The speaker was the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Later, he recalled that he originally took a meeting with MSNBC executives believing that he would be pitching the network on a weekly series. Instead, he was offered a nightly program all his own. He started as a temporary replacement for Ed Schultz at 6 p.m. when Mr. Schultz moved to 10 p.m. in the rejiggering prompted by Keith Olbermann’s departure. Before long, the hour was rechristened PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton.

“The only thing I was worried about was my bosses,” MSNBC president Phil Griffin told The Observer of the decision to name Mr. Sharpton a primary host. “But he’d already been on for a month and a half. If we’d said that he was the permanent host on that first day, I’m not sure we’d have pulled it off.”

MSNBC was willing to let Mr. Sharpton travel (provided he gave enough advance notice to allow for a studio to be provided on the road) and wrote a provision into his contract allowing him to continue his activism, Mr. Sharpton said.

It was less of a leap than it might have appeared. As he pointed out during an interview at his MSNBC office, he’d been a talk-radio host for six years (Keepin’ It Real airs from 8 to 10 p.m. on 1600 AM in New York).

If it weren’t for his civil rights organization, the National Action Network, he added, “I had the background of 50 percent of the people doing this.” But he is Al Sharpton of the National Action Network. He is also the Al Sharpton who enthusiastically fanned a media firestorm 25 years ago with his advocacy on behalf of Tawana Brawley, a teenager who claimed—falsely, it now appears—to have been raped by a group of white men, an incident that cemented the young civil rights leader’s influence and brought him a measure of infamy. He ended up losing a defamation lawsuit filed by an assistant district attorney accused of raping Ms. Brawley and was immortalized by Tom Wolfe as The Bonfire of the Vanities’ “Rev. Reginald Bacon,” a shrewd manipulator of the city’s media. Then, there was his endlessly caricatured tracksuit-and-chains image, immortalized in a parade of Sean Delonas cartoons for Page Six that depicted the reverend as a Violet Beauregarde-like sphere.

Not to mention his unsuccessful, if impressive, run for the presidency in 2004.

Perhaps it was a desire to put his reputation as a firebrand behind him that accounted for Mr. Sharpton’s decidedly sober debut. “His first show was stiff,” Mr. Griffin told the crowd at the PoliticsNation party. “There was no Rev.”

Over the course of his first year on air, though, Mr. Sharpton has managed to uncork those cable-friendly “Rev” qualities—his undisguised political advocacy, for instance, and a compelling style of oratory that finds him punching rhetorical questions with a furious solemnity that lends the daily news churn an unusual hint of gravitas.

Still, his reputation notwithstanding, Mr. Sharpton is far from the angriest man in prime time.

“He's controversial,” Mr. Griffin told The Observer. “But a lot of people only know him from a few things. You don’t understand that he’s a good person. He’s fair. You don’t want to be judged for just a few things in your life, do you?”

We noted that his missteps had been particularly public and might color potential viewers’ impressions before they even tuned in. “It’s the civil rights movement! He has to do things that he’s misunderstood for. Maybe he’s made a mistake or two—but his heart is in the right place.”

He’s even happy to give airtime to his ideological foes. “I fought with Newt Gingrich,” Mr. Sharpton reminded The Observer at his party. He was puffing on a cigar, his only vice after he adopted a vegetarian diet that brought his weight down to a svelte 150 pounds. (He’d lost weight during his 2001 arrest on the island of Vieques, then gained much of it back while running for president—“room service when you get back to the hotel, South Carolina, fried chicken three times a day”—and lost it, once more, before he even knew he’d be on television each day.) He was looking good.

“I fought with Pat Buchanan,” he added. “And I had a good time with Michael Steele!”

For the significant portion of the nation that identifies as liberal (and the smaller number that watches MSNBC), Rev. Sharpton—cast as a clown and a villain throughout the late 1980s and 1990s—is, at 57, suddenly an establishment figure. “The Rev is only going to grow, because more people are going to accept him,” Mr. Griffin noted. “He’s going to break all these notions of who he is.”

Mr. Sharpton, who early in his career served as the tour manager for James Brown, borrowed more than a hairstyle from his mentor.

According to Mr. Sharpton’s lawyer, Sanford Rubinstein, “he’s the hardest-working man in show business.”

Mr. Sharpton's office is decorated with blown-up covers of Newsweek and The New York Post bearing his image, and a smaller frame containing three separately matted photos, portraits of the reverend as a younger man. One shows him preaching at age seven. One has him posing with James Brown. The third is of Mr. Brown and Mr. Sharpton meeting a young Michael and Janet Jackson.

Asked what the biggest misconception about him is, Mr. Sharpton cited the notion that he craves media attention and fame for its own sake. He left his role as James Brown’s tour manager in order to focus full-time on organizing and activism. “If you had a young guy out of Brooklyn, out of welfare, dead broke, who starts flying around the world with Jay-Z, then tells Jay-Z, ‘I know I ain’t got no money but I’m committed to social justice’—that defines him! If I had wanted money, I could’ve stayed with James Brown. You can disagree with me, but at least give me credit for having sacrificed. Because there was no guarantee that when I went to Howard Beach that it was going to be a national issue. Or Bensonhurst. Or whatever! Or that one day I would get MSNBC and radio and all that.”

James Brown, he added, thought his young protégé was crazy.

