None of them posted the $50,000 cash bail imposed by the judge.

Buckle, an independent filmmaker who turns 29 next week, was at St. Vincent’s Hospital in critical condition.

“He recently broke up with his girlfriend and told me he was looking for someone,” said a friend, who co-produced Buckle’s first feature film, “The Minority.”

“He has always had very bad luck,” she said. “But he’s not the kind of guy who would ever cause trouble.”

The gang of women has often been taunted and harassed for being gay, friends and relatives said.

“They go out with a group so they don’t run into friction with a man that doesn’t understand,” said a cousin of one of the women, who did not want to be identified.

Then again, as more details emerge, the victim doesn’t seem totally blameless:

Buckle, a sound technician and film director, was walking home from a friend’s house at around 2 a.m. when he encountered the group of about six women.

One of them caught his eye — she was feminine and beautiful, he said, and stood out from the group.

“I said ‘hi’ and, ‘How are you doing?’ ” he said.

Patreese Johnson, 19, didn’t reply — but her girlfriend did.

“The fat girl just started yelling at me,” he said. “She cursed me out.”

Buckle told Johnson’s girlfriend that he hadn’t been talking to her, but the Newark woman continued hollering insults.

Outside the IFC Center movie theater on Sixth Avenue, Buckle suddenly was surrounded.

“Another girl started dissing me,” he said. “She told me my sneakers were cheap.”

One of the women shook her fist in his face and spit on him, he said.

“I spit back on her,” he said.

Then all hell broke loose, and the gang removed their belts — letting loose on the Jamaica, Queens, man with a furious barrage of punches, kicks and slaps, he said.

Buckle described his attackers as “half girls and half men.”

Transit Worker Contract On Hold . . . Again

The arbitration panel convened to determine a final outcome in the transit worker contract dispute is on hold until perhaps January:

After six days of hearings, a state-appointed arbitration panel has come no closer to reaching an agreement between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the transit workers’ union to end their bitter and protracted contract dispute, and a resolution to the dispute may not occur until a new governor takes office in January, said experts who have followed the negotiations.

The three-member arbitration panel began hearings on Aug. 4, but on Friday afternoon, the panel’s chairman, George A. Nicolau, announced that the hearings had been recessed until sometime this fall with no conclusion. “I have directed the parties to use this break in the hearings to reflect on their positions and discuss ways among themselves to narrow the disputed issues in this proceeding,” Mr. Nicolau said.

. . .

In a statement on Friday, Mr. Nicolau said the arbitration panel could not consider all the issues until the state labor-relations board ruled on petitions by both sides concerning the proper scope of arbitration.

“Those questions will not be resolved by PERB until later in the year,” Mr. Nicolau said. He said the arbitration panel would resume its hearings in the fall.

Backstory: “Whatever Happened To . . . ?” Subway Workers’ Contract Edition.

Upper East Side Infestation In Chelsea; “Hetero Outposts” Torn Down Too Soon

The so-called last “Hetero outpost in Chelsea will fall to the wrecking ball”:

Phil Alotta pulled down the heavy metal gate outside his restaurant Chelsea Grill last Sunday afternoon. Then he and his wife, Carolyn, attached several heavy padlocks to secure it. They would only close up one more time. An auction of the place’s contents was scheduled for Monday, after which Chelsea Grill’s 15 years at the location would come to an end.

A new six-story, residential building with upscale retail on the ground floor is slated for most of the block on the west side of Eighth Ave. between 16th St. and 17th Sts., extending back through the block to Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly Playground. Several one-story buildings, as well as three early 19th-century, four-story houses will be razed to make way for the new building.

. . .

Tim Gay, a former Democratic district leader who lives in the corner building at 17th St. that isn’t being torn down, said the strip of restaurants was one of the places straights congregated in Chelsea.

“Chelsea Grill was a major hangout for the heterosexuals,” he said.

But in an odd twist, the forces of gentrification mean that a new hetero outpost may be needed sooner than expected:

But Alotta said his customer base in Chelsea was a 50/50 mix of gays and straights. Priced out of Chelsea, gays have already been leaving for a while already, Alotta said. He said he hears that, after Hell’s Kitchen, the next gay exodus will be to Washington Heights.

. . .

Passersby who were reading the farewell sign on the door of Chelsea Grill last Friday evening said they just hope the new building won’t resemble the high-rise across the street — the Grand Chelsea — the design of which most consider an abomination. The neighborhood keeps upscaling and affordable stores that sell things people who live in the neighborhood need are disappearing, said Lee Fergusson, who lives around the corner.

“It’s not good because the whole neighborhood is becoming generic,” said Fergusson. “The deli on the corner just had its rent raised from $10,000 to $30,000. So the neighborhood loses its deli and what goes in there? Gay T-shirts . . . .”

Three other old buildings on 18th St. were also recently demolished. State Senator Tom Duane said the hope was that the Chelsea Plan, which was passed in 1998, would preserve low-rise buildings on Eighth Ave. by downzoning Eighth Ave. and allowing taller buildings on Sixth Ave. and 23rd St. But, clearly, the downzoning isn’t stopping the wrecking ball.

“The Grand Chelsea was the one that spurred everyone into action,” Duane said. “That’s when people realized, ‘My God, Eighth Ave. could turn into the Upper East Side with towers.’ These new buildings will be low-rise — but they’re still destroying buildings.”

Boring, A Tunnel

It kind of sucks that the largest, most expensive public works project in New York City history is unseen by most of us:

It is the biggest public works project in New York City’s history: a $6 billion water tunnel that has claimed 24 lives, endured under six mayors and survived three city fiscal crises, along with the falling and rising fortunes of the metropolis above it.

Yesterday, the city’s Water Tunnel No. 3 reached a major milestone, as workers completed the excavation of an 8.5-mile section that connects Midtown and Lower Manhattan to an earlier section under Central Park. The tunnel is a multi-decade effort spanning four stages; yesterday’s announcement signifies the end of excavation for the second of those stages.

It was a major step forward for the tunnel, which was authorized in 1954, begun in 1970 and then halted several times for lack of money. The completion of the second stage will nearly double the capacity of the city’s water supply, currently 1.2 billion gallons a day, and provide a backup to two other aging water tunnels, allowing them to be closed, inspected and repaired for the first time since they opened, in 1917 and 1936.

“Future generations of New Yorkers will have the clean and reliable supply of drinking water essential for our growing city,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, before he descended 550 feet into the city’s lower bedrock and sat at the controls of a 70-foot-long tunnel-boring machine, as it excavated the last eight inches of quartz, granite and silica.

Since 2003, the giant excavating machine’s 27 rotating steel cutters, each weighing 350 pounds, have chipped through the bedrock at a rate of 55 to 100 feet a day, more than double the 25 to 40 feet that could be excavated each day under the old drill-and-blast method.

For further discussion: “Tunnel Vision” (Popular Mechanics, April 2005).