The Presidential Race

Could this be true?

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is growing increasingly enchanted with the idea of an independent presidential bid, and his aides are aggressively laying the groundwork for him to run.

Can A Mayor decide who is Poor?

New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg is trying to devise a new plan on how one is considered poor in this city.

The federal method of calculating the income of poor people does not take into account the value of the extensive benefits that governments give out, like housing vouchers. But the city method will, offering an in-depth look at the assistance provided by New York, which has perhaps the most generous safety net in the nation.

Upwards of 600,000 families in the city are in public housing or receive substantial rental assistance. Other aid that would be counted toward income includes food stamps, subsidized child care and cash that is returned to families through the earned income tax credit and other tax credits. These benefits can be worth thousands of dollars a year for each family, and if that were the only change made in the formula, the number of poor in New York would drop drastically.

Do you think Mayor Bloomberg is capable of making that decision?

New York Will Investigate Tankleff Case

This is certainly good news but it should have happened sooner. Martin Tankleff paid a hefty price for this oversight.

New York State has begun an official inquiry into Suffolk County law enforcement’s handling of the investigation into the 1988 murders of a Long Island couple, Arlene and Seymour Tankleff, according to people involved with the inquiry.

The commission is taking special interest in the Tankleff case as a follow-up to its investigation of Suffolk County law enforcement in the 1980s, which found entrenched misconduct among the police and prosecutors. “This is certainly an outgrowth from the commission’s 1989 report,” said the person associated with officials at the agency.

One police officer named in that report, K. James McCready, became the lead detective in the Tankleff murder case. The report had cited him as having lied as a witness in another murder trial.

May the guilty rot in hell for what they did to this young man.

Innocent Man Finally Released

Martin H. Tankleff was finally released, from prison, after spending most of his life incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

Now 36, Mr. Tankleff was 17 when his mother and father, Arlene and Seymour, were fatally bludgeoned and slashed in their waterfront home in Belle Terre on Long Island. He was arrested that same day and convicted in 1990, and had been in prison ever since.

Mr. Tankleff thanked “all my friends and supporters, in Suffolk County and across the nation and literally around the world, for your interest, and for making my fight your fight.”

Let's hope the prosecutor now spends his time concentrating on the guilty instead of destroying the lives and dreams of the innocent.

'Operation Impact' Is On The Prowl

Will New York City's crime busting efforts pay off?

Every new police officer in New York City will be sent onto the streets of some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods as part of a broad anticrime operation that the authorities say has helped produce historic drops in crime, the city announced on Wednesday.

Police officials and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that each of the 914 police recruits being sworn in on Thursday would join the program, Operation Impact. They also announced that crime in almost every major category declined again this year, with violence down in the schools and on the subways and with homicides on track to fall below 500 for the first time since reliable statistics became available 44 years ago.

Let's hope the rookies are straight shooters.

Are You Holding On To A Library Book?

Get off of your butt and turn that library book in:

Borrowers who fail to return Queens Library books can be reported to a collection agency and to a credit bureau, with a damaged credit rating as a result — a tactic that so shocked one Far Rockaway rabbi that he filed a lawsuit.

The collection policy also has pulled libraries — places where generations of children have learned moral lessons about returning what they borrow — into the debate on just how much punishment is appropriate for failing to return a library book.

Other people may want to read that borrowed book too. It's not fair to other readers like myself.

Operation Lucky Bag - good idea or not?

There has been criticism concerning the Operation Lucky Bag. As a result of said criticism, police noted that there are six types of behavior by suspects in the Lucky Bag operation:

Opening the bag and rifling through the contents; removing money or other items; removing valuables and discarding the bag; hiding the bag; denying to an undercover officer that they had found the items; and displaying “furtive behavior” to see if they were being observed.

But what if they meet a psychopath? When Stan "Pampy" Barre, III went on his crime spree, he pretended to be a police officer after getting caught. How would New Yorkers deal with a psychopath like Stan "Pampy" Barre, III?

Prosecutor won't budge in the Martin Tankleff Case

Although the appellate court has granted Martin Tankleff a new trial, the stubborn prosecutor has failed to acknowledge that they convicted an innocent man.

The Suffolk County district attorney’s office says it may appeal the ruling, but will retry Mr. Tankleff if the ruling stands. Despite his demands for a new inquiry, the prosecutors said they would not reopen the case to investigate Mr. Steuerman and the ex-convicts.

