James Barron

But changing one’s legal home is not so simple.

New York state has a platoon of state auditors who zealously examine whether people are trying to skirt paying its state and local taxes by improperly claiming that they live elsewhere.

Those officials regularly face off against an industry of accountants and lawyers who specialize in tax avoidance strategies.

Under state law, taxpayers who spend 184 days a year in New York — more than half the year — have to pay state taxes on all of their income. But even if a person does spend most of the year out of state, that is not enough.

Tax experts said that convincing auditors that a taxpayer has gone from being a New Yorker to being a Floridian involves more than filing a “declaration of domicile” form, as Trump and Melania Trump, the first lady, did in Palm Beach County Circuit Court in September.

Florida is one of the few states with no state or local income taxes and has long been a preferred destination for wealthy New Yorkers looking to lower their tax bills. But Mark Klein, chairman of the law firm Hodgson Russ, said New York “made it very clear at least a dozen years ago that filling out pieces of paper does not change your domicile.”

For its part, New York has a multipart test that takes in everything from where a taxpayer’s family is and where he or she keeps “items near and dear,” like family heirlooms. Auditors also examine whether a taxpayer continues to maintain a business in New York.

In this case, if Trump still controlled the Trump Organization, with its considerable holdings in New York City, that might raise questions.

In other words, tax officials look at more than whether a taxpayer has simply switched from a New York bank to a Florida bank.

It is not clear how much time Trump plans to spend in New York during the rest of his presidency or after he leaves the White House — or whether he plans to keep his triplex apartment in Trump Tower or sell it, a move that could figure in how New York evaluates his tax status.

And the burden of proof would be on him.

“Unlike the current impeachment hearings, where the burden of proof is on the House of Representatives, here the burden of proof is on the president to prove that he is no longer a New York resident,” said Michael Kosnitzky, who chairs the private wealth group at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “The burden is squarely on him.”

There are seemingly reams of rules and endless ways taxpayers can be tripped up.

Nishant Mittal, a founder of Monaeo, which offers an app to help wealthy people keep track of their whereabouts for tax purposes, said New York had conducted an average of 3,024 nonresidency audits a year between 2010 and 2017. He said the audits had yielded about $1 billion for the state.

Barry Horowitz, a state and local tax partner in the accounting firm of Withum, said New York had been aggressive about auditing taxpayers who left the state — or claimed, for tax purposes, that they had.

“New York’s going to fight you 100% on this,” Horowitz said. “They audit basically 100% of the returns for change of residence. Of every client I’ve handled who changed residency, they’ve all been audited.” He said he had dealt with “800-plus audits.”

One issue that tax authorities consider is, “have you abandoned your New York residence?” Kosnitzky said.

But the state considers more than whether abandoning a New York residence means giving up a brick-and-mortar house, like Trump’s home on the 58th floor of Trump Tower.

“The term they use is where you have established strong and enduring ties,” Kosnitzky said. “He’s associated with New York. He’s Mr. New York. It’s hard for Mr. New York to disavow his residency. It’s not insurmountable, but he’s associated with New York.”

Another factor that could help Trump prove his case is whether a taxpayer who has a business has been running that business in the tax year in question.

Trump “could be found to be a Florida resident because he’s not technically running the company anymore,” said Robin Statsky, an accountant in Manhattan. “He’s basically been in Washington” more than he has been anywhere else since he was inaugurated.

Tax experts said Trump is not alone in leaving. There has been a surge of departures among hedge fund managers looking to slash their tax bills, especially after they lost the deduction for state and local taxes in the 2017 tax overhaul.

The elimination of that deduction had a significant impact among well-off residents in New York and New Jersey, states with some of the country’s highest local income tax rates.

By some estimates, leaving could reduce their tax bills by nearly 13 percentage points. One New York financial executive who relocated to Florida said his tax savings amounted to between $100,000 and $200,000 on income of between $2 million and $3 million.

This executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his firm does not allow employees to speak to reporters, said that saving on taxes was not the only reason he moved. But he said the decision to leave New York “was substantially influenced by not having to pay New York for something I don’t feel I’m getting much value for.”

The exodus of people like him has created business for lawyers like Klein of Hodgson Russ.

“Most of my practice these days is representing high-net-worth, high-income individuals who are getting out of Dodge,” he said, referring to New York. “I probably counsel four or five people a week on how to establish their domicile in — not necessarily Florida, because a lot of people are moving to Wyoming or Nevada, to low- or no-tax states.”

