Former Beatle linked to member of M.T.A.

It would seem improbable for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to be fodder for the British tabloids. But the London newspapers were in a tizzy yesterday with reports that Paul McCartney was having a romantic relationship with Nancy Shevell, who was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki to the authority’s board in 2001.

Mr. McCartney, the former Beatle, is getting divorced from his second wife, Heather Mills McCartney. Ms. Shevell is the chairwoman of the authority’s committee that oversees capital construction, planning and real estate. Most notably, she plays an important oversight role for the Second Avenue subway project, whose cost is estimated at $5 billion for its first phase.

While news reports noted that Ms. Shevell was married, her husband, Bruce A. Blakeman, a Republican lawyer and member of the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said in an e-mail message: “I am legally separated from Nancy. The separation is amicable and mutual.”

The Sun, a British tabloid, reported that Ms. Shevell, 47, and Mr. McCartney, 65, spent last weekend together in the Hamptons. It said they ate at an East Hampton restaurant on Friday, visited each other’s homes on Saturday, and embraced before breakfast at a cafe on Sunday.

There were similar articles in other British news media, including The Telegraph, a conservative broadsheet, and The Mirror, a tabloid.

Ms. Shevell, a graduate of Arizona State University, is a vice president of her family’s businesses, New England Motor Freight, of Elizabeth, N.J., and the Shevell Group of Companies. She is a breast cancer survivor. (Mr. McCartney’s first wife, Linda, died of breast cancer in 1998.)

Until recently, Ms. Shevell was known as Nancy Shevell Blakeman. Mr. Blakeman is also a Pataki appointee, having been named to the Port Authority in 2001. He is a partner at Abrams, Fensterman, Fensterman, Eisman, Greenberg, Formato & Einiger in Lake Success, N.Y., and was majority leader of the Nassau County Legislature from 1996 to 1999.

The Blakemans have given contributions to Governor Pataki and President Bush.

A woman who answered the phone yesterday at a Manhattan residence of the Blakemans said no one was available for comment. Paul Freundlich, a spokesman for Mr. McCartney, said in an e-mail message, “We don’t comment on Paul’s private and personal or business affairs.”

Mr. McCartney’s divorce from Heather Mills McCartney has been a messy and public affair. The couple announced their separation last year. In a televised interview widely distributed on the Internet, she said last week that she had contemplated suicide because of the negative public attention.

Mayor Calls Detective Hero but Adds to the Confusion

After a week of intense criticism, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg retreated yesterday from previous remarks and said a retired police detective who died at age 34 after working hundreds of hours at ground zero was indeed a hero.

The mayor appeared, however, to immediately set off more confusion, when after a meeting with Mr. Bloomberg, the detective’s father said he expected the city medical examiner to re-examine the case.

Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, concluded last month that the death of the detective, James Zadroga, in January 2006 was not connected to his work at the World Trade Center, and that material found in his lungs resulted not from inhaling toxic dust at ground zero, but from injecting ground-up prescription drugs.

That finding departed from previous medical assessments.

The mayor “said Hirsch may have made a mistake,” the family’s lawyer, Michael Barasch, told reporters after the half-hour private meeting in City Hall.

Mr. Barasch said Mr. Bloomberg said he would ask a deputy mayor “to have Hirsch reconsider his findings.”

At a news conference later, however, a top aide to Mr. Bloomberg sought emphatically to dispel any expectation that Mr. Bloomberg would ask Dr. Hirsch to rethink his findings.

Did Bloomberg Put His Foot in His Mouth?

Today, Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to meet with angry relatives of the detective, James Zadroga, to try to undo the damage he caused last week by saying he was not a hero. Although a New Jersey pathologist concluded in 2006 that Mr. Zadroga’s death was directly related to his hundreds of hours of work on the smoldering World Trade Center pile, New York City’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, rejected that finding. He concluded that misuse of prescription medication was the culprit.

Dr. Hirsch’s finding has come under attack from other experts, and Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks — in which he said that “science says this was not a hero” — came amid a spirited defense of a member of his administration. But facing, as he so often has, outrage and charges of insensitivity from a grieving family, Mr. Bloomberg quickly softened his stance, though stopping short of the apology the relatives demanded.

