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Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Catch me in Manhattan, frontin' like Halle Berry” — Jean GraeB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - February 20, 20191 Energy - Sampa the Great/Nadeem Din-Gabisi2 My Man's Gone Now - Nina Simone3 Threats - Blue Sky Black Death/Jean Grae4 Go Crazy - Young Jeezy/Jay-Z5 Say - Method Man/Lauryn Hill6 Work (RiRi Cover) - Artist Unknown7 Sidung - Kranium8 Hostile Gospel, Pt. 2 - Talib Kweli/Sizzla9 Give Me More - Keyshia Cole10 Party Ain't a Party - Queen Pen/Lost Boyz/Markell Riley/Nutta Butta11 Dancing with a Stranger - Sam Smith/Normani12 That's the Way - AlexZ13 Try My Love (On for Size) - The Shapeshifters/Teni Tinks14 Roma Norte - Peter Matson15 Don Esquire - Atjazz/Julian Gomes16 Don't Do It - Moon Rocket17 Starboy - Weeknd18 Boys - Lizzo“HipHouse Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)““I'm that fuckin' Bytch! 'n you know it” — DoechiiB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - Inspired by LEGENDS' tour artists, and dedicated to Mother's Day! INyo Dialog: You, Me and Ethel - Marlena Shaw1 Midnight Train to Georgia - Gladys Knight & The Pips2 When the Sun Comes Shining - Labelle*3 Sweet Thing - Rufus/Chaka Khan4 Feel the Fire - Stephanie Mills5 Egypt - Westside Gunn/Doechii6 No Idea - Mary J. Blige7 Worth It - Offset/Don Toliver8 Rock Wit U (Awww Baby) - Ashanti9 Gimme Dat - Ayra Starr/Wizkid10 Waterfalls - Yung Bleu/Ty Dolla $ign11 Clear My Rain - Gunna/Leon Bridges12 Dude - Beenie Man/Ms Thing/Shawnna13 If I Ruled the World (Imagine That) - Nas/Lauryn Hill14 Not Your Average Girl - Ghostface Killah & Shareefa15 How - Ella Mai/Roddy Ricch16 Tell Me - Groove Theory17 Hot Spot - Foxy Brown18 When I See You - Fantasia/Remy Ma19 Magic Stick - Lil' Kim/50 Cent20 I'll Take You There - The Staple Singers* Excerpt: Wino & Junkie - Richard Pryor“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Baby, I'm so unconventional” — Curtis 50 Cent JacksonB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - June 14, 20171 Is It Because I'm Black - Syl Johnson2 Come 4 Me - Abra3 Smoke Again - Chance the Rapper/Ab-Soul4 The Hope - Fabolous/Jadakiss5 No Better Love - Jacquees/DeJ Loaf6 Baby, Come to Me - The Stuyvesants 7 Devil in New Dress - Kanye West8 Between the Sheets - The Isley Brothers9 Hope Your Feelings Are Like Mine - Vicki Sue Robinson10 The 5th Dimension - I Don't Know Where to Look for Love11 I Got to Have It - Ed OG & The Bulldogs12 Fuck Them - Raekwon/Method Man13 Venus Vs. Mars - Jay-Z14 I Just Wanna - 50 Cent/Tony Yayo15 Hold U - Masta Ace/Jean Grae16 I Want You 'Til The Summertime - Yasiin Bey/Marvin Gaye17 You Get the Best from Me (Say, Say, Say) - Alicia Meyers18 Till You Take My Love - Harvey Mason19 Satin Soul - Gene Page20 Five-Finger Discount - Last Offence21 Heavy Metal Reflective - Azealia Banks22 The More I Get - Rick Ross/Consequence23 The Breaks - Kurtis Blow/Michael K. Williams*/Woody Harrelson*24 Jukebox - Kidz in the Hall/MC Lyte25 Still Dre - Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg* Excerpt courtesy Triple 9 | John Hillcoat“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ - Thankur!CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Today's guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein's show last week).Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city's leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully.We discussed:* How bad did things get in the 1970s?* Why did processing an arrest take so long?* What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently?* How did police get rid of the squeegee men?I've included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits.Subscribe for one new interview a week.Peter, how would you describe yourself?I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I've somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department.Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat.It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood.Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It's caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they're called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into.We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it.A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don't like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City.I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline.In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months.It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department].Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s?Long story short, it was bad. Crime in New York was a big problem from the late ‘60s up to the mid ‘90s, and the ‘70s is when the people who became the leaders started their careers. So these were defining moments. The city was almost bankrupt in 1975 and laid off 5,000 cops; 3,000 for a long period of time. That was arguably the nadir. It scarred the police department and the city.Eventually, the city got its finances in order and came to the realization that “we've got a big crime problem too.” That crime problem really came to a head with crack cocaine. Robberies peaked in New York City in 1980. There were above 100,000 robberies in 1981, and those are just reported robberies. A lot of people get robbed and just say, “It's not worth it to report,” or, “I'm going to work,” or, “Cops aren't going to do anything.” The number of robberies and car thefts was amazingly high. The trauma, the impact on the city and on urban space, and people's perception of fear, all comes from that. If you're afraid of crime, it's high up on the hierarchy of needs.To some extent, those lessons have been lost or forgotten. Last year there were 16,600 [robberies], which is a huge increase from a few years ago, but we're still talking an 85% reduction compared to the worst years. It supposedly wasn't possible. What I wanted to get into in Back from the Brink was the actual mechanisms of the crime drop. I did about fifty formal interviews and hundreds of informal interviews building the story. By and large, people were telling the same story.In 1975, the city almost goes bankrupt. It's cutting costs everywhere, and it lays off more than 5,000 cops, about 20% of the force, in one day. There's not a new police academy class until 1979, four years later. Talk to me about where the NYPD was at that time.They were retrenched, and the cops were demoralized because “This is how the city treats us?” The actual process of laying off the cops itself was just brutal: they went to work, and were told once they got to work that they were no longer cops. “Give me your badge, give me your gun."The city also was dealing with crime, disorder, and racial unrest. The police department was worried about corruption, which was a legacy of the Knapp Commission [which investigated NYPD corruption] and [Frank] Serpico [a whistleblowing officer]. It's an old police adage, that if you don't work, you can't get in trouble. That became very much the standard way of doing things. Keep your head low, stay out of trouble, and you'll collect your paycheck and go home.You talk about the blackout in 1977, when much of the city lost power and you have widespread looting and arson. 13,000 off-duty cops get called in during the emergency, and only about 5,000 show up, which is a remarkable sign of the state of morale.The person in my book who's talking about that is Louis Anemone. He showed up because his neighbor and friend and partner was there, and he's got to help him. It was very much an in-the-foxholes experience. I contrast that with the more recent blackout, in which the city went and had a big block party instead. That is reflective of the change that happened in the city.In the mid-80s you get the crack cocaine epidemic. Talk to me about how police respond.From a political perspective, that era coincided with David Dinkins as [New York City's first black] mayor. He was universally disliked, to put it mildly, by white and black police officers alike. He was seen as hands off. He was elected in part to improve racial relations in New York City, to mitigate racial strife, but in Crown Heights and Washington Heights, there were riots, and racial relations got worse. He failed at the level he was supposed to be good at. Crime and quality of life were the major issues in that election.Dinkins's approach to the violence is centered around what they called “community policing.” Will you describe how Dinkins and political leaders in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s thought about policing?This is under Ben Ward, the [NYPD] Commissioner at the time. The mayor appoints the police commissioner — and the buck does stop with the mayor — but the mayor is not actively involved in day-to-day operations. That part does go down to the police department.Community policing was seen as an attempt to improve relations between the police and the community. The real goal was to lessen racial strife and unrest between black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) communities and the NYPD. Going back to the ‘60s, New York had been rocked by continued unrest in neighborhoods like Central Harlem, East New York, and Bushwick. Community policing was seen as saying that police are partly to blame, and we want to improve relations. Some of it was an attempt to get the community more involved in crime fighting.It's tough. It involves a certain rosy view of the community, but that part of the community isn't causing the problems. It avoids the fact there are people who are actively criming and are willing to hurt people who get in their way. Community policing doesn't really address the active criminal element, that is a small part of any community, including high-crime communities.Arrests increased drastically during this era, more than in the ‘90s with broken windows policing. If the idea is to have fewer arrests, it didn't happen in the ‘80s. Some good came out of it, because it did encourage cops to be a bit more active and cops are incentivized by overtime. Arrests were so incredibly time-consuming, which kind of defeated the purpose of community policing. If you made an arrest in that era, there was a good chance you might spend literally 24 hours processing the arrest.Will you describe what goes into that 24 hours?From my experience policing in Baltimore, I knew arrests were time-consuming and paperwork redundant, but I could process a simple arrest in an hour or two. Even a complicated one that involved juveniles and guns and drugs, we're talking six to eight hours.In the ‘80s, Bob Davin, [in the] Transit Police, would say they'd make an arrest, process at the local precinct, search him in front of a desk officer, print him, and then they would have to get a radio car off patrol to drive you down to central booking at 100 Centre Street [New York City Criminal Court]. Then they would fingerprint him. They didn't have the live scan fingerprints machine, it was all ink. It had to be faxed up to Albany and the FBI to see if it hit on any warrant federally and for positive identification of the person. Sometimes it took 12 hours to have the prints come back and the perp would be remanded until that time. Then you'd have to wait for the prosecutor to get their act together and to review all the paperwork. You couldn't consider bail unless the prints came back either positive or negative and then you would have that initial arraignment and the cop could then go home. There are a lot of moving parts, and they moved at a glacial pace.The system often doesn't work 24/7. A lot of this has changed, but some of it was having to wait until 9 am for people to show up to go to work, because it's not a single system. The courts, the jails, and policing all march to their own drummer, and that created a level of inefficiency.So much of the nitty-gritty of what cops actually do is boring, behind-the-scenes stuff: How do we speed up the paperwork? Can we group prisoners together? Can we do some of this at the police station instead of taking it downtown? Is all of this necessary? Can we cooperate with the various prosecutors? There are five different prosecutors in New York City, one for each borough.There's not a great incentive to streamline this. Cops enjoyed the overtime. That's one of the reasons they would make arrests. So during this time, if a cop makes an arrest for drug dealing, that cop is gone and no cop was there to replace him. If it's a minor arrest, there's a good chance in the long run charges will be dropped anyway. And you're taking cops off the street. In that sense, it's lose-lose. But, you have to think, “What's the alternative?”Bob Davin is a fascinating guy. There's a famous picture from 1981 by Martha Cooper of two cops on a subway train. It's graffitied up and they're in their leather jackets and look like cops from the ‘70s. Martha Cooper graciously gave me permission to use the picture, but she said, "You have to indemnify me because I don't have a release form. I don't know who the cops are." I said, "Martha, I do know who the cop is, because he's in my book and he loves the picture.” Bob Davin is the cop on the right.Davin says that things started to get more efficient. They had hub sites in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, so precincts in the north of Manhattan could bring their prisoners there, and you wouldn't have to take a car out of service to go back to Central Booking and deal with traffic. They started collecting prisoners and bringing them en masse on a small school bus, and that would cut into overtime. Then moving to electronic scan fingerprints drastically saves time waiting for those to come back.These improvements were made, but some of them involve collective bargaining with unions, to limit overtime and arrests that are made for the pure purpose of overtime. You want cops making arrests for the right reason and not simply to make money. But boy, there was a lot of money made in arrests.In 1991, you have the infamous Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn. Racial tensions kick off. It's a nightmare for the mayor, there's this sense that he has lost control. The following year, you have this infamous police protest at City Hall where it becomes clear the relationship between the cops and the mayor has totally evaporated. How does all that play into the mayoral race between Dinkins and Giuliani?It was unintentional, but a lot of the blame for Crown Heights falls on the police department. The part of the story that is better known is that there was a procession for a Hasidic rabbi that was led by a police car. He would go to his wife's grave, and he got a little three-car motorcade. At some point, the police look at this and go "Why are we doing this? We're going to change it." The man who made the deal said ‘I"m retiring in a couple weeks, can we just leave it till then? Because I gave him my word." They're like, "Alright, whatever."This motor car procession is then involved in a car crash, and a young child named Gavin Cato is killed, and another girl is severely injured. The volunteer, Jewish-run ambulance shows up and decides they don't have the equipment: they call for a professional city ambulance. Once that ambulance is on the way, they take the mildly-injured Jewish people to the hospital. The rumor starts that the Jewish ambulance abandoned the black children to die.This isn't the first incident. There's long been strife over property and who the landlord is. But this was the spark that set off riots. A young Jewish man was randomly attacked on the street and was killed.As an aside, he also shouldn't have died, but at the hospital they missed internal bleeding.Meanwhile, the police department has no real leadership at the time. One chief is going to retire, another is on vacation, a third doesn't know what he's doing, and basically everyone is afraid to do anything. So police do nothing. They pull back, and you have three days of very anti-Semitic riots. Crowds chanting "Kill the Jews" and marching on the Lubavitch Hasidic Headquarters. Al Sharpton shows up. The riots are blamed on Dinkins, which is partly fair, but a lot of that's on the NYPD. Finally, the mayor and the police commissioner go to see what's going on and they get attacked. It's the only time in New York City history that there's ever been an emergency call from the police commissioner's car. People are throwing rocks at it.It took three days to realise this, but that's when they say “We have to do something here,” and they gather a group of officers who later become many of Bratton's main chiefs at the time [Bill Bratton was Commissioner of the NYPD from 1994-1996, under Giuliani]: Mike Julian, Louis Anemone, Ray Kelly, and [John] Timoney. They end the unrest in a day. They allow people to march, they get the police department to set rules. It still goes on for a bit, but no one gets hurt after that, and that's it.It was a huge, national story at the time, but a lot of the details were not covered. Reporters were taken from their car and beaten and stripped. The significance was downplayed at the time, especially by the New York Times, I would say.That's followed by the Washington Heights riots, which is a different story. A drug dealer was shot and killed by cops. There were rumors, which were proven to be false, that he was executed and unarmed. Then there were three days of rioting there. It wasn't quite as severe, but 53 cops were hurt, 120 stores were set on fire, and Mayor Dinkins paid for the victim's family to go to the Dominican Republic for the funeral. The police perspective again was, “You're picking the wrong side here.”Then there's the so-called Police Riot at City Hall. Nominally, it was about the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and setting up an accountability mechanism to control cops. But really it was just an anti-Dinkins protest. It was drunken and unruly. The cops stormed the steps of City Hall. I have the account of one of the cops who was on the top of those steps looking at this mob of cops storming to him, and he's getting worried he's going to be killed in a crush. There were racist chants from off-duty cops in the crowd. It did not reflect well on police officers. But it showed this hatred of David Dinkins, who was seen as siding with criminals and being anti-police. The irony is that Dinkins is the one who ends up hiring all the cops that Giuliani gets credit for.In the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program?Yes. That was because a white tourist, Brian Watkins, was killed in a subway station protecting his parents who were getting robbed. That led to the famous headline [in the New York Post] of “Dave, do something! Crime-ravaged city cries out for help.” He, with City Council President Peter Vallone, Sr., drafted and pushed through this massive hiring of police officers, “Safe Streets, Safe City.”The hiring wasn't fast-tracked. It might be because Dinkins's people didn't really want more cops. But it was a Dinkins push that got a massive hiring of cops. When the first huge class of police officers graduated, Bill Bratton was there and not David Dinkins.Some interviewees in your book talk about how there's physically not enough room in the police academies at this time, so they have to run classes 24/7. You cycle cohorts in and out of the same classroom, because there are too many new cops for the facilities.You have thousands of cops going through it at once. Everyone describes it as quite a chaotic scene. But it would have been hard to do what the NYPD did without those cops. Ray Kelly, who was police commissioner under Dinkins at the end [from 1992 to 1994] before he became police commissioner for 12 years under Bloomberg [from 2002 to 2013] probably could have done something with those cops too, but he never had the chance, because the mayoral leadership at the time was much more limiting in what they wanted cops to do.Crime starts declining slowly in the first few years of the ‘90s under Dinkins, and then in ‘93 Giuliani wins a squeaker of a mayoral election against Dinkins.One of the major issues was the then-notorious “squeegee men” of New York City. These were guys who would go to cars stopped at bridges and tunnel entrances and would rub a squeegee over the windshield asking for money. It was unpleasant, intimidating, and unwanted, and it was seen as one of those things that were just inevitable. Like graffiti on the subway in the ‘80s. Nothing we can do about it because these poor people don't have jobs or housing or whatever.The irony is that Bratton and Giuliani were happy to take credit for that, and it was an issue in the mayoral campaign, but it was solved under David Dinkins and Ray Kelly and Mike Julian with the help of George Kelling [who, with James Wilson, came up with broken windows theory]. But they never got credit for it. One wonders if, had they done that just a few months earlier, it would have shifted the entire campaign and we'd have a different course of history in New York City.It's a great example of a couple of things that several people in your book talk about. One is that disorder is often caused by a very small set of individuals. There's only like 70 squeegee men, yet everybody sees them, because they're posted up at the main tunnel and bridge entrances to Manhattan. And getting them off the streets solves the problem entirely.Another emphasis in the book is how perceptions of crime are central. You quote Jack Maple, the father of Compstat, as saying, “A murder on the subway counts as a multiple murder up on the street, because everybody feels like that's their subway.” The particular locations of crimes really affect public perception.Absolutely. Perception is reality for a lot of these things, because most people aren't victimized by crime. But when people perceive that no one is in control they feel less safe. It's not that this perception is false, it just might not be directly related to an actual criminal act.The other thing I try to show is that it's not just saying, “We've got to get rid of squeegee men. How do you do it?” They had tried before, but this is why you need smart cops and good leadership, because it's a problem-solving technique, and the way to get rid of graffiti is different to the way you get rid of squeegee men.This book is in opposition to those who just say, “We can't police our way out of this problem.” No, we can. We can't police our way out of every problem. But if you define the problem as, we don't want people at intersections with squeegees, of course we can police our way out of the problem, using legal constitutional tools. You need the political will. And then the hard work starts, because you have to figure out how to actually do it.Will you describe how they tackle the squeegee men problem?Mike Julian was behind it. They hired George Kelling, who's known for broken windows. They said, “These people are here to make money. So to just go there and make a few arrests isn't going to solve the problem.” First of all, he had to figure out what legal authority [to use], and he used Traffic Reg 44 [which prohibits pedestrians from soliciting vehicle occupants]. He talked to Norm Siegel of the NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] about this, who did not want this crackdown to happen. But Norman said, “Okay, this is the law, I can't fight that one. You're doing it legally. It's all in the books.” And So that took away that opposition.But the relentless part of it is key. First they filmed people. Then, when it came to enforcement, they warned people. Then they cited people, and anybody that was left they arrested. They did not have to arrest many people, because the key is they did this every four hours. It was that that changed behavior, because even a simple arrest isn't going to necessarily deter someone if it's a productive way to make money. But being out there every four hours for a couple of weeks or months was enough to get people to do something else. What that something else is, we still don't know, but we solved the squeegee problem.So in 93, Giuliani is elected by something like 50,000 votes overall. Just as an aside, in Prince of the City, Fred Siegel describes something I had no idea about. There's a Puerto Rican Democratic Councilman who flips and supports Giuliani. Mayor Eric Adams, who at the time was the head of a nonprofit for black men in law enforcement, calls him a race traitor for doing that and for being married to a white woman. There was a remarkable level of racial vitriol in that race that I totally missed.10 years ago when I started this, I asked if I could interview then-Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, and he said yes, and the interview kept getting rescheduled, and I said, “Eh, I don't need him.” It's a regret of mine. I should have pursued that, but coulda, woulda, shoulda.Giuliani is elected, and he campaigns very explicitly on a reducing crime and disorder platform. And he hires Bill Bratton. Tell me about Bratton coming on board as NYPD commissioner.Bratton grew up in Boston, was a police officer there, became head of the New York City Transit Police when that was a separate police department. Right before he becomes NYPD Commissioner, he's back in Boston, as the Chief of Police there, and there is a movement among certain people to get Bratton the NYC job. They succeed in that, and Bratton is a very confident man. He very much took a broken windows approach and said, “We are going to focus on crime.” He has a right-hand man by the name of Jack Maple who he knows from the Transit Police. Maple is just a lieutenant in transit, and Bratton makes him the de facto number two man in the police department.Jack Maple passed away in 2001 and I didn't know what I was going to do, because it's hard to interview a man who's no longer alive. Chris Mitchell co-wrote Jack Maple's autobiography called Crime Fighter and he graciously gave me all the micro-cassettes of the original interviews he conducted with Maple around 1998. Everyone has a Jack Maple story. He's probably the most important character in Back from the Brink.Jack Maple comes in, no one really knows who he is, no one respects him because he was just a lieutenant in Transit. He goes around and asks a basic question — this is 1994 — he says, “How many people were shot in New York City in 1993?” And nobody knows. That is the state of crime-fighting in New York City before this era. There might have been 7,000 people shot in New York City in 1990 and we just don't know, even to this day.One citation from your book: in 1993, an average of 16 people were shot every day. Which is just remarkable.And remember, shootings have been declining for two or three years before that! But nobody knew, because they weren't keeping track of shootings, because it's not one of the FBI Uniform Crime Report [which tracks crime data nationally] index crimes. But wouldn't you be curious? It took Jack Maple to be curious, so he made people count, and it was findable, but you had to go through every aggravated assault and see if a gun was involved. You had to go through every murder from the previous year and see if it was a shooting. He did this. So we only have shooting data in New York City going back to 1993. It's just a simple process of caring.The super-short version of Back from the Brink is it was a change in mission statement: “We're going to care about crime.” Because they hadn't before. They cared about corruption, racial unrest, brutality, and scandal. They cared about the clearance rate for robbery a bit. You were supposed to make three arrests for every ten robberies. It didn't matter so much that you were stopping a pattern or arresting the right person, as long as you had three arrests for every ten reported crimes, that was fine.This is a story about people who cared. They're from this city — Bratton wasn't, but most of the rest are. They understood the trauma of violence and the fact that people with families were afraid to go outside, and nobody in the power structure seemed to care. So they made the NYPD care about this. Suddenly, the mid-level police executives, the precinct commanders, had to care. and the meetings weren't about keeping overtime down, instead they were about ”What are you doing to stop this shooting?”Tell listeners a little bit more about Jack Maple, because he's a remarkable character, and folks may not know what a kook he was.I think he was a little less kooky than he liked to present. His public persona was wearing a snazzy cat and spats and dressing like a fictional cartoon detective from his own mind, but he's a working-class guy from Queens who becomes a transit cop.When Bratton takes over, he writes a letter up the chain of command saying this is what we should do. Bratton read it and said, “This guy is smart.” Listening to 80 hours of Jack Maple, everyone correctly says he was a smart guy, but he had a very working-class demeanor and took to the elite lifestyle. He loved hanging out and getting fancy drinks at the Plaza Hotel. He was the idea man of the NYPD. Everyone has a Jack Maple imitation. “You're talking to the Jackster,” he'd say. He had smart people working under him who were supportive of this. But it was very much trying to figure out as they went along, because the city doesn't stop nor does it sleep.He was a bulls***er, but he's the one who came up with the basic outline of the strategy of crime reduction in New York City. He famously wrote it on a napkin at Elaine's, and it said, “First, we need to gather accurate and timely intelligence.” And that was, in essence, CompStat. “Then, we need to deploy our cops to where they need to be.” That was a big thing. He found out that cops weren't working: specialized units weren't working weekends and nights when the actual crime was happening. They had their excuses, but basically they wanted a cushy schedule. He changed that. Then, of course, you have to figure out what you're doing, what the effective tactics are. Then, constant follow up and assessment.You can't give up. You can't say “Problem solved.” A lot of people say it wasn't so much if your plan didn't work, you just needed a Plan B. It was the idea that throwing your hands in the air and saying, “What are you going to do?” that became notoriously unacceptable under Chief Anemone's stern demeanor at CompStat. These were not pleasant meetings. Those are the meetings that both propagated policies that work and held officers accountable. There was some humiliation going on, so CompStat was feared.Lots of folks hear CompStat and think about better tracking of crime locations and incidents. But as you flesh out, the meat on the bones of CompStat was this relentless follow-up. You'd have these weekly meetings early in the morning with all the precinct heads. There were relentless asks from the bosses, “What's going on in your district or in your precinct? Can you explain why this is happening? What are you doing to get these numbers down?” And follow-ups the following week or month. It was constant.CompStat is often thought of as high-tech computer stuff. It wasn't. There was nothing that couldn't have been done with old overhead projectors. It's just that no one had done it before. Billy Gorta says it's a glorified accountability system at a time when nobody knew anything about computers. Everyone now has access to crime maps on a computer. It was about actually gathering accurate, timely data.Bratton was very concerned that these numbers had to be right. It was getting everyone in the same room and saying, “This is what our focus is going to be now.” And getting people to care about crime victims, especially when those crime victims might be unsympathetic because of their demeanor, criminal activity, or a long arrest record. “We're going to care about every shooting, we're going to care about every murder.”Part of it was cracking down on illegal guns. There were hundreds of tactics. The federal prosecutors also played a key role. It was getting this cooperation. Once it started working and Giuliani made it a major part of claiming success as mayor, suddenly everyone wanted to be part of this, and you had other city agencies trying to figure it out. So it was a very positive feedback loop, once it was seen as a success.When Bratton came on the job, he said, “I'm going to bring down crime 15%.” No police commissioner had ever said that before. In the history of policing before 1994, no police commissioner ever promised a double-digit reduction in crime or even talked about it. People said “That's crazy.” It was done, and then year after year. That's the type of confidence that they had. They were surprised it worked as well as it did, but they all had the sense that there's a new captain on this ship, and we're trying new things. It was an age of ideas and experiment.And it was a very short time.That's the other thing that surprised me. Giuliani fired Bratton in the middle of ‘96.It's remarkable. Bratton comes in ‘94, and August 1994 is where you see crime drop off a cliff. You have this massive beginning of the reduction that continues.That inflection point is important for historical knowledge. I don't address alternatives that other people have proposed [to explain the fall in crime] — For example, the reduction in lead [in gasoline, paint, and water pipes] or legalized abortion with Roe v. Wade [proposed by Stephen Dubner].Reasonable people can differ. Back from the Brink focuses on the police part of the equation. Today, almost nobody, except for a few academics, says that police had nothing to do with the crime drop. That August inflection is key, because there is nothing in a lagged time analysis going back 20 years that is going to say that is the magic month where things happened. Yet if you look at what happened in CompStat, that's the month they started getting individual officer data, and noticing that most cops made zero arrests, and said, “Let's get them in the game as well.” And that seemed to be the key; that's when crime fell off the table. The meetings started in April, I believe, but August is really when the massive crime drop began.To your point about the confidence that crime could be driven down double digits year over year, there's a great quote you have from Jack Maple, where he says to a fellow cop, “This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as we have absolute control, we can absolutely drive this number into the floor.”One detail I enjoyed was that Jack Maple, when he was a transit cop, would camp out under a big refrigerator box with little holes cut out for eyes and sit on the subway platform waiting for crooks.For people who are interested in Jack Maple, it is worth reading his autobiography, Crime Fighter. Mike Daly wrote New York's Finest, which uses the same tapes that I had access to, and he is much more focused on that. He's actually the godfather of Jack Maple's son, who is currently a New York City police officer. But Maple and co were confident, and it turned out they were right.As well as having changes in tactics and approach and accountability across the NYPD, you also have a series of specific location cleanups. You have a specific initiative focused on the Port Authority, which is a cesspool at the time, an initiative in Times Square, the Bryant Park cleanup, and then Giuliani also focuses on organized crime on the Fulton Fish Market, and this open-air market in Harlem.I was struck that there was both this general accountability push in the NYPD through CompStat, and a relentless focus on cleaning up individual places that were hubs of disorder.I'm not certain the crime drop would have happened without reclamation of public spaces and business improvement districts. Bryant Park's a fascinating story because Dan Biederman, who heads the Corporation, said, “People just thought it was like a lost cause, this park can't be saved. The city is in a spiral of decline.” He uses Jane Jacobs' “eyes on the street” theory and then George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's broken windows theory. The park has money — not city money, but from local property owners — and it reopens in 1991 to great acclaim and is still a fabulous place to be. It showed for the first time that public space was worth saving and could be saved. New York City at the time needed that lesson. It's interesting that today, Bryant Park has no permanent police presence and less crime. Back in the ‘80s, Bryant Park had an active police presence and a lot more crime.The first class I ever taught when I started at John Jay College in 2004, I was talking about broken windows. A student in the class named Jeff Marshall, who is in my book, told me about Operation Alternatives at the Port Authority. He had been a Port Authority police officer at the time, and I had not heard of this. People are just unaware of this part of history. It very much has lessons for today, because in policing often there's nothing new under the sun. It's just repackaged, dusted off, and done again. The issue was, how do we make the Port Authority safe for passengers? How do we both help and get rid of people living in the bus terminal? It's a semi-public space, so it makes it difficult. There was a social services element about it, that was Operational Alternatives. A lot of people took advantage of that and got help. But the flip side was, you don't have to take services, but you can't stay here.I interviewed the manager of the bus terminal. He was so proud of what he did. He's a bureaucrat, a high-ranking one, but a port authority manager. He came from the George Washington Bridge, which he loved. And he wonders, what the hell am I going to do with this bus terminal? But the Port Authority cared, because they're a huge organization and that's the only thing with their name on it — They also control JFK Airport and bridges and tunnels and all the airports, but people call the bus terminal Port Authority.They gave him almost unlimited money and power and said, “Fix it please, do what you've got to do,” and he did. It was environmental design, giving police overtime so they'd be part of this, a big part of it was having a social service element so it wasn't just kicking people out with nowhere to go.Some of it was also setting up rules. This also helped Bratton in the subway, because this happened at the same time. The court ruled that you can enforce certain rules in the semi-public spaces. It was not clear until this moment whether it was constitutional or not. To be specific, you have a constitutional right to beg on the street, but you do not have a constitutional right to beg on the subway. That came down to a court decision. Had that not happened, I don't know if in the long run the crime drop would have happened.That court decision comes down to the specific point that it's not a free-speech right on the subway to panhandle, because people can't leave, because you've got them trapped in that space.You can't cross the street to get away from it. But it also recognized that it wasn't pure begging, that there was a gray area between aggressive begging and extortion and robbery.You note that in the early 1990s, one-third of subway commuters said they consciously avoided certain stations because of safety, and two thirds felt coerced to give money by aggressive panhandling.The folks in your book talk a lot about the 80/20 rule applying all over the place. That something like 20% of the people you catch are committing 80% of the crimes.There's a similar dynamic that you talk about on the subways, both in the book and in your commentary over the past couple years about disorder in New York. You say approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness are at risk for street homelessness, and these people cycle through the cities, streets, subways, jails, and hospitals.What lessons from the ‘90s can be applied today for both helping those people and stopping them being a threat to others?Before the ‘80s and Reagan budget cuts there had been a psychiatric system that could help people. That largely got defunded. [Deinstitutionalization began in New York State earlier, in the 1960s.] We did not solve the problem of mental health or homelessness in the ‘90s, but we solved the problem of behavior. George Kelling [of broken windows theory] emphasized this repeatedly, and people would ignore it. We are not criminalizing homelessness or poverty. We're focusing on behavior that we are trying to change. People who willfully ignore that distinction almost assume that poor people are naturally disorderly or criminal, or that all homeless people are twitching and threatening other people. Even people with mental illness can behave in a public space.Times have changed a bit. I think there are different drugs now that make things arguably a bit worse. I am not a mental health expert, but we do need more involuntary commitment, not just for our sake, but for theirs, people who need help. I pass people daily, often the same person, basically decomposing on a subway stop in the cold. They are offered help by social services, and they say no. They should not be allowed to make that choice because they're literally dying on the street in front of us. Basic humanity demands that we be a little more aggressive in forcing people who are not making rational decisions, because now you have to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. That standard does need to change. But there also need to be mental health beds available for people in this condition.I don't know what the solution is to homelessness or mental health. But I do know the solution to public disorder on the subway and that's, regardless of your mental state or housing status, enforcing legal, constitutional rules, policing behavior. It does not involve locking everybody up. It involves drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It's amazing how much people will comply with those rules.That presents the idea that someone's in charge, it's not a free-for-all. You get that virtuous loop, which New York had achieved in 2014–2016, when crime was at an all-time low in the city. Then the politicians decided public order wasn't worth preserving anymore. These are political choices.I had a similar version of this conversation with a friend who was shocked that there were zero murders on the subway in 2017 and that that number was stable: you had one or two a year for several years in the mid-2010s.It was five or fewer a year from 1997 to 2019, and often one or two. Then you have zero in 2017. There were [ten in 2022]. It coincides perfectly with an order from [Mayor] de Blasio's office and the homeless czar [Director of Homeless Services Steven] Banks [which] told police to stop enforcing subway rules against loitering. The subways became — once again — a de facto homeless shelter. Getting rule-violating homeless people out of the subway in the late ‘80s was such a difficult and major accomplishment at the time, and to be fair it's not as bad as it was.The alternative was that homeless outreach was supposed to offer people services. When they decline, which 95% of people do, you're to leave them be. I would argue again, I don't think that's a more humane stance to take. But it's not just about them, it's about subway riders.There's one story that I think was relevant for you to tell. You were attacked this fall on a subway platform by a guy threatening to kill you. It turns out he's had a number of run-ins with the criminal justice system. Can you tell us where that guy is now?I believe he's in prison now. The only reason I know who it is is because I said, one day I'm going to see his picture in the New York Post because he's going to hurt somebody. Am I 100 percent certain it's Michael Blount who attacked me? No, but I'm willing to call him out by name because I believe it is. He was out of prison for raping a child, and he slashed his ex-girlfriend and pushed her on the subway tracks. And then was on the lam for a while. I look at him and the shape of his face, his height, age, build, complexion, and I go, that's got to be him.I wasn't hurt, but he gave me a sucker punch trying to knock me out and then chased me a bit threatening to kill me, and I believe he wanted to. It's the only time I ever was confronted by a person who I really believe wanted to kill me, and this includes policing in the Eastern District in Baltimore. It was an attempted misdemeanor assault in the long run. But I knew it wasn't about me. It was him. I assume he's going to stay in prison longer for what he did to his ex-girlfriend. But I never thought it would happen to me. I was lucky the punch didn't connect.Peter Moskos's new book is Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.My reading listEssays:Johnny Hirschauer's reporting, including “A Failed 'Solution' to 'America's Mental Health Crisis',“ “Return to the Roots,” and “The Last Institutions.” “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. ​“It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem,” Charles Lehman.Books:Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Jill Leovy.​Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, Fred Siegel.​ Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos.​Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, Sam Quinones.​Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“The time has come for life to begin” — Billy PaulB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn; home to HipHop legends: The Fat Boys; StetsaSonic (this mean Prince Paul, who gave us GraveDiggaz/De La Soul); Sean Price; M.O.P., and me, to name few …1 Backdoor - Playboi Carti/Kendrick Lamar/Jhené Aiko/Michael K. Williams2 Glitching - SAINt JHN3 Middle Child - J. Cole/Nipsey Hussle/Kendrick Lamar/Joyner Lucas/Chris Brown/Jay Rock 4 You're Mine - Sijay5 Papertrip - Wallace6 Right There - Floorplan7 Love Change Over - Michael Watford8 I Wanna Be Free - The Lunar Project9 Moody - Hondo Vega10 MOSS Pt. 3 (My Luva) - Osunlade11 Do That Thang - Mo'Cream12 The Final Call - Dave East/Ransom/Jay Electronica13 Can't Hide It - Lil Durk/Jhené Aiko14 Royal Flush - Rae Sremmurd/Young Thug15 Hotel Lobby - Quavo/Takeoff16 Best Friend - Tweet/Bilal17 Bang Time - M.O.P./Styles P18 Children of the Night - The Stylistics19 The Man - Rapsody/Heather Victoria20 War of †he Gods - Billy Paul“HipHouse Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ - Thankur!CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Wednesday is the Benz day!”  — The Notorious B.I.G.B! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - March 10, 2010IN - “We all know a B.I.G.” — Q-Tip1 Notorious Thugs - The Notorious B.I.G./Bone Thugs-n-Harmony2 Spit Your Game - The Notorious B.I.G./Twista/Bone Thugs-n-Harmony3 The What - The Notorious B.I.G./Method Man4 Can't Turn Me Away - Sylvia Striplin5 Get Money - Junior M.A.F.I.A.6 Hustler's Prayer - Max B/The Notorious B.I.G./Jim Jones7 Angels Or Demons - Granthm8 Angels - Diddy/Dirty Money9 The Life - Styles P/Pharoahe Monch10 Bangers - The Alchemist/Lloyd Banks11 1, 2 Pass It - D&D All-Stars12 Queen B@#$H - Lil' Kim13 It Ain't Personal - R. Kelly/Jay-Z14 Wet Dreams - LastO15 Like This (Skit) - DJ Clue/Fabolous/Kanye West16 Been There Did That - K. Banger17 1970 Somethin' - The Notorious B.I.G./Faith Evans/The Game18 Ghetto - Akon/2Pac/The Notorious B.I.G.19 Who Shot Ya? - The Notorious B.I.G.20 All Good - Lil' Kim/The Notorious B.I.G.“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ - Thankur!CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Jacob Laval (The Unbreakable Boy, John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch) and Amanda Warren (The Night Agent, East New York) headline a Sicilian tale about sowing the seeds of kindness, compassion and crocuses.

