The latest purge will cost 13 Conde receptionists their jobs, according to John Koblin. The most famous of those, Keith Kelly reports: The New Yorker's "guy who is absurdly overqualified to be a receptionist". [Or not—See update below].

The most eyebrow-raising of the cuts was The New Yorker's jack-of-all-trades, Charles Stanley Ledbetter, who had been praised in book forwards as a beloved figure by The New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick.

A 20-year veteran, Ledbetter had been a curator of The New Yorker Gallery, and had worked on several book projects, including the humor book collection "Fierce Pajamas" and a collection of business cartoons from the weekly magazine.

The New Yorker, of course, could not simply have some underling there answering phones; they had a Renaissance man for whom signing for packages was just a way to fill the time when he wasn't plotting a new (invitation-only) art exhibition in the magazine's lobby. The Village Voice described Ledbetter (pictured) in a 2001 profile:

Like so many on the edit staff at The New Yorker, C.S. Ledbetter is not content to simply do his job, which ranges from reading unsolicited manuscripts to working the phones. Fiction writing and pastels are two genres Ledbetter has turned his hand to in the past. But in his latest bid for immortality, The New Yorker's underground cult leader has turned the reception area, on the 20th floor of 4 Times Square, into an art gallery, decorating it as if it were his own home.

Ledbetter even wrote a letter to us once. Ah well; C.S., you were meant for bigger things. Conde is a little low-rent for you now, anyhow. You all see what's happening here, don't you? Conde is turning into Hearst: a once-mighty and glamorous company where the expense accounts were no object, being painfully transformed into just another cost-cutting paper-pusher. (No offense, Hearst). The new greeter in the lobby of the New Yorker, and every other Conde mag: "A phone."
[Pic: Paula Gillen]

UPDATE: The New Yorker's PR person tells us that although the magazine is losing a receptionist, it is not losing Ledbetter; they're keeping him on staff by moving him into an editorial position. Specific details are still being worked out. So, whimsy lives! Receptionists, however, still do not.

Thoth was allegedly "shut down by the city" because he couldn't go along and get along in their world. Their world is shaped like a box, and they want all the little people to fit into the box all nice and tidy. But Thoth's world was shaped like a loincloth, and he chose to whirl his world around, scandalously, while dressed like an extra from Last of the Mohicans who sings like an extra from Amadeus. And that wasn't something The Man could fit into their tidy little box. The New York Post explains how it all went down:

Park officials had asked performers to stop, but [Thoth] did not

What an absurd farce. What an farcical purge. What a purge of loins. Across the world, family businesses crumble, robots get laid off, and desperate drivers fill their gas tanks with algae, hoping that it burns. Yet things that are beautiful must be crushed rudely to earth. Ask not for whom the bell OF JUDGMENT tolls, The Man. It tolls for Thoth.

As you can imagine, his situation is harder than the average homeless person because of his history of speaking out against "thousands of Bloombag crimes" while the rest of the media cowered in fear. If you have space for him, let him know. His email:

Got a floor for $200? CXB was robbed and is homeless!

Anyone who lives around downtown manhattan have a FLOOR I can sleep on for a few weeks for $200?

* as you may have heard I was robbed of $4300 I saved up to find a new place.
* the police and DA refuse to help; they say hire a lawyer and maybe I'll get my money and home back in 4 years!
* Most of my friends don't have any space to put me up.
* I ride a bike 365 days a year b/c I care about the environment and don't have money for the MTA, so far is bad.
* The place I found after a 3 month search had my rent at zero dollars a month, b/c I'm poor!
* I also lost my job and much much more, so it's not like I can just get a new place.
* I still work in Manhattan one day a week and do almost all my stuff there (and at the courthouses in downtown brooklyn).
* I've only lasted this long b/c of people letting me sleep on their floors temporarily.
* I even slept in a hallway several times and almost got caught!
* my options are pretty slim.
* the scam artist crook who robbed me just tricked my best friends into making me even MORE homeless and broke!
* (His name is [ENEMY]. Beware, b/c he didn't just rob me. He robbed many artists, bounced checks, etc etc.)
* I just need a consistent spot to sleep each night near downtown manhattan. A floor will do.
* I've been carrying a HEAVY "mobile home" forever now. Need to be able to store heavy laptop and odd guitar.
* I need somewhere I can keep clothes and maybe shower.
* being homeless is more exhausting than you can believe.

