Spike Lee and Mike Tyson on 'Today' (NBC)

We're starting to believe that Spike Lee is either a genius or has gone absolutely insane. (Kind of like Peter Jackson, n'est pas?)

First he spends years jerking us around about an American version of Old Boy, even threatening to put Steven Spielberg in charge and giving Will Smith the lead role of Oh Dae-Su. (For those who haven't seen the film, that's akin to doing a remake of Schindler's List where Zac Efron plays Oskar. And it's directed by Rob Reiner.)

Thankfully, this idea was scrapped and the two leads will now be Josh Brolin and the South African guy from District 9. Still iffy, but it has the potential for genius.

And then we read what Mike Tyson is saying about his upcoming Broadway show, which Spike Lee directed, and the needle swings back to "crazy."

Premiering July 31st after its successful run in Vegas, Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth will have audiences struggling to understand an hour and a half (give or take, intermission...maybe?) of Mr. Tyson's unique diction in his one-man show. We're sure that Mr. Tyson's reviews are well-earned, but this is all we're imagining:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbj6SeznHVg
This play is going to be raw, but "“not raw in a vulgar sense," as Mr. Tyson explained. Just "raw" like a "prostitute hunter."
Seriously, just watch this video from the Today show and tell us: Is Spike Lee crazy, or crazy like a fox? And how many doves, exactly, will this show be using over the course of it's run? That's our other question, obviously.

While the Rapture failed to materialize last weekend, it didn't stop the ominously-named Grímsvötn volcano in Iceland from cutting short President Obama's trip to Ireland--where in between other, presumably more official duties, he threw back a pint of Guinness in celebration of his victorious Bin Laden mission, which we now know was internally called "the trip to Atlantic City." (Atlantic City? Really? We know the boardwalk is collapsing, but it's not that Abbottabad!)

Nor did the massive recall on the Armageddon save-the-date cards stop storm clouds from gathering expectantly above New York for the better part of the past week--the city skies looked grayer and angrier than Bill Keller trying to navigate his Facebook page. In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Mr. Keller once again took to his ill-advised media column to shake his fist in at the confoundingly futuristic enigma that is social networking, musing belatedly that "Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg's device displaced remembering." (Hopefully Frank Bruni, the paper's new Sunday columnist named Frank, will be able to discuss Foursquare without making wistful references to 15th-century inventions.)

Perhaps the clouds were darkening to mourn the death of Academy Award-winning composer and alleged rapist Joseph Brooks, who committed suicide on Sunday in his Upper East Side apartment, forever casting a pall on the most popular song in Debby Boone's canon. Maybe the skies were crying for Gwyneth Paltrow, whose recording contract with Atlantic Records fizzled out after months of negotiations, according to Page Six, or for Glenn Beck, who's now using his crocodile tears to sell discount chocolate and credit-score monitoring through Markdown.com, the soon-to-be erstwhile Fox pundit's brand new Groupon ripoff. Maybe it was for Mr. Beck's fellow radio pundit Rush Limbaugh, whose ratings are down 33 percent, or for former decider George W. Bush, who was nearly brained by a baseball in his native Texas. (Speaking of baseball, maybe all the sturm und drang was for the New York Yankees, whose arch-rival Red Sox have nearly pulled even with the Bronx Bombers after an abysmal start to the season.)

And speaking of abysmal starts to the season, we're 18 months out from the 2012 election and apart from Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Herman "the Herminator" (no, really, that's the name of his PAC) Cain, no one is stepping up to the GOP plate. According to Pete King, Rudy's flirting with the idea of throwing his hat into the ring, but by all accounts we're well past the foreplay stage. When Obama's making victory laps around the E.U., chugging beer, it's time to get on the field, guys. Storm's a-comin.'

Tyson says there was no rage or terror in the ring: "If there is, they're counting to 10 over you." When the interviewer presses him about the famous Holyfield fight, Tyson has to explain how he'd gone wrong, making a weird analogy to writing so the Details man will understand: "16 months out of prison, already with two belts to defend? I had no business with those belts. I was already done. They put you, a writer, in prison, for three years, hands tied behind your back. Then they put you up against some hack, and you outwrite him, and they give you two awards. And then I put you up against a Nobel Prize winner? Absurd."

When Tyson talks about gentrification in his childhood neighborhood of Brownsville, his descriptions feel slightly off because Brownsville is still a pretty rough neighborhood. Also, Tyson doesn't make gentrification sound too bad.

I went back to Brownsville with my reality-TV-show crew, they're doing a segment about my childhood racing pigeons, and Brownsville's all upscale now. They got surveillance cameras, buildings that were abandoned cost, like, a million now, and I'm thinking, My life must've been a lie, 'cause there's nothing there that looks like my childhood. This white woman come up, and I'm thinking, Wow. When I was a kid, she would've been robbed and raped and left for dead. This is a real strange scenario, and I just wanted to cry. I'm like, "Who am I? Where's my heritage?"

Also revealed in the interview: Ali was an exuberant shit-talker.

An umbrella-armed escort accompanied actor Terrence Howard into the Regal Union Square Stadium 14 amid a torrential downpour on Monday, April 20, for the premiere of his new movie Fighting, which is, essentially, a movie about fighting.

“At first, I thought it was going to be a basketball movie,” said Mr. Howard, dressed casually in a T-shirt, jeans, leather jacket and paperboy cap.

Talk about a slam dunk! “You’ll see a lot of my trademark moves out there,” said world champion kick boxer Cung Le, who plays a villain in the film. “So, watch out for the scissor kick!”

Brawling, it turns out, was the theme of the day. Just a few blocks up Broadway, at the AMC Loews 19th Street Cinemas, director James Toback was simultaneously premiering his documentary about the boxer Mike Tyson, simply titled Tyson.

“I think it’s appropriate,” Mr. Howard said of his own film’s clashing title. “This isn’t necessarily about fisticuffs, it’s about emotional battles that everyone goes through. … Fighting, you know, is more of a synonym for the human condition.”

Symbolic or not, Mr. Howard and co-star Channing Tatum still mock-boxed for the cameras.

Mr. Tatum, who brought along fiancée (and Step Up co-star) Jenna Dewan, seemed less enthused about the film’s combative moniker. “Trust me,” he told the Transom, “I gave them a thousand different other options for it.”

Like what? “God, eh, ‘Last Chance,’ eh, ‘Scared’. … It’s about relationships,” he added. “The whole movie is about relationships.”

Meanwhile, Ryan Kavanaugh, CEO of Relativity Media, which helped produce the film, struck a defensive pose along the red carpet when asked about the company’s hotly rumored three-year deal with Lionsgate studios. Then he delivered the stiff-arm: “If there was a deal or would be a deal, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it at this point."

Mr. Torres, whose professional heyday was between 1958 and 1969 (YouTube has a couple of clips: Torres v. Carl 'Bobo' Olson in 1964; Torres v. Willie Pastrano from 1965) and went on to become the chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission from 1984 to 1988. According to Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Torres was "the first former professional boxer and the first Latino to head the agency, which oversees boxing in the state."

Outside of the ring, Mr. Torres was an author. In 1971 he wrote Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story and Fire & Fear: The Inside Story of Mike Tyson from 1990, which formed the basis for the 1995 TV movie Tyson, which we mentioned yesterday in a post about David Carr's interview with Mike Tyson.

Mr. Torres was also close friends with Norman Mailer. The boxer was among several "friends"—including Norman Podhoretz—to whom Mr. Mailer dedicated Why Are We in Vietnam? in 1967 and appeared in Mr. Mailer's 1970 experimental movie Maidstone.

