Traffic Shouldn’t Be Too Bad At That Time Of Day On The East Side

Because if you’re driving around on the lam the obvious place to escape to is Midtown Manhattan:

Joel Noonan, 36, of Avon, Mass., was driving a Jeep on Lexington Avenue yesterday morning when he collided with a Nissan Pathfinder at 63rd Street, police said. The Pathfinder bounced off the Jeep and struck a woman who was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital and was listed last night in stable condition. Noonan’s Jeep was sent onto the sidewalk where it collided with a group of pedestrians. Their conditions were unclear last night.

Two Metropolitan Transportation Authority police officers were the first on the scene and found Noonan outside his vehicle with a knife in his hand, authorities said. Police said they fired at him and used pepper spray to subdue him.

Witnesses described a chaotic scene.

“He had a knife in his left hand and he’s swinging it at the cops, chasing them around his Jeep,” recalled bystander Raymond Garcia, who said he saw the police pepper-spray and shoot Noonan.

. . .

Noonan — who was shot in the groin and abdomen — is wanted in connection with the stabbing death of his cousin’s husband. East Providence, R.I., police told the Providence Journal-Bulletin that Noonan stabbed 37-year-old Steven Dowaglia to death during an argument Sunday evening at a home there. He then attacked his cousin and her 8-year-old daughter, police said.

Her First Mistake Was Looking For A Hit Man On Craig’s List

One, is every hit man actually a cop? And two, what does it say about you that your life is only worth $50? Questions but no answers:

A baby sitter is accused of hatching a bizarre plot to gain custody of an 8-year-old Staten Island girl with whom she became obsessed — paying a “hit man” $50 to whack the kid’s mother, authorities said yesterday.

The “hit man,” however, turned out to be an undercover cop, leading to conspiracy charges against 26-year-old Shonelle Melvelle-Grant.

Developer Charged With Failing To Maintain Waterfront Property 434 Times

Though they cannot or will not prosecute him for actually setting the fire, the Brooklyn DA will charge developer Joshua Guttman with 434 counts of “failure to maintain waterfront property”:

Joshua Guttman, 58, faces 434 counts of failure to maintain waterfront property — a misdemeanor only brought once before in history, said lawyer Robert Hill Schwartz.

“Our research discloses only one reported case in which this statute was enforced,” Schwartz said yesterday in Brooklyn Criminal Court. “So there’s a question as to this statute and whether it’s applicable.”

The lawyer said the research did not indicate how that case was disposed of or which of the five boroughs it was brought in.

A spokesman for the Brooklyn DA countered that although their office could only document one such case that they prosecuted, other agencies and jurisdictions in the city had applied it “dozens of times.”

Brooklyn prosecutors hit Guttman and his son, Jack, 26, with the charges following the suspicious fire at the Greenpoint Terminal Market last May 2.

See also: Greenpoint Terminal Market Fire.

Extortion Never Seemed So Easy

So this is why work on the L train has taken so long:

Under the guise of running labor coalitions for minority workers, four men have been conducting shakedowns at constructions sites across the city — on one occasion last year even stopping work on a section of Water Tunnel #3 — prosecutors charged yesterday.

Their victims are numerous contractors across the city and minority workers who were forced, under threat of violence, to hand over to two labor organizations a large portion of their pay, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said at a news conference yesterday.

The suspects are from two competing organizations, Akbar’s Community Services and P&D Construction Workers. They were arraigned yesterday on charges of enterprise corruption and grand larceny.

The stated purpose of the two groups was to put minority workers on jobsites, prosecutors said. But everything they did was directed at extortion, and contractors grew familiar with their threats of violence or work stoppages, prosecutors said.

In one instance, Mr. Morgenthau said a contractor wrote the word “extortion” across the stub of one of the checks he paid the men.

The extortion occurred on a frequent basis in recent years, an assistant district attorney, Ronald Mooney, told a judge during the arraignment in state Supreme Court in Manhattan yesterday. Mr. Mooney said a “good day” for the Akbar group — which has an office on Livonia Avenue in Brooklyn — consisted of visiting construction sites, often with two or three vans full of workers, and stopping work until they had placed a person on the site or received payment.

At a news conference yesterday, prosecutors expressed surprise at the audacity of two of the men in particular, Reginald Rabb, 39, and Steven Mason, 41, who allegedly precipitated a work stoppage at one of the shafts to Water Tunnel #3, an ongoing project begun in 1970 to increase water supply to the city. Mr. Morgenthau said that on June 16 of last year the two men arrived with several workers at the job site on Gansevoort Street and the West Side Highway. Once there, Rabb and Mason, who headed the P&D group, allegedly disconnected a generator in use, causing the foreman enough worry that he ordered the sandhogs working to leave the area. The delay lasted less than three hours.

Using similar tactics, prosecutors say Rabb and Mason caused a delay that summer of construction work along the L subway line in East New York. Work there resumed when the contractor hired one of the members of the P&D group, Mr. Morgenthau said.

NYPD Bedbug

Who knew police precincts had so many beds? The city’s bedbug problem rolls on:

Blood-sucking bedbugs have invaded a Brooklyn police precinct stationhouse — forcing cops to process arrests at a vermin-free NYPD building 15 blocks away, sources told the Daily News.

The nasty problem in the 60th Precinct stationhouse in Coney Island began about three weeks ago when a cop noticed bites on his ankles, the sources said.

Soon prisoners lodged in holding cells started to complain — marking one of the rare times cops and criminals were on the same side of an issue.

Cops know that sometimes they must bring their job home with them. But they draw the line at bedbugs.

“It’s bad enough to have to deal with these things at work, but how do we explain to our wives why we’re bringing home bugs?” an agitated cop complained.

Backstory: Don’t Let The . . .; It’s Endemic, Pandemic, This Epidemic; Bedbugs Don’t Wait For Midterms Now, Do They?; Don’t Let The Gasoline-Soaked Bedbugs Burst Into Flames In The Middle Of The Night, Setting Your Living Quarters On Fire.