If New York does challenge a residency, the chances that a taxpayer will win are not good, said Mittal of Monaeo.

“The reason is, New York is pulling data from cellphone carriers” and other sources like social media sites, he said. “When the state comes in and says, ‘You were not in New York,’ it’s really, really hard to fight it.”

Klein said the firm had hired three paralegals who used to be auditors in New York City. One now does what he called “prophylactic audits,” reviewing clients’ cases and “telling us what her recommendation would have been to her supervisors had she still been an auditor.”

That Trump would walk away from New York might seem hard to imagine. It was the city where he was born, where he built towers that carried his name and where his blustering personality and his romantic life — he is twice divorced — made him a fixture in the tabloids. It was also where he starred in “The Apprentice,” the reality-television show that elevated his national profile.

But since he was elected president, it has seemed that the city and Trump were headed for a breakup. In discussing his decision to leave New York on Twitter, Trump said he had been treated poorly by political leaders in the state, despite having paid “millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes each year.”

Because Trump has never released his taxes, the validity of his claim cannot be determined.

Trump is also said to be angered by a subpoena filed by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, seeking his income tax returns, though changing his residence is not likely to affect the case.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who Thursday tweeted “Good riddance” about Trump’s change of residence — speculated at an unrelated news conference Friday that the president had moved for “legal purposes,” seemingly referring to the case being pursued by Vance, rather than because of New York’s high taxes.

“He’s resisting releasing his taxes. He’s in litigation. I think his lawyers think this will help his legal case,” Cuomo said, though he acknowledged he did not know that to be true.

Trump responded with a series of tweets that began and ended with “I love New York.”

“New York can never be great again under the current leadership,” he wrote, naming Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio. “Cuomo has weaponized the prosecutors to do his dirty work (and to keep him out of jams), a reason some don’t want to be” in New York, and “another reason they are leaving.”

This article originally appeared in

Can Trump Avoid Taxes With Change of Address? It May Not Be So Simple

Like a long line of other wealthy New Yorkers, President Donald Trump has decided to establish his legal residence in Florida, apparently at least in part to save money on taxes.

Florida is one of the few states with no state or local income taxes and has long been a preferred destination for wealthy New Yorkers looking to lower their tax bills.

“If you make more than $1 million in annual income, your chances of getting audited are about 82%,” he said. Trump’s chances might be higher, he added.

“My belief is once he is no longer president, he will definitely get audited,” Mittal said, adding, “New York is going to make sure he actually did change his domicile.”

Trump “could be found to be a Florida resident because he’s not technically running the company anymore,” said Robin Statsky, an accountant in Manhattan. “He’s basically been in Washington” and has spent more time there than anywhere other than Mar-a-Lago since he was inaugurated, she said.

Tax experts said Trump is not alone in leaving. There has been a surge of departures among hedge fund managers looking to reduce their tax bills, especially if they lost the deduction for state and local taxes in the 2017 tax overhaul bill.

By some estimates, leaving could reduce their tax bills by nearly 13 percentage points.

If New York does challenge a residency, the chances that a taxpayer will win are not good, Nittal said.

That Trump would walk away from New York might seem hard to imagine. It was the city where he was born, where he built towers that carried his name and where his blustering personality and his romantic life — he is twice divorced — made him a fixture in the tabloids.

It was also where he starred in “The Apprentice,” the reality-television show that elevated his national profile.

But since he was elected president, it has seemed that the city and Trump were headed for a breakup, with both sides openly expressing animosity for each other.

In discussing his decision to leave New York on Twitter, Trump said he had been treated poorly by political leaders in the state, despite having paid “millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes each year.’’

But because Trump has never released his taxes, the validity of his claim cannot be determined.

Can Trump Avoid Taxes by Moving to Florida? It's Not So Simple.

The $19 million house in the Hamptons on Long Island has neighbors with boldface names, including Martha Stewart and Steven Spielberg. The $23.5 million yacht is a 150-foot-long prizewinner.

And then there is the art collection, an enormous trove of masterpieces that the judge presiding over the divorce described as “extraordinary” and “internationally renowned” and that has become the latest chapter in the exes’ rancorous unraveling. Among the more than 150 pieces are multiple works by Pablo Picasso, Jeff Koons, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

The exes’ lawyers have fought about what most of them were worth — one rare moment of agreement came when two art experts hired separately by the exes both valued an Andy Warhol creation filled with images of Marilyn Monroe at $50 million — and who should get them.

