[In December 2002, just as New
York City was bracing for a transit strike that was called for four days hence,
37 black boxes labeled "FEAR" were found in the Union Square subway
station. The discovery caused
significant concern and drew public attention—in a New York-sort of way: people
were disturbed, suggested theories of the boxes’ origin, and went about their
business—which, in a subway station, meant going someplace or coming back from
someplace.
[Aside from the looming
strike threat—New York City without public transportation is hell, believe me—we
were just over a year past the 9/11 attack; it was fresh in everyone’s memory.
[Now, I live near Union
Square and the station, which is under the park at 14th Street and 4th
Avenue/Park Avenue South, is one of the city’s busiest. It’s the station I use most of the four that
are near my apartment—though I didn’t happen to have been in it that day. I do remember the incident reported below, however.]
“37 BLACK BOXES
LABELED ‘FEAR’
CAUSE COMMOTION IN
THE SUBWAY”
by Robert F. Worth and
William K. Rashbaum
[The article below was the first
I read about the mysterious boxes in “my” subway station. It ran in the New York Times on 12 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The
Metro Section”]) while the story behind the discovery was still a puzzle.]
There were 37 cardboard boxes in all – some spray-painted
black, some wrapped in black electrical tape, all of them inscribed in white
block lettering with a single word: fear.
At some point yesterday morning [Wednesday, 11 December] the mysterious boxes were
affixed to the walls and girders of the Union Square subway station in Lower
Manhattan. Within minutes, in a city long on edge, there was concern that they
contained bombs or presented other dangers. The police were alerted, the
station and its surrounding area was evacuated, and passing trains were barred
from stopping at Union Square, one of the city’s busiest stations.
After hours of investigation, and the delicate, ultimately
uneventful opening of the boxes, the police said they believed that the episode
was a stunt but did not know its origin or intent. One possible explanation,
investigators said, was that transit workers, who have authorized a strike for
12:01 a.m. Monday [16 December], were somehow behind the prank.
A union spokesman denied that transit workers had had
anything to do with the boxes.
Stunt or not, in a city with terror in the back of its mind
and rumors of possible wildcat actions by the transit workers’ union, the
bizarre boxes seemed to crystallize a host of anxieties, and generated panicky
speculation among those who stood waiting above ground to hear what they
contained.
“You have to wonder,” said Bob Lamb, 57, as he stood in a
frigid rain and stared at the crowd of police officers guarding the subway
entrance on the southwest corner of Union Square. “It seems suspicious so close
to the strike date, but nowadays I guess this kind of thing is becoming
routine.”
A police sergeant first noticed one of the boxes about 10:45
a.m., near a stairwell leading to a lower platform in the station, the
authorities said. As he was examining it, a subway rider told him that there
were others.
The boxes were about 16 by 20 inches, and about two inches
high, the police said. Some were duct-taped to the station walls, some attached
to pillars near the edge of the platforms and others scattered elsewhere,
including under a bench.
The station was shut down, and subway riders and employees
were evacuated. The police bomb squad and the Emergency Service Unit were
called in, and they examined each of the boxes, swabbing them for hazardous
materials and dusting them for fingerprints before the station was reopened in
the early afternoon, the police said.
Police officials said they had no hard evidence indicating
who was behind the event. One official said, however, that detectives thought
there was “probably a pretty good chance that it’s strike-related.”
Another police official also pointed out that Union Square
was the frequent site of antiwar protests and other acts of civil disobedience.
And a third official said a review of videotape recordings
from a camera in the sprawling station failed to shed light on the incident.
A transit union official rejected any suggestion that
workers were responsible. “Transit workers have never been involved in anything
remotely like that, and for people to speculate on that is irresponsible,” said
Ed Watt, the secretary-treasurer of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.
In Union Square, though, there was no shortage of people who
said they suspected the transit workers.
“It’s probably the transit people,” said Amy Kalt, who was
selling scarves and other clothing at one of the square’s market kiosks
yesterday.
Others were more sanguine, observing that the city has its
share of apolitical pranksters and attention-seekers. “It’s probably nothing,”
one pedestrian, Jane Comfort, said as she hurried off toward another subway
station. “I’m a good conspiracy theory person, but it didn’t occur to me that
this was about the strike.”
And to some visitors from abroad, the incident said much
about New York’s relative inexperience with mysterious threats, terrorist or
otherwise.
“In Tel Aviv, we get these things all the time,” said Guy
Grossman, a graduate student in philosophy who is spending a month in New York.
“If it’s a bomb, the robot removes it in five minutes. You have a lot to learn
here.”
