Two days after Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a sweeping civil settlement with the federal government over New York City’s public housing system, federal and local investigators seized documents and other items Wednesday from a Queens office of the city’s housing authority.
The investigators questioned housing officials, cloned computer hard drives and took the city-issued cellphone of a senior manager overseeing lead abatement, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Then they returned on Thursday.
The surprise visit rattled officials and pierced the veneer of common purpose presented by Mayor de Blasio on Monday when he announced that the city would commit at least $1.2 billion in extra funding for needed repairs in New York City Housing Authority buildings. With the agreement with the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, the city avoided a civil trial that would have examined longstanding problems at the authority, including failure to test for hazardous lead paint over several years.
“We agreed to create a common game plan,” Mr. de Blasio said.
The searches were conducted by the city’s Department of Investigation, the inspector general for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency, and they appeared to catch top officials at the housing authority off-guard. The investigators arrived at the building on 49th Avenue in Long Island City without a search warrant, relying instead on the city agency’s power to directly access city records without a warrant, according to one of the people briefed on the raid.
A Queens bar had its liquor license suspended after authorities allegedly uncovered prostitution, narcotics, illicit gambling and untaxed cigarettes.
The New York State Liquor Authority issued the emergency suspension of Huang Jia Inc in Maspeth Wednesday effective immediately, which prohibits alcohol to be sold or consumed on the premises.
According to the State Liquor Authority, SLA investigators and officers with the New York City Police Department’s Citywide Vice-Enforcement Division executed a search warrant of the bar on April 12. During the search warrant, investigators allegedly discovered 97 packs of counterfeit or untaxed cigarettes, jars and bags filled with the narcotic ketamine, records related to the sale of prostitution and illegal gambling devices.
The NYPD made nine arrests, including the bar’s owner, for criminal possession of a controlled substance. Additionally, a number of hazardous conditions were observed, including overcrowding, blocked exits and non-working emergency lighting, the State Liquor Authority says.
On April 14, the NYPD and SLA conducted a follow up inspection, making six arrests after allegedly discovering patrons with ketamine in three separate karaoke rooms inside the bar and finding patrons consuming alcohol after closing hours.
On April 16, the SLA charged the establishment with 22 violations of the ABC Law, including disorderly premises for permitting prostitution, gambling, trafficking of controlled substances, failure to supervise and for becoming a focal point for police attention.
Between March 15th and April 12th, the NYPD conducted three undercover operations where detectives posing as customers allegedly purchased narcotics, prostitution and gambling — all which formed the basis for the April 12 raid, officials say.
According to the NYPD, there was an alleged a pattern of criminal activity in and around the premises months prior to these incidents.
Lawmakers and other opponents of Long Island City strip club Show Palace are celebrating this week after police shut down the problematic venue last Saturday.
Armed with a court order, officers from the NYPD’s vice unit walked into the 45-20 21 St. all-nude venue around midnight, ordered everyone to leave and posted a notice on the door, saying it had been shut down by the authorities.
The closure came a little more than a month after police raided the venue and arrested five women on prostitution-related charges — the latest in a laundry list of alleged crimes, including drug offenses and a handful of nonfatal shootings, that have either occurred there or were otherwise stemmed from confrontations at Show Palace over the years.
Late-night revelers partying at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park after dark were slapped with summonses during an early-morning raid over the weekend, police said.
Officers from the 110th Precinct entered the park at 1 a.m. and handed out 39 summonses on Sunday, May 31 after multiple complaints about loud music and partying, according to Deputy Inspector Christopher Manson.
The identities of those given summonses and the exact violations were not immediately available, but the typical type of summonses given out are for violating city rules against being in the park after dark, police said.
It's the latest enforcement at the borough's largest park after complaints from neighbors in surrounding communities about speeding drivers and partiers who take advantage of the park's thoroughfares, which are open 24 hours a day despite rules against entering the park after dark to allow access to nearby highways.
Manson has said at public meetings he'd like the road that connects the Van Wyck Expressway and Grand Central Parkway through the park to be closed at night to prevent access once it closes.
The drug trade subsists through a network-- dealers, buyers, producers, stash houses, wholesalers, transporters, and so on. Eliminate a single branch, and the network will slow for a bit but then soon regenerate, with a new buyer or dealer filling vacuum. For law enforcement officials, the size of the dent in a drug operation depends on the number of branches they can take out.
So, here in New York, authorities are going after the infrastructure: police arrest the dealers, and then the city goes after their landlords.
Yesterday, the city filed two separate civil complaints against the owners of Bronx apartment buildings that held stash houses. If the city gets its way, the owners-- listed only as, respectively, 1881 Walton Realty LLC and 164 Realty LLC-- will lose the properties.
The lawsuits, filed in New York Supreme Court in the Bronx, makes the case that each building should be classified as a public nuisance, which gives the sheriff's office the right to seize the property and put it up for sale. The city cites a section of the Administrative Code that states that a building becomes a public nuisance when three or more drug violations occur there within a year.
That standard, the city notes, was certainly met, thanks to a handful of NYPD buy-bust operations.
Federal drug agents raided a heroin distribution den -- in a ground
floor studio apartment in Richmond Hill, Queens -- and seized a stash
worth $20 million, authorities said today.
The Drug Enforcement
Administration’s New York Organized Crime Drug enforcement Strike Force
had been watching the 122nd Street apartment for weeks.
