A Brooklyn volunteer neighborhood safety patrol member pleaded guilty on Wednesday to bribing police officers to expedite gun license applications, becoming the latest person to admit wrongdoing in a wide-ranging corruption probe in New York City. Alex Lichtenstein, a member of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood patrol group, told a federal judge in Manhattan that he…
Two-and-a-half years after a late-night gang beating that left him partially blinded, Brooklyn man Taj Patterson is preparing to face one of his alleged assailants in court. Mayer Herskovic, a 24-year-old Hasidic man, faces felony charges connected to the Williamsburg, Brooklyn beating in a trial that began August 29 in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Patterson is…
Pinchas Braver and Abraham Winkler, two Hasidic men involved in the 2013 unlawful imprisonment and vicious beating of Taj Patterson, a then-22-year-old gay black man, are now attempting to shirk their sentence. Braver and Winkler, who pled guilty to unlawful imprisonment in a plea bargain, were sentenced to only three years probation, a $1400 restitution…
A gay African-American man who was beaten, allegedly by a group of Hasidic Jews, in Brooklyn in 2013 is suing New York City and its police department, saying their improper favoring of the Williamsburg neighborhood’s Orthodox security patrol deprived him of equal justice under the law. The victim, Taj Patterson, was expected to file a…
The Brooklyn Hasidim accused of beating a young, gay black man named Taj Patterson back in 2013 are reportedly about to get a plea deal so sweet, they won’t serve a single day in prison. Patterson, who was beaten so badly that he was left blind in one eye, and who had homophobic slurs hurled…
A former leader of a Brooklyn Hasidic security patrol was arrested in Rockland County on April 17 on charges that he offered cash to a police officer in return for gun permits, prosecutors have announced. Shaya Lichtentsein, a former coordinator of the Boro Park-based Shomrim security patrol, was charged in federal court in Manhattan with…
A gay black man who says he was beaten by a group of Hasidic men in Brooklyn sued five of his alleged assailants and a local Jewish volunteer security patrol. Taj Patterson, 22, who was brutally beaten on Dec. 1 in the Williamsburg section, filed the lawsuit Monday in Brooklyn Supreme Court against the five…
● Invisible City By Julia Dahl Minotaur Books, 304 pages, $24.99 About a week or so after I published my first short story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I learned an embarrassing lesson about the importance of getting things right. Scoring a publication credit in EQMM, the longest continuously running, and arguably the best magazine…
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