There are no dolls or Joker masks to hide behind: Just Mr. Carr face-to-face with the disgraced onetime World Heavyweight Champion whose life has already inspired one incredible documentary (Barbara Kopple's Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson from 1993) and one tepid TV movie (Tyson, from 1995). For a short video—it runs just five minutes and 43-seconds—Mr. Carr manages a level of intimacy (one might say discomfortingly so) with his subject, and not just because they're reclining side-by-side on a sofa, Mr. Tyson still a mass of muscle in his well-tailored suit beside Mr. Carr (in a baseball cap and fleece) holding one microphone between them.

At one point, Mr. Carr asks the Junior Olympian-turned-cautionary tale (whom he calls "a reluctant public figure" and "a complicated guy") how all the attention and accolades he's been receiving for the film might act as a trigger for using cocaine. "I don't know," Mr. Tyson tells the author of the addiction memoir The Night of the Gun. "Well, you being a former addict yourself, I don't know how it works in your particular situation, but I never get high when I'm depressed and sad. I always get high when everything's going great." (Mr. Carr says he understands.)

After the interview, Mr. Carr tells viewers, "I gotta say, I do a lot of interviews, but that was one where I was both tense and excited at the same time."

He then offers a boastful sign-off with accompanying emphatic hand gesture: "Please remember: They call it Times Square for a reason!"

Hey, it's better than, "Carr—out."

"You die too young that way," he said. "I learned that from a friend. Never stress about anything you can't change."

Indeed, Mr. Tyson can't change what Brooklyn prosecutors have on videotapes made from surveillance-camera footage at the Marriott in downtown Brooklyn in the early-morning hours of June 21, when a pair of allegedly drunken autograph-seekers approached him in the hotel lobby at 5:30 a.m. They teased Mr. Tyson into a fight and, after Mr. Tyson chased them down with a stanchion from the hotel lobby, all soon wound up in the hospital-in handcuffs.

Given his lengthy rap sheet, if he's found guilty of the misdemeanor charges, Mr. Tyson stands to face up to a year in prison. So far, he's spent far more time behind bars than any other popular boxing champion. In the early 1990's, Mr. Tyson spent three years in prison after an Indianapolis jury convicted him of raping beauty-pageant contestant Desiree Washington-a charge Mr. Tyson adamantly denies-and was suspended from boxing for virtually 18 months after twice biting the ears of boxer Evander Holyfield in a 1997 rematch. Another prison term for the fighter, who is said to suffer the entire spectrum of human emotions-severe depression, kindness, generosity, rage and moments of comical, sparkling genius-might be too much for him to handle, many confidants say.

"Mike has always been looking for an escape, a trap door," said Teddy Atlas, one of Mr. Tyson's first trainers. "He always lacked one essential ingredient in situation building character: the ability to confront himself."

The fight of Mr. Tyson's life has moved from the boxing ring to the courtroom once again, and he's throwing it, confidants and advisers say. Mr. Tyson's newfound, stoic acceptance of his has turned into a dark fatalism, as his fortunes are drowned in debt and the prospect of a real comeback in boxing seems to recede further from his grasp. He doesn't return calls to his lawyers to discuss the assault, and a plea-bargain is out of the question, even though in these sorts of reciprocal-assault cases, both parties usually plead themselves down to community service. His lawyers will be back in court Dec. 19.

Mr. Tyson remains boxing's biggest, most lucrative fighter, no matter who the opponent. Naturally, his unpredictability fuels his drawing power. But to reclaim his fortune and change his reputation in boxing circles as a consummate slacker, Mr. Tyson must force his way back into fighting shape and mount (and market) the comeback. There are still glory days to come.

More time behind bars might spike any comeback dreams Mr. Tyson may harbor in some secret chamber under his tattooed, usually knitted brow. It will certainly kill any immediate chance the boxer might have to earn enough quick money to promptly pay off the nearly $40 million he owes to a melange of debtors, including over $300,000 for limo services; over $30,000 to a Hawaii resort; over $170,000 to a Las Vegas jeweler for a gold necklace with 80-carat diamonds; millions to his many lawyers and managers and consultants, many of whom continue to prey upon Mr. Tyson's earning potential, mood swings and financial naïveté; and a hefty $13 million unpaid tab to the I.R.S.

When Mr. Tyson's periwinkle Rolls Royce pulled up beside the courthouse doors Nov. 31, the anxious gallery of paparazzi expected the famously dapper fighter to step out of his car in a nimbus of bling-bling. Instead, the bankrupt former heavyweight champion emerged from behind the tinted windows of the $330,000 limousine in a pair of blue jeans faded almost to white, a T-shirt and a pair of sneakers.

In court, Mr. Tyson yawned throughout the entire session.

"I'm just trying to take it nice and easy," Mr. Tyson said in an interview before his appearance. "Nice and slow-that's me."

Isn't Mr. Tyson enraged that news of this summer's assault-an attack that even his prosecutors in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office say he didn't initiate-made the covers of two daily newspapers in New York and blitzed CNN and other media outlets around the world?

"It doesn't bother me," Mr. Tyson said about his Godzilla-like play. "They're gonna write what they want to write-what they need to write."

On the phone, he did not want to talk about the two punks who ambushed him, his boxing future, his bankruptcy or any of the serious, life-altering decisions he must make in the coming months-or allow to be made for him.

Instead, Mr. Tyson wanted to talk about one of his heroes, Arnold Rothstein, the famed underworld mastermind, pool shark and gambler widely believed to have fixed the outcome of the 1919 World Series. Often, when Mr. Tyson checks into the many hotel rooms across the country in which he now lives, he can be found under the name Rothstein, or his other nom de guerre , Jack Dempsey, the hobo heavyweight legend who's Mohawk hairdo Mr. Tyson sought to mimic when he became boxing's youngest, perhaps most devastating heavyweight champion at age 20 years and five months.

"All those cats are my heroes, my idols," Mr. Tyson said. Asked why, he replied, "Because they didn't give a fuck about nobody. Nobody ."

Mr. Tyson's crush on history's lawless heroes and self-made pugilists dates to his teen years. Today, he's one of the fight game's premier historians: names, dates, wins, losses, Mr. Tyson knows the inside dope on virtually any fighter in the bare-knuckle and modern eras, and when he's telling these dusty tales about the ghosts of boxing past he knows so well, sometimes for hours on end, Mr. Tyson seems to foam at the mouth.

"They were like the Marc Riches and the Bill Gateses," he said. "They were cool customers, like the mice that lay back in their holes and wait to eat their cheese."

Mr. Tyson has always seen in his heroes of early boxing, particularly the crafty Jewish fighters who boxed their way out of the same neighborhood where he spent his troubled youth-Brownsville-where he was arrested a reported 38 times between the ages of 10 and 13, mugging victims with "a cunningness." His sister Denise and brother Roger were said to have tied him to bedposts with rope, after which they tried to beat the bad out of him. Finally, he was sent to a reformatory upstate, the Tryon School, where he met the half-blind boxing sage Cus D'Amato. The rest was the stuff of classic boxing fairy-tales.

Now, he was talking about lightweight champ Benny Leonard and his set.

"Even though they were Jewish, they were very tribal, and there were all different kinds, Jewish fighters from Russia, the Balkans, Lithuania; they had different styles and different basic ways to even study their religion. They wanted to be classy, they wanted to be accepted by society-and people looked at them as being Uncle Toms, but really it was evolution, just ethnic groups evolving."

Mr. Tyson also indulges himself in the contradictory pasts of ruthless conqueror Genghis Khan and dove-like tennis great Arthur Ashe, whose likeness is tattooed on his torso alongside that of Chairman Mao's.

Everyone is willing to pay triple to see Mr. Tyson fight a mega-matchup against the speediest, most accurate fighter in the game now, Roy Jones Jr. Can he shed the weight and make it happen?

Mr. Tyson asked his own question: He wanted to know whether numbers guru Meyer Lansky (a Rothstein protégé) had a connection to Leonard. If so, what was it?

"I haven't seen that anywhere," Mr. Tyson said. "He must have."

Would he trade places with Rothstein or Dempsey or any of the historical ghosts he admires?

