Long Island Lawyer Caught in Undercover Video

An attorney licensed to practice law in New York was caught on an eye-opening undercover video.

Marcy Baron was the vice president of the Suffolk County Women's Bar Association. But now she is the star of a racy video and embroiled in allegations of prostitution and much more.

Son of NYU VP fighting to stay alive

Police are looking for the two suspects photographed .


The son of a prominent NYU official shot in a drug-related robbery in Greenwich Village was “on the brink,” but fighting to stay alive today, his distraught mom said.

NYU senior vp Debra LaMorte grew emotional when she briefly spoke to a reporter outside the room of her son, Alex Bongard, in an intensive care unit at Bellevue Hospital.

“He is on the brink,” LaMorte said about her 24-year-old son, who was shot Monday along with another man in his Bleeker Street apartment by robbers posing as marijuana buyers. “He is in critical condition.”

Earlier, LaMorte, New York University’s fund-raising and alumni relations chief, issued a statement saying, “I am saddened and dismayed by what has happened to my son, Alex.”


Police are looking for the two suspects photographed above.

see more videos “There will be many challenges for my son and all of us in the days and weeks ahead, but right now, as his mother, I am only focused on two things: his making a full recovery, and the NYPD catching the gunmen who shot my son,” said LaMorte.

The NYPD today took steps to do just that, releasing surveillance photos of the two men cops believe are responsible for Monday’s shooting of Bongard and Lucas Hinde, a 31-year-old who was released in June from Arizona prison for marijuana crimes.

Police said the two unidentified men donned masks when they went up to Bongard’s third-floor apartment, purportedly to buy pot, at about 11:30 p.m.

One of the men pulled a gun, and shot Bongard and Hinde once in the chest each, before running off with several hundreds of dollars in cash, along with the pocketbook of a woman who had been visiting the apartment.

“There was pot strewn all over the apartment,” said one law-enforcement source.

Another source said it appeared that Bongard and Hinde were operating a “substantial” pot-dealing operation out of Bongard’s $2,500-per-month apartment.

Hinde was in stable condition at Bellevue yesterday, and under police guard.

He had been busted last December, a month after being paroled from Arizon prison, with several pounds of pot in his car after leading a Utah police officer on a chase that hit speeds of 130 mph. That case ended with him being sent back to Arizona to finish a 2 1/2-year sentence in his prior pot case.

Sources said that although the amount of marijuana found in Bongard’s apartment was significant enough to support cops filing drug charges against one or both of the shooting victims, it was unclear whether that would happen.

A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. declined to comment when asked if either Bongard or Hinde would be charged.

'Lazy' EMTs hand off to volunteers

They're throwing them a bone. Some city emergency medical technicians are "turfing out" low-priority 911 calls to nonprofit volunteer ambulance units in Queens, several sources told The Post.

That allows the nonprofits to pick up patients and receive payment -- money that otherwise would have gone to the city.

"Yeah, it happens. Some of the guys are turfing out calls to other guys who work for the community crews," said a longtime volunteer with a Queens community-ambulance team.

"It's only low-priority calls they don't want to take, or if they're really jammed up," the volunteer said. "They'll text or call a 'vollie' and say 'there's a pick-up on this street, you want it?' "

One longtime worker at the FDNY's Emergency Medical Service said: "It's a bit deceptive to the patient. When people call 911, they expect to see an FDNY crew roll up, not a volunteer unit."

The FDNY units still respond to the calls, said several volunteer EMTs.

"But maybe they'll just go a little slower to let the volunteer crew get a head start so the vollies do the transport if a patient needs to go to the hospital," said one of the volunteers.

The FDNY said an allegation of call-sharing was made at an agency meeting but the claim was not pursued.

"We don't investigate rumors -- we investigate specific allegations of wrongdoing," said FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon.

"At this point these are rumors. There is no open investigation."

Michael Russell, an EMT with the Corona Community Ambulance Volunteer Corps in Queens, also "heard allegations" his volunteers got texts from EMS workers at nearby FDNY Battalion 46 and private crews at North Shore University Hospital. A few Battalion 46 members moonlight as volunteers for Corona.

"Me personally, I've never gotten a text -- I've heard rumors, but that's it," said Russell.

David Moretti, president of the Corona volunteer corps, called the allegations ridiculous.

"No, no, that's just crazy," he said.

Moretti and Russell also insisted that all Corona EMTs work as unpaid volunteers -- although information filed on Guidestar, which tracks tax returns for nonprofits, said the group instituted paid daytime shifts in December 2009.

The FDNY does officially tap Queens volunteer crews for help during major emergencies -- like last month's freak tornado. But its medics aren't authorized to decide when to turn 911 calls over to other crews.

