Announcing The 2007 Bad Neighbor Nominations
Not much more than a day into the new year there are already two serious contenders for the 2007 Bad Neighbor Awards®. Both involved food, oddly enough. And handcuffs.
Item: When the doughnut shop next door to the chicken shop started selling chicken, the owner of the latter decided to throw a barbecue for the owner of the former. He punched a hole in the wall between the shops, squirted in some gasoline and tossed a match.
The Bronx food fight began when a Twin Donut shop started competing with a Kennedy Fried Chicken by adding legs, wings, breasts and thighs to its menu and selling plates of food for 50 cents cheaper, supervising fire marshal Robert Pinto said.
The chicken place's owner, Kabeer Ahmad, whose business had taken a nosedive, used a hammer to punch a hole in the wall between the stores around 4 a.m. Monday, squirted gasoline into the doughnut shop and tossed in a lit match before driving off, Pinto said.
The blaze destroyed the doughnut shop, but the chicken restaurant was unscathed, he said. No injuries were reported.
Workers at a 24-hour deli in the same commercial building shared by the other stores called the Fire Department of New York when they smelled smoke. They told FDNY investigators they had seen Ahmad locking up and leaving the chicken store earlier than usual — right before the flames erupted.
Ahmad confessed when questioned. Item: Do NOT accept an invitation from this woman for dinner if it involves meatballs. Or anything else, for that matter. She has an unusual spice rack. A woman in Cheektowaga, New York has been arrested after cooking up a nice snack for her neighbor's dog. The meatballs were heavily seasoned with rat poison.
Charmaine Twarozek was arrested Friday after an officer found a frying pan coated with remnants of ground beef and rat poison in her trash. She was charged with poisoning a dog and cruelty to animals, misdemeanors, police said.
Sue Anderson, the owner of the German shepherd mix, said she and Twarozek had been involved in an ongoing dispute over Roscoe's barking.
Twarozek did not return calls seeking her comment.
Anderson said she discovered the meatballs Friday, when she and her husband noticed the dog was eating something by the back fence, near Twarozek's property in Cheektowaga, 10 miles east of Buffalo.
"My husband brought Roscoe in, and he had a meatball in his mouth. He dropped it on the floor, and I could see there were little green pellets, cooked right into the meat," Anderson said.
Remind me not to ask for that recipe. If this is any indication, we're in for an interesting year in the Bad Neighbor category.
