Gambino crime family associate known as 'Seven-Second Bandit' cried when he was busted: defense








This mobster turned rat has one heck of a sob story.

Known as the “Seven-Second Bandit,” Gambino crime family associate and speedy serial bank heists Jack Mannino had 24 New York bank stick-ups under his belt — enough to earn him life behind bars — when the FBI caught up to him.

But the feds had no idea the wannabe wiseguy was also a crybaby.

“The day you were arrested by agents, you actually started to cry. Is that right?” defense attorney Elizabeth Macedonio asked the broad-shouldered ex-con.

“Yes,” the mob associate answered.

Mannino was on the witness stand in Brooklyn federal court today testifying as a government witness against his alleged accomplice in his final bank robbery — the one that got both of them arrested earlier this year.





Handout Photo



Jack Mannino





A serial bank robber who was in continual debt to loansharks, Mannino admitted that he decided to flip after his arrest and became a government witness.

Yesterday he gave the jury a detailed account of the Bensonhurst bank robbery and said he planned and executed it with the man standing truial — reputed mob associate Gary Fama.

Despite careful planning by the two experienced stick-up men, unexpected events marred their efforts.

A dye pack exploded inside the bag of money they had stolen from the bank, and the transmission blew out of their getaway Lexus as they tried to speed away when the sound of sirens grew louder.

Just three months after the robbery, Mannino said was holed up in a hideaway on Staten Island, broke and running low on food.

FBI agents eventually tracked him down with the help of belongings he abandoned in the ailing getaway car — including his wallet filled with ID and credit cards and cellphone.










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Wynwood co-working center funded by Knight Foundation, angel investors




















The LAB Miami announced Thursday it will open a 10,000-square-foot co-working center in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and local angel investors are investing $650,000.

As Miami’s startup community continues to grow, The LAB Miami said its “work-learn campus” will offer an in-house mentor network that will include investors and serial entrepreneurs, said Wifredo Fernandez, co-founder of The LAB Miami with Danny Lafuente and Elisa Rodriguez-Vila.

The LAB Miami, now in a 720-square-foot space in the same neighborhood, turned a Goldman building at 400 NW 26th Street into an artsy, modern space that can support 300 members, including tech startups, programmers, designers, investors, nonprofits, artists and academics.





In addition to offering space to work, the new co-working space plans to offer courses and workshops in business and technology — including a startup school and code school — as well as art, design and education, Fernandez said. It will be a welcoming space for traveling Latin Americans, too. “We want this to be a community center for entrepreneurs,” said Fernandez, explaining that the mix of activities and workshops will be structured by the needs of the LAB’s members.

While the Knight Foundation’s Miami office has sponsored many entrepreneurship events in the past four months, this is the foundation’s largest investment announced so far in its efforts to help accelerate entrepreneurship in Miami, said the Knight Foundation’s Miami program director, Matt Haggman. The Knight Foundation’s Miami office, which made accelerating entrepreneurship one of its key areas of focus this year, is investing $250,000 with the rest of the funding coming from a group of investors lead by Marco Giberti, Faquiry Diaz-Cala, Boris Hirmas Said and Daniel Echavarria.

“This is an important part of our strategy,” said Haggman. “Entrepreneurs need places to gather, connect and learn.”

The LAB Miami has already hosted several events, including HackDay and Wayra DemoDay earlier this week, and the co-working space plans to open for membership in January.

Co-working space will start at $200 a month to use the communal tables, and private offices that will accommodate up to six are also available. The LAB will also offer “Connect” memberships for $40 a month, which allows members who do not need co-working space to participate in events. In addition, there will be phone booths, classrooms, flexible meeting spaces, a lounge area, a kitchen, a “pop-up shop” for local fashion, art or technology products, a shower for those who bike to work and an outside garden with native landscaping.