"It's not better to live in a time like that," he said. "It's just better to know that people lived in a time like that. We need to escalate our humanity towards people. Just think of what one human being does towards another human being now … it's catastrophic ! It would even be a disgrace to a nation of heathens, what people do now-the disrespect, the hate. People say they're loving the world, but really, it's overshadowed by so much hate."

All celebrity court dramas seem to carry at least one signature piece of evidence. For O.J. Simpson, it was a glove; for Bill Clinton, it was a blue dress; for Kobe Bryant, a pair of yellow panties. For Mr. Tyson, this time around, prosecutors have hinted that part of their case could rest on Mr. Tyson's jacket.

Look at the in-house security videotape from the lobby of the hotel that morning, veteran Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney John O'Mara might say in court. Sure, the grainy, hard-to-follow images show Mr. Tyson getting accosted. One can almost smell the boozy breath of the so-called autograph-seekers, Sam Velez, 30, and Nestor Alvarez-Ramos, 24, both of Philadelphia.

"You've got fists, we've got guns," the two men said, according to both the prosecutors and Mr. Tyson's attorneys.

Then the action starts. The images jut back and forth. Soon, within the hard-to-follow frames, the two are on the ground and Mr. Tyson is still standing. But why, Mr. O'Mara might argue at this point, why would Mr. Tyson then choose to take off his jacket (to increase mobility?) and pounce on the two men again?

"At first, we believe, Mr. Tyson acted in good faith to defend himself," Mr. O'Mara said. "But this went way beyond."

After Brooklyn cops broke up the mêlée, Mr. Velez was rushed into emergency oral surgery. His two front teeth had been smashed into his gums, claims his attorney, Earl Brown, and root-canal surgery had to be performed. He was also left with 12 stitches over his right eye, and now Mr. Velez can't feel the right side of his face, said Mr. Brown; it's gone numb. The other friend took less of a beating, Mr. Brown continued, though a beating all the same: Mr. Ramos suffered a twisted ankle, a sore skull, a few face cuts and nasty, pounding headaches. Mr. Tyson cut his hand.

"It could have been worse," Mr. Brown said. "But still …. "

Not so, said Mr. Tyson's legal team, composed of the always-bowtied Mel Sachs and Steve Brounstein, a stubble-chinned criminal attorney. They feel they have a knockout case on their hands, even if Mr. Tyson doesn't necessarily have the juice to pay them-yet.

They've filed motion papers to have the case dismissed and will argue those merits in court on Dec. 19.

"Mike isn't necessarily clear why he was arrested in the first place," said Mr. Sachs, who's represented magician David Copperfield, hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons and comedian Jackie Mason over the years. Mr. Brounstein, a former Bronx district attorney, said, "These guys were only after a payday."

That could mean big money someday-if Mr. Tyson had any-and Mr. Tyson's attorneys say they have and will continue to rebuff any attempts to settle. Of Mr. Tyson's cavalier removal of his coat, Mr. Brown said: "It's our position that Mike made no effort to remove himself at any point from this situation at any time. He initiated it, and he concluded it."

Asked about Mr. Tyson's removal of his coat, Mr. Sachs said the action was "an atavistic response" from a street-bred fighter who, given the circumstances, "showed restraint."

"What should Mike have done?" Mr. Sachs said. "Walk out the front door and wait for them to shoot him in the back?"

There is also the issue of motive. Mr. Sachs' private investigator, a former New York Police Department detective named Mike Charles, has identified at least one witness, Mitchell Swindell, who spent the night with Mr. Tyson's assailants in the Brooklyn holding pen. Mr. Swindell, arrested on a domestic-assault charge that night, remembers the two bragging to anybody who would listen that, with a little luck, they might score a high-stakes settlement deal.

"This is a ghetto thing," Mr. Swindell told The Observer . "Those two knew what they were doing from the get-go."

But Mr. Brown denies that his clients chose to pick a fight in order to make money.

"We all like money," Mr. Brown said. "But taking a series of Mike Tyson punches in order to secure it? I don't think so."

When Mr. Brown first chose to take Mr. Velez and Mr. Ramos on as clients, he said, he had already left his brief legal career (filing a resignation with the Legal Aid Society after one year of service) and taken a job teaching business classes at the University of Virginia, where he currently works. The surprise referral to take on his first private case came through a former employer in the "club party-promotion scene," he said, though he wouldn't identify the person. Mr. Brown also shrugged off any suggestion that representing both of Mr. Tyson's alleged assailants may constitute a conflict of interest. He's filed papers with the court to dismiss the menacing charges, which carry a maximum sentence of 90 days in prison. After the criminal charges are dropped, he said, his clients will file a civil suit against Mr. Tyson for their wounds.

Someone will have to take some Mike Tyson punches soon-or Mr. Tyson's money will run out completely. He's been virtually homeless for the last eight months, traversing the country, from Los Angeles to Miami to Phoenix to Brooklyn, hanging out with friends and sleeping in hotels and entertaining short-money business propositions, like fighting a 7-foot-6, 385-pound former funeral-home carrier turned martial-arts star in Japan. Since he filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 1, Mr. Tyson's only physical assets-including his Las Vegas manse, a home that sits in the lot next to the Shenandoah ranch of crooner Wayne Newton-have been seized and will be sold, according to Mr. Tyson's former manager, Shelly Finkel, who chairs the boxer's creditors' committee.

"It's sad, almost surreal," Mr. Finkel continued. "He's just vacillating."

Mr. Tyson's wanton spending has also been shackled by tax liens. At this point, his money, or the fading memories of it-including the Versace-inspired bathtub he purchased for $2 million for first wife Robin Givens, which came encrusted in diamonds; the $20,000 wads he used to hand out to bums and derelict fighters in casinos; the cars and motorcycles and Siberian tigers; and the over $100 million in earnings that he claims was siphoned away by promoter Don King through dubious accounting-now seems like an unnecessary distraction.

In many ways, wealth has always made him uncomfortable. Mr. Tyson's chauffeur, Rudy Gonzalez, said that when he and the boxer first went into the basement of an old Vanderbilt cottage that Mr. Tyson purchased in Bernardsville, N.J., many years ago, they found cases containing a vintage-wine collection.

"Man, get all this shit out of here," Mr. Tyson, then 21, told Mr. Gonzalez. "I want to build me a gym."

Mr. Gonzalez remembers packing those crates onto a truck and driving back to Brownsville, where he and Mr. Tyson and other members of their team unloaded what might have been the Vanderbilt family's wine collection and handed the dusty bottles out to friends and bums-whoever happened to be walking by.

"He was like the Robin Hood of the ghetto," said Mr. Gonzalez, who handled the fighter's 250-strong exotic-car collection early on in Mr. Tyson's career and now rents Ferraris and Lamborghinis to tourists in a shop off the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Besides, Mr. Tyson never had an interest in saving or showed a penchant for arithmetic. When he first met Joseph Maffia, his accountant at Don King Productions, who is of mixed-race descent, Mr. Tyson didn't inquire about his Roth I.R.A. "So," Mr. Maffia remembered Mr. Tyson asking him, "do you have a big dick or a little dick?"

The life seemed funnier then, when Mr. Tyson was young and hungry to take on challenges to his title, and there was lots of money around to buffet him along. Now Mr. Tyson's advisers and businesses managers change often. There are those who dive into his cell phone periodically to look at the numbers he has stored and weed out undesirables-like reporters. But Mr. Tyson seems to pay little attention to those still trying to eke a living off him. What he wants most now are the things he chose to ignore in his prime, many around him say: security, peace, a real life. He wants some time to watch his kids grow, to hang out on the stoop with old friends, to smoke a little pot, to talk shit.

"There's not one person in the country Mike feels like he can trust," said one confidant. "He's the loneliest fucking guy out there."

