New York’s new normal

Ms Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is a 40-year-old with modern Bagelite manners, and by that I mean they are not exactly those of, say, C.Z. Guest or Babe Paley, two ladies who are no longer with us but whose presence in drawing rooms we could rather desperately do with. Ms Draper is angry as hell and has declared she will not take it any more. She was recently charged with grand larceny and petit larceny for snatching a wallet from a Manhattan man. Nothing strange about that: it’s an everyday occurrence in the city that never sleeps. In fact a New York Post columnist wrote on a different matter that no one gets PTSD from ‘getting pickpocketed’. Yes, I agree, but for one small detail. Ms Draper’s alleged victim had just been run over by a truck and was as dead as the proverbial doornail as he lay in the middle of a downtown street. That’s when Ms Draper is believed to have appeared, taken one look and then lifted the poor man’s wallet. After her arrest she was immediately freed under the state’s new bail laws. She had only 50 prior arrests.

What distinguished Ms Draper from other suspected pickpockets who, when caught, usually blame their sleight of hand on nervous tics and other pathologies, was that she blamed the dead man, 62-year-old Jerome Smith. She also claimed that Smith and she used to be an item. As Noël Coward would surely have said: some item. And it gets better – or rather far worse. Smith was hit by a tractor and crushed near a construction site. Draper was caught in surveillance camera footage reaching into the dead man’s pocket and taking his wallet.