METRO DIGEST
By Unknown Author
THE POOR IMPROVISE FOR BANK SERVICES In six years, Silfrido Frias and Edwin B. Canaan have gone from running a one-room paralegal service in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan to establishing Sherman Plaza, a diverse enterprise with 2,000 square feet of new office space. The two men are lawyers trained in the Dominican Republic who have pursued their piece of the American dream without a bank loan. Lacking credit history, they cobbled together capital from relatives, credit cards and an informal revolving loan fund financed by other immigrants. Finally, they said, they turned to a loan shark, who handed over $10,000 at interest of 6 percent a week. [ Page A1. ] NEW YORK CITY AGREEMENT REACHED ON FESTIVAL The organizers of the Feast of San Gennaro will let New York City officials examine the books from last year's event to determine whether any of the proceeds went to organized crime, Mayor Giuliani said in announcing that the festival would begin as scheduled on Thursday. In addition, city auditors will study the festival to see whether enough of its proceeds are going to charity. [ B3. ] COMPLAINT LEADS TO HOURLONG SIEGE It was a strange story that quickly became stranger: About 9:30 A.M., an agitated man flagged down two police officers in a patrol car in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and told them that he had bought a gold chain for a woman, and that her husband had threatened him with a knife. The man led them to an apartment house overlooking the Prospect Expressway, the officers said, where they were threatened in a dark hallway by men armed with a Mossbach combat shotgun and a Russian-made AK-47 automatic assault rifle. [ B3. ] OFFICER'S ASSAILANT DIES IN CRASH After spending eight years in prison for shooting and paralyzing Officer Steven McDonald in Central Park in 1986, Shavod Jones, now 25, was released on parole last week. Early yesterday, the police said, Mr. Jones died from head injuries he suffered after he and a friend crashed into two parked cars while performing wheelies on a motorcycle in East Harlem. In 1986, Mr. Jones, then 15, was convicted of trying to kill Officer McDonald. [ B2. ] FUNERAL HELD FOR WOMAN HELD CAPTIVE As the church choir sang softly for her soul to rise safely to heaven, Gao Liqin lay in a simple blue wooden coffin in her finest attire: a white ruffled shirt and a frayed chocolate-colored wool coat. Clutching a picture of his dead wife and weeping, D. M. Zhang, an immigrant from Fujian, China, sobbed uncontrollably at Chinatown's Ng Fook Funeral Home. In broken sentences and disjointed words, he asked aloud in Chinese: what had unleashed the wrath of fury of his wife's captors that they would kill her in such a brutal way? [ B6. ] SUBWAY STATION CLOSES; FIRST SINCE 1962 Brooklyn's Franklin Avenue Shuttle has long stood apart from the rest of the city's subways, in ways more often grim than glorious. The shuttle's Dean Street station closed for business just after midnight, the first subway station shuttered since 1962. The official causes of death, given by the Transit Authority, were paltry patronage and budget cuts. The word on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, however, was that the station died of official neglect. [ B4. ] REGION PRIMARIES TO DECIDE FEUDS Republicans and Democrats will try to settle bitter intraparty feuds in primaries on Long Island and in Westchester County and Connecticut, hoping the fighting will not mar their chances of winning in November. [ B8. ] Primary elections will be held in New York City, with polls open from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M. No primaries will be held in the Bronx or on Staten Island. [ B8. ] SUIT IS SETTLED OVER STRIP SEARCHES The New York State Department of Correctional Services has agreed to pay $1,000 to each of 85 female inmates who claimed that they were subjected to improper videotaped strip searches by guards at the Albion Correctional Facility outside Rochester. A department spokesman, James B. Flateau, said the settlement was not an admission of wrongdoing, but rather a concession to keep the case out of court. He added that the videotaping was justified and would continue. [ B5. ] Chronicle B12
