Urine trouble now – bomb threat exposed
The brother of city Comptroller Scott Stringer was charged with misdemeanor assault for punching a fellow patron of a Manhattan sushi joint, police sources said Monday.
David Stringer, 57, played the do-you-know-who-I-am card and vowed he’d get away with the attack without punishment, said his alleged victim Jonathan Hayes, 32.
“You don’t know who you are messing with. I know a lot of people in high places,” Stringer said, according to Hayes’ recounting of the incident that occurred about 8:30 p.m. Friday at the Sushi Gama restaurant on Second Ave. at E. 73rd St. on the Upper East Side.
“My girlfriend was scared because she thought he was Mafia,” Hayes told the Daily News.
Stringer appeared drunk when he lost his cool, Hayes and police said.
“I was waiting for a table with my girlfriend,” Hayes recounted. Stringer was “was very drunk and being very aggressive with the staff. He was saying all kinds of obnoxious things.
“I tried to be nice,” said Hayes, who works as a bartender. “I said, ‘You don’t speak to people like that.’
“He turned and he punched me twice in the face.
“When he hit me, I fell and he landed on top of me. We landed on some potted plants and smashed them. Customers had to pull him off of me,” Hayes said.
“After he hit me, he said how good it felt to use his hands, and he was punching the air. He kept telling the owner to make me disappear.”
Stringer “was asking for free things and more drink,” Hayes said.
After the assault. Stringer sat at the restaurant’s bar and asked for a cup of sake. “Can you do that now for me?” Stringer told a man who identified himself as a manager, video Hayes provided to The News shows.
The aftermath featured more odd behavior. In response to inaudible words spoken by someone off-screen, Stringer said: “I know. I know. It was bad. It was very abusive. He said something about being Jewish. It’s a racist … I’m so sorry.”
“You really hurt me,” Hayes says on the video. He explained in an interview: “I was bleeding from the nose. My nose is still messed up.”
“How did I hurt you? I never hit you,” Stringer said.
The manager then poured Stringer a cup of sake. “You’re acting like a jerk in public,” Stringer told Hayes just before he downed a swig of the strong, fermented rice beverage.
Stringer, who has worked as a real estate broker, was given a desk appearance ticket for misdemeanor assault and released from the 19th Precinct stationhouse, the Manhattan district attorney’s office confirmed to the Daily News.
His bomb threat didn’t pass the pee test.
A heroin dealer hoped to avoid a urinalysis by calling in a fake bomb threat to the Manhattan Federal Courthouse, prosecutors charged Monday.
Gregory Herman faced the drug test on June 5 after completing a nearly 51⁄2-year sentence for intent to distribute heroin, according to a criminal complaint.
“Listen up, today at exactly 2:40 p.m. the Patrick Moynihan building will be completely demolished. Time is ticking,” he allegedly said in a call to the main number for the courthouse on Pearl St.
When Herman, 60, arrived at the courthouse just over 45 minutes later, it wasn’t closed as he’d hoped. After surrendering a pee sample, he tested positive for drugs, prosecutors said.
He pleaded not guilty to one count of conveying a false claim.
In an interview with investigators, Herman confirmed he was responsible for the “bomb scare” and that he had hoped his urinalysis would be canceled, according to investigators.
During his sentencing in 2016 for dealing heroin, Herman admitted in Vermont Federal Court that he’d acted as a courier simply to get money for his drug of choice: cocaine.
“My addiction has been the bane of my existence for 35 years,” said Herman, a father of seven with ties to Harlem.
If found guilty, the bomb threat could have implications for Herman’s heroin case. During his sentencing, Vermont Federal Judge Christina Reiss cut Herman a break by not classifying him as a “career offender” despite his seven prior convictions.
“If you come back and they see that I gave you a fairly lenient sentence, somebody’s going to say she made a mistake,” Reiss said.
She gave him a lengthy sentence of five years of supervised release in the hopes of keeping him on the straight and narrow.
“When you are being watched and when people are telling you what to do, you can do it,” the judge added.