And NYPD CTU — Just So We’re Clear, This Totally Doesn’t Count As A “Foiled Terrorist Plot”

Time was, the crazy and insane could plot against public officials and few people — if anyone — would notice. Then you start throwing around terms like “beheading” and “blowing up” and all of the sudden you’re a teaser for the 11 o’clock news:

The undercover detective posing as a hired assassin sat across from his client in the Rikers Island visitation room last month and asked how he wanted the hit carried out.

In hushed tones, the inmate, David Brown Jr. — a 6-foot-3-inch, 375-pound man with a beard streaked with white — gave the order.

“I want his head chopped off,” he said.

The target: The police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.

. . .

On February 21, an undercover detective made a phone call to Brown in jail. Brown told the detective, whom he believed to be a professional hit man, that he was “fed up with the case where the guy got shot 50 times.”

Mr. Kelly didn’t have the “initiative to prosecute the officers,” he said, according to a transcript of the conversation. “That kind of got me frustrated to the point where I want him murdered.”

The two spoke three times, including once more on the phone on February 22, and then in person on February 23. Brown said he would pay $15,000 to have Mr. Kelly beheaded and another $50,000 for police headquarters to be blown up, police said. The detective advised him that blowing up a building could cost as much as $150,000. They agreed to talk again soon, police said.

“I want them to feel like I’m a . . . terrorist,” he said, according to the transcript of the third and final encounter.

Yup, that’ll get their attention.

Dancing Not Protected Form Of Expression; Arthur Murray Weeps

A state appeals court ruled that dancing is more akin to yelling “fire” in a crowded theater:

As you head out this weekend to your trendy nightclubs and fund dive bars, be wary. The city’s ban on social dancing in bars, restaurants and certain clubs is legal, a state appeals court said yesterday.

The state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division ruled 5-0 that the city’s Cabaret Law, which was enacted in the Prohibition era and prohibits social or recreational dancing in all but specially licensed venues, is constitutional.

The Gotham West Coast Swing Club and several people filed a lawsuit complaining that because the city’s 80-year-old Cabaret Law barred them from dancing with other people, it illegally infringed on their right of free expression.

The plaintiffs also contended that the city’s application of zoning laws was arbitrary and capricious and deprived them of due process. They said they should be allowed to dance in any bar or restaurant they want to.

The appeals court disagreed, saying, “Recreational dancing is not a form of expression protected by the federal or state constitutions.”

. . .

Cenk Eryaman, a bartender at Fat Baby on Rivington Street, said though his bar has no cabaret license, it plays rock and hip-hop on the weekends.

“I don’t know what constitutes dancing, but people shake their assess,” he said.

Global Warming = More Crime?

Are we to assume that if the earth’s temperature rises, there will be a related rise in crime? Oh my god, don’t tell Al Gore because he’ll probably get all uppity about that, too:

The NYPD — with an assist from Mother Nature — is putting the freeze on crime across the city and in the subways.

February is on pace to be the safest month on record since the NYPD began tracking crime statistics by month 13 years ago, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the Daily News yesterday.

. . .

Citywide crime this month through Sunday has fallen 10% compared with the same period last year.

The number of murders is also down to 46 from 75, a 39% drop, the statistics show.

The reduction in overall crime has coincided with an unusually cold stretch of weather: Temperatures have averaged 24.6 degrees, records show.

But Kelly noted this month’s decline in crime followed a similar reduction in January, which was unusually warm.

“We’ve had a recent cold snap,” Kelly said, acknowledging a link between the cold weather and low crime rate. “But the weather was mild for a significant portion of 2007.”

Gary Conte of the National Weather Service, said during the first 18 days of this month, temperatures in Central Park averaged about 9 degrees below normal. Before the last few days, when the mercury crept above 40, the month was on pace to be one of the coldest in 100 years.

“There’s no doubt with the colder temperatures, more people were inside,” Conte said.

From Dick Wolf’s Sick Mind To Your TV In Just 101 Days

From November 7 to February 16 — 101 days — is how long it takes for stories to make it from the headlines to Law & Order episodes:

One grim gray morning three weeks ago, two homicide detectives strode into a small Manhattan apartment and gazed up at a petite young woman dangling by her neck from a ceiling pipe rigged with a homemade nylon noose. “It’s about time,” grumbled a dreadlocked medical examiner. “You have any idea what it’s like being stuck in here with a swinger?

