If You Can’t Shame Subway Performers Into Considerate Behavior, Try Clipping Their Wings, Or, When Subway Performers Are Unable To Exit Cars, It Just Means They Have More Time To Annoy You

The Daily News reports that tickets for new subway infractions have gone up since the new regulations are on the books. Who is most upset about the changes? Take a guess:

Martin Cruz, 16, who was crossing the cars of an E train last week was unaware of the rules. But the Bronx high school student said they have some merit.

“Some people might not have good balance and fall to the side,” Martin said.

The Subway Entertainers, a group of four underground dancers, disagreed.

“I think it’s unfair,” group member Russell Steele, 30, of the Bronx, said on the E train. “If you’re in a car and there are no seats, you should be able to walk to the next car, especially after work.”

But Would We Still Have The Same Dim Sum Experience If The Push-Cart Ladies Were Unionized?

If you wondered whether the ass-busting waitstaff at Chinatown’s Jing Fong was underpaid rest assured that the management definitely screws them over:

It is where Chinese families and hungry tourists flock on Lunar New Year, braving hourlong waits to savor plates of dim sum plucked from steaming carts. It is always one of the first restaurants to become fully booked on Thanksgiving, the busiest day for weddings in Chinatown, with multiple banquets over multiple shifts. It is where the daughter of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, was honored in 1995.

It is Jing Fong, whose dining room has a capacity of 1,300, making it the largest restaurant in Chinatown and perhaps New York.

But a lawsuit filed by six waiters in Federal District Court in Manhattan yesterday charges the restaurant with violating the minimum-wage laws.

. . .

Under New York State law, waiters who are paid hourly rates below the minimum wage, now $6.75, are supposed to keep all their tip income, though it can be redistributed among the waiters.

But the six waiters charge that Jing Fong has been using money from the tip pool to pay the women who push the dim sum carts, without paying them an hourly wage. In addition, the waiters say that the restaurant has been taking up to 35 percent of the service charge that is added automatically to the bills of large groups.

They also say that about $2,500 is inappropriately taken each week from the tip pool. The waiters say they earn $20,000 to $25,000 a year and have no benefits.

The owners of the restaurant say they abide by the labor laws, having hired labor lawyers in the 1990’s to inspect their operations.

“Our way of practice is 100 percent legal, otherwise my attorney wouldn’t let me do it,” said Ming Lam, whose family is an owner of Jing Fong. Mr. Lam says the dim sum women do receive an hourly wage in addition to the money they get from the tip pool. “They have a base salary the same as the waiters and the busboys and the captains, and they get their tip share from the tip pool,” he added.

He also said that while the restaurant did take 35 percent of the service charge from large groups of 30 or more, the law permitted them to do so for reservations that were considered banquets. “When a reservation is done through management, when the menu is done through management, that is a banquet,” he said.

Mr. Lam said he did not know that the waiters were complaining about the service charge policy. “They should have brought it to my attention, but they never did,” he said.

That’s A-L-L-E-G-E-D-L-Y

The Village Voice’s Tom Robbins does nothing to disprove the axiom that good Italian food necessarily involves mob links:

Most nights Ron Straci helps run Rao’s, the city’s most exclusive restaurant, a place favored by society swells and hoodlums alike, where you’ve got a better chance at getting a table if your name is Frankie Brains than if it’s Madonna. But in his day job, Straci is a labor lawyer and the work is far less glamorous. For instance, one of his recent tasks has been to handle a group of dissidents who challenged their union’s recent election as undemocratic and unfair. In February, Straci sent a letter to the members explaining that the union he represents had considered and dismissed their protest.
“All of the challenges were investigated by the committee appointed by the Secretary-Treasurer,” wrote Straci. The committee had recommended, and the executive board had voted, that the challenges be dismissed. The decision was then ratified at a meeting of the general membership, “without questions or objections from the floor.” Case closed. Straci made no mention that the secretary-treasurer in question who oversaw this inquiry into democratic procedures was a spry 83-year-old, an alleged veteran mobster named Julius Bernstein, who goes by the nickname “Spike.” Nor that the meeting of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union had been presided over by president Salvatore Battaglia, 59, another reputed mob associate. Nor that both men, along with the woman overseeing the union’s $268 million in pension funds (the girlfriend of said Spike Bernstein), are currently accused by federal prosecutors of conspiring with an acting boss of the Genovese crime family to obstruct justice and extort a union medical vendor of $100,000.

. . .

