Jared Kushner, Katie Holmes and Mike Bloomberg (PMc)

- The intimidatingly assiduous Peggy Siegal greets people at the door; thanks us for coming to celebrate party with The New York Observer. "We are The New York Observer!" We cry. She doesn't even pause. "Well, it's great to see you anyway."

-Terry McDonell: I've always loved the Observer, I have great respect for Peter Kaplan. The coverage of everything I was interested in New York in the past 25 years was reflected in The Observer at the highest level.

- Ray Kelly recalls the last time he was at the Four Seasons. "[We] feel like you never leave," we tell the Police Commissioner. His reply: "A lot of people feel that way."

- Spike Lee keeps on puffy coat all evening, talks to Katie Holmes, Donald Trump. Catch tail end of his conversation with Mr. Trump: "Well, that's one thing we agree on."

- Mayor Bloomberg gets onstage, proceeds to riff about slipping Harvey Weinstein a script (Bloomie on Bloomie), Cory Booker ("The handsomest mayor West of the Hudson") and The Observer ("It's OK when you needle somebody else, but not me.")

- Michael Shannon confounds half the party with his celebrity status. "What famous person is that?" we are asked more than several times. We finally after give up and refer them to Boardwalk Empire after several of our "the Future General Zod" joke receives blank stares.

- Nick Denton refuses to take photo with Rupert Murdoch because it's "too obvious."

-Chuck Close: I love the Observer almost in spite of myself. At first it was a guilty pleasure. When I go to Europe and can't read you, I get really upset.

- Mayor Cory Booker meets Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s press secretary/Girls actress Audrey Gelman. Mr. Booker finds a way to bring the conversation back around to Star Trek.

- Game Change’s Emmy-winning screenwriter Danny Strong still getting recognized for his years on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But he's a good sport, and challenges fanboy to name the one episode of the hit show that was nominated for an Emmy. (Answer: "Hush.")

-Former editor Peter Kaplan begs off with the excuse that he is trying to wean himself off of anti-anxiety medication.

-Ronald Perelman: I love the publication! I think everybody here is great. I think this is the best collection of New Yorkers I've seen in 20 years!

- Jay McInerney inquires about the after-party; never shows up.

The Four Seasons Restaurant, 99 East 52nd Street, (212) 754-9494, 6:30-9:30pm, by invitation only.

Julie Patz, on the Today show, two years after her son Etan's disappearance.

A New York grand jury has indicted Pedro Hernandez in connection with the 1979 death of Etan Patz. Mr. Hernandez, a 51-year-old resident of Maple Shade, N.J., has been charged with murder in the second degree. He was arrested in May 2012 after reportedly confessing to killing the little boy.

Etan Patz was on his way to school when he vanished from Soho on May 25, 1979. His disappearance became national news, his image eventually appearing on milk cartons across the country.

At the time, Mr. Hernandez was a stock clerk at a bodega near the Patz residence. According to a statement from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, Mr. Hernandez said he lured Etan into the basement of the bodega by promising the boy a soda.

The New York Post reports that some investigators don't believe the state can win its case against Mr. Hernandez, and they have good reasons:

Hernandez has been described by his defense lawyer as bipolar and suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations. A six-month investigation has yielded no additional evidence beyond Hernandez's four, original arrest confessions plus the word of six of Hernandez's church and family members, who have told cops that Hernandez made incriminating statements about having killed a child or "done something bad" in the past, according to sources.

Mentally stable or not, Mr. Hernandez may have been confessing to the crime since Etan Patz disappeared. Detectives investigating the case in 1979, however, dismissed those confessions as the ravings "of a lunatic" at the time.

Let's eat. (EPA)

Just before Hurricane Sandy hit, everyone was busy stocking up provisions to weather the maelstrom. Following the storm, there was a scramble to to find more to eat as stores were empty and restaurants closed. This is a city of gourmands, after all. For the city officials who were responsible for guiding the city through the disaster, this was no exception.

While we were compiling our oral history of Hurricane Sandy, Joe Lhota mentioned that even in the worst of the storm, he had managed to keep his daily dietary regimen intact. This got us wondering: what was everybody eating while they scrambled around getting the city ready and helping it recover? Here is what the protectors and providers of the city had on their plates and in their pockets.

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, MTA: Even in the middle of the storm, I had what I always have—an omelet with two sausage patties. It's what I eat every morning. Would that be a cheese omelet? Is there any other kind? I don't put shit in them. Who needs onions in the morning? It's all protein, no carbs for breakfast, and that's the only thing I eat until dinner time.

Ray Kelly, commissioner, NYPD: He eats two patties a day, huh? Jeeze! He eats that stuff? I'm trying to eat egg whites. I had those Dunkin' Donuts egg white things, the sandwiches. I've had several of those. But I won't have anymore for a while.

It's funny because you take food for granted. I'm out riding around, and a place is closed, lots of places to eat are closed down. When the subways are closed, the restaurants are closed because they can't get their workers in there. It's something that is driven home sort of dramatically when you drive down Columbus Avenue, you think, "Hey there's no flooding here." Yeah, but they can't get their workers to work. Food suddenly became much more of an issue.

Sal Cassano, commissioner, FDNY: I think I ate a granola bar for dinner the night of the storm, and that was it.

Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner, NYC DOT: I’ve been eating a lot of granola bars, a lot of granola bars. And they serve peanut butter sandwiches at every relief station, so between the granola bars and peanut butter and jelly, that’s it. Fortunately I walk up and down the stairs at home and work, and when you’re out all day in the field, I hope it won’t be too damaging.

Josh Vlasto, communications director, Cuomo administration: I don't want to sound complain-y, but when you're on the road, we haven't been eating that much. On the days when you're doing four or five stops, you leave at 10 in the morning and your don't get back to the office till 4 in the morning. It's a lot of granola bars and bottled water that you pick up. But people have been ordering pizza. But nothing has been open. Lots of granola bars, lets put it that way. It's a lot of throwing granola bars into the jacket and munching along the way.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC OEM: Well I didn't eat that much. I mean, we do feed people here, so I'm a big salad person. If I can get fish I'm very happy, but we didn't get much of that. Mainly salads, a little bit of rice and little bit of bread. But I'm a skinny guy. I don't eat that much. There was pizza. I don't eat that stuff, but some of them do, unfortunately.

Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations: I was at OEM, and my hurricane diet was coffee. And I had a trail mix that I had that I actually had brought. Store-bought? No, no, I made it, I make my own. I go to this place called Nut Box and I make my own mix, and I had it in a big jar, and I was eating it by the fistful. Will you share your secret recipe? Almonds, cashews and dried apricots, dried cherries. And a little bit of coconut flaked shavings. It’s quite good.

Howard Glaser, director of state operations, Cuomo administration: Coffee, Coke, bagels.

John Rhea, chairman, NYCHA: I had a couple boxes of Ritz crackers that I was running around with, a bunch of bottles of water, and I had some spaghetti that I made with a little sauce. That tasted just as good cold, but it was even better if it was room temperature.

Robert LiMandri, commissioner, DOB: I didn’t eat very much all week. I remember having chicken soup on Monday, and that was probably the last time I ate for two and a half days. I didn’t have an appetite, standing down there, watching that crane.

(Photo illustration: Ed Johnson)

When Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it fell to the city’s leaders and the thousands of workers at their command to secure our coasts, to rescue those trapped by water and without power, to help the city rebuild. The Observer spent Monday and Tuesday talking with New York's top public officials about Hurricane Sandy. These are their experiences in their own words.

The Storm

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: I have an app on my iPad that monitors hurricanes on the East Coast. I have always lived on the water. I always watch the app. So when I first got involved in this—it was long before it even hit Jamaica—I knew when it started as a tropical storm, and a hurricane, and a tropical storm, and then a hurricane again.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC Office of Emergency Management: We follow the weather very closely this time of year as it comes off the tip of Africa, or wherever it develops. This particular storm came out of the southwest of the Caribbean. At 11 a.m. on October 22, we saw a tropical depression. At that point it’s just a depression, and you don’t know much about it. By 6 p.m., it was upgraded already to a tropical storm called Sandy. It continued to strengthen during the next day, and we kept track of it as it moved across Jamaica.

On Oct. 24, we convened a coastal storm steering committee. That was made up of all the city and state agencies that would be part of any reaction to a coastal storm in New York City. When we do that, it means we see a potential threat to the city. On the 25th, we activated the situation room at OEM, we brought in the Police Department, the Fire Department, the city and state departments of health, the Department of Education, MTA, all the major agencies. We said, “We think this is going to be a big storm and we want to be ready.”

Josh Vlasto, communications director and senior adviser, Cuomo administration: We have a National Weather Service representative within our Homeland Security office up in Albany. When they send those emails saying “Potentially devastating storm coming in,” it puts everyone on notice.

Ray Kelly, commissioner, Police Department: It was a slow moving storm, so it was on everybody's screen that this storm had a lot of potential but these things are uncertain. We prepared. I think we prepared as well for this storm as any other and quite frankly we had more time because it was a slow moving storm.

Veronica White, Robert LiMandri, John Doherty, David Yassky, John Rhea, Mayor Bloomberg, Robert Steele, Janette Sadik-Khan and Sal Cassano at the Office of Emergency Management. (Mayor's Office)

Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations: Either Wednesday night or Thursday morning, the decision wad made that we were going to mobilize all the materials and stand up to shelters. And making that decision then, you basically are over the threshold of mobilizing staff, getting facilities ready and doing all that. So at that point, I was already fully committed to the idea that something was going to happen regardless of what the storm did.

Sal Cassano, commissioner, Fire Department: We were getting all of our boats out, getting all of our pumps ready, getting all of our equipment to where we knew we would need them, areas which would be hit the hardest. We would redeploy our equipment to the most vulnerable areas in the A-Zone, such as Staten Island, such as the Rockaways. We kept extra resources in the tunnels, in case the bridges were cut off because of the wind. That way, if the island was isolated we would have enough equipment to handle the calls that we knew we would receive.

Veronica White, commissioner, Department of Parks and Recreation: We sand-bagged everything, every recreation center and field house, every parks facility, everything that could possibly flood. It was all hands on deck, with people working twelve-hour shifts around the clock. We tried to station people near their homes, so they could be safe and still get to work without having to rely on mass transit for the clean-up we knew was coming.

John Doherty, commissioner, Department of Sanitation: Our department faced this like we would fight a snowstorm. That was the kind of plan we followed for where to deploy, what to prepare for. The weather is different, but the job is the same.

Mr. Kelly: We've been in this business for a long time, and we learn from experience. I was a police commissioner in 1992, I guess, when we had that Nor’easter that did a lot of damage. We learned a lot from that storm, from all of these storms and disasters. It's in the details. This administration put in these boats, they’re called Jon boats, which is a boat without a motor. They’re very shallow. You want to be able to get around on our streets. We had at least one per precinct that was reasonably close to water or had a history of water. Most people if you're on land someplace, you don't think of having boats.

Howard Glaser, director of state operations, Cuomo administration: Really this started a year ago, the day Hurricane Irene ended. Everything we learned from that storm, we realized the system needed a total overhaul.

Joe Lhota inspects the storm preparations downtown. (MTA)

Mr. Lhota: Given the experience I had a little over a year ago with Irene, everyone was aware of what and how long it took to get our equipment on safe ground. The Transit Authority needed 12 hours for the subways, the buses needed eight hours. With the Long Island Railroad, some of the equipment will snap if the wind gets above 40 miles per hour. That’s the last thing in the world you want.

John Rhea, chairman, New York City Housing Authority: Right up until the storm hit, we had cops out there knocking on doors, trying to get people out. We had buses from the DOE and the NYPD, school buses, prison buses, just pulling as many people out as we could. But at a certain point, you know, there’s nothing more you can do, and it actually becomes a danger to our people to be out there, so you just have to let them go and hope for the best. If only they had known better.

Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation: You had wind gusts hitting 101 miles per hour. We had not seen that before, and we didn’t want anyone stuck on the bridge. We knew we weren’t going to be able to get anybody onto the bridge to rescue them in those conditions. So we shut the eastern bridges, and we had crews overnight manning them. I mean, the heroism that went into the people who sat in those trucks all night keeping the bridges closed, and the people manning the ferries all night long as the surges were chest-high in the terminal.

