Bill and Chirlie aren't thriving together anymore

AMNY

 

Ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, are separating, the pair announced during a lengthy interview with The New York Times that was published Wednesday.

De Blasio, who occupied Gracie Mansion between 2014 and 2021, and McCray told the Paper of Record that after nearly 30 years of marriage they are splitting up and will start dating other people. The pair, however, said they won’t be getting a divorce and will continue to occupy the same Park Slope row house where they raised their two children, both of whom are now in their twenties.

The couple’s interracial status — de Blasio is white and McCray is Black — played a role in him winning the 2013 mayoral primary that brought him to City Hall, many political observers say.

During their interview with the Gray Lady, de Blasio and McCray said they decided to separate about two months ago after having a heart-to-heart conversation that revealed their marriage no longer resembled what it used to be.

“You can feel when things are off and you don’t want to live that way,” de Blasio told the Times.

McCray said she’s looking to have more “fun” with the new arrangement, seeking a relationship with someone who isn’t a public figure.

“I just want to have fun,” McCray said. “There’s a certain weight that goes with being with Mr. Mayor.”

They made clear that de Blasio’s eight years as mayor put a heavy strain on their marriage, given the intensive 24/7 schedule that comes with occupying the city’s top job.

“Everything was this overwhelming schedule, this sort of series of tasks,” de Blasio said. “And that kind of took away a little bit of our soul.”

De Blasio’s tenure as mayor was also marked by years of blistering press coverage, a failed long-shot presidential bid and a torrent of criticism over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck during his second to last year in office. The couple said that the pandemic, in particular, hindered their ability to plan their lives after the end of de Blasio’s mayoralty.

McCray, who ran a controversial mental health program within her husband’s administration known as Thrive NYC, said that his ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign also damaged their relationship.

“I thought it was a distraction,” McCray said. In response, De Blasio conceded his wife was right: “kind of true, point for Chirlane.”

 

As the stomach turns...

From the Daily News:

Curtis Sliwa spent his last night as a single man shacked up with Queens Borough President Melinda Katz before his 2000 wedding to since-spurned spouse Mary, according to court papers.

The documents filed Wednesday are part TMZ/part TMI, detailing the repeated trysts between the married Guardian Angel and the needy politician.

Katz, elected in November, is shown whining about Sliwa’s wife as she repeatedly slept with the wedded man.

“You should remember that when you married Mary, you were with me the night before you left for the wedding,” Katz declared in a July 2010 voice mail overheard by Mary Sliwa.

Three months earlier, Katz complained that she was tired of Sliwa stringing her along.

“I’m not a schizophrenic,” she declared. “Thirteen years I’ve waited for you ... I’ve always given you the option of having me, I have always kept your secrets.”

Katz also complained of Sliwa, after sleeping with her, slipping outside to call his wife five minutes later.

For her part, Mary Sliwa recounted the difficulty of listening to the damning voice mails left on her husband’s phone by Katz — who “graphically and nauseatingly spoke about her intimacy with my husband.”

From the NY Post:

“Last night was not about you going home,” Katz said in a July 2010 message on Sliwa’s voicemail — over six months before he left wife Mary Sliwa.

“Last night was about the fact that you are capable of making love to me twice,” Katz allegedly said.

Sliwa admitted in a separate Family Court proceeding in December that he had given Mary access to his email and phone so she could handle calls for the Guardian Angels, where she worked as an executive director during their 12-year marriage.

In another July 2010 message, Katz castigates Sliwa for not calling her even though her sheets were “still…wet” and she “still [had him] dripping out of me.”

Too. Much. Info.

From the NY Post:

The ex-wife of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa discovered he was a devil of a husband when she listened in to X-rated cell phone voicemails to him from his alleged mistress, Queens Borough President-elect Melinda Katz, her attorney said Wednesday.

Mary, Sliwa’s third ex-wife, was the Guardian Angels’ executive director during her marriage to the law-and-order legend.

She had her husband’s voicemail password so that she could handle calls for the organization, Siegert said in court.

Mary “was also privy to telephone messages from Melinda Katz to Curtis Sliwa that were coming in constantly over long periods of time,” he told Magistrate Margaret Morgan.

“They deny any relationship at all prior to 2011. That’s not true,” Siegert said.

Siegert promised that emails and voice recordings from Katz to Sliwa spanning from December 2009 to July 2010 will come out in a separate action filed by Mary Sliwa in Manhattan Supreme Court last May.

That suit documents 13 instances during Mary and Curtis’ marriage when her husband allegedly abandoned his marital bed and engaged in “sexual intercourse” with Katz, the court papers claim.

Sliwa separated from Mary and moved in with Katz in the spring of 2011.

