90th Floor Frozen, Even as Ground Zero Changes

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 12, 2007

Anne Foodim, Manhattan apartment dweller, lighted three candles on her dining table yesterday morning, then switched on the television to hear the name of a slight man in a sport jacket. With a few soft words, some gentle squeezes to shoulders, that man, a colleague, helped save Ms. Foodim and others on the 90th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center in 2001.

His name — Ed Emery — would be somewhere around the 700th on the list of 2,750 read at the Sept. 11 memorial service. So Ms. Foodim absorbed the stately pace of the event, taking note of its scale six years after the attack.

On the first anniversary, she had been chosen to read names as a representative of those who had escaped. The city stood still. Thousands crowded the site, and others who could not get in stood on sidewalks, listening to the ceremony on the radios of parked cars.

Yesterday, on a showery morning, no more than a few hundred relatives and friends of the dead gathered on Liberty Street. Ahead of them, a grove of construction cranes rose from the pit of ground zero. Behind them, traffic heaved along Broadway, the soaring notes of a flutist’s “Amazing Grace” dueling with the diesel wheeze of buses.

The families hiked down a ramp to drop flowers into a pool. No one will make precisely that memory walk again; the ground will be built over next year.

Sept. 11, as a public occasion, has shrunk to life size: potent as ever for people holding photographs of fathers on their wedding days and mothers in their backyards, but unlikely to start wars again.

Babies are in first grade, children have graduated from high school, teenagers have finished college. Ms. Foodim, now 63, has effectively retired. She had been fighting cancer, and could barely get down the stairs that morning.

“In some ways, strange as this is to say, Sept. 11 was good for me,” Ms. Foodim said. “I didn’t know what I had in me. In certain ways, you could say Ed saved my life.”

The personal narratives of that day in 2001 were almost immediately overtaken by the cosmic. The initials N.Y.P.D. and F.D.N.Y. were stenciled onto T-shirts and hats, then onto the sides of munitions that were launched first into Afghanistan, where the Taliban had sheltered Al Qaeda, and later into Iraq, which had no connection to the attacks.

“I don’t know how the country could buy into it to begin with,” Ms. Foodim said. “Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden?”

Two presidential candidates, both New Yorkers, attended the memorial yesterday. One of them, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, was scarcely seen; the other, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, briefly spoke, quoting the writer Eli Wiesel on the need for a moral response to evil.

Other members of Mr. Giuliani’s administration were present, including his business partner and protégé, who was then the police commissioner: Bernard B. Kerik, who pleaded guilty last year to accepting $165,000 in home renovations while in office from a company suspected of ties to organized crime. In his path to the stage yesterday, Mr. Giuliani, whether by design or chance, kept well clear of Mr. Kerik, who was standing in a section reserved for dignitaries.

Ms. Foodim recalled the day six years earlier. She had gone to work, at the end of a long siege of chemotherapy for breast cancer; she was just starting the ordeal of radiation.

That morning, she said, “I struggled up the steps out of the subway at Fulton Street, and said, ‘I am so glad I’m alive because look at that blue sky.’ ”

She worked for Fiduciary Trust, which had offices in the south tower. When the first plane struck the north tower, she felt the heat through the windows.

Mr. Emery arrived with a sense of calm and command, she said. “Ed came running out of his office, and he said, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ ” Ms. Foodim said.

He ushered a group from the 90th floor to the staircase, and led them down to the 78th floor, where they could take an express elevator to the lobby.

AS she walked down the stairs, Ms. Foodim felt the weight of the moment, and the cancer treatments, wearing on her.

She paused on landings, exhausted. Through her illness, Mr. Emery had coaxed her along, encouraging her to get rest when she needed it, but welcoming her company at work. He had given her a book on tranquillity for her birthday a few weeks earlier.

Now, she said, Mr. Emery was talking her down the stairs. “Ed said, ‘If you can finish chemo, you can get down those steps,’ ” she recalled.

At the 78th floor, one of their group, Elsie Castellanos, who had also been working at the trade center when it was bombed in 1993, became upset. Mr. Emery patted her shoulder, and urged her onto the elevator with the others.

As they approached the elevators, they heard an announcement. “Exact words: ‘The building is secure, please return to your desks,’ ” Ms. Foodim said.

“I had been out the day before. I was always a good little girl. How could you go home, if the building is secure? Ed said, ‘You know what, it’s O.K., go ahead.’ ”

The Fiduciary group boarded the express car. “He promised to be down directly, but had to go back up for something or someone,” Ms. Foodim said.

Ms. Foodim and her group got clear of the building. Somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 people escaped from the two towers, investigations later found.

Not Mr. Emery. He climbed to the 97th floor with another Fiduciary employee, Alayne Gentul, to evacuate a group of people who were working on the computer systems. They were trapped by the second plane.

For months after, Ms. Foodim worked as the Fiduciary representative at a family center set up by the city on Pier 94, helping with benefits and death certificates for the survivors of nearly 100 people. After two years, she had had enough; she attributes her own psychic survival to a therapist she continues to see.

She lives with two dogs and has a network of friends, women she has met over the last six years. Most of them are from her neighborhood on the Upper East Side. “I don’t keep in touch with anyone from Fiduciary,” she said.

She gathered with some of her friends at her home yesterday morning. She wept a little when the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the memorial. And she lighted the candles, one for her lost Fiduciary colleagues, one for Ms. Gentul and one for Ed Emery.

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Fighting an Outbreak of Mortgages Too Good to Be True

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 8, 2007

Last week, the lawyers at a legal clinic in Brooklyn set the answering machine to stop taking new messages. So many people in Brooklyn and Queens are in trouble with mortgage bills that the lawyers cannot keep up.

“That’s the first time we’ve had to suspend taking on new clients,” said Meghan Faux, co-director of the Foreclosure Prevention Project at South Brooklyn Legal Services. “There’s no way we could answer all those calls and provide proper representation to our clients.”

Through this week, notices of pending legal action against homeowners are up by 48 percent in Queens and by 40 percent in Brooklyn over last year, according to the county clerks. Foreclosures in the city have doubled since 2005.

The subprime crisis that has knocked the financial markets began, at least in New York, as fliers taped to lampposts in Brooklyn and Queens over the last decade. These posters promised good deals on loans or home refinancing. Lending to low-income people at high rates became a thriving business.

Last year, Tilton Jack, a retired transit worker, opened the mailbox at his home on Cortelyou Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and found a leaflet advertising low-interest loans. He was soon visited by Michael Goltche of Golden First Mortgage, according to court papers, who told him that he qualified for a 1 percent mortgage.

Too good to be true?

In fact, the rate was 1 percent — but for one day. On the second day, it increased to 8.13 percent. Now, it is 8.77 percent. But those jumps are not what is sending his mortgage into a financial death spiral.