Mr. Vlasto: We were looking at a statewide event, so we had to be prepared everywhere. One, you had the front coming down from the north, potentially hitting the front coming up from the south, so it had the potential to blanket the whole state. The second piece was our experience in Irene. Everyone said Irene was going to be a downstate event focused on the coastline.

Instead, it mostly missed New York City and it was disastrous upstate. We were lucky. We had deployed our national guardsmen in the Catskills and up through the north country so they could be out of harm’s way and deployed downstate quickly as needed. It turned out they were exactly where they needed to be. But we learned that these type of storms have to be treated as a statewide issue. The governor visited with security officials and met with them in all the different regions of the state: Nassau, Suffolk, New York City, the Catskills, Binghamton, Albany and up to the north country. We were treating this as something with the potential to be disastrous all over.

Sandy arrives. (Getty)

The Surge

Mr. Holloway: When the Mayor did his press conference at 11:30 on Monday morning, we had looked at the surge, tracking actual surge values and where flooding was happening, and it was happening on the FDR. I turned to Janette Sadik-Khan, and said, "Look, look at the numbers, I mean, isn’t this basically what we saw at the height of Irene?" And that was at 11:30 in the morning. So at that point, that’s where I thought, "Well boy, I don’t know that we really know exactly how bad the inundation is going to be here."

Mr. Cassano: On Monday we were here all day, planning. It was still relatively quiet when we got a report of a crane on a 90-story building that collapsed. That was pretty much the start of a very, very active and serious night. We had a four-alarm assignment for an incident that wasn’t even a fire, so we had a couple of hundred firefighters up there evacuating buildings, and now it’s starting to get windy, and now the activity is starting to pick up, and we have all these resources in Manhattan.

Robert LiMandri, commissioner, Department of Buildings: Certainly none of us—including contractors, anyone you talked to—ever expected the boom on that crane to snap back. For me, that was when we started to see the actual power of the storm. I think most commissioners would tell you that it really put everyone on edge. But then as the fire broke out in Breezy Point, the flood surge was coming up and we saw how bad it was past Zone A.

Mr. Cassano: And then we get a fire on City Island, another four-alarmer, and that took a lot of resources up in the Bronx, and that was not even because of the hurricane, it was just a fire, a fire in a restaurant.

Mr. Holloway: When the storm starts to get worse, there's not much you can do. It’s like turning an aircraft carrier. What you can do is you can put people on the ground, and you can really encourage people to leave, and you can make sure that you have the capacity to accept them. It just shows that this is a truly life-and-death situation that people need to take it very seriously.

A police officer watches the surge in Battery Park. (Getty)

Ms. Sadik-Khan: I live downtown. When I saw the water go all the way up to Washington Street, which is two blocks from the river, and the wind was howling and glass was flying through the air, I had a pretty big ‘oh shit’ moment right then.

Mr. Lhota: I was on my way downtown to see Tom Prendergast, the head of New York City Transit, who was down there keeping an eye on the subway tunnels at the Batter. I was at NY1, I left NY1, and the West Side Highway was just gone. We headed down 14th street and we couldn't get onto 11th Avenue. It was already at least a foot of water at 11th Avenue. Chelsea Piers will tell you they were completely underwater. So we did a U-Turn and then went down Washington Street and went down as far as we could and then the water was coming up over Washington Street. So the water had gone beyond, you know, had gone up one more block, and in fact the next morning we could see all the debris that was left there. So the surge pushed up and pushed over on both sides of the Hudson. And then it was looking for anywhere, anywhere to go.

Mr. Cassano: We had resources being deployed all over. Once the surge came, we got hit with a flurry of calls. The tide was rising and the wind was knocking down trees. In the middle of all that, we got this fire at Breezy Point, and we had no access to the fire, our apparatus couldn’t get down the street. So what the firefighters did was, they went in to evacuate the people out of buildings, get them out of there. We thought we’d take care of the life hazards first and then we would fight the fire.

That was happening in Breezy Point and we were getting a flurry of calls from people in Staten Island and certain parts of the Rockaway who were trapped in their houses, trapped in their attics. We had 30 small boats deployed all over the city and they were being used, our high-axle vehicles—like the brushfire and torpedo vehicles—we were getting them deployed to try and get these people out of their houses in the high waters. By the way, we were also getting those calls from Manhattan and the Battery. That was flooded and the power had gone out, and people were trapped. I don’t think anything has overwhelmed the city like that before.

Mr. Rhea: We were watching the television, we were seeing this movie play out in real life, in terms of water gushing in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan, the Rockaways, you name it. Seeing the level of surge, it's rushing into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, knowing that so many of our projects in these low-lying areas, knowing how much water we took on with Hurricane Irene, which was nothing close to this, realizing that most of our mechanicals are subterranean—it was clear we were going to have real problems.

Joe Lhota, Josh Vlasto and Governor Cuomo inspect flooding in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. (MTA)

Mr. Lhota: When I got downtown to meet Prendergast, we were looking at where we were, we both realized how deep the water was at South Ferry station. It didn’t surprise me when we found out later that the water was all way up to the ceiling. It was four feet above the ground that night. And then we walked over to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, where we ran into the governor totally by accident. I don’t know why I went over to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. I really don’t. We hadn’t been told about water rushing in, but we went over there, and boy, what I saw was extraordinary. White-water rapids, and a pace—you could have created hydro power.

I’ll use the words that the governor used. It was disorienting. It was. You heard it. You saw it. And you weren’t really sure you were hearing it and seeing it correctly. I never expected the Hudson River to do that.

Mr. Vlasto: The governor was standing with Lhota at the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the water was rushing in so quickly that the sound was deafening. I think that for him, that was the moment—where the water was that night, when you’re down there, standing at the tunnel, there’s so much water that you can’t hear—I think the governor would say that was the “We Got a Problem” moment.

Mr. Glaeser: It was a sound you never heard before in Lower Manhattan, a rushing river. And then we went over to the World Trade Center and we saw Niagara Falls was pouring into the site. This was no ordinary storm.

