A sort-of funny thing happened while I was talking with Jason Hairston, a former lifelong New Yorker and successful restaurant owner, for a story about Manhattan hemorrhaging businesses.
Hairston had been telling me about how he’d been on the verge of expanding his booming 14th St. eatery, The Nugget Spot, into Columbus Circle and Citi Field when the pandemic hit and everything changed.
Gov. Cuomo issued his “New York State on PAUSE” shutdown order in March 2020, and Hairston temporarily closed down his 14th St. spot since he didn’t see a good reason to make his workers, many of them living in multi-generational homes, get on the trains.
With the help of a $97,000 PPP loan, he reopened in June and brought in $7,000 that month, compared to $160,000 the previous June, and then $17,000 in July before closing again in August and finally announcing in September, weeks before Cuomo allowed in-person dining to resume, that The Nugget Shop was done for good. The numbers just didn’t add up anymore.
He’s now living in Chatham, N.J. and working for Kong Dog, a Korean hot dog chain based in Chicago. Hairston told me about it over the phone earlier this month as he walked around Manhattan after a trip to his old barber at the iconic Astor Place shop that lost 90% of its business at the peak (knock on wood) of the pandemic.
The barbershop had been days from shutting its doors after 75 years in the same basement when, in November 2020, a group of wealthy New Yorkers including longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson stepped in to buy it from its third-generation owners and keep it going.
“Are you f—–g serious,” Hairston abruptly exclaimed, and then explained himself and the sort-of funny thing that had just happened. He’d been walking by Madison Square Park and had seen a BMW with a vanity plate: PPP LOAN. (Coincidentally, that was days after a boat named Stimulus Money capsized on the Hudson, killing one child and one adult and leaving three other adults in critical condition.)
Hairston texted me a picture of the plate and the car, an i8 hybrid with two doors that open like wings and a combined 362 horsepower that can take it from 0 to 62 mph in 4.4 seconds and hit 155 mph before software throttles its speed. This particular Beamer, records show, originally sold for about $130,000 in 2015 and sold again 20,000 miles later for $60,000 in June of 2020 — a couple of months before Hairston pulled the plug on The Nugget Spot.
According to How’s My Driving NY, the car has been ticketed five separate times this year for a front or back plate missing. The one Hairston spotted, though, appears to be real rather than one of the fakes that have proliferated as the city increasingly relies on cameras for traffic enforcement, along with the number of out-of-state plates belonging to New Yorkers evading the pricey excise tax and insurance rates here.
A vanity plate just begging for an audit in Manhattan pic.twitter.com/jo4VvtALYi
— Harry Siegel (@harrysiegel) July 14, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I’d hoped to look up the name of the “PPP LOAN” guy (yes, I bet that this is a guy) but instead got a crash course on the federal law that makes it a crime to do that without a valid reason, and sensibly doesn’t count curiosity as a valid reason.
I do know his plate was made, as all New York plates are, at the maximum security Auburn Correctional Facility. That the vanity plate ran him $60 up front and then $31.25 a year, which isn’t much for a BMW owner apparently flush with federal funds but is a week’s pay or more for the prisoners collecting hardly a dollar an hour to make those plates for Corcraft, the “preferred source” of the Department of Corrections, which generates $50 million a year or so off of products made from convict labor.
And that a “PPP LOAN” plate evidently didn’t violate New York’s ban on “combinations that are considered obscene, derogatory or offensive.”
Speaking of obscene and offensive, the car had been parked illegally, with a “police-family-member type card on the dash,” when Hairston happened to see it on Broadway, right in front of the Obica Mozzarella Bar.
“It’s so brazen,” he said. “I was thinking this has to be a person with a sense of humor or a complete scumbag.”
Or both! He could definitely be both!
Yo, ‘PPP LOAN’ BMW guy: WTF?
I hate to assume the worst, but your “I ? CRIME” t-shirt is raising a lot of questions.
If you’d like to answer any of them, I’m harrysiegel@gmail.com.
And Hairston would love to know, given how well you seem to have made out here: “Who’s your banker, and who’s your accountant?”
Siegel is a senior editor at the non-profit news outlet The City, and a Daily News columnist.