Two weeks ago, in the snowy midst of a wild blizzard, Mr. Tyson resurfaced. It was well past midnight and, in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, in the midst of a post-fight press conference, Mr. Tyson appeared, decked out in a vintage brown leather coat with sheep fur around the collars and a woolen, pimp-like knit cap. He was swarmed by fans and reporters who stuck pens and business cards and cameras in his face and then asked him aggressive questions, looking to tease a scoop.

"Can you beat Lennox Lewis?"

"What about Roy Jones?"

"Mike, will you fight Klitschko?"

"Yeah," Mr. Tyson laughed in response to the last question. "Tell your promoter to buy me a Ferrari."

Mr. Tyson signed every paper and boxing glove sent his way, and while he did his best to go unnoticed, the mob followed him from the Garden and trudged out with him into the snowy midtown sludge. They asked him to sign more things, they asked him about his future plans-and when the cold wind began whipping down 33rd Street, after nearly half a block or so, the crowd eventually disappeared.

His hands snug in his coats pockets, flecks of gray stubble freckling his chin, Mr. Tyson turned down the corridor that runs beneath the Garden, where the homeless lay their beds in the heated doorways leading to Penn Station. He looked through the windows and saw their sleeping bodies covered in ratty flannel blankets and said simply, "Money."

Mr. Tyson then remembered a time when he came to the Garden as a teen and followed the fighters and trainers from the post-fight press conferences back to their cars-or as far as they would tolerate him. Then, almost spontaneously, Mr. Tyson hollered down the empty corridor.

" Whew !" he yelped. "Man, money can ruin your soul."

DavidGilmartin,thetownattorneyfor Southampton, which has jurisdiction in East Quogue, said that a group of 10 or 11 share houses along Jeffrey Place and Laura Court "are wreaking havoc in the neighborhood," and that the Town Board has authorized him to "commence enforcement action" against them.

"We're bringing a lawsuit against the owners and the people in the house to force them to come into compliance with the town code," Mr. Gilmartin told The Observer .

Town codes prevent the operation of share houses in the quiet hamlet on the western end of that trendy stretch of Long Island's south shore loosely known as "the Hamptons." But that didn't prevent Josh Sagman, a proprietor of one of the houses, from putting himself and his place at Jeffrey Lane front-and-center in Ms. Kopple's documentary.

According to lawyers for Mr. Sagman's neighbors, the house at 6 Jeffrey Lane is owned by a corporate entity called JBJ Enterprises. The three principals in the company-Josh Sagman, Brandon Estrin and Jason Kovar-are also the principals in another business venture called Perfect Oxygen, purveyors of shots of scented pure oxygen for consumption at bars and clubs.

Calls to Perfect Oxygen to reach Mr. Sagman were not immediately returned. Gary Henkus, who was listed as a contact for 6 Jeffrey Lane on the Web site, summershares.com, declined to comment on the status of the share house.

Last summer, Messrs. Sagman, Estrin and Kovar rented shares in the house and advertised a vigorous social schedule stretching from the May 27 "Color War" ice-breaker ("Included will be sports, drinking events, and maybe even a little nudity … hahaha-Hosted by Josh Sagman," the Web announcement reads) to the Labor Day "Jamaican Me Crazy" reggae party.

Rarely enforced town codes did not seem to put a damper on things, from the looks of Ms. Kopple's documentary.

"People always get taken to court for the parking, or if they're throwing a party late-night," said David Shapiro, a longtime Southampton resident. "They don't actually take people to court for overoccupancy. You have to really piss them off to get them to do that."

Consider it done. But just being pissed off won't be enough to enable the town to morph into a gentle gerontocracy. Part of the problem, according to Quogue mayor Thelma Georgeson, is that it's difficult to prove that something is a share house.

"We allow six unrelated persons to rent a house," Ms. Georgeson explained. So proving that there are more people renting than that can be difficult. "Every Memorial Day weekend, we do our patrol to see which houses are share houses," Ms. Georgeson explained. "You pretty soon know which ones they are. But the burden of proof is on us that this is a share house, and that's difficult to do."

That won't stop neighbors and town officials from trying.

Watching the matter closely are Mr. Sagman's Quogue neighbors, who have retained Southampton attorney Lisa Kombrink to represent them.

According to Ms. Kombrink, as of May 28 shares were still being offered in the Jeffrey Lane house for this summer through a Web site, 6jeffreylane.com. On that site, the ad explained that the house was being sponsored for the summer by Tanqueray and Moët & Chandon.

But that Web site has since been taken down, and according to Patti Schickram, a spokeswoman for both spirit manufacturers, the sponsorship was a hoax to begin with.

"Don't believe the hype," she said. "We were not in any way a sponsor of those houses. We had nothing to do with it."

Local brokers are even starting to think twice about facilitating share houses for rent or purchase. Frank Austria, an associate broker at JBG Realty in East Quogue, said they cause brokers too much of a headache to be worthwhile.

"Summer is a nuisance, really," he said. "With a sale, you do it once, you're done. With rentals, there's always someone complaining. There's always somebody getting drunk and making it miserable for everybody else."

If that sounds good to you, however, there are still shares in the house available on summersharehouse.com, which describes a nine-bedroom manse with six and a half bathrooms, a pool, a tennis court, a basketball court, a volleyball court, a pool table-and that famous 12-person Jacuzzi you saw in the documentary.

Your name on the town's suit is complimentary.

Still licking his wounds after his stunning K.O. at the hands of fellow heavyweight Lennox Lewis, Mike Tyson has retreated to his corner-and he's unlikely to find another roost soon.

Not long after The Observer reported that Mr. Tyson put in a bid on a $10.75 million canary-yellow townhouse on East 64th Street, figuring that if he emerged victorious in Memphis, the payday would cover both his myriad debts as well as his proffer for a little piece of the Upper East Side, other reports began to emerge. Mr. Tyson was said to be eyeing a spread in Denmark and, more recently, Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan's Cedar Springs estate in Byron Bay, Australia. Even that place, with its relatively modest price tag, however-for $4.5 million, you get a mansion on 325 acres of beachfront land, where Iron Mike could indulge his storied love of zoo animals with the freely roaming wallabies and black cockatoos-appears out of reach for Mr. Tyson, as press reports have indicated that the owner of that place also thought the purchase was dependent on Mr. Tyson knocking out Mr. Lewis.

As for the Upper East Side townhouse, Mr. Tyson's interest there seems to have evaporated faster than you can say "no rematch."

"I haven't heard from him," said Austrian developer Peter Cervinka, who received a bid from Mr. Tyson on the East 64th Street house last month. "But I guess since he lost, it's my assumption that we won't hear from him again."

At the end of two three-day shoppingsprees in Paris,NewYork investment banker Robert Novogratz and his wife Cortneyhadenough bootytofillsix storageunitsin Chel-sea. Their take included a huge 300-year-oldcircular windowfroma crumbling French cathedral; an enormous analog clock from a Parisian train station; and an antique set of stained-glass double doors.

The idea was to decorate their new Soho townhouse at 24 Thompson Street in a style as eclectic and funky as the neighborhood-a neighborhood in which there are only a handful of townhouses to begin with.

Thirty-five subcontractors later and their mission accomplished, Mr. Novogratz and his wife have put the place on the market for $8.9 million. They're hoping to repeat the process as soon as possible.

"It's both a business and it's become our passion," said Mr. Novogratz, who, in a partnership with his wife and a professional draftsman, designed this townhouse from the ground up, starting in November 2000. It had always been their plan to sell it off as soon as they'd had their fun decorating it.

"It's a ton of fun to go to Paris with a nice-sized check and buy what you want," Mr. Novogratz said.

That check was made possible by their past forays into real estate. Five years ago, they gut-renovated a place in Chelsea, and about two years ago they did the same to 22 Thompson Street, the house right next-door to this one. And as they renovate more and more places-the rent on the first two townhouses is enough to cover the mortgages on them "three times over"-their budget for new construction gets higher and higher.

