FRIDAY, JUNE 24, 2011
Oar losers
Winklevi suffer rowing setback on heels of Facebook defeat
It’s been a doubly bad week for the Winklevoss twins.
First, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss abandoned the legal appeal of their $65 million settlement with Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg. Now Flash has learned the strapping doppelgängers will not represent the U.S. national rowing team at the Henley Royal Regatta, a key race in the brothers’ bid to land on the 2012 Olympic squad.
“They didn’t make the team boats,” a rowing insider told Flash. “It’s a big setback on the way to the Olympics.”
The Winklevi — as they have nicknamed themselves — won’t join the U.S. rowing elite in the Thames River at Oxfordshire, England, next week, a blow to the former Harvard oarsmen’s quest to compete for Team USA at the world championships in Slovenia in August.
“The crews chosen for Henley are likely to compete for the U.S. in the championships and have a leg up on the Olympics next year,” our source said.
The 2004 Henley was even featured in a dramatic scene in “The Social Network,” in which the Winklevi suffered a crushing loss against the Dutch.
When The Daily interviewed Cameron and Tyler in a three-part series in January, the twins were immersed in thrice-daily practice sessions at the U.S. rowing team’s training camp in San Diego. Both brothers represented the U.S. at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Reached yesterday by Flash, Cameron Winklevoss said he and his brother are missing the major regatta by choice.
“We opted to not compete at Henley in order to prepare for another race later in the month,” he told Flash in an email. That race is likely the open trials later this summer for the few remaining spots on the U.S. team.
U.S. Rowing officials did not return Flash’s requests for comment.
Though the Winklevosses’ dream of vindication against Zuckerberg is now dead in the water, their $65 million settlement was mostly in Facebook shares, which have since gone up.
So their stake is now worth about $200 million, which salves the wound.
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Homeless Utah man never turns up to claim $100,000 inheritance
BY SARAH RYLEY
A homeless man from Utah was supposed to collect a $100,000 inheritance in Albany, N.Y., but he didn’t show up to claim the money.
Max Melitzer, 65, is the sole heir to his deceased brother’s estate worth more than $100,000, including a plot of land where his family home once stood. All he had to do was take a Greyhound bus from Salt Lake City, Utah, where he had been sleeping in viaducts, to Albany, N.Y., to meet a cousin he hasn’t seen since he was a boy.
Melitzer had said he planned to use the money to buy an RV and travel the country. But he first needed to get a driver’s license and a copy of his birth certificate so he could open a bank account where the windfall could be deposited.
His bus was scheduled to arrive at the Albany station at 1:15 p.m. yesterday, but when it came, he wasn’t on it. The conductor rifled through his tickets and didn’t have any in Melitzer’s name.
His cousin Richard Goldfarb, who hasn’t seen Melitzer in more than five decades, hugged a confused stranger who got off the bus, then realized Melitzer was a no-show.
“I was baffled when he didn’t get off that bus,” said a visibly shaken Goldfarb. He last heard from Melitzer at 7:45 a.m. Tuesday before he was supposed to board the bus in Salt Lake City. Melitzer doesn’t have a cell phone but was given money to make a call.
Goldfarb had been searching for Melitzer since his equally troubled and reclusive brother, Morris Melitzer, died of cancer in April 2010, with the deathbed wish that Max get everything he had left.
Morris, 66, never married and did not have any kids. His trash-strewn apartment contained little more than a bed, dresser and countless empty peanut butter jars, Goldfarb said.
The retired forklift operator had lived in his deceased grandmother’s modest, wood-frame house in Schenectady, N.Y., until October 2005, when construction workers hit a gas line that torched the home, destroying Morris’ sizable collection of train artifacts and killing his four beloved cats.
The state Department of Public Service estimated the damage at $50,000 to $100,000. Goldfarb is unsure if Morris ever received the settlement.
Morris complained about it shortly before he died of cancer, said George Hansen, treasurer of the local National Railway Historical Society. Morris attended the group’s meetings every month for at least three decades.