On The Gate! A podcast hosted by two jailbird/recovering drug addicts and active comedians Geo Perez and Derek Drescher, who talk each week about their times in jail, what they learned, what you should know, and how they are improving their life or slipping into recidivism each day! This week we have Gastor Almonte! They talk about Dereks health, relationship advice, being from East New York, Brooklyn rap and much more. ON THE GATE! ENJOY!Original air date: 3.12.25WATCH THE LIVESTREAM 2 PM EST MONDAYS and EXCLUSIVE EPISODES 2 PM EST THURSDAYS on gasdigital.com. Use promo code OTG for a discount on your membership. Watch the free livestream here at 12 AM EST FRIDAYS. FOLLOWGeo PerezInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/geoperez86/Derek DrescherInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/derekdrescher/Gastor AlmonteInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/gastoralmonte/-See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“In case nobody told you today, you're special" — LizzoB! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - September 7, 20221 Wait for You - Future/Drake/Tems2 Ooh La La - Run The Jewels/Greg Nice/DJ Premier3 Just A Memory - The Notorious B.I.G./The Clipse4 Until It's All Said And Done - JR&PH7/Sean Price/Skyzoo5 Nigga Whut - Redman6 Special - Lizzo 7 Grace of God - Apollo Brown/Joell Ortiz/DJ Los8 So Gone - Monica/Missy Elliott9 Ain't Nothin New - Jadakiss/Nipsey Hussle/Ne-Yo10 Stressed - Young Thug/J. Cole/T-Shyne11 Brambleton - Pusha T12 Hood Blues - DMX/Westside Gunn/Benny the Butcher/Conway the Machine13 Boys Don't Cry - DDm14 Unloyal - Summer Walker/Ari Lennox15 Kody Blu 31 - J.I.D16 No Idea - Don Toliver17 Silent Hill - Kendrick Lamar/Kodak Black18 Antisocial - Migos/Juice WRLD19 Can't Complain - Prodigy20 My Kinda Nigga Part II - M.O.P./Heather B“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ - Thankur!CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Open up your mouth, put this pussy on your face” — DeJ LoafB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn1 Oscar Winning Tears - RAYE2 Snooze - SZA/Justin Bieber3 Rose In Harlem - Teyana Taylor4 Asteroids - Rapsody/Hit-Boy5 Easy Love - DeJ Loaf6 Personal - Nia Smith7 Never Been - Mary J. Blige/Missy Elliott8 You Don't Know My Name - Alicia Keys9 Something Real - Sa-Roc10 Superstar - Lauryn Hill11 Every Time I Wake - Mz Jonz/William Scott12 Move Me No Mountain - Dionne Warwick13 Where You Belong - The Groovers/Dionne Warwick14 You - Nicole Bus/Rick Ross15 Lyte Ghost Mama - MC Lyte/Ghostface Killah/Lil Mama16 Change - Joy Denalane/Lupe Fiasco17 Runaway Love - T-Pain/Mary J. Blige18 Slow Down - Ciara/50 Cent19 Tell Me - Groove Theory20 Feels Like the First Time - Corinne Bailey Rae21 Carnival - Natalie Merchant22 Push 2 Start - Tyla/Sean Paul“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ - Thankur!CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Dave Ortiz is an artist. Dave is influenced by his Hispanic heritage, grew up in East New York in the 70s and 80s, andwas swept up in the graffiti zeitgeist but eventually decided to turn to fine art and painting.I know of Dave as Zoo York's first employee, Crazy Dave, DQM, Dave's Wear House, Little Camera Big Picture, ANOTHERWHIP, and OUR/NEWYORK.How do you know Dave?Please welcome Dave Ortiz to Wear Many Hats.⁠⁠instagram.com/123dortiz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/wearmanyhatswmh⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/rashadrastam⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠rashadrastam.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠wearmanyhats.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Now that you know I'm fam, does that change the loyalty?” — Sonny LouBang Lewis (RIP)B! NOTED - Originally recorded in East New York, Brooklyn - February 3, 2021INyo - “We're interested in Black music.”  — Tony DJSOUL Dobson1 Mysterious Vibes - The Blackbyrds2 I'll Bet You - The Jackson 53 Ready Or Not (Here I Come) - The Jackson 54 Tale of the Tape - Falside5 Brown Baby - Diana Ross6 In My Hood - Kin4life7 What We Have - Sonny Lewis/Tim'm West8 Al Pacino - Ddm9 I Do (Love You) - GQ10 OUTstanding - The Gap Band11 Work That - Mary J. Blige12 Two Worlds - Yasiin Bey/Kanye West/Marvin Gaye 13 Molasses - Raekwon/Ghostface Killah/Rick Ross14 Tres Leches (Triboro Trilogy) - Big Punisher/Inspectah Deck/Prodigy15 Go Crazy - Chris Brown/Young Thug16 Risin' to the Top - Keni Burke17 If I Ruled the World - Nas/Lauryn Hill18 The Blast - Talib Kweli/Hi-Tek19 Still A Slave - Analog L.U.S.T.20 Hold Up - Marco Polo/Torae/Masta Ace/Sean Price21 East New York - Tony DJSOUL Dobson22 Shimmy Ya - Ddm23 Clubbin' - Q.B. Of Da' Midwest24 Girls Need Love - Summer Walker/Drake25 Nobody Else - Ella Mai26 What's Going On - Eric B. & Rakim27 Ghetto Dreams - Common/NaS28 Hook Drop - Bobby J/Lil Fame“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonPlease TIP the DJCASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