Officials inspect the damage to the Rockaways, including a decimated Breezy Point, from National Guard Blackhawk helicopters. (Governor's Office)

The Flood

Mr. Cassano: We started to get into the buildings that were actually flooded to make some searches. We were still getting a lot of calls from people who were trying to get out of their homes. So we had to use the boats again the next morning. The challenge was to actually assess the damage. We had firehouses that we had to evacuate in the Rockaways and Coney Island, along with a number of EMS stations. We had streets blocked, we had streets still flooded—it was a very difficult operation. It was a mess, and it still is.

Mr. LiMandri: We use a methodology that is used in earthquake recoveries called ATC-45—it’s modified because it’s not an earthquake, but all the principles are the same. The first path is to do a windshield: to sweep the neighborhoods and try to identify how hard-hit each neighborhood is. With the areas that are hard-hit, we go block by block and then identify those buildings that have some damage. The categories start with green, meaning fine, we don’t see any exterior degradation of the façade or foundations. They may have had water damage, but we don’t think it is significant. The second is yellow for minor structural damage, major water infiltration that we know could be a concern for the foundation. The third is red, and we found this in many communities in Rockaway and Staten Island, where the building foundation had been compromised to the point where it could collapse or there was significant damage to the structure.

We’ve tagged 16,000 buildings so far, going back to last Wednesday. We expect to be done by Sunday. There were 400 red buildings so far, but far more are in worse shape. You may have a green building that has been destroyed inside. Structurally, it’s sound, that is our first concern, because it is a matter of safety, but everything else is ruined.

Mr. Doherty: There are some areas, particularly in Rockaway and parts of Staten Island, where you had structural damage to buildings and debris came out into the streets from them. Furniture, wall boards, insulation, tile, just about anything that people would have in their basements or on their first floors. It was just piling up everywhere. You'd spend the day, think you'd finally cleaned up the street and you could mark it off your list, and you come back the next day and it's full again.

The police rescue stranded New Yorkers. (Getty)

Mr. Vlasto: We were going downtown, the day after the storm, to look around. It was right after or shortly after the streetlights went out, and I was driving down Second Avenue with no streetlights. The sun was just rising. It just sort of sunk in. There were no cops on the street directing , no crosswalk lights to tell people when to stop and go. No lights to block people crossing avenues. It was scary. That was really scary. Because you never knew when you were going to hit people, when you were going to get T-boned. Or if somebody was going to jump out into the street. That was really scary. It’s almost better to be driving in than when it’s completely open.

Mr. Lhota: The MTA is a very complex organization. You’ve got the bridge-and-tunnel guys, they had two tunnels down. Not only is the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel out, which didn’t surprise me, but we had water in the Queens-Midtown tunnel. We’ve never had water in the Queens-Midtown tunnel before—ever. So that was a surprising occurrence. I always knew that the LIRR and Metro-North would have trees down all over the place, but this was hard to believe. And then there was the subway system, which I knew was going to have some water. The reality is that the preparatory work that the Transit Authority did helped in many cases.

Nobody’s ever asked why the 4/5 tunnel, the Drummond Tunnel—why did it come back so fast? Bowling Green station is a little higher, and so is Brooklyn where the train comes out. But we also made sure to seal up as much as we could. We moved the trains out and everything was ready to go. More importantly, everyone was ready to go, and they worked nonstop to dig us out, pump us out and get us back up and running. A week ago, when I saw all that water rushing in downtown, I never would have imagined we would be up and running again like this so quickly. Not in that moment, at least.

Mr. Glaser: Coming in with the National Guard on Thursday, carrying food and water with the governor down in Lower Manhattan—we were at the Lexington Avenue Armory with the Food Bank of New York—you don’t expect to be doing that in Manhattan. The power was still off. It was just a shift in our expectations of what government is. Just every day, on a regular basis, there were things like that happening every day. Just the sight of National Guard troops in Manhattan. They were on a humanitarian mission, you know, but it makes you realize what a thin thread it can be any time, keeping a society going.

FEMA, the govenror, the mayor, the MTA. (Governors Office)

Ms. White: We walked every street in every community board, the entire city, looking for downed trees and other damage. We inspected every park and playground, approximately 1700 of them, and made certain they were safe to open to the public. Now we have about 83 percent open. We've had over 3,000 volunteers come out to help us clean up. And we have hundreds of Parks people in the field documenting everything that has occurred to submit to FEMA so we get back every penny New York is entitled to for its parks.

Mr. Lhota: We heard that a 40-foot boat ended up across the tracks outside the Ossining station. The first thing everyone wants to do is get a picture: “We gotta see this.” So we got a picture. And then Howard Permut, the president of Metro-North, and Robert Lieblong, the executive vice president who operates the railroad every day, without blinking an eye they found a piece of machinery in our shop that could lift up a boat. They went to a boatyard and bought the racks and put the boat underneath and lifted it up. They used a train crane to move a boat. It’s emblematic of how anything could possibly happen. They just said, “Okay, let’s deal with it.” And they did.

Mr. Cassano: I spent this weekend on Staten Island helping out a couple of different command centers, and this weekend is when it really hit me to the core, because my sister lives in the area. When I was helping out, I just took a ride down to make sure that she was okay, and they were just emptying the house out. It had been totally flooded. All her possessions were on the sidewalk. And going down blocks and blocks and seeing the same thing in other people’s homes, it really hit home how bad this was.

Mr. Vlasto: I think it was Lyndenhurst—this will stick with me—we were walking, and we went to a street and into a house. The governor walks in a house, and this old lady was standing outside the house crying. She had a picture in her hand and she was crying, and she said, “This is my grandson.” She said, “I’m so happy I found this picture.” She said, “I found it right here.” And we couldn’t figure it out. And then she said, “But I live four houses down.” That was sad. I don’t have any happy moments yet. I’m waiting.

The mayor surveys the damage. (Mayor's office)

The Wake

Mr. Lhota: The thing that amazed me is that when we put together maps of what was together in the system, it was substantive. And then there was the desire to put together the bus bridge, because we realized we had a gap in service between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Queens and Manhattan with the 7 train, so very quickly Tom Prendergast and his team, along with Darryl Irick on the MTA Bus, put together the bus bridge.