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Wisteria Island: A tussle for a wild isle in the Florida Keys




















In the middle of Key West Harbor, there’s a modern-day Gilligan’s Island just a short dinghy ride from Schooner’s Wharf. It’s 21 acres of wild green space with a rusting barbecue grill and an empty beer keg swinging from a tree.

And if you thought the fictional island on the 1960s TV show harbored a quirky assortment of characters, get a load of the ones who’ve figured in Wisteria Island history:

There was Key West luxury developer Pritam Singh, who lived on the rent-free paradise as a hippie.





There were the pot-smokers, partiers, poets and picnickers — as well as artists, vagrants and nature-seekers — who used it to get away from civilization for hours, days or even weeks at a time.

Navy SEALs trained for secret missions on its terrain. Thieves used it, too, as a chop shop for stolen outboard motors.

And don’t forget Dennis Walsh, a guy who sold dirty jokes for $1 to tourists on Duval Street and enjoyed walking his dog on the island’s beach.

Over the past four decades, it seems like just about everyone has used the island except its acknowledged owners: the Bernsteins, a well-to-do family with New York roots who developed most of nearby Stock Island. “We kind of ignored it,” Roger Bernstein said.

But in 2007, Bernstein and his brother, Jordan, decided it was time to turn their “trophy property” into a luxury resort. Those who loved the scruffy island — created during a Navy channel-dredging project around the turn of the last century — had other ideas.

Among them were Naja and Arnaud Girard, who own a Key West marine assistance and boat salvage company. The couple have fond memories of their two children playing on the island with kids from other live-aboard families who grew up on boats anchored off its shore.

The Girards started poking around Washington, D.C., archives and online databases, trying to find a way to keep at least some of the island undeveloped. They hit the jackpot: documents that suggested the Bernsteins could not own the island because the Navy had not given up title to Wisteria until 1982. And, when it did, it transferred it to the U.S. Department of the Interior, not the state of Florida.

“This came out of nowhere,” said Barry Richard, an attorney with Greenberg Traurig, which is representing the Bernsteins. “I have to say it came out of a relatively low administrative level . . . and may well be, at some point, reversed administratively. But it is not a risk we can take.”

As a result, Key West’s local drama has turned into a federal case: F.E.B. Corp. vs. the United States of America.

The ownership controversy prompted the Monroe County property appraiser to slash the island’s valuation to $17,900 (it once was $700,000), and it has brought to a halt the Bernsteins’ effort to turn Wisteria into a resort that mirrors its twin spoil island, Sunset Key.

The Bernstein brothers are shocked that the feds are disregarding the warranty deed their late father, Ben, obtained for $155,000 in 1967, the four decades worth of property taxes they’ve paid and the Submerged Lands Act of 1953, which they believe confirms their ownership.

“This is a land grab by the federal government of epic proportions,” Roger Bernstein said.

But according to Naja Girard, the “real land grab” occurred in 1951, when the state auctioned off the island. She dug up documents that showed the Navy claimed ownership at the time and objected to the auction. The state went ahead anyway.





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New Flickr iPhone app to compete with Instagram and Twitter with 16 filters






Hot on the heels of its email redesign, Yahoo (YHOO) announced on Wednesday that it has completely redesigned the Flickr iPhone app. The new app borrows heavily from Instagram and focuses on what makes Flickr special: photos and communities. Yahoo’s new Flickr app also includes 16 filters with their own fancy names to go head-on with Instagram and Twitter’s recently updated app that added eight filters. Users can now access the Flickr app with numerous accounts including Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG) and photos can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or via email. The new Flickr app is available for free on iPhone but to our disappointment, there isn’t an iPad-optimized version.


Ellis Hamburger from The Verge penned an interesting editorial on how Twitter misses the mark by simply adding filters to its app without having the close community that makes Instagram so addictive. Led by CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo seems aware that mobile apps thrive on the communities that sprout up. The new Flickr app’s emphasis on how the images are displayed and shared in visually appealing and digestible thumbnails suggests Yahoo finally understands mobile.






