Single Mom Scammed by Ticket Hawkers Highlights Pattern of Persistent Crime Downtown
The recent case of a single mother with two small children, who was conned by swindlers selling bogus tickets to the Statue of Liberty at Battery Park, illustrates an ongoing case of lawlessness in Lower Manhattan.
Over the summer, Ashley Bryan treated her children, Sophia (aged 11) and Eli (four), to a trip to New York City. The family drive nine hours from their home in West Virginia and settled into a hotel room in Secaucus, New Jersey, which was significantly less expensive than lodging options in Manhattan.
On the second day of their New York holiday, Ms. Bryan decided to take the children to see the Statue of Liberty. After driving into Lower Manhattan, she began searching for street parking near Battery Park, where the ferry to Liberty Island docks. As she looked in vain for parking, Ms. Bryan was approached by a flock of ticket sales agents. “They must have spotted the out-of-state license plates,” she recalls. “They were wearing uniform vests, which looked official, so I thought they had to be legitimate.”
“One of them asked if I wanted to go the Statue of Liberty,” she says, “and when I said ‘yes,’ he told me he would help. When I explained that I needed to park, he asked me to give him the keys, saying he would take care of parking. I didn’t feel comfortable with that, so he offered to drive with me to a place where we could leave the car.”
The ticket sales agent got into the car with Ms. Bryan and her two sleeping children, and directed her “to a place where a lot of police cars were parked,” she says. This turned out to be the foot of South Street, along the East River waterfront, near the Battery Maritime Building and the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. There is no legal street parking near this location, but it is used as a place to leave NYPD vehicles.
“Once we parked,” Ms. Bryan recalls, “the man started acting like it was his car, and opened the trunk when I said I need to get my son’s stroller. Then he wanted to push Eli, who was still asleep, in the stroller. I told him, ‘no thanks,’ so then he insisted on walking us back to the place where we could buy tickets.” This was the entrance to Battery Park adjacent to Bowling Green.
“There were more men with vests on,” she says, “and they were standing in front of a ticket booth. I was sure they worked for the Statue of Liberty ferry.” These men quoted prices for the boat ride to Liberty Island far in excess of what Ms. Bryan had seen online. “First they said it would be $150 for each of us,” she notes. “When I said it wasn’t that much on the website, they told me I could have a special deal and pay $58 each.”
When Ms. Bryan agreed to this price and paid, she was issued three tickets, but the hawkers explained she would have to take a shuttle to get on the ferry, which she had understood (correctly) to be steps away from where she had parked. “They kept insisting that we couldn’t walk to the boat,” she says. Instead, they directed Ms. Bryan and the children to wait at a nearby bus stop, which turned out to be a pick-up point for a tour jitney operated by City Sightseeing New York. That firm offers bus and boat rides for tourists. None of the boats operated by City Sightseeing stops at Liberty Island, however; they merely cruise in the vicinity of the monument.
In fact, the only ferry operator authorized to bring visitors to Liberty Island is Statue City Cruises, and their only point of departure in Manhattan is inside Battery Park. This company charges as little as $25 to bring visitors to both Liberty and Ellis Islands, one-third of the price initially quoted by the ticket hawkers who intercept visitors outside Battery Park.
The actual cost of tickets for City Sightseeing tours (which do not go to Liberty Island) is a fraction of the prices charged by deceptive ticket sellers at Battery Park, who promise (falsely) that they are offering the opportunity to visit the Statue of Liberty, rather than merely look at it. For example, the City Sightseeing boat ride that passes by the Statue of Liberty is priced at $30. (Editor’s note: There is no indication that City Sightseeing New York is any way an accomplice to the fraudulent Statue of Liberty ticket sellers at Battery Park.)
“Once I was on the bus, I got suspicious, because everyone was talking about the different prices they had been charged,” Ms. Bryan recalls. “Some people had paid a lot more than me, and others had paid less.” The City Sightseeing bus took several dozen passengers to Pier 78 in Midtown, where they all disembarked and boarded one of the firm’s cruise vessels.
“The boat went down the river, toward the Statue of Liberty,” Ms. Bryan remembers, “but cruised past and turned around. When I asked a man who worked onboard, he told us we weren’t going to the Statue of Liberty.” She adds, “people in vests on the boat offered to take pictures of us as we passed the Statue, so I thought we were at least getting that for the price we had paid. But then they wanted to charge us for copies of the photos. It was a short boat ride, and then they took us back to the pier.”
Once Ms. Bryan and the children (right) had disembarked, they assumed that the same bus they had ridden from the Battery to Midtown would take them back to Lower Manhattan. “We waited for an hour before somebody came and told us that no more buses were coming,” she says. “And I had no idea where I was, or how to get back to my car.”
“I was lost, Sophia and Eli were exhausted, and my phone had just died,” she recalls. “I was asking people who walked by for directions, but I didn’t even know how to tell them where I was trying to go.” Finally, a jogger stopped and was able to determine that Ms. Bryan was probably trying to get to the Battery. This person suggested that she take a NYC Ferry from Pier 79 (located next to the City Sightseeing dock) to the Battery Park City ferry terminal, near Brookfield Place. “We got off the boat, and I had no idea where to go,” she recalls. “I was worried and scared.”
As she wandered in the vicinity of North Cove Marina, Ms. Bryan was approached by Battery Park City resident Amy Koethe, who recalls, “I just had a sense that she was in distress. She was pushing a toddler in a stroller, with her older daughter walking beside her, and I thought maybe she was lost.”