Ms. Sadik-Khan: You had issues everywhere, you had no subways coming across from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so we needed to set up a new surface subway system. We worked with the MTA—we’d set up the bridges, so why not some bus bridges?—and the NYPD got their people out there to enforce that.

Mr. Lhota: I drove by it the first day, but the was so horrendous I just wanted to get into the city. But what I saw was a lot of people gathered around. New Yorkers don’t do things in a line. People were all jockeying around, seeing who could get on the bus first. But we learned our lesson. That was Thursday morning, and by Friday morning, we took the Disney approach—we created pathways, allowing people to see that they were moving through the pathways. On Friday morning we were putting 3,700 people an hour on buses, three buses loading at a time, dedicated lanes from the city, police escorts from the city. And once they got on the buses, they were at 42nd Street in 20 minutes. A world of difference from what happened on Thursday. First time through, it was really important to see what we could learn, how could we make it better, and we made it better.

Ms. Sadik-Khan: On Wednesday, when everybody came in to drive, it was just one big parking lot. So looking at that, you needed to do something. I wanted to go with the HOV3, and of course that only works if you have the Police Department doing the enforcement. And they were really terrific—they did an amazing job. I can’t say enough for Ray Kelly’s team, it was really extraordinary what they did.

Govenor Cuomo comforts families put out by the storm. (Governor's Office)

Mr. Kelly: I’m going out again tonight, and I know I will ask people, “How are cops treating you?” And it will probably be very positive, because it’s been very positive. I haven’t had a negative comment. And people aren’t afraid to give me a negative comment.

Mr. Doherty: We have had a number of sanitation workers, particularly out in Rockaway and some areas in Staten Island, who have either lost their homes completely or had a lot of water damage. The ones that I have talked to, they are coming to work, they have been coming in. And I remember earlier in the storm, I was talking to this gentleman out in Rockaway, and he said “I’m here to help my neighbors. Yes, I had damage to my house, but I’m here to help.” The morale has been outstanding by the men and women of the department. They are looking for work to do sometimes. If I’m not moving them quickly enough, they are asking me, “Where can we work, where can we work?” Relax, we are going to get you there.

Mr. Kelly: Cancelling the marathon is something I'm going to remember. It was something that we were prepared to do, and all of a sudden, it was cancelled. But probably more significant for me was the sight of the area that was burned in Breezy Point. I went there, the ground was still smoldering, and all you see is an open field where the houses had burned down. But then I looked out at the end of the field, and I could see a person, and the person was very, very small. The breadth of the damage, it didn't really hit me until I saw the size of that person so far away. It's something that you see in other parts of the world. It's not something that you see on the East Coast of the United States.

Mr. Vlasto: You’re seeing idleness, and kids who are so lonely and tired and exhausted, so the governor said, you know, lets get something for kids. Give them some board games, something to make them smile. That’s where he came up with the idea to ask Walmart for some toys. They had volunteered to help, they had been donating water, so we just said, how about some toys for the kids?

Mr. Bruno: Key people, the president and everyone on down, have reached out to us. Every major official came through here, and they’ve been following up on it. We have the National Guard here. We have Department of Defense forces—they’re helping a lot with the fuel. We got the Army Corps of Engineers, they’ve been a huge partner for us and totally dedicated to getting New York City back up and running. So after the anxiety about whether help was going to come—it is a good feeling when you see this stuff.

Joe Lhota directs traffic at the bus islands in Brooklyn. (MTA)

Mr. Holloway: I was in the Rockaways this morning and this recovery, we’re going to be dedicating an absolutely enormous amount of resources to getting cleaned up and helping as many people get back into their homes as quickly as possible. We have another storm coming, you know, and now we have to brace for that, too. In Irene we responded, the storm broke up, and everybody was able to get back to business as usual pretty quickly. Here, there are certain areas in the city where people’s lives have truly been turned upside down. And we are going to be out there for as long as it takes to get it right side up.

Mr. Rhea: There were many people, through no fault of their own, who bet against Mother Nature, and to see the faces of those who were impacted because they were still in their residences and didn’t evacuate, or those who didn’t think they needed to evacuate because they were outside of the zone, that was hard. They were saying, “We really need help to get basic necessities and power and heat and hot water restored.” And asking very directly and emotionally for that assistance.

Then there’s the flip-side of that, which is being able to fix a problem—to have someone say to you, “Thank you for being able to get that done as fast as you were able to.” So for every person who is still without heat and water, there is somebody who has had it restored. For every person who is without electricity there are four times that number who have had it restored. The people who ask for help, and the appreciation when we do our jobs and deliver on behalf of these families, that is something I will remember.

Mr. Vlasto: Seeing the subways fill up, I think, was a very jarring sight for the governor. He says that it’s not just that, it’s the frequency: now we have dealt with this twice in two years. How many times do we have to deal with this again before we make substantial change? It’s almost like, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” And now we’ve just been fooled again.

Mr. Lhota: I walked into a bar on Saturday night, and even though I’m somewhat of a public figure, I’ve always enjoyed my anonymity. When I was budget director for the city and when I was deputy mayor, I didn’t even unlist my phone number. On Saturday, I walked into a bar, and people wanted to buy me a drink. That’s something that’s going to stay with me, because I was very surprised. By the way, that was my first drink after that whole week. I had wine.

Courtesy, Professionalism and Raincoats. (Getty)

One of the few bright spots to Hurricane Sandy, besides a new found appreciation for a subway system we too often loathe, is that crime is down, and according to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, there have been no homicides since the storm hit the city Monday night.

"We’ve had no murders for three days," Commissioner Kelly told reporters today inside the portico of City Hall, following the mayor's afternoon press briefing.  "And we’ve also had a reduction in domestic violence."

The commissioner was perhaps choosing his words carefully, saying no murders in three days (not counting Friday it would seem), because there was one murder, still unsolved and even unexplained, that happened Monday night just as the storm was hitting the city. The Times' crime columnist Michael Wilson published the remarkable details of the incident just today.

