Chu wins $20K in defamation suit

From the Daily News:

The former traffic agent who City Councilman Dan Halloran accused of speeding through stop signs on a Dunkin' Donuts Coffee Coolatta run has won $20,000 in his defamation suit against the city.
Daniel Chu claimed the stress of the public humiliation left him with Bell's palsy disease.

“My guess is the city settled because Halloran now has no credibility,” said Michael Berkley, Chu’s lawyer.

In court papers, Chu alleged Halloran orchestrated a retaliation campaign after he ticketed the Republican’s chief of staff in 2010.

As a public official, Halloran — who has since been indicted on corruption charges — had the platform to do it and blasted the lowly traffic agent in numerous TV and newspaper interviews.
He claimed Chu was on duty speeding and yakking on his cell phone en route to the chain coffee shop.

Chu had initially asked for $6 million.

He originally asked for $6M and settled for $20K? What a joke.

The pagan and the Meaghan

From the NY Post:

The Queens city councilman at the center of the Malcolm Smith corruption scandal was a lousy husband, too — throwing away his marriage for a co-ed staffer half his age, The Post has learned.

Dan Halloran, 41 — who is charged in a bribe scheme to get state state Sen. Smith into the mayoral race — repeatedly hooked up with Meaghan Mapes, then 21, in her Queens home between 2010 and 2011, sources said.

She served as his deputy chief of staff during that same period, earning $30,000.

The relationship was the final straw for Halloran’s wife, Cynthia, and the two were locked in divorce proceedings by early 2011.

Halloran slept over about twice a week in Mapes’ basement pad, according to a roommate. She was studying government and politics at St. John’s University.

Mapes, now a law student at the University of Virginia, did not return calls for comment about her relationship with Halloran.

She first worked for him in his 2009 City Council run, and was cut three $1,000 checks — which a source said “pissed everyone off.”

“What did she do?” the source asked. “What about the other campaign staff workers?”

Her former roommate said she started bringing him to the apartment around the summer of 2010.

Halloran would sneak in and out of the apartment using a side door, and the two were glued to the hip, the roommate said.

So the worst kept secret in Queens politics is finally out? I wonder if another City Council ethics investigation will be brought since putting your mistress on the city payroll is pretty damn shady.