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Law and Order

2/28/12 3:33pm

Law and Order

Wreckage from the May 2008 Crane Collapse on E. 91st St.

DOB Wanted to Cuff Crane Owner James Lomma for Shoddy Crane Upkeep

The former head of the Department of Building’s cranes and derricks division said that crane owner James Lomma should have been arrested for poorly maintaining two tower cranes in 2007.

During her testimony at Mr. Lomma’s manslaughter trial in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday, former DOB official Bethany Klein said that the head of New York Crane & Equipment Corp. had failed to make two crucial repairs to the two cranes, one of which eventually collapse and kill two men at the E. 91st street accident in 2008.  Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 1/21/12 1:11am

Law and Order

Frank Abagnale he isn't

Catch Arntsen If You Can: Accused Real Estate Lawyer Thief Faces the Music

The grim-looking fella wearing a black Adidas tracksuit hanging slackly from his broad frame didn’t appear to be the sort you’d figure for a globetrotting, multi-million-dollar-swindling, authority-duping mountebank that the female Assistant District Attorney was describing late Friday night inside a Manhattan Criminal Courtroom.

Perhaps that’s the most obvious knock on Douglas Arntsen, a 34-year-old real estate attorney who, according to his attorney Allen Alan Lewis, is a native Staten Islander with deep ties to the borough and the two parishes he attended as a kid—St. Peter’s Church and Our Lady Star of the Sea—not to mention his hardworking parents. Indeed, in testimony now immortalized in criminal court documents, the defendant, insisted Mr. Lewis, was raised by a law-abiding architect and an assistant principal at a local school.

“He deserves to be treated as a person who has never been arrested before,” said Mr. Lewis during a criminal court arraignment proceeding late Friday night–”[as a] US citizen with deep community ties.” Read More