Wildfires torched over 6,000 acres in New York in the last few weeks. The Hudson Valley and the Catskills bore the brunt of the damage, though smaller brush fires broke out across New York City. Hundreds of people evacuated their homes. Schools closed. Dariel Vasquez, an 18-year-old New York state parks department employee, died while battling the blazes. This October was the driest in well over a century, creating the conditions for November’s wildfires to spark and rapidly spread.

But as the risk of fires in New York has grown over the years, one thing hasn’t changed: the number of park rangers and volunteer firefighters responsible for preventing them and putting them out. Former and current leaders of the state’s rangers union, part of the Police Benevolent Association of New York State, have expressed fears that blazes could get even bigger and have lobbied state leaders to prioritize wildfire management and better support the rangers.

A Wall Street mogul with unclear motives is gearing up to spend nearly a million dollars boosting candidates for New York City Council next year.

Michael Jenkins, a founder of the major financial firm Jane Street, is a reclusive figure who has made several attempts in the past to influence New York City elections, primarily in the Bronx. This year, he has dumped $950,000 into a political action committee that has so far only announced its intention to support one nonprofit executive-turned City Council candidate.

The individuals running the PAC appear to have skirted campaign finance laws in their previous political efforts, and they avoided New York Focus’s questions about their political motives. It’s not clear why Jenkins, who did not respond to a request for comment, and according to the address listed on most of his donations lives in Manhattan, has poured his personal funds into low-profile elections in the Bronx.

New York has faced the same conundrum for decades: how to build an effective ethics watchdog agency.

The tension is structural: The state legislature and the governor are responsible for passing any law that creates an ethics agency, yet those are the very same people the agency will scrutinize — and potentially penalize.

The unfolding international scandal around Mayor Eric Adams has fixed New York City’s attention on his odd ties to various Turkish government proxies.

But overlooked have been the equally strange ties one of those groups, a charity incorporated by the son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has to medical fraudsters in Brooklyn — the borough that catapulted Adams into power.

So far, public attention on the Turken Foundation has focused on the nonprofit’s 21-floor headquarters in Midtown, which Adams helped break ground for in 2018 as Brooklyn borough president, and on the donations some of its leaders made to his campaigns.

But well before it secured a foothold in Manhattan for its glamorous home base, Turken acquired a dingy one-story doctor’s office in the remote reaches of Brooklyn. In doing so, the organization entangled itself in a network of insurance-related criminal schemes endemic to both the building and the surrounding neighborhood: what New York magazine once labeled “the Brighton Beach swindle.”