BOUNCER'S KILLER CONVICTED

November 17, 2004
A Queens martial-arts expert was convicted yesterday of killing an East Village bouncer in a melee that began when the victim ordered a clubgoer to stop smoking.
A Manhattan Supreme Court jury found Isaias Umali guilty of manslaughter in the April 2003 stabbing death of Dana Blake.
"I saw justice today," Blake's brother, the Rev. Tony Blake, said afterward. "My brother's soul can rest in peace."
Dana Blake, a 6-foot-6, 360-pound giant, was working at Club Guernica when he tossed one of Umali's friends, Jonathan Chan, for smoking inside, soon after the city implemented its ban.
Umali jumped into the ensuing fight and stabbed Blake in the groin, causing the 32-year-old to bleed to death.
"The hardest thing was to find out what was in [Umali's] mind," said one juror. "We could not know if his intent was to kill Dana Blake, but we do know he intended to do him harm."
Umali's father, Isaias Sr., comforted his son — who faces up to 25 years in prison — saying, "You're still young."
Dareh Gregorian

February 16, 2005
A Queens man was sentenced Wednesday to 17 years in prison for fatally stabbing a Manhattan nightclub bouncer who was trying to enforce the city's new public indoor smoking ban.

State Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner sentenced Isaias Umali, who was convicted of first-degree manslaughter on Nov. 16, 2004, in the death of Dana "Shazam" Blake on April 13, 2003. Umali, 33, faced up to 25 years in prison.

Wittner, a judge for more than 20 years, said the 6-inch serrated knife Umali used on Blake, 32, was "the deadliest knife I've ever seen in a courtroom. There can be no other purpose (for the knife) but to injure or kill somebody."

Umali, who was born in the Philippines and lived in Jamaica, Queens, told Wittner that his fatal stabbing of Blake had "devastated" his own life and he has tried to come to terms with the fact that he killed someone.

"I never intended to kill Mr. Blake or even to cause him serious injury," Umali told the judge. "I want to tell the Blake family how deeply sorry I am. My prayers go out to the Blake family."

The dispute that led to the stabbing inside Guernica, a Lower East Side nightclub, began when Blake told a group of Umali's friends that they could not smoke. One kept puffing, and Blake grabbed him to escort him out.

During his trial, Umali testified that he was afraid for the life of his friend, Jonathan Chan, because Blake had Chan's neck in his grasp.

Umali, a student of a Filipino knife-fighting technique called kali, admitted he then stabbed Blake in the groin. The knife thrust pierced the femoral artery, a major blood vessel, and Blake bled to death.

Harold Blake, a brother of the victim and the administrator of his estate, has filed a $550 million lawsuit in Manhattan's state Supreme Court against the nightclub, Umali and the smokers with whom Blake had the dispute.

The smoking ban -- one of the strictest in the nation -- went into effect on March 30, 2003, two weeks before Blake's stabbing death. It prohibits smoking in about 13,000 bars, restaurants, offices, pool halls, bingo parlors and bowling alleys throughout the city.
http://1010wins.com/

NEW YORK - Cody Knox was doing a brisk business near the Brooklyn Mall when Michael Bloomberg killed him.

Actually, the fingerprints of New York's billionaire mayor and dilettante politician were not on the blade that ended the 17-year-old dealer's life. But considering that the murder was a direct result of Hizzoner's proudest initiative, he is very much an accomplice.

As far as the cops can tell, Cody spotted members of rival pushers, tried to run but went down hard as his attackers piled on. With one hand clutching the overstuffed garbage bag of contraband he had been peddling, he did not put up much of a fight before the knife found his throat.

That was pretty much it for the aspiring artist and "all-round good kid", as his mother described him at the funeral. The trail of his blood indicated that he struggled to his feet, lurched around the corner and crumpled on the footpath of Brooklyn's busiest shopping district.

Beyond hope when the ambulance arrived, the medics could do no more than cover the corpse, wait for the cops to finish and haul the young man's remains away.

A few years ago, before former Mayor Rudy Giuliani reminded the police how to do their job, teenage casualties of dealers' turf wars were so common that the city's newspapers treated the incidents as filler items. Another black or Hispanic kid blown away? So what. The drug trade is lucrative and competitive, so people commit murder to control it.

Cody did not quite fit that old mould, however.

It was not as though he peddled crack or heroin, his mother noted.

"It's unbelievable he had to die like that," she said between sobs, "over cigarettes."

