Midwood, NY – City Sanitation bigs played a dirty trick on an elderly Brooklyn insurance salesman — slapping him with 643 in bogus summonses totaling more than $48,000 in fines, The Post has learned.
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Levy Zelishovsky, 72, received the avalanche of summonses at his Midwood office April 5 for supposedly illegally posting fliers advertising a moving company on public lampposts throughout Brooklyn. Each summons carries a $75 fine.
The problem, Zelishovsky said, is that he is not and never has been in the moving business.
“All my life, I’m in the insurance business. I’m a senior citizen, and I can hardly move myself,” he said.
It turns out that the mix-up occurred because the Department of Sanitation had apparently only done a reverse check on the phone number on the fliers, which led them to Zelishovsky.
Zelishovsky claims he’s had the same phone number for 25 years and that he never owned the phone number on the flier.
He must still appear before a judge at the Environmental Control Board hearing April 29 to officially sort things out, although the DOS says it plans to write to the judge recommending that the summonses be voided.
Chaim Deutsch, a special assistant to city Councilman Michael Nelson, whose office got involved on Zelishovsky’s behalf, called the incident “a bureaucratic nightmare of mistaken identity.
Why was this gentleman referred to as “elderly”, instead of older? Is it because we are a youth oriented society, and anybody over a certain age is written off? Perhaps, people suffer from age bias, and treat other people over a certain age with condescension (i.e. yelling, or speaking extra loud, because one automatically assumes that people at a certain age are all hard of hearing).
Jimmy Justice to the rescue !
Some people are elderly at 72, some are not. If he can hardly move he shouldn’t have to go to court to fight it out, the summonses should just be dismissed.
If I am not mistaken I think elderly is tested by whether or not one can tie his shoe laces while standing on one foot.