Hedda Nussbaum
Joel Steinberg’s abused girlfriend; her testimony helped convict him of killing their adopted daughter
In 1988, Nussbaum testified that her live-in boyfriend, Joel Steinberg, had beaten their 6-year-old adopted daughter, Lisa, to death. (The adoption was never formally recognized by the state.) Nussbaum, a children’s-book editor at Random House, had suffered severe beatings at Steinberg’s hands; police discovered the couple living in squalor in a West Village townhouse. Prosecutors dropped murder charges against Nussbaum in exchange for her testimony, triggering criticism from those who believed she was complicit in the crime. Steinberg was convicted of first-degree manslaughter; after the trial, Nussbaum had extensive reconstructive surgery and found work at a battered-women’s shelter. (She’s now retired.) Today she speaks publicly about domestic violence, but lives in hiding from Steinberg, who was released from prison in 2004. She’s had her name legally changed. “Sometimes I think maybe after all these years it’s overly cautious,” she says, “but then I just don’t know.”
Frank Serpico
Blew the whistle on NYPD corruption
Serpico, the Brooklyn-born cop who exposed systematic corruption among fellow NYPD officers during the late sixties—and was profiled in a best-selling book by Peter Maas and then played onscreen by Al Pacino in the seminal 1973 Sidney Lumet film—retired 36 years ago. Living off pension and disability payments, he spent over a decade traveling through Europe and North America before settling upstate “in a nice little cabin in the woods.” He spends his time, he says, acting, sculpting, teaching ballroom dance, meditating, practicing homeopathic medicine, and playing the Japanese shakuhachi flute. Affable and happy to discuss his varied interests, Serpico nonetheless lives under an assumed name and expresses a deep mistrust of what he calls the “iron triangle” of industry, government, and the military. (He posts his thoughts on such matters at frankserpico.blogspot.com.) He has few kind words for the NYPD. “I still get e-mails from cops telling me what’s going on,” he says. “They say, ‘Oh, it is as bad as ever.’ ”
David Guthartz
Provoked a Rudy Giuliani tirade about ferrets
In 1999, WABC-AM radio caller David Guthartz (“David in Oceanside”) made headlines when his criticism of the city’s ban on ferrets—posed to then-mayor Rudy Giuliani during a call-in show—provoked a lengthy rant from the mayor about “excessive concern with little weasels” in which he advised Guthartz to seek psychological help. These days, Guthartz still lives in Oceanside with his parents and continues to champion his cause through the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Ferrets, a nonprofit organization he founded in 1991. He hasn’t forgiven the ex-mayor: “Giuliani is a diminutive man who needs to make himself bigger by putting other people down. If a brick fell off a building and crushed his head, I’d say, all right, he got his.” Guthartz hopes his nonprofit will eventually become an international authority that regulates the ferret industry. “In Japan,” he claims, “ferrets have become the No. 1 pet.”
Antoine Yates
Kept a tiger in his Harlem apartment
In 2003, Antoine Yates made the cover of the Post when medical professionals who’d treated his “pit-bull bites” ratted him out to the police for keeping a tiger and an alligator in his West Harlem apartment. After serving five months in jail for reckless endangerment, Yates returned to Harlem, where his only current pets are two parrots. He has been helped financially by Michael and Jermaine Jackson and former Kool and the Gang keyboardist Amir Bayyan—“animal fans,” says Yates, who took an interest in his case. Yates, who wears tiger-eye-styled contact lenses to “brand” himself, has sold his life story to a movie-production company for a seven-figure payment, which he’s currently using to live on. With the Jackson group, he’s purchased property in Las Vegas, where, he says, he hopes to become the first African-American to operate a private zoo.
Marla Maples
Donald Trump’s second ex-wife; said in headlines that sex with Trump was “best sex I ever had”
Since her 1999 divorce from Donald Trump, Maples and her 14-year-old daughter by Trump, Tiffany, have lived off settlement money—reported to be in the low seven figures plus child support—in Malibu. Earlier this year, paparazzi caught Maples “canoodling” with a Bachelor alum named Andy Baldwin, and she was also linked to Indian fashion designer Anand John Alexander, who appeared on America’s Next Top Model before he was arrested and accused of sexually assaulting underage models (Maples says Alexander is just a family friend). Maples herself starred in the short-lived 2007 reality show The Ex-Wives Club with Shar Jackson and Angie Everhart, and frequently hosts health segments for nightly entertainment shows. She spends much of her time, she says, at the gym or yoga and Pilates classes. Says Maples: “I’m on a mission to enhance people’s lives through spirituality, health, and fitness.”
