NEW ROCHELLE, NY (July 13, 2022) — As I announced in my first article in this series, Ethics Investigation Transcripts Raise New Questions About New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson, et al, simply dumping all the transcripts online would be like inviting readers to drink from a firehose. I wanted instead to offer readers an organized way to get deep into a complicated stack of documents. Without structure, it would be like trying to complete a blank jigsaw puzzle.
To get started I decided to work on the most important issue — the one I believe caught the attention of Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocah and is now the subject of a Grand Jury investigation — Mayor Noam Bramson using his public office to obtain something of value, the position of Development Commissioner which carried with it an annual raise of $100,000 a year for five years ($500,000) and a corresponding pension increase, together worth an estimated (by me) $2,750,000 above his current salary and pension package.
This work turned out to be a much bigger project than I envisioned (67 pages and counting). It took two full days to first use OCR to convert the transcript PDFs with tiny font to annoyingly imperfect editable text then copy/paste that text into a word processor, clean that up, then pull dates out of the transcripts to create a timeline, then group different sections of testimony from different witnesses under the dates and events in the timeline so, as best as I was able, every witness account of a specific event on the timeline was arranged in proximity to that event and other accounts of the same event. This was especially difficult because some witnesses had imperfect recollections and some witnesses were not telling the truth.
Read the entire article here.