Headliners of ’07: A Subway Savior, Rampaging Rats, and a $12 Million Dog

[Woodmonkey]

Headliners of ’07: A Subway Savior, Rampaging Rats, and a $12 Million Dog


You might say that a news story is not unlike a cut of halibut; it has only a day or two before it starts to smell. Spoilage, in the form of obsolescence, is built into the system. No matter how informative or charming, Monday morning’s headlines are often used to pick up after Tuesday evening’s dog.

This is particularly true in New York City, a town obsessively committed to the present tense. After all, does anyone remember Wesley Autrey or Judith Bailey or Rose Morat? What of James G. Madison or Robert Fernandez? Does the name Stamos Arakas ring a bell?

Luckily for these unfortunate forgottens, New Year is approaching, a time when, despite the intuitions of the calendar, our thoughts often turn to the past. It is in the nature of New York and its environs to soldier forward with a furious momentum until shortly after Christmas. Then, like a fugitive, the whole place spins around and looks across its shoulder to see where it has been.

This year, beyond the obvious pits of politics and macroeconomics, the city has been in the subways and the courts, in cheap apartments and expensive aeries, in the jails and on the streets, blessed with a variety of one-day wonders in the news. That is where a city lives most vividly, not in its mortgages or mayors, but in its heroes, freaks and bums.

Looking back, then, at the transitory stories of the year, it might be appropriate to start with Mr. Autrey, a construction worker and Navy veteran who threw himself before a No. 1 train on Jan. 2 to save a fellow rider who had fallen onto the tracks after suffering a seizure. Mr. Autrey held him down while the train passed above them.

The act of heroism earned Mr. Autrey an all-expense-paid trip to Disney World, a year’s free passage on the subway and the Bronze Medallion, the city’s highest citizenship award. It also led to a media career that, at least of late, has had Mr. Autrey traveling the globe.

“I been more or less living out of a suitcase,” he said the other day, adding that he had just returned from a “TV thing” in Berlin, where, by his own account, he is in the running for Germany’s “Person of the Year.”

“I did Hamburg back in March, and we did Munich for a couple of weeks.” He has also visited schools and summer camps across the country, delivering speeches on the dangers of drugs and guns.

After a whirlwind promotional tour in the spring (Letterman, Ellen, CNN), he sued a lawyer and a movie agent, claiming they had signed him to an “unconscionable” contract. The suit has been resolved, Mr. Autrey’s lawyer said, clearing the way for a children’s book (“The Subway Hero”), one for grown-ups (of the same title) and two potential movie deals.

“There’s a lot stuff I haven’t yet revealed that I’ve been sitting back on quietly,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the Writers Guild to get off strike.”

No judicial roundup of the year would be complete without revisiting the florist Stamos Arakas, who was sued in October for $400,000 by a client who claimed that he had bungled the hydrangeas at her wedding. The client, Elana Glatt, charged in a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that Mr. Arakas, owner of Posy Floral Design on East 72nd Street, had substituted wilted brown hydrangeas for the dark rust and green ones she had chosen to go with the décor at her reception.

The case has been settled, albeit under terms that Mr. Arakas’s lawyer, Scott Nicholas, declined to discuss. (Mr. Nicholas was not averse to discussing the questionable merits of reporting on the suit, which The New York Post, for one, wrote about beneath the headline, “Bridal Bloom & Doom.”)

Indeed, despite publicity about the case, Mr. Arakas said that his reputation was essentially unharmed. “The biggest concern was that we didn’t lose customers,” he said by phone last week. “Our wedding business is off a bit, but otherwise it’s fine.”

In other legal matters, there was Leona Helmsley’s will, which caused a stir in the summer when it left Trouble, the hotelier’s dog, $12 million. There was more of a stir when it turned out that Mrs. Helmsley had been more generous with her Maltese than with her some of her family. Two of her grandchildren were cut out altogether, for what the will described as “reasons which are known to them.”

Trouble, who in subsequent accounts was said to enjoy cream cheese and long walks in the park, became another in a long line of Central Park celebrities. Her days at the Park Lane Hotel (a Helmsley property) were breathlessly discussed as were certain medical conditions pertaining to her kidneys.

These days, Trouble is enjoying her inheritance in happy anonymity, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a Helmsley family spokesman.

“The dog is being well cared for in an undisclosed location,” he said.

Trouble was not the only four-legged mammal to be featured in the media this year. Rats — in large numbers, and apparently very hungry — also made the news.

They made it most prominently at a Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell in February after television cameras caught perhaps two dozen of them scampering across the tables and the floor. The video was broadcast to millions on the nightly news and on the Internet, turning an otherwise anonymous restaurant on Avenue of the Americas into a perceived biohazard, which — to the dismay of its owners, one assumes — could put you off your food.

