A-Rod Has ‘the Heart of a Poet’He’s been writing Madonna love notes. Also gross: Raffaello Follieri is tormented by rat poop in prison, and Artie Lange spanked it eavesdropping on Christina Applegate. All in the gossip roundup!
ByTim Murphy
gossipmonger
Predictably, ‘Lipstick Jungle’ Star Used to Lust After Andrew McCarthyLipstick Jungle’s Lindsay Price had a childhood crush on her co-star Andrew McCarthy. Tom Hanks walked past Eliot Spitzer’s apartment building on 79th and Fifth, but no one recognized him. A Madonna look-alike ran across the second-floor balcony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction at the Waldorf-Astoria, providing some levity to an otherwise boring event. Fashion Week will relocate to the Tenth Avenue rail yards after 2010. The Queens livery driver who faked the baby rescue weirdly will appear on an upcoming episode of The Real Housewives of New York City. A documentary about storied Tribeca nightclub the Wetlands opens Friday. Marc Jacobs’s boy toy, Jason Preston, got punched in the face outside Hiro after trying to get a guy who had thrown a drink at a girl to apologize.
the morning line
WMD Found — in Midtown
• A soda-size can of phosgene, the deadly chemical Saddam used to kill countless Kurds in the eighties, was discovered stashed away in a U.N. office yesterday, but no one has any idea how it got there after weapons inspectors brought it back from Iraq in the mid-nineties. Reassuring. [NYT]
the morning line
Three Punished for Deutsche Deaths
• More than a week after the Deutsch Bank blaze killed two firefighters, three FDNY honchos have been reassigned for failing to regularly inspect the building or come up with a plan to fight a fire there. [NYT]
the morning line
Stone Quits
• GOP consultant Roger Stone resigned his job with the state Republican Party over that call to Pa Spitzer, but he still maintains — busted alibi and all — that Democratic operatives may have just broken into his house and made the call from his phone while using some kind of high-tech device to impersonate his voice. Ya-huh. [NYT]
the morning line
Standpipe Cut
• As Robert Morgenthau’s office starts a criminal investigation of the Deutsche Bank blaze that killed two firefighters, it turns out that the faulty standpipe had been deliberately cut — and recently. [NYP]
the morning line
Murder at Deutsche Bank?
• The deaths of two firefighters in the Deutsche Bank blaze this weekend may be classified as homicides — and it could be negligent contractors, who disabled a critical standpipe, and chain-smoking Eastern European immigrants, who started the fire, who are accused of murdering them. [NYP]
the morning line
Ground Zero Claims Two More
• Two firefighters died Saturday in a blaze in the abandoned Deutsche Bank building adjacent to ground zero. The pair “walked into a horror show,” as Spitzer put it, when they met a maze of protective polyurethane sheets that may have made the fire harder to fight. [amNY]
the morning line
Death at NYU
• The daughter of two prominent NYU professors was discovered dead in a university-owned apartment in Washington Square Village. If it’s a homicide, expect it on Law & Order when the new season starts. [amNY]
gossipmonger
Allah’s Love We DeliverSome Palestinians claim that Yasser Arafat died of AIDS. Justin Timberlake had Lance Bass and his boyfriend run interference at the opening of his Southern Hospitality so that he could sneak out without running into Jessica Biel. Donald Trump and other captains of industry are fighting to keep the heliport in Hudson River Park open. Firefighters invited to the screening of Adam Sandler’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry took issue with Sandler’s financial support of Rudy Giuliani. Jonathan Ames is set to box with another writer. Moby got a surprisingly funny letter from Karl Rove. A.M. Homes is developing a show about the Hamptons for HBO.
in other news
Firefighters Hate Rudy — and Want You to Know It
The International Association of Firefighters has long hated Rudy Giuliani. He didn’t give New York’s Bravest adequate equipment before 9/11, the union has always said, he was insufficiently concerned with their safety during cleanup after 9/11, and he didn’t let them search ground zero long enough for the remains of their brethren. Worst of all, they argue, he’s built a persona — and a thriving presidential campaign — by appropriating firefighters’ heroism as his own. Yesterday the union put out a campaign-style video, attacking Giuliani for his failings. “He was running on his 9/11 leadership, and it was lacking,” FDNY deputy chief Jim Riches says in it. “He was not the hero of 9/11.” And there’s lots more like that.
party lines
Fire Scare Cools Down Live Earth After-PartyA small fire on the third floor of the Maritime Hotel drew a phalanx of fire trucks to meatpacking destination Saturday night, and the equipment and firefighters did a nice job of extinguishing Absolut and Flavorpill’s after-party for Al Gore’s Live Earth concert, going on at the hotel. A source confirmed late yesterday that it was an electrical fire, quickly put out, that brought four trucks, all with ladders extended to the third floor and filled with men in uniform, to Ninth Avenue. It was enough to make the concert’s performers — already exhausted from sun exposure and a twelve-hour day — decide it wasn’t worth the effort to get into the party. (We spotted only Broadway types there: Xanadu’s Cheyenne Jackson and Legally Blonde’s Laura Bell Bundy.) Looking back, we remember that the lack of stars did perplex us for a moment, before we decided not to care. We also remember that we spotted some firemen near the bathroom line, and we asked hotel management what they were doing there. “Oh, those are the strippers,” we were told. —Jada Yuan
Earlier: How Green Was Your Live Earth?
the morning line
New York’s Racistest?
