Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll take another look at the police’s controversial Special Victims Division. We also meet a dinosaur that was found in Montana and will be auctioned off in Manhattan at the end of the month.
One of the two, Inspector Paul Saraceno, was once the second in command of the Special Victims Division. He forfeited 30 vacation days after admitting to misusing police time and submitting false time cards.
The other, Sergeant Keri Thompson, had led the division’s cold case team and oversaw a detective whose mistakes in 2018 led to the dismissal of a charge against disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein. abused a police vehicle and misled investigators during an interview.
Each had faced administrative charges, the most severe form of disciplinary action except criminal charges, and each pleaded guilty. Specific details of what Saraceno and Thompson admitted in their pleadings were not publicly available online, and police said they were not easily accessible Monday due to the July 4 holiday.
The disciplinary action came to light when DailyExpertNews conducted a routine search of personnel files of officials known to have been the target of an internal affairs investigation alleging senior officials were not at work while they were at work. .
Saraceno had been named an executive officer of the Special Victims Division in 2017, when the city’s own division began investigating complaints about the police’s handling of rape cases. After that investigation concluded that the Special Victims Division was “understaffed and under-resourced,” Saraceno was promoted from Deputy Inspector† He was also given full responsibility for the adult sexual offenses that had been the focus of the investigation.
Both Saraceno and Thompson were charged with impeachment in late 2020. She was subsequently transferred out of the division and assigned to patrol duty, according to police records. Saraceno had already left by then to head the Vice Enforcement Department, but he too was sent on patrol after his plea.
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Valid until Saturday (Eid al-Adha).
The best news from New York
Atmosphere check
You may have missed the weekend’s “Five Boroughs, Five Days, One Question” article. As I read it, I had two questions of my own: How did my colleague Dodai Stewart come up with the idea of visiting one borough in a day, just right for a five-day work week—and how many miles did she run?
So I asked her.
“It felt like it was just queuing up — five days of the week, five boroughs,” she said.
She said she walked at least 10,000 steps every day that week, according to an app on her phone, about two miles a day. In one day, the app counted 15,209 steps, or about five miles, well above its usual average of 5,700 steps per day.
Enough of my questions. The one she wanted to answer was: how is the atmosphere in the city right now?
“I thought there are a lot of theories and there’s a lot of chatter about what’s happening in the city right now,” she said. “Someone says ‘New York is dead’, someone says ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about – I stayed up all night’ and someone else says, ‘I’m working harder than ever.’ I felt like in addition to all these non-concrete theories floating around, some areas of the city get more attention than others, so I felt like I should go places where I don’t know anyone and just talk to people. didn’t go to Times Square or Midtown.”
Smaller and faster than a T. Rex
“If you follow the rapper 50 Cent,” Cassandra Hatton said, “he tweeted something like, ‘The worst thing about being an adult is that no one asks you what your favorite dinosaur is anymore.’ He said, ‘For the record, it’s a Gorgosaurus.’”
Hatton, a senior vice president of Sotheby’s, didn’t say the Gorgosaurus was her favorite, too. But think about her reaction when she learned that a Gorgosaurus skeleton had been found in Montana. “I said, ‘Pack it up and send it to me.'” (And for the record, her paraphrase was close, but 50 Cent’s exact words were slightly different, one of them can’t be printed here, and he deleted later the tweet.)
Hatton, who has also sold models of Soviet sputniks and the source code for the World Wide Web (as an NFT), is preparing to sell the Gorgosaurus on July 28. Sotheby’s expects it to go for $5 million to $8 million, in part, in part, she said because Gorgosaurs rarely come up for auction.
“They’re much rarer than T. Rex,” she said, referring to the Gorgosaurus’ cousin. Sotheby’s sold a T. Rex in 1997 for $8.36 million ($15.22 million in today’s dollars). The buyer was the Field Museum of Chicago.
“Gorgosaurs are typically found in Canada,” she said. “Of course there were no national borders at that time.” And now, she said, “Canada has strict restrictions on fossil exports.” The specimen she sells was found south of the Canadian border, in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Mont.
A Gorgosaurus was smaller and faster than T. Rex, with a head like the namesake in the 1961 movie “Gorgo.” Henry Galliano, Sotheby’s dinosaur consultant, dismissed it as “primarily a science fiction fantasy movie.” But it made up for its paleontological flaws in sheer horror: Howard Thompson, a reviewer for DailyExpertNews, called it “the best outright monster shocker since ‘King Kong’.”
The T. Rex sold in 1997 was named Sue — after Sue Hendrickson, the fossil hunter who found it. What about Hatton’s Gorgosaurus skeleton? Does it have a name?
“That’s part of what the new owner gets,” Hatton said. “The naming rights.”
Dear Diary:
The first apartment my fiancé and I shared was a 428-square-foot studio on the fourth floor of a building at 34th and Park. In the intoxicating abandon of youth, we invited 20 friends to a Diwali celebration – and they all accepted.
As night fell, music, the smell of fresh food, the clinking of glasses, and the sound of merry laughter began to fill the small space. The first three guests sat side by side on our folded futon. The fourth claimed the desk chair.
With 15 guests we had the brilliant idea to move the desk into the bath. This created space for three people.
By now the guests were sitting in clusters on the floor. Some sat in groups of two or three, beer in hand as they chatted cross-legged. Others sat in the corner, backs against the wall, legs stretched out.
It was fun but also clear that we had invited too many people. The bell rang again. I opened the door, but I couldn’t figure out where to put five more coats and sit five more people. Then one of our friends asked if we could move the sofa to the hallway.
Our apartment was the last one at the end of the hallway and our closest neighbors were both at the party, so why not? And so a great evening continued.
— Aparna Vasisht
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here†
Glad we could get together here. I’m going to take a few days off. Anne Barnard and Corey Kilgannon will be here. See you next week. — JB