Under the terms, Mr. Jack’s monthly payment is set as if the mortgage cost just 1 percent, even though it is much more. So the seemingly low rate is a trap: every month, the unpaid interest is being piled onto his principal. When it reaches 110 percent of the original loan, the payments will be adjusted to the full 8.77 percent — on the principal that has been swollen by the unpaid interest.

“The principal has been increasing ever since he got the loan, and his payments will go from $1,100 a month to over $3,000,” said Navid Vazire, a lawyer with the Foreclosure Prevention Project who is representing Mr. Jack.

Mr. Jack, 82, had fallen into the grip of a maddeningly dense mortgage scheme known as “payment option adjustable rate mortgage.”

“Nearly all our clients with these loans are elderly, on fixed income, so they have no prospect of making the dramatically higher payments,” Mr. Vazire said.

Feeling uneasy about the loan after the closing, Mr. Jack tried to exercise his right to cancel it within three days, according to court papers, but could not reach Mr. Goltche. A person who answered the phone yesterday at Golden First Mortgage, which is based in Melville, on Long Island, said Mr. Goltche no longer worked there and referred inquiries to a lawyer who did not respond to a message.

In early June, Nerida Cuccia of Queens Village said she got phone calls from people who claimed they could give her a mortgage at 2.25 percent for five years, and then 20 years at 5.5 percent.

Ms. Cuccia, who will be 61 tomorrow and retired in March as a nurse practitioner from the city hospital systems, said she was deeply skeptical.

“But even if your gut tells you something’s wrong, the percentages make you forget about the gut,” she said. The loan was issued by Countrywide Financial, the lender that had come close to collapse. The closing took place at her home on 215th Place. She did not have a lawyer examine the papers.

“They told me, don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ve refinanced before with just a notary.” She said the papers she signed showed the promised rates, but when her first statement arrived, she found that the loan was for 8.25 percent. And like Mr. Jack’s loan, her payments were set at a rate that meant she would lose ground every month. She is now being represented by the Foreclosure Prevention Project, which is considering a lawsuit.

The phone number of the brokers in Monroe, N.Y., who set up the Cuccia loan has been disconnected.

“It mortified me, for sure,” Ms. Cuccia said. “I will handle this. It makes me sick to think of some little old lady getting stuck with this.”

And the answering machine at the legal clinic will be turned back on next week, Ms. Faux said.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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Sketches of History and Folly

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 5, 2007

Starting today, many of the great cartoons of recent times are visiting New York for a five-week exhibition. For those who have not been paying attention, this presents an excellent chance to catch up on a quarter-century of world affairs and an eternity of human folly. Armed with sketch pads and banana peels, cartoonists have always stood ready for the high noons of history.

So in 1991, during the last minutes of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Nenashev drew a team of riot police, wielding water hoses and preparing to turn back a throng of demonstrators — except that all the people in the crowd were holding up houseplants.

And in a 1988 cartoon, two herdsmen sit on opposite sides of a fence, each consuming a meal of the other man’s livestock. The image could have been set anywhere people violate the commandment not to covet thy neighbor’s sheep, but it happens to have been drawn, prophetically, by Darko Pavic, identified as Yugoslavian, just a few years before the Yugoslav federation came asunder.

The Nenahsev and Pavic drawings are two of the 125 works on display in “Cutting Edges: Cartoon Art Defining the World” at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan, a collection of cartoons that won prizes in an annual competition organized by the Aydin Dogan Foundation in Turkey.

Here in New York, where so much of the official art world seems to revolve around hoarding, and where entrance fees to big museums run to $20, the pleasures of the cartoon exhibit begin with the admission price. It’s free.

Better, still, though, is that cartoonists are among the world’s most reliable and democratic subversives. The famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, her dress boosted over her thighs by the draft from a subway grating, was redone by a Romanian artist to show a woman in a long black abaya, the traditional Islamic black overgarment, also sent swirling to immodest heights by the wind from a grate. A Ukrainian artist depicted a military officer bent over a table, straw in his nose, snorting a line of powder — gunpowder, it seems, from a bullet that is cracked open. A cartoon from Iran shows goose-stepping soldiers, heading off to war, followed by goose-stepping Christian monks.

To date, human history has yet to run short of material for cartoonists of any tongue, era or homeland.

Two ducks walking up the gangplank to Noah’s Ark glance backward to see a man and woman behind them, dragging a barbecue grill. The ducks, drawn by the Thai artist Thi-Wa-Wat Pattara Gulwanit, are aghast.

Anyone in the United States would instantly recognize the drowning person drawn by Aleksandr Sergeev, a Russian, even though all that can be seen of the person is a disembodied hand, thrust out of the water. As a black government car speeds past the river, another disembodied hand can be seen — this one thrust from the limousine window in the universal, and universally useless, wave of greeting from politicians.

Few of the cartoons in the exhibit have been seen in this country. Although the competition has drawn about 3,000 entries annually since it began in 1983, almost none have come from American artists, said Candan Fetvaci, general manager of the Dogan Foundation. “Russia — I mean the old Soviet countries — these people are very into this,” she said. “And Turkish artists, of course.”

In 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq war, Necdet Yilmaz, 37, a Turkish artist and a New Yorker who lives in Bellerose, Queens, drew a soldier stumbling over a rock almost entirely covered with sand. The buried rock is actually an Assyrian antiquity, a bas-relief sculpture showing soldiers in a chariot fighting with shields and bows.

“I was thinking about ancient Mesopotamia, a very bloody civilization about 6,000 years ago,” Mr. Yilmaz said. “A lot of war happened in that place. Right now, there is modern war there, on the same land.”

There is war, and then there is love, the work of the same glands. A couple embrace at the fulcrum of a seesaw, their passion holding them in perfect balance in the rendering by Mihai Ignat of Romania. And another man is held in balance by himself: Turkish artist Ali Sükrü Fidan shows him at the edge of a cliff. A suicide note has been placed on the ground. His shadow, however, clings desperately to a tree set back from the cliff edge. This cartoonist, and the others, hang in there.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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In Day of Mass Arrests, Divergent Versions of Events

A man at the New York Public Library was among the
roughly 1,100 people arrested on Aug. 31, 2004.
--Photo by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 29, 2007

Along the terrace of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, two teenage girls played guitar and sang. A yoga teacher hunted for a friend from New Orleans. A young woman who had spent the summer traveling around the country struck up a conversation with two men from Quebec. Hundreds of others sat or stood on the steps, holding flags and signs.

That peaceful moment, a few minutes before 6 on the afternoon of Aug. 31, 2004, would not last. It was the second day of the Republican National Convention in New York, and a date set for multiple demonstrations, some of which had unconcealed agendas of civil disobedience. For months, undercover police officers had been collecting information on groups planning protests. The library had been listed on Internet sites as a gathering spot for people interested in civil disobedience.

