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"An ashtray is a clear invitation to smoke and to break the law."
Elliott Marcus, assistant commissioner, Food Safety and Community Sanitation, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Letter to the Editor, NY Times, Dec. 4th

"Not having ashtrays and putting up no-smoking signs are two of the strongest ways to discourage smoking and to let people know what the current law is."
Sandra Mullin, spokeswoman for the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
"No Smoking, and Don't Try Putting It Out," NY Times, Dec. 2nd

The presence of an ashtray might be taken by some people as an invitation to light up.
 

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December 29, 2003
        Tribe Loses Suit on Tax-Free Tobacco
        By Pam Belluck

BOSTON — A federal judge ruled on Monday that Rhode Island acted legally when it raided a tax-free smoke shop run by the Narragansett Indians and that the state had the right to tax sales of cigarettes on tribal land.

In his ruling, Judge William E. Smith of Federal District Court said the July 14 raid, in which state troopers seeking sales records served a search warrant on the smoke shop in a trailer on the Narragansett reservation in Charlestown, did not violate tribal sovereignty. Tribe members resisted the state troopers, and the resulting melee left eight people with minor injuries and led to the arrest of eight Indians, including the tribal leader.

"The state did not violate federal law or the tribe's sovereign rights when it enforced its criminal statutes by executing a search warrant and making arrests pursuant to that warrant, on tribal land," Judge Smith wrote, rejecting the tribe's argument in a suit saying the state did not have the right to collect the taxes or serve the warrant.

The judge concluded that the state's cigarette tax was a tax on tobacco consumers, not a tax on the tribe. Therefore, he wrote, "the tribe (like other retail sellers of cigarettes), acts merely as an agent for the collection of the tax," an arrangement that is "appropriate" and does not violate tribal sovereignty.

The ruling in the Rhode Island case comes as many states are grappling with tax-free tribal enterprises, including smoke shops, gas stations and Internet cigarette vendors. Indian tax-free sales cost states millions of dollars, especially as deficit-stung states increase cigarette taxes to close budget gaps and end up driving more consumers to tax-free shops. So states from Kansas to Maine have been trying to compel tribes to collect the taxes.

New York, which won a court battle over cigarette taxes in 1994 but has yielded to tribal protests since then and backed away from collecting the taxes, is changing that stance, making plans to start collecting taxes on tribal smoke shops beginning March 1.

Courts, including the Supreme Court, have ruled that states can collect taxes on tribal cigarette sales to non-Indians and to members of other tribes, experts on Indian law say. But the courts have also failed to give states the power to enforce such tax laws, ruling that because tribes are sovereign entities, states cannot sue them if they fail to pay taxes, said Robert N. Clinton, a law professor at Arizona State University.

It was not clear whether Judge Smith's ruling went further for the State of Rhode Island, whose long-contentious relationship with the Indians is governed by a 1978 settlement act, which, unlike laws applying to tribes in most other states, made the Narragansetts subject to the state's criminal and civil laws.

On the one hand, Rhode Island's attorney general, Patrick C. Lynch, said the judge's conclusion that the state execution of the search warrant was legal reinforced the state's contention that it had the ability to enforce the collection of taxes.

But Douglas Luckerman, a lawyer for the tribe, said that while he was disappointed in the ruling he was encouraged that Judge Smith also wrote that "nothing in this opinion should be read to suggest that the state's ability to enter upon tribal land to enforce its criminal/regulatory laws is limitless or that state authorities may act with impunity. It is not; and they may not."

Mr. Luckerman said the tribe had several options, including both an appeal and the path that tribes in some other states have taken, simply operating a smoke shop and refusing to pay the taxes, on the theory that the state cannot force tribal tax collection.

The smoke shop had been operating for two days when it was raided. It has since been turned into an office where the tribe sells merchandise promoting tribal sovereignty. The state estimated that had it been allowed to continue in business as a smoke shop, it would have owed $12 million in taxes.

The tribe's chief, Sachem Matthew Thomas, called the ruling a "minor bump in the road" and said he would recommend to the tribal government that an appeal be filed.

Bella Noka, the tribe's youth director, who was arrested on disorderly conduct charges in the raid, along with her husband, teenage son and daughter, had an angrier reaction, calling the ruling a "rape."

Mr. Lynch and Gov. Donald L. Carcieri were careful to emphasize their respect for the tribe, point out olive branches that have been extended since the raid, and say they hoped the ruling would help resolve things amicably.

"At last, now we have some guidance," Governor Carcieri, a Republican, said. "We know the tax laws apply, the civil and criminal laws apply."

Chief Thomas disagreed.

"I think the governor has misspoken," he said

December 28, 2003
        The Smoking Ban: Clear Air, Murky Economics
        By Winnie Hu

When New York City banned smoking in its bars and restaurants last March, opponents warned that the tough new law would drive away customers and devastate businesses. Supporters insisted that New Yorkers would quickly adjust.

Nine months later, the impact is hardly so clear cut. An examination of government data, public polls, private surveys and interviews with customers, employees and owners of more than three dozen bars and restaurants around the city shows the law having an impact on some businesses, but certainly not on all.

Many bar owners and managers say the smoking ban has hurt business, eroding profits and, in some cases, forcing them to cut back hours or lay off workers. Others say they have seen virtually no effect.

Some restaurants and bars say that business is fine — even thriving, as the economy improves — particularly in places where food is a main draw. Further, a vast majority of New Yorkers have said in recent polls that they are happy with the new law. One survey shows that many regular restaurantgoers see a smoke-free environment as an attraction.

That does not mean, though, that some city night spots are not hurt by the ban. Happy-hour sales on Friday nights at the Whiskey Ward on the Lower East Side have dropped to barely $100, from $600, a co-owner says, and regulars have disappeared along with the ashtrays.

A co-owner of Patroon, a steakhouse in Midtown, says he no longer sees much of a cigar-puffing, after-dinner crowd. And in the meatpacking district, the owner of Hogs & Heifers, where Julia Roberts was once enticed to dance on the bar, says she is considering laying off four employees.

Then there are the many nuisances wrought by the smoking ban, which bar owners and bartenders say just makes it harder to scrape out a living in an already tough business.

"It's harder to keep track of everybody going in and out," said Chuck Zeilfelder, a bartender at Bourbon Street in Bayside, Queens, who opposes the ban. "It's common for people to leave money on the bar, and that becomes an issue — how much they left. Also, people leave their drinks on the bar and go out. The drinks get thrown out, and then you have to buy them another round on the house."

It is unclear whether the complaints about the smoking ban are anything more than growing pains, as a city that prides itself on its night life adjusts to the far-reaching new law. Certainly, where the city goes from here is of great interest to other places around the world, like Ireland, Norway and Lexington, Ky., which are debating their own versions of the law.

The early evidence, however, is that many businesses are unharmed. In fact, though rumors swirl in an environment where every bit of news is trumpeted by the side it favors, a reporter could not verify that one bar, restaurant or club, of the more than 20,000 in the city, had closed solely because of the smoking ban.

In contrast, the owner-chef at Gotham Bar and Grill, Alfred Portale, says more people are dining at the pink granite bar, where the food is served on black lacquer trays. The bar at the Jazz Standard on East 27th Street remains packed every night, its owner says. And the line only grows longer outside McSorley's Old Ale House on East Seventh Street, the "wonderful saloon" chronicled by the writer Joseph Mitchell, though some patrons have grumbled that they miss having a Marlboro with their house ale.

"Believe it or not, it may be helping us because it's driving people to drink," said McSorley's owner, Matthew Maher.

The city's antismoking law was championed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who saw it as a health initiative to protect restaurant and bar workers from being exposed to secondhand smoke. In July, the state followed with an even tougher smoking ban.

Even if the city were to repeal its ban, the state's would remain in effect — something that has not seemed to make much difference to the smokers and businesses who continue to blame the mayor for their woes and lobby to have the city's law amended.

The ban does not appear to have deterred businesses from opening in New York City. The New York State Liquor Authority, which issues licenses to establishments that serve alcohol, received 127 applications from city businesses last month, compared to 126 in November 2002. The number of licenses granted by the authority in that same period rose to 106 last month, from 75 the year before.

The city's Health Department, which enforces the smoking ban, has also analyzed monthly employment numbers and found no overall job loss in the food service and drinking industry. Critics have countered that such findings are politically motivated, and cannot show when establishments cut back shifts and absorb revenue losses. But many restaurants and bars refuse to divulge their finances, making it difficult to gauge the validity of their complaints.

Polls back the city's contention that New Yorkers have welcomed the ban. A New York Times poll in June showed that 56 percent of the 962 respondents said they approved of the smoking ban. A Quinnipiac University poll in October found that 62 percent supported the ban.

Tim Zagat, the publisher of restaurant guides, surveyed more than 29,000 of his volunteer reviewers this year and found that 96 percent said they would eat out as much, if not more, with the smoking ban. Only 4 percent said they would eat out less. "I don't care how you cut it," Mr. Zagat said. "I think it's long-term good for business."

The industry counters with its own surveys, some of which depend on voluntary responses. Pollsters say such surveys are deceptive because those most prone to complain are also most prone to respond.

The city chapters of the New York State Restaurant Association mailed out a survey to more than 900 members and found that 88 of the 115 city businesses that responded said they had a decline in bar sales since the smoking ban, and 58 said they had a decline in food sales. In addition, 76 reported that their employees had an unfavorable reaction to the ban, while 18 reported a favorable reaction.

Similarly, an October study commissioned by the Vintners Federation of Ireland interviewed 300 bars and nightclubs in the New York region and found that 66 percent reported fewer customers since the smoking ban, while 15 percent reported more. In all, 78 percent said the impact of the ban on their businesses had been negative.

"The nightclub and bar industry are the collateral damage in the admittedly noble fight to get people to stop smoking," said David Rabin, co-owner of Union Bar and Lotus in Manhattan and president of the New York Nightlife Association.

Sales representatives for wine and liquor companies say the impact has trickled down to them.

They say business has dropped between 20 percent and 40 percent since the smoking ban. Similarly, an association for operators of jukeboxes, pinball machines and other games says that revenues have fallen between 10 and 25 percent at bars and nightclubs in New York City.

"If the people are outside smoking, they're not inside drinking, and they're not inside playing my machines," said Kenneth Goldberg, vice president of the Amusement Music Operators Association.

Indeed, a check by a reporter on two blocks of Bell Boulevard in Bayside and three blocks of Northern Boulevard in Little Neck, both thriving night life strips in Queens, showed some impact from the ban, but more in terms of subtle economic and social changes than closings and layoffs.

Owners and employees reported selling fewer drinks and losing customers before dessert. They complained of the need to watch over drinks and money left on the bar and seats left unoccupied by patrons heading out for a smoke. And bartenders said that tips were down, as were overall tabs, and that longtime customers were resorting to alternatives — hotel rooms, private homes and parks — to indulge their smoking and drinking.

But Danny Meyer, who owns a half-dozen restaurants and night spots in Manhattan, including Union Square Café and Gramercy Tavern, said his businesses had seen no impact. He banned smoking in some of his restaurants in 1990, and they have grown more popular, he said.

