Leave driving to us

Ángel Franco/The New York Times - Bus theft is not common, but it does happen occasionally. In some cases, the thieves have been reported to pick up passengers — and pocket the fares.


A question that doesn’t come up all the time but does come up every now and then is: What do you do once you’ve stolen a bus? It’s not like with cars, which people who disrespect the law are always stealing. You can’t just change the plates or repaint it and drive it around as your vehicle. It’s very hard to park. And even in New York, where pretty much anything goes, people will notice that you’ve got a bus.


The question comes to mind in light of the fact that someone stole a Greyhound bus in Manhattan the other day. Exactly when it was stolen is unclear. The bus was last accounted for very early Sunday morning at the Greyhound maintenance garage at West 30th Street and 12th Avenue. According to the police, a driver from another bus company spied the empty bus about 2:15 Wednesday morning parked on the street in Astoria, Queens, and called a Greyhound dispatcher. This alerted Greyhound that it was short a bus.


Greyhound workers went out to the bus, but could not start it and had to return to the depot. When they came back with a mechanic at 3:45 a.m., they got lost and could not find the bus. The police were not notified until 9 a.m. and located it about 12:30 in the afternoon still parked where it had been. Since the thief remains unidentified and at large, it’s not possible to determine his motive. Was he fond of your larger vehicles? Did he have a big family? Was he tired of waiting for the bus?

Ángel Franco/The New York Times - Karl Besancon, who drives for Martz Trailways, could think of only one motive: “For giggles.”


More bus-theft knowledge might be forthcoming over at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where big buses chug in and out all day. A few Greyhound drivers were relaxing in the drivers’ lounge but said they were not allowed to talk. They said they did not know much about stolen buses, only that you couldn’t just put one in your garage. Down on the platforms, a Greyhound driver on the Atlantic City route said he did not know anything either, but had an annoying problem of somewhat less magnitude to deal with. Someone had stolen his hat.


Karl Besancon, 56, drives for Martz Trailways, going between New York and Wilkes-Barre, Pa. “In 21 years, I’ve only heard about four stolen in the New York area,” he said.


Why would someone take a bus?


He thought hard before coming up with the only answer that made sense to him: “For giggles.”


The tricky thing is holding on to a stolen bus, Mr. Besancon agreed. A few years ago, however, he said, a bus stolen in Bayonne, N.J., was missing for three weeks. It had about 4,000 miles run up on it, but not a scratch. “The company that owned it said, ‘Hire the guy,’ ” Mr. Besancon recalled. “But they didn’t catch him far as I know.”


On Dec. 19, 2009, a New Jersey Transit bus was snatched from the parking lot of the Livingston Mall in New Jersey. The driver had gone to the bathroom. A half-hour later, it was found abandoned in West Orange.


In January 2007, the tour bus of the country singer Crystal Gayle was swiped in Nashville by a convict who had escaped in South Carolina. He was not caught until he got near the Daytona International Speedway in Florida. Before helping himself to the bus, he had stolen other vehicles to make his way on the cheap. One of them was a Wal-Mart truck.

Now, that a certain kind of talent.

One thing to do with a stolen bus is try to make a few bucks for bail money. That’s what a 15-year-old boy did in October 2006 in Orlando, Fla. After taking a bus from the Central Florida Fairgrounds, he drove it along a conventional bus route, picking up passengers and collecting fares. One of the more keenly observant passengers, though pleased enough with the ride, thought the boy looked youthful for a bus driver and dialed the police.


Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, the trade group for the private bus industry, said: “I remember a few years ago someone stole a bus out west, and the people operated it in charter service for a couple of weeks. So sometimes it’s a business model.”


Back at the Port Authority, some New Jersey Transit drivers were talking about how it’s one thing to steal a bus. Then you have to drive it. “If you’ve only driven cars, you could drive it,” said Sergio Gomez, 46. “But you’d be wrecking everything, hitting poles and cars and curbs and people. You’d be sticking out like a sore thumb, swerving all over the place.”


Jose Valle, 53, was loading up his bus to head to New Jersey. Given the recent bus theft, the culprit still on the lam, was he keeping a closer eye on his bus so no one took it? He gave a weird look. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anybody will take my bus. It’s really big. Nah, nobody’s going to take my bus.”