* due to hundreds of facts, my situation is harder than any other homeless person. EX: I have to expose thousands of Bloombag crimes b/c no one else will tell you the truth. Not the Voice, not the Times—-NO ONE. We can stop this criminal, but only if I finish these websites. EX: if not for my many legal cases, I would just pack up and leave NYC and go ANYWHERE affordable. This town is dead and over. But I don't even know if I'm going back to jail, which makes renting and job hunting real difficult. (City Hall always jails me during reelection campaigns b/c I'm very very dangerous to their phony reputations.) (Also, the crook who robbed me got the slimy police and DA to falsely arrest ME to slow me down as I expose him. I'm facing 2 years in jail b/c these crooks hate law and facts.) (See: Criminal Bloombag falsely arresting 1800 New Yorkers during the RNC who broke no laws!)

PERHAPS YOUR RENT is high and you could use a wonderful house guest temporarily. (I do dishes and love to clean!)

(Ladies, I'm trying to return to celibacy b/c I'm sick of the slavery of love and lust. Maybe cuddling is possible.)

Man, it's hard to believe I wanted to leave this planet beginning when I was ten years old, eh?

(How's that for prescience!?)

Leduff, last seen poking around a dead body encased in ice in an abandoned Detroit warehouse, has now profiled a Detroit retiree, Glemie Dean "Coon Man" Beasley, who hunts raccoons and eats them or sells them. This just barely meets Charlie Leduff's minimum standards of manly quirk.

Beasley peers out his living room window. A sushi cooking show plays on the television. The neighborhood outside is a wreck of ruined houses and weedy lots.

"Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do."

Leduff then killed, cooked, and ate Beasley for his upcoming book, Going 'Against the Grain': Charlie Leduff Goes Totally Carnivorous as He Cannibalizes Various Quirky Men in America's Backwaters.

[Detroit News. Jossip points out that Leduff already wrote this coon-eating story once before, for the NYT. BONUS: Read through and find the sentence where Leduff explains what raccoon tastes like "to the uneducated pallet."]

When the video was done, Mr. Murdoch was handed the microphone. "Your whole career defies description," Mr. Murdoch said. "You were not always the most reliable person. I once wrote you a check for $30,000 as a surprise bonus. You were so surprised you spent the whole night in Costello's. The next morning you had to come to me to confess that you'd lost the check. So I wrote a second check. But I didn't give it to you. I gave it to Gloria, who used it to make a down payment on your house, the one you are still living in."

He was also toasted by firemen and the police chief and a priest along with his press baron patron. Lots of drinking was involved. All in all, appropriate. Adios, Dunleavy. Enjoy the Obama administration in peace. [NYO; pic via Tabloid Baby]

[The story] goes like this: As a young copyboy in Australia 55 years ago, Mr. Dunleavy was so hungry for a story that he popped the tires of his father’s car at a murder scene. His father, a photographer at a rival paper, could not get to the post office to transmit photos, and Mr. Dunleavy, then about 15 years old, earned his paper a big scoop.

That is how Mr. Murdoch remembers it.

Mr. Dunleavy tells a different version. Yes, he punctured the tires of a car, but it was owned by his father’s newspaper and he did not know his dad was there. And it was not a murder but the story of a group of missing hikers.

“That story gets told and told, and each time it gets a little bit more whiskers on it,” Mr. Dunleavy said.

Missing hikers, murder, accident, whatever: The point is Dunleavy pushed past his own dad to get a story. Those are some great competitive instincts.

As a bonus, the story helps alleviate any lingering guilt among those of us who, say, woke up early to snatch a tape recorder out of our girlfriend's car for similar purposes.

(Our prior Dunleavy retirement coverage is here, here and here.)

• From Paul Malmont: "I was in a car with him on the way to Amityville, hearing great stories about his career. For example, he had once slit the tires on his own father's (also a reporter) car to keep him from beating Steve to a story. Another thing he was quite proud of was he claimed to have written the book that killed Elvis. Apparently it was rumored that a book Steve had written, Elvis - What Happened? had been pried from The King's cold dead fingers - he had been reading it on the toilet when he'd had a heart attack.
  After A Current Affair I went to work on the rookie season of Good Day New York - Fox's local morning show. My job was to get in early, get the coffee going and pull gossip stories from the wire. When I say early, I mean like 4AM early. On more than one occasion I would come in to find Steve and several author Aussie reporters and producers crashed out on office desks they had pushed together. Apparently they would drink hard at the Racing Club across the street and not bother going home."
• "When ever Steve was covering a mob trial that was being heard in Brooklyn, he would stop into my local watering hole which was a Thai restaurant with a bar in front that seated about ten. The crowd was always mixed, middle age Gays and Brooklyn Heights locals . Steve would come in and after two visits knew and remembered everybodys name. Over the course of an evening he would consume about 10 to 15 drinks and still appear coherent . He would then use the pay phone to phone his story in and uaually a drive came in to scoop him up and drive him home.
  The first time he came in I was wary of speaking to him knowing his politics and the Post’s. But the funny thing is he never pushed his politics at the bar Instead he would talk of mob trials old time Hollywood , New York , movies and whatnot. He was actually fun to talk, never condescending. He had a great memory. Never saw him drop dead drunk but I heard the stories and seeing him in action I can believe them."
• "A favorite Steve story told by reporters covering the Michael Jackson child molestation trial is how he would turn up in the middle of the day or later, already trademark soused. One day he was so drunk he came out of the courthouse men's room having forgotten to tuck himself back in, let alone do his fly up, and walked unsteadily away down the corridor, to the gapes of onlookers."

