http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090727/NEWS/907270314
Guess Cuomo wasn’t getting his cut!
This practice is called “sewer service”, meaning that unscrupulous process servers would take the summons issued by a court clerk, throw them down the sewer or otherwise into the trash, and then swear out affidavits that the process was in fact served on the defendant(s) named in the civil complaint.
I had a law professor many years ago who hailed from Brooklyn, and he pointed out in one of his lectures on real property that this was a common practice in eviction cases there.