Nor is Cody the only victim of Bloomberg's zealous crusade against tobacco, which he slapped with a US$3-a-pack sin tax earlier in the year, about the same time smoking was banned in every one of the city's bars. When you consider that the mayor made his billions by starting a financial news service, the consequences of his campaign are deeply ironic. You would think a former Wall Streeter could grasp the danger in encouraging the law of supply and demand to get seriously out of whack.

Start with simple arithmetic and geography. In New York, a pack of smokes sells for between US$6.50 and US$9, depending on brand and where you buy it. Across the Hudson in New Jersey - a 10-minute drive when traffic is light - you get change from US$5. And if an underground entrepreneur is prepared for a longer haul, there are Indian reservations where Camels and Marlboros are only US$3, since Native American territory is exempt from taxes.

Head to any of those destinations, load up with butts and make tracks back to the Big Apple. Summon a posse of neighbourhood kids, offer a cut of the profits, and turn them loose with the merchandise.

Thanks to Bloomberg's war on nicotine, that's how easy it is to turn a very big and very quick dollar.

So far, at least three cigarette vendors have paid with their lives. One was executed on the roof of his Bronx tenement, another gunned down on his beat. Meanwhile, as the gangs fight for their franchises, human life is not the only thing being destroyed.

Call it trust or, if you want to get fancy, the social contract that is supposed to bind civic leaders to the citizens they represent. When Giuliani came to office, no sane New Yorker placed much faith in the cops, who saw little point in making arrests when petty felons were back on the streets before the paperwork was finished. Law-abiding residents noticed that criminals and public nuisances were being given a pass and came to the reasonable conclusion that only suckers toed the line.

Red lights? Run 'em! A little reefer to unwind on the stroll home from work? Light it up on Fifth Avenue! If you pass a cop, he'll make a point not to catch the whiff.

Giuliani ended that by forcing the police to make arrests - the first thrust of his strategy for a better New York. The other was rooting out corruption. Restaurant owners found it easier to bribe health inspectors than exterminate the rats and roaches in their kitchens. Things were so bad, even elevator inspectors were demanding tributes.

Giuliani rooted out the worst thieves on the city's payroll, scared the rest straight and dispelled growing public cynicism. He could not expect average New Yorkers to behave, he said, if City Hall did not pull up its own socks.

Then came Bloomberg. Desperate to plug the fiscal hole left by September 11, his inspectors have been writing tickets like bookies. Any tactic is fair game, it seems, if it fills the budget gap.

Merchants have been fined for cluttering their storefronts with more signs than a formerly forgotten bylaw permits. Parking tickets have been doubled, to US$110. An idler sitting on a milk crate was fined for misusing it. A couple of weeks ago, a man carrying a bunch of party balloons was ticketed when one of them burst. The offence: noise pollution.

And then there is the anti-tobacco offensive, which is corroding faith in officialdom while doing little to generate revenue, since on-the-books sales have shrunk as taxes increased.

Last week in Brooklyn, not far from where Cody Knox was killed, "butt-leggers" were offering cut-price, untaxed cartons to Christmas shoppers. Not a penny was going to City Hall - and not one of the buyers seemed troubled to be supporting a criminal enterprise.

"**** Bloomberg," said a buyer called Angelo, who pushes paper for a living at a nearby courthouse.

"I should be guilty because I don't let him rip me off? **** him!"

Say nabbed suspect tried to kill himself

Cops arrested an out-of-work accountant trained in lethal knife-fighting techniques yesterday in the murder of an East Village bouncer who died enforcing the city's smoking ban.

Isais Umali, 31, was taken into custody at Queens' Mary Immaculate Hospital - where he was recovering from self-inflicted slashing wounds to his throat and wrists.

Police sources said Umali attempted suicide Monday - a day after he allegedly delivered a fatal stab wound to Dana Blake's groin as the hulking bouncer tossed the suspect's friends from a birthday party for smoking.

In the chaos after the stabbing, Umali fled from the Avenue B lounge Guernica, ditched the murder weapon and went to his fiancée's apartment on the upper East Side to get rid of his bloody clothes, said NYPD Chief of Detectives George Brown.

"During the fight, Umali pulled out a knife and stabbed Blake," Brown said. "When Blake fell to the floor, Umali ran from the club, walked south and entered the subway station, discarding the knife along the way."

Umali's friends - Jonathan Chan, 29, and Ching Chan, 31, children of the leader of Chinatown's organized crime's Ghost Shadows - were arrested by patrol cops after Blake collapsed.

They were splattered with the victim's blood. Their sister, Alice Chan, 33, was arrested the following morning, and her blood-soaked clothes were seized by cops.