• The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the Fire Department for discriminating against minorities. A complaint filed in Brooklyn alleges that the firefighter recruitment exam is racially weighted and serves to “weed out” blacks and Latinos. [Metro]
• We’ve said it should take more than greening your mansion to make it into the news. This qualifies: An abandoned upstate steel mill has reinvented itself as a wind farm, a first for the Rust Belt. [NYT]
• Peter Braunstein didn’t just want to kill Anna Wintour: He also spoke of heading down to New Orleans to head up a gang of angry Katrina survivors, according to a shrink. (Braunstein did briefly pretend to be a hurricane victim to get free food and shelter while on the run.) [amNY]
• Subway Superman Wesley Autrey left NBC’s Deal or No Deal with $25 after picking the wrong suitcase (the other two held $1 million and $10,000, respectively). No X-ray vision, then. [NYDN]
• And there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot among the Post, CBS, Amy Fisher, and Joey Buttafuoco to pretend that there’s some juice left in the Long Island pair’s story — enough, perhaps, to sustain a reality show. Let’s not encourage any of them. [NYP]
in other news
Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Firefighter?
Oh, the life of a firefighter: the thrills, the excitement, the esteem. If you want to be a fireman, you know you have to be strong and fearless and all that. But did you know you also need to have expertise on cleaning up messy chili? That’s according to the latest Fire Department civil-service exam, as reported yesterday in the Daily News:
“As a rookie firefighter you are responsible for cleaning the kitchen. You arrive for the beginning of your shift to find the kitchen area is a mess. And there is a bowl of chili spilled on the floor from the firefighters from the previous shift. The reason the kitchen is such a mess is due to the previous crew having gone out on a call to a fire during their dinner, and they are still actively fighting the fire … What should you do with the following circumstances?”
the morning line
So Dark the Con of Man
• The Times declares Spitzer’s political honeymoon over; the governor’s first state budget, which cuts $1.2 billion from health care and increases spending by 6 percent, seems guaranteed a hard time in both the State Senate and the Assembly. [NYT]
• Firefighters: Every time we come dangerously close to deifying them, they do something crazy. Like, in this case, by buying fake “St. Regis College” diplomas online, at $500 a pop, and submitting them to the Fire Department for promotions. [Newsday]
• A Long Island con-artist duo lured married marks into one-night stands, videotaped the trysts, then proceeded to blackmail them. The scammers’ photos, printed in the Post, make the “luring” part positively puzzling. [NYP]
• In a feat of participatory journalism, a Daily News reporter spends a “day dressed like Sienna” (Miller). For our money, she looked more like JT LeRoy. [NYDN]
• And a New York marketing firm scared the bejesus out of Bostonians with promo signs for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which the Boston Police Department somehow mistook for bombs. Nobody objected here, where “a box of fries … giving passerby the finger” is a relatively normal sight. [amNY]
the morning line
We Ain’t No State Senator’s Son
• Joe Bruno’s lobbyist son emerges as the crucial link between the embattled State Senate GOP leader and pony-loving businessman Jared Abbruzzese. The Feds allege an unsummarizable roundelay of sweetheart deals, lobbying stints, and commission fees. [NYT]
• Three central New Jersey high schoolers are dead after a head-on collision between their car and a van less than a mile from campus. The van’s driver was also killed, and her unidentified teen passenger hospitalized with serious injuries. [AP via amNY]
• A Brooklyn principal barred a special-ed student from entering a district spelling bee, telling him, “You don’t have the brains to do it.” This after organizing a special schoolwide bee seemingly aimed at eliminating him. [NYDN]
• City firefighters are putting up flag decals on their lockers in defiance of Fire Department’s order to remove all personal adornments from department buildings. Expect an interesting debate on whether a locker is a private or a public space (and a staggering amount of porn in the trash bins behind firehouses). [IHT]
• And speaking of trash, New Yorkers generate a lot of it. Almost twice as much food waste, in fact, as any other city. Best recyclers? No surprise there: Park Slope. [NYP]
in other news
FDNY Comes Rushing Into Late Twentieth CenturyIn an unprecedented technological breakthrough on par with the invention of the telegraph or the splitting of the atom, the Fire Department is now issuing radios that can communicate with the NYPD and the Office of Emergency Management. This upgrade comes a mere five years after September 11, when non-interoperable radios contributed to the deaths of many of the 347 firefighters killed. Plus, the Fire Department also announced that its average response time in 2006 was 4 minutes, 29 seconds, a seven-second improvement over 2005. That is, of course, the average time it takes to respond to a fire, not the average time it takes to respond to suggestions that, hey, maybe new radios would help.
FDNY Finally Fine-Tunes Its Radios [NYDN]
