Good morning. It's Thursday. Today we'll meet a Manhattan couple who went to 47 states and 14 countries for a book about Costco. We'll also find out about a four-decade fight to exonerate two men convicted of killing a French tourist in a mugging in 1987.
The people who wrote a book about the big-box chain they love live in a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side. "Four hundred and fifty square feet of paradise," said David Schwartz, sitting — not too far — from his wife, Susan, in what serves as their living room, dining room and kitchen. It is also their map room. The two maps are relevant to their book, but you could miss them on your way in, tucked, as they necessarily are, behind the front door. You could also miss the 12 largish jars of jelly beans next to an end table. Or the 1.75-liter bottle of whisky on the floor by the window, the even larger bottle of Bordeaux next to it or the three-bottle package of sugar-free ketchup nearby. But you couldn't miss their book, on the coffee table: "The Joy of Costco: A Treasure Hunt from A to Z." On the way to writing 272 pages, they logged 220,000 miles, went to 13 other countries and visited more than 200 Costco "warehouses," as the company calls its members-only, no-frills outposts. The maps behind the door have red pushpins for every Costco they went to. Susan Schwartz, who had been a product manager at Nabisco and later worked as a freelancer, producing television commercials, was a Costco fangirl before they met — and even before there was a Costco in Manhattan. "For years, I was going to Costco with friends, hitching a ride to the suburbs, because there was no Costco in Manhattan," she recalled. She was also trying to figure out how to keep the things she brought home, given that the apartment had only a half-size refrigerator. She said she succeeded by "managing inventory," something she had learned while working in restaurants. Even now, with a larger refrigerator that arrived during the pandemic, the apartment does not feel crammed. The Schwartzes did not set out to be Costco's Boswells. They were just casting about for a project after David Schwartz had handed in the manuscript of a book that could hardly be more different — "The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age." And, on the subject of serious subjects, his father, Melvin Schwartz, shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics. David Schwartz had ideas to follow the Fermi biography, but when he tried them on his wife, her responses ranged from "That's boring" to "Who would read that?"
Then she had a brainstorm: Why not write a book about Costco together? They loved the company, he said, and used to "wonder how the hell they do what they do." It took them two years to wrangle time with Jim Sinegal, a co-founder and former chief executive of the chain. He took them to lunch in the food court at the Costco across from the company's headquarters in Issaquah, Wash. Susan Schwartz was so thrilled that she pinched her husband under the table. Sinegal bought the hot dogs. (Hot dogs are a polestar for Costco: It sells seven times more hot dogs than all the Major League Baseball stadiums do combined, according to "The Joy of Costco.") But Sinegal said "there was no book there," David Schwartz recalled. Not to be discouraged, the Schwartzes plugged away. They emailed him from time to time, and eventually he asked to read the manuscript for accuracy. The Schwartzes agreed.
They also say they were candid: They told him that 22 publishers had turned them down. Before long, they decided to self-publish the book and started their own publishing company: Hot Dog Press. The Costco closest to their apartment is four miles away, on East 117th Street, and is the third-smallest Costco in the world, they said. The smallest is in Juneau, Alaska. Even at 76,000 square feet, she said, it left her thinking "who shrank my Costco" the first time they walked in. As for their local one in Manhattan, with slightly less than 100,000 square feet of wide aisles and to-the-rafters steel shelves, "you can have a fine Costco experience," she said. In their book the Schwartzes marveled at how Costco is the world's largest importer of olive oil and cashews. They wrote that the company has 615 gas stations worldwide and that gasoline accounted for 9 percent of Costco's sales in 2020. And the Schwartzes detailed how Costco's business centers sell even larger sizes than regular Costco warehouses do — 56-gallon cans of maple syrup, five-pound jars of curry powder and 32-pound containers of sour cream, for example.
But don't expect the Schwartzes to tell you the secret of Costco's pumpkin pie. Their book says that Costco sells six million pumpkin pies a year — and that the recipe calls for a variety of pumpkin grown in Illinois. Beyond that, the couple will not spill whatever it is that makes Costco's pumpkin pies special. "If we told you that, it wouldn't be a secret," she insisted when I asked, echoing a line in the book. "That was my line, by the way," he said. WEATHER Expect a mostly cloudy day, with temperatures in the high 40s. At night, prepare for a chance of showers with temperatures dropping to the high 30s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Feb. 9 (Lunar New Year's Eve). The latest Metro news
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Eric Smokes and David Warren were convicted of killing a 71-year-old French tourist in a mugging that turned brutal minutes after New Year's Eve 1986 gave way to New Year's Day 1987. In hearings that began in November 2018, the Manhattan district attorney's office fought an effort by the men to have their convictions overturned. They had long since been paroled but continued to maintain their innocence. A judge denied their lawyers' motion in January 2020. Now, under a different district attorney who said he was "inspired by the unyielding advocacy of Mr. Smokes and Mr. Warren," their indictments have been dismissed and their convictions vacated. The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, added that he hoped the actions in the case could "finally bring them a measure of comfort and justice." Warren, 53, and Smokes, 56, were paroled in 2007 and 2011, respectively. In a court filing, Terri Rosenblatt, the chief of Bragg's Post-Conviction Justice Union, said that a reinvestigation that began in 2022 had uncovered fresh evidence. Judge Stephen Antignani, who had denied the motion four years ago, told Smokes and Warren that they could leave "with the knowledge that you are not criminals." Warren leaned into the microphone at the defense table and said, "We never were." A growing number of convictions from the 1990s — when soaring crime led New York City law enforcement agencies to pursue arrests at all costs — have been vacated in recent years. Since 1989, about 124 murder convictions have been overturned in New York City, a notable portion of the 1,317 overturned nationwide, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Those who have had their names cleared have been overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic. METROPOLITAN DIARY The monster
Dear Diary: I was visiting New York City from France. I had stupidly rented a car that was too large for my purposes. One night in Greenwich Village, I could find only one vacant space and I carefully backed this monster into it. Then I heard a woman's voice and turned around. "Is it a new car," she said, pointing to the hydrant where I had parked, "a new driver, or both?" — François Lonchamp Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here are today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Melissa Guerrero, Sofia Poznansky and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: A couple’s book about Costco
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