One of these things is not like the other. Which of these spending habits attributed to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the eighth-richest man in the country, with a net worth of $18 billion, sounds like it doesn’t belong?
A. Funneling $109 million from his coffers to get elected mayor for a third term.
B. Expanding his neo-Grec East 79th Street home into three neighboring apartments for an estimated 12,500 square feet now worth $30 million.
C. Filling the stables of his twenty-acre farm in North Salem with nine horses for his daughter Georgina.
D. Offering NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly free trips to Florida on his Dassault Falcon.
E. Wearing the same two pairs of work shoes for the past decade. “One day he’ll wear one, the next the other — and when they get worn down, he has them resoled.”
E. may sound far-fetched, but according to Mayor Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser, the mayor’s ascetic approach to footwear is “in keeping with his approach to personal and governmental finance.” Oh, right. We were wondering how to get our checking account up to $18 billion, so this is pretty helpful.
As for the shoes, both loafers are so well worn that the mayor can’t identify what brand they are. Sources speculate to the Post that the penny loafer could be a discontinued “Dennehy” model from Cole Haan. But the loafers, pictured above, look pretty spry for a decade of schlepping around the city. An informal Intel newsroom poll found that wearing a pair of Cole Haan boots every day for three straight winters made them look like they might have been swiped from a stylish hobo, and after two years, a laceless pair of Cole Haans appear as though they’d been worn by a horse. We’re not calling Mayor Bloomberg a liar, we’re just saying his weekday shoe butler has some explaining to do.