Mr. Meyer said that he no longer had to worry about his waiters and customers coughing from the smoke or the nightly squabbles between smoking and nonsmoking tables. One of his best customers, Roger W. Straus, a publisher with Farrar Straus & Giroux, had complained when Mr. Meyer started his ban about being separated from his cigarettes, but later credited the restaurant with helping him to give up smoking, Mr. Meyer said.

"New Yorkers will adapt to almost anything," Mr. Meyer said. "They're not going to quit going to great restaurants just because they can't smoke."

Many bars and nightclubs have adopted coping strategies, with varying degrees of success. At the popular China Club near Times Square, smokers are now directed to a 2,000-square-foot terrace.

"It hasn't impacted us that much," said the owner, Danny Fried, of the ban.

O'Neill's Bar and Restaurant in Midtown laid off three people in April and resorted to novelty events like trivia contests and election-night vigils for races in Ireland. Ciaran Staunton, the owner, says he sees his regulars pass by on the street, toting six-packs of beer to drink at home.

Other bars and taverns, like Broadway Dive on the Upper West Side, are placing new emphasis on their food now that they are selling fewer drinks. Since the ban began, alcoholic beverage sales at the Broadway Dive have fallen about one-third, or between $1,500 and $2,000 a week, its owner said.

Amy Sacco, owner of Lot 61 and Bungalow 8 in West Chelsea, said she had to hire an extra security guard just to make sure the smoking crowd outside does not become unruly.

"It makes the job very unhappy," Ms. Sacco said. "Next thing you know, it's prohibition for cocktails. We're all responsible for policing it. It's such a drag."

"It's just a big headache in a job that had enough headaches to start with," she said.

December 14, 2003
        A Ban, Sort Of
        By Georgina Gustin

In one Connecticut bar recently, a bartender served drinks to a row of customers as they tipped their cigarettes into plastic ashtrays, filling the air with smoke.

In another bar, another bartender also served customers, but the bar stood empty of ashtrays and the air was smoke-free.

Both places had all the makings of the classic watering hole - the bottles of liquor, the beer taps, the regulars perching on stools. But, at least for now, that other atmospheric bar ingredient, smoke, is legal in one place and not the other.

Following the lead of other states, including New York, Connecticut lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a law earlier this year banning smoking in all restaurants and bars throughout the state. But there's a difference in Connecticut, one that has customers and restaurateurs perplexed and a little angry, and some legislators pushing to tweak the new rules.

The law is taking effect in two parts. As of Oct. 1, smoking was banned in restaurants, including those with separate bar areas, and owners were required to put up "no smoking" signs. Then, on April 1, 2004, bars have to follow suit.

The lag time between the restaurant smoke ban and the bar ban has Connecticut restaurateurs, many of whom depend on their bar business more than their dining patrons, angry as they watch their regulars file out the door to places where they can still light up. And while the ban is a victory for public health that has delighted nonsmokers and even improved dining business at some restaurants, many in the state's service industry see it as flawed, inconsistent and unfair.

"I used to close down at 1 a.m.," said Nick Jhilal, manager of the Bear and Grill in Fairfield, who estimated that he had lost 30 to 40 percent of his bar patrons to bars where they can still smoke. "Now I close down at 9:30. The next three hours are dead."

In Connecticut there is a range of permits that allow places to serve alcohol. The bulk of permits are issued to restaurants, which serve food as well as liquor, and to bars, which get what is called a "cafe" license and are allowed to serve liquor with food on the side, if they choose.

Restaurants throughout the state, especially those with closed-off bar areas, are being hard-hit by the ban, and the economic effects have some lawmakers wondering about the wisdom of the new rules.

"This legislation damaged the marketplace," said Simon A. Flynn, president of the Connecticut Restaurant Association, who said he had heard from dozens of restaurant owners, one of whom said he lost $10,000 in the first month of the ban. "It doesn't make sense. The bars are luxuriating in this inequity."

In the meantime, many restaurateurs are simply looking the other way as smokers light up because they can't afford to lose their business.

"People leave, people just walk out," said Tina McManus, a bartender and waitress at Black Rock Castle in Bridgeport, which is in a strip of bars and restaurants lining Fairfield Avenue through Fairfield and into Westport. "The whole law is ridiculous."

Ms. McManus, a smoker herself, estimated that 90 percent of the restaurant's customers are smokers and many are going to more smoke-friendly places. That's a financial hit many restaurants apparently aren't willing to take. "They're cheating," Ms. McManus said of other restaurants in the area. "They have to.

"I don't like smelling smoke. I don't like it on my clothes. But I like walking home with a bundle of cash," Ms. McManus added, noting that smokers who are allowed to smoke tend to linger longer and buy more drinks. "If you did a survey of employees, no one would agree with the ban. You're taking money out of our pockets."

Under the new law, people can be fined $99 if they are caught smoking in a no-smoking establishment. The business itself is only required to post "no smoking" signs and can be fined $99 if it does not, but it is not fined if customers are actually smoking. The only people who can issue the $99 tickets are the police, and police departments around the state said they have more pressing issues than tracking errant smokers.

"I wish I had the time to proactively check restaurants," said Louis DeCarlo, chief of the Stamford Police Department. "We're taking the tack that most police departments are. We're only responding to complaints."

According to the State's Liquor Control Division, which issues liquor permits, the license of a restaurant or bar can be revoked by the state for violating the ban. But that would likely happen only if the police or a customer complained to the state, prompting the liquor commission to investigate. And even then it is not clear what would set off the commission's inquiry - an establishment's failure to post signs, as the new law requires, or its failure to actually pluck cigarettes from smokers' mouths.

"We would expect a licensed permit holder to comply with the state law, and if it was found not to be, we would investigate," said John Suchy, director of the division. Then, "Based on our determination we could take regulatory action."

When asked how many times an establishment would have to violate the law, or in what way, before the commission took action, Mr. Suchy said: "It's going to be on a case-by-case basis. I'm not going to say what the commission might do."

Local departments of public health, which issue food permits to restaurants, also do not have a direct enforcement role, although they can revoke a food license for repeated violations of the ban and can subtract points from annual inspections. Under the new law, though, it's not clear how many violations it would take for a health department to rescind a license.

"It says violations, plural," said Michael Lauzier of the American Lung Association of Connecticut.

Some places are willing to take the risk.

"What are they going to do, have a smoking force, like the Gestapo?" said Richard Ball, owner of Jeremiah Donovan's on Washington Street in South Norwalk. "Enforcing the thing's a joke. That's a full-time job."

Mr. Ball said the ban had been a mixed blessing for his business.

"I know there are people who used to come in every night that are going someplace else for now," he said. "But my lunch business is up 25 percent. I think it's very positive. It's a nasty habit and this is what the state is trying to tell you."

Nonetheless, Mr. Ball said, late at night, after the dining rush is over, "People can light up and I probably wouldn't say anything."

Jeremiah Donovan's is among many of the state's restaurants who said business has improved since Oct. 1.

"Actually, it's kind of interesting," said John Black, a bartender at Dunville's Westport. "Our dinner sales have gone up. People are starting to look at us as more of a restaurant than a bar now."

Still, the change hasn't pleased everyone and some lawmakers are responding.

Under the original version of the bill introduced earlier this year, the General Assembly's Public Health Committee adopted a provision that would allow separate smoking rooms in bars, but the idea was dropped. Now, Representative Art Feltman, Democrat of Hartford and House chairman of the committee, said he would support changing the law to include that provision again.

"If there is a huge drop in revenues at bars," Mr. Feltman said, "I'd be open to that proposal."

In early November, Gov. John G. Rowland told a reporter that he believed restaurants and bars should be allowed to establish separate smoking rooms, but Mr. Feltman said he didn't feel a change should go that far. "It should never extend to restaurants," he said.

Dean Pagani, a spokesman for the governor, said Mr. Rowland's remarks were made in an off-hand way. "It got really overblown. He was really just expressing his opinion," Mr. Pagani said. "He's really leaving it up to the Legislature He has no intention of proposing that."

So, for the time being, restaurants are adjusting to the ban and bars are gearing up for what could be a big financial blow. The only establishments that will clearly see a rise in smokers' business are private clubs, like boat clubs or some social clubs, which have different liquor licenses that will allow smoking even after the ban.

"Our sense, from a number of different restaurateurs is that part of the competition they face now is from private clubs," said Mr. Flynn of the restaurant association. "What we're hearing is that clubs are developing different categories of memberships, like associate memberships, to allow more members. Individuals that might not qualify under the rules of membership are now eligible."

At some private clubs, employees rejected the idea of a smoking ban.

"This is not Cuba," said David Duncan, a bartender at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Norwalk. "Next thing you know people are going to be telling you to be home at 11 o'clock at night."

But this raises another issue, restaurant owners said. If the bill was intended to protect the health of employees in bars and restaurants, don't employees in clubs deserve the same protection?

"Are they protected under the law or not?" asked Mr. Jhilal of the Bear and Grill, who said he has hired lawyers to look into whether the law violates the 14th amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection.

"If it is a public health issue, then it should be a statewide ban," Mr. Flynn said. "If they can't do that, they should retreat to a position whereby the only ban on smoking in the state is in dining rooms."

Or smokers can find refuge in Rhode Island, where smoking is still allowed in restaurants and bars, or perhaps New York, where some lawmakers are attempting to roll back a ban that went into effect in July.

The bill, co-sponsored by Republican Assemblymen Howard Mills and Matthew Mirones would allow bars to buy "smoking licenses" for $100 a year.

"I think people should make their own choices, and I was very concerned about the bars in my district that are going out of business," Mr. Mills said, noting that his district abuts New Jersey, where smokers are spilling over the state border to bars that still permit smoking.

"This is based on personal liberty and freedom of choice issues," Mr. Mills added. "I'm not even a smoker myself."

December 2, 2003
        No Smoking, and Don't Try Putting It Out
        By Clyde Haberman

HERE is a story about Casey Stengel and a smoking pipe, from the days when he was a ballplayer, some 90 years ago.

He was on a train one day. Clenched in his teeth was a pipe — unlighted. The conductor came along and told him that smoking was not permitted. Stengel protested that he wasn't smoking.

"You've got a pipe in your mouth," the conductor said.

Stengel replied, "I've got shoes on my feet, but I'm not walking."

The reason for dredging up this yarn is what it says about a latter-day New York City law.

If it is possible to wear shoes yet not be walking, can you have an ashtray but not be smoking? The answer, obviously, is yes. But under the city's antismoking law, that means nothing.

As some New Yorkers have learned the hard way, the mere existence of an ashtray in a place where smoking is prohibited can lead to a summons. It doesn't matter if the ashtray is stored well away from public areas. It doesn't matter if it is used as a decoration, or to hold paper clips or M & M's. No ashtrays are allowed, period.

The reason is simple, said Sandra Mullin, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The presence of an ashtray might be taken by some people as an invitation to light up.

"Not having ashtrays and putting up no-smoking signs are two of the strongest ways to discourage smoking and to let people know what the current law is," Ms. Mullin said.

Since May 1, when the Health Department began to enforce the law in earnest, about 2,300 summonses have been issued, she said. A little more than 200 were for ashtray violations.

These are hardly huge numbers. Still, some of the summonses are enough to make one scratch his head and invoke the Stengel Corollary about shoes and walking.

In Brooklyn Heights, a video-store owner got a ticket for an ashtray that he says he used only to help a customer who walked in with a lighted cigarette in her hand. She had to put it out in something, no?

