Free Republic

Nine graffiti artists who spray painted creations across the world-renowned 5Pointz building filed a lawsuit Friday in Brooklyn federal court, seeking unspecified damages from the owner who whitewashed away their artwork. [Snip] The aerosol artists say they are owed substantial cash damages because Wolkoff painted over their al fresco works. [Snip] The iconic buildings had more than 350 works of visual art on the walls — inside and out — when Wolkoff destroyed them, the lawsuit said. The colorful, eye-catching creations were torn down for good last summer.

Manhattan writer Suzanne Corso, 46, was once a card-carrying member of the 1 percent — until her financier husband lost their $100 million nest egg in the 2008 fiscal meltdown. Here, the mother of one, who has just published her third novel, “Hello, Hollywood,” tells The Post’s Jane Ridley her very New York story of survival. My 6-year-old daughter doesn’t think twice about calling room service from our luxury residential hotel to order a $25 cheeseburger for herself. It’s November 2005 and we’ve been living in an 11-room suite at the Ritz-Carlton on West Street for a little more than two years. And...

A New York man who sought help from a fortuneteller to fix a romantic relationship says she scammed him out of more than $700,000. Now the allegations have the Manhattan psychic, Priscilla Delmaro, and another person facing charges of grand larceny. The 32-year-old Brooklyn man told police he consulted Delmaro in August 2013 who told him that evil spirits were keeping him from a woman he claimed to love and wanted to be with who did not share his same affections, The New York Times reported ( http://nyti.ms/1dU288a ).

A crane hauling an air conditioner into the top floor of a 30-story building dropped the heavy load Sunday morning, smashing parts of the building and injuring 10 people. Workers were loading the shipping container-sized machine into 261 Madison Ave. when a rigging strap holding the air conditioner broke, a city official familiar with the ongoing investigation told the Daily News. The chiller sheered the building as it fell. Debris rained down on Madison Ave. around E. 38th St. Part of the 30-story building's facade near the roof was bashed open.

NEW YORK, - A Saudi real estate magnate is reportedly under contract to purchase the second-most expensive condo in New York City, for the price of $95 million. The towering unit, located at 432 Park Ave. in Midtown Manhattan -- the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere -- was placed under contract in 2013 but has yet to close, various news media reported. The buyer is said to be Fawaz Al Hokair, a Saudi real-estate magnate worth a reported $1.37 billion. Developers Macklowe Properties and CIM Group, as they do with all other buyers, declined to confirm Hokair's presence...

Witnesses told The Post that tourists snapped pictures on their cellphones of the gruesome aftermath. In the past year or so, there's been a spate of suicides among financial-services employees. Financial firms have been trying to do more to improve the lifestyles of their employees, especially younger ones.

Murders are way up so far this year in Manhattan, The Post has learned. Sixteen people were killed around the borough between the first of the year and Sunday. Over the same period last year, the figure was 11. That’s an increase of about 45 percent. Shootings in the borough have also soared. There have been 50 “shooting incidents’’ since Jan. 1, compared with 31 in the same time period in 2014 — an increase of about 38 percent. Some of these “incidents’’ involved more than one victim. The number of shooting victims nearly doubled, from 33 to 61. ....

Silda Wall Spitzer, who knows a thing or two about moving onward and upward from a cheating husband, is hosting a women-only Manhattan fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton. Silda, along with Wall Street queen Alexandra Lebenthal, Heidi Miller, tech entrepreneur Geraldine Laybourne and Maroon Capital’s Ann Davlin, is hosting the “just for women” event for Hillary on June 1. Tickets cost $2,700 for the two-hour event...

A Brooklyn teacher who was arrested in 2011 on charges of drugging and raping a middle school student is demanding that the city let her keep her teaching job, according to a new lawsuit. Claudia Tillery, 45, argues in papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court that she was acquitted of all criminal charges in April 2014 and the Department of Education’s hearing officer improperly used sealed evidence, DNA tests and the prosecutor’s testimony to toss her from the teaching post she's had since 1996.

The year is 2023, and President Ted Cruz is ending the second of his contentious terms in the Oval Office. While his policies have been controversial — for example, undoing major social legislation (Obamacare) without a single Democratic vote — his administration’s continual expressions of hostility toward dissent have finally proved intolerable to millions of Americans. Liberal grievances date back to 2017, the first year of Cruz’s administration, when his Department of Homeland Security issued a report declaring that fears about economic stagnation and inequality combined with liberal hatred of a conservative Latino could foster left-wing extremism. Specifically, failure to...

