FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2011
Leona Helmsley's pampered Maltese 'Trouble,' one of the world's richest dogs, dies at age 12
BY JOANNA MOLLOY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Ted Mase
Trouble, a Maltese who received part of Leona Helmsley's riches, joins her owner in the afterlife.
Jennifer Graylock/AP
Leona Helmsley's pampered pooch "Trouble," who inherited $12 million from the real estate mogul, has died at the age of 12.
That's 84 in dog years.
Like many Americans, the pampered Maltese retired to Florida in 2007, shortly after Helmsley died.
Carl Lekic, the general manager of the Helmsley Sandcastle hotel in Sarasota, cared for her.
"Trouble was cremated, and her remains are being privately retained," spokeswoman Eileen Sullivan said.
"The funds held in trust for her care have reverted to The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust for charitable purposes."
Trouble, one of the world's richest dogs, died in December, following a series of health setbacks that left her blind and infirm, sources said.
While Helmsley left the dog $12 million, a judge later knocked it down to $2 million.
Lekic said he could manage on $100,000 a year: $8,000 for grooming, $1,200 for food and the rest for his fee and a full-time security guard.
The security was necessary after John Codie, a trustee of the $8 billion charitable trust, reported that Trouble had received 20 to 30 death and kidnapping threats.
The high-maintenance pooch had a life of luxury from the git-go. She was bought at a Kennel Club pet shop on Lexington Ave. and traveled home in a Mercedes-Benz stretch limo, a source said. "Codie bought her to help Leona get over her grief over Harry's death," the source told the Daily News.
The luxe life continued, as Trouble accompanied Helmsley via private jet to her homes in Arizona and Florida, her 21-room Connecticut mansion Dunnellen Hall, and Helmsley's duplex penthouse with swimming pool at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South.
Helmsley, who cut two grandchildren out of her will and evicted her son's widow after his death, was often seen cuddling the canine, which was always impeccably dressed.
Helmsley, who did 18 months in federal prison on tax evasion charges in the early 1990s, wanted Trouble interred with her in the 12,000-square-foot family mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County.
That was not to be.
"You cannot bury pets in a cemetery," said Stephen Byelick, a member of the cemetery's board. "The same rules apply to mausoleums."
Well, maybe they're together in the afterlife.
jmolloy@nydailynews.com
With Barbara Ross
Dad shows a lot of getup and go
Teen cringes as Utah father dresses in costume every day to wave at his bus
BY KAYLEEN SCHAEFER
Listen in, pay up
Wiretaps of Hollywood reporter and sources could cost AT&T billions
AT&T is fighting to limit the billions of dollars worth of damages the telecom giant might have to pay the victims of the largest rogue wiretapping case in the history of the FBI — a victims list said to include Mel Gibson, Harvey Keitel and Forest Whitaker.
The three men were among the many sources who had talked on the phone with Hollywood reporter Anita Busch during the months she was being illegally wiretapped in her Los Angeles home nine years ago by Anthony Pellicano, a notorious Chicago-born private eye who is now serving a 15-year sentence in a federal prison in Texas.
Busch was terrorized in 2002 when she found a dead fish with a red rose in its mouth and a sign reading “Stop” on the cracked windshield of her Audi. Alex Proctor, the Canadian man Pellicano hired to scare Busch, is now in prison and will be deported when he is released.
According to California’s Privacy Act, wiretap victims can collect up to $5,000 for each illegally tapped phone call. For Busch alone, who made thousands of calls, “that would be close to $25 million,” one source told Flash. “And all the people she talked to have claims against AT&T, as well.”
No wonder AT&T was in Los Angeles Superior Court this week seeking to limit damages to just $5,000 per person. “The phone company is trying to reverse the charges,” laughed one of the 101 targets of Pellicano’s snooping.
Besides Pellicano, more than a dozen others were prosecuted in the criminal case, including phone company employees who set up the illegal taps, police officers who leaked confidential information to Pellicano, and a lawyer who knowingly hired the gumshoe to bug his enemies.
“Despite all these prosecutions and all these people going to jail, the whole story has not come out,” said one insider. Besides AT&T, Busch is suing Michael Ovitz, who was known as the most powerful man in Hollywood when he ran the CAA talent agency. Busch’s lawyers will argue that it was Ovitz who hired Pellicano to tap her phones after she had written some unflattering stories about him.
Pellicano, 67, has steadfastly refused to cooperate, and seems prepared to die in prison rather than rat out his clients. His sentence doesn’t end until March 2019. It can’t be long enough for his victims.