Siegert gave a sneak-peak into the evidence: “It was sex, it was money. It was her being a mistress. It was him calling at 2 a.m,” he said.

The voicemails allegedly match descriptions of infidelity in the Manhattan Supreme Court suit. The first romp allegedly took place at Katz’s Forest Hills home on Feb. 25, 2010.

The illicit lovers allegedly continued meeting at the Queens home where the politician grew up, with Sliwa fibbing to his wife on March 31, 2010 that “he wasn’t feeling well and was dehydrated” and would sleep at his Empire State Building office.

Then on June 5, 2010, Sliwa allegedly claimed he “would be going to the big fight night at Yankee Stadium” even though he didn’t come home until 3:30am, according to the suit.

One truly amazing (yet believable) story!

From the Village Voice:

Here's the short version: A Queens cab driver and father of three, Shahdat Tuhin, 41, is suing a Woodside car dealership called New York Motor Group, alleging that they sold him a lemon, and charged him much more than he'd agreed. He's upset about that. Longer version: According to the lawsuit he filed this month in federal court, Tuhin is also upset about other things he says the dealership did during the process of selling him that car, including defrauding him, deceiving him, and threatening to file for divorce on his behalf.

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.

Havoc wrought by illegal alien

From the NY Post:

A heartless Scrooge wants to give his ex-wife a lump of coal for Christmas — by booting her and their kids from a rent-stabilized Brooklyn apartment.

Convicted drug dealer Ahmed Elgheur is currently locked up and facing deportation for immigration fraud.

But before he gets tossed back to Morocco, he is trying to get ex-wife Bajia Elmourabit evicted from her $1,140-a-month, three-bedroom home so his young girlfriend can move in.

Elgheur, 47, used an alias to sign the lease on the Ocean Parkway pad almost 20 years ago.

He and Elmourabit had two children — a son, now 19, and a daughter, 17 — before he abandoned the family after being busted for selling heroin and jumping bail.

Elgheur eventually surrendered and served more than six years in prison for two federal drug raps.

Meanwhile, Elmourabit, 47, raised the kids on her own and made a living running a since-closed Moroccan restaurant on Prospect Park West.

She renewed the lease every two years, signing her own name at the bottom, and paying the rent on her own for 17 years without any child support.

But her ex-husband’s alias — “Gerome Mancini” — stayed at the top of the rental agreement.

Elmourabit’s housing nightmare began last year, when she got an eviction notice from “Mancini.”

What's with Halloran these days?

From the NY Times:

But the more that investigators look into Mr. Halloran’s story, the more mystifying it becomes.

Mr. Halloran said he had been visited by two supervisors in the Transportation Department and three workers in the Sanitation Department. But the two transportation supervisors did not back up his story in interviews with investigators, according to two people briefed on the inquiries. And Mr. Halloran has steadfastly refused to reveal the names of the sanitation workers.

...in the days since Mr. Halloran first made his explosive accusations, he has revised his account.

In an article that appeared in The New York Post on Dec. 30, he said the workers had been told “to take off routes” and “not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner.”

“They were told to make the mayor pay,” Mr. Halloran said in the article, “for the layoffs, the reductions in rank of the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank and file.”

More recently, the councilman has said the workers were not explicitly told to take part in a slowdown, but were subtly informed there was no need to rush while clearing the snow.

In a letter published in The Chief-Leader, which focuses on municipal labor issues, Mr. Halloran seemed to feel conflicted about all the uproar. In the letter he defended his original assertions about the slowdown, but also suggested it might have been small in scope, involving “a few bad apples.”

If your story changes, then you're probably not being honest. Then there's this:

In 2008, Mr. Halloran sternly criticized the city’s Buildings Department after it cited him for building a bathroom in the basement of his home without obtaining the required permits...

Then, last month, he requested a building permit for a $60,000 project to add a second floor onto his Cape Cod-style home. On Jan. 3, the Buildings Department denied the request, saying it would make the house too big for the area’s zoning.

The timing of the permit was unusual, given the recent financial difficulties faced by Mr. Halloran and his wife, Cynthia.

In January 2010, Wells Fargo began foreclosure proceedings on their home. In November, Ms. Halloran, a registered nurse, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, seeking to wipe away $116,521 in credit card debt, while retaining a 2005 Jaguar and their home.

Her debts include $14,777 owed to Home Depot, $29,000 on three Chase credit cards and $58,000 on two American Express cards. The couple has an annual salary of $166,660, according to bankruptcy records and Council salary rules.

Mr. Halloran’s spokesman, Steven Stites, said that the couple was in the process of a divorce, though no public court records have been filed, and that they planned to sell their house.

Bottom line is if you're going to shoot your mouth off making accusations, you better not have an army of skeletons in your closet.