Police caught another not-so-wily coyote Saturday morning in lower Manhattan after a nearly hour-long pursuit, officials said. The critter was first spotted around 7:30 a.m. in Battery Park City, police said. Cops quickly responded, chasing after the fast-moving critter on foot and in police cruisers, authorities said. The coyote was eventually cornered near a cafe at North Cove Marina about an hour after being first spotted, cops said. Police shot the animal with tranquilizer darts, placed it in a cage and brought it to Animal Care & Control’s East Harlem facility. It is unclear if the coyote captured Saturday was...

Eighty-Eight thousand people (so far) have applied for 55 low-rent apartments in a fancy new condominium building on Manhattan's upper west side. The lucky few could get a two bedroom apartment for less than $1100 a month in the West 60's of Manhattan. To get tax breaks, developers of luxury buildings make some units available at below market rent rates, and this is what happened here. But as you can see from the number of applicants, this program will never produce enough low income housing. Rent control is the biggest obstacle to building new affordable housing; that's why nearly...

A 20-year-old Kansas man plotted to kill American soldiers with a vehicle bomb at the Fort Riley military base, an attack he planned to carry out on behalf of the ISIS terror group, prosecutors announced Friday. John T. Booker, also known as Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, was arrested as part of a lengthy FBI investigation. Federal authorities said he was arrested near the army base in Manhattan, Kansas, as he completed final preparations to detonate the bomb, which had, in fact, been rendered inert while he was under FBI surveillance. “As alleged in the complaint, John Booker attempted to attack U.S....

A New York City law firm known for filing class action lawsuits on behalf of chain restaurant workers is going after Dinosaur Bar-B-Que for what it says is the systemic underpayment of tipped workers like servers and bartenders. The law firm of Fitapelli & Schaffer said it has filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York involving all six New York state Dinosaur Bar-B-Que locations, including the one opened in Troy in 2010. Dinosaur has made tipped workers spend at least 20 percent of their time doing non-tippable work — like rolling...

A building has at least partially collapsed in Manhattan after witnesses reported an explosion: Reports are that people are trapped inside. We will have more details as they emerge.

Starbucks Coffee is getting creamed by New York City rents. The java giant may get priced out of its premier and larger Manhattan locations as some of the company’s earliest stores approach renewal after 15 to 20 years. “It’s likely that it’ll be very difficult to renew a number of those leases,” said retail broker Joanne Podell, a vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield, who does not represent Starbucks. She noted that the stores with “superb” locations—i.e., on busy streets with well-trafficked storefronts—are expiring and the chain was paying “much, much less per square foot” than today’s rents. The average...

Did Hillary Commit a Felony? 'The Five': Did Clinton Break Federal Laws With Personal Email Use? by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s systematic evasion of federal recordkeeping requirements involved both the use of private email addresses and a server system installed in her Chappaqua manse. The servers, according to the Washington Free Beacon, may have been set up by shady longtime Clinton lackey Eric Hothem – under a false name (Eric Hoteham) slightly varied from his true name. It may also have been designed to give users the ability to erase emails without a trace. Shannen Coffin’s...

Cyber-security expert Vinny Troia told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday that he traced the IP address of the server Hillary Clinton used to host the private email account she used as secretary of state to a government building in the heart of New York City. “I did read reports that [the server] was at her house, but when we traced the IP address it came back to the city office here in downtown Manhattan,” Troia told Van Susteren. Troia is CEO of the IT consulting firm Night Lion Security. The exact location of Clinton’s server has been a...

I’ve raised in prior posts (here and here) the issue of physical security of the clintonemail.com e-mal server, which is why were it was located and how it was set up matters. Last night, Mitch LaKind — who has experience setting up secure military e-mail servers — wrote me about the detailed issues surrounding Clinton’s approach. I’ll let him speak for himself (emphasis mine, though): As a former contractor to the Air Force, I personally managed the Microsoft Exchange servers that were installed at Thule Air Base. My experience with Microsoft Exchange goes back to 1997, when the earliest versions...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Two Iranian nationals seen by a New York police officer photographing city landmarks were just tourists nearing the end of their stay in the United States, Iran's mission to the United Nations said on Friday."It was these two guys on Saturday, June 22, taking pictures of themselves in Battery Park" at the southern end of Manhattan, said Mohammad Hossein Nosrat, mission spokesman. The two, who work as security guards at the mission and do not have diplomatic immunity, took 1 minute 40 seconds of videotape of the park and environs, Nosrat said. At that point, a...