If the civil case goes to trial, the most exciting witness is expected to be Tarita Virtue, Pellicano’s longtime assistant. In her deposition, the colorful Virtue told stories about Howard Stern, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Mariah Carey, Tony Danza, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Regis Philbin, Chris Rock and Nicole Kidman, who allegedly talked to Pellicano about collecting “the placenta or whatever she saved from the miscarriage” for DNA evidence to prove Tom Cruise was the father.
Please, save us a front row seat.
Faster, pussycat!
British PM’s kitty slacks off on his mouse-hunting duties
XOXO for X Factor
In New Jersey thousands of screaming fans turned up to see Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and fellow judges for another round of "X Factor" auditions.
Surfing Dogs Catching Waves In Southern California
Surfing Dogs competing in San Diego at the 6th annual Loews Surf Dog Competition.
Each dog had 10 minutes to catch his or her top two waves and was scored on confidence level, length of ride and overall ability to “grip it and rip it.” Winners scored the ultimate pet vacation at Loews Coronado Bay Resort… and endless bragging rights.
INFLATION NATION: Hunger pains
Smucker to sharply boost prices on peanut butter, jelly and more
BY ASHLEY KINDERGAN
Filling your belly is about to get even more expensive.
The cost of a basket of 16 common foods rose 4 percent in the last three months, while J.M. Smucker Co. said it will boost prices 25 percent next year.
An American Farm Bureau Federation survey released yesterday showed that the cost of those common foods, including milk, meats and potatoes, rose by $51.17 since last quarter. Meats such as bacon and sliced ham rose the most, but milk and cereal prices also soared.
At Smucker, the price hike is to cover ingredient costs.
“It’s unprecedented times across all commodities,” said Vincent Byrd, Smucker’s president.
Coffee prices have risen sharply. At the end of May, Smucker said it would boost the price of Folgers and Dunkin’ Donuts brand coffees by an average of 11 percent — the fourth increase in a year.
But don’t expect that to hurt sales. Tim Smucker, Smucker’s co-CEO, said the company sold only slightly less coffee than in the previous year.
Harry Balzer, who tracks Americans’ eating habits for the NDP Group, said people aren’t giving up their morning coffee.
“It’s because of coffee’s unique position in our diet,” Balzer said.
In touch with Wii U
The Daily gets hands-on with Nintendo’s new system and controller
BY TRACEY JOHN
LOS ANGELES — At the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo showed off Wii U, its new high-definition console that introduces an innovative touchscreen controller.
The wireless, lightweight controller, which has a 6.2-inch touchscreen as well as several analog sticks, directional pads and buttons, streams games from the console, and was also shown working with the standard Wiimotes and Nunchuk controllers. The Daily was able to get brief hands-on time with the system using several games specifically made to demonstrate the controller’s capabilities on the convention floor.
The game Chase Mii was hands-down the favorite. The multiplayer game allows up to four players using Wiimotes connected to the TV and one player strictly using and viewing the new Wii U controller. As a cooperative game of hide-and-seek, the object of Chase Mii is for the Wiimote players to find the Wii U player amidst a large maze, with the new controller letting the user hide their whereabouts from the others. It was clearly the most fun game and the easiest to pick up and play.
Battle Mii was a little more complex, and had two players use the Wiimotes and the TV as the Wii U player controls a ship and views the battlefield on their own touchscreen. The game pits the Wiimote players against the Wii U player, having them collect health and shoot each other with lasers. The Wii U player can aim by moving the entire controller to hit their targets, while using the two analog sticks to control their ship. Although the flying controls were difficult to master, we were pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness of the device to player movement when aiming and shooting, and experienced no lag during the demonstration.
Another example shown was Shield Pose, a single-player, pirate-themed rhythm game. As pirates attack the player with arrows, the TV screen and musical cues give directions on where to move the controller (front, center, left, right) to block the attacks. Meanwhile, on the Wii U touchscreen, the user could see a 360-degree view of their environment — a pirate ship — and the incoming arrows, as they moved the controller.
Nintendo also displayed a 2-D Mario platformer being played on the Wii U controller, where passers-by can watch the gameplay on the larger TV screen.
Though Nintendo stresses that these were merely tech demonstrations and not full games pending release, the company also promises that the device will allow for standalone games (no TV required), video chat, Internet browsing and photo sharing.
But for gamers, one long-awaited feature was simply being able to see and play Nintendo’s games in high-definition. At their booth, Nintendo displayed footage of the 2006 Wii launch title Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which clearly benefited from the high-def upgrade, as evidenced by the detailed lighting and shadow effects never seen before on the Wii.
While we’re impressed by what we’ve seen so far in these slick tech demos, and certainly glad that Nintendo games will finally catch up to their competitors graphically, we remain curious as to what software will be coming to fully utilize the new controller and replace our Wiis.
