JOSÉ A. ALVARADO JR.

BASED IN NEW YORK, USA

Five people who worked at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, as well as a detainee there, have been charged with corruption, including smuggling contraband into the jail, according to three complaints unsealed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday. Federal prosecutors said that in 2021 and 2022, several former city correction officers, a Department of Correction employee and an employee of a department contractor accepted bribes to smuggle in cellphones, oxycodone, marijuana, fentanyl and a synthetic drug known as K2. Their actions made Rikers Island “less safe, for...

Greg Gordon never shoots up alone anymore. He knows the heroin he buys on the street in East Harlem is deadlier than ever, often mixed with fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, and xylazine, an animal tranquilizer. So when he wants to get high, as he does almost daily, Gordon goes somewhere he can use drugs among people he trusts to save him if he overdoses. That place is an old four-story red-brick building on East 126th Street, between a cramped bodega and a litter-strewn parking lot ringed with razor wire. And those people are the staff at OnPoint NYC , a nonprofit that since 2021 has...

It has been nearly 10 months since a man attacked Maryam Khan, the first Muslim elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives, outside an Eid al-Adha prayer service in Hartford, Conn. She is still struggling to heal, she said. “I have a lot of things to get through, both emotionally and physically,” Ms. Khan said. “I’m still working on trying to heal and process what happened.” But she felt some closure in a courtroom on Tuesday, she said, when she watched her attacker plead guilty to felony charges related to the attack. The man, Andrey Desmond, 30,...

Large health insurers are working with a little-known data company to boost their profits, often at the expense of patients and doctors, a New York Times investigation found. A private-equity-backed firm called MultiPlan has helped drive down payments to medical providers and drive up patients’ bills, while earning billions of dollars in fees for itself and insurers. Photographed for The New York Times, with words by Chris Hamby Health Insurers’ Lucrative, Little-Known Alliance: 5 Takeaways A private-equity-backed firm has helped drive down payments to medical...

City College of New York often serves as a nostalgic symbol of American higher education’s past. The college did not charge tuition for decades, and its students, many of them poor, went on to become Nobel laureates, chief executives, civil rights leaders and more. By contrast, higher education today can seem both less accessible and less rigorous. But it turns out that the school that occupies City College’s original 19th-century campus, on the East Side of Manhattan, has done a fine job of living up to its predecessor’s legacy. That school is Baruch College, and it...

In 1987, Luana Mango Dunn was twenty-six years old and working as a secretary in midtown Manhattan when she received a summons for jury duty. Another person might have tried to wriggle out of it, but she did not. “I believe it’s our civic duty to serve,” she told me. At the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, at 100 Centre Street, she sat among the prospective jurors, answering questions during the screening process known as voir dire. When asked whether she knew anyone who had been a victim of a crime, she mentioned a relative who had been shot during a robbery in Manhattan a...

Guyana’s economy is the fastest growing in the world, driven by a booming oil sector. The South American nation’s reserves are so vast that Venezuela is escalating claims to its neighbor’s oil-rich Essequibo region. Guyana’s fossil fuel supply poses other challenges, too. While natural resource windfalls can create phenomenal wealth, they can lead to hyperinflation, social and political upheaval and severe income inequality. Camera Operator for Bloomberg Originals, Producer/Editor Alasdair Gray How Guyana Can Avoid the ‘Oil Curse’...

Guyana has undergone a huge transformation in the near decade since a massive oil discovery off its shores. That’s on full display at the Georgetown Marriott hotel. By sundown, oil executives in branded shirts step out of vans and mingle with tables of development bank officials, already debriefing over yucca balls and iced beers. A basic room at the chronically sold-out hotel can cost more than $600 on an average night in January. Those prices nearly triple by the time Guyana’s annual oil conference starts in mid-February, drawing in big energy CEOs and world leaders to the...

Poor oversight and bureaucratic delays in New York State’s gold-standard program for treating mentally ill people at risk of becoming violent has led in recent years to preventable injuries and even deaths, according to a state audit made public on Thursday. The audit , performed by the state comptroller, found that the program, known as Kendra’s Law, sometimes dragged its feet in linking people to psychiatric care. In one case, it took nearly a month for a mental health provider to connect with a person in the program, even though such a connection was supposed to occur...