But all three were freed Monday night after prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office said they did not have evidence linking them to the fatal stabbing.

That sparked outrage from cops and friends and family of the victim - until yesterday's arrest of a new suspect.

Trained in martial arts

Many of the party attendees - including the Chan brothers and Umali - are trained in the Filipino martial art of Eskrima, which uses precision knife blows and deadly weapons to fight enemies.

Detectives plan to interview a Manhattan martial arts expert who trained Umali how to kill with a single knife wound, sources said.

"Someone trained this guy [Umali] to hit someone in a fatal spot to kill them, and it worked. We want to find him," one police source said.

Umali's involvement in the bloody slaying became clear late Thursday, when a tipster called the NYPD's Crime Stoppers hotline to turn him in, according to authorities. Sources said the anonymous caller is believed to be his guilt-stricken fiancée, who had bought Umali new clothes before he returned to his parents' home.

"I was just trying to help out my friends," Umali wrote in a suicide note found by his parents, who were there when their son began slashing himself inside his Hillside, Queens, bedroom, according to one law enforcement source.

Brothers not cleared

Umali's arrest does not completely clear the Chans, police told the Daily News.

"The Chans are definitely still under investigation," said one high-ranking police source. "They still have problems."

But the Chan brothers' lawyer, Ivan Fisher, said Umali's arrest "vindicates" his clients.

"I feel that the recent development strongly supports the accuracy of what my clients have been saying happened here from the beginning - that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the wounding of Mr. Blake," Fisher said.

Umali and the Chans were among 19 people at a birthday party in the hip bar Saturday night spilling into Sunday morning.

The skirmish between Blake and the Chan brothers began just after 2 a.m., when revelers at the party for a woman identified as Catherine Leonardo repeatedly lit cigarettes in the bar's downstairs club in violation of the city's new smoking ban.

After a heated argument with members of the party, Blake, 32, grabbed Jonathan Chan and tried to eject him from the bar.

As the 6-foot-5, 320-pound bouncer shoved the Wall Street banker out the door, he was pounced on by Chan's siblings, police said.

Umali then allegedly entered the scrum, stabbing Blake - who died 11 hours later.

Umali was released from the hospital yesterday afternoon and arraigned on two counts of second-degree murder at Manhattan Criminal Court.

He was brought into court wearing a blue hospital shirt and gray khaki pants, bandages swathing his throat and wrists.

Criminal Court Judge Deborah Kaplan ordered Umali held without bail and on suicide watch.

Umali's attorney, David Krauss, said his client is "traumatized" by the slaying.

"He's traumatized by the whole thing," Krauss said. "It's sad. Sad all around. For him and his family."

April 19, 2003
NY Daily News

Rev's rage boils over at funeral

The funeral for slain bouncer Dana Blake was thrown into chaos yesterday when his brother flew into a grief-fueled rage and had to be taken to the hospital.

The Rev. Anthony Blake collapsed on the sidewalk and began shaking as he approached the Humble Way Church of God in South Ozone Park, Queens.

Family members helped him up, but he broke away from them and ran up the stairs into the small church, yelling, "Let's get it on!"

He barreled up the aisle, knocking aside several people before reaching his brother's silver coffin.

Mumbling incoherently, he hugged the bouncer and tried to lift his body before being subdued by guards, who carried him out of the church.

As mourners wailed and wept, the crying minister ranted, "The media better be here. The world better be listening," and "My brother, my only brother!"

After he calmed down, he returned to the church - but snapped again moments later. He starting taking wild swings and hit several clergymen.

Carried out once more, he was taken to Jamaica Hospital - where he later called one of the mourners by cell phone to apologize for missing the service.

"He basically hasn't slept since it all happened," said Sonny Forte, owner of the security firm where Dana Blake worked.

Demanding justice

Before his breakdown, the reverend had been demanding justice for his slain brother, a guard at Guernica on Avenue B on the lower East Side.

Blake, 32, nicknamed Shazam, was fatally stabbed during a brawl that erupted when he tried to enforce the city's new smoking ban at the club early Sunday.

Unaware that a suspect in the slaying had just been arrested, mourners at the funeral angrily called for action.

"Dana died trying to fulfill a mandate from City Hall," said Bishop Kenneth Moales. "He died trying to uphold the law of the land, and he was killed for it.

His bouncer partner, St. Eyes Stroud, said he hopes his friend's death sparks change.

"I really think that the smoking ban is to blame," he said. "Hopefully, Shazam's death will cause police to put more security in bars."

Stroud and others recalled how Blake's bulk belied an easygoing manner.