Mr. Sharpton came to prominence during a period of extreme racial enmity in the city, speaking out on one notorious case after another, fulminating before the news cameras and leading crowds of protesters with his now-familiar rallying cry: “No justice, no peace!”

His reference to Howard Beach recalled the 1986 death of Michael Griffith, who was struck by traffic after being chased by a white mob in Queens (Mr. Sharpton’s activism resulted in the appointment of a special prosecutor in the case). In the Bensonhurst incident, in 1989, a mob of white residents beat four black teenagers, killing one, Yusef Hawkins. Mr. Sharpton’s outspokenness in that case resulted in an attempt on his life.

After a few decades of dancing on the city’s racial fault lines, jousting with guests on basic cable must seem like a pretty low-key gig.

Mr. Sharpton’s 2011 television debut occurred as MSNBC was finding its footing as a liberal answer to right-leaning juggernaut Fox News. Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times recently referred to the network’s mission as “counterprogramming, not coverage,” and counted Mr. Sharpton as part of “a growing cast of anchor-bloviators.” At his party, the host didn’t deny that MSNBC and Fox had similarities: “We’re people with opinions,” he said.

“People don’t watch Bill O’Reilly or me for the weather report,” he went on. “They know we have an opinion. We said in the beginning I wasn’t objective. No one who watches my show thinks I’m objective. Fox is not objective.”

He used the weather-report crack, again, at a recent Saturday broadcast from the National Action Network’s “House of Justice” in Harlem. The crowd roared its approval, as they did with most of his laugh lines; an elderly woman in the audience remarked, “I call him the next Chris Rock.”

Before Mr. Sharpton’s entrance at 10 a.m. sharp at the Saturday NAN gathering, which is a hybrid of sorts between church service and activist meet-up, a female speaker decried Nicki Minaj’s apparent endorsement of Mitt Romney (which the rapper herself has disavowed). “When I look at certain celebrities, I look at what they’ve done. How engaged are you in community activism? If you’ve never seen them on the ground, why would what they say matter?”

A choir member announced, “We should be thankful that we are blessed, that we are educated, that we can tell somebody something.” Then Rev. Sharpton took the stage, swaying to the beat but unsmiling.

“What do we waaaaaant,” he sang. The room was packed with guests who knew the answer: “justice.” Rev. Sharpton added, “Some people cheat and come at 10, because that’s when I get up here. But you don’t have a seat this morning.”

He discussed, briefly, the Trayvon Martin killing this year; he was frustrated, he told the crowd, that he had been perceived to be seeking publicity from a case he took credit for bringing to the public’s attention. (After Mr. Sharpton urged due process for George Zimmerman, Martin’s shooter, he was criticized by some media observers for full-throated political advocacy on top of his journalistic duties.) “Later the press tried to act like we rode in on the publicity,” he went on. “No. We started the publicity. Was I an ambulance chaser? No, I’m an ambulance.”

He exhorted the crowd to never lose the power to define themselves. “In my life I’ve had ups and downs. I keep going. You know why I like having my MSNBC show on at six o’clock? Not four o’clock or nine o’clock? I think about my critics, who said I’d never do anything. My show comes on at six o’clock, about the time my critics come home and put dinner on the table!”

Like his office, Rev. Sharpton’s House of Justice is decorated with images from his past. The Newsweek cover is there, as is a New York Daily News front page, “GIVE ME THE TRUTH,” about the reverend’s quest to learn about whether he was biologically related to Senator Strom Thurmond. Hung above the stage, to the left of the podium, is a framed picture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., looking down and to the right. It appears he’s gazing approvingly at whomever is speaking.

Still, Mr. Sharpton is looking for real approval these days—and not just from his amen corner.

“We can get 300 or 400 in the room on Saturday,” he explained, “and 50,000 more on the radio. Okay. When do you stop playing to the 300 people in the room that’ll clap at anything you say? And when do you deal with the 50,000 that are listening, half of whom may not be on your side but would be if you make a sound argument?”

In September 2011, its first full month on air, PoliticsNation averaged 598,000 nightly viewers; in the first two weeks of this month, the show is hovering around 912,000 per evening. Viewership in the 25-54 demographic has nearly doubled as well. (The program comes in second in its time slot among cable news outlets in both metrics, behind Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier.) While Mr. Sharpton claims that his Saturday-morning audience is tuning in, PoliticsNation executive producer Matt Saal described the viewership of MSNBC as, traditionally, affluent. “He speaks for people who aren’t of means. He’s making sure we’re speaking not necessarily to those people—but for those people.”

Though he’s making fewer headlines these days, Mr. Sharpton finally seems to be achieving a measure of respectability. Knowing what he knows now, he was asked, does he regret anything about the fiery rhetorical style he employed back in the day?

“So, I was in my 30s when people first met me,” he said, “and I would say things, or react, or be personal. You learn over time, well, you may be more effective not making personal attacks. Not because it looks better—but because you may really want to win the case. You may really want to win people over. So, the question is, is you being flippant more important than winning? Or is winning more important than you being flippant?”

He leaned back, almost horizontal, in his desk chair.

“I regret personalizing the battles rather than keeping it on public policy,” he said.

By way of example, Mr. Sharpton recalled that he’d once had a habit of referring to then-mayor Ed Koch as “Bull Koch,” in reference to the Civil Rights-era scourge Bull Connor. “There are a lot of people who supported Koch who don’t see him as Bull Koch but would have supported us on not cutting services. Again, the question is, when do you put winning as your goal rather than just being flippant?”