On Tuesday night they saw a person wearing latex drugs, like those used by heroin mill workers, at the site.
After
midnight Jose Santiago Diaz, 44, left the apartment, with keys to it,
and had a smell on heroin on him when agents questioned him, authorities
said.
Diaz, of The Bronx, was identified as an illegal alien who was
previously deported to the Dominican Republic. He was charged with
criminal drug possession and other charges.
Police announced the arrests of 140 individuals in a massive drug sweep throughout the city this week.
The largest takedown took place in Far Rockaway, Queens, where 56 people were busted including 18 violent members of the Gang of Apes, which has ties to the Bloods.
The NYPD and Queens prosecutors began the 14 month investigation that resulted in the seizure of $35,000, 12 handguns, six kilos of cocaine, heroin and marijuana, a kilo press, and a bullet proof vest, authorities said.
“Many of those arrested are gang members who plagued the Far Rockaway neighborhood,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at Police Headquarters. The gangbusters –which began terrorizing the area since investigators broke up the Flocc gang in 2010-- raked in more than $10,000 per week from peddling drugs.
Some of the perpetrators were slapped with attempted murder, robbery, weapons and drugs possession and face up to 25 years in jail, officials said.
Seven people in Flushing, Queens, were arrested in connection to underground gambling parlors in the Chinese community, the police said on Thursday.
The authorities periodically raid illegal gambling operations, which thrive throughout New York’s Chinese population. But the network of gambling parlors has come under particular scrutiny by the authorities in recent weeks since four businesses — two in Manhattan’s Chinatown and two in Flushing — were robbed by a crew of armed gunmen. The police say they suspect the robberies were the work of the same group.
All of the recent arrests occurred during a sweep of four apartments in Flushing between 7:20 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, officials said.
Police officials did not say what precipitated the raids. They occurred on the same day that The New York Times published a story describing the recent robberies and exploring the subculture of underground gambling in the Chinese population in New York.
When Walter Alberto Torres, a Salvadoran immigrant and a gang member, confessed in October 2009 that he had unsuccessfully plotted the assassination of an immigration agent in New York City, the admission touched off more than just his prosecution.
In the weeks that followed, immigration authorities, working with other law enforcement agencies, conducted raids on suspected hide-outs of Mr. Torres’s gang, La Mara Salvatrucha 13, an international network of violent cliques with a growing presence in New York City and its suburbs.
And that offensive — intended in part, officials said, to signal that the government would not tolerate attacks on its officers — was only the beginning for the New York office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the months since, agents in the office’s investigative division have expanded their dragnet far beyond La Mara Salvatrucha and across the region, from Ulster County in the Hudson Valley to eastern Long Island.
From October 2009 through September, they arrested 285 suspects they said were gang members or close associates — a record for the office and a fivefold increase over the same period the previous year.
The surge, which has unfolded with little public notice, coincided with the arrival of James T. Hayes Jr., who became the special agent in charge of the investigations division several weeks before Mr. Torres confessed to the murder plot.
Mr. Hayes, 37, said that while the threat to an agent had fired up his team, the arrests also reflected a new emphasis for the investigative unit, which enforces more than 400 federal customs and immigration statutes. When he assumed the job, he said, he reviewed the office’s recent moves against gangs — it had made 57 such arrests in the previous year — and concluded that his team could be doing far more.
He added 3 agents to a force that now numbers 11, “and really gave them a mandate, not just to look at individual gang members but to look at these street gangs as criminal organizations and to use all our tools to disrupt and dismantle them,” Mr. Hayes said in an interview.
The office’s stepped-up action against gangs reflects a nationwide shift in priorities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, which says it is now focusing on capturing immigrants who pose a threat to public safety and security, rather than those with civil violations. The New York offensive has come under the banner of Operation Community Shield, a five-year-old national campaign by the immigration agency to dismember violent street gangs by prosecuting and deporting their members and associates.
Several law enforcement officials in the New York area said gang activity appears to have grown in recent years, particularly among immigrants, spurring the formation of new anti-gang units and greater collaboration between local and federal agencies. Yet even as that has produced an increase in prosecutions, officials said, the very nature of gangs — quick to form, grow and change shape — has made them particularly hard to track and tackle, and the immigration agents’ contribution has helped.
The interior-construction industry is hidden from the view of most New Yorkers, but billions of dollars a year are spent building and rebuilding the walls and guts of the city’s corporate towers.
Investigators seized records from Sweeney & Harkin Carpentry and Dry Wall Corporation this week in an inquiry into the interior-construction industry.
The industry is coming into public focus for the second time in a dozen years as investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office expand their investigation into possible corruption by contractors suspected of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars using false invoices from electrical, drywall, plumbing and mechanical contractors.
On three successive days this week, state troopers and detectives from the Manhattan district attorney’s office raided three prominent subcontractors, the P.J. Mechanical Corporation in Manhattan; Sirina Fire Protection Corporation in New Hyde Park, on Long Island; and Sweeney & Harkin Carpentry and Dry Wall Corporation, in Long Island City, Queens.
Investigators served search warrants and carried off billing records and computer hard drives, although none of the companies were charged with any wrongdoing.
They are among roughly 70 companies that the district attorney’s office is looking at as part of its inquiry.
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