A more prominent New Yorker, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, received a summons because of ashtrays in his Times Square office. Inspectors, who had gone there on a complaint about smoking, found no one puffing away. But they did spot the ashtrays. That was enough.

"I keep them around to remind me of my youth," Mr. Carter said in an e-mail message yesterday after being asked about the incident. "They had not been used and did not have cigarette butts in them when we were fined."

One more thing: "Any city that allows you to keep a loaded gun in your office but not an ashtray," he said, "is one with its priorities seriously out of whack."

Many feel the same way at the Players, the theater-themed club on Gramercy Park South. As first reported in The New York Post the other day, health officials, acting on an anonymous tip, insisted last week on inspecting the office of the club's executive director, John Martello.

They found no one smoking. But — shades of Eliot Ness on the trail of rum runners from Canada — they came upon three ashtrays on a shelf behind a desk.

THEY were there just to get them out of the way," Mr. Martello said yesterday. "We had to get them out of the public eye. They were collected. Who thinks about throwing them out?"

"I think what I was most appalled about," he said, "was the constitutionality of them being able to come in and search my office. Unlike the police, they don't need a search warrant. They just walked in on an anonymous tip."

Ms. Mullin acknowledged that "there is some discretion offered to our inspectors."

"If we do see stacks of ashtrays," she said, "it is tantamount to the potential that people are permitting smoking."

But to Richard E. Farley, a lawyer who is advising the Players, the real issue is "Where does this end?"

"Can these people show up," Mr. Farley said, "and disrupt your law firm, your psychiatrist's office, your religious meeting, on the pretext that you're violating this provision of the smoking law?"

It is possible, in the opinion of those challenging this strict application of the no-ashtray rule, to be overzealous in pursuing virtue. One doesn't always get the desired results.

Another Caseyism comes to mind, this one from the 1950's, when Stengel was the manager nonpareil of the Yankees.

"Look at him," he said of a ballplayer. "He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, he doesn't chew and he doesn't stay out late.

"And he still can't hit."

November 1, 2003
        Years of Feeding Wall Street Meet Abrupt End at Harry's
        By Frank J. Prial

Harry's Hanover Square, a venerable Financial District restaurant that feted the market's winners and solaced its losers for more than three decades, closed its doors abruptly last night with no plans to reopen anytime soon.

"It's over," said Harry Poulakakos, 65, the restaurant's founder and owner, with mingled sadness and relief. "It was the toughest decision of my life," he said, "but I just don't have the heart for it anymore."

Mr. Poulakakos's wife, Adrienne, who opened the restaurant with him in 1972 and worked at his side there, died of cancer in August.

"We did everything together," he said, "and now it's not the same."

Located in the basement of India House, a landmark at 1 Hanover Square, Harry's was a mecca for some of the most powerful men on Wall Street. At its heyday in the 1980's, Harry's would serve 800 lunches to an almost exclusively male clientele, as well as several hundred dinners.

Some of the bigger brokerage houses had private lines connected to a battery of telephones on a wall in its vast barroom. What's more, the restaurant was surrounded by the major Wall Street firms. "L. F. Rothschild was just over there," Mr. Poulakakos said, pointing out a window. "Kidder Peabody was there, Dillon Read there and First Boston there."

The stock market transactions still flicker across the electronic board over the bar, but these days, there are far fewer upturned faces watching them; maybe 200 at lunchtime, even fewer at dinner. "After the market crash in 1987, everyone moved to Midtown," Mr. Poulakakos said. "But still we did O.K."

"It's interesting," he said. "When the market was down in the 70's and 80's, those were our best years. In the 1990's, when there was so much money around, we didn't do nearly as well."

To Harry's, the change in Wall Street culture was not nearly as devastating as the recent ban on smoking. "Overnight, we lost 60 percent of our evening bar trade," Mr. Poulakakos said, shaking his head. "For the bar, it was the difference in profit and loss. Sales of expensive cigars had been almost as important as the sales of Scotch," he said.

When union negotiations — a task Mrs. Poulakakos, if not her husband, relished — were coming up, Harry's was actually in better shape than it had been for several years, sharing in what many observers saw as a renaissance in downtown Manhattan.

Battery Park City and the new residential areas of TriBeCa and the Lower East Side are within walking distance, and the streets, once deserted in the evening and on weekends, fill up with local residents and tourists.

Harry's notwithstanding, the Poulakakos family will not disappear from Hanover Square. They own the restaurant space, and the upper floors of India House have been transformed into Bayard's, an elegant French-oriented restaurant, at night. Bayard's, where the former Lutèce chef, Eberhard Muller, holds forth, is open on weekends, unlike Harry's, which always followed a Monday through Friday schedule, like its patrons. Bayard's is owned and managed partly by Peter Poulakakos, 27, Harry's son.

In addition, just behind India House are two new casual restaurants, Ulysses and Financier, owned by Peter Poulakakos with partners. Both are doing well, thanks in part to the recent renovation of Stone Street, which runs from Hanover Square to Broad Street and is partially blocked off each day for pedestrians and al fresco dining for Ulysses customers.

At 3 p.m. yesterday, Mr. Poulakakos told his staff of about 50 that it was the last day at Harry's Hanover Square. "They took it pretty well, I thought," he said. A few old-time customers lingered at the bar for a few hours longer.

"One guy told me I looked ten years younger," Mr. Poulakakos said.
 
 
 
 

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December 24, 2003
        PLAYERS PUTS ITS CIG SUIT IN PLAY
        By Stephanie Gaskell

The legendary Players Club filed a lawsuit yesterday to overturn city and state smoking bans, claiming data showing secondhand smoke kills as many as 1,000 New Yorkers a year is junk science.

"We believe that the alleged effects of the secondhand smoke problems that they have based the law upon are at best flawed," said John Martello, executive director of the 115-year-old club on Gramercy Park.

Kevin Mulhearn, the clubs lawyer, said the ban infringes on federal law governing workplace safety under Occupational Safety & Health Administration rules.

Mayor Bloomberg brushed off the suit filed in federal court in Manhattan, saying, "Lets stop killing people and get on with it, shall we?"

December 23, 2003
        PLAYERS FIRED UP
        By Stephanie Gaskell

The Players Club, a 115-year-old establishment on Gramercy Park South, is expected to file a lawsuit today challenging the state and city anti-smoking laws.

Executive Director John Martello declined to give details about the suit, which will be announced at noon.

"We're the first courageous club to take this step," he told The Post.

The Players Club is acting after getting slapped with fines of $200 to $2,000 last month by city health inspectors for having three stacked ashtrays in Martello's office.

"No cigarettes, nothing. No evidence of smoke, just three stacked ashtrays. I wasn't even there," Martello said.

Martello said he had the ashtrays in his office because it's illegal to have them on the bar, so he had to put them someplace. "I didn't know ashtrays were illegal," he said at the time.

Club officials claim the city's law wasn't designed for inspectors to raid private offices. But the city's anti-smoking laws, which went into effect March 30, ban smoking virtually anywhere indoors.

The state passed an even tougher law in July, closing loopholes that would exempt, for example, owner-operated bars.

Martello said he was suing both the city and the state because if the state repeals its law, the city law would still be in effect.

Both the city and state laws are controversial. The Post reported that 68 percent of state residents surveyed in a recent poll believed the state law went too far.

But Mayor Bloomberg has defended the city law, saying it would save the lives of hundreds of New Yorkers each year from secondhand smoke.

More than 500 city bars, restaurants and other establishments were ticketed in the first six months of the city law.

As of two months ago, 30 places received three tickets, 10 more received four, and two spots acquired five.

Being hit with three or more tickets in a 12-month period puts an establishment at risk of being shut down under the new laws.

The Players Club was founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, brother of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, as a private establishment for actors and theater lovers.

The posh establishment in a historic brownstone has boasted as members Gen. William Sherman, Mark Twain, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, James Cagney, Mayor John Lindsay and now has as another honored member, former Mayor David Dinkins.

December 22, 2003
        NEW RECRUIT
        Page Six

HEY, hey, he's not smoking! Former Monkee Mickey Dolenz went bananas when Des O'Brien, owner of Langan's on West 47th Street, asked him to sign the New York Night Life/United Restaurant & Tavern Owners Association's joint petition that seeks justifiable amendments to Mayor Bloomberg's draconian anti-smoking law. Dolenz, a vehement anti-smoker who supports the ban, got into a "sometimes testy" exchange with O'Brien. But by the end of the night, Dolenz was sufficiently persuaded - or exhausted - by the Irishman's arguments, and he agreed to sign.

December 21, 2003
        IN A HUFF, U.N. STAFFERS STILL PUFF
        By Jennifer Gould Keil

It's downright UN-healthy.

Staff and diplomats at the United Nations are flouting their own secretary-general's health directive to quit smoking and abide by the rules of the U.N.'s own World Health Organization - not to mention the local laws of New York City.

Walk into the U.N.'s world headquarters on the East River and you'll be hit by the stale smell of smoke.

Throughout the building, clouds of smoke billow from various corners including an espresso bar and the popular delegates lounge, where representatives from 191 countries blatantly puff away, oblivious to the tobacco-stained no-smoking signs.

Last September, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a directive to his staff: No smoking in the building.

Neither Annan nor the city have the power to tell diplomats what to do - that's why the city loses out on millions of dollars in unpaid parking tickets amassed by envoys successfully claiming diplomatic immunity.

But Annan does have the authority to discipline his staff.

For a while, after the directive was issued, the staff stopped smoking - at least publicly. Certain offices and hidden basement areas remained smelly, smoky bastions of defiant, butt-puffing staffers.

"We hope the staff will abide by the rules," a U.N. spokesman said. "Staff could in theory be disciplined for smoking. It's within the secretary-general's authority to do so."

But Annan never got around to setting up enforcement guidelines for his no-smoking directive. Over time, the smokers came out of their hiding holes and resumed puffing - defiantly - in U.N. lounges and coffee spots.

December 20, 2003
        BOUNCER KIN FILE $550M CIG-SLAY SUIT
        By Laura Italiano

The family of the Club Guernica bouncer who was stabbed to death after asking a patron to stub out his cigarette is suing the club, the accused stabber and his alleged accomplices for $550 million.

Dana "Shazam" Blake was only 32 years old when he died in the April scuffle at the Avenue B nightspot. The stabbing of the well-liked, 6-foot-5 "gentle giant" added controversy to the city's then-new and much debated smoking ban.

A lawsuit filed by Blake's brother Harold blames the nightclub for "failing to properly train, advise and inform its employees . . . regarding proper procedures regarding implementation and/or enforcement of the then recently enacted 'no-smoking law.' "

The club also failed to screen patrons with metal detectors, thereby exposing Blake to "excruciating and agonizing horrific injuries and wounds."

Blake died after a knife pierced the femural artery in his groin area - a knife Manhattan prosecutors say was wielded by Isaias Umali, a 31-year-old martial-arts expert from Jamaica, Queens.

Umali's trial is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 23 in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Lawyers for Blake's family and Club Guernica did not return phone calls yesterday. A lawyer for the Chans declined comment.

December 11, 2003
        TOBACCO (TAXES) KILL
        Editorial

It's official: The next war has begun.

No, not in the Middle East.

In New York. Among criminals - over cigarettes.

