Men of Manhattan

Javier Peres slept on the flight from Berlin last Wednesday night and hit the tarmac running. He dropped by the Tribeca Grand hotel to check in, splashed some water on his bearded face, then grabbed a cab to Terence Koh’s art opening at a private residence uptown. Sometime around sunrise, he crashed. He woke up the following evening around 8 p.m. and went to the Phillips de Pury auction, where he attempted to buy back a piece of Mr. Koh’s work—a wall installation of 12 bronze hands and forearms covered in black patina, wax and oil. A bidding war ensued between Mr.  read more »

“I think this country should be operating the way it used to be a long time ago which was if you take a risk, then you’re going to be punished if it doesn’t work out,” said Kiliaen Van Rensselaer over drinks Saturday night at the Hotel Plaza Athenee hotel on East 64th Street.

 Mr. Van Rensselaer knows something about how the country operated a long time ago: his great-, great-, many-times-over-great-grandfather of the same name was co-founder of the Dutch West India Company and presided over Rensselaerswyck, a swath of roughly 1,200 square miles of present-day upstate New York.  read more »

The Germans are dug in at Casa Brava, a sprawling waterfront home on the South Shore of Long Island. British infantrymen are charging at the front lines; others are recharging at a mess hall. Enemy tanks are playing a deadly game of chicken. From their respective positions, General Bernard Montgomery and Field Marshall Eugene Rommel stand at attention, each with his own funny hat and standard-issue blank stare.

Bill Jackey, 68, rediscovered toy soldiers, a passion from his childhood, about 12 years ago. When Mr. Jackey was a kid in the 1940s, his family had a summer home not far from the manse he now lives in with his wife, retail exec powerhouse Rose Marie Bravo.  read more »

For the past 15 years or so, Stefan Fitzgerald has made a living selling weed. Back in high school in Austin, Texas, he sold joints to classmates. He would keep them stashed in empty magic markers. Then pot helped pay the bills for six years in San Francisco. Two years ago, he moved to New York and got a job working for a marijuana bicycle delivery service. 

He pulled into New York on Halloween 2006—“One date I can remember,” he said with a laugh—rented the cheapest place he could find, a studio apartment in  Bedford-Stuyvesant, and began looking for work in his field of expertise.  read more »

Last month, Paul “Magic Man” Malignaggi vacated the International Boxing Federation junior welterweight champion title, which he’s held for the past year and successfully defended three times, so that he may fight the welterweight world champ, the great pug-faced hope of Britain, Ricky “The Hitman” Hatton. Nov. 22, MGM Grand, HBO. A seven-figure payday. He’s arrived.

Only Little Paulie doesn’t see that way. He wants the world to know his name.

Mr. Malignaggi, 27, has come a long way from throwing dice and cutting class at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst—starting with a pair of Golden Gloves in ’98—but the fact that everyone from back in the day had bet on him losing still weighs on him something awful.  read more »

Darren Aronofsky was a serious young man, a nature boy. He grew up in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, where the beaches were beautiful but cluttered with trash. His interest in the environment took him to Alaska to study the behavior of seals.

“There was a moment, we were kayaking around,” he said of the trip with the School for Field Studies, a charity on whose board he now sits. “I was eating a candy bar and I dropped the wrapper in the water and it went under. And I realized that that thing was going into this pristine environment that I was in and there was no way of ever taking back what I had just done.  read more »

Imagine you are Levi Johnston. Like all 18-year-old males, you feel you own the world. Makes your mouth water. Hey—keep your tongue in your mouth! You can’t let them know what you’re up to. But they’re not going to know what hit ’em. Right now your playing field is the ice; you kick ass. But the wider world is also hungry for your tear-it-up testosterone. And you’re gonna see it all.

Then suddenly: Well, we all know what happened. Bristol happened to you and then Sarah Palin happened to all of us.

“There are lots of dropouts,” said Gabriel Weaver, a 32-year-old lawyer who lives in Los Angeles and grew up in Wasilla.  read more »

Mark Warfel was always a swimmer. As a child, his parents owned hotels in Florida on the Gulf of Mexico, and Mark and his brothers were always in the water. Later, he was on the high-school swim team in Huntington Beach, Calif.