"We just got a bigger budget and got more creative and funkier as we went," said Mr. Novogratz.

Now they're ready to sell this place-and parlay the profits into an even more ambitious project.

It all began as a hobby for the Novogratzes, but quickly turned into a 30-hour-a-week undertaking. During his lunch break, Mr. Novogratz would jog from Wall Street to Thompson Street to direct construction. On the weekends, he and his wife would scour the city for hidden or overlooked treasures. All this while the two were looking after their four children-including one set of twins.

The five-story townhouse-on Thompson Street right off Grand Street-has a gray cement façade, approximately 5,000 square feet of space indoors and a 1,000-square-foot roof terrace. None of the ceilings are lower than 15 feet, and the walls have been done in warm shades of yellow, salmon, pink and blue. The first floor feels the most cramped, as it shares space with a one-car garage and a small patio. But the second-floor kitchen and dining area sprawls luxuriously across an open-floor plan, an 18-foot-long bar accentuating the room's outsize length. Light pours in through that 300-year-old cathedral window on one side, and three arched window-doors span the width of the other. The Novogratzes salvaged upwards of 10,000 Minten tiles from a decaying old cancer hospital on West 94th Street and hired a mosaic specialist to re-plaster them on their kitchen floor.

The children's floor, two levels above, has a working pinball machine and an impressive phalanx of ceramic ball-players and action heroes with bouncing heads. There's more for the kids: The fifth floor has a children's playroom, nanny's quarters and laundry facilities, as well as another huge circular cathedral window. The terrace level has Moroccan-style light fixtures and offers 270-degree views of lower and upper Manhattan.

Does Mr. Novogratz feel any pang of regret now that he's selling the place that he and his wife worked so hard to perfect?

"You hate giving up a great place like this," he said. "But to be able to do that again is worth it."

Sara Gelbard, Meredith Hatfield and Joseph Dwyer of the Corcoran Group have the exclusive listing.

upper east side

51 East 78th Street

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $775,000. Selling: $785,000.

Maintenance: $895; 43 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: four weeks.

TROMPE L'OEIL TRADER This Wall Street trader spent his down time upgrading from armchair carpenter to woodworking craftsman, installing staircases, arched-barrel ceilings and hardwood floors-with his bare hands-in this turn-of-the-century first-floor duplex (with a patio garden) on 78th Street off Madison Avenue. "It wasn't an apartment," said Halstead senior vice president Louise Phillips, the exclusive agent on the deal, by way of complimenting the trader's handiwork. "You could tell it was somebody's home." Little grace notes weren't beyond his ken, either: To dress up the cabinet concealing a Murphy bed, he bought a load of vintage books at the Strand, sawed off the spine ends and glued them onto the wall to create a trompe l'oeil bookcase. When it came time for the seller to depart from the old clubhouse, finding the right person to appreciate his work turned out to be a matter of luck. The buyer, another Wall Street guy, hadn't even considered the East Side, but after he'd lost several bidding wars across the park, his fiancée (who saw an item about this apartment in The New York Times ) dragged him over to take a look. Her intended was surprised at what he saw there: It definitely wasn't the froufrou Mario Buatta feel he'd expected. "It was masculine," said Ms. Phillips of the dark, heavy woodwork. "But it was done with tender, loving care. You could soften it up easily." Which is why these two quickly placed a bid-and this time, won.

east village

14 East Fourth Street (the Silk Building)

One-bedroom, two-bathroom condo.

Asking: $899,000. Selling: $899,000.

Charges: $705. Taxes: $570.

Time on the market: four months.

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT When the buyers of this East Village apartment fled their old place near Ground Zero, they were forced to abandon most of their prized orchid collection, but were hoping to find a place that would allow them to start growing again. Anna Hetzel, a sales agent with William B. May, immediately thought of a 1,250-square-foot triplex condo at the Silk Building (where Britney Spears lives) whose top floor had a greenhouse. "It was really important for them to have this outdoor space," said Ms. Hetzel. The apartment has an odd configuration: The master bedroom is on the first floor, the living room and kitchen are on the second. A winding staircase from that floor leads to the garden level above. The buyers-they're in their late 20's; he's an investment banker, she's a freelance multimedia consultant-aren't feeling the apartment's prewar frills. So they plan to do away with the wood paneling and delicate moldings, and bring in a little bare, sheer, stainless-steel modernity. Edward Ferris of William B. May worked with Ms. Hetzel on the deal.

brooklyn heights

28 Old Fulton Street (the Eagle Warehouse)

Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $619,000. Selling: $601,500.

Maintenance: $916; 50 percent tax-deductible.

Time on the market: two months.

HEARTHLESS Before a developer carved apartment units out of this Brooklyn Heights warehouse in 1980, the building served as a storage facility for The Brooklyn Eagle , which was published daily for 114 years, until 1955. Writing about the building for The New York Times in 1995, Christopher Gray said, "This medieval brick fortress recalls the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, with a massive entry arch, barred windows and a machicolated cornice." Apartments in the seven-story building have high ceilings, exposed wooden beams and gorgeous views of the river and the Manhattan skyline beyond-and electric stoves. The couple in their early 30's who bought the place "loved it so much, but when they saw it didn't have gas stoves, they almost didn't buy it," said Jim Rigney, a vice president with the Corcoran Group. Desperate to resolve their dilemma, the couple found an electric contraption that mimics the heating action of a gas stove. "If you can get to the moon, I guess you can get an electric stove that heats up similar to gas," said a puzzled Mr. Rigney.

Iron Mike has bid on the house. To afford it, all Mr. Tyson has to do is take down Mr. Lewis-his former chew toy, the pride of the British empire, the reserved, 35-year-old, 247-pound heavyweight champion-in Memphis on June 8. If he wins, he'll be able to buy the $10.75 million Upper East Side townhouse that he bid on several weeks ago, complete with pseudo-Rococo stylings and an eight-person Jacuzzi surrounded by a tile mosaic reminiscent of Pompeian baths.

If he doesn't-well, a source close to the deal told The Observer that the sellers of the house believe he's got to win in order to be equal to the townhouse's purchase price.

Then he's got to get past Mr. Cervinka-who has, with workmen and decorators, been ebulliently bestowing Viennese elegance on the house for years-and convince him that he's a worthy owner. Mr. Cervinka isn't immovable.

"He was very nice; I was very surprised," said Mr. Cervinka, an Austrian developer who owns the building, of Mr. Tyson's visit. "He and his girlfriend appreciated the house …. He stayed here for over an hour and he liked it a lot-that was my impression."

The loser of the Tyson-Lewis fight is guaranteed at least $17.5 million-not chump change, but not enough to get Mr. Tyson the house. Sports Illustrated recently reported that a smaller payday probably wouldn't pay down Mr. Tyson's debt. To buy it, he's got to win. Now that he's bid on the place on East 64th Street, he needs to earn the $30 million he'd get for a triumph in what The Sporting News says may be his last big payday-an event that has already generated $23 million on site in Memphis and is commanding $54.95 on pay-per-view television.

Mr. Tyson's public difficulties have been well-documented: ear-bitings, crotch-grabbings at press conferences, many vivid quotes, wife-hurlings, imprisonment. His recent assertion that he would smear Mr. Lewis' "pompous brains all over the ring" and some other obscenities cost him the services of his P.R. firm. When questions were presented about the possible purchase of the new house, the spokesman for the ex-champ was no longer Dan Klores Communications, who dropped him, but an independent publicist who did not return calls for comment.

But Mr. Tyson is-even by the account he has offered to the court, in documents submitted in connection with his lawsuit against his onetime promoter, Don King-deeply in debt. He owes Showtime Networks-the co-producer, with HBO, of the June 8 fight-somewhere between $10 million and $12 million. He is being sued for divorce by his second wife, Dr. Monica Turner. Besides his other difficulties, his suit against Mr. King is also expected to be costly: The fighter claims that Mr. King bilked him out of tens of millions of dollars before and after his stint in prison on a rape charge.

