Woah. Didn't know all that.
And the roots is real. Don't play with that...
Woah. Didn't know all that.
And the roots is real. Don't play with that...
he really deserves it
enjoy this story:
New Woes Seen as Just Reward
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/new-woes-reward-article-1.868099
ON THE STREETS of Harlem, central Brooklyn and the South Bronx, wherever black and brown New Yorkers gathered to marvel at the sudden collapse of Mayor Giuliani's personal life and political career, the name that kept coming up was Patrick Dorismond. "You don't mess with Haitians," one African-American told me. "They'll put that voodoo on you.
" Dorismond was the unarmed Haitian-American guard shot to death outside a midtown bar in March by narcotics detectives who mistakenly took him for a drug dealer. The dead man's character was then assassinated by Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir. Instead of apologizing to his mother and family, they had the nerve to blame Dorismond for his own death. He dared to lunge at the cops, Giuliani insisted. Giuliani and Safir even dug up Dorismond's juvenile record, one that had been ordered sealed by a judge, then handed it out to the press in an effort to paint him as some walking time bomb. They then leaked portions of a toxicology report on Dorismond that showed he had small traces of marijuana in his body, as if a little pot in your system can turn you into a wild aggressor. These were acts of such uncommon disrespect for the dead and for a victim's grieving family that no Haitian in this city will ever forget them. Little wonder that many callers this week to WLIB, the major talk-radio station for the black community, kept mentioning Dorismond and kept insisting that Giuliani's sudden health and family problems are due to what Haitians call un travail - or as we say in Spanish, un trabajo. Author and journalist Jill Nelson was sitting in at the station for popular host Mark Riley on Wednesday. That was just after Giuliani announced that his marriage was breaking up and before the mayor's wife had revealed that her husband's current girlfriend was not the only girlfriend. Nelson doggedly tried to keep the discussion off the occult and on the political high road. "But callers weren't having it," said Bill Lynch, the show's producer. One caller after another suggested a curse had been put on the mayor. Back in Dorismond's old Brooklyn neighborhood, Haitians would only smile when asked about voodoo. "I don't know if a work was done," said the owner of one botanica on Flatbush Ave. "These things can be done, all kinds of things. Giuliani stepped on too many people.
" The botanica owner, who asked that his name not be mentioned, was once a taxi driver. "Giuliani drove many of us out of business," he said. "He kept after us with his police, and we couldn't make a living.
" In Haiti, of course, voodoo is not considered some crazy cult, but a legitimate religion. Its followers have practically subsumed themselves within the Catholic Church, using church saints as symbols for voodoo's loas, or spirits. People visit Haitian serviteurs or houngans, as they are called, to get the help of loas to bring back a straying spouse or lover, to cure an ailing relative, to get a better job, to win a case coming up in court or just to hit the lottery. In rare instances, they use the darker side of voodoo, known as petro, to ask the spirits to send evil back to those who have hurt or killed a person. "To do a work, you only need the dead body itself," the botanica man insisted. "The clothes of the dead man are enough.
" The talk is that during the burial of Dorismond, a travail was done on Giuliani, Safir and several of the cops involved in the incident. Some Haitian leaders smile knowingly at the mention of voodoo, but others, like Lionel Legros, who helped organize the big Haitian march from Brooklyn to City Hall, call it a distraction that only reinforces stereotypes about Haitians. "Sickness can happen to anybody," Legros said of Giuliani's newly discovered prostate cancer. "I don't wish that on him. We wanted to end his political life, not his physical life.
" VOODOO OR NOT, Giuliani, a mayor who once swaggered with arrogance before all the poor and powerless of this town, who thought himself so invincible he paraded around with his girlfriends while ignoring his wife, that Giuliani is now feeling more fragile than he ever imagined. In some quarters of this city, he gets the same kind of sympathy that he once gave to others.