Those are stories that get told regularly and with gusto at Rao’s (pronounced Ray-ohs), the restaurant that constitutes Straci’s second job. Together with his better-known cousin, restaurateur turned actor Frank Pellegrino, Straci is co-owner of the much coveted East Harlem bistro, which they have made into a destination for everyone from presidents to movie stars and Wall Street tycoons. Bill Clinton has tucked in a napkin there, along with New Jersey’s Jon Corzine, George Pataki, and ex-senator Al D’Amato, who wooed a girlfriend or two over dinner. But the pols get fewer glances than celebrity regulars like Woody Allen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Crystal, and Rob Reiner. And the stars make room for such corporate titans as Jack Welch and Ron Perelman, and the steady stream of moguls who dine with tough-talking ex-detective turned private eye to the stars Bo Dietl, who holds down a weekly table.

For sure, part of the attraction is a reputation for excellent red sauce, chicken limone, and seafood salad. There is also the fact that Rao’s is a charming and cozy little place, with just 11 tables, lit by perpetual Christmas lights. It is located on a remote corner at East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue, across from Thomas Jefferson Park and the old Benjamin Franklin High School.

But even more important than its ambience and clam sauce is the unmistakably strong aroma of Cosa Nostra. As the late author and Rao’s regular Dick Schaap wrote in his preface to Rao’s Cookbook: Over 100 Years of Italian Home Cooking, one of the lures is “the suspicion that every other diner is the Godfather of something or other.”

And of course Robbins gives the reader ample reason to remain suspicious . . .

Impounded Because . . . They’re Just Silly

“Party Bikes” — those big circular multi-player cycling contraptions in Times Square — have been impounded by police:

Is the party over for PartyBike? The owner of Peddle Pushers Limited, which runs a fleet of red, seven-seated giant tricycles often seen traversing Times Square, faces a bumpy ride after the Police Department impounded 14 of its 15 vehicles in the city.

Donald Domite says his company is being singled out by police. “We follow the vehicle laws. We stop at lights. No one was ever injured,” said Mr. Domite, 52, of Sayville, L.I., whose company started about two and a half years ago.

Mr. Domite said police have been issuing “ECB tickets” — a reference to the city’s Environmental Control Board — which allow them to impound the vehicles for violating the city’s vending laws. Published reports have said that Mr. Domite’s PartyBikes were drawing complaints of noise on Eighth Avenue.

Mr. Domite said the ECB violations fall under the charge of “vending without a license.” Previous summons of “disorderly conduct” have been dismissed in court, he said.

Although PartyBike has received about 250 disorderly conduct tickets, Mr. Domite said, a bicycle is allowed anywhere in New York City unless there is a sign saying “No Bicycles.” When asked if his vehicles have impeded traffic, he said, “You cannot impede traffic if you’re part of it.”

. . .

The vehicles were at first well received, Mr. Domite said, until one of his drivers had a verbal dispute with a police officer in September 2004. Tickets and impoundment since followed, he said. Mr. Domite said the police have singled him out, arresting him for loitering six months ago in Times Square. He said he spent three days in jail but the city, he said, declined prosecution at the arraignment. In October, he filed a civil action against the police and is seeking a civil rights attorney.

Maybe 2021 Is A More Realistic Date

The fact that the order of victims’ names on the Sept. 11 memorial is a contentious issue shows just how contentious everything about the World Trade Center site is:

One of the most potentially divisive issues at ground zero — how victims’ names are arranged on the memorial walls — was settled two years ago, when the governor and mayor said they would be listed in random order, with insignias of service next to the names of uniformed emergency workers. Period.

But nothing about the World Trade Center site ever seems completely settled.

Firefighters and police officers never liked the random concept, union officials said, believing that their mission of running into the buildings while others fled entitled them to special recognition. A group of victims’ relatives proposed that names be listed by association (employees of Cantor Fitzgerald or Aon, for example) in the space corresponding to the tower where they died. The architect who won the design competition, Michael Arad, originally spoke of creating “meaningful adjacencies” that would, for instance, permit siblings to be listed side by side.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation long maintained that this discussion was over. Yesterday, however, Stefan Pryor, the corporation president, and Thomas H. Rogér, a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, told a City Council committee that renewed discussions about the arrangement of names were in fact still going on.

“L.M.D.C.’s ears remain open,” Mr. Pryor said. “We are always open to further solutions, suggestions. And we’ve had meetings on this topic quite recently.”

He said that random arrangement remained the plan and said that any alternative would have to conform to the overall memorial design.

Pressed by Councilman Alan J. Gerson of Lower Manhattan to articulate the corporation’s position on the names, Mr. Pryor said, “The current position of the L.M.D.C. is to support Michael Arad’s position.” Mr. Arad, who did not testify yesterday, said in 2004, “The haphazard brutality of the attacks is reflected in the arrangement of names and no attempt is made to impose order upon this suffering.”

At yesterday’s hearing, Mr. Rogér, whose 24-year-old daughter, Jean, was a flight attendant aboard the American Airlines jetliner that crashed into the north tower, said, “The random suggestion contained within the current design may have some artistic elegance about it, but it certainly is flawed in many respects.”