The Base Salary Is Not So Great But You Should See What They Make With Commissions

Everything’s working out exactly as planned:

Low pay is forcing more and more NYPD recruits to bail out of the Police Academy before they can graduate, the Daily News has learned. Nearly 7% of the current class quit in the first four weeks, sources told The News.

That’s about twice the first-month dropout rate of the July 2005 class, the last academy class before a state arbitration panel slashed starting pay from $36,878 to $25,100.

. . .

The NYPD always loses cops in the academy, especially in the opening weeks when newbies first encounter the department’s tough training. Before the pay cut, about 3% of the class dropped out in the first four weeks. But since January last year, between 6% and 7% of the class has left in the opening weeks.

More than half — 57% — of the 95 recruits who have already left the current class said the chief reason they were leaving was because they just couldn’t live on a starting cop’s salary, sources told The News.

. . .

“It’s kind of scary how poor I am right now,” said a 25-year-old cop in the current academy class.

He said he borrowed $2,000 to cover the costs to buy his uniform, nightstick, memo book, handcuffs and rain gear. The department buys new cops a gun and pepper spray.

The Bronx resident, who didn’t want his name used, hoped he could balance his checkbook to make it through the six-month training program, after which the salary rises to the slightly more livable $32,700.

“I guess it’s part of the whole boot-camp, break-you-so-they-can-rebuild-you thing,” he said. “But you feel like the city is giving you the back of the hand when you look at your paycheck stub.”

Earlier: I’ll Show You What Selling Out The Unborn Really Looks Like; New York’s Finest Receiving Food Stamps?

You (Private) Dick!

Landlords are going to great lengths to challenge their rent-regulated tenants:

Bill Golodner idled his sport utility vehicle beside the curb a few doors down. He clipped a surveillance camera to the steering wheel and brought the house into focus. He ran a rough paw over his shaved head, switched on a camera concealed behind the third buttonhole of his dress shirt, then slipped out into the chill morning, heading for the front door.

Philip Marlowe, if he were around, might be doing rent-fraud cases, too.

These are busy times for private investigators in the real estate racket in New York City. Market-rate rents are in the exosphere. Denizens of the city’s 1.1 million rent-regulated apartments have dug in, and landlords are shelling out serious money in search of grounds to dislodge rent-law violators and get a chance to push up rents when an apartment turns over to a new tenant.

At the confluence of those crosswinds, a private eye can flourish. Investigators like Mr. Golodner sweep up whatever incriminating evidence can be used by building owners and their lawyers to show scofflaw tenants the wisdom of, say, relocation.

Mr. Golodner and his partner, Bruce Frankel, both former New York City police detectives, say their firm has handled close to 500 real estate cases in the past year. They mine public records, plumb the depths of the World Wide Web, plant hidden cameras — trawling for proof of illegal subletting, income-limit violations and the improper use of apartments for businesses, even prostitution and drug dealing.

Then again, sometimes you don’t need to hire a private dick to discover the truth:

Take the tenant who seemed to be allowing her Manhattan apartment to be used for illicit business. The owner of the building answered an ad for what Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner call a massage. Unexpectedly, he found himself in a building he owned. When Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner investigated, they say the found the tenant of record was paying $800 a month but living in Westchester County, while collecting $2,700 a month from the woman in the apartment selling her services.

Some people’s luck . . .

And then there’s the use of private investigators as leading indicator of housing prices:

Another private investigator, Nick Himonidis, founder of NGH Associates in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., recalled a case in which a tenant was operating an architectural office out of a rent-regulated apartment: three architects, support staff, cleaning crews. Two investigators from Mr. Himonidis’s office made an appointment, talked to the architects and asked for a tour of the office. They captured the whole thing on hidden cameras.

“As a percentage of our business, our work for landlords as clients has probably gone from 5 percent to closer to 20 percent in the last 24 months,” said Mr. Himonidis, who believes the rise in rents has made an owner more likely to call in an investigator. “It simply might not have made economic sense 5 or 10 years ago. And now it does.”

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.”

Assorted Dyspeptics, Grouches, Grumblers, Hit-And-Run Writers And Talkers Who Hint Broadly That Our Fair Will Be Artless, Boycotted, Funless, Foodless, Constipated, Strangled And Tasteless

It’s a Ken Jackson-Robert Caro grudge match to the death, with the title of supreme Robert Moses scholar at stake:

Sometime last fall, the biographer Robert Caro got a phone call from Roger Hertog, then vice chairman of AllianceBernstein and a rich and powerful New York City history buff. Columbia was planning a big exhibit on Robert Moses, New York’s master builder from the mid-20th century, and he wanted to know if Mr. Caro would give a lecture as part of it.

It was the first time, Mr. Caro said, that he had heard from anyone connected to the massive three-part exhibit opening next week, “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” which includes among its backers noted historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

And yet Mr. Caro had written the book on Moses, hadn’t he? Since its publication in 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has sold 315,000 copies through its 30 printings (and counting), and can be found on the bookshelf of every self-professed New York–ophile the world over.

With the exhibit (which is to be staged at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and Columbia University) still not open, and with the academic conference weeks away, Mr. Caro gleaned what he could about the whole undertaking—especially the sort of re-evaluation of Moses’ life (and therefore his book) that the exhibit would prompt—by studying its 336-page catalog.

In particular, there were four pages written by Mr. Jackson, another great narrator of the saga of New York, that had gotten Mr. Caro’s attention — four critical pages that made him wonder whether this exhibit was going to be an attack on The Power Broker.

Mr. Caro’s editor Robert Gottlieb, who also read the four pages, told The Observer: “I got this impression that Mr. Jackson, even if he didn’t have a direct animus toward Caro, was suffering from some kind of Moses envy, as if he wanted to own Moses himself.”

. . .

Criticizing Mr. Caro must make students of New York history feel like Oedipus killing his father: The Power Broker is where they all learned about Moses in the first place.

“I wish it had my name on it rather than his,” Mr. Jackson said.

Yet more trash talk:

“There was no intention on my part or by any of the sponsors to not include him,” [Columbia professor and event organizer Hilary] Ballon said. “I have been very concerned that this project not be taken as a critique of what he did. The exhibit raises a different set of questions about Moses’ impact on the physical character of New York City. I’m really interested in what got built.”

Mr. Jackson, who co-edited the catalog with Ms. Ballon and is co-organizing the academic conference, said that he hadn’t thought that Mr. Caro would be interested in the conference, which won’t pay its participants and will probably have a smaller audience than the museum event. Ms. Ballon said that Mr. Caro was the first person to be invited to the public portion of the exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

“I understand his speaking fee is pretty large,” Mr. Jackson said.

Just How Bad Is It? New York Post Employees Are Forced To Panhandle

Upper East Siders scream at the New York Post’s Doug Montero to get a job:

The muscular store worker didn’t mince words when he told me to shoo from outside the Ralph Lauren clothing shop.

“Go stand by the church or I’m going to call the cops,” he threatened as I lowered my panhandling coffee cup.

Bumming on Madison Avenue is a tough business.

It took about an hour before the Ralph Lauren workers at the East 72nd Street store began harassing me.

The first worker, a linebacker-sized maintenance worker, told me to get off the store’s planters because my rear end was disturbing the hedge.

“You should go by the church. You’ll make more money there because people walk by and feel more spiritual,” he said, pointing toward East 71st Street.

“Get a job,” sneered one 60-something lady.