Whether Mr. Bloomberg, who has a terrier-like tendency to dig in on his positions, will apologize today remains to be seen. But it is clear that the proudly contrarian, politically incorrect, potty-mouthed guy from the Wall Street trading floor still lurks close to the surface. At a public school in Brooklyn on Tuesday, for instance, after answering questions from a group of third graders, Mr. Bloomberg warned of the need to “reduce the amount of crap that we put into the air.” (The children had by that time left the room.)

Daughter of Slain Man in Foster Care

A 4-year-old girl whose father was killed at a Queens playground last week was taken from her father’s relatives on Friday and placed in foster care, lawyers in the case said.

A lawyer for the girl’s mother, Dr. Mazoltuv Borukhova, said that the girl had accused her grandmother of hitting her, while the child’s legal advocate said that the grandmother had denied hitting the girl and that the basis for the removal was unclear.

The child, Michelle Malakov, had been in the custody of her father’s relatives since her father, Dr. Daniel Malakov, was shot to death last Sunday as he entered a playground in Forest Hills. The police have been investigating whether the shooting was linked to a custody battle between Dr. Malakov, an orthodontist, and Dr. Borukhova, a specialist in internal medicine.

Dr. Borukhova had had de facto custody of Michelle since leaving the family home with her in November 2003. But on Oct. 3, a State Supreme Court judge in Queens gave temporary custody to Dr. Malakov.

On Friday, during a visit with Michelle, Dr. Borukhova noticed that she was holding her left ear, said Florence M. Fass, Dr. Borukhova’s lawyer. Michelle said that her paternal grandmother, Malaka Malakov, had hit her, Ms. Fass said. Dr. Borukhova also noticed a bruise on the child’s left cheek, which the child also said had come from her grandmother’s striking her, Ms. Fass said.

Later in the day, Michelle was taken from the paternal grandparents and placed with a foster care agency, Ms. Fass said.

A spokeswoman for the city’s Administration for Children’s Services declined to comment on the case yesterday. The child’s removal was reported yesterday in The Daily News.

David Schnall, the court-appointed legal advocate for the child, said there was conflicting information about whether there was a bruise and whether the child had indeed said her grandmother had hit her. The grandmother, he said, told him she would never hurt the child.

A hearing is scheduled for tomorrow in Family Court in Queens.

Bloomberg's Pay Raises for Union May Trouble the City After He Leaves

Amid the gloomy talk of subprime mortgage failures, tumbling profits on Wall Street and a cooling real estate market, one powerful force squeezing New York City’s budget has gone largely undiscussed: the sharply rising cost of municipal labor.

As Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has moved to settle contracts extending past the end of his term in 2009, he has agreed to more generous pay raises for union after union, leading to expenses that stand to outpace revenue, especially toward the end of the city’s four-year spending plan.

In July, the city settled a retroactive contract with the police sergeants’ union that increased their pay by 27.5 percent over six years, bringing the maximum base salary to $94,962 at the end of the contract in 2011, up from $76,403. A week later, Mr. Bloomberg struck a deal to raise wages of sanitation workers 17 percent over four and a half years, bringing the maximum salary to $67,141 from $57,392. Last month, Mr. Bloomberg announced a similar increase over four years for the police detectives that would bring the maximum base pay for a first-grade detective to $109,002 from $93,176.

Those agreements, along with those made with the police captains’ and fire officers’ unions, will cost the city roughly $300 million in the last two years of the contracts and have helped establish a pattern for wage increases of 4 percent each year for city employees, with an additional 1.59 percent over two years for the uniformed services.

City officials have recently factored the higher salary projections into their spending plan for all employees, regardless of whether they have settled contracts.

That revised plan, submitted last week to the Financial Control Board, which oversees the city’s finances, anticipates that labor costs, rather than declining revenue, will become the driving force in widening deficits over the next four years.

According to the revised plan, a decline in tax collections will account for 60 percent of the expected $396 million contributing to a shortage this fiscal year, and new labor agreements will account for 23 percent. By 2011, however, the final year of the plan, tax revenue is expected to be responsible for 34 percent of the $2.5 billion swelling the deficit and labor responsible for 65 percent.

Earlier this week, Mr. Bloomberg instituted a citywide hiring freeze and directed agencies to devise spending cuts, the first time he has resorted to such actions since 2002, when the city was struggling with the economic effects of a recession and the 9/11 attack.

