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 »