NYC NOW - 'November 29, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Court officials say more than 3,800 claims were filed in New York State under the Adult Survivors Act. Plus, WNYC’s Sophia Chang takes us to a park in lower Manhattan that’s been plagued by violence in recent years. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with Shawn Borgue, investigative reporter at the Washington Post, about Wael Hana, the businessman charged with bribing New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jena Pierre. 3,800. That's how many claims were filed in courts across New York State under the Adult Survivors Act. The full number comes about a week after the deadline to file a claim. The law had created a one-year window for people to bring sexual assault claims, regardless of the statute of limitations. State Senator Brad Holman-Sigel sponsored the measure. I hope we've provided some of the bill. measure of closure and acknowledgement of the defects in our statutes.

Several politicians are facing claims, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams and former President Donald Trump. Suits were also brought against celebrities, doctors, and prison staff. Stick around. There's more after the break. In Lower Manhattan, some residents are calling on the city to speed up critical repairs to a local park that's been plagued by violence in recent years. WNYC's Sophia Chang has more.

Sarah D. Roosevelt Park is a seven-block long rectangle spanning Chinatown and the Lower East Side. On its north side by Houston Street, there's a popular soccer field and basketball court sponsored by Nike. The south end is in the heart of Chinatown where elderly locals sit near the playground chatting and drinking tea.

Yeah, the park is very good. And the people seems like nice. That's Christine Lay, who works nearby. It's a warm fall day, and she's eating her takeout lunch of fish and vegetables on a bench in the Chinatown section. But she says she pretty much sticks to that part. Do you ever go to the other side of the park? No, no. That side, I don't want to get. Why? What's wrong?

That size seems like not so good. You know, this size is. For me, I could see the... People come here and then old lady is all sitting down here. Like me, I'm sitting here. Take a lunchtime. It's very comfortable, you know. So anything on that side is not safe. Lay is talking about the Lionsgate section in the middle of the park,

where I saw people buy drugs and openly inject themselves on benches and sleep on the pavement next to the lion statues that the section is named after. Community members say city officials have neglect. the space, allowing drug activity to flourish, its sidewalks to deteriorate, and its fields to fill up with trash and needles. Violence is also an issue. A homeless man was stabbed to death there earlier this month and a delivery driver back in 2021. And in 2022, a man who was known to sleep in Lionsgate followed a local resident into her apartment across the street from the park and stabbed her to death. Yet, the city is sitting on more than $20 million of unused public funding.

slated for upgrades. Local landlord Brian Chin says, at the very least, the city could take some immediate steps to improve safety. To me, it seems like the answer is pretty simple, you know, enforcement within the park, cleaning within the park, and upkeep within a park. Now Chin is trying to take action. He's helped to launch the Sarah D. Roosevelt Park Alliance to make sure Chinatown has a voice in the process. We need, you know, a safe place to take your kids, to take, you know, your grandparents without fear of being stabbed or have to explain to your kid what that drug transaction across the other bench is happening, you know? Local officials say they intend to use the money dedicated to improving the park, but its

redesign is still in the planning stage. Community groups have called for more lighting, more parks police assignments, and landscaping to make the Lionsgate a safer and more inviting space. Kay Webster, a longtime community advocate and president of the Sarah D. Roosevelt Park Coalition, says the city needs to act fast. Lionsgate is continuing to fall apart, and she worries about the safety of the people who sleep in the park themselves.

All of these murders have been awful. All of them. I mean, you could cry a thousand years. The Parks Department held its first public input sessions on the upgrades this summer, more than a year after the city first put aside money for the work. And the renovations aren't expected to be done until at least March 2025.

