He got a job delivering food, even though it meant he had to work long hours, brave unforgiving weather and run the risk of getting mugged every time he went to a customer’s door—all for just $150 in a good week.

“People are stabbing each other for a dollar here,” said Shehu, who learned English in school and traded his delivery shifts for a safer job behind the counter of Bona Pizza on Flatbush Avenue.

Delivering food is still a dangerous and underpaid job for immigrants in Flatbush. The New York Police Department’s 70th Precinct started making efforts last year to improve safety for deliverymen, an easy target for muggers. Police officers say the outreach has worked, but restaurants remain afraid to deliver and statistics show that robberies are up.

Muggings and other types of robberies are up 13.7 percent, from 292 to 332, compared to this time last year, according to New York Police Department statistics.

Officer Hubert Tai said that there is no record of how many robberies are muggings or involve deliverymen. Because he speaks Chinese, he is often first on the scene when a deliveryman is mugged, but he said he had not been on that sort of call in months.

Tai attributed the slight rise in robberies this year to an increase in cell phone thefts. He said deliverymen are getting mugged less frequently as they become more aware of their surroundings.

“If a guy gets mugged in a building, he’s never going back there,” he said. “He may quit his job or move away, but he’ll learn. There are certain areas you don’t go to.”

Tai said that the muggings he was called for were generally perpetrated by adolescents and left the deliveryman shaken but not seriously hurt.

“If I’m there, I’ll tell them what they’re getting into,” he said. “They’re thinking about the money they just lost and what they’ll do differently next time.”

Often people stole only the food they ordered, or the small amount of cash—rarely more than $20—the deliveryman was carrying, said Tai.

Officer Yvonne Breiner said that many muggings could be avoided if deliverymen waited downstairs in public spaces instead of delivering food to people’s apartments, where it’s nearly impossible to find help in a tight situation.

Police have advised restaurants to prohibit their deliverymen from making door-to-door deliveries, Breiner said. The precinct also introduced a multilingual form designed to help non-English-speaking victims of muggings identify their assailants.

She said muggings have become less frequent in the past year but didn’t know whether deliverymen have heeded warnings not to make deliveries to apartments.

“They still need to earn a living,” she said, acknowledging the business reality that with food deliveries, convenience is really the point.

Some deliveries end in tragedy. Foreign-born deliverymen, mostly from China, have been targets of deadly muggings in Brooklyn and other New York boroughs.

Jian Lin-Chun, 36, was shot dead in Brownsville, Brooklyn by three teenage customers in 2002. Huang Chen, 18, was mugged and brutally stabbed to death in a Queens apartment in 2004. Fahua Chen, 52, was fatally shot when he delivered a $9 order to a building in the Bronx in 2005.

Not many restaurants in Flatbush offer delivery. Flatbush Avenue is lined with Chinese businesses that sell take-out from behind bulletproof plastic windows. Most pizza parlors do not deliver, and Shehu said it’s because they’re afraid.

“When I first got to the country, I was completely nervous,” Shehu said. “It was a language thing. People are asking you for money and you don’t know what they’re talking about and the next thing you know there’s three of them around you.”

Shehu said he is the only member of his family who has not been mugged in the area of Flatbush below Prospect Park, which he described as a “criminal red zone.” He said he was just lucky, not smart.

“People don’t like to deliver in a neighborhood like this,” he said. “But if you need money, you need money.”

Vox Pop, a self-billed democracy café on rapidly gentrifying Cortelyou Road in Flatbush, finally took on its eponymous function after the debate ended, the projector screen disappeared into the ceiling and one patron appointed himself discussion moderator.

“In the spirit of democracy, who would like to react to the debate?” said Murray Gordon, who was born in South Africa and lives in the neighborhood. The crowd’s pregnant silence soon broke into conversation.

About a dozen people stuck around to talk. They were all unwavering Obama supporters—no surprise in a venue that serves Obama personal pizza (topped with organic mozzarella, chicken sausage and chopped garlic) and coyly encourages patrons to accept the Joe six-pack challenge and drink when someone from the McCain camp says “reform,” “change,” “maverick,” “Main Street,” “pork barrel” or “fundamentals.”

They agreed the debate had done nothing to further the political conversation for them, but acknowledged there was little short of a silver bullet for world peace and prosperity that could have changed their voting preferences.

“It’s all filtered through Tom Brokaw, then condensed into a format that doesn’t mean anything,” said Gordon. “But we’re all so far removed from the type of people this should appeal to.”