So watching the bout closely alongside the 20,000 spectators at Memphis' Pyramid Arena-and hundreds of thousands of viewers dialing up for pay-per-view at homes, bars and private clubs-may be Upper East Side doyenne Jayne Wrightsman, confidante of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who, although a well-known fixture on the co-op board of 820 Fifth Avenue, is the owner of 182 East 64th, and would become, immediately, the Girl Next-Door to Mike.

Also on the block: Spike Lee and Kenneth Laub, the former president of the 64th Street Association, who seemed to lay out a welcome mat to the house's new owner-whoever it may be.

The neighbors, said Mr. Laub, "are of fine quality, and are conscientious about maintaining the street, and take great pride in the trees lining the street.

"Anybody who lives on the street," he added, "will be very happy for being there."

Still, some of the Upper East Side's most old-school brokers have turned up their noses at the cheery, canary-yellow row house with white accents on this shady block of 64th Street, which is home to chef Jean Georges Vongerichten's JoJo. Around the corner is Hale and Hearty soups; across Lexington Avenue, the slowly sinking 136 East 64th Street. Nearby neighbors include Martin Scorsese and the Palestinian embassy.

All in all, a good neighborhood, to which the champ might bring something else: Mr. Tyson, who owns estates in Connecticut, Ohio and Las Vegas, pays high premiums to animal-husbandry employees who help him tend to his flock of carrier pigeons, his lion and his two tigers.

As for the house itself, some find it a little jolly for the neighborhood.

"It is not in the New York spirit," said one broker who's seen it, noting the townhouse's Rococo-style moldings, the gold wall sconces illuminating its six bedrooms-and that Jacuzzi. "Of course, if somebody wants to have a little Versailles in New York, you might go for that," the broker added.

Mr. Cervinka, a 53-year-old with blond hair, paid $1 million for the place in 1993 and has spent over $8 million renovating it. He has an infectious love for the yellow-taffy-painted house he's been working on for years, and was kind enough to allow The Observer to get a look at the place Mr. Tyson wants.

"Look at this here," Mr. Cervinka said, pointing to the gold-leaf detailing on a wrought-iron stair railing. "You wouldn't do this on spec." Mr. Cervinka bought the place as a home for himself and his three children. When work took him back to Europe, he had to put it on the market.

From the two powder rooms, done in onyx, to its basement spa mosaic-the artist who spent three months down there also does work for the Vatican-the house was a labor of love. The wrought-iron gates and staircase railings took an Austrian artist two years to forge by hand; a towering, nine-foot armoire of European walnut crests the second-floor landing; there's an olive-walnut library and a salon with frescoed ceiling in delicate pink and green pastels on the second floor, and a book-match rose-marble bath on the third.

"I'm very proud of this," Mr. Cervinka said, standing in an oval-shaped dressing room flanked on all sides by mirrors.

Not everyone was as impressed-"Only [Tyson] would want to buy this townhouse," said a broker who wished to remain anonymous-but apparently it struck the boxer as just right. And Jed Garfield, of Leslie J. Garfield & Associates, said the place was "beautifully done," although he called it a bit "over the top."

Before 1993, and for 35 years, 180 East 64th Street was owned by a doctor who had a practice on the townhouse's ground floor and lived in the triplex above. Leslie J. Garfield & Associates brokered the house's sale in 1993 to Mr. Cervinka, who might be experiencing some early seller's remorse. Mr. Cervinka suggested that even though he's lowered the asking price around $2 million in recent months, he could get cold feet when it came time to sell it. "I'm very attached to it," he said, looking lovingly about.

-with additional reporting by Brandt Gassman

Judge Kicks Bowie Bond Banker Out Of West 67th Street Co-op

David Pullman, the man who invented the Bowie Bond, may have to do his dancing in the street now that a judge has ruled that his co-op board was within its rights to kick him out of his Upper West Side apartment.

But the court's split decision means Mr. Pullman will automatically get to make his case to the State Court of Appeals, where he said he will knock down the co-op board's charges against him.

"It's absurd!" Mr. Pullman told The Observer when asked about Friday's ruling. "[If they win] it would mean that anyone who litigates, [the co-op board] would try to terminate their lease. Like, 'Hey, wouldn't it be great to get rid of all these "objectionable" people?' If you're going to keep your principles, you can't allow this kind of thing to go on."

The ruling, on an appeal by the co-op board of 40 West 67th Street, completes the latest round of a years-long dispute between Mr. Pullman and his neighbors that started with complaints that an elderly couple had their TV on too loud and peaked with charges of anti-Semitism and assaults in the building's elevator.

A State Court of Appeals on Friday ruled, by a margin of 3-2, that Mr. Pullman's tenancy, and the motives for his behavior towards his neighbors, were "objectionable" and that the board was within its rights to kick him out.

The problems with Mr. Pullman, who just this month saw his story turned into a novel by international best-selling author Linda Davies with the book Something Wild , began soon after he moved into his apartment on 40 West 67th Street in October 1998-a year after he made financial history by raising $55 million through the issuance of previously unheard-of bonds backed by David Bowie's future royalties. According to documents filed by representatives of the co-op board with the court, Mr. Pullman made repeated noise complaints against the elderly couple who lived in the apartment above him, accusing them, among other things, of turning the volume up on their TV and stereo, and of making loud banging sounds stemming from a commercial book-binding business which he claimed they were operating from their apartment. A subsequent investigation by the co-op found no evidence to support such a claim, and previous occupants of Mr. Pullman's apartment said that they'd never heard any such noises.

"The whole thing is like a satire, like a skit," Mr. Pullman told The Observer . In documents Mr. Pullman has filed with the court, he claims the co-op board ignored his complaints because the board's president, Brian Pusch, is friendly with his chief antagonist among his neighbors, Norman Indictor. "You live in a building, you complain about the noise? The guy upstairs, he buries it because he's the guy's best friend. He swept it under the carpet."

Mr. Pullman continued to make repeated complaints to the building manager, "in rapid sequence and accompanied by threats," according to the documents.

Papers filed by the co-op board go on to say that Mr. Pullman distributed leaflets to other tenants in the building that made slanderous accusations against the couple above him. The "slanderous" leaflets, Mr. Pullman told The Observer , simply accused Mr. Pusch of siding with Mr. Indictor against him, and ignoring Mr. Pullman's complaints-and accused his neighbor of assaulting him in the elevator. The leaflets were titled, "Push Pusch Out, Evict Indictor."

Criminal charges were filed against Mr. Indictor, a retired college professor, but were later adjourned in contemplation of dismissal.

Mr. Pullman was riding high on his Bowie Bonds and issued similar bonds for James Brown, the Isley Brothers and the estate of Marvin Gaye, among others. And though his critics claim that the supposed multibillion-dollar market for Bowie Bonds has never materialized, Mr. Pullman has continued to ride high on his creation-even as the tensions with his neighbors mounted.

In 2000, Mr. Pullman filed four lawsuits against various people in the co-op, including suits against the building's managing agent and Mr. Pusch, for failing to abate the noise above his apartment.

Around the same time, the shareholders in the co-op had decided that they'd had enough. The lawsuits and threats notwithstanding, court documents claim that Mr. Pullman had made illegal renovations to his apartment and had failed to carpet it, which meant that he was now the one disturbing his downstairs neighbors.

Mr. Pullman rejected those claims, saying that he did indeed have carpeting in his apartment, and that the only "renovations" he had made were to paint the walls and to add a new light switch to an existing outlet.

"It wasn't even against the rules to do those things," Mr. Pullman said.

The board notified him that a meeting would be held to decide upon his eviction. A clause in every lease in the building-which Mr. Pullman signed-allows for such an eviction if two-thirds of the shareholders agree. He was not in attendance when the shareholders voted him out by 2,048 shares to 0, with 542 not in attendance or voting.