The ex-husband is Harry Macklowe, the real estate developer who has had highs (he built the building on Billionaires’ Row) and lows (he had to sell the General Motors building in Manhattan in 2008 as the financial crisis spilled into the commercial sector).

The ex-wife is Linda Macklowe, an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who is passionate about collecting modern art.

Their divorce is the latest rancorous breakup in the moneyed world of New York, but this one comes with the added twist of an impressive art collection that has been valued at as much as nearly $1 billion.

The Macklowes’ wealth made them prominent in the Manhattan celebrity whirl for years. They were mentioned regularly in gossip columns and were photographed at gala after gala: for the Guggenheim Museum (Linda Macklowe is a vice president of the foundation that runs it), for Alzheimer’s disease research and for the Paris Opera (at its gala last year, Harry Macklowe was seated next to Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece).

But in 2016, Harry Macklowe told his wife that the marriage was over. The tabloids soon reported that he was having an affair with Patricia Landeau, president of the French Friends of Israel Museum, in Jerusalem.

By the end of last year, the Macklowes’ divorce had been granted. Harry Macklowe married Landeau in March, a few days after he put giant his-and-her photographs on the side of a building. The building happened to be the one on Billionaires’ Row that he built.

But the wrangling continued over how to divide what Harry Macklowe, 82, and Linda Macklowe, 81, amassed in 59 years of marriage — an art collection that David Redden, a former vice chairman of Sotheby’s, called “fairly staggering” and “one of the great prizes.”

“The art world will be fighting over it,” he said.

An appeals court recently upheld a lower-court ruling that gave Linda Macklowe the apartment in the Plaza and $39 million worth of the art.

But the $50 million Warhol? It will have to be sold, along with the rest of the collection.

The ruling, by Justice Laura Drager of state Supreme Court, gave Harry Macklowe the yacht (his ex-wife got a credit for $3.28 million) and cars that the judge said were worth $385,000. Linda Macklowe got the silver, which the judge said both sides agreed was worth $409,500; jewelry valued at $3.8 million; and books valued at $85,500.

When she was reached by phone the other day, Macklowe said that she was “not talking about anything” and that she had “no interest in discussing” the case. A spokeswoman for her lawyers said they would not comment.

Harry Macklowe did not return calls to his office. Dan Rottenstreich, a lawyer who represented him in the divorce trial, would not discuss the case.

To many New Yorkers, Harry Macklowe is known as the developer whose company tore down several single-room-occupancy hotels in the middle of a winter night in 1985 to beat a moratorium on demolition that was about to take effect. He ultimately paid $2 million to settle a lawsuit the city had filed.

The Macklowes, who have two adult children, join a long parade of high-profile, big-money divorces in the rarefied precincts of Manhattan. One case that drew attention in the 1990s was the divorce of Ivan Boesky from Seema Boesky, who were identified as Anonymous I and Anonymous II in court papers. Ivan Boesky was a high-flying arbitrageur before he pleaded guilty to insider trading.

And President Donald Trump is now on marriage No. 3 after two tabloid-fodder divorces.

“There’s no question New York’s position as a center of wealth and a center of litigation tends to invite some of the largest and nastiest and prolonged divorces in the country,” said David Pikus, a principal in the Manhattan law firm of Bressler Amery Ross.

“The biggest problem you have with high-money divorces is the litigants have the money to spend,” he said. “It’s a vicious circle. The larger the stakes in the divorce action, the more inclined litigants are to fight over them.’’

Jay Goldberg, who was one of Trump’s lawyers in his breakups with Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, said big-money divorces sometimes turned on matters far less consequential than an art collection worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The sticking point in one case, he said, was who would get the Frank Sinatra records.

“The more money the people have, the greater tendency there is to turn to issues that seem silly,” Goldberg said.

Other prominent exes have also squabbled about their art. Robert Soros, a son of billionaire investor George Soros, feuded with his estranged wife, Melissa Schiff Soros, over their collection, according to Town &amp; Country magazine, including a Christopher Wool word painting that spelled “FOOL.”

In the Macklowes’ divorce, David Boies, a lawyer who represented Harry Macklowe in the appeal, told the appeals court that the former spouses had to unload the art “to sustain their lifestyle.”

“They don’t have the cash,” Boies said, noting that 60% to 75% of their assets were tied up in the art collection. (Drager said each ex-spouse was to receive $689,941, half of the money in their three joint bank accounts.)

