Shots 97
Another shooting outside 395 Hudson St. where the radio station Hot 97 has its studio — this one at 9 p.m. Wed. April 26 when the hip-hop performer Jamal (Gravy) Woolard took a bullet in the butt — prompted the District Council of Carpenters, owner of the building, to begin eviction proceedings against the station on May 2. At the same time, the Police Department announced it would install a police surveillance camera outside the building between W. Houston and Clarkson Sts. as part of its program to keep an electronic eye on high-crime sites.
The April 26 shooting was attributed in the Daily News to a hanger-on upset because Gravy would not let him sit in on a studio interview. Gravy gave the interview, presumably while standing up, right after the incident. There was no arrest.
In February 2005, a dispute between the rapper 50 Cent and his protegé, The Game, erupted in gunfire outside the building where a member of The Game’s posse was injured.
In September 2002, Hot 97 D.J. Funkmaster Fox was accused of assaulting radio station Power 105 D.J. Big Steph Love outside 395 Hudson. Fox later pleaded guilty to harassment.
In February 2001, a feud between Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown’s Capone-N-Noriega crew, ended in gunplay outside the building and a Noriega follower was injured. Kim is currently serving time in a federal prison for lying to a grand jury in connection with that incident.
Rooftop fire
A fire in a wireless relay tower on the roof of a six-story residential building at 401 W. 24th St. on the corner of Ninth Ave. broke out at 11:14 a.m. May 1 and brought 15 fire units and 65 firefighters to the scene. They had the fire under control at 12:40 p.m., a Fire Department spokesperson said. Firefighters evacuated the 20 apartments in the brick building. There were no injuries. Cause of the fire is under investigation.
Union Square bribe
Janet Billups, 45, a seasonal aide with the Department of Parks and Recreation, was arrested Tues. April 25 for receiving a total of $80 in bribes from a Department of Investigations undercover agent posing as a participant in the Alternative Sentencing Program who was buying his way out of two days of court-ordered community service in Union Square Park.
Billups is charged with accepting the money on two occasions when she allowed the agent, who was supposed to work eight-hour days, to sign out for the full time after only 15 minutes.
She faces up to seven years in prison if convicted of third-degree bribery and offering a false document for filing in the first degree.
Fatal hit-run charge
Police arrested Marlen Mustafaev, 41, of Sheepshead Bay Rd. in Brooklyn, and charged him with leaving the scene of a fatal accident on April 22 when a Newark, N.J., resident, Jessica Martinez, 21, was killed while crossing the West Side Highway, police said.
Bouncer in prior case
Darryl Littlejohn, the former The Falls bouncer charged with the February murder of Imette St. Guillen, was charged on April 27 in an unrelated abduction on Oct. 19, 2005, of a 19-year-old female student at York College, according to law enforcement officials in Queens. Littlejohn was charged because his DNA matches that found on a pair of handcuffs used on the York College student, who broke free from her abductor and fled from his blue van in Queens, law enforcement officials said.
The suspect, arrested in March for the brutal murder of St. Guillen, a John Jay College graduate student, is also a suspect in two rapes, one in Queens and the other nearby in Elmont in Nassau County.
Lewdness
Daniel Hoyt, 43, owner of Quintessence, the raw food restaurants on E. 10th St in the East Village and on Amsterdam Ave. on the Upper West Side, was sentenced on April 18 to two years probation and ordered to undergo therapy for exposing himself last summer to a young woman on an R train near E. Eighth St. Hoyt had pleaded guilty to public lewdness, a misdemeanor, in connection with the incident, which the woman photographed on her cell phone camera.
Albert Amateau