Yusef Salaam
Falsely accused of Central Park Jogger rape; spent seven years in jail
In 1989, Salaam was a 15-year-old Harlem high-school student when he and four other young black and Latino men were tried for the rape and beating of white 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meile, the “Central Park Jogger.” The defendants were convicted on the basis of confessions they said were forced. “I was completely terrified,” Salaam recalls of the interrogations. “I thought they were going to put me in a bag in the back of some building somewhere.” In 2002, the convictions were vacated after another imprisoned murderer’s confession was confirmed by a DNA match. Salaam, who spent a total of seven years in prison, had been released in the mid-nineties, after which he spent time helping his mother run the nonprofit she directs and worked on and off in construction. Now 34 with three children, he’s an IT specialist at a city hospital. Along with his co-defendants, he’s pressing a $25 million class-action suit against the city.
Jeffrey Maier
At age 12, he reached over the wall and helped send the Yankees to the World Series
In Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series, with the Yankees trailing the Orioles by one run in the eighth inning, a 12-year-old Maier reached over the right-field wall and tipped Derek Jeter’s fly ball into the stands. The umpire (incorrectly) ruled it a home run, and the Yankees ended up winning the game, the series, and their first world championship since 1978. Maier became a tabloid hero (ANGEL IN THE OUTFIELD, the Post called him). He went on to play baseball for Wesleyan University, and after college he spent a summer working for baseball writer Peter Gammons. Now he works in Boston in accounting. Maier says he’s not worried about being a Yankee hero in enemy territory. “I mean, I still have a youthful look,” he says, “but I think for the most part it would be pretty difficult to identify me based on those childhood pictures.”
George “Super Fly” Willig
Scaled south tower of the World Trade Center
On a May morning in 1977, Willig climbed the World Trade Center’s south tower using clamping devices he’d built himself. He was arrested upon reaching the roof, but Mayor Beame, recognizing Willig’s potential as a folk hero, let him go with a symbolic $1.10 fine (a penny for every story of the tower). Willig, then a 27-year-old toy designer, appeared on The Tonight Show and The Merv Griffin Show and soon moved from Hollis, Queens, to work as a stuntman in Southern California. That job led him into television production, but he eventually found his way back to tinkering. “I was working on Entertainment Tonight, and they had hired a contractor to come in and move things around, and when I saw them finishing the work, I thought, Wow, I’d rather be doing that.” He co-founded a contracting business that thrived during the nineties boom in fiber-optics-related construction. Now 59, he rarely climbs anymore, and has never considered scaling another structure. Says Willig, “I didn’t want to be the Evel Knievel of building climbing.”
Jayson Blair
Fabricated stories; precipitated the fall of the editor of the New York Times
Blair left the New York Times in 2003 after he was caught repeatedly lifting material from other reporters, concocting scenes and quotes, and pretending to be places he was not, triggering the firing of the executive editor and managing editor of the newspaper. After his resignation, Blair checked himself in to a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He spent the next two years working odd jobs—“selling books and helping with people’s yards and whatever”—and writing his memoir, Burning Down My Masters’ House, which was published in 2004. Now 32, Blair lives in Centerville, Virginia. Three years ago, he founded a nonprofit that organizes weekly depression-support groups in Northern Virginia, runs one of the groups himself, and works some twenty hours a week as a life coach at a private psychological practice. He occasionally visits college journalism classes to warn students off his path of ruin. He is finished, he says, with ambition: “I don’t have any.”
Joey Buttafuoco
Auto-mechanic paramour of “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher
Buttafuoco, 52, says he’s still in regular contact with Fisher—and his ex-wife, Mary Jo, whom Fisher shot in the face in 1992. Fisher, 17 at the time, had been involved in an affair with Buttafuoco, and he spent four months in jail for statutory rape. He returned to prison in 1995 after hiring a prostitute who was an undercover cop, went back for a third time in 2004 for insurance fraud, and again in 2007 for possessing ammunition, a parole violation. In 1996, Buttafuoco moved to Los Angeles, where he ran an auto shop for several years; he’s now a partner in a company that builds sets for television advertisements. “You’re allowed to live your life and reinvent yourself here,” he says of L.A. “New York is the greatest city, but it was a prison.” He’s now married to a Yugoslavian woman named Evanka, who’s currently pregnant, and doesn’t see himself staying in California long: “My plan is to retire out in Europe. The family name has a vineyard in Milan—Buttafuoco Wineries.”
With reporting by Kat Ward.
Hedda Nussbaum
Joel Steinberg’s abused girlfriend; her testimony helped convict him of killing their adopted daughter
All Photos: Dan Winters
David Guthartz
Provoked a Rudy Giuliani tirade about ferrets
Antoine Yates
Kept a tiger in his Harlem apartment
Marla Maples
Donald Trump’s second ex-wife; said in headlines that sex with Trump was “best sex I ever had”
Yusef Salaam
Falsely accused of Central Park Jogger rape; spent seven years in jail
Jeffrey Maier
At age 12, he reached over the wall and helped send the Yankees to the World Series
George “Super Fly” Willig
Scaled south tower of the World Trade Center
Jayson Blair
Fabricated stories; precipitated the fall of the editor of the New York Times
Joey Buttafuoco
Auto-mechanic paramour of “Long Island Lolita” Amy Fisher
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