One day while doing laps, he looked up and saw an older man climbing out of the pool.

“It must have left an impression because I’m still talking about it,” the doctor said, leaning back in his chair behind his desk at the Warfel Institute for Rejuvenation on West 16th Street. “But yes, I saw this man, and it struck me—great body, youthful body, old face.  read more »

Giovanni Luciano got busted using his friend’s credit card at the Manhattan nightclub Bungalow 8 in May 2007. He’d been passing himself off around town as an heir to Dolce & Gabbana. The Post dubbed him “Bungalow Thief.” He got 2 to 4 years for grand larceny.

I wrote to him at the Greene Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y., two hours north of Manhattan.

He replied, handwritten in all caps: “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, to share ‘my side’ of the story … You see Spencer there’s more to my nightlife than you know … I always thought I needed to write a book on how I came and conquered N.  read more »

In the heyday of New York society, a guy could appear out of nowhere with no income and no trust fund and in no time know all the right people and be invited to all the right parties.

It was a tricky Rubik’s Cube to solve—you had to be very attractive, well mannered, sexy, extremely fun, and have at least have one connection to get you going. Then you made your own luck. 

Carlos de Souza was born in the 1950s in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the son of a lawyer and wonderful housewife. 

“I used to do some modeling stuff in Brazil for local newspapers, advertising and things like that,” said Mr.  read more »

The scene at a screenwriters’ “boot camp” in Chelsea was not funny. Around 40 or so people had coughed up $400 for four days of seminars, culminating in a final pitch session Sunday afternoon. The room was packed and had the dank air of an AA meeting. Instead of telling gruesome, true-life stories of battles with the bottle, each person got up and tried to sell the crowd on the sheaf of romantic comedy—a wedding photographer gets amnesia!—or action—Die Hard meets Memento!—he or she had been perfecting. The writers, whose median age appeared to be late 30s, introduced themselves first: waiter, bartender, PA, grip, Off Off Broadway theater producer.  read more »

A while back, a friend of mine boasted that he was spending time with a hot transsexual. Now, my friend—let’s call him Ryan—is quite the ladies’ man. Despite his perplexing androgynous style—tight jeans, guy-liner, the occasional wig—Ryan always shows up with a gorgeous young woman on his arm.

Now he was dating a tranny, and talking about it as casually as if he’d recently begun incorporating onions in his scrambled eggs. He went on and on about how she was “totally fucking hot, man. Probably one of the hottest transsexuals in the world; it’s probably between her and some Thai boy.  read more »

It was the summer of 1984. A few nuns were strolling the streets of La Romana, a resort town in the Dominican Republic, when they heard a baby’s screams coming from a dumpster. The news soon reached the bronzed ears of the city’s most renowned resident, Oscar de la Renta, who at the time was mourning the death of his first wife.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Moises Oscar de la Renta, now 24, picked me up in a Lincoln Town Car he had hired to run some last-minute errands in preparation for a camping trip he was taking that weekend with two attractive young women.  read more »

John Follini is a 58-year-old contractor from East Patchogue, L.I. He’s spent his life building barns, mending roofs and fences, installing light fixtures—doing the general upkeep required in sprawling homes along Long Island’s North Fork, in towns such as Bellport, Mastic-Shirley and Brookhaven. His forearms are invariably sheathed in a moist film of dirt; he has a gray mustache, a great muscular back. Like most accomplished Long Island contractors, he is a crack shot with a bow and arrow.

His father, who was also in the construction business, taught him to hunt when he was five. Grandpa Follini got in the way of a shotgun while serving as a guide on a bird hunt in East Hampton; he showed young John the pellets in his knuckles.  read more »

My editors told me I was crazy. Nuts. As in meshugge. After writing a column two weeks ago about the actor Steve Guttenberg’s move to New York and his hopes for finding true love—a column which they’d O.K.’d under protest—I went back to them last week and announced that it was absolutely essential that I go back to the Goot, as Mr. Guttenberg sometimes calls himself, for more. The original column, I pointed out, had received more than 170 comments on our Web site; Drudge had linked to it; some TV suits had contacted Mr. Guttenberg about a reality show. Clearly, there was an untapped wellspring of American passion for this wonderful actor; in the decades since he first sprang into the national consciousness in the Police Academy movies, he’d remained a lightning rod.  read more »

