BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The man who would become Pope Francis always bought his shoes in the same small store. And now, the remarkably ordinary footwear that surprised and charmed millions has brought pride to his old Buenos Aires neighborhood — and to his cobbler.

The simple black shoes — a stark contrast to the flashy ruby red slippers of Francis’ predecessor, former Pope Benedict XVI — are among the pope’s personal effects that have captured attention as his death this week triggers an outpouring of emotion around the Roman Catholic world.

The seemingly comfortable loafers offer a powerful reminder of Francis’ humility, simplicity and lack of ceremony that helped him relate to ordinary people wherever he went.

A third-generation cobbler

The Muglia family men were the first cobblers in the middle-class Flores neighborhood of western Buenos Aires. Their shop, Muglia Shoes, opened in 1945, just a few years after Pope Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Italian immigrant parents.

There wasn’t much competition, so when a young Bergoglio came in to buy shoes, it was Juan Jose Muglia’s grandfather who sold him the first pair. Bergoglio was in his 20s then, serving as a Jesuit priest at the Basilica of San José de Flores just around the block.

“My father, my grandfather, they told me stories about how Father Jorge came from the church around the corner to buy these shoes, they were the ones he liked, he wore them all the time,” Muglia, 52, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

“They’re simple, it’s the kind of shoes that waiters like to wear today, Muglia said, holding up a pair of the handmade lace-up loafers. “They can last you years and years.”

When Muglia took over after his father’s death, he added a poster of Elvis Presley, a Harley Davidson motorbike and a vinyl turntable to give the place a hipster note.

A time gone by

The racks now display newer fashions like pointy boat shoes and bright patent leather numbers.

But much of the shop remains the same, including the pinewood-paneled walls, floor-to-ceiling shelves of cream-colored shoeboxes and, of course, the leather black loafers with grippy, nonslip soles that Francis repeatedly purchased, inspiring local Catholic priests to do the same.

“Priests came here from all the basilicas in the city, some young priests even came from Rome to buy them,” said Muglia.

They sell for around $170 today — far more than the price-tag Francis saw — due to Argentina’s runaway inflation.

When Francis became pope in 2013, Muglia said he offered to send the pontiff off to St. Peter’s with a new pair of his favorite shoes. But he recalled Francis saying that his feet had become too swollen in his old age and he needed to find a more customized fit that he could depend on in Rome.

Papal footwear

Rather than adopt the typical papal shoes — red velvet or silk — as pope, Francis didn’t stray from his Flores roots.

He chose normal black shoes with an orthopedic sole — a far cry from the Byzantine era, when pilgrims customarily kissed a decorative cross embroidered on the papal shoe, and from the era of Pope Benedict, whose bespoke leather slippers in a succulent tomato red prompted Esquire Magazine to name the former pontiff “Accessorizer of the Year” in 2007, prompting intense speculation about the designer brand.

As years passed, beyond the occasional priest or parishioner who dropped into Muglia Shoes, few ever wondered about the brand of Francis’ plain footwear.

But that changed when Francis died on Monday at the age of 88, setting off a frenzy of interest about his Flores roots. Around the world, Francis was remembered for paring down the papacy’s inherited pomp to become more accessible — swapping the fur-trimmed velvet cape that popes had worn since the Renaissance for a simple white cassock, and preferring a Ford Focus to the usual papal limo.

As word spread about his original footwear and local journalists flooded the neighborhood, Muglia said curious customers have bombarded him with requests. He placed a framed portrait of Francis prominently in his window.

“It was a world of people,” Muglia said. “They came from everywhere.”

A neighborhood remembers

In Flores, the mourning for Francis feels personal. Residents remember him as someone who lived frugally, visited and advocated for the city’s poorest and could often be found sharing Argentina’s signature yerba maté drink with old friends and strangers.

At the newspaper stand just down the block from Muglia Shoes, vendor Antonio Plastina, 69, recalled how he and Francis made small-talk “like any two Argentines, a bit of this and that, some politics mixed with soccer.”

“He was a marvelous person, those are beautiful memories,” Plastina said, his eyes welling up. After becoming archbishop and cardinal, Francis still made the half-hour drive to Flores from downtown Buenos Aires every Sunday before church.

He always bought the two main Argentine daily papers, Plastina said, and read the news with a cup of coffee at the quiet cafe across the street, now a mattress store on a traffic-clogged intersection.

Although the crowds that poured into Flores upon learning of Francis’ death largely tapered out by Thursday, they left a mass of bouquets and handwritten notes to their beloved pontiff at the iron-barred windows of Membrillar 531, the modest house where Francis grew up as the eldest of five siblings.