“That’s not going to happen,” Leonard Lato, an assistant district attorney, said this weekend. Referring the appellate ruling, he said: “Has this changed our theory of the murderer to someone other than Tankleff? No. The Appellate Division didn’t say these other guys did it. All it said was: If the jury had all this other evidence, Tankleff probably would have been acquitted.”

It is ashame that the innocent have to suffer because the prosecutor wants to save face.

Detectives Used Trickery to obtain confession in Martin Tankleff's Case

How far will some unscrupulous detectives go when trying to solve a case?

In the case of Mr. Tankleff, who was 17 at the time of his parents’ murders and who quickly recanted his confession, one detective’s ruse had an especially dramatic flair. He faked a phone conversation with a hospital worker that Mr. Tankleff could hear, saying, “No kidding, he came out?”

The detective then told Mr. Tankleff that his father had regained consciousness briefly and had identified his son as his attacker. The performance was so convincing that another detective testified that he believed the call was real.

Should these detectives face some sort of sanction? Let's weigh in on this behavior.

Innocent Man Gets New Trial

Can you imagine languishing in prison for a crime you did not commit? Well, that is exactly what happened to Martin Tankleff.

Mr. Tankleff had just turned 17 when his parents, Seymour and Arlene, were slashed and bludgeoned in their spacious home in Belle Terre, on a North Shore cliff overlooking Long Island Sound on Sept. 7, 1988. He was arrested that day, based on the disputed confession, which became the prime evidence in his conviction.

Appeals to state and federal courts challenging the admissibility of the confession were rejected, sometimes narrowly.

Several new witnesses came forward starting in 2003, implicating Joseph Creedon and Peter Kent as the killers. Mr. Tankleff said he believed the two had acted at the behest of his father’s embittered business partner, Jerard Steuerman.

Let's hope he receive justice this time.

Something is 'Fishy' with New York's school grading system

What rule of thumb does New York use to grade it's schools? According to a New York Times report:

More than half the elementary and middle schools that got an F under the city’s new grading system are in good standing under the federal law, while more than 20 percent of the schools that the city gave A’s are considered failing, the state said.

Of the 568 elementary and middle schools that received an A or a B from the city, 398 are in good standing under the federal standards. At the other end of the spectrum, of the 115 schools that received a D or an F, 66 are in good standing, while 49 are not. Two schools that the city announced it would close at the end of this year for poor performance, among other factors — P.S. 79 in the Bronx and P.S. 183 in Brooklyn — are considered in good standing under the federal law.

There is something fishy here that we are not seeing. Perhaps this grading flaw has something to do with the "perceived character" of the students. This needs to be further investigated.

Slave Owners to Lose Home

Former slave owners will have to give up their quarters. Poor master and mizzus; what will you do?

A jury has decided that a millionaire Long Island couple convicted in a slavery case must forfeit their home to the government.

The jury convicted the couple, Mahender and Varsha Sabhnani, of imprisoning and torturing two Indonesian women whom they brought to the United States to work as housekeepers in their Muttontown home.

The jury has now determined that the 5,898-square-foot house on the Gold Coast of Long Island was used in the commission of a crime.

The government can now seize the house, where the couple operated a worldwide perfume business.

Maybe the home should be designated as a landmark passage to free the slaves.

Weigh In On This

School awarded for bad behavior.

In a survey conducted last year by the City Department of Education, 98 percent of Applied Media’s students said there was fighting in the school, 94 percent said there was bullying and 67 percent said they were worried about crime and violence in the school.

Reflecting such realities, the New York State Education Department has placed Applied Media on its list of “persistently dangerous” schools, one of 52 in the state. Applied Media earned the designation after its second year of existence.

Yet when the city’s Education Department recently released its progress reports about public schools, Applied Media received an A.

Deception should be a serious crime.

Union Leader Accused of Extortion

Union Leader has no scruples.

The former president of a New York area Teamsters local was arrested on Tuesday on charges that he forced his union members to do work for him personally, including building a new roof on his country home, squiring his daughter to her yoga class and setting up a Christmas tree at his Manhattan apartment.

The onetime union leader, Anthony Rumore, extorted “personal services” from members of his union for nearly 15 years, officials of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan said. According to a federal indictment handed up on Tuesday, the members complied with Mr. Rumore’s demands because they feared being fired from their jobs.

It takes a very small man to resort to extortion to get what he want.

Investigation of Spitzer's Administration

Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s administration has received a second subpoena from the Albany County district attorney, P. David Soares, reflecting what appears to be a more aggressive approach in his investigation of the administration.

