John Edwards and Hillary Clinton trade some indirect barbs.

Barack Obama will get in, or out, of the 2008 race soon.

The state comptroller's office criticized George Pataki's use of chartered planes in his final days as governor.

Joe Bruno went to a strip club, courtesy of friend Jared Abbruzzese.

The Village Voice drops a bombshell accusation about the sale of judgeships in Brooklyn.

And they even explain, in impressive detail, how reporter Wayne Barrett, with help from late newsman Jack Newfield, broke the story.

Colin Miner, who worked with Newfield on a number of those Brooklyn stories, has a piece in the New York Sun.

This could tarnish the "Spitzer shine," according to the Daily News.

Spitzer nominated for the appellate court the judge who busted the TWU.

Chuck Schumer joined the line-up of Democrats campaigning for state Senate candidate Craig Johnson.

Former state Senator Seymour Lachman and Robert Polner of NYU give Eliot Spitzer some advice.

And Al Sharpton has kind words for Christine Quinn.

-- Azi Paybarah

Today is a much-celebrated (and feared) day in the annals of Manhattan real estate, for The Village Voice has released its glorious "10 Worst Landlords" list.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development clocks in at Number One, earning flowery prose like "decaying carcass," "decrepit stairways," "overgrown with mold," "chemical trap" and "belches smoke"--that's just the first three paragraphs.

The full list--plus something extra for Jack Newfield fans--is after the jump.

1. HUD ("The No. 1 worst in the United States")
2. Olufemi Falade ("When it rains, it rains inside the house")
3. David Melendez ("A tenant... cannot forget the time his kitchen floor went out from under his mother")
4. Abdur Rahman Farrakhan ("Owes over $10 million in unpaid taxes")
5. Jacob Selechnik ("15,260 housing-code violations on 110 properties")
6. Mark Hersh ("Dubbed the "West Side Batman" for using a bat to intimidate tenants")
7. Steven Kessner (He says: "I will, under no circumstances, repair any overcrowded apartments")
8. John Kosman ("HPD fined Kosman $103,500 for lack of hot water in the building for 118 days straight")
9. Fitos Neophytou ("'We were greeted by blood in the elevator one morning'")
10. Margaret Streicker Porres (A murderer--almost)

The Voice gets several media bonus points for beginning this cover story with a dedication to legendary editor Jack Newfield--and for quoting Newfield (twice), and pointing out that the piece was "written by students from his alma mater," and that it was edited by The Jack Newfield Visiting Professor of Journalism at Hunter College, that Jack Newfield began the "10 Worst Landlords" series way back in the '60s, and that it remains "a Voice institution." Indeed.

- Max Abelson

The controversy is over whether Andrew Cuomo denied that anti-gay Koch fliers ever existed, or simply denied that he had a role in them. Our reporter, and a lot of other people, left with the former impression. Healy's interpretation, in the paper today, was the latter. The transcript is ambiguous, but Cuomo apparently clarified it to him immediately after speaking.

Here's Healy's transcript, which he notes he gave me as a professional courtesy (a courteous guy, Healy), and not at the request of any campaign:

Q: Now that this campaign is heating up, old stuff is cropping up. One of the ones we're hearing a lot these days on blogs and in whispering campaigns are about the posters that popped up during your father's campaign against Ed Koch, which read "Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo." Fairly or not, a lot of the times you are described as a driving force behind this postering campaign, which we know did happen. I just was wondering here, today, at the community center, if you once and for all disavow any involvement on your part with this postering campaign, and if you say - if you catch anybody in your campaign involved in that kind, what would be the consequences?

Cuomo: May I ask you something?

(Man nods.)

Cuomo: "When you said that you know that it happened, how do you know that happened?"

Q:"It's been written about in a lot of books, it was in Jack Newfield's books, the one that just came out, Ladies and Gentleman the Bronx is Burning—"

Cuomo:
"Jack Newfield said that it had anything to do with the Cuomo campaign?"

Q:"Uh, I don't know—"

Cuomo: "Ok. He didn't. Anyway. In 1977 Mario Cuomo ran against Ed Koch. That was one of the rumors that came out of the campaign, which is now folklore. It was an ugly cheap rumor then; it's a more ugly cheap untrue rumor today. And the previous question, when we talked about negativity in campaigns, let Mark Green say he's better. Let Sean Patrick say he's better. But rumors, gossip, untruth about other people is not positive, and it re-enforces stereotypes. It's just not true."

