Daily News from New York, New York • 163

DAILY NEWS, MONDAY, MAY 1, 1978 19 lihereslnlelphr SrimeMhtimsmd Witnesses Koch assured that the kind of services that the Brooklyn woman received will be expanded to all of the city's criminal courts. Lucy Friedman, associate director of ILe Vera Institute of Justice, will head the Victim Services Agency a non profit corporation financed with $1.5 million in federal community development funds. Expand he Services Dae to open shop July 1, the agency will pet in start up funds from the city and will be under mayoral control. Friedman's first priority will be to expand the -ception room services to every victim and witness viio comes to Criminal Court. Caseworkers will interview victims to offer moral support and to make appropriate referrals to battered women's shelters.

services, senior citizens programs or the Department of Social Services' Emergency Assistance Unit. They also will help victims fill out insurance forms pnd inform them of their eligibility for benefits from the state's Crime Victims Compenation Board. The agency also will expand Brooklyn's victim "hotline," so that flustered crime victims around the f-Uv can telephone and receive cool-headed suggestions fro i volunteer workers about what to do next. The agency will coordinate existing programs for crime victims, most of them run by private groups, and try to fill gaps in existing serv ices. One common problem is that when your wallet is stolen, it is a time-consuming process to replace Medicaid, half-fare transit and her cards.

Friedman hopes to set up a central place where applications for all of the new cards could be filled out and expedited. She sees smell merchants is a particularly neglected class of crime vict'ms i.nd wants to make, them aware of the availability cf federal crime insurance. The agency also might provide individuals to mind the store" when the have to make court appearances. The agency will expand its experiments by substituting mediation proceedings for criminal trials. Conducted only with the consent of the judge, district attorney, victim and defendant, the theory behind is that such proceedings is that victims are more interested in being compendated by the defendant than in putting the dfendant in jail.

"Our main purpose will be to hook up the victims with what services exist and to make sure they are not victimized further by the bureaucracy of the courts," Friedman says. By SHERYL McCARTHY When a Brooklyn man helped put out a fire in his neighborhood last winter, he was assaulted by a suspected arsonist who then threatened to burn down the man's house. The man and his wife pressed criminal charges. But when the case came to trial in Brooklyn Criminal Court, the wife was terrified of entering the courtroom and sitting for hours in the defendant's presence. In the district attorney's office she met a caseworker from the court's Victim-Witness- Assistance Project, a three-year-old pilot program- run by the Vera Institute of Justice.

He suggested that she remain in the project's own waiting room until she was called, which eased her concern considerably. And she was spared having to wait in court during three adjournments because of the project's "witness alert" system. She merely notified the project of her whereabouts on scheduled court dates so she could be contacted if needed. With his announcement last week that he is creating a quasi-city agency to aid crime vietims, Mayor Letting George Do It Again Time ckout t's Che 111 or bx-lotnm By FRANK LOMBARD! Almost two years after the last guests checked out of the Commodore Hotel on E. 42d its owners will complete arrangements this week for $140 million in financing and will begin stripping the 62-year- I 111 l-r New Bond Is Oifem old hotel to its frame.

The Commodore then will be transformed into an ultramodern, 1.400-room Hyatt Regency Hotel that will be completed in time to cash in en the city's proposed convention center. The Hyatt is slated to be completed by May 1980, according to its developer, Donald J. Trump. The convention center announced Friday by Mayor Koch is scheduled to be finished by 1983. Trump is counting on housing many of the new convention guests the city hopes will be attracted to the new convention center.

Last year the city drew 840 conventions to its hotels and the Coliseum, attracting 3.5 million visitors and generating S1.6 billion in spending. Experts estimate the new convention center will bring in up to 394.000 additional convention guests a year to help feed tax dollars into city and state coffers and cash into the business economy. Trump says his new hotel though situated across town from the proposed convention center at W. 34th SL will be the closest new, major hotel. Sees City Renaissance "We'll be in the middle of a renaissance of this section of the city," says the 31-year-old developer of the Commodore, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal.

Just down the street is the Chrysler Building, whose owners the Massachusets Mutual Life Insurance Co. recently announced a $23 million rehabilitation effort. The Commodore closed on May 18. 1976. Two days later the city granted tax abatements to the proposed hotel under a program that provides incentives to private developers to build new facilities in the city.

Owned by the bankrupt Penn Central (as is the site of the proposed convention center on W. 34th the Commodore will be turned over for $1 to the state's Urban Development Corp. The UDC will turn the hotel back to Trump with a 99-year lease. The city will provide abatements for 40 years. He has Financing Trump said that he has obtained a $70 million construction mortgage and another $70 million in financing loans.

It is believed the construction loan is being made by Manufacturers Hanover, while a consortium including the Bowery Savings Bank and Equitable Life provided the remaining finances. The new Hyatt Regency will include a ballroom, which Trump says will be the largest in the By Big Mac By MARK LIEBERMAN The Municipal Assistance Corp. will unveil this week a new bond which it will offer to the city's pension systems to raise needed operating cash for the city. Big Mac officials say Uie new security will be supported by revenues not needed to off Big" Mac's existing bonds and by city bonds which will be sold to the siate agency. Big Mac chairman Felix Rohatyn says the new bond would "another ftring to our bowtoy creating a new security we could use for special purposes such as future pension system investments." Big Mic currently issues first and second resolution bonds.

The first resolution bonds are repaid from sales and stock transfer tax proceeds. The second resolution bonds are backed by those revenues and state aid to the city. Requires Board Okay The Big Mac plan will require approval of the corporations's board of directors and the Legislature. Eig Mac sources say they see no reason why the legislation can't be passed "as soon as it is introduced" to allow time to complete transactions required tto raise cash for the city by May 22, the date which Controller Harrison J. Gol-din's office row says is when the city will run out of money.

Big Mac sources say that although the city pension systems were supposed to invest S683 million this month in city bonds and the city sinking funds another $20 million, the city does not neet that entire sum to get through May and June. But, the sources say, the full $703 million would allow the city to get through July in the event Congress delayed action on credit aid for the News photo by Michael Lipack Ceremony reenacting inauguration of George Washington as nation's first president is underway at Federal Hall National Memorial yesterday. Event, conducted by grand lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, celebrated 189th anniversary of Washington's inauguration. ops to Ge British Suits Armor at 7. 6S Each By THOMAS POSTER New York bomb squad cops will soon be protected by British armor suits that cost $7,616.66 each.

Deputy Mayor Phi'ip Toia has approved tro purchase of two of the suits, which are manufactured by the Calt Glass Co. on the Isle of Wright. "These suits are utilized by the British Army and are the suits that their forces wear in Northern Ireland, and are considered the best protection available," Toia's office said. The armor suits were tested for 30 days at the Police Department's Rodman Neck training facility in the Bronx. There Is No Equal "They found that it is the only suit that provides an acceptable level of protection against bomb flash, pressure r.nd fragmentation," Toia's office said.

His office said also that "a consensus of opinion of 21 bomb technicians at the FBI Academy was thai Inere is no existing armor available that can equal the suit." City officials supported their request to purchase the suits by quoting the chief of the U.S. Army Research Development Center at Natick, who said there is no domestic equivalent of the suit. In addition to wearing the suits when checking bombs, Uw police can wear city, and 65.000 square feet of space for them as protection against gunfire in emergencies..