A new public plaza is in the works for East New York's Broadway Junction, but residents fear being priced out. And finally, WNYC's Michael Hill talks with Bart Chezar, a chestnut expert, about an effort to bring the trees back to Brooklyn.

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Miss Thing, there is no guest list tonight!” — Lil' LouisB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn — To show luv and appreciation for my househeadz … HVD!1 Moving On Up - M People2 Caught In Luv - K London Posse/Dawn Tallman3 Drink On Me - Teulé4 Caught In the Middle - Juliet Roberts5 I'll Make You Happy Baby - The Motherless Child Project/Ele Ferrer6 I Wanna Be Free - The Lunar Project7 Supersonic - Crusy/Alex Now (ES)8 Alien Superstar - Beyoncé 9 This Rhythm - Prospa/RAHH10 Lovin - Blaine Connell11 The Boss - Diana Ross12 Happy Ending - Yooks13 Flawless - The Ones14 Tiki Tiki - Javi Colina/Dario Nuñez15 Play Low Now - Delgado16 Sunshine - Grant Nelson17 Royal Express - Luis Radio18 Hola Venga - Tom Enzy19 Hateful Head Helen - Hateful Head Helen/Sweet Pussy Pauline20 Not About You - Honey Dijon/Hadiya George21 Moody - ESG22 Baby Wants to Ride - Jamie Principle/James Curd23 A Prayer Answering God - Dj Disciple “DEEP House Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonPlease TIP the DJCASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Learn more at TheCityLife.org

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Miss Thing, there is no guest list tonight!” — Lil' LouisB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, Brooklyn — To show luv and appreciation for my househeadz … HVD!1 Moving On Up - M People2 Caught In Luv - K London Posse/Dawn Tallman3 Drink On Me - Teulé4 Caught In the Middle - Juliet Roberts5 I'll Make You Happy Baby - The Motherless Child Project/Ele Ferrer6 I Wanna Be Free - The Lunar Project7 Supersonic - Crusy/Alex Now (ES)8 Alien Superstar - Beyoncé 9 This Rhythm - Prospa/RAHH10 Lovin - Blaine Connell11 The Boss - Diana Ross12 Happy Ending - Yooks13 Flawless - The Ones14 Tiki Tiki - Javi Colina/Dario Nuñez15 Play Low Now - Delgado16 Sunshine - Grant Nelson17 Royal Express - Luis Radio18 Hola Venga - Tom Enzy19 Hateful Head Helen - Hateful Head Helen/Sweet Pussy Pauline20 Not About You - Honey Dijon/Hadiya George21 Moody - ESG22 Baby Wants to Ride - Jamie Principle/James Curd23 A Prayer Answering God - Dj Disciple “DEEP House Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

Backdoor Media presents HUMP! Wednesdays with DJSOUL - 60-minute, commercial-free mixtape by Tony DJSOUL Dobson, featuring the best LGBTQ+ voices in HipHop - Weds 12a (ET)“Basslines affect me” — Dana Queen Latifah OwensB! NOTE - Recorded in East New York, BrooklynINyo - “Blakk Excellence” —Lyrical Paradigm1 My World Is Empty Without You - Smith Connection*2 Living for the City - Curren$y3 Searching - Roy Ayers4 Basslines Affect Me - Tony DJSOUL Dobson/Dana Queen Latifah Owens**5 Princess of the Posse - Queen Latifah/DJ Mark The 45 King 6 Port Antonio - J. Cole/Tony DJSOUL Dobson RMX7 I Don't Think They Like Me - Last Offence8 Just a Memory - The Notorious B.I.G./The Clipse***9 Road to Perdition - Jay Electronica/Jay-Z10 That's My Dog - DMX/The LOX/Swizz Beatz11 Champion Sound - Ghostface Killah/Beniton12 I'd Rather Be With You - Bootsy Collins13 Look What You've Done - Rapsody14 Alive - A$AP Ferg/Dapper Dan15 Down Halsey Street - The Stuyvesants/Tony DJSOUL Dobson Exclusive16 Gloria - Kendrick Lamar/SZA17 Let It Breathe - Gunna/Roddy Ricch18 Need Somebody - Diddy/Jazmine Sullivan19 Emotionless - Drake/Mariah Carey20 Food 4 Thought - Pete Rock/Tony DJSOUL Dobson Exclusive****21 You Are What I'm All About - New Birth22 Player's Anthem - Junior M.A.F.I.A. 23 Do Better - Ab-Soul/Zacari * Saul Williams | MLK Week** Living for the City | Stevie Wonder*** Theme from Mahogany | Diana Ross**** Excerpt courtesy Brother to Brother | Rodney Evans“HipHop Is Fine Art!” — Tony DJSOUL DobsonTIP the DJ CASH APP $TonyDJSOULDobson

A new book posits that the roots of the rise in crime in East New York, Brooklyn, can be linked directly to a subprime mortgage scandal decades earlier. Author Stacy Horn discusses her new book, The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood.This segment is guest-hosted by Tiffany Hansen.

