Please help. Republicans. Democrats all the same.
Letter: Why close racetrack on Palm Sunday?
Photo credit: AP | In this photo provided by New
York Racing Association, Stay Thirsty, left, with Ramon Dominguez
aboard, captures The G1 Cigar Mile horse race at Aqueduct in New York.
(Nov. 24, 2012)
To see what's wrong up in Albany, one only
needs to look at the fact that the Aqueduct Racetrack was closed on
Palm Sunday. On an average Sunday, The Big A has a total handle of
between $6 million and $7 million, of which New York
State takes a percentage.Racing also injects money into the industry, paying jockeys, trainers, grooms, etc. Hundreds of employees -- pari-mutuel clerks and racing officials -- help put on the show, which the state gets a piece of in income taxes.
All of this, worth thousands upon thousands of dollars, was lost because on an antiquated law. Not being allowed to race on Christmas or Easter is OK, but Palm Sunday? The New York Racing Authority races on Thanksgiving, and that's a holiday that the vast majority of us celebrate.
Changing this law would be a slam-dunk revenue creator.
Gerard Bringmann, Patchogue
Editor's note: The writer is both a racing fan and a practicing Catholic.
OPEN ON 1ST PALM SUNDAY, OTB RAKES IN $2M - NY Daily News
www.nydailynews.com/.../open-1st-palm-sunday-otb-rakes-2m-articl...
OPEN ON 1ST PALM SUNDAY, OTB RAKES
IN $2M. By Jerry Bossert / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. Monday, April
14, 2003, 12:00 AM. Print · Print; Comment ...OTB FACES HAND SLAP OVER PALM - NY Daily News
www.nydailynews.com/.../otb-faces-hand-slap-palm-article-1.667233
Apr 16, 2003 – By Jerry Bossert
/ NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ... Aqueduct was also closed on Palm
Sunday, but OTB thrived on action from around the
country.
HI-
Thanks for the help. The item’s
below. I’d be happy to mail you a copy, if you give me a mailing
address.
Claude
Solnik
(631)
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LI Confidential
> Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
In Rural Oasis, Serpico Finds New Adversaries
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Serpico at Home:
Four decades after battling corruption in the New York City Police
Department, Frank Serpico, 77, is now battling a developer building a
luxury home next to his upstate refuge.
By COREY KILGANNON
Published: July 4, 2013
STUYVESANT, N.Y. — Frank Serpico
stopped along a road near his home in this Hudson River town, picked up
a dead bird, gently placed it on a steel guardrail and laid a
wildflower on the bird’s breast.
“This is my little oasis,” he said, surveying a leafy expanse of 40 or
so acres he has owned in Columbia County since 1968. “This is my healing
place.”
Mr. Serpico became one of the most famous police officers in the history
of New York after he helped uncover one of the Police Department’s most infamous corruption scandals.
But speaking out carried a price — he became a pariah inside the force,
and his career ended soon after he was shot in the face in 1971 during a
drug raid gone bad and fellow officers delayed calling an ambulance.
His convalescence here, a two-hour drive north of New York City, has
been Mr. Serpico’s second act. He wandered Europe and North America for a
decade and then, in the early 1980s, built a rustic one-room cabin with
no furnace overlooking the Hudson and began living a monastic life in
nature.
But now Mr. Serpico’s serenity has been broken and he finds himself
battling a new nemesis. This time, it is not an entire agency, but a
local developer and town officials who Mr. Serpico says have ignored his
complaints; this time, it is not over issues like taking cash payments
from drug dealers, but over the fate of some trees and the desecration
of pristine woodland.
“It’s like fighting the system again,” Mr. Serpico said. “Here I’m
trying to enjoy my tranquillity and I’m being dragged back into a world
of corruption.”
So discouraged has Mr. Serpico, 77, become that he has renewed his
American and Italian passports with an eye, he said in all seriousness,
toward moving back to Europe.
The developer, Frank Palladino, scoffed at what he called baseless
claims made by a bitter old man who is using his celebrated name to
satisfy a hunger for attention.
“He wants to be back in the limelight. He needs an ax to grind,” said
Mr. Palladino. “He’s a lonely and unhappy man — he’s like a petulant
child.”
