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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.
Mario Cuomo, Vocal Foe of Italian Stereotyping, Finally Sees ‘The Godfather’
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: October 21, 2013
Mario M. Cuomo’s hate-hate relationship with “The Godfather”
has been well documented. For four decades, he refused even to see any
of the movies or, presumably, to read Mario Puzo’s book. He all but denied that the Mafia existed. And who could forget that unfortunate slip of the tongue
during the 1992 presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton suggested that
Mr. Cuomo, then the governor of New York, acted like a Mafioso?
Steve Schapiro/Paramount Pictures, via Everett Collection
Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.” Mr. Cuomo conceded that “maybe this thing was a masterpiece.”
But over the weekend, Mr. Cuomo, 81, did the unthinkable: he finally watched “The Godfather.”
And, somewhat grudgingly, he offered that “maybe this thing was a masterpiece.”
Mr. Cuomo’s change of heart was spurred by the 2013 Forum Film Festival at the Forum on Law, Culture and Society at Fordham Law School, when he finally accepted an offer long refused.
Indeed, he had turned down an invitation from Mayor John V. Lindsay when
the film was released in 1972, maintaining his boycott until the night
before Sunday’s forum. Nor, unlike another Italian-American politician, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor and United States attorney, did he typically play up the Mafia’s role in America.
In fact, when Paul Castellano, the mob boss, was executed
in 1985 in front of Sparks Steak House in Manhattan, Mr. Cuomo urged
reporters to refrain from invoking the word Mafia in reference to the
hit. “Every time you say it, you suggest to people that organized crime
is Italian,” he said. “It’s an ugly stereotype.”
“You’re telling me that Mafia is an organization,” he was quoted as
saying, “and I’m telling you that’s a lot of baloney.”
On Sunday, though, he said yes, there was a Mafia, born of vicious
invasions of Sicily. “They created an organization to fight those people
who were intruders but they got out of hand and they moved here,” he
said.
He added, though, that Italians and blacks were typically singled out
for abuse in American movies and that those stereotypes had spilled over
into politics. When he was first running for office, he recalled, “only
16 percent said they knew me.
“And 14 percent said they wouldn’t vote for me because of my
relationship to bad criminals,” said Mr. Cuomo, who was governor from
1983 through 1994.
“When I didn’t run for president,” Mr. Cuomo later recalled, “there were
two reasons people gave in their dark speculations: I must be in
organized crime or have colon cancer. Nobody was saying I had a
28-year-old blond girlfriend.”
As for the film, Mr. Cuomo pronounced it “great, if you’re referring to
artistry.” Still, he expressed dismay that films like “The Godfather”
and television programs like “The Sopranos” delivered a “horrible”
message by stereotyping Italian-Americans for taking the law into their
own hands to seek revenge and sanctioning murder.
Prodded by the moderator, Prof. Thane Rosenbaum,
and his fellow panelist, Larry King, Mr. Cuomo refused to draw a
distinction between entertainment and what he considered the insidious
immoral message conveyed by Mafia movies.
“You demean our system of law and order by saying if you want to get justice you mow down the bums,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Then why do so many people go see those movies? Mr. King asked.
“I don’t go,” Mr. Cuomo replied flatly, before softening his tone.
“I’m against the death penalty,” he added, “except for people who make bad movies.”
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