NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: Attorney General Letitia James Indicted on Federal Fraud Charge, PATH Service Suspended for Weekend Repairs, and Deadly Week on New York City Transit

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

New York Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted on a federal fraud charge, accused of lying on loan papers about a Virginia property she owns. The indictment follows President Trump’s calls for the Justice Department to pursue his political opponents. Meanwhile, mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is weighing both sides of the debate over banning Central Park’s horse-drawn carriages. Also, PATH will suspend service between Harrison and Journal Square this weekend for track work, with shuttle buses running in both directions. And in this week’s transit segment, we look at a string of tragic incidents, a woman killed by riders on a large e bike, two girls who died subway surfing, and a man beaten to death at a Brooklyn station.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Friday, October 10th. Here's your morning headlines from Michael Hill. New York State's top law enforcement official is facing a federal fraud charge. A federal grand jury has indicted Attorney General Letitia James. The indictment comes after President Trump urged the Justice Department to bring cases against his adversaries, including James. who won a massive fraud judgment against the president in 2024. In this case, Trump officials say James claimed on loan papers she intended to occupy a Virginia house she owns as her primary residence.

In a statement, James calls the charges baseless and politically motivated. A ban on carriage horses in Central Park has long been a third rail in New York City politics. W&Myssey's Elizabeth Kim reports mayoral candidate Zeranamam Dany is straddling both sides of the debate. Before the primary, Mamdani told the animal rights group Night Class that the use of carriage horses was, quote, inhumane. But here he is when recently asked again about his stance. One of the first orders of business would be for me to visit the stables myself, convene an independent panel of medical experts to assess the health of these horses and to work with labor leaders. It's a sign of how the Democratic frontrunner is trying to avoid controversy as he heads.

into next month's election. The carriage horse driver's union says Mamdani will consult them about the future of the industry. Nyklaas says they've received a commitment from Momdani that he'll implement the ban. Path is suspending service both ways between the Harrison

and Journal Square stations from 2.30 tomorrow morning, Saturday morning, through 5 on Monday morning, for essential track work. The agency says, riders should plan to use free shuttle buses operating between the stations. It'll post directions to the buses at affected stations, and staff will be on hand to help out.

This is the fourth of six planned weekend outages to allow crews to install new track switches to improve service. The final suspension is planned for the weekend of November 1st. 50 and clear now but a coastal flood watch Sunday morning through Monday afternoon. Today's forecast sunny and 62. Tomorrow, slim chance of rain by noon,

mostly cloudy 68, and more rain chances on the day. Sunday. It's Friday. That means it's time for our weekly segment of On the Way. Covering all things transportation, that's after the break. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's time for On the Way. Our weekly segment on all things considered breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us, WNIC's transportation reporter Stephen Nesson and Ramsey Kalee and editor Clayton Goosa. This week, we saw the tragic death of a 60-year-old woman after two people on a large e-bike slammed into her. That incident happened in the Flushing Avenue bike lane. It was alongside the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

There's also a bus stop right there. What's the latest? What have we learned? The woman who was killed, it was Terry Valenti. She's from Maspeth. And for the last 16 years, she's worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for this high-end elevator company. So on Monday, she had just stepped off the bus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, something she's

probably done hundreds of times. And the thing to know about this is the bus drops off passengers right in the bike lane. So at 7.30 in the morning. She was struck by these two people riding a large e-bike, and she was killed. Right, and this pair, they were riding a bike from the company called MoveCan. We looked this thing up online. It's advertised as being able to go up to 30 miles an hour, which is way too fast. It's shaped like a motorcycle.

It looks like a motorcycle. It effectively is not as fast as a motorcycle, but all intents of purposes, it is a motorcycle. You ride a motorcycle. That has a license plate right on it. All right, of course, yeah. The Department of Transportation officials who we talked to said that this thing is not street legal. It's not. It's too fast.

It should be registered with the State Department of Vehicles. It should have a license plate. And it doesn't. And it kind of highlights this problem that we're seeing on city streets where you have all these different kinds of micro mobility devices, scooters, all kinds of things. And they're proliferating way faster than city officials are regulating them. Yeah. I mean, you know, To that point, I checked in with Nicole Jelineus of the Manhattan Institute to get her thoughts about, you know, who should be checking on these e-bikes.

The problem is if you have tens of thousands of these vehicles on the street, you have no enforcement mechanism for the police to differentiate between what's legal and what's illegal and room for so much more illegal vehicles to just skate through because we're just overwhelmed on the enforcement side. And one thing we didn't really mention, which is not really a factor in this particular death, but as we see on the streets, most of the e-bikes are from delivery workers who are racing against this clock imposed by the tech companies that require them, you know, to make those deliveries within a certain window. And the city has really dropped the ball in regulating that industry as well. Can we talk about what the rules actually are right now? Because, yeah, I admit just being out and about in the world, it does kind of feel like it's a free-for-all at the moment. And as we've reported, I've definitely talked about on all things considered. Mayor Adams just lowered the speed limit on city bike e-bikes. Also other e-bikes too, right?