"Shazam was such a gentle giant," said friend Al Randolph, who gave him the nickname after seeing the Shaquille O'Neal movie "Kazaam." "He looked like Shaq but had the warmest smile."

Pastor Mitchell Taylor told the standing-room crowd that Blake "had so much love for his friends, he didn't have time to make enemies. "He had overwhelming size, but when he opened his mouth, nothing but love came out."

April 19, 2003
The New Zealand Herald

New York facing smoker backlash

With the exception of the Iraq updates that interrupt late-night TV sports at Lola's suds joint on Second Ave, the resident barflies don't pay too much attention to great men and the tide of history. But if they were given the chance to elect a new mayor - maybe even a president - then someone in the mould of Count Joseph Radetsky would be a shoo-in.

"I will not recognise or tolerate," the Austrian field-marshal declared after a wave of violence swept Milan in 1848, "any society that insults and attacks peaceful smokers".

The old fellow would be apoplectic about what has gone on in New York since the country's harshest anti-smoking laws were introduced three weeks ago. Radetsky had only to contend with rebellious Italians protesting tobacco taxes and their country's occupation. In the Big Apple, where bar bouncer Dana "Shazam" Blake was stabbed to death last weekend in the East Village while attempting to enforce the law, emotions are more heated.

This latest attempt to wean Americans off nicotine is the most aggressive and, in its own way, the most instructive example since Prohibition of the pitfalls awaiting legislators who attempt to mandate virtue.

In theory, banning smoking in nightclubs, bars, company cars, even under sidewalk awnings, is good for everybody. Nicotine fiends will live longer for not being able to indulge their habit so often and innocent bystanders won't be imperiled by secondhand smoke.

But look closer at the crusade's consequences and the most obvious lesson - one even non-smokers can't deny - is that tobacco sullies civility and shining principles as readily as it stains teeth.

Start with what happened at Lola's last week. "Put it out or go out," snapped the barmaid at a fiftyish regular, who usually sits in smoke-wreathed silence by the phone booth. It was his third warning, the third time he had been denied a temporary reprieve from the new law, and it was the final straw. Draining his drink, he was up and gone.

"Hey, it's the law," the barmaid said with a shrug and a dirty look at the few patrons who remained, a handful rather than the normal dozen or so night owls. All over town, the story is much the same. Crowds are down, as are bar tenders' tips. Only tempers have been rising.

At a memorial service for the slain bouncer, his fellow bruisers ridiculed billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg's war on the weed.

"Get people drinking, tell 'em they can't smoke and they get angry - it's human nature," one bouncer said, adding that he now faced "conflict situations" every night.

The dead man's brother, a Pentecostal preacher, was more pointed. "If you go to Sodom and Gomorrah, you're going to find people smoking there. This is what bars are," said Anthony Blake, who blamed Bloomberg as much as the alleged killers, two guys from Chinatown who were released without charge when police couldn't find a witness to testify.

Hizzoner, as New Yorkers call their mayor, was unrepentant. The murder was terrible, he said, but the smoking ban would do the city good. It was the same line he took last year, after adding a $3 ($5.39) tax to a packet of smokes, which now cost about $8 ($14). While that initiative was supposed to fill the city's coffers, the evidence is that it has achieved little.

Police say "butt runners" are doing a roaring trade trucking untaxed cigarettes from Dixie, where Marlboros still go for $3 ($5.39) a pack. It's been a bonanza, too, for the Indian reservations that take orders over the internet and mail out thousands of tax-free cartons every day.

City Hall's line is that New Yorkers will become used to the new regime, just as they did when smoking was banned in restaurants, and then in betting shops, and at baseball stadiums, and, well, just about everywhere. Californians have copped it for more than a year, so New York's stoics can just learn to cope.

This argument ignores some obvious differences between the left coast and the right. California boasts a benign climate, so stepping outside to satisfy a craving doesn't involve braving arctic winds off the Hudson.

And New York bars are different, too, mostly storefronts under apartment buildings. Since the ban was introduced, complaints about rowdy revellers disturbing the peace have flooded in - so many that stiffer penalties for public drinking have just been introduced. As one of the grieving bouncers predicted: "Come summer, if they hand out fines, there'll be riots."

Finally, there's the issue neither Bloomberg nor the state governors like to discuss: a multi-billion dollar dose of hypocrisy. For all their talk about eradicating smoking, the same legislators are just as addicted as the twitchiest butt head.