Or, more to the point, among smugglers - over bootlegged cigarettes.

That's right: Mayor Bloomberg and his friends in Albany have managed to spur a brand-new crime war - involving turf battles over bootlegged smokes.

We hate to say we told you so, but . . . well, we did.

Any time you make a popular product illegal - or, in this case, prohibitively expensive - you create a black market.

Criminals rush in and look to corner the market. And they seldom limit themselves to fair business practices to eliminate the competition.

That is exactly what happened when Mayor Mike and lawmakers in Albany imposed what is, in effect, a 75 percent sales tax on cigarettes last year.

Of a $7 price for a pack, $4 goes to the seller and fully $3 goes to City Hall and Albany - that is, if the seller's honest.

Too often, they're not.

Wide tax margins are to bootleggers what raw meat is to lions. Opportunistic free-marketeers buy cartons - hell, cases of cartons - out of state or on Indian reservations and sell them on the street, effectively splitting the price difference with consumers.

Because it's all illegal, cigarette smugglers are (by definition) criminals.

And because Mayor Mike & Co. have made the trade so lucrative, it has attracted a really nasty lot - Russian thugs, Chinatown gangs, even those with ties to terror groups like Hezbollah.

These chaps think nothing of murdering the competition.

Literally.

* On Tuesday, Yvonne Knox buried her teenage son, Cody, who was stabbed to death last month by rival bootleggers.

It seems Cody was undercutting their per-pack price - by a whole dollar.

* Sherwin Henry, 23, was buying smokes in bulk from a Long Island Indian reservation. He took a fatal bullet in his head last month on a Brooklyn rooftop.

* Two other men were also shot in separate cig-war incidents.

Indeed, so hot has the war become that the NYPD has created a special unit, called the Cigarette Interdiction Group, to deal with growing "butt-legging."

Again, none of this should surprise. Indeed, it's classic.

Remember Prohibition?

Violence among liquor bootleggers spawned a whole genre of movies.

More recently, crack wars ravaged this city. And even today, turf wars among drug dealers continue to take lives - including those of innocent bystanders.

"You can liken [cigarette bootlegging] to narcotics trafficking," Garry McCarthy, an NYPD official, says.

But what's saddest about this war is how unnecessary it is.

Mayor Mike and the Albany geniuses imposed their confiscatory taxes for two terrible reasons:

* To raise money to feed their own addiction - government spending.

* To make it harder for people to smoke - because they know better than smokers that tobacco is bad for you.

In fact, lawmakers aren't raking in nearly as much as they expected to, or curbing smoking, because (see above) the business has gone underground.

Which makes the tobacco-war violence that much more tragic.

How much more escalation will it take before they come to their senses and ditch the tax?

December 11, 2003
        SAVE US FROM MIKE'S 'LIFESAVING' CIG-BAN BS
        By Steve Dunleavy

FACT: On Dec. 30, 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said of his proposed anti-smoking ban in bars: "We will literally save tens of thousands of lives."

FACT: On May 12 of this year, he apparently revised his figure: "We are going to save over 1,000 lives a year in New York City from smoking-related diseases."

FACT: In October, Bloomberg was saying: "Well over 1,000 people are dying of secondhand smoke, as opposed to 428 people who are murdered. A death is a death."

Mr. Mayor, you may be a business genius and a multimillionaire, but you are also a bumbling, bloody moron. You pushed up the sales tax on cigarettes - and what did that do?

Ask the parents of Sherwin Henry, 23, and Cody Knox, 19, shot dead after they got on the wrong side of a turf war to sell untaxed, bootlegged cigarettes. Ask two other guys who were wounded in The Bronx in a similar turf war what it means to say "A death is a death."

Before you are thrown out of office, please explain how you're saving lives - before you create another Chicago prohibition bloodbath.

If Mad Mike says he's saving 1,000 lives every year for denying freedom of choice to smokers in bars, I presume that tens of thousands of bartenders or waitresses over the past 10 years have died.

Can anyone genuinely believe this?

Where are their mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers and cousins?

Yesterday I tried to speak to Joanne Koldare, the director of the NYC Coalition for a Smoke-Free City, to ask her about all these bartenders and barmaids who have died over the last 10 years.

Ten calls. "I'm sorry, I'm on the telephone or away from my desk," her answering machine responded 10 times.

Brian Nolan, executive director of the United Restaurant and Tavern Owners Association, said: "I don't smoke.

"My father is 89 back in Ireland. Ask him how many cigarettes he smoked a day. This thing is so bizarre. A repressed demand will see profits, exceeding profits. Exceeding profits will bring violence."

Now, Mayor Bloomberg, get off your pinstriped derriere, smell the coffee and stop telling us what we should do.

Put that in your non-existent pipe and smoke it.

December 11, 2003
        JUDGE SNUFFS ASHTRAY RAP
        By Gersh Kuntzman

The ashtray fiend of Brooklyn has beaten the rap.

In a ruling that could have profound implications for enforcement of the city's Smoke-Free Air Act, an administrative court judge has snuffed out charges of ashtray possession against Brooklyn Heights video store owner Marty Arno.

As reported in The Post, Arno had faced a fine of up to $2,000 for possessing that most villainous of inanimate objects: an ashtray (in this case, a souvenir from the classic 1984 B-movie, "The Rosebud Beach Hotel").

At a hearing yesterday, Arno argued he had the ashtray simply to allow smoking customers to snuff out their illegal tobacco without having to leave the store.

Judge Stanley Trattler accepted that argument.

"I dismissed it on the grounds that it wasn't used as an ashtray," Trattler told The Post.

Although Trattler did not rule on the legality of the city's anti-ashtray law, the decision may blow smoke on ashtray summonses.

Dozens of bars and restaurants have received an ashtray summons.

"Non-food" establishments like Arno's video store are inspected only if the Health Department receives a specific complaint.

December 10, 2003
        CLUBS BLAME SMOKING BAN FOR STAFF CUTBACKS
        Page Six

THE NEW York Nightlife Association is trumpeting a new survey that it says proves Mayor Bloomberg's smoking ban has crippled the city's nightlife industry. The survey, conducted by International Communications Research of 300 bars, hotel lounges and nightclubs, found that 34 percent of bars, hotels and nightclubs have reduced staff by an average 18 percent since the ban took effect, and 74 percent of those establishments blame the layoffs on the ban. The survey also showed that 76 per cent of them have lost customers by an average of 30 percent. And 78 percent of businesses reported a negative impact on their businesses. "Before the smoking ban was passed, we told government leaders that bars and nightclubs would take the brunt of the economic fallout," said NYNA president David Rabin. "This survey confirms that devastation. The smoking ban is driving a multibillion-dollar nightlife industry into the ground."

December 10, 2003
        DEADLY WAR FOR BOOTLEG SMOKES
        By Murray Weiss

Two people have been murdered and two others shot in separate acts of violence tied to a surge in cigarette bootlegging that has rocked the Big Apple in the aftermath of the whopping cigarette tax hike.

The allure of easy profit - as much as $50 per carton - has drawn to the lucrative illegal cigarette trade a variety of criminals, from Russian thugs in Brighton Beach to gangs in Chinatown to suspects with ties to the terror group Hezbollah, police and federal officials say.

And now the rival factions are setting their beefs with guns and knives:

* Sherwin Henry, 23, who was re-selling cigarettes bought in bulk from a Long Island Indian reservation, was fatally shot in the head on the rooftop of an East New York, Brooklyn, apartment building on Nov. 19.

* Cody Knox 19, was chased down through a crowd and stabbed to death in broad daylight near Brooklyn's Fulton Mall in a cigarette-selling turf dispute.

* A 25-year-old Bronx man, whose name was withheld, was shot at 1304 Miriam Ave. in another turf war.

* Desmond Jordan, 34, was shot twice allegedly by William Giddens, 45, last May 17 in front of 24 Humboldt St. in yet another battle.

"You can liken this to narcotics trafficking; there are people who buy in bulk, then break it down and distribute to stores or to street dealers who sell them by the cigarette," said Garry McCarthy, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for operations.

The NYPD created a unit called the Cigarette Indiction Group (CIG) to deal with the "anticipated" upturn in "buttlegging" immediately after the city passed a $1.50-a-pack tax increase in July 2002 - an extraordinary 1,900 percent jump from 8 cents a pack.

Since then, the six-member CIG unit has made 146 arrests, seized six cars, $250,000 in cash and 30,000 cartons (6 million) cigarettes - and their work does not include the more than 1,000 cigarette-related collars made by the city's patrol cops, McCarthy said.

McCarthy said the lucrative trafficking and the comparatively modest sanctions suggested the schemes could continue, as could the bloodshed.

"Any money-making scheme will branch into violence," he said.

December 8, 2003
        GRAYDON'S FIGHT UP IN SMOKE
        Page Six

GRAYDON Carter - among the most vocal opponents of Mayor Bloomberg's anti-smoking laws - has been crushed by the Health Dept. enforcers who ticket him each month when they find ashtrays in his office at Conde Nast headquarters.

The Vanity Fair editor in chief was defiant after the third bust at his corner office on the 22nd floor, declaring: "I find Mayor Bloomberg's smoking laws to be nothing short of asinine and their enforcement to be nothing short of harassment."

But a week later, the editor sounded like the victim of overzealous prosecution and implied he never uses the ashtrays.

"I keep them around to remind me of my youth," Carter informed the Times.

The back-tracking led one smoker to lament, "We have lost our leader. Graydon was like Charles de Gaulle commanding the underground against the Nazis. But now they have beaten him into submission."

The storm troopers first raided Carter's office in September after he was ratted out. Health Dept. spokeswoman Sandra Mullin said, "There were several complaints." A Vanity Fair spokesman denied that Carter is trying to find out who betrayed him: "There is no witch hunt."

Conde Nast faces fines of $200 to $2,000 for repeat violations, and it is almost certain the jack-booted city inspectors will return soon for a fourth visit.

"This is harassment on the part of Mike Bloomberg, pure and simple," Carter e-mailed PAGE SIX: "Of the 200 so-called ashtray violations handed out, I have received three of them. This is no coincidence."

Carter seemed surprised by his new persona as a civil-rights leader. "I make the front page of the [International] Herald Tribune not for having written a great book or having painted a great picture or anything, but for having an ashtray in my office."

No longer. His spokeswoman said, "There are no ashtrays." And a source who works nearby told PAGE SIX: "I haven't smelled smoke coming out of his office this week." Sounds like surrender.

However, The Post's Keith Kelly reported that Carter defiantly enjoyed a post-prandial cigarette at the Four Seasons last week after the annual Conde Nast lunch, and lured editorial director James Truman to light up too. So maybe the fight for smokers' rights, while it has moved from Carter's office, still has a spark of life.

December 6, 2003
        DROP THAT ASHTRAY!
        Editorial

Where are the New York Civil Liberties Union busybodies when you really need them?

Just sitting on their butts?

While Mayor Bloomberg's ashtray posse is out there kicking down doors?

Recent reports demonstrate only too well what Mayor Mike's anti-smoking holy war has degenerated into.

Now they're busting folks for possession.

Not of cigarettes.

Of ashtrays.

Case in point: The Health Department's "raid" of the venerable Players Club off Gramercy Park, as reported by The Post's Steve Dunleavy last week.

An intimidated assistant of the club executive director was forced to open her boss' private office.