That's WNYC's Sophia Chey. Well Hanna, an Egyptian-American businessman, was charged with bribing New Jersey Senator and Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez to help the Egyptian government. A new report in the Washington Post finds that Hanna's connections to the Egyptian government go back further than expected. For more, WNYC's Sean Carlson talked with Sean Bowberg, an investigative reporter at the Post. Can you bring us up to speed here? Remind us who Well, Hanna is and why he has been in the news. as of late. Well, Whale Hanna was indicted for bribing Senator Menendez, and prosecutors alleged that one of the things that Whale Hanna did was introduce Senator Menendez to various high-ranking Egyptian,

military, and intelligence officials. And at these meetings, there was a request made to Senator Menendez. Of course, Senator Menendez was arguably one of the most powerful people in Congress as Senate Foreign Relations Chairman. And the request that was made, and prosecutors alleged the promise that was returned was that foreign aid to Egypt would continue to flow from the United States. Now, can he give us a condensed version of his business history? This guy goes from a struggling entrepreneur behind several failed businesses to driving a bed lean, becoming an object of fascination in his Hudson County neighborhood. How does that happen? He's someone who moved from Egypt, got a visa, in the U.S. through the lottery system in 2006 and started a series of businesses.

He'd run a gas station, a truck stop in and around Jersey City, New Jersey, most of which failed. And he accumulated a mountain of debt and lawsuits. And that was in just his first decade here in the United States. There's an apparent transformation in Whale Hahn's fortunes around 2015. we know that he begins arranging military shipments for the Egyptian government. Let's talk more about the political situation in Egypt. In 2015, the Obama administration lifted a freeze in military aid Egypt.

That was after the country's military staged a coup against its democratically elected president. Why was this important for Hanah? Well, the earliest connection we have to Egyptian officials that we found is that in 2015, the Egyptian military, Ask Whelhanna, to serve as a sort of shepherd for prized U.S. military aid that is going to Egypt.

He was in charge of arranging the shipment from a port in Jacksonville, Florida, to Alexandria. And one of the most puzzling things about this was that this executive said he had no experience in shipping. But clearly, in 2015, before he had ever met Senator Menendez, the Egyptian government was tasking him with something very important. Yeah, talking about his actual business in terms of exporting, Hanna eventually comes to hold a monopoly on certifying halal meat exported to Egypt from the U.S. Do we know how he came to possess the monopoly?

Prosecutors allege it happened after he had met Senator Menendez and began introducing him to government officials. So from what we have known publicly before we confirmed that he was working on behalf of the Egyptian government back in 2015, was that Wailana found himself in a place of influence, having met Senator Menendez. And it raised the possibility that the Egyptian government then could have approached him to sort of leverage that relationship. What we found is that the relationship preceded this. But what is also certain is that after he met Mr. Menendez, his business opportunities from the Egyptian government grew. They enriched him through this monopoly, certifying halal beef. And almost overnight, he becomes an international businessman. And they tried to further expand that monopoly in the ensuing months and years.

Can you tell us anything more about Hana's relationship with the Menendez's? When does he enter their lives? He was introduced to Nadine Menendez, Senator Menendez's wife, before she had even begun dating Mr. Menendez back in 2018. And the connection is through a lawyer in New Jersey. And what happens in the years after that is that these connections are made. personal introductions and relationships are made. And it just so happens that one of Whale Hana's acquaintances becomes the wife of the U.S. Senator. So what happens to Hana now? Where does his case go from here?

He was in Egypt when he was indicted and he got on a plane and he came back to the United States to face charges. He's now being monitored. He wears an ankle bracelet. And his criminal case will continue separate from Senatorman, in Nadine Menendez's case. But U.S. Department of Justice is also pursuing what they call a counterintelligence investigation. This is completely separate from a criminal investigation.

And what they're trying to determine is when and how did Whale Hana get these government connections with Egypt? What was the precise nature of that relationship? Did he have connections to intelligence service agents? and how does that play into this criminal case? And so I imagine that that will continue for many months and potential years. That's Sean Boberg, investigative reporter at The Washington Post, talking with WNYC's Sean Carlson.

Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.