“My vision is going but my memory is long,” said Alicia Gigante, 91, Francis’ neighbor and family friend, who stopped at the house on Thursday morning, leaning on her daughter for support.

“I’ll remember him for a long time, always his kindness, his smile, and that greeting, when you rang the doorbell and he came out into the street,” she said, her voice trembling. “There he was, always the same, he would caress you and bless you.”

NEW YORK (AP) — A private equity executive turned his New York City apartment into a torture chamber of “grotesque sexual violence,” Manhattan prosecutors said Thursday. The 43-year-old is accused of raping six women over five months in a depraved rampage in which he punched, waterboarded and shocked victims with a cattle prod and kept recordings of the assaults as trophies.

Ryan Hemphill, who remains jailed after his arrest last month, pleaded not guilty to a 116-count indictment charging him with predatory sexual assault and other crimes dating to last October. Hemphill, who is also a lawyer, threatened to have victims arrested or disappeared in a bid to keep them silent, prosecutors said.

“The defendant told these survivors that he was untouchable,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said. “The indictment makes clear that he was wrong.”

Hemphill sat quietly in a khaki jail suit, his cuffed hands clutching a cross behind his back, as a prosecutor described his alleged crimes in gruesome detail.

If convicted, Hemphill could spend the rest of his life in prison. He was previously acquitted in 2015 of choking and holding a knife to his ex-girlfriend’s throat after testifying that he enjoyed strangling her during sex.

“We have reason to believe these six victims are only the tip of the iceberg,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mirah Curzer told Judge Ann E. Scherzer.

Hemphill’s apartment, near the Empire State Building, was outfitted with numerous surveillance cameras, and investigators have recovered images showing dozens, if not hundreds, of other women, many of them naked and blindfolded, Curzer said.

Investigators also found hundreds of bullets and high-capacity magazines, and a large amount of drugs, including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and fentanyl, prosecutors said.

Hemphill met the six women through websites, including some that specialize in “sugar daddy” arrangements for women seeking wealthy romantic partners, Curzer said.

He told the women he was into role play and dominance and offered them large sums of money in exchange for sex and companionship, though he ended up not paying some of the women or giving them fake cash instead, Curzer said.

As Hemphill got to know the women, he convinced them to confide their past sexual traumas, which he then deliberately reenacted as he assaulted them, Curzer said. He took advantage of some victims’ inexperience, the prosecutor said, or crossed boundaries that victims had clearly articulated.

Hemphill is accused of tricking victims into ingesting substances that rendered them unable to fight back, using handcuffs and other restraints on them, wrapping their heads and faces with duct tape, slapping and punching them, and torturing them with a cattle prod and shock collar.

Hemphill kept one victim shackled to a bed for hours while she begged him to let her go, Curzer said.

Hemphill’s alleged conduct is “truly shocking to the conscience,” and he “has made clear that he has no regard for the law or the courts,” Curzer said.

To keep women quiet, Hemphill boasted about connections to law enforcement and organized crime, prosecutors said, and claimed that because the women had accepted offers of money, it was them who would be arrested.

Hemphill is charged with bribing a witness and, according to prosecutors, drew up a contract in which he agreed to pay a woman $2,000 in exchange for dropping a complaint she filed with police. He is also accused of forcing some victims to record videos in which they stated that they had consented to being abused.

“The power imbalance in his predatory acts could not be more clear,” Bragg told reporters. “He wielded his law degree and money as both sword and shield, coercing and silencing survivors.”

The arraignment happened down the hall from disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial.

Scherzer ordered Hemphill to remain jailed without bail after prosecutors raised concerns that his predicament, combined with his wealth and connections — including a history of philanthropy and family real estate holdings — could give him the means and incentive to flee the country.

Hemphill’s lawyer, a public defender assigned to represent him at least through his arraignment, had urged Scherzer to move him to a rehabilitation facility to deal with substance abuse issues.

Scherzer ruled that, given the fact pattern laid out by prosecutors, “including efforts to dissuade by force and threats to witnesses from testifying against him,” jailing him was the only way to ensure Hemphill would return to court.

Hemphill’s alleged behavior, the judge said, “shows his extent to which he’s willing to go to protect himself from facing these charges.”

LONDON (AP) — New smartphones aren’t cheap and prices could reach even higher as globe trade tensions fueled by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats throw Asian exports into turmoil.

To save money, consider buying a secondhand device.

The market for used cell phones is booming. It’s now growing faster than the market for new devices, according to CCS Insight, a U.K.-based tech research firm.