Harry Macklowe was No. 239 on Forbes magazine’s 2007 list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, with a net worth of $2 billion ($2.48 billion today). That was when he still owned the GM building. He has not made the Forbes list since.

As for the value of the art, during the lower-court proceeding, each side hired an expert to appraise the art. Harry Macklowe’s expert estimated the value at $788 million; Linda Macklowe’s expert said $625 million.

Their totals were well under a 2015 valuation done by Christie’s for an insurance estimate, which said the collection was worth $937.5 million.

“If this had been a case with one or two fewer zeros, it would be an ordinary kind of dispute,” Boies said. “Because of the prominence of the parties and the amount of money involved, this is a case that attracts natural attention.”

But the Macklowes attracted attention long before the divorce papers were filed. Author Vicky Ward, in a 2014 book about Harry Macklowe’s quest to own the General Motors building, wrote that the marriage was “a relationship often compared to an Edward Albee play.”

“Both Macklowes have been heard to disparage each other and their marriage, forcibly and publicly,” Ward wrote, adding, “Yet they were inseparable.”

The Macklowes acquired so many paintings and sculptures that their apartment in the Plaza could not hold them all, even if one real estate appraiser called it the largest one-bedroom he had ever seen. (It was originally seven apartments. They bought them all and demolished the walls.)

Some works in the Macklowes’ art collection went to their home in the Hamptons, where Harry Macklowe famously feuded with a next-door neighbor, Stewart, over a hedge. Other pieces went into storage.

The art collection began as a “quiet pastime,” Ward wrote. But she quoted a friend as saying that “it truly became the dominant, driving force” in Linda Macklowe’s life.

Ward wrote that Harry Macklowe “liked it for different reasons.” He prized the theater of the art world — the thrill of auctions and the hobnobbing at gallery receptions.

Drager noted that art had been a mutual interest during the Macklowes’ marriage. Harry Macklowe even “developed relationships with artists and gallery owners, including assisting people in the art world with real estate transactions.”

Selling off their holdings is likely to be an art-world happening. “My sense is this would be one of the major art collections to arrive at auction within the past decade,” Lark Mason, president of the Appraisers Association of America, said.

He mentioned two sales last year at Christie’s — the sale of the David Rockefeller collection, which brought in $865 million, and the auction of the Barney Ebsworth estate for $372.5 million. Ebsworth was an entrepreneur who started Royal Cruise Line and the tour operator Intrav.

“I think this would be on par with those,” Mason said, because of “the name recognition, the focus on quality from what I understand that they had, and the types of materials that they collected, which from what I understand was a good variety.’’

Drager indicated that she would appoint a receiver to work out a plan for selling the art.

The couple and their experts could not agree on what the collection was worth, but there was a bigger issue: Linda Macklowe did not want to let anything go. “She stated that she wished to enjoy the collection and sell individual pieces only as necessary to support her standard of living,” Drager wrote.

That would have posed tax problems for Harry Macklowe, said his lawyer, Boies. “The wife wanted all the major pieces of art to go to her, and she would decide what to sell and when to sell it,” he said. “The husband would have to pay taxes on what would be sold, because the value that would be attributed to the works would be the after-tax value. She would keep the art, the art would get sold and he would pay the taxes.”

Drager said that given the discrepancies on valuations, averaging them was not possible. The appeals court agreed, rejecting Linda Macklowe’s proposal to have a neutral expert value the collection.

The appeals court seemed to suggest there was no time to waste.

Bringing in another expert, the justices wrote, “would serve only to prolong this litigation between octogenarians.”

Selling the Warhol: Their Bitter Divorce Leaves an Art Trove

NEW YORK — There is the $72 million apartment, so large it runs the full length of one side of the Plaza Hotel, with windows overlooking Central Park. A second Manhattan apartment is high up in one of the tallest buildings in the Western Hemisphere, along the so-called Billionaires’ Row.

But a park in New Jersey routinely delivered a lot worse — bloody noses, bruises, broken teeth and bones, concussions and even death. People who spent a day at Action Park in its prime, in the 1980s and 1990s, often left with something to show for it: scars.

“People were bleeding all over the place,” said Susie McKeown, who is now 52 and remembers going to Action Park after she graduated from high school more than 30 years ago. “People were walking around the park with scraped elbows or knees.’’