Goldfarb said Morris had around $60,000 in his bank account and a $40,000 pension from General Electric. But he was known to check payphone coin slots for change, walk the streets collecting cans, and dress “kind of like a homeless man,” two longtime acquaintances said.
Hansen said the friendly but eccentric train buff never mentioned a brother in Utah.
“And he was pretty vociferous about what his feelings were. It was mostly his day-to-day struggles. Just the fact that he had a hard time getting around and that people didn’t respect him as much as they should,” Hansen said.
Max Melitzer likewise rarely spoke about his family. His cousin was unaware that Max had once been married and had fathered nine daughters.
Max told The Daily that three of his daughters are dead, two from a car accident and the other of “natural causes.” The Daily’s questions were posed to Max by the private investigator who found him last Saturday sitting on a park bench.
Max’s wife and two neighbors died in a one-car rollover accident in 1990 on a Wyoming interstate. Max was the driver.
“It destroyed him for years,” said Jay Beckstrom, owner of Beckstrom Body Shop in Ogden, Utah. “It’s unbelievable how unlucky he was with things.”
Beckstrom said he first met Max in 1968 while working at another auto body shop in Ogden. His coworkers disliked Max, who was a pesky customer. They prodded Beckstrom to teach the pest a lesson.
“I remember carrying him on my back and he was kicking like a little child, and I threw him in some water,” recalled Beckstrom, who felt so guilty about the incident that he later took the chronically homeless man under his wing. For the past four decades, Beckstrom has given him odd jobs, held conversations with him despite his noxious odor, and even lent him money, which was always repaid.
“Max’s life has been one giant struggle. From what I’ve seen, there’s been nothing positive at all,” he said.
Kay Dykster, whom Max called his girlfriend, said he had been sleeping in viaducts and salvage yards.
“He’s in real bad shape and he’s sick, too. His [blood] sugar is low and he has infections in his body,” she said.
Goldfarb said he hopes his missing cousin will be found in the next few days.
“I know he’s going to get his money because he’s the only one entitled to it,” he said.
Sarah.Ryley@thedaily.com
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Party of one
Judge says Lindsay can drink – with a single guest at a time
Party pooper! A judge yesterday banned Lindsay Lohan from hosting any more hoedowns while she’s under house arrest — but said La Lohan is allowed to drink, so long as she’s only entertaining one guest at a time.
Dressed demurely in a blue-and-white striped button-down shirt, black pants and a platinum ponytail, Lohan showed up for court in Los Angeles to get a slap on the wrist that most grounded teenagers would envy.
“You are not guilty of a probation violation, but what you are guilty of is extremely poor judgment,” Judge Stephanie Sautner told Lohan. “You are not to have parties. You can have one friend over at a time, plus family members or business associates. You can go on your roof ... There is no drug or alcohol testing in effect.”
The scandal-plagued actress, who had been wearing an alcohol-monitoring anklet, was called to court after testing positive for alcohol earlier this month, but Sautner determined sobriety was no longer required.
Don’t expect another visit from Matt Lauer, though. The “Today” anchor flew to Los Angeles Tuesday to interview Lohan for a reported $50,000 in “photo licensing fees” from NBC. But Lindsay kept him waiting on the first floor of her Venice Beach, Calif., house while she held out for $100,000, the New York Post reported.
Yesterday, Lauer hinted on “Today” that Lohan got cold feet because of her impending court date.
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HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Captured mobster Bulger and girlfriend Greig in court after 16 years on the lam
BY DEBORAH HASTINGS AND TORI RICHARDS WITH HUNTER WALKER AND IKE SRISKANDARAJAH
LOS ANGELES — He was the subject of an international FBI manhunt and topped the agency’s most-wanted list, but Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger was hiding in plain sight, living in Santa Monica, Calif., just another gentleman in a neighborhood of retirees, three blocks from the glimmering Pacific Ocean.
Except he was the old man with more than 20 weapons — handguns, shotguns, rifles and knives — some of them hidden in hollowed-out history books. And the walls of Bulger’s top-floor apartment, where he’d lived since at least 1996, were stuffed with an estimated $800,000 in cash.
