company town

Trou-Dropping Guantanamo Lawyer Leaves Firm

David Remes

Photo: Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi/Reuters

LAW

• David Remes, a Covington & Burling lawyer who dropped trou in Yemen to demonstrate how his clients, Guantanamo detainees, were being treated, has left the firm. [WSJ]
• Police busted tax lawyer Louis Posner for running the Hot Lap Dance Club in Hell’s Kitchen, where clients paid as much as $5,000 for sex with dancers in private rooms. Interestingly, Posner was using the money he made from the club to fund an account for Voter March, a grassroots organization he started after the 2000 election. [NYT]

• It’s the summer of love for law firms as merger activity heats up. [WSJ]
• Above the Law blogger David Lat is leaving D.C. and moving to the Big Apple, where he will oversee DealBreaker.com and Fashionista.com. Welcome home, David!! [Legal Blog Watch]

FINANCE
• Is Thomas Montag, whom Merrill Lynch just hired to be the head of trading and sales, worth his $89 million pay package? [Bloomberg]
• Even Citigroup’s $2.5 billion second-quarter losses can’t stop the firm from spending $400 million to name the new Mets stadium Citi Field. [DealBook/NYT]
• Thankfully Yahoo and Carl Icahn finally settled their proxy fight as the Internet giant placed the activist investor (or as Yahoo called him, the “corporate agitator”) on the board along with two of his pals. [DealBook/NYT]

MEDIA
S.I. Newhouse has built Condé Nast into one of the largest, most successful American media companies, but how much longer can he keep his empire glossy? [NYT]
• Harold Evan thinks the Gray Lady needs a face-lift: “The New York Times desperately needs to rethink its whole design,” he says. [Independent]
• David Carr wrote his The Night of the Gun, which was excerpted in yesterday’s New York Times, to help pay for his daughters’ college tuition. He also concedes that he videotaped the interviews for a companion Website to increase his chances of landing a movie deal. [WP]

REAL ESTATE
• The high-rise at 215 East 86th Street is home to enough boldface names that you could establish a city government right in the building. And the prices that those famous people pay aren’t bad either. [NYT]
• Giuliani Partners, the company run by former mayor Rudy Giuliani, is starting a real-estate-investment fund at a particularly tumultuous time in the market. [NYT]
• Are the Russians going to save real estate in New York? [NYT]

Trou-Dropping Guantanamo Lawyer Leaves Firm