PAUL SHECHTMAN

When Bob Morgenthau turned 75, Barbara Jones, the federal judge, and I asked John if he would participate in a videotape tribute. The pretext was it was the year 2000 and Bob had stepped down as D.A., and his son Josh was taking over. And Josh's first task was to pick an assistant, and he picked his sister. His sister, Morgenthau's daughter, was only 4 or 5 at the time. And so in the scene, Bob's daughter doesn't want to do it, and John comes in to persuade her. She sat down on John's lap, and he started singing to her. They sang, "I love you, you love me, everybody loves Morgy." And then he said, "Will you take the job?" And she said, "Yes." He was irresistible.

KEN SUNSHINE
Public-relations consultant

He would kid me mercilessly about my celebrity clients and the problems they were having with the paparazzi. He would call me up and do a killer imitation of Barbra Streisand or Leonardo DiCaprio. The Streisand imitation would include a chorus of "People." As Barbra, he would yell at me because the press wasn't treating her fairly. He'd kvetch about something, and then start singing "People." His imitation was actually really good, though perhaps a bit too ethnic. It was a bit more Brooklyn than she really was. But he really could sing. If it was Leo, he'd say, "They're hounding me! They won't leave me alone! Why can't I just be a regular guy going to a nightclub?" And then he'd launch into a routine from Titanic -- like "I'm the king of the world!" He had a mischievous streak.

JILL KONVISER

People used to tease him a lot. Other lawyers would want to take an extra day off for Thanksgiving. He'd ask for a day off to speak at the Democratic National Convention. He had a secretary whose sole job it was to answer all his mail, because he had a slew of it every day. There were love letters, invitations to parties, lots of pictures of naked girls. The other idiots in my office would fight over them.

JILL BROOKE
CNN correspondent and friend

He was always playing practical jokes. Once, when I was starting out, there was a story breaking and I was trying to get an interview with a network president. Suddenly I get a call, and this woman says, "Hold on for Grant Tinker." I was so nervous that I started babbling. I thought I was talking to the president of NBC. There was silence on the line, and all of a sudden, John started cracking up. "Got ya," he said. Once, I said to him, "Sometimes it must be hard being you," and he smiled and said, "Actually, I highly recommend it."

MERRILL HOLTZMAN

I was putting together a board of directors for Naked Angels -- this is ten years ago -- and I was asking everyone I knew who to help in one way or another. And I knew I had to ask him, but I figured he could be involved with any cultural institution he wanted, and we were a little band of nobodies, so I didn't expect him to say yes. But he did -- he said, "Count me in." And he was a great board member. He loved to stir the pot. He'd throw pencils at people in the middle of meetings. It was a very casual environment.

John loved the theater. We saw everything from Broadway to things in storefronts in the East Village. He'd always call me to ask if I'd like to see so-and-so and then pause, because of course he'd picked something that I'd never heard of -- he'd picked something that no one had ever heard of. And then he'd complain to me, "You are so out of it! I can't believe how out of it you are!"

JOHN MOSLEY
Notre Dame football star and longtime friend

One night, John and I went to the Ritz to see George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars. There was a line all the way around the block, and he could have gone up to the front and they would have let him right in, but he said, "We're going to wait on line like everyone else." We waited on that line an hour and a half. To see P-Funk!