Indeed, if anything, Mr. Sharpton seems not to take politics personally at all these days; he has dinner with Bill O’Reilly several times a year and is friends with MSNBC morning host and former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough. “He’s not a phony,” Mr. Sharpton noted. “And I get along with any conservative if they believe what they’re saying.”

Would a younger Al Sharpton have been able to say that?

“I don’t think I would have said that. I would have gotten along with them. But I wouldn’t have said it."

Now that he’s adopted a more conciliatory tone and taken his seat among the media elites, Mr. Sharpton was asked if he’d spotted any likely successors for the role of chief civil rights bomb-thrower he played so effectively for so long. He declined to name anyone specific, but he noted that whoever came after him would have opportunities he had never imagined. “A guy said to me soon after we started PoliticsNation, he said, ‘Rev. Sharpton, I always saw you as an activist, you came out of the post-King movement, would Dr. King have had a radio and talk show?’

“I told him that there was no MSNBC in Dr. King’s time, so we will never know!”

And during that review, he somehow managed to note the Occupy movement as terrorists.

Apparently, some guy started giving Bill a hard time leaving The Theatre. Usually, people get harassed at the theatre because they didn't turn off their cell phone. We have no proof Bill O'Reilly didn't turn off his cell phone. We also have no proof that he did.

Anyway, the money quote:

"This Occupy Wall Street movement is now very coordinated and they are terrorists. They are trying to create trouble, that’s what terrorists do.”

Now, some people might take umbrage with this definition—like Occupy Wall Street and civil rights advocates—who'd argue that they're using their first amendment to practice free speech, who could then—based on O'Reilly's logic—reasonably equivocate blowing up buildings with free speech.

But that wouldn't make sense, because Occupy Wall Street hasn't killed anyone.

They have, however, had more cayenne pepper sprayed in their face than two weeks worth of pretty decent tamales. They also did not sink the global economy. So they've got that going for them.

Want to see? Of course you do.

Here. His ditty starts at about 1:34:

http://youtu.be/spE6yBn0xzo

More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Bill O'Reilly saw Jesus Christ Superstar.

This musical:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AIRBpW1drE

On Broadway.

Bill O'Reilly hates Jesus.

[Via ANIMAL NY]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Bill O'Reilly tore into New York Times television reporter Brian Stelter on The O'Reilly Factor last night, using Mr. Stelter's "Gay on TV" article as proof that "most of the media will not even consider the traditional point of view on marriage."

Mr. Stelter wrote that Mr. O'Reilly and one of his guests had complained about Chaz Bono appearing as the first openly transgender contestant on Dancing With The Stars. In fact, only Mr. O'Reilly's guest, Fox house psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow did. Mr. O'Reilly said Mr. Bono had the right to pursue happiness.

"Once again Mr. Stelter writes a falsehood in order to demonize me and Fox News," Mr. O'Reilly said. (Like Dr. Ablow, however, Mr. O'Reilly has complained about Glee glamorizing homosexuality and transsexuality in the past. "If children hear it, unsupervised children, they might go out and experiment with this stuff," he said.)

Mr. Stelter tweeted out the video and a correction this morning.

Naturally, Gawker published that legal threat (alongside an old picture of Bill O'Reilly with topless women, of course). Entertaining as it is, we've taken the liberty of annotating the best parts of Fox's legal letter to Gawker, right here:

1. Yeah, right. Adorable! But basically a sign that says—to Gawker, at least—"DON'T FORGET TO PUBLISH." These notices hold absolutely no legal bearing, and in the event the law firm would attempt to prove malice on the part of the publisher of said legal threat letter (Gawker), all Gawker has to prove is that the letter is newsworthy. If that. Judging by the six-digit counts on each of Gawker's Fox Mole posts, one could reasonably assert that this letter is, in fact, newsworthy.

2. Ronald M. Green, Litigious Legal Machine. If Ronald M. Green sounds familiar to followers of Fox's media troubles—or the troubles of Powerful Men in Media—he is! Green's page for the firm lists (boasts?) of his association to Bill O'Reilly as legal representation. What it doesn't note: Some of the cases Green has worked on for O'Reilly, including but not limited to the sexual harassment claim a producer filed against O'Reilly, which was settled out of court before the world got to hear the evidence in the case. He also represented Cablevision/MSG chairman James L. Dolan and The Garden in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders after she claiming she had been sexually harassed. A jury found in her favor to the tune of $11.5M, $3M of which came out of Dolan's pockets. Also noted on Green's bio page from his firm? A position he wrote for The New York Law Journal entitled "The Employer's 'Sue First' Strategy: In high stakes litigation, 'preemptive strike' has produced results." If you thought Fox News was calling up My Cousin Vinny from the bullpen, think again: Green is their "Lights Out" guy, and he will no doubt take this thing to some inevitable conclusion. Don't place your bets yet, though: Handicapping odds is contingent upon on what further action he has planned, if any. Then we'll open the pool.

3. Covered Bases. The funny thing about legal threats is how many copies you end up getting. New York City's bike messengers owe the litigious lawyers of their fair city a debt of gratitude for giving them, like, half their business.

