« Job Growth Requires Vibrant Urban Neighborhoods | Main | Review and Comment: New Guide for New City »
June 3, 2010
Talking Point: The Angry Buddhist takes a stroll on the boardwalk
The Villager
by Carl Rosenstein
I walked down the boardwalk to the Russian Sector where the buzz is over their newest homeboy, megalomaniac Brooklyn Nyet owner Mikhail D. Prokhorov — Nyet worth $14 billion. Just what our town needs, another tumid billionaire. Our billionaire mayor had him over for breakfast. Afterward he was ushered around town, including a visit to the new billionaire Steinbrenner Stadium, scandalously funded with $300 million in public money. This was apparently to show Prokhorov just how easy it is to rip off the public coffers, as will be done in suit for the construction of his Atlantic Yards basketball-arena-office-and-condo development.
The Atlantic Yards plan was opaque enough and without a semblance of participatory democracy when it was billionaire Bruce Ratner’s alone. But now for taxpayers to subsidize this Russian plutocrat and playboy raises the level of arrogance and contempt toward the public to where it would make Robert Moses blush. James Dolan, the billionaire owner of the Knicks and Cablevision, has never blushed about Madison Square Garden’s property-tax-free status dating back to 1982 that has cost the city more than $300 million to date. “Off with their heads.”
Public records on Mr. Prokhorov are scarce and incomplete and the NBA accepted a certain amount of ambiguity. David E. Hoffman, the author of “The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia,” said that Mr. Prokohorov emerged from a business climate that has “no rule of law, a lot of shadiness, a lot of violence, a lot of coercion.” Welcome to Crooklyn, Mikhail, you’ll fit right in.
Posted by eric at June 3, 2010 8:54 AM