She went home with her own badge of honor, having broken one of her front teeth on a ride that ended with a 15- or 20-foot plunge into a chilly pond. “You went so fast that if your chin hit the water at the wrong angle, you chipped your teeth,” she said.

She is hardly alone, as far injuries go — or memories. Sports Illustrated recently published a 3,300-word article under the headline, “Remembering Action Park, America’s Most Dangerous, Daring Water Park.”

And in 2014, Cory Booker, a U.S. senator from New Jersey and a Democratic presidential candidate, wrote on Twitter, “I’ve got stories 2 tell.”

Now a documentary is on the way. Its title is “Class Action Park,” a reference to one of the many nicknames for Action Park. The park, about 50 miles northwest of New York City in Vernon, New Jersey, was long ago replaced by a far tamer destination, with different owners and a new name, Mountain Creek Water Park.

Action Park “was funny, it was weird, it was hysterical, but there was a darkness to it,” said Seth Porges, who made the documentary with Chris Charles Scott.

“People got hurt there. The hardest part of making this movie was: How do you portray that? A lot of people look back fondly on it as a coming-of-age experience. How do you reconcile the fun of it with the human toll?

Porges’ parents put Action Park on their vacation itinerary when he was a teenager growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. “I have these memories of impossible machines, water slides that seemed like they came from a Looney Tunes cartoon and this crazed atmosphere of chaos,” he said.

He also remembers the way Action Park promoted itself in the 80s and 90s. “The ads portrayed the place as a family-friendly, wholesome, great place to bring your kids,” he said. “You’d get there and realize the reality of the situation was anything but.”

The website WeirdNJ said two of the touchstones of growing up in New Jersey were being able to name all the places in the opening montage of “The Sopranos” and being seriously injured at Action Park. At least 14 broken bones and 26 head injuries were reported in 1984 and 1985. Action Park eventually bought the town new ambulances to handle trips to hospitals.

“Even the Action Park employees jokingly refer to the place as ‘Traction Park,’” as in broken bones, The New York Times said in 1983.

But there were deaths at Action Park: six between 1978, when it opened, and 1996, when it closed. (It reopened under different owners a few years later, only to close and reopen again.) Two deaths occurred within a single week in 1982. One victim was a 15-year-old boy who drowned in the notorious Tidal Wave Pool. The other was a 27-year-old man who was electrocuted on a ride called Kayak Experience.

“There was virtually no action taken against” Action Park, said Porges, the filmmaker. “Eventually it shut down, not because of some regulator who said ‘You’re through’ but because it went bankrupt.” (The state Labor Department found no violations in the kayak case but said that electric current from an underwater fan could have caused serious bodily injury.)

Porges, a former editor at Maxim and Popular Mechanics magazines who has a degree in journalism, saw Action Park as a good story. “I’m a journalist by trade,” he said. “I realized this is a great opportunity to apply my trade, so we began to dig. The true story of Action Park — it’s weirder and crazier than the legend.”

But it is the nostalgia-tinted legend that remains in people’s memories. Alison Becker, 42, an actress and writer best known for a recurring role on the sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” said the risks at Action Park were part of the appeal. She said she had gone to Six Flags Great Adventure, which is also in New Jersey, and nothing equaled the fear factor at Action Park.

“You know the scene in ‘Footloose’ where they’re playing a game of chicken with tractors and going at each other?” said Becker, who grew up about 30 miles from Action Park in Allamuchy Township. “Most people look at that and say, ‘What dumb kids.’ I look at it and say, ‘That’s like a day at Action Park. They could’ve charged an extra five for that, and we would have paid it.”

Action Park was so notorious that there are stories about a test dummy that was sent through a ride before it opened. The dummy came out missing something — its head, in some versions; a leg or an arm in others.

Andy Mulvihill, 56, the son of Action Park’s longtime owner, said the tale about the dummy’s head was true. He said he knows this because he was there. He was the first person to go on that ride, he said, after the dummy came out decapitated.

“I was wearing my hockey equipment when I did it,” he said. Speed was essential. “If you didn’t have enough speed,” Mulvihill said, “you’d fall and smash your face, and if you smashed hard enough, you could break your nose or knock out some teeth.”

He said that ride was open for only a few weeks at a time. “Generally, the rides were very tame,” he said. “But there were some where you controlled the speed and the action, and if you were reckless, you could get hurt.”

Action Park was created by Andy Mulvihill’s father Eugene, whom Porges described as a “showman-huckster businessman, a mixture of P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney, with a little bit of Trump.”