The subpoena, issued last week, seeks both public and private e-mail records from the administration. The subpoena was reported on Monday by The Daily News and was confirmed by the governor during a testy appearance at the Capitol on Monday.

Mr. Soares’s investigation is his second in the wake of a damaging July report from Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo’s office, which found that members of the Democratic administration had misused the State Police in an effort to discredit Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican Senate majority leader.

Is this an investigation or a witch hunt? Time will tell.

Bravo for Ingrid Michaelson

Her talent is amazing.

Ms. Michaelson began her music career in 2002 as a barista at the Muddy Cup, a coffee bar and performance space in Stapleton, where she performed weekly. By 2003, she had produced her first album, “Slow the Rain,” and was playing at the Bitter End in Manhattan.

She called those shows a sobering experience. “I learned pretty quickly that just because you’re playing at a good venue doesn’t mean people are going to come see you,” she said.

So she decided to throw caution to the wind, or, more specifically, to the Internet. She completed “Girls and Boys” in 2006 and loaded the music onto a MySpace page, where it caught the attention of Lynn Grossman, the owner of Secret Road, a music licensing and artist management company in Los Angeles.

It is a blessing that she did not encounter the weirdo, Stan "Pampy" Barre, III on Myspace. The 41 year old unemployed father of four would have tried to steal her persona as he drifted into absurdity on the social networking site.

New York Slave Owners Found Guilty

The so-called Muttontown Slave Trial has involved a wild barrage of testimony by two Indonesian domestic workers employed — and according to prosecutors, enslaved and tortured for years — by an affluent Long Island couple. The verdict on Monday made for no less of a wild scene.

When it was announced that the jury in Federal District Court here had found the wealthy couple, Mahender Sabhnani, and his wife, Varsha, guilty, husband and wife stood dumbfounded and one of the couple’s three daughters fainted, according to authorities, and friends of the Sabhnanis.

Don't faint now; too bad your parents did not have any moral compass.

Who is Felix Sater?

Does Donald Treump know the real Felix Sater? Well, according to the New York Times, a federal complaint was brought against him in a 1998 money laundering and stock manipulation case that was filed in secret and remains under seal. A subsequent indictment in March 2000 stemming from the same investigation described Mr. Sater as an “unindicted co-conspirator” and a key figure in a $40 million scheme involving 19 stockbrokers and organized crime figures from four Mafia families.

The indictment asserted that Mr. Sater helped create fraudulent stock brokerages that were used to defraud investors and launder money. Mr. Sater and his lawyer, Judd Burstein, repeatedly refused to discuss in detail his role in the stock scam.

But a onetime friend, Gennady Klotsman, who is known as Gene and who was accused with Mr. Sater as a co-conspirator, contends that they both pleaded guilty in 1998, and that Mr. Sater began cooperating with the authorities. Prosecutors are unwilling to discuss either the 1998 complaint or the 2000 indictment.

Was the Confession coerced?

Should we give weight to the defense attorney's claim?

The woman accused of killing Linda S. Stein, the punk rock manager turned Fifth Avenue real estate broker, was coerced into confessing and should be released on bail, her lawyer told a judge on Wednesday at a hearing that ended with an angry confrontation between the families of the defendant and the victim.

The lawyer, Ronald L. Kuby, told Justice Micki A. Scherer that his client, Natavia S. Lowery, 26, of Brooklyn, who was Ms. Stein’s personal assistant, had given written and videotaped statements to the police and prosecutors that had all the earmarks of a false confession.

He said that the police and assistant district attorneys who took the statements knew that Ms. Lowery’s stepfather had hired a lawyer to represent her but had not informed that lawyer that she was being questioned. Ms. Lowery is now being represented by Mr. Kuby.

Maybe this is just the defense crying fowl in order to stir the pot.

What happened to the missing drugs in Brooklyn?

Where did the drugs go?

Despite an inquiry that began over a year ago, officials still cannot say whether the drugs were lost, stolen or thrown away. Investigators believe that a police officer serving as a courier took several large plastic bags of drugs as far as the laboratory. There, the trail goes cold.

At various stages, prosecutors from all five boroughs have joined the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau in the investigation, which is now being led by the district attorney’s office in Queens, because the laboratory is there.
-----

Um, drugs get to lab and then disappear. Maybe one should check with the lab workers.

Mediator to enter talks with drivers of Wheelchair Vans

A federal mediator will arbitrate talks between four companies that provide 8,000 daily van rides for disabled and frail passengers in New York City and the union that represents their drivers.

