Gay-bashing B'klyn cops attacked me: lawsuit

A Brooklyn man says a gang of gay-bashing cops savagely beat him and hurled nasty slurs after responding to a noise complaint at a gay pride party at his home early Sunday.

“They were yelling ‘you f---ing fag!’ and ‘homo!’”, Jabbar Cambell, told The Post, recounting how a group of nine NYPD officers allegedly joined in the beatdown. “I couldn’t block the blows. I was fighting to stay conscious [but] I was blacking out because of the hits I was taking.”

Cambell recounted the alleged attack in his lawyer’s office today, shortly after filing legal papers indicating he intends to sue the city and nine NYPD officers.

The alleged beating occured after cops responded to a call about excessive noise at Cambell’s apartment on Sterling Place in Crown Heights.

Cambell saw the police arrive through the surveillance camera at the building.

A short time later, police disabled the camera, according to Cambell, who provided a timestamped videotape that appears to show three officers looking at the camera for about two minutes before one of them reaches up and tampers with it.

“I noticed them turning the security camera and I got scared,” Cambell, a soft-spoken six-footer, said.

When he went to answer the door, he says, two or three officers were banging with batons and flashlights and trying to force their way into the building. Campbell’s 8-room apartment takes up the entire second floor of the two-story building; there is no tenant on the ground floor.

“I opened the door and one officer used his foot and arm to hold the door open,” Cambell said. “There was a sergeant, he yelled ‘get him!’ and that’s when I got attacked.”

“They kept saying, ‘stop resisting’ but I wasn’t resisting. I didn’t have any time to respond,” the soft-spoke, 6-foot-tall Campbell said.

According to a criminal complaint, police claim Campbell ignored their demands to “discontinue a party” and then pushed Sgt. Juan Morero, attempted to flee and flailed his arms at cops and behaved “belligerently’ as he tried to fight with them.

Campbell was charged with resisting arrest, attempted assault, and pot possession.

He said two officers held back his arms while another pushed Campbell’s head forward, and a fourth cop delivered a steady stream of upward blows to Campbell’s face.

“One particular officer had a gloved fist and was hitting me in the face,” he said.

Campbell said he got a black eye, split lip and bloodied mouth in the attack, and was still bleeding when he was taken to the precinct.

Cops later took him to Kings County Hospital for treatment, he said, before holding him in custody for 24 hours.

Campbell, who works as a computer forensics investigator, said he had been paid $300 by a party planner to host the gay pride bash at his house.

About 80 people, mostly gay men and transsexuals, showed up, paying $5 apiece to get in.

Campbell’s lawyer, Herb Subin, said the cops “were screaming anti-gay epithets” and are guilty of a “hate crime.”

“I was an innocent person in my home that night,” Cambell insisted. “What scares me most is that the NYPD are the people you call on to help you. I’m scared now. “

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Coral Gables culinary students learn the art of sushi making

Christian Rivas is still years away from becoming a professional sushi chef, but his hand-crafted California roll looks good enough to serve professionally.

“The hard part was getting the roll to be in good shape,” Christian, a 16-year-old junior at Coral Gables Senior High, said of his first attempt.

The Gables student was one of about 30 who stood in rapt attention inside the school’s kitchen classroom. He is a member of the school’s culinary arts program.

On Tuesday morning, chefs and executives from Sushi Maki, including CEO Abe Ng, volunteered to teach these students about the restaurant business. The main part of the presentation was Kingston-bred director of sushi education Steve Ho Sang’s instruction on how to make sushi rolls and hand rolls.

Sushi Maki goes through three tons of fresh salmon every week, Ng said. The succulent Norwegian fish in front of the class, expertly filleted via Ho Sang’s knives, looked like half a week’s supply.