Andy Mulvihill said “the intent certainly was not to make it dangerous.”

He also said the deaths did not deter his father, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges related to insurance policies in the 1984 and whom the Securities and Exchange Commission banned from the securities business in 1986.

“He didn’t build Action Park just to make money,” Porges said.

Nor did he “build Action Park just to break rules,” he said. “He really wanted to create an incredibly fun place. He had a vision for the most fun place in the world, unhindered by common sense or safety. A lot of people romanticize it about him and the park. They say there are too many rules now, too much regulation, stuff used to be fun. Yeah, stuff used to be fun — if you survived.”

Andy Mulvihill called the deaths at Action Park “devastating to me.”

But he added, “three of those deaths were drownings. We pulled out thousands and thousands of people who were people who had no business in the water.’’

And yet, it was exhilarating. For some, the conversation in the car on the way there “was about who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that, who do you think is going to get hurt,” recalled Kris Brennan, who is now 45 and lives in Westfield. “It wasn’t ‘If someone gets hurt,’ it was ‘Who’s going to get hurt?’”

Brennan had “a chunk of skin taken out of my hip” on the 2,700-foot-long Alpine Slide.

“Class Action Park” will probably bring on a flood of memories. But Andy Mulvihill is looking to tell the story his way, and next summer Penguin Books will publish “Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park.”

He said it was “nonfiction for sure,” even if it read like fiction.

“When you do something as crazy, as cutting-edge” as Action Park, he said, “and you put it in the metro New York area, where New Yorkers are pretty much crazy anyway, you have stories.”

'People Were Bleeding All Over': America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

Amusement parks are designed to deliver thrills. They are places for splashing and screaming and laughing, often on rides that defy common sense, not to mention the laws of physics.

The ambulance was equipped with lifesaving equipment, he said, but “the attendant didn’t even know how to turn on the oxygen.” His niece, Cynthia Lomax, died along the way.

The incident prompted Robinson to start a volunteer ambulance corps in Bedford-Stuyvesant that has answered calls ever since, cutting response times to only a few minutes. The group, one of more than 30 volunteer emergency service agencies in New York City today and one of nearly that many certified to give basic life support, has also trained more than 1,000 emergency medical technicians.

Robinson, who was known as Rocky, died Friday at 79. The cause was heart failure, said a son, Antoine Robinson.

When he started the corps, Robinson had a day job that made him well aware of a devastating crack epidemic that was ravaging poor and working-class neighborhoods in New York City: He was an ambulance driver for the Emergency Medical Service of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.

Robinson said his mission with the corps was not to replace EMS but to add to the ranks of those qualified to help in emergencies. “They never thought black guys would want to save lives,” he told The New York Times in 2017, without specifying who “they” were. “It’s about neighbor helping neighbor. I don’t see the color of the skin.”

The corps trained volunteers — young people Robinson affectionately called “vollies” — to be emergency medical technicians. Once they passed state examinations, the volunteers could take a patient to a hospital and provide basic first aid along the way.

At first he and a friend with whom he started the corps listened to police and fire department radios and went to addresses they heard on the air — accident scenes or apartments where sick people needed help. They answered the calls in their own cars.

Before long they got an ambulance, the first of several that the corps would operate. Robinson recalled in 2017 that on the first day with the first ambulance, the corps treated 10 people at the scene of a fire. On the second day, corps members delivered a baby.

Dr. Alexander E. Kuehl, who was the medical director of the city’s Emergency Medical Service and a vice president of the Health and Hospitals Corp. when the corps began, said in 2017 that the corps had opened a pathway to EMS.

“That was the catch about EMS when I got there: You had to have a driver’s license and your EMT card to join EMS,” Kuehl said. “I needed to have a way for ghetto kids to get that card like the kids on suburban Long Island” — where volunteer fire departments are entrenched in many towns and villages — and provide training.

Over the years, the corps became something of a labor of love, with protégés teaching classes for those seeking to join the ranks. “The corps, we don’t get much money,” Robinson’s son Reggie said in 2017, “and he couldn’t afford to give me a salary. A lot of times, that place runs off of Pop’s pension.”

James Robinson retired from EMS in 2000 with the rank of captain but continued to oversee the corps, which is still in operation.

In addition to his sons Antoine and Reggie, his survivors include his wife, Vernice, and many other children.

