National Arts Club apartments will finally return to the market.

They don't look very good right now, but ten Gramercy Park apartments formerly controlled by ex-president Aldon James and his brother John will soon be returning to the market. Relatively soon, that is, following gut renovations that were much-needed after the apartments' time in the hands of the two hoarders.

Last week, Real Estate Weekly reported that the National Arts Club had finally reached a settlement with the Attorney General's office allowing it to tidy up the club's governance, financial controls and the filthy apartments. Today a state appeals court upheld the National Arts Club's decision to boot the James brothers, the New York Post reported.

The James brother still have some issues to work out with the Attorney General's office, however, which filed suit against them in late September for mishandling $2 million in club funds. The bulk of the badly managed monies—some $1.5 million—from the rent deals Mr. James gave himself and his friends, thereby depriving the club of significant income.

Mr. James allegedly commandeered more than a dozen apartments when he was president and rented them to his cronies for far below market value. He also kept a number for himself and his brother. The brothers, who are hoarders, told the court they needed the apartments to hold all the belongings they compulsively bought at auctions and antique stores.

The apartments are said to be in horrible shape, with holes in the walls and urine-caked bathrooms—hence the gut renovation. And there may be more rehab needed in the future. "The James gang" still controls four apartments in the building, although they have not been allowed to return since being ousted.

The revamped apartments will, according to terms worked out with the attorney general, be rented at market rate. Unfortunately, they will not be available to the open market, but only to club members. Much like the coveted keys to the Park!

kvelsey@observer.com

He carried carried six of six council candidates to victory yesterday in Newark's runoff elections, ensuring that his allies will be sitting in each of the council's nine seats when he takes office on July 1.

It's a pretty amazing political accomplishment. Although Booker had a multi-million dollar financial advantage over his opponents, it wasn't as if the candidates who lost yesterday were nobodies. Several well-known incumbents went down, including Ras Baraka - the son of 9/11 conspiracy theorist and former state poet laureate Amiri Baraka. And another surprise loser was John James, the son of the city's domineering five-term Mayor Sharpe James.

The guy's a media monster. My guess is he's going to get more coverage in New York over the next few years than all but a handful of city and state officials.

The challenges Booker's going to be grappling with in one of the country's poorest cities makes for a compelling story, whether he succeeds or fails. (A documentary about his first, unsuccessful bid for mayor was nominated for an Oscar last year.)

And he's going to attract national attention for some of his more controversial ideas. He's a Democrat, for example, but has made himself a hero to national conservatives (and an enemy of the local teachers union) by proselytizing for school vouchers.

My Baghdad-bound former colleague Damien Cave has the wrap-up.

-- Josh Benson

When the artists began arriving that morning, however, they found that approximately 20 police detectives and agents from the city's Department of Finance were making a more unsettling kind of pick-up. The law-enforcement officials had arrived at the crack of dawn with a search warrant and orders to raid the club's administrative offices as part of an investigation into possible grand larceny and tax evasion started by the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

By the time the officers left around midday-departing with 40 boxes of files that they loaded into a van-talk of the incidents and its ramifications had traveled well beyond the leafy precinct of Gramercy Park.

"The news spread like wildfire among us," said one longtime member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It was nonstop phone-to-phone, even though we knew something was going to happen … it was just inevitable, like a volcano that had to erupt."

Controversy is nothing new to the members of the National Arts Club. For more than a decade now, the organization and its president, Aldon James, have been at the center of numerous public dust-ups involving not only the governance of the club but the administration of Gramercy Park itself. Until Jan. 4, Mr. James and his group of staunch supporters-which includes his twin brother, John James-have remained relatively unscathed by all the criticism, and the club has continued to chug along with the ivy-covered joie de vivre found in old Woody Allen movies.

But with the arrival of the N.Y.P.D. and the District Attorney's office, some club members-most of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity, because they didn't want to risk losing membership or, worse, a legal battle with Mr. James-are predicting that the stage is being set for a final reckoning for the N.A.C. and its administration.

Three days after the raid, a sense of normalcy seemed to prevail at the club. At its annual gold-medal awards dinner on Jan. 7, Mr. James took the stage to a thunderous round of applause and, according to a witness there, walked around the place looking as he always has: sprightly, effete and debonair-a New York version of Frasier Crane's younger brother Niles.

Through his spokesman, the well-connected public-relations executive Ken Sunshine, Mr. James declined to comment or be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Sunshine did say that business at the club was "continuing nonstop with no change."