No warrant.

No due process.

And then the inspectors found - are you ready for this? - three ashtrays.

In a stack.

Now, there's a threat to public health.

As Players Executive Director John Martello said: "No cigarettes, nothing. No evidence of smoke, just three stacked ashtrays. I wasn't even there."

The ashtrays had been intentionally removed from the interior bar premises - as the law demands.

Not good enough.

Not for Mayor Mike.

We think the ban is misguided - that's no secret.

Also obvious: the economic damage the ban is inflicting across the five boroughs.

But the latest incidents - Dunleavy's anecdote is but one of many tales of proprietors ticketed just for ashtray possession - suggests that the tobacco dragoons are now totally out of control.

The rationale for the ban is the allegedly damaging effects of exposure to so-called "second-hand" smoke.

The scientific basis for that is dubious, but let that go for now: If that's the concern, then let the health inspectors investigate on that basis - exposure to actual smoke.

If there is clear evidence of smoking going on, go after the perps.

But don't start throwing around tickets because of ashtrays.

A questionable policy from the start, the ban has now become a license to invade New Yorkers' privacy, waste resources and further make New York City seem like an oppressive, over-regulated place in which to do business.

To say nothing of a laughingstock.

NYCLU, do your stuff!

December 4, 2003
        CONDE NAST XMAS PARTY: WHO'S UP & WHO'S DOWN
        By Keith J. Kelly

It's Christmas season in New York - when the Rockefeller Christmas tree lights are turned on, and the upper echelon of Conde Nast gathers at the Four Seasons restaurant for the annual editors and publishers' holiday bash.

When smoke began wafting through the room late in the luncheon, it did not take long to find the culprit: Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter. A bitter foe of Mayor Bloomberg's smoking ban, Carter also enticed Table 5 seatmate Truman to flout the law.

November 28, 2003
        NICOTINE NAZIS ARE ASH-KING FOR IT THIS TIME!
        By Steve Dunleavy

LAWYER Rich Farley was steaming like a Thanksgiving turkey.

"It's like making a household glass tumbler illegal during Prohibition because you could pour whiskey into it," he was saying.

Farley was commenting on the latest outrage committed by the nicotine Nazis.

At 3:30 p.m. on Monday, two inspectors for the Health Department "raided" the time-honored Players Club on Gramercy Park South.

Operating on an anonymous tip, the inspectors called on Players Club Executive Director John Martello.

Martello was out of the office and so was his assistant.

"When my assistant returned, the inspectors demanded she open my locked office. Of course, she was intimidated, and indeed opened the office," Martello said.

"There behind the desk, on a low shelf, they found three stacked ashtrays.

"No cigarettes, nothing. No evidence of smoke, just three stacked ashtrays. I wasn't even there."

Martello said the reason the ashtrays were in his office is because the Health Department makes it illegal to have ashtrays on the bar since the smoking ban.

"I didn't know ashtrays were illegal," said Martello.

Farley said: " If you have a kitchen license, the Health Department has the right to inspect you at any time.

"Clearly, the law wasn't made for going into a private office, seeing stacked and stored ashtrays and giving you a citation. Previously, the Health Department in this regard was limited to food and beverage establishments for this law. But now they can go anywhere, they can go into your office building, a psychiatrist office, a hospital.

"Could you imagine if a cop on an anonymous tip went into a private office without probable cause for a search warrant, what would happen?"

The Players Club, founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, brother of Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, has boasted as members Gen. William Sherman, Mark Twain, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, James Cagney, Mayor John Lindsay, and now has as another honored member, former Mayor David Dinkins.

The Players Club faces a fine ranging from $200 to $2,000 for a Health Department citation. Department spokesman Sid Dinsay said, "There was a complaint that smoking was occurring in that office. It's routine for us to search every part of an establishment and that includes an office."

Where the hell is the American Civil Liberties Union, that whining bunch of lefties, now?

November 26, 2003
        FREDDY COMES OUT SMOKING
        By Stephanie Gaskell

Likely mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer was blowing smoke at Mayor Bloomberg last night.

Ferrer - who has been critical of Bloomberg's far-reaching ban on smoking - made a splash at Cigar Aficionado's annual "Big Smoke" event, where he puffed away and created a buzz in the crowd of hundreds by his presence.

"I'm just having fun," Ferrer told The Post as he lit up a stogie at the Marriott Marquis.

The city's new strict smoking ban allows venues to apply for special waivers for tobacco promotion events, so last night's event was legal.

Ferrer's presence raised some eyebrows.

"It's a statement," said Ike Johnson, an international marketing salesman and cigar fancier. "It shows that politicians are against Bloomberg and the smoking ban."

Ferrer recently criticized Bloomberg's smoking ban, telling The Post in an interview last month that the mayor went too far.

"There's a way to protect people in the workplace without denying others the opportunity to exercise their right in the marketplace," Bloomberg said at the time.

While Ferrer last night refused to attack Bloomberg directly for the city's strict smoking rules, he said the Big Smoke was an example of how to strike a balance between those who want to smoke and those citizens who don't want to inhale second-hand smoke.

"I think this is a perfect example of it," said Ferrer, who lost in the mayoral runoff in 2001 and is eyeing another run. "People come here willingly."

"A lot of smokers would like" to hear about Ferrer's participation at such a pro-smoking event, said fellow puffer Sean Moroney.

Moroney, a Manhattan bartender, said he would vote for Ferrer just because of his position on smoking - and he indicated his line of work was a factor.

"I'm not making as much money as I used to," Moroney said.

The city's best-known cigar fan, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, didn't attend the Big Smoke.

November 24, 2003
        POLS' PERMIT PROPOSAL COULD EXTINGUISH LAW
        By Neil Graves

Two legislators said they are leading a move to have the state's bar and restaurant anti-smoking laws rolled back by permitting qualified establishments to set their own smoking policy.

Deputy Minority Leader Howard Mills (R-Rockland) and Assemblyman Matthew Mirones (R-S.I.) said under their bill, any bar of food-service establishment that already has a liquor license would be able to apply for a license that for $100 would permit on-premise smoking.

The legislators said some businesses are down by 40 percent to 50 percent because of the smoking bans.

During a press conference at an East Side pub yesterday, Mills said many establishments "will be forced to make the critical decision over the next couple of months of whether they will stay in business." Mill, a non-smoker, said although he recognized second-hand smoke was a health problem, the larger issue was "freedom of choice and personal liberty."

Brian Butler, a spokesman for the 2,200-member Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association, said millions have been lost in the ban, with smokers either going to New Jersey bars or staying home.

"I don't know anybody [in New York] who has benefited from this," said Butler, whose own Newburgh ale house has lost 25 percent of its business.

Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan), chairwoman of the City Council's Health Committee, said she doubted whether Albany would want to "revisit" an issue approved last spring - 97-44 in the Assembly and 57-4 in the Senate. The City Council's vote, in December 2002, was 42-7 with two abstentions.

Quinn said the Mills-Mirones proposal misses the point. "The point is to make the workplace safe for workers," she said

November 24, 2003
        CLEAR AS SMOKE
        By Stephanie Gaskell

Some of the city's tough new anti-smoking rules are so complicated and confusing that health inspectors and judges don't even know what's kosher and what's not.

Brian Bui knows that all too well. The owner of Mekong restaurant in SoHo got ticketed twice for allowing a customer to smoke outdoors under an awning - but when the cases got to court, one judge ruled for him, and another ruled against him.

Smoking under an awning is definitely illegal - but Bui insists the awning was retracted when he got his two tickets.

If that's the case, Health Department officials admit Bui shouldn't have gotten any tickets.

"A notice of violation should not have been issued if smoking was otherwise allowed and the awning was retracted," said department spokeswoman Sandra Mullin.

"We are going to look into that further to make sure that that is, in fact, what was observed."

The anti-smoking law permits smoking in 25 percent of a bar or restaurant's outdoor area - as long as there is no awning or overhang.

But the inspector wrote on one ticket that Bui "is not allowed to have a smoking area outdoors where [there] is a canopy present, even if the canopy is retracted."

"I tried to explain to her that the awning was retracted," Bui said.

He said the inspector told him "they were instructed to cite it, even though the awning is retracted."

Bui said the inspector never claimed that the awning was open.

"It shows a mean-spiritedness in their interpretation of the law," said Bui's lawyer, Rob Bookman.

Bui fought the first ticket, which was issued in June, and lost.

The administrative judge ruled that Bui didn't make a "good-faith effort" to tell the customer not to smoke and slapped him with a $200 fine.

Bui said, "Even the judge admitted that it's confusing. They're the interpreters of the law and they're not sure."

"From our perspective, the law is clear," said Bookman. "The Health Department appears to be confused."

Just two months later, Bui was ticketed again for the same offense. "I was shocked," he said.

This time, Bui hired Bookman, fought the ticket - and won.

Even after winning that case, Bui is out $3,000 in legal fees lawyers and fines.

November 8, 2003
        BLOOMY'S BUGABOO
        Editorial

New Yorkers can rest easy - Mayor Mike's health police are blanketing the city 24/7 in search of illegal ashtrays and missing "No Smoking" signs.

Such is the lesson that Marty Arno learned: As The Post reported yesterday, he faces up to $6,000 in fines after a health inspector discovered an ashtray in his Brooklyn video store.

Not only that - it had a cigarette butt in it.

And not only that, but he had failed to post two required signs - one informing patrons that smoking is illegal, the other outlining his business's official non-smoking policy.

Is Mayor Mike the only one who doesn't think all of this is getting pretty ridiculous?

Apparently so - after all, he's still making offensive and insulting moral equations between the alleged victims of second-hand smoke and the people who were killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

That can't possibly be true, you must be thinking. Not even Mayor Mike would stoop that low.

Guess again. Here's what the mayor told Vanity Fair in a newly published interview:

"Talk about all of the press attention to 9/11. That number of people die every year in the city from second-hand smoke."

Which, apart from its appalling insensitivity, is utter nonsense factually. (A leading British medical journal last May reported that "the association between [passive smoke] and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.")

But it certainly explains why cracking down on smokers seems to be the mayor's top priority these days.

Arno contends a customer entered his video store with a lit cigarette, and rather than send her outside, he offered her an ashtray to extinguish the butt.

Uh-uh, says the city, you can't do that - having an ashtray on the premises, says the department, is "an invitation to smoke in the establishment."

Indeed, the Smoke-Free Air Act, as it's known, specifically states that ashtrays "shall not be used or provided for use."

So it seems the city has the law on its side, however much it may be lacking in common sense.

If only Mayor Mike spent even half as much time solving the city's long-term fiscal woes as he does ensuring that no New Yorker ever again lights a cigarette in public, maybe the municipal budget would be in balance.

What a novel idea.

November 7, 2003
        IDIOT BUTTHEADS
        By Gersh Kuntzman

Freeze, punk! Drop the ashtray!

A Brooklyn video-store owner is facing up to $6,000 in fines after a health inspector caught him with the city's newest controlled substance: an ashtray.

"One (1) ashtray with cigarette butt, and ashes, was seen on the counter of the establishment," inspectors M. Dundas and S. Holloway noted on the ticket that they handed to Marty Arno, owner of Brooklyn Heights Video, last month.

The inspectors also hit Arno with two other violations, one for not having "No Smoking" signs and another for having not posted his company's official nonsmoking policy. The alleged violations carry maximum fines of $2,000 each.

