REAL ESTATE
• No one wanted to buy the $27 million duplex in Julian Schnabel’s Palazzo Chupi, so the brokers raised the price to $32 million, apparently on the assumption that people always want what they can’t have. [Curbed]
• Leona Helmsley’s Park Lane Hotel could sell for $800 million. Lady is rich even in death. [NYP]
• Madison Square Garden has revealed plans for a renovation that will make the Garden only moderately less gross while ensuring that Penn Station will stay gross forever. [NYO]
MEDIA
• A New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Barry Bearak is being held in a Zimbabwean jail after writing a page-one story yesterday about President Robert Mugabe’s losing control of the nation’s Parliament. [NYT]
• Time and Newsweek seek to reinvent themselves with smaller staffs as the newsmagazine landscape changes. [WSJ]
• What’s the Huffington Post really worth? [Mixed Media/Portfolio]
FINANCE
• Vulture investors have started swooping, buying up mortgages, bank loans, and companies on the cheap. [NYT]
• Jamie Dimon didn’t want any part of the Bear Stearns scheme until the Fed twisted his arm. [Bloomberg]
• Ten years after John Reed orchestrated the deal that merged Citicorp with Travelers and created Citigroup, he realizes it was kind of a lousy idea. [FT]
LAW
• A Manhattan-based Starbucks barista is suing the coffee chain, alleging that shift supervisors violated a state law by putting their sticky fingers in the employees’ tip jar. [NYT]
• New York nail-salon worker Susan Kim sparked a mani-pedi rebellion after she won a labor lawsuit over her working conditions. [NYT]
• The court threw out a lawsuit filed by a headhunter who sued Akin Gump, alleging that the firm stiffed him out of his commission. [Law.com]