[In December 2002, New York
City averted a potentially crippling transit strike when the Transport Workers
Union Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reached a
tentative contract agreement. The
strike, which would have halted subway and bus service for millions of
commuters, was averted after negotiators "stopped the clock" and
continued talks. An agreement was reached
late on 16 December, avoiding the shutdown.
[Robert F. Worth became a New York Times reporter at the metropolitan desk in
2000. He was the Times correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006, and the Beirut
bureau chief from 2007 until 2011. He’s
also contributed to the New York Review of Books and he’s the author of Rage
for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
[William K. Rashbaum is a
senior writer for the New York Times,
covering municipal and political corruption, the courts, and broader law
enforcement topics in New York. He writes
investigative stories and news articles.]
* *
* *
“AN UNUSUALLY
ARRESTING ART PROJECT”
Melanie Lefkowitz
[The following article,
revealing the perpetrator of the Black Box Mystery, ran in the Queens edition
of Newsday (Melville, Long Island,
NY) on 17 December 2002 (Sec. A).]
Clinton Boisvert’s public-art assignment earned him an A.
A Class A misdemeanor charge, that is.
Boisvert, a freshman at the School [of] Visual Arts, turned
himself in yesterday on charges he scattered 37 small black boxes stenciled
with the word “fear” in the Union Square subway station Wednesday [11 December],
just as worries about a transit workers’ strike were reaching a crescendo.
[SVA, a private for-profit art school, has facilities in both
the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan's west side, and the ‘Gramercy Park neighborhood, on the east side. The east side campus is less than a ten-block
straight shot south to Union Square.
Chelsea’s a little farther, but only a one-mile/20-minute walk.]
The incident touched off jitters across the city, suspicion
that disgruntled transit workers or even terrorists could have been involved,
and the evacuation of the transit hub for more than five hours.
But Boisvert’s lawyer said the 25-year-old student only
intended to observe the public’s reaction to his project, and wasn’t even aware
of the potential transit strike when he planned it.
“It’s an innocent art project that went unfortunately awry,
to say the least,” said Boisvert’s lawyer, William Stampur. “It was done in the
morning rush hour in full view of hundreds if not thousands of people walking
by – it wasn’t done in any surreptitious fashion.”
Boisvert was awaiting arraignment last night on charges of
second-degree reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct, officials said.
Boisvert, who is from Michigan, has lived in New York for
only three months. He allegedly taped the boxes to walls, pillars and benches
throughout the station. A friend who was helping him carry the two bags of
boxes will not face charges, police said.
The stunt was part of a class assignment to display art in a
public place, police said. Stampur said that Boisvert hung up the boxes, went
to class to make his presentation and was planning to return to the station to
retrieve his work when he found out the subway stop had been evacuated.
“If it weren’t so serious it would be jocular,” Stampur
said.
A spokesman for the school did not return a phone call
seeking comment.
Police described Boisvert as “clueless,” not malicious.
“This was not a publicity-seeking stunt in any way, shape or
form,” Stampur said.
[Before Melanie Lefkowitz left
journalism to enter academia, she was a newspaper reporter for 20 years, and
her work has been published in Newsday,
the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York
Post, among other publications. She
taught journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and
the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New
York.]
* * * *
“ART STUDENT’S
PROJECT ON ‘FEAR’
BECOMES A LESSON
IN THE LAW”
by Kevin Flynn
[Kevin Flynn’s report ran
in the New York Times of 17 December
2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]
Clinton Boisvert’s assignment for his Foundation Sculpture
class, according to the police, was to situate art in a specific place, not to
create alarm in the subway system.
But Mr. Boisvert, a college student at the School of Visual
Arts, succeeded in the latter, if not the former, last week when he taped 37
black cardboard boxes inscribed with the word “Fear” in the Union Square subway
station, according to investigators.
After seeing the disruption his project had caused, Mr.
Boisvert contacted a lawyer. And yesterday morning, he surrendered to the
Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on a
charge of reckless endangerment, a spokeswoman said.
[Formally, there’s no such office
as the Manhattan district attorney.
Manhattan is the name of the borough, a city division. The DA is a state job (which, by the way, is why
it doesn’t have term limits, as all city positions do) and the incumbent’s
jurisdiction is the County of New York—which covers the same ground as the Borough
of Manhattan but is a state division. (The
other four boroughs are also counties, and two of them, like Manhattan, have two
names.)]
“The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said. “He
did not seem to know the ramifications his art project would have.”
