Nearly a Ton of Taxpayer-Provided Food Wasted Every Day in NYC Because Illegals Won’t Eat It
Nearly a TON of taxpayer-provided food is thrown in the trash each day at a huge Manhattan hotel. Housing migrants — because they’d rather secretly cook their own meals on dangerous hot plates, a whistleblowing worker has revealed.
The disturbing photos of garbage bags filled with bagels and sandwiches at the four-star Row NYC hotel near Times Square show that there is no way to dispose of them. A daily rate of $500 per room is charged by the city.Felipe Rodriguez, a hotel employee, told The Post.
“It’s a crime to be throwing out so much food,” He stated.
Rodriguez stated that another image shows a hotel room filled with empty beer cans, bottles, and other debris from a November World Cup viewing party.
That gathering — in a room whose occupant “gave the key to a cousin” While she “was in The Bronx, hanging out” — erupted into a fight over the match that left one man with a “big knot on his head,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez also said that he shot a clip of two female migrants engaging each other in a fight for their hair outside the hotel. New Year’s Eve festivities Last week.
A cellphone recording of 23 seconds shows men holding what appears to be beer cans and trying to separate women who fell off the sidewalk onto the street.
An NYPD source who was working in Times Square on New Year’s Eve confirmed the chaos at the hotel, saying the lobby was littered with broken bottles and some revelers were dancing while others were sprawled out on the furniture and the floor.
“It was a total s–t show,” They said so.
City Hall refuses to disclose the rent for the Row and any other properties. Migrants are housed in hotels
But Rodriguez said he’s “heard from management it’s between $400 and $500 a night, per room, depending on how big the room is.”
Rodriguez, 57, said he began working at the 1,300-room hotel in 2017 and was shocked by what’s happened since Mayor Eric Adams’ administration began using it as a “Humanitarian Response and Relief Center.”
“What changed in October was dramatic,” He stated. “There are some nice migrants in that hotel looking for that American dream, that second chance to make it in society. But there are a lot of migrants there that are causing chaos. We have a lot of fights, a lot of drugs, a lot of sexual harassment abuse.”
According to an NYPD source, cops responded to several domestic incidents at the hotel.
Rodriguez claimed that NYPD officers had been initially stationed at the lobby but were eventually replaced by National Guard soldiers.
Rodriguez said that Rodriguez had also mentioned that there was a list in the hotel. “of people that are supposed to be quarantined — for COVID, chickenpox, whatever it is.”
“Nobody supervises those people,” He stated. “Once they get bored, they flee. We don’t know who’s sick and who’s not sick.”
Rodriguez added ruefully: “We are in an environment that is hostile, violent and not safe anymore.”
The Row NYC, one of the four HERRCs, is located in Manhattan’s large hotels and also lets out 71 hotels in the city.
Hotel inventory is growing is being used to house about 26,100 of the 38,700 migrants who’ve flooded into the Big Apple since the spring, according to City Hall’s latest count.
Officials had initially planned to process migrants in the HERRCs only for 72 hours. However, they were overwhelmed by the influx and decided to abandon that goal. Adams declared a State of Emergency in October.
Rodriguez — who was wrongfully Convicted in 1987 fatal stabbing in Queens and released from prison in January 2017 — said that at least 40 percent of the food supplied to migrants at the Row gets thrown out.
Rodriguez also estimated how much was wasted “almost a ton” One day.
“How do I know that? Because the sanitation guys go floor-by-floor every day picking up the trash,” He stated. “Before, it used to be something like six, seven bags in the back landing of each floor. Now they’re picking up 15-20 bags.
“Anything [the migrants] don’t consume is in those bags, and they’re heavy. I weighed one of the bags full of sandwiches one time and it weighed 60 pounds.”
Rodriguez added: “There have been times when we couldn’t take all of the garbage out because the bins were full, and I’m talking about 25-30 bins of garbage.”
“My problem is, why are we throwing away so much food? Someone from the city should have said, ‘Let’s order less food so we throw less food out.’ But nobody cares,” He stated.
At the same time, Rodriguez said, he’s confiscated hot plates, pressure cookers and other forbidden kitchen items from hotel residents at least eight times.
“I felt horrible. They want a hot meal. They don’t want sandwiches. They want a cooked meal like in their own country. And that’s a serious issue,” He stated.
Sandwiches and bagels are not the only food offered to migrants. They also get fruit, peanuts and chips as well as prepared meals. “you heat in a microwave,” Rodriguez said.