The FDNY suffered line of duty deaths at two separate fire operations on January 23, 2005, “Black Sunday.”  Firefighter Richard Scalfani of Ladder Co. 103 was killed in the performance of his duties while operating a private dwelling fire on Jerome St. in the East New York section of Brooklyn.  Just hours prior, six members of Ladder Co. 27 and Rescue Co. 3 jumped from the top floor of a 4-story apartment building on E. 178th St in the Bronx.  Lieutenant Curt Meyran, FF John Bellew, and Lieutenant Joseph DiBernardo succumbed to their injuries.      Firefighter Brendan Cawley is a survivor of the 178th St fire. Nearly three years after the fire, Brendan returned to full duty status following a grueling and miraculous recovery from the physical and mental injuries that he sustained after exiting the top floor.  The interview you will hear in this episode was recorded in 2019 at a LUF Human Performance Summit devoted to the concept of resilience and the question, “what happens when we compete to win and lose?”  The LUF team remembers those members who lost their lives on Black Sunday.  The LUF team is inspired by the resilience that the survivors have displayed in the years since, survivors including sons of members killed and critically injured who have recently joined the ranks of the FDNY. 

Show Notes provided by Joe Peluso Unlike the New York Yankees in this year's World Series, New Year's at 12:00AM is the only time it is acceptable to drop the "ball".    Ringing in the new year is always accompanied with a "sober" look back at the highlights of the past dozen months. But with your ever faithful Mint crew of James, Chris and Joe, the recollections are dialed down to the world of Pop Culture. And by dialed down we don't mean insignificant or trivial. Quite the contrary, we shout from the highest spires in fabled Asgaerd the accomplishments of men and women who strive to entertain, educate and amuse us within the confines ofpure, unadulterated fantasy!     With gusto, and a magnum of Dom Perignon 1995 in hand (We're kidding, it's more like a Welch's Grape Juice Box), the boys list their favorite pop offerings from the previous year. "Deadpool and Wolverine", "Absolute Batman", "Only Murders in the Building" (sounds like my old East New York neighborhood), and X-Men'97 are but a few oftheir prodigious picks for 2024.  But the list, like the beat, goes on. So stick around for the fullhour and see if your favorite pop culture choices made our enormous enumerations!   Oh, and when that ball drops in Times Square at midnight lets hope the are no Yankee ball players responsible for catching it! What a mess that would be!   HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR MINT FRIENDS AND FAITHFUL! May you find peace, health, and prosperity in 2025!

The All Local Morning for Tuesday, December 17 2024

In this episode, Cherise is joined by Stacie Wong, Principal at GLUCK+ in New York. They discuss the Van Sinderen Plaza Project in Brooklyn.You can see the project here as you listen along.Van Sinderen Plaza is a model of transformation and opportunity in Brooklyn, serving a neighborhood where the need for affordable housing is urgent. Located on the border between East New York and Brownsville, where over half the residents live below the poverty line, the development turns long-abandoned land into a vibrant community asset. The project incorporates green building practices, featuring a ventilated rain-screen system on the facade built from fiber cement panels, using fully recyclable and mostly natural materials.If you enjoy this episode, visit arcat.com/podcast for more. If you're a frequent listener of Detailed, you might enjoy similar content at Gābl Media. Mentioned in this episode:ARCAT Detailed on Youtube

Celebrate the gay high holiday that is BRUNCH with Lea DeLaria once a month at 54 Below! Today Sarah chats with Lea about her incredible career, her background in jazz, Brunch is Gay (Lea's fabulous monthly series), our mutual hatred of T****, and so much more! Lea DeLaria brings you a fat, fast, and funny Sunday filled with her trademark comedy and musical chops in Brunch Is Gay. Let's face it, brunch is a Gay high holiday, so come and spend it with the highest, gayest human on the planet. Be prepared to hear music from some of her favorite repertoire, including Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, and LaChiusa, as well as classic jazz standards. Emmy Award winner Lea DeLaria was the first openly gay comic on television in America, and is an accomplished Jazz performer who has performed in concert venues all over the world. She is best known as ‘Big Boo' from “Orange is the New Black” (3 SAG Awards). Lea can currently be seen in the indie feature film Potato Dreams of America, and in the Indigo Girls jukebox feature film, Glitter & Doom. She recently starred in the Off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' play, The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann. TV credits include “East New York,” “The Blacklist,” “Physical,” “Reprisal,” “Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness,” “Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts,” “Shameless,” and “Broad City.” Film credits include Cars 3, Support The Girls, and First Wives Club. Broadway credits, POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (Bernadette), The Rocky Horror Show (Eddie/Dr. Scott) and On The Town (Hildy), Obie and Theatre World Awards. 54below.org for more info Connect with Lea DeLaria Instagram: @realleadelaria Connect with GOOD SHOW! Instagram: @goodshowpodcast  Tik Tok: @goodshowpodcast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this compelling episode of the Stuck In My Mind Podcast, host Wize El Jefe welcomes the inspiring Terry Fossum for a profound discussion on mastering goal-setting and personal transformation. Titled "From Struggles to Success: Terry Fossum's Journey and Goal Setting Insights" the episode delves into key life lessons, touching on motivation, resilience, and the journey from adversity to success. Terry Fossum, a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and influencer with a top TED Talk, brings his rich background and genuine experience to the table. Growing up in McAllen, Texas, a region marked by crime and violence, Terry faced immense challenges, including the death of his father during his high school years. Despite a low point following his father's death and discouragement from a neighbor, Terry used these adversities as catalysts for motivation, eventually emerging as a beacon of success and personal growth. His story underscores the importance of resilience and effective goal-setting strategies, which he shares with the audience. Fossum and Wize El Jefe explore a range of topics, starting with the value of helping others as a source of joy. Terry advises listeners to engage in activities such as visiting pet shelters or nursing homes, emphasizing how these simple acts can uplift spirits and enrich personal well-being. They also discuss the importance of removing toxic relationships from one's life, stressing the need to surround oneself with supportive and positive individuals to foster a conducive environment for personal growth. The episode highlights the crucial role of self-improvement, a theme close to Wize El Jefe's heart as he recounts his journey of personal growth and the joy of sharing impactful stories through his podcast. A poignant anecdote enlivened the conversation, as Wize recounts releasing a podcast episode a year late, which miraculously had a timely impact on a guest grappling with self-discovery. This story emphasizes the power of storytelling in creating a ripple effect that can motivate and guide listeners toward finding their purpose. Terry introduces his renowned "Oxcart Technique," a practical and emotionally-driven approach to goal-setting that consists of three distinct steps: the "Failure Scenario," which outlines the consequences of failing to achieve goals; the "Daily Actions," which involves committing to SMART goals; and the "Success Scenario," which provides positive visualization to generate emotional motivation. By encouraging listeners to read these scenarios in the morning and night, Terry provides a clear blueprint for maintaining focus and enthusiasm toward achieving personal goals. The conversation takes a reflective turn as both speakers acknowledge the acceptance of imperfection. They express that everyone is on a learning curve, and mistakes are part of the journey. Terry underscores the importance of using time constructively by engaging with positive content, such as uplifting podcasts, to remain motivated. He also shares his experiences on a survival reality show, revealing how his Oxcart Technique aided him in preparation and ultimate victory, offering listeners a firsthand account of its effectiveness. Wize El Jefe adds depth to the conversation by sharing his personal narrative of overcoming adversity. Growing up in East New York, Brooklyn, Wize faced his own set of challenges, including the loss of significant loved ones, which left him feeling angry and lost. Determined to change his life, Wize sought therapy, learned about goal-setting and financial literacy, rebuilt his life, and eventually started the podcast to inspire others by sharing stories of overcoming hardships. Both Terry and Wize openly discuss the misconceptions surrounding goal-setting, debunking myths such as the fallacy of the Harvard goal-setting study and the mistaken belief that mere visualization can lead to success. They emphasize that tangible action is as crucial as positive thinking, ensuring the audience understands that real progress requires effort and persistence. The episode also touches on the concept of comfort zones and how fears—ranging from failure to success—can restrict personal growth. Through Terry's insights on the Prospect Theory by Kahneman and Tversky, listeners learn the psychological aspects of motivation, particularly how the desire to avoid pain often outweighs the pursuit of pleasure. In a heartfelt segment, the duo discusses the impact of small, positive interactions and the importance of kindness. Terry shares a poignant story about a housekeeper struggling with addiction whom he chose to help rather than prosecute, leading to her 14 years of sobriety. This story, included in Terry's book, exemplifies the power of compassion and its ripple effect on people's lives. As the episode draws to a close, Wize El Jefe reflects on the enriching experience of the conversation, expressing gratitude for Terry's valuable insights. The episode leaves listeners with a wealth of practical advice, inspiring stories, and a call to action—motivate yourself from within, take decisive action daily, and help others through kindness and support. Terry's promotion of his podcasts, including "The Comeback Chronicles" and resources like "comebackchroniclespodcast.com" and "terrylfossum.com," provide additional avenues for listeners seeking continued growth and inspiration. This episode of the Stuck In My Mind Podcast is more than just a conversation; it is a rallying cry for those at crossroads in life, encouraging them to embrace challenges, discard negativity, and create their own extraordinary paths to success.

DAPHNE RUBIN-VEGA BIO  Daphne Rubin-Vega can currently be seen on Hulu's hit series ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING. She can also be heard voicing the role of 'CARMILLA CARMINE' in the hugely popular A24/Prime Video R-rated animated musical comedy series HAZBIN HOTEL. She can be seen in the David Duchovny-directed feature BUCKY F*CKING DENT. She was seen in the Tony Goldwyn-directed feature EZRA, in the Apple TV+ series THE CHANGELING opposite Lakeith Stanfield, and as a guest lead on FOX's anthology series ACCUSED directed by Marlee Matlin.Rubin-Vega starred in the Jon Chu-directed Warner Brothers feature IN THE HEIGHTS as 'Daniela.' During the pandemic, she shot the Netflix series SOCIAL DISTANCE, produced by Jenji Kohan and Tara Hermann, and SAME STORM, the newest Peter Hedges film. Additional TV credits include THE HORROR OF DOLORES ROACH (Prime Video), which Rubin-Vega developed into both scripted podcast and TV iterations, KATY KEENE (CW) and TALES OF THE CITY (Netflix).  A staple of the New York theatre community, Daphne earned a Tony nomination for her portrayal of 'Mimi' in the original cast of RENT, and another for ANNA IN THE TROPICS. She was most recently seen starring in the Signature Theatre's NIGHT OF THE IGUANA opposite Tim Daly and Lea DeLaria. She starred in the musical MISS YOU LIKE HELL at The Public Theatre and in the one-woman show EMPANADA LOCA, which was written for her. She helped adapt the play into the scripted podcast, THE HORROR OF DOLORES ROACH, which was then adapted into a TV series for Amazon. Additional theater credits include Broadway revivals of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, and LES MIS; TWO SISTERS AND A PIANO and F*CKING A at The Public; ROMEO & JULIET at Classic Stage; and JACK GOES BOATING opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman.  ELIZABETH RODRIGUEZ BIO  An award-winning actress who crosses seamlessly from studio films to independent, from the stage to television, Elizabeth Rodriguez played the emotionally complex Aleida Diaz on the groundbreaking Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black" for which she received three consecutive Screen Actors Guild Awards. Most recently, she was seen as a series regular in the CBS drama "East New York". She was also a series regular in the role of Liza Ortiz on AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead", NBC's "Prime Suspect", and Cinemax's "Blanco". Rodriguez recurred as Paz Valdez on Starz' "Power", in Showtime's "Shameless", Hulu's "Chance', "Devious Maids", "Grimm", "The Shield", "ER", and "Six Feet Under.  Rodriguez's film credits include co-starring in the blockbuster film "LOGAN" opposite Hugh Jackman, Michael Mann's "Miami Vice", "The Drop", "Tio Papi" (for which she garnered an Imagen Award Nomination), "Making Babies", "Skate Kitchen", "11:55", "Return to Paradise", and "Jack Goes Boating." Most recently, she completed a starring role in the feature film "Allswell in New York", which she also co-wrote and co-produced. Rodriguez received an Obie Award, as well as a Drama Desk Award nomination, for her performance in "Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven" at the Atlantic Theater, and a Tony Award nomination, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award and the Theatre World Award, for her performance in the role of "Veronica" on Broadway in Stephen Adly Guirgis' "The Motherfu**er With The Hat". Additional theater includes three world premieres at NYC's acclaimed Public Theater in "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" (directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman), "Unconditional" and "A View from 151st Street". Other notable plays include "Beauty of the Father" (MTC) and "The Power of Duff" (Geffen). Rodriguez is a native New Yorker and member of Labyrinth Theater Company.  ABOUT ALLSWELL IN NEW YORK, AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL NOVEMBER 15th  Three sisters navigate the daunting life challenges of single motherhood, career, and family, all while finding humor and solace within the bond of sisterhood.  Here's the trailer:   Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb8CKBdXK70 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.

Joanne Mariano is a firefighter with the FDNY assigned to L136 in Elmhurst, Queens, and formerly assigned to E225 in East New York, Brooklyn. Prior to joining the fire department, she was a lighting technician with IATSE Local 52 Motion Picture Studio Mechanics. She holds a bachelor's degree in Film Production from Hunter College and is currently pursuing a master's degree in Sport and Performance Psychology with a concentration in applied practice at the University of Western States. Joanne is working towards becoming a Certified Mental Performance Consultant (CMPC) through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP).

