Cockfighting ring busted

From the Daily News:

The chickens came home to roost Sunday for members of a bloodthirsty New York cockfighting and betting ring.

As many as 3,000 birds were seized and more than 70 people rounded up in "Operation Angry Birds," the largest cockfighting takedown and rooster rescue in state history, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said.

State investigators carried out three simultaneous raids that stretching from Saturday night into Sunday morning, busting up a cockfighting event in Queens, a secret rooster coop in Brooklyn and breeding farm in upstate Ulster County.

Nine people were arrested.

The crackdown began Saturday night as Schneiderman's Organized Crime Task Force joined state police and U.S. Department of Homeland Security cops to execute a search warrant at 74-26 Jamaica Ave. in Woodhaven, Queens, where chicken-livered rooster owners, gamblers and spectators were watching birds fight to the death.

Six people who brought and fought gamecocks at the event were arrested and charged with animal fighting, a felony punishable in New York by a maximum penalty of four years in prison and a $25,000 fine.

The Woodhaven location, a two-story rowhouse with a shuttered first floor barber shop, hosted cockfights twice a month, an informant told cops, who zeroed in on the spot last May. It stank of wet bird feathers Sunday.

The unnamed informant, who made video recordings of an event for authorities in the lead-up to the takedown, admitted he bred, trained and fought roosters for roughly 10 years before turning in his non-feathered friends.

The roosters were plied with performance-enhancing drugs and fitted with razor-sharp spurs to tear each other apart in a small pen surrounded by alcohol-swilling gamblers, authorities said.

Spectators were charged admission and seating fees and booze was sold without a permit during the all-night fights. The ring even had security guards who frisked spectators and wagers reached as much as $10,000.

"I don't know what they were doing in there," said Sammy Ayala, who works down the street. "I never saw any chickens."

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

From Sunnyside Post:

Jennifer Hiser’s college architecture project was a far cry from designing skyscrapers.

The Sunnyside Gardens resident, intrigued by the concept of urban farming, decided she would design and build a chicken coup instead. Shortly after completing her project, she decided to test it out.

Hiser has three hens, which she reared from the time they were just a day old. She named them Nugget (as in McNugget); Schmaltz (as in the type of chicken fat used by Ashkenazi Jews); and Poulet.

Hiser and her boyfriend, Peter Montalbano, also have a vegetable garden that is cordoned off from the chickens where tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, lettuce, beans and lavender are grown. There is also a compost heap as well.