JPMorgan Chase is giving the humble bank branch some swagger. Hundreds of branches at rival banks are being closed each year, and customers are shunning the teller and choosing the mobile app. But at the nation’s biggest bank, old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar locations are part of the secret sauce. The bank Tuesday announced plans to double down, continuing a yearslong strategy . JPMorgan plans to build 500 new branches in the next three years, it said, confirming an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal. The multibillion-dollar investment will fill out cities it has recently...

For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery. To support the idea, Democrats invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist Danny Glover. Republicans turned to a virtual unknown: a 23-year-old philosophy major at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes. In the hearing, Mr. Hughes, looking very much his age, testified to the House subcommittee that not paying reparations after the...

One night in fall 2015, an 18-year-old woman was standing on a subway platform in the Bronx when a homeless man named James Dolo came up from behind and used both hands to push her onto the tracks, the police said, injuring her. Jailed on an attempted murder charge, Mr. Dolo, then 38, soon was seated in front of a court evaluator for a review of his competency to stand trial. Mr. Dolo smelled of urine, the evaluator noted, had described a history of psychiatric hospitalizations and did not seem to understand the gravity of what he was accused of doing. The evaluator marked him down as...

Dyluis Rojas and his wife and children fled first from Venezuela and later from Colombia and Chile, crossing deserts, jungles and rivers with one goal: to make it to the United States and stay there. The family arrived in June 2022. Less than a year and a half later, they were elated when they received news that their asylum application had been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, one of the federal agencies that processes immigration matters. Mr. Rojas and his wife could soon begin to work. They would eventually be able to apply for green cards. Then, a few days later,...

Two men walked into a bar in midtown Manhattan, and this was most certainly not a joke. The University of South Carolina had a 3:30 p.m. date with the University of Georgia, college football’s defending national champion, and oddsmakers said the Gamecocks were supposed to lose by twenty-seven points. In the fall of 2022, Daniel Watts and Ethan Lustig were on campus for the perennially lopsided matchup, tailgating with their fraternity. But since they’d graduated and moved to New York City for jobs—Lustig’s in real estate; Watts’ on the PGA of America’s...

The timeworn fish weir on the East Branch of the Delaware River may have trapped its last eel. The stone-and-wood structure in Hancock, New York, has been operated for decades by Ray Turner, whom locals refer to as “The Eel Man.” Turner also runs Delaware Delicacies Smokehouse, where he sells a variety of smoked foods, from cheese to shrimp and fish, including the eels he captures in his weir. Selections of images published in "End of an Era" for Anglers Journal, with words by William Sisson

A thousand miles from his usual Wall Street perch, a 60-year-old powerlifter stepped into the spotlight as he prepared to dead-lift more than 410 pounds. Mike Mayo was probably the only contestant at last year’s powerlifting nationals who used to have an Alan Greenspan photo pinned to his apartment wall — and undoubtedly the only one who spends his day job sparring with financial leaders, often moving shares of their banks with just a few words. But here, in the halls of a Memphis convention center, the analyst hardly looked like an oddity in tight black shorts. Sucking in a...

Glassjaw celebrated 30 years of making things in 2023 with a new vinyl box set and book and some very select shows that went down in late December. Two of those shows happened at Brooklyn venue Warsaw on December 29 & 30, with thoughtcrimes opening night one and This Is Hell opening night two. The setlists at these shows celebrated the same releases as the new box set, in reverse chronological order. They opened with a portion of 2017's Material Control , then did songs from 2011's Coloring Book & Our Color Green EPs, then a big chunk of Worship &...

After John Skeene served prison time for beating his mother to death with a chair leg, after he attacked a man with a radiator cover and threatened to murder his therapist, New York State placed him in its gold-standard program for treating mentally ill people at risk of committing violence. The program, which grew out of legislation known as Kendra’s Law and has been held up as a national model, was supposed to ensure that Mr. Skeene complied with a court-ordered treatment plan despite being homeless and living with schizoaffective disorder. But by late 2018, there were signs that...