At one point James Robinson underwent a kidney transplant, and the donor was an adopted son who was part of the corps. In 2017 he was injured at the West Indian-American Day Parade, a Labor Day celebration in Brooklyn that has often been marred by violence. When a 22-year-old man was hit by gunfire on a side street, the crowd surged toward where Robinson, by then in a wheelchair, had positioned himself.

“Guess who they trampled?” Robinson said. “Me. They were waving ‘Rocky! Rocky!’ They all know me. I was trying to get people to save lives and nearly lost mine. Instead of running to me for help, they trampled me. They crushed the whole foot.” It had to be amputated.

James Matthew Robinson Jr. was born July 15, 1940, in Marietta, North Carolina. His parents moved to Brooklyn when he was a child. He graduated from Eastern District High School in the Williamsburg section and joined the Army. He served in the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as the Old Guard, and Robinson often recalled standing guard when Jacqueline Kennedy visited President John F. Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

Back in Brooklyn after the Army, Robinson sometimes needed urgent medical help himself — even before the West Indian parade incident. Once, in 1992, he went into cardiac arrest. The emergency team that was dispatched included several people he had helped train.

Antoine Robinson said that in the emergency room his father was treated by Dr. Timothy Sutton. Sutton had been in the corps’ first class and had later gone to medical school.

James Robinson, 79, Dies; Filled an Ambulance Gap in Brooklyn

When a 7-year-old girl was hit by a car one day in 1988 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, it took more than 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. When it did, her uncle, James Robinson Jr., climbed in for the ride to the hospital.

He was right. He was 3,000 feet above the traffic, in a helicopter.

In New York City, which is saddled with gridlocked roads and slow and unreliable public transit, more and more of those who can afford to are flying over it all.

Helicopter service is blossoming in the region, not just to the area’s three main airports but also to the Hamptons, a popular playground for the rich. The Hamptons, on the East End of Long Island, have the same downside as the airports: Getting there by car or commuter train can be no fun at all.

Of course, helicopter travel is fun if you have the money to pay for it, which would leave most New Yorkers sharing the pain on the ground while the privileged fly overhead — yet another manifestation of the income inequality that has come to define life in a new Gilded Age.

But for the fortunate few like Anand, it can be enjoyable to look down on one of those New York traffic jams that seem to go on as long as the Hundred Years’ War.

And sitting in a fancy departure lounge enjoying a cocktail is far more enjoyable than stewing in an unmoving car.

“The exclusivity of it, I like that,” said Tami Fox, a writer who has flown by helicopter to Southampton. “I like the efficiency. I’ll be there by sunset with a glass of rosé in my hand.”

Uber, which has transformed the way people travel on the ground, is moving into the airspace; it started helicopter service to Kennedy in early July.

Another company, Blade, started flying to New York’s three major airports — Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International — in the spring after testing the routes in previous years. It said ridership was flourishing, though it declined to provide figures.

The company said it had also seen high demand for service to towns its helicopters fly to on Long Island: East Hampton, Southampton, Montauk, Sag Harbor and Westhampton.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airports, said helicopter traffic has increased in recent years. At La Guardia, there were 1,096 helicopter takeoffs and landings last year, compared with 874 in 2017, a 25% increase. At Newark Liberty, there were 4,391 helicopter takeoffs and landings last year, up from 3,626 in 2017, a 21% increase.

At Kennedy, there were 1,966 takeoffs and landings in the first five months of this year, up from 1,064 during the same period a year ago, an 84% increase.

The jump in helicopter traffic has upset some people on the ground below the flight path who say they have to listen to the incessant roar of the vehicles.

“There’s a bunch more helicopters than there used to be,” Betty Brayton, the chairwoman of a local community board in Queens, said, adding that there is also more noise. “Just because somebody’s got a couple hundred bucks to get to the airport doesn’t mean they should be doing that to the negative impact of somebody else. They can get to the airport the same way everybody else gets to the airport.”

The increase in helicopter traffic has also raised concerns about safety — a pilot was killed when a private helicopter crashed on the roof of an office building in Midtown Manhattan in June — and three City Council members recently called on the Federal Aviation Administration to ban “nonessential” helicopter travel over the city.

“These flights are run solely for the benefit of the private operators and the few passengers with the means to afford the expensive ticket,” said one of the three, Mark Levine of Manhattan, adding that the city does not have the authority to ban such flights.

