January 11, 2008--Fanaticism XCX: Hell's Bells
Just when I was beginning to think that New York City was becoming boring with everyone racing around buying up $10.0 million condos and waiting in line at Gucci to spend $5,000 for a pocketbook or two or three, something comes along to remind me of the New York I grew up in and still want to love.
Did you hear about the two guys who were arrested the other day for loading their dead roommate onto a desk chair and wheeling him over to a neighborhood check cashing store, Pay-O-Matic, where they attempted to cash his Social Security check? (See NY Times story linked blow.)
It didn’t work out—they were having so much trouble keeping their pal from flopping out of the chair and onto the sidewalk that they attracted a crowd of onlookers, including a NYC detective who was having lunch at Empanada Mama, a diner next to the Pay-O-Matic. So the two perpetrators, as the cops there refer to them, were arrested and booked for attempted forgery. As far as I know there is no law on the books in the Big Apple for schlepping around a corpse. My kind of town!
This sort of stuff used to go all the time. I don’t mean to go Sweeney Todd on you, but some while ago there were these funeral directors in Brooklyn and Staten Island who got busted for stealing body parts from various deceased in their care and then selling them to middlemen who then turned a buck by selling them to companies that supplied bones and such to doctors who needed them for tissue transplants. That’s a New York story for you.
And I should spare you the details about the gravediggers who were in cahoots with undertakers who after the mourners left the cemetery . . . . You’ll just have to use your imagination. Which you can also do if I merely mention that owners of a couple of pet cemeteries did unkind things to some of New Yorkers best friends and pussycats.
There’s a recurrent theme here triggered off by the check-cashing scammers, but I could share numerous more benign examples about a grittier, more diverse New York than the current city which seems to be all about stories of Wall Street bonuses and getting and spending.
There’s even a little irony here surrounding Jimmy and Fox, as they are known in the neighborhood, the two who were nabbed for attempting forgery. Their neighborhood happens to be the wonderfully, non-euphemistically named Hell’s Kitchen. We’re not talking Soho or Tribeca or Nolita. But Hell’s Kitchen where years ago it resembled nothing more than the ultimate place after which it is named.
Ruled then by a legendary Irish gang called the Westies, it was a place of mayhem and murder, it is now one of the fastest gentrifying areas of the city. High-rise condos are sprouting up all over the Westies’ turf, and I can’t begin to imagine what two-bedroom places are going for. But I can imagine what James O’Hare (Jimmy) and Virgilio Cintron (Fox) must be thinking about what’s going on all around them: Probably, it’s time to cash in and sublet their three-storey walkup. It should go for . . . ?
Did you hear about the two guys who were arrested the other day for loading their dead roommate onto a desk chair and wheeling him over to a neighborhood check cashing store, Pay-O-Matic, where they attempted to cash his Social Security check? (See NY Times story linked blow.)
It didn’t work out—they were having so much trouble keeping their pal from flopping out of the chair and onto the sidewalk that they attracted a crowd of onlookers, including a NYC detective who was having lunch at Empanada Mama, a diner next to the Pay-O-Matic. So the two perpetrators, as the cops there refer to them, were arrested and booked for attempted forgery. As far as I know there is no law on the books in the Big Apple for schlepping around a corpse. My kind of town!
This sort of stuff used to go all the time. I don’t mean to go Sweeney Todd on you, but some while ago there were these funeral directors in Brooklyn and Staten Island who got busted for stealing body parts from various deceased in their care and then selling them to middlemen who then turned a buck by selling them to companies that supplied bones and such to doctors who needed them for tissue transplants. That’s a New York story for you.
And I should spare you the details about the gravediggers who were in cahoots with undertakers who after the mourners left the cemetery . . . . You’ll just have to use your imagination. Which you can also do if I merely mention that owners of a couple of pet cemeteries did unkind things to some of New Yorkers best friends and pussycats.
There’s a recurrent theme here triggered off by the check-cashing scammers, but I could share numerous more benign examples about a grittier, more diverse New York than the current city which seems to be all about stories of Wall Street bonuses and getting and spending.
There’s even a little irony here surrounding Jimmy and Fox, as they are known in the neighborhood, the two who were nabbed for attempting forgery. Their neighborhood happens to be the wonderfully, non-euphemistically named Hell’s Kitchen. We’re not talking Soho or Tribeca or Nolita. But Hell’s Kitchen where years ago it resembled nothing more than the ultimate place after which it is named.
Ruled then by a legendary Irish gang called the Westies, it was a place of mayhem and murder, it is now one of the fastest gentrifying areas of the city. High-rise condos are sprouting up all over the Westies’ turf, and I can’t begin to imagine what two-bedroom places are going for. But I can imagine what James O’Hare (Jimmy) and Virgilio Cintron (Fox) must be thinking about what’s going on all around them: Probably, it’s time to cash in and sublet their three-storey walkup. It should go for . . . ?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
8:45 PM
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