I Can’t Tell You Why But I’m Trapped By Your Love And I’m Chained To Your Side

Astorians Coming Together to show that they are interesting, too:

While taking a ride on the N or W trains to Astoria these days, one is likely to notice a musician hauling a guitar or an actor reading a script or maybe a young artist sketching the city views from the elevated tracks.

With proximity to Manhattan, public safety, good cuisine and still-affordable rents, Astoria and neighboring Long Island City have been seeing a migration of newcomers in recent years — many belonging to the creative set.

Now these artists have a place to congregate in the form of a monthly gathering that kicked off last week.

The idea is “to give people a nice chance, in an intimate setting, to meet each other and get to know each other,” said Andrea Reese, a writer, performer and one of the founders of the group B-QUACK, which stands for Borough of Queens United Artists Collective Kum-Ba-Ya.

The first meeting was held last Thursday night at Waltz, an artistic-minded coffee shop on Ditmars Blvd. More than two dozen artists, playwrights and musicians mingled at the inaugural event.

“There was a feeling of a lot of excitement,” said Reese, an actor in a one-woman show about Jackie O. “It was really a lot of fun.”

B-QUACK is the brainchild of five locals: Reese, performer Jen Ryan, director and theater editor Leonard Jacobs, designer Rik Sansone and David Gibbs, a publicist.

. . .

“We’re a little tired of hearing about Brooklyn,” said Jacobs, who moved to Astoria from the Theater District three years ago after the notion of artists being able to afford Manhattan rents turned into “a laughingstock” and after many Brooklyn neighborhoods became nearly as expensive.

“It is time for us to say we are here, we are interesting,” Jacobs said.

You Couldn’t Throw A Little Embezzled Largess The Way Of One Of The City’s Smaller Theatres, Could You? And You Know Why? Because The Broadway Hegemony Has Turned All You All Into Theatre Zombies!

More proof that an unhealthy obsession with Broadway shlock is actually a sickness:

A starstruck accountant embezzled nearly a half-million dollars from a Midtown clothing company — then blew the money on Broadway charities, theater tickets and flowers for her favorite female stars.

Jennifer Smith, 35, lavished $3,000 worth of flowers on such celebs as “Wicked” star Kristin Chenoweth, Oscar-nominated actor Catherine Keener, who played Anna in off-Broadway’s “Burn This,” and Anne Nathan of the Broadway hits “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Chicago.”

Also presented with purportedly purloined petals were Jennifer Laura Thompson, who played Frieda Bauer in “Pardon My English,” and Cherry Jones, who wowed the critics as Sister Aloysius in “Doubt” at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Her favorite star was Chenoweth, who played Glinda the Good Witch in “Wicked” at the Gershwin Theatre. Chenoweth got flowers four times from the accused embezzler, who sent them to the star’s home address, prosecutors said.

. . .

The theater-minded charities Broadway Cares and Carnegie Hall Society also benefited from her looted largesse, prosecutors said.

Smith, who has two prior Manhattan embezzlement convictions totaling $58,000, was apparently dissatisfied with the $65,000 she earned as the personal assistant to James Ammeen, owner of Neema Clothing, a manufacturer and importer.

Ammeen had discovered the two years’ worth of alleged thefts only after he fired Smith last June. She was canned after she kept calling in sick, even claiming falsely that she had cancer, only to be spotted at — where else? — a Broadway theater by the boss’ wife.

“Nothing Has Hurt People More In This Country Than Wanting To Be In The Movies”

The Times’ Alan Feuer shows how overenthusiastically pitching your film script can get you into big trouble, even years later:

Just beneath the surface of the federal trial of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa is a cautionary tale about the entertainment age. If one were a screenwriter or, say, one of the half-dozen authors writing about the case, one might propose a work titled, “The Deal Got Him: How a Former Lawman Was Charged With Conspiracy Because He Tried to Get His Movie Made.”

Mr. Eppolito, 57, a retired New York detective, has found himself in exactly this situation. After leaving the police force in the early 1990’s, he went to act in films and write scripts in Las Vegas, where years later he was charged with his former partner, Mr. Caracappa, 64, in a federal narcotics case.

The drug case in Las Vegas revived the government’s desire to pursue a much bigger and much more gruesome case against the two men — accusations that they had killed at least eight people for the mob. That case, based on events said to have occurred in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, was in jeopardy of being voided because of a five-year statute of limitations — which is where Mr. Eppolito’s writing career comes in.

He has always had a touch of the poet in him, penning “Mafia Cop,” a book that describes his break with the Brooklyn gangsters in his family, and scripts like “Turn of Faith,” a cop-mob-priesthood potboiler produced by the former lightweight champion Boom Boom Mancini. And yet his current troubles began in 2004, prosecutors say, when a government informant with a micro-recorder approached him in Las Vegas, posing as a rich accountant with investors interested in his next script.