Pat adds:

"After Mr. Cuomo finished, I told him in an interview that his wording was muddled and asked him to clarify - was he saying the posters did not exist at all, or was he saying that a connection between him and the posters did not exist? He told me he was saying the connection between him and the posters did not exist, saying that was the point on his mind because it was the point raised, and noting his question back to the man about whether Jack Newfield reported a link between the posters and the Cuomo campaign. Mr. Cuomo then told me that the posters themselves were 'disgusting' and added, 'I condemn them.'"

The Commission -- following a line opened by the late Jack Newfield -- found that Feinberg directed "excessive and overly generous" fees to a friend.

The Surrogate's Court, which administers the estates of people who die without a valid will, is a patronage plum in a political system that makes the courts a cash cow for connected lawyers. If Feinberg is removed -- we're told that process, in the hands of the Court of Appeals and Chief Judge Judith Kaye will take about 6 months, though he could be suspended sooner -- Governor Pataki will appoint an interim replacement. That appointment would be a remarkable opportunity to choke off some of the money flowing from the courts to Brooklyn's politicized legal establishment, which in turn writes checks to the politicians who make the judges.

In a twist that would surely madden, not to mention impoverish, various Brooklyn lawyers, we've heard the name of a Brooklyn insurgent and Newfield favorite, Margarita Lopez-Torres, floated as an interim Surrogate or as a candidate in the next election.

" I don't even get along with DeLay," King told me.

But Vito's got a problem, the first in a line of problems the Democrats are going to make for potentially vulnerable Republican members. He won an unexpectedly close victory against an energetic, underfinanced, imperfect challenger this year, and many expect a better-organized candidate-- newly minted Senator Diane Savino? -- to mount a real challenge in 2006. Now if the Republicans were able to turn the meek Tom Daschle into a bogeyman, it's no stretch to think that Vito's loyalty to the Hammer -- remember that cruise ship? -- could cost him more than a few votes.

But we still don't know how he voted, and since it was a voice vote, only he can tell us.

The Last Editor: How I Saved The New York Times , the Washington Post , and the Los Angeles Times from Dullness and Complacency , by Jim Bellows. Andrews McNeel Publishing, 349 pages, $28.95.

Once upon a time, most cities boasted at least two newspapers, making competitionforstories-andtalentedstorytellers-quite fierce. In the last 25 years, however, consolidation has shrunk the number of multi-newspaper towns to 49 from 174; and between 1990 and 2000 alone, thenumberofdaily newspapersdeclined by 131 to a new low of 1,480 nationwide. Two guys who lived through this era of contraction have recently written accounts of their time in the ink-stained trenches. Journalist Jack Newfield and roaming editor and self-proclaimed "savior" Jim Bellows both offer an inside look at American journalism-from different sides of the copy desk.

Mr. Newfield, who wrote for The Village Voice for 24 years before moving on to the Daily News and the New York Post, is a left-wing populist in the most traditional sense, exposing the City's "Worst Landlords" and "Worst Judges" in yearly features and writing scathing accounts of the failures of New York City government. Like many an American rabble-rouser, Mr. Newfield comes from the streets-Bed-Stuy, in this case. He makes no secret of his politics or his allegiances, including the "neighborhood code" he's tried to live by: "unity, loyalty, fair play and no surrender." "My Brooklyn," he explains, "was the working-class Brooklyn of the Dodgers, Democrats, unions, optimism and pluralism."

At The Village Voice in the early 60's, Mr. Newfield felt right at home with a staff of "'inspired amateurs,' who had not gone to graduate school, who had not worked for a daily paper where their opinions would have been squeezed out of them." At The Voice, Mr. Newfield taught himself how to be a writer and, more importantly, developed his journalistic technique, which he would later dub the "Joe Frazier method of reporting": "Keep coming forward. Don't get discouraged. Be relentless. Don't stop moving your hands. Break the other guy's will."

Ardently pro-labor, he was the only member of management to quit the Daily News during the 1990 labor strike, even though working there, he admits, "was one of the joyful periods of my career." The battle lines in that notorious fight were drawn when the Tribune Company, which published the News, set out to destroy the newspaper unions in New York, the way they had in Chicago years earlier. Under self-imposed pressure to back up his principles with action, Mr. Newfield chose to side with his conscience: "The strike forced me to confront myself, testing my own integrity, my willingness to live by the words I wrote. Could I exhibit the sacrifice and courage that I preached? … In my heart I knew I had to resign and join the picket line of my peers."

