Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll look at potential Republican presidential candidates who are making the rounds in New York City. We’ll also look at a crackdown on wage theft.

The next presidential election is more than 600 days away, but already some potential Republican presidential candidates are headed to New York. They’re hoping to capitalize on what appears to be waning support for former President Donald Trump among Republican-leaning donors. “Most of these people are coming in only because they are looking to raise money,” said Alfonse D’Amato, the former Republican senator. “Where is the money? The money is in New York.”

I asked our political reporter Nicholas Fandos, who with Maggie Haberman wrote about the parade of presidential hopefuls visiting New York, to explain who’s been here recently and who’s coming this week.

You write that would-be Republican candidates are finding their way to New York, and donors are opening their doors, if not their wallets. Isn’t one of the potential candidates Mike Pence, the former vice president?

Yes, indeed.

There may only be a few Republicans who have formally declared they are running for president so far, but a bigger shadow primary is well underway here in New York. The idea is not so much to woo voters — New York remains a safely Democratic state — but the huge concentration of political donors who live here.

Many of them are business executives and billionaires who backed Donald Trump as president but are now interested in playing the field for an alternative. Very few seem ready to commit to a single candidate yet, but when they do, some of these donors have the capacity to put millions of dollars behind someone they believe in.

Pence is a prime example. He is still weighing whether to run for president, but he came to town last week to meet with a Jewish group and some donors to gauge their interest in a candidate who shares Trump’s agenda without being Trump. Their response could affect whether he jumps into the race.

But there are others potential candidates. Isn’t a fund-raiser on Nikki Haley’s calendar?

That’s right, and it’s today.

Though she was governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, Haley is no stranger to New York. She lived here for her next job, as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2017 and 2018.

Haley has already declared herself a candidate for the Republican nomination against Trump. So she’s not just meeting with donors, she’s collecting checks. She hopes to get quite a few from her event with Wall Street types. It’s been reported that the tickets range from $3,300 to $6,600.

What about Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia?

He’s scheduled to meet with donors and other influential figures in New York on Wednesday, but it is less clear right now if Youngkin will actually run.

His star has been rising in recent years after winning the governorship of a solidly Democratic state.

Like many of the donors he would need to court, he is a successful businessman, having made a fortune in private equity. He’s a former chief executive of the Carlyle Group, the big Washington-based firm.

But he is not particularly well known nationally, and so his visit this week seems to be more of a “get to know you” tour. One stop will be a visit with a group called the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, whose members include the media mogul Steve Forbes, the conservative economist Arthur Laffer, the Trump economics adviser Larry Kudlow and John Catsimatidis.

Who is John Catsimatidis, and what’s his role here?

Catsimatidis, known to friends as “Cats,” is a larger-than-life New York character who made a fortune in grocery stores, hosts a political talk radio show (on WABC-AM, which he bought in 2019) and has been a high-dollar political donor to both parties for years. He ran for mayor as a Republican in 2013 and was a big booster of his fellow billionaire, Donald Trump.

Now, though, he seems to be open to at least exploring some fresh Republican blood. He told me he’d be willing to host a dinner for any big G.O.P. candidate who asks. He also said he has some concerns about Trump’s ability to win this time unless the former president adjusts his approach.

Is all this a sign that Donald Trump can no longer count on big-money contributions from people in New York who gave to his campaigns in 2016 and 2020? And when will we know who’s actually contributing to whom?

It’s probably too early to say, but the idea that influential Republican donors in Trump’s former hometown are openly flirting with potential challengers to him feels significant. I hedge because it is certainly still possible that Trump will do well in the primaries and many of these donors line up behind him once again. But for now, at least some of these donors are heading toward putting real money behind efforts to prevent him from getting the nomination.

Who exactly they are and how much they give may remain a mystery for a while. The biggest donors in the country are adept at using our lenient campaign finance system to steer large amounts of money to support candidates through dark money groups that shield their identity.

Weather

Expect snow and sleet early, then rain and wind in the afternoon, with a high near 40. It will be partly cloudy at night with a slight breeze and temps in the low 30s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

Will be suspended today to facilitate winter weather operations.

The latest New York news

Gun Regulation: A Supreme Court decision overturning century-old New York gun regulations has produced scores of new lawsuits as jurists and citizens sort out what’s legal.

But is it ethical to kill them?: “City rats are a species that in some sense humans have created,” said Dr. Jason Munshi-South, a biologist and rat researcher at Fordham University. “They’re evolutionarily and ecologically linked to us.”

A crackdown on wage theft

Prosecutors say twin brothers stiffed day laborers on construction sites for thousands of dollars — and one of them punched a worker who asked to be paid.

The charges came a week after the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced that a new unit was being set up to prosecute wage theft. One of the twins — Lulzim “Luis” Shabaj, 41 — was charged with scheming to defraud. Prosecutors said he and his brother Gzim “Jimmy” Shabaj had stolen thousands from Spanish-speaking workers by declining to pay them for work at a site in Harlem.

Prosecutors said that when one worker asked to be paid in early September 2022, Gzim Shabaj pulled out a knife and, with his other hand, punched the worker in the head. The man’s ear bled.

A few weeks later, a second laborer asked for his money. That time, prosecutors said, Gzim Shabaj ripped a side mirror off the worker’s van and repeatedly hit the van with the detached mirror, cracking the windshield and denting a hubcap. Cursing and saying “Hispanics, get out of the country,” he hit the laborer in the shoulder and threatened to call immigration enforcement. He later canceled one of the worker’s paychecks, prosecutors said.

The twins and their construction contracting company, 3 Brothers, were accused of stealing more than $7,500 from the two workers. A third brother who works with them was not involved and was not accused.

A spokesman for the Legal Aid Society, which is representing Gzim Shabaj, said he had pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for Lulzim Shabaj, Patricia Wright, said her client was “innocent until proven guilty by a jury.”

METROPOLITAN diary

First date

Dear Diary:

It was May 1996, and I was on my first date with Dave from Brooklyn. He picked me up at a friend’s house in Bayside and we headed into Manhattan for dinner and a night out at the Back Fence on Bleecker Street.

Dave accidentally drove onto the Long Island Expressway heading east before realizing we were going the wrong way. “Oops,” he said with a smile before exiting the highway, turning around and heading back west.

When we finally arrived in the West Village, we weren’t too confident in our sense of direction, so we left the car at a garage on West Third Street and hopped in a cab. Dave told the driver the address of the restaurant, and the cab pulled away.

We went one block, made a quick turn, pulled over and stopped. Dave and I looked at each other perplexed, but then we noticed we were right in front of the restaurant.

I braced myself for what for what I expected would be a heated exchange, knowing the driver could simply have told us that we were so close to our destination.

Instead, Dave from Brooklyn turned to me with a big smile.

“We’re here,” he exclaimed and then paid the driver.

Twenty-seven years later, we’re still getting lost, even with GPS, and laughing about the shortest cab ride ever.

— Valarie Neirman

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Walker Clermont and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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