COURIER L 16 IFE, JANUARY 17-23, 2020
critter paddling with a fl ock of its native
cousins.
“It still thinks it is a buffl ehead
as it keeps up with a small group of
them,” wrote Kepler, referring to one
of North America’s smallest diving
sea ducks.
The young duck’s stay in Sheepshead
Bay mark’s the fourth recorded
sighting of the bird in Kings
County, according to Brooklyn Bird
Club President Dennis Hrehowsik.
Hrehowsik touted his own roll in
spotting the county’s third recorded
harlequin duck sighting in November
off the shores of Coney Island,
where he eyeballed the feathered
jester for just a few seconds, before it
took fl ight and disappeared. Greenberg
suspects that bird and the one
in Sheepshead Bay are one in the
same.
“It is possible it’s the same bird,
they had a scope to see it,” Greenberg
said. “But now you can see it with the
naked eye.”
Hrehowsik theorized that the harlequin
duck made his way into Sheepshead
Bay earlier in the week, when
dense fogs that descended on the borough
made navigation more diffi cult
for the winged migrant. After landing
in Brooklyn, the bird may have
gotten distracted from its journey
while searching for a good place to
forage and some other young ducks
to mingle with.
“We’ve had to lay off dozens of employees,
we’ve already closed three of
our six locations and if this continues
on, we’re going to lay off a lot more staff
and close all our brick-and-mortar locations,”
she said.
State legislators passed laws thats
took effect on Jan. 1, limiting judges’
ability to impose bail on most misdemeanors
and non-violent felonies, while
not allowing them to keep defendants in
custody pre-trial for any misdemeanors
and most non-violent felonies.
Fordin-Saler and her competitors in
the bail industry strongly oppose the reforms,
including one prominent Brooklyn
bondsman, who complained that
some patrons — whose bail was retroactively
eliminated as a result of the new
laws — have already cut ties.
“I have clients coming into my offi ce
saying ‘I don’t have to check in with you
anymore,’ and laughing,” said Ira Judelson,
who has arranged large bonds for
disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein,
mixed martial arts fi ghter Conor
McGregor, and the former director of
the International Monetary Fund Dominique
Strauss-Kahn.
Judelson — whose Atlantic Avenue
offi ce lies directly across from the recently
shuttered House of Detention —
often deals with clients who have to post
large amounts of bail for felony charges,
and roughly half of his customers fall
outside of the new laws.
Advocates pushing for reforms argued
that the state’s former bail system
resulted in the mass incarceration
of poor New Yorkers who had not been
convicted of any crimes, while their
well-heeled counterparts could afford to
buy their way out of jail.
To illustrate the disparity, Public Advocate
Jumaane Williams compared the
case of Weinstein — a millionaire fi lm
executive accused of sexually assaulting
two New York women — to the tragic
circumstances surrounding the 2015
suicide of Kalief Browder, who spent
three years on Rikers Island awaiting
trial, because he couldn’t afford $3,000
bail on charges related to the theft of a
backpack.
“I can think of no clearer example of
why these reforms were so critical than
the fact that just a block behind us Harvey
Weinstein arrived for his trial today
under his own power, while … Kalief
Browder couldn’t afford to go home,”
Williams said in Manhattan Tuesday.
The Brooklyn bail industry in particular
has suffered under policy’s enacted
by District Attorney Eric Gonzalez
prior to the state-wide bail reform.
The Kings County prosecutor — who
effectively decriminalized possession
of small amounts of marijuana in the
borough — requested bail in only seven
percent of misdemeanor cases in 2019,
and several of Judelson’s competitors
in and around Downtown Brooklyn had
already closed shop in the years leading
up the new laws taking effect.
On the other hand, the closure of the
Brooklyn House of Detention as part of
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s borough-based
jails plan has not deeply impacted either
bail bonds company, according to Judelson,
who said that most of their business
comes from the nearby criminal and supreme
courts in Downtown Brooklyn.
But the state’s trend toward enacting
progressive criminal justice reforms
may reduce the state’s bail bonds
industry of slightly more than 200 licensed
agents by half, according to the
head of the trade organization the New
York State Bondsman Association Michelle
Esquenazi, who said most bailbonds
businesses are not large enough
to weather a longterm recession.
“They’re family-owned business,
they’re not multimillion dollar enterprises,”
said Esquenazi, who also owns
Empire Bail Bonds. “It will affect everyone
at a 50-percent ratio.”
Bail bondsman Ira Judelson estimates bail
reforms affect roughly half of his clients.
Photo by Kevin Duggan
DUCK TALES
Continued from Page 1
BAIL INDUSTRY
Continued from Page 1
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