If you believe the government the informant, Steven Corso, risked his life recording Mr. Eppolito boasting about all sorts of gangsters he knew and then agreeing to secure an ounce of methamphetamine for some Hollywood big shots. Mr. Corso seemed, after all, to hold the keys to the film world and was, therefore, a man Mr. Eppolito wanted to impress.

But if you believe Bruce Cutler, Mr. Eppolito’s lawyer, Mr. Corso was “a defrocked C.P.A.” and a man worthy of “a nice smack in the face,” who played upon his client’s celluloid dreams to entrap him.

Even though Mr. Corso recorded Mr. Eppolito saying some fairly rough things on tape, Mr. Cutler has argued they were not criminal things — and not even, in the factual sense, true. They were rather fictions produced by Mr. Eppolito’s Brooklyn-steeped imagination — “Mafia folklore, stories,” Mr. Cutler said — the very thing that made his client worthy as a writer.

What is not in dispute is this: one ounce of methamphetamine said to have been procured by a struggling screenwriter for some “Hollywood punks,” as Mr. Cutler called them, has allowed the government to jump across the statute of limitations and indict the two detectives in a continuing criminal conspiracy — recall the title from above? — that stretched from the streets of Brooklyn to the subdivisions of Las Vegas.

Which may be why Edward Hayes, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, had this to say in his opening arguments last week: “Nothing has hurt people more in this country than wanting to be in the movies.”

(It’s Fuhrmanesque, no?)

Corrupt Cops! Shootings On The Belt Parkway! Vowel-Ended Last Names! Where’s My Book Deal?

The Times reports that the upcoming trial of mafia-linked cops Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa has attracted a boatload of literary carpetbaggers:

Depending on whom you ask, when you ask them and how honest they are, there are four books and a movie, five books and a movie, four books but no movie or five books but no movie about the federal racketeering trial of Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa in the works.

The trial, which began yesterday with jury selection in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, has become the latest scoop for the disheveled band of newspaper reporters who write about the courts and has led, in at least two cases, to a literary luncheon and a book deal. It has also served as a midcareer change of pace for two investigators on the case who have cashed in on their inside knowledge, signing book deals of their own.

Almost from the day last March when Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, two former New York police detectives, were slapped in handcuffs over dinner in Las Vegas, literary agents and Hollywood types have descended on the case. There were articles in Playboy and Vanity Fair, not to mention the city’s newspapers. At a pretrial hearing in September, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, Edward Hayes, mused aloud that every member of the prosecution team, except the two chief prosecutors, seemed to have a book deal.

It Did Not Happen As I Reported It . . . Or At All

That Village Voice article about The Game appears too good to be true. Gawker reports that the story seems to have been Blaired into existence:

Here’s what we know: This week’s Voice had a cover story by hotshot young Nick Sylvester reporting that men around New York are using Neil Strauss’s The Game, about pickup artists and their techniques, and that women are increasingly aware of this and outsmarting their would-be seducers. We know said cover story has been removed from the Voice website. We know that the Voice’s acting editor-in-chief Doug Simmons, to whom we were referred when we called because the paper’s PR director has left the company, hasn’t returned our message. And we’re reliably informed that the newsroom — such as it is anymore — knows some sort of big shit is going down but isn’t being told what.

Here’s what we hear/speculate/gather: People quoted in the story claim they never spoke to the reporter. Editors at the paper now believe Sylvester likely fabricated material. Writers at the paper believe this is because young Sylvester — a former Harvard Lampoon kid who writes criticism for the Voice and indie-music reviews for Pitchfork — didn’t quite get the whole big-reported-cover-story thing, which he wasn’t really ready for and which Simmons was pushing him to do. Simmons, merely the acting editor, is trying to make a splash so he can get the job permanently. This is not the sort of splash he had in mind. Sylvester may or may not have fainted in Simmons’s office while being berated. And everything in the usually boisterous office is being kept very need-to-know.

Gawker supplies cached Google links here.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Voice explain in part what happened:

Early Wednesday morning, the Voice learned that the concluding section of this week’s cover story, “Do You Wanna Kiss Me?” by senior associate editor Nick Sylvester, contained fabricated material. In that section, Sylvester says he met at a New York City bar with three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. to test their updates of pickup techniques from Neil Strauss’s book, The Game.

That scene, as Sylvester now acknowledges in the statement below, never happened.

We have removed the article from the Voice website and begun a review of the entire piece. Sylvester has been suspended.

What follows is Sylvester’s statement:

“Dear Voice Readers,

“I did not meet Steve Lookner in New York at Bar 151. The trip and my encounter with him, DC, and Vali did not happen as I reported, or at all. . . .”