local news outfit

Today I am wearing my

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hellgatenyc.com/mayor-mamdan...

A Judge's Illicit and Uncashable Check Was Supposed to Make the Case of the Missing $2 Million Go Away. It Didn't. "This information rattles me in my soul."

A perk of owning your workplace as a journalist is that, if you think it's interesting, you can write story after story about an insane legal tangle of alleged scammers, political machers, and conflicted judges, and there's no one to tell you to knock it off.

hellgatenyc.com/missing-2-mi...

Subscribe to @hellgatenyc.com, support local NYC journalism, and get your AI-Eric-Adams-Speaking-Yiddish-Freedom-of-Information-Dump news two whole years before local TV news gets to it.

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Like an especially dismal @greatdismal.bsky.social outing.

'Stop Saying No To Me': AI Brainrot Hits New York's Federal Courts A defamation suit involving a YouTuber allegedly on a Gamergate-inflected quest offers a glimpse into the LLM abyss.

I could tell you this story is about the intersection of AI brain poisoning, dead-ender gamergate misogyny, and new frontiers in civil litigation discovery practice, but it would not communicate how unsettling and funny it is.

hellgatenyc.com/chatgpt-hits...

Subscribe to @hellgatenyc.com, support worker-owned local journalism, and get your locally-produced-Julian-of-Norwich-cinema news three weeks before the New York Times gets to it and recycles our headline.

hellgatenyc.com/how-to-shoot...

Plant label that reads “Plump & Plentiful Beautyberry”

[Approaching from the other end of the bar, making an elaborate show of doffing my fedora] Hello, my

A NYC Social Worker Referred a Shelter Resident to ICE The shelter resident, who had already been arrested once by ICE this year, was approaching the federal immigration court building when the social worker called to say that a mistake had been made.

A city caseworker at a NYC shelter made a referral for a shelter resident, directing him to show up... at ICE's New York headquarters—the same building where he had already been detained once, only freed after lawyers filed a habeas petition.

hellgatenyc.com/city-worker-...

Publishing allegedly humorous fake news on April 1: Lame, annoying.

Publishing allegedly humorous fake news stochastically across the rest of the calendar year: Awesome, admirable.

Mamdani should institute a civic obligation akin to jury duty where twice a year you have to go sit in a room and talk for three hours with another New Yorker assigned to you at random (8) The anxieties are numberless: Nativism is surging, some worry. Newcomers aren't integrating, others complain. Gentrifiers are transforming neighborhoods. Pointy-headed elites don't understand working-class concerns. The youth don't know how to interact without the mediation of a screen. We've lost the capacity for and expectation of intergenerational friendship. We're all trapped in a dense and foamy froth of filter bubbles. And so on. But we're all talking about the same thing: the fragmentation and atomization of society. There's no silver-bullet solution for a problem this complex and overdetermined, except for the one we just thought of: The Mayor should make it a thing that twice a year you have to report to the Manhattan Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street, go through a metal detector, watch a short orientation video, get a reference number, and then go sit in a small comfortable room with another New Yorker assigned to you at random for three straight hours. No phones, no reading material, just conversation. What do you talk about? That's up to you. This institution would increase mutual understanding and empathy, the very lifeblood of the civic project. It would almost certainly precipitate a golden age of rom-coms and two-actor stage productions. It would promote accountability and reduce the instance of ghosting because what if the next time you were called to Conversation Duty you got assigned your ghostee? Your job would have to let you off work and also kids would get out of school. You'd get lunch, but it would be way better than jury duty lunch. If the weather's nice you're allowed to have your conversation outside but you have to wear ankle monitors so they know you're really doing it.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced I should be Deputy Mayor for Healing Our City and Our Nation.

hellgatenyc.com/hell-gate-pr...

I'm at the combination David Lynch / Sawako Kabuki apartment nightmare.

Hell Gate Presents: March Madness of NYC Hot Takes 2026 Sixty-four correct opinions we will stubbornly die for (metaphorically).

I wrote a bunch of these. I won’t say which ones, but I *will* say that if you think one is really good, I wrote it, but if you think one is bad, someone else wrote it, but if it’s so bad that it enrages you and makes veins in your forehead pop out, then I wrote it.

hellgatenyc.com/march-madnes...

