In the wake of Eric Garner’s death, Mayor De Blasio said this:
“Eric Garner was a decent man. Obviously, it was a minor offense he was committing — there’s no way it should have ended up in this situation,” de Blasio told HOT 97 radio on Dec. 4, a day after the grand jury ruling.
Meanwhile this was happening:
Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered city lawyers to stay silent about a groundbreaking lawsuit to keep bootleg cigarettes out of the Big Apple — because it came as Hizzoner was downplaying the illegal cigarette sales that led to the ill-fated police arrest of Eric Garner, The Post has learned.
The city Law Department drafted the civil racketeering suit the same week that a Staten Island grand jury did not indict NYPD cop Daniel Pantaleo in Garner’s chokehold death, and it was quietly filed in Brooklyn federal court on Dec. 9.
The Law Department drafted a press release boasting that the suit “is the first of its kind brought by the city against an out-of-state entity for supplying cigarette traffickers,” sources said.
You think Maybe the repeated police contact with Mr. Garner had before his death?
“You can’t have the mayor blabbing away that selling loosies is a ‘minor offense,’ but then have the Law Department, which represents and protects the city and the mayor’s interests, file this suit,” the official said. “It reeks of duplicity.”
The official, citing de Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities” campaign rhetoric, added that “the mayor has a problem with two cities, and he created it.”
“On one hand, to pander to his voting base, he spews some nonsense that selling loosies is a ‘minor offense,’” the official said.
“But, on the other hand, he realizes this is a major issue with serious ramifications if left unchecked and he has the city’s Law Department file this first-of-its-kind federal lawsuit against the smoke shop.”
And of course New York’s “Progressive” views on taxes have created this:
According to a March report by Bloomberg News, an estimated 57 percent of the cigarettes smoked in New York are smuggled across state lines to avoid hefty state and city taxes that add $58.50 to the cost of a carton.
Remember this next time somebody says we should “legalize marijuana and tax the hell out of it!” or any other drug, because if you tax it too much people won’t change their economic activities, and will continue to buy drugs from the cartels (or if we’re lucky, from other states who have legalized it, but have taken street values into account when they add taxes to the fair market value), and no problems will be solved.