Not to mention the getaway bag, always packed and ready for a quick escape. But Bulger went out with a whimper after being duped into leaving his apartment by a phone call informing him his storage locker had been broken into.
Bulger, 81, was described by neighbors as a man who kept to himself and wore baseball caps, dapper hats and sunglasses. He often strolled the residential street dotted with apartment buildings and palm trees in the company of the woman neighbors believed to be his wife. She liked to feed squirrels and stray cats.
The aging couple were “very nice neighbors and very good-looking,” said Catalina Schlank, an elderly woman who lives in the same building where Bulger shared a third-level apartment with longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig, 60, who had been on the lam with the head of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang since 1995. “I always said to whoever would ask that they must have been very handsome when they were younger,” Schlank said.
But the couple who appeared yesterday in Los Angeles federal court were far from attractive. Arrested Wednesday night by FBI agents acting on a tip, the man and woman known in Santa Monica as Charles and Carol Gasko sat about 15 feet apart during a hearing in which they were asked if they understood the charges against them. Sporting an unkempt white beard and wire-rimmed glasses, Bulger laughed and smirked at the packed courtroom. Greig looked gaunt and pale, and ducked behind a railing to avoid scrutiny.
Both were flown to Boston earlier today and appeared in court this afternoon.
The charges Bulger faces are staggering. He is wanted in connection with 19 gangland murders — including shooting a man between the eyes on a busy street in broad daylight, and garroting the stepdaughter of his top henchman (a murder he and the henchman allegedly committed together because the young woman knew too much). He’s also wanted on a variety of racketeering charges including shaking down bookies, loansharks and illegal gambling fronts for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments he called “rent,” while simultaneously running his gang’s own criminal enterprises in the same fields.
When asked yesterday if he had read two grand jury indictments filed against him, a handcuffed Bulger replied, “I know ’em all pretty much. I’ve received copies of both. I got ’em here, thank you.”
Neither Bulger nor Greig contested the charges against them — she has been wanted since 1997 for aiding and sheltering a fugitive.
It was a strange end to a strange tale that scandalized the FBI. Bulger bolted Boston after being tipped by a retired FBI agent, John Connolly. That agent had run Bulger and his henchman Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi as informants for decades. Connolly allowed them to continue their organized crime lives in exchange for information on rival mobsters.
Flemmi and Connolly both went to prison. Bulger ran.
Newly unsealed court documents detail some of the early travels of Bulger and Greig following his indictment in 1995. In an affidavit dated April 25, 1997, Bulger and Greig in 1995 and 1996 traveled to Long Island and Grand Isle, La., where they checked into hotels as “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Baxter.” Also according to the affidavit, a search for Bulger was aided by a woman who believed Bulger cheated on her with Greig.
According to unnamed landlords in Santa Monica, the “Gaskos” moved into their Third Street apartment around 1996 and have rented it ever since — at the bargain price of $1,145 per month, according to the Los Angeles Times, which they paid in cash.
Barbara Gluck, who lived on the same floor, told the Times that Bulger seemed to be suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease and was always in the company of his female companion, whom she described as glamorous and charming. When the woman smiled and said hello, Gluck said, Bulger would snap, “Why are you saying hello to her?”
“She was living with hell ... he was a rageaholic,” Gluck said. “I worried about her.”
“Regular” was never a word that applied to Bulger, whose mostly Irish-American gang ruled “Southie,” the gritty streets of South Boston, with impunity for decades, buying off local, state and federal authorities.
Nicknamed “Whitey” for his childhood shock of platinum hair, Bulger first hit federal prison in 1956 in Atlanta, convicted of armed robbery and hijacking. He was transferred to San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island in 1959, and later to Kansas’ Leavenworth penitentiary. After his release in 1965, he became a janitor for a local enforcer for the dominant crime family in Southie.
Bulger rose through the ranks, came out on the winning side of a 1970s gang war and took over the Winter Hill Gang with Flemmi when boss Howie Winter was arrested for fixing horse races in 1979.