Commissioner Kelly explained that these things are to be expected, though, as with any natural disaster. "It’s a phenomena we’ve seen before, where there’s bad weather, where there’s any sort of major catastrophe, then crime seems to go down," the commissioner said. "We’ve had a 34 percent reduction in crime over this week."

But that does not go for all types of crimes "We’ve seen a certain increase in burglaries in certain areas of the city," the commissioner said. Those reports were mostly in Staten Island and southern Queens, two of the areas hardest hit by the storms.

The commissioner said he had yet to see similar reports for downtown Manhattan, which has been without power up until tonight, a pronouncement that surprised some reporters. But the commissioner than acknowledged that it may not be that those crimes have not happened but simply that they have not been reported, given the situation downtown.

"There may be a latent effect in terms reporting, people may not be in a position to report it, they may not be aware of it," the commissioner said.

But at least for now it's nice to hope/pretend that everyone was on their best behavior downtown during the storm.

Gilberto Valle III. (Facebook)

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced the Halloween-worthy arrest of 28-year-old NYPD officer Gilberto Valle III today. Mr. Valle, who was stationed at the 26th Precinct, has been charged with kidnapping, conspiracy and illegal use of a federal law enforcement database.

Those charges aren't strange at all, considering the crimes were allegedly committed as part of a plot with co-conspirators to kidnap and cannibalize as many as 100 women.

According to U.S. Attorney Bharara, Mr. Valle's plans were detailed and gruesome. In a press release, Mr. Bharara said that Mr. Valle "planned to kidnap women so that they could be raped, tortured, killed, cooked, and cannibalized."

The officer's plans "shock the conscience," said Mr. Bharara.

In the complaint against the officer, investigators detailed plans that allegedly went far beyond the talking stages. Mr. Valle may have thoroughly investigated targets and meticulously studied their lives.

In chat sessions held in July 2012 with someone referred to in court documents as CC-1 (Co-Conspirator 1), Mr. Valle and his associate allegedly discussed the best ways to kidnap, cook and eat an unnamed victim.

Authorities say the cop even created a document titled "Abducting and Cooking [Victim's name]: a Blueprint." The document contained the woman's name, birth date and physical details like height, weight and bra size. Investigators allege Mr. Valle even included a list of items needed, which read,

• Car (I have it)
• Chloroform (refer to website for directions)
• Rope (Strongest kind to tie her up)

Creepier still, Mr. Valle allegedly agreed with another co-conspirator to kidnap a different woman whom he would deliver bound, gagged and alive. Court documents contained a chilling transcript of an online exchange regarding the second would-be victim:

(Co-Conspirator 2): I definitely want her and how much again, I'm sorry to ask but I don't remember.
VALLE: $5,000 and she is all yours.
CC-2: Could we do 4?
VALLE: I am putting my neck on the line here. If something goes wrong somehow, I am in deep shit. $ 5,000 and you need to make sure she is not found. She will definitely make the news.

The U.S. Attorney says federal investigators found evidence of how closely Mr. Valle may have watched intended victims--cellphone data allegedly revealed the cop made and received calls while very close to the second target's Manhattan apartment. Investigators say interviews with "victim 2" revealed that she'd never had Mr. Valle over to her place and didn't know him very well.

In a statement about the arrest, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "This is a bizarre case. We suspended the officer immediately upon his arrest, and a review is now underway to determine whether there was anything in his background that should have alerted the department to his alleged proclivities."

The complaint and warrant for the arrest of Gilberto Valle III is embedded below.

Julie Patz, on the Today show, two years after her son Etan's disappearance.

In a press conference streamed live by multiple media outlets, N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Ray Kelly announced that police have arrested Pedro Hernandez in connection with the May 25, 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz. Mr. Kelly told reporters that police found "probable cause" to arrest Mr. Hernandez.

Mr. Kelly said Mr. Hernandez confessed to strangling and killing the boy as Etan headed to school the morning he vanished. Mr. Hernandez allegedly placed the body in a box which he left on the street.

Mr. Hernandez was a stock clerk in a bodega near the Patz home at the time of the disappearance. He allegedly led the boy into the basement there, luring him with the "promise of a soda," according to Commissioner Kelly.

A source tells The Daily Beast Mr. Hernandez may have confessed to Etan Patz's murder over 30 years ago :

Relatives of Pedro Hernandez first contacted police not long after Patz vanished from his New York City neighborhood on May 25, 1979, according to the source. The relatives are said to have told police after Patz’s disappearance that Hernandez, who worked in a nearby store, had admitted to them that he killed the 6-year-old boy.

Detectives interviewed Hernandez at that time, the source says, and he confessed to the crime. But the detectives deemed this first confession to be “the raving of a lunatic,” in part because he told them that he had put the body in a box and stashed it someplace only for it to disappear.

The same source told the Daily Beast that police simply didn't believe the confession, because "You can’t just leave a dead kid out in the street and nobody reports it."

Protesters in Union Square (Getty Images)

Over the weekend, 14 people were arrested during Occupy Wall Street protest in Union Square. The participants were demonstrating against Commissioner Ray Kelly and police brutality, and friends told us to avoid the area at all costs.

"The police are really jumpy today," The Observer was advised.

But protesters had another group to contend with: the burnouts, skaters, and drug dealers who spend their days in the Square, and didn't appreciate the extra heat OWS brought to their stomping grounds.

Bucky Turco from Animal interviewed some of the Union Square regulars on Friday, including a skateboarder who was screaming "They smell like wild piss!"

We had our own interaction with a local around 5:00 p.m., when we were walking down 15th st. and Irving Plaza. A young man approached us.

"Have you been over there," the dread-locked kid asked us, shifting his backpack so he could point over to the square. "It's nuts."

We had heard about the protests...were they really out of control?

"Yeah!" The young man exclaimed. "Especially when you are tripping on acid. I just had to like, get out of there before I started to feel bad about things."

Fair enough. "Feeling bad about things" is certainly not in the OWS credo.

The individual smiled, looked around and then asked how to get to Second Avenue. We told him, and he went scampering off. Five minutes later, he was back.

"I forgot the directions," he admitted.

"Just go straight," we advised. "You'll get there eventually."