The drivers walked off their jobs yesterday after twice rejecting a tentative contract their leaders had signed off on late in August. The strike should continue at least until tomorrow, when the parties are expected to resume negotiations with the mediator and try to resolve their differences over wages and health benefits, according to representatives on both sides. |Read on|

Hearing Set In Airport Plot Case

A hearing was scheduled today for three men held in Trinidad who have been ordered to be extradited to the United States to face terrorism charges related to what prosecutors said was a planned attack on Kennedy Airport.

The men, Kareem Ibrahim, Abdul Kadir and Abdel Nur, were charged in the summer by the United States attorney in Brooklyn of conspiring with a former airport cargo worker to attack jet fuel storage tanks and fuel lines at Kennedy. On Aug. 6, officials in Trinidad approved their extradition.

Lawyers for the three men have appealed that ruling and will challenge the extradition order in San Fernando, Trinidad. Their lawyers were expected to argue the extradition would be a breach of the men’s rights.

Gun Dealer Countersues Mayor

In Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaign to remove illegal guns from New York City’s streets, he sued 27 out-of-state gun dealerships last year over what he said were illegal sales. Most agreed to settle, while others chose to take their chances in court. Jay Wallace, owner of a hunting and gun store in Smyrna, Ga., is suing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, claiming fraud, slander and libel.

A well-known resident who has operated the business here for 31 years, Mr. Wallace has drummed up support with an online fund-raising campaign, a summertime rally that drew hundreds, and celebrity representation by a lawyer who is a former congressman, Bob Barr.

The Georgia courts have ruled that Mr. Wallace’s suit can proceed here, a decision Mr. Bloomberg’s lawyers have appealed in the hope of having it dismissed. Mr. Barr and his law partner, Ed Marger, said they expected some action on the matter within the next week.

Watchdog of the Docks Investigated

The Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, an agency created more than 50 years ago to root out corruption on the docks that was immortalized by Marlon Brando, is itself now at the center of a wide-ranging investigation.

Law enforcement officials in New York and New Jersey have spent the past month looking into whether the commission, which oversees the docks and certifies waterfront workers, hired unqualified police officers, inappropriately spent agency money and improperly issued licenses to operate, a government official briefed on the investigation said yesterday.

Investigators from the offices of the New York State inspector general and the New Jersey attorney general have been examining the commission’s records, though it is unclear whether they have issued any subpoenas or interviewed executives there. |Read more|

What People Won't Post Online

A 17 year old teen shot a video that has circulated around the internet. Was the depicted video real or a hoax? The police department is trying to answer that question.

The young woman who shot the video, Kadejra Holmes, 17, of Harlem, says the assault was real, according to her lawyer, Earl Ward, who was speaking to reporters on her behalf.

Mr. Ward said that Ms. Holmes, who was enrolled in a filmmaking program in Harlem, had not spoken to the police yesterday but was expected to soon.

Mr. Ward said that his client was on her way home from a party with two friends when she saw a group of girls harassing a man who had been lying down on the A train. Ms. Holmes decided on the “spur of the moment” to record the event, Mr. Ward said. “She was a passenger, she saw something happen on the train, and she had her camera available,” Mr. Ward said. “If you are a passenger on a subway train and somebody is being assaulted, you have no obligation to help. She did not aid the individuals involved in the assaulting behavior. She had no culpability.”

She is 17 years old, but did she not think to send the video to the police?

Live Performances Distributed By Myspace

According to a New York Times report, MySpace, the addictive social networking site which draws millions of viewers weekly, is currently planning to give "MTV Unplugged" and VH1’s "Storytellers" a run for its money.

The pop culture powerhouse has started a new program called Transmissions, which will enable specially selected MySpace artists to record live shows, which will then be distributed exclusively through MySpace.

Unlike MTV’s penchant for turning "Unplugged" performances into live albums months or years later, because of the lightening-fast publishing capabilities of the internet, the MySpace performance content and music will be available for viewing immediately on MySpace.

MySpace will also allow artists the opportunity to take control of their entire performance. Instead of producers choosing sets and requesting songs for musicians to perform, Transmissions artists will select their own location and songs.
___________

It is also a great thing that Myspace is eliminating profiles who pose a danger to others. Stan "Pampy" Barre, III, a convicted burglar from New Orleans recently had his site deleted from the popular social networking site. The 41 year old unemployed father of four was trying to pass his tasteless sounds off as recordings by Lil Wayne. The site was immediately deleted due to the perpetrated fraud by Mr. Barre.