"I wasn't going to show up to something that was obviously one-sided," Mr. Pullman explained. "It was a joke at that point."

Mr. Pullman, who is Jewish, also claimed in court documents that there was an unmistakable strain of anti-Semitism on the co-op board. They "discriminate religiously, as demonstrated in the way they decorate the building during the year-end holidays," Mr. Pullman alleged in documents filed in court. "They refuse to put up Jewish decorations, including menorahs to represent the holiday of Chanukah, and only display Christmas decorations."

Mr. Pullman's brief also alleged that a picture of Adolph Hitler on the wall of a first-floor apartment whose door is often ajar is visible from the building's public area. Mr. Pullman wrote that the owner of the apartment "wears a "self-imposed dress code … of a fascist"-and is a best friend of Mr. Indictor.

"Hogwash!" said Mr. Van Der Tuin. "If you saw the picture you would know it's not anti-Semitic, and there has not been religious decorations in the building of any sort."

When the co-op sued to have him removed from the building-you need a sheriff's warrant to actually evict someone-Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Shafer ruled that the board had exceeded its authority in evicting Mr. Pullman, saying that something as drastic as an eviction must be subject to judicial review rather than the mandate of a co-op board.

Friday's appeal, brought on behalf of the co-op board by Manhattan attorney John Van Der Tuin, in effect reversed that ruling, finding that according to what's known as the "business judgment rule," a co-op board is well within its rights to force someone out of his apartment.

The majority in Friday's decision wrote, "were we to look behind [Mr. Pullman's] actions, we would find that the record amply supports the determination that Pullman's tenancy is 'objectionable' …. These actions have had a negative effect on all of the 37 other leaseholders, including making them responsible for the payment of thousands of dollars in unnecessary legal fees."

Robert Braverman, who represented the co-op board and its then board president in two lawsuits that Mr. Pullman filed against them in 2000, was gratified by the recent ruling.

"The court looked at the record and found that there was no question Mr. Pullman's conduct rose to the level of justifying the shareholders' decision to have him ousted from this building," Mr. Braverman said. "It's well established that absent a showing of bad faith or discriminatory conduct, the actions of a co-op board of directors will not be subject to judicial review."

Before Friday's ruling, the statute that allowed co-op boards to mandate decisions affecting a single shareholder had only applied to actions of lesser import, such as routine business decisions. Mr. Van der Tuin said that Friday's ruling was something of a landmark, because it now expanded the scope of that statute to encompass full-out evictions.

"This is a significant case for co-op board/shareholder relations because it … determines whether shareholders [can decide] objectionable grounds for termination of lease."

Lawyers for the co-op board at West 67th Street conceded that Mr. Pullman probably had grounds for an appeal, given the 3-2 split ruling. Writing for the minority, Justice David B. Saxe said that a co-op board review is "simply too narrow a prism to protect tenants against the loss of their homes. While the ordinary management decisions of a co-op board may result in some sort of negative impact upon an individual tenancy, they cannot compare to the loss of a person's home … the proprietary lessee, like any other tenant, is entitled to judicial scrutiny of the basis of the ejectment sought against this allegedly undesirable tenant."

Despite his recent loss, Mr. Pullman was upbeat, and spoke as though it was he who had the co-op board on the run.

"This thing will take years to get through the courts, and my apartment appreciates every year," he said. "So what's the downside?"

upper east side

162 East 64th Street

Five-bedroom, five-bathroom townhouse.

Asking: $4.3 million. Selling: $4 million.

Time on the market: four months.

SCHOOL TIES When the seller of this townhouse, an Internet mogul in his 40's, met the buyer, the head of a large, family-owned contracting firm, the negotiations immediately skidded off course. The two men realized that they had known each another at college and may even have dated the same co-eds. To boot, both had grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood. "The closing was so relaxed," said Tristan Harper, a vice president at Insignia Douglas Elliman, who represented the buyer. "They were talking about who they know instead of going through the paperwork." The seller was represented by Nancy Weaver, a senior vice president at Elliman. The buyer looks forward to using the townhouse's garden-with redwoods and a ginkgo tree-and tiled patio as a playground for his three daughters, the eldest of whom was bat mitzvahed a few weeks before the closing.

MURRAY HILL

330 East 38th Street (the Corinthian)

Four-bedroom, three-bathroom condo.

Asking: $1.495 million. Selling: $1.4 million.

Charges: $1,302. Taxes: $1,090.

Time on the market: three months.

When an American couple in their early 50's returned to New York after 25 years in Asia, they were eager to get back into the life of the city. The financial-services company they worked for put them up in a Battery Park City rental apartment-on Sept. 4. When the attack on the World Trade Center blanketed their new neighborhood in ash, their first impulse was to seek solace in an uptown apartment. But in the tight post–Sept. 11 housing market, they found little out there that merited serious consideration, and they decided to be good soldiers-for a while-and stick around in lower Manhattan. When the time came to look again and find a permanent home in New York, "they looked east, west, up, down, all over the city," said their broker, Margo Goodale of Charles H. Greenthal. "One of the elements of why they were successful was because they were willing to be flexible with the neighborhood." Eight months later, they settled into this 2,200-square-foot condo in Murray Hill on a high floor-with dazzling views of the river and the city skyline they had left behind decades before.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

136 Waverly Place

One-bedroom, one-bathroom co-op.

Asking: $499,000. Selling: $499,000.

Maintenance: $803;

35 percent tax-deductible

Time on the market: four months

SOLDIERING ON, DOWNTOWN In September of last year, a 29-year-old in human resources and her fiancé began to look for an apartment more conducive to a married lifestyle-and big enough for their dog. They'd been living on Bleecker Street for two and a half years, and the wedding was set for October, when terror struck. The consultant's fiancé, an asset manager who worked in Tower One of the World Trade Center, died in the attack on Sept. 11. And though their apartment had a full-on view of the destruction, his fiancée continued the search for an apartment downtown. "I thought about what he would have done if he survived," she said. "I knew he would not have left the city. I know he would have felt like it was important to stay." Determined to remain in the neighborhood, she teamed up with Mady Faber, a vice president with the Corcoran Group, and settled on this prewar Waverly Place co-op. "It's helpful to me to be close to the life I had before," the disaster survivor said. "Because it's still my life, and it's good to be close to what happened."

And all I'd done was bring an extra audio tape. Of course, it was a very special morning. The Home Box Office corporate dining room, where we were seated for breakfast, was filled with love-the love of money and of the people who can help deliver it. Mr. King, the 67-year-old boxing promoter with the high-voltage hair and even higher self-esteem, had come to break bread with 51-year-old Seth Abraham, the HBO Sports chief and boxing impresario, after an eight-year rift between the two men who had once dominated boxing together.

So they were seated side by side, high above Bryant Park, straining to demonstrate a little love, now that they were temporarily back in business for a pair of fights at Madison Square Garden. Yes, Don and Seth were together again, as they had been back in the 1980's when they were the fight game's First Couple. For a dozen years they had ruled the boxing universe, turning HBO Sports, a unit of Time Warner Inc., into a pay-per-view juggernaut. Mr. Abraham had the big budget to buy the big fights. And Mr. King had the heavyweights, eventually getting ahold of the most lucrative one of them all: Mike Tyson. Over late-night feasts in rib joints and hotel suites, at baseball games and tennis matches, the two men, who happen to share the same birthday, had engaged in spirited negotiations that were often far more intriguing than many of the lopsided laughers they staged in the ring.

But then came "the divorce." In 1990, during talks on a new Tyson-HBO contract, Mr. King, Mr. Tyson's promoter at the time, demanded that HBO remove its ringside commentator, Larry Merchant, from its Tyson broadcasts because Mr. King felt Mr. Merchant was too critical of his fighter. Mr. Abraham refused. The deal fell apart. Mr. King bolted HBO, and delivered Mr. Tyson to Showtime, HBO's rival. The Don and Seth show came to a stop.