The Manhattan borough president on Tuesday announced a plan that he said will help expand access to psychiatric care and housing for severely mentally ill homeless people in New York City. The proposal by the borough president, Mark Levine, was designed to address gaps in New York City’s social safety net in the wake of several high-profile incidents involving random attacks by homeless people with mental illness. It calls for the creation of 240 long-term psychiatric beds in the public hospital system’s extended care units, where patients can be stabilized rather than...

The drive through Greenwich, pearl of Connecticut’s Gold Coast, can feel like a journey into 48 square miles of money. From back-country lanes around the exclusive Round Hill Club — past patrician estates, $5 million colonials, the Ferrari and Porsche dealerships, Saks and Hermès — to the Indian Harbor Yacht Club on the sound, Greenwich, celebrated hedge fund capital of the world, seems to drip with wealth. This is a story about the other Greenwich — the one that’s brought Patricia Restrepo to a downtown food pantry, not far from the Citarella Gourmet...

Oscar yi Hou is in his poetry era. In his “poem paintings,” a private lexicon of hieroglyphs—cranes, the yin and yang symbol, Western spurs—serve as stand-ins for the artist. “It’s the universe of the paintings, and it’s up to the viewer if they want to decipher it or not,” the New York-based, Liverpool-born painter says of the works, which have served as a means to document his relationships with loved ones over the years. Photographed for CULTURED Magazine, with words by Meka Boyle At 25, Artist Oscar yi Hou Has Already Had a...

Did you see this photo?? *link* Wow. Omg!! Follow this exchange with a dynamic discussion, hit repeat, and you have a pretty accurate snapshot of the TIME photo department’s typical Slack conversations. Even though we collectively scroll through thousands of photographs each day, there are still those that stop us in our tracks on a regular basis. As we draw close to the end of another year punctuated by grief and conflict , but also records broken and breathtaking moments of human achievement , photographers continue to astound us by offering new ways of seeing the world. How...

For years, the social safety net intended to help homeless, mentally ill people like Mr. Gomez — and keep them from unraveling violently — has failed in glaring and preventable ways. Yet rather than be held accountable, a New York Times investigation has found, city and state agencies have repeated the same errors again and again, insulated from scrutiny by state laws that protect patient privacy but hide failings from public view. Violent attacks by homeless, mentally ill people are relatively rare. In fact, mentally ill people are more likely to be the victim of a violent...

n a Saturday in early fall, a sisterly crowd of political volunteers milled about in a community center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They were there to help elect a thirty-seven-year-old Democrat named Susan Zhuang as the City Council member for the borough’s first-ever majority-Asian district, the recently redrawn Forty-third. The district, in the usual manner of these things, has a complicated outline, with several sharp turns. It roughly resembles a crowing rooster, with the top of its head touching Kai Feng Fu dumpling house, on Eighth Avenue, and its feet perched right around the...

As New York City inches closer to recovering all the jobs it lost during the pandemic, Manhattan — the city’s economic engine — marked a far less encouraging milestone. It now has the biggest income gap of any large county in the country. Even in a city notorious for tableaus of luxury living beside crushing poverty, the widening gap is striking. The wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites earned an average household income of $545,549, or more than 53 times as much as the bottom 20 percent, who earned an average of $10,259, according to 2022 census data, released earlier this...

What is the best way to combat homelessness? Research has shown that supportive housing, which provides tenants with long-term rent subsidies and support services, is highly effective-about 90 per cent of chronically homeless people who enter supportive housing remain housed after two years. 90 Sands Street, a newly renovated skyscraper in Brooklyn, offers 305 such units. Jennifer Egan reports from the facility, where she spends time with several tenants: Jessica (not her real name), who is frank about her heroin use and troubled history and spoke often of wanting to go back to school for...