The executives were there as part of the Education Fund’s Teach-a-Thon program which brings business professionals into Miami-Dade County Public School classrooms. These pros volunteer to teach a class at the elementary, middle or high school level to help raise money for school activities such as Coral Gables’ culinary program and to promote the value of public school teachers.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that teaching is really brain surgery,” said Linda Lecht, president of The Education Fund. “We want to call attention to the fact that teaching is a hard job and we, as a community, have to rally around our teachers if we are going to improve education. We want to get out the message of how important teaching is to our whole economy.”

Mercy Vera, Coral Gables’ culinary teacher, sought a partnership with The Education Fund — a North Miami-based non-profit that helps fund programs at Miami-Dade public schools from Homestead to Miami Gardens — to help prepare her students for careers in the profession.

The Education Fund’s latest fundraising campaign currently has $23,202 to split among 26 participating schools.

But having pros come into the classroom is also invaluable, Vera said, because it is impractical, if not near impossible, to cram 30 or more teenagers into a professional restaurant kitchen. And, of course, they would not be allowed to use the knives and other utensils. Here, in the school’s carefully stocked kitchen classroom, the guests give the kids a taste of reality.

“This brings a totally different dynamic to the classroom. This is an experience they normally wouldn’t have and this is the only way to show the children industry,” Vera said.

“I love the energy of public schools,” said Ng, 39. “I’m excited to do a restaurant 101, and to ignite a spark in them would be a big thing to me.”

The experience met with much enthusiasm from senior Jorge Castro, 19, who says he hopes to follow in the footsteps of Food Network star chef Bobby Flay, one of his inspirations in the culinary world.

“This is one of those jobs where you meet a lot of people and you make people smile when you make them good food and that counts — to see them smile,” Castro said.

Ng, a Palmetto High and Cornell grad, is part of a family that opened the Canton chain of Chinese food restaurants locally in 1975. His mom and dad still work at the South Miami and Coral Gables locations and the family also operates the spin-off Sushi Maki chain, which opened in 2000.

Ng enjoyed stepping out of the boardroom and into the classroom for his two-hour teaching experience.

“These students seem to have a good foundation,” he said as the students hustled to clean the kitchen. “The future generation of culinary, I’m optimistic about it.”

Follow @HowardCohen on Twitter.

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Senator vows revive ALF reform efforts

TALLAHASSEE --
The head of the Senate committee in charge of elder affairs vowed Tuesday to revive efforts to toughen the rules for assisted living facilities — and close the most dangerous ALFs.

As the state Legislature met Tuesday for the first time in 2013, Sen. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, chair of the Committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs, said she plans to bring back legislation that sank at the end of last year’s session.

At the hearing, resident advocates and ALF operators tried to sway lawmakers through passionate testimony. Elder advocates called for more oversight and tougher punishment for rogue facilities while industry leaders warned that more regulations could put the homes out of business.

Many people in the packed committee room held copies of The Miami Herald’s 2011 Neglected to Death series, distributed by Senate staff before the meeting. The Herald’s two-year series revealed that at least one ALF resident is killed per month from starvation, beatings or neglect at little-regulated homes in Florida.

“There’s so much information out there and so much that needs to be done, and we can’t drop the ball on this,” Sobel said. “This is a very very important issue, and this committee is going to get it done.”

The Agency for Healthcare Administration, which oversees ALFs, recommended proposals similar to those scrapped by the Legislature last year, from increased education requirements for administrators to a state website that would allow potential residents to shop facilities and rate them.

Several witnesses asked for more unannounced visits to facilities. Under current law, inspectors visit the state’s 6,000 facilities only once every two years, said Jim Crochet, Florida’s long-term care ombudsman.

“The more active we are in the facilities monitoring them up front, the less they will fester,” he said. “We’re hoping we can improve with time to meet that goal of four visits per year.”

Although Sobel says “now is the time” to address ALF reform, she could face a daunting task in 2013, with momentum waning.

Change seemed inevitable at this time in 2012, with Gov. Rick Scott promising to clean up the industry and his ALF task force rolling out some of the most forceful reform proposals in decades.

