Beating-death arrests
Police arrested three suspects on June 1 for the killing of Thomas Whitney Jr., of Hoboken, N.J., who was found at 4 a.m. May 21 with head injuries on the sidewalk outside the Spy Lounge on 20th St. and Sixth Ave.
Three other suspects were arrested for possession of stolen property after they had used Whitney’s credit card, police said.
Charged with murder and robbery were Daryush Omar, 20, of North Babylon, L.I.; Najib Noor, 19, of Flushing, Queens; and Walliullah Hashimi, 22, of Willets Point, Queens. They were arraigned and held without bail pending a June 7 court appearance.
Police said the three charged with possession of Whitney’s credit card and wallet — Salem Qurbani, 21, of Whitestone, Queens; Abdullah Kahn, 20, of Huntington Station, L.I.; and Jaweed Farhadi, 24, of Bethpage, L.I. — were among the group that beat and robbed the victim outside Spy Lounge and then drove off.
Whitney was found by a passing Emergency Medical Service team who took him to Bellevue hospital where he died of skull fractures several hours later.
The six suspects, who had been ejected earlier from Avalon, a nearby club, encountered the victim inside Spy and attacked him as he was leaving, police said. Witnesses said they heard one of the suspects yell, “Get the white [expletive].” But police said the remark was apparently intended to identify the victim and did not classify the murder as a hate crime.
Bad check bust
A teacher of graduate finance and accounting subjects at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies was charged last week with bouncing nine rent checks for his E. 79th St. apartment, according to the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Jack Bloom, 49, was charged with one count of third-degree grand larceny and nine counts of issuing bad checks between May 2005 and May 2006. He is free on his own recognizance and is scheduled for a Sept. 7 court appearance.
His landlord, Murray Kesten, said in a criminal complaint that eight rent checks totaling $21,150 were returned for insufficient funds over the past year and a ninth check for $2,350 dated March 2 of this year bounced five times. Kesten said Bloom still owes more than $3,000 rent.
Bloom said he had repaid most of the money to the landlord before he was evicted in May. He is scheduled to teach a course this summer on the essentials of finance and accounting for graduate students at N.Y.U.’s professional studies school in the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan.
Page Sixer eighty-sixed
Richard Johnson, 52, editor of the New York Post’s beleaguered Page Six gossip column, was arrested for driving while intoxicated and driving while impaired shortly after midnight June 2 on W. 14th St. near the Gansevoort Market District. A Manhattan Traffic Task Force officer said in a misdemeanor complaint that Johnson, “had watery and bloodshot eyes, had slightly slurred speech and had the odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath.” Johnson refused to take a test to determine how much alcohol was in his system and failed some coordination tests.
His lawyer denied Johnson was drunk but said he had stopped off for a birthday party at the private Soho House in the Meat Market after playing basketball. Johnson is free on his own recognizance and is due in court July 11.
Albert Amateau