When We Attempt To Deceive

Whatever happen to a husband and wife discussing their feelings with each other? It seems a former New York detective had to find out about his wife's feelings the hard way.

Detective Anthony Chiofalo has filed a lawsuit to get his job back after being fired from the New York Police Department, which rejected his assertion that he failed a random drug test because his wife had spiked his meatballs with marijuana.

The detective, a 22-year veteran assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, was suspended without pay in November 2005 after a drug test found marijuana in his system.

Mr. Chiofalo’s wife, Catherine, said she put marijuana in a meatball dish in July 2005, hoping a failed blood test would force him to retire, court papers say. Mrs. Chiofalo, please learn how to communicate with your hubby.

On another note, a priest felt his collar could rescue him from the long end of the law. Telling him, “Not even the collar can protect you from prison,” Judge Janet Bond Arterton ordered a 37-month sentence Tuesday for the Rev. Michael Jude Fay, the Roman Catholic priest who admitted pilfering $1.3 million from the church he had led in Darien.

Rejecting calls from Father Fay’s supporters for an alternative sentence, Judge Arterton told a crowded courtroom in Federal District Court here, “A sentence of probation would be impunity for a crime of enormity.” She said the priest’s crime was “enormous” in terms of the amount taken and its impact on parishioners and the public trust.

Do the time father and remember these words, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time."

New York City's DNA Evidence Can't Be Trusted

If you can't trust the evidence, you can't trust the conviction. According to a recent report, the New York Police Department has begun to test thousands of drug evidence samples, as a review by the state’s inspector general has found that sloppy work by analysts in the department’s crime laboratory could have skewed drug evidence used by prosecutors.

But since the mistakes in the laboratory, the nation’s busiest, were found to have been made in 2002, some of the evidence has been destroyed, making any new tests very difficult, according to the review, which was released yesterday. Legal experts said this could open the door to appeals by those who want to have their convictions overturned or their sentences shortened.

It will open the doors to appeals. Can you imagaine people in prison for something they did not do?

The slipshod drug testing — which may have involved “dry-labbing,” or failing to test all the bags when many were seized — has been acknowledged by the Police Department, which transferred or disciplined three technicians who failed internal tests of their accuracy in 2002. Since 2002, the lab has been revamped and restaffed.

What sort of discipline did they receive. After all, they played with people's lives.

The department has said that the errors did not rise to the level of a criminal offense. But in March, the office of the state inspector general, Kristine Hamann, began its own investigation, and has now come to a different conclusion.

“The integrity of evidence is a cornerstone of law enforcement,” Ms. Hamann said yesterday. “These lapses were a threat not only to the prosecution of drug crimes, but to the public’s trust in our criminal justice system.”

She recommended that the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, consider criminal charges against the three former analysts, known as criminalists, and against W. Mark Dale, a former director of the criminal laboratory who retired in 2004. Attempts to reach Mr. Dale by phone last night were unsuccessful.

I believe criminal charges should be filed. What do you think? We definitely have to keep up with the prosecutor's decision on this one.

Defense Case Begins On Modern Day Slavery Case

A Long Island couple has been accused of keeping slaves. According to prosecutors two Indonesian women were made to sleep in closets of the sprawling, multimillion-dollar home of their employers.

They were forced to work day and night, threatened, tortured, beaten with rolling pins and brooms, deprived of adequate food and never allowed out of the house except to take out the garbage.

Although the women were able to articulate that the couple had them say "Master" and Missus" the defense lawyers have characterized the two women as liars, practitioners of witchcraft, and inventors of a false claim designed to win them fast-track advantages that federal immigration law grants certain victims of torture and abuse. Whatever injuries the women may have suffered, the lawyers said, were self-inflicted in the practice of a traditional Indonesian folk cure known as kerokan.

Their employers, Varsha Sabhnani, 35, and her husband, Mahender, 51, naturalized citizens from India, have been on trial in U.S. District Court here for the past month. They are charged with what the federal criminal statutes refer to as involuntary servitude and peonage, or, in the common national parlance since 1865, the crime of keeping slaves.

Study Finds Immigrants In New York Better Off

According to a new analysis, New York's foreign born residents are less likely to have entered the country illegally. The analysis also cites that they are better educated and more likely to have health insurance.

The narrower socioeconomic gaps between immigrants and native-born Americans in New York may be one reason that the state has generally been more receptive to foreigners.

“That may help many immigrants integrate and affect the politics as well,” said Steven A. Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors reducing the influx from abroad.

