Daily News from New York, New York • 16

(gDO0 (gtajD IIIIIM uw jt- tf: SrZtfXtftitp ft I firm bought it in 1989 for $16 million. Independence is run by Alfred J. Koeppel, a member of a powerful real estate family. Last year, the Daily News reported that the Koeppels were also deadbeats who owed the city more than $4 million in property taxes. The top 20 commercial real estate deadbeats alone owed the city more than $80 million.

Yet these tax delinquents somehow manage to get City Hall to provide rent-a-cop service for them. Look around and you will see a blue uniform standing guard next to virtually every group of four or five picketers. Last Friday night at 26 Broadway, seven of Lichvrik's co-workers were hauled in by cops and given desk appearance tickets. "When the private garbage trucks came, I walked over to them nicely to ask them not to cross our lines," said ANA LICHVRIK, wrinkled and white-haired, stood huddled at a snowbank outside a towering office building at the foot of Manhattan. The evening rush hour had begun, and hundreds of office workers were pouring out onto Broadway, sloshing their way toward the Staten Island ferry or the subways.

Next to Lichvrik stood Laura Djen-cic and Mary Grys and a half-dozen other women, all bundled in shawls and worn coats and looking frightened and lost. For 40 years, since she came here from Czechoslovakia as a teenager, Lichvrik has cleaned offices in the building at 26 Broadway. Every night, after all the big-time analysts from Standard Poor's and their secretaries had gone home. Lichvrik would arrive to empty their trash cans and vacuum their rugs and clean their bathrooms HAM AIo Hoti, the only man in the group. "Right away, the truck driver yelled, 'Get out of the way or I'll run you over.

The women walked over and formed a line peacefully in front of the truck, and all of a sud and polish their floors spotless for the next morning. But last evening, and all this week, Lichvrik and her coworkers were treated like goons and criminal suspects by the UND CATAFFO DAILY NEWS SIGNING ON for another day on the picket line yesterday are these members of the maintenance workers union at the World Trade Center. 9 Guy sQdICs DfH(tar ate odu DtadhnoQ By ALEX MICHEUNI city to which she has given only a life's worth of honest work. For the first time, Lichvrik is on strike along with 35.000 other cleaners and porters from Local 32B-32J who work at 1,363 office buildings. The strikers stand in small knots with their picket signs outside these skyscrapers many of them elderly, unassuming immigrant women from Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America.

They are facing some of the most powerful millionaires in the country. Among the landlords are Lew Rudin, Arthur G. Cohen and Jerry Speyer. and such companies as Olympia York and Ilelmsley-Spear. Imagine Leona Helmsley complaining that a cleaning woman who makes $29,000 a year is pricing her out of business.

Or take, for example, Lichvrik's building at 26 Broadway, which is owned by Independence Partners. The ,9 Mm mm -H: den about 10 cop cars showed up. They never even asked us to move, just started shoving." Mary Grys charged she was thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Yesterday, a week later, there were still welts on her wrists from the handcuffs. Police took in striker Laura Djencic and her husband, who had just driven up to take her home and was standing on the sidewalk.

"We're not criminals. Our taxes pay those cops' salaries," Hoti said. "Why are the mayor and the police taking the landlords' side?" When Mayor Giuliani talks about a shrinking tax base, he must mean the shrinking profits of Rudin, Speyer and Helmsley, not the shrinking paychecks of those New Yorkers who, like the members of 32B-32J, keep being asked to sacrifice more. The landlords have argued that labor is costing them as much as $2 a square foot in New York, which they say is too expensive. This is for properties that rent for an average of $30 a square foot It doesn't take a rocket scientist to ask, what happened to the other $28? Some junk bond whiz from Drexel Burnham Lambert, you can bet, has a good percentage, and the mortgage holders, and the management companies for the buildings, and the cleaning companies that the management company hires.

Everybody makes a killing except the cleaning people. The cleaning people even get taken by their own union leaders. But that is a story for another day. ITJ) IGHT NOW, THE MAIN ISSUE is TYthat 35,000 honest, hardworking people are out on the street because a bunch of millionaires wants to squeeze even more money out of them, and every fair-minded person in this city should tell our mayor and our police to stop renting themselves out to the the powerful. Daly News Staff Writer Gus Bevona, the powerful but reclusive leader of the striking maintenance workers union, made his first public appearance in the week-old work stoppage yesterday to rally his troops.

It was a rare showing for the heavy-set 55-year-old labor leader, who has made privacy his hallmark in his 15 years at the helm of the Local 32B-32J of the Service Employees International Union. "This is such a critical strike that he felt compelled to come out and speak out," said union spokesman Dennis Sheehan. One union insider said he couldn't remember the last time Beyona held a news conference. Bevona has conveyed his thoughts to the public mostly through written statements. But in the public eye or not, Be-vona's 35-year career in building services has had rich rewards.

He has drawn more than $400,000 in salary from the local and his membership in various labor groups in the past Sheehan did not know how much he currently makes. Yesterday, Bevona emerged at the local's gleaming five-year-old office tower on Grand St in Manhattan to say that 100 leaders of other unions had pledged their support to the strikers including possibly refusing to cross picket lines at more than 1,000 commercial buildings. But Bevona was careful to point out the union promised i whatever they i Squabble over kitty axes a 'Cats' show A special performance of "Cats" scheduled for Sunday night was called off yesterday after theatrical unions refused to make salary concessions, sources said. The performance a makeup for the one canceled Monday night because of the storm would have been in addition to the regular Sunday matinee, and unions insisted on premiums for their members, the sources said. Union officials could not be reached for comment Michael RIed.l UHDA CATAFFO DAILY NEWS QUIET MAN Gus Bevona, head of Local 32B-32J, meets press.

could do "legally," adding, means remains to be seen." Half the membership about 35,000 workers are on strike. The other half work at residential buildings, which are not affected. James Berg, spokesman for the landlord group, the Realty Advisory Board, said it had not received reports of action by other unions and that "most buildings are operating fine." Fuel oil also apparently was being delivered without incident Both sides said they were waiting for the other to call for a resumption of negotiations. But Bevona said the union would not accept a contract that includes the owners' request to trim the pay for starting workeirs.by 60a to O) 3 4f tcMt-H..