Did St. Vincent's Hospital in NYC engineer its own bankruptcy for the sake of a real-estate killing? (Caution: It's the NY Post asking)

Plus: How I spent the earthquake



NY Post caption: St. Vincent's officials allegedly ran the now-defunct hospital's finances into the ground in order win approval to sell it off [sic].



"DA investigators are examining sky-high payments to top executives and private consultants at the hopsital . . . said multiple sources familiar with the probe. Former CEO Henry Amoroso . . . oversaw the runaway spending, which led to $1 billion in debt and bankruptcy before the hospital closed in April 2010. . . . Going broke allowed the hospital to get an OK from the state Health Department to sell to the Rudin family, which is building luxury housing on the site. Without bankruptcy, state officials would not have been permitted [sic] the hospital to shut down, the sources said."

-- from "DA eyes St. Vinny's 'go-for-broke' plan"

by Brad Hamilton, in yesterday's New York Post

by Ken



This is why you have to pay attention to sourcing. I was intrigued by this story when I stumbled across it yesterday on the handy daily local news digest site DNAinfo.com, and today I see it's been picked up by a number of sites -- now including this one. But I also note that, as far as I can tell, all reports trace back to a single source: an "exclusive" (possibly too exclusive?) report by Brad Hamilton in (ugh) yesterday's New York Post.



For example, Becker's Hospital Review's report is based on "a NY1 News report," but the report in question by the New York cable news channel was attributed entirely to . . . the New York Post! Meaning that without some kind of corroboration, it's just stuff somebody's saying.



Still, it's tantalizing. It's hard to explain to people who don't know the area -- which is to say the lower portion of Manhattan -- how hard it was hit by the closing, after a period of protracted financial woe, of St. Vincent's Hospital, smack in the heart of Greenwich Village, in April 2010. And there's no doubt that this is extraordinarily valuable real estate that the erstwhile hospital was sucking up for no better person than, well, to serve the health care needs of the community. To heck with that!



For the record, various interested parties at least went through the motions of trying to find ways to keep the facility open as a hospital. But also for the record, the sale to the Rudin family ("whose real estate holdings are estimated at more than 10 million square feet in New York," according to the exceedingly developer-friendly New York Sun) was rammed through pretty aggressively. In April of this year Anemona Hartocollis reported in the NYT:

A plan to build a luxury housing development and an emergency medical center in Greenwich Village came a step closer to reality on Thursday as a federal bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the bankrupt St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan campus.



The judge, Cecelia G. Morris, approved the $260 million sale to the Rudin development family and the North Shore-Long Island Jewish hospital system despite vociferous opposition from a small group of community activists who have been arguing for the creation of a new full-service hospital on the site where St. Vincent’s had operated for more than 160 years.



One opponent, Alan J. Gerson, a former city councilman who lives in the area, asked for more time to present a rival buyer, but the judge declined.



The sale was unanimously supported by St. Vincent’s creditors, including GE Capital, who are owed about $1 billion, according to Kenneth Eckstein, the lead lawyer for St. Vincent’s. . . .

All of that said, what the Post's Brad Hamilton reported is, as I said, tantalizing, and he at least claims to have multiple apparently unnamable sources, and unnamable sources do sometimes have legitimate reasons for their unnamability. Hamilton found one person who allowed himself to be quoted, and by name -- before we return to unnamed "sources."

"This was a well-thought-out plan," said Tom Shanahan, a lawyer for a group of former St. Vincent doctors and nurses suing St. Vincent's. "They wanted out and had to justify it to the state. They were running it into the ground."



DA Cy Vance's team is looking into whether vendors double-billed for services, gave kickbacks for contracts and hired relatives of hospital employees, sources said.



Two senior administrators each got more than $1 million after leaving their jobs -- and continued to be listed as employees on tax returns.



Virginia Sweeney, the top nursing officer whose employment ended in 2006, got paid $1.3 million between 2007 and 2009. Jane Connorton, the president who left in 2004, pocketed $1 million over the next four years.

