Following her Sunday night arrest, Tatum O'Neal held her head high yesterday upon her release from the 7th Precinct, where she spent the night. The actress was busted buying crack and cocaine on Clinton Street, not far from her apartment in The Forward building, around 7:30 p.m. Not even a full 24-hours later she quickly came clean to The NY Post, thanked the cops for saving her, and is even trying to help the guy......

Actress Tatum O'Neal hasn't kept her battles with addiction a secret, but just when things in her life seem to be on the straight and narrow, the NY Post is reporting she got busted buying crack and cocaine on the Lower East Side. Seems the neighborhood still has its drug roots, the addicts just have Oscars on their mantles now. Last year O'Neal landed a role on Rescue Me playing Denis Leary's alcoholic sister, and......

In a decision that sets a new standard for what constitutes a legal search by police, as well as serving to remind why doing crack is a terrible idea, The New York Court of Appeals ruled that "reasonableness" should remain the touchstone for searches in order to not violate the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Defining reasonableness was the basis of the case in question, which involved the searches of body cavities.......

Approximately 85 undocumented workers are being fired from the high-end grocery delivery company Fresh Direct on the on the eve of the holiday season because their status as U.S. residents is disputed. Dozens of workers filed out of the company's Queens warehouse. Fresh Direct blamed a federal probe for the axing of almost a hundred workers. According to the Daily News, "management insisted it carried out the purge under pressure from federal authorities to crack......

Mayor Bloomberg, our very own billionaire mayor, is asking state lawmakers to keep the sales tax at 8.375%. Apparently the sales tax, per "Rules dating back to the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s" (thanks for the history lesson, NY Sun!), would have dropped 1 percentage point to 7.375% on July 1, 2008, but Bloomberg wants to keep it at its current level. That extra 1 percent tax means about $1 billion in revenue for......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: shots fired on 166th St. and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a pedestrian struck at Berry St. and Division Ave. in Brooklyn, and a found body on Richmond Valley and Arthur Kill on Staten Island. Still searching for the Staten Island ninja burglar, police questioned New York Post photographer Ron Romano because of his ninja-like ability to tightrope walk. A huge hole in the middle of Brooklyn's Pacific......

The New York Post profiles a West Village man who's taken to vandalizing cars with incessant anti-theft alarms. Harry Schroder is a retired art director who likes to spend his afternoons practicing the piano in his home on Charlton St. Occasionally, however, he is interrupted by a car alarm. If it goes on long enough, Schroder leaves the car's owner a note in black magic market on an 18-inch by 24-inch posterboard which he sticks......

The Hershey candy company is under fire for producing a breath mint candy that police say is hard to distinguish from an illegal drug. Philadelphia cops are complaining that a new iteration of Hershey's Ice Breakers product looks a lot like crack cocaine. When we initially read a quote from a local Philadelphia news station––"Even veteran narcotics officers acknowledged that they could not tell the difference between a package of crack cocaine and the breath......

Paramore Arrives One of our favorite albums of the year is by these girl-fronted teenage pop-punkers, and they were in town this week to headline their largest local show yet at Roseland Ballroom. It was the last show of a massive national tour, but you wouldn't know it seeing front woman Hayley Williams running around stage with the rest of her band. Paramore may not win any originality contests, but they've got more fire and......

The young woman accused of killing real estate broker to the stars Linda Stein pleaded not guilty in Manhattan Criminal Court yesterday. Natavia Lowery was denied bail, and her new defense lawyer, Ron Kuby, made a few points:First, he said Lowery's confession was coerced by the police detectives because, having been interrogated for hours on end without access to a phone or her lawyer "She had to make something up to get out of that......

An NYPD detective was arrested in the breaking up of a Bronx drug ring this week. The bust was comprehensive and prosecutors are alleging that officer James Calderon used his inside knowledge of police activities to enable crack and heroin dealers to operate with relative impunity. James Calderon was a 13-year veteran of the force, but is now being accused of acting as an agent for Jorge and Luis Mendoza, Bronx drug dealers who allegedly......

City officials are warning drivers that they should expect to spend more time sitting in traffic than waiting in line while holiday shopping. Today is the first of nine designated holiday gridlock days, when the city tries to head off street-clogging traffic that can frustrate even a seasoned city driver. NY1 quotes some professional drivers and visitors on how bad traffic can be around Thanksgiving and the holidays in New York. “Oh man, traffic is......

Rangers 4, Devils 2: Given New Jersey's recent dominance over its cross-river rivals, Martin Brodeur's picking up his 500th win against Rangers would have seemed appropriate. Jaromir Jagr and Henrik Lunqvist had other ideas. Lundqvist stopped 22 shots and Jagr added a goal and an assist as the Rangers on the Prudential Center ice. Even defenseman Marc Staal got into the act. Jamie Langenbrunner had two goals for the home team, whose fans eagerly booed......

An engineering firm hired by the victims of Midtown steam pipe explosion say that there was a "crack-like flaw" in the pipe. Exponent Engineering's Robert Caligiuri wrote, "The observed crack-like flaw appears to be old and is large enough that, in my opinion, Con Ed should have detected it prior to the rupture. Once detected, good and accepted practices would have required that this pipe section be immediately replaced." Naturally, Con Ed said the findings......

Robert Chambers, whose privileged Upper East upbringing earned the tabloid nickname "The Preppy Killer" when he killed a woman in 1986, was charged with 14 counts of selling and possessing drugs. Since two of the counts are for first-degree sale, which the Daily News reports carries 15-30 years, Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau said, "I would expect he would spend the rest of his life in jail." Chambers and girlfriend Shawn Kovell were arrested by......