According to Jody Widelitz, a club member who has spent some time at 15 Gramercy Park South since Jan. 4: "If nobody had known about the raid, you wouldn't have thought it had happened. There is a mild buzz among some members, [a] 'did you read this article?' sort of thing, but there's varying degrees. Some people still refuse to believe anything, and others say 'I told you all along.'"

For those familiar with recent developments at the N.A.C. and recent investigations into club matters by the city's Department of Finance and the State Liquor Authority, however, the raid and its implications were no matter for applause.

As The Observer reported in 1992, Mr. James has been under fire practically since the beginning of his tenure as club president in early 1986. He initially received praise for bringing the club "into the 20th century" by substantially fattening its membership list and making its awards hot commodities. Writer Tom Wolfe was a recent honoree, and director Martin Scorsese has been touted as a member. But some members regarded the endless stream of parties and fund-raisers held then as straying from the club's artistic tradition.

Founded by New York Times art and literary critic Charles de Kay, the National Arts Club had been a meeting place for the Ashcan School of painters and American impressionists. But increasingly it seemed to be serving as a shabby-chic social hall where Mayor David Dinkins or Senator Roy Goodman threw parties and the guests ranged from playboy publisher Morgan Entrekin to former Second Lady Tipper Gore and hard-ass former Secretary of State James Baker. In 1991, Mr. James even hosted a book party for Lucinda Franks, wife of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

Under Mr. James' leadership, member bulletins and, more recently, the club's Web site featured countless photographs of dignitaries attending club functions, usually standing cheek-to-jowl with Mr. James.

"Yes, Aldon did very interesting things at the beginning," said another longtime member, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. "But it seemed they were all done to foster his image and not the club's. It became very obvious in the last years, when he held political events and did people favors to enhance his own image."

At the time, one of the most prized benefits of N.A.C. membership was occupancy of one of the club's 37 spacious prewar apartments, which boast prime location and below-market rents. Soon after Mr. James arrived, however, he became embroiled in a lawsuit with some tenants over rent stabilization at the club. Four elderly dwellers were eventually evicted. During the battle, some tenants found themselves thwarted when they attempted to get hold of the club's financial reports and membership rolls. For critics of Mr. James, this was prime evidence of the secrecy that they contend pervaded too many of the club's dealings. It was also a harbinger of the litigation to come.

With court permission, some tenants obtained the right to have accountants audit the club's finances. The audit was completed in 1997, though auditors complained that the club hampered their investigation. The resulting report, prepared by M.R. Weiser & Co., hinted at a tax-fraud scheme.

Mr. James called the charges "chopped hamburgers," and his supporters dismissed the audit because it had been ordered by one of the club members who, at the time, was embroiled in a lawsuit with the club.

According to some members, Mr. James might have encountered smooth sailing after that had he not made the decision to take on the Gramercy Park Trust-the entity that controls the city's only private park-in a series of other lawsuits in the mid-1990's. In the latest one, which claims violation of the civil rights of minority schoolchildren, Mr. James and other plaintiffs demanded damages. But they didn't stop there: They also asked for a guarantee of equal access to the park-currently, only Gramercy Park residents can access the park with a key-and removal of two of the three lifetime park trustees.

The lawsuit not only antagonized a number of longtime Gramercy Park residents, who hired public-relations executive Dan Klores over the summer, it angered a number of N.A.C. members who felt that the club's monetary resources were being wasted.

"Prior [to the lawsuit,]" explained Rob Seyffert, a third-generation club member, "we'd been rumbling a lot, mainly talking among ourselves. But now … our biggest gripe became the hemorrhaging of money towards lawyers, approximately $100,000 a year going to a lawyer's pockets on issues not related to the National Arts' Club mission, which is to educate the American people in the fine arts."

A new coalition of members, which billed itself the Concerned Artists of the National Arts Club, formed to protest the escalating legal costs of these lawsuits and began a relentless campaign of letter-writing. The group grew to include some 100 active participants. Concerned Artists of the National Arts Club placed an open letter in a local community newspaper and created their own Web site last spring. On it, they posted private correspondence between members and the president, club bylaws, and a summary of the 1997 audit's findings.

According to several sources familiar with the situation, the driving force behind the group was Nilda Misa, a lawyer and artist who is not a member of the club but once lived with Mr. Seyffert in one of the N.A.C.'s apartments. "I went to Harvard Law School; I worked in the Clinton administration for a number of years; and I'm familiar with certain financial, First Amendment and disclosure issues," said Ms. Misa. "What can I say? A whole lot of bells and whistles were going on."

