Sonic Discord in Northern New Jersey

In a post a few months ago, I mentioned that one business that seemed to be bucking the recession locally was Food Network chef Bobby Flay's, burger place, Bobby's Burger Palace. A few weeks ago, the first Sonic drive-in opened in Northern New Jersey, on Rt. 17, one of the two main commercial highways cutting through densely populated Bergen County¹. Since then, the place has been jammed. There have been traffic cops on foot directing traffic into the lot, and waiving off cars when the lot is full. We have a lot of people in NJ who love to eat, but we also have, arguably, the most aggressive and most dangerous drivers in the country². Last night, that combination led to one of the traffic cops getting sandwiched between two cars. From the Record:

Several teenagers in their cars at the drive-in heard the crash and ran to the scene, on Route 17 north. They saw a Honda Civic with its front end smashed, facing north, and up against an Acura SUV facing south, both vehicles pinned against the center median in the northbound lane.

They said they saw the officer pinned between the two cars. “The officer wasn’t moving … his eyes were closed,” said Ryan Conlon, 17, of Allendale.

“We heard, like, a screech, and then a loud thud … it sounded like somebody hit something heavy,” said Conlon, who was at the drive-in with two friends, Brandon Neuburger, 18, of Allendale, and Nicole Piazza, 18, of Ho-Ho-Kus³.

[...]

One customer, P.J. Montevirgen, 29, of Hackensack said he had to circle up and down the highway to try and get a spot, and saw an Acura SUV trying to get a spot and a police officer telling the driver the lot was full. The Acura driver suddenly floored his vehicle in front of the officer, jerked to the left, and disappeared behind some car. Moments later, Montevirgen said, he heard a crash.

“It’s a real popular spot. … I’ve been hearing about it [the drive-in],” said a 50-year-old Ramsey resident who declined to give her name. She said she had circled on the highway five times before she pulled into the drive-in. “People jockey to get position in the right lane to get in.”

As she pulled in, she spotted two police officers directing traffic and blurted to herself about the position of one of them, “That cop is going to get killed.” Five minutes later, she said, she saw all the commotion.

I dedicate the footnotes below to the memory of David Foster Wallace.

¹According to Wikipedia, there are about 900,000 of us tucked into the little corner of Northeastern NJ comprised by Bergen County. In contrast, Sussex County, which is situated in the Northwestern corner of NJ and covers twice the land area of Bergen County, has only about 150,000 residents. My mother owns a small horse farm in Sussex County, and when we drive there Cheryl and I pass the "Welcome to Sussex County" sign, which features that county's slogan, "People and Nature Together". We've joked that the slogan for Bergen County ought to be "People at each other's throats".

²I say this based my experience driving in a number of different parts of this country. Los Angeles, for example, has lots of traffic, but when I've driven there, I've never seen the kind of nonsense I see here. I don't see it driving in Manhattan, for that matter either (with the possible exception of the taxi drivers).

³As densely populated as Bergen County is, the northern end of it includes some scenic, rural parts. Ho-Ho-Kus is up in that area. One bit of trivia: Ho-Ho-Kus was mentioned in an episode of Sex and the City ("Sex and the Country"), when Carrie Bradshaw drives into NJ from her boyfriend's cabin in New York state to get a burger. According to IMDB, this scene was actually shot somewhere in Long Island though.

Peering Under the TARP: Foul Waters

Representative Maxine Waters (pictured above), Democrat of California, was one of the members of the House Banking Committee featured in the YouTube video in a recent post ("Armando Falcon, Jr: An Enemy of the People?"). Today, she was the subject of a New York Times article ("Congresswoman, Tied to Bank, Helped Seek Funds"). From the article:

WASHINGTON — Top banking regulators were taken aback late last year when a California congresswoman helped set up a meeting in which the chief executive of a bank with financial ties to her family asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds, Treasury officials said.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Water’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board of directors until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 in stock in the institution. Treasury officials said the session with nearly a dozen senior banking regulators had been intended to allow minority-owned banks and their trade association to discuss the losses they had incurred from the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Kevin Cohee, OneUnited’s chief executive, instead seized the opportunity to plead for special assistance for his bank, federal officials said.

