Construction Maison

In 1926 the fraud police had Jared Flagg under questioning. It wasn't the first time the flimflam man was in trouble with the law. But it would be the last. As the investigators pushed for answers about a particular fraud, Flagg began struggling for breath. The attorneys suspected it was a trick to slow them down. But for once in his scandal-plagued life, Jared Flagg was playing it straight. He collapsed and died. Just short of 70 years old, Jared Flagg left his estate to his wealthy and better-known brother Edward, who was a highly regarded architect and landlord in New York City. The Flaggs were relatives of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt money had paid for Edward's education and launched him as a successful architect. At the time he died, Edward was a major landowner on Staten Island and, his obituary noted, had the design of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. among his notable credits. Jared's obituary, meanwhile, simply noted he "collapsed on...

Tammy "Sunny" Sytch was recently a guest on The Ross Report podcast with Jim Ross where she spoke on a number of interesting topics, including getting hired by the WWF at age 21. "After six and a half years, I was working at Smoky Mountain and I was in the apartment with Chris [Candido]; the phone rings and I pick it up, and I hear, 'Hi, this is Bruce Prichard from the WWF.' I went and called Chris because I assumed it was for him," Sytch explained to JR. "He said to me that he was calling for me, not for Chris; so I asked him, for what, because this wasn't something I was striving to do or wanting to do; it was just something that fell on my lap, and then that was how I was hired by the WWF at the time," recalled Sytch. "It was such a crazy rollercoaster over the years, so by the time I turned 21 years old on December 7th, and December 15th I had started working for them. It was crazy." The year was 1994 when Sytch originally...

This month, a man was arrested in Oklahoma City for trying to detonate 1,000 pounds of explosives in a cargo van parked downtown . The attack, he hoped, would cripple the government and start a revolution. Last October, three men were arrested in Kansas for plotting to bomb an apartment complex and a mosque using four cars laden with explosives. In these febrile days, where terrorists have sought to wreak fear and chaos from Orlando to Paris, and now Barcelona, you’d expect wall-to-wall coverage on cable news about these foiled plots. Terrorism experts would be wheeled out to opine for hours on all angles, from the explosives used to the profile of the would-be attackers to how and why they were radicalized. Instead, the two incidents got barely any coverage — some brief news spots here and there and a few mentions online. Ask any Arab-American or Muslim in America why those incidents weren’t covered ad nauseam and they’ ll reply deadpan : because the would-be attackers were white. So...

Huma Abedin has gone high fashion and high society, with the Hillary Clinton aide enjoying a weekend in the Hamptons just days after she was featured in the September issue of 'W.' A single and ready to mingle Abedin, 41, was spotted on Sunday at the Southampton home of Moda Operandi founder Lauren Santo Domingo and her music executive husband Andres .  Lauren and Andres, whose father is billionaire Colombian business magnate Julio , were hosting their annual all- white Badminton tournament at the estate this weekend, which they scooped up for a reported $30 million. The couple split their time between that residence, an apartment in Paris and their $18.5million townhouse on Gramercy Park in New York City.  And while Abedin certainly does not have that kind of money, she still seems to be doing just fine in the wake of her boss' defeat last November, with the latest quarterly filings from the Hillary for America campaign revealing that the aide has received $64,369.94 ...

Regeni was undeterred. Proficient in five languages, he was insatiably curious and exuded a low-intensity charm that attracted a wide circle of friends. From 12 to 14, he served as youth mayor of his hometown, Fiumicello. He prided himself on his ability to navigate different cultures, and he relished Cairo ’s unruly street life : the smoky cafes, the endless hustle, the candy- colored party boats that plied the Nile at night. He registered as a visiting scholar at American University in Cairo and found a room in Dokki, a traffic-choked neighborhood between the Pyramids and the Nile, where he shared an apartment with two young professionals : Juliane Schoki, who taught German, and Mohamed El Sayad , a lawyer at one of Cairo’s oldest law firms . Dokki was an unfashionable address, but it was just two subway stops from downtown Cairo with its maze of cheap hotels, dive bars and crumbling apartment blocks encircling Tahrir Square . Regeni soon befriended writers and artists and practi...