The
National Puerto Rican Day Parade may be over for the year, but the magic and mayhem still linger. While the police say the crowd was generally better behaved than in years past, that doesn’t mean anybody would mistake the event for the Steuben Day Parade.
On
June 12, at 3 p.m., the police ordered a large crowd obstructing the parade route at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street to disperse. That didn’t sit well with at least one paradegoer, who became loud and abusive, according to the police, and socked two police horses that were clearing the area in the head. If he suffered any remorse, he didn’t show it: He struggled with the police officer who arrested him, causing the cop to fall to the ground and injure his knee.
At
3:45 p.m., a male threw a bottle at a crowd assembled on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 85th Street. This also wasn’t the most tactically impressive thing to do—not only because the place was crawling with cops (indeed, the bottle almost hit one of New York’s Finest in the head) or because he resisted arrest, but rather because he was carrying a significant amount of party (or should we say parade?) favors. His supplies allegedly included crack cocaine and heroin in 10 small glassine envelopes, recovered from his mouth and front right pants pocket.
He
also came equipped with an unloaded .25-caliber handgun, discovered incidental to the arrest.
In
a similarly ill-conceived provocation in front of 860 Madison Avenue at 5:20 p.m., a male was observed rolling a marijuana joint in public view. When a cop called him on it, rather than confess to the crime, the suspect—an 18-year-old male—tried to flee the scene and, when that didn’t work, injured the arresting officer’s partner during the subsequent struggle. The reason for his uncooperative demeanor may have been the marijuana and five vials of crack cocaine that the police discovered when searching his pockets.
At
6:15 p.m., a woman was walking eastbound on 68th Street between Lexington and Third avenues when a fellow pedestrian touched her breast, smiled and continued on his way. Perhaps he assumed that the afternoon’s festive mood gave him license to do as he pleased. Instead, his victim followed him to Second Avenue, between 70th and 71st streets, where she hailed a cop and had the fellow arrested for sexual abuse.
In
a less touchy-feely but no less troubling incident earlier in the afternoon, a police officer spotted a 32-year-old male videotaping up a woman’s skirt at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 66th Street. The suspect was promptly arrested, and his knapsack, camera and several videotapes were confiscated.
The
parade was but a fading memory by 3:30 a.m. the following morning, when a couple thought it a good idea to vandalize the rear-view mirrors of no less than four vehicles on 79th Street, between Third and Second avenues.
The
male kicked and broke the mirrors of a gray 1990 BMW (BMWYY), a 1997 gold Cadillac, a
2002 Nissan and a 1997 Blue Honda Civic. At the same time, his consort—no slouch herself in the fun department—assisted “by jumping and landing butt-first on top of rear-view mirrors,” according to the police.
It
just so happened that one of the cars belonged to a doorman at 240 East 79th Street. He summoned the police, who arrested the suspects for criminal mischief. A police official ascribed their anti-vehicular behavior to being “liquored up.”
Kitty
Litter
Like
him or not, the polar-bear-sized Fernando Botero kitty-cat sculpture in front of 900 Park Avenue has become something of a landmark, a work of art whose subliminal message seems to be that, appearances to the contrary, the swells who live on Park Avenue don’t take themselves too seriously. (Either that or they have lousy taste in art.)
Certainly
the feline statue didn’t appeal to one bandit, who grafitti’d the word “mitzabichi” on the front of it around midnight on June 10. While 900 Park had two doormen on duty at the time, both of them were doing chores inside the building with the doors locked and thus didn’t see the crime go down.
As
precious as the pussy undoubtedly is to cat lovers—not to mention fans of the Colombian artist––there are no cameras in front of the location that might have caught the crime in progress.