Mr. James' supporters contend the group was simply regurgitating the same material that the club's initial litigants had used. "This is not a new group," said Daniel Schiffman, a member of the board of governors since the beginning of Mr. James' tenure. "It all stems from the same thing. I would be very surprised if Aldon had done anything dishonest, and until people succeed in proving that he has done something dishonest I won't believe it."

Enter Christopher Hagedorn, the 57-year-old editor and publisher of Town & Village , a community newspaper that covers the Gramercy area. Mr. Hagedorn is a member of the Players' Club, another hallowed Gramercy Park institution, which had incidentally declared itself against Mr. James' attempts to change park constitution. Mr. Hagedorn's father, who started the family newspaper business in 1947, was friendly with many at the N.A.C and had taken his son there on several occasions. Mr. Hagedorn had even held one of Town & Village 's anniversary parties there.

But, last spring, when Concerned Artists wanted to place an ad airing their beef with the National Arts Club in Town & Village , Mr. Hagedorn said he had to review it for libel concerns. He said the ad's content piqued his reporter's instincts and he started investigating. According to Mr. Hagedorn, he made some calls, found some talkative members, got hold of the 1997 audit report.

Since then, he's written more than 20 stories on the subject for his paper. Over a period of some six months, he examined the club's potential evasion of sales taxes, its alleged failure to report taxable income and the possibility that the club had allowed a third party to use its liquor license, which is prohibited by the S.L.A.

Indeed, last spring, the S.L.A. began investigating the N.A.C. as well for just such a violation. "We received complaints from various individuals alerting us to the potential that something was not right there," said Thomas McKeon, a spokesman for the authority. "We have issued a notice of pleading and they have to answer to that charge. We're in the disciplinary mode at this point."

Mr. Hagedorn also uncovered another bombshell. "The income from the dining room … was never reported … by the club," Mr. Hagedorn said. With a chuckle he added, "Because we're not the New York Times , we forwarded the story to the Commissioner of the Department of Finance."

Approximately three weeks later, Mr. Hagedorn reported another scoop in his paper. The Dept. of Finance and Taxation was investigating the N.A.C. A department spokesperson denied that the articles had spurred the investigation, but a number of club members seem to feel otherwise.

One would think that, after years of fighting to shed more light on Mr. James' administration of the N.A.C., the club's dissidents would welcome these investigations. But one thing is keeping them up at night - namely, how Mr. James plans to pay to defend the club and himself from any allegations that may result from these inquiries. These members point out an N.A.C. bylaw, passed during Mr. James' tenure (and featured on the Concerned Artists' Web site) that could result in the president receiving the club's financial support in the case of a lawsuit. For a James supporter such as Mr. Schiffman, such a bylaw is not-for-profit boilerplate and no grounds for members to complain.

Yet critics of Mr. James worry that some of the club's sizable art collection, which the 1997 audit said had an appraised value of $4.9 million, could be sacrificed to pay for the club's legal bills.

Said one longtime member of the N.A.C.: "Right now, we're coming up to a very difficult time for the club."

"That's the first time I've ever seen him cry!" joked someone in the crowd. Yalies were swarming amid the taxidermy at the musty, red-leather-and-oak edifice on East 70th Street, a club whose members have included Edmund P. Hillary and Charles Lindbergh, and, more recently, Mr. Prosek. Speeches over-Harper Collins editor Larry Ashmead had cracked, "We can certainly say that James is mediagenic!"-the crowd jostled toward its hero, who was dispensing hugs to old friends and day-old acquaintances alike. Classmate Wym Van Wyk, a tall, blindingly blond man in a charcoal suit, idled near a staircase. He said he works at Sotheby's and lives on the Upper East Side. Looking toward the man of the hour, he said, "For me, he's an inspiration. You know, I worked at a bank before. Knowing James helped inspire me to try something else." A giant stuffed bear stared down at him.

Dink Stover is dead. The hero of Owen Johnson's 1912 novel, Stover at Yale , readied himself for public life by joining Skull and Bones and playing football. But in 1999, the new Yale man is more like Mr. Prosek: a sensitive, blue-eyed, downy-limbed sprite who's already plowed through three major Manhattan publishers (Alfred A. Knopf, Rob Weisbach and now Harper Collins) and who has risen not through the bloodlines of the old-boy network, but through a bloodless, new old-boy network, composed largely of fly fishermen with media connections whom Mr. Prosek has hooked with his unassuming, self-deprecating brand of flattery.