When the mysterious boxes showed up last Wednesday, taped to
the girders and walls in the Lower Manhattan station, they raised the sort of
wide-open questions that authorities in a city still anxious about terrorism do
not enjoy answering. Were they some kind of bomb canisters? Or a threat from a
union member contemplating a transit strike? Or simply an artsy stunt?
The station was shut for hours while the bomb squad examined
each box, dusted for fingerprints and checked for hazardous materials. When the
station reopened, many subway riders just shrugged. But the Transport Workers
Union had to labor to dissociate itself from an incident that some riders
mistook for a bit of intimidation.
“No one at the school understood that he was going to do
something that was of that radical a nature,” said Adam Eisenstat, a spokesman
for the college.
Mr. Boisvert, 25, in his first year at the school, had
submitted a proposal to do a different project for the class, but apparently
changed his mind, Mr. Eisenstat said. “He chose to make the city, the subway,
the topical events, his canvas,” he said. But Mr. Boisvert was trying to mark
the tension, not create it, Mr. Eisenstat said. “The tension is at a level that
I think he never realized,” he said.
William Stampur, Mr. Boisvert’s lawyer, said his client had
arrived in New York only three months ago from Michigan and had not even been
aware that a transit strike was being contemplated. Mr. Stampur described the
boxes as an innocent art project that had been erected during the morning rush
when hundreds of people were passing by. “It was done methodically and in open
view,” he said.
As a result, he said, Mr. Boisvert did not anticipate that
others would view it as mysterious and frightening. “He feels so bad,” Mr.
Stampur said.
Reckless endangerment is a misdemeanor that carries a
maximum term of a year in jail upon conviction. A friend who helped Mr.
Boisvert arrange the boxes is not likely to be charged because his role was
minimal, the police said.
Mr. Boisvert was waiting in a Manhattan holding cell last
night for arraignment, and missed one of his final exams, Mr. Stampur said. Mr.
Eisenstat said it was unclear just how the subway project would be graded.
[Kevin Flynn is an editor
with the New York Times and the
co-author (with Jim Dwyer) of 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to
Survive Inside the Twin Towers New York (Times Books, 2005). His work as an investigative editor helped
earn the Times numerous awards, including a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He served as the police bureau chief of the
newspaper from 1998 to 2002, when he became investigations editor for the
newspaper’s Metro desk. He’s currently
investigations editor for the paper's Culture desk. He’s also the editor of The New York
Times Book of Crime: More Than 166 Years of Covering the Beat (Sterling
Books, 2017).]
* *
* *
“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK:
IN NEW YORK, ART
IS CRIME,
AND CRIME BECOMES
ART”
by Michael Kimmelman
[This news story was published
in the New York Times on 18 December
2002 (Sec. E [“The Arts”]).]
By strange coincidence, New York City’s crime rate was
reported yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United
States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000
residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but (thank
goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes
with the word “Fear” on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders
and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as you may
have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which spread panic and
caused the police to shut the station for hours and call in the bomb squad,
turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert, a 25-year-old freshman at the
School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who surrendered Monday [16 December] to the
Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on charges
of reckless endangerment.
So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh
from Michigan, to keep up the city’s gritty reputation for crime. At least New
York can still take pride, as the nation’s cultural capital, that even our
misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.
First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the
saying goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. “The kid is clueless, basically,”
a police official said on Monday, demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art
critic. The state of public and political art has now declined to the point
that plenty of people who follow it simply presumed last week that what
happened at Union Square must be a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist
or a threat by a union member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960’s,
people might have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70’s,
a loony loner. Yesterday’s loony loner is today’s Conceptual artist.
[The term “Son of Sam” refers to David Berkowitz (b. 1953), a serial killer who terrorized New York City between 1975 and 1977, leading to possibly the biggest manhunt in the city’s history. His crimes involved the shooting or stabbing of six individuals and the wounding of eleven others. He also became known as the “.44 Caliber Killer” due to his weapon of choice, a .44 Special caliber Bulldog revolver. Berkowitz also sent letters to the press and police, taunting them and signing them as “Son of Sam,” a name derived from his claim that he was taking orders from a demon that resided in his neighbor’s dog, named
[Berkowitz appeared calm in court on 8 May 1978, and pleaded guilty to all of the shootings. On 12 June 1978, he was sentenced to a 25-years-to-life term in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively. Berkowitz became eligible for parole in 2003, but remains incarcerated in upstate New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. His next parole hearing is scheduled for May 2026.]
Mr. Boisvert couldn’t be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes bearing “fear” were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New Yorkers have felt since 9/11 – to give physical form to prevalent emotion. But that’s art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious remark, which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.”
[Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, acknowledged as one of the most important, but also
controversial, composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He’s known for
his work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory
techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.]