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Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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’12 rounds








The year 2012 will go down in real estate history as the year of the 100-year storm — and the $100 million apartment.

From a housing perspective, the biggest story by far was Hurricane Sandy. Millions of New Yorkers were left without power. Neighborhoods like Breezy Point and Red Hook experienced crippling damage. Thousands of residents still have not returned to their apartments in the Financial District, and dozens of buildings in that neighborhood were flooded.

“From a personal standpoint, I was homeless,” says Shermon Peters, the owner of Rosetta Wines, at 40 Exchange Place in FiDi, who was living at 2 Gold St.





Hurricane Sandy hasn’t stopped downtown development, which will include conversions like the Woolworth.

Lorenzo Ciniglio(2)



Hurricane Sandy hasn’t stopped downtown development, which will include conversions like the Woolworth.




Shermon Peters had to leave his 2 Gold St. pad, but he’s staying in FiDi at this William Beaver House rental.


Shermon Peters had to leave his 2 Gold St. pad, but he’s staying in FiDi at this William Beaver House rental.





Peters stayed with his parents in Queens, and then camped out in his van parked outside Rosetta Wines (mercifully spared from the storm). “Several businesses were looted, so I decided to stay in front of my store each night, just to keep an eye on it.”

Move-back dates for the 2 Gold rental building are not scheduled until March, so Peters asked one of his customers, Cyrus Eyn, of Platinum Properties, if he knew of any nearby apartments. Eyn found him a one-bedroom at William Beaver House. For about two weeks, Peters would climb 20 stories to get bags of clothing out of his old apartment while wearing a gas mask. (A boiler had exploded during the storm, and the hallways reeked of fuel.)

And 2 Gold (which also suffered a rash of robberies in the ensuing chaos) was only one of the luxury apartment buildings — which included 88 Greenwich St., 201 Pearl St., 95 Wall St. and others — damaged by Sandy. According to the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, rental transactions are down a jaw-dropping 70 percent from last year in lower Manhattan.

But the fact that Peters is still living in FiDi says something about the area’s staying power.

“In the last couple of weeks, we have rented to a number of people from 2 Gold and 88 Greenwich,” says Kristen Risko of LCOR, whose building, 25 Broad, is offering displaced residents six-month leases, or three free months on an 18-month lease. “We’ve probably gotten 12 residents — and I have two pending applications.”

“People are still renting and still looking down there,” says Platinum Properties President Daniel Hedaya, who sells and leases apartments all over FiDi.

And developers aren’t shying away from the area, either.

Ken Horn, the head of Alchemy Properties, is moving full speed ahead with plans to turn the top 30 floors of the 58-story Woolworth Building into 36 to 42 condos. (Exact numbers haven’t been set.) “Our goal is to hit the market in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Horn says. The building will feature a 6,000- to 7,000-square-foot cupola penthouse, which will almost certainly be one of the city’s top trophy properties.










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Lennar to borrow $1.7 billion from Chinese bank




















Miami-based Lennar Corp. has gotten approval on $1.7 billion in loans from China Development Bank to fund the development and construction of two major projects in San Francisco, according to a person familiar with the transaction.

The contract, set to close by Dec. 31 subject to various conditions, would mark the first U.S. loan by the big state-owned Chinese bank. One condition — tagged the “Chinese component”— is that China Railway Construction Corp. be included as a general contracting partner in the project, the person said.

Closing by year’s end is crucial because of new tax rules set to take effect, the person added.





The agreement, first reported in The Wall Street Journal, would provide funding for the first six years of what is envisioned to be a 20-year project.

The loan agreement, reached Dec. 7 after Lennar officials met in China with bank officials, provides for $1 billion in financing to a partnership led by Lennar to redevelop Hunters Point Shipyard-Candlestick Point, a site in southeast San Francisco spanning more than 700 acres, the person said. Plans for the mixed-use community call for nearly 12,000 residential units on the site. Construction is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2013.