And he's landed some big ones. "James? He's a very charming man," said Mr. Wenner. "He's got a lot of charm and intelligence, and a nice, fresh-faced appeal." Mr. Brokaw fished with him, avuncularly, on a Nightly News segment. Mr. Bush has written him an adoring, if largely illegible, fan note. Ted Turner contributes to the same environmentally conscious foundations. The Times ' Mr. Raines has attended all of his book parties. "I hope James and I get to fish this year," said Mr. Raines, author of 1994's Fly-Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis . "There's kind of a fraternal feeling among fly fishers."

Indeed. "I think James was the beneficiary of, well, the largesse of old white men," said one female classmate. "I don't know anyone my age who is interested in anything James Prosek writes about. I don't think that means he's a bad writer." She added, "It's very safe to think that James Prosek is cute if you're an older man, if you're a straight older man, because he's so wholesome, and he talks about fishing. I don't mean to say that they're pedophiles or anything like that. I just mean that there's no trace of effeminacy or liberalism or anything vaguely countercultural associated with his persona. He's a very nice emblem."

'Trout Boy' at Yale

"I didn't know Knopf from Cheerios," said Mr. Prosek of his premature induction into Manhattan's highest literary echelons. It was two days before his Explorers Club soirée, and the author was thigh-deep in the murky waters of Mill River in Easton, Conn., an hour north of Manhattan and a few miles from the $500,000 house that he recently bought with his sister, Jennifer, 29, a Columbia University M.B.A. student who moonlights as his publicist. The house is two doors down from where they grew up.

Beneath his high-tech but still irredeemably dorky waders, Mr. Prosek, who is 6 feet 1 inches tall and weighs 170 pounds, was outfitted in Late 90's Male, with a dash of innocent British schoolboy: gray Banana Republic trousers, a checkered North Face polyester shirt and blue socks. His cheeks were flushed; his lips were full; a pair of dusty deck shoes waited by the bank.

"I didn't know who Jann Wenner was ," he continued, in between whiplike cracks of his fishing line. But as a teenager, his next-door neighbor in Easton was Samuel Beckett biographer Deirdre Bair. Young James mowed her lawn; his dad, a retired science teacher, showed her stacks of his son's poetry. Later, she helped wangle him an agent, Elaine Markson, of whom he has said, "She's probably a woman I admire more than any other."

He first tried fishing when he was 5, but only really became "crazed" at age 9, when his mother left his father for another man. "I have a lot of abandonment issues," he said. In lieu of therapy, he believes fishing helped him overcome an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

As for his fixation on trout, he couldn't really explain it.

"I just can't think of any creature other than the human body that is as pretty to my eye," he said. He reserves a particular affection for the trout of Fairfield County, which he dubbed "opportunistic feeders." On this day, however, after an hour of fishing, he caught nary a minnow.

Perched on his bed back home, Mr. Prosek described himself as floundering somewhat during his freshman year of Yale. Vowing to publish before age 20, he mailed a proposal, cold, to 10 publishers; Alfred A. Knopf editor and fly-fishing dabbler Gary Fisketjon (he of Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy) was the only one who bit. Knopf advanced the freshman $10,000 for Trout , in which he meticulously illustrated the taxonomy of the species.

"His writing qualities weren't maybe his strongest suit," said Mr. Fisketjon, "but what was immediately apparent was his basic nature, which is to say passionate and not even remotely snotty about something that many people tend to be snotty about."

In short order, The New York Times ran a glowing piece comparing Mr. Prosek to John James Audubon; and Mr. Fisketjon helped arrange a cover story in Sports Afield , then edited by Mr. Fisketjon's pal, Terry McDonnell. "Gary is a kingmaker," said Mr. Prosek, who counts Machiavelli's The Prince as one of his favorite books.

Then, synergy: One night on Friends , Chandler was spotted paging through Trout . In the spring of his junior year, Mr. Prosek appeared on the cover of the Yale Alumni Magazine in full fly-fishing regalia. "I mean, yeah, they kind of laughed about it, you know-'Trout Boy,'" he said, of the subsequent drubbing he received in his residential college newsletter. "But, you know, I think they kind of respected it." He also joined a secret society-not Skull and Bones, but one called Manuscript, filled with mostly preppy artsy types.

Out in the real world, the big fish read about Mr. Prosek and got hooked. "When any of these people who have been trout thinkers or trout writers-and they are legion-reach a critical mass of geezerhood, they worry about the future of their sport," said Mr. McDonnell, who now edits Men's Journal . "And then here out of nowhere was this 17-year-old kid who was brilliant and devoted all of his time to doing these paintings that were exactly right.… There was a sense of relief, an aha! So that sort of swept the literary fishing community."

Mr. Prosek visited Mr. Raines at The Times , where he signed a book for Oscar de la Renta; he formed a band, called Trout, and left a demo tape for Mr. Wenner. But he still had to go to class: He "skipped cheerily," as he writes in The Complete Angler , to Mr. Bloom's office.