“It’s kind of a different way of life, because you can really just live your life one loop at a time,” said Gunner of his life caddying at a very exclusive private Hamptons golf club which is often bathed in a nice ocean breeze. He’s 25; back home in Glasgow, he’s studying to be a dentist. “You always know you’re going back out the next day. So it’s quite a surreal environment. ”

“It’s just something you do between sessions,” said Coco, Gunner’s 22-year-old friend from Glasgow. By “between sessions” he means between bouts of drinking.

While the work itself—digging around for balls in the fescue, lugging two sets of golf bags, praying for the moment when you put that flag in the 18th hole—might at times feel like grunt work, the way of life in the shack—two long pine planks that run along either side of a covered tent, tucked away behind a well-groomed hedge—is rarely dull.  read more »

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me,” said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot—as he’s known to his friends—appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

“All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!’” said Mr. Guttenberg. “And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in.  read more »

Captain Stefan Barr said the scallops at the Gramercy Tavern could use a little more salt. He’s been back only a few months from his second tour in Iraq. For 10 years, he was one of the few, the proud, or, as he puts it, “the best”—a Marine. Now he lives in Soho.

Yes, there are soldiers walking among us, dining right next to you, tucking into those same $20 scallops. Some of them probably look just like you or me. Mr. Barr does not. He is 6 foot 5. He has a chest like a well-fed pterodactyl, with long, sinewy arms and giant hands that could easily reach across the table and pop my head off like a cork.  read more »

The Bear Stearns man, the lifer, the one they would have put on the cover of their recruiting pamphlet if they had one—Bear Stearns wants you!—he’s a self-made man. Daddy didn’t put him through Harvard Business School, and if he did, you better keep that to yourself.

Ace Greenberg—the man who put Bear on the map and defined the archetype, Missouri-educated on a football scholarship, started as a clerk, kept his nose to the grindstone, became the CEO—Ace isn’t interested in your business degree. “I want them to have a PSD degree,” he said. “A poor, smart, and deep desire to be rich degree.  read more »

The block of West 11th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues is lined with brownstones and London plane and Chinese scholar trees as tall as the brownstones they shade. Their leafy branches overlap, creating a cozy green roof over the block, as well as a considerable mess to clean up—one of the trees has a pair of birdhouses attached to its trunk.

Henry Codin has been sweeping the block for over a decade. To some he is known as the Mayor of 11th Street. The city is filled with these neighborhood characters, like the Godmother of East 10th Street, or the homeless twins of East 12th Street between Third and Fourth avenues—they are identical, but one is far grumpier.  read more »

“I’ve been too high lately to be terrified of anything,” Liam McMullan said as he loped down Broadway on a recent afternoon to audition for a remake of the movie Fame. Twenty years old, he wore jeans, a purple T-shirt, beat-up Chuck Taylors and a Batman fanny pack containing a jar of marijuana, a bottle of Excedrin for the migraines he been getting lately, and a cell phone and iPod.

When he was 2 years old, Liam was featured in a VH1 special on children with wild parents—his are nightlife society photographer Patrick McMullan and the artist Laurie Ogle. His godparents are Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto and Mudd Club DJ Anita Sarko. His parents brought Liam to Warhol’s Factory when he has 3 weeks old. They never married.  read more »

Rip Torn, paragon of masculinity among actors and for the public who have seen him in Men in Black, Larry Sanders and recently as Don Geiss in 30 Rock, was telling a story. He was standing on the southeast corner of 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue, wearing black cowboy boots, black Wrangler work pants held up by suspenders, a blue striped shirt, sherbet orange vest and a dusty black fedora.

“I’ve seen people die, but never go from alive to dead that quickly,” he said.

It had happened on this same corner; Rip Torn was hiding behind a lamppost with Norman Mailer, who would one day try to bite off his ear. But that was later. The soon-to-be-dead guy in the story Mr. Torn was telling was someone unfortunate enough to be flushed out from a hiding place under a car by four armed men in dark suits.  read more »