Superfund: What Will It Mean for Gowanus?
Posted on 01. Jun, 2010 by Mike Reicher in News Features
By Kieran K. Meadows and Mike Reicher
For nearly six decades, Vivian Scarpati has lived within blocks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. In the 1970s, she married a man who lived on her street. Her husband’s family had lived a block east of the Canal—for four generations.
Tragedy struck in 1981: Scarpati’s husband, James, passed away from lung and bone cancer at 33 years old, leaving her with two kids to raise. Perhaps only a coincidence, her husband’s grandfather also died young of cancer.
And perhaps also only a coincidence, the Gowanus had long been a heavily polluted industrial area. The Canal was created in the 1860s to bring raw
w material to rapidly developing residential Brooklyn. Within years, toxic waste was in the water and on its banks.
Police Use Web To Track Down Gang Members
Posted on 13. Aug, 2009 by Mike Reicher in News Features
By Mike Reicher
Soon after Nicholas Donaldi-Subero, the 18-year-old son of a Metropolitan Opera singer, was fatally stabbed in Queens, New York in January, some self-declared members of the Latin Kings gang took to the internet to boast about their prowess.
“We shut plenty of clicks down in the past and Corona Queens is not even an exception,” someone named ‘Farrocking’ from Far Rockaway wrote on the site thehoodup.com.
More and more social networking users like Farrockking are boasting about gang exploits, making threats about future activities and posting photos of themselves in gang colors. And increasingly those sites have become helpful tools for law enforcement officials who have used this material to prosecute alleged gangbangers. States like Ohio and California have introduced online evidence to link suspects with street crimes. Meanwhile, Florida has made it a felony offense to post gang-related material online. But this increased presence of both gang activity and law enforcement surveillance online raises questions about how to determine the line between youthful braggadocio and true bad behavior. (more…)