Hell Gate Presents: March Madness of NYC Hot Takes 2026 Sixty-four correct opinions we will stubbornly die for (metaphorically).

The thing about @hellgatenyc.com Hot Takes is they are an infinitely renewable resource with a theoretical energy payload equivalent to a G-class star. hellgatenyc.com/march-madnes...

Tremble Before the Male Baby Falcon SKYFORGER And his little sisters Genevieve and Marcella.

Thinking about Skyforger again this morning and wishing someone would make a (non A.I.) real-life version of the painting described here so we could hang it in the @hellgatenyc.com office.

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Gonna be lobbying hard internally to make this the official motto of @hellgatenyc.com and print it on our next round of subscribers' swag.

It's like we're building a Death Star, but for good.

A *LIFE STAR*.

New York Focus Is Suing the State Prison Agency Prison officials have refused to release crucial records on how the agency handles allegations of sexual abuse.

NEW: New York Focus is suing the state prison agency.

@hellgatenyc.com reporter @nickpinto.bsky.social interviewed @chrisgelardi.bsky.social, New York Focus’s justice bureau chief, and Hell Gate’s @jessyedwards.bsky.social about the lawsuit, their reporting, and why it matters.

Hell Gate Keeps Growing Julianne Escobedo Shepherd has spent the last 25 years covering culture, politics, and the general fabric of New York. Now she'll do it at Hell Gate!

Hell yes. HELL yes. HELL YES. So excited to have Julianne joining her forces with @hellgatenyc.com. The snow boulder grows, its velocity increases, its inertia approaches the unstoppable. Onward! 🔥🖤🔥 hellgatenyc.com/hell-gate-ke...

John Chell tweet: "@HellGateNY is the extreme toilet bowl of NYC journalism. They even make the @THECITYNY look good and that's hard to do."

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A Sanctions Hearing for Frank Seddio In the case of the Brooklyn power broker and the missing $2 million, a judge will hear evidence on whether Seddio abused the judicial process

New Frank-Seddio-and-the-Case-of-the-Missing-$2M episode just dropped:

hellgatenyc.com/a-sanctions-...

Anyway, subscribe to @hellgatenyc.com, support worker-owned local journalism, and get your NYPD-prosecutorial-shenanigans news hours or months before it appears in the local NBC affiliate or the Times (respectively).

“NBC New York and Hell Gate first reported the dismissal.”

I guess I’m gonna call this a win.

A petty quibble? You bet! But as a small and scrappy worker-owned local news outlet, breaking important stories is part of how we sell the subscriptions that keep us alive and thriving. When those scoops get erased by the big dogs, it's money out of our modestly-proportioned pockets.

(For whatever reason, NBC subsequently backdated the page to 7:07 p.m., four and a half hours before the page had initially said it was first published, but still 6+ hours after Max's story.) web.archive.org/web/20251219...

Subsequently, @nbcnewyork.com picked up the story. According to the first available archive, from 12:22 a.m. the next day, the NBC story was first published 38 minutes earlier, at 11:44 p.m. on the 18th.
web.archive.org/web/20251219...

The Queens DA Just Let Two Cops Charged With Preying on Sex Workers Walk The DA made a big deal about indicting cops for robbing a sex worker this March. Last week, her office quietly let the case get dismissed.

My colleague @maxrn.bsky.social wrote a great story about the Queens DA inexplicably dropping a well-supported case against cops accused of robbing and sexually assaulting a sex worker. He published it a little after noon on December 18 of last year.

hellgatenyc.com/melinda-katz...

"...burglary and forcible touching. That case was dismissed in December over a speedy trial violation. NBC New York first reported the dismissal of the case."

As @hellgatenyc.com's designated skeet enforcer, it falls to me to point out that this @nytimes.com attribution is incorrect: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/n....

Hell Gate was the first to report.

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hellgatenyc.com/behold-nycs-...

A Year Later, Incarcerated New Yorkers Are Still Paying the Price for Prison Guards’ Wildcat Strike Some of the lingering impacts: reduced family visitation days, limited recreation time, cuts to classes, and less access to required and elective programming.

One year after the New York prison guard strike, it's incarcerated New Yorkers who are suffering from its lingering impacts.

Read the stories of six New Yorkers locked up in state prisons:

hellgatenyc.com/ny-prison-st...