Objects in the room told the story of the dead woman’s promising career. Near stacks of videocassettes, the walls were decorated with posters for independent films featuring images of the young woman, an actress turned director who had been renting the apartment as an office.

If the details of the crime scene called to mind the death of Adrienne Shelly, the 40-year-old actress and director who was hanged in her Greenwich Village office in November, what happened next did not: After two police technicians cut the body down from the pipe, the corpse, played by a 40-year-old stuntwoman named Jennifer Lamb, headed into a nearby room to nurse her 4-month-old daughter.

“Law & Order” was at it again, ripping a gruesome crime from the headlines and transforming it into an hour of fast-moving, plot-driven television, which in this instance will be broadcast Friday night at 10 on NBC. Although the use of such raw source material is common on the program, this particular real-life victim had an eerie way of returning to people’s minds during production.

. . .

In reality, barely a New York minute passed between the moment Ms. Shelly’s life ended and the moment it became fodder for prime-time drama.

After Ms. Shelly’s body was found hanging from a shower rod on Nov. 1, investigators initially suspected suicide. But a footprint in her bathroom led the police to a 19-year-old Ecuadorean illegal immigrant named Diego Pillco who had been doing construction work in a downstairs apartment, and the police determined that they had a murder on their hands.

On Nov. 7 and 8, the morning newspapers were filled with macabre accounts of the crime, as pieced together by the police. According to the authorities, Mr. Pillco had struck Ms. Shelly in the face and, suspecting he had killed her, then faked her suicide by hanging her from the shower rod with a bedsheet. The police said Mr. Pillco admitted that Ms. Shelly had complained about construction noise and that after their confrontation grew violent and he pleaded with her not to call the police, he had hit her and then hanged her body, in an apparent effort to conceal his crime. The city medical examiner later ruled that Ms. Shelly had died not from a blow but from “compression of the neck.”

The story had all the earmarks of drama and sensationalism that make a successful “Law & Order” episode, and Dick Wolf, the creator of the show and its sister series, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” was hardly the only one to take notice. The morning the faked-suicide story broke, three people, including Mr. Wolf’s barber and the counterman who poured his coffee at Dean & DeLuca, brought the story to his attention as material for a new episode.

“It just screams it,” said Mr. Wolf, who reads a half-dozen newspapers a day, in part to stimulate story ideas.

Over the next few weeks, Mr. Wolf and the program’s writing “show runner,” Nicholas Wootton, batted around ways to take the apparently straightforward footprint-leads-to-the-killer story line and give it the whiplash-inducing plot twists the show is known for.

Earlier: Law & Order To Become A Show-Within-A-Show Self-Contained World.

At Least They Waited Until After Bonus Season Was Over

NYPD undercover agents — with no guns blazing this time! — get back on the ball by busting Scores strippers for alleged prostitution:

Several Scores strippers — including a lovely who still lives with her parents in an upscale suburb — were caught with their G-strings down after they allegedly offered to sell sex to undercover cops inside the Chelsea club.

The four strippers agreed to engage in various sex acts in locked back rooms for prices ranging from $200 to $750, police sources said.

Another dancer and two male managers were also arrested on charges of promoting prostitution in what appeared to be the first vice roundup at the famed flesh palace on W. 28th St. “It was wide open,” a police source said. “They didn’t have to work for it.

“Somewhere the managers are sweating,” another police source said. “They put the club’s legitimate money at risk. . . . People above them can’t be happy.”

. . .

Manhattan South vice cops raided Scores just before midnight Wednesday after getting a tip some of the girls were performing sex in rooms at the back of building.

Unlike the club’s glitzy Champagne and President rooms that VIPs rent for private strip shows with their favorite girls, the secluded sex rooms had doors that locked, a police source said.

“Management was involved. They were prepping the backroom. They escorted them back,” another police source said.

The strippers also set their own rates for certain sex acts.

. . .

Last night, a Scores manager who asked not to be identified said the vice squad has been raiding a number of strip joints — not just Scores. “I can guarantee you no girl did anything like that,” he said. “Lap dances or table dances, that’s what we do. There is no friction.”

A raven-haired stripper at the club seconded the manager’s claims. “I don’t do anything like that,” she said. “My mother would kill me.”