Hamilton reported that former St. Vincent's CEO Amoroso and vice chairman Jane Iannucelli "did not return calls for comment." DNAinfo.com's Liddy reported, "The DA's office did not immediately respond to an email for comment." And both the Post and DNAinfo.com were told by St. Vincent's spokeswoman that the hospital is not aware of an investigation.



Now of course it could just be that St. Vincent's was run with normal-range fiscal ineptitude and chicanery that fall within the range of standard operating practice, which under recent hospital-unfriendly financial circumstances made the operation unsustainable, and seeing the end in sight, the overseeing rats stuffed their pockets with moolah before jumping ship.



Or it could be that something a lot more dastardly went, possibly even drawing attention now from the Manhattan D.A.'s office. Since it's the fraud unit reportedly involved, it's presumably not related to the crackerjack team that masterminded the DSK, er, prosecution.





CONFIDENTIAL TO RUPERT M.:



Rupert M., do you see why it can sometimes be a disadvantage for a "news" organization to develop a reputation for propagandizing and making up stuff in its so-called reporting? It makes it kind of hard for folks with a grain of sense to take anything you "report" at face value -- even if we can assume that no phones were hacked in the reporting of the story.





HOW I SPENT THE EARTHQUAKE

"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

So I guess it was a little before 2 this afternoon. Hey, if I'd known it was going to be history, I'd have checked the time -- I just thought it was, well, I didn't know what the heck it was, but I considered and dismissed "earthquake" as a possibility. We don't normally have earthquakes on the 14th floor of my building in the Financial District (Lower Manhattan) of New York.



So like I said, it must have been a little before 2, and I was at my desk in my cubicle on the 14th floor of a pretty sturdily built building (at least in the 2½ years my company has been here, the building has never moved that I'm aware of), and for a while the floor and everything kind of trembled, and after awhile people sort of looked at one or another, and somebody mentioned that there had been a 5.8 earthquake in Washington. Only I didn't make out exactly what that person said; I reconstructed it later after I found out that there had been a 5.8 earthquake centered in northern Virginia, which was also reported as 5.9 or even 6.0 Online somebody joked that S&P had upgraded the earthquake from 5.8 to 6.0.



Then we were hustled into the conference room to hear our HR director, who happened to be in California (as it happens, our office manager was also out of the office -- coincidence?), via conference call tell us to do whatever we felt necessary for our safety. She also warned us about taking precautions before getting on a subway, but somebody else reported that New York Transit was reporting no service delays. (And New York Transit wouldn't kid us now, would it?)



Me, I figured if an earthquake is coming to get me, I really wouldn't know where to go to escape its clutches. I figure you're just as likely to walk into it as to escape it. When I went back to working on the InDesign file I had been working on, the computer claimed that the file was damaged. I rebooted and tried reloading it, and while the program still voiced suspicion about the file being damaged, it then accepted and saved some small changes, and the asterisk went away. So far the file seems to be OK.



And that's how I spent the earthquake. We're not used to this sort of stuff here, but believe me, I take it seriously. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.

I HOPE MOTHER NATURE ISN'T PLANNING MORE OF THIS

SEISMIC STUFF JUST NOW. I HAVE URBAN GADDING AHEAD

Constitution Island, viewed from the West Point side

As I write, I'm getting read to leave the office for this evening's Hidden Harbor Tour of the "North" (i.e., Hudson) River waterfront, and then tomorrow I'm actually taking off work for my first look, courtesy of a tour offered jointly by SI 350 (a volunteer group promoting celebration of Staten Island's 350th birthday -- apparently someone thinks Staten Island is 350 years old; I wonder how Mother Nature feels about that) and the NYC Parks Dept., at the work-in-progress Freshkill Parks, built with huge infusions of technology, cash, and manpower on top of the old trash megadump.



The Parks Dept. has been offering tours, but I could never figure out from the website where I would have to get to, or therefore whether I could get there via public transit. This tour, however, is leaving from in front of the library in St. George, the part of Staten Island where the ferry lands -- and that I know how to find.