Time Out NY has a list of PETA's most wanted in the city. The organization has 25,000 of its 1.6 million members based right here, and while we wish they'd have a crack team of those members targeting folks like Brooklyn's Cruella DeVil, here are some of the big offenders. • The Ringling Brothers circus is back in town in March 2008 and PETA is again questioning the way the circus treats its animals. The......

The string of pleasant, if not all that meteorologically interesting, weather continues today with another sunny, mild day. More of the same is expected tomorrow, though the mercury may crack the 80 degree mark. The Weather Service has finally come to their senses and backed off their earlier prediction of highs around 90 on Friday and Saturday. They are currently calling for highs around 86, which is more in line with weather.com's predictions of the......

Some more details about the latest person-in-custody- who-escaped: 46-year-old Gregory Pollock who had escaped police custody while at Long Island Hospital in Brooklyn yesterday morning was found a few hours later. It turns out that Pollock, who had been arrested for, per the Sun, "allegedly drinking a beer in public and possessing a crack pipe," escaped by crashing through a plate glass window around 1:40AM. Eek. The Sun adds that Pollock's handcuffs had been removed......

The Post and Daily News have a number of editorials and columns about the Deutsche Bank building fire response and fallout. The Post continues to demand FDNY Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta's resignation and faulted Mayor Bloomberg for standing by Scoppetta. The Daily News' Juan Gonzalez wonders why Bloomberg and Scoppetta have gone into "virtual hiding" and blasts Bloomberg for sending lobbyists to kill "legislation that would force tougher enforcement of safety laws by the city......

The Dept. of Sanitation has proposed doubling the fines for those who fail to pick up after their defecating dogs from $100 to $200. The Daily News reports that Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty said that since the introduction of the pooper scooper law in 1978, the city has been issuing about 1,000 fines annually. If only New Yorkers could be deputized to issue fines! Doherty explained that the problem of errant dog waste on......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a DOA/Fall Victim at 1 Hogan Place in Manhattan (that's the Manhattan DA's office), a double stabbing on East 171st St. in the Bronx, and an overturned ambulance at Broadway and Delafield Ave. on Staten Island. Opening day sales for tickets to The Metropolitan Opera set a record this Sunday after increasing 25% year over year, to $2.08 million. Online sales to performances were 50% higher than 2006's opening.......

If you've ever tossed your junk mail into a sidewalk trash can, you better think again. The City Council is expected to approve a bill doubling fines for "illegal dumping" - and sanitation officials will be allowed to fine people if "identifying information" is found. So, if you dump a catalog and other junk into the trash, you could be be fined $100-300 for the first violation, $250-500 for the second violation, and $350-400 for......

New York's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is reporting that there has been an alarming resurgence in the reported number of cases of syphilis in the city. The New York Times writes that after spiking in the late 1980s during a wave of unsafe sex fueled by an epidemic of crack cocaine use, cases of syphilis dropped steadily. By the late 1990s, incidences of the disease became so rare that public health officials at......

Back before the turn of the century, and concurrent with the spread of air conditioning in Off-Off Broadway theaters, theater buffs John Clancy and Elena K. Holy seized a golden opportunity to exploit the only brief lull in New York’s raging theater scene – when conventional wisdom held that no slob stuck in town during mid-August would want to get stickier in a stuffy theater up two flights of stairs. And so The New York......

Yesterday morning, a 77-year-old Queens man walking in Chinatown was injured when he seemingly fell into the path of a police cruiser. Tong Hong had been walking with his adult daughter at Canal and Broadway and tripped on his flip-flops, sending him into the windshield of the cruiser. Hong was bleeding profusely, and the Daily News says there was a "basketball-sized, spider-web crack on the driver's side windshield." However, one witness thought that the cruiser......

Lawmakers are looking to toughen laws around tinted windows on automobiles. Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum pointed out that police officer Russel Timoshenko was fatally shot when he approached a stolen SUV with tinted windows. And current State Senator Eric Adams (a retired police captain and a founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care) summed it up, "The criminal element does not use tinted windows to protect themselves from dangerous UV rays. They use......

MOVIES: With another version of Hairspray hitting the big screen this summer, it seems to be a season of decades past and, of course, hair! Movies With a View brings back the musical tale of Central Park hippies, small town boys headed to Vietnam and the '60s as they show the film Hair tonight. Deejays at 6pm, Movie at Sundown // Empire Fulton State Park, Dumbo // Free It's the last night to catch Punk's......

The city encourages people to call 311 to report non-emergency situations (broken traffic lights) or to ask questions (what's that noise). But this anecdote from the State Island Advance's Newslog shows that being helpful can be hard. When 77-year-old Agnes Burney called 311 to report that a contractor had "mowed their trucks over a fire hydrant in front of her South Beach residence and cracked the concrete slab around it," the city did inspect the......

Last week, Jonathan Aponte admitted to paying a man $500 to shoot him in the leg so he wouldn't have to return to Iraq and his unit. The physical pain of his injury was augmented by the pains of embarrassment when people complimented or thanked him for his service in the Army as he was transported back to Fort Hood in Texas. While he's facing criminal charges of conspiracy and falsely reporting an incident in......

On the Gothamist Newsmap, there are a few incidents that are not mapped but simply listed as "Unusual Rescue," with the time and place, and occasionally we learn what was so unusual about them. For instance, yesterday at 5:06PM, the unusual rescue at Avenue W and East 27th Street in Sheepshead Bay turned out to be a teenager stuck in a mailbox. Really. The Daily News reports that the kid's friends dared him to go......