Rebekah, Stop The Madness!

Rebekah Johnson, accused of shooting Ganas commune founder Peter Gross, is on the loose, perhaps in Staten Island, and is sending fucked up communiques to the Staten Island Advance:

The manila envelope, which bears a June 15 Staten Island postmark, contains copies of fliers demonizing Gross, as well as clippings about the May 29 shooting and previous articles about the Ganas commune.

“Patrol car was stationed by 127 Corson for 2 weeks — 24/7,” is the blue-pen jotting on an article from the May 31 Advance. “They left June 12th. June 13th Ganas cut all the vegetation by 127.”

Whether Johnson continues to pose a threat to Gross is open to interpretation.

Next to the headline “Commune stalker: Who’s next?” in that same issue of the Advance is an arrow pointing to a picture of Gross with the words: “Just him!”

Another scrawl reads: “Expecting return of shooter? No way!”

. . .

The fliers contained in the packet branding Gross a “rapist” and a “pimp” first surfaced in 2004, and also appeared on a Web site in a rambling diatribe that compared Gross to Charles Manson and accused Ganas of practicing mind control.

It’s believed that Ms. Johnson was the woman who disrupted the Staten Island Ferry centennial celebration in St. George last Oct. 25, distributing fliers branding Ganas a “cult group” that “rapes women to force them into fraudulent immigration marriages.”

A copy of the flier — which depicts Gross in a photo — is included in the packet with a sarcastic note on the bottom-left corner: “I think someone don’t like him.”

Stretched across the bottom of the page is a question in red felt-tip pen: “Could she be telling the truth?” The word “she” is underlined.

A woman who answered the phone at the Ganas compound yesterday said, “It could be a good thing — if it helps the police catch her.”

Meanwhile, Advance reporter Jeff Harrell pleads with Johnson to turn herself in:

You have reached out to me with a packet of assorted clippings and scrawled messages in an effort to get your message out. And your message brings out very serious problems that merit public attention.

I am apparently your designated public messenger.

That’s good. Communication is a key that can unlock the thickest of doors.

But how can we communicate if you’re a fugitive in hiding?

How can we find peaceful solutions to the severe problems you have posed if you’re being hunted down like a hardened criminal?

. . .

Nobody wants to see anybody else get hurt. Nobody wants you to be harmed, either.

So let’s do this the easy way. Put down your gun. Walk into the police station.

Surrender. Please. For your sake. Nobody will hurt you if you don’t give them a reason to.

Turn yourself in.

Then we can talk.

Backstory: You Win Some, You Lose Some.

A Car With Pep

Is it really the owner’s fault if his car produces narcotics? Keep this vehicle away from Dwight Gooden*:

A New Brighton man whose car trunk yielded cocaine was sentenced yesterday, under a plea deal, to two years behind bars.

*Or the mayor of Bridgeport, for that matter.

You Wrapped Up My Ring In What And Put It Where?

Please, someone buy this household a jewelry box:

Ron Goldstein found a diamond in the dump yesterday: His wife’s lost ring.

The Staten Island man, who accidentally tossed the 3.5-carat bauble in the trash, watched as sanitation workers poked through tons of garbage in the searing heat before recovering the ring he gave his wife 35 years ago.

“I was afraid to go home unless I found it,” said a relieved Goldstein.

The 63-year-old had tucked the ring in a napkin for safe keeping while his wife was in the hospital for a week before she returned home Sunday.

Somehow the napkin wound up in the garbage.

Yesterday morning, around 7 a.m., the Staten Island grandfather awoke in a sweat. The napkin was nowhere to be found.

He ran outside only to see a sanitation truck lumbering down the block and out of sight.

. . .

Heartbroken, he called the local Sanitation Department garage and an understanding supervisor arranged for Goldstein to follow the truck driven by Carlo Tanutco, 30, to a transfer station in Elizabeth, N.J.

“I put all my garbage in yellow ShopRite bags and those bags into a black garbage bag,” Goldstein told officials.

So the search began. Tanutco and fellow workers sorted through dozens of black garbage bags, piled more than 7 feet high.

The heat and smell was getting to him, Goldstein admitted, but he wasn’t leaving.

After just over an hour, some yellow bags suddenly appeared. Tanutco ripped them open, one by one, finally finding the napkin and in it, the diamond ring.

“He was a very happy man when he found the ring,” Tanutco said.

“It was meant to be found,” Goldstein recalled. “It was like God giving me another shot.”

A Cautionary Tale

The one thing that just can’t happen when you self-righteously call for a study is that it refutes everything you were trying to prove:

For generations of Staten Islanders, it has been conventional wisdom that borough residents don’t get their fair share of public transit for all the money they pay in fares and tolls.

Researchers in the city Independent Budget Office may have turned that assumption on its head, finding in a recent study that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority subsidizes Island commuters at a rate higher than passengers anywhere else in the city.

Whether by local or express bus or by train, the analysis, requested by two local lawmakers, determined that when Islanders swipe their MetroCards, their fares cover a substantially smaller portion of the real cost of their rides.

Transit observers played down the report and the borough’s $110 plus million annual subsidy, saying that the level of per-person subsidies belie a struggling transit system in need of even greater resources.

Still, they acknowledge that the report did not turn up fresh evidence that more MTA funding is warranted here.

“It doesn’t give us the ammunition we were seeking to make the case,” said Councilman James Oddo (R-Mid Island/Brooklyn) who called for the study with Assemblyman Vincent Ignizio (R-South Shore).

The Number Of The Beast Ain’t Nothing But A Number

The Advance reports that — unlike some mothers-to-be — those on Staten Island are wildly unimpressed with the hype surrounding giving birth on yesterday’s ominous date:

Staten Island moms seemed to buck a one-day trend yesterday that had some superstitious mothers-to-be around the country taking steps to ensure that their babies were not born on the most unholy of dates: 6-6-6.

According to Island obstetricians, most moms here yesterday cared little about the negative association that went with the date and opted to have their children born on June 6, 2006, or 6-6-6, despite the devilish connotation of the number.

“It’s not empty,” said Arleen Ryback, spokeswoman for Staten Island University Hospital, noting that the hospital labor and delivery unit had listed a total of 11 births yesterday so far and had another two women in labor soon after nightfall.

“It’s a pretty normal day,” she said.

“No one called up to cancel,” said Danielle Piazza, a receptionist for Dr. Andrew De Fazio, an OB-GYN with a private practice in Oakwood.

She said so far six mothers had given birth, no one called to cancel, and few mothers even made the connection with the notorious date.

For most Christians, the number 666 is synonymous with the return of the Antichrist — the incarnate Satan that will bring seven years of Tribulation on the Earth before the return of Jesus Christ.

. . .

Ms. Ryback suggested that people on Staten Island are more interested in having families than buying into yesterday’s bizarre propaganda.

“I think women are having babies later and they are so excited to have children and become pregnant that they just want to give birth, especially if they’ve waited so long to do this,” she said.