Most people migrate to New York so that they can live a different kind of life than they could back home. Until he was busted a couple of months ago for failing to make child-support payments back in Michigan, Josef Meyer was living a really different kind of life. The 50-year-old Detroit native had assumed the identity of Prince Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen of Austria, married chandelier designer Michel Trico, and become a kind of neighborhood eccentric in Soho, where he was often spotted walking the couple’s “rare dog” in lederhosen or flamboyantly retrosexual pinstriped suits and bow ties. “Sometimes he would even wear a cordless hair dryer on his belt like it was a gun,” a source told the Post. “It was so bizarre.”
Now, to be fair, who does the dry cleaner ever see work? Actually, Josef did work; according to a Post source, the dandy was a “high-level FBI informant” who had been recruited after committing a violent crime.
Obviously, the question here is not why the FBI would recruit Les Homme Nikita and then let him get taken in on a child-support payment, but was that hair dryer actually a gun? And is everyone in New York a secret informant for someone, even the crazies? We’re going to be looking at Sad Panda in a whole different way from now on.
Phony prince outed after child-support bust [NYP]
Faux prince arrested in New York on Michigan deadbeat charges [Detroit News]