Moving to the Post after his resignation from the News, he soon found himself in the middle of "one of the busiest, craziest car wrecks in the history of American journalism."

What happened was this: In January 1993, unable even to buy newsprint, the Post was on the verge of collapse-until Mario Cuomo stepped in and found a buyer for the beleaguered daily. The only problem was, Governor Cuomo picked the wrong man-Steven Hoffenberg-who stood accused by the S.E.C. in a $215 million swindle. Call it a case of mistaken identity. "I reached the conclusion," Mr. Newfield recalls, "that Hoffenberg's crazy idea was to take the Post hostage, use it as a shield against the S.E.C. and F.B.I. His thinking was that as long as he was impersonating the civic patriot, 'rescuing' the seven hundred jobs at the Post, they wouldn't put him in jail." After firings, rehirings and a staff mutiny that saw Mr. Newfield and other columnists banned from the Post building, Rupert Murdoch finally bought the paper (thanks to some F.C.C. wrangling), and Mr. Newfield stayed on until last June, when he was let go.

Jack Newfield's career was powered by political zeal. Legendary editor Jim Bellows is by comparison apolitical-and frankly self-aggrandizing. For readers unfamiliar with Mr. Bellows' career, the subtitle of his book might be a tad misleading: At no time did he "save" the three newspapers mentioned by working for them. What he did-brilliantly-was to influence their content by working at smaller cross-town rivals: the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Star and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, all now defunct.

There is no question that Mr. Bellows was a talented editor. An early supporter of the New Journalism, he launched New York magazine as a Sunday supplement for the Herald Tribune, with writers like Tom Wolfe, Dick Schaap, Seymour Krim and Jimmy Breslin. He also masterminded a celebrated gossip column while at The Star (where he regularly lambasted the Washington Post's Katharine Graham), and in Los Angeles he began treating the world of entertainment as front-page news.

Mr. Bellows gives himself many titles, each demonstrating his high regard for himself. Others love him, too-he treats us to a profusion of letters, telegrams and what appear to be solicited quotes from friends and colleagues, all testifying to the brilliance of Jim Bellows. Family members also chime in, including his wife, stepson and four daughters, each praising a man who by his own account doesn't seem to have been home very much.

Mr. Bellows' professional talent lay in finding great writers and trusting them. Since he only enjoyed working for struggling papers and relished the challenge of trying to keep them afloat, the pay was never very high-but he granted his writers a freedom that kept the most talented ones coming back. After 31 years in the newspaper business, Mr. Bellows made the jump to television, livening up the content of the then-sputtering Entertainment Tonight in 1981, and moving on to ABC News, USA Today TV, TV Guide and later overseeing editorial content for Internet pioneers Prodigy and Excite in the late 80's and mid-90's.

It's worth noting that Mr. Bellows barely touches on the events of the day-Watergate, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the war in Vietnam. As these events helped shape-perhaps more than anything else-the American psyche in the latter half of the 20th century, and as he was the editor of big-city newspapers at the time, this is more than a little disappointing. It would have been interesting to learn how events affected the way he treated the news-if indeed they did-or to read about newsroom reactions to, say, the social upheaval of the 60's. It's a curious omission, for though he contributed in important ways to the trend of turning entertainment into news, Mr. Bellows also brought old-fashioned hard news to his television and Internet projects.

Mr. Bellows makes it clear that he truly loves the business of disseminating information to the masses-whether by print, broadcast or broadband. As an editor, he has done much to influence the course of contemporary journalism, both what we read and how we read it.

Paul McLeary has written for Social Policy Magazine, Salon and Hyde Park Review of Books.

Big Al hadn't been in Elaine's in years, if at all, and despite the presence of celebrities like Danny Aiello, all eyes were on us as we answered questions about the Mayoral race for the three or four reporters gathered around. They had been alerted to the opportunity by Mr. Sharpton's office; he wanted to make the point that my possible candidacy had more potential than most pundits were suggesting.