Then Saturday I'm actually venturing outside the five boroughs of NYC, well up the Hudson River to venture onto Constitution Island, which is opposite West Point on the west bank of the river, and is only open three weekends a summer. I'm expecting to meet up with a Shorewalkers group at the Metro North train station in Cold Spring, on the east side of the river from the island.

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Re. the News Corp scandal(s): The thing about corruption is that it's so, um, corruptational

by Ken

If there was any thought that the decision of News International -- the tentacle of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp that controls the British holdings that have become the subject of such mountingly embarrassing (not to mention quite likely prosecutable) disclosures -- to shut down the once-massive-circulation News of the World, which has been at the center of the scandals, would lessen the heat on the company, so far it isn't working out.

Their best hope at this point is that so many people in authority are being incriminated -- not just News Corp execs who've been promoted to lofty positions, including in the U.S., but the Metropolitan Police (i.e., Scotland Yard), British pols like now-PM David Cameron, parliamentary "overseers" -- that there may be enough nabobs with enough power to keep some of the mess safely swept under the rug. Is it any wonder that one of the free "newspapers" circulated to weary New York commuters, Metro New York, had as its front-page head this morning: "Is Murdoch's empire crumbling?"

It's important to remember that the "signature" booboo of the case, that enterprising News of the World reporter's clever stung in hacking into the cell phone of a kidnapped teenage girl and deleting phone messages during the investigation, is not only the proverbial tip of the iceberg but, more importantly old news; there are already NOTW creeps in prison for it.

ASST. COMMISSIONER YATES: IT'S NOT MY FAULT
NEWS INT'L DIDN'T, YOU KNOW, TELL US STUFF

In one form or another the scandal goes back to 2005. In fact, John Yates, the Met's assistant commissioner for terrorism, who in 2009, as assistant commissioner in charge of specialist operations had the mess dumped in his lap, and totally bungled it, reminded us of the timeline in his testimony today before a Home Affairs select committee of the House of Commons:

Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner John Yates: "Please do not take that admission as in any way accepted, I accept responsibility for what News International have not done with regard to this case from 2005 to 2006 to 2009 to 2010 and even up until yesterday." (You can watch Commissioner Yates try to maintain a shred of dignity on the Guardian website.)

Yates, according to the Guardian team's account, "acknowledged in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph that his decision not to reopen an investigation in 2009 was 'pretty crap.'" However, in his opening statement to the select committee today, he set the tone for his testimony, "Had I know then what I know now, I would have made different decisions."

Yates's people are currently poring over "11,000 pages of material containing nearly 4,000 names of possible hacking victims," which "he conceded" he hasn't seen, and whose contents . . . well, apparently our guess is as good as his. Also in the course of his testimony, according to the Guardian account, "Yates said he had 'never, ever, ever' received payment from journalists for information but admitted it was 'highly probable' that some of his officers did."

Well, that's OK then.

In case you hadn't heard, one of the directions well beyond phone hacking into which the case has slithered is police, er, "cooperation" with "inquiring" reporters. And it's not just News of the World that's involved. Suspicious glances are being cast at the other News International papers in London -- the surviving tabloid, the Sun, and even the Times and Sunday Times. The question rightly raised, it seems to me, concerns an entire culture of corruption.

After all, the editor of NOTW from 2000 to 2003, when the first illegal hackings took place, was Rebekah Brooks, who went on to edit the Sun from 2003 to 2009 and is now chief executive of News International! And the man whom Rupert M installed as CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal after he took control of them in December 2007, Les Hinton, came to these august journalistic positions from 12 years as executive chairman of . . . oh my, News International! (His Dow Jones bio adds that "Mr. Hinton is chairman of the Dow Jones Foundation, which supports the promotion and defense of journalism as well as literacy and education." Roger that.)

Somebody (I wish I remembered who) made the excellent point is that the most frightening thing about this whole still-emerging stinkpot is that the practices being uncovered seem to have become standard practices -- for so-called journalists (in search of money-making headlines) whose bosses hobnob with the coppers' bosses and the political elites. (And are we to believe that it's only News International journos who behave in such dastardly fashion. How about their American counterparts? Fox Noise, anyone? And are News Corp minions the only ones playing these games?)

