Because It’s Not Like There Aren’t About A Million Yahoos Walking Around In Yankees Gear In This Town Or Anything . . .

It’s kind of like looking for “a white van” — there are thousands of white vans out on the roads:

While other New Yorkers have been holding their heads in their hands over the steroid scandal enveloping past and present Bronx Bombers, [Benjamin] Soto wrongly spent a week in prison on Rikers Island — just for proudly wearing a Yankee jacket.

. . .

The Staten Island man’s odyssey began Nov. 10, when cops approached him with guns drawn as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house in Port Richmond.

“They were screaming, ‘Where’s the weapon? Where’s the stuff you stole? Where are the credit cards?'” he said.

“They threw me up against a fence, and I was asking, ‘What’s going on? What did I do? I don’t know what you’re talking about.'”

Turns out Soto, 35, loosely matched the description of one of three young men who had robbed a teen at knifepoint nearby. The victim told cops one of the men was wearing a Yankee jacket.

Two other men, Terence Ascensio, 17, Andre Glover, 18, were arrested separately.

Before Soto knew what was going on, he was handcuffed in front of his neighbors, hauled off to jail, arraigned on robbery charges and held in lieu of $25,000 bail — which as a YMCA custodian, he could not raise.

The City Finds $2.1 Billion For A Train Stop At That Convention Center But Can’t Figure Out How To Provide Working Elevators At Bronx Family Court*

Sure, the project is a lot less “sexy” but it at least provides some useful purpose:

There are many longstanding, seemingly intractable shortcomings in the city’s family court system that might delay a parent in getting a child back from foster care: unprepared lawyers, overcrowded dockets and long waiting lists for drug treatment and mental health services.

But Bronx Family Court has added a new obstacle: broken elevators.

For about a year, the elevators at the courthouse have been a disaster, people who work there say. Breakdowns have long been routine. This year, repair work has only added to the problem.

Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to be postponed because clients and witnesses cannot get to them.

“It’s absolutely an outrage,” says Ava Gutfriend, a lawyer who often represents parents in child welfare cases. “But in the Bronx it happens all the time.”

In some cases, warrants have even been issued for people who are downstairs waiting for an elevator; judges know only that they are not in the courtroom, said Bill Nicholas, the assistant attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s office at the court.

. . .

In a city full of aging towers, many people view elevator breakdowns as a common annoyance of life. But the scale of the waiting at Bronx Family Court, which often extends to an hour or more, is beyond what most New Yorkers face. And the potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed. Consider the case of a client of Ms. Gutfriend’s who was scheduled for a hearing in mid-November to determine whether she could get her daughter back from foster care, where the child had been for 10 months.

The hearing was set for 10 a.m., Ms. Gutfriend recalled, but it was a day when only two of the four elevators in the building were working. The lines to get on the elevator and up to the hearing rooms stretched back two city blocks. Her client phoned upstairs to let her know she was stuck in the line, but was not able to get upstairs in time.

The judge agreed to call the hearing again an hour later, but the client was still in line. So the judge, who had something like 70 other cases to try that day, rescheduled the no-shows for the next available date. For this mother, the next chance to plead her case and get her child back was in January.

*I don’t care if it’s a reductionist apples-oranges argument — this is horrifying.

Now It Smells Like Fish And Roses!

It’s actually more like a matchbook by the toilet than anything “fancy” like Chanel No. 5:

It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of trying to cover up bad body odor with Chanel No. 5.

For more than a year, residents of one Brooklyn neighborhood have been complaining about a stomach-churning smell wafting from the site of a former sewer pipe project.

The city’s response? Tossing nylon socks filled with pine deodorizer into the catch basins.

That hasn’t stanched the stench. In fact, locals say the scent of raw sewage is even more noticeable now.

“I think that adding the pine made the existing smell even more potent,” said Aaron Green, 27, one of the Bay Ridge residents who is sick of the stink.

The stink has been hovering over a stretch of Fort Hamilton Parkway between Marine Ave. and 99th St.

The odor cropped up in the summer of 2006 after the completion of a $6.9 million project to combine the underground sewer pipes there, residents say.

As complaints mounted, the community board notified the city Department of Environmental Protection, which began dumping piney perfume onto the site.

You’re The Man Now, Dog

Trouble, the dog to which Leona Helmsley left $12 million, has had to flee to Florida under an assumed name for its own protection:

The poor little rich bitch has been wintering in Florida after being targeted by death threats up North, The Post has learned.

Trouble turned tail from the 28-room Connecticut estate where she had been staying after her caretakers received approximately two dozen threats against the petite pooch, who became a celebrity earlier this year after Helmsley died and left her a $12 million trust fund.

The dog — under an assumed name — was flown by private plane with her security team to a Helmsley property in the Sarasota area about two months ago, sources said.

. . .

John Codey, the Helmsley executive in charge of the pooch’s trust fund, said Trouble is being well taken care of.

He estimated the cost of her upkeep — including security, medical care and grooming — to be well over $300,000 a year. The Maltese chows down on meals prepared by chefs.

. . .

He said that the 4 1/2-pound pooch has a rotating security team and used an alias when she flew out of Connecticut.

“We’ve had problems keeping her identity confidential, and we had to change her name even to take her on the aircraft. We called her Bauble instead of Trouble,” he said.

In Old Timey Time, We Worried About Whether Our Esophagus Would Be Strafed By Stray Bits Of Glass

Brooklyn nostalgia reaches even more absurd heights:

Customers at Sahadi’s, Brooklyn’s primary stop on the Near Eastern spice route, are still fuming that the grocer has replaced the classic glass jars with generic plastic containers in the nuts, dried fruits and candies section.

“Everyone is talking about it,” said Charlie Sahadi, the second-generation owner. “No one likes change less than me,” but “my concern is about my customers, not about my jars.”

The jars were a big part of the shopping experience at Sahadi’s. The store, open since 1948, contained dozens of large, circular glass jars, each containing a different kind of nut, dried fruit or candy. Customers would take a number and wait for an employee to scoop out their order.

The shapely glass jars made a distinctive clinking noise when lid made contact with base, but that repeated clinking led to chipping, with bits of glass ending up in the food.

In other stores, a change like this would be insignificant, but like other recent changes to the Atlantic Avenue grocery, famous for foods of the Levant, anything that tinkers with the old-time atmosphere is sure to draw fire.

“I don’t like them,” said one longtime shopper who didn’t want to give her name. “The new ones look like any deli. I prefer to see broken glass because it has more identity.”