"I'm a tiny video store - it's just me and a girl who comes in part-time," he said. "She knows smoking policy: We don't smoke in the store - it's bad for the videos."

Arno said the illegal ashtray is a case of mistaken identity.

"What happened was that a customer came into the store with a cigarette and rather than make her go all the way back outside, I just let her snuff it out in the ashtray," he said.

Health Department spokesman Andrew Tucker said that the city outlawed ashtrays so that "there is not an invitation to smoke in the establishment."

Arno, whose video store is a favorite of film buffs, took offense at the criminalization of the humble ashtray - in this case, his souvenir from the classic 1984 B-movie, "The Rosebud Beach Hotel."

"How can they take an inanimate object and make it illegal?" he railed. "During Prohibition, alcohol was illegal, but they didn't make the shot glasses illegal. Does anyone even know that this is the law?"

Arno does now. Since receiving his initial summonses, the same inspectors have visited twice. Both times, Arno was in compliance.

"The guy was crawling under the counter looking for the damn ashtray," Arno said. "I said, 'Do you think I'm such a schmuck that I'd leave it out again?' "

Arno says he will fight the fines on the grounds that there is widespread confusion about the less- heralded parts of the city's anti-smoking laws, which took effect this year.

Most of the attention has focused on bars and restaurants, so many businesses and mom-and- pop stores may share Arno's confusion. But the summonses Arno received are right there in the fine print of the Smoke-Free Air Act.

For example, ashtrays "shall not be used or provided for use." "No Smoking" signs must be "conspicuously posted so that they are clearly visible." And "every employer shall establish and/or update a written smoking policy."

Brooklyn Councilman David Yassky said he'll urge the Health Department to better explain the law to owners of small businesses.

November 7, 2003
        NYERS SPLIT ON CIG BAN BUT STILL BACK DRUG LAWS
        By Fredric U. Dicker

ALBANY - Half of New Yorkers say the state's tough new smoking ban should be changed, while clear majorities favor cutting spending and keeping the tough Rockefeller drug laws on the books, a new poll yesterday found.

The Quinnipiac University survey of 1,304 registered voters also found an overwhelming 72 percent of New Yorkers feel that government corruption is a "serious" problem in the state.

The poll found 50 percent of voters want New York's harsh smoking ban in restaurants and bars made "less strict," while 47 percent favor keeping the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of New York City and upstate residents favor a less restrictive smoking ban, while suburbanites, by 54 percent to 45 percent, like the law as is.

New Yorkers in all regions say government corruption is a serious problem: 74 percent in the city, 71 percent in the suburbs and 73 percent upstate.

November 4, 2003
        BLOOMY RAPS RUDY
        By Stephanie Gaskell

Mayor Bloomberg, in an unusually sharp jab at Rudy Giuliani, says racial issues tinged every aspect of his predecessor's administration.

"You forget that every single decision, everybody, every story, everything was always couched in terms of race," Bloomberg says in the December issue of Vanity Fair, which hits newsstands tomorrow.

"That's not true anymore," Bloomberg concludes.

In the revealing interview, Bloomberg also stresses that he has a different management style than Giuliani, who is universally credited for his leadership in the city in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

"He made all the decisions . . . particularly when it came to police and fire. Rudy wanted to be the PC [police commissioner]. Rudy wanted to be the fire commissioner. He rushed to the fires," Bloomberg says.

"My attitude is, my job is to pick people and let them do it."

A Giuliani spokeswoman declined comment, saying the ex-mayor hadn't seen the article.

Bloomberg's press secretary, Ed Skyler, defended the mayor's comments.

"No one should infer any criticism of Mayor Giuliani in either of those statements," he said.

Bloomberg also compares the number of deaths caused by secondhand smoke to the number of people killed in the World Trade Center collapse.

Doubling his previous estimates, the mayor says that 2,000 New Yorkers die each year from secondhand smoke.

"Think about all the press attention to 9/11," he says. "That number of people die every year in the city from secondhand smoke.

"Or think about all the press focus on anthrax," he continues. "Six months. Headline stories. Every radio station. Every television station. Every periodical. Every newspaper. Anthrax, anthrax, anthrax.

"There were seven deaths."

Bloomberg also suggests he wouldn't be devastated if he loses his re-election bid in 2005. "If the public decides they don't want me, OK, I'm gonna have another career," the billionaire former businessman says. "For most people, when they leave office, that's the end. That's not true in my case. My Plan B is better than the other guy's Plan A."

Bloomberg admits that being mayor isn't the "highlight of his career."

"You look at people, this is the highlight of their career - in terms of power, access, visibility," he says. "That wasn't the case with me. I can go to any city in the world," he says.

In the nine-page article, Bloomberg also targets Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, citing him as a politician who spends his entire term running for re-election.

October 25, 2003
        2 BLDGS. GET TO WAIVE IN PUFFERS
        By Kenneth Lovett

ALBANY - The city Health Department has granted two waivers to the tough smoking ban, officials said yesterday.

Smoking is now legal for patients in the psychiatric ward of Staten Island University Hospital and people at the General Cigar Co. in Manhattan.

The two were among 14 businesses that have applied for waivers. The fate of the other 12 requests wasn't clear last night.

City Health Department spokeswoman Sandra Mullin said General Cigar Co., which manufactures cigars, had sought a waiver on the grounds of economic hardship.

A waiver was granted to the Staten Island hospital on the grounds that compliance is unreasonable, a state official said.

On Aug. 20, the state gave the city the power to grant waivers to a very limited number of businesses and other places that could prove the statewide smoking ban had caused economic hardship or that compliance was unreasonable.

Statewide, hundreds of bars and other businesses have sought waivers to allow smoking, but only five have been granted.

October 24, 2003
        MAYOR BUTT-HEAD'S BAN BURNS ANOTHER BIZMAN
        By Steve Dunleavy

MAYOR Bloomberg promised he would save 1,000 lives a year through his secondhand-smoke ban in bars.

With great respect, I suggest he go to A.J. Kelly's Pub on Stone Street off Broadway and speak to saloon owner Brian Kelly.

On Oct. 15 at 9:30 p.m. at Kelly's pub, a disaster of frightening proportions was averted by Fire Co. 15 and Engine 4.

The worst-case scenario would have been Mayor Bloomberg having to go to funerals.

"It was the night of that terrible thing happening on Staten Island, and it was terribly windy," Kelly was saying.

"It was after the Yankee game, and the Chicago game was coming up.

"The place was packed, and the customers went outside into the wind to have a smoke."

One of the customers flicked his lit cigarette on to the street.

The best guess is that the wind blew it under a crack between the bar's storefront.

"Suddenly the customers were saying 'I smell smoke,' " Kelly recounted. "We evacuated the place, and me and the chef started searching all over.

"The cigarette had got into the ceiling of the basement and started a fire," Kelly said.

Of course, it just could have been a passer-by who flicked that cigarette.

"No way. At 9:30 p.m., the only reason why the bar was packed was because of the games; this is a very little traveled street at night. And in 33 years, there hasn't been any fire. Outside the bar, the place was littered with cigarettes because they can't smoke inside and put their cigarettes out in an ashtray."

Kelly estimates the damage was up to $20,000.

Firefighters quickly put out the fire in the basement of A.J. Kelly's Pub, but caution being the best boss, they evacuated the residents of the five-story building. And when one resident did not answer the door, they broke it down just in case someone was sleeping inside. The resident was out.

"This is all because of Bloomberg's silly law. I don't smoke but my wife does. And here is the wife of the owner of the pub having to go outside. I can't tell you how much business I've lost because of this smoking ban. Now comes winter. I will have customers dying of pneumonia."

Postscript: The pub called Fiddler's Green on 48th Street, a durable Irish establishment owned by veteran saloon keeper John Mahon, is closing.

"We have just lost too many customers to this law, which I did not vote for, bar owners did not vote for, bartenders did not vote for, and the public did not vote for," Mahon said.

October 22, 2003
        JUDGE SNUFFS OUT BID TO BLOCK SMOKING BAN
        By Kenneth Lovett

ALBANY - A federal judge yesterday denied efforts by bar and restaurant owners for a preliminary injunction to block the statewide smoking law.

Judge Lawrence Kahn ruled that the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association failed to establish a likelihood that its lawsuit to overturn the new law would ultimately be successful.

He also said the association failed to prove the likelihood that bars and restaurants will suffer irreparable harm absent an injunction.

"The court finds that the qualitative differences between adverse business consequences and adverse physical health effects weighs in the favor of [supporters of the law]," Kahn wrote in his 14-page decision.

A disappointed Scott Wexler, executive director of the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association, will proceed with the lawsuit, even though the decision "doesn't point to the likelihood to success before this judge."

"If people are looking for relief, this does shift the focus to the legislative process for the time being," he said.

October 20, 2003
        Inside Albany ("Smoke This, Joe Bruno!")
        By Fredric U. Dicker

An angry new rock-'n'-roll song blasting Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno for backing the state's anti-smoking law is selling out in his home city of Troy.

"We can't get enough of our CDs into peoples' hands," said James Barrett, lyricist and keyboardist with the Troy-based six-member group The Lawn Sausages.

Entitled "Smoke This, Joe Bruno!" the song takes the powerful Rensselaer County Republican leader to task for pushing through the controversial measure, which banned smoking in bars and restaurants.

"They say Uncle Joe used to smoke a couple packs a day, but now that he's a senator, he's got the nerve to say, 'You can't smoke in restaurants, you can't smoke in bars, you can't even smoke in a corporate car,' " the song begins.

"Now I don't even smoke, and I don't care if you do, but how many more rights can they take away from you?"

"We wrote this in a night about two weeks ago because he's costing a lot of our friends their jobs," Barrett said.

"It's being sold in all the bars in Troy and at local records shops and at the Smokers' Paradise in Troy. The response has been overwhelming."

Barrett said The Lawn Sausages were formed 12 years ago and had earned about $75,000 during that time, performing mostly locally and selling CDs, with all the money going to local food banks and other charities.

Local observers believe Bruno, once a strong pro-business opponent of expanded government powers, has suffered political damage because of his backing of the smoking ban and his support for the biggest tax hike in New York state history.

October 18, 2003
        CITY SUES TO FILTER OUT WEB CIGS
        By Stefan C. Friedman

The city stepped up its war on Internet cigarette distributors yesterday, filing a lawsuit against seven out-of-state Web sites for illegally shipping cigarettes to New York.

The city Corporation Counsel and Finance Department launched a sting operation against the Web sites in an investigation in which two undercover officials purchased cigarettes online and had them delivered to city addresses - a violation of state law.

The city is looking to have an injunction filed against the sites, forcing them to cease shipping smokes to New York state and pay back taxes on the cigarettes they sold to New Yorkers.

"The city is losing millions and millions in tax dollars it should be getting," said city lawyer Eric Proshansky. "The suit is designed to ensure that that money gets collected."

October 17, 2003
        HOSP JOINS CIG BID
        By Stephanie Gaskell

Claiming financial hardship, 14 businesses - including a hospital and several psychiatric centers - have applied for special permits that would allow smoking, health officials said yesterday.

On Aug. 20, the state Health Department gave the city the power to grant waivers to businesses that could prove they lost money because of the statewide smoking ban.