After some vigorous give-and-take, including Mr. Sharpton being asked how my stance on the Simpson case would affect the African-American vote ("It wasn't a civil rights issue," he replied adroitly), the reporters seemed to be satisfied that a potential candidacy would pass the laugh test. But the real target audience of the evening was the veteran columnist Jack Newfield, who stayed with us for dinner after the other reporters left.

When it comes to New York City politics, Jack Newfield is as good as they come-tough, experienced, savvy. And Rev. Al and I agreed that if Jack liked my chances for City Hall, and was intrigued by the prospects of a Rivera-Sharpton multi-ethnic, third-party "unity" alliance, then others might give the notion a second look. "From Howard Beach to Harlem," the reverend suggested it be called. I applauded the idea so vigorously I knocked my gin-and-tonic into his lap. I felt like Rick Lazio the day he planted his face on the asphalt. "Hey, I'm the one who does the baptizing around here," Rev. Sharpton quipped. Everyone laughed and forgot my clumsiness.

Anyway, Jack Newfield hated the idea of my running for Mayor. I was in L.A. when his open letter ran Sept. 13 in the New York Post , urging me to abandon my reckless dream. Reading it on my laptop, I was relieved that the old pro I've known for 30 years, since my days in the Young Lords, at least didn't make fun of me. In a tone that was wise, worldly and only mildly mocking, Jack warned that my candidacy would be savaged by the professional politicians and ridiculed by my colleagues in the media. He suggested that all of my well-known excesses would be rehashed in excruciating detail: Al Capone's empty vault, my ill-advised autobiography, the skinhead studio rumble and others now only on the fringes of the public consciousness.

Aside from tearing apart my reputation, he went on to suggest that the race would also strip me of my hard-earned treasure, wasting millions on a race I couldn't possibly win, squandered by professional scammers who would say and do anything to convince me that I stood enough of a chance that I must pursue the office, no matter how expensive or debilitating the effort.

He painted a grim picture, but not so different really from the advice I've received over the past few weeks from many friends and family members. Essentially they all say that, for all my good intentions, I am too inexperienced, too naïve, too innocent, too outside, too personally tarnished and emotionally vulnerable, to risk a quest so quixotic.

They may be right.

But let me tell you why I might take the risk anyway, even with C.C. and me in the midst of marital convulsions.

I was born in New York City, of a marriage that was as unique as the town-a Jewish mother and a Puerto Rican father. Throughout childhood, my siblings and I wrestled with the question of identification; to which of these profoundly disparate groups did we belong? It wasn't until years later that I finally figured out that we are 100 percent of both. That was when I started dreaming of running for Mayor, a dream I first wrote about in 1973, in a children's book titled Miguel Robles, So Far , a thinly veiled (G-rated) autobiography.

Watching the devastating impact Rudy Giuliani's policies have had on relations between the city's racial and ethnic groups, my old dream was revived. Under his administration, we have seen New York become an emotionally segregated city, one in which minority mothers are more fearful of the cops than the crooks. Stop-and-frisk racial-profiling policing has left us a city divided. Mr. Giuliani is probably a well-meaning person, and I wish him good fortune, but his reaction to any controversy involving law enforcement made him seem an insensitive, inflexible bully. There are better, more honest, constitutionally permissible approaches to police work that do not require the Thin Blue Line to mimic its counterpart in pre-Mandela Johannesburg.

My Mayoral dream really went into overdrive on another Wednesday, an afternoon in August. I was meeting my sons Gabriel, 21, and Cruz, 12, at Sardi's before heading off to see the Jesus Christ Superstar matinee. Walking from the parking garage on 42nd and 10th, over to Broadway, up to 44th Street, I felt like I was attending a high school reunion. Every one of the people in the wildly diverse crowd that I encountered gave me a warm and friendly greeting.

I started getting excited again about this childhood dream. In it, I reach a hand from, yes, Howard Beach to Harlem, from Staten Island to the South Bronx, and say to all New Yorkers, "Hey, we've been divided long enough; we're all in this together."

And while that bridge-building would be the central theme of any Geraldo candidacy, it is only one plank in a platform that would call for a gigantic effort to register all eligible voters. It would be part of a campaign promoting self-respect: Be part of the process-vote.