Anand’s trip on a Blade helicopter took less than eight minutes from liftoff at the West 30th Street Heliport in Manhattan to landing at Kennedy, where Blade had sport-utility vehicles waiting. The SUVs drove him and the other passengers on his Blade flight to the airline terminals, where they boarded their commercial flights.

The helicopter ride cost $195, about $100 more than a typical Uber ride would cost, about $135 more than a taxi trip and $187.25 more than a subway-and-AirTrain combination.

To one passenger, James Kogut, the price was not exorbitant.

“If you value your time, paying this kind of money to get a couple of extra hours is worth it,” said Kogut, 30, an associate broker in a Manhattan real estate firm who was bound for a JetBlue flight from Kennedy to Reno, Nevada, and a bachelor party in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

In the New York area, taking a helicopter to the Hamptons has long been a way that people with money are different. “It’s conspicuous consumption,” said Bob Mann, an aviation industry analyst. “It’s instantaneous satisfaction, or almost.”

But chartering a helicopter costs $1,500 and up, and if there is only one passenger, there are several empty seats.

One goal of Blade is “moving the word ‘indulgence’ away from helicopters,” according to its chief executive, Rob Wiesenthal. By offering what amounts to ride-sharing in the sky, Blade, which also has operations to airports and other destinations around San Francisco and Los Angeles, has made helicopter flights less expensive if still not affordable for everyone.

“We basically say, look, congestion in the city has never been worse,” he said. “We turn a two-hour drive into a five-minute flight. We say this is not an indulgence, this is mobility.”

Uber said its mission is different from Blade’s. “We’re not trying to launch helicopter service for the 1%,” Matt Wing, an Uber spokesman, said. “We’re just trying to test for the future.”

The company’s operation in New York is a dress rehearsal for an aerial ride-sharing network elsewhere, using not helicopters but what are essentially air taxis — electric vertical takeoff and landing craft, designed to rise straight up like a helicopter but fly like a fixed-wing aircraft.

Uber said it expects to begin test-flying such machines next year in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles areas. They will have pilots, at least at first, and the aircraft will need federal approval — and permission from local authorities if they are to take off or land from the tops of buildings in downtown areas.

First, Wing said, Uber wanted to master what will be involved on the ground. “You order it, the car takes you to the heliport, you get in the helicopter, it takes off, it lands, you get out and another car takes you to your terminal,” he said.

The helicopter operation to Kennedy is aimed at figuring out how to make each part of the trip unfold seamlessly. That was an important reason behind Uber’s decision to fly to Kennedy: It is one of the world’s busiest and most complicated airports. Uber figures if service works there, it can work anywhere.

Although the services have added to the traffic in the skies over New York City, Mann, the aviation analyst, said traveling by helicopter is “never going to be a mass-market thing.”

“It’s either going to be high-net-worth individuals or high-time-value individuals, or people who are out for a lark and a joy ride,” he said.

Dietrich Stephan, a geneticist and entrepreneur from Pittsburgh, was in the second category. His decision to take a Blade helicopter to the Hamptons for a meeting “was spur of the moment,” he said.

He had dreaded “facing near 100-degree weather, slogging through Penn Station, switching at Jamaica and spending three hours on the Long Island Rail Road,” he explained. “Someone in my last meeting said, ‘You should look into Blade.’ I said for $195, it was worth it.”

He was misinformed. While the fare to Kennedy is $195, a ride to the Hamptons starts at $695 and can cost about $1,400, depending on the type of aircraft. The $795 Stephan was charged did not faze him.

“I decided you only live once,” he said. “I do have to be there for a meeting.”

Wiesenthal said Blade draws roughly equal numbers of passengers under and over 40, but there are distinct differences. “Our older customers value the time,” he said. “Younger customers value the experience more.”

That explains passengers who arrive 40 minutes before departure time, snapping selfies in the lounge. “I say, ‘You could come in five minutes before,’ and they say, ‘I want to record this for posterity.’”

For first-time passengers like Sophie Covillard, an export sales representative, the lounge at the 30th Street Heliport was part of the experience. “I’m using my savings to do this,” she said before boarding, “but it’s worth it.”

After her flight to Southampton, she said that she had smiled all the way as she looked down at traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/nyregion/helicopter-nyc-airports-hamptons.html" id="1f209081-e577-383f-a9f2-95a79dc847a1">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Aakash Anand, who was on his way to Kennedy International Airport, looked out the window at the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. “I’m not sitting in that bumper-to-bumper traffic,” he said happily.

James Barron

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