This episode we are in Brooklyn behind the stage talking with various old school artist. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kev-stone3/support

In today's episode, I dive deep with Danny Tejada, who shares his journey from growing up in a tough NYC neighborhood to becoming a key figure in college access and admissions. Danny emphasizes the importance of understanding education's return on investment and how he helps students navigate college finance and career planning. Tune in to hear his impactful insights and experiences.BioDanny Tejada grew up in public housing in East New York, Brooklyn. He is a first-generation high school and college graduate. He attended Skidmore College. He also holds a certificate in College Advising from Teachers College, Columbia University. He co-authored a book with his mentee called Different Families, Still Brothers.  Danny has been in college counseling for over ten years, working in public, private, charter schools, non-profits, and his own consulting company, We Go To College, LLC. In his consulting, he works with non-profits and high schools on their college counseling programming, colleges on their recruitment of historically disadvantaged students, and individual families on the college application process. In addition to his consulting work, he works at an independent school in Manhattan and reads applications for the University of California, San Diego.  Danny sits on the boards of Stony Brook University's Counselor Advisory, Uprooted Academy, and Puerto Rican Family Institute, Inc. Previously, he was on Common App's Counselor Advisory Committee and College Access Consortium of New York's board. Throughout his college counseling career, he has presented at state and national conferences and been featured on NewsNation, in The New York Times, NPR, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Education Week, and Money.com, discussing college access issues for historically disadvantaged students.  Danny's mission is to expand college access for low-income, Black, and Brown students so they can achieve upward mobility and break their generational curse. Follow Danny on LinkedIn.Access free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

In this episode of the SCBWI Podcast, we are joined by Desmond Hall!Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee's creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He's also been named one of Variety magazine's Top 50 Creatives to Watch. Desmond is the author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters.Purchase his book here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/better-must-come/18934206?ean=9781534460744Support the show

A correction officer at a Brooklyn federal jail is facing up to 10 years in prison for allegedly chasing a civilian vehicle in a bureau-issued minivan, firing multiple shots, and injuring a passenger last year. Meanwhile, some East New York residents, part of Mayor Eric Adams' voting base, express disappointment over his indictment for allegedly taking bribes from the Turkish government. Plus, fall marks cranberry season. WNYC's Michael Hill talks with Stephen Lee IV, a 6th-generation cranberry farmer from New Jersey, about the upcoming harvest. Finally, WNYC's Ryan Kalaith shares free activities for October

Host Jason Blitman talks to Rumaan Alam (Entitlement) about the intricate themes of his novel, focusing on class, money, and societal values. They also delve into the significance of the book's title and how it reflects broader societal issues. Featured in this episode is Guest Gay Reader, Lea DeLaria, who discusses her work in theater, her desire to play iconic Shakespearean clowns, and her passion for classic literature. Rumaan Alam is the author of the New York Timesbestselling novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and adapted into a major motion picture, as well as two other novels. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.Lea DeLaria was the first openly gay comic on television in America, and is an accomplished Jazz performer who has performed in concert venues all over the world. She is best known as ‘Big Boo' from Orange is the New Black (3 SAG Awards). Lea can currently be seen in the indie feature film Potato Dreams of America, and in the  Indigo Girls jukebox feature film, Glitter & Doom. Lea recently starred in the Off-Broadway Revival of Tennessee Williams' play, The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann. TV credits include Girls5Eva, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, East New York,The Blacklist, Physical, Reprisal, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Shameless, and Broad City. Film credits include Cars 3, Support The Girls, and First Wives Club. Broadway credits, POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (Bernadette), The Rocky Horror Show (Eddie/Dr. Scott) and On The Town (Hildy), Obie and Theatre World Awards. @realleadelaria www.leadelaria.comGays Reading is sponsored by Audible. Get a FREE 30-day trial by visiting audibletrial.com/gaysreadingBOOK CLUB!Use code GAYSREADING at checkout to get first book for only $4 + free shipping! Restrictions apply.http://aardvarkbookclub.comWATCH!https://youtube.com/@gaysreadingBOOKS!Check out the list of books discussed on each episode on our Bookshop page: https://bookshop.org/shop/gaysreading MERCH!Purchase your Gays Reading podcast merchandise HERE! https://gaysreading.myspreadshop.com/ FOLLOW!@gaysreading | @jasonblitman CONTACT!hello@gaysreading.com

Welcome back to Dear Multi-Hyphenate! It is Season Two and let's kick it off with superstar multi-hyphenate Lea Delaria. In this episode we discuss all about how and when to identify as a certain type of artist, unheard stories of working with Lea's idols, hysterical and inspiring stories about projects like POTUS and Orange is the New Black, and of course Lea's new brunch show at 54 Below… Brunch is Gay, currently running one Sunday a month at 54 Below.  Lea was the first openly gay comic on television in America, and is an accomplished Jazz performer who has performed in concert venues all over the world. She is best known as ‘Big Boo' from Orange is the New Black (3 SAG Awards). Lea can currently be seen in the indie feature film Potato Dreams of America, and in the Indigo Girls jukebox feature film, Glitter & Doom. Lea recently starred in the Off-Broadway Revival of Tennessee Williams' play, The Night of the Iguana, directed by Emily Mann. TV credits include Girls5Eva, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, East New York,The Blacklist, Physical, Reprisal, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Shameless, and Broad City. Film credits include Cars 3, Support The Girls, and First Wives Club. Broadway credits, POTUS Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (Bernadette), The Rocky Horror Show (Eddie/Dr. Scott) and On The Town (Hildy), Obie and Theatre World Awards. @realleadelaria www.leadelaria.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get up and get informed! Here's all the local news you need to start your day: NYPD brass are touting a lower-than-usual homicide rate for August. WNYC's Brittany Kriegstein reports. Meanwhile, transit advocates canvassed 23 subway stations on Sunday, where they say elevator improvements for disabled riders have been delayed due to the pause in congestion pricing. Also, Mayor Eric Adams visited two churches in East New York on Sunday amid federal investigations over his administration.

Maggie Gray joins the show to explain why she thinks the New York Jets will win the AFC East. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Dominique M. Carson, LMP, is an award-winning freelance journalist, licensed massage practitioner, author, and orator. Carson's work has been featured in several publications, including Ebony.com, The Grio, NBC News, Singersroom.com, Bleu Magazine, Virginian Pilot, Preferred Health Magazine, Soultrain.com, Education Update, and Brooklyn news media outlets. She interviewed over 100 notable figures in entertainment, such as Charlie Wilson, Regina Belle, Patti Labelle, Kirk Franklin, and many more. She also collaborated with Brooklyn historian and journalist Suzanne Spellen and launched a 118-page journal on Lefferts Manor, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Carson also served as Program and Communications Coordinator for Man Up! Inc., a nonprofit organization in East New York, Brooklyn. While at the organization, she received a citation from the New York City Council and the "It's My Park Award" from the Partnership for Parks for community engagement in her hometown, East New York, Brooklyn. In November 2020, she released her first solo book, a biography on R&B icon Jon B titled "Jon B: Are You Still Down." Although published independently, "Jon B: Are You Still Down" was an Amazon Hot New Release in One Hour Biography and Memoirs Short Reads. It was also featured in Book Authority's 7 Best New R&B Music Books To Read, Goodreads, and Readers' Favorite in 2021. A year after the Covid 19 pandemic, she participated in the National Women's History Museum's journaling project titled "Women Writing History: A Coronavirus Journaling Project." In a 42-page journal, she shared how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted her life and career as a media analyst and massage provider.  Carson graduated from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, with her bachelor's and master's degrees before age 25. She was also the first African American to receive the Brooklyn College Wall of Fame award in the winter of 2011. Her post-college life consists of writing articles and books and adding another venture, massage therapy. In 2019, she received her Associate of Applied Science degree and license in Massage Therapy from CUNY Queensborough Community College. She can practice massage with her credentials in her hometown, New York City, 44 other states, and Puerto Rico. She has received numerous awards, including 2x Author All-Star, the Global Iconic Changemaker Award, The Empowered Woman Award, and the Global Recognition Award for her editorial and health/wellness work. She was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humanitarianism from the Global International Alliance Advocate University in Spring 2024. Her story has been featured in prestigious media outlets such as Sheen Magazine, Impact Magazine, Femi Magazine, Industry Times, and Forbes—one, as well as VoyageLA, ShoutoutLA, and Bold Journey. Carson's mission is to facilitate people's lives with my hands and words.

Gastor drops insane knowledge on the Asian Friends, starting with how to impress your wife. Mic has a very very big announcement and needs a hug. Jenny drops a new version of herself.C O M E S E E U S L I V E https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hack-city-comedy-with-mic-nguyen-and-jenny-arimoto-tickets-914169043217?aff=erelexpmltF O L L O W U Shttps://www.instagram.com/asiannotasianpodhttps://www.instagram.com/nicepantsbrohttps://www.instagram.com/jennyarimoto/P A T R E O Nhttps://www.patreon.com/asiannotasianpod P A R T N E R S - Thanks to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services for making this episode happen visit vaccines.gov-Experience Magic mind, use code "asian20" to get 40% off at magicmind.co/asian- BETTER HELP: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/asian and get on your way to being your best self. Get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/asian- EXPRESS VPN: 3 Months free at expressvpn.com/asian- EARNIN - Download the Earnin app today in the Google Play or Apple App store. Be sure to write in "Asian" under PODCAST when you sign up. - Helix Sleep Mattress: $125 off ALL mattress orders for ANALs at helixsleep.com/asian - Hawthorne.co is offering 10% off of your first purchase! Visit hawthorne.co and use PROMO CODE “NOTASIAN” - TUSHY Bidets: Go to hellotushy.com/ANA for 10% off!- THE SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE: www.joinallofus.org/asiannotasian- HBO MAX: http://hbom.ax/ana2- FUNDRISE: Fundrise.com/asian- SANZO: DrinkSanzo.com and use promo code “ASIANNOTASIAN”- TruBill: Truebill.com/Asian- Quip: GetQuip.com/Asian- Athletic Greens: Athleticgreens.com/asiannotasian - Shopify: Shopify.com/asian - Manscaped: Get 20% Off and Free Shipping with the code ASIAN- Big Brother Big Sister: https://bit.ly/30zQZan- Nutrafol: www.nutrafol.com (Promo code: Asian)- Sesanood: www.sesanood.com (Promo code: AsianNotAsian)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Want to join the podcast? Come together with other listeners in a deep dive into this summer's episodes, discussing ideas, asking questions, and sharing your experiences about issues brought up in our interviews. Perfect for writers at every level. Only a few spots available. Email 7amnovelist@substack.com for more info.Today, we hear from Desmond Hall whose newest novel, BETTER MUST COME, was released on June 4. I'll be interviewing Des with a whole lot of other questions about this book live at GrubStreet in the Boston Seaport on June 13, so I hope to see people there where you can buy your own copy and get it signed. Today, however, we'll be talking about how to manage dramatic irony—which is basically about when to reveal what info and where in terms of what a character versus a reader knows—while writing multiple points of view.Watch a recording here. This audio/video version is available for one week. Missed it? Check out the podcast version above or on your favorite podcast platform.To find Hall's latest and many other books by our authors, visit our Bookshop page. Looking for a writing community? Join our Facebook page. Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee's creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He's also been named one of Variety magazine's Top 50 Creatives to Watch. In addition to his latest, Better Must Come, Desmond is also the author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 7amnovelist.substack.com