The professor was quite taken. "I must say I've had a lot of students, graduate and undergraduate, through all these many decades, that I've cared for immensely," said Mr. Bloom. "But I'm not sure, in the end, I've ever been as fond of any of them as I have been of James." He added, "James wrote a remarkable version really of Paradise Lost . It has a kind of splendid , glowing intensity … I've never known anyone who didn't like James!

"Of course, I'm not trying to suggest he is an angel or anything like that," giggled Mr. Bloom over the clink of teacups. "He is what the French would call an average sensual male."

Back in Mr. Prosek's Yale dorm room, the phone messages piled up. The scrapbook of clippings grew fat.

"Of course you were a little jealous," said Andy Karch, 24, Mr. Prosek's roommate of three years, currently a doctoral candidate in political science at Harvard University. "It was human nature. But he has this kind of aw-shucks mentality. You're not going to hate him."

"Junior year, whenever he felt particularly frisky," remembered Mr. Karch, "he would put on this silk shirt that he called his party shirt. One night at a party, he was dancing up a storm, as he was famous for, and I guess he got a little bit out of control, and ripped his jeans wide open, and so there he was, with his powder-blue silk shirt and burgundy silk boxers, on the floor of Eli Levenson's room."

Fishing Albania

During the fall of his senior year, Mr. Prosek turned his sights to a novel, signed with Rob Weisbach's splashy new imprint at William Morrow and wrote Joe and Me , a memoir of his mentor relationship with an Easton ranger.

Mr. Weisbach wanted him to follow up with a book in which he would take 20 "interesting" people fishing. But, said the writer, "I don't want to go too commercial." He sold The Complete Angler to Harper Collins' Mr. Ashmead for $60,000. His next advance, for a book about fishing the 41st Parallel, which crosses Madrid, Beijing, the Gobi desert, Albania, Nantucket and Easton, Conn., was in the low six figures, plus considerable traveling expenses.

Classmate Aaron Kennon, 23, an analyst for Salomon Smith Barney Inc., said, "I would almost sort of consider him the Hemingway of the 21st century."

Others might agree. "A friend of mine had a disastrous date with him," sniffed another recent Yale graduate, a woman who lives on the Lower East Side and works in publishing. "He got really drunk and just kind of forgot she existed and left her at a party where she didn't know anybody. It was horrifying, so bad that he called a couple of weeks later to apologize formally. All the more so because, one is supposed to take for granted this impression of James Prosek as this nice all-American boy."

"I have no recollection of that," responded Mr. Prosek with some anguish. "It sounds like somebody I didn't even know I was on a date with."

He met his current girlfriend, Valerie Green, a half-American, half-French 23-year-old, on the bus to Kennedy International Airport. She is studying medicine in Rouen, France. "She lives in this little apartment," he said. "In Madame Bovary , the character in the beginning lives in the same street, on the same floor, and is a med student, too."

She doesn't fish. "My God, why would I?" she said at the Explorers Club party.

"He's too young to have a permanent girl at this point," said Mr. Bloom. "I don't want him to foreclose his life in any way."

"Women and trout are very close for me," Mr. Prosek said. "They're the things I regard as the most esthetically wonderful creatures. But you know, I don't have any sexual attraction to fish, although you know fish are very kind of phallic. If you look at fish from the bottom, they look a lot like, you know, male genitalia." He paused. "In ancient Rome, they put mullet in women's vaginas as a punishment for adultery. Isn't that horrible?"

As the Explorers Club party wound down, several Yalies trouped to an afterparty, held in an Upper East Side apartment belonging to the parents of a Manuscript member. Classmate Eli Levenson, tie flung over his shoulder, was thoughtfully eating lasagna. "I feel like Yale is very unique in that people stay on campus, people end up socializing in people's rooms, they get to know people very intimately that way," said Mr. Levenson, who lives on the West Side and works in government. "When people meet you from outside they think, 'Oh my goodness, you must be hyperintelligent,' but I think what you see in James, and what you see in the best Yale guys, is an extremely, extremely self-effacing quality."

Mr. Prosek seconded that assessment of himself.

"For me, it's kind of about [Izaak] Walton's philosophy of life, which is to live as simply as you can, to be content, to be humble," he said. "To me it's not just about trout, it's about life."

He said he had recently pitched a story to The New Yorker that ended up in a Condé Nast advertising supplement instead. But he was not daunted.

"Society and the public tend to label and pigeonhole people," he said. "I prefer not to be pigeonholed."