Looking for something worthwhile to read the next time your subway is delayed? Here are some recommendations from the partners at BFKP Law:
Lee Bergstein
The Man Who Cracked the Lottery (by Reid Forgrave, New York Times Magazine): This one will be a movie someday — the story of Eddie Tipton, the information-security director for the Multi-State Lottery, who used a simple piece of code to rig the lottery, making himself (and a select handful of friends and family) a very wealthy man. Tipton fashions himself a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from the state to give to … his friends. But his story is as much about his transformation from a lovable, lonely workaholic into lottery-robbing mastermind as it about the investigator hot on his trail, whose use of technology, intuition and good old fashioned boots on the ground investigation is white collar investigation at its very best. There’s also some fun with numbers for the math geeks out there. Bonus “swag” for the reader who nominates the best leading man for the titular role of Tipton. I’ve got John Goodman in his post-Roseanne comeback gig. Honorable mention to Bryan Cranston as this is a Breaking Bad redux with Powerball instead of pushing meth.
Mike Flynn
New York Looks to Crack Down on Airbnb Amid Housing Crisis (by Zoe Greenberg, for The New York Times): This article will likely only be of interest to those currently making money from an Air BNB rental in NYC, or a stakeholder in the NYC hotel business. All I have to say is, if you thought the same city that banned the sale of certain sized “sugary” beverages was going to let you just engage in the free market renting of your property without regulation, you haven’t lived in NYC long enough. It’s referred to it as “an island off the coast of America” for a reason.
Cooper Knowlton
ICE Has Conducted Hundreds of Raids in New York Since Trump Came to Power. Here’s What Those Operations Look Like (Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept): Just this past week, the Immigrant Defense Project and the Center for Constitutional Rights, two of New York’s leading advocacy organizations launched ICEwatch, an interactive project that attempts to document all of the ICE operations in the New York metropolitan area. While we’ve all heard stories about ICE crackdowns happening across the country, it’s shocking to see just how active the agency has been in our own backyard. What’s also shocking is to read about the tactics they’ve been using — specifically how active they’ve been at our local courthouses (according to the IDP’s tally, there has been a 1200 percent increase in arrests and attempted arrests at NYC courthouses this past year.) Regardless of your politics, this is an issue that affects all of us and this new project will hopefully start to give us a better sense of what’s really happening out there.
