"People are fearful," said Alice Green, executive director of the Center for Law and Justice. Green has been working with Siena College sociology Professor Mathew Johnson, who recently convened a focus group among inner-city youth. The findings were grim: youngsters in the city's poorest neighborhoods feel hopeless and police are viewed as an occupying force rather than as protectors.

Some police outreach efforts may have had unintended consequences, added Johnson, who said youngsters felt particularly alienated by the mobile unit that police adopted after the city closed the Arbor Hill police station. With the old police stations, Johnson found, youngsters at least had some familiarity with officers who were assigned there

Now I like basketball. A lot. And I remember the good old days when the Patroons were the CBA champions. Phil Jackson coached them! Yeah, that Phil Jackson! And guys like Vincent Askew played for them. He could really dunk. Entertaining stuff. Back in the days before NBA expansion, cable TV, non stop NBA coverage every night of the week. Those were the days. If you wanted to see some good basketball the Patroons were the only game in town. That was last century. People are not going to pay to watch guys that can't play in the NBA anymore.

Back in 1984 the CBA set a record for the number of people that attended games for a season. Still trying to break that record.

Leveille said the perception that the authority, which does have a small paid staff, would run out of money without additional aid from lawmakers is false.

“There’s money in place for staff for 50 years,” he said.

He said the club was not considering a compromise proposal.

Most neighborhoods in Brooklyn have at least one blog — and in some places, there seems to be one in every house, every bedroom — but not many read like BayRidgeTalk.com, where the subjects over the last year or two veered away from apartment sales and plumbing tips and block parties and sounded more like rat-a-tat police reports.

“Fighting and drug deals going down in the driveway of this house,” one person wrote in 2006 about a home steeped in reports of suspicious activity on 93rd Street in Bay Ridge.

Another person replied: “I’ve heard loud fighting for almost a year now but did not realize until recently that it’s a crack house.”

A third, who sounded more like a cynical cop than what he really is, a pet store owner, weighed in: “There have been two deaths in a one-block radius up here. One was definitely an overdose and the other is suspect, but the toxicology is still pending (to my knowledge). If the tox comes back positive, then that could indicate that some bad stuff has hit the streets.”

Months later, the bloggers are celebrating, days after the police raided the two neighboring homes in question, 346 and 348 93rd Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, and arrested five people, including three brothers who lived there.

Several months ago, FBI agents from Albany met with prosecutors from the Southern District regarding the Bruno investigation, a person with knowledge of the meeting said.

The agents made an informal overture to the Manhattan-based federal prosecutors at a time when the FBI and prosecutors in New York's Northern District, under U.S. Attorney Glenn T. Suddaby, have been at odds about the handling of the Bruno investigation, which sources believe has been dogged by unnecessary delay.

Suddaby is awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate to a position as a federal judge in upstate New York. He has declined to comment on the Bruno investigation.