Joseph Smith, 31, an information technology director wearing a beret and thick plugs in his tightly stretched earlobes, also placed himself far outside the debate’s target audience.

“Most of us in this room probably aren’t the average voter,” Smith said. “I find ‘my friends’ rather disgusting. Cringe.”

Indeed, patrons said the candidates did little to illuminate issues beyond their increasingly familiar talking points. At the end of the second day in a row that the stock market tumbled more than 300 points, neither showed appropriate zeal for getting the economy back on track.

When Brokaw asked Obama and McCain to respond either “yes” or “no” about whether Russia is an evil empire, both stopped short of delivering a straight answer.

Vox Pop patrons managed to turn their disappointment with the debate’s content into an opportunity for an unusual neighborhood conversation.

“Usually people watch the debate at home with a spouse or girlfriend, and they have a discussion,” said bartender Justin Wert, 24. “You don’t normally get to interact with strangers in a public space.”

Wert said that as the debate was ending, Gordon asked him whether the bar was going to have a discussion afterwards. Wert told him there were no such plans, but that he was welcome to get people talking.

“It really opened up something,” Gordon said.

When asked if there was a televised debate format that he would like to see, Gordon said a 60-minute debate every night for the next four weeks with questions selected at random would suit his needs.

Pit bulls strain on their leashes, seeming to walk the young volunteers who show up to exercise them. Impossibly small kittens doze in crates, impervious to the commotion, while lizards and snakes bask on their heat rocks. Casey took all these animals in through Hamilton Dog House, his no-kill shelter built on an unwavering conviction that all animals are adoptable.

“Everyone is here until they find a home,” said Casey, 27. “It’s a matter of waiting until we find the right owner.”

The infamous two-headed turtle wasn’t so lucky. In August, it was famously snatched from its aquarium in the shelter’s storefront, which had been decorated with a jungle scene so dense it provided a shield from the store’s security cameras. News outlets from Brooklyn to Australia picked up the story of the two-headed turtle’s kidnapping. But the publicity wasn’t exactly the type Casey hoped for.

“I think, more than new customers, we got so many calls asking, ‘Will you take my turtle?’” he said with a dry smile.

Casey offered a $1,000 reward for the turtle’s return, no questions asked—because he was worried its new owner would be unaware of its special needs, which include hand-feeding each head and keeping it in very shallow water so it doesn’t drown. He didn’t get a single tip and thinks the turtle, unable to flip upright or feed itself, is probably dead.

“My opinion is a kid stole him,” Casey said. “Unfortunately, he can’t swim, and most people would put him in water.”

In the months since the disappearance of the rare amphibian, Casey’s has continued to quietly help masses of New York’s abandoned and abused pets.

A Rottweiler/pit bull mix was found chained to a post outside the shelter in November, with chemical burns so deep her red sweater had fused with her skin. Casey nursed her back to health over a period of weeks, peeling her old skin off every morning and scrubbing her until she bled to create new skin growth. He named her Scarlett for the color of the sweater she arrived in, that he cut from her raw skin in melted scraps. His army of volunteers took her for long walks along the residential blocks of Kensington. He found her a home in Bay Ridge with a young woman who has a Chihuahua and a soft spot for tending to physical and emotional scars.

When a wary neighbor reported a six-foot American alligator to be roaming a Cypress Hills basement, Casey captured it with his friend Charles Henderson, who works as the shelter’s animal trainer and events coordinator.

“All you have to do is get on top of them, then tape their mouth up,” said Henderson, 42, a burly former college football star with dog-bitten knuckles who grew up training German Shepherds for police and military work.

After it was bound and restrained, Casey confiscated the giant lizard from its owners, two kids who received it as a gift from an old man, and sent it to live in a small zoo in the Poconos.

And he took them, as he tends to indiscriminately house the city’s unwanted dogs and cats, ferrets and hamsters, birds, snakes, lizards and frogs. Casey took in more than 2,000 animals last year. About 30 percent of them were reptiles—the often-overlooked cold-blooded victims of abuse and neglect that no other shelter in the city will take in.

Located on the corner of East Third Street that butts up against Fort Hamilton Parkway, Hamilton Dog House is the only official animal shelter in southern Brooklyn. The borough is home to two other shelters: Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition in Williamsburg, and the city-run Animal Control in East New York, which sends many of its rescues to Casey once they pass their expiration date.