The biggest income disparities between native and foreign-born residents were found in Arizona, Colorado, Texas and California, where immigration has generated more controversy.

In New York and New Jersey, the income differential between native and foreign-born residents was smaller than the national average.

The gaps between native and foreign-born residents of New York and New Jersey in education, poverty and health insurance coverage were also generally narrower than in other states.

Mr. Camarota, who prepared the analysis for the center, based mostly on census results, concluded that more than 10 million immigrants had entered the country since the beginning of the decade, more than half of them illegally. About one in eight residents of the United States is an immigrant, the highest proportion since the 1920s, when stricter limits were imposed.

New York State accounts for more than 1 in 10 immigrants in the country, second only to California. New Jersey is home to 1 in 20 of the nation’s immigrants.

New Jersey ranked third, after California and Texas, in the growth in immigrants since 2000. They now account for nearly 22 percent of the state’s population, the same proportion as in New York.

New York remains a magnet for immigrants, who arrive in fairly constant numbers. But the number who remain seems to be declining. The state’s total foreign-born population increased by 585,000 from 1995 to 2000, but by 262,000 since 2000. In New Jersey, the number of immigrants grew by 152,000 from 1995 to 2000 and by 588,000 since 2000.

While many politicians in New York and elsewhere were briefly incensed over Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, New York has been regarded as more generous in providing various benefits, regardless of whether immigrants are here legally. New York City has encouraged illegal immigrants to avail themselves of city public safety, health and other services by saying they would not be reported to immigration authorities.

In contrast to many other places, New York’s immigrant population is also more diverse.

The census does not ask immigrants whether they are here legally or not, but Mr. Camarota estimated the number of illegal immigrants by subtracting those who, by country or origin, military status and other variables, were likely to have arrived legally.

By those indicators, illegal immigrants represent 65 percent of the foreign-born population in Arizona, 50 percent in Texas, 39 percent in Colorado on the high end, ranging to 23 percent in New Jersey and 13 percent in New York.

One reason for the relatively low proportion in New York, he said, is that the state is farther from the Mexican border. Also, social networks in New York draw many more legal immigrants. And, he said, other studies have found that among the foreign-born people who are in New York illegally, more are likely to have overstayed their visas than to have entered the country illegally.

In New York City, 57 percent of children under 5 had foreign-born fathers, even more than in Los Angeles County. In New York State, according to the analysis, 49 percent of households headed by an illegal immigrant are enrolled in one welfare program or another, typically food assistance and Medicaid for their children.

Morrissey Charged in forging Brooke Astor's Signature

Not only did Brooke Astor's son do his mother a great injustice, it seems that her lawyer had his hands in the till too. Francis X. Morrissey Jr., 65, turned himself in at the Manhattan district attorney’s office after being charged in the 18-count indictment with helping Mr. Marshall exploit an ailing Mrs. Astor so the two men could gain financially. Mr. Morrissey is charged with, among other things, forging Mrs. Astor’s signature on a final amendment to her 2002 will.

In the afternoon, Mr. Morrissey, his wrists handcuffed in front of him, appeared at his arraignment but did not utter a word. One of his lawyers, Pery D. Krinsky, entered a not guilty plea on his behalf. An assistant district attorney, Peirce Moser, then summed up the crimes that Mr. Morrissey was charged with committing.

“Under the guise of representing Mrs. Astor when she had diminished mental capacity, the defendant in reality worked himself into a position to collect millions of dollars when she died,” he told Judge A. Kirke Bartley Jr.

Mr. Moser asked that Mr. Morrissey provide a personal recognizance bond of $100,000 and surrender his passport, the same request prosecutors made of Mr. Marshall on Tuesday. Mr. Morrissey stroked his chin with his left hand, which was no longer cuffed, and signed the necessary papers before leaving the courthouse in silence.

It would seem to be the darkest moment in the career of a lawyer who over the years has gained a reputation for ingratiating himself to older people and finding his way into their wills or trusts, mostly as a beneficiary, but also as an executor or a trustee.

In the indictment in the Astor case, Mr. Morrissey was charged with forgery, criminal possession of a forged instrument, scheme to defraud, and conspiracy. Mr. Marshall was charged with scheme to defraud, grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, falsifying business records and other charges.

Mr. Morrissey has been accused in several previous cases of taking advantage of mentally incompetent people near death and then being named as a beneficiary of such bequests as a Park Avenue apartment, a Midtown Manhattan apartment, expensive art and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.