The city is considering each application on a case-by-case basis, according to Health Department spokeswoman Sandra Mullin.

Very few establishments are expected to qualify for waivers - only bars that want to build a ventilated smoking room and owner-operated pubs.

The city had allowed for these exemptions until the stricter state law took effect in July.

The businesses all claim they lost revenues in the first seven months of the ban.

The city ban went into effect on March 30, followed by the statewide ban in July.

October 8, 2003
        BRUNO UNDER FIRE OVER SMOKE BAN
        By Kenneth Lovett

ALBANY - The state Conservative Party yesterday began a statewide postcard campaign aimed at getting Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno to consider changes to the ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.

Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long said Bruno (R-Rensselaer) - a one-time favorite of the party - is being targeted because "he's the biggest zealot on this."

The postcards proclaim, "The smoking ban has gone too far. This onerous law does not allow the free market to work . . . This burdensome law is causing the loss of business and jobs . . . This oppressive law is an affront to freedom."

It goes on to say, "I join with the Conservative Party and urge you to amend the law to allow accommodation of all patrons."

The cards are being sent to restaurants and bars around the state. Customers will be asked to sign them and send them to Bruno's office.

Long said he sent 10,000 cards to Nassau County alone yesterday.

Long said the cards are not being sent to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Gov. Pataki because he believes Bruno represents the biggest roadblock on the issue.

Bruno spokesman John McArdle had no comment other than to note that it also takes the Assembly and governor to make any changes to the law.

Several Bruno allies have quietly said they would like to see changes in the law, to at least give bars and restaurants the option of providing separately ventilated smoking sections.

Bruno has indicated he might be open to such changes next year.

October 1, 2003
        SMOKE SHOCK TV ADS
        By Kenneth Lovett

ALBANY - A national anti-smoking group is looking for New York cancer sufferers to feature in a new round of ads designed to keep kids from smoking.

An internal memo sent to the anti-smoking group Smokefree NY, and obtained by The Post, shows that the American Legacy Foundation is looking for New Yorkers whose lives have been harmed by smoking to appear in "a few powerful, reality-based smoke-free commercials."

Perhaps the best-known of such anti-smoking ads was made by actor Yul Brynner and broadcast after he died of cancer in 1985.

Among those real-life victims now being sought:

* A teen who during his life lost a parent to smoking.

* A woman who has lost her hair due to treatment for a smoking-caused disease.

* A hospitality worker with lung cancer caused by exposure to secondhand smoke at work.

* A woman who uses an oxygen tank to breath.

The ads are to be shot in New York and shown nationally, said casting director Mimi Webb Miller.

"We are actively looking for people in those positions to speak to a camera," Miller said. "Those kind of truth ads are real effective with kids."

The nonprofit American Legacy Foundation was formed in 1999 to education kids about smoking and is mostly funded with money from tobacco companies as part of a 1999 settlement with 46 states.

Smokers called the coming ads exploitive.

"They have no shame," Audrey Silk, co-founder of a New York City-based pro-smoking group, CLASH. "They'll do anything for the cause."

Silk added the anti-smoking groups "are starting to sound desperate to me. Oh, I hate them."

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart entered into an agreement with 43 states, including New York, to try to stem tobacco sales to minors, state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said yesterday.

Wal-Mart agreed to better educate and train employees on the issue, use cash registers that allow for ID checks on all tobacco sales and prohibit self-service displays of tobacco products.

Wal-Mart will also pay $437,500.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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December 24, 2003
        Suit: Smoke ban ash-backward
        By Dave Goldiner

Hands off our stogies, Mayor Bloomberg!

The grumpy old smokers at the century-old Players Club sued yesterday to overturn the smoking ban, saying City Hall should keep its nose out of their venerable cigar-scented lair.

"The only thing smoking causes is second-hand statistics," quipped bon vivant Bert Sugar, gripping a Scotch-and-soda in one hand and a cigar in the other. "George Burns lived till 100. He would've died at 70 if he didn't smoke."

Daily News columnist Sidney Zion was there and angrily invoked the Constitution, the First Amendment and the law of the smoke-filled jungle to blast the mayor, who recently claimed second-hand smoke kills more New Yorkers annually than terrorists did on Sept. 11.

"There's a place called Bellevue for people like that," Zion groused. "It's totally bogus."

The club, founded in 1888 by legendary actor Edwin Booth - who also was the brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth - filed suit in federal court yesterday asking a judge to overturn both the city and state smoking bans.

The suit says there is no proof that second-hand smoking is harmful and that private clubs should be free to make their own rules. It also claims the strict law is discriminatory because it exempts a handful of cigar bars.

Bloomberg brushed off the latest challenge, calling it a last-breath effort to derail his successful snuff-the-puff campaign.

"We've been through the smoking business," he said. "Let's stop killing people and get on with it and grow up."

December 23, 2003
        Thanks to smoke ban, I'm outta here
        Ex-bar owner says he's not alone in losing biz
        By Shay Leavy -  Leavy, now a former New York City bar owner, started a new job in Florida a few weeks ago

It has been about six months since the smoking ban went into effect, and perhaps it is somewhat true that bartenders and service people in taverns can now breathe better-quality air. But I wonder if they are really well-served if they lose a portion of their income, or their employment altogether, because their establishment has suffered a significant loss of business.

Thanks to the politically correct crowd that backed the smoking ban, a number of bars and taverns have closed. Many more have suffered a major drop in business. It's a shame that neither Mayor Bloomberg nor Gov. Pataki saw how air purifiers could have served the needs of all interests here.

The smoking-ban advocates claimed that when smoking was prohibited, nonsmokers would patronize establishments where they previously had felt out of place. Well, they didn't come into my establishment. And the other bar owners I talk with haven't seen them either.

I just closed my bar in lower Manhattan about two weeks ago. I felt bad laying off seven workers. Most of them had been with me for the five years Swan's was open. None of them had ever complained about secondhand smoke. Harry's Hanover Square recently closed after 30 years in the Financial District. About a month ago, the century-old, family owned Roesch's Tavern in College Point closed.

Taverns are dropping like flies, but not from smoking or cancer.

December 20, 2003
        Bouncer's kin want 550M
        Sue club, alleged killer in slaying over cig ban
        By Helen Peterson

The family of a nightclub bouncer who was killed while trying to enforce the city's smoking ban is suing the club, his alleged killer and two other men for $550 million.
Dana Blake, 32, nicknamed Shazam, was fatally stabbed during a brawl that erupted when he asked a patron to comply with the ban at a lower East Side club in April.

The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, accuses Blake's suspected killer, Isaias Umali, of causing the "excruciating and agonizing horrific injuries" that led to Blake's "extremely painful death" by stabbing him in the groin.

The suit also alleges that Jonathan Chan, 29, a Wall Street banker, refused repeated requests by security at Club Guernica to stop smoking before the April 13 murder.

Umali, Chan and his brother, Ching Chan, a 31-year-old medical student, created a "hostile, dangerous and violent atmosphere," according to the lawsuit.

Umali and the Chans, whose father, Wing Yeung Chan, was a notorious Chinatown gang leader, are being sued by the family for assault and battery.

Umali is charged with murder and may stand trial next month. The Chans, and their sister, Alice, were initially arrested but were later released.

The lawsuit also accuses the club of negligence for failing to "train, advise and inform" its employees regarding "implementation and/or enforcement of the then-recently enacted 'no smoking' law."

A lawyer for the Chans, Ivan Fisher, said they were "not pleased" when they learned of the lawsuit yesterday, but declined to comment further because they have not yet seen it.

The suit was filed by Harold Blake, of Queens, who is the administrator of his brother's estate.

December 11, 2003
        NYPD Set To Smoke Out Black Market Cig Trade
        By Michele McPhee

The Police Department has launched a major investigation into bootleg cigarette dealing, a lucrative, cutthroat trade blamed for three recent murders, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday.

"It's a cause of concern.  We have seen violence in the recent past," Kelly said.  "We are always concerned about violence on the streets of the city."

Kelly said the NYPD's cigarette unit is focusing on "organized groups" that drive to Southern states and buy thousands of untaxed cigarettes to sell on the streets of New York at $5 a pack.  A rise in New York City and state sales taxes have pushed the price at local stores to more than $7 a pack.

"We've seen this before, with cartons being sold in bars.  But it's changed to a different kind of business with packs being sold on the streets," Kelly said.  "The money is there.  The profits are going way up."

The NYPD's Cigarette Indiction [sic] Group, composed of six investigators, has made nearly 150 arrests and seized 30,000 cartons of cigarettes since July 2002.

Yesterday, the Daily News reported that three men have been killed in the bootlegging wars in Brooklyn.  The most recent case came on Nov. 25, when Cody Knox, 19, was fatally stabbed by two rival cigarette sellers near the Fulton Mall because he was undercutting their sales of illegal smokes by a buck.

December 10, 2003
        The deadly butt-leg war
        3 slain as cig street trade booms
        By Michele McPhee

A bootleg cigarette war in Brooklyn has claimed the lives of at least three people since the summer, the Daily News has learned.

With city and state taxes boosting the price of cigarettes, hundreds of streetwise hustlers are selling cheap tax-free smokes - an illegal but lucrative trade that is becoming nearly as cutthroat as dealing drugs.

One teenage victim, Cody Knox, was buried yesterday, two weeks after he was chased by two fellow bootleggers and fatally stabbed because he was undercutting cigarette prices by a buck, stealing his rivals' business.

"I loved my son, he was a good boy, he was an artist. He was just trying to find himself, and that cigarette thing was just a little hustle that he did on the side," the victim's mother, Yvonne Knox, told The News last night as her voice trembled with tears.

"It's unbelievable that he had to die like that over cigarettes," Knox said, recalling how police told her a broken knife was found beside her 19-year-old son's body that horrible afternoon on Nov. 25. "A silly thing like cigarettes."

But law enforcement sources said Knox is not the only street seller of cigarettes to meet a violent end in recent months.

There have been at least three slayings in Brooklyn associated with selling packs of untaxed cigarettes on streetcorners, law enforcement sources said.

The business began to explode last year, when both the city and the state levied taxes that boosted the price of a pack of butts to more than $7.

Crafty entrepreneurs began building businesses by driving to Southern states for cheaper nicotine, or enlisting the help of Native Americans to buy untaxed cartons on reservations.

If a dealer is caught, the penalty is just a slap on the wrist.

"These guys are making as much money as drug dealers, but if they get caught, all it is is a summons," said one high-ranking police official.

Bootleggers run their operations like small businesses - or like drug operations using steerers to bring customers to secreted stash houses and lookouts to watch out for cops.

Shirwin Henry, 23, took a legitimate approach to his illegal smokes trade by placing ads in Brooklyn community papers advertising his delivery service. Henry bought cigarettes legally on an Indian reservation in Mastic, L.I., with a Native American buddy but then sold them for a profit using a toll-free number to sell their wares.

On Nov. 17, Henry's body was found on an East New York rooftop where he had gone to deliver a carton of cigarettes to a tenant at 185 Wortman Ave. He had been shot once in the head.

"This guy was making about $1,000 to $1,500 a week selling these untaxed cigarettes," said the law enforcement source. "We believe someone in the neighborhood knew how much money he was making and decided to rob him."