During his testimony today, Commissioner Yates was asked by select committee chair Keith Vaz whether he has given any consideration to resigning. The commissioner seemed quite adamant that there was no reason for him to consider such a step. After all, how could it be his fault that News International didn't turn over all that information that if only he'd known he wouldn't have made the same "crap" decision he made in 2009?

Apparently police work in the U.K. goes something like this:

SCOTLAND YARD [shaking fist]: We demand that you turn over any information you have that would tell us how naughty you've been.
NEWS INTERNATIONAL: Information? Information? We have no information.
SCOTLAND YARD: Well, that's all right then, because otherwise we might have to, like, do something. Cheerio!

[CURTAIN]

Select committee chairman Vaz, by the way, pronounced himself dissatisfied with Yates's testimony, giving rise to the Guardian head: "Met officer John Yates's evidence on phone-hacking inquiry 'unconvincing.'"

WHAT DOESN'T GET LOST EN ROUTE TO MUMBAI?

Meanwhile, I have to say my favorite episode in all of this mess goes way back to when those Met bulldogs were still trying to shake information loose from NOTW, in particular several zillion e-mails that were mysteriously unaccounted for. We Yanks recall when we had our own missing e-mail scandal, back when the thugs of the Bush crime regime were wiping out everything they could get their zappers on. Our brave American thugs know how to tough it out. "E-mails?" they said. "Nah, they're all gone. Close the door on your way out." And that was pretty much the last we heard of it.

British investigators, however, are more tenacious, and insisted on an answer. Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer nevertheless. Here's the Friday Guardian account:

NI originally claimed the archive of emails did not exist. Last December, its Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow that the emails had been lost en route to Mumbai. Also in December, the company's solicitor, Julian Pike from Farrer and Co, gave a statement to the high court saying it was unable to retrieve emails more than six months old.

The first hint that this was not true came in late January when NI handed Scotland Yard evidence that led to the immediate sacking of its news editor, Ian Edmondson, and to the launch of Operation Weeting. It was reported that this evidence consisted of three old emails.

Three months later, on 23 March, Pike formally apologised to the high court and acknowledged News International could locate emails as far back as 2005 and that no emails had been lost en route to Mumbai or anywhere else in India. In a signed statement seen by the Guardian, Pike said he had been misinformed by the NoW's in-house lawyer, Tom Crone, who had told him that he, too, had been misled. He offered no explanation for the misleading evidence given by Bird.

What can I say except that I am in awe? Lost en route to Mumbai! But of course! That happens all the time! Why, just last week my watch went missing, and as soon as I read about Bob Bird and his breakthrough in uninvestigation, I knew immediately that the darned thing must have been lost en route to Mumbai.


Now editor Bird could just have said that his dog ate those millions of e-mails. But apparently with that image of e-mails wafting off course en route to Mumbai, his interrogators were charmed into complaisance. Nobody in Scotland seemed to wonder how the e-mails came to be en route to Mumbai. Or for that matter just what was en route to Mumbai. Was the idea that those millions of e-mails had been dumped into a really, really big old steamer trunk and dragged to the post office? Really now, even in my state of technical innocence I know that you can't crate a batch of e-mails up for shipping to India or anywhere else. Maybe the e-mails were on a server that somehow got crated up and somebody slapped a label with a Mumbai address on it?

I like to think that editor Bird didn't even crack a smile when he broke the news about the grief to which the Mumbai-bound e-mails had come. When you come up with a story like that, you really have to sell it.

Hey, I'm sold. I don't even have a dog to accuse of eating my homework. In any case, the "lost en route to Mumbai" story is so much classier, more elegant. As it happens, I found the missing watch this morning, so apparently it wasn't lost en route to Mumbai after all. However, if my DWT post tomorrow should happen not to appear on schedule . . . well, you know where it is.

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