Yes, Sanitation ticket. I heard this from my tenant who operates the storefront on ground floor, who heard it from our neighbor who had the tenant that threw out the mattress.
Yeah. While I recognize this is how the actual world works in NYC, in the court system, not so much. This is like 3 levels of hearsay, which is a stretch even for the ECB.
However, do not abandon all hope just yet.
Sanitation tickets are the only other tickets in the city treated like parking tickets - they are the sole evidence against you (eg, no live witness shows up in court) so they have to be factually accurate in order to make a valid case against you.
What does that mean in plain English? Make sure the date of the offense, time, violation address, description, etc. are all filled out, and filled out correctly. If any of those are missing, that alone is grounds for dismissal.
If there are no procedural grounds, you can always fight it on substantive grounds too - "I didn't do it" is a perfectly valid defense. You'll probably want to show up in person to make it though. While you are permitted to do it via letter, I personally find that people who show up in person tend to get better results (harder to say "no" to someone's face, I guess).
See here for more info (especially #5):
http://www.alblawfirm.com/index.cfm?pageid=12&itemid=233 {random google result}
