Donohue Cecere Funeral Directors

We were supposed to sit on the first base line, third deck. But instead of seeing the Mets’ Noah Syndergaard strike out Nationals shortstop Danny Espinosa to lead off the third, I stand in the Donohue-Cecere Funeral Home in Westbury and watch David "Bull" Gurfein pray over the body of a stranger. He looks at peace there on the kneeler, though he’ll tell me later that he’s uncomfortable at wakes, even the ones he doesn’t crash. He rises, pauses at the casket as if to say a final goodbye to a man he’d never said hello to, then turns to greet the grieving son. I lunge for the kneeler and remove the prayer card from my coat pocket. There’s some Hallmark verse on the back that funeral homes pass off as prayer—"Ah, bitter sweet was the trial to part from one as good as you"—and a print of St. Anthony on the front. The 13th Century Franciscan is the patron saint of things lost. He has helped me find everything from sunglasses to car keys, but not even he can help me recover the story I set out to write.Gurfein’s running an underdog campaign against the Washington machine to become the first Republican to represent New York’s Fourth District since 1994; the Mets trail the Washington Nationals by one game. The metaphor writes itself. All I had to do was coast through a yawn-filled day on the campaign trail and I could see a baseball game for free. I didn’t count on Gurfein crashing a wake or accidentally getting inducted into a ridiculous veterans group or making a pitstop to help those Koreans.The whole project seems ill-fated from the moment I leave D.C.—I trip a red light camera on I-295 at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday—to the moment I arrive in Long Island—Gurfein’s campaign manager gets a speeding ticket en route to our rendezvous—to my return home—either my rental car or the VW van next to me tripped the I-295 red light camera at 3:50 a.m. Wednesday. Twenty four hours of sleepless calamity. "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrano [the Fourth Congressional District of New York]."Gurfein’s resumé and campaign announcement would make most candi... (Washington Free Beacon)

The Centre Island resident, whose firm Polimeni International LLC developed major retail and office real estate projects from Port Jefferson to Poland, was 70. His family said he had been suffering a "debilitating illness."Most Popular He was sitting in a Warsaw restaurant in 2007, next to contractors discussing the Chunnel undersea rail tunnel between England and France, when he envisioned his most ambitious idea: the Cross Sound Link. The $13-billion project would connect Oyster Bay to Rye with a 16-mile, privately owned and operated tunnel under Long Island Sound. For a proposed cost of $25 each way, motorists could reduce the time of a 45-mile trip by nearly two-thirds by avoiding congested New York City roads and bridges. Polimeni put together a team of investors and spent millions of dollars conducting engineering and environmental studies for the project, which he promoted as not only feasible, but necessary for the future of Long Island. "It made sense. . . . The need was obviously there," his son, Michael Polimeni, of Locust Valley, said Monday. "He recognized that . . . what we do stays in a community indefinitely. He had a real sense of responsibility about that." The Cross Sound Link, which found support among planning groups but some scrutiny from elected officials, ultimately stalled in the state approval stages three years ago. Polimeni, who grew up in Brooklyn and served three years in the U.S. Air Force, first got excited about real estate while installing carpeting in a law office handling a property deal, his son said. Years later, he married his wife, Joan, and went to work as a broker for her father's real estate agency. He later founded his Garden City firm and first made a name for himself in the commercial real estate industry with the development of the 400,000-square-foot Islandia Shopping Center in 1991. Other large development projects followed, including a 250,000-square-foot office pavilion in Mineola and the 150,000-square-foot MacArthur Plaza in Holbrook. Polimeni also took special pride in seve... (Newsday)