4 and 5. Scare Quotes. In legal paperwork, scare quotes are often used to precede the paraphrasing of a term throughout the rest of the brief; this isn't that. This is just a funny use of scare quotes.

6. 'Likely.' As in, "we haven't yet figured out exactly what about this is illegal, but it's surely something" or "probably, so you should be scared." Pretty standard.

7. 'Should.' As in, "this isn't actually a cease and desist, though we're going to vaguely allude to some sense of obligation, whether or not there's a law against it." Pretty standard.

8. Niceties. These are always enjoyable to read; they always act as amusingly macabre punctuation points, like someone telling you to watch your shirt for blood immediately after having stabbed you in the gut.

In other words, get out the popcorn: This has nowhere to go but up.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

In particular, they wanted to know what he thought of Sean’s decision to become a Muslim. Oliver instructed his office to decline comment.

Sean Christopher Ali Stone at a press conference in Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 17 (ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images)

“He never consulted me,” the elder Mr. Stone recalled in a phone call to The Observer from his production office in Los Angeles. “That is something you normally talk to your parents about.”

The director is a practicing Buddhist. “Obviously the Muslim religion believes in a singular god,” he added. “I don’t.”

Sean Stone, a 27-year-old filmmaker who was raised a Buddhist and spent his youth exploring his Christian and Jewish roots (not to mention any number of film sets), is like his old man, a determined—some would say obstinate—truth-seeker. He is also a man of firm opinions who is unafraid to express them in a highly public fashion.

But to peg him, as one Yahoo! News commenter did recently, as “another nut from a spoiled confused family,” is to miss the point entirely.

To hear him tell it, accepting Islam as his faith (and adopting a new Muslim middle name, Ali) is a demonstration that one man can embrace three Abrahamic religions as a gesture of peace.

“I don’t take a priest’s interpretation as sanctity,” he said. “I would not take an imam’s ruling on the Koran as being definitive. I would not take anyone’s word except my own interpretation of the books.”

Mr. Stone’s conversion was only part of his recent media coming-out party. In announcing his newfound faith, he eagerly stepped into perhaps the thorniest foreign policy question of the moment: whether Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons, and whether its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a total nutjob.

“My main thing is I don’t want to see a war, an imperialistic war, because I know what it could do to the region,” he said.
Mr. Stone also defended Mr. Ahmadinejad—the man who infamously referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” and declared that Israel should be “wiped off a map”—as a “rational actor.”

“The media is so biased in trying to paint him as a madman, because if he is a madman, you can’t talk to him,” he explained to The Observer.

Mr. Stone first met with Mr. Ahmadinejad in February, when he was a featured guest at the “Hollywoodism and Cinema” conference in Tehran. The president gave him a copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.

When asked what they talked about, Mr. Stone didn’t really remember. The meeting might have seemed an opportunity to do some diplomatic work for his father, who had been eager to follow up his documentary portraits of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez with one on Mr. Ahmadinejad, but had been rebuffed (many Iranians took issue with perceived historical inaccuracies in his Alexander the Great biopic).  Still, the younger Stone didn’t push the issue.

It soon became clear that Mr. Stone’s views on Iran are not all that radical.  For instance, shortly after he defended his opinions to network news blowhards Bill O’Reilly and Piers Morgan, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, appeared on 60 Minutes to declare that bombing Iran right now was “the stupidest idea [he] ever heard.”

Still, his comments were controversial, even within his own family. “When you’re younger, you can make mistakes by saying what people don’t want to hear,” the elder Mr. Stone noted. “Sometimes he says stuff that I think is downright fucking stupid.”

Mr. Stone posing on top of the Milad Tower in Tehran (MEHDI HASANI/AFP/Getty Images)

The Observer met the Son of Oliver at a rear table at Think Coffee by Union Square one March morning.

Tall, strapping and square-jawed, Sean Christopher Ali Stone appeared more Winklevii than Wahabi. He did not have his father’s self-described “Mongol eyes” or the gap between his teeth.

What he did have, however, was the family curiosity, and that knack for taking controversial positions.

“I think it’s important to have that spirit of inquiry, that spirit of investigation,” Mr. Stone said as he periodically sipped from a cup of chai tea. “If you keep slandering people, calling them ‘conspiracy theorists,’ you’re killing the desire to investigate, the desire to actually know.”

Mr. Stone, who is single and divides his time between Los Angeles and New York’s Alphabet City, wanted to make it clear that his highly publicized spiritual transformation was not intended as a publicity gambit.

It all began on Valentine’s Day 2010, when he and his filmmaking partner, Alexander Wraith, were at Letchworth Village, an abandoned institution for the mentally and physically disabled in Rockland County. They were there to film Graystone, Mr. Stone’s feature debut, about two men (named Sean and Alexander) who visit supposedly haunted sites to explore their belief in the supernatural.

He and Mr. Wraith had brought along candles from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which they lit and placed on the ground as they prayed aloud. They heard screams and howls and a child’s laughter, which scared them both shitless.

“That’s why there’s an expression ‘There are no atheists in foxholes,’” he said. “Either you find your faith and you believe that there is a higher power guiding you and protecting you, or else you basically surrender it and say there is no God.”

Two years later to the day, Mr. Stone found himself in Isfahan, Iran, sitting inside a mosque across from a Shiite cleric, explaining his reasons for wanting to be a Muslim. He was accompanied by a man named Bahram Heidari, an Iranian living in Canada who was helping him develop a feature film about the Sufi poet Rumi (Mr. Stone is also prepping a documentary on djinn, or genies). With an Iranian TV news crew on hand to document the occasion, Mr. Stone said the shahada, the Muslim declaration of belief.