(Illo: Fred Harper)

Just before Christmas last year, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly hosted a small, cosmopolitan group of pretty young women in his office at 1 Police Plaza. Most were immigrants to the city, having come from Asia, Central America, Eastern Europe and around the United States. Because of the sensitive nature of what they would discuss, only two other officials were present—the NYPD’s chief counsel and the commanding officer in charge of vice.

The women spoke different languages but had at least one thing in common: they had all been brought to the city to labor in the sex industry. The non-natives’ first English words were “blow job” and “fuck.”

They told harrowing stories of being kidnapped, imprisoned and forced to sell their bodies. One immigrant without legal status in the U.S. described being shuttled around in a livery car, the driver delivering her to various “customers” one after another. “She was basically a prisoner,” said one participant at the meeting.

Mr. Kelly spent two hours with the women, an unusual investment of time for the commissioner. “He has a lot on his plate,” NYPD counsel Katherine Lemire told The Observer. “It was very, very moving. You could tell these women have been through a lot, and for them to come in to the NYPD and have them tell their stories was intimidating for them. That’s why the Commissioner kept the attendance on our side pretty low.”

Shortly after that meeting, which antiprostitution advocates had long been requesting, Mr. Kelly created a new antitrafficking squad, believed to be the first of its kind in an American city. And in the next two months, the NYPD shifted its focus for the first time to arresting johns rather than prostitutes. In two sweeps, one in January and one in February, 386 men were arrested. Many have since been arraigned, and fined between $150 and $250. Some are completing community service and have had their cars impounded. In exchange for leniency, the DA’s office has interviewed many of them, seeking information about trafficked women.

Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne told The Observer that Mr. Kelly has now “directed commands citywide to respond to complaints about prostitution by identifying locations and then arresting the johns through the use of officer decoys and their back-up teams.”

“We are very much in agreement with how the NYPD is handling these cases, in terms of their stepped-up efforts in johns cases,” executive assistant DA Karen Friedman Agnifilo, chief of the trial division, told The Observer. The DA’s office has a number of human trafficking cases in the works, she said, including one against a New York City pimp who has “branded” his girls with tattoos.

The new law enforcement emphasis on the demand side was not apparent last week, as Anna Gristina, the “soccer mom madam,” was carted off to Rikers Island, where she remains, unable to cover a $2 million bond (despite being charged with only one count of promoting prostitution). Instantly, the mother of four became a tabloid cover girl, as law enforcement sources dangled leaks about her business. Ms. Gristina was sitting on a fortune, sources said. Her clients were rich and powerful. City officials had made it known that they had her on tape bragging about her well-heeled customer base. The Daily News, hard out of the gate on the story until it got beat on the first jailhouse interview, characterized the johns as “a roster of bold-faced names including royalty, state politicians, CEOs, club owners and members of the boards of city hospitals and art institutions.”

Clearly the authorities know who many of those johns are. No names have been forthcoming, however. Rather the “curvy strawberry blonde,” who had a soft heart for orphaned pot-bellied pigs, used the New York Post to assure her regular patrons that her incarceration wouldn’t alter the discretion for which some had paid the equivalent of the median American annual income.

“I’d bite my tongue off before I’d tell them anything,” she declared, in her Scottish brogue.

If history is prologue, the men have little to worry about. Like 90 percent of the johns in the United States, New York’s most famous prostitution customer, the notorious Client Nine, was never charged with a crime. Client Nine’s favorite rental girl, Ashley Dupré, was never aware that the square-jawed, important-seeming guy who fucked her bareback without ever removing his black socks was the governor of the state of New York, or that he helped write and then signed into law the nation’s toughest anti-human trafficking statute.

In New York State, patronizing a prostitute is a Class A misdemeanor. Theoretically, offenders can get up to a year in jail, but most are issued a desk ticket and walk away with a small fine and maybe some community service. (The crime becomes a felony only if the prostitute is under 14.)

Among Eliot Spitzer’s one-time comrades in the effort to shut down human trafficking is Norma Ramos of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Ms. Ramos, who works out of a serene, unmarked office not far from the Korean brothels in the 30s, is a self-described “product of the New York City foster care system” who equates prostitution with slavery and calls herself an “abolitionist.”

Ms. Ramos was one of the advocates who arranged for Mr. Kelly to meet with what they call “prostituted women”—placing the responsibility on the traffickers and customers, a distinction that has rankled advocates for the rights of “sex workers.”

“I say to them, ‘Why should anyone have to give a blow job to eat a sandwich?’” Ms. Ramos said. “They stopped inviting me to debates, because they can’t answer how that is empowering.”

For their part, supporters of sex workers, like the writer Melissa Gira Grant, assail the new abolitionists as prudish “moralists” who don’t get that sex work is just another part of the service industry. “There’s nothing feminist or new in the current wave of antiprostitution reformers who say … that all sex work is ‘sexual enslavement,’” she wrote last year in The Guardian.

Ms. Ramos and her fellow abolitionists frame prostitution as a gender-bias issue. “We live in a world where the whole enforcement apparatus around prostitution is constructed in a hugely, chokingly gender-biased manner,” she said. “Those who are sold are overwhelmingly female. And the buyers and sellers are overwhelmingly male. And resources always go toward arresting the victims. But if we stand a chance of putting the trafficking industry out of business we have to end the demand.”

Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education in San Francisco, produced a 2003 study based on interviews with 854 prostituted women around the world. She found that 68 percent of them met the criteria for PTSD. “The most severe damage of prostitution is not physical, it’s psychological,” she said. “The rates of PTSD are among the highest of any group ever studied.”

Prostitution, Ms. Ramos argued, has created “a class of human beings that are not allowed to say no.”

Former diplomat and Texas oil heiress Swanee Hunt has poured millions into the antitrafficking movement. Her Demand Abolition project surveyed 202 johns in Boston and found some disturbing attitudes. “I’ve never had emotional encounters with a prostitute,” said one unnamed survey respondent. “You tell a girl, like, can I put it in your ass and she’s like, ‘Oohh, I really like that.’ That has a good physiological effect.” More crucially, the survey found twice the level of criminality among the sex buyers it interviewed as among the nonbuyers.