Former Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, a vocal elder-advocate, got behind the issue. And a Miami-Dade County grand jury called for reforms. But Storms couldn’t convince the House to take up the bill as the clock ticked down the final day of session.

This year, Storms has left the Legislature and Scott’s task force has unveiled a second, more business-friendly round of proposals.

Meanwhile, industry leaders and their lobbyists seem to have made headway with lawmakers, some of whom expressed concern during the meeting that ALFs have a hard enough time staying afloat under existing regulations.

“Many of these facilities are already strapped; they’re trying to balance quality care with their staffing needs and that sort of thing,” said Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla. “I don’t want to do anything to take away from their ability to care for their residents.”

Brian Lee, director of Families for Better Care, said industry leaders want lawmakers to believe that problems are being adequately addressed by relatively modest adjustments to existing rules. A panel of ALF operators, policy makers, agency heads and resident advocates are in the final stages of hammering out those changes, which can be made within existing law.

“This is simply rearranging deck chairs, this piecemeal approach won’t work,” Lee told senators. “Residents need comprehensive, resident-focused new laws.”

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Why the Atlantic removed the Scientology advertorial

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The Atlantic apologized on Tuesday for posting a sponsored advertorial from the Church of Scientology, celebrating its leader David Miscavige.

The sponsored post, which went live Monday at 9:25 a.m. PT, touted 2012 as “milestone year” for the secretive church, which has been steeped in controversy throughout the years.

It was taken down about 8:30 p.m. and replaced by a message saying the magazine had “temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.”

“We screwed up,” Natalie Raabe, an Atlantic spokeswoman told TheWrap after the firestorm of criticism and mockery the advertisement generated on the web. “It shouldn’t have taken a wave of constructive criticism – but it has – to alert us that we’ve made a mistake, possibly several mistakes.”

The Atlantic issued the following statement:

We screwed up. It shouldn’t have taken a wave of constructive criticism – but it has – to alert us that we’ve made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It’s safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand. In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out. We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge – sheepishly – that we got ahead of ourselves. We are sorry, and we’re working very hard to put things right.

The timing of the ad was no surprise. New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s book-length exposé on Scientology – based on his 2011 profile of former Scientologist Paul Haggis – is due out Thursday.

Sponsored content, otherwise known as native ads or advertorials, have become a popular source of revenue for online publications, including Forbes and Business Insider.

But, normally, advertisers do not want comment threads under their paid-for content, and while this has never been a problem for previous Atlantic clients, the heated feelings surrounding Scientology erupted in the comment section below the article.

The Atlantic’s marketing team was moderating the comments – about 20 in all before the post was pulled – as they were posted, Raabe said.

“In this case, where a mistake was made, where we are taking a hard look at these things, is there were comments allowed on this post,” an Atlantic official with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap. “For a subject like this where people very strong feelings, we realized there’s not a clear policy in place for things like commenting.”

The Church of Scientology told TheWrap no one was available to speak on the controversy, and its media relations team did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

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Washington Heights Exclusive Sneak Peek

Emotions are running high in The Heights this week as Ludwin struggles to keep it together in the face of family drama while his needy girlfriend Diana demands attention he can no longer give. 

Video: Is 'Buckwild' the New 'Jersey Shore'?

Check out an exclusive sneak peek of the drama-filled episode in the player above!

Washington Heights airs Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. on MTV.

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LI drunk driver who crashed through elderly woman's house gets 1 1/2 years

A Long Island drunk driver was sentenced today for blasting his parents’ Mercedes into an elderly woman’s house — but his lawyer claimed that he only plead guilty to the crime to protect his ex-girlfriend, who was really behind the wheel.

“I’m telling you that my client wasn’t the one driving that night,” said William Keahon, the lawyer for Dan Sajewski, 23, who was sentenced to one and a half years in prison.

Instead, he said, Sajewski’s Brooklyn hipster girlfriend, Sophia Anderson — who has since moved back to Connecticut with her parents to recover from her hard-partying days — drive the car into the Huntington house.