Ms. Koethe says, “Ashley explained that she had taken boat ride and had no idea where she was or where her car was. She was keeping it together, but was definitely not in a state in which I could leave her alone.”
Based on Ms. Bryan’s description of events earlier in the day, Ms. Koethe conjectured that her car was somewhere in the vicinity of Battery Park. “We walked along South End and then West Street, and got closer to Battery Park. I kept asking her if anything looked familiar, but she wasn’t sure. But she did remember a building with a silver roof.” As they approached the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, the facade of which is dominated by a polished steel canopy, “Sophia’s face lit up,” Ms. Koethe recalls, “and she said, ‘that’s it!’”
This still left the task of finding the Ms. Bryan’s car, but within a few minutes, they group had located the vehicle, which was within site of the ferry terminal. “It was a miracle that the car hadn’t been towed or booted, or even ticketed,” Ms. Koethe says. “And I don’t know what we would have done if it had been stolen.”
Once Ms. Bryan and her children were safely back in the car, “she broke down and started sobbing,” Ms. Koethe remembers. “She had stayed calm for the sake of her kids, but now she could let go.”
“I started crying and couldn’t stop,” Ms. Bryan says. “I felt so vulnerable. And to make it worse, when we got to car, I finally realized that I had parked just a few steps away from where the real Statue of Liberty ferry picks passengers up.”
Ms. Koethe observes that, “Ashley was so resilient and kind, and never lost her empathy. She insisted that this must be some kind of a misunderstanding, because she refused to believe that anybody would con a mother and her kids and put them in an unsafe situation.”
Ms. Bryan says, “everybody on that bus was swindled the same way we were. Everybody had their vacation ruined. And everybody came away trusting people less.”
Mike Burke, the chief operating officer of Statue City Cruises (the legitimate operator of the Liberty Island ferry in Battery Park) says, “for more than 12 years, illegal ticket vendors have been intimidating and ripping off tourists looking to visit Lady Liberty. Tourists do not travel to Battery Park intending to take a bus ride to a distant departure point for a short harbor tour, and these unlicensed hawkers have plagued Battery Park with little to no consequences. And this year, this problem has been magnified by not just lax enforcement, but by construction of a resiliency project to raise the Battery seawall five feet, limiting park access to only two points, where a gauntlet of vendors swarms unsuspecting visitors.”
He adds that, “Statue City Cruises pays $7 million in fees to the City for the right to operate at the Battery. Now, the City Parks Department wants us to pay for public security in a public park when the City is losing more than $2.3 million annually in concession fees because of their own inaction. What we need is consistent and sustained enforcement and a crackdown like we saw last year on the Brooklyn Bridge. That is the only way to fix this public nuisance once and for all.”
Ms. Koethe believes, “if anyone thinks these ticket hawkers are just annoying, but not aggressive or dangerous, this shows they are wrong. The next victim might be much more seriously harmed. This is preventable with the right kind of enforcement.”
Nearly a decade of local history underscores the chronic nature of this problem. In February, 2016, a man and woman believed to be romantically linked, but who worked for competing tour services, became involved in a violent altercation, which ended when the woman attacked her erstwhile boyfriend with a stun gun. Later that month, another couple selling tickets attacked a tourist who refused to buy from them, fracturing his skull. That fall, a pair of vendors were accused of assaulting a tourist who refused to buy the tickets they were offering.
In the spring of 2017, police officers arrested more than a dozen sellers for offering fake tickets to unsuspecting tourists. (In addition to tickets for boats that tour the harbor, but were sold under the false pretense that they would stop at the Statue of Liberty, other cases involved tickets that turned out simply to be worthless counterfeits, and a third scam involved selling bogus, expensive tickets to the Staten Island Ferry, which is free.)
In April of that year, gunfire erupted near the corner of Battery Place and Washington Street, arising from an altercation between two men who sold tour tickets in Battery Park. The shots were fired steps away from three childcare facilities, and struck one innocent bystander, a woman in her 30s who was wounded when a stray bullet hit her in the ankle. A second victim, who sustained a gunshot wound to the abdomen, was a party to the dispute.
By 2018, ticket hawkers had refined their scheme by coopting the Connection shuttle bus, operated by the Downtown Alliance, as a prop. In this version of the ruse, ticket sellers would herd their victims (who had paid inflated prices for worthless passes to board the bus, which is free) onto the shuttle, under the pretense that it take them to a pier for embarkation. In fact, the Connection shuttle merely drove in a circle around Lower Manhattan. For several years, the Downtown Alliance was forced to eliminate multiple stops from the shuttle’s route, in an attempt to foil the scam.
When ticket sellers are arrested for what might be considered minor, quality-of-life offenses in Battery Park, they sometimes turn out to have records of being charged with or convicted of serious crimes like rape, assault, drug dealing, and robbery. A 2016 police investigation found that several of the companies that deploy ticket sellers to Battery Park made it a practice to hire people who have recently been released from prison, and were in many cases on parole or probation. In one case, the enterprise was being managed by an owner while he was imprisoned at Rikers Island.
“The police will do a sweep every so often, but they just come back,” Ms. Koethe says.
Ms. Bryan adds, “it’s disturbing that the ticket sellers feel so comfortable, standing in the open, knowing they can get away with this. The New York police should be paying closer attention to this, and guard that area. We don’t have this kind of criminal activity on the streets of West Virginia.”