Leroy Antonio “Nicky” Barnes (born October 15, 1933) is a former Harlem, New York drug dealer who at one time, along with Frank Lucas and Guy Fisher, was one of the biggest heroin dealers in New York. He was eventually prosecuted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After several years in prison, Barnes turned State’s evidence and testified against others in his criminal organization in order to reduce his sentence.

On June 5, 1977 The New York Times magazine released an article titled, Mr Untouchable with Barnes posing on the front cover. The Times told Barnes that they were going to use a mug shot of Barnes unless Barnes came and posed for the cameras. Barnes, who hated mugshots, agreed and took the infamous shot.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The 74-year-old man who used to be Leroy Nicholas Barnes, owner of 60 pairs of custom-made shoes, 27 full-length leather coats and more than one Mercedes-Benz, wears baggy Lee dungarees these days and drives to work in a used car he bought five years ago.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Audio: Sam Roberts interviews Leroy Nicholas “Nicky” Barnes }

During the Harlem heroin plague of the seventies, few dealers were bigger than Frank Lucas and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. Both made millions selling dope, lived the wide-brimmed-hat high life, enabled the addiction of whole neighborhoods, and, eventually, got caught. (…)

NICKY BARNES: Hey, hey, what’s up, playa?
FRANK LUCAS: Hey, Nick.
NB: I heard you’re in a wheelchair. What’s going on?
FL: Broke a leg, Nick. Two places.
NB: Damn.
FL: So what’s with you, man?
NB: Chilling, dude.

{ A conversation between Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes | NY mag | Continue reading }

image { 12ozprophet }

Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal has been swift and smooth—till now. Marcus Brauchli, the Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, is reported to be quitting his position.

Brauchli was one of the few Journal managers who tacitly supported the takeover of the Journal by Murdoch’s News Corporation, hoping the removal of the Bancroft family and a deep-pocketed backer would free a newspaper which had become hidebound.

But the Australian media mogul, and his lieutenants, have shown growing impatience with the Journal’s resistance to their plans. Murdoch plans to turn the Journal into a full-fledged competitor to the New York Times.

{ Gawker | NY Times }

related { One of Rupert Murdoch’s companies is going on trial for charges that it hired hackers to sabotage a rival company and gain the top spot in the global pay-TV war }

{ Madonna photographed by Steven Meisel, Vanity Fair, 1992 | more | “As she nears 50, Madonna is searching for her true self.” }

{ Jeff Koons, Girl with Dolphin and Monkey, 2006 }

{ During the day, you can only see the Playboy logo. At night, the poster is lit so that the circles of light form two breasts | Playboy poster, Germany }

Memo passed on to Gawker Media editors

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Noah Robischon
Date: Feb 12, 2008 10:27 AM
Subject: Valleywag Voice Guide
To: [REDACTED]

Excellent post writing tips from Paul Boutin (and Owen) for your Tuesday reading pleasure.

—-


THE RAGE OF THE CREATIVE UNDERCLASS
We need to put back the Gawkeresque angry-creative-underclass glint to our voice. Just one glint of nastiness per post. I loved Carlson’s advice to Paultards on their irrelevance: “Don’t just take my word for it. Go to the polls and find out for yourselves.” Zing, and irrefutably true.

DENTON’S FORMULA: MIX A PLUS AND A MINUS
If someone screwed up in business, find something nice to say about them: “The charmingly incompetent CEO.” If someone succeeded, find a way to slap them. “The wildly successful blowhard.” Denton says this is a key to Gawker posts about people, and when he got lazy he slipped on it and readers noticed in a roundabout way that the site felt less brilliant.

PEOPLE, NOT COMPANIES OR PRODUCTS
Write about Steve Jobs or Jonathan Ives rather than “Apple” as an actor. Or find out who their VP of sales is if they’ve had a wildly successful quarter and credit him/her, a nice detail. I don’t want to read that the Zune is a flop, I want to read that Wink Twinkerton, head of the Zune division, has done for portable music players what Bill Gates did for CEO sex appeal.

DON’T LET YOUR ANGER GET TO YOU
If someone whose politics or opinions you disagree with says something you want to call out, don’t do a straight-ahead criticism. Instead, take their argument further to a simple but ridiculous conclusion. When Hillary Clinton proposed a moratorium on home foreclosures and a freeze on loan rates, Jordan Golson asked, “Why not a moratorium on people paying their mortgages? That seems easier.”

BEAT-DOWNS ARE BAD
You’ve wrung this out of them mostly, but I still see the young ones do the oldschool Ann Coulter / Molly Ivins thing of insulting someone three times in a paragraph when once would be better. Pick the one best dig and save the others for another time.

IF YOU WOULDN’T SAY IT IN A CONVERSATION, DON’T WRITE IT
Avoid journalist-speak like “He takes umbrage with our statement.” You never say umbrage in real life.

ONE JOKE PER POST
We’ve slipped on that. Too many jokes comes across as not having enough to report. Keep the post short and move onto the next one.

JUST NEVER USE THESE WORDS
Douche, douchebag, douchery, asshat. Techcrunch uses them, need I say more. (To which I’ll add: “teh,” “intarwebs,” “lulz.”)