That day, in the space of about four hours starting about 4 p.m., some 1,100 people were arrested around the city, and many were held for 30 or more hours. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the police stopped many dangerous troublemakers from creating havoc. Now, though, the city faces 605 federal lawsuits; it has already paid $694,000 to settle 35 such cases, according to the city comptroller.

If the absence of widespread violence during the convention reflects successful police work, as the mayor has maintained, the narratives slowly emerging from the lawsuits are revealing the hazards of mass arrests made that day.

***

At the library, that included scores of people who, it appears, were not doing what they were charged with, according to testimony and video from the lawsuits, as well as video recordings collected by I-Witness Video, an organization that documents public demonstrations.

“I met up with these two men from Montreal, and they said, ‘Would you like to help us hang a banner?’ ” recalled Amber Tejada, now 27, who had timed a cross-country trip so that she could join protests.

The three had just stretched the banner along the base of one of the library’s famous lions when Capt. Ronald Mercandetti approached. A videographer recorded the moment.

“Excuse me,” Captain Mercandetti said. “You can’t hang signs on Parks Department property.”

They immediately took down the banner.

“You can hold it, but you can’t hang it,” Captain Mercandetti said.

Two seconds later, as the men stood on the steps, holding ends of the banner, other officers moved in and arrested them.

As their wrists were bound, people on the stairs shouted that the officers should let them go.

“What did they do?” hollered one.

The answer, given in the police criminal complaints, is strikingly different from what videotape showed.

Although Ms. Tejada had been well up the stairs of the library, she and the two men were accused of “obstructing the entire intersection” of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue “so that no cars or pedestrians could pass through.” The complaint also said police officers had ordered her “to leave the area on numerous occasions and the defendant refused.” And, the arresting officer said, she had paraded through the intersection with at least 50 other people but did not have a permit.

“I’m totally willing to be held responsible for any violation of the law, but this was ridiculous,” Ms. Tejada, who lives in Oregon, said in an interview last year.

The only part of the complaint that resembled the situation on the steps accused her of hanging a banner on Parks Department property without permission.

After the uproar over the banner arrests had quieted, two girls then in high school, Gwynn Galitzer, who was 16, and Grace Kalambay, 17, sang and played guitar at a cafe table, the music drifting across the terrace.

Then the police searched the backpacks of at least three people on the steps. Although none of them were arrested, a fresh outcry rose from the crowd, and more police officers moved to clear the crowd.

“I had made the determination that it was no longer safe in the mezzanine area,” Chief James P. O’Neill, a police commander at the library, testified in a deposition. “There were a tremendous amount of people. It was loud, there were chairs, there were tables that can be used as weapons.”

The fracas swept up the two guitar-playing girls. Once again, the criminal complaint placed the action elsewhere: Both girls were accused of holding a banner and blocking the intersection of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and of parading without a permit.

With the library steps cleared, the crowds streamed away. Among them was Ben Kappel, pulling his luggage on wheels; he had arrived on the airport bus after flying in from New Orleans, and met a friend, Wendy Tremayne, on the library steps. They were heading for the subway, Mr. Kappel said.

“We’re about to cross 42nd and Sixth, police said, ‘You can’t cross here,’ and turned us around,” Mr. Kappel said. Blocked from going west, they found that they also could not go east, south or north. “They countered us with those orange nets,” Mr. Kappel said.

The nets had followed the crowd from the library down 42nd Street. A police commander, holding his own video camera, gestured to the people trapped in the pen. “Sit down,” he ordered. The crowd — shoulder to shoulder, backpack to bandanna — sank awkwardly to the sidewalk.

Among them were Ms. Tremayne and Mr. Kappel. When they saw their arrest documents, many hours later, they discovered that they had been accused of disorderly conduct: for sitting on 42nd Street and blocking traffic.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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Two New Deaths, Same Old Questions

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 25, 2007

In a partnership with the State of New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s government owns a ruined, contaminated skyscraper at 130 Liberty Street, across from the World Trade Center site. The building appears to have been a howling firetrap, the kind for which private owners would be indicted in days. Last week it killed two men, Firefighters Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph Graffagnino, 33.

Mr. Bloomberg and his partner, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, preached at the funerals that they would find out what their own governments had done.

Here is a short list: They hired what appeared to be a shell corporation to demolish the building. This company plugged stairwells with plywood to keep asbestos from flying around. Workers clipped sprinkler lines. Someone cut a standpipe, a dry water main that is reserved for delivering water during fires.

On many floors, the workers left a carpet knife and a flashlight by plywood doors that led to the stairways. Because the doors were draped with sheets of plastic, the knife could be used in an emergency to get out. The floors, being slowly demolished, were mazes.

All this was done under the eyes of inspectors from Mr. Bloomberg’s Buildings Department. They were in 130 Liberty almost every day, along with agents of Mr. Spitzer from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the official name of the partnership between the governor and the mayor. They issued piles of citations.

However, no one from other branches of the governments run by Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Spitzer got around to telling the Fire Department exactly what was going on. And no one from the Fire Department bothered to find out.

Even though there is a firehouse next door to 130 Liberty Street, no firefighter had set foot in the building to inspect it for about a year. No one from Mr. Bloomberg’s government has yet explained their absence. Nor has anyone explained why the Fire Department had not taken part in discussions about the building’s demolition.

The first mission of the department is to respond to fires. Its second “critical objective,” as defined by the Mayor’s Management Report, is to “reduce the risk of fire incidents through quality inspections, investigations and public education.”

With the city booming and with vast new resources, the Fire Department has conducted 8,000 fewer inspections since 2001, while its budget has grown by more than a third. Officials say this is a normal fluctuation.

The calamity of 130 Liberty Street is not the sole responsibility of the Fire Department, but it will be firefighters who will be buried after the next Liberty Street, wherever it may be, if the department does not figure out how this one happened. If it is possible for the mayor and the governor to conduct thorough investigations of their own government, it still will fall to the Fire Department to protect its members by understanding how this could have happened. If it can.

The modern Fire Department grew out of 19th-century volunteer organizations that were aligned with gangs and politicians. With mass deaths in early high rises, the department emancipated itself from political influence and became a force for reform of building codes. It also became an organization devoted to merit hiring, in the process creating a culture of civil service fundamentalism. The highest-ranking officers are chosen by test. This has had its historic virtues, but it has also clogged the department’s ability to shape and scrutinize itself.

“You have no accountability at the senior levels,” said Thomas Von Essen, who was the fire commissioner under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. He noted that in 2001, three firefighters, John Downing, Brian Fahey and Harry Ford, were killed on Father’s Day, fighting a fire in a hardware storage area that had not been inspected in years.

Three months later, the attacks of Sept. 11 found other weak spots: 343 firefighters died. Now, what appears to have been an accidental fire a week ago has killed two more.

In “Young Men and Fire,” a book about a forest fire that killed 12 firefighters, the author, Norman Maclean, wrote that such a disaster had to be honestly examined; otherwise, it would leave “terror without consolation or explanation.”

“Perhaps most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died,” Mr. Maclean wrote, and “those who loved them forever questioning this ‘unnecessary death,’ and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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About New York: A Moist Finale to a Summer of Movies in Bryant Park

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 22, 2007

At the drizzling dot of 5 on Monday evening, security guards dropped the barriers to the Bryant Park lawn. Hundreds of people began a slow-motion dash across the lawn for the park’s final night of free outdoor movies this summer. By the time “Psycho” started four hours later, about 2,000 people had grabbed a few square feet of grass and the unlimited romance of a city night outdoors.

The summer of 2007 was getting its last licks. In a few days, colleges will open and the freshmen will peel off; there are sales everywhere on three-hole loose-leaf paper.

On the park lawn, people spread picnics and pizza boxes, then popped open contraband bottles of wine and beer. The rules say alcohol is not permitted in city parks, but those rules are not all that vigorously enforced. Waiters from sandwich kiosks moved through the crowd, taking orders and using helium-filled balloons to mark the spots for deliveries.

By fair-weather standards, the audience was small — it can run to as high as 10,000 with the right movie and clear skies — but given the light rain and the cool dreary night, it was a big crowd. Before long, even the stairs on the east side of the park were packed.

“A horrible night for weather, but it was the last movie of the summer,” said Ethan Lercher, who is director of events for Bryant Park and has gone to just about every Monday night movie for years. “And it was ‘Psycho.’ ”

Alfred Hitchcock, who made his last film in 1976 and was dead long before many of the spectators were born, could probably draw a crowd in a blizzard. He made “Psycho” in 1960, and it remains a classic of suspense about an insane man who operates a run-down motel and the young woman who makes the mistake of stopping there to hide out.

This is the 15th summer that free movies have been shown in Bryant Park. When the program began, it seemed like a defiantly countercultural statement, even though it was sponsored by HBO. In 1993, the city after dark and Bryant Park were generally seen as unfit for decent people, or the indecent, for that matter. (Even three years later, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani rejected a proposal to put giant television screens in city parks for the 1996 baseball World Series; the security issues, his aides said, would be too difficult.)

By then, however, outdoor movies were thriving, and not only in Bryant Park. Now, in places across Lower Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, independent films are shown in the Rooftop Films festival, which continues into September.

The Bryant Park films are sturdy classics — “Annie Hall,” “Wait Until Dark,” and “Casablanca” were on this year’s calendar — but the movies are practically beside the point. Couples kiss. Friends meet. Strangers connect.

“Quite a few people have said that they met their husband or wife at the films,” Mr. Lercher noted. “I mean, it’s the perfect opportunity. You’re sitting on a lawn. You have four hours to hang out from the time the lawn opens until the movie starts. I think there are people who just come to eat on the lawn in a crowd and then leave.”

As darkness fell over the park, a short cartoon was shown. Then an HBO preview trailer ran, with an old theme song for the network.

With that, as happens every Monday night when that commercial plays, people climbed to their feet and danced.

“Why?” asked Mr. Lercher. “I can’t explain it. A few people just started dancing one year, and more people joined, and now you have it every Monday night. All the better that no one stood up and made an announcement that people should dance.”

The movie began, a crisp black and white print. The crowd cheered the appearance of Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins. Along 42nd Street, about two dozen police cars rolled by with lights flashing, in one of the city’s daily counterterrorism drills.

The spectators appeared to stick with the scary scenes on screen. They screamed when Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, stood under the running water of a shower and a shadowy figure holding a knife appeared.

The rain fell harder. Umbrellas popped up, and lines of kids leaned against each other to share the shelter, as if they were in little fortresses, unafraid of the dark.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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A Moment of Stray Voltage, and a Life Upended

Philip Vanaria suffered a brain injury when he was shocked by stray voltage
as he talked on this pay phone in the West Village a decade ago.

By JIM DWYER

Published: August 8, 2007

It was one of the muggiest days of the summer a decade ago. Philip Vanaria had gone for a walk in Greenwich Village, where he had lived most of his adult life. A friend wanted ideas for his birthday, which was coming up. At the corner of Hudson and Morton Streets, he called her from a pay phone.

“Hello,” she said.

Something jolted Mr. Vanaria’s elbow. Then it shot into his arm. Waves of pain ran along his arm. He nested the phone on his left shoulder, cranked his ear down.

“I said, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack,’ ” he recalled this week.

He was just about to turn 47, the hour of life when the body becomes a permanent suspect in acts of treachery. To calm himself, Mr. Vanaria reached for one of the posts next to the phone, and gripped it. He screamed. Someone was shooting him dead, a machine gun, it was the tail end of an era of drive-by killings, he was being riddled with bullets. He looked into the street to see his murderers.

No car. No gunmen. No one.

Then he realized that he could not let go of the post. Panic and pain ripped through his body. His arm fought with his fingers, which were locked onto the post by an invisible force. He unclenched his grip and pulled away.

A man stood nearby. “What’s happening?” he asked Mr. Vanaria.

“You don’t understand,” Mr. Vanaria said. “I was being electrocuted.”

In a daze, Mr. Vanaria walked away. Who do you tell? The police? The Fire Department? He walked to the firehouse of Engine 18 on 10th Street, spoke to a battalion chief, who brought a crew to the corner. Someone touched the phone with a metal tool, and it sparked. The firefighters cordoned the intersection and called Con Edison. The electricity was measured at 90 volts.

The fire chief urged Mr. Vanaria to go to the hospital. Instead, he wandered up to St. Francis Xavier church on West 16th Street. Later, he went to St. Vincent’s. They asked him his date of birth. It took him a while to come up with it.

He had, he learned, suffered a brain injury. He had literally been fried.

“Those first five years were really, really dark,” Mr. Vanaria said. “I wouldn’t call it attention deficit. It was a collision of thoughts, like a car crash.”

He had to give up his job teaching third graders at a parochial school. He stopped dancing in clubs. He used to draw, but felt that his sense of shape and color had seeped away.

He sued Con Edison, which, it turned out, had installed a high-voltage vault beneath the pay phone at Hudson and Morton Streets. The utility had put a pump in the vault to clear water out; the pump burned out, but because it was not equipped with a circuit breaker or a fuse, electricity passed to the pump, then to a drain pipe, a metal grate, up to the telephone and into Philip Vanaria’s body and brain.

There was no question that Con Edison had been negligent, a judge found; only the amount of damages was at issue. The jury awarded Mr. Vanaria $1.9 million. The circuit breaker would have been a few dollars.

HE watched, as the years went by, the outcry when a carriage horse was killed after stepping on a charged manhole. Dogs hopped over electrical hot spots on the street. Jodie S. Lane, walking her dogs in the East Village, was killed in January 2004 when she stepped on a metal service box that had not been properly insulated.

Mr. Vanaria testified at hearings on the dangers of badly maintained utility wires. Some people used the term “stray voltage,” but then engineers would say there is no such thing: Electricity does not escape from a properly maintained system.

After Ms. Lane’s death, Con Edison pledged to spend millions of dollars to find spots where electricity was leaking. Yesterday, people injured in the steam pipe explosion last month said they intended to sue the utility.

Mr. Vanaria lives alone, writes fluid letters in perfect penmanship, and steps carefully through his days. “Ten years this month. I’m better. My attention skates at times,” he said. “I don’t read books, but I still buy them like crazy.”

He has not returned to work. Occasionally, he goes to a club on Sheridan Square. “My doctor says dancing is the No. 1 activity to combat Alzheimer’s,” he said.

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Officials Fly, and Voters Are Taken for a Ride

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 28, 2007

In 1994, George E. Pataki got very mad — or at least pretended to — about Mario M. Cuomo and his family using state aircraft to fly all over New York. Mr. Pataki wanted Mr. Cuomo’s job, which was governor.

Such flights, Mr. Pataki said, were an “incredibly stupid use of taxpayers’ money, like flea collars for the governor’s dog and some larger elements, like Air Cuomo, the plane and helicopters to ferry people around the state, not on government business.”

If elected, he, George Pataki, would get rid of the fleet.

That did not happen. Of course, he won the election — experts disagreed whether Mr. Cuomo went down in defeat over the flea collars, the taxpayer-financed “wee-wee pad” for his dog or his stand against the death penalty — but in victory, Mr. Pataki resisted the temptation to get rid of the aircraft that he had called a symbol of Mr. Cuomo’s “outrageous, free-spending liberal philosophy.”

It is not hard to imagine what happened next.

Not long after the election, Mr. Pataki himself was the subject of news stories about how the Pataki clan had replaced the Cuomos on board the state aircraft. With that, the executive helicopters and planes pretty much fell out of the news for the duration of the Pataki administration.

(And in far less important news, the state managed to increase its debt from $28 billion to $51 billion under Mr. Pataki, much of it by simply borrowing new money to pay off old debts.)

Then Eliot Spitzer replaced Mr. Pataki and promptly rescued the helicopters from obscurity. He permitted his enemy, Joseph L. Bruno, the leader of the Republicans in the State Senate, to ride whenever he wanted. As soon as Mr. Bruno used helicopters to go to political fund-raisers, Mr. Spitzer’s people ran to the newspapers and told on him.

This treachery has shocked even the case-hardened souls of Albany politicians who have overseen decades of pillage without batting an eye. Mr. Spitzer’s critics say his career is hanging by a thread. Once a professional Good Government Type, he now will have to rebrand himself to survive, though he surely can take heart from the recovery of Rudolph W. Giuliani, another politician who got his start by scolding people about their lack of ethics.

To recap, for those who have fallen into a stupor and can’t understand what was done wrong: the Spitzer people snitched on Mr. Bruno, instead of allowing him to fly in secrecy from Albany to Manhattan hotel suites so he could collect campaign money.

State troopers drive Mr. Bruno to the helicopters and fly him to the fund-raisers. He puts in a few minutes of legislative business at these events, he raises money, and then heads back home on the helicopter. The State Police have two Bell 430 helicopters that are used for “executive transport.”

WHEN Mario Cuomo was governor, the state estimated that an hour in a helicopter cost about $2,000. The state no longer tracks those costs. Remarkably, neither did the attorney general, who this week somehow managed to issue a 10,000-word report on the “alleged misuse of New York State aircraft and the resources of the state police” without mentioning how much it cost the police — and the public — to fly politicians on a state aircraft.

The attorney general happens to be Andrew M. Cuomo, son of the former governor, and himself an occasional passenger on what was known in its day as Air Cuomo.

For commercial helicopter use, the base cost is $1,250 an hour, according to David Wyndham of Conklin & de Decker, a firm that consults on aviation costs. That cost easily rises to $1,600 an hour when insurance and pilot salaries and benefits are included.

The true costs of these trips, though, are not just airfare. A few years ago, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided to pay off old debts by borrowing $14 billion. This borrowing brought little in the way of new facilities for the public, but generated about $85 million in fees for underwriters and lawyers. They, in turn, gave $4 million in political contributions and lobbying fees. Today, that $14 billion is part of a debt crisis at the authority that could drive up bus and subway fares.

When politicians get a ride to a fund-raiser, the public can be paying for years.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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Albany Parses the Purposes of State Trips

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 25, 2007

At 11 a.m. on April 5, state troopers drove Joseph F. Bruno, a politician who lives near Albany, to a helicopter and flew him to Manhattan. He arrived in time for lunch. The first hint of a public purpose for his trip came in a meeting that began at 3:30 and lasted 30 to 40 minutes. Participants said the subjects involved both legislative business and Republican Party affairs.

After that, Mr. Bruno had a 4:30 meeting that is said to have involved state matters in some manner, shape or form. This lasted all of 10 minutes.

Then it was time for Mr. Bruno, leader of the Republicans in the State Senate, to fly back to Albany, where state troopers were waiting to drive him to his next stop.

So for the better part of a day, Mr. Bruno commanded the use of state vehicles, state helicopters and state troopers as chauffeurs and pilots in order to conduct a grand total of about 30 minutes of legislative business in Manhattan. That’s all, folks.

These details can be found on the 48th page of a 53-page report issued by the state attorney general in one of the fastest investigations in the history of political warfare.

A few weeks ago, Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s staff leaked information about Mr. Bruno’s use of state aircraft. Mr. Bruno said the governor was using troopers to spy on him. Everyone involved was outraged — outraged! — and demanded investigations. The attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, complied.

It turns out that trips like the one taken by Mr. Bruno on April 5 — and others in which he was flown to Manhattan on the dates of major fund-raising parties — are entirely O.K. under the current state rules, according to the attorney general’s report. As long as a few minutes of public business are blended into the trip, the use of state aircraft is allowed.

Apparently, the main scandal is how the public came to learn about this.

By page count, 80 percent of the Cuomo report has to do with various sneaky things done by Governor Spitzer’s aides to collect and leak information about the Bruno flights. They got State Police officials to recreate itineraries for trips taken by Mr. Bruno, but not for travels of the governor or the lieutenant governor.

Then, a reporter from The Times Union in Albany sought details of the trips under the Freedom of Information Law, quite possibly by invitation; any journalist would welcome such an invitation.

Given the energy devoted to this project by senior members of the governor’s staff, as documented in the Cuomo report, the only surprising thing is that Mr. Spitzer himself did not personally deliver the records to The Times Union.

Many branches of government stall for months or years before releasing ordinary public records, much less go to the trouble of creating new ones. Alas, fans of open government can hold their applause. Despite the exemplary speed in rushing out the information on Mr. Bruno, the governor’s aides were not nearly as thorough in assembling details of trips taken by Mr. Spitzer and other leading figures in the state capital.

The folly of this venture is plain, though it appears nowhere in the Cuomo report. The purpose of the leak was to embarrass Mr. Bruno. But if officials can be flown to Manhattan by the State Police, then driven to Aqueduct Racetrack by state troopers, and meet ethical standards for publicly paid travel because they have a “legislative business” meeting at the track, then it is pretty clear that embarrassing anyone in Albany is a cause long and hopelessly lost. (The horses, by the way, were not running the day of that meeting, listed as May 4 in The Times Union’s account.)

THAT the governor’s office did not know better is a strong hint of powerful hubris. As of the spring, the Republican Party in New York State had all but gone toes-up. It had lost the governor’s office, and its one remaining bunker of power, a majority in the State Senate, was eroding. Now, rallied by its leader’s persecution over his helicopter flights, the Republicans have all but called in Amnesty International. And they are vowing to investigate Mr. Spitzer’s own fund-raising, back to 1998.

No one — including the attorney general — is volunteering to document how many thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of state police time, are used to carry politicians to events that are strictly party politics. “Whatever facts we had are in the report, which speaks for itself,” a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said.

Apparently there is such a thing as too much information.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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From Team Giuliani, a New Willingness to Tiptoe

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 21, 2007
**********************

As the politician previously known as Rudy Giuliani, fearless maverick, trudged through primary states this week, he added a group of conservative lawyers to his virtual entourage, a Justice Advisory Committee.

Their job, it appears, is to smother traces of the politician who once declared a “Roe v. Wade 25th Anniversary Day” and offered to help Bill Clinton pass tough national gun licensing laws.

Looking back — not that his campaign encourages doing so without supervision — there was a time when Mr. Giuliani would not have been seen onstage with people holding views like those of some of his new justice advisers.

For instance, during the 1993 mayoral race, the National Abortion Rights Action League of New York tried to organize a forum for candidates, but hit a snag. In the maneuvering, the incumbent mayor, David N. Dinkins, insisted that a candidate from the Right to Life Party be allowed to take part.

Mr. Giuliani would not hear of it.

“He said, ‘I would never accept a Right to Life candidate at this forum,’ ” said Kelli Conlin, the executive director of the abortion rights group. Instead of endorsing Mr. Dinkins, a Democrat who was also a vigorous supporter of abortion rights, the group stayed neutral. Mr. Giuliani showed his gratitude.

“He felt we were dealing honestly with him, and he rewarded me by putting me on his transition team,” Ms. Conlin said. “How passionately he believed in this.”

He appointed leading advocates of abortion rights to the city’s Board of Health. He spoke at a Naral luncheon in 1997. A year later, he welcomed Ms. Conlin and her group to City Hall for the declaration of “Roe v. Wade 25th Anniversary Day,” marking the Supreme Court decision that lifted many restrictions on abortions.

“He warmly gave me a kiss and a hug,” Ms. Conlin said.

That was 1998, when the theater of his political life was New York State, where any hesitancy in support for abortion rights is practically a disqualification from statewide elected office.

Asked recently about the prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Mr. Giuliani skipped the warm hug. “It would be O.K. to repeal,” he said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as a precedent.”

He still supports abortion rights, Mr. Giuliani says, but actually hates abortion, an antipathy that he is now revealing to the abortion opponents who will be voting in the Republican primaries.

“He made his reputation on being forthright,” Ms. Conlin said. “Well, at least he’s standing in unreceptive crowds and saying, ‘I am pro-choice.’ ”

New Yorkers who thought they were familiar with what appeared to be Mr. Giuliani’s views after his two decades in public life are now discovering that some of his other passions have cooled.

In February 1997, after a man shot seven people on the observation platform of the Empire State Building, Mr. Giuliani spoke urgently about the need for national gun control laws.

That particular fever has also broken.

“You have a personal right to carry arms, to have arms,” he said at a recent town hall meeting. “That personal right is as strong as the right of free speech.”

Each state, he now says, should regulate guns as it sees fit.

But back in 1997, when the Empire State gunman established residency in Florida by staying in a motel for a few days, long enough to legally buy a .380-caliber Beretta semiautomatic handgun, Mr. Giuliani said Florida’s law was “absurd.”

Most guns used in New York crimes were bought in Southern states, so the country needed national regulation, Mr. Giuliani said in 1997.

“The United States Congress should have the courage to pass uniform licensing for everyone carrying a gun,” he said. “A gun is more dangerous than an automobile. You have to go through a rigorous test in order to drive an automobile. You should have to go through an even more rigorous test before you get a gun, much less an automatic weapon.”

Sure, he sounds a bit different these days. But as his campaign Web site explains, “Rudy understands that what works in New York doesn’t necessarily work in Mississippi or Montana.”

Or as Groucho Marx is believed to have said: “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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The Imperative of War: A Life Recruited at 17, Taken at 18

Military members transported Pfc. Le Ron A. Wilson’s coffin in Queens.

Kitra Cahana/The New York Times

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 18, 2007
=================

A little more than a year ago, Le Ron A. Wilson, not yet 18, walked into the military recruiting center on Jamaica Avenue in Queens and signed up to serve in the Army. He had the kind of brains and drive that make a good soldier, the persistence that wears down parents. His mother, Simona Francis, gave her permission.

Yesterday, not far from the recruiting center, the short, happy life of Le Ron Wilson was recalled at a funeral Mass in Christ the King Church. Twice named soldier of the month in his platoon, a specialist in the repair of weapons, a correspondent with scores of friends on his MySpace page, Private First Class Wilson and another soldier were killed on July 6 by a roadside bomb.

Many of those in the church yesterday wore buttons with his image. The pictures that show him fresh-faced do not lie. He was born on Nov. 16, 1988. He was not yet 13 during the attacks of Sept. 11 and never voted for a president. He barely had to shave.

He is among the youngest soldiers killed in Iraq. Of more than 3,600 soldiers who have died in the war, about 30 have been 18. Tens of thousands of Iraqis young and old have also lost their lives.

In the pews, his classmates from Thomas Edison High School dabbed their eyes.

“Me and Danielle, one of our friends, tried to talk him out of it,” said Lilibel Araullo, 19, recalling when he enlisted. “A few others signed up. Justin. Derrick. I went to see him down in Savannah, before he left.

