Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll get details on an attempted bombing at Gracie Mansion. We’ll also find out why “Luigi: The Musical” has added additional performances to its run in June.
The question was whether the 18-year-old suspect — who was caught on video lighting a homemade bomb and throwing it toward demonstrators outside Gracie Mansion on Saturday — had envisioned an attack like the one at the Boston Marathon in 2013.
“No, bigger,” the suspect, Emir Balat, told law enforcement officers, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan yesterday. “It was only three deaths.” He had already asked for a pen and paper to write that he pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State, misspelling the word allegiance.
The makeshift device that officials said he pitched toward a crowd of protesters outside Gracie Mansion — the official residence of New York City’s mayors since Fiorello LaGuardia — did not go off. Neither did a second similar bomb. But the episode has jarred New York, where the Police Department was already on high alert because of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Iran and the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Balat and another man, Ibrahim Nikk Kayumi, 19, were charged with attempting to support the Islamic State and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. They wore white plastic jump suits with hoods when they were arraigned yesterday. They were handcuffed and had their arms and ankles shackled by chains around their waist.
This was the first time in nine years that a makeshift device was used in an attack in New York City. In 2017, a pipe bomb was detonated in a subway station, filling an underground passageway with smoke. No one was killed. But the man who was arrested and convicted — and in 2021 was sentenced to life in prison — was injured, and shrapnel hit a pedestrian nearby.
Kayumi said after his arrest on Saturday that he had watched ISIS propaganda on his phone and that he “was partly inspired to carry out his actions that day by ISIS,” according to the complaint. Balat told officers that “we take action,” he said, adding that “if I didn’t do it, someone else will come and do it.”
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the two men had arrived in the city about an hour before they were arrested. They parked a few blocks from Gracie Mansion, where a MAGA influencer and Jan. 6 participant, Jake Lang, had scheduled a “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” demonstration.
Lang had arrived with a goat and about 20 followers. About 100 counterprotesters also showed up. The two groups shouted at each other. One of Lang’s supporters fired pepper spray at some of the counterprotesters.
Then, according to the complaint, Balat lit one device and tossed it on a sidewalk. He ran toward Kayumi, who handed him the other device. The complaint said Balat dropped it near where several police officers were standing and jumped over a barricade. Officers tackled him and took him into custody.
As my colleague Emma Goldberg noted, people who live near Gracie Mansion are accustomed to the occasional protest. During the city’s fiscal crisis 50 years ago, when Abe Beame was mayor, thousands of police officers surrounded Gracie Mansion. Neighbors pelted them with tomatoes. And in 2020, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter activists gathered for a nighttime vigil while police officers put up metal barricades around the residence.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was not at Gracie Mansion on Saturday, said that the devices had been “meant to injure, maim or worse.” He said in a separate statement that the two suspects “should be held fully accountable for their actions.”
“We will not tolerate terrorism or violence in our city,” he said after promising “to keep New Yorkers safe.”
Weather
Expect another warm, sunny day, with temperatures near 70. Partly cloudy conditions are expected tonight with a low around 46.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 20 (Eid al-Fitr).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Why does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this district potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure? The government tells us: The president doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.” — Judge Matthew Brann, ruling that the Justice Department had illegally delegated the powers of the U.S. attorney in New Jersey to a three-person team.
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‘Luigi: The Musical’ to open a week after Mangione’s trial begins
A staged reading of a show called “Luigi: The Musical” will open on June 15. That is a week after the real-life trial of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of assassinating a health care executive on a Manhattan sidewalk in 2024, is scheduled to open in a courtroom downtown.
The trial is expected to run for weeks if not months. “Luigi: The Musical” was originally scheduled to run for one night at the Green Room 24, in the Yotel New York at 570 10th Avenue. But — in a sign that the fascination with Mangione continues — the tickets sold out almost as soon they became available online.
Last week the producers added two more performances to the schedule, and they also sold out. They are adding three more performances; tickets go on sale this morning.
Mangione was “briefly America’s most wanted man, and perhaps still is,” The New Yorker magazine said after his arrest in 2024. He became a folk hero, celebrated (or reviled) on social media. Someone sent him heart-shaped notes along with some socks. Photos circulated on Instagram and Reddit showing tattoos of bullets marked “deny,” “defend” and “depose,” the words Mangione supposedly etched on his shell casings.
“Luigi: The Musical” presents Mangione and two other inmates who were held in the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn — the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, who was convicted on prostitution-related charges; and the crypto financier Sam Bankman-Fried, who was found guilty of a multibillion-dollar fraud and ordered to pay $11 billion in restitution. The producers said that in the show, they represented “three disillusioned pillars of American life — health care, Hollywood and tech.”
Since then two more high-profile defendants have been held there: Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader who was captured in a U.S. military operation in January and faces drug-trafficking charges, and his wife, Cilia Flores. But the producers say they won’t rework “the musical to include new characters like Maduro.
The show was a sellout in San Francisco last year. As my colleague Amanda Hess wrote, “the media circus around the case” in the months after Mangione’s arrest inspired Nova Bradford, a guerrilla theater performer and standup comic, to write it. “After all,” Amanda wrote, “even as Fox News commentators condemned the musical, they scraped cast rehearsal footage from TikTok and replayed it on their own network.” That brought attention to the show — and, Bradford told me, “speaks to the virality of this topic, which is ultimately what we want to interrogate onstage.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Salad dressing
Dear Diary:
I briefly lived on East Ninth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A in the early 1990s. One of my favorite local haunts was the Ukrainian restaurant Odessa on Avenue A.
One cold, snowy evening I went there for dinner and settled into the always-crowded diner’s warm glow.
An older waitress eventually came to take my order. The entree I ordered came with a salad, and she asked what kind of dressing I wanted.
“Plain,” I said. That was how I always ate my salads.
The waitress stopped writing on her pad, lowered her bifocals and studied me.
“Plain?” she repeated in a heavy accent.
“Yes, plain.”
“Young man,” she said in a scolding tone. “This is a salad, not a woman. You never leave a salad undressed!”
Awkwardly, I ordered a dressing and she walked away satisfied. I have never ordered a salad undressed since then.
— Joe Toris
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A Homemade Bomb at Gracie Mansion Unsettles New York appeared first on New York Times.
