Eat Out (From The Trough Of) New York

What was once a perfectly good closed circuit feed of boring city council meetings somehow turned into a flashy taxpayer-supported media empire and now it’s all coming down . . . more Bloomberg legacy:

In fact, city investigators only tumbled to Scotland’s thefts after they launched an inquiry last year into complaints by employees at NYC-TV. The wide-ranging gripes included charges that Wierson and other top officials were often absent and appeared to be using city staff and resources for their own private projects.

The results of that inquiry were assembled in a memo that was presented to City Hall shortly before Scotland’s arrest. Since then, in addition to Wierson, at least four other high-ranking aides at the network have also quietly resigned. Asked last week if they’d been fired, a City Hall spokesperson declined comment.

Charming Thought Of The Day

Speaks for itself:

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the money and drugs appeared to have been what the robbers were after when they burst into Special Moments Daycare in East Flatbush on Friday afternoon — while a dozen or so children were napping.

Three men were arrested at the scene, including a suspect who was shot by the police.

“It now appears the day care center was a drug haven, or where drugs in significant quantities were kept, primarily marijuana,” Mr. Kelly said . . .

One Way To Meet Your Quotas . . .

. . . er, or productivity goals — is to ticket a dead man’s car, maybe even with him in it:

The daughter of a man whose badly decomposed body was found inside a minivan said Thursday traffic cops should have noticed her father over the several weeks they covered the vehicle in parking tickets.

“He was my only family,” said Jennifer Morales, 29, about her father, whom she believes died from a heart attack while sitting in the family’s 2000 Chevrolet Ventura in Queens.

“The window was cracked open. I don’t understand how no one noticed him. They just gave him tickets,” she told the Daily News last night.

Film Tax Credits Nearly Turn Deadly

And in a time when there is much confusion about what’s real and what’s not you can’t be too sure what you’re seeing:

A movie chase scene got too realistic early today when a car jumped a curb during a film shoot and smashed into the entrance of a Times Square restaurant, injuring two people, police and witnesses said.

The action scene gone awry unfolded at the Sbarro at 47th Street and Seventh Avenue shortly before 1 a.m.

Street closing notices posted by the police indicated the shoot was for the Nicholas Cage film, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

. . .

Mark Watkins, a tourist from Birmingham, England, watched the live action chase from the top of the new TKTS booth.

“A black Ferrari and a silver Mercedes were chasing each other,” he said.

“The Ferrari took a route down the center of the road, swerving between cars. The Mercedes took the outside lanes.

“The Ferrari took a sharp right to the left and lost it, swerving across the lanes, taking out a lamppost and a news stand.

“One lady was knocked to the ground and a lamppost landed directly on top of a chap.”

Horrifying video at link.

Let Me Strap You Into The Restaulounge So We Can Waterboard You

But in the end, threatening to torture your landlord can only get you so far:

Manhattan prosecutors described yesterday how two Greenwich Village restaurateurs allegedly set the stage for extortion this past January — kidnapping their landlord’s agent, taking him to a nearby apartment, and showing him some hardware decidedly not meant for a home-improvement project, they said.

The unidentified victim took one look at the tarp and the wicker chair on it — alongside a table full of sinister-seeming tools — and agreed to forgive $250,000 in back rent, prosecutors said.

“They showed him a chair, placed on top of a tarp with a table holding pliers, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a candle,” said prosecutor James Meadows. “A burning candle.”

It hadn’t helped that one of the suspects, Vasileios Giamagas, 35, bragged he was a former mercenary and an accomplished killer who’d slain his own brother.

“He told the managing agent that he was in the Chechen army and had blown up a building with more than 80 people in it,” said Eric Seidel, chief of the DA’s rackets bureau.

Giamagas, an illegal alien from Greece, and co-defendant Ekkehart Schwartz, a 70-year-old German architect here on a green card, had fallen behind on their rent at their never-opened bar and nightclub, Restaulounge-Bar De’Vill, at 68 W. 3rd St.