For A While There People Did All Sorts Of Crazy Shit With Their Money

Wow, you can climb into a cool pimped out limo and smoke pot with the driver:

The owners of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the iconic middle-class housing complexes overlooking the East River in Manhattan, have decided to turn over the properties to creditors, officials said Monday morning.

. . .

For tenant advocates and urban planners, the sale underscored the loss of affordable housing in the city and the highly speculative financial structures that, they warned, would only end in disaster.

Sorry, wrong link there . . . turns out you can actually pay $100 an hour to rent a pimped out limo and smoke pot with the driver:

For $100 an hour, late-night club crawlers can spread across its red leather seats, roll up its tinted windows and share a fat joint with the driver – Al, the affable cannabis chauffeur.

The Governor/Mayor’s Plan To Go After Sugar Hits A Snag

Apparently the cops need stuff to do:

Two Bronx men were locked up and left to rot in a filthy jail cell for nearly a week after a pair of bumbling cops mistook their candy for a bag of crack.

The “drugs” were finally tested five days later and determined to be popular Coco (coconut) Candy. The charges were dropped — but there were no apologies from the NYPD.

“Sweet happens,” a police source glibly said of the boondoggle.

. . .

The trouble began the night of Jan. 15, as José Pena, a 48-year-old plumber, and his longtime pal and colleague Cesar Rodriguez, 33, were headed to a party, and decided to stop at a bodega on 181st Street and the Grand Concourse.

When they came out, cops were waiting and asked to search their Ford minivan. “I said ‘Go search.’ I even opened the door,” Rodriguez told The Post.

An officer rummaged around, came out holding a “Hello Kitty” sandwich bag, and shouted “Bingo!” the men said.

“It’s only candy!” Rodriguez said, as the cops handcuffed him and Pena, and several other police cars rushed to the scene.

Rodriguez said he buys a 50-cent bag of Coco Candy, a hard coconut-based treat, almost every day. Because it easily crumbles, he puts it in a sandwich bag.

“I didn’t know having candy was a crime,” he said.

That’s What We Were Hoping For From A Third Term!

Bloomberg goes to bat for the fashion industry to the detriment of the homeless:

New York City officials destroyed tons of new, unworn clothing and footwear last year that had been seized in raids on counterfeit label operations, abandoning a practice of giving knockoff garments to groups that help the needy.

. . .

Another government agency that confiscates large volumes of pirated clothing, United States Customs and Border Protection, donated $78 million in such goods last year. The donations are made only with the consent of the trademark holder, and are limited to essentials like clothing and shoes; they do not include fake Rolex watches or Gucci handbags.

In Los Angeles, shoes that would otherwise have been destroyed were given to Samaritan’s Feet, said John Saleh, a spokesman for the customs agency. Other ports that have participated are Detroit, El Paso and San Francisco. In New York, customs officials recently began working with World Vision.

“Usually the holder of the intellectual property rights allows us to do it,” Mr. Saleh said. If the trademarks can be removed, the goods are given to organizations near the ports, Mr. Saleh said. If they can’t be, they are shipped abroad.

Until recently, New York had a similar policy. In 2006, Mr. Bloomberg announced that the city would send shipments of knockoffs to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. In that case, said Jason Post, a spokesman for the mayor, the city had the assistance of World Vision in sorting through the materials, a daunting task — but one that World Vision and the clothing bank say they still do.

Many major fashion brands have their headquarters in New York City, and Mr. Bloomberg has made prosecution of trademark infringement a priority for his administration. The companies also take actions in civil court against the pirates, an expensive process, to protect the designers’ names.

“These are people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of them millions, to get counterfeit goods off the street,” said Robert Tucker, a lawyer with the firm of Tucker and Lafiti, whose fashion clients include Chrome Hearts, Steve Madden, Zac Posen and Ed Hardy. “Everyone wants to feed and clothe the homeless. But how are you going to spend all this money and then put it back on the street?”

Like The Sopranos Or Oz . . .

They smell a “rat” down in the subway tunnels:

Subway worker Juan de los Santos suffered a broken nose, broken teeth and a gash that needed eight stitches when he slammed into the tracks at the Wilson Ave. station on the L line early Wednesday, he told the Daily News.

. . .

De los Santos said word spread among track workers that he was a whistleblower.

“No matter where I go, always someone says, ‘This is the guy. This is the rat,’ ” de los Santos said. “All the time, I have felt threatened.”

You Can’t Scare Me, I’m Sticking To The Union, I’m Sticking To The Union ‘Til The Day I Die

The Transit Workers Union takes those automatic dues checkoffs very seriously:

Callous union administrators refused to give a dead track worker’s grieving family a customary Bible because he fell behind on his dues before dying, colleagues charged Monday.

. . .

[A friend and fellow signal maintainer] went to the union’s Manhattan headquarters last week to pick up the Bible, but a clerk and Local 100 staffer told him they couldn’t authorize release of the Bible, prompting him to go to the president’s office.

Then a president’s office secretary said a Bible wouldn’t be provided because [dead track worker Jose] Rodriguez was not up to date with his dues and not a “member in good standing,” [the friend] said.

. . .

[O]ther signal maintainers chipped in to buy a Bible, which was presented to the family at the wake last Wednesday, they said.

Union dues are automatically deducted from transit workers’ paychecks, but the checkoffs were suspended for approximately 16 months as punishment for the illegal 2005 bus and subway strike.

During that time, Local 100 urged members to actively make the payments, but many did not. Union leaders disqualified thousands of workers from voting in union elections for not keeping up with their dues.

See also: 2005 Transit Strike.