• "The Star's rival, the National Enquirer, had "paid a ransom for the exclusive serial rights to the hottest book of the decade — Judith Exner's revelations about her affair with President Kennedy".
  Kerrison says: "The book was under lock and key, guarded tighter than Fort Knox. One day, I told Steve, 'We've got to get a copy of the book and beat the Enquirer to the punch'. Steve said, 'Boss, gimme some time and I'll get it'.
  "He disappeared. A few days later he turned up in my office, clutching a copy of the Exner book. I couldn't believe my eyes. 'My God,' I said to him, 'Where the hell did you get that?' Steve looked a bit sheepish and said, 'Boss, don't ask. You wouldn't want to know.'
• "It is said Dunleavy would f..k anyone or anything for a story, and that is true.
  He got a scoop for the News of the World when he wined, dined, seduced and ignobly reported the pillow-talk and tears of one of Teddy Kennedy's "boiler room" girls after the Chappaquiddick scandal. I visited him one evening in his New York apartment. He opened the door and greeted me, naked, before introducing me to a star witness in a police corruption investigation, also naked. They were engaged in an in-depth, probing interview of sorts — another scoop."
• And one from Gawker commenter Baroness: "My favorite Dunleavy moment was on TV. He was covering the Palm Beach Kennedy-Smith rape trial for A Current Affair I think. Some bigmouth girl who went to school with the victim was looking for her 15 min., blabbing personal details with any tabloid who'd listen, and presumably pay.
  Dunleavy took this chick for a long, very liquid lunch at a posh place, plied her with drinks and she sang like a canary. When she was well and truly sloshed and giddy, Dunleavy pulled out some dirty Polaroids of Blabbermouth with a big dick in her mouth, close-ups he had bought off one of her treacherous friends.
  The hilarity of her drunkenly trying to grab those pictures out of his hand, as he held them high in the air making her jump for them, was unforgettable, wicked, and very funny. He was gleeful as a kid on Christmas morning, loving life and his job at that moment."

How did he get that book? Theories? Have more Dunleavy stories to share? Email us.

[Mark Day via Tabloid Baby]

Dunleavy was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. He moved to New York as a stringer in the mid-1960s, and made his way to the Post after Rupert Murdoch bought it in the late 1970s. In 1977 he found time to publish a book called "Elvis- What happened?", a behind-the-scenes look at the life of The King that came out just weeks before Elvis died. Hm. In the 80s Dunleavy was a lead reporter on A Current Affair, the Post of television.

He was famous for being a rabid right-winger—the type of man who figured that if you got your head cracked by the cops, you probably deserved it—and for being a lush. Some of the typical Dunleavy stories:

• "There was the night a blizzard buried Manhattan and Dunleavy, "reclining" with a young woman in a snowdrift outside Elaine's, and had his foot run over by a snowplow. Snarled Pete Hamill of the Daily News, 'I hope it was his writing foot.'"
• "Celebrated for first-punch fights at Costello's now defunct saloon and for sleeping overnight in a straight-backed wooden chair in the Post's city room when the paper was on South Street, in recent years Dunleavy has been favoring a booth at Langan's, a pub near the Post's current midtown HQ, for his recuperative overnight naps."
• Dunleavy hated Bill Clinton, and during his presidency loudly advocated for the release of Wayne DuMond, an Arkansas man in prison for raping Clinton's third cousin in 1984. DuMond was almost certainly guilty. But "Dunleavy also referred to the young woman, a minor at the time of the assault, on the record as the 'so-called victim,' and asserted 'That rape never happened.'"
• And a classic Dunleavy Gawker Stalker: "I was at Langan's on 47th at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, and Mr. Dunleavy was there. We only noticed him after he fell into some chairs and onto the ground. The hostess rushed over and immediately started saying loudly that the chairs were in his way (despite the fact that he was obviously sauced). He got up and then propped himself by the doorway, until a bartender came over with a glass of water for him. Dunleavy took it and left the bar."

He inspired a lot of outrage, but at least he was a character. Now that he's retiring for good, fellow rabid Post columnist Andrea Peyser is truly the Last Man Standing.

We'll see you all at the party.