Big Apple's a crime scene once more

Nonetheless, in the past week there has been a rash of nasty crimes, a reminder of how this city used to be 10 years ago when I first moved here, with an uneasy friction between a violent underclass and the supremely wealthy upper class. Then, the tension was manifest by horrific high-profile rapes in Central Park and on the Upper East Side. There were scenes eerily reminiscent of the moment in the film of Batman, when young Bruce Wayne sees his wealthy parents murdered casually by thugs.

Since then there has, more or less, been calm, thanks mainly to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crime-busting methods, followed by the rise and dominance of Manhattan's newest breed: the hedge-fund kings. With their fat wallets and baby faces, these young men and their reed-thin wives are buying up all available property in Manhattan, driving anyone who has, say, a mere million or two out to Brooklyn or the suburbs.

And Downtown is the new Uptown, with new private schools and the best public school in the city. The fashionable boites are on the Lower East Side - it's where Chelsea Clinton goes to drink.

Yet last week there were two horrible rapes in that neighbourhood, allegedly committed by a man posing as a taxi driver, right outside the trendiest club of them all, The Box on Chrystie Street.

Suddenly it feels like we're in a time-warp. New York's former police commissioner William Bratton, now busy policing Los Angeles, warned recently that domestic crime was rising, particularly in New York, because our police resources have been refocused on fighting terrorism. If he's right, could it be that the hedge-fund kings will follow the nouveau-pauvre to the suburbs? Manhattan could be left empty like a ghost town. Now there's a strange thought.