“I didn’t ‘convert,’” he pointed out, “because I don’t believe you can convert from the same God. It’s an acceptance of Islam as an extension of what I call the Judeo-Christian tradition going back to Abraham.”

He said he was surprised the event generated so much attention. “We had not arranged for any press,” he said. “We don’t know how they found out about it.”

But when everyone from CNN to Agence France-Presse jumped on the story, he went with it. He later defended Iran on cable news. “It seems that every time we sanction this country and turn the bolts tighter around it … it’s just going to make them potentially more radical and dangerous,” he said. “You can’t just bomb your way to an accord.” While defending Mr. Ahmadinejad, he also was emphatic that “there is no room for Holocaust denial.” (Not long ago, his father also was quoted minimizing the Holocaust.)

It’s not hard to understand how Mr. Stone developed a certain sympathy for men of strong convictions who are unafraid to offend.

“He says things that rile people, I’m not going to deny that,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Ahmadinejad. He says the same about his dad.
“I think he likes controversy,” Mr. Stone said. “I think as much as anything, he likes that people get riled.”Sean Stone was born in Santa Monica in 1984, the eldest child of Oliver and Elizabeth Burkit Fox, a production assistant and Oliver’s second wife.

Sean and Oliver on the set of "Heaven and Earth" (photo courtesy of Sean Stone)

He made his screen debut at 6 months, with a cameo in Salvador. At age 2, he was playing Gordon Gekko’s kid, “a fat little capitalist son,” as he put it.

His earliest and clearest film memory was being on the set of Born on the Fourth of July, in which he was among a group of kids shooting at each other with fake guns in the woods.

“That’s pretty intense when you’re, like, 4,” he said.

Mr. Stone’s early film career was more a matter of convenience than raw talent. “He was available and I thought he was photogenic,” his dad admitted.

Sean’s parents separated in 1993 (“It was not an easy divorce,” Oliver said), and Sean and his brother Michael lived with Elizabeth. When he could, Oliver took Sean on weekend trips “where he could be outside the normal Los Angeles ‘shop, drive, and die’ routine,” said Oliver.

They also traveled the world, from East Africa to Tibet, where Oliver, an Episcopalian who had converted to Buddhism, introduced the then 9-year-old Sean to the Dalai Lama.

“It’s a different kind of Buddhism, it’s an atomistic form,” Oliver said. “It must have been amazing for him.”
The experience was eye-opening, Sean said. It inspired him to take up the practice of meditation and fostered a curiosity about all forms of spirituality.
It was also around that time that Sean began to discover his father’s films, each one violent and provocative and dubious about the powers that be.

Mr. Stone was 7 when his father released JFK, a film that brought a mix of reviews both approving and vitriolic. The knocks on his father bothered him at the time, and still do.
“Of course it hurts,” he said. “To me it’s a disgrace that so many people get away with calling him a conspiracy theorist, when the truth is he’s always based his work on evidence. He does his homework.”

After graduating from Brentwood School, just around the same time the second Iraq war was getting underway, Mr. Stone considered joining the Army, “more out of a desire to have a life experience,” he said. (Oliver, who dropped out of Yale and eventually enlisted in the Army in 1967, earning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, recognized the impulse.) Rather than enlist, Mr. Stone wound up at Princeton, where he enrolled in the ROTC, bailing after a semester to focus on academics.

In 2009, after apprenticing with his father, Sean began to focus on his own filmmaking, starting with Graystone, which will be released on video-on-demand in the fall.

Mr. Stone’s long-term goal is to be a filmmaker, though his father is quick to tamp down expectations. “It’s very hard to assume the mantle, so to speak,” Oliver said. “It’s true about anybody in any profession, whether you’re the stockbroker’s son or a garbage man’s son.”

Mr. Stone agrees that it will be hard to step out from his father’s shadow and make a name for himself, though that new middle name of his is certainly a start.

Even so, his embrace of Islam goes only so far. For instance, Mr. Stone isn’t quite ready to forswear alcohol altogether.

“I know plenty of Christians and Jews who violate the Testaments all the time,” he pointed out. “It all depends on how you practice.”

drosen@observer.com

“It’s essential,” said Mr. Bailey, the attorney who last year garnered national attention as counselor for the Ground Zero mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal. “I’ve studied everything about the court room. It’s a subconscious thing, but this shows a jury you have nothing to hide.”

As if to prove his point, Mr. Bailey awkwardly tucked the sleeve of his shirt back inside his jacket. “See?” said the attorney, who takes the nuances of his dress code so seriously that every new associate at the law firm shops for their first suit with him so that he can personally give them a lesson in proper courtroom attire. “You’re hiding something.”

Adam Leitman Bailey. (Photo by Hannah Mattix)

As the nameplate on Mr. Bailey’s firm suggests, this is Adam Leitman Bailey’s world.

Unlike most law firms, which reward their top performers and veteran executives with equity, there’s only one partner at the eponymous Adam Leitman Bailey PC. Yet a quick tour through Mr. Bailey’s firm yields droves of young, attractive associates who offer almost cultlike praise of the company and its culture.

