Choppergate Ramps Up: De Blasio Accused of Using Little League Field as Helipad

HARLEM, NY — The more the de Blasio Administration has tried to suppress Choppergate 2016, the more it has come to capture the ire and imagination of the city.

The whole thing started on a quiet Friday in mid-October, when NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's spokespeople refused to explain why he'd decided to take an NYPD helicopter from Brooklyn's Prospect Park to a speaking engagement in Long Island City, Queens. Left in the dark, de Blasio's millions of watchdogs could only assume their "dope from Park Slope" was blowing through police resources and making a big, windy V.I.P. scene in a public park just so he could squeeze in a quick sesh at his favorite gym, the Prospect Park Y, or grab a bite at his favorite restaurant, Bar Toto — both located a few blocks west of the baseball field where the helicopter scooped him.

Mobbed by reporters the next Monday at City Hall, de Blasio declined to comment on his Brooklyn-to-Queens police helicopter ride, according to an extensive piece on the ride's greater significance in the New York Times.

Since then, a handful of additional NYPD copter rides taken by de Blasio in recent months have come to light — including one to the Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump debate last month on Long Island.

But Choppergate reached a whole new level of hype Wednesday evening when the New York Post dropped this bombshell: "Mayor de Blasio shut down a Little League baseball game in a Harlem park for more than an hour in August so police could ready a field for his helicopter."

For the story, the Post spoke to two angry New York fathers who declined to give their names. A breathless excerpt:

The extended seventh-inning stretch got underway at Harlem River Park during an Aug. 9 Little League game when the NYPD cleared the diamond of two under-14 teams, one dad told The Post.

The cops “basically told everybody to get off the field,” the dad said.

“The mayor wants to land his helicopter here,” he recalled police telling him.

On the mayor's schedule that day, the Post reported, was a visit to an injured firefighter in the Bronx and, much later on in the evening, a speaking engagement at his home, Gracie Mansion.

Confronted about all this by a Post writer Wednesday, de Blasio reportedly responded: “We’ve done every form of disclosure we have to and we follow exactly the rules. ... I’ve just said all I’m going to say about it.”

NYPD officials, too, brushed off the Post's request for comment with the same stock statement they've been issuing since the onset of Choppergate: “The security and transportation of the mayor are determined by the NYPD. We do not discuss the specifics of security.”

So why do we care?

The Village Voice thinks de Blasio's new NYPD helicopter fetish has become a bizarre "media obsession" overshadowing real issues. The Post and Daily News, meanwhile, think it just might be the end of the world.

No matter your place on the hype spectrum, though, you've got to admit: The irony of Choppergate is scrumptious as hell. We're now watching as the people's mayor — the mayor who swore air travel was "not my thing"; the mayor who once called “the nonstop din of helicopters” in the city a “major quality-of-life issue for New Yorkers living near heavily trafficked routes"; the mayor who from Day One pledged that his path through New York's "tale of two cities" was in the streets, not in the sky — demands that two baseball teams' worth of Harlem schoolkids cease to partake in America's most beloved and humble of pasttimes so he can avoid rush hour via $600-per-hour NYPD escort.

And then he refuses to talk about it.

Lead photo by Tony Hisgett/Flickr