The city has agreed to pay more than $350,000 to settle three lawsuits brought by protestors at Occupy Wall Street who claimed thousands of books, electronic equipment and bikes seized by the city were either damaged or never returned.
The biggest winner in the deal was civil rights lawyer Normal Siegel, who collected $186,349 in legal fees, sources said.
Twenty-six truckloads of materials were carted off when cops raided Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, 2011 and ended a two-month sit-in that drew worldwide attention.
Among them, according to a federal lawsuit, were 3,600 books that were part of the stock of the “People’s Library.”
The volumes included classics by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, an autobiography of Andrew Carnegie and even Mayor Bloomberg’s autobiogpraphy, “Bloomberg by Bloomberg,” said Siegel.
About 1,000 books were recovered from the Sanitation Department. But 200 were so severely damaged that had to be tossed, the lawsuit said.
The protestors sued for $47,000 and that’s what they got.
One third of that sum is being paid by Brookfield Properties, which owns Zuccotti Park.
In a second lawsuit, the city paid $75,000 to Global Revolution Television for broken electronic equipment and $49,850 in lawyer’s fees to Wylie Stecklow.
In a third suit, the Time’s Up bike group collected $8,500 for bicycles that were damaged. The group’s lawyer, Samuel B. Cohen, received no fee.