Under the pact, the Chinese bank would provide another $700 million to a partnership of Lennar, Stockbridge Capital Group and Wilson Meany, a real estate investment and development firm, to redevelop Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Islands in San Francisco Bay. Some 8,000 units of housing are planned for the mixed-use project on 535 acres. The U.S. Navy is set to turn over the first parcel of land to the development company in late 2013.





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Parents of students at Broward school warned of Legionnaires’ Disease exposure




















Parents of students at Olsen Middle School in Dania Beach were being informed on Tuesday that their children may have been exposed to someone diagnosed with Legionnaires’ Disease, Broward School District officials said.

The person with Legionnaires’ Disease was not a student, district spokeswoman Nadine Drew said. They did not say if the infected person was a teacher.

Automated ‘robo-calls’ were made to the telephones of Olsen Middle School parents that explained how the district was working with the Broward Health Department





To read the entire Sun Sentinel story click here.





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Facebook helps FBI bust cybercriminals blamed for $850 million losses






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Investigators led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and aided by Facebook Inc, have busted an international criminal ring that infected 11 million computers around the world and caused more than $ 850 million in total losses in one of the largest cybercrime hauls in history.


The FBI, working in concert with the world’s largest social network and several international law enforcement agencies, arrested 10 people it says infected computers with “Yahos” malicious software, then stole credit card, bank and other personal information.






Facebook’s security team assisted the FBI after “Yahos” targeted its users from 2010 to October 2012, the U.S. federal agency said in a statement on its website. The social network helped identify the criminals and spot affected accounts, it said.


Its “security systems were able to detect affected accounts and provide tools to remove these threats,” the FBI said.


According to the agency, which worked also with the U.S. Department of Justice, the accused hackers employed the “Butterfly Botnet”. Botnets are networks of compromised computers that can be used in a variety of cyberattacks on personal computers.


The FBI said it nabbed 10 people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States, executed numerous search warrants and conducted a raft of interviews.


It estimated the total losses from their activities at more than $ 850 million, without elaborating.


Hard data is tough to come by, but experts say cybercrime is on the rise around the world as PC and mobile computing become more prevalent and as more and more financial transactions shift online, leaving law enforcement, cybersecurity professionals and targeted corporations increasingly hard-pressed to spot and ward off attacks.


(Reporting By Edwin Chan; Editing by Matt Driskill)


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News


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Jessica Chastain on Top Secret Zero Dark Thirty Shoot

The black ops mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was as top secret as they come and, as it turns out, so was the feature film adaptation of the true-life story. 

In fact, Zero Dark Thirty's cast, headlined by Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke and Kyle Chandler were forbidden to speak a word of the hush-hush project to the press which caused a few problems for one cast member in particular.

Video: 'Zero Dark' Stars on Emotional 9/11 Connection

"As soon as I was cast I wanted to just scream it from the rooftops," revealed Chastain of the moment she found out she'd nabbed the part of Maya, a CIA analyst who anchors the film's hunt for bin Laden.

Speaking with ET at the Los Angeles Premiere, the much-buzzed-about star says, along with wanting to share her accomplishment, she longed to correct the misinformation being circulated about the flick.

Video: How 'Zero Dark Thirty' Copied Bin Laden's Compound

"I had to keep it a secret for a whole year and press was coming out saying that they were speculating that I was playing the wife of a SEAL, which just sort of made me more mad," she explained. "But I had to keep my tongue."

Zero Dark Thirty, helmed by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, is out in limited release December 19.

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Iran’s panic = Obama’s opportunity









headshot

Amir Taheri





For the past few months, Iran’s rulers have shown growing signs of panic.

Transformed into pulpits, the state-owned media showcase one mullah after another in a campaign of “stiffening Islamic resistance.” The regime’s various military arms are organizing rival exercises with the claim that the Islamic Republic is “ready for all eventualities.”