More impressive, however, is the ring of senior lawyers sitting in the windowed offices along the periphery. Despite having a hairline that retreated rapidly through his 30s, Mr. Bailey is a youthful-looking 41, an image enhanced by the energy and force of his personality. Yet he has been able to recruit veteran attorneys, some decades older than himself, to handle important portions of the firm’s growing caseload.

“He has built a remarkable law firm. I don’t think everyone understands that what he has done is a huge accomplishment,” said Joshua Stein, a retired partner at the large law firm Latham & Watkins who has since started his own firm.

In the span of about a decade, Mr. Bailey has not only grown Adam Leitman Bailey PC into a bustling real estate law practice, expanding from just himself in 2000 to more than 40 employees today, he has personally become one of the industry’s most visible litigators as well. And not just in the city. Last year, Mr. Bailey represented Mr. El-Gamal, the mosque developer, in lawsuits against the controversial project. He did the work pro-bono, he said, because of his passion for the constitutional right of religious freedom.
Yet when the mosque riled sentiments beyond the city and popped up in national headlines, Mr. Bailey expertly rode the wave of attention. Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, Mr. Bailey showed up ready to scrap, quickly pushing the show’s host Bill O’Reilly into a debate on his opposition of the project. Mr. El-Gamal, meanwhile, has slipped into serious arrears on his rental payments at the site and is in danger of being evicted. In hindsight, for all the storm of debate the mosque story generated and all the airtime it earned Mr. Bailey, the project now seems like little more than a pipe dream.

The episode wasn’t Mr. Bailey’s only foray onto the national media scene. Last year he released The Uncommon Deal, a how-to book for homebuyers looking for a bargain. Since it appeared on The New York Times best-seller list, he has been a more frequent guest on the cable news-show circuit as a real estate expert and pundit.

To his critics, Mr. Bailey is a marketer and self-promoter more than a legal virtuoso.

“He is amazing, first of all, how he gets all of this publicity, it’s just incredible,” said Stuart Saft, a partner at the large firm Dewey Laboeuf and the global chair of its real estate department who has faced off against Mr. Bailey in the courtroom. “Watching him go, he’s nonstop. There’s no one else like him in our field.”
And yet, there is no doubt that Mr. Bailey has carved out an impressive string of victories.

Mr. Bailey began his rise to prominence starting in the early 2000s, representing homebuyers who had purchased units in defective condominium buildings. It was a fertile area for cases. The real estate market in the city was heading upward and more developers were getting into the business of building apartments or converting existing structures into housing. Not every project was administered by skilled hands. Bad buildings were erected and tenants were left with uncomfortable problems like leaky roofs, cracked facades and shoddy plumbing. A natural showman, Mr. Bailey knew how to milk these defects for maximum courtroom drama. And when a case bogged down, unlike most attorneys, Mr. Bailey usually knew all the right levers to pull.

“There’s three prongs in the law these days,” Mr. Stein said. “You have your discovery period, the litigation itself, and increasingly the media is a tool, too. Mr. Bailey is obviously an expert with it.”
In 2004, at the 27-story building 90 Washington Street, a condo developed by landlord Joe Moinian where tenants alleged faulty work, Mr. Bailey said he brought the conditions to the attention of state officials, who had allowed the project to use low-cost Liberty Bond financing.

“The problems were immediately fixed,” Mr. Bailey said, declining to discuss specifics because of confidentiality documents he signed in the settlement. Mr. Moinian didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

Mr. Bailey’s biggest legal home runs have come more recently. When the real estate market collapsed in 2008, it left scores of condo buyers with deposits on properties that were suddenly worth much less than the amount they had negotiated to pay. Enterprising lawyers may have been eager to tap into this suddenly captive pool of clients, but they would need a legal mechanism to wield any leverage. It was Mr. Bailey who shot to the forefront of these disputes using an obscure federal law called the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act (ILSA), which Congress passed in 1968. Mr. Bailey wasn’t the first lawyer to employ ILSA, but he was the first with the bombast and vision to employ it in major cases.

Beginning with the Brompton, a high-end condo built by the real estate development company Related, Mr. Bailey showed in court that the company, which had refused to negotiate with buyers who had contracts, had failed to notarize ILSA documents, a seemingly minute oversight. The decision sent shock waves through the residential real estate industry. Buyers could overturn contracts even for developers who had made seemingly insignificant ILSA filing errors. By then, only two buyers in contract at the Brompton were left to benefit from the decision, Vasilis Bacolitsas and Sofia Nikolaidou, two wealthy individuals with the wherewithal to pay Mr. Bailey’s retainer fee until the end. But as the case had progressed and the perception of its argument as a mere long shot began to shift, Mr. Bailey said he was able to negotiate settlements that allowed buyers to recoup increasingly generous portions of their deposit payments or negotiate discounts to the purchase price of their units. Related, of course, disputes this. Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for the company, said that no bargains or refunds were offered. Because the settlement agreements are confidential, it’s impossible to tell with objective certainty what the terms of all the deals were.

Regardless, with that decision in hand, Mr. Bailey moved onto other properties, repping buyers at the Trump Soho, a large condo-hotel, and Sky View Parc, a condo project in Flushing, Queens.

At Sky View Parc, Mr. Bailey got back 75 percent of buyers’ down payments. John Desiderio, one of Mr. Bailey’s most senior attorneys, quarterbacked a successful litigation with Mr. Bailey at Trump Soho, utilizing components of the ILSA law.

