Noting that he was a billionaire from the Boston area, with a widowed mother, we wondered where did he get so wealthy and how? Then we noted that he had his own stock-oriented NYC radio station and a similar TV network. Big Business for a little guy, mixing neatly on big Wall Street in our City.
We elected him for 4 years then for the limit, four more, the most under the very recent two term law – not more.
When the NY State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer hit Wall Street hard with a record heavy hundred million dollar fine against the big street’s biggest, Merrill-Lynch, for flagrant violations, each of the radio stations broadcast the apologetic speech, before surrendering the eight-figured record penalty.
Each of NYC’s news stations carried the speech ofML’s president. One radio station, Bloomberg’s WBBR alluded to that speech only by commenting that they could not broadcast that apologetic statement, because their Bloomberg station had a connection to Merrill Lynch.
In Bloomberg’s very first years, brazen builders found loop holes to destroy the coziness of our finest private homes.
New real estate ‘pirates’ bought two-level private homes, chopped them down, one here, one there — wherever they could get away with it in the neighborhood.
The pirate builders always gave them the same name: Luxury Condos. Some of the them were across the street from noisy ‘el’ trains or overlooking a gas station. Neighborhoods became engulfed.
To this day cars drive haphazardly on dark rainy nights, seeking a safe place to park. Tired and weary, they’re a night hazard. Many park on business streets and have to move their car again, when Bloomie turns his meter revenue on.
On 19th Avenue we found a parking meter location alongside a private house.
Early in Bloomberg’s tenure we wrote a column called “Where did all the Bensonhurst gardens go?” with aphoto of a block where home owners who once parked in the street near home now had to have their curbs cut, with a slideway into their once flowery gardens.
With the sudden engulfments of once quiet clean neighborhoods, came the escalating real estate tax increases. Bloomberg’s Real Estate staffs have escalated taxes, based upon the over engulfed prices that speculators paid to tear down other homes, so over build the areas that once were private, and now are pirated by the new tycoons. Look at the new real estate names. New Pirates to help the third termer who brazenly evaded two term limit referendums.
This is a 21st century piracy engulfment.