Investigators also are looking at a third cigarette-related slaying, in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Aug. 16. Angel Aponte, 17, was suspected of robbing a cigarette dealer days before he was found shot dead at 544 Throop Ave.

November 24, 2003
        Pols: Let pubs pay for smokes
        By Nicole Bode

A new bill would allow any bar or restaurant to skirt the statewide anti-smoking law for $100 a year - the cost of about a dozen packs of cigarettes.

For a C-note, any business with a liquor license could get a smoking permit from the state Department of Health, under a bill introduced by Assemblyman Howard Mills (R-Orange Co.) and Assemblyman Matthew Mirones (R-S.I., Bay Ridge).

"It's not about smoking. It's about ... freedom of choice and personal liberty," Mills said yesterday at a pub called O'Neill's on Third Ave. near 46th St. in Manhattan.

The bill is among several proposed exemptions to the law, including a hardship waiver under discussion in the GOP-led Senate. The waiver would give exemptions to businesses that can prove they have lost substantial revenue due to the smoking ban.

A spokesman for Gov. Pataki declined comment on the Mills-Mirones bill, which would seem to face an uphill battle. State Department of Health officials did not return calls.

October 3, 2003
        Most say smoking ban is a butt-iful thing
        By Joe Mahoney

ALBANY - Most New Yorkers want to keep the butts out, a new poll shows.

The state's ban on smoking in restaurants and bars is supported by 59% of registered voters in New York, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday.

New York City voters matched the statewide results, with 59% favoring the ban and 36% opposed to it.

Groups representing bars and restaurants questioned the poll's value, arguing that it lumped bars in with restaurants.

"It's only the bars where we think the ban is problematic," said Scott Wexler, director of the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association, which says that many of its members have lost business because of the ban.

Its backers, however, note that new statewide figures show a slight increase in the state's beer and alcohol tax collections in August - $15.2 million, about $800,000 more than the $14.4 million collected in August 2002.

Those collections, however, reflect overall alcohol taxes, not just those pouring in from bars and restaurants.

The same poll had good news for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), with 61% saying they approve of her and 33% saying they disapprove - her highest favorability rating since she entered politics three years ago.

"She makes sure she gets around all over New York, and people think she is doing her job," said Quinnipiac pollster Mickey Carroll.

There also was an uptick in support for Gov. Pataki, who scored an approval-disapproval rating of 46% to 42%. His approval rating was up three points from a June 25 Quinnipiac survey.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) rang up a 60% to 24% positive-over-negative rating, while state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, expected to run for governor in 2006, had the highest approval rating of any statewide official: 62% to 15%.

The telephone survey was conducted last week and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
 
 

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Associated Press - December 31, 2003
        N.Y. to Require Self - Extinguishing Cigs

ALBANY, N.Y. -- New York will be the first state to require that all cigarettes be manufactured with paper that extinguishes itself if smokers don't do the job, state officials said Wednesday.

Advocates say the regulations, which go into effect in June, will prevent many of the fires started by careless smoking.

``This could be the beginning of a global standard for cigarettes,'' said Blair Horner, legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group.

The self-extinguishing cigarettes are wrapped in banded paper, with the bands serving as speed bumps to inhibit burning when no one is puffing on the cigarette.

State officials said they will allow retailers to sell off inventories of the old cigarettes after the June deadline.

The lower-ignition paper does nothing to reduce the dangers of smoking.

Every year approximately 900 Americans die, 2,500 are injured and $400 million in damage is caused by fires started by cigarettes, according to the American Burn Association and the federal government.

In many cases, smokers fall asleep and their cigarettes drop onto something flammable, such as clothing, furniture or paper.

News 10 Now - December 31, 2003
        Bars use smoking ban loophole

Even though one smoking ban waiver has been issued to a bar in Onondaga County, in all other bars across the state, it's still illegal.

On New Year's many people make a resolution to quit smoking. Others said the only resolution they’re making is to keep up the fight against the smoking ban.

One such individual is Watertown's new mayor, bar owner Jeff Graham.

He feels the Health Department and tavern owners should be teaming up to ensure patrons' health but that instead, the ban is driving them apart.

“This issue has put us at lager heads and we end up in these tit-for-tats about whether you can have sampling nights or waivers and so on. I think that's the most unfortunate part of the law because if we work together we could come up with ways that we could still do business, still accommodate customers and yet mitigate the effects of smoking,” said Graham.

Graham has applied for a waiver multiple times, to no effect.

“I applied June 20th, I applied October 1st, and again with the new guidelines that come out on December 14th I applied. The State Health Department is refusing to respond to any kind of letters. I'm disturbed by that because these people are public servants, they're supposed to enforce the law, unfortunately their only enforcing the parts of the law they like,” said Graham.

The law does allow bars to host two tobacco sampling nights a year. The events are aimed at letting smokers sample other brands or products.

Graham’s bar, The Speakeasy, scheduled one of their biannual tobacco samplings for New Year’s Eve.

The Speakeasy kept smoking to a designated area. It's the same place they'd put smokers if their smoking ban waiver is ever granted.

New Year’s was their second tobacco sampling party and so far, neither section has complained.

However, according to Graham, these sampling nights are far from the fix.

“You know this is just a chance to show how ludicrous the law is, but long-term, sampling days are not the answer. Waivers could work if the health departments will get over this extremism that they seem to have embraced and start working with businesses on finding solutions,” he said.

The Speakeasy will use the two days they can allow smoking in their bar on December 31st, 2004 and New Year's Day 2005.

The Saratogian - December 31, 2003
        City business owners largely miss smoking ban loophole
        By Brendan McGarry

SARATOGA SPRINGS -- City bar and restaurant owners said Tuesday they would not allow smoking in their businesses today or New Year's Day, as most were unaware of a two-day exemption in the state's anti-smoking law.

Nearly two dozen such establishments in Rochester planned to let patrons smoke on New Year's Eve in legal tobacco promotions, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

In July, New York law banned smoking in public areas, including bars and restaurants. But it allows smoking two days a year if the businesses are promoting tobacco products, provided they notify the state Health Department or county-designated 'enforcement officer' at least two weeks in advance, do not serve food and post a sign or ad.

'I didn't know about it,' said Carolyn Male, owner of Hurricane Sam's on Caroline Street.

The business was not the only one; the exemption largely flew above the region's radar.

Since the law went into effect, only one business has contacted the state Health Department district office in Glens Falls -- which covers Saratoga, Washington and Warren counties -- requesting the exemption, said Department spokeswoman Claire Pospisil.

'We haven't had a lot of interest in this,' she said.

Pospisil was unable to identify the business.

Although Male attributes a 35 percent dive in winter business to the smoking ban, she said she would not likely try to take advantage of the exemption.

'It would cost me more to promote that than it would to not do anything,' Male said. 'Two days is kind of irrelevant.'

Male said she is less likely to use the exemption because her property can offer outside patio smoking during warmer weather. Even so, she said she lost many patrons to the smoking ban, particularly this time of year.

Eugene Goolic, owner of The Alley Bar on Long Alley, was aware of the exemption but said he was more concerned that the state Health Department is considering granting waivers from the smoking ban to businesses with losses of at least 15 percent.

Since last year, Goolic said his business is down nearly 40 percent.

'I want the permanent waiver,' he said. 'I need the permanent waiver to be able to survive.'

Peter DiCarlo, owner of City Tavern on Caroline Street, didn't know about the temporary exemption. He said his business, which opened a year ago November, is too new to determine if there has been any impact from the smoking ban.

'I don't think it matters,' he said of business. 'Most people are very respectful of the law.'

DiCarlo said most affected by the ban was the city's image, with nighttime crowds periodically glutting sidewalks, littering them with piles of cigarette butts.

'They look like a mob,' he said. 'Is that the image we want of Saratoga?'

NY Sun - December 30, 2003
        Bars Owners Think Smoking Waiver Plan Is Just Huffing and Puffing
        By Dina Temple-Raston

    A little-noticed hearing at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene earlier this month floated revisions to the city’s smoking ban that would permit a handful of bars and restaurants to receive waivers that will allow customers to light up.

    Bar owners suspect the city and the state are determined to make the waiver process onerous, so they can say they have provided a program for relief without really having to step back from their decision to ban smoking.

    “The truth is the city and the state don’t want to create a standard in which waivers can be granted,” said Robert Bookman, a lawyer for the New York Nightlife Association.“They don’t want, for political reasons, any scenario in which they will have to concede the smoking law has been a hardship.They are just going through the motions with these hearings.”

    Jeffrey Brust attended the city’s waiver hearings earlier this month and said they were a farce.“There were only about 40 people there and anyone who went would tell you this was all window dressing,” Mr. Brust said. “This wasn’t about the city looking for wiggle room, this was about them looking for cover.”

    Mr. Brust owns a 20,000-square-foot pool hall in the Bronx called Fieldston Recreation. A fixture in the neighborhood for more than 40 years, Mr. Brust said he would have to shutter the place unless the smoking ban is rolled back. He reckons he will be out of business in the next six to eight months.

    “People want a cigarette and a drink when they play pool and the city says you can’t do it,” he said. “The government can’t get involved with everything we do. Seat belts? Okay. Safety helmets for kids? That’s fine too. But this smoking ban is killing us. I’ve already got real estate guys coming in so I can sell the building.”

    The city’s smoking ban went into effect April 1; the state smoking ban has been in force since July. As if to underscore the low priority waivers hold, the state has yet to pull together a waiver application. The city doesn’t have one either. Businesses that want an exemption have to write a letter and hope they provide the appropriate documentation. Officials hope to have a form by early next year.

    “We’re feeling our way through the process,”said the public information officer of the New York State Department of Health, Claire Pospisil. “The beginning will be a little slow but we expect several hundred waivers will be considered in the in the next couple of weeks.”

    That is not to say the latest waiver provisions under consideration are useless to everyone.

    One bar that could slip through the sliver of a loophole is a small establishment on East 5th Street called Fish Bar. It is part of tiny subset of city bars that are owner-operated or have a separate smoking room, both of which allow them to be eligible for waivers from both the state and the city smoking bans. Managers from the Fish Bar declined to be interviewed for fear they would jinx the process.

    “If the Department of Health adopts the rules and regulations they [recently] drafted, then an owner operated bar or a separate smoking room could apply and they might get a waiver,” said the executive director of the Empire State Restaurant & Tavern Association, Scott Wexler. “Essentially our members who were exempt from the city’s ban before the state law went into effect could end up qualifying for a waiver and from what we can tell the Fish Bar fits in the category. Not many people do.”

    Upstate, the Syracuse Brigadiers Inc., which runs a bingo hall in Onondaga County, became the first business in the country to win a waiver from the state’s smoking law.

    The county health commissioner, Dr. Lloyd Novick, determined the ban was causing “undue financial hardship,” so bingo players in the 800-seat hall will be allowed to smoke.

    Most bar owners feel they won’t be as lucky as Brigadiers.

    “I’m having to rethink my business and I am having the kinds of problems I have never had before,” said Lee Seinfeld, who owns Broadway Dive, Dive 75, and The Dive Bar on the West Side. “Now littering and security is a problem. I used to be seen as a positive force in the neighborhood, but now it is a negative because I have customers in the street all the time. I have been trying to change the mix in the bar to make food my selling point. I used to be in the liquor business — not anymore.”

News 10 Now - December 30, 2003
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