The restaurant closed and was replaced by a T-Mobile store. In the wake of its closing, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released a report this spring that called for strict inspections of vermin infestations. Under the “Findings” subhead of a section titled “Analysis of General Rodent Issues” one finds the following, which is unlikely to surprise:

“The Health Department’s pest control program has found that properties within 50 feet of a restaurant are 35 percent more likely to have signs of rodents than are properties farther from restaurants. If a restaurant has been cited for rodents or poor garbage handling, nearby properties are 50 percent more likely to be infested.”

It could be argued that the year’s most fashionable bandit was James G. Madison, of Maplewood, N.J., who confessed in September to robbing (or attempting to rob) 18 banks across New Jersey, wearing a different hat at each one. Mr. Madison, who was eventually known in law enforcement circles as — the police keep it simple — the Hat Bandit, pleaded guilty to making off with almost $81,000 in a four-county spree. Mr. Madison wore a ski cap, a hunting cap, a St. Louis Cardinals cap, a Texas Longhorns cap and a variety of others.

Mr. Madison, whose first attempt at pleading guilty was put on hold by a sudden change of heart, changed it again, pleaded guilty and is now awaiting sentencing at Federal District Court in Newark. He faces more than 100 years in prison when he goes before a judge on Jan. 11.

Heroes in the city come in many shapes and guises. Some are born, like Superman. Some are made, like Roger Clemens. Others, like Officer Robert Fernandez, happen to be carrying a pistol in the right place at the right time.

Officer Fernandez, a guard at State Supreme Court in the Bronx, was standing at the court’s employee entrance on a Thursday in late August when a blood-spattered man walked in, handed him a loaded .38 and said: “Arrest me. I just killed someone.” It was an odd request, but Officer Fernandez hastily obliged. The man was Paulino Valenzuela, and he was a disgruntled former janitor, who, enraged at having lost his job, had just shot his supervisor at Co-op City in the Bronx.

Officer Fernandez still works at the courthouse and insisted he did nothing more that day than perform his job. “That’s what I do,” he said. “I secure the floors and the perimeter. If they need extra officers in a courtroom, I go and do that, too.”

It was not the first time, he explained, that a perpetrator tried to “ingress” on the building while carrying a weapon.

“Me myself, I had a gun collar a couple years back, a loaded .380,” he said. “Then I assisted on a stun gun. That’s the Bronx. You could write a book out there.”

For Judith Bailey, 2007 will always be reduced to a single day, July 18, when she left her job a little early to have her car towed to the Bronx. She called her auto club, and a tow truck from the One Stop Shell in Brooklyn soon arrived. It was not quite 4 p.m.

On their way to the Bronx, she and the driver, Gregory McCullough, talked about career goals and their shared interest in taking the Police Department entrance exam. The Triborough Bridge was jammed, so they chanced going through Manhattan. By 6 p.m., they were stalled in traffic at East 41st Street when a steam pipe burst beneath the asphalt, and truck and passengers were hurled into the air.

Five months later, Judith Bailey stills speaks warily about that day and the weeks of painful therapy that followed. Her legs and fingers hurt, although the skin graft has been healing. The hardest part is preparing her girls for school. They are 6 and 10, and she cannot dress them by herself or comb their hair.

Ms. Bailey and Mr. McCullough are two of more than a dozen people who have sued Con Edison over the explosion. Their lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, said the cases had been consolidated under a single Brooklyn judge.

“My wish for the new year is I just want to continue living my life,” Ms. Bailey said last week. “I wish I didn’t have to go through all this stuff I’m going through. Basically, I’m still waiting for answers.”

Rose Morat is waiting for a birthday, her 102nd, which with any luck she will celebrate in another few weeks. She may stay home to celebrate with friends. She may go to the Immaculate Conception Church on Edgerton Avenue in Queens.

In any case, there is much to be thankful for this year, the one in which she survived a mugging at the hands of a man who was less than half her age. The man, identified by the police as Jack Rhodes, 44, punched her repeatedly during the robbery in the lobby of her building in Jamaica Hills.

Mr. Rhodes was indicted on hate-crime charges that said he had singled out the elderly, and he will soon be facing trial. Ms. Morat suffered a broken cheekbone, but has been getting out of late, doing her exercises, walking with the walker, visiting friends and eating fairly well for a woman her age.

“I’m not overweight, and I do everything that I’m supposed to do,” she said. “I’ll be 102 in February and I’m not complaining, even though I could.”

The Source

[conlor]

Interesting stuff.

[Woodmonkey]

Glad you like it.