Victor Alcorn

“He pleaded guilty because he cares for Sophia and didn’t want her to face this,” Keahon said, adding Anderson wrote Sajewski a tender letter in prison thanking him for agreeing to plead guilty.

Initially, Anderson almost took the rap for the May 23, 2012 accident because Sajewski was already on probation for a drug charge, said her lawyer, John LoTurco.

"Sophia didn't need to be protected by Daniel," LoTurco said.

"She needed to be protected from Daniel. Sophia was protected by the truth and the overwhelming evidence establishing Daniel as the driver."

LoTurco blasted Keahon's claim -- and portrayed Sajewski was trying to take advantage of a vulnerable young girl to save his own hide. Anderson was 21 years old at the time of the crash.

Sajewski, who has theft and drug charges on his rap sheet, appeared stoic yesterday during his brief sentencing in Riverhead.

He had lived with Anderson in Bushwick before the accident split them up.

Anderson is slated for sentencing Thursday and will likely avoid jail time by pleading to violations related to the crash, sources said.

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.CO sets sights on changing ‘the fabric of the Internet’

For the millions of people who equate the Web with .com, . CO Internet is out to change that mindset.

The Miami company that manages and markets the .co domain is already making impressive gains — more than 1.4 million in 200 countries have hung their businesses, blogs, personal projects or dreams on a .co virtual shingle. Still, that’s just a tiny fraction of industry titan VeriSign’s 105 million .com registrants.

“We want to change the fabric of the Internet,” Juan Diego Calle, founder and CEO of .CO Internet, said during an interview in .CO’s Brickell office. “We can only make that happen not by changing what happened in the last 25 years of the Web, which is owned by .com. We want to change the next 25.”

About 2½ years after the launch of .CO Internet, .co — the country code of Colombia — continues to be one of the fastest-growing Internet domains in the world and grew by 24 percent in 2012. .CO Internet is profitable and is projecting to bring in more than $25 million in revenues this year, the company said. The early success of .CO Internet, with operations in Miami and Colombia, is powered by passion and perseverance.

Calle moved to Miami from Colombia at age 15 with his family. He started several businesses, including one he sold in 2005 providing seed capital for what would come next. “I can’t say I ever sat still.” When he learned Colombia would be commercializing the country's .co domain extension in late 2006, he said it hit him like a lightning bolt.

With the right strategy and by “marketing the hell out of it,” the entrepreneur believed .co could solve a huge problem in the market — vanishing Internet domain names. If you’ve tried to nab a new .com address lately, you can relate — it’s difficult to find one that hasn’t been snatched up.

Calle thought that by appealing to the hearts and minds of the entrepreneur, .co could go where .info, .biz, .net or .me had never gone before. But first he needed the right team.

One of this first stops: The Big Apple, to visit Nicolai Bezsonoff, who had been an advisor and shareholder in Calle’s TeRespondo.com, a sort of Ask Jeeves for the Latin American market that was sold to Yahoo in 2005. At the time, Bezsonoff was the director of technology and operations at Citigroup.

“We went out for coffee, he started pitching me on a napkin. I said ‘really dude you want me to leave a big job at Citigroup for this?’ ” said Bezsonoff. “But he kept showing me the numbers … Later, that napkin was on my desk and it was one of those boring days and I kept looking at it and thought maybe I should.” He would become .CO’s chief operating officer.

Lori Anne Wardi, a lawyer and serial entrepreneur who was working at a venture capital firm at the time, became vice president in charge of brand strategy, business development and global communications. “She’s the heart and soul of the company,” said Calle. Eduardo Santoyo, based in Bogota, would become corporate vice president over policy and be the liaison with the Colombian government. “Some would say it was overkill talent but I needed the best. ... When you have a big dream, you have to think big and hire the right people,” Calle said.

