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It’s Wednesday. Get the popcorn. The Tribeca Film Festival is up and running through May 5. Here’s the film schedule.

Weather: Dry, sunny and breezy, with a high around 70.

Alternate-side parking: In effect through today, then suspended through Saturday.

For the first time, a distributor of oxycodone and other painkillers has been charged criminally for its role in America’s opioid crisis.

The distributor, Rochester Drug Cooperative, is based in upstate New York, and its former chief executive, Laurence Doud III, turned himself in to the federal authorities in Manhattan yesterday.

Prosecutors applied the same kind of felony drug-trafficking charges against the company, Mr. Doud and another former executive as they have brought against street dealers in New York.

The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan accused Rochester Drug Cooperative of conspiring to distribute drugs and defraud the federal government. The company sold 143 million oxycodone pills in New York State between 2010 and 2018, the state says.

Translation: The company is essentially accused of sending suspiciously large numbers of prescription pills to doctors and pharmacists, and preventing regulators who work to stop improper drug trading from interceding.

[Read about the giants at the heart of the opioid crisis.]

Mr. Doud is charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances, conspiracy to defraud the United States and failing to file reports on suspicious orders. One of Mr. Doud’s lawyers said his client was being “framed.”

But the government reached a deal with the company: It will delay prosecuting Rochester Drug Cooperative as long as it pays a $20 million fine, complies with the controlled substances law and submits to five years of supervision by an independent monitor.

As part of the deal, the company admitted in court papers that it violated narcotics laws by shipping opioids to pharmacies, knowing that the highly addictive medication was being sold and used illicitly.

New Yorkers are probably more familiar with another name in the opioid supply chain: Sackler.

The Sackler family, which owns the drug maker Purdue Pharma and has lavished money on the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other city institutions, is facing legal action in Manhattan as well.

The state filed a civil suit last month against eight family members, accusing them of personally contributing to the opioid epidemic by aggressively pushing to expand the market for their drug OxyContin after the company had admitted that it had misrepresented the drug’s potential for abuse.

Here’s what the Shirley Chisholm monument will look like

Last year, we told you that a statue of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the House of Representatives, was coming to Prospect Park in Brooklyn in 2020.

Now we know its creators: Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous, who won the inaugural commission for She Built NYC, an initiative that is addressing the gender gap in the city’s public art and monuments, nearly all of which are devoted to men.

Called “Our Destiny, Our Democracy,” the statue will feature the former congresswoman’s portrait fused with the silhouette of the United States Capitol.

[Read more about the monument and its artists.]

“I really feel like her arms are present,” Ms. Williams said of the design, “and her energy is present, and she is giving love to this community.”

— Ana Fota

From The Times

Karina Vetrano’s killer, sentenced to life in prison, maintains, “I didn’t do this.”

Right to free speech? On the City Council, it has limits.

SummerStage in Central Park will have a new feel this season.

She was fired after raising questions about a DNA test. Now she’s getting $1 million.

[Want more news from New York and around the region? Check out our full coverage.]

The mini crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

What we’re reading

After the police confiscated bicycles that had no bells on their handlebars, someone dug up photos of the police commissioner on a bicycle that had no bell. [Gothamist]

A civil service test to become a police officer in Suffolk County drew the fewest applicants in 16 years. [Newsday]

Democratic Party leaders want to hold New York’s presidential primary election on April 28, 2020. [Wall Street Journal]

A “Hideous-Men Walking Tour” in New York City includes stops at Trump Tower, the Plaza Hotel, Rockefeller Center, the Fox News offices and the CBS headquarters. [New Yorker]

Coming up today

BRIC in Brooklyn kicks off its arts and ideas festival, which explores justice, self-expression and identity. Noon. [Free]

The American Folk Art Museum hosts a drink-and-draw session at the Self-Taught Genius Gallery in Queens. 6 p.m. [Free]

Community organizers reflect on L.G.B.T.Q. homelessness and gentrification at the Bronx Library Center. 7 p.m. [Free]

— Elisha Brown

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages.

And finally: Remembering the mayor of Morningside Heights

The Times’s Corey Kilgannon reports:

While there has been criticism of Mayor de Blasio for focusing more on a possible presidential candidacy than on city matters, remember that the city also has many unofficial mayors — regular people who become such fixtures in their neighborhoods that it is hard to imagine life without them.

Morningside Heights in Manhattan always had Bobby Fibel, who spent his life walking the same stretch of Broadway near Columbia University, greeting neighbors and stopping to chat in businesses like Tom’s Restaurant, the diner made famous by “Seinfeld,” and the now-shuttered West End bar, where Jack Kerouac and other Beat poets once drank.

Mr. Fibel died this month at age 75, after suffering a stroke. At a memorial service on Monday, dozens of neighbors packed a small room in a Hell’s Kitchen funeral home where his photo rested on a simple coffin.

The memorial for Mr. Fibel, who had no immediate surviving family, had been set up by a social service agency. With no organizer or speaker present, neighbors simply began standing up and relating their own Bobby stories, many of them through tears.

Mr. Fibel never finished grammar school. He ran errands for store owners as a boy and never held a regular job.

He helped turn his stretch of Broadway into a small town and “brought the community together,” Officer Kathleen Clifford of the Police Department’s 26th Precinct said.

A recent stroke landed him in a rehab center, where he seemed to suffer withdrawal from the social sustenance of his Broadway buddies.

So neighbors pitched in to pay his rent but were unsuccessful in persuading his health guardian agency to move him back to his rent-regulated, five-bedroom apartment overlooking the Columbia campus and Broadway.

“He got so depressed about not being in the community that he stopped eating,” a neighbor, Stephanie Rugoff, said.

It’s Wednesday — who is your neighborhood’s mayor?

Metropolitan Diary: Red light

Dear Diary:

It was a hot, sticky morning last August, and I was sweating.

I thought I could make the light at 35th Street and Seventh Avenue. I eased through the turn just as it changed.

Then, blue lights, the quick burp of a siren. Oh, no. I pulled over and rolled down my window.

“The light was red,” the police officer said.

“Um …,” I replied.

“Where you headed?”

I spoke fast, completely stream of consciousness.

“I’m on my way to Boston,” I said. “But when I packed my tuxedo this morning, I noticed that the pants were missing. I have to stop just down the block and rent a pair, so that at my son’s wedding tomorrow I won’t be the only person not wearing pants.”

I didn’t admit that I had had plenty of time to discover the problem. My son had been engaged for more than a year.

The officer was quiet, but it definitely looked like he hadn’t heard that one before. He pulled a pamphlet from his pocket and handed it to me, something to do with safe driving.

“Enjoy the wedding,” he said.

— Donovan Moore

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