Mr. Bailey’s clients won back 90 percent of their down payments in November, another victory for the firm.

Spokespeople for The Trump Organization and Bayrock did not immediately return calls for comment.

Ironically, the Brompton decision that affirmed ILSA is currently being re-evaluated in an appeals court.

It’s possible that next month, a judge might overturn the whole ruling. To Mr. Bailey, the outcome doesn’t matter. A quick-moving opportunist, he used ILSA while it worked, never expecting it to be an enduring tool he could utilize in future suits.

“ILSA is over,” Mr. Bailey said. “It was something that was good for that moment in time. Any developer who builds going forward would obviously abide by the regulations now so it’s no longer a loophole.”
The sunset of ILSA cases and faulty condo suits brings up the question of what’s next for Mr. Bailey.

Recently divorced, he is back on the dating scene and said he wants to have children, though there is some part of him that also seems conflicted about balancing familial responsibilities with professional ambitions.

“I was destined to run this company,” he said.

Though he has won fame for representing tenants and buyers, the depiction of Mr. Bailey as a nemesis to landlords infuriates him. Mr. Bailey said that his firm is increasingly doing business with large owners, lenders and corporate clients. According to Mr. Bailey, who said that much of his career has been dedicated to “defending underdogs,” his firm now handles foreclosures, fraud and mortgage work for a long list of major investment firms and banks in the city, though he said he couldn’t identify the clients by name.

“We’re doing work with Fortune 500 companies, with Fortune 10 companies,” Mr. Bailey said. “You just never hear about it.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Per Deadline, Donald Sutherland has signed on to a comedy pilot at Fox set in the rollicking world of NPR. While it's purportedly a pilot focused on a father-son relationship, we're sure the setting will have some impact upon the plotlines, especially since Fox's corporate cousins at Fox News have had a few things to say about NPR recently!

• “They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive," Fox News chief Roger Ailes on NPR, 11/17/2011
• "I am not yet convinced that the NPR national operation in Washington has been able to rid itself of the elite liberal orthodoxy that made me into their whipping boy." --Juan Williams, Fox News commentator, 10/25/2011
• "Why should conservatives’ taxes pay for this?," from FoxNews.com article "NPR Admits It's Packed With Liberals," 03/16/2011
• "This shake-up at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster should not be soon forgotten. It shows the degree to which off-base and twisted Tea Party opposition can be, and how high the fanaticism reaches," 03/11/2011
• "NPR Executive Goes on Bigoted Rant," post syndicated from the Daily Caller, 03/08/2011
• "[NPR] throw[s] out propaganda in violation of the First Amendment... Terrorists want to create terror. Well, what does NPR want to create? They're intimidating, too," Bill O'Reilly's on-air comments, 10/2010

We eagerly await the show, as we love to laugh!

Megyn Kelly, let us pepper spray you

Dear Megyn Kelly:
Earlier this week on Bill O'Reilly you minimized the effects of the pepper spray used by police on UC Davis students. "It’s like a derivative of real pepper," you said. "It’s a food product essentially.”

This comment, as you know, has sparked outrage all over the country. Currently, there is a petition with 11,000 signatures asking you to undergo a pepper spraying yourself, so you can notice the difference between a police weapon and something you put on your low-carb chicken Fiesta salad.

The New York Observer wants to extend this offer even further: Come to our offices, Ms. Kelly, and let us document your experience of being maced or sprayed with high grade pepper spray.

You might be wondering "Why should I let The New York Observer in on this piece of stunt journalism? If I do this, why wouldn't I want it to be done by professionals, like that time Christopher Hitchens was waterboarded or Rick Sanchez was tasered?"

The answer is simple: if you let us pepper spray you, we'll allow you to pepper spray one of us to disprove the counterargument that pepper spray is more than just "abrasive." (We'll keep milk and VISINE handy.) If it turns out that being sprayed in the face is more a tactic of fear than actual physical pain, than your point will be proven and people will stop making fun of you on the Internet. And even if it does turn out to be a painful, somewhat terrifying experience for you, then you'll get the chance to retaliate in kind...an option never presented to protesters.

It's a win-win, really. Please let us know ASAP, so we can start assembling the necessary materials. We can do it on a Friday, so the red, swollen eyes won't get in the way of your next TV appearance.

Sincerely,
The New York Observer

Protester Jesse LaGreca schools Fox producer

Even if Geraldo Rivera was at the Zuccotti Park yesterday, Fox News has generally been a tad dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Foxnews.com (as of this writing) has no coverage of this national event on their front page stories. (Hard to imagine for a network that was so gung-ho about the Tea Party!) Red Eye's Bill Schulz went out to try to "prank" the protesters. Bill O'Reilly sent a producer minion out with the same mission: to belittle OWS's cause by cutting up interviews to make people sound stupid.

Well, here is an interview that Fox News filmed, but doesn't want you to see. The segment was shot on Wednesday for Greta van Susteren's show, (though it looks like the same producer from this O'Reilly segment questioning Michael Moore's anti-capitalist agenda) though the decision was made to leave it on the cutting room floor. The reason should be obvious pretty quickly.

The speaker giving Fox News the buisness is Jesse LaGreca, a vocal member of the Occupy Wall Street protests. This video comes courtesy of Kyle Christopher from OccupyWallSt.org's media team.

