From the NYTs:
Plunging headfirst into a delicate issue that has long bedeviled New York State and Long Island’s Indian tribes, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg criticized Gov. David A. Paterson on Monday for not enforcing cigarette tax laws, which the mayor estimated had deprived the city of up to $195 million a year in revenue.
Residents of Indian reservations — like the 50-acre Poospatuck reservation in Mastic — are entitled to buy cigarettes tax free for their own use.
But in a federal lawsuit filed on Monday, the Bloomberg administration accused eight stores on the reservation in Suffolk County of breaking state and federal law by selling cigarettes in bulk to bootleggers. The bootleggers, the lawsuit said, then shipped the cigarettes into the city.
Turtle Talk 