Meanwhile, people are selling whatever they can, and emptying their savings, to dump the rial, the national currency, and buy dollars and/or gold.

For his part, “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei has broken his tradition of remaining in seclusion to embark on tours of several provinces. Yet his message of “don’t panic” sounds hollower each time.




Observers agree that the Tehran rulers haven’t manifested such panic since 2003, when they believed that the American “Great Satan,” having deposed the despot Saddam Hussein, would turn on them next.

This time, no one fears a US invasion. If anything, the mullahs hope to save themselves by leading the Obama administration down the garden path.

The somber mood in Tehran is prompted by several factors.

The first is deepening divisions within the regime as it prepares for another tricky presidential election in June. Though every such election is stage-managed, none has passed smoothly. The 2009 election provoked uprisings that were crushed with massive brutality.

This time, the regime faces a split: One faction, led by outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is trying to retain power by fielding a candidate and “arranging” a victory. Its candidate is Esfandiar Rahim Masha’i, a homespun philosopher believed to be Ahmadinejad’s guru. Khamenei loyalists fear that Masha’i plans to push the mullahs out of politics in the name of Iranian nationalism.

The second source of panic is the economic crisis prompted by continued drop in the value of the rial. This has led to mass unemployment and flight of capital on an unprecedented scale.

The regional political landscape is also changing against the regime. The Arab Spring has led to the emergence of new Arab regimes dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood — a Sunni Muslim movement hostile to Shiism, the majority faith in Iran.

Tehran is also near the point of losing its chief Arab ally, Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad, as rebels pursue their thrust into Damascus. And loss of Syria could also mean the end of the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah — and thus the loss to Tehran of an instrument of terror against Israel and the United States.

The Iranian regime is also contemplating the erosion of its influence with Hamas, the group controlling Gaza. In recent weeks, a coalition of Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia has persuaded Hamas’ leaders to distance themselves from Tehran.

Last month, Iran’s foreign minister asked to visit Gaza to celebrate what he termed “the success of Fajr 5 missile” supplied by Tehran and used by Hamas against Israel. He got no invitation because Hamas, already promised $400 million by Qatar, feels its bread is buttered more thickly by the oil-rich Arab states than by an Iran whose economy is in free fall.

Tehran is also losing influence in Iraq. One sign is Baghdad’s decision to challenge Iran by fielding a candidate for OPEC secretary-general. Coveting the post, Iran has worked hard to win it with help from Venezuela.

But then Tehran may soon also lose Venezuela, its staunchest ally, as President Hugo Chavez faces yet another round of cancer treatments. The rest of the Chavista establishment has never shared “El Loco’s” enthusiasm for alliance with Tehran.

But the “Great Satan” might ride to the regime’s rescue. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have hinted at such a possibility by offering “direct and unconditional talks” with Tehran.

Such talks could torpedo negotiations with the 5+1 group (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany). The argument would be to put off 5+1 negotiations, which focus on the nuclear issue, pending the outcome of Iran-US talks.

That, in turn, would mean putting five Security Council resolutions on the backburner for an unknown period — since Tehran could drag talks with America as it’s done under every US administration (except that of George W. Bush) since 1979.

The perception that tension is easing with the United States would immediately boost Iran’s economy, relieving pressure on the rial and slowing the capital haemorrhage.

And, as with previous talks with America, regime factions would close ranks pending the outcome of the high-stakes negotiations.

Obama could put the panic in Tehran to better use. He should throw his weight behind the 5+1 negotiations by making his offer of “direct talks” conditional on success on the nuclear issue, where Iran faces the whole United Nations and not America alone. Talks on bilateral Iran-US issues could start once Tehran has at last complied with the five Security Council resolutions.

The offer of direct talks should be used as an incentive to Iran to stop its defiance of the United Nations. Otherwise, Tehran will see the offer as another sign of US weakness, and be encouraged to continue thumbing its nose at the 5+1.



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