He was a hero to some in South Boston — a bigger-than-life benefactor who kept the neighborhood free of crime, even though authorities said he was running numbers, loan sharks and drug dealers.
That was evident yesterday in Southie. “He’s no more corrupt than the politicians in the Statehouse,” where Bulger’s brother, William, once served as Senate president before becoming president of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, said Paul Rose, smoking outside Tom English’s Cottage bar. “More violent, though.”
Asked if he was glad that Bulger had been caught, Rose wouldn’t reply, but mentioned that answering could get one beaten up.
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'Jersey Shore' hair 101
'Jersey Shore' star Pauly D shares his hair secrets with the Daily News
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Check the mirror first
PopBooth instantly turns your iPhone into a photo booth
BY NICHOLAS DELEON
Company: Sincerely Inc.
Where: San Francisco
Established: 2011
Number of Employees: Six
Who: App maker Sincerely Inc. was established in April, and its goal, said co-founder Matt Brezina, is “to make it easy to send real photos in the mail from your mobile phone.” The company’s first app, Postagram, puts a fun spin on that idea by giving users from anywhere in the world the ability to turn their Instagram photos into real-life postcards for only 99 cents per postcard.
What they make: Postagram, first released for free in April, isn’t the only app up Sincerely’s sleeve. On deck is PopBooth, a photo-booth app that Brezina said will be available for the iPhone and iPad 2 in “a couple of weeks,” before the beach-going weather goes away for the year. (Since the app requires a camera, it doesn’t work with the first-generation iPad.) Photo booths are a “crazy, growing trend across America,” said Brezina, with people using them at all sorts of places, including weddings, so much so that many devices, such as the iPad 2, already ship with photo-booth apps.
But PopBooth brings photo-booth apps into the real world by giving users the ability to buy physical copies of their photo-booth photos that show up in three to five days. Perhaps unlike photos posted to Facebook — who knows how long that site will be around? — “this is a photo strip that you can keep, that you’re to put in your family scrapbook that’s going to go in that box that you pull out 20 years from now, it’s going to be there. People really seem to care about that.”
And yes, these are real, honest-to-goodness photos we’re talking about. Sincerely works with printers around the country to produce them. Said Brezina, “We communicate via APIs. This is something that 10 years ago probably would have been a lot harder, we would have had to go out and ramp up our own printing centers. Now we get to work with people who are specialists in this. From what I know and from what I’ve seen, no one has done what we’re doing.”
Design philosophy: “We’re trying to build a company that’s somewhere between Hallmark and Shutterfly,” said Brezina, “and we think there’s huge business there.”
Brezina sees PopBooth as having a wide appeal, not merely limited to the early-adopter techie crowd. “There’s people who are going to have nostalgia about photo booths, who used them at a bar whenever they were going out. I’ve been to some weddings recently where they have a photo booth and there’s little kids there who don’t even know what a photo booth is, they know they go in, they press a button and they get four photos of themselves and think it’s the coolest thing ever. So I see people doing this maybe drunk with their friends, and I also see families doing it with their kids.”
“Our philosophy at Sincerely is that a photo is the most ubiquitously appreciated gift on the planet. Not everybody’s going to like a bottle of wine, not everyone’s going to want a box of chocolates, but a photo from a friend is something that every single person appreciates. That has applications to all 6 billion people on this planet. That’s a big deal.”
The hardest part of it all? “Working with the Postal Service,” said Brezina.
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“THANK YOU!” Supporters rejoice following the New York State Senate’s vote to pass a marriage equality bill. (Photo: Hans Pennink / AP via the New York Times)
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New York passes Same Sex Marriage bill : 33-29
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A Dog's Tale
Technicians built four prosthetic legs for Naki, allowing him to lead a normal, active life.
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The Kiss and Tell
The story behind the photo of a couple kissing on the pavement during the massive Vancouver riot has been revealed. Scott Jones rushed to his girlfriend's aid after police clubbed her to the ground. Jones' first reaction? Kiss the pain away.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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