Several budget analysts praised Mr. Bloomberg’s move to trim costs as prudent, but warned that unions could come to expect at least a 4 percent raise each year, even as the budget squeeze tightens.

The mayor, said Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the city’s Independent Budget Office, “deserves credit for anticipating that we’re going to need money further down the road.” But, he said, “That would appear to set the floor for negotiations in terms of how much is available at a higher place than it has been in the recent past.”

Since guiding the city out of the fiscal problems he faced upon taking office in 2002, Mr. Bloomberg has enjoyed flush times, and has been able to increase spending on popular items like additional library hours and tax cuts, while banking surpluses for the future.

But now, even as he seeks to burnish his image and may even test his popularity nationally, he may confront starker choices than any he has grappled with since those early days. It may be increasingly difficult to maintain the city’s work force, which provides the services and amenities Mr. Bloomberg says are so crucial.

If the economy gets much worse, said E. J. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, “and they’re really in the hole, the only way to really save money is to reduce head count, unless the unions begin to make the kinds of concessions that they’ve never actually made.”

Since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, city spending on wages and salaries, including pension and health care benefits, has grown to $32 billion from $27 billion, adjusted for inflation, with an average annual growth rate of 4 percent. Under his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, those costs increased to $26 billion from $23 billion, about a 2 percent annual increase.

Those costs are now expected to rise to almost $40 billion by 2011, nearly equivalent to the entire city budget in 2001.

City officials argue that they have flexibility in how they settle contracts; they can extract concessions like longer workdays or fewer holidays in exchange for higher wages, they say, or perhaps even put off longer-term agreements if they do not have the money to pay for them.

Some fiscal analysts say the city has locked itself into costly work agreements, in part by following a decades-old practice called pattern bargaining. Under that approach, if one union extracts an agreement for a salary increase, the city often extends the same increase to other unions when their contracts come up for negotiation.

The Bloomberg administration has vigorously defended the practice in arbitration, as it resists a push to give pay increases that are higher than those for other city workers to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union, representing 23,000 officers.

“It’s pretty expensive given the economic outlook,” said Charles Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed policy group. Administration officials “have hoisted themselves on their own petard in that they’ve fought the P.B.A. by saying that there should be a strict pattern,” he said.

But city officials say they can manage the city’s finances better by settling contracts before they expire and for longer terms, as well as by factoring into the spending plan the established pattern across all unions, including those that have not agreed to terms, like District Council 37, with 99,000 members.

“In tough times we’ve been able to work with the unions to find collaborative methods for cost savings, but the reality is once you set the parameters, different unions are going to get similar amounts regardless,” said Edward Skyler, the deputy mayor who oversees both the budget and labor negotiations. “You have to deal with these expenses whether you put them in the financial plan now or later. Not including them at this point would be burying your head in the sand.”

Mayor Weighs Pupil Rewards of Free phone and Airtime

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he was considering a proposal to give some city students free cellphones and to reward high performance with free airtime, but emphasized that he had no intention of lifting the ban on cellphones in the schools.

“It’s something we’ll take a look at,” the mayor said of the proposal being pushed by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who joined the Education Department this year as chief equality officer. But, he added, “We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of letting students use cellphones” in schools. “That’s not what that proposal was all about.”

Dr. Fryer is also the architect of the city’s plan to pay cash to students in several dozen schools who do well on standardized tests, a step connected to the mayor’s broad antipoverty efforts that give families money as a reward for certain behavior. Dr. Fryer spoke of the cellphone plan during a lecture to his undergraduate economics class last month.

Mayor Bloomberg suggested that the plan would not necessarily collide with the ban, which has come under continued attack from parents and politicians in the city because the phones would not be used in schools.

Ex-FBI Agent's Murder Trial Fizzle, as does Chief Witness

Prosecutors said they would drop the murder case against a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation supervisor, a law enforcement official said yesterday, after a reporter upended the trial with taped interviews showing that their main witness, a gangster’s mistress, had changed her account and damaged her credibility.

The formal announcement is expected this morning in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, where the former F.B.I. supervisor, Roy Lindley DeVecchio, 67, is charged with helping a Mafia informant commit four murders in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The lead prosecutor, Michael F. Vecchione, strongly hinted of his inclination yesterday morning in remarks addressed to Justice Gustin L. Reichbach, who is presiding over the nonjury trial.