Community | November 18, 2011 | 4 comments

Who Smashed the Laptops from Occupy Wall Street? Inside the NYPD's Lost and Found

source: http://tinyurl.com/89yvdq8

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LOrion
If you’re looking to recover any personal effects swept up early Tuesday morning in the NYPD raid on Zuccotti Park, epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, there’s only one place that may have what you’re looking for. Only it doesn’t have a marked address.

The Department of Sanitation has a brand new building. Situated at 650 W. 57th Street – the corner of 12th Ave. and 57th St., in the wastelandish Far West Side –

This is where we find Isaac Wilder, head of the Free Network Foundation, late Thursday morning. Wilder, who we first met on Day 3 of the occupation, is an integral part of OWS’ Signal Corps, a working group that had been dedicated to providing free Wi-Fi to demonstrators within Zuccotti. During the raid, all of Wilder’s stuff, including the FNF’s Freedom Tower, a thin, maybe nine-foot-tall pole, loaded on all sides with nondescript routers that had been beaming out wireless access since early on in the occupation, was confiscated not long after he and another 200 or so protestors were hauled away after barricading themselves in the middle of the park. Matt LiPani, a Sanitation representative, tells us that in the raid’s aftermath 151 Sanitation workers carted away the belongings to 650 W. 57th St. in “our collection trucks.”

Wilder hasn’t slept much in the last 36 hours. He looks shelled, haggard. He told us earlier how he and many others affiliated with the Signal Corps were held in a separate “dungeon-like” cell below the main holding tank at 1 Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan beginning early Tuesday morning through Wednesday evening. But beyond that, his report from inside the heap holds true: No backpack. No cash. No tower.

Worse, it was as if someone along the way purposefully destroyed all confiscated electronics, a strategic smashing of at least part of the digital record logged by full-on occupiers. “Dude, all the laptops are in a row," he tells us, baffled and raking his shock of brown hair. "They’ve all been smashed with bats.” When asked about the mangled property, LiPani admits that, inevitably, certain items could’ve been damaged in the shuffle: http://tinyurl.com/89yvdq8
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