The proof came several weeks ago, when an Illinois jury hit Philip Morris with a $10 billion ($18 billion) penalty for claiming that "light" smokes were less hazardous than full-strength ones. The company responded by informing the court that it might have to declare bankruptcy, since it could not afford to satisfy that judgment and still contribute its share of the $246 billion that Big Tobacco agreed in 1996 to pay the states over 25 years.

Panic swept governors' mansions across the country at the news. In New York and other states, that stream of windfall revenue is earmarked to underwrite new bond issues. If Philip Morris went belly-up, the other tobacco concerns would follow. The cash would dry up and budgetary trimming would be needed - cuts that are apt to make voters annoyed, even the most ardent anti-smokers.

So last week, as Bloomberg denounced cigarettes, New York officials joined other states in begging Illinois to go easy on the same tobacco companies it has prosecuted with such zeal. Yes, people like Bloomberg want an end to harmful habits. But like the low-lifes at Lolas, not just yet.

April 16, 2003
NY Times

"Number of people killed by second-hand smoke: Zero.
Number of people killed by smoking ban: One."
Christina Mavros, Astoria

April 15, 2003
Guardian Unlimited

No Charges in NYC 'Smoking Ban' Stabbing

Police officials announced the decision early Tuesday following an investigation into the stabbing of Dana Blake, 32, who died about 11 hours after a fight Sunday at an East Village nightclub.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, Sherry Hunter, did not immediately return a call for comment early Tuesday morning.

Police arrested two brothers, Jonathan Chan, 29 and Ching Chan, 31, shortly after the fight on charges of assault, criminal possession of a weapon and resisting arrest.

According to police, Blake approached the men about 2:30 a.m. Sunday to tell them they could not smoke in the bar. It was unclear whether one or both men were smoking.

Police spokesman Michael O'Looney said witnesses told police that harsh words were exchanged and the brawl began when Blake tried to eject Jonathan Chan for disorderly behavior. A third man and a woman, identified as the brothers' older sister, then intervened.

Blake was stabbed in the fight, but it was unclear who stabbed him or with what, O'Looney said.

No weapon was recovered at the scene and no witnesses actually saw the stabbing, police said. Medical examiners were investigating whether the wound was caused by a knife or even a broken bottle, which could indicate that the stabbing was not intentional, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Blake's death was caused by a ``sharp force injury of groin with injuries to major blood vessels'' and has been ruled a homicide,'' Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office, told Newsday for Tuesday editions.

Bloomberg spokesman Ed Skyler said the mayor's ``thoughts are with the family of the victim.''

A message left at the nightclub, Guernica, early Tuesday was not immediately returned.

The smoking ban took effect late last month.

April 15, 2003
CNN.com

Police said the bouncer was stabbed in the early hours of Sunday morning in the Guernica club on the Lower East Side after asking one of two brothers in the club to put out a cigarette.

After an argument with the men, the bouncer tried to eject them and was stabbed in the stomach "with an unknown sharp object," police said.

The bouncer, 6-foot-6 Dana "Shazam" Blake, 32, died of his injuries.

The two brothers, Jonathan Chan, 29, and Ching Chan, 31, of Manhattan's Chinatown face charges of assault, criminal possession of a weapon and resisting arrest, police and prosecutors said.

New York's tough new law banning smoking in bars and restaurants, with very few exceptions, was pushed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former smoker who has turned into an anti-smoking zealot. The law, which went into effect on March 30 and penalizes first-time offenders with a $200 fine, was designed to protect workers in the city's 13,000 bars and restaurants that have allowed smoking.

Businesses caught repeatedly allowing smoking run the risk of being shut down.

Bouquets of flowers and photographs in tribute to Blake were displayed outside the Guernica club, which serves Spanish tapas and cocktails and has a dance floor.

April 15, 2003
wjla.com

Bouncer Fatally Stabbed In Brawl Over NYC Smoking Ban

Dana Blake, 32, died about 11 hours after the late-night fight in an East Village nightclub.

Police arrested two brothers, Johnathan and Ching Chan, shortly after the fight and charged them with assault. Prosecutors had not decided Sunday whether to upgrade the charges because of Blake's death.

Blake approached the men about 2:30 a.m. to tell them they could not smoke in the bar, police spokesman Michael O'Looney said. It was unclear whether one or both men were smoking, he said.

Harsh words were exchanged and the brawl began when Blake tried to eject Johnathan Chan for disorderly behavior, witnesses told police. Blake was stabbed in the fight, but it was unclear who stabbed him or with what, O'Looney said.

The smoking ban took effect late last month.

It could not immediately be determined if the brothers had lawyers.