Casey’s uniform is jeans and a t-shirt; he keeps his dark hair cropped boyishly close. With a faint Brooklyn accent, he described how grew up about three blocks from his shelter among five brothers and sisters and innumerable furry, feathered and scaly pets. He found his calling early on as the youngest member of the New York Herpetological Society at age 14.

“I was the only kid, so anytime someone in the group had a snake they didn’t want, they gave it to me,” he said. “Pretty soon I was the official adoption person.”

At age 18, Casey rented a small space in Sunset Park and started his first shelter. He relocated to Queens in 2005 and set up shop in a part of John F. Kennedy Airport previously used to house drug-sniffing dogs. The building ended up slated to be leveled for a new Jet Blue terminal.

Last year Casey moved his business to Kensington—the neighborhood where he grew up and just a block from where he currently lives in a one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend, Lorena; an English bulldog, Morton; a pit bull, Mia; an Italian mastiff, Macky; and an assortment of snakes that drape themselves about the “reptile room” he built around the boiler system.

All of his animals were rescues. Mia and Macky, both a year old, came from Animal Control. Morton, 7, was imported from Russia to a pet store where he was declared unfit for sale because he had pneumonia and required surgery in his knees and an eye.

“I’m sure I’ll have more reptiles,” he said, when asked about future pet acquisitions. “I have enough dogs.”

Casey’s current shelter is a modest two-room storefront, its back room is stacked floor to ceiling with crates that accommodate 15 to 20 yapping and howling dogs. Pit bull blood runs through many of them, it’s easy to see. Casey said most dogs in New York City are pit bull mixes.

“It’s the dog of choice in lower income areas, where fighting and drug dealing are part of the culture,” he said. “And in those lower income areas, people can’t afford to neuter their pets.”

The result is a surplus of dogs many people see as irrevocably aggressive. Casey is troubled by the misconception.

“People think you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” he said. “The truth is, when you socialize a dog, you can usually train the aggression right out of him.”

The shelter’s front room bustles with teens dropping off dogs they’ve walked and potential customers ogling crates of fuzzy kittens waiting to be adopted. But mostly the room is devoted to selling pet supplies. This is how Casey pays his rent.

“I’d never take from these guys,” he said, gesturing to his menagerie.

Casey said the Mayor’s Alliance, a non-profit corporation dedicated to caring for New York City’s animals, provides funds for the pets he receives from Animal Control. A vet on his board of directors performs all the medical procedures at a minimum cost. He gets some private donations, but adoption fees are what keep his business afloat.

It costs $200 to adopt a dog and $75 to adopt a cat. Casey said the basic cost to neuter, vaccinate, microchip, feed and house a dog is $150. The remaining $50 is directed to a fund for animals, like Scarlett, who have special needs and can run up hundreds of dollars in surgeries.

Casey attributes the shelter’s solvency to its unusually high turnover rate. He said the dogs that arrive at his shelter—via Animal Control, fickle owners or boxes on his doorstep—can expect an average stay of only about three weeks before he finds them a permanent home. He sees each cage as a piece of real estate to be turned over as quickly as possible.

“Every day they sit in this cage, someone else is put to sleep,” he said, referring to the pets from Animal Control that are routinely euthanized when there is no room for them at privately-owned shelters.

This means bringing all his animals, especially the problematic ones other shelters may have given up on, to adoption events and reptile symposiums. Casey also uses his Internet savvy to reach wide audiences through YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and adoption search engines such as petfinder.com.

Kittens, puppies and small-breed dogs, with their newly minted and neatly packaged charm, are the easiest to place. Older animals are tougher, and some people have a hard time warming to the idea of adopting a pit bull. Casey said he’s had adult pit bulls sit in his shelter for more than a year, but he never gives up on finding them homes.

He paused at the cage of an agitated young puggle, the designer hybrid that can sell for upwards of $2,000 a puppy in New York pet stores.

“Those two dogs were never meant to be bred together,” he said. “Beagles are so inherently stubborn, and pugs have all these health problems. People don’t know what they’re getting into.”

Despite how many animals are rushed in and out of Hamilton Dog House’s doors, Casey treats each one like it’s his own. He’s allergic to cats, but he personally microchips each kitten, tenderly holding the scruff of its neck as he injects the electronic tracking device, then disappears to scrub the dander from his hands.

“He has this way about him of being very calm,” said Theresa LaBianca, 39, who has handled the shelter’s adoptions for two years. “He knows how to approach an animal. They can feel it. He’s the same way with people.”

