Good morning. It's Tuesday. We'll take another look at the Police Department's embattled Special Victims Division. We'll also meet a dinosaur that was found in Montana and will be auctioned in Manhattan at the end of the month. |
 | | Dakota Santiago for The New York Times |
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One of the two, Inspector Paul Saraceno, was once the second-in-command of the Special Victims Division. He forfeited 30 vacation days after admitting to misusing Police Department time and submitting false time cards. |
The other, Sergeant Keri Thompson, had led the division's cold-case squad and had supervised a detective whose mistakes led to the dismissal of a charge against the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein in 2018. She was docked 45 days after she acknowledged that she had misused a Police Department vehicle and had misled investigators during an interview. |
Each had faced administrative charges, the most serious form of discipline short of criminal charges, and each pleaded guilty. Specific details of what Saraceno and Thompson admitted to in their pleas were not publicly available online, and the Police Department said they were not readily accessible on Monday because of the Fourth of July holiday. |
Saraceno had been named the executive officer of the Special Victims Division in 2017, as the city's own Department of Investigation began looking into complaints about the Police Department's handling of rape cases. After that inquiry concluded that the Special Victims Division was "understaffed and under-resourced," Saraceno was promoted from deputy inspector. He was also given sole responsibility for the adult sex-crimes squads that had been the focus of the probe. |
Both Saraceno and Thompson were served with the charges in late 2020. She was subsequently transferred out of the division and assigned to patrol duty, according to police department records. Saraceno had already left to lead the Vice Enforcement Division by then, but he too was sent to patrol after his plea. |
Prepare for a chance of showers in the afternoon and temps near the mid-80s. Temps are in the low 70s with a chance of showers and thunderstorms late at night. |
In effect until Saturday (Eid al-Adha). |
 | | George Etheredge for The New York Times |
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Maybe you missed the article "Five Boroughs, Five Days, One Question" over the weekend. As I read it, I had two questions of my own: How did my colleague Dodai Stewart come up with the idea of visiting a borough a day, just right for a five-day workweek — and how many miles did she walk? |
"It felt like it just lined up — five days of the week, five boroughs," she said. |
She said she walked at least 10,000 steps a day each day that week, according to an app on her phone, roughly two miles each day. One day the app counted 15,209 steps, or about three miles, well above her usual average of 5,700 steps a day. |
Enough of my questions. The one she set out to answer was: What's the vibe in the city right now? |
"I was thinking there are a lot of theories and there's a lot of chitchat about what's happening in the city right now," she said. "Somebody's saying 'New York is dead,' somebody's saying 'I don't know what you're talking about — I stayed up all night' and somebody else is saying 'I'm working harder than ever.' I felt that in addition to all these not-concrete theories floating around, some parts of city get more attention than others, so I felt like I should go to places where I don't know anybody and just talk to people. So I didn't go to Times Square or Midtown." |
Smaller and speedier than a T. Rex |
 | | Assembling the Gorgosaurus skeleton at Sotheby's.Anna Watts for The New York Times |
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"If you follow 50 Cent, the rapper," Cassandra Hatton said, "he tweeted something like, 'The worst thing about being an adult is nobody asks you what your favorite dinosaur is anymore.' He said, 'For the record, it's a Gorgosaurus.'" |
Hatton, a senior vice president of Sotheby's, stopped short of saying the Gorgosaurus was also her favorite. But consider her reaction when she heard that a Gorgosaurus skeleton had been found in Montana. "I said, 'Pack it up and ship it to me.'" (And for the record, her paraphrase was close, but 50 Cent's exact words were slightly different, one of them is not printable here, and he later deleted the tweet.) |
Hatton, who has also sold models of Soviet Sputniks and the source code for the World Wide Web (as an NFT), is preparing to sell the Gorgosaurus on July 28. Sotheby's expects it to go for $5 million to $8 million, in part, in part, she said because Gorgosauruses rarely come on the auction market. |
"Gorgosauruses are typically found in Canada," she said. "Of course, there were no national boundaries then." And now, she said, "Canada has strict restrictions on the export of fossils." The one she is selling was found south of the Canadian border, in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Mont. |
A Gorgosaurus was smaller and speedier than T. Rex, with a head something like the namesake in the 1961 film "Gorgo." Henry Galliano, Sotheby's dinosaur consultant, dismissed it as "mostly a fantasy science fiction movie." But it made up for its paleontological shortcomings in sheer horror: Howard Thompson, who reviewed for The New York Times, called it "the best outright monster shocker since 'King Kong.'" |
The T. Rex sold in 1997 was named Sue — for Sue Hendrickson, the fossil hunter who found it. What about Hatton's Gorgosaurus skeleton? Does it have a name? |
"That is part of what the new owner gets," Hatton said. "The naming rights." |
The first apartment my fiancée and I shared was a 428-square-foot studio on the fourth floor of a building at 34th and Park. In the heady abandon of youth, we invited 20 friends to a Diwali party — and they all accepted. |
When the night arrived, music, the aroma of fresh food, the tinkling of glasses and the sound of cheerful laughter started to fill the little space. The first three guests sat side-by-side on our folded-up futon. The fourth claimed the desk chair. |
At 15 guests, we had the brilliant idea of moving the desk into the tub. That created space for three people. |
By now, guests were sitting in clusters in the floor. Some were in groups of two or three, holding beers while sitting cross-legged and chatting. Others sat in the corner, backs against the wall and legs stretched out. |
It was fun but also obvious that we had invited too many people. The bell rang again. I opened the door, but I couldn't think of where to put five more jackets and seat five more people. Then one of our friends asked whether we could move the couch into the hallway. |
Our apartment was the last one at the end of the hall, and our nearest neighbors were both at the party, so why not? And that's how a great evening continued. |
Glad we could get together here. I'm going to take a few days off. Anne Barnard and Corey Kilgannon will be here. See you next week. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero, Geordon Wollner and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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