“Last time I heard from him was in June, a phone call, he was telling me it was hot over there,” she said. “I told him: ‘Message me on MySpace. Let me know you’re O.K.’ So I would get messages from him — ‘I’m alive, I’m okay.’ ”

These are the rites of connection for the young. Rituals for the dead are woven into the church and the military. For the church, a bishop came; for the Army, a general. The bishop, Octavio Cisneros, recalled the suffering of the mother of Jesus, and prayed that she would bring peace to Private Wilson’s mother. The general, Bill Phillips, spoke of the fellowship of soldiers, their care for one another and their mission.

He read the citations for the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star and the Combat Action Badge for service in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the name given to the invasion that started more than four years ago as a mission to eradicate weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist, and in retribution for the Sept. 11 attacks, which the Iraqis had nothing to do with.

The name of the operation is not heard so often these days.

The medals and a framed flag were presented to his mother. Ms. Francis handed them to relatives. Then the bishop, stood to begin the final prayers in the church.

“Into your hands, father of mercies, we commend our brother Le Ron,” Bishop Cisneros said.

When he was done, Ms. Francis strode behind her son’s coffin, composed but struggling.

The young people did not bother. They wept openly, then pooled together in cars, ready to join the procession to Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, where they would lay their friend down.

“A girlfriend? Not in high school,” said Ms. Araullo. “He went to Hawaii, on recreation; there was a girl named Roxanne he met that he liked. That was before he went to Iraq.”

A few blocks away, as the funeral procession moved east, it was break time at the military recruiting center where Le Ron Wilson declared that he would become a soldier.

Two girls cantered streetward, down a flight of stairs, out into the sunshine. They paused beneath a sign for the center, where they are working through August.

“We go leafleting, we call people up about recruitment,” said one of the girls. “A lot of people say ‘no’ right away because they think they have to go straight to Iraq, but that’s not true, there’s other things they could do.”

She was 14. Her companion was 15. All told, they said, nine teenagers, paid $7.15 an hour by the city’s summer job program, are working at the Jamaica recruiting center.

Military recruiting, of course, is the work of professional soldiers, not teenagers in a summer program to learn how to hold a job.

Still, it is not surprising that they would be drawn into the search for new soldiers. Just as youth must be served, so, too, must the needs of a country at war.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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Third Strike and Beyond, if This Man Was There

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 11, 2007
==================

At 2:30 Monday morning, the two young police officers approaching the black sport utility vehicle on Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn knew nothing of the histories of the people inside. But if, as the police say, Dexter Bostic was one of the passengers, he would have known that the spinning light was a signal of crisis for him.

The police, at that hour, and in those circumstances, meant prison for him, most likely for life, before the first shot was fired.

Having spent most of his adulthood behind bars for acts of violence in Queens and Brooklyn, Mr. Bostic’s freedoms were rationed out by the New York State Division of Parole in minute doses.

At age 34, Mr. Bostic still had to be home by 9. He could drive only when he got permission from a parole officer, could not live within 1,000 feet of a school, and, on command, had to urinate into a cup every few weeks. He had raped and robbed a woman as a teenager, spent most of his 20s in prison, then returned to the street long enough to take part in a robbery in which a cohort fired shots. He had two convictions for violent felonies.

Over the years, four parole panels refused to grant Mr. Bostic early release. “There is a reasonable probability that you will not remain at liberty without violating the law, and your release at this time is incompatible with the welfare and safety of the community,” a panel found in September 2002.

Still, he was not in prison for life, and after serving the maximum sentence for his part in the robbery, he returned to Queens in 2004. He found a job at a car dealership on Long Island. Last Thursday, a parole officer visited his home at 11 p.m. to make sure that he was abiding by curfew, according to Mark E. Johnson, a spokesman for the parole division.

On Monday morning, Officer Russel Timoshenko, 23, and Officer Herman Yan, 26, checked the license plate on a black BMW, and found that it did not match.

If Mr. Bostic was there, the circumstances were clear.

He was out after his parole curfew.

The BMW had been stolen.

There were guns in the car.

Before a shot was fired, he was likely to return to prison for another two years on a parole violation. Any guns that were in the S.U.V. might have earned him a third violent felony conviction and a sentence of 25 years to life.

Alberto Ortiz, 30, stood outside a parole office in Midtown yesterday, on his way to report to his parole officer. He did not know Mr. Bostic, but the thought of being in a car at 2:30 a.m. made him shudder.

“Parole has rules, and you can’t do none of that,” Mr. Ortiz said. “My parole officer came to my house at 6 a.m., Sunday into Monday, to see if I was home in bed. I can’t have pets — well, not a dog — because it might go against the officer. I can’t drive, unless I get permission.”

To violate any parole rules is to risk returning to prison. The strict rules, Mr. Ortiz said, keep him a safe distance from even deeper trouble. He committed a robbery when he was young, and sold drugs in 2005 to an undercover officer, becoming one of the 7 percent of parolees in New York who commit new felonies within three years.

“I’ve got two felonies. I get another one” — he shook his head. “I won’t see daylight for a long time.”

On Monday, the police say, as Officer Timoshenko approached the passenger side of the black BMW on Rogers Avenue, someone inside opened fire and gravely wounded him. Officer Yan, who returned fire, was hit in the arm and the chest by shots from inside the car, but was spared from life-threatening injury by his protective vest.

The police say they believe Mr. Bostic and another man, Robert Ellis, fired from inside the car, and they were looking for both men last night. A third man has been arrested.

By Mr. Ortiz’s calculations, riding in a car after curfew, even for easy money, would not be worth the risk. “I’d rather stay broke, the freedom’s too good,” Mr. Ortiz said.

If Mr. Bostic was involved, Mr. Ortiz said, that meant “he loved prison, man.” And if it is true he shot the officers, Mr. Ortiz said, “now he’s going to die there.”

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One Man’s Plea for Mercy, With a Recent Precedent in Mind

Frederick Lake, 54, waving his passport, with his son, Brandon, 9, in their home in Brooklyn.
Mr. Lake is facing deportation to Jamaica over a 1991 robbery conviction.

By JIM DWYER

Published: July 7, 2007

If official mercy comes back into fashion, thanks to the clemency that President Bush granted this week to a former member of his administration who was headed to prison, it won’t be a moment too soon for Frederick Lake, a resident of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, for most of the last 20 years.

Mr. Lake has been to prison and finished his time; he was convicted in the 1989 robbery of a payroll company, and now faces deportation to Jamaica. From the moment of his arrest, he has insisted that he is not guilty. “I didn’t do this thing,” he said. “I wasn’t in the country.”

Now he has applied to Gov. Eliot Spitzer for a pardon, which is a legal cousin of clemency. A pardon erases the conviction from the records — and in Mr. Lake’s case would spare him from deportation — while clemency reduces a sentence, but does not eliminate the conviction.