But now, on a morning when Mr. Tyson was holed up in a Maryland prison, Mr. Abraham and Mr. King were sitting elbow to elbow in a corporate dining room, recalling the rough patches while picking at plates of melon and fresh berries.

"I guess you could say I'm very sensitive and sentimental about relationships," Mr. King said. He was seated to Mr. Abraham's left, dressed head to toe in maroon: maroon turtleneck, maroon cardigan, maroon wide-wale cords. "I was more hurt personally in the divorce, because I really relied heavily on him, depended on him. I didn't think a commentator could come between us. I didn't think no one could."

"It was tough, it was tough," Mr. Abraham said. "When you're married to someone professionally for years and years, and all of a sudden every day is a fight, an argument, a debate, it becomes a very, very testy situation. But by remembering we were rivals, not enemies-I told Don, 'Hitler is the enemy, Mussolini is the enemy, Hirohito is the enemy, but you're not the enemy'-we always kept the line of communication open."

But they didn't do business together. And while early on it may have hurt Mr. Abraham more, because of the loss of Mr. Tyson, as time went by Mr. King found himself losing his claim to the title of the most powerful promoter in boxing. HBO had the hot boxers, while he kept losing his. Meanwhile, a series of Federal trials, along with civil suits filed by some of his boxers, kept him tied up in the courts, where he has always been far more successful than Mr. Tyson. The old hustler was getting squeezed out.

He Wanted Respect (and Cash)

After having licked the Government and his former charges in court last year, however, Mr. King wanted back in. He wanted respect, and he needed money. He found a way to get a measure of both, when it became expedient and necessary to make a fight (as they say in the boxing business) between the two top heavyweights, Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis. The fighters wanted it made, as did fans long deprived of sensible and competitive match-ups. But Mr. Holyfield belonged to Mr. King, and Mr. Lewis belonged to HBO. So the only way to make this fight was for Mr. King to put his fighter in harm's way, make peace with Mr. Abraham and get as much as he could out of the bout, which of course is never enough.

"You're hanging, but you got a chance to have the guy ride by and shoot the rope, you know what I mean?" Mr. King said. "So Seth gave me a chance to have the guy ride by and shoot the rope. But I had to work my ass off. That's what I call the Lemon Doctrine. I got a lemon and done made lemonade out of it."

On March 13, HBO will carry Holyfield-Lewis, live from Madison Square Garden on pay-per-view. In the sordid farce the fight game has become, Lewis-Holyfield is that rare good thing: a match-up of two worthy heavyweights. The winner will lay claim to all three championship belts. It is one of the biggest fights in years, and the most significant bout in the Garden, the self-proclaimed boxing mecca, since Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier duked it out in 1971. The Garden already is sold out, but the real money to be made is in the pay-per-view orders. Mr. King, the lead promoter, has said he won't make any real money unless those orders top 850,000. So he is "incentivized," as he put it, to do what he does very well: attract attention. Because attention equals eyeballs, and eyeballs equal money. And in boxing, it's all about the Benjamins-as in Franklin, as in the face on the $100 bill.

"I'm peerless in this business," Mr. King said. "Seth is one of the few who has respect for my business acumen. The promotion deal, that's hype, you can go out and hype and say you're hyping, but you gotta be able to put something under that smoke to give a panache to it that will make it have a supportive situation that will substantiate what you're selling. You got to have the sizzle, and you have to have the steak. You have to get 'em to come back, because comeback sauce is what really counts."

For breakfast, Mr. King ordered pancakes, scrambled eggs and crisp bacon. When the food arrived, he put five pats of butter on the pancakes, then cut the stack into squares. As he dug in, Mr. Abraham watched him. "Don makes the business fun for me," he said. "I get a lot of personal pleasure from it. The energy that you get after a terrific fight, you don't wanna let it go. When the fight is over, I don't want to go to the hotel room. I don't gamble, so I'm not interested in going to a casino. I've been married to the same woman for 27 years, so that doesn't interest me, so after a big fight when I have a lot of energy and Don has a lot of energy, we look for interesting places to go. Remember Winston's?"

"Yes," Mr. King said, producing a smile to go with the memory. "Seth came to Cleveland for [Gerri] Coetzee-[Michael] Dokes, so he's got to be my guest. It's my hometown. I have the baton, so I took him to Winston's. Winston was a guy who was creative, who made a restaurant with an after-hours perspective-a house where he cooks his ribs, gives you special service. Like the creoles. So we sat there, had a great dinner and made some great deals."

Mr. Abraham nodded. "Real soul food, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning. Don's a dervish at that stuff after a big fight. He can go for hours! We talked about a unification fight and other fights to make. I had a 7:30 A.M. flight back to New York. I went right to the airport from the restaurant. Is Winston's still there?"

"Naw, he's out of that one now," Mr. King said. "He had all those movie theaters on Euclid. He was a weird guy, but he was a good hustler."

The two men were warming to each other, recalling all those good times, so it seemed like a fine moment to ask them what was the nastiest thing they ever said during the divorce.

Nasty? Who, Me?

Mr. King got out a big belly laugh. "I don't recall anything nasty," he said.

Mr. Abraham paused for a moment. "The darkest chapter was what I call the dueling dates. Don was going to promote Tyson-[Buster] Mathis on the same date that we were going to do [Riddick] Bowe-Holyfield III. He wouldn't budge."

"I came up with the date first," Mr. King said. "I had the date first, and that's what the problem was, and once they were locked in on the date, they didn't wanna give up on the date."

Mr. Abraham recalled: "I said to the writers that if Don continued to put Tyson or any of his other fighters on our dates, we would then start putting our fighters on his dates and in the long run he'd have to lose."

"It came out that we had to move," Mr. King said. "Tyson got hurt, anyways."

"Things calmed down: Tyson injured a thumb, the fight got moved," Mr. Abraham said. "A truce developed by an act of God. But it would have been terrible for boxing. It would have been a very dark day."

The pancakes appeared to energize Mr. King. He embarked on a 20-minute filibuster, discoursing on the glory of America, his flagpole in Florida, his own "yiddish kop" and his work on behalf of blacks. As he half-listened, Mr. Abraham took a few bites of his scrambled eggs. (A power-breakfast rule of thumb holds that he who eats the least possesses the larger portion of the power. By that measure, Mr. Abraham had the juice there, but the rule probably does not apply in the boxing business, where restraint and self-discipline don't count for much.)

Mr. King said: "At one time, I wanted Seth to quit Time Warner-it was Time then-and come with me. We could go be adventurous: 'I'll bring the fighters, you take care of the cable operators.' I wanted to stack my fortune with Seth, run the gamut. You know, 'Let's go out in the boat, like Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Ocean. Let's get in the boat together. There will be no impossibility. We can snatch the possible out of the impossible, victory from the jaws of defeat!'"

Mr. Abraham did not interrupt him, and before long, breakfast was over.

A few days later, on a Saturday night, the two men were at the Garden for the other fight that occasioned their recent reunion, a welterweight bout between Pernell Whitaker and Felix Trinidad. After Mr. Trinidad (a King boxer) won, Mr. King jumped into the ring to get into the post-fight interview with HBO's Larry Merchant, so that he could flog for a meeting between Mr. Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya, HBO's reigning superstar. But HBO would not put him on. Its announcers don't interview promoters. Mr. King went berserk, though he did say, "I'm not blaming Seth, it's his subordinates."

Jay Larkin, the executive producer of Showtime boxing, referred to the incident a few days later, when asked what he thought of the reconciliation between his rival Mr. Abraham and Mr. King, with whom Showtime has a contract. "I'm not sure how much of a reconciliation it is," he said. "This is a fluid business. It's like a bag of snakes. You throw it in the corner, and it changes its position."