“There was a lush,” he recalled several months later. “And some of these lushes have money on them.”
The lush, as he put it, was passed out. Another man entered the car and noticed.
“He smiled,” said Mr. Gluckstadt, now 61. “He sat down like he knew him.”
Mr. Gluckstadt, vigilant to a fault on the subway, watched to see if the newcomer would steal the sleeping man’s wallet.
“I have a perverse nature and I couldn’t stop looking at him,” he said.
The man looked back at him, and Mr. Gluckstadt became nervous, moving toward a door and announcing, “I’m getting off. Leave me alone.” But the man punched him in the face.
“It was a pretty good shot, but I’m a pretty tough customer,” he said. He had taken a close look at his assailant: “He had a long face and he had good teeth.”
Mr. Gluckstadt called the police. He declined medical assistance beyond an ice pack. His attacker fled and got away. The lush, whoever he was, continued his unconscious journey through the subway system, blissfully unaware.
The police did not get off so easy.
Mr. Gluckstadt becomes incensed over nuisances that a vast majority of New Yorkers have learned to live with. He has called 911 to report men playing bongo drums on the subway. Once, he said, he pulled the emergency brake cord in a subway train to draw attention to drummers in his car. “I can’t stand those subway drummers,” he said.
He had a subway preacher arrested after arguing that the preacher had threatened his life when he said Mr. Gluckstadt would “burn in hell.” He called the police on a nightly basis to report the same homeless man on West 23rd Street. Mr. Gluckstadt was arrested, accused of assault after “a friendly little fight” with a man feeding pigeons, he said. “I didn’t hurt him,” he said.
After the episode in TriBeCa in 2012, a detective told Mr. Gluckstadt that the lush worker — a person who robs drunken subway riders — fit into a pattern of similar crimes, and promised to keep in touch. This was hardly necessary. Mr. Gluckstadt appeared repeatedly at the transit bureau offices in the neighborhood to ask about the case. Then things got complicated.
Mr. Gluckstadt said that a detective asked him to come in and look at photos of possible suspects that numbered in the thousands. But around that time, he said, a captain told him a lush worker had been arrested, and invited him to look at a picture of the suspect. Mr. Gluckstadt accepted the invitation, he said, and replied yes, that was the guy.
The detective later told him that the suspect could not have been the guy, as that man was in custody on the day Mr. Gluckstadt was struck. And furthermore, now the case had been botched, Mr. Gluckstadt claims he was told, because he had not identified the right guy from the larger photo array.
Mr. Gluckstadt returned repeatedly to the detective squad to complain. After about 10 of these visits, a detective told him that the next time he would be charged with trespassing.
Mr. Gluckstadt complained to the Internal Affairs Bureau. He wrote letters to the police commissioner and his deputies. He called 311, the city help line. He wrote emails to this writer describing his situation. Months passed.
A week or so ago, Mr. Gluckstadt received a certified letter from Internal Affairs. He tore open the envelope and prepared himself for the brushoff he knew was coming.
“The Bureau has determined that there is evidence to partially substantiate some allegations,” the letter read. He said later he stopped to reread that sentence, sure he had missed the word “no” somewhere.
“I felt good,” he said. He sent me a photocopy. He took it to show the detective who had threatened him with trespassing. “He wasn’t there,” he said.
But then I noticed with dismay the date of the complaint, 2009. The letter had nothing to do with the lush worker. I broke the news to Mr. Gluckstadt and asked what had happened in 2009.
He thought back. “Yes,” he said. “That was the coffee cart on the sidewalk,” he began, telling a story that apparently ended four years later with this letter.
The 2012 complaint about the punch has been ruled unsubstantiated, the police said. Mr. Gluckstadt seemed unaware of this development on Friday. He was undeterred.
“If everybody was doing what I’m doing,” Mr. Gluckstadt said, “the world would be a better place.”
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=16767
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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