Photo credit: Nintendo
So far, Nintendo has revealed that Wii U will be backwards compatible and supported by first-party titles, only hinting at new games for the Smash Bros. and Pikmin franchises, as well as a variety of third-party titles, including Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Online, Warner Bros.’ Lego City Stories and unannounced games from Electronic Arts.
The system is slated for release in 2012, so more details should come in the coming months.
Lay off the layoffs
Government firings are the worst way to save public funds
BY REIHAN SALAM
Alabama’s Jefferson County, home of Birmingham and its prosperous suburbs, is facing a mammoth budget shortfall that may force as many as a thousand layoffs. Even if the good people of Jefferson County make it through this crisis, they still have to contend with a debt of $3.2 billion in sewer bonds. Bankruptcy might be the county’s only option.
And though Jefferson County is facing a number of unique challenges, it isn’t alone in facing fiscal doom. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorganChase, has said that he expects more U.S. municipalities to declare bankruptcy before the year is out, and the celebrated financial analyst Meredith Whitney has gone so far as to predict up to 100 defaults by local governments. That has spooked investors in the $2.9 trillion municipal bond market. If Whitney is right, we could be in for another financial crisis
The upshot of these mounting fiscal pressures has been a torrent of public-sector layoffs. As state and local governments shed workers, many have a hard time finding new jobs. The U.S. economy needs to generate 400,000 jobs a month to get back to full employment over the next two and a half years. Average payroll growth over the last three months has been just over half that amount, and last month saw payroll gains of just 54,000. If dozens of American cities go under and thousands of public workers go on the unemployment rolls, we’ll find ourselves in an even deeper hole.
State and local governments need to become leaner and more efficient. That is a given. But layoffs aren’t necessarily the best way to achieve that goal, particularly if they’re pursued in a panicky fashion. In many cities and towns, so-called “last in, first out” rules mean that new employees are let go before veterans, regardless of effectiveness or compensation costs. A city that slashes its police force might achieve modest short-term savings. Yet a spike in crime will drive residents and businesses out of town, causing the tax base to deteriorate. Rather than cut the number of cops, a city would be far better off by making it cheaper to employ cops. That might mean cutting or at least limiting increases in take-home pay. But it is pension and health benefits that have been the big driver of state and local budget woes, not cash wages. To stem the tide of layoffs, states and cities need to get public workers to make bigger contributions to their pension and health benefits.
This week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed raising the minimum retirement age for future state workers and raising employee contributions to the state pension plan from 3 percent to 6 percent. The unfortunate truth is that while this proposal represents an improvement on the status quo, it doesn’t go nearly as far as it should. It leaves current employees untouched, and its tough-sounding provisions can easily be reversed in future years. Even so, this decidedly watered-down approach to pension reform has already been met by fierce resistance from the state employee unions, who sense that Gov. Cuomo is a pushover.
In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie hammered out a deal with the president of the state Senate, Stephen Sweeney, on benefits that has been praised by struggling local governments. Because the reforms proposed by Christie and Sweeney go beyond curbing benefits for future workers, they’d have a much bigger fiscal impact than Cuomo’s more modest proposal. But opposition in the state Assembly means that these reforms might never see the light of day, thus leaving local governments with no choice but to fire thousands of workers.
And in San Francisco, where the political spectrum extends from left to ultra-left, Jeff Adachi, the city’s elected public defender, has been leading a crusade to save the city from bankruptcy by reforming pensions. Adachi frames the choice San Franciscans face in a distinctive way: Do we want to pay upper-middle-class public workers six-figure pensions or do we want to keep funding summer programs for poor kids? Though Adachi has demonstrated tremendous mettle in his fight against San Francisco’s powerful public-sector unions, even he’s backed off of efforts to get city workers to contribute more to their health benefits.
Cuomo and Christie and Adachi all have very different styles and very different politics. Yet all of them are united in a desire to stave off layoffs that will have a big impact on the quality of life and on the employment picture. Instead of accepting the need to pare back compensation costs to prevent a wave of layoffs and defaults and deep service cuts, a depressingly large number of public workers are choosing to dig in their heels.
In the end, it will be taxpayers and the people who depend on public services who will get screwed.
Weinergate’s Twitter Effect: Tweets from Congress down 30% since Weiner accidentally tweeted crotch photo to the public.
Heat-Pocalypse
Tips on survival when mercury climbs above 75 - or perhaps taking advantage of the situation if presented with a half-naked body of the opposite sex. Brooklyn comedian Matt Evans has a flair for pseudo-serious hyping of routine things, like how sometimes in the summer it gets hot outside
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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