So is there anything more we can do here? There are some rules. The rules and regulations obviously are coming a little too little, too late. You know, just for example, I was curious. I looked it up. Last year, 638 people were injured. 17 were killed in crashes involving e-bikes. But last year was actually the first year the city actually even had separate stats for e-bikes.

before they were just lumped in with motorcycles, just to give you a sense of how far behind the city is on really checking in on these things. But, yeah, last June, Adams demanded that city bike lower its max e-bike speed limit to 15 miles per hour. On October 24th, that's going to go into effect for all e-bikes. But the big question is, again, how will we enforce this? Who's going to enforce this? I spoke with Bruce Schaller. He's a former transportation official and consultant.

He compares it to the 1980s when the city. was dealing with a different problem on the streets, a flood of what was then called gypsy cabs, these unregulated car services. And at the time, there were 35,000 vehicles on city streets. The solution to this stuff is to define like the most egregious behavior and then have legal authority to seize the vehicle. In the 1980s, when TLC was first getting its arms around car services, the agency towed thousands of cars. And that's what it took to get control of that industry. Still, even Schaller said that was a 20-year effort.

Thinking about a couple other tangible examples of the city kind of being slow to regulate ever-evolving technology. I mean, one good example is cell phones in schools, right? We just banned them this year. I mean, the iPhone came out in 07. That's a long time coming on 20 years ago. And think about Uber and Lyft when they flooded into New York City and other cities. I mean, New York was one of many cities across the country that didn't know what to do. Disrupted the market.

It took years and years. upended the taxi medallion market. Now we've got 80,000 on the street. A report from Bruce Schaller, who we just heard from years ago, found that they contributed so much to congestion in the city that we're still dealing with. Yeah. Well, it was also a tragic week on the subway. Two young girls were killed while subway surfing on the J-Train in Williamsburg, Ramsey. You followed up on that. What have you learned? So, yeah, over the weekend, a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old girl were found unresponsive and unconscious at the Marcy Avenue Station. That's the first stop in Brooklyn on the J-Train, as a It crosses the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge.

Their deaths now mark five people who have been killed from subway surfing this year. And riding on top of a subway car is really picked up in recent years, namely because kids are posting the act on social media, on Instagram and TikTok. It's become a trend. City and MTA officials have really urged the public again to communicate with their kids how dangerous this is. The MTA launched their own campaign. It's like a widespread public service campaign in the system early this year to deter teens from subway surfing. But I went to a public community council meeting last night and in the district where these two girls died.

In public, we've heard police officials say that they've used drone technology to try to spot and apprehend subway surfers. But at this meeting, commanding officer Vincent Seminero, he's speaking with a community member and says that that tech might not actually be so effective. The drones do go out, but I mean, honest, by the time the drones come from where they need to go, the kids are going to be able. And by the time you make the phone call, the kids are going to go. It's education for talking directly to the kids about the dangers of it. So my sense from this meeting is that police don't really right now have a concrete way to resolve this problem. They can host assemblies at schools, reach out to principals of those schools, make a PSA, or even lobby social media apps to remove this content, which they've tried to do.

But the feeling is that more can still be done. Yeah, and I've covered this issue for years. And as much as the MTA says, it's cracking down on social media, they always say we spoke with them and they say they're going to take it down. The videos proliferate. You see them out there. I've seen them out there. Same.

And, you know, the MTA has its own PSAs, ride inside, stay alive. They hired a superstar BMX athlete to, you know, warn people about the dangers of subway surfing. But it's just not resonating with the crowd that's still subway surfing. Yeah. Okay. We're running out of time, but I do want to get to this because there's another, yet another tragic event to talk about on transit this week. A man was beaten to death on a platform at the J Street Station in downtown. Brooklyn. Tell us about that case. Yeah, and excuse us to the listeners. It's a very bleak segment

this week, but I think we're highlighting some cases that are really in the public conversation. And this one on Tuesday was at J Street Metro Tech, right? 3 p.m. It's one of the city's busiest subway stations, broad daylight. Kids are coming out of school at this time. And a police alleged that a Bronx man entered through the emergency gate and randomly attacked a 64-year-old Brooklyn man, Nicole Tansi, and beat him so brutally, randomly, went. through his pockets, went through his bag afterwards, took off. He was in such bad shape that police had trouble identifying him after this. And it really kind of just highlights this kind of tragedy of the commons where, yeah, the subway is safer than driving or many other forms

of travel. But what kind of gets into the public psyche is the kind of nature of these random attacks that happens sometimes in the system when we're all sharing this shared space. Yeah, it's pretty brazen, but it's still quite rare. This is the fourth murder in the subway system this year. The MDA has lauded that crime has gone down, major overall crimes, and that this summer is one of the safest, but the nature of the crimes have changed. felony assaults are still rising,

while robberies and larcenies are still down. Well, that's doubly when my sees, Stephen Nesson, Ramsey-Kleifah and Clayton Goosa. You can stay in the know on all things transit by signing up for our weekly newsletter at gotamist.com slash on the way. My friends, as always, no matter the subject manner, thanks so much for your work.

Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep vibes. Also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.