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Children living in home of missing baby taken into DCF custody

The four young siblings of Brittney Sierra, the mother of a Hallandale Beach baby whose remains may have been found behind their former rental home last week, have been taken into custody by the Department of Children & Families.

The children, 8-year-old twins, a 10-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, are the children of Renee Menendez, Sierra’s mother.

Sierra’s other two children had already been taken into DCF custody.

DCF picked up the children late Friday due to a “prior history” with the family, said spokeswoman Paige Patterson-Hughes. The were put into a state shelter over the weekend.

On Monday, a Broward County judge ordered there be no contact between the children and their parents.

Meanwhile, Sierra, 21, and Calvin Melvin, 27, are being held in Broward County jails on child neglect charges. The each are being held on $100,000 bond. Sierra is being represented by public defender Don Williams.

Tiny skeletal remains were unearthed behind the home at 106 NW First Ave., in Hallandale Beach Friday and Saturday. They are presumed to be those of 5-month-old Dontrell Melvin, who has not been seen in 18 months.

“The medical examiner will be examining the remains found on Friday and Saturday,” said Hallandale Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy. “DNA testing will be conducted for a positive ID. Until then, this is still an investigation of a missing persons case and a homicide case.”

He said that how soon the information becomes available depends on “the scientists and the protocols they use.”

Melvin and Sierra and two of Sierra’s children moved into another Hallandale Beach home just five blocks west of where they had been living when Dontrell disappeared about a year ago. They moved in with Sierra’s mother and her own four children.

The search for Dontrell began last week when authorities responded to a Department of Children & Families hotline call of alleged child neglect. When police arrived at the home, they found only two of Sierra’s children where there when there were supposed to be three.

Melvin had an explanation: He had taken Dontrell to live with his parents — the boy’s grandparents — because he and Sierra were experiencing financial difficulties. Officers went to the grandparents’ Pompano Beach home to check out the story, but the grandparents said it wasn’t true.

Police went back to talk to Melvin, but he was gone. He later turned himself in.

Melvin later offered police a variety of stories about his son’s disappearance. One was that he had left the boy at a North Miami-Dade fire station — which is legal under the state’s Safe Haven law, though only for about a week after a child’s birth.

Police didn’t believe him.

Sierra initially told police that Melvin walked out of their Hallandale Beach home with Dontrell in July 2011 — and came back without him. When she pressed Melvin about what he had done with the boy, he said he had given the child to his parents. She said she believed him, and life went on in the Hallandale Beach house, minus Dontrell.

Melvin and Sierra would have another child. There was also a third child — one by a different father — in the household.

Throughout the coming months, no one — not Sierra, not Melvin, not the boy’s grandparents nor other family members — reported to authorities that Dontrell had vanished.

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Smartphone data consumption tops tablets for the first time ever

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REPORT: Lance Armstrong Tells Oprah Winfrey He Doped

After more than a decade of denials, Lance Armstrong has reportedly come clean to Oprah Winfrey.

RELATED: Armstrong Agrees to Oprah Interview

According to The Associated Press, a person close to the situation spoke on a condition of anonymity, claiming that Armstrong confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France during an interview with Oprah for OWN's Oprah's Next Chapter.

ABC News reports that Armstrong spoke to about 100 Livestrong Foundation staffers in Austin, Texas prior to his interview. Spokeswoman Katherine McLane described Armstrong's speech to ABC News, calling it a "sincere and heartfelt apology" in which he "took responsibility" for any trouble that he may have brought on the foundation.

A report from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency led to Armstrong being stripped of his seven Tour titles last year, but Armstrong has maintained his innocence until now.

USADA chief executive Travis Tygart has accused Armstrong of taking part in "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."

RELATED: Armstrong To Be Stripped of Tour De France Titles

Oprah is scheduled to appear live on CBS This Morning tomorrow, January 15. Armstrong's episode of Oprah's Next Chapter airs Thursday, January 17 at 9 p.m. on OWN.

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