The study recommended that police departments like Dallas, which have started to take DNA swabs of prostitutes they arrest—claiming that such women are more likely to be the victims of homicide—should start swabbing johns instead, since they are more likely to be involved in criminal behavior.

The “50 beauties” employed by Ms. Gristina, as the New York Post put it, were said to be a different type than the women enslaved by sex traffickers. They weren’t hookers, they were “escorts,” who come at a higher price and provide services that go beyond sex. Chief among such premium services is what Canadian journalist Victor Malarek, who has written a book on the john culture, calls the “Girlfriend Experience” or GFE (the basis for the Sasha Grey movie).

As one john explained to Mr. Malarek: “The GFE means that for the duration of the encounter, the provider does not make you feel like you are participating in a business transaction.”

Some of Ms. Gristina’s clients are said to have paid $25,000 for weekends in Europe, or $800 an hour. One of her employees, “Lizzie,” told the Daily News that she was flown on a private jet to Europe to help a john shop for a mansion. “I’m not a typical escort,” she said in a wide-ranging sit-down with reporters. “I don’t have big implants, I don’t dress [like a prostitute]. I don’t do drugs. I don’t even smoke … Did I travel first-class? You don’t understand. These are men who have their own jets. They have collections of cars.”

She thought of herself as a kind of well-paid surrogate. “I’m the companion, the therapist,” she said. “I can hold a conversation. I’m the person to whom they go when they need a retreat, when they want to get away from their wife.”

Reading those words, Ms. Ramos scoffed: “What I would ask Lizzie is, how did you get started in this business?”

Abolitionists advocating the prosecution of buyers point to the success of what is called “the Swedish model.” Since Jan. 1, 1999, it has been illegal in Sweden to purchase or attempt to purchase sexual services, punishable with fines or up to six months of imprisonment. Those who are prostituted risk no legal repercussions.

By 2004, the number of prostitutes in Sweden dropped 40 percent, and by 2007 the nation was estimated to have the lowest number of victims of human trafficking in Europe. At the time of the change in legislation in 1999, it is estimated that one in eight men bought sex. In 2009, it was down to one in 14. The numbers aren’t particularly surprising: Johns tend to have more at risk—their reputations, careers, families. The surprise, perhaps, is that they’ve been protected for so long.

Norway, Iceland and Finland have copied the approach and it is under consideration in Israel. Even free-wheeling Amsterdam has begun to crack down. In 2008 the mayor started a campaign to close the brothels in the red-light district, contending that the workers in it were trafficked. The city set up a hotline for buyers to call to verify whether an independent prostitute (a prostitute who does not work in a licensed brothel) is legal.

The NYPD’s new human trafficking squad consists of eight experienced investigators and a sergeant supervisor, all handpicked by Mr. Kelly with the involvement of antiprostitution coalition members.

Since the beginning of 2012, NYPD has run two citywide stings, one in January and one in February, dubbed “Operation Losing Proposition”—in which a total of 360 johns were arrested and 102 vehicles were seized. Mr. Browne said the new focus on the johns will continue. “While we have had Losing Proposition arrests in the past, they have been small in scope, not citywide like these,” he explained. “It’s a new policy in that the focus has switched to johns.”

In a statement to The Observer, Commissioner Kelly noted that “women are victimized by prostitution, often forced into it by intimidation and other forms of exploitation. It makes sense to focus on those who are creating the demand, and for them to realize that they face being arrested and having their cars seized.”

Mr. Ramos welcomes the developments as evidence that she and her cohorts have made a dent in police culture that generally abides the trade, or even participates in it. “These girls often say they know cops from the waist down,” she said.

The fact that Mr. Spitzer was never prosecuted not only reinforced the notion that the law enforcement apparatus in New York is not just casting a benign eye on the trade, but partaking of it as well, Ms. Ramos added. “You know, Spitzer apologized to a lot of people, to his family, his wife, the people of New York, but he has to this day withheld the one apology that would get him redemption. He has yet to apologize to the decade of women he bought, for using them as disposable things. He should have been prosecuted and the first one charged under the bill he signed.”

The NYPD’s new focus on johns began long after the five-year investigation that netted Ms. Gristina was initiated. The only male names that have turned up so far are those of two cops and a banker. Sergeant Richard Wall was seen entering and leaving the brothel building, and NYPD has asked for his log book, which presumably will explain the frequency of his visits. A former cop who worked in the Manhattan DA’s office, Sly Francis, was outed in the press as one of Ms. Gristina’s personal bodyguards. And a Morgan Stanley banker, David S. Walker, was meeting with Ms. Gristina in his office when she was arrested. He was reportedly discussing financing her planned expansion into online dating. Mr. Walker denied wrongdoing, but has been placed on leave.

The NYPD has run only two citywide john stings, and Ms. Ramos believes the police may be reluctant to continue because of tepid public support, especially from The New York Times, which covered the stings with critical comment from pro-sex worker advocates. “It is not a sound policy,” Audacia Ray of the Red Umbrella Project told The Times. “I don’t think we’ll see a big drop in prostitution because of these arrests.”

Ms. Ramos disagrees. “You don’t need to arrest them all,” she said. “But you need to arrest enough so you change the cultural and community standards and people realize that it’s not O.K. to buy sex and if you do this there will be consequences to the victimizer.”

Ms. Ramos plans to bring feminist icon Gloria Steinem with her to a meeting with the editorial board of The Times to discuss its coverage of prostitution. “Two men reported on the change in police policy, and quoted only the sex workers project,” she pointed out. “There is a huge problem at The New York Times.”

Besides The Times, the media response to sensational arrests like Ms. Gristina’s tends to be more winking than thoughtful. The tabloids kept the story on page one for three days, teasing out sensational tidbits. Ms. Gristina and her employees were variously described “mantraps” and “high-class hookers” satisfying “the sexual appetites of high-flying clientele” in “an uncut, XXX version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Amorous.” Even the Daily Beast, run by women’s empowerment maven Tina Brown, advertised the story with the headline “The Best Little Whorehouse in New York.”

Now sitting behind bars while her well-heeled johns go about their usual business, the “McMadam” appears determined to protect her clients. Whether prosecutors will do the same remains to be seen.

editorial@observer.com