Mr. Serpico’s plan had been a simple one — to keep his property wild and
leave it to a preservation group upon his death, possibly for use as a
retreat for other whistle-blowing police officers. But his plans were
upended after Mr. Palladino bought a wooded parcel next to his and
bulldozed much of it to put up a luxury home.
The 4.8-acre parcel abuts a favorite section of Mr. Serpico’s land where
he often watched hundreds of swallows on a sandy bank, and where he
walked a stream that runs partly through his property, looking for
medicinal herbs.
Mr. Serpico said he had passed on an opportunity to buy the property for
a low price years ago, because he thought it was environmentally
protected from development.
But after Mr. Palladino, 58, bought the land in 2010, he started clear-cutting trees to build a luxury home to sell.
The chain saws and bulldozers disrupted his idyll, but Mr. Serpico said
he was even more aggrieved by what he said was an intrusion by Mr.
Palladino onto his property and upon nature. He has accused the builder
of knocking down trees Mr. Serpico owns, destroying part of the
swallows’ nesting area and being insensitive to the wild feel of the
area.
In escalating hostilities, the two have traded insults and called each
other trespassers. Mr. Serpico said he had been unable to get help so
far from various government agencies and preservation groups.
Mr. Serpico said his predicament brought him back to when he was an
idealistic young officer turned bitter and disillusioned after Police
Department and City Hall officials ignored for a time his reports of
rampant corruption. Eventually, his revelations led to the formation of the Knapp Commission and one of the department’s biggest shake-ups.
The land dispute validated his longstanding belief, he said, that
wrongdoing still flourishes in government and that whistle-blowers wind
up being punished.
“You have favoritism — those who are in it, and those who are on the
outside,” said Mr. Serpico, whose account of taking on the Police
Department was chronicled in a best-selling book and in the 1973 film “Serpico.”
Mr. Palladino said Mr. Serpico was simply using his fame to harass him.
“He went and filed charges with everyone under the sun,” Mr. Palladino
said, “and when all was said and done, they said, ‘No foul.’ ”
When Mr. Serpico called a state trooper to Mr. Palladino’s property
recently to lodge a complaint against Mr. Palladino, the trooper wound
up giving Mr. Serpico a warning for trespassing. Mr. Serpico videotaped
the episode, as he has other encounters with Mr. Palladino and local
officials in an attempt to document his claim that Mr. Palladino was
receiving preferential treatment because of connections with town
officials. That includes the Stuyvesant town supervisor, Ron Knott, who
once rented Mr. Palladino an apartment.
Mr. Serpico called the town government a clubby “old-boys network” run
by entrenched Republican elected officials who embrace cronyism and
political patronage and favor native-born locals over the increasing
population of New York City residents who have moved to the area.
Despite his 30 years in Stuyvesant, Mr. Serpico said he still felt like a
second-class newcomer from the city. He only recently realized, for
example, he had been overpaying on his property taxes because town
officials failed to notify him of a senior discount.
And when he complained to Stuyvesant’s zoning board last year that Mr.
Palladino was encroaching on his property, he said it took no action.
Mr. Serpico also has a video of himself walking on Mr. Palladino’s
property with Stuyvesant’s zoning enforcement officer, Gerald Ennis, and
Mr. Palladino, who admitted during the walk to having cut several of
Mr. Serpico’s trees. He offered to replace them.
Mr. Ennis visited the property four times before concluding that the
town had no reason to cite Mr. Palladino. Mr. Ennis said the issue was
simply a dispute among neighbors that amounted to “two guys butting
heads.”
Mr. Knott is dismissive of the idea that any of this amounts to a
“Serpico” sequel. He said he knew “both Franks” and favored neither one.
“There’s no corruption here,” he said. “It’s not like Albany.”
Mr. Palladino, a hard-driving man who can alternate between flashes of
anger and incisive wit, had thought that having Mr. Serpico as a
neighbor would make the property more marketable. In fact, Mr. Palladino
had entered into a contract to sell Mr. Serpico the land for $50,000.
But then the men had a dispute over an environmental review Mr.
Serpico’s lawyer had sought and Mr. Palladino withdrew his offer.
Now he has become so aggravated that he is willing to stop his
development and sell once and for all — just not to Mr. Serpico. “I
don’t need the battle,” Mr. Palladino said. “It’s for sale — five acres
overlooking the Hudson.”
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