Former WI fast bowler receives award
Caribbean Life, A BQ pril 19–25, 2019 3
By Nelson A. King
Ten rent-stabilized tenants on Tuesday
filed a complaint in Kings County
(Brooklyn) Supreme Court alleging that
their landlord, the Shasho family, has
engaged in long-term tenant harassment
and illegal housing practices in
an effort to push tenants out of their
rent-stabilized apartments in Brooklyn’s
gentrifying Prospect-Lefferts Garden
neighborhood.
According to Brooklyn Legal Services,
the charges include failing to
provide heat and hot water, refusing
to repair dangerous living conditions,
filing baseless eviction proceedings,
charging erroneous late fees, repeatedly
offering unwanted buyout deals, pushing
long-term rent-stabilized tenants
out and converting newly vacant units
to Airbnbs.
Tenants allege the landlord has even
installed separate heating and cooling
systems in the Airbnb units, while the
long-term tenants suffer in the frigid
cold.
Tenants, represented by Brooklyn
Legal Services’ Tenant Rights Coalition,
which receives support from the
City’s Anti-Harassment and Tenant Protection
program, take their landlord
to court to seek penalties and punitive
damages, and put a stop to the longterm
harassment and illegal housing
practices.
“Sometimes I come home and the
lights don’t come on. In the wintertime,
I freeze in my own apartment because
there’s no heat,” said Digna Doesserie-
Mitchel, a tenant of 611 Flatbush Ave.
since 2006.
“How is the landlord going to fix up
these other apartments for Airbnb and
not maintain the rest of the building?”
she asked. “We actually live here. We
pay our rent just like everyone else.
Enough is enough. We deserve better
than this.”
Catherine Frizell, an attorney at
Brooklyn Legal Services’ Tenant Rights
Coalition, a program of Legal Services
NYC, said “these buildings are unsanitary
fire traps.
“Not only is the landlord terrorizing
these tenants to drive them out of
their rent-stabilized homes, but they
are actively putting the tenants’ lives at
risk,” she said.
“The landlord also mocks, threatens,
and gaslights tenants when they request
repairs or complain about the landlord’s
illegal hotel operation, operating under
the assumption that tenant protection
laws won’t be enforced,” she added.
“But they are dead wrong,” Frizell
continued. “We won’t stop fighting
until every tenant in this building gets
the justice they deserve.”
NYC Department of Social Services
Commissioner Steven Banks said
“every New Yorker has a right to a safe
and healthy place to call home,” adding
that the current administration is
“using every tool available to enforce
the law against unscrupulous landlords
who disregard their basic obligations.
“We are proud of our partnership
with Legal Services NYC as we continue
our efforts to prevent tenant harassment
and displacement by holding
landlords accountable for their actions,”
Banks said.
Brooklyn Legal Services charged
that the Shasho family has racked up
over 220 open housing violations in
three buildings over the last four years:
611 Flatbush Ave., 607 Flatbush Ave.
and 599 Flatbush Ave.
By Nelson A. King
The Brooklyn-based, Vincentian
group, Friends of Sion Hill, Inc. on
Saturday, April 13 bestowed its Lifetime
Achievement Award on former West
Indies fast bowler Winston Davis at a
gala honor ceremony at the Friends of
Crown Heights Educational Center in
Brooklyn.
“On April 23, 1983, Winston Davis
made us real proud,” said Frank Montgomery
Clarke, a former Counsellor
at the St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Embassy in Washington, D.C., in introducing
the wheelchair-bound Davis to
the sell-out audience at the group’s 4th
Annual Black-Tie Gala.
“Lloyd ‘Manager’ Lewis and Winston
Davis were all of us,” added Clarke,
who played with Davis in the devastating
Sion Hill Cricket Team in the local
cricket championship in the late 1970s
to early1980s. The late Lewis was manager
of the team.
Clarke recalled Davis’s destructive,
fast bowling spell for the West Indies,
of 7-51, against Australia in the 1983
Cricket World Cup.
“When Winston Davis played cricket,
he was the fastest (bowler) in St. Vincent
and the Grenadines and the West
Indies,” said Howie Prince, St. Vincent
and the Grenadines Consul General to
the United States, in his remarks.
Prince also recalled that, when his
cricket team played against the local
Flour Mills in the 1980s, “Winston
almost bowled out the entire team.”
In Davis’s biography, which was
inadvertently omitted from the souvenir
journal, Friends of Sion Hill,
Inc. described him as “one of the
best fast bowlers of the planet” in the
1980s.
“In another time, another place,
he would have been famous and feted
across the cricket world,” the biography
says. “But then, nearly all the best fast
bowlers were West Indian.
“He had to break into a line-up that
included Malcolm Marshall, Andy Roberts,
Michael Holding and Joel Garner
who, as far as opposing batsmen were
concerned, were the ‘Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse’, but a degree or two
more dangerous,” it adds.
“Even so, Winston played 15 Test
matches and 53 One-Day Internationals,
a fair number in those days,” it
continues. “And one unusually, sunblessed
day at Leeds (England), in 1983,
he made history, bowling out a mighty
Australian team in a World Cup tie with
a whirlwind burst of six wickets for 14,
seven for 51 in all — which would stand
as a World Cup record until the 21st
century.”
Still, the biography says that Davis
was “more often on the fringe than in
the team.
“But in (English) county cricket, he
was much in demand: Every English
team wanted their own West Indian
to bully the opposition, if only in selfdefense,”
it says.
The biography notes that, when
Davis first went to play for Glamorgan,
“he was a bit raw and naive.”
“But, later, especially after he moved
to Northamptonshire, he was recognized
as one of the best in the business,”
it says.
The biography quotes former England
bowler-turned-commentator, Mike
Selvey, as saying of Davis: “For sheer,
uncomplicated textbook method only
Richard Hadlee was superior.
“Winston was quick, athletic, willing
and a popular team man, and averaged
more than 60 wickets a season in that
phase,” Selvey said.
The biography says that, by 1992, at
34, Davis “drifted out of the game.”
Late in 1997, he was returned to St.
Vincent and the Grenadines to help
build a church, according to the biography.
“He was up in a tree, sawing a branch
that had become entangled with another
one. The top branch then crashed
down on him. He fell only a few feet,
but he was left a tetraplegic,” the biography
says.
It says that Davis was flown to England
for treatment.
“And it was then, in this terrible
time, that Winston was to perform a
more important role than he, or perhaps
anyone, has ever played on the
field,” the biography says. “Firstly, he
would change the Professional Cricketers’
Association.”
Former St. Vincent and the Grenadines Deputy Consul General to New York
Cyril “Scorcher” Thomas (L) and former St. Vincent and the Grenadines National
Soccer Captain Elliott “Morie” Millington present award to Winston
Davis (in wheel chair). All are Sion Hill natives. Photo by Nelson A. King
Tenants sue Brooklyn slumlord for harassment