Now, no news organization is under obligation to air every interview they've filmed, especially when it makes them look bad. But you'd think that a "Fair and Balanced" network (that tells an interviewee that they are here to give them fair coverage to get any message they'd like to get out) would try to include at least a couple of opposing viewpoints to Mr. Shulz's smarmy jokes or O'Reilly's "infiltration" of the camp.

The ball is in your court, Fox.

Updated 10/3 11:00a.m.: Now with transcript of the video

Fox: Jesse, so Ray, your partner here, your ..

Ray: comrade.

Fox: Your colleague, she'd seen the protests in Greece and Europe and elsewhere. Did you guys take your cue from that? Are you hoping to cite certainly what was a lot of the tension, if not police activity. I know over the weekend there were over 100 arrests and you guys got things fired up. Are you taking your cues from the international movement and how do you want to see this? If you could have it in a perfect way, how would it be?

Jesse: Well I don't know, its really difficult to answer questions leading to those conclusions. I'd say that we didn't take our cue leading off of anybody really. It became a more spontaneous movement. As far as seeing this end, I wouldn't like to see this end. I would like to see the conversation continue. This is what we should have been talking about in 2008 when the economy collapsed. We basically patched a hole on the tire and said let the car keep rolling. Unfortunately it's fun to talk to the propaganda machine and the media especially conservative media networks such as yourself, because we find that we cant get conversations for the department of Justice's ongoing investigation of News Corporation, for which you are an employee. But we can certainly ask questions like you know, why are the poor engaging in class warfare? After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it's time for some maybe, I don't know, participation in our democracy that isn't funded by news cameras and gentlemen such as yourself.

Fox: But, uh, yeah well, let me give you this challenge Jesse.

Jesse: Sure.

Fox: We’re here giving you an opportunity on the record […] to put any
message you want out there, to give you fair coverage and I’m not
going to in any way

Jesse: That’s awesome!

Fox:…give you advice about it. So, there is an exception in the case, because you wouldn’t be able to get your message out there without us.

Jesse: No, surely, I mean, take for instance when Glenn Beck was doing his protest and he called the President, uh, a person who hates white people and white culture. That was a low moment in Americans’ history and you guys kinda had a big part in it. So, I’m glad to see you coming around and kind of paying attention to what the other 99 percent of Americans are paying attention to, as opposed to the far-right fringe, who who would just love to destroy the middle class entirely.

Fox: Alright, fair enough. You have a voice, an important reason to criticize myself, my company and anyone else. But, let me ask you that, in fairness, does this administration, President Obama, have any criticism as to the the financial situation the country’s in…?

Jesse: I think, myself, uh, as well as many other people, would like to see a little but more economic justice or social justice—Jesus stuff—as far as feeding the poor, healthcare for the sick. You know, I find it really entertaining that people like to hold the Bill of Rights up while they’re screaming at gay soldiers, but they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that a for-profit healthcare system doesn’t work. So, let’s just look at it like this, if we want the President to do more, let’s talk to him on a level that actually reaches people, instead of asking for his birth certificate and wasting time with total nonsense like Solyndra.

Update 10/5 12:00p.m.: Is Jesse LaGreca the smartest man on Wall Street?

http://www.observer.com/2011/09/theory-of-achievement/

So Rick Perry, President Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walk into a bar…  It’s not a joke; it’s a scenario we imagined as a real possibility as all three were descending upon Manhattan this week.  (As long as they stay away from Miss Lily’s. It’s already crowded enough.)

We like to call this scenario “fantasy bar fight.” It’s probably fair to say that many New Yorkers aren’t too happy with any of them to varying degrees, and not just because the resulting security chaos means it takes four weeks to get across midtown in a taxi instead of the usual three.

We’ve examined the President’s new job plan, and subsequently have been attempting to make lemonade from lemons, but retailing homemade beverages to make money is far more complicated than it was when we were 10.  (The permits alone! And turns out our lemonade stand isn’t OSHA compliant.)  But maybe it’s for the best. If we were too good at the whole money-making thing, we’d just be taxed into oblivion—at least according to Bill O’Reilly, who expressed concern this week that any federal tax increases would effectively “tax achievement.” “Let’s take me,” he said, redefining achievement in his own charming way. “If Barack Obama begins taxing me more than 50 percent, which is very possible, I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this.”

Which actually makes us root for a tax increase a teeny tiny bit. (Is that a promise?)

We’re sure Mr. O’Reilly believes he’s doing god’s work, if a little less literally than Michele Bachmann or, depending on which god we’re talking about, Mr. Ahmadinejad.  But it’s a little unclear what constitutes god’s work these days. According to a Baylor University study, one in five Americans believe God controls the economy, which is not exactly the sort of career we had in mind for Him. (“They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work,”  sociologist Paul Froese and co-author of the Baylor survey told USA Today.) If so, God’s invisible hand has been about as steady as Eli Manning’s earlier this week in the season opener at MetLife Stadium. But the Giants managed to pull off a win, which is more than we can say for God, looking at those unemployment numbers.  Maybe He’s just concerned about those high taxation rates that come with achievement.

In any event, we’re looking forward to the exodus of our early fall visitors.  We all have work to do—underachievement milestones to hit, illegal lemonade stands to run and the like. Or maybe we’ll scrap it all and go to Miss Lily’s.