Good morning. It's Thursday. We'll ride in a driverless shuttle that stopped when I stood in front of it. We'll also find out who killed a mobster who had managed to avoid hit after hit. |
 | | James Barron faced down a driverless bus. Luckily, it stopped.Leo Tsang |
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As a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper, I know what I'm supposed to do. So you won't be surprised that I stopped a two-and-a-half-ton bus. And I did it without leaping over any tall buildings or bending any steel in my bare hands. |
Actually, the bus stopped itself. That was what it was supposed to do when it approached a crosswalk that someone was standing in, the someone being me. |
I was thinking about the Sandra Bullock-Keanu Reeves thriller "Speed," in which Sandra — who went to the same high school as I did, but not at the same time — jumped into the driver's seat of a runaway bus rigged with explosives. The bus that was coming straight at me had no driver, no steering wheel and no explosives. It had one passenger, Caroline Dunn, who works for Navya, a French company that designs and builds autonomous electric vehicles like the one that was coming straight at me. |
At 13 miles per hour, which is a lot slower than the bus in "Speed." |
The bus slowed to a stop. |
The bus started up again and went through the crosswalk, which had been painted in a mostly empty parking lot near Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, where a team from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has been testing a pair of small electric shuttle buses. They are vaguely jelly-bean shaped. They have been programmed to play a recorded clanging sound, like a cable car in San Francisco, just before they drive off. |
The Port Authority sees possibilities in autonomous vehicles like the little shuttles, which can carry about a dozen passengers. Someday you could get on a driverless bus in an airport parking lot and say "take me to my car," and the bus would thread its way up and down the lanes until it found the space where you had parked. |
He also said he understood the challenges of persuading people to ride in autonomous vehicles. "Technology always has to win the confidence of the users," he said. "The first people to get on airplanes were nervous." |
Wainer clambered into one of the little shuttles. The clang sounded, and we were off, trailed by the other shuttle. This was "platooning," a term Wainer defined as meaning "traveling close together and behaving a little like they're one vehicle, even though they're not." |
There was no hint of the preparations that had gone into the demonstration: Wainer said Navya had made a three-dimensional map of the parking lot and had created two paths, one going back and forth, the other looping around the outer edge of the lot. It was that second path that took the shuttles over the crosswalk. |
Cotton said he had not stood in front of a shuttle, though he said he had stood in the path of autonomous airport baggage machines, and Wainer was breezy and casual before I took my place in the crosswalk. "I've been walking in front of them the whole time," he said, "which is very fun, because you just experience the complete, boring nature of it." |
Boring? That wasn't the word that flashed through my mind when the shuttle was coming straight at me. I'm a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. It was no nerves-of-steel moment. |
Expect another sunny day, with temperatures near the high 50s. The evening is mostly clear. Temps will drop near the mid-40s. |
In effect until Monday (Diwali). |
 | | Christopher Lee for The New York Times |
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When a mob associate's luck ran out |
 | | Gregg Vigliotti for The New York Times |
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Sylvester Zottola dodged hit after hit until someone shot him as he sat in his S.U.V. at a McDonald's drive-through. |
The authorities say Zottola, 71, was a Mafia associate. But prosecutors said it wasn't another mobster who kept trying to kill Zottola but his 44-year-old son, Anthony. And on Wednesday, a jury in Brooklyn convicted Anthony Zottola of murdering his father in 2018, along with conspiracy and murder for hire, as well as shooting his brother Salvatore. |
Himen Ross, who was accused of firing the fatal shots, was also convicted. Alfred Lopez, who prosecutors said was Ross's getaway driver, was acquitted. Several other men had pleaded guilty to taking part in the plot. |
Prosecutors had told jurors in Federal District Court that Anthony Zottola wanted his father dead so he could control a family real estate business. He was accused of working with a high-ranking member of the Bloods street gang who hired a "network of hit men." His lawyers denied that he had conspired to kill his father and brother. They said he had been taken advantage of by a group of criminals with whom he had cultivated a relationship because he felt he needed protection against the Mafia. |
The evidence at the trial included hundreds of text messages among conspirators and testimony from a hired killer who described bumbling assassination attempts. |
That witness, Ron Cabey, testified that besides trying to kill Sylvester and Salvatore Zottola, he considered murdering Bushawn Shelton, a senior member of the Bloods whom Cabey suspected of withholding information from him, and two getaway drivers whom he deemed too talkative. |
In the end, Cabey's decision to talk broke the case. Arrested in the summer of 2018 after a police officer saw him getting rid of a gun, he eventually told investigators about the murder plots. That led to the arrest of Shelton and the discovery of text messages he had exchanged with Anthony Zottola, whose wife wept as she walked out of the courtroom after the verdict. |
Salvatore Zottola, who testified during the eight-week trial, said that his father had been friendly with mobsters but was not a "made member" of La Cosa Nostra. He said his father's income came from providing pool tables, jukeboxes and poker machines to bars and restaurants and from about 30 properties in the Bronx that yielded roughly $1.5 million a year in rental income. |
"He didn't deserve this," Salvatore Zottola said of his father after the verdict. "None of us did." |
We were in New York visiting our daughter and son-in-law. |
"Where to?" the doorman asked as we left our hotel. |
Upper West Side, we said. Riverside Drive in the 90s. |
The next cab that came by had its off-duty light on. The doorman asked the driver if he wanted one last fare. |
The driver said, no, we were going the wrong direction. |
My husband stepped forward and thanked him for considering the request. |
The cab began to pull away, then it backed up. The window rolled down. |
"I'll take them," the driver said to the doorman. |
"I've never been thanked for not taking a fare before," he said. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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