10-3-2014 New York:
Talk about a big crybaby. A 560-pound former pimp and convicted sex offender called The Post to whine about his taxpayer-funded stay at a Queens medical center — saying his bed was too small and the food is scanty and bland.
Kenneth Harvey, 58, says the Peninsula Center for Extended Care and Rehabilitation in Far Rockaway has made his five-month stay a “bad dream.”
“My body is literally bending the mattress like an accordion,” Harvey said in his private room, which costs Medicaid and Social Security up to $10,000 a month.
“A lot of times when they bring a meal up here, almost nothing is on the plate,” he said. “There might be lettuce and tomatoes and two pieces of bread. That’s what they call lunch.”
The supersized slacker, who was once 700 pounds, said he griped to the state Health Department and Queens Legal Aid to no avail.
Maybe the heavyset hustler’s own past came back to bite him. Harvey admits he used to own an escort service.
He was convicted of first-degree attempted rape in 1994, and was sentenced to four to eight years in prison, the state sex offender registry says. The charge was for a violent attack on a woman at the Pickwick Arms Hotel on East 51st Street in Manhattan in 1993.
Authorities in New Jersey separately accused him of stalking and harassing his victim so she wouldn’t testify. Harvey said the charge was dropped.
Harvey says his apartment in Brooklyn burned in 2013. He lived on the streets for a while and panhandled at Grand Central Terminal. Eventually, he was hospitalized with pneumonia.
A social worker at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick, Brooklyn, set him up at Peninsula.
“It’s a rehab place and also a long-term home for you until you lose enough weight to get back on your feet,” the social worker told him.
“I’m the heaviest guy here in the home. Nobody is nearly as heavy as me,” Harvey said.
“A lot of people don’t like people as heavy as me,” he whined.
Harvey says Peninsula’s staff is slow to respond to his requests for pain medication or to empty his urine bottle.
“I have to wait three hours for medication here,” he said. “I am in pain from not being in a proper bed.
“I’m being verbally abused by everybody.
“Depression can do a lot of things. It can happen to anybody.”
He has no money. The hospital takes the $800 per month he gets from Social Security, he says.
Harvey hopes a lawyer will help him sue the home.
On Friday, The Post observed as nursing-home staff set up a bigger bed. ..Source.. by Kate Briquelet
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