Via tipster Nickarama on Twitter, the story of an occupation gone wrong:
“Occupy Our Homes” was that idea. The group would take over an empty house, foreclosed on by a bank, fix it up and provide shelter to a homeless family…
The atmosphere was giddy that overcast December day. A swell of people hung banners (“Foreclose on Banks, Not People”) and chanted on Vermont Street, waiting to welcome new neighbors to 702, the two-story rowhouse Occupy had taken over.
The excitement reached a crescendo when Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) knocked on the door, decorated with a pine wreath for Christmas, and out came the homeless man who was moving in with his family, Alfredo Carrasquillo.
Only problem with the plan is that someone else still owned the house. When he finally got back in what he found was what America has found everywhere Occupy goes: wreckage.
Last week,Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York.
Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.
Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.
“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dish-washing system.
And here’s the key line of the piece, one with a broader application than this incident:
Send the nitwit Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn the bill.
This would be a great law school student challenge to establish a boolean link between those who illegaly occupied the “foreclosed” residence with the Occupy Movement. Then establish that Occupy Movement with the ownership of the bank account held at the Amagalmated Bank being certain the account still has assets. Then sue for all their cookies. Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) could have stepped into a legalistic patch by giving a previously unknown entity with a Christmas wreath; ergo, just to whom was he offering the gift. Gift giving legally implys gift receiving which further implys someone or thing sueable happened in the transaction. Great chance here for some print coverage, sans the Times, by getting him to testify in a discovery – under oath – deposition to recover just he actually knew at the location. “Names please!”, then pursue the characters back to their enclaves in Manhattan, Westchester Suffolk Nassau counties or their four/five bedroom golf course manses in New Jersey. Those occupiers were not ghosts or figments of imagination, they were real brats and were there are brats there is money.
Occupy bank accounts seem to be a shell game.
No one (it seems) gets money OUT.
But the money does disappear.
Suing an Occupy group is like taking a drug addict or vagrant.
You can’t bleed a turnip.
A good neighbor policy should be to call the police about a break-in whenever Occupiers try this again.
No amount of wreaths on the front door make this a legal act.