The department has a process to deal with infractions like passing off calls to outside groups, said EMS union spokesman Bob Ungar. "We think a thorough investigation is called for," he said. "This should be looked into as a matter of public safety."

Rockland County, NY – Police Caution Monsey Residents Regarding Chasidic Driver Luring Young Kids

Rockland County, NY - Ramapo police are warning the public to be extra vigilant after a disturbing incident on Friday, October 22nd in which a teenage boy reported that a driver who picked him up at the corner of West Maple Avenue and Maple Terrace attempted to engage him in inappropriate contact.

The driver of the four door silver sedan appeared to be between 25 – 30 years old, was dressed in Chasidic garb and spoke Yiddish. The teenager, who jumped out of the car and suffered injuries to his knees, reported that the incident occurred at 5:33 PM as they were driving south on College Road between Carlton and Highview Roads. Witnesses who saw the teen jump from the car called Hatzalah. The boy was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital where he was treated and released.

Ramapo police are notifying the Jewish community of Monsey about this incident in the hopes that not only will someone come forward to help identify the driver of the car but also to ensure that residents are aware that someone out there is preying on members of the religious community.

“This happened on a Friday afternoon, right before sundown,” said Ramapo Police Detective John Lynch in an exclusive interview with VIN News. “This man knew all the right things to say to get this teenager into his car. We are notifying the community that this boy was targeted because he was Jewish. With people like this, they tend to strike again. We want parents to know, we want people to know that there is someone out there preying on people under the ruse of ‘I will give you a ride to the synagogue.’ ”

Ramapo police are requesting that anyone with any information regarding this incident call them at 845-357-2400. Anyone wishing to remain anonymous can call the Ramapo Police tip line at 888-998-8477.

Silwan The Truth

Livery Driver Arrested Over ‘Kill Jews’ Notes

MINEOLA, NY – A former livery cab driver is accused of driving around Nassau County neighborhoods and tossing hate notes out of his window

Demetrios Apolonides, 37, of Brooklyn was arrested Tuesday on nine counts of second-degree aggravated harassment. He is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday in First District Court in Hempstead.

Authorities admit they do not know how many small pieces of paper with threatening anti-Semitic slurs were thrown onto the ground in Nassau County.

Police tell WCBS 880 reporter Sophia Hall that on at least nine occasions from September 2009 to March 2010, Apolonides, while driving a Lincoln Town Car for the XYZ car service company, would leave the threatening papers.

Cops caught him after piecing together the evidence.

“When all these little pieces of evidence were put on a table, detectives looked at it,” says Nassau County Police Lt. Kevin Smith who showed one of the notes containing the words “Kill Jews” several times. “… and they found, on the reverse side, that there was a form and on that form was printed the XYZ car company.”

Smith told 1010 WINS’ reporter Mona Rivera that he would distribute the small pieces of paper wherever his duties took him — including Port Washington, West Hempstead and Rockville Centre.

If convicted, he could face up to four years in prison.

University City police investigate SUV crash with synagogue, parked cars

University City, Mo - Police are investigating the cause of a Wednesday morning crash involving an out of control car that drove through two yards, sideswiped a synagogue, struck at least two parked cars and ended up in the front yard of a University City home.

The episode unfolded just after 6:30 this morning when the westbound Dodge Durango veered out of control on Delmar Boulevard and crossed through a yard, through some shrubs and hedges, into another yard and into the side of the Young Israel Synagogue at 8101 Delmar.

The out of control SUV wasn't done there, as it continued into the parking lot where it crashed into a parked car. The impact mashed that vehicle into one parked next to, at the very moment a woman inside the second car was exiting. Incredibly, she was not injured.

The Durango then went into another yard and finally stopped about five feet from crashing into a residence at Delmar and Center.

Two people inside the sport utility vehicle were being treated for non life threatening injuries. There's been no explanation offered at this point as to what led to the incident

IS ANTHONY WEINER (BORN) JEWISH?

Cargo bomb makers timed blasts for plane arrivals in US

An analysis of the cell phone circuitry in two package bombs intercepted last week suggested the terrorists intended to delay any explosion until the US-bound planes carrying them were close to landing, US officials said Wednesday.

Authorities intercepted the two packages, sent from Yemen, in the UK and Dubai after the US was tipped off by Saudi intelligence that they were being shipped aboard UPS and FedEx flights. The packages carried addresses that previously belonged to Jewish synagogues in Chicago but were long out of date.

Officials said they have strong evidence Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was behind the plot. The group's chief bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri is suspected in other recent attempts using innovative methods of hiding explosives.