“They don’t like the menu. They just don’t. They want rice and beans, plantains, tostones,” He stated.
Rodriguez recalls an incident from last month. “I knocked on the door on the 18th floor to deliver a duvet and I saw smoke and could hear a fire alarm going off.”
“I put in my key and pushed open the door, and a whole bunch of smoke came out,” He stated. “A lady was there and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ She said, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘What do you mean nothing? Where’s all this smoke coming from?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’”
Rodriguez claimed that he searched the room for burned rice and found it in the bathroom vanity. He also found two other pots and a frying pan. “an old hot plate” Unter dem Bett.
“It was older than my grandmother, and my grandmother’s been gone a long time,” He stated. “I was like, ‘Seriously? This is electrical. If these wires spark and something goes wrong, this whole building will be on fire.’”
Rodriguez — who kept working at the hotel even after scoring a $5 million settlement from the state in April — said he felt so bad that he gave the family $300 the next day and told them to go to a restaurant.
Rodriguez stated that he understood the reasons for the hotel’s closure. “can’t allow” Migrants are allowed to cook in their homes.
“They usually put the hot plate on the rug so that nobody can see it and it stays away from the fire alarm,” He laughed. “If those polyester curtains by the windows touch that red coil, it’s over. It’s a possibility that scares the s–t out of everybody in the Row.
“If you are on the 27th floor, the 28th floor, and a fire breaks out, the elevators are gone. That means you have to use the stairs,” He stated. “My biggest concern is the children. We have too many children in that hotel. We have pregnant women in the hotel…The tragedy would be devastating.”
Rodriguez added that the Row “forgot about the standards we had when we had regular guests.”
“If they got caught smoking in the hotel it was a $500 charge. You could smoke outside, but you couldn’t stand in front so that people wouldn’t get secondhand smoke,” He said “The protocols went down the toilet because migrants can smoke weed, they can smoke cigarettes. You can’t tell them nothing.”
Rodriguez also alleged that he’s seen some residents apparently selling drugs outside the hotel and that he took photos of some scooters that were chained up nearby.
“One of the guys said, ‘Yo, why are you taking pictures?’ I said, ‘Because they don’t belong here.’ He said, ‘They’re ours.’ I said, ‘How are they yours if you just got here? How do you get money to buy scooters? These are brand new scooters?’” He said he remembered, and that he didn’t get a straight response.
Rodriguez first spoke about what he’s seen and documented at the Row in an interview with ABC7 New York’s “Eyewitness News.”
Rodriguez, who maintained his innocence in Maureen McNeill Fernandez’s murder, was convicted of the crime in 1990 largely due to testimony from a police informant, who later admitted that Rodriguez was part of the frame.
Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo commuted Rodriguez’s sentence in December 2016 and he was cleared in 2019 by a judge who called the case a “miscarriage of justice.”
Rodriguez said he kept his hotel job — which nets him $800 a week after taxes — following his wrongful-conviction settlement because “I get something out of going to work, doing something that’s purposeful.”
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He kept working through the COVID-19 pandemic when the Row — formerly known as the Milford Plaza, which advertised itself as the “Lullabuy of Broadway” in memorable 1980s TV commercials — rented out four floors to the city to house homeless people.
“The rest of the floors were for airline employees, tourists from Europe. During the United Nations General Assembly, we had Secret Service and FBI staying with us. It was a fantastic hotel,” He stated.
In October, Rodriguez said, “We were told the hotel was going to have migrants, but it was only going to be five floors, and that was it.
“When the hotel says that migrants were going to be a good business, they canceled the airlines’ contracts and they decided they weren’t going to rent to regular guests anymore. And they went and gave the city the entire hotel,” He stated.
The hotel’s website now has a large notice on its homepage that says: “ROW NYC HOTEL IS CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR ANNOUNCEMENTS AND UPDATES.”
The Row didn’t return requests for comment and NYC Health + Hospitals, which oversees the hotel and the other HERRCs, referred questions to City Hall, which issued a prepared statement that said, “All clients are offered a food selection that reflects the diets of residents and is prepared same-day to ensure freshness.”
“Last month, residents were even asked to participate in guest surveys to help us refine and expand menu options. Of course, we cannot and would not ever force clients to finish food they had taken but we do donate leftover food when possible,” The statement was added.
Officials from the city also stated that Row has security personnel assigned to each floor in order to spot potential problems and ensure safety for residents and staff.
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