Mr. Boisvert’s inspiration was evidently Keith Haring [1958-90;
pop artist who emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture; studied at SVA], who made
his reputation in the 1980’s drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures and
barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused advertising spaces in
subway stations [including, coincidentally, Union Square Station]. He was a
graffiti artist, which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not
leave dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert is
an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me yesterday.
She stressed that his project wasn’t meant to be a prank. She insisted that he
was a very serious young man. The work was intended to get people talking, she
said.
Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it.
Her assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a
site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of students in
the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he was going to paint
Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in the school. Ms. Schwartz had
reserved a room for him, she said, but he mentioned nothing about “fear.” He
said he wanted a dance floor. She thought he was planning a performance.
Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. “It
was my last class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had
done, and his was the last project before the break at 2 o’clock that
afternoon,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He put out snapshots he had taken around the
subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union Square that morning and
placed them in plain view of everyone. He said he had painted the word ‘Fear’
on them.
“We were all saying, ‘Wow, how interesting,’ but I looked at
him when it dawned on me. I said, ‘Clinton, you didn’t leave them there, did
you?’ One of the other students then said the trains were no longer stopping at
Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat. I said, ‘Oh my God,
do you think this has something to do with your project?’ He looked stricken.
He never imagined what would happen.”
Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr.
Boisvert consulted a lawyer.
He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment.
His work thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered
with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only an elite
few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.
A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much
fear as he caused straphangers.
[Michael Kimmelman is the
architecture critic for the New York
Times and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space,
landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure, and
urban design. He’s reported from more
than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist.]
* *
* *
“LETTERS: TEACHERS
SHARE BLAME”
by Louis Torres
[The letter below
pertaining to the guerrilla artist, Clinton Boisvert, was printed in the
Queens edition of Newsday (Merrick, Long Island, NY) on 21 December
2002 (Sec. A).]
Clinton Boisvert is the hapless student who planted 37 black
boxes stenciled with the word “fear” at the Union Square subway station. If he
is found guilty of the misdemeanor of reckless endangerment and disorderly
conduct [“An Unusually Arresting Art Project,” News, Dec. 17], his teachers at
the School of Visual Arts should certainly be held responsible for brainwashing
him into thinking that something like stenciled boxes displayed in a public
place would be considered “art.” He probably thought they would give him an A
for originality for the place he picked! They still might.
Louis Torres
Manhattan
* *
* *
“WARNING: ART
AHEAD”
by Lenore Skenazy
[Lenore Skenazy’s column in
the Daily News (New York City) ran
on 22 December 2002.]
Whatever happened
to the plain old pursuit of beauty?
The artist had a great idea: He would put some suspicious
packages in the subway to get people thinking about bombs, terrorism and maybe
even deeper stuff, like a change in the balance of power. Cool!
But this was not 11 days ago here in New York. This was
1994, in the London tube. And the artist, Brooklynite Gregory Green, took one
crucial precaution: He put up plaques to explain his project, which had been
approved in advance by the subway authorities.
[Gregory Green (b. 1959) is
active in New York, where he also lives. Green is known for sculptor-assemblage.
He creates conceptual pieces that suggest explosive devices, such as pipe bombs
neatly packed into briefcases or hollowed out books with nuclear warheads. His
purpose is to stimulate creative thought about freedom and personal
responsibility. As for the installation connected to the London Underground, it
may be related to a work called Suitcase Bomb #10 (London) (1994) which
was part of a series that seems to have been exhibited in London, but I was unable
to connect it specifically to the Underground.]
That way, nobody had to shut the station for five hours.
Here in New York, Clinton Boisvert would have done well to
follow that model. Instead, he placed 38 black boxes [sic; all other reports said there were 37 boxes] labeled “FEAR” around the
Union Square subway station Dec. 11. After the cops dismantled the packages,
they set out to find a suspect described as “artsy” by a commuter who’d seen
him.
The profiling worked. Even as police were seeking,
presumably, a guy with a goatee, black clothes and a tattoo, they got lucky
when School of Visual Arts freshman Boisvert – goatee and black coat, yes,
tattoo status unknown – turned himself in.
Apparently he had no idea his boxes would cause such a
commotion. “He’d have to live in a black box to be that dumb,” opined a
colleague.
Whether or not he intended to create havoc, I leave to the
judge. But clearly he did intend to create art, and that is just as disturbing.
His sculpture class assignment had been to put a piece of
art in a specific place and watch the public’s reaction.
That’s pretty broad. If he had placed 38 wads of gum on the
subway floor, would that have been any different? How about 38 papier-maché
rats? Or condoms?