Officials cited design changes made to maximize battery life and the outdated addresses as signs that the terrorists intended to blow up the planes in the air and delay blasts until near the end of their journeys.

Authorities said they believe al Qaeda intended to use the alarm function on the deconstructed cell phones to trigger the explosions. Officials said AQAP appeared to carry out at least one test run with harmless household items in September, possibly to time the journey to Chicago using internet tracking to monitor the shipments.

Inside the two intercepted packages were large quantities of hard-to-detect PETN explosives connected to sophisticated cell phone circuitry. The explosives were packed into printer cartridges to avoid detection.

Battery-draining features, including the screen face, were removed from the cell phones, authorities said. Because of those adjustments, the batteries in the packages might have been able to last three to four days.

Authorities said it remains unclear whether the devices would have worked as designed had they not been intercepted. AQAP attempted to blow up a US-bound passenger plane last Christmas Day, but the PETN explosives, sewn into the would-be bomber's underwear, failed to detonate.

Did Orthodox Jewish Schools Scam Kohl's $10 Million Dollar Contest?

Kohl's contest raises questions

A Kohl's Corp. contest that gave a total of $10 million to 20 schools nationwide inspired intense campaigning and wound up being dominated by small religious schools, many of them Chabad, leading to questions about whether the well-intentioned competition was fair.

A Kohl's Corp. contest that gave a total of $10 million to 20 schools nationwide inspired intense campaigning and wound up being dominated by small religious schools, leading to questions about whether the well-intentioned competition was fair.

Featuring online voting on the company's Facebook page, the contest succeeded in mobilizing hundreds of thousands of parents across the country to talk about Kohl's during the back-to-school shopping season. But there also has been criticism of methods used by some of the top finishers to lure votes, such as raffling off iPads or reaching out to overseas voters.

Each school in the top 20 received $500,000. Jewish schools won 12 of the 20 spots, and six other winners were Christian or Catholic schools. Two were public schools.

"It wasn't fair," said William Henk, dean of Marquette University's College of Education, said of the raffles and international voting. "It was probably creative. But it doesn't seem like it was a fair thing to do."

Henk followed the controversy surrounding the contest on his blog, Marquette Educator.

Kohl's said the raffles and the votes from outside the U.S. were in compliance with contest rules.

"We saw several communities show ingenuity and creativity in raising support for their schools," said Vicki Shamion, senior vice president of public relations.

Kohl's held the giveaway to mark the 10th anniversary of its Kohl's Cares charity effort, coinciding with the department store chain's back-to-school marketing campaign. Each person could vote a total of 20 times, casting up to five votes per school, using a Facebook account.

Voters automatically became "fans" of Kohl's on Facebook, the social networking website, boosting the company's fan total to 2.7 million, from 1 million.

"They get more connections for future marketing campaigns," said Jan Owens, associate professor of marketing for Carthage College in Kenosha.

At the same time, Owens said, the gifts to schools resonate with parents and teachers.

"We were inspired by the amount of school spirit and community support we saw from students, teachers, parents and school supporters across the country during this contest," Shamion said.

Drumming up support
More than 11 million votes were cast, as parents and school administrators drummed up support for their schools. Parents set up laptops in shopping malls, at nearby colleges, at Starbucks, at entertainment events - anywhere they could log on. The volunteers would solicit people to vote for their schools, helping them to set up Facebook accounts if they didn't have one.

Lucas Christian Academy in Texas, the second-place finisher, found lots of votes at the FortyFest Christian rock concert at the Texas Motor Speedway.

Our Lady of the Presentation, a Catholic elementary school in Lee's Summit, Mo., that ranked third in the contest, had help from a nearby elderly living complex, John Knox Village, where some residents belong to the parish.

"We had little old ladies helping people at John Knox set up Facebook accounts," said Jodie Briggs, principal at Presentation.

Kohl's kept a running tally of the vote on its Facebook page throughout the contest, but after it ended last month, it did not post a list of the winners. Visitors to Kohl's Facebook page can search only for top vote-getters by state.

The company provided the list to the Journal Sentinel at the newspaper's request. No schools in Wisconsin were among the winners.

"We wanted it to be very local," said Julie Gardner, chief marketing officer for Kohl's, of the decision not to post the full winners list. "We felt like the localization piece was more important."

The top vote-getter was Lake High School, a public school in Millbury, Ohio, which was listed with 163,395 votes at the end of the contest. The school was destroyed in June by a tornado that killed the father of its valedictorian. The $500,000 prize from Kohl's will go toward a $24 million rebuilding project, said Principal Lee Herman.

Lake High was a sympathetic favorite among other front-running schools, who directed their extra votes to the school, Herman said.