The shelter’s open-door policy allows neighbors to come in and out to walk the dogs and adoptive owners to return at any time for advice. Casey employs five staff and relies on dozens of volunteers to walk the dogs. Many are kids from local middle and high schools, such as 14-year-old Jonathan La.

“I’m not ready for my own dog,” La said, as he traded the leash of a floppy-eared spaniel for that of an incorrigible puppy that looked to be mostly pit bull. “But I like to help. I like for dogs to be joyful.”

Casey would like to bring joy to a wider cross-section of the city’s unwanted pets and eventually open a shelter in every borough, but first he’d like to expand his Brooklyn store. His plans might not be thwarted by the recession.

He said the city’s animal surrender rate is high, but it’s always high, and the reasons people give for turning over their pets are usually not economic. Adoptions at Hamilton Dog House have soared in the past two months—the shelter placed a record 43 dogs and 33 cats in November alone.

Casey’s success appears to be rooted in steadfast dedication and a lot of really hard work, but he has his own modest explanation.

“Maybe used car sales are better than new car sales in these times,” he said.

“I remember it vividly, like it happened yesterday,” said Framowitz, now 51. “After the other people in the car got out, he asked me to come sit beside him and he put me on his lap. He started fondling me. He opened my pants and put his hand down my pants.”

Rabbi Yehuda Kolko continued to molest Framowitz on at least 15 occasions over three more years, Framowitz said.

Framowitz lived with his private demons for decades before he learned from blog postings three years ago that Kolko had amassed numerous other victims over his 40-year teaching career—and was still teaching. He decided it was time to come out with his story.

Framowitz filed a civil suit against Kolko in 2006 and helped force Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community to begin confronting the long-unspoken cancer of rabbinic sex abuse in yeshivas.

Two years later, Framowitz’s courage remains the exception. The cone of silence surrounding sex abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community is still pervasive, and lawyers say an ingrained pattern of institutional cover-up continues to make cases against rabbis rare and difficult to prosecute. Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents Flatbush and Borough Park, is convinced molestation remains epidemic in Brooklyn’s yeshivas. Hikind is trying, with limited success, to gather a task force that will address a problem long ignored in his community.

Hikind said hundreds of sex abuse victims have contacted him, and that his task force won’t stop until it publicizes a comprehensive list of all the predators in Brooklyn’s Orthodox schools.

“My office is committed to doing something,” Hikind said on his radio program in August. “We are going to stick with this. Those who are abusing our children, doing inappropriate things, I’m coming after you in every single way.”

Framowitz is unsure the task force will be effective.

“If the rabbis decide what he’s doing is not appropriate, they’ll tell him clearly,” he said. “If that happens, he’ll stop working on the task force or he won’t be reelected.”

One prominent rabbi and psychologist, Benzion Twerski, has already been intimidated into quitting the task force.

“I was approached by individuals, some stating that they would cross the street if they were to meet me while walking with their children,” he wrote in a statement. “Family members were likewise confronted by all sorts of comments and phone calls.”

Michael Dowd, an attorney representing four plaintiffs suing Torah Temimah’s principal and owner, Rabbi Lipa Marguiles, for his complicity in Kolko’s abuse over many years, said the yeshiva leader bullied those around him.

“It’s a pretty enclosed community, and [Marguiles] certainly threatened and harassed people in the community from coming forward,” Dowd said. “A lot of people were afraid of him because he was a person with a lot of power and he was running a school he’d refer to as the Yale of yeshivas.”

Marguiles could not be reached at Torah Tememiah, but a school representative who would not identify himself said, “This whole thing is frivolous.” Kolko did not return multiple phone calls.

Dowd hopes the Child Victims Act of New York will pass in the state senate, where it is currently being blocked by Republicans. The bill would waive the statute of limitations for all victims of sex crimes for a year. Victims now have just a year after they turn 18 to file criminal charges against their abusers, even though many aren’t ready to come to terms with their abuse until they’re adults.

“If older victims of Rabbi Kolko were able to file claims, I think that would be a major, major way to bring people forward,” Dowd said.

Framowitz filed a civil suit in 2006 because his statute of limitations ran out decades ago. He said that as a child he tried telling his mother about the abuse, but she didn’t believe him.

“People in those days couldn’t fathom that a rabbi, a young, newly married man with a new baby, could do those things,” he said. “Today people know there are a lot of not-good things in the world, and one of them is child molesting.”

