Brooklyn Week in Review: Tax Breaks & Teen Hitlers

This is some of what happened, the last week of October & first week of November, 2006 in Brooklyn:

First, we will note that it was a week of comings and going. First, a ten-ton rock was dug up in Fort Greene and made headlines and made people happy. Then, the rock was taken from us and brought to Queens. At least, King's Highway will get a trial of those anxiety-inducing countdown walk signals. Meanwhile, we learned that Marty Markowitz is jetting off to London to do the cheerleader thing, but that the head of the Bronx Planning Office is coming to Brooklyn to do the big building, dense development thing. We're guessing it won't make much difference one way or the other because the borough's goose is already cooked in so, so many ways.

Speaking of Atlantic Yards, there are noisy weeks and quieter weeks, with this week being somewhere in between. We did note that Newark Mayor Cory Booker held his nose, got some tiny concessions out of the New Jersey Devils and came out in support of the arena with which his slimy sleazoid seriously-under-investigation predecessor saddled him. What's this got to do with Brooklyn? Newark would love to have the Nets play in its big turkey arena. Interestingly, new IRS rules could increase the cost of building Atlantic Yards by preventing the use of a tax-exempt financing mechanism that would save Bruce Ratner nearly $100 million over 30 years. Of course, you can always vent by tossing a basketball at The Bruce.

That's not the only tax break for the rich causing a spike in blood pressure. Derek Jeter and a lot of other celebs were in the news again for taking advantage of the city's 421-a tax abatement, which costs taxpayers (including the really low-income and middle-class ones) $300 million a year. Great if you want to buy a $2 million condo in a Richard Meier building. Less good if you're an ordinary person paying half his or her income in rent or for a (non-tax abated) mortgage. We are unsure, however, whether 421-a's are good or bad for Park Slope fornicators that need a place to go to do the nasty outside the bonds of matrimony. Maybe the Brooklyn principal whose numbers add up to more than 100 percent can tell us.

Of course, there are those that prefer to steal their money the old fashioned way--by putting on a wig and a beard on Halloween, marching into a bank and robbing it. The robber was described as a "bearded lady." She may have been one of the few characters that didn't show up in Thor Equities release of Coney Island 3.1, but how often does a rendering have a pumpkin on a mermaid's ass? The dumbest bank robber in all of New York City, however, tried robbing two Brooklyn banks without a costume.

Well, at least, the Halloween Bandit wasn't dressed up as Hitler, like our favorite Brooklyn Moron of the Week, the teenager who dressed as Der Fuhrer at Leon M. Goldstein High School.

Twice.

And posed for a number of newspaper photos.

Ass wipe.