“Here you had a tiny community bank that comes in and they are not proposing a broader policy — they were asking for help for themselves,” said Steve Lineberry, a former Treasury aide who attended the meeting. “I don’t remember that ever happening before.”

[...]

While OneUnited did not get the $50 million it requested, the bank did become among the first minority-owned institutions to receive a cash infusion — $12 million — in December through the Treasury’s bank bailout effort, called the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The aid surprised some bank analysts because the bailout was intended for healthy banks, and OneUnited was then considered to be in precarious condition. In addition, it had been harshly criticized by regulators in 2007 for failing to give a sufficient number of loans to lower income residents in Miami, while favoring wealthier customers there. And the F.D.I.C. sanctioned the institution in October 2008 for “unsafe or unsound banking practices,” including excessive compensation for Mr. Cohee. The bank had provided him with a 2008 Porsche SUV and maintained his $6.4 million beachfront compound in Santa Monica. Calif., with views of the Pacific and a spa and pool.

[...]

Ms. Waters and Mr. Cohee have been outspoken advocates for fair treatment of African-Americans and other minorities by the nation’s banks — “silver rights,” Mr. Cohee called it during an interview in his Los Angeles office, where he prominently displays a photograph of him with the congresswoman. Indeed, in Los Angeles the bank has won praise for its record of helping minority businesses and lower-income residents.

Their interests first intersected in 2002, when Mr. Cohee was involved in a bidding war for Family Savings, a small, black-owned bank in Ms. Waters’ South Los Angeles District.

As a white-owned Illinois bank initially emerged as the winner, Ms. Waters made clear through the local news media that she opposed any deal in which Family would fall out of African-American hands. She was credited when the bank abruptly changed course and gave Mr. Cohee another chance to submit a winning bid.

“It’s very helpful if you have a community-based transaction to have the real or implied support of Maxine,” said Mr. Bradshaw, who preferred the initial deal. “She’s a star in the community.”

This Mr. Bradshaw seems quite diplomatic. Back to the article:

The acquisition nearly doubled the size of Mr. Cohee’s bank, making it among the nation’s largest African-American-owned banks.

Less than two years later, Mr. Cohee named Mr. Williams, Ms. Waters’ husband, to the bank’s board. A former professional football player and ambassador to the Bahamas¹, Mr. Williams was working as a business consultant, pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars over a several-year period working with some of Ms. Waters’s political allies, according to disclosure forms.

[...]

The federal takeover of Fannie and Freddie last fall was a near-fatal blow to One United. The bank, like many others around the United States, had invested some of its capital in preferred stock of the two mortgage companies.

After the federal intervention, the stock became nearly worthless and OneUnited lost almost $50 million. That left the bank dangerously under capitalized.

[...]

Ms. Waters had been in regular contact with Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary, urging him to hire minority contractors to advise the federal government on investments and to move more aggressively to head-off a rash of forced evictions of people defaulting on their mortgages, Treasury officials said.

It was in one of those conversations that she asked Mr. Paulson to host a gathering at Treasury of representatives from minority-owned banks to discuss their losses related to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the officials said.

OneUnited officials, including Mr. Cohee, had separately been pressing for such a meeting, requesting it on behalf of the National Bankers Association, a Washington-based group that represents minority-owned banks. Its incoming chairman was a OneUnited executive, Robert Cooper. But it was only after Ms. Waters intervened that the session was approved, Treasury officials said.

At the meeting were representatives from the offices of Representative Barney Frank and Senator John Kerry, both Democrats of Massachusetts, the home state of OneUnited, along with Ms. Waters’s chief of staff. As the hour-long meeting got underway, Treasury officials were surprised as Mr. Cohee and Mr. Cooper focused the discussion on their bank, not broader industry problems, participants said. Mr. Cohee made it clear that he wanted the federal government to somehow make up for their $50 million loss.

“They wanted money — cash,” said a former Treasury Department official who attended the meeting but asked not to be named, because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. “That is why they were there. It was very, very explicit.”

The photo above, of Rep. Waters, accompanied the article. It is credited to Doug Mills/The New York Times .

¹Perhaps Rep. Waters ought to recommend Wayne-Kent A. Bradshaw, the former president of Family Savings, for this post?