"It was more the effort on the local media's part," Herman said. "As a school, we did nothing to promote this."

Lake High was the exception in that regard.

Some schools, including Pius XI High School, St. Marcus Lutheran and Racine Mitchell Middle School in Wisconsin, had administrators sitting on the roof to garner attention.

Some others did more. Mount Ellis Academy, a high school in Bozeman, Mont., that is affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist church, used contests offering an iPad and a 30-minute helicopter ride as part of its successful effort to make the Kohl's top 20 list.

"We think of it as a miracle," said Darren Wilkins, principal of the 70-student high school.

The school, which is more than 100 years old, had been struggling to find ways to raise money to repair its failing sewer system. The big turning point for Mount Ellis was near the end of the contest, when the school was close enough to winning to draw support from the worldwide Seventh Day Adventist organization, Wilkins said.

"It really did end up going around the world," Wilkins said. Votes came in from Nepal, Malaysia and Japan, he said. In addition, a former exchange student from Pakistan drummed up support in his country, just as the floods there started.

After winning $500,000 from Kohl's, students at Mount Ellis ran a fundraiser for Pakistan.

Schools form partnerships
Motti Seligson, media relations spokesman for Chabad.org, a website that serves Jews worldwide, said the base of support for the 12 winning schools, most of them affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch organization, was local.

"It was really between the schools themselves," Seligson said.

Many of the winning schools formed partnerships at some point in the competition, asking their supporters to use extra votes for one or two other schools.

Charlotte Jewish Day School in Charlotte, N.C., for example, worked with Spartanburg Charter School, a public school in Spartanburg, S.C., marketing themselves as the only Southern schools with a chance to win, said Gale Osborne, development director for Charlotte Jewish. On the last day of the contest, the local Fox TV affiliate did live broadcasts from the school, urging viewers to vote. Both schools were among the 20 winners.

"The positive effect of the campaign is so much greater than the money," Osborne said. "The Jewish population in Charlotte is small. What happened is that it galvanized our community. By the end of the campaign, people were saying, 'How are we doing?' "

For parents at Darby Elementary in Northridge, Calif., however, the Kohl's contest brought frustration. Darby, which is part of the Los Angeles school district, was in 12th place at the end of the competition, but was eliminated after 35,000 votes for the school were disqualified. Kohl's has not explained the problem to the school, despite requests from parents posted on Kohl's Facebook page.

Sharon Docter, a Darby parent who worked on the campaign, said parents decided to try to win the money because of the school budget crunch.

"It feels like we were duped into providing free marketing for Kohl's and in the end they disqualified a significant number of our votes with no explanation," Docter said.

Two other schools, Yeshiva Achei Tmimim Academy in Worcester, Mass., and United Lubavitcher Yeshiva in Brooklyn, N.Y., also were in the top 20 at the contest's end, but were not certified as winners.

"Kohl's engaged a third-party organization to verify adherence to contest rules and regulations including voting accuracy," Shamion said. "The organization used the same contest criteria and verified votes for all schools. Any votes determined invalid per rules and regulations were not counted, per contest rules, therefore changing the final vote count. While many schools that exhibited a strong sense of spirit did not win, Kohl's congratulates all of the participants that displayed an inspiring sense of community throughout the contest."

"What we were hoping to do was to get a lot of engagement with our customers," Gardner said. "At the end of the day, we accomplished what we hoped."

THE WINNERS ARE …
Kohl's Cares $500,000 winners:

• Lake High School, Millbury, Ohio

• Lucas Christian Academy, Lucas, Texas

• Our Lady of the Presentation, Lee's Summit, Mo.

• Pius X High School, Lincoln, Neb.

• Hebrew Academy, Huntington Beach, Calif.

• Good Shepherd Christian Academy, Fairfax, Va.

• Cheder Menachem, Los Angeles, Calif.

• Bais Chaya Mushka School, Los Angeles, Calif.

• Mount Ellis Academy, Bozeman, Mont.

• St. Clement Coptic Orthodox Christian Academy, Nashville, Texas

• Charlotte Jewish Day School, Charlotte, N.C.

• JETS-Jewish Educational Trading School, Granada Hills, Calif.

• Chabad Hebrew Academy, San Diego, Calif.

• Hebrew Academy Community School, Margate, Fla.

• Rohr Bais Chaya Academy, Tamarac, Fla.

• Silverstein Hebrew Academy, Great Neck, N.Y.

• Netan Eli Hebrew Academy, Reseda, Calif.

• Jewish School of the Arts, North Palm Beach, Calif.

• Spartanburg Charter School, Spartanburg, S.C.

• Sha'arei Zion Ohel Bracha, Forest Hills, N.Y.