As each new model release sends consumers rushing to upgrade, they’ll also be selling or trading in their existing devices, which usually have lots of life left.

If you’re on a budget, a refurbished secondhand phone can be up to 50% cheaper than new, and they now come with warranties, flexible financing and after-sales service, CCS said in a recent report.

Meanwhile, the starting price of a new top of the line iPhone Pro Max could potentially rise 29% from $1,550 to $1,200, according to a UBS estimate.

But buying a secondhand device is less straightforward than buying a new one. Here are some pointers:

Which phones are the most popular?

Apple fans will have the most choice because iPhones make up about 60% of the global market for secondhand phones, according to CCS insight. Samsung Android devices are second with about 17%. The rest is made up of lesser known Chinese brands like Xiaomi.

Where can I buy them?

There are numerous places online to buy secondhand phones, but like much of the internet, there are many scammers. The usual advice applies: check reviews, look for trusted sellers and guarantees, and avoid deals that seem too good to be true.

Try platforms that specialize in selling secondhand electronics and other goods such as Gazelle and Backmarket. Refurbished phones are also available from retailers like BestBuy and Amazon. Phone companies also sell them, so check with your wireless carrier.

Even Apple and Samsung sell secondhand devices on their websites. The advantage there is that they’ve been refurbished by their in-house technicians, so you’ll know they’ll be reliable. The downside is that discounts aren’t as significant and selection can be limited. Apple’s website currently only lists refurbished iPhone 13 and 14 models, for example.

When a phone is refurbished, it normally means that the data has been wiped and it has been tested and inspected for any problems. Any defective or faulty components are normally replaced.

A used phone, however, could refer to any secondhand device, including those sold by individuals through online classifieds like Facebook Marketplace. Prices could be cheaper but it’s buyer beware because used phones are often sold as-is and usually without any repairs or guarantees.

“You will get the best price if you’re prepared to handle that risk,” Simon Bryant, vice president of research at CCS Insight.

Lots of used phones are also sold on marketplaces for so-called peer-to-peer transactions that also offer better protections for buyers, like eBay or Swappa, which have policies for refunds if a phone isn’t as it was advertised.

What about the battery?

Just because a phone is refurbished doesn’t mean that critical components — especially the battery — have been automatically replaced. It depends on a vendor’s seller’s policies.

Apple and Samsung say their secondhand phones come with new batteries and, in Apple’s case, a new shell. Both companies also include a cable, a one-year warranty and a new box.

Meanwhile, other platforms might merely guarantee that a battery has a certain level of its original capacity, usually 80%.

How do I judge the quality?

There are ratings, but be cautious with the terminology.

Each secondhand platform will usually have its own system of grading the quality of the devices it’s selling. It’s a useful gauge for comparing various phones that the vendor has for sale.

But keep in mind there’s no universal system of grading. One platform’s rankings might, for example, read “Good, Very Good, Pristine and Like New,” while another will run from “Fair and Good to Excellent and Premium.”

Grading is “all over the place,” said Bryant, and it makes it difficult for consumers to compare, say, a $300 phone rated “Grade A” on one site with the same device on another site rated “like new” and priced at $280.

“It makes it difficult to shop around,” he said.

How old is too old?

Bryant advises buyers to look for a phone that’s about three generations old, and avoid anything that dates back more than five or six generations because that’s getting to the point where its Android or iOS operating systems may not be supported anymore.

Three generations is “the sweet spot,” said Bryant. “You know it’s going to work. It’s going to have relatively new features and it’s not going to be used so much. So the wear and tear on the device will be less.”

What about the risk that a phone is stolen?

Most online marketplaces have safeguards to prevent stolen phones from being sold to consumers, but check the policies to be sure.

If a phone is reported stolen, the carrier will usually blacklist the serial number, known as the IMEI number.

Swappa requires sellers to run their device’s serial number through its online checker before it can be listed for sale. The number can be found by dialing (asterisk)#06#. Some phones have two IMEI numbers, so Swappa advises checking both.

BackMarket says it works with the certified sellers that use its platform to make sure there are no blacklisted phones but sometimes “a bad apple” slips through. If that happens, it will work with buyers to return it immediately.

Can I check for water damage?

Most newer phones are water resistant and can withstand being dunked for a limited amount of time. But that doesn’t mean they’re totally waterproof. Any moisture that has gotten inside could damage components even if the phone looks fine from the outside.

If you’re buying a used phone in person, you can check if it has been exposed to liquid. Apple has a guide to finding the liquid contact indicator that every iPhone since 2006 has. Samsung has a similar page for Android devices.

What about accessories?

Charging cables or earphones might not be included. Don’t forget to budget for these.

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