{ NY mag | Continue reading }

{ We sell space in our paper to advertisers so we can cover the cost of printing, distributing, and putting the whole damn thing together. | Austin Chronicles | AA blog }

{ New York Woman magazine, March/April 1987 | Photo: Jean-Jacques Castres | dress by Jean-Paul Gaultier }

A North Carolina judge held an attorney in contempt on Wednesday for reading Maxim magazine during a court session. Judge Kevin Eddinger (pictured) held lawyer Todd Paris in contempt after he saw him reading Maxim magazine with “a female topless model” on the cover, according to the court order. Paris declined to comment yesterday to the paper.

When Eddinger gave Paris a chance to respond he apologized and “stated in his view the magazine was not pornography, was available at local stores and that he did not intend contempt,” the order said. Eddinger fined Paris $300, gave him a 15 day suspended jail sentence that remains in effect for a year and placed him on unsupervised probation, according to the order. (…)

Comment by Mr. Grolsch - January 25, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Flawed judicial selection process produces insecure little arrogant judges. No wonder top-down court rules prohibit lawyers from telling the public the truth about some of these nothings who hold a gavel and wear a robe.

Comment by Anonymous - January 25, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Well, I always considered it inappropriate to read newspapers and magazines while the judge is on the bench. I don’t know if that’s the practice in NC. That said, this guy seems like a typical state court tyrant who has a problem with the boobies.

Comment by Dirk Diggler - January 26, 2008 at 5:24 pm
If a female lawyer had been reading Cosmo (with a picture of a buffed, shirtless dude on the cover), would the judge have had the guts to make the same punitive call? Or would he worry about political backlash or some other form of discomfort and merely asked her to put it away? Just curious.

Comment by Anonymous - January 26, 2008 at 5:28 pm
5:24: A female lawyer wouldn’t be reading Cosmo. That’s the difference.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

{ The double page spread was glued together and had to be forced apart to see the ad. | Hombre magazine ads | Leo Burnett, Argentina }

Walking down the street near my house, I came across this funny note. And a few steps later, the box of porn.

Dear Residents of 2412 Fulton…, I was dumpster diving and came accross the abundance of porn in your trash. I have a friend who would love to have it. However, it is now 7:21 and I will miss breakfast if I don’t get to the (people’s) park before 8am, There is only one of me, currently. So I am borrowing your trash can til later this morning. Please don’t be alarmed. I promise to return it. Thanks for your understanding + sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

{ Mary Hodder }

One of the things I said to them was, you know, “You guys are just covering — what do they call it — the scream of the peacock, and you’re missing the whole fox hunt.” Like waterboarding [or] where all the money went that we poured into Iraq. It just seems to disappear. And yet you get this coverage of who’s gonna get custody of Britney’s kids? Whether or not Lindsay drank at her twenty-first birthday party, and all this other shit.

You know, this morning, the two big stories on CNN are Kanye West’s mother, who died, apparently, after having some plastic surgery. The other big thing that’s going on is whether or not this cop [Drew Peterson] killed his… wife. And meanwhile, you’ve got Pakistan in the midst of a real crisis, where these people have nuclear weapons that we helped them develop. You’ve got a guy in charge, who’s basically declared himself the military strongman and is being supported by the Bush administration, whose raison d’etre for going into Iraq was to spread democracy in the world.

So you’ve got these things going on, which seem to me to be very substantive, that could affect all of us, and instead, you see a lot of this back-fence gossip. So I said something to the Nightline guy about waterboarding, and if the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture. (…)

We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that’s really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don’t know who their f—— Representatives are. (…)

Britney is now famous for being famous. Her sales have gone down with almost every album, bigger and bigger jumps, so that nobody really cares about her music anymore. They care about the tabloid headlines and whether or not she’s wearing panties. (…) It’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

{ Talking with Stephen King | Times | Continue reading }

related { Britney’s millions }

The red carpet is sometimes the only way to get into the theater for a movie premiere. Faced with this, I walk really quickly with my head down, afraid that if a photographer mistakes me for someone famous, I’ll disastrously start to pose, assuming that he’s taking my picture because my column has suddenly become super popular — and the whole while I’ll actually just be blocking his view of that guy from “Will & Grace.”

But where I see potential humiliation, others see opportunity. Celebrity magazines and websites are insatiable, so desperate for photos that there’s an emergent class of the un-famous frequently photographed. Paris Hilton started her “career” this way. It’s how Eva Longoria will end hers.

Can just anyone draw the lenses of the paparazzi if they walk down the red carpet slowly with their head held high? I wanted to know. So I persuaded my lovely wife, Cassandra, to walk the carpet at the Pink Party, a huge, star-packed annual fundraiser for breast cancer research that always provides lots of visual fodder for the celeb mags. (…)

I called Phoebe Price for advice. While not famous in this country for anything at all, Price has spent the last two years traveling around the world, wearing very expensive, very skimpy outfits to parties at the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, Cannes and, most likely on off weeks, local quinceañeras.

And it’s worked: Price has appeared in Us, Star, InStyle, In Touch, Life & Style and OK! — and has been shot by paparazzi eating in public and running on the beach. She is also the obsession of the snarky gossip blog Dlisted. Price is one leaked porn tape away from getting her own reality show.

Price had great suggestions. “Say I find a Dolce & Gabbana dress, and I think it’s really hot and I think someone else might wear it. I’ll wear it so that it might get compared in a magazine.” In fact, Price has a personal shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue who leaks to her what other celebrities are wearing to big events.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }