From the Blog
The Gritty King of New York
Abel Ferrara, the ghoulishly looking American film director, whose film The Bad Lieutenant has been a perennial favorite ever since I first saw it in the early 90s, especially for Harvey Keitel’s riveting tour de force performance, is one of the most eccentric and cryptic figures I’ve met. From his fertile mind, has poured a ...
Tipping the Scales of Justice for the Rich and Infamous
I was reminded of an encounter I had with F. Lee Bailey one evening while working at Cafe Nicholson’s in Manhattan in the late 1980s. F. Lee Bailey was a legendary legal giant who in a career spanning more than fifty years represented some of the most well-known and infamous miscreants. Bailey first came to ...
A Silent Slugger
Around 1984, during my last year in high school, I was working at an Italian restaurant called Piero’s on a small island enclave in Miami Beach, known as Bay Harbor. Owned by a handsome and gregarious Sicilian named Piero Filpi who had been running another restaurant only a year before called Tiberio at the Bal ...
The Second Coming of Jilly’s
In the early 2000s, one of Frank Sinatra’s old stomping grounds was reborn when Jilly’s reopened on 41 West 58th Street. For many years, Sinatra and his Rat Pack gang frequented the old place on 256 West 52nd Street, which is now home to the Russian Samovar. They used to hang out there until the ...
The Wonderfully Wacky World of Fernando Arrabal
Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish playwright, poet, and film director, is one of the wackiest and zaniest people I’ve ever met. Best known for co-founding the Panic Movement—a group of surreal and chaotic performance artists inspired by the god Pan who were pushing the envelope where surrealists had left off by shocking audiences with their bold ...
Jorge Amado and His $250,000 Advance
To Brazilians, the name Jorge Amado is to literature what Antonio Carlos Jobim is to Bossa Nova. In a career spanning 70 years that included 32 books, millions of sold copies, and translations in over 50 countries, Amado is often referred to as the “Pelé of the written word.” Best known for his three novels, ...
Murder, He Wrote
Some of my most memorable encounters at Trattoria Dell’Arte happened serendipitously. Like the time I met Abe Feder, one of America’s first modern “lighting designers” who devoted himself to a life of illumination lighting virtually everything he touched, including the Broadway theater, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Empire State Building. Or the time ...
The Financier and His Attorney
Victor Posner was the nastiest and the most corrupt financier I have ever met. He took corporate malfeasance to new heights, plundering the companies he bought and sold like baseball cards, with little regard or sympathy for the people who devoted their lives to building those now-bankrupt businesses. Posner didn’t care about anyone else; he ...
Looking for Gay
Ever since I read Gay Talese’s collection of nonfiction writings in Fame and Obscurity, he has been one of my favorite authors. His meticulous attention to detail and deft, almost artisanal approach to selecting the ideal words or phrases to characterize the people or settings that were his topic were frequently arresting—layered but straightforward, and ...
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