Welcome to the latest episode of the Spun Today podcast, where we dive into the entrepreneurial journey of Steven, a driven and passionate restaurateur. Join host Tony as he delves into Steven's inspiring story of hard work, resilience, and dedication to pursuing his dreams in the restaurant industry. From discussing the challenges of starting new ventures to the importance of family and financial preparedness, this episode is a testament to the power of chasing your passions and embracing entrepreneurship. Get ready to be motivated and inspired by Steven's journey of overcoming obstacles and building a successful business from the ground up.   *Original Release Date: December 26th, 2019*     The Spun Today Podcast is a Podcast that is anchored in Writing, but unlimited in scope.  Give it a whirl.    Twitter: https://twitter.com/spuntoday Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spuntoday/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@spuntoday   Website: http://www.spuntoday.com/home Newsletter: http://www.spuntoday.com/subscribe   Links referenced in this episode: Episode page: https://www.spuntoday.com/podcast/261   Follow Aura on Social: AuraCocina   Caoba is now Room 100! Follow on Social: Room100BK   DOMINICAN PIZZA! How it's made! | DEVOUR POWER: https://youtu.be/-rdRPX9q0nY   Bushwick Daily article on Aura: https://bushwickdaily.com/bushwick/categories/food-and-drink/6368-aura-cocina-plans-to-bring-cuban-asian-fusion-to-the-breeze   Get your Podcast Started Today! https://signup.libsyn.com/?promo_code=SPUN (Use Promo code SPUN and get up to 2-months of free service!)   Check out all the Spun Today Merch, and other ways to help support this show! https://www.spuntoday.com/support   Check out my Books Make Way for You – Tips for getting out of your own way FRACTAL – A Time Travel Tale Melted Cold – A Collection of Short Stories http://www.spuntoday.com/books/ (e-Book, Paperback & Hardcover are now available).   Fill out my Spun Today Questionnaire if you're passionate about your craft.  I'll share your insight and motivation on the Podcast: http://www.spuntoday.com/questionnaire/    Shop on Amazon using this link, to support the Podcast: http://www.amazon.com//ref=as_sl_pc_tf_lc?&tag=sputod0c-20&camp=216797&creative=446321&linkCode=ur1&adid=104DDN7SG8A2HXW52TFB&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spuntoday.com%2Fcontact%2F   Shop on iTunes using this link, to support the Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?genreId=38&id=27820&popId=42&uo=10   Shop at the Spun Today store for Mugs, T-Shirts and more: https://viralstyle.com/store/spuntoday/tonyortiz   Background Music: Autumn 2011 - Loxbeats & Melody - Roa   Outro Background Music: https://www.bensound.com   Spun Today Logo by: https://www.naveendhanalak.com/   Sound effects are credited to: http://www.freesfx.co.uk   Listen on: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Google Podcasts | YouTube | Website   Episode Transcript [00:00:00] All right, so we are recording the second ever in a car, in a vehicle, in route podcast, Spontane podcast, with another, a second Amante family member. Elaine was the first one, now Steven, you are the second. Amante, yeah, thank you for having me. Always, always bro. So obviously like, usually like with these podcasts I always do like my own intro and stuff like that, so. Introduce everything, but what I wanted to jump into as we are on our way to Aura. Which is located where? In East Williamsburg. What's the address? 315 Mesereau, Brooklyn, New York, 11206. And that, for the folks listening, is a new restaurant, a second establishment that Stephen is in the process of opening up. And I wanted to have him on. To speak generally about like entrepreneurship and his whole experience [00:01:00] and how it's been with, with this specifically, you know, literally buying a second location and having to like build it up and construct it off from like the visions that he has in the set for it. And, you know, everything that he has gone through from like interior design and having to, you know, just like everything A to Z, like having to get bartenders and chefs and managers and like, how, how does that, all that should work? You know what I mean? Like, plan it out or break it down. Well, I love the restaurant business. I've always since a young kid, that was my first job. I love hospitality. As you know, I always like to host in my house and, you know, make people feel good. And I have a personality for that. I always started from the bottom. As a busboy, then moving on to a waiter, to a head server, to bartending, to managing. So I went through all the routes, you know, on the floor. And you did that in Bruce's on the Bay, right? I remember. I think that was like your first restaurant job in, in high, back in high school when we were in high [00:02:00] school. Yeah. I did that in, Bruce was on the bay in Howard Beach. I also did it in Lenny Clam Bar and Oh, you serious? Yeah, I did it cla Yeah. And I also did it in Santa Fe State House and Austin Street. Oh yeah. Yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I was always like the head server everywhere I went with the highest sales. And that's why I always got promoted quick and I always said I wanted one. So thankfully I was able to land a good job when in the local 46 union. I ain't working. I was able to be in different sites. One of the big biggest ones was the world trade center and I'm happy about that. Every time I pass by and I was there five, six floors before the building doing the foundation of the building. So, you know, that was great to be part of it. And I definitely want to get into all that. You, you've had, like, I always consider you like a, like a renaissance man, like somebody that's had like a thousand different jobs and I'm sure all of them, like you, you gain knowledge and experience from each and every one of them that are, you probably still carry with you to this day [00:03:00] and like, like everybody's lives, like shit that you go through, like informs like who you are, who you become and stuff like that. And I want to get into all that, but real quick before we get off from Bruce's on the bank didn't you see like Robin De Niro or Al Pacino there? Yeah, I served there, yeah. It was an Italian function. Yeah. And I was able to serve him. I was like Robert, can I take your place? I said, sure. That was our long conversation, but it was pretty cool. I served the Gaudi's as well. Gaudi's wife and the other kids. It was good. Joe Pesci. That's dope. Yeah. And that comes full circle with the, the latest movie that we were talking about the other day, which we're going to finish, finish speaking about Irishman. Yeah. I saw it twice actually. Yeah. Yeah. I want to watch it again. Wait, so you went from working in the world trade? Like that was another connection you had to like hospitality and stuff? No, I just In terms of like working for the iron workers? No, like you stated before, I've had like a thousand jobs. I've done literally everything. But to sum it all up, I just do it [00:04:00] for the money. I just chase the money because I just I always wanted to become an entrepreneur ever since a kid. And, you know, I'd rather get If I get paid 800, I'd rather 600. You know, I'll do that job. Even if I've never had no knowledge of it and I've never done it. But I'm always, I was always chasing the paper. You know, I well, you know that, you know me my whole life growing up. It's like the hustler's mentality right there. Yeah, I just I always went where the money was more. Construction, I don't even have a screwdriver in my house right now. Like, I don't know anything about construction, but, you know, they offered me. 40 an hour starting and I was like, fuck it. I dropped my job at a Santa Fe steakhouse and also she, and I went over there. And, and the reason why at least I think like specific to this, to this episode and like your purpose behind like chasing the money and stuff like that was because you had, or what I'm asking, was it because you had like this, um, like end goal of like opening up your own spot? Yeah. I had my vision and I knew I had to save money. I know my parents weren't going to give it to me. You know, we, we faced a lot of hard hardship through our high school years when my father had a [00:05:00] bodega in in uptown and it did really bad. He lost everything. And I just, you know, we were just coming from the bottom and I knew I wasn't going to get help from my parents. So I was just like always like saving money, saving money because I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. My dad's side of the family, everybody's an entrepreneur. Everybody works for themselves and that's exactly what I wanted. And do you know, do you know why? Like the, the bodega When he had hard times, he had like some, like a partner or some shit that screwed him? No, no, he had a partner. The partner actually saw what was happening soon, so he was able to bail out and cash all his money in. But But was it like just business going down? Yeah, it was just that like when they were buying the business, they were supposedly selling, you know, whatever it was a week, 20, whatever it was. But basically the guy that was selling it was having his family go, you know, for three weeks straight when my father was, you know, testing the register, see how the sales were. And, you know, the sales were great. Obviously when he's when they sold those, those customers weren't coming back. And it's just like so the sales weren't there. It's a lot of competition. I'm talking about like, there's like four bodegas on each block in uptown. It's like little Dominican, little Dominican Republic up there, as everybody knows in the Heights. And it's [00:06:00] just like, if one bodega has it for platanos for eight per dollar, the other one throws it for nine per dollar. And it gets ridiculous at a point where it's like a platinum. How do you make money off of that? So it was just a competition thing. People would literally walk 3 or 4 blocks just to get something 50 cents cheaper. That's insane. And yo, not for nothing, that's a really good and important point, I think, for folks to take in as far as When you want to get into purchasing a business, cause I know just from like doing real estate and mortgages and stuff like that, and, and I, I've worked for small businesses in the past as well, like restaurants and you know, real estate offices, mortgage offices. And one thing that's different with purchasing a business versus that I, that I, the little that I know of it just from that side of it then purchasing a house is that you, like one of the prerequisites is that that you get to like shadow the owner of the establishment. You get like two to three years is like rule of rule of thumb of their business income tax and their, and their personal income [00:07:00] taxes as well to like, see how the business has done, you know, cause they could say, Oh yeah, this does a million a week. And you, you know, obviously not just going to take somebody's word for it. Cause they're selling you something. They're going to paint the picture as pretty as possible. You definitely have to go by the court of sales by that. You can't, you can't lie about that. Okay. Yeah. So once you get that report and you see what you're paying a sales tax. The cash you could always play around with here and there, and there's like a rule of thumb for it. But quarterly taxes is, you know, it's money that you're paying to the IRS, which is like, nobody gives money to the IRS for no reason. True. And but the point that, that I definitely want to get at is how, how that dude, like, to show your pops, Oh, look how good the registers are doing. And he had, you know, he, he like orchestrated fucking three weeks worth of people just coming through, buying shit, and he was probably just giving them back like the money at the end of the day. And, you know, so your pops even, Diligence of, you know, shadowing the guy for three weeks and checking the registers and shit like that. You know what I mean, like people It's always scams, it's New York City. As soon as you land in the [00:08:00] airport, you get scammed. You know, I currently, I'm a Port Authority police officer at JFK and you gotta see these people that come to, you know, to the, to the, To New York from like different countries never been here before and they'll jump on a cab and literally go from one terminal to the next terminal and get robbed for 200 and they pay it because they have no idea. They're like, Oh, they always hear it. Oh, New York, very expensive. It's the highest, the biggest city of the world. It's probably 200 to go from terminal one to terminal eight. And it's not, you know, these guys also charge 300 to go to Times Square where a regular yellow cab will charge you 68 bucks, but they pay it because they don't know. But then the next, when they do find out they come the next day, they give the complaint to the police department and that's when we have to enforce. So we're constantly, you know, shooing away the hustlers at the arrivals area. But it's just like, it's just New York, it's just shady, you know. Yeah, it's like the nature of the beast, you know. So yeah, so you had that vision from a young age and you knew that if you were gonna establish something Yeah. And eventually bring your vision into fruition, you had to grind and do it yourself. You had to work [00:09:00] hard, save money. Exactly. To, to like, reach that point. Exactly. That's exactly it. And you know, it's a lot that goes into it, to try to like, save this money. Like, I've always told you like, I bought my first house in 2008. Just because I knew, if I would, I was calculating how much money I was making a week, how much I was making a month, and then yearly. I was like, and then I calculated the money that I was paying in rent, yearly. So I was like, wow, if I'm spending 12, 000 to 15, 000 in rent every year, that's taken away from 75, 000 to 58, 000. I'm sorry 52, 000. I had this up Four years, that's 60 grand. You know what I'm saying? So there's a lot of hidden money that if you think about it, if you, if you, if you take it away, you, you're actually making more money in the future. So I was able to get an investment in East New York, which I, I was, I'm not from Brooklyn, I'm from Queens, Richmond Hill. But I was able to get it, 'cause it was a new construction house of four apartments and I knew with two apartments I was gonna pay the mortgage. So not only was, was I not. Paying rent, but I was also making money off my house. So there, there alone, I [00:10:00] was making basically double equity. You know what I'm saying? I was making money and not having to pay rent. And I was making money off, you know, what was left over of the cash rent. Yeah, the savings plus like the assets of the money actually coming in. Correct. Correct. And also building equity after 10 years. You know what I'm saying? It's like a long term game. You know, the value is always going to go up, historically speaking. So that's actually a tremendous game. That's honestly how I was able to, you know, I was always able to do it. I was always and then I have a restaurant, so I wasn't spending money in food. So the way people see my stuff, they see me with, with two houses, two restaurants at 35 years old, but it's not, I've never sold any drugs in my life. I've always, you know, I'm a military to a iron worker to a police officer. If nobody's ever given me anything, blue collar jobs, exactly. Everybody, I've paid my taxes every single year. Everybody knows it. It's just that I have these, you know, these knickknacks where I could. And I, and I, and I just see, and I, and I see what, what, what, where I could produce more. And You could add like optimizing. Correct. And that's how, that's how I was able to save money. Once I had my house [00:11:00] in Brooklyn, I didn't want to get into another house. I hate being the handyman of the house. So I had some extra money and I was able to buy a house with the restaurant with your cousin Elvis in in East New York. We started off great and then, you know, so I found out a couple of things and then just the relationship wasn't there anymore. Everything happens for a reason. He was, he, he faces the hard, he faced the hardship that he just needed to get out. He needed money quick and I took the opportunity and paid off his half and I, I stood him with, with my business. After that, the business just boomed. You know, I had a vision of, You know, what the restaurant is, you know, in this age and the future, the guy Elvis was just, you know, he was used to restaurants in the 70s and 80s and he thought it still worked that way. So Yeah, because I was going to ask you about that specifically because I know there was a Mm look when the, the restaurant wa was ade before and you took it over and it's now known as Gawa, located at a hundred Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica Avenue. Jamaica Avenue in Brooklyn. And it's a popping spot people can follow on Instagram at gawa nyc n yc. And also the food [00:12:00] page is Guba underscore Bistro Bistro. The head chef is Chef bfi, correct? Right. There's I noticed from the outside looking in and from obviously knowing you personally, but like a complete like one, what is it? 180. What's happened? 360. A complete one. Yeah. From, I need more coffee from when it was my Cody took, oh, it was like, like you know, it was a, it was a nice restaurant. It was cool. But like, like you said, it like definitely like blew up. Like after, after switching it to go and you kind of switch like the business model a little bit. a little bit, like it wasn't just restaurant, like you have, yeah, I added a variety, you know, we open up at three o'clock, we start off with the happy hour and we open up the kitchen and I just basically run two businesses. I run the restaurant three to 12, and then I do the lounge part 12 to four. I mean, I'm paying rent, you know, for the 30 days, whatever time it doesn't matter, you know, so I was basically producing four hours more a day where, you know, where my ex partner at Makuri didn't want to do it. So that's when I started seeing profit. And then I just started renovating the place, making it more hip. Okay. [00:13:00] And that's interesting. You see it that way. Like two businesses like running it as two businesses, like two separate businesses. One is a club, one is a restaurant that's dope, and it's literally like location and one rent. One rent. And you, you just like, you like, you're splitting it up in your mind that I'm, I'm guessing just from hearing that, like, just that hour wise, like from this time to this time it's a restaurant and then from this time to this time, it's a, a club. Correct. That's pretty dope. So I was able to optimize in that and and it draws. Sorry to cut you off, it draws like different crowds like for that reason like me personally like I'm not into Like the clubbing scene DJs and and whatever But I'm more into like the you know Fine dining experience that you do get from like the early times when you know nice music in the background It's crazy The transition is crazy, like you could be literally eating, formal dinner, nice music in the background. I was there, I was there for that. Literally, I literally envisioned it. You go to the bathroom or go outside to smoke a cigarette, you come back inside and you be like, what the fuck just happened? Everyone's like, mm, mm, mm. I'm talking about the sofas are away, you got stand up tables, the hookah's [00:14:00] going, the DJ's going, you got the moving heads going with the lights, and it's just like, what the hell just happened? It's like it's like a twilight. It's insane, and that transition happens in, in, with like, it's like, yeah, like military style precision. I got another staff that comes in at 11 o'clock and they're the ones who set up the floor and they just transition everything. That's dope, that's awesome. And then we transition again at 4 in the morning to get ready for dinner service the next day. And then, that's a pretty good segue in that, that you seizing that opportunity with the restaurant and you seeing a vision for it that wasn't being implemented when it was Macquarie. And you're saying, you know, I had this opportunity now to buy out my partner, you took it, and it, and I'm sure you had, including myself, like at that time you know, focused on you, and maybe it's not a good idea, maybe you should just focus on the cop thing, cause I'm not sure if you were like already a cop at that point. Or not. I was no, I had the restaurant first and then a year into it was when I got called from the Port [00:15:00] Authority and it's a job that you can't refuse. And I'm sure you had like a mix of like support from people and, you know, people like being like cautiously optimistic, which is like the camp I would put like myself in. Like, but you followed through with the vision that you had implemented it. And now that business flourished based on the vision that you had. And to the point that you are now able to invest in a second restaurant like your, your dream restaurant, which is out of the location that we're headed to now. Then, you know, it's like mid construction right now being built up and I'm going to see it for the first time. So I'm definitely going to like take some pictures and stuff like that. And we're going to speak about it more when we're actually at the location. So if folks want to put some visuals together with, with this audio. Okay. Check it out at Sponsoreday. com forward slash podcast forward slash 142, which I think this will be episode 142 and check it out. Actually, it's one of my waitresses right here. Hey Desiree. And we're just, we're literally [00:16:00] driving by right now on, what is this? On Cypress Avenue. Cypress Avenue in Hancock. And one of Steven's waitresses from, from Galoa just walked by. You gotta respect the hustle. So we left there at 515 this morning. Like, in this business, it's good. You know, you flourish a lot, you know, if you do it the right way. But it is a lot of sacrifice, a lot of you know, sleeping, a lot of time away from the family. And it's just like, I respect this girl's hustle. She has a kid, you know, she was out there till five in the morning, and I just see her coming out of bodega, you know, with food, with a bag full of food, you know what I'm saying? So she's gonna go cook now for her family. Meanwhile, she has to come back to work late in a couple of hours. That, that's, that's insane. And not just, not just Lazo from the employees, But I just want to highlight the fact that, like, Steve is running this business, opening up the second business. And he's a full time Port Authority police officer. Yes. At the same time. And a two year old baby. And has a two year old. Which is awesome. My godson. Dude, it's just like, I'm driven, man, and I, I'm sure like, you walk into McDonald's right now, you're not gonna see the owner, and he probably has like five of them, and these things [00:17:00] make millions of dollars a year. So that's my mentality. One of, one of the things that, that most pushes me, dude, is my mom. With my last restaurant, you know, it was a lot of time away from the family. I was, it was, I was a first time entrepreneur. You know, I let things go to my head. I was dedicating more time to, to, to the restaurant and to my actual family at home, you know, and I did things I shouldn't have and it cost me my first marriage. You know, that's a failure. I gotta, I gotta suck it up and take it. But one of the thing that biggest pushes me is my mom. When I first, when I got divorced, my mom was like, Steven, you know, get the fuck out that bed. You know what I'm saying? Don't be depressed. Don't do this or whatever. I know you better than this. And listen, your ex and her family, they just want to see you fail, they want to see you lose your business, they want to see you lose your house, they want to see the worst in you. Fuckin I'm sick, I have diabetes, but you know, if I ever leave this earth, I want you to have, if you can, buy three more houses, if you can, buy five more restaurants, buy five more. But, like, don't let those people shut you down. And I've taken that like a grain of salt. That shit motivates me the fuck out of me every single day. And, you know, that's why I do what I do. So I [00:18:00] go to sleep a couple of hours. But I have people that I put in play to work for me, that manage for me. Like, I have my brother in one place. I got my sister, Elaine, which helps me out tremendously. I got my compadre radi that also runs on my hookah and my liquor, you know, so I put, if you put people in play in all the businesses, you don't have to be there because honestly, if you're, if you're in a business that you have, you actually have to work, why the hell are you paying a manager? Why the hell are you paying a head bartender, head server? Why do you have a team? There's no team there. Yeah, you're, you're, you're doing it wrong. If you have to like be, be at a, at a spot 24 seven. Exactly. I mean, you know, I'm always, I'm not constantly looking at the cameras. I'm not going to live a life where I'm But then, you know, the numbers are good. It's exactly what I expect. So obviously my team is doing what they gotta do. And I know, you know, by that operation, all you gotta do is set a good team, a good operation, and you could open up 3, more. I'm actually looking at another location right now. We're negotiating a lease. Over here also in Bushwick, in Broadway. I think I'm going to sign that and start that project in June. No, that was a surprise for you. Damn! Yeah. That would be like another restaurant? Yeah, the reason is that Kyle, I have two more years [00:19:00] left in my lease and the landlord, I haven't seen the landlord in three years. I don't know if he's dead or what the hell happened. You serious? Yeah, but his wife actually has a property. She runs it, so I pay her the rent, but she has no say in, you know, on the lease or if they're renewing the lease or whatever. So God was a very good business, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I can't just like wait till the day before my lease to hand in the keys and not have no business. So that's why I'm setting this up now, because I want to keep it out as a very formal dining, you know, sophisticated Destination place, but I also want to have the same like out a crowd. I mean cow a crowd where it's just you know Good food, and then it's in the transition into the the nightlife, and you know with the whole hook and the music Yeah, so yeah, I definitely I'm not winning. I don't want to lose that right now, and I'm not these guarantees So that's why I'm gonna start this new project in June God willing that's open that actually leads me to something I wanted to ask you about Like you have that vision. That's already something that you're thinking about. That's two years out. And I always remember something that stayed with me from you that I learned from you growing up is something even from, I think it came about like with your time in the [00:20:00] army. But maybe even before then, I think before then, the first time you ever told me about it was that you always like break things down into five year chunks. Like you have five year plans, five year vision. So I'm guessing something like this that you're already planning out two years ahead. You know, I gotta prepare for it. I'm a soldier. You know, you always gotta go to the war with all your weapons or your gadgets or your, you know what I'm saying, everything ready. And this is actually what I'm doing. You know, it takes time to open up a business. I've been here for eight months now on this construction site. And, you know, I come here every day. If I wouldn't have come here every day, I would have took like a year. You know, cause guys, you know, doodly dally and fuck around and I'm paying these guys by day. So they actually want the job to be longer cause, you know, they're getting paid regardless. So I'm here guiding the orchestra, you know, all day. And is that something that you learned also from doing construction? Correct. Yeah. But it's true, that's like, that's like the work contractors and construction workers are known for, like, they'll tell you a job takes 10 days, but the, you know, just sign it, sign the dotted line, start getting paid, and then when you get out of the way, it's like 15, 20, 25 days that it takes. Exactly. But I got a good team here. I got [00:21:00] two teams here. One is excellent, the other one I gotta keep watching. But I'm actually on my way here now to drop off some furniture. We're getting ready to hopefully open up to 26 right after Christmas. And so time is money right now. It's every day is just long hours now for these next eight days of construction. Cause we're missing on Christmas Eve and Christmas day next week. And I just got to make this happen. And I think that, that's one that large amounts for, so I think that's what that large amount I think is for some, I think I've seen no What was I about to ask you? The, so you've been, so you signed the lease for this place 8 months ago. So you've had the place for 8 months, you're paying like, right? No, I signed the lease in January, February. But I didn't have TCO until May 1st. So May 1st is when I started the What is that TCO? Temporary CBO certificate? Yeah, correct, yeah. That's what it is. It took me like 30 days to get a good contractor. You know, with all his licensing. And I was able to get it. So you had to like try out different contractors? No, no. I had one, I had one contractor that I was definitely working with, but he doesn't have all [00:22:00] his licensing. And this is a DOB job where the plumbing has to be signed off, electric and all that stuff. So you have to get one of those. Yeah, so I had to get one of those. That took some time. It took like 30 days and it actually cost me now a whole month of rent. But, you know, it is what it is. You learn from it. And where was I? Oh yeah, so we started in June, so since June here, it's been like 7 months already. Damn. Wait, you started paying rent when? A month ago? The first of this month. Okay. Yeah, so I got this month and I gotta pay January 1st now. Definitely. So, so what like ups and downs have you experienced, like, because this is a little different from when you opened up Gawa. 'cause Gawa was already did Elvis have it, have it already or No? No, no. Boom. But, but it was an operating restaurant. You guys took it over it? No, it was already closed down. It, that corner's been there for, since like the seventies. But when we got it, it was already closed down. The guy had, the guy before us had to close it down. I don't know what he did. I think he, he started putting domino tables in the restaurant and just made it like a shit show. And so the landlord took it. And when we got it, we got it with the gates down and you know, we put the gates up and it was [00:23:00] starting from the beginning exactly what I'm doing here in outer. I feel kind of confident because I did it once already over there. I feel I could do it again here. I hired an excellent PR person. We're actually going to be in good day America on the fifth, right before three Kings. We have a session for Telemundo. At the end of January, and we have NBC, I believe, on the 8th of January. Wow, that's dope. How does that work? Oh, no, you got a PR, public relations, and he has connections with all these networks, you know, you pay him a fee. Each time I want you to promote my business type of thing? Yeah, you pay him, obviously not for free. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You pay him a fee, and he does his thing. And you get recognition, we were featured in the Bushwick Daily already. We plan on the grand opening to have the hold a press conference with the Times and the Post. So we're doing everything the right way. And a sponsored podcast, of course. Of course. We got a, we got a great manager. She just came off a, a one star Michelin restaurant. She's great great resume, great personality I feel we're gonna do really good by her. Basically, I have all my puppets in play, like, how are you supposed to do it? I'm not [00:24:00] just like going to cheap bra, like, Oh, I'm letting me make a beautiful place and just hope that people come here. You know, something could be beautiful on fifth Avenue, but if, you know, the service is not there, the charisma is not there, you know, you don't have anything. So, yeah. And by that, I don't want people to misconstrue that either. Like, like, are you just like puppets in a play? It's not like you're like like like with a negative connotation, it's like with the connotation of, like you mentioned before, being the conductor of an orchestra, like, You guys go, you guys do this, now you're on, your turn, you know? Yeah. Like the perfect pieces in place that you know that you have the confidence in certain people to like execute at the jobs that you put them in. I also believe a lot in team building. You know, you see how I run my restaurant in Cowabunga. Like I'm very like, everybody says I'm the best boss because I basically, I believe in a team. Everybody knows what they got to do. And I don't, you know, I don't, I don't press them, I don't, you know. You don't like micromanage. Yeah, I don't like to micromanage. I don't like to talk behind anybody's back. Or, or scold somebody in front of another coworker. Like, I'm very professional with that because it, I think about it this way. I'm hardly ever there. If, if they hate me, they're gonna like fucking rob me when I'm not [00:25:00] there. So I'd rather, I build like this friendship, like this family. And it just like, it hurts them, like, if they try to do something like that to me. I've had the same staff for years and, you know, they work great. I love them. I shout out to my, to my Galba family in East New York. And I just, I just, like, I like building an establishment that's family orientated. That's awesome. That's something good to hear. When I used to, there was like a, a stark difference between when I used to work in my first job in high school. When I was 16, it was a restaurant. And then I worked in two ever. I went from that one to another one in Mineola and which we actually used to cut, cut to, and, Go play ping pong and pool and shit in the basement. Shout out to Labs, but there was a stark difference between the owner of it and the manager of it. The manager, which I'm still friends with to this day that went on to open up his own, his own spot called Sangria in Jamaica was Joey. And he had that. Look that you just mentioned, like if he ever, ever had like an issue with a staff member, he'll call them [00:26:00] aside, call them up to the office and, you know, speak to them, you know, calm, cool, collected and, you know, teach, teach them like how to do something right that he thought that they were doing wrong. And whereas literally the owner, like he would literally like in front of customers, like somebody was holding a plate in their left hand, they should have been holding it like in the right hand, whatever. Like he would yell at them, put them on the spot. Make nervous in front of the customer like no, no, you did that wrong. Come back. Come back over here Like grab him by the shoulder. Look look pick it pick that up that goes on that side You know, he was he was like he's like an old school like Portuguese, dude They you know kind of like rough around the edges kind of yeah, but he didn't have like that type of important to me like leadership skill of You know You have to look beyond a mistake and if you want them to not if you want an employee Not to commit that mistake again, you know, putting them on the spot and putting them on blast and make them feel like shit is not the way to achieve that. Definitely. That's definitely old school. That was actually like my ex partner. That's how he like managed it. But, [00:27:00] man, honestly, waste of talent is the worst you could do. Honestly, if you have your dream, like, my best friend Tony has always wanted to open a laundromat, like, Jesus one day got to do it. If you fail, you fail, but the worst thing to live with is, is, was regret. Like, I, I love what, I, I stand behind my brand. I guarantee it. You know what I'm saying? I love, I, I know I'm gonna do good. You know, I, I have a lot of faith in God. I, I do, I do the right thing. I just know that whatever I put my hands into, it's gonna, it's gonna be good and it has for everything else in the past. So I just feel like it's gonna be good here. And if you have a strong passion for something, you know, start saving your money, get good credit, take a lot, take a take a load out and just follow your dreams. But you don't want to like be 70, 80 and be like, wow, I wish I would have done this before, you know, because regret, you can't buy time again, you know. Absolutely. And that, that, That honestly is something that has motivated me more towards like the whole laundromat idea and like dream, like you said, that, that I've had for, for some time. And like I wanted to do but was like gun shy and hesitant [00:28:00] about and you know, I've went from like the restaurant jobs and stuff to, to now corporate America for like 10 years. And You know, seeing you and your success with, with the, the restaurant and just the entrepreneurship in general, it like made me see that, you know what, it is possible. Like, you know what I mean? And I should like save up, like you said, and, and actually, you know, give it a shot, go for it. And not, not put myself in a position where, you know, I'm, I'm like. Selling every single thing I own or whatever to accomplish a goal, but like hedge my bets and do it, do it smartly. And if God forbid, something fails, you know, I'm not out industry with a, with a can of man. Yeah, definitely. If you have a hundred dollars, don't invest a hundred dollars. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like. Yeah, I would say if you have 20 invest 12, you know, you always gotta be, you know, right now I'm prepared for like a whole year if like nobody comes into my restaurant, I'm prepared to pay a whole year of rent that way I don't lose my place. A lot of people fill in the restaurants because they put everything they have into it.[00:29:00] Business is bad a couple months and you go right in the hole, you know, you're talking about five, 6, 000 of rent, you owe four months, you owe 25, 000, like how do you come back from that, you know? So you got to be prepared to have that rent because it's going to take time, you know, and I ain't got what took me two years to start seeing money and, and I'm. Made all my money back and was able to invest in more and other stuff. Same thing, we're out of here. I'm prepared. Like, if nobody comes in, which I don't think the Russians are going to be that bad, and the pool's going to be that bad, then nobody's going to enter. But, again, I have that military mentality where, like, I'm preparing for the worst. Correct. So, as long as you do that, you have a backup plan I think you'll be fine. That's dope, man. And we are pulling up right now on the outside of it. It looks dope from the outside. Can't wait to take a couple pictures. We're going to pause the podcast for now, take a look around, and get back. Alrighty folks, we are back in the car. You're going to hear some navigation in the background, but please don't mind it. And the restaurant is dope. I was telling Steven inside, I'll repeat it here that I'm like super proud of him, like [00:30:00] seeing his success. And this restaurant, which I know has been a long time goal of his this one specifically like the what did you call it before? Like a fine dining experience type of thing. It's going to be a fine dining. You know, the aesthetics is what I've always wanted. More formal dining, you know, more like to celebrate birthdays, romantic dinners, anniversaries, stuff like that. And it's something I know definitely that it has always been a goal of his, so congratulations. Thank you so much, I appreciate that brother. Can't wait, can't wait to see it open. Tell me the name. You were just getting into a story about the name I cut you off, so you can repeat it here on the podcast, because I think it's, it's, like, just a dope, like, origin story. Well, the name of the complex is called The Breeze. It's it's an industrial it was an old pillow factory. And now it became like a warehouse for businesses. So it's all corporate offices. You have Ethos Club. You have you have a marketing agency. You have people that make skate ramps. It's pretty cool. So it's all commercial. And then there's a retail level that's attached to it. There's a corridor called the Breezeway that you have to go through to come to my place. [00:31:00] And so the whole thing is called the Breeze, the whole complex. And I initially wanted to do a Latin restaurant. So I googled the Breeze in Latin and Aura came out. A U R A. Aura. I like the name also because it reminds me of my grandmother, my father's mother. That's her first name, Aura. And third of all, like it's just like your energy, like your aura. Like what do you portray? Like people were like, my aura is more like, like personality and Steven's always in a good time. And Steven always wants to turn up and you know, make everyone happy. So I love, you know, I love people's aura. I love that name, I love the meaning behind that name. So that's how Aura came about. And then we named it Cochina and Bar. Which means Kitchen and Bar. That's so sick. And the you're gonna, you're gonna, Like the type of cuisine that you picked was Cuban, Asian? Yes. Basically they, a lot of people wanted this space. Cause it's gonna be the feature restaurant for the whole complex. And they just wanted to go with the moves, with the person that would move it. more innovative. It's a very hip neighborhood. A lot of hippies a lot of hipsters, freelancers, [00:32:00] and they want something innovative. They want something new. They don't want your typical Mexican restaurant or Dominican restaurant or anything, you know, regular. So I was like, you know what? My favorite Spanish food is Cuban and everything. I love Chinese food. I can eat Chinese food every day of the week. So I was like, let me just combine these two cuisines. I think there's like two or three in the city, but they're not very popular, you know, and you really have to match. And I was able to get this celebrity chef, Ricardo Cardona, who's like the official chef of the Yankees, Mark Anthony's personal chef the official chef of Edgewater, New Jersey. He's awesome. He teamed up with another Asian chef from L. A., who was featured on a two page article in the L. A. Times. So they combined the menu. It's amazing. I just got the menu. I haven't tasted it yet. We have the tasting next week sometime. But it's just like all the ingredients and everything that you need. It's amazing. Can't wait to try it and I can't wait for you guys to try it. So how does that work? So, so these like celebrity chefs and stuff like that, they, they like put together a menu, [00:33:00] like you said, and the flavors and like how to cook it type of thing, or how to cook certain dishes. And then like the, the chef on like whatever chef you have like working there, they get like taught those, like how to cook, execute those dishes. Well, yes, well, obviously they went to chef school and the good thing about Ricardo Cardona is that he. He's literally gone like everywhere in the, in the, in the world because he likes it. He wants to cook Mexican food. He'll go to Mexico and learn the authentic way of making it. Same thing with like Argentina and Spain. He's been to Asia. He's been to Thailand. Like he's gone to all these countries besides being a chef and learning, you know, the basics, but he's gone to all these countries and has like a special feel to all these, to all these cuisines, you know, it's not, for example, Mexican food, it's just not putting salsa and chips and guacamole in a plate, you know, there's a lot that goes, that goes into it. So it's the same thing with. That's dope. I just didn't know that it worked that way. I thought it was like, let's say Ricardo Cajona or whatever. I thought, like, he was physically, like, in the kitchen making it. You know what I mean? But, it's like, it's like a different level of, like, that whole chef world.[00:34:00] Yes. Yes, yes. That's exactly how it is. And he's very expensive as well, so. Somebody has a lot to do with it. That's crazy. That's awesome. But he has a good resume. He has a big following. Like he'll bring baseball players to your establishment. Celebrities singers. There's you know, the whole nine and that's what builds a place, you know, it must be like a lot of like cloud, like attached to this thing. Correct. And what's dope is we, we just saw the places, obviously like still in the construction, but like you said, it's like like all of the like heavy lifting is out of the way. It's like, now it's like more like decorations and aesthetics and stuff like that being done. And it already, I've never been to Cuba. You went a couple of times. I should have gone when you told me to go with you. And I didn't probably for A reason that I don't even remember. So it obviously wasn't a good reason probably like, oh no, I gotta work. Or like, some dumb shit. But it, like from pictures that I've seen of Cuba and stuff like that, like it, it has, like, I'm starting to, like, I could visualize like those elements like coming together, those, especially like buildings, those, those rusted cars, [00:35:00] you know, it's, it is like, like pastel colors and stuff like that. What I love about Cuba is like you basically transform yourself from like 2019 to like the 1950s. It's a whole transformation with everything, with the people, with the decor, what car you get in, what restaurant you go to. So it's like being trapped in a different era, you know, it's like time traveling. Yeah, exactly. That's awesome. All right. And the, I took some video for, for folks that want to check it out, some videos, some pictures and stuff. And you guys can check it out where I mentioned before sponsored. com for slash podcast forward slash one, four, two. So you could definitely get the visuals. Come along with this episode. So yeah entrepreneurship. I also have a shipping company where I import Items to Dominican Republic and tanks boxes, refrigerators, TVs sofas, and that type of furniture. I remember when you told me about that, like mad long ago, I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? It's literally, it was like in the middle of like the [00:36:00] whole Macquarie transition and stuff like that. You're like, Oh, I'm going to open up another business. I was like, yo, this guy. You're doing, like, way too much. You're biting off, like, more than you could chew, and then that business you still have, like, going. Exactly. Again, like I told you, if you have the right people in play, there's no reason why you can't do it. So, like, a business like that made Mahino that you're obviously not involved, like, day to day, you just, like, collect your, your, like, money from it. Yeah, that's it. When the time comes. Yeah. Nice. But you, like, established it, you started it. Yeah, it's called the Dominicana Cargo Express. I'm actually very good now with the next president elect. We've met a couple times. I'm helping run his campaign here in New York. I'm the secretary of Mil Amigos Abinadel. He's like 90 percent of the tolls that he's gonna win the election, so In DR? Yeah. What's his name? Luis Abinadel. Nice. Yeah. He's a disciple to Peña Gomez. Gotcha. And for folks that don't know, like, like, it's like a big, like, popular thing, especially for Dominicans. Like, my parents, like, ship stuff. My, my, [00:37:00] you know, my wife to, like, her pops and, like, family members that you have over there. It's like, you ship, like, containers. And boxes, and like, literally like these big like jug tanks of liquids and stuff like clothes, food, like stuff like that to the relatives that you have over there. So it's pretty dope. Yeah man, it's cool. And dude honestly my dream is, like I want to be a restauranteur. This is like my, the one I'm opening now is like my dream restaurant. If that pops off, I really literally want to do like, I want to keep the same, I want to branch out franchise out Aura, but like, I want to like, I'm going to change the name and like in the aesthetic of whatever culinary I decide. Like, let's say, for example, I want to do a Mexican restaurant, I'd probably name it Aura Cantina and Agave Bar, you know, something like that along those lines. So like the tagline to it would be like more specific to correct of what culinary it is. Gotcha. Yeah. But you still maintain like the outer, the staple of it. I just I have 11 years left in the port authority to retire, like 10 and a half. [00:38:00] It's a good job, but I honestly, I love working for myself. You know, I love what I do. Like it's, it's fun when I come to, to the restaurants, you know, it's not like I'm dragging my feet and like, fuck, I got to wake up and do this. Like I love getting up and coming over here and seeing what's going on. I like the, like the motion. I like the energy. I like the, the, the busy and, and the craziness that goes behind, behind the scenes in the kitchen. I love all that stuff. And I just want to keep doing it, you know, and I want to pass that. Which is important to like, love what you do, right? Of course it is. It doesn't feel like you're working. If people loved work, you know, they would be free, you know? Yeah, exactly. That's why a lot, that's advice that a lot of people give people that I follow and listen to. Which is, like, find what you love, and are passionate about, and do it, and then figure out a way to get paid from it later. Correct. Correct. And I just want to pass that down to my kids, you know. I want it to be like a Peter Luger's that, you know, it just goes down from generation to generation. Honestly, the way college is going now, I feel like people are just going to keep dropping out, [00:39:00] dropping out because, honestly, these guys, like, you go, you go out there, it's expensive, you spend four years and you can't even get a job getting out, you know, and everything's so competitive and all this computers, you know, it's eliminating so many jobs. I honestly feel like social media is like, it's killing the game. I just, I don't, I don't see college, like, like, Obviously, you know, but for the major professions, like, you know, being a lawyer and doctors, that's always going to exist. Yeah, for very specific professions. Correct. Yeah, but I definitely, like, I think entrepreneurship is important to that extent and, you know, like, either with, like podcasting and writing and, like, my personal goals, like, in that field, and people that I read and listen to on other podcasts, like, that, like, that's a very, very important element. To me, which is establishing that there are alternatives, there are different lanes that if you're willing to like put in the work for it, you can like follow and pursue. Like they're like unorthodox, like different things. You know, it's not just like go to high school, go to college, do four years, get a master's and then get this job. And then work at this job until you're 65, then retire and collect social security and then die. Like [00:40:00] it's not just that path alone. You know, there's an unlimited amount of different paths that people can go from investing in, in businesses. And I think that's important for our generation, which is like in the middle of it now, and for future generations to factor in and put into play. That's a fact. But yeah, bro. Thank you very much for doing the episode. I appreciate it. Anytime. I know folks are going to get a lot from it. And anything else? Remind folks again where Caoba is, where Outta is. Yeah, Caoba is located in East New York, 100 Jamaica Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. Outta is in East Williamsburg. That's on 315 Mesero Street. Estamos ahi a la orden We're there to serve you. I hope you guys come. Try out the amazing food. And the ambiance. And the The The The shift into the nightlife it's, you could get a little bit of everything. You go for dinner, then casual drinks, then end up dancing, you know, the night away with your wife or significant other, whoever, but it's definitely to bring joy to your heart.[00:41:00] And the social media is for Caoba and Aura. Caoba and Aura is underscore NYC and Caoba and Aura underscore bistro. Aura is Aura Cochina. Nice. All right, folks, I'm out. Bye.    

Scott is a recognizable face from is work on TV, movies and Broadway. He has been seen in such projects as Gilmore Girls, The Fix, Jacob's Ladder, The Girls on the Bus, East New York, The Resident, Billions, The Americans, Allegiance, The Carrie Diaries, Necessary Roughness, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and many more.

Get up and get informed! Here's all the local news you need to start your day: 18 people, including federal, state, and city government workers, are being charged in a sprawling indictment ranging from making ghost guns to identity theft and fraud. Meanwhile, New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy's victory in the Somerset County Democrats' convention on Thursday has drawn criticism over the process. Plus, the NYPD says it's investigating an 8-year-old boy allegedly menacing another 8-year-old boy with an unloaded pistol on Thursday at P.S. 158 in East New York, Brooklyn.

Single-handedly redefining the term “character actor,” the accomplished Richard Kind is surely one of the hardest working people in show business. His resume is unfathomably wide and deep, with over 270 film and television credits, spanning roles that exploit his killer comedic timing, like sitcoms “Spin City” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and those that exercise his dramatic chops, like HBO's “Luck” and the CBS procedural “East New York.” He's an actor just as likely to appear in an Oscar-winning feature film as an animated one, to scene-steal a sketch comedy series as to star in an indie short. Kind is also a Tony-nominated stage actor, having appeared on Broadway in “The Producers,” “Funny Girl” and “The Big Knife,” among many others. Richard Kind speaks with host Alec Baldwin about the type of comedians that raised him, how he found his way to the profession after almost attending law school – and why he believes he is the “Costco of acting,”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thousands of New Yorkers depending on public benefits face worsening delays in processing aid. Meanwhile, New York City officials say Illegal lockout complaints are on the rise in East New York, Brooklyn. WNYC's David Brand accompanied a group of city workers trying to educate renters there about their rights. Plus, the Biden administration is releasing funds to communities in Brooklyn and New York City suburbs after widespread flooding in September 2023 from the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia. Finally, New York City is set to roll out a whole new way to have the trash picked up at private buildings. WNYC's Michael Hill sits with Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso who was chair of the sanitation committee when the plan was created.

This is a preview of a special bonus episode for Patreon supporters of The War on Cars!   In the last episode of the podcast we spent some time with Baruch, Shawon, and their battery-swapping startup company, PopWheels. When I started working on that episode, I figured I was going to learn a lot about e-bikes, batteries, and the delivery app business. And I did. But over the course of more than a half dozen interviews and conversations between May and December 2023, I also learned a lot about Bangladeshi politics, immigration, and life in New York City as an e-bike delivery worker.   One of my favorite interviews for this episode took place on a crisp, sunny, Tuesday morning last October. I biked out to East New York, Brooklyn to meet Shawon and his friend Fokhrul, a Bangladeshi delivery worker who uses PopWheels battery-swapping network. (Shawon and Fokhrul asked me not to use their last names because they have asylum-seeker cases working their way through the legal system). We found a park bench and spent the morning talking about the political oppression they faced in Bangladesh, their arduous, months-long journey to the United States, and what their lives are like here in New York City. It was super interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. But, as often happens with these things, only tiny bits of this conversation made it into Episode 118. So, for this special bonus episode I wanted to share more of my interview with Shawon and Fokhrul with you. I also had some fun additional bits and pieces of tape with Baruch that never made it into the last episode. So, you'll find some of that woven in here too. I hope you enjoy hanging with Shawon, Fokhrul and Baruch as much as I did.   You can join us as a Patreon supporter to listen to the whole thing. -- Aaron

Chris Banks, New York City Council member (District 42, East New York, Starrett City, Brownsville, Canarsie, Remsen Village, and East Flatbush), talks about his district and his priorities as one of four new members of the City Council.

What type of mindset would you have if you were sentenced to 25 years to life? In this episode of the Nightmare Success podcast, host Brent Cassity interviews Joe Robinson, the founder of Mindful Money. Joe shares his personal journey from growing up in the rough neighborhood of East New York, Brooklyn, to getting involved in a life of crime and eventually being sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Despite the challenges he faced, Joe's passion for helping others and improving financial literacy remained strong. This episode highlights the importance of education, mindset, and resilience in overcoming personal nightmares and finding success. Joe Robinson shares his experience of facing a long sentence and entering the unknown world of prison. He discusses how he found purpose in the law library and began teaching classes to help others. After his release, Joe started Mindful Money, a platform focused on financial literacy and empowerment. He highlights the challenges of reentry and adapting to technology. Joe emphasizes that individuals should not be defined by their past mistakes and that everyone has the capacity to do good things and be resilient. In this conversation, Joe Robinson shares his journey from incarceration to success and offers valuable insights on mindset, overcoming challenges, finding purpose, building a support system, taking responsibility, and creating opportunities for others. Joe's story serves as an inspiration for anyone facing adversity and seeking to turn their life around. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/brent-cassity/support

This week on Dopey! We are joined by infamous corrupt New York City police officer, Michael Dowd. We hear about his rise in East New York's legendary 75th precinct. We learn about how Michael Dowd broke bad and get the story on what happened after teaming up with nefarious Dominican drug kingpin Adam Diaz. PLUS how Dowd's alcoholism and addiction to action(and cocaine) drove him ultimately to 12 years in prison. EMAILS! VOICEMAILS, The Return of Ask Erin! and much more on this brand new super gritty corrupt morally shaky episode of that good old Dopey show. Also a short homage to friend of the show and Los Angeles legend - Mike Martt. More About Dopey: Dopey Podcast is the world's greatest podcast on drugs, addiction and dumb shit. Chris and I were two IV heroin addicts who loved to talk about all the coke we smoked, snorted and shot, all the pills we ate, smoked, all the weed we smoked and ate, all the booze we consumed and all the consequences we suffered. After making the show for 2 and a half years, Chris tragically relapsed and died from a fentanyl overdose. Dopey continued on, at first to mourn the horrible loss of Chris, but then to continue our mission - which was at its core, to keep addicts and alcoholics company. Whether to laugh at our time in rehab, or cry at the worst missteps we made, Dopey tells the truth about drugs, addiction and recovery. We continually mine the universe for stories rife with debauchery and highlight serious drug taking and alcoholism. We also examine different paths toward addiction recovery. We shine a light on harm reduction and medication assisted treatment. We talk with celebrities and nobodies and stockpile stories to be the greatest one stop shop podcast on all things drugs, addiction, recovery and comedy pathfinding the route to the heart of the opioid epidemic.

Ariel J. Luna has been serving veterans in higher education and government for more than 18 years. Luna is originally from Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Starrett City section of East New York. AJ's mother is from the Dominican Republic and his father is from Argentina. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at the start of 2000 and he was stationed as a communication soldier in Fort Gordon, Georgia, South Korea, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After he left the Army in 2002, he joined the NY National Guard where he was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004-2005. While serving in the National Guard, Luna was pursing his bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College. He completed his master's in administrative science with a concentration in Non-Profit Organizational Development, Human Resource Administration, and Global Leadership from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2012.After a successful tenure at FDU, Luna has recently appointed by Bergen County's new County Executive, James Tedesco III, as the new Director of Veteran Services for Bergen County. Luna plans to bring his experience and expertise to serve the 30,000 resident veterans of Bergen County. Luna focused his efforts on housing, employment opportunities, and good service referral providers. Luna also served as the Deputy Director for the Office of Government and Community Relations for the NJ Department of Transportation from 2021-2022. He is also one of the founders of the NJ SOS Veteran Stakeholders Group.  A Northern NJ non-profit that hosts quarterly county meetings throughout the Northern part of the State that gives organizations an opportunity to network and refer veterans to various services in the community.  He assists in putting together Suicide Awareness Seminars to educate the community about resources available to veterans in crisis.  There have been successful events in Elmwood Park, Newark, and Trenton.  He is married to his wife, Shevonne Murray-Luna, and has 2 beautiful daughters, Mariah Angel Luna, 10, and AJ Luna, 7. Find The AJ LunaCatholic Charities NJ SOS VetsNJ SOS on FacebookFind The Suffering PodcastThe Suffering Podcast InstagramKevin Donaldson InstagramMike Failace InstagramBuzzsproutApple PodcastSpotifyFacebookTikTokYouTubeMake your brain your friend with Better Help. Go to BetterHelp.Com/Suffering for 10% off your first monthSupport the showThe Suffering Podcast Instagram Kevin Donaldson Instagram TikTok YouTube

A murder that has haunted the neighborhood for years. In the heart of East New York, a neighborhood known for its grit and secrets, a chilling mystery unfolds. Detective Donovan , a seasoned investigator, finds himself entangled in a web of darkness and deception. An all-night house party erupts into chaos, culminating in a fatal shooting. Kelson Fleary, a regular at these raucous gatherings, becomes the tragic victim. The party house, notorious for its disruptive activities, becomes the epicenter of the investigation. Witnesses remain silent, but their eyes speak volumes—a community accustomed to keeping it Listen n Download FREE YOUR FAV STORIES : Romance : https://creativeaudios.in/romance  Adventure : https://creativeaudios.in/season/23  Super Hero : https://creativeaudios.in/superheroes  Spiritual Stories : https://creativeaudios.in/spiritualstories Crime & Mystery https://creativeaudios.in/crime-and-mystery Sherlock Holmes : https://creativeaudios.in/season/7  Christmas stories : https://creativeaudios.in/season/25 Arabian Nights : https://creativeaudios.in/season/5 Adventures of Sinbad : https://creativeaudios.in/season/23 Freedom Fighters : https://creativeaudios.in/indianfreedomfighters Hindi Stories : https://creativeaudios.in/hindi-kahaniyaan Interviews with Global Artists : https://creativeaudios.in/season/26 Follow on Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/podcastaudios/ Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/podcastaudios/

New Guest Gastor Almonte joins KATG to talk about Black names vs. White names, explaining White people to Black children, being a landlord in East New York, and when it's okay to zone out on your kids. Also, John Stamos reignites the Lori Loughlin college admissions scandal and the trio covers the airline pilot who claims that psychedelic mushrooms caused him to try to down a flight midair.