During his afternoons at work, Bryan Ortiz wraps tourniquets around the arms of intravenous drug users to help them find a good vein. If asked, he will even insert the needle, and pull the plunger back, before letting the user push the drug in. Mr. Ortiz, 29, is the “responsible person in charge” — his official title — on the late shift at OnPoint NYC in East Harlem, one of only two openly operating supervised drug consumption sites in the country. He oversees the stuffing of the tips of crack pipes with copper filters, checks off paperwork that lists what illicit...

From the outside, the tall white building looks like any other hip, new Brooklyn living space. But about a thousand migrant men sleep here every night and there's room for hundreds more.  It's a sort of mega shelter, poised to become one of New York City's largest.   It's been open for just a few weeks, and it's already riddled with accusations of abuse.   For months, Mayor Eric Adams has been issuing warnings that the New York City shelter system simply cannot handle the deluge of over 90,000 people it has received in the last year or so. "We have...

Sheryll Durrant left her family farm in Jamaica in 1989 and embarked on a career in corporate marketing. But after the 2008 financial meltdown, she reconsidered her life. She returned to her roots. Now she runs a thriving urban farm wedged into a triangular plot in the Bronx, between the Grand Concourse and the Metro North railroad tracks. At her farm, New Roots Garden, membership consists of refugees and migrants, resettled by the International Rescue Committee, whose herbs and vegetables sustain their memories of home. “Just putting your hands in soil is a form of healing,”...

In a part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has been transformed in recent years by modern apartment buildings and fast-casual restaurants, a nondescript door on Grand Street is the entrance to Toñita’s, one of the last Puerto Rican outposts of its kind in New York City. Here, the customers drink $3 beers and play dominoes, or sit around and chat over free plates of food like arroz con gandules . The walls are crowded with Puerto Rican flags and portraits of the bar’s owner and matriarchal figure, Maria Antonia Cay, who is more commonly known as Toñita. She opened...

A dispute between Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council intensified on Thursday, as the Council voted overwhelmingly to override the mayor’s veto and expand a city housing voucher program designed to address rising homelessness. The override passed by a vote of 42 to 8, after which most members of the City Council cheered and loudly applauded. “I want to be clear: These bills are about helping the lowest-income New Yorkers facing homelessness and housing insecurity,” said the Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, calling the bills the most “significant policy reforms to...

When Jerry Leader was growing up, he made himself a toy set of DJ equipment.   Two empty cereal boxes were the turntables. For the records, he cut circles out of cardboard. The needle, a plastic spoon. He would sing to himself, "mixing" the tracks.   Leader grew up in an 18-story apartment building in the Bronx, New York City, during the 1970s and 1980s, with his parents and eight siblings. The address was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. It's a tall, unremarkable high-rise overlooking an expressway.   But he says the building, and his unit, were always filled with...

A retired inspector who worked and socialized with Mayor Eric Adams when they were both members of the New York Police Department was charged on Friday with conspiring with four construction executives and a bookkeeper to funnel illegal donations to Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign. The 27-count indictment accuses the defendants, some of whom had sophisticated knowledge of campaign finance law, of trying to conceal the source of thousands of dollars in donations by making them in the names of colleagues and relatives. The indictment, announced by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L....

When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her. One night, the voices urged her to kill herself. For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life. Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with an intellectual...

His girlfriend told him not to buy the electric scooter.                     But Alfonso Villa Muñoz was intrigued. He was working in a Brooklyn bodega last August when a delivery man said he knew someone selling one for $700. Mr. Muñoz said yes.                     The scooter was cherry red with the number 7 on the front. Under the seat was an ex- tra-large lithium-ion battery. When it needed charging, Mr. Muñoz would remove the battery from the scooter and use both hands to lug...

When Mr. Muñoz brought home the red e-scooter from the bodega, it did not come with any safety certifications. He did not know to be worried. He met his girlfriend, Marilu Torres, at a party in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in 2013. He drank too much and left his sweater and an ID card. She returned them. They moved in together, and the next year, Stephanie was born. They called her “gatito,” kitten in Spanish, because she made meowing sounds when she was young. She had a big heart for all creatures, even alligators and tarantulas. “She would like something odd and make...