State Races Seen as Tests for Obama

President Obama arrived Thursday to speak at a fund-raiser in McLean, Va., for R. Creigh Deeds, a candidate for governor









President Obama has returned to the campaign trail. He is appearing in television advertisements in New Jersey this week on behalf of Gov. Jon S. Corzine, the embattled Democrat struggling to win a second term. And he campaigned on Thursday evening alongside R. Creigh Deeds, the candidate for governor fighting to keep Virginia in the Democratic column.

The New Jersey and Virginia races for governor are the only big-ticket political contests for 2009. And fairly or not — Mr. Obama’s advisers are not alone in arguing that the significance of these races does not extend beyond the boundaries of either state — the contests are being held up as an early measure of how Mr. Obama is doing and a predictor of how Democrats might fare in next year’s Congressional campaigns.

Non-stop campaigns. People began talking about 2010 and 2012 days after January 20, 2009.

He sold Dr. J

Roy Boe in 1975.


What could possibly be the worst sports move I ever witnessed. Boe sold Dr. J for the money he needed to pay the NBA. Still, he put together two great teams.

Addicted to Peter Lorre (That Voice, Those Eyes)

Jack Terricloth, center, and his band, World/Inferno Friendship Society.

Lorre’s craven characters in films like “M” and “Casablanca” have been fodder for comedians for decades, but Jack Terricloth’s aims are more ambitious. As leader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a Brooklyn band that mixes Weimar-style cabaret and roisterous ska-punk, he is the driving force behind “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century,” a self-described punk songspiel that is part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, including a performance at Webster Hall in the East Village on Friday.

Interesting music.

Tall and slim, fond both of dandyish dark suits and heavy, mosh-pit-ready boots, Jack Terricloth looks nothing like the doughy and goggle-eyed Lorre. And despite how much he enjoys imitating Lorre’s voice — he says he sometimes falls asleep listening to recordings of Lorre on the radio — his performance in “Addicted to Bad Ideas” is less impersonation than sympathetic interpretation.

“I find Peter Lorre a strangely charismatic, extremely creepy person, which I think most punk rockers can identify with,” said Jack Terricloth, 38, who was born Peter Ventantonio and grew up in Bridgewater, N.J. “It’s the lure of the other. He’s the underdog, the outsider.”

The Museum of Film and Television, Berlin
Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie, “M.”
Emphasizing that outsider status, the show portrays Lorre as a misunderstood antihero whose life reflected broad political and social tumult. Born in 1904 in what is now Slovakia, Lorre, who was Jewish, had a promising early career in Germany working with Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang, but fled Nazi Germany for London and eventually Hollywood, where he was unable to escape typecasting as a sinister, usually foreign, villain. By the time of those 1950s television gigs he often seemed a caricature of himself. He died in 1964.

“Lorre is an excellent way to examine the 20th century historically,” Jack Terricloth said, “and the concerns and problems of every artist who works in the culture wars.”

We are a punk-rock band, and we play punk-rock shows, but our music couldn’t be more different,” he said. “Kids see us and think: ‘Guys in suits and makeup at a hardcore show? Come on.’ But we always have them by the third song, and then we’re something they have to accept about the punk rock scene and about the world. We’ve now entered into the great dialogue that is our culture, which is what any artist should do. I was going to say ‘any good artist,’ but any bad artist too.”

At Montclair State culture clash was part of the idea. The touring contract for “Addicted to Bad Ideas” stipulates that a presenter must make room for a mosh pit, and when fans began tossing themselves around it on the first night, Jedediah Wheeler, the executive director of the series, was at first horrified.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is dangerous,’ ” he said. “But the more I watched, the more I realized that they had tremendous physical respect for each other. It became a dance. I could not believe how beautiful it was.”

“There was a point where we could have gone really theater or gone really punk rock,” he said. “We just started touring all the time, and theater seems kind of fey, so we put the theater world aside for a good number of years.”

Now it is becoming a greater part of the band’s repertory, and he said there was more theatrical work to come. The band’s next project, he said, is a punk version of “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Boss sideman dies at 58

Invariably introduced on stage by his boss as “Phantom Dan”, the keyboardist Danny Federici played with Bruce Springsteen for 40 years and helped to define his trademark sound as a key member of his E-Street Band.