After other students came forward with charges against Kolko, took a plea bargin for child endangerment charges in 2006 and was placed on administrative leave from Torah Temimah. Rabbi Avrohom Reichman of Williamsburg’s United Talmudical Academy was hit with similar allegations from two male former students in August and September.

Still, Framowitz said that the insularity of Brooklyn’s black-hat Orthodox neighborhoods is a major obstacle in addressing rabbinic sex abuse. People worry that their entire families will face threats on the street.

“I still think parents would not believe, and would try to dismiss it if their children said anything,” he said. “They don’t look at the child as the one who is going to be affected for the rest of his life. They’d rather look at the rest of the family and say one person is a victim and he’ll get out of it somehow.”

Framowitz is now married with four adult children of his own, but he’ll never forget what Kolko did to him.

“The problem is, he won’t get out of it,” he said.

“Many of our customers lost their jobs,” Kaba said as she sewed extensions into the hair of her first customer in four days on a recent afternoon. “Even when they have jobs, they don’t want to spend their money here. After buying food, it’s gotten so expensive, they have nothing.”

Kaba, 36, is a native of Guinea and, like so many West African and Caribbean immigrants, came to Flatbush trained to braid, weave, perm and set black hair.

These immigrant women started moving in and setting up shop in the 1980s, making the mile-long stretch of Flatbush Avenue below Prospect Park a bustling center of New York’s black hair business and earning it the moniker “Hairdresser Lane.”

Dozens of braiding salons and beauty supply stores still line Flatbush Avenue, but customers aren’t flocking there like they once did. Hairdressers said they are steadily losing money, and the economic downturn has made weaves, perms and purchased hair a luxury many of their customers can’t afford. Dwindling business could reshape the historic strip if a significant number of salons have to shutter.

“People don’t have the money,” said Jennifer Nyako, 26, who manages Diallo Hair Braiding. “If they’re not coming, how are we going to pay the rent?”

Hairdressers try to attract business by lowering prices, but it’s nearly impossible to compensate for the rising price of human and synthetic hair and remain solvent.

Because customers buy their own hair and bring it to salons for weaving and braiding, beauty supply stores, largely owned by Korean and Chinese immigrants, were the first to take a hit.

J Lee, 65, owner of Plaza Hair and Wig, said the falling dollar has made human hair from China much more expensive. A 12-inch pack of human hair costs $120, and a weave usually requires more than one pack.

“Everything’s down,” she said. “Business is very slow.”

Beverley Maybere, 34, a braider at Paradise Beauty Salon, said the cost of purchased hair has gone up so much she charges less for styling to try to absorb some of the cost for her customers.

“Everyone’s lowering their prices,” she said. “People compare, and there are so many salons and so few customers, you can’t be the lowest without losing money.”

Maybere said she noticed more people are buying reusable hair by the ounce, which costs more but is higher quality and can be washed and re-woven over and over again.

Still, she said, it costs $100 to $200 for hair, and at least $110 for a weave—an investment few customers can afford in these times. Gone are the days when streams of customers from Manhattan, Brooklyn and as far as her native Trinidad would line up for the latest African-American hairstyles.

“They’re coming in, but not like before,” she said. “During the week we get maybe one customer a day.”

Some customers stretch out the time between appointments or buy cheaper hair, but others have changed their approach to coif maintenance altogether. Kaba said more and more people are buying wigs because they’re cheaper than purchased hair and hair treatments.

Diane Reid, 46, who works at Lindell’s Beauty & Barber Supplies, said business has been slow since September, but she has noticed an increase in customers wanting wigs. Often they request styles they’ve seen on pop stars like Rihanna or Janet Jackson.

“Why spend a lot of money on hair and a perm when you can throw on a wig and walk out the door and look just as good?” Reid said.

Reid said that she hopes business will pick up for the entire Flatbush hair industry around the holiday season when everyone wants a new hairstyle.

Hairdressers said they have heard of braiding salons that were forced to close, but for now most just sit empty. Their owners and braiders pass the time sitting and chatting in chairs once meant for customers facing a wait.

The future of Hairdresser Lane is uncertain. If the hairdressers can squeeze out a living until going to a salon no longer feels like a guilty indulgence, the black hair industry may hang onto its Brooklyn epicenter.

Right now, they’re just trying to get through each day, as job options for immigrants are limited in an already dismal job market.

“You come here trained to braid,” said Nyako, who immigrated to Brooklyn from Guinea seven years ago. “It’s all I know.”