My guess is, all would have been equally acceptable in
class, because almost anything gets to call itself art today.
Beautiful pictures and stunning sculptures? Those are so old
hat that sometimes it seems artists are running in the opposite direction, just
to be considered legit.
Why can’t they go back to the simple pursuit of beauty? “I
don’t think you can go back to anything,” says Dave Tourje [b. 1960], an artist
in Southern California. “The only thing you can do is keep moving forward.”
Forward to “FEAR” boxes. Great. “One of the functions of art
is to be on the edge of what is permissible,” says James Yood, a professor of
art theory at Northwestern University. Provoking the middle class, he explains,
is a time-honored artistic pursuit.
That pursuit has lead [sic] to such gross attention
grabbers as Andres Serrano’s [b. 1950] “Piss Christ” [1987] – a crucifix hung in a jar of pee – and the
infamous dung-covered Madonna [The Holy Virgin Mary
(1996) by Chris Ofili (b. 1968)] at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation”
show [2 October 1999-9 January 2000].
[Both Piss Christ and The
Holy Virgin Mary are mentioned prominently in my posts “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “The Return of HIDE/SEEK” (4 January 2012).
[I also recommend having a look
at “Susanne
Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater” (4 and 8
January 2010)—I think Skenazy should have
as well—which discuss the art philosopher’s ideas about beauty. Langer’s theories
are also discussed in “Jackson
Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” (2 October 2017). The ideas of Langer (1895-1985) crop up many
times in posts on this blog.]
But Yood points out that even Michelangelo [1475-1564;
Italian Renaissance sculptor and painter] provoked the public in his day: His “Last
Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel was criticized for too much nudity, and parts
were soon painted over.
[The reference to Yood didn’t
connect. I assume Skenazy means the Israeli rock band, but I couldn’t find any
reference associated with them concerning Michelangelo.]
“The first person who did a painting about something that
wasn’t a religious subject was considered bizarre,” adds Carol Oster, a
Manhattan sculptor. So were such groundbreakers as the now-loved
Impressionists, and the wacky Dadaists, whose claim to fame was placing a
urinal in an art gallery. After that, it was anything goes [see my report on Dada (20
February 2010), the 2006 exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City].
Some of that anything is disturbing, but, indeed, does make
a point. Those “Suspicious Looking Objects” in London, for instance, were part
of Green’s 10-year exploration of power. His bomb-centric art was trying to
make people aware of how easily our world could change if a person or group
embraced terrorism. Rather prescient.
The difference between Green and the “FEAR” boxes is that
Green identified his work as art. He wanted people to think about issues, not
about dying on the way home.
Setting out to simply upset people is not art. It’s self-indulgence.
The art world has too much of that already.
[Lenore Skenazy is an author,
speaker, and syndicated columnist. She’s
known for her advocacy of free-range parenting and her work with the
organization Let Grow. She was a
columnist for the New York Daily News
for 14 years. Skenazy has written for
various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Mad
Magazine, and the New York Sun, and has given lectures at venues like
Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House.]
* *
* *
“METRO BRIEFING:
NEW YORK: MANHATTAN:
ARREST IN SUBWAY
INCIDENT”
Al Baker
[This short notice was part
of a regular column in the New York
Times on 31 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]
Under heightened alert to inspect unidentified packages that
may conceal bombs, the police arrested a woman yesterday for placing four
cardboard boxes in the Union Square subway station. The incident follows a
similar one on Dec. 11, when the same station was evacuated after 37 boxes
labeled “Fear” were placed there. The black boxes taped inside the station
yesterday were labeled “Fear Art.” Cleaners in the station reported seeing the
woman, Ani Weinstein, 26, of East Chatham, N.Y., placing the boxes there. When
she was arrested, she had 10 more boxes, the police said. Ms. Weinstein was
accused of reckless endangerment and other violations. The police said there
was no evidence that the incidents were linked.
[Al Baker was a reporter on
the Metro staff of the New York Times
for close to 20 years beginning in 2000. He was a police reporter and the police bureau
chief, covered education, Long Island and Westchester County, and was the
Albany Statehouse correspondent, among other roles. Baker also wrote for Newsday and the New
York Daily News.
[Clinton Boisvert was
initially charged with reckless endangerment, but Lawyer Stampur got that dismissed,
leaving only a charge of disorderly conduct. He was given a ticket, fined, and ordered to
fulfill six days of community service and write a letter of apology to the bomb
squad.
[He got up early and did
manual labor from the back of a dump truck. Boisvert thus paid his debt to society.]