Mr. Spitzer, in office only since January, is new to the exercise of official mercy. It has largely fallen into disuse, in New York and elsewhere.

Over the last 25 years, New York’s governors have granted fewer and fewer pardons or commutations of sentences. Perhaps they could find no one worthy of it, though the number of prisoners has grown fourfold. More likely, they feared TV ads saying that they were easy on criminals, or they fretted that one of those shown mercy would commit another crime.

The only person pardoned in New York since 1990 was the comedian Lenny Bruce, cleared in 2003 by Gov. George E. Pataki of “using foul language in public,” as state officials put it. At that point, Bruce was a safe bet to cause no further trouble for any governor: he had been dead for 37 years.

On Monday, President Bush granted clemency to I. Lewis Libby Jr., an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted of lying to a grand jury — a single thread in the web of untrue stories that were spun to justify the Iraq war. At age 56, Mr. Libby was about to go to prison for 30 months, until Mr. Bush stepped in and declared that the sentence was “severe” and “excessive,” considering Mr. Libby’s public service and the hardship to his family. He is probably as safe a bet for Mr. Bush as Mr. Bruce was for George Pataki.

Mr. Lake, 54, is the father of children ages 8 and 9. He has heart disease and diabetes. Before going to prison for six years, he worked at night, cleaning aircraft at Kennedy Airport, and ran a car-repair business during the day.

In turning to Governor Spitzer for a pardon, Mr. Lake is asking not just for mercy, but also for the justice that he and his lawyers, John D. B. Lewis and Claudia Slovinsky, say they were unable to get in court.

“I’m here laying in the bed, thinking, when is I.N.S. going to come for me?” he said. “What about my children? My whole life is crumbling for something I never did.”

On May 18, 1989, a payroll company in Inwood, on Long Island, was robbed of $103,000 by a short, stocky man wearing an earring. Some months later, Mr. Lake passed along a money order that had been stolen in the robbery. At a trial in 1991, three people identified him as the stickup man, though he did not have a pierced ear and is close to 6 feet tall.

Mr. Lake, a legal resident of the United States, produced airline tickets and passenger manifests from Jamaica Air showing that “F. Lake” flew from Miami to Kingston, Jamaica, on May 12, 1989 — a week before the robbery — and then back to the United States on Sept. 29, 1989.

On his passport, the stamps matched the dates on the tickets.

“The truth is swimming on top of the water,” Mr. Lake said.

Prosecutors in Nassau County challenged his alibi by calling to the witness stand a Jamaican immigration official, who testified that he could not find a landing card filled out by Mr. Lake, a requirement for anyone entering the country. Later, a judicial inquiry in Jamaica found grave inaccuracies in the official’s testimony and said that if the jury relied on it, Mr. Lake had been the victim of a “serious miscarriage of justice.”

“Whenever I talk about this, it tears me up,” Mr. Lake said. “The medical care in Jamaica, that will be the finish of me. My son says, ‘Daddy, why are you crying? Are they going to put me in the casket with you?’ ”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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A Mayor Often Ill at Ease, and Usually Muted on Iraq

By JIM DWYER

Published: June 23, 2007

The mayor’s lips are pursed. The tuxedo-and-gown dinner crowd in the Pierre hotel ballroom has fallen still, just a few spoons rattling along the rims of dessert plates. At the very front of the room, the spotlight has settled on Michael R. Bloomberg. Someone is reading an award citation for his work as mayor. Mr. Bloomberg oscillates. He bounces on his toes, nods his head. His eyes appear to be pinned open. Though he has not uttered a word, Mr. Bloomberg’s body seems to all but scream: Get me out of here.

It is easy to watch him going through the motions of the routine antics of public officialdom — the giving of plaques, the issuing of proclamations, the receiving of medals — and believe that he shows up only because, somehow, if just through body language, he can sneer at the ceremony. That the soul of a punk-rocker has been wrapped in custom-tailored suits.

By quitting the Republican Party, Mr. Bloomberg has made himself available for a presidential campaign, ready for voters who like their coffee strong. Yet for all his bluntness, Mr. Bloomberg has kept his lips pursed on the defining exercise of American power in the 21st century — the invasion of Iraq — except to offer quiet, unambiguous support.

At the Pierre on Thursday, as the gold medal of the Foreign Policy Association was draped around his neck in honor of his efforts at education reform, Mr. Bloomberg ducked his head and managed the barest of smiles.

Mr. Bloomberg combines frank indifference to ritual with what seems like a full-brained embrace of problems: Here are 158 pages on how the city can cut the amount of carbon fuels it burns. Here’s a new telephone number for all city services. Here’s a reorganized school system.

He raced through his speech Thursday evening without bothering much about the oratory, but still managed to offer a panoramic view on a few topics. He noted that in a global economy, a weak education meant second-class citizenship. Without 400,000 to 500,000 immigrants every year, he said, the country would not have enough people to pay for Social Security, to start new businesses, or to refresh the culture. And how, he asked, could the United States have visa rules that forced brilliant foreign graduate students who had gotten American degrees to leave the country?

“We just have to stop this craziness, and understand who we are, and not be so threatened by terrorism that the terrorists win without firing a shot,” he said.

Although he was speaking to a foreign policy group, Mr. Bloomberg barely mentioned Iraq or the central role that the city was assigned in the justification for the war.

In May 2004, a year after the invasion, Mr. Bloomberg served as host to Laura Bush, who had come to New York in an effort to rally support for the war effort. Mrs. Bush visited a memorial for Sept. 11th victims. Standing next to Mrs. Bush, with the Statue of Liberty in the background, Mr. Bloomberg, right, suggested that New Yorkers could find justification for the war at the World Trade Center site, even though no Iraqi is known to have had a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Don’t forget that the war started not very many blocks from here,” he said that day in 2004.

Apart from these remarks and other comments about the cruel history of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bloomberg has said little about the war or other foreign affairs; to do so, he and his aides have said, would be a form of grandstanding for which he has no taste.

A few hours before the mayor gave his speech on Thursday night, American military officials announced that 14 more soldiers had been killed in two days. And for Iraqi civilians, the death toll of 9/11 is not a once-in-an-epoch moment, but often the monthly body count in the morgues. In his speech, Mr. Bloomberg remarked on the sacrifice of soldiers and what he implied was the ingratitude of people opposed to the war.

“We shouldn’t forget that we have young men and women overseas fighting and dying, sadly, so that we can protest,” he said. “I sometimes think young protesters don’t realize that their right to protest is not something that they would have elsewhere, and it’s a right that has to be fought for continuously.”

As for those who made the decision to go to war, Mr. Bloomberg’s lips remained firmly sealed.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

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