The platform would urge a vast overhaul of the city's port, an environmental, commercial and recreational disaster that squanders and insults the precious waterways with which we've been blessed. It would have sane regulations for the workday flow of road traffic, especially delivery trucks. It would be pro-enterprise, encouraging everyone to become a capitalist. It would welcome all world leaders, regardless of their politics or local popularity. It would applaud gay marriage and refrain from judging what art was appropriate for public institutions. Most importantly, it would closely scrutinize the public school system with an eye to using whatever means necessary to ensure that its students get an education on a par with that received by more advantaged youngsters.

And it would attempt all these things with a warm heart, an open mind, a hard, helping hand and a smile from a City Hall run by a team of competent citizens who don't need the job, and who are unhindered by the promises, patronage, cronyism and corruption of party politics.

The experts might be right; I may very well self-destruct if I pursue this probably unattainable dream. In the end, I might heed their advice and stay out of it.

But if I did try it-even if the process damaged or destroyed me-I can think of worse ways to go.

And it led to a platform in Gary, Ind., on another terrible day, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Robert Kennedy was supposed to speak at a campaign rally; most of his listeners were black. Kennedy knew King was dead before his motorcade set out for Gary. John Lewis, a young civil rights worker then, a Congressman now, was among those who told Kennedy he should cancel his speech. There was no telling what could happen.Kennedy ignored the warnings. He went to Gary, stood in front of this mostly black crowd and announced that Martin Luther King had been murdered. He had no notes; he spoke, in Mr. Lewis' words, "from the depths of his soul." To those blacks who were now burning with anger toward white people, he said he understood. "I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling," he said. "I had a member of my family killed, too, but he was killed by a white man." People were weeping, clutching each other, praying, cursing. And from memory, he quoted from Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." He invited his listeners in their grief to live up to the Greek ideal: "To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

Less than a month later, Kennedy was dead, too.

On June 7, New York Post columnist Jack Newfield and the Discovery Channel will present an extraordinary three-hour video memoir of his friend Robert Kennedy. Timed to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Kennedy's murder, the film recalls a time when politicians, however flawed, actually mattered, a time when those who chronicled public affairs (and those who followed them) were not ashamed to be serious, were not discomforted by adulthood.

Mr. Newfield is, famously, devoted to Kennedy's memory, but he didn't shy away from his friend's flaws, in particular Kennedy's inaction on civil rights early in his career. In fact, Mr. Newfield was walking a civil rights picket line outside Kennedy's office when the two men met in the early 1960's. It was an unlikely beginning to what became a warm and memorable friendship.

The film depicts Robert Kennedy's journey from hatchet man to crusader in a fashion that won't satisfy skeptics and Kennedy-haters (what, at this point, would?) but is moving and revealing all the same. Mr. Newfield concedes that the transformation, seen in the context of Bill Clinton and the 1990's, could easily be viewed as transparent–indeed, even in those less cynical times, it was condemned as such. "Was he capable of calculation? Of course," Mr. Newfield said. "As an example, I think he hesitated too long to run for President in 1968, and he admitted he was slow to denounce the Vietnam War. He was a politician, not an intellectual or a religious leader. But he set the standard for being a political leader."

It is the standard by which Mr. Newfield measures President Clinton, a man who has been known to claim a piece of the Kennedy legacy. Anyone familiar with Mr. Newfield's thoughts on Mr. Clinton will not be surprised to learn that the veteran columnist sees little of Robert Kennedy in Bill Clinton.

"Robert Kennedy was immersed in the writings of Emerson, Shakespeare and Aeschylus. There's where he looked for wisdom. Contrast that to Fleetwood Mac and Dick Morris," he said with not a little bitterness. "Robert Kennedy was guided by Camus; Clinton was guided by Dick Morris' focus groups." Mr. Clinton made the mistake of trying to ingratiate himself with Mr. Newfield several years ago, telling him that he had read Mr. Newfield's book on Kennedy and that it had changed his life. Mr. Newfield clearly resents Mr. Clinton's attempts to cast himself as Kennedy's heir–his revenge is this film, which he described as "an antidote to Primary Colors ," of the shallow, poll-driven politics of the Clinton era.

Yes, public life was different in 1968, although for reasons few would wish to see again. War, racial strife and assassinations gave politics a drama, an importance, it simply doesn't have today. But Mr. Newfield believes that the issues of 30 years ago haven't changed, even though the chroniclers of public life seem convinced that the most important affair of state is named Monica Lewinsky.

"Class and race–those are always the two great issues, and that hasn't changed," Mr. Newfield said.

Watch the film and think about what might have been.