Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll see why a camera crew spent a couple of hours trying to track down Wesley Autrey, who was in the headlines as a subway hero 15 years ago. We’ll also find out why some lawyers are not welcome at places like Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, even if they have tickets.
Usually in commercials for Publishers Clearing House, the sweepstakes prize patrol goes to where the winner is — a house or, in Manhattan, an apartment building. This time, Wesley Autrey went to where the sweepstakes crew was. And by then he knew he had won something.
The prize patrol’s camera was running, as were cameras from two television stations that had been tipped off, when the door opened at the address Publishers Clearing House had for Autrey, who made headlines when he saved a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks during a seizure in 2007. But the surprised-looking man who opened the door was a contractor doing renovations. Autrey had moved out before the work started.
It took nearly two hours to track down Autrey, with help from a neighbor in the building on Broadway at 135th Street who reached one of Autrey’s daughters. She, in turn, called him, letting word slip about why people were looking for him. He hopped in a taxi and arrived a half hour later.
Then there was a question: Which did he want, an S.U.V. or its cash value — $52,820? The sweepstakes crew had brought along an outsize check, along with Champagne, roses and balloons.
Autrey chose the S.U.V. “I got family along the East Coast,” he said. “I’m ready to just hit the road, you know.” He said the first stop would probably be Atlanta, to visit his mother, who is 85 and has had health problems.
Autrey said he often entered Publishers Clearing House contests and had won about $500 in the past. “I play this game daily,” he said. “I just retired three months ago, and so this is a little extra income and, you know, a free ride. You can’t beat that, you know.”
Howie Guja of the prize patrol said that about 1 in 5 winners are not around when he rings the doorbell. “It hasn’t happened in a while,” he said, “so I was overdue for a winner who wasn’t home.”
Autrey and his two daughters were waiting for a downtown local at 137th Street and Broadway one afternoon in January 2007 when a man collapsed and began convulsing. The man, Cameron Hollopeter, who was 20 then, got up, only to stumble and fall onto the tracks.
Autrey lay on top of Hollopeter in a space about a foot deep as the train, its brakes squealing and screeching, rolled into the station. Autrey said at the time that Hollopeter asked if he had died. “I said, ‘You are very much alive, but if you move, you’ll kill the both of us.” On the platform above them, people were screaming. “We’re O.K. down here,” Autrey yelled, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s O.K.” The two men had little more than bruises.
Autrey said on Thursday that he and Hollopeter usually speak around this time of year. “He’ll be calling me,” he said, or “I’ll be calling him.”
Autrey still owns a Jeep Patriot that he was given by Chrysler after he saved Hollopeter. It is in Georgia, where his 85-year-old mother has been living. The year of free parking that came with it has long since expired.
He was also given $10,000 by Donald Trump, then appearing on “The Celebrity Apprentice.” So what did he think of Trump’s career path?
“Well, Donald Trump was Donald Trump then,” Autrey said. “But as a president — I didn’t like him as a president.” He said it was “like he had this country hostage. No one man should have that much power.”
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ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
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The latest New York news
MSG Entertainment is not doing what that character in Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 2” suggested — “Let’s kill all the lawyers.”
But it is killing the fun for some of them by turning them away at places like Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, using facial recognition software that spots lawyers from firms that have filed lawsuits against the company.
The software checks an “attorney exclusion list” that contains photos taken from their law firms’ websites. The list includes not only lawyers currently involved in lawsuits against MSG Entertainment but all the lawyers in their firms.
My colleagues Kashmir Hill and Corey Kilgannon write that the use of the software has raised an outcry not just from lawyers turned away from Knicks basketball games, but also from civil liberty watchdogs who call it a startling example of taking surveillance technology beyond security-based watchlists. Lawyers affected by the ban accused MSG Entertainment, which runs the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side as well as the Garden and Radio City, of punishing them for suing the company and of attempting to discourage future lawsuits.
Officials of the company said they wanted to guard against improper disclosure and discovery by preventing opposing lawyers from gathering evidence for pending litigation.
Facial recognition technology has been used sparingly by corporations because of privacy concerns. Retailers have deployed it to identify shoplifters, and casinos rely on it to keep out gamblers suspected of cheating. But using it with a watchlist for a company’s critics is unprecedented, said Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“It raises the question of what’s going to come next,” he said. “Will companies use facial recognition to keep out all the people who have picketed the business or criticized them online with a negative Yelp review?”
Sam Davis, a lawyer at a New Jersey law firm who was turned away from a recent Rangers game at the Garden, called the use of facial recognition “a dystopian, shocking act of repression.” Alexis Majano, a lawyer at a Long Island firm, was escorted out of a Knicks game last month. And last week Nicolette Landi, a personal injury lawyer, was barred from using the $376.83 tickets to a Mariah Carey concert that her boyfriend had bought for her birthday.
Now her law firm, Burns & Harris, has filed a lawsuit against MSG Entertainment in Manhattan Superior Court, saying the ban violates a state civil rights law that prohibits “wrongful refusal of admission” to an entertainment venue.
Landi, who began working at the firm in February, said she had attended six events at the Garden in October — before her photo was added to the firm’s website. She said that security guards asked her to leave after she walked through a metal detector and they confirmed that she was a lawyer on their list. She said her firm had sued MSG Entertainment on behalf of a woman who has since died, bringing the case to a standstill. Landi was not involved in the case.
METROPOLITAN diary
And for dessert?
Dear Diary:
We were on a trip to New York and got a restaurant recommendation at the hotel where we were staying. Small, we were told, but the food is good.
When we arrived, we wiggled our way to our table. We were careful not to knock over glasses or bruise our elbows as we settled in after a day of adventures in the city.
After we finished our meal, our waitress returned to the table. Sorry, she said to my husband, I don’t remember what you ordered for dessert.