2008 was like herpes, very hard to get rid of.  2009 will be worse, trust me, as Bernie Madoff used to tell the suckers. This one, incidentally, is not over. The greatest scam ever perpetrated will go on and on. Madoff was not alone, and if the crooks in the SEC who turned a blind eye to his Ponzi scheme are ever forced to come clean, some pretty big names will hopefully end up in striped suits sewing buttons. Madoff ...

Yes, Virginia, Charles Dickens did invent Christmas, at least the Christmas spirit of giving to the poor as well as the presumption and posturing of the rich. As everyone knows, it was 1843 and Dickens had spent his hard-earned cash like an oil-rich camel driver. He was only 31, but he had a large family to feed and felt he was slowly sliding toward oblivion. So he walked the Manchester streets and decided to stop browbeating ...

I find the fact that Bernard Madoff is walking around free and smoking cigars an outrage. The press and media have reported that his two sons gave him away. That’s almost as big a lie as Madoff’s life and career. The whole scam was based on only the family knowing. When the game was up due to redemptions, the crook obviously moved many millions to secret accounts in his children’s name, and then had them ...

NEW YORK—A Brooklyn-born rapper by the name of John Forte had a business idea of sorts about eight years ago. It was one of those get-rich quickly schemes that, alas, work most of the time, hence the reason so many people are out of it most of the time. He flew to South America, bought a large amount of a liquid substance, stuffed it into an expensive briefcase, and flew into Newark airport with $1.4 million worth of ...

NEW YORK—A funny thing happened to me on my way out from a party on November 17 in London. I was temporarily confused until I ran into Naomi Campbell in the Royal Hospital Gardens. She was carrying some packages into her car and offered me a ride . “Are you going on to Andrew’s?” she asked sweetly. “Hop in, I’ll take you.” We chatted away, and I reminded her how she once had applied a vice-like grip ...

NEW YORK—When I heard about it, my own inchoate feelings were confused. A party for Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Muammar Gaddafi, and the caller was Nat Rothschild, son of Lord Rothschild, a major donor to Jewish causes and Israel. What in Mohammed’s name was going on here? Nat Rothschild is no stranger to England thanks to his by now famous letter to the Times. He is less well known in America, but his Atticus fund, ...

NEW YORK—Arletty was a great French star of the silver screen during the Thirties and Forties, but she was also known for a few outspoken apophthegms about having sex with a German officer during the occupation. ‘If you hadn’t let them in, I wouldn’t have slept with him,’ and the better known, ‘My heart is French, but my arse is international.’ Like immortal ancient Greeks such as Socrates, Plato, Taki, ...

NEW YORK—Election nights in the Bagel were always spent at 73 East 73rd Street, in Bill and Pat Buckley’s house, more often than not described as palatial by eager-to-please gossip columnists. In reality it was a fine New York maisonette, better suited for entertainment rather than cosy living, the latter reserved for their tiny and warm Connecticut house. Alas, both Bill and Pat are now gone, so I had to fend for ...

I want to make something very, very clear. This column’s review of the autobiography of Cheeta, Tarzan’s chimpanzee, has absolutely nothing to do with the man who just got elected to the White House last month. Cheeta’s opus was published in Britain two months ago (Fourth Estate, 336 pages)  and has become a runaway best-seller. Is it a spoof? Obviously, but it’s a brilliant one, taking us back to ...

NEW YORK—Back in the summer of 1960, a married Hollywood actress and her friend, a Hollywood wife, came to the south of France and met a randy 23-year-old who showed them around the place. The actress was the sexy Janet Leigh, then married to Tony Curtis, and her beautiful friend was Jean Martin, whose hubby was Dean Martin, while the randy one was the poor little Greek boy. We had a very good time boating around the ...

New York America’s diminished intellectualism has made this interminable election period as boring as a Nat Rothschild Corfu party for respectable folk. Part of the problem is that presidential candidates try ‘to reach out to younger voters’, hardly an admirable goal as demographic researchers have gone the way of TV programmers, targeting young morons whose Facebooks comprise 90 per cent of their education. Hillary ...

The story so far: Old Blighty has been hit by a scandal of major proportions. People in high positions met in princely places and discussed matters not supposed to be talked about even on a yacht. In brief: Nat Rothschild, son of Lord (Jacob) Rothschild, is a partner in certain ventures of Oleg Deripaska, the richest of Russians and the sleaziest of all oligarchs—so sleazy, in fact, he’s not permitted to enter the ...

NEW YORK—“Oligarchs brace for a downturn,” screams a New York business headline, a fact that sends me rushing to buy hankies, now selling at a premium at every corner store. Bloomberg News calculates that the richest 25 Russian crooks on the Forbes list have lost a collective $230 billion since last March. Which means that the 25 richest thieves have lost more than four times Warren Buffet’s total wealth. ...

One of my favorite moments in my long life was election nite 2004, chez Bill Buckley, where I had spent every presidential election since 1972. Henry Kissinger approached me and asked—referring to the magazine Pat Buchanan and I had launched two years previous—whom I’d be voting for. “Who have you endorsed?” I was quite drunk by then and although I had endorsed a candidate, I couldn’t come up ...

Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and is a graceful essayist and good Catholic lady who happens to be a political conservative. I haven’t seen her in years but sometimes we exchange emails. She has written a book about how badly Americans need Patriotic Grace, the title of her opus, and I bought it just as the news of a Catholic archbishop being found strangled on the Brighton Beach boardwalk came in. The ...

In No Man of her Own, a 1932 black-and-white beauty, Clark Gable, playing a big-city shark tries to pick up a small-town librarian, the divine Carole Lombard, who was to become his wife later on. “Do your eyes bother you?” asks Clark. “No, not at all,” answers Carole. “Well, they sure bother me…” says Clark. What a great pickup line, graceful, respectful, full of humor. My father once ...